Turn 77 - Let Me Reach
You receive some memos from your sister concerning a new procurement request from the navy, specifically for a dedicated infantry transport. You thought you had one with the
Bataan class, but it turns out that this is for a battle armor infantry transport. The memo points out that you are having to tie up an excessive number of
Trentons for cycling infantry forces through Okusawa in order to facilitate the planned 6 month troop rotations. Since these are non-combat rotations that is overkill.
The proposed
Queen class transport is an aerodyne specifically optimized for transporting infantry. While it is rather large and bulky, it is minimally armed and armored and uses no strategic materials at all, rather the bulk is due to the extensive training and recreation facilities on board for the nearly 700 infantrymen carried. There’s a note in the design specifications that several commercial companies are interested in licensing a non-military variant of the design, deleting most of the weapons and replacing the military training facilities with additional recreation spaces for civilian passengers.
The insurgency is continuing on Okusawa, and still your troops are making you proud. No excessive responses, the rules of engagement are being religiously followed with the only exceptions being to show even greater restraint in the face of various provocations. It’s costing you some people, hardly a day goes by without reports of KIA or WIA troops, but the deployed forces are maintaining discipline and restraint.
Law enforcement is trying to hunt down the criminals behind the land scam on New Castor, so far with little luck. The money trail vanishes into a maze of money-laundering operations which have effectively obfuscated the trail. The inside employees have vanished. Supposedly all of them are dead, at least according to filed death certificates, and had been cremated, but there are no bodies and the medical examiners who filed the death certificates are themselves now deceased via a rash of apparent ‘suicides’. Considering that said ‘suicides’ were attested to by death certificates issued by fellow ‘suicides’ after the supposed time of their own ‘suicide’... the records in those offices are now extremely suspect and are being gone over with fine-toothed combs by the Special Branch and the Imperial Grifftiger Mounted Police.
Martina has assured you that law enforcement is on the case. You wish her luck, because you can already tell that she is up against a well-organized criminal group. The enormous amount of money that they’d managed to bilk out of people means that if they aren’t greedy they might never surface again, having more than enough to live comfortably for years or even decades to come.
Here in the Griffon system a substantial mineral strike in the inner asteroid belt has significantly boosted the overall economy, while in Nowa Warszawa ongoing settlement of Nowa Warszawa II has had a similar boosting effect on the economy.
But the biggest news comes from Edelsteine.
Thanh shows up in your office, looking torn between laughing and raging and throws a folder down on your desk. “I know you are well aware of our difficulties in figuring out the AR10 system, well… I think we never should have trusted those specs for the Barracuda, White Shark and Killer Whale missile systems we got from the
Dart and
Potemkin plans and samples, because the Star League were lying liars who lie and could care less about efficient logistics.”
She doesn’t even pause. “You know why we can’t do AR10s? Because a Barracuda missile is 1 meter in diameter, needs to be breech loaded into the tube, is a rounded triangle in cross section, and has pop-out maneuvering thruster arms at the mid point of the missile body. The White Shark is 1.5 meters in diameter, a rounded rectangle in cross section at the mid point, round at the nose and has multiple independent boosters at the rear and needs to be side loaded into the tube due to the shape. The Killer Whale is 2.5 meters in diameter, circular cross section with a pronounced wasp waist three quarters along the length and, like the Barracuda, needs to be muzzle loaded, but with a completely different style of loading mechanism. The AR10 somehow fires all three of these very different missiles from a common tube and loading system.”
You ask her why she is bringing this up.
“Because,” she laughs, gesturing to the folder, “the Star League are lying liars who lie. We’ve been struggling to develop an AR10 now for years, we know it is possible, we have the broad outline specifications for it, but we’ve utterly failed at every turn to even come up with something that could theoretically work. Then a podunk little engineering company run in their spare time by a group of mining equipment engineers in the Edelsteine system solves it. The three different missiles are utterly incompatible with each other, so why not develop new missiles with the same performance profiles that are compatible with each other and a common launcher, and just to cap things off, switch from a hot launch to a cold launch profile by using a variation of a mining mass driver in the tube, giving the missiles higher initial launch velocity and thus improving performance. And based on the preliminary calculations? Doing precisely that will yield an AR10 launcher identical in every single goddamn way to the specs we have from the Star League archives.”
[] | Action | Arguments Pro | Arguments Con | Effects |
[] | Finance the development of the AR10 on an expedited basis | This weapon is one of the Holy Grails of capital weaponry. The ability to fire any sort of capital missile from a single common launcher? Incredibly useful in warship design. Moreover, doing this will be a nice boost to the Edelsteine economy as that little engineering firm is about to make all the money, and that means more tax revenue down the road | It’s not a big deal, we can finance this through the ordinary process for much less money, and just because those hicks on Edelsteine came up with a good idea doesn’t mean we should turn them into billionaires, let an established weapons development company do the work so we can trust the results. |
- Gain immediate access to the AR10 Missile System
- Cost 1,000,000,000
- +50% GDP on Edelsteine for the next 2 turns
- +1 Politics
- -1 Economy Event
|
[] | Missiles, schmissiles, do it through the ordinary channels | Sure, these yahoos came up with a good idea, yay, hurray, that’s lovely. Have our regular R&D teams validate things in the normal way through trusted established contractors. Sure, it will take a while, but it won’t cost us nearly as much. | Doing it this way is just a giveaway to the existing military industrial complex, allowing them to get their own piece of the pie and leaving the people who actually came up with the idea out in the cold. Plus, the AR10 is an important system, we need it as soon as possible. |
- Unlocks the AR10 R&D option, taking 3 turns and costing 250,000,000 a turn with a target of 80
- +1 Economy Event
|
You are so tempted to face palm, this is so like the Star League’s penchant for extreme levels of disinformation.
Parliament is back in session. So far things have been rather mundane with minimal items of interest being debated. You do have a few decisions to make, but nothing too world shattering.
First is the Healthcare Cost Containment Act of 3007. The act is intended to address the steady rise in healthcare costs, especially within the government healthcare systems intended for active duty and retired military and the very poor. That makes you immediately rather suspicious, because the name plus the topic probably means somebody is trying to cut benefits.
You are pleasantly surprised, however, when you read the actual legislation. The act pinpoints a number of ‘penny wise, pound foolish’ practices extant within the healthcare system which are contributing to unnecessary cost increases over time. For example, building a small number of extremely large hospital and medical care complexes in central locations. Very efficient in up front and running costs, but transportation costs, especially for critical care cases, soon obliterate the upfront savings. In addition the massive complexes require equally massive support staff to keep running in comparison to the actual medical staff, and any issues lead to massive expenses as resolving them is more critical due to the lack of alternative care centers. The bill proposes spending more money on upfront costs like a larger number of smaller, more dispersed, hospitals and medical centers. The analysis shows that while physical plant costs and payroll costs will both increase by about 25%, the reduction in transportation costs combined with the economic effects of spreading out the spending to a wider area would make things, in the long term, nearly net zero in actual budgetary terms.
[] | Action | Argument Pro | Argument Con | Effects |
[] | Approve the Healthcare Cost Containment Act of 3007 | We owe it to our veterans and those served by the government healthcare system to give them the highest quality of care. Additionally, we owe it to all of the taxpayers to spend their money as wisely as possible. Being able to meet both goals at once is a wonderful thing. Spending a bit more upfront may seem counterintuitive, but in the end it will result in overall savings and improved care. | The current model works. It may not be perfect, and tweaks may be needed to address transport issues, but this legislation goes too far. We might as well call this the ‘Medical Full Employment At Taxpayer Expense Act’ because the main thing here is that it significantly expands the number of doctors, nurses, and technicians needed to serve the same number of people. |
- Splits the existing ‘Benefits’ expense into ‘Benefits’ and ‘Healthcare’ categories with them totally up to equal the current 100,000,000 per system expense.
- Negates 1 degree of failure on Health rolls
- +1 Politics
- +1 support Chamber of Delegates
- -1 Economy
- +3 Economic Event
|
[] | Veto the Healthcare Cost Containment Act of 3007 | The current model of building centrally located large medical care facilities has proven to be effective. Changing things simply to deal with some edge cases is an overreaction. To be blunt, this is nothing but a giveaway to the medical community and will result in greater expenses in the future, mark my words. | Constantly seeing only the negatives… currently our system does, indeed, work, but it can and should work better. We currently are losing patients during the extended transportation times to the One Big Hospital, especially on the smaller peripheral worlds. This needs to change. |
- Keeps the current system
- -1 Politics
- -1 Support
- Chamber of Delegates
- Imperial Senate
- +1 Economy
|
Next up is the RECREATion Act of 3007. The purpose of this act is to set aside funds from the Imperial Treasury in order to finance the creation of parks and recreation areas throughout the Empire in conjunction with system, planetary, and local governments. It’s a very straightforward bit of legislation, it would increase the yearly upkeep costs of the Empire in order to maintain these funds, and in return you’d hopefully have a happier, healthier, and more productive populace thanks to having recreation areas and parks.
[] | Action | Argument Pro | Argument Con | Effects |
[] | Approve the RECREATion Act of 3007 | Parks and recreation areas are important for the mental and physical well being of our citizens. Having more of them would be a wonderful thing. | Local and system governments are already building parks and rec areas, why does the Empire need to spend our money on this too? If people want them, let them pay for them themselves. |
- Establish a new category for Civil Upkeep titled ‘Parks & Recreation’
- Initial Expense of 100,000 per system
- +1 Approval Change
- +1 Politics
- +1 Economic Event
- +1 Support Chamber of Delegates
|
[] | Veto the RECREATion Act of 3007 | If the citizens of a given system or locality want a wonderful park, wonderful, let them pay for it in order to enjoy it. It’s not the business of the Empire to spend money on such things when we need to buy more warships and such | The mental and physical well-being of all of our citizens is a priority for the Empire. Parks contribute to this, but oftentimes are too expensive for poorer communities to pay for. We owe it to all of our citizens, even the poorest, to provide them these things |
- -1 Approval Change
- -1 Politics
- +1 Economy
- -1 Economic Event
- -1 Support
- Senate
- Chamber of Delegates
|