Part LXXII - Section 2 of 2----------
Mbeki nodded. "Who would I get as XO?" she asked, considering the offer.
"Probably Hollister transferring from
James Sever, so it won't just be a mix of rookies and guys and gals coming up on retirement" Bremman told her. "Unlike a lot of our people these days he's actually seen some action, during Klondike and later against the Blood Rain, and he was on the Circinus and Terran expeditions so you can count on him."
"I thought he was lined up for promotion, getting the
Badger?" Mbeki asked, frowning.
"That
was the plan, but with the changes to the expected fleet composition I'm going to shuffle the deck" Bremman replied. "We might end up putting one of the officers currently commanding an
Invader on the
Badger, less of a step up. Then we put Hollister on the
Cape Bon or the
Protecteur, give the current captain of
that ship on the
Buccaneer and put Whitfield on the
Michigan."
"Really? I thought Captain Brentjes on the
Michigan was bolted to his chair?"
"Not to put too fine a point on it Sarah, but the fleet is going to need a new commodore to act as my second-in-command at some point in the not-too-distant-future and Brentjes is the only candidate with both the seniority and that
isn't nearly as old as you are" Bremman told her. "Frankly, I need someone that can replace
me when I reach mandatory retirement myself."
"Brentjes isn't that much younger than you are" Mbeki pointed out.
"I've got six years on him, not ideal but at least he's not a centenarian" Bremman replied. "Getting replacement personnel was always going to be a stretch for a while, give us another twenty or thirty years' worth of Tax Break kids and Ironborn and we'll be sweet, but demographics is a pitiless bitch."
"Would have been a lot better for us if the army hadn't scooped up so many of the kids from your breeding program" Mbecki correctly observed.
"Unfortunately the mechwarrior mafia are
always going to see the world though the lens of a battlemech cockpit window and allocate resources accordingly" Bremman replied. "It was even worse in the clans, the only exception to the rule was the Snow Ravens. With them it was the ground pounders that bitched about all the best people and hardware going to the navy while the
army lived on scraps."
"Those are the ones that have one of the McKenna family in charge, right?"
"Yup. Living the dream" Bremman said wistfully. "Hound of Dracula signed up with the wrong clan."
"Say what now?" Mbeki responded, confused.
"My cousin, Zoltan, his nickname was 'Hound of Dracula', painted it on his fighter and everything" Bremman explained. "It's an old movie, twenty-fifth century, although I think he once said that it was actually a remake of an even older one, anyhow the movie was called 'Zoltan: Hound of Dracula' and he loved it. Mostly because of the name" he continued. "Anyhow, Zoltan signed up with McEvedy instead of McKenna and I basically got dragged along for the ride. I probably wouldn't have made Star Admiral with the Ravens though, they started out with more fleet personnel so the competition to rise up the ranks would have been greater. Sarah McEvedy, well she wasn't exactly an expert when it comes to using warships effectively so she delegated, mainly to me, because she quickly realised I
did and she was the pragmatic type that mostly cared about results, not personal aggrandisement."
"At least it sounds like she wasn't one of those bozos that thought because they knew how to command ground troops effectively that those skills transferred over to naval matters" Mbeki observed. "I never had that problem with Romanov, but some of the generals I dealt with before her during the war were… difficult" she said, greatly understating the reality. "They didn't really grasp that by treating the fleet as basically just a glorified taxi service for their precious battlemech regiments they were wasting the most valuable assets we had."
Bremman chuckled. "I know you mean 'valuable' in the sense of them being the prime strategic asset of the military, not to mention the sheer tactical utility of having a warship or two in orbit, holding the high ground and raining fire on ground targets, but I still remember the expression on High Associator Murray's face a few months back when he asked how much it would cost to build a small warship to placate the press."
"I'll bet" Mbeki replied, chuckling herself. "Tell him the sticker price of a McKenna did you?"
"Nah, told him that a
Vincent class corvette like the
Badger, the smallest warship we have, costs over five billion dollars to build, about as much as two brigade's worth of assault mechs which is why I didn't kick up a fuss when Olson and Romanov agreed we should prioritise the army for capital military spending for the first ten to fifteen years. Upgrading mechs and aerospace fighters with the latest gear just gives a lot more bang for your buck, initially at least."
Mbeki nodded. "Law of diminishing returns starting to kick in hard now though" she noted. The first wave of upgrades, replacing Star League era weaponry with first generation clan tech had massively improved the army's firepower, and the gradual development of even better hardware continued, but most of the relatively cheap wins were a thing of the past. Military R&D was fiendishly expensive and with lead-in times for the next generation of equipment often measured in decades.
The population boom and the expansion of the Hegemony's industrial base would allow for an increase in quantity as improvements in quality slackened off, but in financial terms the argument that money was
far better spent on the army than the navy was fading as the Hegemony expanded.
You could also occasionally find jobs for warships to do that meant they weren't just expensive white elephants in peacetime, with an obvious case-in-point being the one that had facilitated building the Arsenale Nuovo station in the first place.
Moving the asteroid from its original orbit had been a task primarily undertaken by the corvette
Badger, the big rock having originally rested almost as far away from Elizabeth as the other dwarf planet in the system Helena did. According to James Murray, that being James Murray the former SLDoME engineer and not James Murray the current High Associator, back in the day whenever they needed for borrow a ship from the SLDF to apply some thrust to a problem it had usually been a similar
Vincent class ship that turned up so
Badger finding itself being the craft doing all the pushing had been very apt, even if playing a glorified bulldozer wasn't exactly a glamorous job for a warship.
Whether it was as useful as the two brigades of assault mechs it was worth financially in the average military campaign was debateable, but all those mechs would have definitely had a hard time pushing the asteroid from where it was to where it was needed.
The Star League Department of Mega Engineering had shunted so many asteroids about over the years that there were even instruction manuals in the naval database as to how you should safely go about using a
Vincent to push gigantic floating rocks about, much of the advice being to make sure to hollow them out as much as possible
before you tried moving them, and
not to try and rush things. As was often the case, the compact nature of the Niops star system had helped considerably as even though the corvette was a mere fraction the size of the rock it was pushing it didn't have to push it nearly as far, or as fast, as would have been generally required elsewhere. Accelerations of a mere fraction of a gee in the Niops system could get you from A to B in a fairly reasonable space of time, weeks rather than months for example, and a
Vincent didn't lack for potential delta vee.
After carefully,
very carefully, nudging the asteroid that was to become the Arsenale Nuovo shipyard into its new home in stable orbit over Elizabeth, academics at the university were practically queueing up to help with the calculations required, the
Badger had then got to work helping to move cargo around, hauling equipment from the inhabited worlds of the system out to the construction site. That was another reason the
Vincent class had been popular with SLDoME, they weren't merely the most common warship in the fleet, so there was usually one readily available when required, their exceptionally large size for corvettes converted into lots of cargo space as well as plenty of thrust.
Badger herself was scheduled for a
very long overdue refit eventually once the shipyard was operational, so in a way she had been doing herself a favour. An older model
Vincent that had been in mothballs when the Amaris War began, causing the old girl to be quickly brought back into service, she had never been upgraded to the latest Mark XXXIX standard and therefore lacked the state-of-the-art Ulsup AI Surveillance Computer that had made the last production model of the
Vincent such a good picket ship. On the other hand the aging
Badger boasted Medium Naval PPC's as her primary armament, instead of the usual NAC/10 autocannon of the Mark XXIXs, so she could reach out and touch an enemy further away than most potentially giving her a minor tactical edge against an unwary foe, albeit at the cost of some total firepower.
Her planned refit would keep the Naval PPC's, though it would add a number of anti-fighter and point-defence guns as well as upgrade her various electronic systems to something less Age-of-War vintage and more cutting edge circa 2750.
Rumours that they urgently needed to strip out the original computers on the
Badger before her former captain Simon Mitchell died of old age, mostly because he was the only one that still knew how to fix the clockwork in the Difference Engine that calculated jumps if the gears stripped a tooth, were exaggerated.
Despite what he claimed when interviewed about his long, eventful naval career Mitchell had
not been taught computing by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, and neither had he been taught jump physics by Thomas Kearny.
The even more improbable story about once going up against a squadron of M-3 Drones that had drastically outgunned his own vessel and winning was true though, he didn't BS when it came to how he won his medals.
When it came to turning the asteroid
Badger had delivered into something more useful than just a tiny new moon for a dwarf planet that was now the task of engineers and technicians who had previously put together not only the Olympus Recharge stations but also the multiple smaller orbitals that now littered the system. Fortunately since much of Camelot Command itself had essentially been a gigantic kit, one that was produced by the SLDF in secret within the Terran Hegemony, surreptitiously transported in sections to the Dark Nebula within the Rim Worlds Republic, and then constructed there even more secretly, essentially repeating the whole process was
much easier than it could have been. Other such shipyards, such as the enormous ones the Terran Hegemony had built over Titan, were not so readily transportable because they had never been intended to be moved.
More than half of those engineers and technicians were demobilised or retired naval personnel, many of them grateful for work that kept them in space or, like Mbeki, happy to just spend much of their time in freefall where the aches and pains of their advancing years mostly went away.
Apprenticeship schemes had eventually provided a steady flow of workers for the slowly expanding number of orbital factories that dotted the system, the majority still situated above Niops V but as time went on the bulk of them would be located in the asteroid belt, utilising automated mining robots to gather resources they would convert into materials needed to not only supply Arsenale Nuovo but to build the planned second shipyard over Helena.
The Helena shipyard wouldn't be a pressurised dock, and it wouldn't be intended to produce warships as well as transport jumpships, but it would in time be by far the larger station with multiple shipways enabling it to work on building several ships at once. These would not only be needed to meet the needs of the Niops Hegemony itself, given the state of the Inner Sphere in a few years excess jumpships could be exported for truly exorbitant sums.
If the projections were right, then by the turn of the century the Hegemony, with both shipbuilding capacity and the germanium required to utilise it, would be draining the coffers of the Successor States as they struggled to maintain internal trade.
That would have probably been the right time to start thinking about orbital telescopes and colossal astronomical arrays but there you are.
"I'm told that docking the
Zug inside won't interfere with construction of the station, she's a lot shorter than the bay, we hollowed out the rock enough to build a
Newgrange in there if we had to after all, assuming we ever get the blueprints, so if you accept the job you'll get the privilege of commanding the first new warship produced by the yard" Bremman told Mbeki.
"The
Zughoffer Weir with fresh paint and a name borrowed from another old
McKenna isn't really a new ship though, is it sir?" Mbeki replied sardonically.
"Eh, while she's in there we might as well spruce her up a bit too, there's probably some parts from
Thorin that are in better condition than the ones in
Zug and if it isn't going to be too difficult to swap them out we might as well do that at the same time" Bremman suggested. "If she's going to bear her name she might as well carry a few of her heat-sinks or whatever too."
Mbeki frowned. "Given that it's supposed to be bad luck to re-name a ship, then some parts from Thorin might be in order to ward off a curse" she suggested.
"Superstitious are we, Sarah?" Bremman asked, amused.
"I've served with too many Jonah's in my career to not be at least a tiny bit cautious about that kind of thing" Mbeki replied. "My ancestors would have talked about not angering their ancestral spirits, not sure if that applies to ships too, but why take the risk?" she asked rhetorically.
"Okay, but if you
do take the job, if your beliefs
in any way involve astrology then kindly keep that to yourself because the High Associator will insist on me having you relieved of command and placed in psychiatric care if
that gets out."
"What if I suddenly get the urge to worship the Aesir once the IFF switches over from squawking
Zughoffer Weir to
Thorin?"
"Oh, that would only get you tagged as being eccentric, not unacceptably deranged" Bremman reassured her. They were okay with eccentric, it looked like they would even let
really eccentric reproduce.
Sarah Mbeki thought about that. "Good to know" she replied, thinking that it
would be nice to finally command a battleship for a while, even if it
was mostly just as a publicity stunt to help out a damn politician.
She also wondered how Bremman planned to convert this 'favour' he was doing for Murray into something that benefitted the fleet in a more concrete way down the road. Maybe getting that stupid array shelved indefinitely? That would solve a
lot of medium-term problems.
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Note from the Author:Working on ships inside pressurised docks is easier which is why they are considered superior to yards open to vacuum despite being far more expensive to build. The Arsenale Nuovo Station in the process of being constructed above the dwarf planet Elizabeth in the Niops Asteroid belt is essentially the yard from Camelot Command with a great deal more internal space for building larger ships (although as yet they don't have the full blueprints for anything bigger than a Black Lion II).
Commodore Sarah Mbeki was attached to the 295th. Despite being somewhat older than Admiral Bremman, and having served against Amaris, she found herself only the second-in-command of the fleet though fortunately she was okay with that (she knew she was rusty after all those years stuck on Buffalo Meadows). Coming up on retirement, getting to captain the Zughoffer Weir/Thorin is a nice way to end her career.
The First Succession War was extremely nuke-happy. The two hundred gigaton bomb dropped by the FWL, that's canon.
Laser based Optical Tweezers are very much a real thing. Work on them won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics (and they didn't have battletech naval lasers to play with). Any similarities between elderly scientist Ogbert Farnstrom ending up with offspring via a big glass incubator tube and anyone else is purely coincidental I swear... *crosses fngers behind back*
Warships, even small ones like the Vincent class corvette Badger, are very, very expensive.