The Scorpion Empire: All your Warhawks are belong to us

[glitterboy2098]

it is likely that a lot of the Manatee's built by the Hansa were the original cargo carrying version, not just the mech carrier variant. the hansa were very merchant oriented after all.

[Weirdo]

Both are available per the MUL, and I don't know of any way to confirm the ratio beyond wild speculation.

Honestly, given the fact that the RDF's experience prior to the Crusade(and the buildup to it) was almost exclusively in small-unit actions, it would not surprise me to learn that the Manatee was one of their favorite DropShip classes. If you have a strong aerospace fleet to cover it and think you can prevent it from getting shot on the ground, the Manatee is an extremely good light transport, one I might actually prefer over the Leopard in these circumstances.

[Doc Swift]

The merchants would have built gobs of the standard version. The RDFs would have used the 'Mech variant.

[Weirdo]

Makes sense. Their engineers would have had literally centuries to refine the design and iron out any quirks in it.

[Colt Ward]

But does that dropship make sense as the Hansa common dropship . . . IMO that depends on their jumpship fleet.  I mean we are talking about a faction that is set up, big fish/small pond, as a space going trading power.  If their JS are limited to smaller versions that have at best 3 collars, I would expect the merchants to move to bigger cargo DS IF their trade levels warrant . . . OR to be a merchant power, they may not have ships with large numbers of collars but they have a lot of jumpships.

Personally, for their footprint and just how small each trading partner/opportunity would be . . . I would expect a lot of the smaller jumpships with perhaps the handful of Star Lord or equivalents being in the RDF's hands.

[Doc Swift]

Cargo ships would have been necessary within the League itself, not just outside it. As a low-cost vessel, it should be expected in high numbers for a mercantile power.

[Colt Ward]

It is not the dropship cost itself, it is how many collars they have to move things period.  It is where you set the efficiency marker- 3 collar JS with Jumbos, Mammoths & what should be larger w/o Behemoth problems.

Or go for large numbers of collars (IE, SOMEONE should have pumped 8 & 9 collar JS, if not baby Potemkins) which allows you to transport more of the smaller DS.

If we are talking about a wide roaming merchant marine, as suggested by fluff, then having 2 or 3 collar JS spread through the League and trading with their economic vassals across that region of space makes more sense since it allows them to disperse the most valuable commodity in BTU across more space.  The operating costs of a Jumbo (50ish crew) would not be too much greater than a Manatee (5 crew for unarmed), taking into account the Jumbo carries about 10 times the cargo for 10 times the crew while offering other functions- self defense, passengers & small craft being the primary ones.

 . . . if the League had the Manatee, they should IMO have the DroST IIa (or clone) as a contemporary design, and the late Age of War Jumbo.

As the 'local' producer of industrial/technological goods, the Hanseatic League would ideally be set up in a sort of triangle trade . . .

Load up industrial goods from the home factories
goes to-
farming/biologicals settlement, trades out agromechs & other industrial products turning over 50-60% of their cargo space
goes to-
mining/fuel settlement, trades out mining mechs, pumps/refining equipment and the bulk foodstuffs taken on at stop 2 for refined metals, distillates, and other resources
goes to-
League home port, sells cargo of refined metals & distillates from stop 3 along with luxury/exotic foods & biological compounds from stop 2 to load back up on industrial products

While the Manatee is not a great interstellar trader because it offers a paltry 1k tons moved on a single drop collar, they MIGHT make brisk sales selling whole dropships to trade partners.  The Manatee would make a pretty good intersystem tramp freighter, and sales of the dropship would be a good means to exert economic hegemony over other systems.  It would allow developing systems access to asteroid/planetoid/moon mining for resources, refining fuel from gas giants, and getting water from Kupier Belt objects by offering economic intersystem transport.

[Weirdo]

I would imagine Manatees would be most common within the League itself or along known routes to 'safe' destinations, with Trojans being what you find going to more far-flung systems or out into the wilds.

Similarly, a Manatee is more suited to transporting high-value-low-mass stuff like luxury goods or advanced mechs/vehicles, or even zero-mass goods like music recordings or entertainment programs. Who knows how far-flung the audience for a long-running Hansa telenovela really is?

[Doc Swift]

I think it's important to point out that the Hansa had a surplus of JumpShips (and now the Goliath Scorpions have one...), but no classes are stated. They aren't tied down like most Deep Periphery powers.

Regarding large DropShips: It's more economically feasible to fill those massive beasts for each trip rather than fill them partially. That might delay runs for quite some time, especially for single system hops. Smaller DropShips cost less (fuel, maintenance) and can be filled faster. That means they can load, transport, and offload faster than the big boys. When profits are running on a razor's edge, keeping the revenue flowing is important. Large merchants could probably handle delays created by waiting for cargo, but smaller concerns (especially those looking to move up) would be more dependent on constant operation. Keeping it parked on the ferrocrete costs money that could be made in transit.

[Weirdo]

Similarly, there's always the practice of doing an initial sale at a loss in order to open a new market. Send a Manatee or Trojan first, and sell some IndyMechs that to an isolated world are likely worth their weight in gold. The cargo bay full of raw ore you're coming back with might not be worth as the mechs you sold...but the market is there now, and next time you can send a Mule.

And if that Mule is carrying heavy refining equipment, then the ships you send after THAT are gonna be bringing refined metals instead of raw ore, and you're making a fortune.

And if you do things right your customers are gonna get richer too from this boost to their industrial base, and that's when you send another Manatee...loaded with luxury goods for sale. :)

[Colt Ward]

Oh, I am all for the Hansa having operated Libertys & Leviathans, just not expecting that . . .

As for the large cargo DS, I was not suggested they were partially filled, merely that their cargo partially changes over at each destination with the final return to Hansa territory bringing in the high value materials they exchanged for their industrial products.  It can also be that it is only worth it for a dropship to hit a destination once every 4 or 5 months on a trade route.  It comes back around to IF the merchant marine operates the smaller JS, basically anything smaller than Star Lords- which matches up with IS, then that cargo costs more using a Manatee over a Jumbo due to economy of scale with that collar.  The drop collar is the most expensive & rare commodity in BTU and should have pushed for cargo dropships to be larger as the overall numbers of jumpships declined.  You are looking at the transit fee for the dropship's COGs on a Jumbo being 10% of what a Manatee would have to charge.

Your low operation costs for the Manatee is why I said it would be excellent for intersystem trade, making it analogous to a ocean barge or coastal trader.  The Manatee shipyard would, IMO, absolutely try to court single-system colony trade partners as buyers of the dropship because it allows them access to their home system w/o having to devote resources to native production for the capability.

For a bit of comparison . . . the Cutty Sark on it's first trip carried a bit under 600 tons of tea back to the UK if the converter I used was right.  So a Manatee carries a it over 1.5 times the Cutty Sark's cargo load.

One thing for the RDF . . . didn't the Manatee pre-date current battlemech drop technology?  Unlike the modern Union or Leopard, the Manatee actually has to land to offload the mechs?

[Weirdo]

One thing for the RDF . . . didn't the Manatee pre-date current battlemech drop technology?  Unlike the modern Union or Leopard, the Manatee actually has to land to offload the mechs?

That's a fluff-only thing, with absolutely zero rules support. Similarly, that fluff only refers to ships in Terran Hegemony service - for all we know, Hansa shipwrights (or even the IS Houses during the SL years) have corrected that deficiency in the design. 700 years is a LONG time to fiddle with the plans for a DropShip.

[glitterboy2098]

especially since we know they were building non-primitive battlemechs even before the WoB and Scorpions got involved in the region. so it wouldn't be too hard to beleive that a more recent design like a Union or Leopard made its way out there for them to obtain and study, letting them update their mechbay designs to post-age of war standards

[Colt Ward]

I understand it is fluff . . . but we do not get up-armored dropships- like the Black Eagle getting a (26xx) version that exchanges Primitive Armor for then modern, or the Canopian Dictators getting (307x) where they have better armor than the original version.  So without a canon reference, we are left with the design still having that drawback.  Is it the only mech-carrier DS with that drawback?

One way to answer about the Manatee though . . . did the RDF counterattack make any combat drops?

[Doc Swift]

Their JumpShip numbers didn't decline. Again: They had a surplus of JumpShips. In a region where JumpShip numbers dropped, your argument would prevail. But that's not the case in the League.

The RDF had more than one DropShip class. See the RAT in OTP: Hanseatic Crusade. Combat drops could be performed with something other than a Manatee if that restriction existed.

[Colt Ward]

I was not saying their numbers declined- no ROM or infrastructure destruction to deal with.  What I was saying that was the IS and why the average hauler there should have moved to carry more than the Mule.

For the League the question is can the expansion of their trading sphere keep up with their jumpship production . . . and BTU's jumpship production typically answers that with a no.  So if you cannot gain more collars, you are still going to want to put more on each of those finite collars you will have getting back to that economy of scale.  The more cargo each dropcollar moves, the cheaper the cargo gets.  Which also means the cost point per ton for something traded on a interstellar scale would be marginal or even not profitable for a Manatee would be profitable for a Jumbo or some other larger cargo ship.

[Doc Swift]

I was not saying their numbers declined-

The drop collar is the most expensive & rare commodity in BTU and should have pushed for cargo dropships to be larger as the overall numbers of jumpships declined.

You seem to have suggested it as the reason to support your assertion for them replacing all the small cargo vessels with larger ones. There's clearly no need to push for larger DropShips, since they would only have needed to do so if the number of their JumpShips had declined, which it did not. One might even suggest that since they increased their JumpShip number by various means, the opposite would have happened.

[Weirdo]

This also assumes that there's functionally no upper limit to the amount of goods you can produce, and/or that the customers you can find can/will buy everything you bring, and/or there's no limit to the amount of stuff that can/will be yours in return.

If you can produce 20,000 tons worth of Bop-It IICs a year, but your various customers are only willing/able to buy 500 tons of Bop-It IICs, then why use a Mule to ship them when a far smaller ship can do the same job for cheaper?

(Yes, I'm aware that DropShips can carry more than one type of goods at a time. It's a very quick and dirty metaphor. VERY dirty if you know what the residents of Space Ohio actually do with Bop-It IICs.)

[Colt Ward]

Doc, the sentence before that referenced the IS and 'overall' as in existence.  No matter what, their jumpship numbers are finite- IF they were trying to expand their mercantile sphere of influence either by gaining more colony customers or more frequent trips it would require more efficient use of those drop collars.  My last statement was that they might not have gone in to the same degree the Inner Sphere should have, but still as they expanded trade they would want more cargo moved on those limited collars.

Weirdo, I agree with that but the smaller ship is only cheaper in it's operation- not the jump cost.  The cost they pay to use the collar is the same for a small DS or a large DS- a large DS is just able to spread that cost out among more goods.  I understand your example but consider this . . . during the age of sail- which oddly enough the end gets close to the same cargo load (ignoring BT's mass vs volume inaccuracy).  During that time, cargo loads were things like precious metals, gems, alcohol, tea, spices, and fabrics- most high value, low mass/bulk with precious metals being a outlier due to the value.  Cargo loads of things like bulk grain or other food stuffs were not shipped half-way around the world because it had no profit margin for the costs of transport.  Fast foward to steam power and metal hulls which allowed more direct/faster transport along with larger hulls to carry more, and things that were previously unprofitable to ship became profitable.

So say when you delivered your Bop It IICs before you only accepted refined rare metals from mining worlds/colonies, and such things as rum, bolts of cotton or other fabric, concentrated organic dyes, and rubber extracts from ag worlds.  Take a larger cargo ship and now you can trade for metals (molybdem vs say nickel) that would not have been profitable to haul before b/c the transport costs were too high- spread over a 1000 tons of cargo instead of 10+k tons of cargo.  So now you might also import unwashed cotton (might be thinking of wool) which has uses for water resistant cloth IIRC, along with the bolts of cotton.

The colony can increase their production of raw materials without having to expand their refinement & processing facilities to make use of the increased production- broader base of the triangle without having to expand the layers on top of it.  So, simplified example . . . every week the colony mined 10 tons of ore to refine and get 2 tons of pure ingots.  Now they might be able to mine 15 tons, still refine to get 2 tons of ingots, but also because the dropship can haul away more they might be able to sell 5 tons of ore and 2 tons of slag that can be used to make fertilizer (to be sold to the ag world) back home.

It makes a feedback loop, the ability of a Hansa DS to take more in trade gives the world they visit more buying power, thus buying more Hansa goods.

Then again, this is all world building in a way FASA never looked at or really provided any guidance beyond 'the economy works.'

[Doc Swift]

That's why I'm confused. Why mention what happened in the IS when the circumstances there don't apply to the HL? There's about as little in common between the Hansa and the Inner Sphere nations. There's no reason to expect similar behaviors. And I'd caution against expecting any behavior you might consider rational from a people running a slave economy.

[Colt Ward]

Because in the Inner Sphere the Monoliths and Star Lords are rare and mostly in the service of the militaries, it would be hard to believe the Hansa have a greater ratio of those type of ships than what would be found in the IS.  The most common JS we are told is the . . . Merchant?  or was it the Invader . . . either way, 3 collars would be the upper end of a typical Hansa merchant ship.

While not the IS, it still does not change that the bottleneck for moving a army or engaging in trade is the limited number of dropship collars available- they are the rarest and most valuable commodity in BTU.  I want to say the merc books under transportation say renting a collar is 200k c-bills per jump.  Which means a Manatee has to charge 200 cbills to each ton of cargo while a Jumbo FREX would be charging 20 c-bills per ton.

Also, the trade practices I was stipulating were predatory- like doing the 'company store' on worlds/colonies/systems outside the Hansa borders.  Such as selling a Manatee to a settled system that is a trade partner instead of them building the local infrastructure to build one . . . they get dependent on such a ship and the Hansa has a locked in deal to sell parts.

[Doc Swift]

Those rates don't necessarily apply in a place where C-bills never existed. Like the Hanseatic League (because there were no HPGs there, and thus no ComStar). The Hansa aren't bound to the same limits and concerns as any Inner Sphere entity, including mercenaries.

[Colt Ward]

It is still a economic measure of volume expressing the cost of transporting.  Hansa script, whatever, the economic cost of jumping from one place to another still gets tacked on the cost of the goods, the same ratio would apply to a load of cargo . . . interstellar transport costs of a Jumbo are going to be 10% per ton of what it will cost a ton of Manatee goods.

I mean, I could say it costs 140000 Hansa megabucks for a DS to hitch a ride one jump, the ratio is still going to be a 10-1 cost difference for interstellar travel, or 140 per ton on the Manatee vs 14 per ton on the Jumbo.

[Baldur Mekorig]

A quick question, as i dont have my books at hand:

What are the color schemes (that we know) of the current Scorpion Empire Galaxies/Clusters?

[Weirdo]

My guess is that any Galaxy that can trace a lineage to a pre-Reavings unit would retain those colors. The Scorpions have always held a strong reverence for connections to the past, though admittedly they've also proven to be unafraid of change.

Aside from those older schemes and the new Hellion Keshik, we just don't know.

It's pure headcanon, but I like to think that when Omega Galaxy was first formed it kept the crazy yellow-and-green stripes of Nueva Castile and continues to use that. Similarly, while it would not surprise me to learn that Beta adopted a new scheme when it formally became Hellion Galaxy, I'm continuing to paint all my stuff in the published tan-and-black colors, even newer machines.

[Doc Swift]

A quick question, as i dont have my books at hand:

What are the color schemes (that we know) of the current Scorpion Empire Galaxies/Clusters?

Unless stated otherwise (or on CSO), existing camo schemes remain unchanged. For new units, if not stated or on CSO, then they are presently undefined.

[CJC070]

With Tau Galaxy due to the Eridani influence wouldn’t surprise me if other Trinaries or clusters took on colours of former SLDF units to “keep the dream alive”.

[wanderer25]

   I think the deal with the Manatee like allot of other things in BT  boils down to: You use what you have and make due with it!!

The Hansa have the specs and tools to make Manatees so that's what gets used. Is it the best option for a large trading polity.
Probably not  but that's what  they have. The big markets get what Mules and Jumbo's  are available, everyone else get a Manatee.

The escorts get  Centurion light ASF and Vulcan primitive heavy ASF cause that's what the local factories churn out.

The top RDF  units get  the few Unions/Overlords. The  local gov gets Manatees to move things around the planet/system.

[Weirdo]

I think my favorite part of the Manatee isn't actually the very large bulk cargo bay. It may have the cubicles for a mech lance, but in actuality that ship is easily capable of transporting a combined-arms company. The ship lands, deploys the mechs immediately, and those set up a security perimeter while everybody else aboard spends a few hours offloading a couple lances of hovertanks and APCs for an infantry company.

Not so good for smash and grab raids where extracting under fire is to be expected, but if your mission is to just level a pirate base or settlement it's a good way to hit them with a lot more force than they might be expecting just going by observed incoming ships(assuming you were even spotted coming in). And if such a raid goes sour and you need to bug out fast, it's not THAT severe a loss to spike the vees and just evacuate the crews and infantry.

[Wrangler]

I have to agree the Manatee doesn't make much sense if JumpShip availability is limited. You'd want max out carrying capacity of the drop ships attached.  It would if real like freight costs through the roof.  It likely you want to be using Jumbo or larger dropship if your transport freight or beat up Dictator or Union for Mechs.