Hidden supply caches for the Taurian Concordat

[Archangel]

One, main reason is that the Periphery was never the focus of the game designers.  Limiting the number of designs they created was in keeping with the setting that the Periphery states are the wild untamed frontier of space.

Second, they were focused on rebuilding their shattered military forces after the fighting against the SLDF.  While they inflicted heavy losses on the SLDF, they had suffered heavy losses of their own.  Limiting the number of different designs to existing designs helped limit rebuilding costs.

Third, limited resources which an extended economic depression, caused by them cutting themselves off from the markets the SL had made them so dependent upon, only made worse.  Like the Great Houses, they were overwhelmed simply trying to keep their people alive.

Fourth, their limited military-industrial complex was repeatedly targeted by pirates, shattered house units fleeing the Inner Sphere, etc.  Some of the raiders even used nukes to cover their tracks.  Even a minor raid could cost them months of lost production including that stolen by the raiders, production lost while the production line(s) is being repaired and production lost while waiting for new parts to be shipped in.

That said they did come up with a few of their own design variants and likely had many more that were abandoned before reaching the prototype stage let alone the production stage.

Regardless, this belongs in its own thread.

[FedComGirl]

Building an entirely new design takes time and money which the Taurians didn't have.  They even stuck with SLDF mechs instead of reintroducing their Toro because it wasn't cost effective to retool the factories.

The Taurians also didn't have to be physically hit by the Succession Wars to feel the ripples of war. After the SLDF won they redid the Peripheries economies so entire worlds were focused on building one item. This was done to eliminate the periphery being self sufficient and make them dependent on the Star League. With the disruption in shipping and commerce those worlds suffered greatly.  Those worlds would have needed to be supported by more capable worlds which would strain the Periphery even more.


As for hidden caches, they existed. The last surviving Toro was hidden in one. What else they might have contained and how many had been opened can vary depending on the game.

[Intermittent_Coherence]

to be honest, i'm surprised that the Taurians didn't try to design some new mechs during the succession wars. the early ones didn't hit them as hard, and they had mech production already. even if it was just redoing the weapons loads and cosmetics of the one's they had factories for. which IIRC by 3025included the Stinger, Griffin, and maybe the Commando? plenty of things you could do with those as a base.

once the SLDF was gone the Taurians have little reason to maintain the Status Quo forced on them by the Star league.

To be fair, the available mechs being produced locally did tend to cover a lot of the roles the fairly small military would need. Recon, skirmishers, troopers, fire support, they practically had everything. They had all of the Unseen designs save for the PHX, BLR, SHD(though it was available next door at the MoC), the OST's and the WVR.

[GeminiBull]

You know, I was thinking about this, possibly for a fanfic, but the TC had a massive industrial machine-- and even at the end of the war, they still had most of it, since it was inside the cluster. 
Equally, they had several years to know that they were going to lose. No way around it.  What types of caches might they have established, especially when you consider that there is no FTL tracking in Btech.  Hidden worlds a'la the blakists? Caches of equipment and such just put into interstaller space or the oort cloud of a convenient system?

I have this in my alternate future fan fiction thing. ;D I haven't gotten to the TC just yet, but you do see some of what the TC has acquired from a long forgotten base in what I have posted. Yeah this is a little like a promo for my thing and I'm sorry.  :-[ I just love BT. If anything, the TC would have created distant caches rimward of its borders after the Reunification War. Slowly building them up. They did it before the Amaris Civil War. There should still be some untouched ones out there.

[Nightgaun7]

none of the canon universe makes sense from just about any perspective you choose, just do what you want.

[glitterboy2098]

I'm not sure you'd get many Caches of the complex military hardware. Mechs, combat vehicles, and the like would have been shipped to the front as quickly as they could be made during the fall of the TC to the SLDF.. and by the time anyone figured out that they were going to lose, i doubt there would have been much time to build caches.

however i could see a lot of Caches of lower-end gear (Infantry weapons, body armor, etc) being set up widely during that time. it would be a lot easier to hide away a couple platoons worth of gear than it would be a mech, and infantry weapons and gear is manufactured in large enough quantities that you could siphon off entire company's worth of gear without really harming the supply to the frontline. plus it is compact.. a few pallets of crates that could be squirreled away in a basement or hidden in a fairly small hidden bunker.

plus such Caches would be easily justified to the military as pre-positioning for Guerrilla uprisings after the SLDF occupies the TC. and if the TC was pre-positioning similar caches in less covert fashion "for the defense of the homeworld", you could hide the secret ones in plain sight.

on the less military side i could see the industries building some caches to hold their databanks, records, blueprints, etc. less because they'd be afraid of the SLDF destroying all those (i suspect that when the SLDF did it caught them by surprise) but as a hedge against any loses due to battle damage during invasion, or sabotage.


the more advanced hardware, the mechs and such, i doubt many made it into caches. odds are that some Unit commander's might have tried to hide away gear, some Taurians tried to 'rescue' a few from the SLDF wreckers.. but i doubt that any caches such groups could arrange short notice would last more than a few decades in any useable condition. after a century or so they'd need a ton of work.

[Red Pins]

First, let me say this is a fascinating discussion!  Its gone a bit afield, but really interesting.  Btw, 'Black Bessie' was salvaged off a battlefield and hidden, iirc, not placed in a cache to repair and serve after the occupation.

none of the canon universe makes sense from just about any perspective you choose, just do what you want.

Also, Reading the previous posts, I have several points of agreement, mostly this one.  Its a game, after all.  The designers focused on massive wars, political intrigue, and not the little guys off in the corners without the bucket, to, you know, after shafting them.   ^-^

And they didn't concentrate on the clever, or even commonsense, with notable exceptions (truly massive doses of stupid pills, here).  Yes, they had holdout military reserves - iirc, according to the ISP 3 section mentioned, those were used (if they ever really existed - I despise the ISP books simply for that, as well as the Genecaste TP) with the exception of the crippled TDF WarShip in mothballs resurrected by the Blakists in the Jihad for the Concordat.  (I suppose the biggest remaining golden eggs are the Amaris storehouses supposedly hidden in the deep Periphery - good luck finding them, eh?)

Anyway, I think equipment and materials caches such as the Amaris factories or Marion Hegemony's Germainium storehouses make a LOT more sense - rebuilding materials and military production equipment or stockpiles would go a long way to quickly bouncing back - but it wouldn't be easy to hide in the kind of quantities needed.  Massive quantities, by the way.  Massive - huge - in scattered locations, or a couple remote locations guaranteed to be secure for decades.  My point is they would have been forced to consider a member planet or nearby system, since just moving it would have been next to impossible while facing occupation. Something like the collapse of Nazi germany might make sense, as individuals move to deny things to the invading Star League that they could loot for their immediate benefit.  Any number of them could still exist, similar to the storehouse for the Helm memory core.

But a technology cache?  ...Not really.  The C* 'Holy Shroud' campaign (more than one, according to the fluff) was a pretty cunning bit of in-universe explaination, and went a long way toward making an extended SW timeline plausable.  Sure, there are all kinds of tech companies, universities, colleges, hobbists even, but the kinds of massive government programs to recover some of these things and the SW themselves would work to keep the number of Bill Gates/Steve Jobs down.  In-universe, they stand out, and the whackos in the white bathrobes would have been on them like cheap lawyers on a wrongful death suit.  When the SL took education materials, books, equipment, EVERYTHING the Concordat needed to recover after they won, it was the only smart thing they could have done.

Frankly, the idea of the Helm, Dallas, and the SL-era Prometheus data core were drivers to explain new rulebooks and TROs, imo - it was the only thing that could explain how after only a few years could go by such massive improvements were possible, but I use the possibility of a SL Prometheus database to explain the conditions of my AU.  Its your fanfic or AU, after all.  Oh - seems to me there was a fanfic here where an operational WS misjumped and came out in 3025 with such a memory core - it was pretty good.  Looking forward to reading your take on it.

[Arkansas Warrior]

Here's an easy, multipurpose cache the Taurians could seed on multiple worlds: sheep.  They provide meat, wool, recreation, and they're even self-replicating!  Interestingly, it's actually a proven idea: there are a number of North Atlantic islands with no permanent human population, but plenty of sheep.  The shepherds will come by occasionally to shear, slaughter, stc, but otherwise leave them to their own devices.

[Sharpnel]

Here's an easy, multipurpose cache the Taurians could seed on multiple worlds: sheep.  They provide meat, wool, recreation, and they're even self-replicating!  Interestingly, it's actually a proven idea: there are a number of North Atlantic islands with no permanent human population, but plenty of sheep.  The shepherds will come by occasionally to shear, slaughter, stc, but otherwise leave them to their own devices.

Those crazy Scots and Irish (maybe).

[Nightgaun7]

Prometheus database

What's the source on this?

[Red Pins]

I think it's the jihad TRO, in the old is the new new section.  I think.  I'll look for it after work

[Red Pins]

Sarna actually lists it on a disambiguation page under 'prometheus', but doesn't give it a reference or link - Sorry, I just don't have time to run the reference down right now.  My evil, evil, wife is limiting my computer time.  Something about getting enough sleep. 

[Maelwys]

The Prometheus Database shows up a couple of times. The first time is in the original Star League sourcebook, on page 104 under the Department of Education and Information. It talks about a "Prometheus Inc" that was a government run company that published books, managed libraries and ran vast computer databases available to the SL citizens. It also talks about the Prometheus database being connected to Prometheus run libraries and being free to anyone visiting the library, or who had a personal computer.

All of the data was naturally contained on computers on Terra which didn't survive the Amaris Coup.

The database is again mentioned in TR3075, which states that while the Helm Core was "immensely valuable" it was incomplete, because it was only part of the Prometheus database.

[Intermittent_Coherence]

That warship misjumping to 3025 is if I'm not mistaken By the Horns by Master Arminas.

Frankly even an RW era Taurian Concordat database would be plentiful. Remember that even after defeat, the Taurian Concordat remains one of the best educated populations in BT. Without Holy Shroud and Star League educational tampering, the Taurian Concordat was able to reverse engineer and put into production such things as endo steel, ferro fibrous, double heat sinks, and beagle active probes. And prototype extra light FE's. All in just over ten years. That's aside from having the native knowhow to build the second largest warfleet in known space.

[Archangel]

That warship misjumping to 3025 is if I'm not mistaken By the Horns by Master Arminas.

Frankly even an RW era Taurian Concordat database would be plentiful. Remember that even after defeat, the Taurian Concordat remains one of the best educated populations in BT. Without Holy Shroud and Star League educational tampering, the Taurian Concordat was able to reverse engineer and put into production such things as endo steel, ferro fibrous, double heat sinks, and beagle active probes. And prototype extra light FE's. All in just over ten years. That's aside from having the native knowhow to build the second largest warfleet in known space.

You need to re-check your facts.  While the TC does have one of the best educated populations in BT overall, they had plenty of difficulty reverse engineering SL tech and in fact received assistance  from the Trinity Alliance and then later more from the Word of Blake in order to achieve some of the SL tech you listed.  While the tech may have appeared over the span of a decade, the TC had been trying to reverse engineer it for decades with limited success.

[Red Pins]

Oh - I took that to be about the period before the reunication war.

[Colt Ward]

Nah . . . IIRC it was either 3030s or a bit earlier they discovered a cache of Maultier APCs on some world.  They could replicate the vehicle except for the advanced (FF) armor that was beyond them until the late 3050s.

[Intermittent_Coherence]

You need to re-check your facts.  While the TC does have one of the best educated populations in BT overall, they had plenty of difficulty reverse engineering SL tech and in fact received assistance  from the Trinity Alliance and then later more from the Word of Blake in order to achieve some of the SL tech you listed.  While the tech may have appeared over the span of a decade, the TC had been trying to reverse engineer it for decades with limited success.

That's after the STar League and Holy Shroud. I'm talking about before either one had a chance to tamper with the Taurian knowledge base. The Taurian Concordat was able to reverse engineer all these during the Reunification Wars.

[DarthRads]

My iluminati group"The Dark Circle" has it's origin in this very idea. In the closing years of the RW the TC tried to pull an exodus, a Wagon Wheel frigate (modified with additional collars) carrying a tech database mis-jumped, and ended up thousands of years in the past in the Sol System. The story goes from there...