Turn 95 - Well The Girl I Love
You receive a report from Admiral von Falkenrick, who is in command of the squadron sent out to Novagalicia. NRI scouts have found a nearby Black Steel supply depot that is in the process of being constructed and he is requesting permission to attack.
The NRI is fully on board, with their available forces ready to go, but they’d need your support to have any chance of victory. A quick analysis from Admiral Fisher and Admiral Sims indicates that he should have adequate forces to accomplish the mission and that the proposed OPLAN appears sound. At this remove they are not willing to second-guess the Admiral on the scene and recommend immediate approval of the operation.
This is a risk, however, Admiral von Falkenrick has a fairly substantial portion of your most modern warships under his command, and if he loses the battle you may see your naval build up negatively affected, especially with the build times for the truly heavy iron. On the gripping hand, you will have a number of heavy cruisers and battlecruisers commissioning this year, and next year you’ll have a major tranche including a full ten
Prinz Eugens. So it might well be an acceptable risk. If you manage to destroy that supply depot before it becomes operational you might be able to redistribute forces away from that flank for a time.
This is why you are the Empress, you get to make these sorts of calls.
[] | Approve Operation: Parabole |
- Potential combat action this turn
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[] | Deny Operation: Parabole | |
The IGMP brings a matter to your attention. A moderately sized corporate bank here in the Griffon system has been caught manipulating the financial markets, however what they are doing is not, strictly speaking, illegal. Unethical perhaps, shady, underhanded, and sneaky most certainly, but not quite illegal. Moreover what they are doing is benefiting their investors and depositors rather than defrauding them, indeed this particular bank is showing some of the best investment returns in the market, it’s just that they are being sneaky little snakes about it, taking advantage of loopholes around the margins of regulations in order to score an extra bit of benefit here and there.
Again, no laws are being broken, even by the strictest and most restrictive reading of them. No regulations are being broken. Bent, certainly, adhered to by the letter and not the spirit most definitely. But not broken.
Where things become a bit problematic is that the board of directors for this bank include a number of businessmen who are well known to be highly supportive of the Crown, indeed you’ve met many of them at various functions in thanks for their earnest dedication to the Empire. And while none of them have broken the law, you are quite uncomfortably aware of just how bad this might look if the opposition press were to get their eager little hands on the story and do their usual viewing with alarm fan dance to discredit you in the court of public opinion.
You can see the headlines now, and it would be very troublesome. On the other hand, none of these businessmen are doing a single thing that’s actually wrong, which would make the opposition news sources have a field day as they’d be able to yell and scream about the ethics, while if you were to take any action they’d suddenly be able to switch to emphasizing your ‘lawless’ actions.
You sometimes really hate allowing a free press.
You are honestly not sure how you want to handle this, it’s a minefield, and you feel like you’ll be having to tap dance through it while wearing lead snowshoes.
[] | WRITE-IN (effects determined by QM, winning action gets a reroll) |
Parliament, meanwhile, is in session. Tiberius brings you the latest proposals for your consideration.
There are two, neither are earth shattering, but both require your attention. The Imperial Senate has proposed the Health Care Cost Containment Act of 3025. You were worried for a moment reading the title, but then you got into the meat of the proposal.
The legislation is surprisingly straightforward.
Firstly, it would establish an Imperial fund to provide financing to charitable organizations involved in providing health services to the poor and indigent. Effectively it would be an Imperial matching scheme, providing funds equal to the amount raised by the organization for qualifying services intended to provide free health care to the poor.
Secondly it would incentivize health care providers to provide at-cost or below-cost services to said charitable organizations by granting them an official seal of Imperial patronage, which would cost next to nothing but would be excellent advertising for those providers. Straightforward criteria have been proposed for this purpose. It would require members of the Imperial family to make the occasional appearance at the various institutions involved, but you’d been doing things like that ever since you were a small child.
Finally it would establish an oversight office within the Interior Ministry to ensure that the program is administered properly empire wide. This office would also be responsible for maintaining the fund itself, communicating the fund to the prospective recipients, and all other ancillary tasks associated with the program.
[] | Action | Arguments | Effects |
[] | Sign the Health Care Cost Containment Act of 3025 | For the poorest among us, even with our extensive social safety nets, a health crisis can be the difference between keeping a roof over the head and food on the table and becoming homeless. There are many charities dedicated to the hard, rewarding work of helping those on the edge, but they are always chronically short of funding.
This isn’t government funded healthcare, it isn’t mandatory insurance, it places no mandates, imposes no regulations, twists no arms. It is a means by which the Imperial government can support the existing charitable institutions as they labor to alleviate the costs associated with healthcare. Nothing more, nothing less.
Those healthcare providers who are willing to proactively lower their prices in order to better serve the poor and needy would be rewarded with a token patronage. Those too greedy to do so will not. How any person of good will could object to that is beyond us. |
- Initial outlay of $10,000,000,000.00
- Increases upkeep by $10,000,000 per system per level
- +1 Approval Change
- +1 Economic Event
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[] | Veto the Health Care Cost Containment Act of 3025 | When will this end? We already have an enormous social safety net. We already subsidize education, wages, food, and shelter. What more must we do before these bleeding hearts stop coming back with their hands out demanding we give them more?
Even the poorest among us already get the most basic healthcare services free of charge, it is only specialty and advanced services that are so expensive as to be an issue, and frankly their expense is a factor due to the difficulty and cost of providing those advanced services and treatments, not out of some sense of greed. The margins are already razor thin as it is, so the insinuation that those who charge reasonable prices are too greedy to deserve Imperial patronage is an insult. The people working in those healthcare institutions need to pay the bills as well, they have families and their own expenses to meet. Insinuating that wanting to charge a fair price for their services is somehow greedy is well beyond the pale. |
- +1 Politics
- +1 Research Event
- -10 support
- Imperial Senate
- Chamber of Delegates
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The Chamber of Delegates is proposing the Access to Communications for Education and Science Act of 3025. It takes you a moment, then you groan at the deliberate creations of an acronym. ACES indeed.
Lame title aside, the actual legislation is fairly serious. The underpinning of the Empire’s success has long been your excellent educational system and the enormous benefits a well-educated populace brings to the table. Your R&D engine is as powerful as it is because of the excellence of your schools.
However as you have grown, your education system has sprawled out across the Empire. Even with the existing HPG network it has become difficult, not to mention expensive, for scientists, teachers, and students across the Empire to communicate with each other outside of their own local region.
This act is intended to rectify that issue. It would finance an Empire-wide project to build a dedicated HPG network for the use of schools and scientific institutions. This network would run in parallel to the regular, commercial and military network, and would be fully at the disposal of the education system.
Four dedicated HPG stations would be built in each settled system of the Empire, allowing for constant, real-time communication across the network. This would allow students, teachers, researchers and scientists unprecedented connectivity, giving a massive boost to scientific cooperation and coordination.
Grace is extremely enthusiastic about this project, noting that it is something she’d been planning on proposing in the near future anyways but she’s quite happy to see that the Chamber has preempted her. She provides you with briefing papers on something called ‘ARPAnet’ from old Earth, and contrasts it with your current far more segmented and isolated communications infrastructure. She points out that if this is successful, it may well be possible to expand the regular HPG network to permit the same thing for business and government purposes.
[] | Action | Arguments | Effects |
[] | Sign the Access to Communications for Education and Science Act of 3025 | The benefits for science and education are self-evident. The smaller scale communications networks we’ve built within universities and such have been very useful, meaningfully linking them all together into an Empire wide network of networks would allow for amazing work. It would be incredibly expensive to set up, but it could well be the prototype for something amazing for the commercial sector as well. |
- Initial cost of $6,880,000,000.00
- Ongoing upkeep of $10,000,000.00 per system
- +5 to Research Event roll
- +5 to all Research targets (up to cap)
- -1 Politics
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[] | Veto the Access to Communications for Education and Science Act of 3025 | We should not waste money on such useless boondoggles. Next thing you know, they’ll be claiming that businesses that exist solely to do business over this uber network of theirs would be a thing, and that’s just ridiculous. |
- +1 Politics
- -1 Research Event
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