What's up with mercs?

[DarkSpade]

How are things working for mercs in the current timeline?   Is there still a MRBC or something similar?  Are their any large merc companies not currently in a long time contract to a great house?

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

The MRBC dissolved at the beginning of the Jihad with the Word's devastation of Outreach.

With Devlin Stone's attempt to restrict the amount of mechs in private hands, I don't think that there was ever any real attempt to make a replacement organization.

[Colt Ward]

Huh?  The MRBC transferred to Galatea and had a office on Arc Royal already by that point.  I want to say FM Mercs Sup deals with that, especially since its the MRBC who puts Word mercs on the blacklist and offers bounties.

As for leading into Shattered Fortress . . . we know the Republic reclaims the Remnant who were allies to the Galatean defense league or whatever it was called.  Both were designated 'training' opponents of Alaric's Wolf Empire.  I want to say FM3145 talked about how Galatea's little zone had just lost a world to the Wolves.  One of the biggest problems with the merc industry is the break down of communications since someone or a message has to now physically travel to do contract work.  A linked problem would be how the c-bill crashed- how do mercs get paid (lots of ways per new SBs)?  where is the escrow for the balance of the contract payment kept?  how high is the interest (b/c of additional risk do to lack of coms) for loans to mercs?  how are the loan payments made?  how many lenders on Galatea went belly up when they could not get regular payments via ComStar?

I posted this- https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=726.msg1494473#msg1494473- about the status of the hiring hall worlds.

[Col Toda]

Economics is enough to drive the mercenary trade . Be it being hired to defend rear areas so you can redeploy house troops on an offensive or do objective raids to pin down enemy forces . As for no private ownership of mechs after the Jihad it would apply to individuals infringing on Nobel prerogatives not national or collective corporate ownership . So the different dynamic in a mercenary company no one individual owns the mech passes muster .  Also periphery states operate mercenary companies just to get foreign currency to uplift their own economy . So private military contractors will never disappear even if they have to be formed in a neutral periphery state and have contracts include letters of Marque and Reprisals from the Client's State . It just changes the paperwork and makes a tough bussiness even tougher to stay in . After the Jihad most mercenary companies was bought out and absorbed by one nation or another .

[Iracundus]

The collapse of the C-bill means now mercs are paid in House currencies.  Therefore if a unit does not want to have all its financial assets at the mercy of one House, diversification across multiple currencies either through holdings in other Houses or the use of currency options may be necessary. 

Fintech: Foreign currency hedging in an age of war

[dgorsman]

Or they get partially paid in physical assets e.g. Quirinus battle armor.

Edit: auto correct needs a breathalyzer...

[Colt Ward]

The collapse of the C-bill means now mercs are paid in House currencies.  Therefore if a unit does not want to have all its financial assets at the mercy of one House, diversification across multiple currencies either through holdings in other Houses or the use of currency options may be necessary. 

Fintech: Foreign currency hedging in an age of war

Yeah, ER/FM3145 talks about how they are being paid in kind- particularly ammo.  So now your mercenaries that travel between Houses or from House to local noble to corporation then you are going to be paid in various kinds of value- sort of back to bartering.  Precious/rare metals in bullion form (so bars of silver, platinum, palladium, etc), planetary luxury exports (rare wine/liquor, woods for crafting, fabrics), pharmaceuticals, and MAYBE some Triangle trade items if they disclose their travel plans.

So paid in kind-  ammo, armor, POL, maybe myomer for mech units, electronics, rations, TP . . . remember that part of the contract that paid the mercs for discretionary/overhead?  Well, you are going to literally be giving the employer a shopping list of supplies for them to deliver to meet that 'value' for that part of the contract. 

Besides the c-bill de-valuation I would also expect the S-bill to tank after the Wolves launched their first attack that halted Hammerfall.  Drop even MORE after the Falcons attack which encourages the Wolves to push and both end up on Tharkad w/Melissa dying.  And the lowest ebb for the S-bill was probably when Falcons/Horses & Wolves were on Heserpus- even more than Tharkad, Lyran control of Hesperus is what props up the Lyran's fiat currency IMO.

Davion's currency probably started its slide after Caleb was killed by the Dracs and just kept going . . . loss of Cap & Drac March capitals . . . loss of New Avalon.  Would it rebound after Julian reappears in the FedSuns territory?  By the novella it should have boosted after re-taking New Syrtis.

K-bill or L-bill which would be stronger?  Both are riding high on the military victories and with command economies . . .

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

The S-Bill started tanking before that, when Melissa sank massive amounts of money into Comstar after Grey Monday.

[Colt Ward]

No, b/c that was not public knowledge and did not effect the S-bills circulation.  It was only when the Falcons & Wolves were marching on Tharkad when Trillian asked about hiring mercs that Melissa revealed the treasury was stripped to buy in to ComStar.  So, that is the one IC conversation and I do not remember if its mentioned in ER or FM3145 where it could be assumed to become somewhat common knowledge and thus effect the faith in the S-bill.

Though in regards to Melissa's plan . . . not sure how that would work out, especially if she kept plowing the money in until Hammerfall.  You buy into a company going bankrupt and you are likely to lose your investment.  Its not like she could have claimed many assets either as ComStar was selling off real estate, probably DS and likely JS to cover operating costs of their smaller level of operations.  Heck, their JS fleet would have been out of position for Pony Express messages in the core since they would be tending the message traffic off in the boonies/fringes.

[Frabby]

I reckon that some agency, somewhere, must have picked up the interstellar banking aspect previously provided by ComStar. Maybe not the MRBC themselves, but any number of large players dabbling in communication, courier and/or financial services will probably have satellite office on Galatea to keep the centuries-old merc trade going with some sort of credit system. For all we know, it could even be a completely artificial in-house credit system. Many corporations such as Earthwerks, Bannson and the like are likely to jump on that opportunity, especially those from Marik and Steiner space.

[Colt Ward]

Its not just ComStar as the big bank- you know there was probably a Bank of the Commonwealth, TharkadBank, Marsden Bank, etc but its ComStar's quick interstellar communications that allowed human-space wide transactions to quickly occur.  Its more like the spine of the transaction network collapsed- instead of going into the store, presenting your credit card, running it through a machine, getting notification of payment & recording a signature . . .

Think back to when the cashier pulled out the little sliding copy device.  The cashier would put your card on the proper space, fill out the triplicate form for the purchase, tax and total, put the triplicate form on top of your card & the device, swiped the imprinting bar so the triplicate has the card information, and check the signature against the back.  IF its a big enough purchase, by your store's policy, you call the CC issuing company's number for a proper authorization and also copy that number onto the triplicate form.  Then you give them the bottom . . . yellow? form, and put the top (white) and middle (pink or yellow) forms in your drawer.  End of the day, you keep one copy (white) to turn in with the records and the other goes into the bank deposit bag where IIRC the bank uses the wire service to transfer the funds into the company account . . . which IIRC originally could take weeks.  And could bounce like a check, which is why you got authorization if it was a large enough purchase.

Without ComStar's sphere-wide communication, its not just the prevailing currency that fails its also the monetary transfer system.  Unlike before Gray Monday, I cannot be a merc on Podunk that places a order for 5 tons of Thunder LRMs from a factory on Tikonov over 200ly away through the HPG with payment in escrow through a ComStar account.  Finding out in a few days to a week that my order is accepted, based on exchange rates & market fluctuations, I got X back from the escrow account, and my order of 5t will arrive in two months taking blablah chain of JS/DS to arrive on Podunk.  Not being fast enough, I try to get the shipping company to transfer the to make part of it command circuit-like though I will have to pay express rates it might be able to make the trip in a month and a half.  Never mind that most businesses like mercs are going to hold their money in C-bills since it was the more stable currency, more widely accepted and if placed in ComStar bank you had access in a variety of places- lots of international operations would have started a run on the c-bill and ComStar bank when it became apparent it was human-space wide and the HPGs were not coming back.  They probably suffered from several runs depending on timing.

Now after Gray Monday . . . if I want to be certain I can get the 5 tons of Thunder LRM, I better send a purchasing agent who will take around 2 months to get to the system.  I am not going to have any idea how long its going to take b/c there is no way to circulate JS schedules since nothing is guaranteed until the ship shows up.  If I was in the Republic in the early 30s, they should take Stones (or whatever) but if I know the Swordsworn is running the world that might be questionable . . . I might want to send someone with D-bills.  So do you send enough Stones to buy what you want along with enough D-bills?  How about after the Fortress goes up (and I am outside), I am on a former Republic world, and Aaaron Sandoval has taken Tikonov into the FedSuns?  Stones will have become worthless on worlds outside the Fortress the moment Levin makes his announcement (think Weimar Republic levels of inflation).  Who/how would I even exchange my Stones for D-bills with on Podunk, since previously it was ComStar that handled currency exchange options- and kept the foreign currency on hand.  So . . . currency is out, my purchasing agent boards the dropship with a cache of silver, platinum, and industrial grade diamonds.  The purchasing agent arrives three months later on Tikonov during a Liao raid to find out the production from that missile ammo factory I was going to buy from had been nationalized for 'the duration of the emergency' and to top it off, the Davion customs agent seized the agent's cache of silver, platinum and industrial diamonds as 'strategic resources' with a voucher for their value in D-bills from some agency on planet.  Any Stones the purchasing agent had are absolutely worthless on Tikonov (he discovers the blackmarket is also accepting L-bills!) and when the voucher (hrmm, let me see that . . . looks like a fake to me) is finally paid by the agency, the valuation is half what it was on Podunk b/c of scarcity/market forces/wartime nationalization.

Interstellar commerce is hosed after Gray Monday, and the merc trade relies on it.  When the Fortress announcement went out, all the worlds outside should have gone into absolute chaos with shades of Weimar and Venezuela.

[Mohammed As`Zaman Bey]

  There will always be mercs. The IS and Periphery had hundreds of hiring halls, filled with men, ready to sell their skills to the highest bidder. In a time of restricted private mech ownership, the value of a deniable force increases dramatically. Hiring halls wouldn't disappear, they'd go underground and screen hiring parties more thoroughly, as well as move across borders, where laws would not impede business.

  A lucrative way to make money would be to rig a jumpship with communications arrays and deliver messages along a route that was once linked by HPG stations. They would jump into a system, take on messages  for a fee, then jump to the next system, deliver messages marked for delivery, pick up more message packets, then jump to the next system. A network of JS comm would decrease the time of communications delivery through random JS routes.

[JPArbiter]

With the loss of HPG communications, mercenaries will go where the work is and proffer thier services themselves. 

The funny thing is that the entire inner sphere economy at this point is functioning on barters and IOUs, so a merc is just as likely if not more to negotiate for upgrades, spare parts, room and board as they are for currency.

[Colt Ward]

  There will always be mercs. The IS and Periphery had hundreds of hiring halls, filled with men, ready to sell their skills to the highest bidder. In a time of restricted private mech ownership, the value of a deniable force increases dramatically. Hiring halls wouldn't disappear, they'd go underground and screen hiring parties more thoroughly, as well as move across borders, where laws would not impede business.

  A lucrative way to make money would be to rig a jumpship with communications arrays and deliver messages along a route that was once linked by HPG stations. They would jump into a system, take on messages  for a fee, then jump to the next system, deliver messages marked for delivery, pick up more message packets, then jump to the next system. A network of JS comm would decrease the time of communications delivery through random JS routes.

Oh yeah, mercenaries are never going to go away as its included in one of the oldest professions in the world.  My point was not that it was going to go away, but that some mercenary groups will fall apart since they may not be able to adapt as quickly- natural selection, aka the invisible hand of the free market in economics terms.  I also think we are not as likely to get mercs wandering quite as much across breath of the Inner Sphere.

JS running on Triangle Trade would have already been doing that, and of course would just increase their business . . . but in the Republic, and especially the DC & CC borders with the Falcon desant, the areas are not going to stabilize enough for those patterns to form.  Periphery March of the FS?  Sure . . . old CapCon territory?  Absolutely.

[DarkSpade]

Looks like both mercs and those that hire them are taking a chance when it comes to who to trust then?  No more trusted 3rd party telling you "this guy's legit".

[dgorsman]

A lucrative way to make money would be to rig a jumpship with communications arrays and deliver messages along a route that was once linked by HPG stations. They would jump into a system, take on messages  for a fee, then jump to the next system, deliver messages marked for delivery, pick up more message packets, then jump to the next system. A network of JS comm would decrease the time of communications delivery through random JS routes.

I suspect existing commercial JumpShips would already be doing that.  Information is essentially a zero-mass good, which would cost little to carry.  They would be set up to automatically dump and receive data feeds from a local station, perhaps even other ships.

[Colt Ward]

Looks like both mercs and those that hire them are taking a chance when it comes to who to trust then?  No more trusted 3rd party telling you "this guy's legit".

MRBC was still functioning after the Jihad . . . late Dark Ages, with Arc Royal sacked, Galatea facing the Crusader Wolves, Outreach behind the Fortress and Solaris VII the property of the Wolves . . . well, who knows.  But its not like you can send a message for a quick response like before Gray Monday to learn about your prospective hires.

[Orin J.]

Looks like both mercs and those that hire them are taking a chance when it comes to who to trust then?  No more trusted 3rd party telling you "this guy's legit".

an officail holovid declaring satisfactory mission completion might become part of the contracts, but i can see what you mean. sorta depends on how easy it is to fake the recording.....

"I assure you, this endorsement is entirely legitimate in spite of your misgivings but we take no offense in your caution"
"Caution? You expect me to believe you got an endorsement from Aleksandr Kerensky for support provided in the siege of Terra!"
"...My unit has a distinguished history."
"He's shaking hands with you in the holovid right now!"

[Elmoth]

Aren't alternatives to the hog already in place? There are some in the background like the FS black boxes, that have been dormant for a century or more by this time.

[Iracundus]

It's not the collapse of commerce, just reversion to a pre-HPG era like in the Age of War and early Star League. 

The lack of a single currency hasn't stopped commerce throughout human history, even if it means increased foreign exchange risk.  People have found ways around that from direct trade in commodities, to all sorts of financial instruments to mitigate the risk.  Where there is risk there is also opportunity, and I would imagine there would be a bunch of traders and Jumpship captains that have gotten rich in the post-HPG era.

[Colt Ward]

It's not the collapse of commerce, just reversion to a pre-HPG era like in the Age of War and early Star League. 

The lack of a single currency hasn't stopped commerce throughout human history, even if it means increased foreign exchange risk.  People have found ways around that from direct trade in commodities, to all sorts of financial instruments to mitigate the risk.  Where there is risk there is also opportunity, and I would imagine there would be a bunch of traders and Jumpship captains that have gotten rich in the post-HPG era.

But for 3133 and a period after, it IS a collapse of interstellar commerce b/c none of the systems from Age of War or early Star League are in place- its 400 to 500 years since they were used!  Same sort of effects as in Fight Club when they want to crash the system, or the Fire Sale from one Die Hard movie . . . or even the recent EMP/solar flare TV shows.  The interstellar economy/commerce is going to suffer a 'asteroid impact' level event which will cause a large business die off and like I said economic natural selection- aka invisible hand of the free market using adaptation.

[Elmoth]

Actually the hpg crash would have been a great opportunity to destroy the 5 major factions and create a much more divided inner sphere. A pity they did not use that and the monolític houses remain despite their lack of ability to actually control those empires.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Turning every Successor State into the Free Worlds League wouldn't have worked.

[Deadborder]

The Republic wanted to get rid of the mercenary trade completely, but found that doing such was impossible. It was just simply too deeply entrenched and dug into the Inner Sphere and its systems of power to get rid of. However, they did do their best to disempower mercenaries as much as they could by weakening their influence and the influence of the systems that supported their trade.

Before Grey Monday, the Merc trade was at its nadir. It'd been functioning under four and a half decades of diminishing power, reduced contracts, shrinking populations and the severe reduction in the amount of military equipment in circulation

[Elmoth]

Turning every Successor State into the Free Worlds League wouldn't have worked. I

Actually,the thing would be to get rid of the successor states. You would have pact of Tamar, duchy of oriente and tikonov as the highest level of government. I think this would work better in a comms-less universe. 2 or 3 jumps from the central location (generally a powerful industrial world) tops.

I do not see why this could not work. But alas it is not to be :)

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

It wouldn't have worked because most of the fans actually like having existing factions they can root for.

[JPArbiter]

Aren't alternatives to the hog already in place? There are some in the background like the FS black boxes, that have been dormant for a century or more by this time.

Black boxes were always very limited, and turned out unsecured if you knew what to look for.  They remained the purview of the intelligence services of the DCMS, AFFS and RoTS. It was never addressed if the Lyrans brought theirs out of mothballs or not.  Commercial grade black boxes simply do not exist

The only other method of intersteller coms that is not in range of one of the few functional HPGs (remember, all you need to RECEIVE HPG transmissions is an antenna system set to the right frequency) is daisy chaining jumpships loaded with server banks uploading and downloading information at each destination.

It can be really hard to fathom just how devastating the loss of HPGs are. It is like if we today overnight went from fibre internet and satellite telecommunications to use of the telegraph.  The aftermath of such a communications regression would take decades to even tally the cost of

[idea weenie]

It wouldn't have worked because most of the fans actually like having existing factions they can root for.

They can have existing factions.  There are just 5-10 that identify as existing factions, so Davions can choose one of them, multiple Kuritas fighting over Luthien, the Archons fighting against each other for the right to rule from Tharkad, etc

You might even have the Clans splitting in half, or even more pieces, due to a small group of warriors deciding that their Khan has failed, or isn't Clan enough, etc.  Think like a bubbling pot, with different groups coming to power, being destroyed, etc.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Yeah, no.

Remember how when Mechwarrior: Dark Age came out and everyone was upset that the classic factions were no longer around?  Doing it for real would be a bad move.

[Daryk]

To paraphrase the Incredibles: "When everyone is happy, noone is happy!"  :D