After buying and reading
Touring the Stars: Tortuga Prime, I find myself revisiting an old puzzle. I’m mostly thinking out loud here, trying to hash out the sequence of events that led to the birth of arguably the Inner Sphere’s most notorious corsair haven. Going all the way back to the original
Periphery 1e sourcebook, we find their origin story treated to a sparse paragraph:
The Tortuga Dominions are a result of the Reunification War ... During the latter stages, the Federated Suns 237th Light Cavalry Regiment was all but destroyed in a wasteful penetration raid against the Taurian outpost of Sterope. Unable to hold their positions and unwilling to be thrown into the vicious fray elsewhere, the 237th opted to jump outward into the unknown.
And in broad strokes, this matches what we get in the
TtS pdf:
The planet was discovered and settled in 2588 by deserters from the AFFS’s 237th Light Cavalry Regiment and their dependents after they fled the Reunification War.
And yet: in a wrap-up of the events of 2587 (including the Battle of Montour), the account of Operation BULL RUN in
Historical: Reunification War goes out of its way to declare that Sterope was ‘newly colonised’. With the SLDF
et. al. camped on their doorstep, the TCA wouldn’t —
couldn’t! — have had much to spare for garrisoning a remote start-up colony. (Sterope didn’t reach its status as a major resource and manufacturing hub until well after the War, it would seem.) The TCN had been all but annihilated at Montour. The 237th should have had all but a walkover when they hit Sterope — and yet, somehow,
an entire regiment got their asses handed to them, to the point where the
TtS notes that upon colonising Tortuga Prime, their remaining ’Mech forces were a ‘demi-battalion’. How did they get such a
hiding, and who did the job?
(There’s also the question of ‘who in Sagan’s name were the 237th Light Cavalry in the first place?’ As far as I can tell, the AFFS didn’t
have a Light Cavalry formation before, during,
or after the RW, and indeed joining the Star League meant that between donating troops to the SLDF and just plain Cameron-mandated RIFs, they’d just gone through a radical downsizing. And
why did they take their dependents along on what was supposed to be an objective strike?)
There’s also the issue of how the heck did these guys remain a viable menace for so long? The loss of a mere
three of their remaining ’Mechs in 2604 was enough to prompt the overthrow and murder of their then-leader. I won’t go into the details of the absolute Charlie-Foxtrot that was their civilian ‘economy’ over the ensuing centuries — sorry, folks, you’ll have to buy your own copy to get all the dirt on that part ;) — but there’s no way they should’ve been able to maintain anything resembling modern war-machines, let alone
’Mechs, and yet by the 31st century they’re nearly a regimental-sized force! Did they somehow steal whole job-lots of replacement ’Mechs from the FS/TC and somehow not get butchered in the process?
How did they not simply wither away, curl up and
die within a century of settling Tortuga?
Hoooowwww? Curse you, FASAnomics!
