Turn 119 - No Surprize
While your youngest daughter is being wild and carefree, your three oldest daughters are settling down and getting married. Well, getting married at least. Your eldest is still in the Army, your second eldest has officially joined the Special Branch, and your third eldest is still in the Navy. But they are getting married, which opens up the delightful prospect of grandchildren.
You are almost 60, you want grandchildren, darnit.
Now if you could get them to settle down and stop doing dangerous things.
Your eldest has been transferred to serve as the most junior Battalion commander for the 19th Heavy Combat Team Division, although unfortunately she is still serving in the Armored Cavalry, thus is still running around in a thoroughly inadequate medium mech rather than a proper assault machine. On the plus side the 19th is currently assigned to Griffon, and will be there for the foreseeable future.
Your second eldest is marrying one of her fellow Special Branch agents, although Aaron Korsch is actually a data analyst who works out of headquarters rather than a field agent. You are deliberately not thinking about how your daughter was commended for her ‘able assistance’ breaking up a human trafficking ring on Awha, nor how she was decorated for her ‘key role’ in a major human trafficking bust on New Algiers.
Your third daughter, Mary, is a junior Lieutenant in the Navy, serving aboard HMS Agincourt as a gunnery officer, which is rather concerning to you considering that she is on the flagship of the Grand Fleet and Admiral di Palo has a history of aggression. Her fiance, Ethan Sullivan, is a yard dog in the Arvum system.
You will likely be spending quite a bit of time at weddings this year, and you are rather looking forward to this. You especially are eyeing the bits of regulations concerning pregnant women not being allowed in front-line service with a faint smile. Would it be ethical to slip fertility enhancing drugs into the wedding cakes?
Bourbon forces have completed clearing RS 2 and have formally taken possession of the system, allowing those forces committed to that world to depart. Fighting continues in the other three systems, with RS 1 continuing to see the highest intensity. Bourbon forces have begun reinforcing your units on RS 3, easing the strain a bit on your logistics and troops. RS 4 is more than halfway reduced, although the local RN forces are still stubbornly rebuilding destroyed surface to orbit installations as fast as they can, materially slowing your progress in reducing the two planets to balls of mildly radioactive dust.
A small Black Steel raid was repulsed in the Arvum system with minor casualties among ASF units involved. No major units were destroyed in the fighting, thankfully, but a number suffered damage requiring time in the Repair docks. The worst damage will take several months to fix.
One of the maneuvers that Admiral di Palo has been drilling the Grand Fleet on is a rapid evasive ‘sidestep’ maneuver, accomplished by fully overloading the reaction control thruster arrays to violently shove the ship to the side while maintaining the ordinary vector. Since the Black Steel have a propensity for ramming tactics once heavily damaged, a last-second dodge like this, even if it burns out the RCS arrays and results in requiring yard time for repairs is preferable to the loss of an entire ship. Unfortunately mass and volume limits make it impossible to fit heavier duty RCS thrusters, any larger than the current models and other critical operational requirements are seriously degraded.
In the latest engagement the Grand Fleet tested out an idea mooted by some creative junior officers that, sadly, didn’t work out. Remotely controlled small craft equipped with a space-borne version of the NRI’s beloved ‘shield’, a roughly circular slab of ferro-carbide armor that folds out to provide some additional protection for your ships. Unfortunately Black Steel gunnery is good enough to be able to ignore the ‘shield craft’, and the small craft themselves are extremely vulnerable to Black Steel drone ASFs.
The overall effectiveness of Black Steel swarm tactics has dropped, however, thanks to the new anti-swarm techniques developed by your R&D establishment. Losses among ASF pilots have dropped noticeably, although there is evidence of the Black Steel adapting their own tactics to compensate. It’s an arms race in many ways.
It’s nice to be ahead, if only briefly.
In some very welcome news, the Awha system has been officially designated a Core world, triggering massive system-wide celebrations that have resulted in some superb economic growth this year. You now have 19 Core Worlds, showing superb growth over the last century. Indeed, when you were a little girl there were only a few colonized worlds, and none of them qualified as ‘Core’ systems apart from Griffon itself. Your grandchildren will be born into a massive Star Empire. Not bad, you think, not bad at all.
Kaiyo is the next system expected to reach Core status, indeed some analysts are predicting it achieving that level by early next year.
After a number of years away, the Black Pumpernickels are back in your space and making their way to the Griffon system. They evidently have discovered a cache of ancient Rodgers & Hammerstein books and are gleefully performing them, booking shows on each world that they pass. They’ve scheduled their arrival in the Griffon system itself for Christmas time, and have announced their intention to put on a performance of Cinderella.
This wonderful news, since you love their shows, has had one unfortunate side effect.
Periphery Studies is on a thespian kick again. Impromptu stages are popping up all over Griffsport, featuring tenured faculty of Periphery Studies loudly declaiming ‘epic orations’ that they wrote themselves that generally make no sense to anybody who isn’t a tenured academic in the prestigious field of Periphery Studies. Thankfully the hard-working staff there have ensured that their ‘swords’ and such are made from foam rubber, so the worst injuries that occur are to the sanity of onlookers at the sheer awfulness of the ‘art’ on display.
You did not realize it was possible to mangle Hamlet quite that badly, and you aren’t sure you’ll ever be able to attend a performance of Romeo & Juliet without the truly dreadful ‘improvisation’ that you heard about rearing its ugly head in your thoughts. To was or not to was? Really? Seriously?
Back to the plus side, the Black Pumpernickels have contacted you with an offer to open a permanent theater company in the Empire, with yourself as the official patron of the company. It would be titled The Empress’s Players and they are requesting your assent to their proposal. It’s rather touching, actually. But it could be seen as giving preference to a ‘foreign’ troupe over home-grown ones. On the other hand, a permanent company here in the Empire would almost have to wind up hiring local talent, and local talent would benefit greatly from working with the Black Pumpernickels.
[] | Action | Result |
[] | Charter The Empress’s Players |
- +1 Economic Event
- -1 Politics
|
[] | NOT INVENTED HERE! NO! |
- +1 Politics
- -1 Economic Event
|