Part VI----------
"
All I'm saying is we need to come up with a catchier name than 'Improved Enhanced Extended-Range Particle Projector Cannon' for the prototype when they get it to work. It's clunkier than a rusty agromech."
Colonel Trish Ebon - 2836 CE ----------
Municipal Planetarium – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2828You could find numerous cities across the breadth of colonised space that featured a large domed building in their city-center. On many of them it was a governmental structure, a parliament or senate house, others meanwhile had theatres, opera houses or sports stadiums depending upon their cultural leanings.
Niops VII had a planetarium with seating for upwards of ten thousand people.
When Lieutenant-General Romanov had asked if there was a venue available for a presentation by herself and Franklin Hallis, one that had capacity for perhaps a few hundred attendees and most importantly a holo-projector, she had expected to be offered a meeting chamber in a government facility, or perhaps just a school hall. The location that was arranged for her instead was rather more epic in scale that she had ever envisioned, although she had to admit being able to project multiple holograms of battlemechs at 1:1 scale added a certain grandeur to proceedings.
As to whether having a piece of classical music playing incessantly in the background, this being 'Mars the Bringer of War' from Holst's Planet Suite, would add more gravitas was a matter for debate. The retired astronomer who ran the place as director of the planetarium certainly thought so, his side of the argument being strengthened by both stubbornness and him being the only person present that knew how to work the projector, so after Brigadier-General Nellis told Romanov that the Niops Association Militia used it as their unofficial anthem anyway she eventually conceded with a reluctant 'I'll allow it', a glare at the director and an audible growl.
It was things like that which resulted in people saying she was getting crotchety in old age, which annoyed her greatly. Not only had she
always been crotchety she wasn't even in her nineties yet, let alone ****** 'old'. It might be best to try and get a couple of children from an Iron Womb soon though, she admitted to herself, chasing around after young kids after turning a hundred would doubtless be a pain-in-the-ass. Fortunately if they proved too much to cope with she could always foist them on the Wolverine's 'Sibling Company' system, part-creche, part kindergarten, part cadet school, that seemed to work well enough.
Even at her age barring an accident or enemy action she could readily expect to live long enough to see them grow up and perhaps have kids of their own. It was a oddity of fate that despite being decades older than most of the 331st she herself and a lot of her own people would still likely outlive a fair percentage of them, thanks simply to the youngsters not having received the anti-agathics people born in the Terran Hegemony had been given in their youth. Franklin Hallis himself
had received them, being fortunate enough to having been born on Terra in the years between the liberation and Kerensky's Exodus, but most of his people were mayflies that might not even reach what was considered middle-age back in the Hegemony as-was.
Re-developing those gene-therapy treatments for use on Niops, in particular aiming to ensure that expensive military assets like genetically-engineered Ironborn mechwarriors lived long enough to warrant what was spent on them, was high on the list of priorities. Naturally the treatments would eventually be offered to everyone, it would certainly help the demographics, but Romanov suspected the criteria for which civilian children got them
first was going to be IQ in a society structured like this one. In other places it might have been how much money your parents had, or if you were the cousin of some duke, but the Niops Association purported that it was a pure meritocracy based on intellect not nepotism.
If they were
really as meritocratic as they liked to think they were you would see a lot more people of Capellan descent among the higher echelons of society however, Romanov considered. The distinct lack of second-generation immigrants amongst the politicians, civil-servants, scientists and engineers attending that day was noticeable, and not for the first time she heard Franklin Hallis quietly grumbling to himself about restrictive caste systems and the ****** who upheld them.
Romanov had little doubt that if the civilian government ever moved to formally stratify their society by law then Hallis and his Wolverines would military-coup the shit out of them and impose an egalitarian liberal constitution with universal suffrage and a bill-of-rights at gunpoint. Throughout history such coups typically came from the politically far-right, or occasionally far left, so having one sprung by the far-
centre instead for a change would at least be novel, she thought with amusement. Romanov recalled reading something more than half a century ago in which the political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested that some people might to be forced to be free if necessary, and readily imagined Hallis subscribing to that notion.
As the last of the invited guests finally arrived, civilians were not the most punctual of people, Jenna Romanov considered that in some ways 'forced to be free' as a philosophy overlapped the unofficial policy of the SLDF towards the star nations of the Inner Sphere and Periphery during much of the Golden Age, 'Play nice,
or else!'.
After a brief introduction presented by Nellis as the ranking NAM officer, Romanov and Hallis began by telling the audience abridged histories of their own respective peoples to set the scene. Since the tale of what had befallen Franklin Hallis's people since the fall of the Star League was rather more eventful than that of her own he went first, with the complicated story of the Star-League-in-Exile, the Clans, Operation Klondike and the Wolverine Secession taking a while to tell. When he eventually finished Romanov told an almost comedically abridged story about her own 295th Division which basically went like 'Got left behind by Kerensky Senior because we were running late, tried to catch up, starship broke down, decided to take up farming and raising kids, bad at both, ran into these sorry bastards from the 331st, eventually wound up here'.
Asking for questions at this juncture proved a mistake, Romanov had hoped that raising the spectre of the clans as another mortal threat to Niops, the locals were already wary of the Successor States, would make the audience think in terms of defence matters but it seemed to have lacked the desired impact. Most of the questions were directed at Hallis, querying the stellar classifications and planetary orbits of the various colonised systems of the Kerensky Cluster and Pentagon Worlds, whereas Romanov was asked by a xenobiologist about the native plants of Buffalo Meadows and how they compared with those of Niops VII, both being planets orbiting Red Dwarf stars.
"We had more trees and longer grass" Romanov flatly responded to the question before pointedly changing the subject to military matters. "Can I get a
Flashman projected please, it should be on the data-cube I gave you" she requested of the Planetarium's Director who had plugged the thing into his own console.
After a few seconds the holographic image of the battlemech appeared floating in space in the centre of the planetarium. "For those that don't know, which I assume is most of you, this is an FLS-8K
Flashman, a seventy-five ton machine that happens to be the most common heavy battlemech we have in service, or at least it will be once the rest of the 295th arrive with our equipment" Romanov told the audience. "It's a highly effective weapon-of-war, and fortunately for the SLDF the planet it was made on, Wasat, was one of the first Hegemony worlds to be liberated from Amaris, giving the SLDF a chance to help replace battlefield losses previously sustained in the Rim Worlds Republic" she continued. "Thanks to over a decade of round-the-clock production by the time the Star League dissolved there were some divisions with several battalion's worth of the things, including my own 295th. I know it's not the most menacing looking machine" she admitted, "Honestly it looks like a potato with arms and legs, but it's pretty fast for its weight class, well armoured, reasonably well-armed and most importantly in the current circumstances easily upgraded" she said, looking to Franklin Hallis to continue.
"For the record I
don't think the
Flashman looks like a potato with arms and legs, to me it has always put me in mind of an Urbie that has been pumping iron, hitting the gym really hard, but mileage will vary" Hallis began to some laughter from the SLDF and NAM personal present that knew what a
Urbanmech looked like. "On a more serious note, it is the primary armament of the FLS-8K which works out so well for us here. She carries three Selitex Radonic Large Lasers that we can easily strip out and replace with our Improved Large Laser design, each of which is both more compact and a full ton lighter than the original" he said. "With the weight savings gained we add an extra ton of armour to the 'mech and two additional double-heatsinks, making what was already a good, if often underrated, machine even better."
"And it's something we can do quickly and cheaply because, do not be under any illusions the fact is we
are facing a clear-and-present threat," Romanov added for herself. "Even if the other clans
weren't hunting for the Wolverines, which they will be, remember that the Mariks are only one jump away which is why we're already setting up a production line for the Improved Large Laser even before we have other military industries established. We don't know how much time we have until someone unpleasant comes calling. It's really a matter of getting the best bang for our buck in the short term" she said. "For the resource cost of one brand-new
Pulverizer assault battlement we can turn out enough Improved Large Lasers to re-equip nearly a battalion's worth of the
Flashman, which is why the plant and tooling for 'mech production is still packed away while that for weapon production is not" she explained. "As a bonus, when the Successor States go back to war with each other, which they will, we can sell off our older surplus weaponry to the highest bidder, helping to recoup some of our investment into upgrades. And we
will fleece the bastards on principle, count on it" she announced to some laughter.
"We'll finish talking about the
Flashman with a sad story" Romanov told the audience. "Despite surviving Amaris, and helping us win the war, the factory on Wasat where they were made was destroyed in 2796 because once the Terran Hegemony fell the Free Worlds League and the Capellan Confederation started fighting over it" she said. "The side which was losing the fight on Wasat that year raised the factory to the ground because they're like vicious, petty-minded children and if
they can't have the shiny toy then nobody can" she continued. "Worth thinking about if you're living on another world with plenty of shiny toys worth fighting over don't you think?" she asked rhetorically.
Hallis nodded sagely. "Of course, nobody in the Inner Sphere was talking about what was happening on Wasat that year because at the same time the Draconis Combine was massacring millions of civilians with ******
swords on Kentares" he reminded everyone. "Those petty-minded children can be really,
really vicious and if you think being unarmed means they'll spare you think again" he advised. "The only thing they respect is military strength. The Age of War is back, ladies and gentlemen, don't fool yourself thinking otherwise."
"And once again remember that the Marik's are only one jump away and also remember what
they did to the millions of people living on New Dallas and Brownsville, maybe not with swords but dead is still ****** dead" Romanov stated coldly.
Judging by the expressions on the people in the audience that argument had cut through, Romanov thought to herself with satisfaction. If the population of the Niops Association accepted that the Ivory Towers of Academia were a lot safer if they were behind strong walls then they weren't going to object to the changes in society that required.
"Moving on. Logistical considerations require a paring down of the battlemechs we are going to keep in service" Romanov told the now subdued audience. "To be specific, instead of trying to operate and maintain the multitude of different models we currently have, some in only single-digit quantity, in the interim we're going to only keep four types of each weight class" she announced. "Starting with the heavies, because we already have the
Flashman up there and it was the first chosen to be spared mothballing, the other three heavies in service will be the
Marauder, the
Crusader and finally the
Black Knight, which I'm sure will please the NAM pilots already well familiar with them. If you could project the other three 'mechs I named too please" she requested, images of the named trio of war machines soon appearing beside the FLS-8K.
"Apart from the
Flashman these machines are actually a mix of those used by SLDF Regulars and the upgraded models assigned to Royal formations like the 331st, for instance. Fortunately the standards and the royals still share enough commonality of design to allow for long, cost-effective, runs of spares and replacement parts" Hallis noted. "For the record even the Royals will greatly benefit from refits with our various types of improved weaponry as our own planned series of upgrades progresses. For example, a MAD-2R Royal Marauder with its Star League ERPPC's swapped out for our own Enhanced ERPPC brings serious extra hurt to a long-range engagement. The resultant twenty-percent increase in firepower makes the difference between badly mauling the cockpit of an enemy battlemech and blowing its head off completely. Ask Colonel Callahan over there, he did it to an Orion belonging to the Snow Ravens."
"Son-of-a-bitch was just unlucky my
Wolverine II needed fixing after another skirmish the day before, so I took out a
Stag II that morning instead" the officer concerned spoke up from where he was sat. "He had thirty tons on me and was having fun peppering me with LRM's, all of which meant precisely squat when my first PPC bolt caught him square in the face and ended the fight before he got the chance to close to autocannon range."
"It's precisely that ability which makes us so glad that one of the Light 'mechs we have in quantity is the
Talon TLN-5W, itself mounting an ERPPC we can easily swap out for our punchier version" Hallis observed, after acknowledging Callahan's unplanned, though welcome interjection with a nod of approval. "A few dozen of those little bastards running around at nearly a hundred-and-thirty kph, plinking away with a weapon that makes them a mortal threat to machines two or three times their mass, is going to play merry hell with enemy formations trying to follow a battleplan" he suggested. You might choose to ignore a
Locust, or a
Wasp or whatever if you're stomping around in an
Atlas, following orders to take an important objective ASAP, but a
Talon mounting an eERPPC could actually kill you if you didn't take it seriously, which was distracting to say the very least.
Since the TLN-5W had already been cited Romanov moved onto the subject of the light battlemechs they were going to keep in service for now, the images of the heavies being replaced by those of the
Talon itself but also the
Night Hawk,
Hussar and finally the
Mongoose. Mention of the latter being good-naturedly booed by a few of Hallis's people given it was a totem machine of Clan Mongoose. Fortunately that clan wasn't thought of particularly badly by the Wolverines compared with most, they wouldn't object
too greatly to being assigned one, and there actually rumours that the Mongoose Khan, Mitchell Loris, had privately agreed with Sarah McEvedy regarding Nicholas Kerensky becoming increasing tyrannical, and decreasingly stable over the years, earning his clan a few 'well they're clearly not
complete ******' points.
Not wishing to bore the civilian audience to tears talking extensively about war-toys they quickly moved onto medium battlemechs, with those being the
Griffin,
Phoenix Hawk,
Dervish and
Wolverine, the latter's mention being greeted by cheers. Hallis did spend a couple of minutes explaining how the new Improved Long Range Missile (iLRM) launchers would make the
Dervish, sometimes derided as merely the poor-man's
Archer, a much nastier customer.
After a waylay into materials science prompted by questions of how exactly the clans had
halved the weight of LRM launchers while also making them more compact, several engineers requesting a chance to look into the new hyper-alloys and super-ceramics required to actually achieve something like that, Romanov finished the list of battlemechs that would avoid mothballing for now with the Assault Class. These were to be the
Stalker,
Thug,
Pillager and
Highlander, all of which would be greatly enhanced by the new weaponry available, though it would be quite a while before enough of that was produced to finish the upgrade program.
It might take well over a decade before they could re-fit all the aerospace fighters too, by which time even better weaponry, those only currently existing in prototype form, should hopefully be ready for production thus starting a
second, perhaps even
more extensive round of upgrades.
Gauging a feel for the audience when the prototypes were mentioned, Romanov surmised that they might not be all that interested in military hardware
as such, but talk of hefty grants for Research and Development into fields with military applications set hearts a flutter. If there was one thing Niops enjoyed in abundance was people with degrees in physics and the other hard sciences, and while studying the stars might be their first love if you dangled a paycheque in front of them you could surely find plenty of people who were frankly overqualified in high-energy physics that would work on lasers for you instead.
Best to try to avoid forays into developing expensive and impractical wunderwaffe though, Romanov considered, thinking of the Wolverine's own egregious example of such that had recently been brought down by dropship from the
Dobrev. That vessel being a carrack class transport jumpship which had been hauling the thing around in a crate ever since they left Circe behind.
Apparently Sarah McEvedy had the notion that they should create a battlemech specifically for the purposes of fighting in trials. As such it would not need to be economical to mass-produce, just mean as all hell, constructed out of bleeding-edge technologies and with a set of 'impossible' design criteria accompanied by a blank cheque.
The scientist and technician castes looked at the design specifications for quite some time until eventually one of them said 'Oh come on. This is
bullshit!' which led to the entire enterprise being referred to as 'Project Bullshit'. This name stuck right up until they somehow managed to actually pull it off, renaming it
Bull Shark before presenting it to Khan McEvedy just a few days too late to matter because by then they weren't fighting a Trial of Possession, or a Trial of Refusal, it was a Trial of Annihilation.
For a start, in order to fit in all the weaponry required, and within the necessary weight constraints, the
Bull Shark BSK-MAZ needed a endoskeleton which was less bulky than anything the Star League ever managed, but no heavier. After realising that they didn't actually have to worry about completely bankrupting the clan by making more than one or two of the machines they chose to give up on titanium and switch to a superior beryllium alloy instead. Problem solved.
Beryllium being about seventy times as expensive as titanium, the stuff was effectively a
precious-metal that cost half again as much per kilo as freaking
silver, this solution did not in any way come cheap given you needed nearly two
tons of it for the BSK-MAZ. That was even
before you factored in you that you also needed to alloy it with a not inconsequential quantity of even pricier rhenium (and a little iridium which itself cost more than
gold).
Growing all the finicky boron-arsenide crystals needed to create a new double-heat-sink which was only two-thirds the size was even
more expensive, mostly because of the R&D costs involved rather than raw materials in this case. Given another decade of incremental improvements and enhanced manufacturing techniques the engineers said they might even be able to make them cheaply enough to be turned out in quantity but warned not to count on it.
By comparison miniaturizing a Thumper artillery piece to hang off the
Bull Shark was cheap…
by comparison.
So, taken all together Clan Wolverine owned the most advanced and deadly battlemech in the known galaxy, but for the same price you could buy a whole bunch of ordinary 'mechs that would quite easily kick the ever-loving shit out of the
Bull Shark if they just ganged up on it.
It
would have been hell to face in single combat or a two-on-two Trial of Refusal though.
"Primarily it's a question of logistics and resources" Romanov explained to the audience after fielding a few more questions, this time largely more relevant to the subject. "We already have a lot of the tooling and equipment we need, entire production lines ready to go in some cases, but until we can up primary resource-extraction we're going to be facing a bottleneck of supply" she explained. "On the plus side this has got to be one of the most carefully surveyed solar systems outside the core worlds of the Terran Hegemony. You seem to have mapped the orbits of every floating rock out there larger than a basketball but it'll take a few years to get asteroid mining operations up and running to the necessary capacity. Can I get a projection of the Niops System?" she requested. "I assume you have one?" she joked.
The holographic image which replaced the last set of battlemechs filled most of the planetarium, not only showing the star and planets but also the larger asteroids and their own orbits. Two of them, named Elizabeth and Helena after the daughters of First Lord Simon Cameron, resembled Ceres in the Sol System in that they were massive enough for their gravities to have formed them into spheres rather than irregular shapes. Woe betide you here if you called them Niops VIII and IX however, they were only 'Dwarf Planets' according to the official criteria for such things which apparently meant no Roman Numerals for them!
As he looked up at the projection Hallis mentally re-scaled everything. He was used to 'normal' solar systems where everything was a lot less compact. You could fit every planetary orbit here, and most of the asteroid belt, inside the orbit of Mercury which put everything mere hours away, not days or weeks. Hell, you could hop from Niops VII to Niops VI in an aerospace fighter if you felt like it, they had the thrust and carried enough fuel to make it a viable trip.
"Building up that kind of infrastructure is not something we haven't done before, and we didn't have access to Project Workshops then, so we know we
can do it we just need the full cooperation of the people here today to get it done ASAP" Franklin Hallis spoke up again after bringing his thoughts back to the subject at hand. "We don't know how much time we have before the Sword of Damocles falls and the skies are full of clanners, or Marik's, or some other uninvited ****** with bad intentions" he warned.
"I can speed things up considerably on that front if you'll permit me to make a proposal on that score Mr. Hallis" a man towards the back loudly interjected. "With a small investment of capital, and by handing over a few items you already have in your gift to readily supply, I can obtain enough raw materials to meet your needs for centuries to come in record time" he boasted.
"It's
Lieutenant-General Hallis not 'Mister' Hallis if you don't mind, and who are you exactly may I ask?"
"Professor Ogbert Farnstrom. I lecture in High Energy Physics at the university and also have a personal interest in meteoritics" the man introduced himself.
"Weather forecasting?" Hallis responded, confused.
"That's meteorology,
meteoritics is the study of meteors" the scientist, Farnstrom, responded, visibly rolling his eyes at the military officer's ignorance. "As you already seem to know the asteroid belt beyond the orbit of Niops VII is ripe for full-scale exploitation, I have personally compiled a list of suitable Type-M metallic asteroids of considerable mass and
stupendous worth that would only need cracking open to provide easy access to a cornucopia of raw materials" he said confidently. "Given the extensive spacelift capacity already at your disposal all I need to move ahead with the project immediately is a supply of thermonuclear devices, merely a couple at first for a proof-of-concept trial."
"Thermonuclear devices?" Hallis repeated slowly, raising his eyebrows.
"That small-minded luddite we elected High Associator turned me down point-blank when I approached him regarding the idea before" Farnstrom complained bitterly. "Some of his advisors even had the temerity to refer to me as the university's 'Resident Mad Scientist' for even proposing it" he continued bitterly. "I AM NOT MAD!" he suddenly and loudly exclaimed, jumping to his feet and shaking his fist at the sky, or rather the ceiling of the planetarium. "Sometimes a little angry" he admitted, "BUT NEVER MAD!" he declared unconvincingly as people nearby started edging away from him.
Hallis and Romanov looked at each other. "Um… right" Hallis eventually responded awkwardly, wondering if he might need to have the man restrained for his own good and that of others. "Our intent is to start a little more smaller-scale than that" he told the man. "Scooping up whatever rocks we find small enough to fit through dropship airlocks" he explained. Part of the asteroid belt was so close you could send out a Mule dropship to collect a few rocks and have them back to you ready to feed into an orbiting electric blast furnace within hours.
"That sounds like half measures to me" Farnstrom responded dismissively. "Timidly sweeping up a few pebbles, the mere leftover detritus of space, when you could harvest great mountains of metal shows a lack of ambition, nay a lack of vision!" he vociferously maintained. "I have personally run the numbers, checked and double-checked the results" he claimed. "Have your own scientists study my detailed proposals and I'm certain they'll agree with my calculations" he added confidently.
"We'll take it under advisement, Professor" Romanov told him carefully.
"Please do" Farnstrom replied happily, pleased that they seemed to be hearing him out at least. "While I have your attention, it would be extremely helpful in my own studies if I could borrow a Naval Laser from one of your warships, and a fusion reactor sufficient to power it of course" he now requested hopefully. "Pure science I'm afraid, no real military or other practical applications, but I could use it to prove a pet theory of mine that's been keeping me up at night for a few years."
"That's a definite no" Romanov told him flatly.
Farnstrom sighed. "I thought as much, too much to hope for but I had to give it a shot. I suppose I'll just have to get back to building my own" he said sadly, instantly setting himself up for an imminent visit by the legal authorities.
"Anybody else with any radical suggestions?" Romanov asked bemusedly.
"Stephanie Jeffs, Associate Professor of Geology" a woman introduced herself. "You might want to think about setting up mines on Niops III, the dark side facing away from the star is cool enough to make it viable, it's mineral rich with plenty of Rare Earth metals and the gravity well to haul them off isn't as steep as on Niops V where most of our existing mines are located."
"You're sure about the mineral deposits?" Romanov checked.
"I've landed enough probes and rovers there to be sure" the scientist confirmed.
"Don't listen to the rock people, geology is barely a real science" came a heckle followed by laughter from all sides.
"How would you like a geo-pick shoved up your ass sideways Hartman?" Jeffs growled, clearly recognising the heckler. "That goes for the rest of you laboratory-bound dweebs" she added, glaring in all directions.
"Fifty bucks on the geologist" Hallis whispered to Romanov.
"No bet."
----------
Note from the Author:
Although the Wolverines left before the so-called 'Golden Century' of Clan technological progress they would have still had access not only to prototype versions of quite a few later weapons, but also all the 'Early Clan' Improved versions of Star League gear (the Improved Large Laser, Improved LRM, Improved SRM, Improved Autocannons etc. etc. These are typically more compact and a ton or two lighter than what the SLDF had and depending on the mech concerned offer a big step-up in capability. Upgrading existing gear with 'Improved' weapons is far more cost effective than turning out brand new Pulverizers, Mercury II's or Stags.
Spending scarce resources keeping a plethora of different battlemechs in service is also a bad idea. Only keeping common (but effective) mechs like the Flashman, Stalker, Talon etc in service makes more sense (they don't have enough of any type to simplify things any further logistically if they want to be able to field more than one brigade). If they ever need the other machines they can still pull them from mothballs readily enough.
The anti-agathic treatments of the Terran Hegemony (my assumption being that it was gene-therapy because you didn't need to keep taking them) pushed lifespans out to a hundred and fifty (the sourcebook Touring the Stars: Granada mentions a 97 year old mechwarrior that was still perfectly fit for combat because he had received the treatments on Terra as a kid). The Clans did not use them because of their culture of youth and wanting a quick turnover of generations (life expectancy for clanner warriors was particularly awful) but a combination of the treatments and Iron Womb technology will have an interesting effect on the demographics of the Niops Association. For one thing 'long-term multi-generational planning' means really long term when you might live for a century-and-a-half.
The Bullshit Bull Shark requires tech to work (like clan endo-steel) that the Wolverines just should not have had. Hope people like my justification for how they managed it (it's not clan-tech, it's blank-cheque-tech). Think of it as akin to how the Successor States were able to copy Clan-Tech after the invasion but just couldn't do it in a cost-effective manner until decades later.
Farnstrom is, in fact, quite mad (and also angry sometimes).
