author: Hey look! Fluff text!
We all know about the Vincent. Propaganda from out Protectorate way is full of them moving relief supplies, shipping food to starving settlements, transporting valiant peacekeepers fighting against filthy anarchists, rebels, pirates, and Taurians. Anybody who works the spacelanes has seen them too, at space docks carrying a League governor's Luggage, in transit hauling "malcontents" from one penal colony to another, or disgorging swarms of landing craft on planets whose definitions of "freedom" have gotten a bit too permissive. We've all seen them, they're everywhere.
The Star League depends on them is what I'm getting at. And they have for a while, even before they managed to nuke everybody into accepting them as the Star League. The Mark 57 is actually based on an older design, the Mark 27, which dates back to the actual Star League. Anyway, the Word either already had or converted a couple of these old Mark 27s and used them to set up outposts and staging areas for their upcoming campaign, and it worked so well that they kept doing it. Eventually, deciding an old Mark 27 wasn't really equipped to protect itself if it got caught by any of the naval forces they hadn't run down yet, they came up with an upgrade package that they called the Mark 57. More armor, newer guns, marines, an extra deep missile magazine to hold nukes. All that good stuff. And it did its job, so they made more of them. Lots more.
Let me be pedantic for a moment. Most people call them Vincents. People who want to show off how "with it" they are will call them Vincent Mark 57s. It's my pleasure to call those smug losers wrong, because they call every Vincent a Mark 57. They aren't. At least not really. Mark 57 specifically refers to those ships that are equipped to transport station modules, and the majority of the Vincents floating around the League aren't equipped for that. The first ones were, because it was what the Word needed. Once they started building them to support their empire, though, what they needed were cargo carriers and troop transports. So that's what they built, and that's what you see nowadays, and because they're different, they each have a slightly different designation. The Mark 57A carries bulk cargo, about ninety thousand tons worth. Those are the ones shipping cargo from place to place, including people if the need arises. You can fit a lot of cots and very basic sanitation equipment in a 57A's cargo hold, and if the passengers get upity it's just a short jaunt out the cargo bay door to not being a problem anymore.
The ones you see valiantly suppressing the hell out of unruly civilians are Mark 57Bs. These are troop transports, with space for over a hundred landing craft and their complements of protomechs, vehicles, and cybernetically augmented psychopaths. Smart people know these things on sight, and will usually know to get away from a world if one or more of them show up.
And if we're gonna talk Vincents, we gotta talk about the Whore of Babylon. Regular listeners will know all about her. Out fighting the good fight, running guns to rebels, supplies to the unfortunate, supplying faxes and transport so humble pirate broadcasters like yours truly can get the word out, even taking swats at the League directly when they can. But there's more to it than that. Hearing about the Whore is the first time I've felt hope since old Yvonne ordered the banners pulled down. And to explain that, I gotta explain just how important the original Mark 57, no bloody A or B, was to the Word's takeover.
We know how the Word beat us. And if you don't, you can get a hint from how every "legitimate" jumpship started from a Terran yard and is registered and secured via FTL beacon and the Star League Department of Trade. The Word stripped away our interstellar capabilities. Starting halfway through 68, they hit every jumpship yard in the Inner Sphere. Didn't try to take them, didn't try to preserve anything, they flattened them with swarms of megaton yield missiles. Then they used more missiles (or just great big rocks) to take out the places that had built them, and the places that had the understanding to build them. The trade hubs where lots of traffic went through were hit with biological weapons, spreading contagions along the trade lines, killing jumpship crews, infecting other worlds, and making those that survived afraid to even let a jumpship visit for fear of bringing another plague.
Then they started hunting every jump capable ship they could find. They had a hell of a lot more warships than we thought they did, hell, more than we thought anybody could have. They didn't get all of ours, but between the ones they got, the yards we lost, the ****** bioweapons, they did enough. The interstellar economy collapsed. The Inner Sphere went dark. Worlds were isolated from one another. Unable to count on each other. Unable to fight alone. Then they just started picking us off, world by world. Some surrendered. Most resisted. None of them for very long. Either they learned the error of their ways and bowed to the new order, or their homeworld briefly got some new moons until they suddenly didn't. We won't ever actually know how high it got, but by simple math based on the number of worlds that aren't on the map anymore, the death toll during the "Second Reunification War" was easily over a trillion people.
But that wasn't the only thing they did. They also used the Mark 57s to set up new industry in out of the way places. They built up massive industrial complexes, starting from small manufacturing modules stuffed in a Mark 57's bay, hidden and off our radar, to protect themselves against the exact same tactics they were using. That's why when the Capellans got lucky and took out the Titan yards in '78, and when the Regulans managed to drop half a hundred megaton yield nukes on Europe in '79, and when those suicidal Taurians managed to crash the Vandenberg into Hilton Head in '82, it only slowed them down. It never stopped them. It couldn't stop them. They knew where all our weak points were, and they'd already moved theirs to somewhere else.
So now we circle back to the old Whore, and why I feel hope again. You see, the mad lads who took her didn't just steal a transport. The League's got plenty of those, no real loss. They didn't take out a troopship. They captured a station transport, and this one was packed to the gills with a full load of manufacturing modules. The same ones the Word used to build their hidden industries. And they're using them. Somewhere, out there, there's a new network of stations churning out material, equipment, entire jumpships, and most importantly more stations, always expanding. Free folk, ex-military, ships and crews who'd been hiding all this time trying to avoid being eliminated, they're starting to gather. They've got something to rally around, an ever expanding source of supply to put their gear back together, get their ships back into trim. And they've got humble broadcasters like yours truly, willing to spread the word. Letting you all know that we can fight back.
And we will fight back. However long it takes. And we will win. Ladies and gentlemen, mankind will be free.
~Excerpt from "Pirate Radio" broadcast circulating in Avalon City, New Avalon, Circa 26 NSLC (New Star League Calendar)
