Quest Deep Periphery Quest (Battletech Sandbox Empire Builder)
- Thread starter LordSunhawk
- Start date
Thors_Alumni
Well-known member
[X] Upgrade Now
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
[X] Upgrade Now
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
Trashman.exe
Well-known member
[X] Upgrade Now
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
[X] Upgrade Now
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
[X] Upgrade Now
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
Joyousmadman
Well-known member
[X] Upgrade Now
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
[X] Assimilation
Ridli Scott
Well-known member
[X] Upgrade Now
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
-[X] Double down on the contract, offer 36 additional as 'Lend-Lease'
[X] Assimilation
-[X] IF the population seems keen on it. The last thing we need is Spehs-Afghanistan/Viet Nam/Skye/etc.
[X] Just do it
[X] Arsenal of FREEDOM!
-[X] Double down on the contract, offer 36 additional as 'Lend-Lease'
[X] Assimilation
-[X] IF the population seems keen on it. The last thing we need is Spehs-Afghanistan/Viet Nam/Skye/etc.
I'm going to borrow Senator Robert Taft's argument against Lend-Lease: "Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum—you certainly don't want the same gum back."
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
Mind you 36 ASFs per year isn't exactly going to break the bank
No, but if we're going to sell them we should sell them.
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
True enough. Speaking of which I wonder if they're also interested in buying dropships albeit export grade ones
Do we have the excess production capacity?
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
Export dropships come from Civilian yards
Turn 53 - But I Ain't Seen Nothing Like Him
Turn 53 - But I Ain’t Seen Nothing Like Him
Cleanup efforts continue on Castor, dominating the news cycle day after day. Unexpectedly, you receive reports that employment is surging as corporations compete for reconstruction contracts from the Planetary government. It looks like the ‘rainy day’ fund that they’ve been maintaining is being spent profligately, but it is showing excellent results.
Of more concern on the Imperial level, however, is how to strike back.
To that end, Jeremy has been working with SARAH and the various staffs at Defense HQ.
“OK, here’s what we’ve got so far. Our old plans to maintain purely triangular divisions have gone out the window. We had hoped that a single Armored Division would be sufficient to attack or defend a planet, and we found out to our cost that this is most certainly not yet the case. Therefore we have been working on a new concept for our order of battle. Mark?” he looked over at his adjutant, who passed out datapads containing the proposal.
“Up to the Brigade level things will remain triangular in nature, with three subordinate elements. At the Division level, however, this will change into a Pentagonal structure. We will then insert a triangular Corps level above Division, and a variable Army level above that.” he turns on the display.
“The ‘standard’ Armored Division makeup is shown here.”
The next formation organizational chart comes up.
“The planned Corps organization, at this time, is 2 Infantry Divisions and 1 Armored Division per corps.” Jeremy shrugs. “Each Division would require 15 Dropships to transport, with an additional 5 Logistics ships per Division, for a total requirement of 20 transports each. Scaling up to a Corps would require 60 Dropships. In order to guarantee logistics on an assault 1 jump out, we would need 10 additional Logistics ships per Division, or 30 per Corps, with the collars to support them all. Collars used for the initial landing force would count towards progressive logistics, of course. Each additional jump away from the Griffon system would require another 10 Logistics ships per Division.”
This does leave you with quite a bit to think about as your most favoritest part of the year approaches, the part of the year that always leaves you dancing for joy. BUDGET TIME! Now with kung fu grip!
OK, no kung fu grip, damnit.
General Stewart is up first. “Your Majesty, we continue to stress the need to build up our strategic production as well as our military production facilities, especially for our ground forces. With that, I’ll turn things over to General Griffith.”
Jeremy is on his newly cloned legs, and managing to stand without crutches finally. “OK, let me get this out of the way immediately. We need more production capacity, period, dot, end of line. We have insufficient capacity to build any units smaller than the Standard Mech Regiments, as factories optimized for heavy and assault mechs are unable to build light and medium mechs efficiently. And we badly need those lighter units. This year, we recommend only procuring a single Assault Regiment and a single Standard Mech Regiment, consolidating all of the mechs into 1st Armored, and focusing on getting the 1st fully back up to strength. To that end, we also recommend redesignating 2nd Armored as a permanent part of the Nowy Gdansk garrison to defend our most productive, militarily speaking, planet.”
“On to conventional forces, we do not need any additional garrison forces, what we need are a mix of Mechanized and Armored Regiments. However we don’t have the Ferro-Fibrous production capacity to build more than 1 of either. Therefore, we recommend building a Mechanized Regiment and a SpecOps Regiment, both of which would be assigned to 1st Brigade, 1st Armored.”
He sits back down, and General Reyes takes the floor… with her powerpoint of doom, sadly.
“Your Majesty, we have a massive python’s lump of ships coming online this year. For the future, we recommend leaving a number of slips empty next year in order to better space out production. It’s not as bad as it could be, as we don’t need to handle any new Megaraptor or Star Fort wings this year, but we do have to fill the hangars of seven Royal Sovereigns. We barely have enough ferro aluminium production to manage this.” She looks rather grim. “And barely enough ASF factories to actually build the birds in question.”
She sits back down, and you are quite proud that you managed to stay awake through her powerpoints.
Admiral Jackson takes the podium next. “I’m going to somewhat reduce my colleagues' pain, in that the Navy recommends laying down a quartet of Newport-Cs for logistics purposes, rather than anything that will require ASFs to fill their hangars. We also have a pair of new dropship designs, or rather, the first fruits of our programs to replace the Warrior and Devastation classes.”
He nods to his aide, who is using the Admiral Jackson Special Flipchart.
“To start with, the replacement for the Warrior-class, the ten existing ships of which proved lackluster at best in the recent action and which have become increasingly outdated. Even the recent refresh of the design failed to fix the class's greatest flaws, namely the fighter bays and inefficient weapons layouts.” he begins. “To that end we have two possible replacements. A third design was rejected on the basis of having no anti-fighter or point defense armament at all.”
“First up, from our old friends at the Imperial Griffon Dropship Werks and Majeure Electrique, we have the Maiasaura Parasite Destroyer Escort. She is the more expensive of the two options, possesses the greater offensive punch, and despite having less armor overall is nearly as survivable in raw terms, and has far greater anti-missile firepower. Second is from a startup firm in Nowy Gdansk, called the Wojownik Parasite Destroyer Escort. She is smaller, more heavily armored, but lacks in capital firepower as well as AMS… and looks like a pyramid.”
You can’t help laughing at that, as it looks like the Pyramid Power design firm has struck again.
“Overall, we recommend procurement of the Maiasaura, which would be designated the Frigate-class and take their names from historical Royal Navy frigates of the Age of Sail. We prefer her on the grounds of greater firepower, both capital and conventional, and heavier AMS, highly desirable for an escort destroyer design.” he consults his notes.
“Next up is the Devastation replacement. This time we had two entries.”
“First up, from the Imperial Griffon Dropship Werks and Majeure Electrique, we have the…” he clears his throat. “Well, we’re not using their internal project name…” his aide whispers in his ear. “You mean we have to use their internal project name?” The aid nods. “OK… well, the cheeky buggers named it the Admiral Graft Spree class, evidently having too much time on their hands to come up with bad jokes. We intend to name these vessels after Royal Navy cruisers regardless. This design has very heavy armament, both at range and up close, combined with a truly unholy barrage of long range missiles that are sure to have your oldest daughter and husband screaming about unholy witchcraft.”
“The other design is another pyramid, although a quite heavily armored one. The Dewastacja is cheaper and better armored, but is overall a more lightly armed design, with significantly less anti-fighter and anti-missile armament.”
“Overall, even though it is quite inappropriately named as a project, we recommend the Majeure Electrique/IGDW design. The greater expense is balanced out by getting a substantially more powerful vessel.”
Once he sits down Bridget doesn’t even wait for General Stewart to do the normal wrap up of the military side of things. She’s bouncier than ever… Did somebody slip her some energy drinks despite the dire threats of Imperial displeasure if such an atrocity against good sense ever took place?
“Your Majesty I know that Karin has lots to say but I think she’d just steal my thunder and I got great news for you and her and the military and everybody else because we’ve got new ways to build lots of new stuff much more efficiently although it will cost a pretty penny to pull off it’ll be the best way to rapidly build up production capacity you see if we combine all of our normal contracting teams together into one giant pool and issue bloc contracts for upgrades across the board we can potentially have many more projects going at the same time although like I said we’d have to pay extra but it would so be worth it from an efficiency standpoint and we can even use the same techniques to upgrade our mech and ASF factories en bloc rather than one by one even if that’ll be even more expensive but we can do it and thus have more teams free to do things like build NEW factories and foundries and other stuff we need!”
She sounds like a chipmunk on meth, and you do not think she took a single breath in that entire eruption.
Isoroku is an island of zen calm in comparison to Bridget. “Your Majesty, at your word we can start work on exchanging a permanent embassy with the New Rasalhaguians.” he says simply, then pauses. “Oh, and my wife has asked me if you would please sponsor another orchestral exhibition.”
Jake is grinning. “Well, Your Majesty, considering our strategy for dealing with those steampunk fellas over on Calliope, we probably should look into establishing a proper Colonial Office to oversee things, since it would be far more difficult for you to look over everything without HPGs.”
Mary is looking almost as excited as Bridget, albeit in her prim and proper way. And she has her custom presentation software all ready to go.
“Your Majesty, I won’t waste your time babbling.” she says simply, then fires up the display.
Janet is on vacation, her grandkids all got together and bought her and her husband an all-expenses paid trip to the finest resort on Capricorn, but forgot to check the date and it conflicted. Her deputy is present and has nothing of particular note to report budget wise.
Cleanup efforts continue on Castor, dominating the news cycle day after day. Unexpectedly, you receive reports that employment is surging as corporations compete for reconstruction contracts from the Planetary government. It looks like the ‘rainy day’ fund that they’ve been maintaining is being spent profligately, but it is showing excellent results.
Of more concern on the Imperial level, however, is how to strike back.
To that end, Jeremy has been working with SARAH and the various staffs at Defense HQ.
“OK, here’s what we’ve got so far. Our old plans to maintain purely triangular divisions have gone out the window. We had hoped that a single Armored Division would be sufficient to attack or defend a planet, and we found out to our cost that this is most certainly not yet the case. Therefore we have been working on a new concept for our order of battle. Mark?” he looked over at his adjutant, who passed out datapads containing the proposal.
“Up to the Brigade level things will remain triangular in nature, with three subordinate elements. At the Division level, however, this will change into a Pentagonal structure. We will then insert a triangular Corps level above Division, and a variable Army level above that.” he turns on the display.
“The ‘standard’ Armored Division makeup is shown here.”
- 1st Brigade
- 1 Pathfinder Regiment
- 1 SpecOps Regiment
- 1 Mechanized Regiment
- 2nd Brigade
- 2 Light Horse Regiments
- 1 Armored Cavalry Regiment
- 3rd Brigade
- 1 Armored Cavalry Regiment
- 2 Standard Mech Regiments
- 4th Brigade
- 1 Armored Cavalry Regiment
- 2 Standard Mech Regiments
- 5th Brigade
- 3 Assault Regiments
The next formation organizational chart comes up.
- 1st Brigade
- 2 Armored Regiments
- 1 Mechanized Regiment
- 2nd Brigade
- 2 Mechanized Regiment
- 1 Armored Regiment
- 3rd Brigade
- 2 Mechanized Regiment
- 1 Armored Regiment
- 4th Brigade
- 2 Mechanized Regiments
- 1 CAS Regiment
- 5th Brigade
- 2 Light Horse Regiments
- 1 Armored Cavalry Regiment
“The planned Corps organization, at this time, is 2 Infantry Divisions and 1 Armored Division per corps.” Jeremy shrugs. “Each Division would require 15 Dropships to transport, with an additional 5 Logistics ships per Division, for a total requirement of 20 transports each. Scaling up to a Corps would require 60 Dropships. In order to guarantee logistics on an assault 1 jump out, we would need 10 additional Logistics ships per Division, or 30 per Corps, with the collars to support them all. Collars used for the initial landing force would count towards progressive logistics, of course. Each additional jump away from the Griffon system would require another 10 Logistics ships per Division.”
This does leave you with quite a bit to think about as your most favoritest part of the year approaches, the part of the year that always leaves you dancing for joy. BUDGET TIME! Now with kung fu grip!
OK, no kung fu grip, damnit.
General Stewart is up first. “Your Majesty, we continue to stress the need to build up our strategic production as well as our military production facilities, especially for our ground forces. With that, I’ll turn things over to General Griffith.”
Jeremy is on his newly cloned legs, and managing to stand without crutches finally. “OK, let me get this out of the way immediately. We need more production capacity, period, dot, end of line. We have insufficient capacity to build any units smaller than the Standard Mech Regiments, as factories optimized for heavy and assault mechs are unable to build light and medium mechs efficiently. And we badly need those lighter units. This year, we recommend only procuring a single Assault Regiment and a single Standard Mech Regiment, consolidating all of the mechs into 1st Armored, and focusing on getting the 1st fully back up to strength. To that end, we also recommend redesignating 2nd Armored as a permanent part of the Nowy Gdansk garrison to defend our most productive, militarily speaking, planet.”
| [] | Agree - 2nd Armored is redesignated the 1st Garrison Division |
| [] | Disagree |
“On to conventional forces, we do not need any additional garrison forces, what we need are a mix of Mechanized and Armored Regiments. However we don’t have the Ferro-Fibrous production capacity to build more than 1 of either. Therefore, we recommend building a Mechanized Regiment and a SpecOps Regiment, both of which would be assigned to 1st Brigade, 1st Armored.”
He sits back down, and General Reyes takes the floor… with her powerpoint of doom, sadly.
“Your Majesty, we have a massive python’s lump of ships coming online this year. For the future, we recommend leaving a number of slips empty next year in order to better space out production. It’s not as bad as it could be, as we don’t need to handle any new Megaraptor or Star Fort wings this year, but we do have to fill the hangars of seven Royal Sovereigns. We barely have enough ferro aluminium production to manage this.” She looks rather grim. “And barely enough ASF factories to actually build the birds in question.”
She sits back down, and you are quite proud that you managed to stay awake through her powerpoints.
Admiral Jackson takes the podium next. “I’m going to somewhat reduce my colleagues' pain, in that the Navy recommends laying down a quartet of Newport-Cs for logistics purposes, rather than anything that will require ASFs to fill their hangars. We also have a pair of new dropship designs, or rather, the first fruits of our programs to replace the Warrior and Devastation classes.”
He nods to his aide, who is using the Admiral Jackson Special Flipchart.
“To start with, the replacement for the Warrior-class, the ten existing ships of which proved lackluster at best in the recent action and which have become increasingly outdated. Even the recent refresh of the design failed to fix the class's greatest flaws, namely the fighter bays and inefficient weapons layouts.” he begins. “To that end we have two possible replacements. A third design was rejected on the basis of having no anti-fighter or point defense armament at all.”
“First up, from our old friends at the Imperial Griffon Dropship Werks and Majeure Electrique, we have the Maiasaura Parasite Destroyer Escort. She is the more expensive of the two options, possesses the greater offensive punch, and despite having less armor overall is nearly as survivable in raw terms, and has far greater anti-missile firepower. Second is from a startup firm in Nowy Gdansk, called the Wojownik Parasite Destroyer Escort. She is smaller, more heavily armored, but lacks in capital firepower as well as AMS… and looks like a pyramid.”
You can’t help laughing at that, as it looks like the Pyramid Power design firm has struck again.
| [] | Name | Cost | Materials | HP | A/D | Specials |
| [] | Maiasaura Parasite Destroyer Escort | 214,727.52 | FA, DHS | 718 | 418 |
|
| [] | Wojownik Parasite Destroyer Escort | 169,426.32 | FA, DHS | 791 | 361 |
|
“Overall, we recommend procurement of the Maiasaura, which would be designated the Frigate-class and take their names from historical Royal Navy frigates of the Age of Sail. We prefer her on the grounds of greater firepower, both capital and conventional, and heavier AMS, highly desirable for an escort destroyer design.” he consults his notes.
“Next up is the Devastation replacement. This time we had two entries.”
“First up, from the Imperial Griffon Dropship Werks and Majeure Electrique, we have the…” he clears his throat. “Well, we’re not using their internal project name…” his aide whispers in his ear. “You mean we have to use their internal project name?” The aid nods. “OK… well, the cheeky buggers named it the Admiral Graft Spree class, evidently having too much time on their hands to come up with bad jokes. We intend to name these vessels after Royal Navy cruisers regardless. This design has very heavy armament, both at range and up close, combined with a truly unholy barrage of long range missiles that are sure to have your oldest daughter and husband screaming about unholy witchcraft.”
“The other design is another pyramid, although a quite heavily armored one. The Dewastacja is cheaper and better armored, but is overall a more lightly armed design, with significantly less anti-fighter and anti-missile armament.”
| [] | Name | Cost | Materials | HP | A/D | Specials |
| [] | Admiral Graft Spree Parasite Heavy Cruiser | 360,936.24 | FA, DHS | 1244 | 944 |
|
| [] | Dewastacja Parasite Heavy Cruiser | 291,483.16 | FA, DHS | 1069 | 709 |
|
“Overall, even though it is quite inappropriately named as a project, we recommend the Majeure Electrique/IGDW design. The greater expense is balanced out by getting a substantially more powerful vessel.”
Once he sits down Bridget doesn’t even wait for General Stewart to do the normal wrap up of the military side of things. She’s bouncier than ever… Did somebody slip her some energy drinks despite the dire threats of Imperial displeasure if such an atrocity against good sense ever took place?
“Your Majesty I know that Karin has lots to say but I think she’d just steal my thunder and I got great news for you and her and the military and everybody else because we’ve got new ways to build lots of new stuff much more efficiently although it will cost a pretty penny to pull off it’ll be the best way to rapidly build up production capacity you see if we combine all of our normal contracting teams together into one giant pool and issue bloc contracts for upgrades across the board we can potentially have many more projects going at the same time although like I said we’d have to pay extra but it would so be worth it from an efficiency standpoint and we can even use the same techniques to upgrade our mech and ASF factories en bloc rather than one by one even if that’ll be even more expensive but we can do it and thus have more teams free to do things like build NEW factories and foundries and other stuff we need!”
She sounds like a chipmunk on meth, and you do not think she took a single breath in that entire eruption.
Isoroku is an island of zen calm in comparison to Bridget. “Your Majesty, at your word we can start work on exchanging a permanent embassy with the New Rasalhaguians.” he says simply, then pauses. “Oh, and my wife has asked me if you would please sponsor another orchestral exhibition.”
Jake is grinning. “Well, Your Majesty, considering our strategy for dealing with those steampunk fellas over on Calliope, we probably should look into establishing a proper Colonial Office to oversee things, since it would be far more difficult for you to look over everything without HPGs.”
Mary is looking almost as excited as Bridget, albeit in her prim and proper way. And she has her custom presentation software all ready to go.
“Your Majesty, I won’t waste your time babbling.” she says simply, then fires up the display.
- New Projects
- Military
- Heavy Battle Armor
- Increases maximum mass of infantry battle armor to 1,500 Kilograms
- Advanced Naval Combat Doctrine
- In depth study of historical ‘Black Ocean’ naval combat to improve our naval combat doctrine, will include intensive exercises, simulations, and multidisciplinary research
- Advanced Ground Combat Doctrine
- Same as the Naval doctrine work, only focused on land forces
- Naval Autocannon/20
- Having built the Class 10 Naval Autocannon our researchers are confident that they will be able to build the Class 20, giving heavier punch and capability.
- Ferro-Carbide Armor
- Derived from samples taken from SLS Morristown, Ferro-Carbide Armor is excellent for Warships and Stations.
- Naval Laser/45
- Derived from examples dismounted from SLS Morristown
- Barracuda Capital Missile System
- Derived from examples taken from SLS Morristown
- Improved XL Fusion Engine
- This is theory work, an actual production grade engine would require additional research once we’ve tested the proposed new shielding
- Subcapital Laser/3
- The most powerful subcapital energy weapon able to be mounted on dropships
- Integrated CASE
- Work on integrating CASE protection into regular armor plating designs, saves internal space compared to traditional CASE
- Grifftiger Scale Battle Armor
- Some of our more enthusiastic researchers believe that this is now possible
- Heavy Battle Armor
- Non-Military
- Advanced Standard Core Theory II
- Needed for larger (up to 9 collars) jumpships
- Advanced Standard Core Design II
- See above
- Advanced Standard Core Construction II
- See above
- Energy Storage Batteries
- Allows us to build recharge stations, improving turnaround times for our jumpships.
- Advanced Standard Core Theory II
- Military
- Recommendations
- Military (3)
- Barracuda Capital Missile System
- Can be immediately mounted on our largest dropships
- Improved Large Laser
- We have a number of designs which mount extended range 8cm lasers, this may be a pathway to improving them
- Heavy Quad Battlemechs
- Our light and medium quads did very well, time to see how a heavier design works
- Barracuda Capital Missile System
- Non-Military (4)
- Improved Germanium Refining
- We need to get more efficient at this as our ability to build jump cores increase, next year we’ll be ready to begin production, after all.
- Thermal Dissipation (Advanced) Tier 3
- Structural Materials (Advanced) Tier 3
- Power Transfer (Advanced) Tier 3
- All three of these may be required to build more advanced weapons, armor, engines, etc. Basic research is key. Our researchers believe that once we finish the current ‘tier’ of advanced basic R&D work we’ll be able to continue more, well, basic R&D.
- Improved Germanium Refining
- Military (3)
Janet is on vacation, her grandkids all got together and bought her and her husband an all-expenses paid trip to the finest resort on Capricorn, but forgot to check the date and it conflicted. Her deputy is present and has nothing of particular note to report budget wise.
SuperHeavy
Well-known member
At this point I am not convinced this team is actually a design firm instead of a corporate plant to discredit opposing government bids.