Turn 31 - Immortal Fear
You are truly irritated with the Chamber of Deputies, not only for their greed but for their sheer abject stupidity making it more difficult to fully integrate Nowy Gdansk into the new Empire.
You had already been scheduled to make a State Visit to the colony to meet personally with the leadership and review the Home Army who made up the core of the initial garrison. You had intended to discuss establishing internal immigration guidelines with the local leadership but the actions of the Chamber had made that fraught. At least the Senate had their head screwed on more or less straight.
The reception was far warmer, however, than you had feared, even if the weather was disobliging by freezing colder than a witch’s tit. Your kids and the tigers might like all this fluffy white stuff, you rather preferred the beach.
Old Leopold, the Sejm, and the Council were all waiting to meet with you after you reviewed the Armia Krajow. The troops looked hard, tough, and angry. You are quite glad that you aren’t a Kuritan since you strongly suspect that these hardened guerrillas wouldn’t be all that concerned about the niceties of ‘rules of war’.
You can live with that.
So you decided to throw out the planned itinerary a bit.
Standing in front of the troops you folded your hands behind your back and made use of the lungs that God had given you and which had been quite well trained by then Sergeant Ngo in the ancient art of bellowing orders. Microphones were for wimps.
“You have all no doubt heard by now of the recent debates in the Imperial Parliament.” you start, your gaze slowly sweeping the line of soldiers. “We shall be charitable and ascribe the actions of the Delegates to ignorance, after all, no person in their right mind who is aware of history would think that the descendents of those who stood at the
Battle of Wizna would lay down and allow their ancient liberties to be trampled in the name of greed. That men and women whose ancestors defied the Nazi’s with cries of
Warszawo, walcz would permit themselves to be subjugated by anybody.”
“We will one day liberate Nowa Warszawa. We will crush the Dragon beneath our heel. And we will do it with you at Our side as comrades, not slaves. It will take blood. It will take sweat. It will take the utmost dedication of all of us. But we will prevail. And We will do so without sacrificing the principles that We hold, to treat all of our people, regardless of culture, regardless of origin, regardless of how much or how little they can contribute at any given point to Our great struggle, as Our people, not as disposable tools to be used and discarded.”
You smile then, a smile almost colder than the arctic climate of this benighted place. “And We expect you to hold Us to that pledge. You have already pledged your service to Us. And We pledged Ourselves to you in turn.” you pause for a beat. “Colonel Sikorski.” you turn to the Home Army commander. “Dismiss the formation.”
As you finally head inside you make a mental note, the winter version of the AFGR uniform was still too damn lightweight, you were feeling cold in places that should only know warmth.
While you are meeting with the representatives of the ex-slaves one of your aides brings you a datapad with a report on it.
You strongly resist the urge to bang your head on the table and shout ‘DAMNIT TYLER’.
Lee Aerospace has unveiled what they had been working on. Evidently inspired by the skeletonized
Behemoth they’d constructed what appeared to be an incomplete frame of a dropship with a set of engines on one end and a pressurized control area on the other, linked by a girder and tube arrangement, with additional girders and pierced steel plates radiating from the central girder.
At first glance it looks completely mad, but then the announcement shows specially designed small craft delivering vacuum sealed cargo containers that are easily secured to the framework. In a matter of hours (according to the time lapse information at least, the video itself is only a few minutes long) the framework is filled with containers and the unwieldy craft slowly boosts from Griffin’s Roost on a transfer orbit to Nowy Gdansk. According to the video it is carrying machine tools, mining equipment, and farming equipment.
QM Note - you now have access to a superheavy cargo craft that is far too fragile for any military purpose but which will allow for far easier trade between planets in the system. For the next 10 turns Nowy Gdansk will have +10% GDP, Griffin’s Roost will have +1% GDP, and the Empire will have +1% Tax and Interest rates each year.
Upon your return to Griffin’s Roost you are immediately besieged by outraged complaints from the Chamber of Delegates, however you pretty much ignore them. The polling is showing that the Delegates are very likely going to find themselves voted out of office soon, so it’s no real skin off of your hide how much they dislike you for pointing out for all to see their petty nature.
And then it’s that time of year again. The time of year you always wait for with existential dread because good God are the meetings boring.
Budget time! (yay?)
Like always the military goes first, and General Swanson leads the military briefers. “Your Majesty, overall ground forces are in a good position for now. We should focus on procuring
Jaguar tanks for 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored for now. We might also want to consider purchasing a regiment of
Winged Hussars for Nowy Gdansk, it would be a good operational environment for the design and would expand our RRF’s reach beyond Griffin’s Roost itself.”
General Reyes then takes over. “We are in a solid place ASF wise, although more is always preferable. I would recommend filling out our
Roc and
Eagle wings and possibly starting a new
Gyrfalcon wing while holding off on further
Goshawk production until we have a suitable upgraded design. The challenge there will be strategic materials availability.”
Admiral Benjamin then takes over. “Your Majesty, HMS Valiant will be joining the fleet early next year, bringing our number of
Defiant class assault ships to 3. We are in the final stages of a RFP for a new transport dropship for conventional forces to supplement the
Harris class. We have two options at this time.”
He lays out the basic details of the two designs. Both are intended to be easily convertible between an armored battalion carrier and a mechanized battalion carrier.
[] | Name | Cost | Speed | HP | A/D | Special |
[] | Hera | 1879.89 | 5 | 70 | 20 | Dropship, AMS 2 |
[] | Stork | 2264.47 | 5 | 81 | 31 | Dropship |
General Potter simply confirms the recommendations of his subordinates and leaves it at that.
Bridget is even more excited than usual. “We’ve got all sorts of things we can do, Your Majesty! Starting with things like developing the infrastructure on Nowy Gdansk even more to spur internal growth and other things like really looking hard at Griffin IV to see if and where we would want to colonize the place we can even use
Sarah to do basic resource surveys of Griffin IV and Nowy Gdansk to find places of interest and that would be very useful for future growth not to mention building more orbital infrastructure like factories and such and expanding space stations for the improvements to research and defense and building bigger orbital factories and the rest and we have some longer term plans that would require help from Jake to implement since it would go through them.”
Isoroku is his usual stoic self. “Your Majesty, this year we recommend the musical festival for cultural affairs. In addition, we in the Ministry are pondering expanding the Olympics into summer and winter events, in order to better incorporate Nowy Gdansk. It would have no net cost change, at least in our current estimates, but should broaden the appeal of the event.”
[] Approve - No change in cost, +1% Interest Rate in the years with a Games
[] Disapprove - Summer games are enough!
Jake is grinning a bit. “Bridget stole a little bit of my thunder, but we have a working group in our department who have proposed a template for expanding the Department of Mega Engineering. The main problem is that there simply aren’t that many overly ambitious civil engineers to go around for supporting multiple projects, but a solid promotional campaign combined with scholarships for those who commit to the field early should correct that issue. It’ll be expensive, but it would allow us to do more.”
Mary is as incredibly organized as ever, and presents a full powerpoint breakdown of the available projects.
- Military Projects
- Medium Aerodyne Dropships
- Up to 5,000 tons
- Superior assault dropship configuration
- Can better concentrate forward firepower
- Better protection for a given mass of armor
- Medium Spheroid Dropships
- Up to 10,000 tons
- Superior transport dropship configuration
- Larger, thus able to support larger amounts of cargo and units
- Poorer armor protection for a given mass of armor
- Superior all around weaponry, most useful while landed
- Streak SRM-2
- Least expensive advanced weapon system research option
- The SRM-2 is used on several of our light units and the Streak guidance package would be a natural upgrade for them without requiring strategic materials
- Advanced Ultra Autocannons
- UAC/2, UAC/10, and UAC/20
- Provides high volume of fire
- UAC/20 would be highly lethal against enemy dropships
- Heavy Bipedal Mechs
- Up to 75 tons
- Would permit a wide variety of highly versatile designs ranging from fire support, anti-aircraft, direct assault, cavalry, and general purpose trooper
- Artemis Fire Control
- Can be added to any missile system to improve accuracy and lethality
- Laser Anti-Missile System
- Relatively straightforward upgrade to the small pulse laser to permit interception of enemy missiles without consumption of ammunition
- ER Medium and Small Laser
- Add the enhanced focusing systems of the ER 8cm laser to the 5cm and 3cm lasers.
- Expected to be highly efficient weapons when perfected
- Guardian ECM
- Provides valuable ECM support
- Note - it is not believed that the Dracs field any systems which would be affected directly by ECM
- Beagle Active Probe
- Extremely capable sensor package
- Light Quad Mech
- Has high potential for stable high-mobility scout platforms
- Arrow IV
- A highly lethal artillery missile
- Can be carried by ASFs as underwing ordnance for air-to-ground strikes
- Non-Military Projects
- Terraforming Equipment - Lvl 3
- The civil engineers are annoyingly vague about the projects that they are thinking about.
- Expanding oceans, reclaiming land, lowering mountains are among the possibilities but details are scarce
- Will be threatening the engineers with relegation to the Department of Periphery Studies if they continue to be evasive
- Industrial Mechs Tier 2
- Larger and more powerful industrial mechs will have a significant benefit for major civil engineering projects, including DoME projects.
- Materials Research Lvl 4
- General materials research, upon completion of this project a number of new fields will open up for investigation in more specialized areas, while general research will still be available
- Electronics Lvl 4
- As above, but only with electronic systems, especially fire control and avionics
- Power Generation Lvl 4
- As above, with power systems, including reactors, drives, myomer, etc
- Orbital Infrastructure Lvl 4
- Slightly different, in that research advances in this field are coupled with improvements in surface-to-orbit communications capabilities, more sophisticated traffic routing routines to deconflict orbital pathing, and general improvements to satellite networks.
- Improved Communications Lvl 4
- As for Materials Research Lvl 4, but focused specifically on communications systems of all kinds
- Organize Expedition to the Ruins
- The archaeologists are making Big Sad Cry Eyes at me to beg for this, it’s cheap but it takes a long time to complete, thus limiting flexibility
- Improved Agriculture Lvl 3
- The agronomy folks are talking about vertical farms, high intensity hydroculture and advanced greenhouse systems.
- Orbital Survey
- The satellite folks promise not to look at any nude beaches if they are allowed to play with their toys.
- Life-Extension Therapy Lvl 2
- I am not a specialist in the biological sciences, but the biomedical people say that there are promising avenues of ethical research in this area.
- Genetic Editing
- This could be a risky endeavor, but the potential rewards are great. The more visionary scientists speak of artificial gestation and the redevelopment of Iron Wombs, but also of genetically tweaking in vitro to produce Home Superior, a very dangerous path indeed.
- Recommendations
- I have sufficient research teams to support 2 military and 3 non-military projects
- Military Project Recommendations
- Medium Aerodyne Dropship
- Best candidate for a small carrier
- Could yield a larger ‘frigate’ analogue to the Defiants PT Boat
- We have the most experience with this layout, allowing for greater design flexibility
- Least expensive of the improved dropship projects
- Streak SRM-2
- While it is of limited utility, this project is inexpensive and straightforward.
- Would provide immediate upgrade capability to the Phalanx and Legionnaire light tanks as well as the Weasel IFV, which is currently our most common combat unit.
- Non-Military Project Recommendations
- Materials Research Lvl 4
- Perhaps the most critical area of study
- Sub projects would include:
- Improved Heat Dissipation and Management
- Reduced bulk of lightweight armor and structural components
- Industrial Mechs Tier 2
- The across the board improvements for infrastructure development make this a very attractive project indeed.
- Genetic Editing
- The potential to reintroduce the Iron Womb alone is reason enough for this project.
- There is no need to continue research beyond the Iron Womb
Harry chuckles “That is a hard act to follow, Your Majesty. The only thing from us is we’d like permission to debrief the Home Army folks to see what we can learn from them. Primarily about the Dracs, but they might have some good ideas for our operations as well.”
Janet has, as usual, provided all of the caffeinated goodness that allows you to survive these meetings. She’s also brought along baby pictures of her first granddaughter. You spend most of the allotted time cooing over them and sharing pictures of baby John. The rest is spent laughing about the latest antics of Special Branch as they are dealing with a small bank robbery gang in Griffsport that
race around in really small fuel cell cars.