Yeah, you probably don't want the Capellans to add Niops to their list of "ancestral worlds to reclaim".
Especially given so many of their citizens' ancestors ran screaming from the Capellan Confederation in the first place?
I always wondered how such a car could get past weight sensors or something to be a spy car.
Weight of the safety gear mandated by the Star League Highway Transportation Safety Administration to all cars.
All very good choices. Especially Chaparral and Myrmidon. Mercury...too undergunned. Better go for the Locusts.
I wonder if they put their effort on military tech instead of astronomy, would the Niops eggheads be able to figure out Clantech-level infrastructure/production? All that Star League-level knowledge and education has to give an edge...and there was no mention of the Blakists targeting any Niops academics during their occupation
Some of it? Possibly. That doesn't mesm they'd have the industrial refinement to build any of it... and they certainly wouldn't want to advertise the fact if they could.
I honestly don't think Xin Sheng would work well on Niops' Capellan refugee descendents. I've come to imagine them as being more Tikonov Commonality based for some reason, so the overtly Han-centric cultural overtones in Xin Sheng really wouldn't appeal, and at this point all they know about the Confederation is that it was someplace great-grandma and great-grandpa really didn't want to be anymore.
But I can definitely see God Empress Ilsa Centrella-Liao wanting to exert her influence, since it is relatively near her ever-expanding realm... ;)
So, more Russian than Chinese?
And, yeah, attracting the attention of any of the nationalistic expansionistic groups would be... bad for Niops.
I have a sentimental attachment to the Locust as it was the first mini I ever acquired.
Mine was the Phoenix Hawk. :)
The reason I suggested the Mercury over the Locust is threefold:
1. While the SLDF used Locusts, so did everyone else. The Mercury was a rarer bird, and one the Militia may consider superior to the Locust, since it was originally slated to be its replacement. Even a lowtech -98 may be seen as superior.
2. The Mercury has hands, which makes it useful for combat engineering tasks. In a way, it can replace Wasps and Stingers because of this, as well, despite the lack of jump jets, especially because of:
3. With its modular weapons and equipment, it's one step shy of being a true OmniMech, and the fluff for the MCY-99 implies ComStar and WoB largely used it like one. I can't see it as being far off from turning into a true Omni, which would make for a neat homegrown Niops design.
The Blakists were mostly after minerals and usable materials, which would mean Niops V. The nuke that went off in the capital would likely have done considerable damage to the main research facilities, as they grew up around the initial colony on Niops VII (or vice versa, actually).
But one would think that Niops might be able to do some interesting things with lasers, what with their expertise with optics. :)
Which is a good point, actually. It also makes me wonder how Niops could pray its knowledge elf radio telescopes to battlefield usage, and what other scientific research Niops does: particle physics, for example?
Also, was most of the mining on Niops V? I've seen conflicting sources on Workshop locations (or, more likely, they had Workshops on both V and VI at minimum), but the only clear indicator I've seen of locations for mining was the space mining they're doing with Interstellar Operations.