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Fan Fiction / Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Last post by Hotpoint on Today at 07:51:55 »Part LI - Section 2 of 2
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"The misdirection and obfuscation is actually pretty good for us" Hallis maintained. "We might want to spread a counter-rumour ourselves that we were actually in league with Herman Schwepps, the guy that was supposed to take over ComStar after Blake, and that our beef with Toyama and now Karpov is because they're not doing enough to restore the Terran Hegemony" he continued. "We know Toyama was telling the Great Houses that the reason he purged Schwepps and his supporters was because Schwepps wanted to leverage their SLDF divisions and control of the HPG network to that end, so it'll ring true in a few circles. Especially after we sent some people all the way to Terra and bigged up our Hegemony credentials in public" he said before smirking. "Even if Karpov wasn't paranoid about his own people before, I'd assume that rumour would tip the bastard over the edge."
"You've never managed to forget your time running an impromptu Intelligence Agency have you Franklin?" Romanov asked him rhetorically, wagging her finger in mock reproachment.
"Once a spook always a spook. I'm sometimes surprised that the galaxies most unnerving burger flipper never adopted him" Bremman remarked. "Although if we're talking murky, secret squirrel stuff I still think that Craig here is holding out on us after what we turned up in the old NAM database."
Nellis held up his hands. "As God is my witness, I have no freaking idea how the blueprints for Nighthawk power-armour ended up on Niops" he insisted honestly, having been just as surprised as anyone else when a trawl though the old files in the archive looking for something else had recently turned them up. "My only guess is that they're from back when the Association was making spare parts for XXXIV Corps, they did have some Royal troops on their roster. Maybe the 187th Royal Striker regiment was going to be issued them as part of the next set of operational trials before the Periphery Uprising in sixty-five threw everything into chaos?" he suggested.
"Oh, come on!" Hallis replied, feigning suspicion because he did actually believe the guy. "It would be bad enough if Niops only had the design for the Mark XXI, that was at least actually in service before the Star League fell, but the Mark XXII was only a prototype undergoing trials. If the 331st hadn't been a Royal Division we wouldn't have even heard of the thing and we didn't even have the actual plans for them, just a few photographs."
"I was even more surprised than you were" Brigadier Nellis insisted. "If I'd had any idea we had the plans for those things then you'd have found us already using them when you people first arrived here" he told the SLDF officers earnestly. "Project Workshop time wasn't fully booked fifteen years ahead back then. We could have found some capacity to make a few platoons worth of the things if we'd known we had the blueprints."
"Tell the truth, NAM is just a front for a SOG sleeper cell, just admit it!" Romanov joined in, enjoying the banter. The Special Operations Groups of the SLDF, the Special Forces teams that performed Black Ops missions, had been equipped with Nighthawk Mark XXI power armour suits because the integrated stealth and ECM systems made them very difficult to detect. Making an infantryman wearing a heavily armoured suit weighing four hundred kilos that had a jetpack attached actually sneaky had been quite the accomplishment but Special Forces Command had managed to pull it off.
The Mark XXII version was essentially just a Mark XXI that swapped out the ECM for an automatic grenade launcher. It had been intended for large scale production and if not for the Amaris War the infantry units of the Hegemony-born Royal divisions would have started being issued them in quantity. Like a lot of Royal equipment the Mark XXII was intended to make sure that the Terran Hegemony remained very much first-among-equals in the Star League and it genuinely was a mystery how the plans for such a highly classified piece of kit not yet fully in service ended up in a database of a Scientific Research Colony situated in the back of beyond.
"It's true. NAM is actually an SAS unit in disguise. We've only been pretending not to be the elite of the elite all these years and until now we've just been letting your people win whenever we conduct exercises together" Brigadier Nellis replied deadpan. "And because that information is need-to-know I'll have to kill you all now" he declared, holding up his hands in a kung-fu stance.
"Can I finish my doughnut first?" Hallis asked.
"Sure, go ahead" Nellis replied, reaching for his coffee, while trying not to laugh.
"Before Craig breaks our necks and quietly disposes of the bodies I'd like your thoughts on Kepler" Romanov said, wondering to herself whether it was worth having another doughnut given that she would have to spend another thirty minutes on the damn treadmill if she did.
"Kepler? Well it's hard to get started when reading his Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, but once you get going it's a lot easier" Nellis replied, feeling pleased with himself until he realised that nobody else in the room seemed to get the reference. "It's an inertia joke" he explained, realising that people not born and raised on Niops wouldn't have necessarily have even heard of that book much less know what was in it.
"I'll take your word for it" Romanov replied flatly.
"Assuming that you mean the Kepler system not the astronomer I guess you're asking if we think we should go ahead and place a garrison there as well?" Bremman surmised. "If so I'd have to say yes. If anyone else ever finds out about all the oil and natural gas hidden under those sand dunes they'll plant a flag there even if it's just to stop us doing it."
"The oil down the desert way, has been shaken to the top" Hallis sang a line from an old song. He liked various types of classical music although dubstep of course remained his go-to favourite genre, much to the annoyance of his family he inflicted it on. "We'll have plenty of J-U water purifiers coming out of the factory on Alphard soon, which will make sustaining a small garrison in the drier parts of Kepler a lot easier logistically."
"It's not exactly going to be a popular posting, and not just because it's almost Alphard level arid" Romanov pointed out. "Our survey teams had a few less than encouraging things to say about the local fauna and flora, those Kepler Magnalizards can chew right through an armoured environmental protection suit for a start. When they caught one to bring it back for the zoo it ate its way out of the cage they stuck it in on the dropship, they ended up flushing the damn thing into space because they were worried it might start gnawing on the hull."
"Why the crap would anything need teeth and a jaw pressure like that?" Nellis asked reasonably. Even animals that could effortlessly crush bones with their bite couldn't chew through a dropship hull.
"Supposedly they mostly subsist on a type of vine that's more like a steel cable than it is a normal plant" Romanov told him. "The Corps of Engineers has this notion that with a little genetic tweaking they can grow tow lines for tanks and suspension cables for bridges using it. Someone claiming a sense of humour even suggested making leashes for Thunderbirds out of it."
"Leashes? What about a lasso? I'd pay good money to see an assault mech rope and hogtie a thirty-five ton chicken with a bad temper" Bremman told them with completely sincerity.
Hallis blinked. "Okay, so I was going to suggest we enter a mech in the tournament on Illyria next year as part of our attempts to raise our profile in the Inner Sphere, but Thunderbird wrangling sounds like something that would really bring in the ratings" he opined. "Of course we'd also need an Atlas sized Stetson hat, something to add to the backlog of jobs for the Project Workshops."
"Sounds more like something we'd have to assign to the Skunk Works, they've got more of a sense of humour over there" Bremman decided.
"Children, I work with children" Romanov complained, rolling her eyes as she was once again reminded that men never grew up. "Galileo is the only system we already have a presence upon that's within a single jump of Kepler, so we might want to consider rotating the SLDF garrisons between those two systems every few months for the sake of morale. Building sandcastles and trying not to get eaten by lizards on Kepler is going to get old fast, knowing that it won't be too long until you rotate back to Galileo and can visit a bar and send an HPG home is going to make it much more bearable" she suggested. It could be years before Niops actually colonised Kepler, hydrocarbon deposits or not, and the garrison couldn't even look forward to seeing some action because no pirate was going to raid the place to steal sand.
"Any news on trying to get a license to produce the Crab, Mom?" Nellis asked. "I mean Ma'am" he corrected himself, earning a glare.
"Not yet, I'm still trying to get the High Associator to grasp that's it's worth doing right now despite the fact it'll be ten years or more before we can actually get around to building a factory for them" Romanov replied, wishing not for the first time that Brigadier Nellis was in her chain of command because Hallis and Bremman who were wouldn't have made that joke.
"I guess you explained that the only reason we want to try and get it now is because the Federated Suns took Northwind and with it the only part of Cosara Weaponries not under the thumb of ComStar?" Hallis checked.
"Yes, and I also explained that the reason we never tried thought about getting a license before was that with Northwind under Capellan rule we'd have been giving money to a tyrannical police state, which just wasn't morally acceptable" Romanov confirmed. "We already did deals with New Avalon to get licenses for the Blackjack and the CargoMaster, so we know they're open to approving them, and since the Cosara plant on Northwind is supposed to be a wreck they might not make us pay through the nose either. It's not like we'd be competing on sales, they aren't actually making the things just servicing them."
"If we can get them we'll have one hell of a good, reliable trooper mech on our hands, especially with our new ER Lasers, the next generation double-heat-sinks and the improved ferro-fibrous and endo-steel we'll have before we're actually in a position to make any of them" Hallis observed before chuckling. "Maybe we'll even get that weird new engine that Farnstrom came up with by then too" he added in jest.
"I'll believe that thing works when I see it, and by 'works' I mean consistently without periodic containment breaches that'll turn the cockpit into a blast furnace" Nellis responded dubiously. He had been dealing with that lunatic a lot longer than they had, and certified genius or not Farnstrom was still a confirmed whackjob. Just the idea of having to rely on what was effectively a forcefield to protect you from the particles being thrown off by the high-energy plasma inside the fusion reactor sounded way too sci-fi for his tastes.
Just because it looked like it would work on paper didn't mean it would work in practice and given that it would have to work reliably in the field on the move with people shooting at it, not just under ideal laboratory conditions, Nellis wasn't alone in being cautious.
They were about to start discussing the next item on the agenda when they were interrupted by a knock on the door.
"Enter" Bremman called out. He knew his people well enough to know they wouldn't interrupt a meeting of the Joint Chiefs for something unimportant.
A young naval lieutenant opened the door and entered, smiling sheepishly. "Feels like déjà vu" she said quietly, looking at the admiral and the three generals with him. "Sorry to interrupt but we just received an HPG addressed to General Romanov and Brigadier-General Nellis from a mercenary unit looking for work."
"Bolton's Rangers are persistent, I'll give them that" Hallis remarked.
"It's not from them, that's why I thought I should interrupt" the lieutenant replied. "It's from the Blackhearts, they used to be the 77th Special Operations Group, you know, Special Armed Services" she said, moving to hand a piece to paper to Romanov and then an identical one to Nellis. "They were like SLDF Black Ops right?" she asked.
"The blackest" Hallis replied, looking pointedly at Nellis.
"I was just joking earlier. Joking!" Nellis insisted, holding up his hands. "They must have addressed it to me as well as General Romanov because Captain Carmichael mentioned I was his commanding officer when he was interviewed by the press on Terra."
"Okay, but I've had people waterboarded I've been less suspicious of than I am of you right now Craig" Hallis told him. "Just keep that in mind, Nighthawk boy" he said as Romanov ignored them and read the HPG message.
"Anybody got any ideas what we could find an elite special-forces unit with possibly flexible morals to actually do at the moment?" Romanov asked rhetorically after finishing reading the message. "They'd be wasted guarding sand dunes on Kepler" she said wryly, folding it up.
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Note from the Author:
The political and strategic situation in the Inner Sphere of the early 2840's was very much dynamic. The Free Worlds League was still trying to recover from the ComStar Interdiction with Marcus Steiner at their throat pushing hard at Irian, The Capellan Confederation had to deal with Paul Davion taking Northwind off them and ComStar's Operation Holy Shroud was messing with everyone. Interesting times indeed!
With Northwind now in the hands of the Federated Suns not the Capellan Confederation trying to obtain a license to produce the Crab battlemech from Cosara Weaponries because more politically viable. The SLDF had intended on making the Crab its standard medium mech but events conspired otherwise.
Kepler (Horatius) was known for its hydrocarbon reserves and some interesting local fauna and flora including the Ferrovine and the Magnalizard. It's nowhere near as readilu habitable as other worlds in the region such as Islington (a breadbasket world of the Marian Hegemony in cannon) but was still colonised because thespice oil must flow.
Cerignola and Melk in the Free Worlds League both dropped off the map around this time, with many other systems to do so over the next few years. The League was unable to support all its worlds for economic and logistical reasons (not enough jumpships to go around) and isn't going to object too much if someone else offers the inhabitants of worlds it's given up on a new home.
In canon the Niops Association began production of Nighthawk power-armor in the 3070's in response to the deteriorating strategic situation in their corner of space. Quite how a scientific research colony had the plans for the highly classified Mk. XXI and Mk. XXII Nighthawk in their database is one of those mysteries that leads people to think that's there's more to Niops than meets the eye. The Mk. XXII in particular was only in trials when Niops became isolated at the start of the Amaris Civil War.
The Mk. XXI Nighthawk was used by the SLDF's Special Armed Services (SAS) branch which included the 77th Special Operations Group, AKA the Blackhearts, who stayed behind and became a mercenary regiment that operated in the periphery during the First and Second Succession War.
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"The misdirection and obfuscation is actually pretty good for us" Hallis maintained. "We might want to spread a counter-rumour ourselves that we were actually in league with Herman Schwepps, the guy that was supposed to take over ComStar after Blake, and that our beef with Toyama and now Karpov is because they're not doing enough to restore the Terran Hegemony" he continued. "We know Toyama was telling the Great Houses that the reason he purged Schwepps and his supporters was because Schwepps wanted to leverage their SLDF divisions and control of the HPG network to that end, so it'll ring true in a few circles. Especially after we sent some people all the way to Terra and bigged up our Hegemony credentials in public" he said before smirking. "Even if Karpov wasn't paranoid about his own people before, I'd assume that rumour would tip the bastard over the edge."
"You've never managed to forget your time running an impromptu Intelligence Agency have you Franklin?" Romanov asked him rhetorically, wagging her finger in mock reproachment.
"Once a spook always a spook. I'm sometimes surprised that the galaxies most unnerving burger flipper never adopted him" Bremman remarked. "Although if we're talking murky, secret squirrel stuff I still think that Craig here is holding out on us after what we turned up in the old NAM database."
Nellis held up his hands. "As God is my witness, I have no freaking idea how the blueprints for Nighthawk power-armour ended up on Niops" he insisted honestly, having been just as surprised as anyone else when a trawl though the old files in the archive looking for something else had recently turned them up. "My only guess is that they're from back when the Association was making spare parts for XXXIV Corps, they did have some Royal troops on their roster. Maybe the 187th Royal Striker regiment was going to be issued them as part of the next set of operational trials before the Periphery Uprising in sixty-five threw everything into chaos?" he suggested.
"Oh, come on!" Hallis replied, feigning suspicion because he did actually believe the guy. "It would be bad enough if Niops only had the design for the Mark XXI, that was at least actually in service before the Star League fell, but the Mark XXII was only a prototype undergoing trials. If the 331st hadn't been a Royal Division we wouldn't have even heard of the thing and we didn't even have the actual plans for them, just a few photographs."
"I was even more surprised than you were" Brigadier Nellis insisted. "If I'd had any idea we had the plans for those things then you'd have found us already using them when you people first arrived here" he told the SLDF officers earnestly. "Project Workshop time wasn't fully booked fifteen years ahead back then. We could have found some capacity to make a few platoons worth of the things if we'd known we had the blueprints."
"Tell the truth, NAM is just a front for a SOG sleeper cell, just admit it!" Romanov joined in, enjoying the banter. The Special Operations Groups of the SLDF, the Special Forces teams that performed Black Ops missions, had been equipped with Nighthawk Mark XXI power armour suits because the integrated stealth and ECM systems made them very difficult to detect. Making an infantryman wearing a heavily armoured suit weighing four hundred kilos that had a jetpack attached actually sneaky had been quite the accomplishment but Special Forces Command had managed to pull it off.
The Mark XXII version was essentially just a Mark XXI that swapped out the ECM for an automatic grenade launcher. It had been intended for large scale production and if not for the Amaris War the infantry units of the Hegemony-born Royal divisions would have started being issued them in quantity. Like a lot of Royal equipment the Mark XXII was intended to make sure that the Terran Hegemony remained very much first-among-equals in the Star League and it genuinely was a mystery how the plans for such a highly classified piece of kit not yet fully in service ended up in a database of a Scientific Research Colony situated in the back of beyond.
"It's true. NAM is actually an SAS unit in disguise. We've only been pretending not to be the elite of the elite all these years and until now we've just been letting your people win whenever we conduct exercises together" Brigadier Nellis replied deadpan. "And because that information is need-to-know I'll have to kill you all now" he declared, holding up his hands in a kung-fu stance.
"Can I finish my doughnut first?" Hallis asked.
"Sure, go ahead" Nellis replied, reaching for his coffee, while trying not to laugh.
"Before Craig breaks our necks and quietly disposes of the bodies I'd like your thoughts on Kepler" Romanov said, wondering to herself whether it was worth having another doughnut given that she would have to spend another thirty minutes on the damn treadmill if she did.
"Kepler? Well it's hard to get started when reading his Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, but once you get going it's a lot easier" Nellis replied, feeling pleased with himself until he realised that nobody else in the room seemed to get the reference. "It's an inertia joke" he explained, realising that people not born and raised on Niops wouldn't have necessarily have even heard of that book much less know what was in it.
"I'll take your word for it" Romanov replied flatly.
"Assuming that you mean the Kepler system not the astronomer I guess you're asking if we think we should go ahead and place a garrison there as well?" Bremman surmised. "If so I'd have to say yes. If anyone else ever finds out about all the oil and natural gas hidden under those sand dunes they'll plant a flag there even if it's just to stop us doing it."
"The oil down the desert way, has been shaken to the top" Hallis sang a line from an old song. He liked various types of classical music although dubstep of course remained his go-to favourite genre, much to the annoyance of his family he inflicted it on. "We'll have plenty of J-U water purifiers coming out of the factory on Alphard soon, which will make sustaining a small garrison in the drier parts of Kepler a lot easier logistically."
"It's not exactly going to be a popular posting, and not just because it's almost Alphard level arid" Romanov pointed out. "Our survey teams had a few less than encouraging things to say about the local fauna and flora, those Kepler Magnalizards can chew right through an armoured environmental protection suit for a start. When they caught one to bring it back for the zoo it ate its way out of the cage they stuck it in on the dropship, they ended up flushing the damn thing into space because they were worried it might start gnawing on the hull."
"Why the crap would anything need teeth and a jaw pressure like that?" Nellis asked reasonably. Even animals that could effortlessly crush bones with their bite couldn't chew through a dropship hull.
"Supposedly they mostly subsist on a type of vine that's more like a steel cable than it is a normal plant" Romanov told him. "The Corps of Engineers has this notion that with a little genetic tweaking they can grow tow lines for tanks and suspension cables for bridges using it. Someone claiming a sense of humour even suggested making leashes for Thunderbirds out of it."
"Leashes? What about a lasso? I'd pay good money to see an assault mech rope and hogtie a thirty-five ton chicken with a bad temper" Bremman told them with completely sincerity.
Hallis blinked. "Okay, so I was going to suggest we enter a mech in the tournament on Illyria next year as part of our attempts to raise our profile in the Inner Sphere, but Thunderbird wrangling sounds like something that would really bring in the ratings" he opined. "Of course we'd also need an Atlas sized Stetson hat, something to add to the backlog of jobs for the Project Workshops."
"Sounds more like something we'd have to assign to the Skunk Works, they've got more of a sense of humour over there" Bremman decided.
"Children, I work with children" Romanov complained, rolling her eyes as she was once again reminded that men never grew up. "Galileo is the only system we already have a presence upon that's within a single jump of Kepler, so we might want to consider rotating the SLDF garrisons between those two systems every few months for the sake of morale. Building sandcastles and trying not to get eaten by lizards on Kepler is going to get old fast, knowing that it won't be too long until you rotate back to Galileo and can visit a bar and send an HPG home is going to make it much more bearable" she suggested. It could be years before Niops actually colonised Kepler, hydrocarbon deposits or not, and the garrison couldn't even look forward to seeing some action because no pirate was going to raid the place to steal sand.
"Any news on trying to get a license to produce the Crab, Mom?" Nellis asked. "I mean Ma'am" he corrected himself, earning a glare.
"Not yet, I'm still trying to get the High Associator to grasp that's it's worth doing right now despite the fact it'll be ten years or more before we can actually get around to building a factory for them" Romanov replied, wishing not for the first time that Brigadier Nellis was in her chain of command because Hallis and Bremman who were wouldn't have made that joke.
"I guess you explained that the only reason we want to try and get it now is because the Federated Suns took Northwind and with it the only part of Cosara Weaponries not under the thumb of ComStar?" Hallis checked.
"Yes, and I also explained that the reason we never tried thought about getting a license before was that with Northwind under Capellan rule we'd have been giving money to a tyrannical police state, which just wasn't morally acceptable" Romanov confirmed. "We already did deals with New Avalon to get licenses for the Blackjack and the CargoMaster, so we know they're open to approving them, and since the Cosara plant on Northwind is supposed to be a wreck they might not make us pay through the nose either. It's not like we'd be competing on sales, they aren't actually making the things just servicing them."
"If we can get them we'll have one hell of a good, reliable trooper mech on our hands, especially with our new ER Lasers, the next generation double-heat-sinks and the improved ferro-fibrous and endo-steel we'll have before we're actually in a position to make any of them" Hallis observed before chuckling. "Maybe we'll even get that weird new engine that Farnstrom came up with by then too" he added in jest.
"I'll believe that thing works when I see it, and by 'works' I mean consistently without periodic containment breaches that'll turn the cockpit into a blast furnace" Nellis responded dubiously. He had been dealing with that lunatic a lot longer than they had, and certified genius or not Farnstrom was still a confirmed whackjob. Just the idea of having to rely on what was effectively a forcefield to protect you from the particles being thrown off by the high-energy plasma inside the fusion reactor sounded way too sci-fi for his tastes.
Just because it looked like it would work on paper didn't mean it would work in practice and given that it would have to work reliably in the field on the move with people shooting at it, not just under ideal laboratory conditions, Nellis wasn't alone in being cautious.
They were about to start discussing the next item on the agenda when they were interrupted by a knock on the door.
"Enter" Bremman called out. He knew his people well enough to know they wouldn't interrupt a meeting of the Joint Chiefs for something unimportant.
A young naval lieutenant opened the door and entered, smiling sheepishly. "Feels like déjà vu" she said quietly, looking at the admiral and the three generals with him. "Sorry to interrupt but we just received an HPG addressed to General Romanov and Brigadier-General Nellis from a mercenary unit looking for work."
"Bolton's Rangers are persistent, I'll give them that" Hallis remarked.
"It's not from them, that's why I thought I should interrupt" the lieutenant replied. "It's from the Blackhearts, they used to be the 77th Special Operations Group, you know, Special Armed Services" she said, moving to hand a piece to paper to Romanov and then an identical one to Nellis. "They were like SLDF Black Ops right?" she asked.
"The blackest" Hallis replied, looking pointedly at Nellis.
"I was just joking earlier. Joking!" Nellis insisted, holding up his hands. "They must have addressed it to me as well as General Romanov because Captain Carmichael mentioned I was his commanding officer when he was interviewed by the press on Terra."
"Okay, but I've had people waterboarded I've been less suspicious of than I am of you right now Craig" Hallis told him. "Just keep that in mind, Nighthawk boy" he said as Romanov ignored them and read the HPG message.
"Anybody got any ideas what we could find an elite special-forces unit with possibly flexible morals to actually do at the moment?" Romanov asked rhetorically after finishing reading the message. "They'd be wasted guarding sand dunes on Kepler" she said wryly, folding it up.
----------
Note from the Author:
The political and strategic situation in the Inner Sphere of the early 2840's was very much dynamic. The Free Worlds League was still trying to recover from the ComStar Interdiction with Marcus Steiner at their throat pushing hard at Irian, The Capellan Confederation had to deal with Paul Davion taking Northwind off them and ComStar's Operation Holy Shroud was messing with everyone. Interesting times indeed!
With Northwind now in the hands of the Federated Suns not the Capellan Confederation trying to obtain a license to produce the Crab battlemech from Cosara Weaponries because more politically viable. The SLDF had intended on making the Crab its standard medium mech but events conspired otherwise.
Kepler (Horatius) was known for its hydrocarbon reserves and some interesting local fauna and flora including the Ferrovine and the Magnalizard. It's nowhere near as readilu habitable as other worlds in the region such as Islington (a breadbasket world of the Marian Hegemony in cannon) but was still colonised because the
Cerignola and Melk in the Free Worlds League both dropped off the map around this time, with many other systems to do so over the next few years. The League was unable to support all its worlds for economic and logistical reasons (not enough jumpships to go around) and isn't going to object too much if someone else offers the inhabitants of worlds it's given up on a new home.
In canon the Niops Association began production of Nighthawk power-armor in the 3070's in response to the deteriorating strategic situation in their corner of space. Quite how a scientific research colony had the plans for the highly classified Mk. XXI and Mk. XXII Nighthawk in their database is one of those mysteries that leads people to think that's there's more to Niops than meets the eye. The Mk. XXII in particular was only in trials when Niops became isolated at the start of the Amaris Civil War.
The Mk. XXI Nighthawk was used by the SLDF's Special Armed Services (SAS) branch which included the 77th Special Operations Group, AKA the Blackhearts, who stayed behind and became a mercenary regiment that operated in the periphery during the First and Second Succession War.
