Author Topic: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star  (Read 77603 times)

Daryk

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #480 on: 15 May 2024, 17:58:47 »
I'm sure the Primus enjoyed the news to everyone else that he had 8 Divisions...

I don't think that was ever spelled out to the Houses in the original timeline.
"Had" or "has"?  That's the question that will bother most of the Houses... ;)

mikecj

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #481 on: 15 May 2024, 20:15:07 »
And what naval support that Corps has available
There are no fish in my pond.
"First, one brief announcement. I just want to mention, for those who have asked, that absolutely nothing what so ever happened today in sector 83x9x12. I repeat, nothing happened. Please remain calm." Susan Ivanova
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Romo Lampkin could have gotten Stefan Amaris off with a warning.

Kujo

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #482 on: 16 May 2024, 04:55:57 »
Clans or C* who's going to be a bigger threat to Niops (or even more dangerous self-righteous politicians who "KNOW" better...)?
For the FEDCOM For the Archon-Prince

Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #483 on: 21 May 2024, 07:49:08 »
Part LI - Section 1 of 2

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"The Niops Association is the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma of the Inner Sphere, we're probably the people that ComStar have conspiracy theories about. We should pick three diametrically opposed or mutually exclusive ones and drop hints to the Maskirovka that the first one of them is true, the ISF the second and SAFE the third, not just to obsfucate things but because it'll send ROM completely nuts when they read their mail."

General Franklin Hallis has fun messing with Intelligence Agencies - 2843CE

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Robert H Goddard Spaceport (Niops VII) - Niops Association – 2842

"I peaked into your office on the way to the meeting room, love the new desk" Franklin Hallis told Admiral Bremman as he took his own seat at the conference table. As usual the building was warm enough but Navy Headquarters had been built in a hurry with everything bodged together, including the holoprojector somewhat crudely bolted to the table. General Romanov was focused on examining the large projection currently floating above said table, a colony starmap zoomed in on the border between the Free Worlds League and the Lyran Commonwealth, and as the others chatted she was considering the strategic situation. If Irian there fell to the Steiner offensive it wouldn't just rob Marik of one of their most important industrial worlds, it could also lead to the eventual loss of every system the League owned from there to Terra she determined, frowning.

It was no wonder why Gerald Marik was throwing just about all the reserves he still had at Irian, even at the expense of other systems. Marcus Steiner, his opponent, being less overstretched however was also able to find forces to send other places, hence his recent conquest of Danais which put pressure on the border elsewhere.

All things considered the current situation still majorly sucked for the Free Worlds League, Romanov decided while pressing a button on her noteputer to centre the starmap back on Niops instead. The ComStar Interdiction might have only lasted a couple of years, but Atreus might well take a couple of decades to fully recover from its consequences even if they were able to keep Marcus Steiner's boot firmly off their neck for now, which in itself wasn't looking entirely certain.

If it hadn't been Gerald Marik that had arranged his father's 'brain aneurysm' he might be wishing that whoever actually was responsible hadn't made their move earlier. Frankly he had inherited an absolute ******, and the only bright spot in his strategic situation was that the Capellan Confederation was too busy dealing with a major push into their own territory by the Federated Suns to maintain their offensive towards Oriente.

Bremman looked at Hallis askance. "You really had to mention the desk?" he asked rhetorically as Brigadier Nellis at the other end of the table tried to hide his grin behind a doughnut. "You just couldn't resist?"

"You can't still be sore about losing the last one Jake surely?" Hallis asked sweetly.

"I will hold a grudge about that until the day I die. That desk was an antique, came all the way from Terra back in 2741" Bremman complained.

"If it was that good then why did Olson have a new one made?"

"Because he wanted a bigger, more imposing one" Bremman explained. "That desk was the only thing in Navy Headquarters nicer than the furniture in Craig's office."

"Don't drag me into this, it's not my fault that the furniture and décor in my building isn't mass produced, soulless utilitarian junk" Nellis replied. The Star League had spared no expense when they originally established the colony, although this was of course an organisation which had a budget that allowed for things like ordering two McKenna class battleships to be built annually for nearly a century-and-a-half at a cost of thirty billion C-bills each.

"By rights the High Administrators old desk should have come to me anyway as ranking officer, but you didn't hear me whining about it" General Romanov interjected, sipping at her coffee. Somehow Bremman was still managing to get his hands on higher quality coffee beans than she was too. If she didn't know better she'd think he'd been getting it smuggled all the way from Jamaica on Terra all these years, right under the nose of ComStar.

She was definitely going to have the James Sever searched from stem to stern when it finally got back in a couple of weeks, mostly to check if the navy had sneaked a few hundred tons of contraband aboard. Apart from high-grade Terran coffee, genuine Scotch and Irish Whiskey were worth a fortune way out here and it was a lot easier to get your hands on it in Italy than on Niops.

The ever-dependable Colonel MacArthur was hopefully bringing her back a few kilos of First Flush Darjeeling Tea from India with express orders to keep quiet about it of course. "Please pass on my congratulations to your troops who participated in the latest training exercise on Reykjanes Island Craig" she requested of Brigadier Nellis. "I hear Colonel Benedict wasn't too happy about the outcome."

Hallis chuckled. "Jax Benedict practically had steam coming out of his ears after one of his battalions fell headlong into a NAM ambush and got themselves virtually annihilated" he said. "He's not the most placid of men at the best of times."

"Let's face it, my guys and gals were due another win, they don't happen that often. We've been regularly getting whupped by the SLDF for a decade now" Nellis pointed out. "It's a good thing you learn more from failure than you do success."

"No need for false modesty, for what it's worth I doubt there's many regiments of House regulars out there these days that one of yours wouldn't maul, let alone militia. It's not just the better gear, it's the training and doctrine" Hallis told him. "Just don't expect to be able to pull that particular trick on any of my people again. You're right about learning more from failure."

"Just so long as Benedict doesn't demand a Trial of Grievance for showing him up" Nellis joked. "I was never really that good a mechwarrior to begin with" he said before becoming more serious. "High Associator Murray told me that he's still in two minds about offering a contract to Bolton's Rangers."

"So am I, but not for the same reason I'll bet" Hallis added for himself. "If they had quit working for the Combine after the Kentares Massacre like the Eridani Light Horse did it would have been a better look for them but they didn't."

"We did raise the issue and they say they thought it was all exaggerated until they left Drac territory and got to see the evidence ComStar and the Federated Suns had collected" Romanov replied. "Could be true, it's not like the Combine is well known for having a Free Press, or for allowing you to express officially unsanctioned opinions as well as keep your head on your shoulders. If you only got to read their accounts of the war they'd probably seem just as honourable as they always claim to be."

"Maybe" Hallis replied, still not entirely convinced. "I suppose they were just lucky that they didn't end up like those poor bastards from the Paul Bunyan regiment when they finally realised that the Combine actually were the ****** the Steiners and the Davions always said they were."

"Murray's issue is more financial, if we hire them to take over protecting Comstock and Francas as proposed we'll have to cut back government spending somewhere else and the easiest place to do that is scale back on his pet project to place orbital telescopes around every world where we've placed an HPG before he leaves office."

"Those actually have a defence application. Why not just scrap that gigantic radioastronomy array he wants to build a couple of jumps out from McEvedy's Folly because it's so quiet out there?" Hallis asked.

"Oh no, he won't be doing that" Nellis replied, rolling his eyes. "If it came to it he'd delay construction of the shipyard again first."

Unfortunately for him Admiral Bremman had been taking a drink from his cup of coffee at that precise moment and he practically drowned as he made a strangled sound of horror and it went down the wrong tube. "No!" he eventually managed to protest through the coughing.

"Relax Jake, you're getting your damn shipyard" Romanov assured the admiral before he had some kind of seizure. Objectively he did have a point that the navy had been sidelined when it came to investment and procurement over the years, and he was also probably correct that it was their warships which deterred foreign aggression far more than their advanced battlemechs. If that had been in any doubt before then the press reaction to the James Sever being deployed to Circinus and then all the way to Terra had confirmed it. Despite not being deployed nearly as much now as they used to be warships were still the ultimate symbol of the power of an interstellar nation. There was a reason why Charles Marik had used a couple of his to destroy the ComStar orbital facility over Oriente in 2837, thus triggering the ComStar War and the Interdiction, rather than just take it out with squadrons of aerospace fighters. Sending warships to do a job sent a message that you were serious.

The Niops Association had warships, possibly more of them than they were letting on, that meant that despite them being a small periphery nation they had to be taken seriously by the Great Houses. This was particularly true of their closest neighbour, the Free Worlds League, which was still trying to recover economically and territorially from Charles Marik's ill thought-out move against ComStar. If Atreus tried to lean on Niops at the moment then Niops would laugh in their face because Charles's successor, Gerald Marik, just couldn't spare enough troops and ships from the front lines to invade the Illyrian Palatinate right now, let alone someone that could, at minimum, ram a frigate and a couple of destroyers up his ass.

"Good. It's bad enough that those orbital telescopes need electronics that would otherwise go into dropship production. They'll slow down the rate at which I can get CargoMasters and CargoKings into service" Bremman succeeded in getting out once he stopped coughing. The new Alliance class orbiting dropship yard could make most of the CargoKing and CargoMaster, but the advanced computers that made the things so superior to other cargo carriers had to be produced by the electronics auto-fac salvaged from Camelot Command. That auto-facs time was almost as precious as that of the Project Workshops, it could reproduce any circuit you fed the diagram for into it and even make custom electronic components not already in its inventory if it had to. The secrecy of Camelot Command had meant the station needed to be as self-sufficient as possible, the fewer SLDF ships travelling in and out of the Dark Nebula carrying supplies the lower the chances that the Rim Worlds Republic would discover the naval base hidden in their midst.

Franklin Hallis looked thoughtful. "Maybe we're missing a trick here" he said, drumming his fingers on the table absent-mindedly. "What if there's a way to get Bolton's Rangers to accept a contract that'll cost us a lot less money and enable us to hold onto them in the long term?" he suggested.

"Such as?" Romanov queried.

"We were already looking to absorb Islington into the Hegemony, its prime real estate, a future breadbasket system with only a small indigenous population that is amenable to further migration. We could offer Bolton's Rangers land grants there in lieu of some of their pay, explaining that they'll be worth a fortune as more people from the Inner Sphere come to settle in the Hegemony."

"It's already been suggested by the treasury" Romanov replied. "Offering them land grants I mean, not necessarily on Islington."

"It has? Well, it's only part of my idea" Hallis replied. "What we also need is to get them to agree to signing up for the Niops Company Store."

Nellis blinked. "You're kidding. They'll never do that, a good part of the reason they quit working for the Combine is because they were getting screwed by that kind of system."

"That was the Draconis Combine Company Store, not the Niops Association Company Store" Hallis responded. "The one the Drac's operate doesn't have Ferro-Fibrous armour on the shelves because we're apparently the only people that can still make that stuff. Hell before too long we'll be literally the only game in town for new Double-Heat-Sinks, ERPPC's, Guardian ECM systems, all sorts of gear."

"Gear that we're either currently in the process of replacing with even better equipment or have in mass production already like the Ferro-Fibrous for the Blackjack" Romanov replied, nodding as she thought it through. Their cast-offs were worth their weight in gold to most anybody else, and for a lot of mercenary units signing a contract that lasted a few years just to get hold of them might be well worth doing even if the actual pay was better somewhere else.

"The Ranger's probably have a few Phoenix Hawk mediums in their inventory, the Niops company store naturally has an offer on compatible XL engines if someone should want to soup up their old PXH-1" Hallis said, doing his best impression of a used car salesman. "Here's another idea, Bolton's Rangers were originally the 208th Hussars regiment right? We could even give them an HSR-200Db Hussar light as a signing bonus, we already replaced them in SLDF service with the 250 model and now we've got the 260 in production. To anyone but us handing over a Royal would seem ridiculously generous, extravagant even, it would certainly make it easier to get them to sign on the bottom line."

"All the 200Db's were transferred to the Militia when you got the 250's, if you plan to give any of my mechs away to mercenaries I'd really hope you'd ask me first" Nellis responded drily.

"We'd replace them with either new-build 260's or 250's upgraded to 260 standard" Romanov told him.

"Great, so are there any other machines that belong to me you want to give away, because if I get better mechs as replacements I'm all for it?" Nellis offered magnanimously, immediately scrapping his initial objection to the proposal.

Admiral Bremman smiled. "I've got visions of Bolton's Rangers in ten years looking to go work for someone else but then realising it'll be a bitch getting spare parts for all their fancy new equipment."

"If we wanted to keep them sweet in the long-term we could say we're okay with them basing themselves in the Niops Hegemony but taking contracts elsewhere" Hallis suggested. "That was part of my thinking in giving them land on Islington. It's five jumps from here, halfway to Frobisher. If they rotated one battalion to stay at home for training, and to look after their dependents say, while the others deployed, we'd get a free garrison unit in a strategically useful location."

"Anything like that would have to be agreed by the civilian government, I don't think the politicians would be happy allowing a mercenary unit based here to work for just anyone" Nellis said. "I mean, if they wanted to do work for the Palatinate or the Magistracy while living inside our borders I don't think anyone would have an issue with it. For that matter the Mariks, Steiners and Davions are ****** but they're not complete ******, and they all seem to have at least a vague understanding that people have individual rights, but in the Draconis Combine and the Capellan Confederation it's tyranny O'clock twenty-four-seven. Allowing mercenaries living under our flag to work for governments I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire wouldn't be a good look."

"I doubt that Bolton's Rangers would agree to work for Kurita ever again but it's a fair point" Hallis responded, reaching for a doughnut. "Widening the scope of this we might want to think about bringing our association with the Troublemakers into this discussion. Their contract with us is open-ended but they're bound to want to get out there and bringing in more money eventually. I know Tyson himself is looking into expanding recruitment, get his regiment back to being an actual regiment again."

"Yeah, I don't know if everyone heard but he inquired about maybe buying a Blackjack lance from us a while back" Romanov noted. "We had to turn him down of course, what we've got under the hood on those things is secret for a good reason, but he seemed to accept that all our production capacity for the next few years is already earmarked for our planetary militias. I offered to put in a good word with Majesty Metals and Manufacturing if he ever thought about buying mechs from them instead. We're on their Christmas Card list at the moment thanks to facilitating their arms contract with the Palatinate and the ongoing Sabre negotiations."

"If we can fix those Stasis Tubes for the Magestrix our rep on Canopus will head into the stratosphere faster than a Sabre on overthrust. That'll be the time to put in a good word for Tyson" Bremman observed.

"You're not kidding, the way I heard it Michaela Centrella would probably offer to blow the High Associator if she thought it would help" Romanov joked.

"I'm glad you're the one that said that Ma'am" Nellis said, laughing.

"Jeez, imagine what she'd do for the anti-agathic treatments" Bremman asked rhetorically, laughing himself.

"Something you can pay good money for no questions asked on most any planet in the Magistracy most likely" Romanov replied. "I'll bet you've got no shortage of volunteers for the cargo runs to Thraxa do you Admiral?"

"No Ma'am, it's a very popular assignment. I'm not sure it's just because of the cheap tazqan burgers and the mountain climbing either" Bremman replied. Getting shore leave on a Magistracy planet was a lot of fun. "Talking of Thraxa, if we do hire these new mercs then we might want to think about planting the flag on Al-Farghani ahead of schedule. We'll have a few extra troops available for garrison duty and placing an HPG relay there means we won't be as vulnerable to more 'random technical glitches' in the Hednesford Station occasionally cutting off our communications with the rest of the Inner Sphere."

"I do hope you're not insinuating that Comstar might be screwing with us?" Hallis asked in mock horror.

"Nah, of course not, it's just that it would look a teeny bit suspicious if both the Hednesford and Thraxa stations went down at exactly the same time, more blatant than they might be comfortable with" Bremman replied, smiling. "I'd like to be a fly on the wall inside their Thraxa HPG compound when the first transmission arrives there from Al-Farghani. Anybody want to make a bet how long it'll be before a jumpship appears to investigate what we're doing out there."

Hallis suddenly smirked, looking distinctly evil. "It's not like we'll likely ever actually settle Al-Farghani, there's no rocky planets in the goldilocks zone and terraforming the one moon around a gas giant that is on the outer edge of the zone would cost us a fortune, but if we wanted to mess with ComStar we could make it look like we're building a Castle Brian there" he suggested. "You know, signs of excavation, big piles of dirt visible from space, loads of landing pads and runways marked out on the ground a few klicks from the relay station."

Nellis grinned. "An automated warning buoy telling people to stay well clear or they run the risk of being targeted by surface batteries" he added for himself. "All we'd need is a radar with enough wattage to make it convincing."

"I'd bet ComStar would make sure to mention it to the Free Worlds League and the Magistracy given where Al-Farghani is located" Bremman reasoned. "Our cover story, which would actually be the truth, is that we've only got a presence there because it's within HPG range of both Comstock and Thraxa."

"Nah, we're also officially there so we can set up an orbital telescope" Nellis added. "Which will actually be true as well, but they'll all assume it's part of the Castle Brian's sensor grid rather than because the High Associator wants stellar observation data from as many systems as possible."

Romanov sighed. "If people knew how much time and effort we put into messing with the Phone Company they'd think we were either very petty or that we thought ComStar was some kind of dark malevolent force slowly twisting its tendrils into the galaxy."

"Eh, little of column A, little of column B" Bremman responded with a shrug. "In other news it looks like we're going to get approval from Atreus to begin relocating people from Cerignola and Melk, they've basically given up on both colonies and if we want to offer the people there a new home it just gets them out of Gerald Marik's hair."

"Any conditions?" Nellis asked.

"Only that we have to offer the refugees the option to be dropped off at Romita if they don't want to come live on Baccalieu" Bremman replied. "If it all goes smoothly it's possible we'll get people migrating from Stettin, Izmir, Revel, Turov and New Galicia eventually too, they're becoming almost as rundown as Melk themselves and they're not that far away from us either. That might depend on whether the Free Worlds League wants to plough in the money and resources needed to keep them viable or not though."

"Is it just a lack of fresh water for irrigation that's screwing all these worlds?" Romanov queried.

"That and a lack of jumpships" Bremman told her. "If the League wants to buy J-U Purifiers from us, or even make their own, that would help with the water situation but they're still critically short of interstellar transport. Part of the reason they're willing to let us relocate their citizens without kicking up a fuss is because we're still helping them out hauling cargo between Westover, Lesnovo and Hednesford. Having one of our big Monolith jumpships doing that heavy lifting for them frees up three of their Invaders that they really need hauling logistics up to the front lines."

"You know, when they find out about us moving cargo for the League the Lyrans and the Capellans probably won't be happy" Hallis observed. "Not that I really give a rat's ass about what Marcus Steiner or Laurelli Liao thinks of us, but it's still an issue."

"We're not moving any actual military units or equipment for Marik, so we can still claim neutrality, and we are charging a fee to ferry their dropships around so we can claim it's just a commercial decision" Bremman replied. "Having the Free Worlds League feeling antagonistic towards us would be a much bigger pain-in-the-ass than having the other two feeling aggrieved which is also why we've just agreed that Andurien AeroTech doesn't have to start handing over the next Stingray squadron they owe us until halfway through next year. The FWLM desperately need to replace some of their own losses first."

"I hope we kicked up a fuss about the delay, we paid for those things in PPC's nearly three years ago now" Nellis pointed out.

"Yes, of course, on principle, but it's not like the Skunk Works doesn't already have plenty of other work to do so it's not like we've got people stood idle because they're not upgrading imported aerospace fighters up to our specs" Bremman told him. "On that topic I checked with the Skunk Works for an update yesterday and I was told they're confident that they can re-tool the line that made the 315XL engines for the Stag II to turn out 300XL engines they can cram into the Stingray instead. Having a little longer to sort out any teething problems could actually be useful though, it's not quite as simple as tweaking the engine being made for the Stag to power a Hussar they say."

Hallis chuckled. "Understatement of the century maybe given that aerospace fighters aren't mechs" he said. "It's not just about generating electrical power on a fighter."

"I'm told they're basically just going to borrow some ideas from the engine in the Voidseeker, it was based on the Stingray after all, and the legal ownership of the design is murky enough that hopefully we won't get sued by someone about it in the future" Bremman said. "The Terran Hegemony's Skunk Works operated in just as much of a legal grey area as ours does."

"Heh, if anyone asks we'll tell them Niops had a license to produce Voidseeker engines and be deliberately vague about how we got it. Just something else to add to all the conspiracy theories about us that are starting to fly around out there" Hallis said, grinning evilly. "My new personal favourite is the one running around the Magistracy that says Aleksandr Kerensky deliberately left the 295th behind at Niops to keep an eye on Lauren Hayes and Jerome Blake because he didn't fully trust them. That's the real reason shipped PPC's to help the Free Worlds League during the ComStar War, and why we're eventually going to break their monopoly on HPG's. Our orders were to make sure the phone company with delusions of grandeur didn't ever become too influential and powerful."

Bremman laughed. "Well we're actually here because of a different Kerensky but, that said, it's still a policy I could get behind."
"A dread fear rests deep in the heart of Clan Coyote that one day a lawyer will arrive on Tamaron talking about intellectual property rights, the Mercury II and the Coyotl omnimech and this will herald the end of the Clan as the Not-Named sue their asses into bankruptcy for patent infringement" - The True History of the Clans (Dark Caste Press: 3050)

Hunted Tribes - Hotpoint's Battlestar/Battletech Crossover Series


Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #484 on: 21 May 2024, 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.


----------

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 spice 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.
"A dread fear rests deep in the heart of Clan Coyote that one day a lawyer will arrive on Tamaron talking about intellectual property rights, the Mercury II and the Coyotl omnimech and this will herald the end of the Clan as the Not-Named sue their asses into bankruptcy for patent infringement" - The True History of the Clans (Dark Caste Press: 3050)

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paulobrito

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #485 on: 21 May 2024, 10:18:26 »
And more and more elite ex-SLDF and even SOG/Royal units going to Niops.
And with them adquiring rights for advanced mechs, this is going to be 'fun' a few years ahead.

FubarX

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #486 on: 21 May 2024, 10:35:49 »
This meeting would be a good time to come up with a standard "mercs who are former SLDF want to join us" policy.  Raising their profile on Terra and declaring you never stopped being the SLDF will be having groups come out of the woodwork.  Not just the big guys but the small ones too.

Land Grants for everybody!  Niops creates a merc contract approval board where you can take external contracts but only if Niops Central Command says it's OK.  Oh, and that lostec you need to maintain your mechs is available at reasonable prices.  Caught selling it on the black market to others has bad penalties.

Are there any other known scientific colonies like Niops or Frobisher besides the Folly?  Might make sense to contact them and see if they want in or at least troll their database.

« Last Edit: 21 May 2024, 12:57:57 by FubarX »

Wrangler

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #487 on: 21 May 2024, 16:48:06 »
I'm curious what their going to do with them if they do hire them.  Just because their fellow SLDF doesn't mean they have any work to do.
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Giovanni Blasini

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #488 on: 21 May 2024, 18:55:54 »
This meeting would be a good time to come up with a standard "mercs who are former SLDF want to join us" policy.  Raising their profile on Terra and declaring you never stopped being the SLDF will be having groups come out of the woodwork.  Not just the big guys but the small ones too.

Land Grants for everybody!  Niops creates a merc contract approval board where you can take external contracts but only if Niops Central Command says it's OK.  Oh, and that lostec you need to maintain your mechs is available at reasonable prices.  Caught selling it on the black market to others has bad penalties.

Are there any other known scientific colonies like Niops or Frobisher besides the Folly?  Might make sense to contact them and see if they want in or at least troll their database.

Not necessarily nearby.  According to Interstaller Players 3 - Interstellar Expeditions, there are:

Spinward - ie. out past the Outworlds Alliance and Tortuga Dominions

  • The Rover system, where someone set up a metric buttload of automated probes, made from modified Kanga main computers, to monitor absolutely everything in the system, eagerly awaiting someone to report their data to.
  • Shady Palms, a modified Alliance class station out past Tortuga, that was originally set up for astronomical observations, but while partially self-sufficient, originally needed some degree of resupply to support the astronomy team there.  They died off some time after the fall of the Star League, and the station, its life support and hydroponics were still working on automatic when Outworlds refugees find the station in 3010.  In 2842, some of the original astronomers or their descendants may still be alive, but they're a long, long way from Niops.

Rimward
  • Skyfog is out in the Canopian ruins, and was another astronomical colony like Niops, but one dedicated to studying gas giants and their moons.  They were abandoned in 2769, but the infrastructure was still intact in 3003.  They're a bit farther away from Frobisher, but would definitely be of interest.
  • Of course, even further away, is the California Nebula...
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Daryk

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #489 on: 21 May 2024, 19:22:37 »
FubarX hit on the ultimate trump card of the Niops Company Store: rejoining the SLDF! :)

HABeas2

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #490 on: 24 May 2024, 18:22:46 »
  • Of course, even further away, is the California Nebula...

Give or take how close to canon one wishes to be...

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #491 on: 25 May 2024, 17:14:36 »
Depends if the binary stars of Hollywood work same way they do in the Non-canon setting;   
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
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Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #492 on: 28 May 2024, 09:10:31 »
Part LII - Section 1 of 2

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"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Quotation from a flyer distributed by the Niops Association Hegemony in the Inner Sphere - 2842CE

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Toruń City Spaceport – Copernicus System – 2842

Growing up Václav Štefánek had never really thought he would get to travel, much less leave Cerignola for good, but now as he led his young family down the ramp of the dropship to set foot on another world for the first time in their lives he was pretty sure that this wasn't even going to be their final destination. Štefánek had been a farmer back home and wanted to remain one, he just wanted to farm land actually worth farming and fortunately his wife Anjali had agreed. There was clearly no future for them back home and when the opportunity to start a new one dropped into their laps they had seized it with both hands.

The Niops Association was looking for people to settle their new colonies out in the periphery and they were the ones currently offering that better future Václav and Anjali wanted for their three children. The fact that someone actually was establishing new colonies was weird enough in this day and age, but if you took their offer to emigrate Niops would even transport you there for free and maybe even give you land for a farm if you convinced them you would work hard.

The big attraction of moving to Niops controlled space however was that they weren't at war with anyone. As a result interstellar commerce there wasn't in its death throes, the economy was booming not contracting, people were willing to take risks on investments and companies were building capital constructing new factories because people weren't randomly dropping WMD on them.

In an era where weather forecasts across much of the Inner Sphere could be summarised all too often as 'Light breeze with a chance of nerve gas' or 'Twelve-thousand degrees, very cloudy', even those people who did still had money were understandably somewhat loath to risk their savings on anything that might attract orbital bombardment.

Nobody had directly attacked Cerignola of course, it was so poor they didn't even have to deal with pirates all that often, let alone assaults by House militaries or mercenary raids, but the wars raging elsewhere still impacted them hard. Like many it had relied upon imports to maintain its economy and among those imports were the water purifiers needed to sustain viable agriculture on a marginally habitable world.

The destruction of the factories on Brownsville that had made the Jamerson-Ulikov purifiers had not hit the Free Worlds League as badly as it did everyone else, at least not right away. The less efficient but still functional TriFil system made by Curtiss Hydroponics in the Paradise system had allowed many Marik-administered worlds which were dependent upon cheap water purification to soldier on for decades longer. Now however, with the Free Worlds League lacking the jumpships needed to keep the civilian economy running and transport things like water filters to everywhere that needed them, less important worlds like Cerignola were drying up.

It wasn't just systems like Cerignola that were suffering though. Right across the Free Worlds League, much like the rest of the Inner Sphere, everything was spiralling towards collapse. Even before the First Succession War had really got going you could go six months between visits by jumpships in many systems, and as the wars between the Great Houses ground on that interval grew longer and longer until it was measured in years. Lacking an HPG the population of Cerignola didn't even find out about the ComStar Interdiction on the Free Worlds League until it was already over, and the only effect it really had on them was to learn from the crew of the Merchant class jumpship which had appeared in their midst one day was to learn that from now on they should probably expect to see visitors even less frequently than they had before.

There was clearly no future on Cerignola, maybe not even for the Free Worlds League itself which was being assailed from all sides and losing systems to both the wretched Capellans and the insidious Lyrans. That was why when the ship from Niops arrived one day offering the people there a chance at a new home, saying it would be back again in a few months to collect anyone who was interested, Václav Štefánek and most of his neighbours had decided to take that chance.

The government back on Atreus didn't kick up a fuss about it all. Judging from their non-reaction they might have even been secretly pleased to have the problem the people on Cerignola and other worlds in similar positions represented off their hands. As such, while a few of the people who decided to leave Cergnola on the Niops owned jumpship decided to disembark early on Romita and remain living in the League, most chose to stick with the ship and continue their journey towards a new home in the periphery.

For Štefánek's three kids it was all a big adventure of course. Fortunately, and unlike some of their friends, they didn't discover during the first jump of their lives that they suffered from Transit Disorientation Syndrome which made some people extremely nauseous or disorientated during interstellar travel.

The Monolith class jumpship which had come to collect them from Cerignola was massive, able to carry nine dropships at once, each one huge, and with tens of thousands of people loaded aboard, along with a surprisingly generous allowance of luggage and personal items it had jumped from Cerignola to Izmir, then onto Romita its last stop in Marik controlled territory, before finally jumping to Niops itself one jump further out in the so-called near periphery.

While nobody would call their parent star particularly impressive, when the Monolith had manoeuvred alongside a massive space station floating there to fast-recharge its jump-core for the next leg of the journey it certainly confirmed that Niops was not your typical periphery world. While they waited at the Niops zenith point for a few days recharging the drive for the next leg of the trip they even got to see an actual warship off in the distance, the crew loaning out a hand-held telescope to anyone wanting a better look through the portholes at what they said was the destroyer currently operating as the Niops guardship.

Those among the Cerignola migrants who knew more about military matters than most weren't actually as impressed, or surprised by the warship as they were the aerospace fighter that flew past their ship not long after they arrived, the fighter close enough to see the Red Cameron Stars on its wings and tailplane as it buzzed the Monolith.

"That's a ****** Voidseeker drone" someone Štefánek knew in passing had exclaimed in obvious shock. Štefánek didn't know them very well, they were from a couple of valleys over from where he had lived, but if he remembered right their grandfather had served in the Free Worlds Navy.

"What's that then?" Štefánek had asked curiously, wondering what the fuss was about.

"You know, a Voidseeker, a robot fighter, they used to use them as part of an SDS system along with Caspar AI warships" the man answered his query. "I've seen pictures of them in old books."

"Don't be too impressed, we didn't make them, we just salvaged some of them from an old SLDF base" one of the jumpsuited dropship crew interjected, floating past them in microgravity presumably on the way somewhere. "It'll be a few more years before we can make things like that on Niops, but we'll get there eventually" she said confidently. "You might see one again when we make the jump to AJC, we use them to defend space stations. They don't get bored doing guard duty or flying repetitive patrols like human fighter pilots do so they're always alert and ready to throw down if someone tries to shoot up the station."

"Has that ever happened? Someone attacking your space stations I mean?" the man who had recognised the drone asked.

The woman in the jumpsuit shook her head, the movement in microgravity causing her longish hair to tumble around. "Nah, after word spread about our warships, and that pirates who wander into our corner of space inexplicably vanish, it's been really quiet in Niops territory" she replied. "If we weren't always concerned about the Succession Wars spilling out of the Inner Sphere into our laps we'd probably mothball the battle fleet, but as it is we're all warshipped-up and no-one to blow…' she said, "to bits" she added after a brief pause, grinning.

"Inexplicably vanish?" Štefánek repeated her phrase, quizzically.

"Sounds more shadowy and dramatic than 'get immediately blasted and end up dead or doing twenty-five years hard labour' don't you think?" the crewwoman joked. "We like to maintain our air of mystery in the Niops Association. Gives the conspiracy theorists out there something to talk about. Talking of which, quick warning, if you ever meet someone in the Hegemony calling themselves Kerensky they're just yanking your chain" she told them.

"But what if they call themselves Cameron?" Štefánek replied, smiling.

"Oh, that might be a real Cameron, we've got loads of them running around. I know plenty of people out there already know that Amanda Cameron wasn't an only child, saying that her parents secretly had twins, but that's misdirection" the woman announced, trying to sound sincere. "They actually had octuplets and since then they've all gone on to have at least half-a-dozen kids of their own too. It's gotten bad, you can barely walk down the street without tripping over a Cameron on Niops these days, honestly they're starting to become a pest" she said sadly.

"So you're saying that ComStar doesn't have the Cameron heir hidden on Mars?" one of the other migrants asked, playing along.

"Only the fake one we planted on them, the Cameron they have is just a doppelganger. The Primus is going to be really mad when he finds out he's only got a McKenna with some plastic surgery."

"I knew it!" someone else exclaimed resulting in considerable laughter from all sides as the Voidseeker made another final pass and then headed back towards the station.

It was also while waiting at the Niops zenith point that Štefánek got to try out a couple of unfamiliar foods for the first time, part of the resupply that was ferried over from the space station. The fonio bread from Alphard and some kind of meat from an animal called a 'Moa' was different to what he was used to eating, but they weren't bad by any means. The Moa was supposedly a recreated Terran species, not the completely alien one he had assumed, a flightless bird from New Zealand that had originally gone extinct more a thousand years ago and was now being raised for its meat on Niops VII.

Judging by the size of the drumstick he saw Štefánek concluded that the bird it came from must be as tall as a man at least and out of curiosity he asked the ship's cook how big they actually got. Being told in response that, 'one species is the size of a battlemech', Štefánek naturally assumed that the man he had asked about it was just yanking his chain, people from Niops seemed to enjoy doing that to people from elsewhere, he had laughed and thought no more about it.

Nobody not actually from Niops was allowed to land on one of the planets in the that system, and there wasn't even a planet to land on in the oddly named 'Annie Jump Cannon', the next stop on their long journey, so it wasn't until they reached Copernicus that Václav Štefánek and the other migrants got to actually set foot on one of the worlds belonging to their new homeland. His initial impressions on arrival were that the local climate seemed better than it did on Cerignola, and as they headed down from orbit he had seen that the region around the spaceport and the town nearby called Toruń was studded with seemingly well-organised and productive farms, but Štefánek knew that if he agreed to settle on a more recently colonised world than this one he would be granted more land so he wasn't planning to stay on Copernicus very long, even if some of the other families were.

There was a good future to be made on Copernicus for anyone that decided to make a home there, although it would likely be as an employee of someone else not as your own boss. Thanks to its central location the system had been designated as the future commercial, trade and transport hub of the Niops Hegemony going forward. From there the large majority of worlds with a Red Cameron Star currently flying over them could be reached in one or two jumps, and because of that it was supposedly next on the list to get its own recharge station after Alphard did.

Unfortunately for those like Štefánek that had been farmers on Cerignola, and still wanted to be, most of the good land on Copernicus had already been claimed by people from Comstock and Francas. Those worlds were both former Terran Hegemony colonies like Niops itself so Štefánek assumed the people from there were getting preferential treatment over non-Terrans, but if you were willing to travel further afield then there was still plenty of free acreage available for budding farmers on Baccalieu and Ballalaba apparently, wherever the hell they were.

The buses waiting at the starport ferried the immigrants from Cerignola in batches to one of a trio of large transit camps nearby, each camp a collection of large tents and prefabricated buildings where they were able to shower and get something to eat in a large canteen before the bureaucracy got to work. People in uniforms hurried around answering questions as best they could and assigning everyone temporary quarters in the camp, families sharing dorm rooms together.

A few refugees from the Inner Sphere had been trickling into the Niops Association for a few years now, and while they had initially all been directed towards Alphard more recently the government had been settling them on Copernicus, building the transit camps to help smooth out the process. Having tens of thousands of people all arriving at once was new, but the people running the camp seemed to have been prepared for it and the process of dealing with them all appeared to be going smoothly as far as Štefánek could tell.

After some paperwork was completed a full medical screening came next, starting with the taking of DNA samples and then an eye-exam performed by some kind of computer-controlled machine you sat in front of before the main event.

Štefánek had expected to be prodded and probed by doctors for the main battery of tests but instead everyone was directed to a large room consisting of a number of cubicles, each one holding a disconcertingly coffin-like machine that you had to climb inside one at a time after partially undressing.

It was a medical scanner, some kind of Terran technology that Niops could still produce but was lostech most everywhere else. The thing didn't just perform CAT, MRI, GRT and VelRay scans upon you, do an ECG, monitor your blood pressure and analyse the chemicals in your breath it also painlessly took a blood sample all while playing soothing music.

If you were scared of such procedures, or machines generally, it would also surreptitiously tranq you with a mild anaesthetic if it noticed your heartrate climbing too fast, though only after it determined you weren't allergic to the drug being used.

Anybody that refused to be scanned was told that the only alternatives were to be put back on a ship heading for the Free Worlds League or to be examined by human doctors instead.

Nobody chose to go back to the League, while those who chose to be medically examined by a human instead soon learned that the third generation Eligus Medical Diagnoser likely had a much better bedside manner than the grumpy military doctor concerned.

For one thing her own blood samples were not drawn painlessly and there were no happy drugs involved.
"A dread fear rests deep in the heart of Clan Coyote that one day a lawyer will arrive on Tamaron talking about intellectual property rights, the Mercury II and the Coyotl omnimech and this will herald the end of the Clan as the Not-Named sue their asses into bankruptcy for patent infringement" - The True History of the Clans (Dark Caste Press: 3050)

Hunted Tribes - Hotpoint's Battlestar/Battletech Crossover Series


Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #493 on: 28 May 2024, 09:12:37 »
Part LII - Section 2 of 2

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While it was medical technicians who actually operated the machines the results of the tests were sent to other doctors for review, that part of the entire operation taking rather longer so it was a couple of hours later when Václav Štefánek and his wife Anjali were summoned to an office to discuss the findings while their kids played.

Sat at a desk looking at a computer screen a doctor in a pristine labcoat stood up when they entered. "Mr and Mrs Stepanek?" he asked, butchering the pronunciation.

"Yes"

"Please take a seat" the doctor said, sitting back down himself as they did on the chairs provided. "I've gone through the results of your tests and can confirm that both of you are perfectly healthy, as are your two eldest children, but I'm afraid that I have to inform you that your youngest daughter, Diya, has a serious medical condition related to her kidneys and unfortunately it has progressed too far at this point to reverse or mitigate it effectively with drug treatment" he said in a manner that appeared far too relaxed given the gravity of what he was telling them.

"How serious a condition?" Štefánek asked as his wife stared at the doctor in horror.

The doctor leaned forward in his chair. "Potentially life threatening if we don't do something about it" he replied. "If it had been caught earlier we could have probably fixed it with gene therapy, but at this stage she'll certainly need a transplant. As yet she's still asymptomatic, but that won't last and when her health starts to deteriorate it'll do so fast."

Štefánek blinked as his wife gasped. "If she needs a kidney transplant you can take one of mine" he told the doctor immediately.

"Or mine if he's not compatible and I am" his wife Anjali added quickly.

The doctor looked from one of them to the other then inexplicably chuckled. "This isn't the Dark Ages" he responded. "At least not here anyway. We'll clone her two brand new kidneys from her own cells, transplant one when its ready and if everything goes smoothly transplant the second a few months later once she's recovered from the first operation" he told them. "I read on your file that you were planning on going on to Baccalieu or Ballalaba to start a farm, but I'm afraid she'll have to stay on Copernicus for this particular treatment. The medical services on the newer colonies aren't up to full Hegemony standard yet, it hasn't been all that long since we even got them here to be honest. As late as last year we had to send patients with the most serious conditions to Alphard or Comstock for treatment."

Štefánek stared at the man nonplussed. "So, you're saying she'll be okay and we don't even have to donate a kidney ourselves?" he asked.

"Your daughter will be perfectly fine" the doctor reassured him. "By cloning her own organs for the replacements the chances of tissue rejection are practically zero" he told the couple. "I'd even go so far as to call it a routine procedure except for the fact that, like I said before, we would normally deal with this particular problem using gene-therapy well before it got to this stage" he continued before frowning. "Routine medical screening really should have caught this before now. I'm assuming that your doctor back home never said anything?"

"We didn't really have 'routine medical screening' back on Cerignola, certainly no fancy new machines like you have here" Štefánek replied.

"Those fancy 'new' machines were invented about two hundred years ago but okay" the doctor replied, shaking his head sadly. "We've sent out the blueprints for them to everyone so they can make their own too if they want, but being cynical about it they might be too busy making devices to kill each other with instead" he said wryly.

That was probably all too true, Štefánek decided. The forever war between the Great Houses had been raging since his grandfather was a boy. "How much will this cost?" he asked seriously. "I have some money saved, we can sell some things and I guess I can borrow some as well."

The doctor smiled. "It'll cost you about a third of your income for the rest of your life" he replied, clearly amused by the question. "Healthcare here is provided by the state, paid for via taxation. That is of course assuming that you plan to take up Hegemony citizenship, if not then you will have to pay I'm sorry to tell you. Guest workers and their dependents are only entitled to emergency care, not cloned organ replacement or elective surgical procedures. It stops health tourism by people coming here trying to get a new heart, for example, without paying for it and then heading straight back to the Magistracy or wherever afterwards."

"I already intended to become a citizen" Štefánek told the doctor truthfully. Admittedly that was because he had been told by a crewman on the dropship that only Hegemony citizens were allowed to own land there, but now he had a really good reason to do so. That kind of high-tech medical care must cost a fortune.

"Good for you" the doctor replied, smiling once again. "I'll refer your daughter's case to my colleagues at the hospital in town, they'll get in contact and arrange everything. In the meantime I'll also notify the administration team that you'll need to stay here on Copernicus until after your girl completes her course of treatment. That'll stop them shoving you all on the next dropship to Baccalieu to get rid of you before the jumpship from Melk brings in the next batch of immigrants."

"We won't have to stay here at the camp until she's treated will we?" Štefánek asked. It wasn't a bad place to be for a few days, or maybe a couple of weeks, but you wouldn't want to be there for much longer. For one thing he and his wife had to share a room with the kids.

The doctor shook his head. "Nah, they'll find you a place in town and maybe help find you a job too, plenty of work around. You might find yourself helping to dig sewers or build roads for the government though if you're not planning to settle on Copernicus permanently. Most employers on Copernicus these days want their workers to sign a contract saying they stick around at least a couple of years, there was a problem with people not turning up for their shifts because they'd suddenly decided to go join the Galileo gemstone rush."

"Gemstone rush?" Anjali queried.

"Diamonds and fire-opals" the doctor explained. "Fool's errand really, the mining companies have already claimed all the best potential places to dig" he told them. "Most people heading to Galileo and buying some land to try and make their fortune would be better off planting crops there than digging for shiny rocks on it."

Štefánek nodded. "Hard work is more reliable than pinning your hopes on being lucky" he agreed.

The doctor pursed his lips. "Here's a piece of advice since you plan on getting some land for a farm" he said. "At the moment anyone not wanting to settle on Copernicus or Alphard is being directed towards Baccalieu or Ballalaba. Now don't get me wrong, neither of them are bad places to live, they're almost certainly nicer than where you came from at least, but in about six months or so there's going to be opportunities for people to emigrate to Islington instead and if I wanted to be a farmer that's where I'd go. From what I've heard it's a future breadbasket world, great climate, rich soil and the people already living there are happier to allow large-scale immigration than they are on Stafford."

"Someone on the jumpship mentioned Stafford being very nice" Anjali remarked.

"It is, all green and verdant with a pleasant climate" the doctor confirmed. "I actually spent a little time there myself working with the flying doctor's service. We visited patients in remote towns that couldn't make it to the capital for treatment, basically tearing around the sky in a big VTOL with an operating stuck theatre in the back" he continued, grinning. "Their planetary government recently passed a law restricting how much land anyone not born on Stafford could own, and since that's a domestic political decision Niops isn't complaining about it. It's not like we let people from Stafford come to live on Niops so it would be hypocritical of us to try and get them to be a little more accepting of immigrants than they currently are" he said. "Regarding your daughter, I can give her the bad news myself or if you prefer you can do so. The hospital will be able to explain to her exactly what it is they'll be doing when the time comes using age-appropriate terms and language."

"We'll tell her" Anjali replied. "Just to be absolutely clear, she's not in any danger?" she checked.

"Well, there's a risk involved in any medical procedure, but honestly her journey getting here in the first place would have likely been statistically more dangerous than the transplants will be" the doctor replied. "To not have the surgery would be orders of magnitude riskier" he continued before looking at the screen on his computer. "Now if you'll excuse me it looks like I need to talk to an elderly gentleman that needs a new liver. That's always fun, I love threatening people that if they don't cut down on the booze we won't clone them a new liver. You know what they say, cirrhosis is the Almighty's way of telling you to quit drinking."

"What do you do when people don't take the hint?"

"First replacement liver is free, after that you're on your own. God helps those that helps themselves and so does the Niops Hegemony Health Service" the doctor replied. "Nice to have met you both, though I wish it could have been under better circumstances without the bad news" he said, standing up, Štefánek and his wife doing likewise.

"The news could have been much much worse" Štefánek replied, shaking the doctor's hand before heading towards the door to leave.

"Oh, and while your eyesight isn't too bad at the moment you both might need laser eye surgery in a few years. It's not a big deal but it will mean getting a replacement identity card and have your government file updated at that time because the retina scan won't exactly match afterwards."

"Identity card?"

"You'll see, we've all got one, make sure not to lose it. In a few years it'll be difficult to do anything without one. At the moment you just need one to vote, obtain healthcare, access government buildings and such but, if the bureaucracy has its way, you'll eventually need one to buy bread" the doctor joked. "Technocratic government at its finest. Coming from the Free Worlds League you might find our way of doing things a little more organised than you're used to."

Given that the government structure of the Free Worlds League had been described as chaos, disagreement and bickering moderated by assassination that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, Štefánek decided. There was a vast gulf to be found between the way things were done back home and an outright police state like the Capellan Confederation, something which became clear the next day when they started citizenship lessons with a lecture on how things were done in the Niops Hegemony.

Predictably the 'Niops Association Hegemony' modelled itself on the Terran Hegemony, which was certainly a better decision than copying the old Terran Alliance would have been. Niops itself took the role of Terra in this arrangement, clearly 'first among equals' but within a federal structure where the other member worlds largely controlled their own domestic affairs.

Defence and interstellar trade policy was controlled from Niops, they were after all the ones supplying the jumpships and the military might, as well as the technological wizardry, so that seemed reasonable enough, but as long as the local governments of the member worlds didn't implement laws Niops deemed entirely unacceptable on moral or security grounds they largely ruled themselves.

Niops expected the colonies within the Hegemony to follow Star League legal precedents and cultural norms regarding things like universal suffrage, they were for it, equality of the sexes, also for it, freedom of and from religion, again for it, freedom of the press, ditto, and slavery/serfdom, being very much against it. They expected town mayors and planetary governments to be voted in via free and fair elections and they insisted on observers from other member worlds being present during those elections to make sure they weren't being rigged.

Fortunately for the immigrants from Cerignola the Free Worlds League wasn't a totalitarian police-state ruled imperiously from on-high like the Capellan Confederation so this all didn't seem particularly outlandish a notion to them. Whatever criticisms you might make of the government on Atreus it was at least still partially accountable to the people via parliament, and a certain amount of power had always been devolved downwards to regional or planetary governments.

If Stafford, for example, wanted to restrict the number of people going there and buying up land that was their choice. They had elected a government which ran on that platform and Niops wasn't going to try and force them to absorb a bunch of refugees against their wishes.

Try and introduce something like the Servitor system with restricted citizenship such as existed in the Capellan Confederation however and Niops would go berserk. If you lived in the Hegemony a while you found that it was generally held as a truism among the colonial populations that the technocratic nerds running the Niops Association from their closed hermit republic were culturally more than a little weird, just mention astrology in front of them and you'd see first-hand, but they were generally nice and well-meaning nonetheless. Just don't make them angry, you wouldn't like Niops when it was angry.

They were also very security conscious. The restrictions on who could work in a factory making defence related materials or join the local militia was pretty extreme. If both your parents and at least three of four grandparents weren't born on a Hegemony world you weren't ever going to be allowed to do certain jobs or enter certain locations and your identity card made sure of it.

Your identity card didn't just have your name and photograph on there, it also had your retina scan encoded upon it, along with your fingerprints and a unique section of your DNA code any of which might be needed into get into a certain building.

While Štefánek was still living on Copernicus with his family waiting for his daughter's operation the local authorities caught someone from SAFE trying to access a militia base there which made the news when he was deported.

The woman from ComStar's ROM that was apprehended on Alphard not long after he moved to Islington was a bigger story though, people didn't rate SAFE highly enough to think catching one of them was all that impressive.

The land Václav Štefánek and his family were given on Islington to farm was all he could have hoped for and more. Good fertile land with rich dark soil that could support most any crop and the warm, wet temperate climate of Islington meant you didn't even need any of those fancy water-purifiers to feed irrigation systems.

Not that people he knew from back on Cerignola were doing badly on Baccalieu or Ballalaba. Thanks to NHCOMNET he could stay in touch with them and Diya stayed HPG-pals with a girl she had met while on Copernicus.

That ROM spy had deserved to get caught, ComStar had clearly been overcharging people for sending HPG messages for years Štefánek had decided, watching the news on the families new holovid projector imported straight from the factory on Alphard. He had to borrow some money to pay for it but the interest rate the bank charged wasn't too high and the kids had missed the shows they used to watch on Copernicus.

Anjali liked the documentary channel, particularly the nature shows which was why one was playing when her husband came downstairs after taking a shower, ploughing fields all day was hot work even with the new tractor.

Štefánek stared at the image. "What the hell is that?" he asked.

"It's called a Thunderbird, they're native to a planet called Folly out near Frobisher" Anjali replied.

"Is that a battlemech wearing a park ranger hat?"

"Yeah, I think they just made one that size for fun" Anjali replied. "Thunderbirds are ten metres tall, they herd them using assault battlemechs."

"For real?" Štefánek asked his wife seriously.

"Yeah. What's wrong with you?"

Václav Štefánek frowned. "I'm wondering if the Cameron octuplets weren't just a joke" he said confusingly, his mental state not being helped by the fact that the documentary was now showing footage of feathery pink mammoths performing a mating dance.

"Please don't go crazy on me Václav, Diya's new kidneys were one thing but I don't think they can grow you a replacement brain" Anjali Štefánek told her husband, wondering if he had been outside in fields too long without a hat to keep off the sun.



----------

Note from the Author:

In canon very large numbers of people fled the Inner Sphere to come live in the Marian Hegemony because of the Succession Wars, this despite the knowledge that many of them would end up joining the plebian class (or even potentially ending up slaves). Given that the Niops Hegemony is both freer and has better prospects they should have little trouble attracting people to go live there (although some of the member worlds might still want local restrictions).

The Free Worlds League is a melting pot of cultures, Václav Štefánek is of Czech descent, his wife Anjali Indian, they lived on
Cerignola which was about to fall off the maps and is only a couple of jumps from Niops.

Suetonius (here called Copernicus) had the second highest population of any world in the Marian Hegemony so it must be quite habitable (the Roman cosplayers didn't have any fancy Terraforming gear) and it was a trade hub with some industry based there.

Islington, like Stafford, was a breadbasket world of the Marian Hegemony. I'm running with the notion that worlds with non-Roman names had a reasonable number of people already living on them when Imperator Johann O'Reilly turned up with his mercensries and a whole heap of germanium in the 2930s.
"A dread fear rests deep in the heart of Clan Coyote that one day a lawyer will arrive on Tamaron talking about intellectual property rights, the Mercury II and the Coyotl omnimech and this will herald the end of the Clan as the Not-Named sue their asses into bankruptcy for patent infringement" - The True History of the Clans (Dark Caste Press: 3050)

Hunted Tribes - Hotpoint's Battlestar/Battletech Crossover Series


paulobrito

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #494 on: 28 May 2024, 11:39:13 »
"footage of feathery pink mammoths performing a mating dance"  :smilie_happy_clapping: :smilie_happy_clapping:

Daryk

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #495 on: 28 May 2024, 18:13:38 »
Excellent progress and some humor too! :D

DragonKhan55

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #496 on: 28 May 2024, 18:14:23 »
Poor guy, if I were in his shoes I'd also be questioning my sanity, and that's even with my knowledge of the BT Universe to begin with.

"****** it there were no 10-foot killer birds and feathery pink mammoths in any of the sourcebooks!"

Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #497 on: 04 June 2024, 10:02:58 »
Part LIII - Section 1 of 2

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"The mark of a first rate Great Power isn't always raw military strength but rather power projection capabilities, the ability to bring that military strength to bear upon a distant foe. There are several regional players in and around the Inner Sphere that are undeniably strong in their own backyard but can't readily make their presence felt, or impose their will on someone five hundred or more light years away. From the mid 2840's Niops proved to be the regional power that unusually could, and would do that if they thought you deserving of their wrath and within twenty years Niops-flagged merchant jumpships could roam freely accross much of the Inner Sphere unmolested by pirates, largely because of the fear that if you attacked one Niops was just insane enough to dispatch an entire naval task force after you. The concept of 'forgive and forget' was apparently an entirely alien concept to them, they held onto a grudge like a cranky Taurian and would reputedly chase you to the ends of the galaxy if needs be to make an example of you regardless of how long it would take or much it would cost them. To quote one renowned Buccaneer Captain hailing from Star's End, 'Niops be crazy, yo'."[/I]

Stephen J. Tran, Red Star Rising: A History of Niops 2800-2900 - Niops Press, 2915

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Capital City – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2842

Listening to the conversation that was already well underway when he arrived late for the meeting being held at the Council Offices building, the diplomat having entered as quietly as he could and sitting down in the only free chair at the conference table while trying not to disturb anyone, Gareth Jeffries gradually started to wonder if he had stumbled into some kind of parallel universe.

The person from the diplomatic corps who was supposed to be attending and had been sent the notes and itinerary had called in sick that morning and because Jeffries was only doing some paperwork he got sent instead. As a result he had gone in blind, a situation not helped by the fact he had only found out about the meeting shortly before it was due to start and had to dash there with zero preparation.

In common with the tendency of Niops to practice government by committee there were representatives of every government department present in the room along with the military, with General Romanov apparently chairing by default because the High Associator had opted not to attend himself, as was his habit. James Murray much preferred to be simply presented some options prepared by others, with a written summary of each included, and then to choose which one he wanted to be implemented. He didn't actually like to be as involved in the day-to-day running of government in the way that his predecessor Giles Olson had.

Behind his back the civil service joked that Murray was elected to read, not lead. This was not to say that he was lazy, and he certainly wasn't stupid, he just wasn't that inspirational, and he certainly wasn't exactly passionate about the business of government. Unless that business intersected with one of the issues he was ardent in supporting of course in which case he was very passionate indeed.

Getting James Murray to care about the minutiae of fiscal policy was hard, getting him to shut up about orbital telescopes even harder.

"I'm sorry" Jeffries spoke up eventually after listening to everyone for a while, increasingly perplexed and dismayed by what he was hearing. "Have I gone insane or are you really all discussing the overthrow of a foreign government and putting their planet under military occupation?" he asked in bewilderment, looking around at the military officers and civilian officials sat around the large conference table.

"Yes" General Romanov confirmed, looking confused as to why he was confused.

"We can't do things like that!" Jeffries exclaimed. "Our international reputation would be in tatters, it would completely undermine all the efforts we've been making aimed at garnering a reputation for being better than the Great Houses" he declared, standing up so he could make his objection to this deranged course of action as strident as possible. "It would throw away everything we gained in terms of diplomatic good will from handing over Critchly and releasing the blueprints of non-military technologies to the masses."

Romanov stared at him in mystification. "Since when was hammering scum into the ground unpopular?" she asked.

"Just because we know they're scum doesn't mean they haven't been successful in fooling other people into thinking they're a legitimate state" Jeffries replied. "I mean, they've practically got ComStar running a PR campaign for them"

"ComStar? What the hell has ComStar go to to do with…" someone from the Department of Trade and Industry started to say before she stopped mid-sentence. "Wait. Did you think we were discussing invading Circinus?" she asked, that possibility seeming to dawn on her suddenly.

"Yes" Jeffries responded, noting that when he did so most everyone in the room either looked at him like he was an idiot or rolled his eyes.

"We're discussing a proposal for a military operation against Von Strang's World" the woman told him flatly.

"Von Strang's World?" Jeffries repeatedly awkwardly.

"Yes" General Romanov confirmed with a sigh.

Wishing the ground would open up beneath him and feeling like a complete idiot Jeffries grimaced. "Oh" he said feeling all the eyes upon him. "Yeah, screw those guys" he gave his personal endorsement to such a plan. "Sorry, but everyone was saying 'Bandit Kingdom this' and 'pirate raiding that' so I just sort of assumed…" he continued awkwardly, trailing off. "Why are we discussing attacking the Barony of Von Strang though?" he asked, this was literally the first he had heard of it being proposed.

"Someone put a note in the High Associator's suggestion box while you were still on your way back from Terra, he asked for a committee to be formed to look into it" General Romanov explained. "I guess you were out of the loop."

The woman from Trade and Industry nodded. "There was a general feeling that we got a lot of good press from ridding the galaxy of one bunch of Amaris Empire remnants so why not build on that?" she asked rhetorically. "It's not like it's going to be hard work demonising a group that named their planet after Gunthar Von Strang of all people."

That was true enough, Jeffries considered. Modern historians still argued whether he or Antilos Legos were the worst of the worst when it came to ranking the various war criminals commanding regiments for Stefan Amaris. Legos got style points for personally executing Pope Clement XXVII but Von Strang's rape, loot and pillage of much of North America gave him a higher body count.

Romanov fixed Jeffries with a look. "So, just to be sure. In your professional opinion would it be accurate to say that you don't think us kicking the ever-loving shit out of Karl Von Strang and his goons would be a diplomatic faux pas?" she asked sardonically.

"No, I mean yes, I mean most if not all of the Inner Sphere and the Near Periphery would consider the galaxy a better place without Von Strang's World in it" Jeffries answered the question. "If we did anything to Circinus ComStar could spin the story to make us look bad, but they're going to find it difficult to convince the general public that giving the Von Strang family a whupping is a bad thing. His predecessor literally renamed the planet after a mass-murdering war criminal" he noted, trying to remember what else he might know about Von Strang's World. The planet was originally called Erin if his memory served him correctly, although what its capital city was called before Nico Von Strang, the father of the current ruler, had renamed it 'Amaris City' escaped him.

Choosing to rename a world in honour of the infamous Gunther Von Strang, and its capital after Stefan Amaris, was certainly a bold move in the mid 2780's so soon after the Amaris War, although not nearly so bold as it would have been if Gunther's heir Nico had done so before Aleksandr Kerensky led the SLDF Exodus away from the Inner Sphere. The veterans of the Star League Defence Force that had defeated Amaris would have come crashing down on Nico Von Strang and his followers like the Chicxulub asteroid.

Romanov nodded. "Yes, we were operating on that assumption" she observed drily. "Perhaps you could make sure to arrive on time in future so that you don't go off half-cocked again" the old soldier suggested in a manner that made Jeffries feel like he was being told off by his grandmother.

"Point taken" Jeffries replied sheepishly.

Jenna Romanov resisted the urge to wag her finger at him reprovingly. "Also, just so you know, 'on time' should be read as meaning getting there early' she added. "Just because you're famous from one side of the Inner Sphere to the other these days doesn't mean you get to swan in five minutes late to meetings. I can only hope you showed up on time for your audience with the Pope" she chided.

Gareth Jeffries knew that sometimes it was better just to suck it up and take your being told off publicly with good grace, so he didn't attempt to defend his tardiness, nor indeed his jumping to conclusions any more than he had already. Instead it would be better to contribute something useful to the discussion. "My only caveat to what I said before as to the diplomatic reaction would be to us taking action against Von Strang's World would be that it's situated way on the other side of the Lyran Commonwealth, and that kind of power-projection so far from Niops might potentially ruffle a few feathers, particularly on Tharkad" he said. "They're not going to vociferously object in public per se, but they'll likely not be too happy at seeing us operating in their back yard and some of them might view it as us deliberately making them look bad by doing a job of cleaning house they should have one themselves" he continued. "After the digs we've already made at House Steiner for continuing to keep Raymond's Redcoats on the payroll they're likely to be sensitive to perceived criticism coming from our direction. We might want to consider offering them an olive branch as part of any such plan to smooth things over, they're primarily a business-orientated society so opening up new trade links might be the best approach."

Romanov thought about that a while. "It's not like they're remotely the worst of the Great Houses" she responded eventually. "If we were going to do something that might potentially antagonise the murderous tyrants running Luthien or Sian I personally wouldn't care if they were feeling a little butthurt about us playing in their sandbox without being invited, and I doubt many other people on Niops would either, but you make a good point. We should probably take Lyran sensibilities into account here when finalising our proposal" she concurred.

"It's still only a proposal at this stage then?" Jeffries checked. "We're not planning to launch an invasion of Von Strang's Worlds next week, or rather in about six months when our ships would actually get there if we set out now?"

"Even if the High Associator gave the go ahead it's unlikely we'd be doing anything other than make preparations before the end of the year" Romanov replied, shaking her head. "For one thing we're still not sure when the linchpin of the whole operation will actually get here and when they do if they'll be actually be willing to do the job" she said. "That's out of our hands at the moment so we should just plough on for now with what we do have control over. You were saying, Colonel Benedict" she addressed the other army officer present who had been just starting to speak when Jeffries interrupted proceedings.

Jax Benedict directed a look of personal annoyance at Jeffries for interrupting him earlier before clearing his throat. "Thank you, Ma'am' he replied, glancing down at his notes for a brief moment to see how far he had gotten. "As I was saying, even our higher-end estimates for the planetary population of Von Strang's World places it at below twenty-five thousand. Therefore in the event that local infrastructure is damaged in the fighting to the point it can't support them we could simply evacuate them all and relocate them elsewhere after a successful mission" he suggested. "It's likely that a good proportion of that population are feudal serfs, or perhaps even outright slaves, and far from happy about their current circumstances so they may not even want to stay there anyway and will desire relocation regardless" he said. "Getting them all the way back here would be a severe logistical stretch, just getting our own forces there and back is no simple undertaking, but there are multiple populated systems within a jump or two of Von Strang's world that could readily absorb a few thousand refugees."

"Paran perhaps?" Romanov suggested. "They had a major food surplus the last time we were in that part of space and with the SLS Pioneer to keep the riff raff out it's probably the safest place in the region" she reasoned. The old warship and its crew of former Expeditionary Brigade members were not something any corsair in his right mind would mess with. According to intelligence even the so-called 'Void Nation' pirates that preyed on much of the former Rim Worlds Republic, the large well-armed and well-organised band usually dismissive of any opposition they encountered, had poked their noses into Paran precisely once and had promptly crapped themselves when they found themselves looking down the gun-barrels of an Avatar class heavy cruiser.

There were plenty of other systems to plunder elsewhere that wouldn't shove a battery of Heavy Naval Particle Projector Cannon up your ass if you messed with them, so the Void Nation's pirate fleet had metaphorically taken one look at Paran and the SLS Pioneer and had then slowly backed away grimacing while saying 'Sorry. Wrong room'.

"What are our best estimates as to the estimated military strength of Von Strang's World?" Romanov queried.

"Our sources indicate perhaps a battalion's worth of battlemechs, likely with tank and infantry support" Benedict replied, Romanov assuming that was accurate. One of the senior regimental commanders of the 331st Benedict had been assigned the task of formulating a plan to deal with Von Strang and he was nothing if not professional, diligent and thorough. Some considered Jax Benedict borderline anal as regards his attention to detail in fact, those tending to be the ones that also regarded him as something of a martinet in his command style, but even those people that disliked him personally would never accuse him of doing anything in a slapdash or sloppy manner.

It was widely known that he thought he should have been appointed saKhan instead of Trish Ebon and had even wanted to fight a Trial of Grievance over the matter at one point which provided him with some notoriety in military circles, but despite still visibly glaring at her whenever they were in the same room Benedict had accepted the status quo.

Despite routinely using contractions in his speech these days he was still a little more clanner in outlook than most of his contemporaries though. He publicly advocated introducing Romanov and MacArthur bloodnames to Wolverine society so as to help bring the 295th into the fold, not entirely grasping why Jenna Romanov and Robert MacArthur just weren't wildly enthused about the notion.

If not for Jennifer McEvedy remarking that she thought it was a good idea too the whole proposal would have died a death some time ago but her name, and her practically clone-like resemblance to the great Khan Sarah had breathed new life into the rather niche campaign.

Benedict had even recently suggested adding a Donovan bloodname as well. Claire Donovan bringing down Bernard Critchly and being appointed a knight of the Roman Catholic Church by the Pope himself as a result was something that would make for a couple of good lines in the Wolverine Remembrance.

"In terms of aerospace assets, Von Strang operates at least one jumpship and multiple dropships, a couple of them armed military types, which they use both to conduct trade and to occasionally raid other periphery worlds they've taken a dislike to" Benedict said. "They also strike at the Lyran Commonwealth when they can, or rather the systems annexed by the Lyrans that used to belong to the Rim Worlds Republic, generally ones that the Steiners don't care much about likely for fear of making Tharkad angry enough to divert forces away from fighting the Combine" he continued. "They also possess a non-trivial number of aerospace fighters, perhaps a fair proportion of these being the ubiquitous Vulcan heavy."

Romanov nodded. "The Rimjobs always did love the Vulcan" she observed. "Perhaps you might explain to our civilian compatriots why that's particularly noteworthy here" she requested of the colonel.

"The Vulcan is a heavy fighter, albeit only an eighty-tonner so it's on the lighter end of that scale but being a heavy with a decent wedge of firepower and armour it's a viable threat to dropships and thus a deterrent to them being raided" Benedict told the room. "They're something you ideally need to remove from the board before trying to risk a landing, and even if they don't come out to play when you're on your way in they're also a very effective ground-attack platform when utilised in that role."

"I'll never forget the first time I was strafed by them" Romanov recalled, the memory clearly not a pleasant one judging by her expression. "Damn things came in at tree-top level going like a bat-out-of-hell and they just flew straight through all the flak our Rifleman air-defence mechs were throwing up in front of them" she said. "A light fighter would have been shredded, but those big pointy bastards just shrugged it off and kept going, shot up half the unit before they hit overthrust and disappeared over the horizon before our own fighter-support could get there. We were only lucky they weren't carrying ****** Inferno bombs that day, they usually did, it was practically their trademark."

"The Vulcan was always a mainstay of the Rim Worlds Republic, the Blood Rain built their fighter-force around them too, so it would be wise to assume that the Amaris hold-outs who rallied to Nico Von Strang brought along more than a handful of the things with them" Benedict said. "Von Strang's World, then known as Erin, was a naval base for the Rim Worlds Republic, and while the orbital shipyards are no longer functional ground-based military installations, including those needed to operate and maintain aerospace fighters, were not blasted down to the bedrock there by the SLDF like they were in other places."

"We're not talking Castle Brian-like fortresses are we?" someone asked.

"No, but we are talking about an old Rim Worlds Army bunker complex that is known to exist and may have been expanded in the last few years. It's also possible that Von Strang may have re-purposed some of the diamond mines the planet is known for into additional strong-points and shelters" Benedict replied. "We know that they're still digging up the shiny rocks because Von Strang uses them to trade with his neighbours, at least the ones that are willing to stomach him. While we were scouting the region during our spell at Camelot Command we heard rumours that one of the city-states in the Fredotto system supplied Nico Von Strang with machine tools and infantry weapons in return for diamonds. Some of his people had contacts there from where they were stationed on the planet."

Romanov nodded. "The RWA maintained training facilities on Fredetto so a lot of regiments cycled through there" she recalled. "It was one of the places we expected to have to take by storm but in the event Amaris moved so many of his troops to Terra he couldn't properly garrison his own worlds" she said, mind going back to fighting in a campaign which had happened before anybody else in the room had even been born.

"It's likely that part of Karl Von Strang's so-called 'Guard Division' are actually mercenaries from Fredotto as well" Benedict added. "We know that at least one of the major factions in their ongoing civil wars were originally formed from Amaris loyalists that fought the SLDF, then Lucien Dormax and his supporters in the RRA and then the Lyrans, so they would be a convenient source of experienced and ideologically aligned military personnel. More reputable mercenary units from other places would likely baulk at association with the Von Strang name, but there are going to be plenty of guns-for-hire on Fredotto who just don't view history through the same lens we do."

"How well equipped is this Guard's Division?"

"We're assuming that most of Von Strang's battlemechs and tanks are common Rim Worlds types, gear that was left over after the war that had plenty of spare parts available to keep them running" Jax Benedict said. "Best case scenario, lots of older model Phoenix mediums that haven't been upgraded since the Reunification War, worst case scenario Rampage assaults with Star League supplied weaponry" he said. "We do know that Von Strang himself pilots a Battlemaster, he's boasted about it, and it's also known that his raiding forces use a number of Wasp lights and at least a couple of Hunchback mediums, but the latter may not be representative of his actual fighting force."

"They've got hands, useful for smash-and-grab operations" Romanov explained for the benefit of the civilians.

Benedict nodded. "That was my thinking on the matter anyway" he said. "We know the Rim Worlds Republic produced their own version of the Orion heavy, so we might expect to encounter those on Von Strang's World too, but despite being a good reliable fighting machine if you need something picked up they're just not the tool for the job because they don't have hands."

"Back in my day the joke was any mech can ****** you up, but only some of them can give your corpse the finger afterwards" Romanov said with a chuckle a few of the civilians amuse by her coarse language. "That said, fighting in close quarters I'd rather turn a corner and find myself nose to nose with an enemy Orion than a Hunchback anyway, those things will end all your hopes and dreams in an instant."

"Given their home-field advantage, and that they'll be playing defence, that particular scenario with the Hunchback sounds all too likely" Benedict stated flatly. "That's why we plan to mitigate the possibility via unconventional warfare tactics rather than charging down the guns seeking glory like good little clanners would" he added with some disdain for how he was actually encouraged to do things as a young mechwarrior on Strana Mechty. "As regards tanks there are indications that they operate the Burke, Ignis and possibly also the Merkava all of which were manufactured in the Rim Worlds Republic. A dug-in Burke is bad news."

"That's a lot of hardware for a world with such a small population isn't it?" someone observed quizzically.

"A number of surviving Rim Worlds Republic Army units rallied to the banner of Nico Von Strang after the war" Benedict explained. "Thanks to their diamond mines and particularly the stripping of other nearby worlds of resources they've been able to support a disproportionately large military for such a minor periphery power. After the Republic-Commonwealth War the whole region was such a power vacuum that Nico Von Strang had a free hand to asset-strip several systems that had fallen into anarchy. They've been largely living off that bounty ever since."

"Given how far away we are we seem to now quite a lot about them" Jeffries observed.

"It's mostly open-source intelligence gathered from when we were living in the Dark Nebula" Benedict explained. "Much of what we know comes from poking our noses into Star's End, pirates gossip like teenage girls apparently" he continued disparagingly. "We learned more during our dealings with the Expeditionary Brigade remnant at Paran who were happy to talk to us after we handed them a load of naval autocannon ammunition and spare parts, and who were understandably wary of having a Von Strang two jumps away and kept tabs on him, and, believe it or not, the newspaper archive in the public library on Erit filled in an awful lot of blanks."

Jeffries frowned. "So you're saying much of your intel dates from fifteen years ago?"

"Yes, which is why we would want to properly reconnoitre before actually go ahead with the operation just to make sure the current situation on Von Strang's World isn't radically different now" Benedict replied. "Some news from way out there does reach this far, but not much unfortunately."
« Last Edit: 04 June 2024, 10:05:28 by Hotpoint »
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Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #498 on: 04 June 2024, 10:09:32 »
Part LIII - Section 2 of 2

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"Von Strang's supporters are all hardliners no doubt? The type that think Amaris did nothing wrong?" someone Jeffries didn't recognise asked, he thought they might be an advisor to the High Associator.

"Given that they actually named their capital 'Amaris City' that seems a fairly safe assumption" Benedict replied drily. "Even by the standards of the Amaris Empire Gunther Von Strang was a complete monster and it doesn't seem that the apple fell far from the tree as regards his heirs" he said. "That said there a quite a few people elsewhere in the former Rim Worlds Republic that think somewhat fondly of the Von Strang's."

"Why?"

"Because they never kow-towed to the Star League or the Lyran Commonwealth right?" Jeffries interjected. "They're still out there flying the flag of the Rim Worlds Republic and proudly proclaiming their ongoing loyalty to House Amaris despite everyone in that House being dead and them being just a tiny single-system holdout of what was once a vast interstellar nation" he continued. "They venerate their former wartime leaders and wax lyrical about restoring the Republic and taking back the worlds they lost to grasping Inner Sphere barbarians" he said then paused to effect. "They're basically Niops. I mean, they're us if we were complete ******."

"I can't say I like the comparison much Gareth" Romanov replied using his first name so that he once again felt like he was being told off by grandma.

"They'd probably object to being called the Niops of the old Rim Worlds Republic too" Jeffries replied, sticking to his metaphorical guns. "Could be worse though, imagine the galaxy if a couple of Stefan Amaris class battleships and several regiments of RWA regulars who had been hiding out in the periphery for decades had turned up on the doorstep of Von Strang's World in 2827 pledging allegiance to the last remnant of the Amaris Empire."

Jenna Romanov stared at him for a while looking somewhat perturbed as she considered that scenario. "Well, that would have sucked but it's got the makings of a good Alternate History novel" she said eventually. "What do you think about Von Strang's World with capital warships and several regiment's worth of Amaris Dragoons Colonel?" she asked.

Jax Benedict considered the scenario himself, his moth forming into a feral grin. 'Finally a worthy opponent" he said enthusiastically. "Our battle would be legendary!"

"I guess you can take the boy out of the clans but you can't take the clans out of the boy" Romanov observed. "Seriously though, as regards other Amaris holdouts hiding out in the periphery those aren't just speculative fiction unfortunately" she reminded everyone. "According to Marcus our prisoner from the Blood Rain rumour was Rim Worlds Outpost 25 was built to host a full division and it's not been heard of since the war, while huge numbers of diehard refugees headed to an Outpost 27 even further out after the Lyrans carved up the Republic like a cake" she continued before leaning forward in her chair. "Other than the battleships it's not completely implausible that we could face an invasion by Amaris holdouts at some point" she added seriously. "They might potentially even be spying on the Inner Sphere right now, waiting for the Great Houses to wreck each other enough that they can come back."

"Kinda hilarious if they came back the same time as the Clans did and for much the same reason" the representative from the science ministry remarked. "It'll be all 'the Successor States are weak, this is our opportunity' and then they run right into each other."

"Good point. We might need to invest in a strategic popcorn reserve for when we just sit back and watch" the woman from the Department of Trade and Industry agreed, laughing.

"Just as long as paying for it doesn't come off my budget for establishing Brian Caches" Romanov said, playing along. They had already dug a few reserve bunkers on Niops VI to hold surplus mechs, mainly Mercury II, Stag and Pulverizer types that they couldn't use off-world, following the precedent from the Kerensky Cluster when the SLDF had demobilised much of its fighting strength. The oceans and the bad weather on Niops VI caused by it being tidally locked made it a good place to hide things, cloud cover and rain in some places was constant and the frequent electrical storms played hell with sensors.

"Here's a piece of disconcerting trivia some of you may not know, or may not have given due consideration to if you did" Romanov said. "It's actually possible that more of Amaris's people fled anti-spinward to Outpost 27 than SLDF personnel followed Aleksandr Kerensky coreward" she told the room. "Not necessarily relevant to the current discussion but it's something I like to remind people when they discuss mothballing more of the military" she said, smiling. "It's potentially not just the clans and the Successor States out there, the galaxy is even more dangerous than you think."

That in itself of course was likely part of the reason why the military would want to advocate sending off a force to beat up on Karl Von Strang, Jeffries considered. It helped justify their existence and also gave them an opportunity to blood their younger mechwarriors.

For Jax Benedict and the former clanners in the SLDF there might be another motivation too. Most of them had either served in the 331st Royal Battlemech Division themselves or their parents or grandparents had.

The 331st was known as the 'North American Division', and had always primarily recruited from that region, while Gunthar Von Strang and his 18th Amaris Chasseurs had laid waste to several large urban centres in the northeast of that continent. That made it a little more personal for the 331st than it might be for the 295th, it had been some of their childhood friends and kinfolk who had Von Strang's boot on their necks and they weren't going to let that slide very easily.

Just settling scores wasn't as easy to justify to the civilian government as a potential propaganda coup though, something else to raise the profile of Niops in the public imagination of the Inner Sphere and in particular give the population of the old Terran Hegemony and Terra in particular something to cheer about.

Beating up on a single-system polity, albeit it a distant one, was also an achievable goal, Jeffries considered. Dispatching an armada right across the Inner Sphere to go put an end to the Tortuga Dominion would actually benefit far more people if you were looking for someone unpleasant to go beat up on, but that would be really expensive and tie up far too much of the military.

Von Strang's World had a notoriety that far eclipsed its actual impact on the galaxy. The more Jeffries thought about it the more he came to realise they were just a great choice if you were out looking for a whipping boy. Just strong enough that attacking them wasn't akin to kicking puppies and with truly terrible connotations regarding their name recognition among the masses.

As a student of history Gareth Jeffries idly imagined what would have happened to a small country on Terra in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century that was taken over by a relative of Oskar Dirlewanger, said relative then subsequently renaming the country after his infamous forebear and then announcing its new capital to be 'Adolf Hitler City'.

After due consideration Jeffries concluded it would not have likely ended well for them. People were slow to forgive and forget certain things.

"Can we actually spare the forces to accomplish this though?" Jeffries queried.

"We couldn't before, but after Bolton's Rangers have run out their remaining contract and made it here it'll free up some units we've currently got deployed as garrison troops" Benedict told him. "Even so we don't have the full brigade available we'd need for a quick decisive, overwhelming victory with minimal friendly casualties so this entire operation is predicated on whether or not the Blackhearts come aboard and are willing to travel quite that far to help us knock Karl Von Strang off his pedestal."

Jeffries raised his eyebrows. "The Blackhearts?"

"Dirty deeds done cheap deep in the periphery is kinda their thing" Benedict told him. "If they go in quietly ahead of the main attack to disrupt Von Strang's defences and sow a little chaos it'll make things much easier for our own combined-arms-regiment that'll be following up as the primary assault force."

"I was thinking we might want to see if Bolton's Rangers wanted to send a token company along too" Romanov interjected. "Give them the opportunity to say that they were there at the last battle of the Amaris War again."

"The last battle of the Amaris War so far, Ma'am" Benedict responded. "Still those Rim Worlds Outposts out there somewhere that might need to be taught one day that there's still a few SLDF units watching over the Inner Sphere and keeping faith with the Star League."

Jeffries fought back the urge to laugh at just so completely earnest the expressions were on both his face and Romanov's when he said it. "I assume part of this plan involves renaming Von Strang's World and Amaris City again?" the diplomat asked instead.

"It'll be fun sending an HPG to ComStar telling them that the starmaps need to be changed to say 'Erin' again, but as for the capital, I think 'Cameron City' would be apt" Jenna Romanov opined. "Anybody think otherwise?" she asked the room in a tone that led everyone to assume she would not be best pleased at dissent, not that it wasn't a great choice.

"Incidentally General Romanov, given your seniority I'm slightly surprised you're here and not General Hallis instead. This doesn't seem like the sort of meeting the Head of the Joint Chiefs would usually go to" Jeffries queried.

"General Hallis has his own pet project, something he knows more about because it's somewhat more akin to fighting a clan trial than it is planning a planetary invasion" Romanov replied. "The High Associator signed off on us entering the Mechwarrior games on Illyria next year, we've tasked the Skunk Works with coming up with something… special for the occasion."

"We're entering the games?" Jeffries responded in surprise.

"It's not exactly Solaris but it's something else to help raise our profile" Romanov replied. "You really do need to get back up to speed on this stuff Gareth" she told him. "You can't ride on your fame and name recognition forever" she joked, half the room laughing.

"I think you're probably the most famous person that lives on Niops, General" Jeffries replied.

"It wasn't a photograph of me stood next to the Pope when he visited Critchly in his cell that made it onto the front page of most of the newspapers in the Inner Sphere" Romanov replied. "Tell the truth, what did God's representative on Terra say to the prick after excommunicating him anyway?"

"He called him something very rude in Latin" Jeffries replied.

"You understand Latin?"

Jeffries nodded. "Well enough that I had to try hard not to wince" he replied.

"Think we could get the Pope to sign off on a crusade against Von Strang's World?"

"Probably not."

"That's a pity, we could have easily painted a few lances of Crusader heavies white and put a St. George's Cross on them" Romanov said regretfully, though far from seriously.

"Von Strang's World isn't exactly the Holy Land" Jeffries noted.

"You're right, it's not so much a crusade as it is an exorcism. We'd be casting out the last stronghold of Amaris" Romanov decided. "The firepower of the SLDF compels you!"

Jeffries laughed. "If you don't mind me asking, if we captured Karl Von Strang alive what exactly do we plan to actually do with him?" he asked.

"Good point. Let's open that to the floor, the High Associator will want to have a list of options he can choose from" Romanov replied, looking around the room for suggestions. "For a start I'm thinking germanium mine or maybe just throw the bastard out of an airlock, any other ideas?"


----------

Note from the Author:

Von Strang's World, originally known as Erin, in the Apollo province of the former Rim Worlds Republic is a somewhat notorious place. Smarting after losing the Amaris Civil War and the Republic-Commonwealth War, and after Operation Exodus removed Aleksandr Kerensky and the SLDF from the picture, Nico Von Strang and his supporters took over Erin, establishing the Barony of Strang in honour of his relative Gunthar Von Strang.

Given that Gunthar Von Strang was an infamous war-criminal that commanded the equally infamous 18th Amaris Chasseurs during the war (rape, loot and pillage was very much their modus operandi) this would have ruffled enough feathers already but then Nico decided to name his capital 'Amaris City' after, you guessed it, Stefan Amaris. Karl Von Strang is what I've chosen to name Nico's son.

It's a long way from Niops, about thirty-three jumps, on the other side of the Lyran Commonwealth, but if you were a Star League/Terran Hegemony colony with a SLDF presence looking for someone to beat up on for various reasons Von Strang's World is a prime candidate.

Noteworthy systems not too far from Von Strang's World include
Paran and Fredotto.

While everyone talks about the millions of SLDF personnel that went on the Exodus with Kerensky the millions of pro-Amaris people that fled to RWR Outpost 27, the future Coreward Confederacy, after the war gets understandably less attention (they didn't come back later like the Clans did to try and conquer the Inner Sphere, although they might have under different circumstances. Their own civil war being more catastrophic than the one on the Pentagon Worlds).
"A dread fear rests deep in the heart of Clan Coyote that one day a lawyer will arrive on Tamaron talking about intellectual property rights, the Mercury II and the Coyotl omnimech and this will herald the end of the Clan as the Not-Named sue their asses into bankruptcy for patent infringement" - The True History of the Clans (Dark Caste Press: 3050)

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Daryk

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #499 on: 04 June 2024, 18:33:15 »
That was a masterful volt face by Jeffries! :D

Wrangler

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #500 on: 04 June 2024, 19:58:22 »
Von Strang's World going be having visit soon I hope.
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David CGB

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #501 on: 05 June 2024, 04:00:53 »
Von Strang's World going be having visit soon I hope.
There are a few other RWR sites which might hold treats as well, on the way there!
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Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #502 on: 11 June 2024, 09:45:44 »
Part LIV - Section 1 of 3

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"We who are about to die salute you."

Many a mechwarrior with a sense of history to the crowd, while competing on Solaris VII.

----------

Illyria III – Illyrian Palatinate – 2843

'All I'm saying is the last time I came to this planet I ended up on life support and missing my liver, my spleen and one of my kidneys fighting to defend it" Jacqueline Mroczkiewicz muttered. "And I just feel that should have entitled me to a free corndog" she complained, biting through the batter coating the sausage on a stick she was holding. She had just got back to the dropship being used as the headquarters of 'Team Niops' after going to watch a light-mech match while off duty, finding her cousin Kristen sat on a box at the bottom of the loading ramp reading from her noteputer.

The Illyrians had been more than accommodating to requests from the Niops Association as to how they wanted to go about getting involved in the games for the first time, partially because of continued gratitude for the way Niops had intervened during the raid by the Black Warriors a few years earlier but mainly because they saw it as a great opportunity to draw in bigger crowds and higher-profile competitors and as a consequence a lot more money.

Being permitted to set their CargoMaster dropship down so close to where the games were being held just outside Dalmatia, the capital city, had been convenient, although it had also necessitated some security precautions. A squad of SLDF marines prevented anyone authorised getting close to the dropship, and a number of short-range electronic jammers including White Noise Generators had been planted in a ring around the craft to prevent surveillance.

The marines took their job seriously too. Despite Jackie being in uniform, and the fact they recognised her, they had still checked her ID card before letting her past the cordon. Being relentlessly spied upon by the agents of Jason Karrige and Nicolas Kerensky back in the Clan Homeworlds had left the Wolverines security-conscious to the point of paranoia ever since, something that subsequently stood them in good stead while dealing with ComStar.

It was probably overkill when dealing with SAFE, who were considered the intelligence agency most likely to have agents embedded on Illyria, but if you let standards slide it was hard to get them back to par.

"If I was you I'd be more concerned that hotdog you're eating might have the internal organs you left behind in it Jackie" her cousin Kirsten Mroczkiewicz said, looking up from her noteputer and smirking. While Jacqueline had been assigned to this mission because she had gone back to working at the Skunk Works after her misadventure the last time she was on Illyria, Kirsten meanwhile had developed some contacts within the Illyrian government as part of the delegation from Niops which had attended the conference of Circinus.

"If you weren't a higher rank than I was I'd tell you to bite me, Ma'am" the younger and lower-ranked of the two Mroczkiewicz's replied. Their grandfather had served in the 331st under General Frederick Hallis, both his sons, their respective fathers, joining the same unit and going on to serve under James McEvedy against Amaris staying on with him during Kerensky's Exodus.

"If I wanted to take a bite out of you I'd just eat one of those corndogs" Kirsten responded, clearly amused by her own wit.

"Better not, at your age you need to watch your cholesterol intake" Jackie advised sweetly.

"I'm not that much older than you Jackie" Kirsten defended herself.

Now it was Jackie Mroczkiewicz's turn to smirk. "Then why did that guy at the clothes store earlier assume you were my mom?" she asked. On a whim they had decided to go buy a couple of souvenir t-shirts in town, Jackie wanting one saying, 'I went to the Illyria games and all I got was this lousy shrapnel wound from a stray LRM', but the owner thinking her cousin was her mother was way funnier than the t-shirt.

Kirsten scowled. "You promised you wouldn't mention that again ever" she protested. People meeting them had assumed for years they were sisters, they certainly resembled each other enough in terms of looks, both taking after their grandma Oliwia, but somebody thinking she was Jackie's mom had been pretty horrifying.

"I lied, it's too good not to throw in your face at every opportunity, Mom" Jackie replied. "I warned ya that you were spending too much time under a UV lamp and it would age your skin. The idea is to get enough to stop you getting depressed, or Rickets, not a tan" she reminded her cousin. That was one problem with living on Niops VII, a cold planet under a Red Dwarf star was not a home conducive to getting enough vitamin D.

"Meh" Kirsten responded unenthusiastically. Just because being a bit paler than normal in complexion was the Niops norm for those like her of Caucasian descent didn't mean she had to conform with the pasty masses.

Jackie took another bite out of her corndog, chewing then swallowing. "Meat's not very high grade" she said. "Seriously, they should start importing it from Francas, the junk food is much better quality back home."

"If it's a crappy corndog then why are you still eating it?" Kirsten asked reasonably.

"Hey, it might not be the Solaris games but with a corndog to eat, and maybe some popcorn too later, I can pretend it is while I watch the fights" Jackie replied. "If I wasn't on duty later I'd grab one of those oversized beers too. My replacement liver's thirty years younger than the rest of me, if I don't put the extra mileage on it it'll live on after I die and be lonely."

"That is not remotely how biology works Jackie" Kirsten Mroczkiewicz told her cousin flatly.

"Says you" Jackie replied dismissively, taking another bite from her corndog.

"Also, your new liver is closer to thirty-five years younger than you than it is thirty" Kirsten added. Her younger cousin wasn't that young.

Jackie grinned. "Hey, if you don't mind someone thinking you look old enough to have a daughter in her late thirties then you be you" she replied.

Kirsten Mroczkiewicz winced. "Okay, so that was just unnecessary and downright mean" she responded after a few moment's consideration of the implication there."

"You deserve it for saddling me with this" Jackie replied, pointing to the nametag on her duty uniform, the one that gave her name as 'Brzęczyszczykiewicz. J'.

Kirsten Mroczkiewicz, AKA Christine Brzęczyszczykiewicz, shrugged. "It's a good Polish name, and on the plus side you finally get to have guys stare at your chest. Maybe the real reason that guy thought I was your mom is that you're still wearing a training bra so he thought you were closer to thirteen than thirty?" she suggested. Okay so that was pretty bitchy and verging on juvenile she inwardly chided herself, but Jackie had repeatedly crossed the line earlier with the 'mom' thing, so it wasn't an entirely unwarranted escalation.

"I'd be offended but mine aren't going to need to be in freefall not to hang down to my knees in a few years unless someone invents bras with endo-steel support" Jackie retorted.

"Jesus Christ. Can't you two just settle this in a Circle of Equals?" one of the dropship crew interjected, appearing at the top of the ramp. "It would be a lot more civilised" he opined, grinning.

"Mind your own business and get back to work, swabbie" Jackie curtly replied to the navy crewman who kept grinning as he disappeared from view into the ship again.

"You know we probably could borrow a couple of mechs and an arena and then charge admission" Kirsten suggested, finding it all too funny not to laugh. It was amazing how the two of them could so easily regress back to how they were with each other as kids.

Kirsten could still remember Jackie's reaction to being told that because Nicholas Kerensky had appointed the older of the two cousins as one of the forty warriors belonging to Clan Wolverine, Mroczkiewicz now becoming a clan bloodname, that she could no longer use her own surname until she effectively won back the right to do so in a Trial. Jackie, then still basically a kid, had not been pleased.

"So how are the games anyway?" Kirsten asked. "I haven't had the chance to watch any matches yet."

"Mostly it's just junkers with rookies at the helm fighting it out to try and win spare parts or some fleeting glory" Jackie replied. "Of course that was just the light division, once you get into the heavy and assault categories you'd likely get to see some better matches" she said. "I caught a repeat of a fight earlier between a Crusader and an Orion being shown up on one of the big screens while I was queuing for the corndog, that one looked pretty exciting."

"All seems like a bad waste of good mechs to me, but I guess if it wasn't drawing the competitors and the spectators here the Palatinate wouldn't keep holding the games" Kirsten observed. The annual mechwarrior games on Illyria brought in a lot of money and tourism to a relatively poor and underpopulated periphery nation, one that a lot of people in the Inner Sphere had only even heard of because of the games. Like Jackie said, it wasn't exactly Solaris but just because the gladiatorial games held in the amphitheatre at Capua weren't as impressive as the ones in the Colosseum in Rome that didn't mean they didn't still attract large crowds baying for blood.

Being financially savvy and frugal the Palatinate didn't waste money building gigantic stadiums for all the games, they didn't need to, disused open-cast mines more than sufficed and were actually considerably larger than most of the arenas on Solaris itself. Spectators watched the action down below from seating set up for them on the rim edge of the old mines, and because of the scale long-range weaponry like LRM's and ERPPC's were actually useful at the start of a match before the opposing mechs closed on each other.

A couple of the huge open-cast-mines turned amphitheatres were even replete with old mining equipment as features and obstacles to fight around, gigantic mechanical diggers dwarfing even hundred-ton assault battlemechs. Some connoisseurs of the fights maintained that the action there was as good, if not better, than that to be seen in the Scrapyard arena in Solaris City because combat tended to be more varied, less turning a corner and suddenly being blasted at close range.

It wasn't nearly as safe being a spectator at the games on Illyria as it was on Solaris of course. Even the Steiner Stadium in Solaris City which did allow people to come and watch the fights live protected them from stray fire through the use of advanced technology, including the famous 'Blue Shield' that somehow absorbed PPC fire. On Illyria you just had to rely upon the competitors being careful about where their guns were pointing and be grateful that they were shooting at each other down in a deep pit with the audience not being in the line-of-fire to start with.

The hint of personal danger and peril for the audience did always make it a tad more exciting to go watch the games on Illyria than Solaris though, some argued, even if was generally regarded as very much Reno, or even Primm, to Solaris's Las Vegas.

The prize money to be won at the Illyria games was only a fraction of that you could potentially earn on Solaris too of course, and the salvage to be had nowhere near as valuable either, so it never usually attracted any of the famous 'big name' competitive mechwarriors or the advertising revenue and press coverage that went along with them.

That was different this year. The Niops Association was running an exhibition match at the games with the prize for beating the Association's own champion being several million c-bills worth of rare or entirely lostech equipment, including an assault mech's weight in both double-heat-sinks and ferro-fibrous armour.

Double-Heat-Sinks were getting expensive these days, they were only still made in a handful of places and with the Second Succession War raging what stockpiles that still existed were being used up faster than they could be replaced. Ferro-Fibrous armour meanwhile was literally lostech, the last plant able to produce it having been destroyed all the way back in 2810, and even the extremely well-funded elite mechwarrior stables on Solaris had largely run out of the stuff decades ago.

The revelation that the Niops Association could still make it though had caused a few ripples, though understandably not nearly as much as their warships had. According to rumours flying around the Inner Sphere they had upgraded all their mechs and tanks with indigenously produced Ferro-Fibrous some time ago, which along with their fancy Terran Hegemony weaponry was the reason why they why were increasingly perceived as being a power that could punch far above their weight-class in galactic affairs.

Some of the wiser, better-informed pundits had observed that it was actually their electronic warfare gear which was the real force-multiplier however, not their fancy armour plate or ERPPC's. In the Inner Sphere battlefields of the sensor-blind the man that still had a working Beagle Active Probe was king. The fog-of-war killed a lot more mechwarriors than particle-projector-cannon ever did after all.

All that super tech was no substitute for battlefield experience though, naysayers maintained when ranking where to place Niops in the order of which star-nation was the most formidable. Beating the snot out of pirates, even ones as vaunted and feared as the Blood Rain, was one thing but the mechwarriors of the Successor States had honed their skills against each other and the combat veterans of the 295th were old.

Case in point, as Kirsten and Jackie Mroczkiewicz got into another argument about whether or not they should go watch a medium mech match later, or a couple of slow heavies duking it out, up on the dropship's command deck nonagenarian Major Claire Donovan was bemoaning the fact that her 'fame' had landed her with this gig so soon after getting back from Terra.

"All you have to do is smile for the cameras, answer a few questions, and maybe shake some hands while spouting a few meaningless platitudes Major" Colonel Fallstaff told her. "Just standard public-relations crap. Nothing you couldn't do standing on your head in low gee."

"If it's so easy then why don't you do it then?" Donovan replied. "Sir" she added after a pause. She was old enough to be his mother, maybe even his grandmother at a stretch, something that occasionally still caused a little friction between the younger clanner-types of the 331st and the veteran soldiers of the 295th when the kids often outranked the oldsters. At least Rory Fallstaff himself was middle-aged, it wasn't as bad as when you had some captain still in their early twenties pulling rank on an ninety-year old lieutenant.

The truly irritating thing of course was that a lot of those kids weren't just better mechwarriors than the 295th were now, they were objectively better than most of the 295th had ever been. That genetic engineering had definitely worked for them, even if some of them were cursed to having to stay tee-total for their entire lives as a result.

"Because I'm not the one that's famous" Colonel Fallstaff replied. "And it wouldn't be a good idea for my photograph to be sent whizzing around the Inner Sphere in case the clans see it. The beard and the coloured contacts aren't exactly a perfect disguise" he added, scratching the unaccustomed facial hair he had grown out for this mission.

Donovan sighed. "Okay, but I'm missing my son growing up" she said sadly.

"One of mine is about the same age and you have my sympathy but at least this deployment isn't going to last remotely as long as your mission to Terra did" Fallstaff noted. "You'll be back on Niops in less than two months. Just think about all those poor bastards on Operation Shamrock, they left Niops before we did and we'll all be home before they even get to where they're going" he pointed out.

That was true enough, Donovan knew. It said a lot that they actually had enough volunteers for that mission that nobody had to be voluntold like she had been for the Illyrian deployment. "You got deployed to the Folly twice didn't you? How did your family take it?" she asked curiously. McEvedy's Folly was a ten jump journey from Niops and she knew it wasn't a quick easy job at the other end. There was a lot of valuable SLDoME tech to salvage there and the local wildlife was not to be take lightly.

"My wife was understanding, but not understanding enough that I'm not pretty certain that if I was to do something stupid like accept an assignment to command the Frobisher garrison for a year or two I'd be getting a divorce" Colonel Fallstaff replied honestly before grinning. "Not that I expect that the governor of Frobisher would accept me. I tried, but I just couldn't keep a straight face when we delivered their garrison's new aerospace fighters on our way to the Folly the first time and he saw they were all Trident lights."

Claire laughed. "Yeah, it could be a while before they really see the funny side, if ever" she agreed. The SLDF only ever had a small number of the Trident ASF in the inventory, just enough for a single garrison, and upgraded to Royal standards with an extralight engine, double-heat-sinks and pulse lasers they were actually pretty formidable, but the people on Frobisher weren't nearly stupid enough to buy the official reasons why they got them all.

"So, are you okay with subjecting yourself to the PR bullshit later?" Fallstaff asked. He certainly didn't want to have to order her to do it, she reminded him a little of his mom.

"I'll plaster on a fake smile for the photographers and answer a few dumb questions but please don't read that as me being happy about it Sir" Claire replied before something occurred to her. "I might be a little more enthusiastic if I didn't have to wear that stupid, gaudy medal in front of the press" she suggested hopefully.

"You know, if I had the Order of the Golden Militia I'd never want to take it off" Falstaff responded. "I'd wear it in the shower."

"No, you wouldn't" Claire Donovan replied flatly.

"You're right, I wouldn't, too ostentatious for me, but you're still wearing it in front of the press Major because it's all part of our PR offensive" Fallstaff told her. "You can consider that a command from on high, by which I don't mean the Pope, I mean General Romanov."

Claire groaned. "Why couldn't I get the fun job and fight in the arena?" she asked rhetorically.

"Because we want to win and, annoying though it is, and as annoying as he is, Sampson represents our best chance of doing that" Fallstaff replied. "Which reminds me, I've got to go remind Billy the Kid again that just because he can kick all our asses in a mech fight that being the biggest fish in a small pond doesn't make him a Thraxa Devourer in the wider ocean. He's up against one of the demonstrably best tournament mechwarriors alive and we're not allowed to use all of our tricks."

"Frankly getting his own ass kicked for once would probably be good for him, if not us" Claire suggested. "You know he was in the same lance as my husband during the fight on Algenib, Douglas said afterwards he was one of the best he'd ever seen, maybe the best, although he also said that it was really annoying that the cocky little jerkoff actually could back up his bullshit."

"Yeah" Fallstaff reluctantly agreed. Despite the nickname Sampson was no longer a 'kid' by any means, but any hopes anyone had that the more abrasive elements of his personality would mellow with age were dashed years ago. Even the genetically-enhanced kits from Clan Wolverine's warrior breeding program had been unable to match Sampson's scores in the Gunslinger program which only boosted his already oversized ego and made him even more brash. He was inordinately smug too, especially after he was asked to contribute his genes to the clan's genetic repository so they could be used in future generations of super-soldiers.

Given that he had been taken as a Bondsman by Clan Wolverine, originally being a mechwarrior of the Rasmussen Elite on Circe, and had started out his life in the clan as a lowly member of the Labourer Caste, Wilhelm Sampson's smugness was perhaps a little justified.

Objectively Sampson's eyesight, reaction times, hand-eye-coordination and ability to stay calm under pressure were all right at the top of the human scale so on that basis his DNA was well worth preserving. Naturally nobody in the lab told him that any genes relating to his personality would be ruthlessly weeded out, one of him was more than enough.
« Last Edit: 11 June 2024, 09:47:16 by Hotpoint »
"A dread fear rests deep in the heart of Clan Coyote that one day a lawyer will arrive on Tamaron talking about intellectual property rights, the Mercury II and the Coyotl omnimech and this will herald the end of the Clan as the Not-Named sue their asses into bankruptcy for patent infringement" - The True History of the Clans (Dark Caste Press: 3050)

Hunted Tribes - Hotpoint's Battlestar/Battletech Crossover Series


Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #503 on: 11 June 2024, 09:46:51 »
Part LIV - Section 2 of 3

----------

With Major Donovan properly squared away and with her head back in the game for the press interviews later Colonel Rory Fallstaff then sought out Mechwarrior Wilhelm Sampson, assuming he would find him in the custom mech bay which had been specially installed in the dropship for this mission by some engineers and technicians from the Skunk Works.

Arriving on Illyria in the first production CargoMaster to come out of the dropship yard on Niops was itself actually part of the Public Relations campaign. The unusual looks of the craft made it stand out from the crowd, prompting questions from anyone that saw it and giving Niops the chance to flex their technical sophistication a little more. Standing upright a hundred and-seventy-five metres tall on its thrusters and landing gear the CargoMaster towered over even a Mule, let alone the smaller cargo dropships like the Danais which were more typically seen in the periphery, and with a distinctive profile that meant you couldn't mistake it for anything else the big dropship painted SLDF olive green and with the Red Cameron Star emblazoned on the side looked suitably imposing.

As the military version of the CargoKing, if history had gone slightly differently the CargoMaster would have been the standard cargo hauler of the Star League Defence Force by now, with thousands of the things flying around the Inner Sphere. The fall of the Star League had prevented that of course, and the advanced designs were too expensive for the war-torn Successor States to put it into production themselves, but thanks to its high-tech manufacturing base and getting the blueprints and a license to produce both versions from Federated-Boeing-Interstellar cheap, the Niops Association was now gradually starting to field the new dropship types, although production rates were admittedly very low.

The gawkers who had come to see the CargoMaster when it first arrived were treated to the sight of the ramps coming down and after the marines secured a perimeter the dropship started to unload some ammunition boxes onto an open-bed truck that had rolled up at the bottom of the ramp.

Literally, the dropship itself unloaded the cargo, not a bunch of guys with forklifts. Robot arms and a conveyor belt unfolded themselves from inside the CargoMaster and started automatically stacking crates on the back of the truck while one of the marines chatted with the very surprised driver who was there to pick up a load of J-U water filters the Palatinate had ordered.

Apparently there wasn't even some technician operating the machinery from inside the dropship. A computer did all the work, with the only human intervention being that someone had to press a button to confirm that it was unloading the right boxes onto the right truck before it started.

Having one of the robot arms give the driver a thumbs up when the truck had finished being loaded was a nice touch. The technician responsible had also given it the ability to give anyone in the vicinity that complained about losing their job as a cargo handler to creeping automation the middle finger, but that particular action was something else that required human intervention to initiate. The cargo computer wasn't quite smart enough to get defensive when accused of being scab labour by union agitators.

Whoever it was that had programmed one of the arms to high-five the single assault battlemech the dropship was currently carrying when it had been loaded aboard the vessel back at Niops V was still refusing to fess up, but Colonel Fallstaff had his suspicions.

As expected Rory Fallstaff found Wilhelm Sampson in the mech bay along with one of the guys from the Skunk Works who had accompanied them to Illyria, the best mechwarrior on Niops looking up at the Nightstar assault he would be piloting in the arena.

What Sampson was wearing caught Fallstaff a little by surprise though. "What the hell have you got on?" he asked, staring at the all-white, form-fitting and slightly shiny outfit.

"It's one of our prototypes of the next-general cooling suit" the technician from the Skunk Works said happily. "Sampson here just agreed to try it out."

"You look like a pimp from a Canopian Pleasure Circus" Fallstaff opined disparagingly.

"Yeah, bitchin ain't it?" Sampson replied, holding out his arms and spinning around to give the colonel a better look.

Given Sampson's dubious personal tastes in music him actually liking the suit seemed oddly par for the course, Fallstaff considered.

"I'm glad you like it" the technician responded brightly. "Jackie Mroczkiewicz didn't much like the other suit we got her to test."

"Probably because if it was as tight it would have made her look like she was working for the pimp in the Canopian Pleasure Circus" Fallstaff suggested.

"She did say it was a little snug in the rear" the technician admitted.

Probably less so in the front, Sampson thought to himself, visualizing her wearing the suit. The other Mroczkiewicz girl would have had the opposite problem of course.

"Jackie was very helpful to the team when we were putting the machine together, it's useful having a mechwarrior's input into these things" the technician said, smiling. "If you have any last-minute piloting questions regarding the Nightstar just ask her" he suggested to Sampson. "That's partially why we asked her to tag along with the team."

Sampson made a non-committal sound that probably meant there was zero chance of him doing so, he probably thought that asking for anybody else's advice like that would ruin his image, Colonel Fallstaff rightly surmised. The other reason why Jackie Mroczkiewicz was assigned to the mission was her having been badly wounded fighting to defend Illyria from the Black Warriors the last time she was there, it made for good press locally.

The technician was smiling as he looked up at the machine he had helped build. "Because the Nightstar runs cooler than a lot of mechs we've slightly reduced coolant flow in this particular prototype in favour of weaving in some more ballistic fibres" he noted. "In conjunction with the additional ton of armour we've placed around the cockpit, pilot survivability should be markedly higher than on a regular NSR-9J with the mechwarrior wearing a standard suit. Our attempt to meet General Romanov's design requirement that we 'don't get a man killed for a stupid PR stunt'."

Fallstaff frowned. "Related to that are you absolutely certain that the additional cockpit armour doesn't interfere with the ejector seat?" he asked.

"We are" the technician confirmed.

"And the fancy new CASE does what it's supposed to?" Fallstaff checked.

"Tested to destruction, literally. We exploded charges inside test units fitted with the stuff and the armour and blow-out panels worked just as well as the old model CASE system, despite being lighter and less bulky" the technician confirmed. "It may have taken us a while to perfect the second-generation Ferro-Fibrous armour that made it possible but we're pleased with the result."

"And it's been added to the capacitor bank of the gauss rifles in the arms too, because if those get hit when they're holding a full charge they go up like an Arrow IV warhead?" Fallstaff cautioned. He had once seen the gauss-rifle on a Highlander explode after being hit by an ERPPC and the sudden release of stored energy had blown the mechs whole arm off.

"Naturally" the technician replied smiling. "That was actually easier than adding the blow-out panels to the torso where we put the armoured ammunition bins for the autocannon. The Nightstar wasn't designed to ever have that kind of stowage there so it took quite some work to modify the internal structure."

"I would have preferred to just swap out the original Star League ERPPC for one of the new ones rather than an LB-10X" Sampson said regretfully. "Yeah, yeah, I know that we can't go showing off an ieERPPC or even an old eERPPC in front of the rubes" he added before Fallstaff could say it.

Fallstaff nodded. "Just remember to switch from regular HEAP to cluster rounds once you've stripped off his armour or you might as well have just kept the original ERPPC" he advised.

"I'm frankly insulted that you felt the need to say that to me, Sir" Sampson replied. "Insulted."

"Like I care" Fallstaff responded, unmoved. Sampson was a notorious pain-in-the-ass and was so deliberately, relishing every opportunity that presented itself to annoy his superiors. "And while I'm stating the obvious, don't fire your medium pulse lasers until he's inside range for the ones they know exist. The chances anyone notices that our new ones hit slightly harder are slim enough to risk using the things, but they'll definitely notice if you open up with them twice as far out as anything they've seen before."

That was the trick of course, use as much advanced technology as possible to give Sampson an edge but without the audience ever finding out.

The mechs internal metal endoskeleton was the easiest part of that to achieve as it was hidden from view, although the upgrade had necessitated taking the Nightstar completely to pieces and then reassembling it around a brand new one made of superior materials. The latest alloy being used didn't require quite as much beryllium as the one which the Bull Shark had been built around, but it was still very expensive and therefore not yet economically viable for mass production, but for this one-off upgrade package it got the job done very well.

Similarly the second-generation Ferro-Fibrous armour plate worked, but the manufacturing process needed refinement to get the cost per ton down to acceptable levels. That annoyed a few people in authority as the stuff had been at the prototype stage over twenty-years ago and the materials-science were still working on it, but at least it was available, if again too expensive for widespread use.

Using both overpriced endo-steel and ferro-fibrous made the custom Nightstar a prime example of overpriced bleeding-edge technology in some ways, although weirdly the replacement powerplant meant the thing was no more expensive as a whole than it had been as built. The mech's original Star League era XL Fusion Engine had been swapped out for a much cheaper Pitban 285 SFE pulled from an old Puma tank in storage, an engine that was heavier that what it replaced but was also considerably less fragile. They wanted a mech that could take a licking and keep on ticking and thanks to the new endoskeleton, improved gauss rifles and a prototype LB-X autocannon all being lighter than Star League models there was enough spare tonnage to use a standard fusion engine without skimping on firepower.

There was even some weight available for a couple of extra surprises for Sampson's opponent on top of that, which everyone involved hoped would be enough to get him the win.

If he was facing a less formidable opponent, they would be more certain, but the man Sampson would be up against was a legend, albeit one who had been resting on his laurels for a few years.

"Son, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you've not arrogant enough not to have watched all those recordings we scraped together of Grigg competing in Solaris" Falstaff addressed Sampson seriously. "I hope you've got a game-plan beyond hoping he'll mess up because he's not been competing in the big leagues for the last decade or so."

"I watched his matches, he's pretty good" Sampson replied.

"Pretty good?" Fallstaff repeated, rolling his eyes. "Peter Grigg was the Grand Champion on Solaris two years in a row."

"Yeah, but that was fourteen years ago. Man's middle-aged now, he won't be quite as quick as he used to be" Sampson replied confidently. "Now, if I was up against say, Oliver Two-Horse, I'd want to swap out this white cooling suit for a brown one but I'm not" he joked.

"Got to admit, I'm surprised to hear you admit that about anybody, which is weirdly encouraging because it means you're not completely delusional, but I really hope you're not thinking that just because he's got a few years on you that Grigg isn't still one of the best mechwarriors in the Inner Sphere."

"Oh hell, he'd still beat most anyone else back home without breaking a sweat, and he might still be better than I am now, but that custom Atlas he rides isn't custom enough to beat me in this thing" Sampson replied, pointing up at the Nightstar. "Not in that big arena anyway, if I had to take him on at knife-fight ranges it would be a different matter entirely, but I should be able to soften him up before he gets close enough to bring that big autocannon he's packing to bear."

"You'd better because all the new-fangled ferro-fibrous in the Inner Sphere isn't going to stand up to an AC/20 putting bursts of 155mm HEAP into you for very long" Fallstaff cautioned. "Once it's stripped away you're only a single shell from being deader than disco."

Sampson narrowed his eyes looking aggrieved. "Mark my words Sir, tomorrow night in the arena you're going to get to watch my Nightstar there rip Grigg's Atlas a new one" he vowed. "I've bet two grand of my own money on it."

"And your life" Colonel Falstaff reminded him. Sampson had volunteered for the mission of course, his ego wouldn't have allowed him to do otherwise, but it was only right to remind him what the stakes were here to him personally. "Out of interest, what odds did you get?" Fallstaff asked curiously.

"Really good ones" Sampson replied. "The bookies have all heard of Peter Grigg but who the hell is Henry McCarty?" he asked rhetorically, grinning as he tapped the fake name stencilled on his cooling suit.

"Hopefully a lot more will know after Saturday night, and not just because he got turned into a smear in a battlemech cockpit by an AC/20 in front of a large crowd" Rory Falstaff replied flatly, wondering whether or not to put a few bucks on the kid himself.
"A dread fear rests deep in the heart of Clan Coyote that one day a lawyer will arrive on Tamaron talking about intellectual property rights, the Mercury II and the Coyotl omnimech and this will herald the end of the Clan as the Not-Named sue their asses into bankruptcy for patent infringement" - The True History of the Clans (Dark Caste Press: 3050)

Hunted Tribes - Hotpoint's Battlestar/Battletech Crossover Series


Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #504 on: 11 June 2024, 09:50:09 »
Part LIV - Section 3 of 3

----------

The following evening, sat as a spectator on the rim of the old open-cast mine being used as an arena for the special exhibition fight, Fallstaff fought back the urge to go get some popcorn from the vendor nearby and hoped that Sampson, AKA 'Henry McCarty', was actually going to listen to Jackie Mroczkiewicz, AKA Jackie Brzęczyszczykiewicz, who would be coaching him via radio once the match started.

Jackie's cousin was sat behind him on the stadium bench seating provided, herself eating a corndog, muttering confusingly that it tasted like it might actually be related to her, as they waited for the announcer to start the event. Tens of thousands of spectators were sat in rows right along the edge of the pit, a fair percentage of the planet's entire population usually attending the games, as well as tourists from elsewhere.

Large screens of bullet-proof glass set up in front of the seating offered the crowd of spectators some protection from stray shrapnel, though it wouldn't stop anything more than that so you had to trust the mechwarriors that would be fighting down below were careful with their aim, and a number of massive video screens were currently displaying images of the two mechs that were about to enter the arena from opposite ends to fight each other along, with pictures taken of their pilots just before they climbed aboard their machines.

Kirsten put down her corndog. "Did I tell you the cocky little bastard asked me and Jackie if there was any chance of a threesome as a special reward if he won?" she asked as an image of Sampson wearing his cooling suit appeared up on the screens.

Fallstaff groaned. "Going to put him up on a charge?" he asked. Both cousins outranked him, nobody was ever going to even promote Sampson to lieutenant, let alone any higher.

"Nah, I just advised he stick to banging high school girls and college freshmen that were dumb and inexperienced enough to be impressed by him because actual women weren't" Kirsten replied.

"You realise he'll just take that as a challenge right?" Fallstaff checked.

"Yeah" Kirsten replied with a sigh. "The worst of it is, much as I hate that man right now you've gotta love that cooling suit" she said looking up at the image.

Concluding that Kirsten Mroczkiewicz had no taste in fashion, and hoping that she didn't pass on that defect to the multitudes of future Mroczkiewicz's that would emerge from the Iron Wombs in coming years, Rory Fallstaff wisely opted not to pass comment. "They flipped a coin to see which one would enter the arena first" he said as searchlights started to play through the air indicating the match was about to start.

"My Lord's, Ladies and Gentlemen. Good evening and welcome to a special, one-night only exhibition match here at the Grand Arena on Illyria" a booming voice emerged from loudspeakers, their local Scandinavian accent a little softer than most. "It's the weekend Illyrian Games fans, and this is Dagfin Fjellner bringing you the play by play. It should be an exciting match tonight, but before we begin let me thank our sponsor for this evening, NHCOMNET, the Niops Hegemony Communication Network" the announcer continued. "NHCOMNET" he said grandly. "Interstellar Communication without kooky superstition."

Both Fallstaff and Mroczkiewicz burst out laughing. "And with that some poor ComStar precentor somewhere just suffered a stroke" Fallstaff said grinning.

"Our first competitor tonight needs no introduction" the announcer continued, though he immediately went on to introduce him anyway, presumably because that was what they paid him for, "Competing for the first time ever at the Illyria Games. The man, the mechwarrior, the legend. Two-time, back-to-back Solaris Grand Champion Peter Griggs!" the announcer practically thundered the name for emphasis as near-deafening music began to play from the speakers causing a few of the spectators to cover their ears, though that may have been as much because they didn't like Grigg's choice of music to herald his entrance into the arena than just the excessive volume.

Rasalhague Death Metal was not to everyone's tastes, although it did have something of a following in the Illyrian Palatinate so that might have been why Grigg's chose it. As the hundred-ton Atlas assault battlemech he was piloting stomped into the arena accompanied by fireworks its custom paintjob certainly suited the bombastic, thrashing music, black and red highlights accentuating the machine's already imposing appearance. The skull-like head of the mech made it look suitably monstrous to start with, sheer intimidation being one of the design specifications Aleksandr Kerensky had given for the thing when ordering the thing to be created, so making the twelve-metre tall machine look even more terrifying to behold was something a lot of Atlas pilots went for.

Upon reaching his start position for the match Peter Grigg halted his battlemech and ran through the game-plan in his head one more time. He knew his opponent was riding a Nightstar, an advanced machine undoubtedly tricked out with Niops lostech, and one he had also rarely encountered before because both the factories that had made them had been destroyed during the First Succession War.

The Nightstar was a long-range sniper, even if the one he was facing had apparently swapped it's original ERPPC for an LB-10X autocannon, which meant he would want to close the distance as fast as possible because otherwise his Atlas would just get battered to pieces by gauss-rifle slugs.

Close up however his Atlas would eat the thing alive. The Nightstar used a high-tech XL engine which meant it couldn't absorb the punishment his own machine could, and having the ammo for that autocannon in their alongside the lightweight engine was a really bad idea. Chances were that Niops had installed CASE on the ammo bins, they still had all the fancy SLDF gear that was gradually becoming extinct in the Inner Sphere, but CASE only limited the damage caused by an internal ammunition explosion it didn't eliminate it entirely.

A few good AC/20 hits into the torso of the Nightstar and not only would it's XL engine be destroyed, crippling the mech, the ammo might even go up sending pieces of assault mech hurtling up into the stratosphere.

You could kill a mech with a single headshot from an AC/20 but that wasn't easy to do. Aiming centre-mass was more reliable, the torso was much larger than the head, and with both an XL engine and ammo in there the Nightstar would go down almost as fast from putting rounds into its gut as it would from a lucky strike on its cockpit.

Griggs smiled, this wasn't exactly Solaris but it was nice to get back into the game, he thought to himself as music ended and announcer started speaking again.

"Our challenger tonight, hailing from the Niops Association, graduate of their Gunslinger program, the pride of the SLDF, Henry McCarty!" the announcer roared as very different music began to play and more fireworks reached for the skies.

What started out seeming like easy-listening elevator music played softly with a funky beat a falsetto male voice began to sing as the Nightstar stomped into the arena.

"Listen to the ground
There is movement all around
There is something goin' down
And I can feel it"


"On the waves of the air
There is dancin' out there
It's somethin' we can't share
We can't steal it
"

In the cockpit of his machine Wilhelm Sampson grinned. "Saturday Nightstar fever baby" he said, knowing Jackie Mroczkiewicz was listening in on a secured channel as the ninety-five ton assault mech strutted in to the beat of the music.

As yet nobody else in the SLDF had figured out how he managed to get a battlemech to walk quite like that, although many others had tried, and failed, to emulate the weird bouncy stride. Apparently it had something to timing the electrical triggering of the myomers in the leg and foot exactly at the right moment, and also having good rhythm Sampson maintained.

"That sweet city woman
She moved through the light
Controlling my mind and my soul
When you reach out for me, yeah
And the feelin' is right
"

"Then I get night fever, night fever
We know how to do it
Gimme that night fever, night fever
We know how to show it
"

As the music faded away Sampson reached his start-point facing his opponent, a couple of hundred metres short of gauss rifle range as he switched on his targeting system. The Nightstar was a late Star League design with very advanced computer-assisted aiming and he switched it over to long-range mode as he selected the Atlas over yonder for the computer's attention.

All the bulky mining equipment in the open-cast-mine turned mechwarrior arena would give both mechs the opportunity to use cover, but Sampson knew if he chose his path carefully, maximising line-of-sight contact with his opponent, it would give him the best chance of getting in a few good hits before Grigg's in the Atlas could properly retaliate.

"Can I get a round of applause for both these brave gladiators out here to entertain us tonight" the announcer requested over the tannoy system. The crowd doing so and cheering as well.

"OKAY MECHWARRIORS. LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE!" the announcer exclaimed. "THREE, TWO, ONE, GAME ON!"

Sampson started to move forward as did Grigg's, although the former only wanted to get into gauss-rifle range as soon as possible and once he did so planned to try and keep his distance as long as possible while the man at the controls of the Atlas would be trying to close down the range as quickly as he could.

Reaching effective range for his twin gauss rifles Sampson opened fire with the first shots of the match and the audience started to cheer once again as the crack of large-bore steel slugs accelerated to ludicrous velocities echoed off the walls of the mine.

In the Atlas Peter Grigg's knew his machine wasn't the sniper that the Nightstar was, those first two shots barely missed him, but that didn't mean he was incapable of firing back as one of the second salvo of gauss-rifle slugs whizzed past his machine close enough to leave a mark on the paint.

Battlemechs used for the tournaments on Solaris were often better equipped than those used by the Great Houses, customised machines with weaponry that was lostech in many places, and the LRM 20 missile launcher installed on Grigg's Atlas was fitted with an Artemis IV Fire-Control-System. This gave the missiles considerably better accuracy and as Grigg's got into range he locked onto the Nightstar in preparation for unleashing a barrage.

Or rather he tried to lock onto the Nightstar but as soon as the Artemis IV attempted to do so the Nightstar instantly broke the lock.

"Dammit, he's got a Guardian ECM system fitted" Grigg's said aloud so his pit-crew listening in could hear him. "Probably swapped out some gauss-rifle rounds to find the tonnage" he reasoned. As designed the Nightstar NSR-9J typically carried a whopping seven tons worth of gauss rifle slugs into action, which was frankly excessive for a battle, let alone a one-on-one tournament, so losing some to fit an ECM unit wasn't the worst choice.

You could still fire the launcher without an Artemis IV lock so Grigg's did so, knowing that he wouldn't get as many hits as he would have wanted but it was better than just letting the ****** in the Nightstar plink away at him without response.

The volley of twenty LRM's launched by the Atlas sailed in an arc through the air, putting on a good show for the spectators as they left a smoke trail behind them.

The audience got an even more exciting show just as the first missiles in the volley neared the Nightstar because a concealed hatch on the thing snapped open and a tiny computer-controlled turret with its own targeting system popped out and began shooting at the inbound LRM's, those that wee hit exploding.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, what you are seeing in action is an Anti-Missile-System" the announcer eventually commented in obvious surprise as the small-calibre multi-barrelled machine gun shot down a proportion of the LRM's before they struck the Nightstar, minimising the damage the barrage could inflict. "Niops lostech not seen in the battlefields of the Inner Sphere for nearly a decade" he added.

The loud 'clang' of a gauss rifle slug making contact with the Atlas indicated that the Nightstar had made its first hit on the Atlas, that single impact stripping away nearly three times the armour off it than its handful of LRM's which got through the AMS fire had inflicted on its opponent.

Cackling maniacally at the control of his Nightstar as the Atlas continued to bear down on him Sampson keyed up his LB-10X which was now in effective range, selecting standard HEAP rounds for his first burst of autocannon fire.

Both gauss rifles mounted in his arms fired, their slugs along with the autocannon rounds hurtled through the space between the mechs, the faster magnetically propelled slugs reaching the target first, one making contact with another loud 'clang' just before the HEAP rounds exploded on impact near to where the slug had hit, tearing off more armour.

Grigg's was getting annoyed now, at least the Nightstar couldn't run away. It was no faster than the Atlas and they were penned in by the walls of the mine anyway. Fortunately the Atlas could soak up punishment like almost no other machine, and once he got close he could dish it out a lot harder than the damn Nightstar could.

Managing to get in a couple more good hits with his own longer-range guns before the Atlas got close enough to shoot back with its gigantic AC/20 Sampson was satisfied with how things were going so far. The Atlas had continued to throw LRM's at him all this time, and enough had gotten through the AMS fire that his Nightstar was far from pristine but the Atlas looked a lot worse.

Finally close enough for his AC/20, SRM launcher and his two medium lasers, Grigg's custom Atlas also had a pair of medium-pulse-lasers that he would have to be even closer to use, the former Solaris Grand Champion opened up with nearly everything he had causing the crowd to start cheering again.

Unable to deal with quite so many inbound missiles, the Atlas was just the range where both LRM's and SRM's were effective and was firing both its launchers, the AMS on the Nightstar, already running red hot and running out of ammunition, struggled to cope with such a target rich environment only stopping some of them from getting through.

Inside the Nightstar Sampson could feel his machine taking an absolute battering but he ignored it as he continued to put round-after-round into the torso of the Atlas.

Just as an AC/20 burst tore a big chunk of armour off the Nightstar a gauss rifle slug from the Nightstar itself did likewise to the slightly heavier machine, an already damaged section of its torso now stripped bare of ablative armour plate revealing the internals behind.

Sampson switched his LB-X autocannon over from standard shells to cluster rounds, essentially making it into a huge shotgun giving it a better chance of hitting something important as the Atlas continued to close to medium-pulse-laser range for the end-game.

At least this close up the Atlas couldn't use its LRM launcher as well, Sampson considered although that was scant comfort as the AMS ran dry, barrels glowing red after taking out it's last few SRM targets. Adding his arm-mounted medium pulse lasers to the fire he was pouring into the Atlas trying to shred its internals Sampson noted that the Atlas had a couple of those two which wasn't good at this range even though his own were better.

Eventually one of those big AC/20 shells was bound to get lucky and one triggered an ammunition explosion in the Nightstar, what was left of the rounds for the LB-X autocannon going up in a rippling explosion that rocked the ninety-five ton machine to the side and would have destroyed it entirely if not for the CASE protection system, blow-out panels directing much of the explosion away from vital systems.

The Nightstar appeared to stumble, arms dropping as it stopped firing, a puppet with the strings cut. Peter Grigg's yelled in triumph, that explosion right next to the mechs fragile XL engine would have crippled it, fancy CASE protection or not.

Grigg's brought his Atlas around to face the cheering crowd, raising the arms of his mech in triumph.

When the cheering abruptly stopped and with his pit crew screaming in his ear Grigg's realised the enormous magnitude of his mistake.

The Nightstar had smoothly straightened back up and was aiming its gauss-rifles and medium pulse lasers at him where the Atlas had no armour left, one arm aimed just above the magazine for the AC/20, the other centred on his gyro.

"I can't believe I got suckered like that" Grigg's muttered to himself, deciding that he didn't want to risk dying on this ****** rock in the periphery and hitting eject just as the Nightstar fired.

Sampson whooped in triumph as the Atlas exploded and collapsed to the ground. Switching on the external speakers on the Nightstar and cranking the volume up as far as it would go he collected himself again before speaking. "Disco is not dead" he declared to the crowd, voice booming around the arena. "Disco is life!"

Kirsten Mroczkiewicz and Rory Fallstaff, officers of the SLDF and bloodnamed warriors of Clan Wolverine, looked at each other. "If he wants to try and find and nightclub later, don't let him wear the cooling suit" Mroczkiewicz said eventually.


----------

Note from the Author:

The only reason why most people in the Inner Sphere might have even heard of the Illyrian Palatinate is the annual mechwarrior games held there. It's not exactly the Solaris Games but they have enough of a following to attract competitors from pretty far away, all hoping for a chance to earn money, salvage and maybe even a little fleeting fame and glory. Illyria using big open-cast mines as makeshift arenas just seems like something they would do (their economy is based on mining after all).

You wouldn't usually expect to see a competitor of the likes of Peter Grigg on Illyria but dangle enough money (or lostech) in front of him and you can get him to travel.

Wilhelm Sampson, AKA 'Billy the Kid', AKA Henry McCarty (cookie if you get the reference), is using a customised Nightstar that uses an Standard Fusion Engine and an LB-10X autocannon instead of a Star League era XL Engine and and ERPPC, Grigg has a somewhat less customised Atlas.

The Nightstar also has
CASE protection, AMS and a Guardian ECM suite. It's lostech fever baby!

And yes, the all-white prototype cooling suit is indeed a
direct reference to a certain movie.  :D
"A dread fear rests deep in the heart of Clan Coyote that one day a lawyer will arrive on Tamaron talking about intellectual property rights, the Mercury II and the Coyotl omnimech and this will herald the end of the Clan as the Not-Named sue their asses into bankruptcy for patent infringement" - The True History of the Clans (Dark Caste Press: 3050)

Hunted Tribes - Hotpoint's Battlestar/Battletech Crossover Series


Wrangler

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #505 on: 11 June 2024, 13:59:19 »
That was interesting "Weapons Test" method.  I love banter between the characters. 
"Men, fetch the Urbanmechs.  We have an interrogation to attend to." - jklantern
"How do you defeat a Dragau? Shoot the damn thing. Lots." - Jellico 
"No, it's a "Most Awesome Blues Brothers scene Reenactment EVER" waiting to happen." VotW Destrier - Weirdo  
"It's 200 LY to Sian, we got a full load of shells, a half a platoon of Grenadiers, it's exploding outside, and we're wearing flak jackets." VoTW Destrier - Misterpants
-Editor on Battletech Fanon Wiki

Daryk

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #506 on: 11 June 2024, 19:19:48 »
Hilarious, and under no circumstances should they let him wear that cooling suit in public! :D

D-Rock

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #507 on: 14 June 2024, 10:28:44 »
Are we going to see a 'Night Fever' variant Nightstar statted out in the future?

paulobrito

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #508 on: 15 June 2024, 16:11:46 »
What is the fleet (military/warships and civilian/jumpships) of Niops at this date? Active and in mothball.

Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #509 on: 18 June 2024, 10:05:08 »
Part LV - Section 1 of 2

----------

"No, the Blackjack's autocannons aren't going to explode when you fire them. That's just an unfounded rumour."

Battlemech Training Instructor to a mechwarrior recruit with the Copernicus Militia - 2850CE

----------

Illyria III – Illyrian Palatinate – 2843

People hailing from Niops were well-known for wearing sunglasses a lot when visiting other places. The dim red dwarf star, they lived beneath made them sensitive to the much brighter daylight to be seen on most colony worlds, but they didn't usually wear them inside and the fact that Wilhem Sampson, AKA 'Henry McCarty' was only made him look like even more of a douche.

This was of course by design. Leaning back in his chair at the front of the press room facing the various journalists and camera crews, hands cupped behind his head, fingers meshed to cradle it and with a smug expression on his face he very much looked the part of the underhanded ****** the crowd had booed out of the arena.

In some ways Sampson's entire life up to now had been a rehearsal for this performance, the Stanislavski acting method taken to its ultimate level. If you want to look like a real jerkass then actually being one helped a lot.

Sat beside him, looking suitably bitter and annoyed, two-time Solaris Grand Champion Peter Grigg would have happily swapped his prized gilded laurel wreath, the one that he had been handed twenty years ago as the trophy from his first ever championship victory, for the chance to go back in time a few hours and double-tap the sonofabitch when he had faked his mech being crippled.

Behind them on the wall a large vid-screen was displaying the match earlier in looping repeat, several points in the action being shown in slow-motion including when Sampson had faked being disabled and Grigg fell for it.

"Mister McCarty, are you aware that tricks such as the one you pulled are heavily frowned upon in arena competition?" a sports journalist asked, not bothering to disguise his own feelings on the matter judging by his expression of distaste.

"Yeah, that's why I thought it would work" Sampson replied, smirking.

"Then perhaps you are unaware of why it's frowned upon?" the journalist persisted.

"Nah, it's to try and keep down the number of schmucks that get killed to a minimum" Sampson replied. "It stops guys in crippled mechs getting finished off with an unnecessary coup de grace."

The journalist now visibly glared at him, so much for giving the benefit of the doubt. "So, despite knowing that you still went ahead with such a ruse?" he asked rhetorically, tone dripping with contempt.

"Right, because it's not technically against the rules, more like just a suggestion or guideline" Sampson replied, leaning even further back in his chair causing Grigg to offer a silent prayer he would topple back and hurt himself. "Once I realised what he was trying to do from his shot placement, worked out that his game-plan was to try and take out my engine, keep hitting my mech in the left torso where my autocannon was to try and set off the ammunition there to make it a slam-dunk, I just let him think he'd done it" Sampson explained his thought process. "Because he wanted his plan to work, he naturally assumed that it had when I made my mech looked like it had powered down. Basic human psychology."

Grigg's narrowed his eyes. He was a consistent, cerebral mechwarrior the kind that won matches as much in their head as they did with their marksmanship, reflexes and piloting skill. That was how he had managed to win the Grand Championship at Solaris two years running, he didn't just rely on luck and raw skill. He liked to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent compared to his own, and if you've got an AC/20 and the other guy is using long-ranger weaponry and has a mech with a fragile XL engine the smart move is get close as fast as you can and keep smacking rounds into that torso until you've totalled that engine. That was especially true if there's ammunition stored in the same location that'll give you a sweet secondary explosion when you hit it.

It frankly annoyed the crap out of Grigg that the bastard had used his logical approach against him.

"And what would you have done if your opponent had decided to finish you off, instead of showing mercy?" the journalist wanted to know.

"Not let him" Sampson replied. "Even with the autocannon knocked out I still had two working gauss rifles and my pulse lasers. At that range I had a more than decent chance of making a head-shot, the only reason I didn't is because I wasn't trying to kill the guy, just win the match, but if he just tried to kill me then the rules would have changed."

Grigg's rolled his eyes. "Man seriously overestimates his skills" he observed. "Faking being crippled was the best piece of piloting I saw you make all match" he told Sampson.

"Can't argue with the last part" Sampson responded, not that the match up until that point had really given him a chance to show what he could do. He had been following a script, of sorts, which severely impinged on his style.

That said, and although you'd never get him to admit it out loud, Wilhelm Sampson himself now judged that Grigg was probably better than he was by some margin. That this was the case even now with Grigg a decade past his prime certainly surprised him and indicated just how good the top Solaris jocks actually were. Having had the chance to watch the match in slow-motion from several camera angles it was clear that Grigg's manoeuvring, use of cover and particularly his shot placement, was truly outstanding given he was piloting a lumbering Atlas. If many more of the LRM's or SRM's had gotten through, if those pulse lasers the Atlas was packing instead of its regular armament had seared off more armour, then Sampson knew would have had to take it all very seriously to win despite his tech advantage, giving up on the little piece of chicanery he had planned to employ if the opportunity arose.

Not that the chicanery hadn't come good in the end, if not in the way almost everybody thought it had, not being cognisant of all the relevant facts for a very good reason.

"You should have made a lot more hits, what with that fancy targeting system in that Nightstar doing a lot of the work for you" Grigg belittled the other mechwarrior's skills.

If Sampson had been doing his best he would have made more hits, and would have used cover and terrain better as well to limit how much damage he took in return too, but he wasn't really competing so much as acting, so the accusation of ineptitude didn't have too much sting to it. As it was he just shrugged in response to Grigg's criticism. "I won didn't I?" he replied conceitedly. "Even if I hadn't pulled the trick you were only one or two gauss rifle slugs away from losing by the time my ammo exploded, and if I'd been luckier with the cluster rounds you'd have lost before then."

Rory Fallstaff's ham-fisted attempt to motivating Sampson into handling his mech in a certain way at a level below his actual abilities with the challenge 'Well if you don't think you're good enough to convincingly fake it…' hadn't worked quite as well as the colonel still thought it had. Sampson had let him think it did, but in reality his main to playing along with the ruse de guerre was something else.

Wilhelm Sampson was actually more of a team player than he let on, though if you ever accused him of not being an entirely egocentric, self-absorbed, jerk he would vociferously deny it to his dying breath. His entire persona was built around being a rebel, the mechwarrior savant captured by Clan Wolverine when they defeated the Rasmussen Elite, the prisoner who railed against being turned into a bondsman then being forced to join the clan's labourer caste, only to be put back into a cockpit a couple of years later when Khan Hallis found himself with more battlemechs on his hands than skilled and experienced mechwarriors to pilot them.

As a teenage wunderkind with the Rasmussen Elite Sampson had been a thug in a Thug. His comrades there had been violent ****** that ruled their territory like the Bandit Kingdom it was, with Gustav Kran as their king and the warriors like Sampson living the high life on the backs of the serfs that did all the work. After that subsequently finding himself one of the people at the bottom of the ladder doing unskilled manual work had been quite the comedown, and his reaction to that was the genesis of the 'Labourer Caste Hero' schtick he still played to on occasion.

Even once he was back doing what he was best at, piloting a battlemech, Sampson liked to push the boundaries. Seeing how far he could go in annoying his superiors without risking getting court-martialled, kicked out of the army and made to get a real job, while all the time feigning to not really give a crap about why his new home on Niops maintained such a large, well-funded and well-equipped military for its size so long as he got to be a part of it.

Sampson knew full well of course, after all he had been one of the people that decent people needed to be protected from. It hadn't been Colonel Fallstaff's appeal to his ego that got him to go along with the misdirection, it had been the logic and aim of the plan itself and the fact that deep-down Sampson knew that his people, and they were his people now, were the good guys. Or at the very worst they were objectively the least bad of the bad guys by a decent margin.

ComStar and the Successor States were watching Niops closely now which made obfuscation ever more important. More concerningly Nicolas Kerensky was himself undoubtedly looking out for signs of Wolverine influence, and at some point Niops would tip its hat that they had weapon's technology more advanced than the Star League had which would trigger alarm bells amongst the clans as to where Franklin Hallis and his people had ended up.

Misdirection was called for, or as General Hallis had put it the waters needed to be muddied a little so when the information inevitably leaked out that there was something just a little screwy about the battlemechs the Niops Association was producing it wouldn't immediately bring the Great Houses down on them like a ton of bricks, or worse the clans.

That all made sense, and as long as it was made clear to everyone back home that mattered that Billy the Kid had not been doing his best, Sampson was willing to take one for the team.

Just don't ask him to make a habit of it, he had a reputation to maintain after all.

"Try me again without all the lostech weaponry" Grigg's defended his own reputation in front of the press, regarding Sampson with an expression that made it look like the other mechwarrior was something nasty he had stepped in.

"A bad workman always blames his tools" Sampson responded, smirking again. "Nothing worse than a bad loser" he opined, wondering if he was going to get punched in the face for that one and knowing full-well he would deserve it if he was.

Peter Grigg's momentarily considered slugging the arrogant prick but decided to keep the moral high ground in front of the media instead. Anyway, he could always beat the tar out of him later without being photographed doing it after all. "Even with CASE protection the only way you could have survived that ammunition explosion is if you weren't using an XL engine" he stated with conviction. Annoyingly enough if he'd known less about the Nightstar before the fight he might have actually been better off. "If I'd realised it would have all gone very differently, chuckles" he said with justified certainty. For that matter, SFE or no it was still practically a miracle that ammo going up hadn't blown the machines arm off at the same time, those kind of internal detonations were almost always catastrophic.

"We did say it was a custom Nightstar, we just didn't explain in detail how we customised it" Sampson replied. "Maybe you should have considered the possibility that I was rocking a standard fusion engine instead of the one the thing came out of the factory with."

"How could I? I still don't know how the hell you fitted an LB-10X, and AMS and a Guardian ECM in that thing without an XL engine" Grigg's replied suspiciously. It really shouldn't have been possible, that's why he hadn't expected the bastard was faking.

Sampson grinned. "Niops super-science" he replied.

"Are you saying that the Niops Association has advanced beyond the Star League in weapons development?" a reporter asked in shock, the others looking equally astonished.

"Yes" Sampson confirmed truthfully. "But I'm lying" he lied about lying. "Cards on the table, our engineers did mount a lightweight autocannon on the Nightstar, but it's not a new technology."

"Care to explain?" the same reporter queried, looking suitably confused.

"It's really not difficult, anybody could do it, they just don't" Sampson replied, Niops had been keeping this particular cover-story ready for years and this had been deemed a good time to roll it out where it would be guaranteed to reach a wide audience. "The vast majority of the weight in an autocannon is in the barrel and the breach, you can easily shave off a couple of tons or more just by using less material."

"So, you've developed a better alloy?"

"No, we just used less of it" Sampson replied as if that was no big deal.

Given that this was a big deal Grigg's just stared at him. "Are you insane?" he asked reasonably after taking a few seconds to let it sink in. "The breach is the only thing keeping the propellant explosion inside the gun when you fire it, they're not made that thick and heavy for the ****** aesthetics!" he exclaimed. "For that matter have you seen what it looks like when a barrel bursts?" he asked incredulously. "It's like a gigantic pipe-bomb."

"Our guys tested the lightened autocannon to destruction. It wasn't going to fail in a match that only lasted maybe ten minutes" Sampson dismissed the argument.

"Not under ideal test conditions but I was shooting at you, you ****** maniac!" Grigg's pointed out. "There's a reason why nobody does that kind of crap even on Solaris. You might think saving a couple of tons of weight off the gun you can exchange for an extra couple of heatsinks is a good idea, but even if the gun doesn't explode on you when you pull the trigger, you'd still have to replace the entire breach and the barrel after every match. That's got to cost a couple of hundred grand at least for an LB-10X" he assumed. The LB-X autocannon was effectively lostech in the Inner Sphere but not just because nobody knew how to make them anymore, the lightweight alloys required for the weapon had to be make in a freefall environment, making them very expensive after so many orbital manufacturing facilities had been destroyed during the war.

In order to make back all the weight savings lost by swapping an XL engine for a standard one Niops must have used a endo-steel structure too presumably, Grigg's surmised. Given that it was known they had built their own Olympus recharge stations everyone already assumed they had plenty of orbital manufacturing capability though, so that wasn't remotely as surprising as the crazy bastards shaving down an autocannon to save weight was.

"Meh, isn't me paying for the thing" Sampson responded flippantly.

Grigg's was calculating in his head. "I guessed you saved some weight by not bothering to haul anything like a full load of gauss rifle slugs but even if you shaved some weight off the autocannon I'm still coming up short."

"Think outside the box dude" Sampson replied condescendingly.

Peter Grigg's really wanted to hit that guy now. "Even if you went with the minimum amount of gauss rifle rounds, the only way you could have possibly made up that much tonnage is if you…" he began to say before trailing off. "Oh, for the love of God" he suddenly started speaking again. "You only armoured the front of the mech, that's why you didn't manoeuvre properly, you had to face me straight on" he concluded.

Sampson grinned. "I neither confirm nor deny that particular statement" he replied. "But I will say we did save a little weight by only partially filling the ammo hoppers for the autocannon. If I wasn't going to be manoeuvring to keep my distance, I wasn't going to be missing a crapload of shots at max range anyway so I didn't need a whole ton of regular HEAP and another ton of cluster rounds."

"That is just about the stupidest, most reckless ****** game-plan I have ever heard" Grigg's exclaimed, the armour thing was clearly how they did it and that was insane. On the other hand, the partially filled ammo hoppers did help explain why the explosion when they went up wasn't as dramatic as it should have been though, even with CASE.

Sampson shrugged. "Worked, didn't it?" he asked rhetorically.

"If it's stupid but it works it's still stupid" Grigg's retorted. "Being lucky doesn't make it any the less dumb" he added feeling almost personally affronted by the sheer amateurish idiocy of the whole thing, which was presumably done just so Niops could show off some more of their lostech. "If you'd stumbled, or if you'd just guessed wrong where I was heading, I could have gotten a shot into your side or rear and without any armour at that location it would have been Goodnight Vienna" he said flatly. "I wouldn't have even needed my AC/20 to core you, the lasers or missiles would have turned that big, expensive Nightstar to ****** scrap."

"You're just pissed you never thought of it yourself" Sampson suggested, inwardly agreeing with every word. "If you're open minded there's all sorts of ways to do things differently" he maintained.

"Can you provide us with any more examples?" one of the other members of the Press asked, intrigued.

"Okay, so here's an easy one" Sampson responded, nodding. "Neither of us were using a PPC so why not strip out the surge protectors and the Faraday cages around the electronics to save a little more…"

"McCarty shut the hell up right now!" a voice bellowed from the back of the room.

"Oh yeah right, sorry Sir" Sampson responded sheepishly as if he had gone a little further than he had been authorised to do when explaining. "Guess we can't pull that one again now" he added with an awkward grimace.

"What was that about 'surge protectors' what are they and what do they do?" another journalist less familiar with the inner workings than most of his colleagues in the room asked quickly.

"The electrical charge caused by firing a Particle Projector Cannon, or getting hit by one, plays merry hell with electronics" Grigg's explained himself professionally. "After the PPC was invented battlemechs had to be modified to protect their circuitry from the side effects of either firing one yourself or having one fired at you" he said. "It's still not completely effective, that's why they have a minimum range below which the safeties in the field inhibitor won't allow you to fire the thing, there's potentially feedback effects at ninety metres or less. Imagine an electrical arc between the mech firing the PPC and the one getting hit by it and just how much that would suck."

"So I'm assuming that removing these surge protectors is considered inadvisable?" the journalist who had asked the question surmised.

"If you're carrying a PPC, or if there's any chance whatsoever of being hit with PPC fire yourself, then yes. It's really inadvisable which is why nobody sane ever does it" Grigg's replied, looking to Sampson then shaking his head sadly. "You'd have to practically the dismantle the entire machine to take out or put back the cages and surge protectors just for the sake of a fraction of a ton of weight and a little more internal volume, and if it turned out that you were wrong about what you were up against and the other guy did have a PPC then you would be more screwed than a five c-bill Solaris whore."

"Yeah, but you didn't" Sampson muttered to himself just loud enough for Grigg's to hear. "A little weight saved here, a little there, and pretty soon you've got a whole extra ton to play with" he said making the Solaris Champion wonder what other ill-advised modifications these munchkins had come up with.

Were they crazy enough to skimp on the endoskeleton frame as well? Maybe use more aluminium and less titanium or something like that? It could be done, people just didn't because it was nuts, any mass or volume you saved wasn't worth the risk of having limbs that were just a little less fragile than they should be. An awful lot of math, engineering and materials science had determined how strong a mech's internal skeleton had to be in order to do its job, when you ignored that math your mech was always one unlucky hit away from getting a limb blown off and you burned through your assigned quotient of luck fast in combat.

Niops was well known to be a scientific research colony, and Grigg was starting to conclude that their scientists had spent too long thinking about whether they could do something and not enough time on whether they should.
« Last Edit: 18 June 2024, 12:48:45 by Hotpoint »
"A dread fear rests deep in the heart of Clan Coyote that one day a lawyer will arrive on Tamaron talking about intellectual property rights, the Mercury II and the Coyotl omnimech and this will herald the end of the Clan as the Not-Named sue their asses into bankruptcy for patent infringement" - The True History of the Clans (Dark Caste Press: 3050)

Hunted Tribes - Hotpoint's Battlestar/Battletech Crossover Series


 

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