Quest Deep Periphery Quest (Battletech Sandbox Empire Builder)

OMAKE: PROJECT CLEVER GIRL

Many centuries ago, long before mankind reached for the sky and stars, a talented young entrepreneur named P.T. Barnum taught the world that confident showmanship could turn something merely a step beyond the mundane into something absolutely spectacular.

Today, the aerospace division of Majeure Electric was applying that lesson to unveiling and pitching their newest project. More specifically, they were pulling a bit of a fast one by taking advantage of the presence of the Queen and several high-ranking military officers to view the company’s progress on the new Microraptor class escort carriers. After viewing the partially assembled Microraptors on the production line, the royal party was ushered into an adjacent facility housing a heavily masked and shrouded aerodyne DropShip backlit by large stagelights.

“Your Majesty, Generals, Admirals, and other guests. . .”

The shrouds snapped aside to reveal an absolutely massive shark’s mouth logo stretched across the bow of a heavily modified Microraptor. The rest of the DropShip was painted in what looked like a dappled variant of the low-visibility slate-grey that the AFGR had adopted for the Defiant class assault dropships, subtly accentuated by pale silver detailing and a belly fade towards a lighter blue-grey. A decidedly intimidating number of extremely large caliber gun ports were set into that bow, along with a sleekly contoured anti-missile system turret under the chin and another on top, just behind the cockpit.

“. . . Majeure Electric presents Velociraptor!”

Hidden speakers on board the testbed reverberated with the signature shrieking snarl of its namesake. Serried ranks of missile tubes neatly recessed into the aerodyne wings extended in swirls of dry ice smoke, and clusters of semi-conformal gun mounts set into the roots smoothly precessed to show their range of motion.

“As you can see, Velociraptor is a substantially reconfigured derivative of the Microraptor.” explained the company executive after a suitable pause. “Our engineers felt that the AFGR contract was somewhat over-ambitious in terms of fighter capacity, and they convinced us to green-light working her up as an internal project. What we’re able to deliver with this platform is an assault dropship / carrier hybrid with over three times the firepower, twice the protection, and significantly improved acceleration, all while still carrying a flight of AeroSpace fighters and a utility shuttle. And because she’s built on the same spaceframe and most of the same avionics as Microraptor, she is ready for immediate production.

If you’ll step this way, we have complete technical dossiers for your perusal. . .”

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Majeure Electric Aerospace Division - Project Clever Girl

Velociraptor class Aviation Gunship

Medium Aerodyne; 5,000 tons, 5/8 movement
895.55 million C-bills, BV 28027; 4 ASFs, 1 small craft
215 tons Ferro-Aluminum armor; 4044 points

Armament: 14x Enhanced ER PPC (12 forward, 2 aft), 14x Gauss Rifle (12 forward, 2 aft), 4x LRM-20 w/Artemis IV, 2x Ultra AC/20 autocannon, 4x Medium Pulse Laser (aft), 10x Anti-Missile System (6 forward, 4 aft)

Turn 34 - All That Glitters Is Gold



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Since you were now sponsoring the ‘conventional’ motorsports federation, you felt a bit obligated to go to a race. You’d never actually been to a conventional race, in this case a stock car race, so you weren’t quite sure what to expect.

You didn’t expect this.

You are used to either very large courses that have multiple corners, elevation changes, and differing surfaces (water, sand, concrete, etc) or small courses that are mostly over water with buoys to mark the ‘corners’, the corners are large and sweeping, but level.

Not here.

This track is an oval, about 800 meters in length, with incredibly steep banking all around. It seems that the banking has barely ended on the straights before it starts up again for the next corner, and the corners are, to your eyes, extremely sharp. There’s a pair of short pit lanes, one on each straight, and the stadium, for want of a better word, is a true amphitheatre, completely wrapping around the track and towering above it.

You get to ride around in the pace car, which is an interesting experience in and of itself. The extreme bank angles make it seem like the car you are in is about to tip over at any moment. The driver, a retired racer himself, tells you that any slower than you are going and the car would ‘fall’ off the banking, skidding down and possibly rolling.

That’s a sobering thought.

You are told that this track is a faithful copy of a legendary track from back on Earth, which is rather interesting in and of itself.

The racecars themselves are also interesting. They run fuel-cell engines, but with such small hydrogen tanks that they can only manage 20 to 30 laps before needing to pit for fuel, which is also about how long they can run on a single set of tires before they start failing. In the hovercraft racing you are more familiar with pit stops are more for course management and adjustments rather than fuel, considering that most pro level racers use fusion engines, while the ones used by the youngsters in the Pee Wee and Junior divisions have enough fuel to last an entire race.

Then you have the fact that you have almost twice as many race cars on the track than in the Hovercraft Racing League, a track, moreover, that is a kilometer shorter than the shortest track in hovercraft racing at the professional level and only half as wide… the racing is incredibly intense. In the time between you getting out of the pace car and making it to the luxury box where you’d watch the race itself there’s already been a three car wreck that resulted in a yellow flag.

The officials you are with tell you that before the switch to fuel cells, which evidently was incredibly unpopular in motor racing, you needed to wear ear protection at the track or risk deafness. Even now the shriek of the tires desperately clinging to the track for grip is audible even in the luxury box, and the soft whirring noise of a fuel-cell engine seems to have been amplified to a nearly ear-splitting whine.

You are quite glad to be wearing a headset anyways.

In hovercraft racing it’s incredibly rare for a racer to wind up in the catch fence, and most of the time spinning out just means losing track position. Here, every wreck is a spectacle of vehicular carnage, and cars that go into the wall are thoroughly wrecked. The level of contact and aggression shown on the track makes Smirky look positively tame and civilized, with the victory being decided by what is described as a ‘bump and run’ move by the winner, who spun out the person who had been in the lead coming out of Turn 4.

And unlike in Hovercraft Racing, there’s no stewards inquiry to determine if it was ‘incidental’, ‘deliberate’, or whatnot. Everybody, including the spun out driver, seems to accept that sort of thing as normal.

Evidently this is ‘civilized’ compared to ‘real racing’, which evidently takes place at dirt tracks. This is rather disturbing.

You want to see one of them.



Jeremy pulls off some impressive bureaucratic-fu to keep from getting promoted to Major and remains in command of his company for another year by successfully arguing that he hasn’t seen a ‘proper’ full company command deployment as required by regs for promotion.

You are very proud of your boy for that, promotion avoidance right out of mom’s playbook. You’d intervene in order to keep your son from surpassing you at the ‘keep from getting promoted’ record, but then your second granddaughter is born and you’ve got more important things to do.

The twins quite theatrically accuse you of abandoning hovercraft racing after you attend the stock car race, to which you respond in the proper Mom manner and arrange a suitable prank by abusing the Special Branch. The twins are quite surprised to go to their garage the morning of the next big race to find their highly tuned racers replaced with the machines they raced in the Pee Wee league. Their actual racers were hidden on the hauler, and you’d co-opted the crew into the prank, but the expression on their faces was priceless.

Thanh is settling into flight command in her squadron. Promotion is slower at the moment in the ASF community due to the large ‘python’ lump of combat veterans still holding squadron and wing commands. Thanh is a very talented pilot, but she’s not a combat veteran, and that counts for a lot in the ASF community.

Sarah and Tony are still on their honeymoon, evidently they have decided to turn it into an extended grand tour of all of Griffin’s Roosts libraries.

And then they go to Sarahs bunker to conclude their Grand Tour and any worries you might have that the bookworms were so busy being history nerds to actually consummate their marriage are put to rest when the AI congratulates Sarah on her pregnancy.

To your marvelously nerdy daughter’s singular surprise, as she’d not gotten any tests.

One is performed forthwith and indeed she is pregnant. She decides she wants to be surprised by the gender of her child, which you are willing to indulge as this means you get to decorate two baby rooms for more grandbabies.

The ACDB is up and running despite your joking that it should be renamed ‘Alphabet Soup’ and have the ABC song as its theme music. Many of the long-range theoretical work is now being performed there.

Procurement is going quite well. A new Defiant is laid down, the first Haskell and the next Enterprise are shaking down, the battalion your son is in has expanded to ⅔ nominal strength, while the 1st Aerie Cadre has grown by two more lances of training mechs. ASF sustainment procurement is on track with gradual growth and expansion.

The ASF Assault Carrier project has been renamed the Escort Carrier project, as it was discovered that the initial specifications were a bit too overly ambitious. Nevertheless the Majeure Aerospace Microraptor design is chosen for procurement and a large factory is built right next to the new drop port on Phoenix. The factory construction project completed on time and on budget, but it is soon learned that the corporate team working on this had decided to flex a bit and the factory in question has a dropship line more comparable to the Defiant line in shear capacity than to the smaller Enterprise sized line you were expecting.

Of course, at the reveal Majeure Aerospace shows off a derivative design to the Microraptor, the same hull design with downgraded ASF capacity and massively enhanced firepower and raw performance. It’s currently only a mock-up, but it looks… impressive. The procurement team is looking a bit pinched, evidently this wasn’t on the schedule and they are feeling rather peeved about it.

Then comes the coup de grace, the Majeure Aerospace teams reveal that they built the production line for the Microraptor to potentially produce this Velociraptor design with almost trivial reconfiguration between variants.


The last two stations have been completed in the Inner Asteroid Belt, giving well spaced coverage to the mining operations there. From here it is highly recommended to continue expanding them in order to support heavier ASF patrols.

The environmental survey is complete on Nowy Gdansk with a number of very interesting conclusions and discoveries.

First of all, the majority of life on the planet is in the large oceans, with a highly complex and robust food web that has at its apex massive cetaceans that have inevitably been dubbed ‘Gdansk Doomwhales’ that resemble ‘roided up Sperm Whales that are surprisingly placid and curious about humans. It’s even more incongruous in some ways than the Grifftigers, in that here you have massively lethal predators, and you’ve seen videos of what they do to the primary prey, that seem to be able to coexist with people. They aren’t nearly as intelligent as the tigers, as far as anybody can tell, but they are quite willing to live and let live, and that’s good enough for you.

There’s one very interesting discovery, however. Oozing from vents on the continental shelf is a jelly like substance that almost instantly hardens into near armor-grade toughness and hardness the moment it is exposed to air, but which remains incredibly malleable and soft and behaves as a non-newtonian fluid when kept from contact with air. Researchers are absolutely fascinated by this substance. Small amounts can be used in power armor to seal breaches and absorb shock, to do the same for larger vehicles would be prohibitive.

Focusing Imperial resources on growing the economy in Nowy Gdansk pays off handsomely, with a nice boost to economic growth that is reflected in the growing commercial and industrial sectors on the planet. Infrastructure continues to be improved with more mining sites being built and transport infrastructure secured to handle the traffic.

When you see Jake he looks like he can’t decide if he’s in a good or bad mood. On the one hand, evidently the shenanigans conducted by the Periphery Studies ‘occupation’ of Parliament are still not fully cleaned up, with Delegates still not able to make proper use of the various lounges and meeting rooms due to the constant discovery of yet more hidden ketchup packets, mustard traps, and even a few Improvised Relish Delivery Systems that send the green stuff everywhere when triggered.

On the other hand, the expansion of the Department of Mega Engineering has been incredibly successful. Jake had been expecting to hire a dozen or so new engineers with the ambitious vision and skill to implement said vision that the Department needed. He got over fifty qualified applicants, and when he tried to pair things down to fit the budget he discovered that some people are so passionate about things that they’re willing to work for well under market rate just for the opportunity to do Big Things.

QM Note - Instead of 1 new DoME action each turn, you get 2

The work to fully survey and clear the ruins has been completed. There have been no ‘Eureka’ moments, no intact artifacts just waiting to be found, but plenty of valuable fragments. Civil engineering teams have stabilized the structures and cleared out dangerous areas, making the old Ruins much safer and allowing them to be opened as a sort of heritage park.

Apart from a rather spectacular failure in the Communications Test Lab, the result of an, and you can’t help but laugh, ‘unexploded water balloon which was undetected until power was applied to the test rig, resulting in said unexploded water balloon rapidly disassembling itself in an uncontrolled fashion with unfortunate consequences to the delicate electronics under test.’, R&D work at both the main labs at Griffin’s Rest University and at the Aerie are quite successful.

Further refinements to data-transmission cabling and interface standards advance general electronics capabilities while similar refinements in long distance power transmission and conditioning have reduced the required number of boosters on high-tension lines in half, greatly simplifying the electric grid.

Research into larger and more robust spheroid dropships have been completed, however the newly renamed Imperial Griffin Aerospace Werks is waiting on the results of some other R&D work before finalizing what they are calling the Warrior project for a ten thousand ton assault ship.

Two new weapon systems have been fully validated by the test ranges. The Laser AMS consists of a modified small pulse laser in a dedicated rapid-tracking mount with specialized sensors, while Streak guidance technology has been applied to the SRM-4 and -6 mounts with great success.