Author Topic: The Struggle Of Survival 2052-2053  (Read 2808 times)

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Offline Viridia (OP)

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The Struggle Of Survival 2052-2053
« on: June 09, 2015, 03:15:12 PM »
Commonwealth -
Combined Population: 635.12 million
Naval Tonnage: 4800 tons
Commercial Tonnage: 35,200 tons
Civilian Tonnage: 512,000 tons
Ground Forces: 6x INF, 6x GAR

Republic -
Combined Population: 440.65 million
Naval Tonnage: 5200 tons
Commercial Tonnage: 22,600 tons
Civilian Tonnage: 0 tons
Ground Forces: 4x INF, 5x GAR, 1x REP

Corporation -
Combined Population: 213.23 million
Naval Tonnage: 4900 tons
Commercial Tonnage: 24,400 tons
Civilian Tonnage: 99,400 tons
Ground Forces: 3x INF, 3x GAR, 1x REP



New Year's Day, 2052 saw something a little different than hungover partygoers in the Vermont-based labs of the Commonwealth's researcher Anita Fantasia. Building on their achievements the previous year, her team developed a brand new active sensor for the Commonwealth's Fleet that offered a one-point-two million kilometre increase in range. Just a few days later, the Montague Foundation, the owners and founders of the Swift-Tuttle facility, opened a brand new plant on the Neujmin asteroid. For the next few months, the solar system spun on in gentle silence, broken only in early March when the Earth-registered corporation Fontan Marine launched a seventy-two thousand-plus ton freighter covering the Earth-Luna route, while Yanagita Ltd of Callisto launched a second sixty-two thousand-plus ton freighter that began to cover the Callisto-Io route, the busiest trade route the Corporation had.

In early April, Tadeshi Services, a Kurogasai-registered company, finally entered the commercial arena by launching a sub-forty thousand ton colonist ship, which promptly sat in orbit as Kurogasai had no viable place to land colonists, and the Corporation was already fixated on just trying to provide enough living space for its burgeoning population. Millions of kilometres away on Earth, the Commonwealth's ruling Council privately debated their concerns over the way Kurogasai's subsidiaries seemed to be extremely active, as well as the continuing hostility of the Republic towards the Commonwealth. In the end, a motion was put forth by Luna's governor, Trent Blitz, who was worried over the fact that the Fleet's paltry few ships were all kept in Earth's orbit, a few hours distant from Luna itself. The motion itself was a controversial one, to double the tonnage of the Fleet by building a second Earth class destroyer and two more Turkmenistan class frigates, and the following vote saw a very narrow victory for the pro-expansion side who promptly set about authorising the expansion covertly.

Within a couple of weeks of the meeting, the Nicomachean Republic's intelligence division provided a brief, but damning, report on it to President Espinosa. Incensed by what she saw as the Commonwealth's warmongering, she quickly summoned an extraordinary meeting of her cabinet, and with their backing authorised her own expansion, calling for an additional two Andalusia-class frigates for the Republic Navy, as well as beginning the design of a planetary surveillance facility. Intended to be equipped with the most capable passive and active sensors the Republic can build, such a facility would act as an early warning facility in case of Commonwealth attack. Other than that, all remained quiet until May when Tadeshi Services launched a sub-thirty-three thousand ton freighter.

June 2052 was, like the preceding months, quiet for the most part, with Jin Colony Line of Earth launching a pair of freighters, one a sixty-five thousand ton design, and the other a smaller sub-thirty-three thousand ton model which were put to work contesting the Earth-Luna trade route. Later on in the month, the Commonwealth's scientist Val Ferreira and his team completed research into allowing an FTL drive to convey other ships with it, an achievement mirrored by the Kurogasai research team of Matoke Toshiyuki just over a month later. It was in August 2052 however, that tensions in the solar system upswung fiercely as the two additional Turkmenistan class frigates CSS Holland and CSS Gambia were released into service, with the Republic's own pair of Andalusia class frigates, the NSM Azuay and the NMS Amazonas following just ten days later.

September and early October saw minor advances for the Commonwealth as it cemented its technological edge, with Carmelo Petrucci's team researching an increase in terraforming efficiency that allowed a single terraforming facility to put out 0.0015 atmosphere's worth of gas. Just under two weeks later, her fellow researcher Elbert Greenstreet and his team researched new ways to more efficiently structure the Commonwealth's production capabilities. Five days later, a meeting was summoned for the Commonwealth Council, where the news about the Nicomachean Republic's own expansion was debated. Most of the council seemed fixated on the possibility of a spy or a leak to an aide, but Governor Blitz argued that it was a natural and spontaneous development. After all, hadn't the Martians threatened to use mass drivers on Earth just a decade or two before? Surely this was, he declared, an evolution in their militaristic ways. If this was the case, then shouldn't the Commonwealth manufacture more munitions for their valiant defenders, he said, calling for a motion to produce a full eighty of the Spitball S2A type anti-ship missiles used by the Turkmenistan class. Within the end of the day, he'd swayed most of the Council to his side, and those who didn't necessarily follow his arguments still thought a strong response would play well with public opinion.

Early November saw Republican scientist Laura Mesa Concepción and her team research an incredibly tough and flexible cable-tube system based off carbon nanotubes. The intent of the device was to allow a mobile spacecraft to physically attach another behind it using this system, so it could act as a spatial equivalent of a 'tug'. Just under a month later, her compatriot Celina Escobar Ruelas and her team researched a minor improvement to the sensitivity of the thermal sensor technology the Republic possessed as part of the border surveillance system President Espinosa had demanded. As part of an off-shoot to the programme, the Republic had also launched an effort by Marcos Mata Valle and his team in researching a turret capable of tracking a target moving at two-thousand kilometres a second, or near the speed of a Commonwealth Spitball S2A missile, in an effort to develop a credible anti-missile defence system, and this was completed in early December.

January 2053 saw the continuation of life as usual, with Lloyd Costigan and his Commonwealth team researching a higher initial launch velocity for railguns, something believed to be vital for the Earth-class in its meteorite-defence role. On Mars, the Valdivia Steel and Shipbuilding naval yard was expanded in size from offering two two-thousand ton slips to two three-thousand ton slips, offering the Republic the chance to build vessels as large or slightly larger than the Commonwealth's Earth class destroyer. Just a few weeks later, the Commonwealth team of Val Ferreira developed the capacity to allow an FTL-drive equipped vessel and its cohorts arrive as much as fifty-thousand kilometres from the target destination, a necessity lest such ships risk arriving in the same precise volume of space.

By the sixth of February, the Montague Foundation had expanded their Swift-Tuttle facility with a fourth mining complex, making it the most heavily mined of all belonging to the Commonwealth or its citizens. The calm of late February was disrupted when, on the twenty-first, a pair of colony ships from both the Tadeshi and the Yanagita subsidiaries of Kurogasai burn their way in-system, stopping two weeks later with the Yanagita vessel holding just outside Mars' orbital period while the Tadeshi vessel lay just inside Earth's period. Fully loaded with colonists as they are, speculation is rife on both Earth and Mars over the purpose of the vessels, with the most popular ideas being prison hulks housing dissidents or experimental mobile laboratories.

In mid-March, Jin Colony Line of Earth repeated the success of June '52 in launching two vessels at once. This, ostensibly minor, event proved to be incredible, in that by doing so Jin Colony Line had finally turned out as having constructed and was operating more tonnage than all the defacto nation-states of the solar system did themselves. Just under a week later, Matoke Toshiyuki and his team finalised their own work on the same squadron-radius technology as the Commonwealth, putting Kurogasai Corporation that one step closer to having an FTL drive all their own, an achievement the corporation sought to play down in a veil of secrecy. Even if anybody had paid attention enough to start asking questions, events were overshadowed when a second Earth class destroyer, the CSS Luna, was launched from the Earth-bound yard that had created her.

Yet again, it seemed in mid-April, that the citizens of the Commonwealth took advantage of its growing security. Astromining Ltd was set up by the current heir to the Hilton dynasty in early 2052, and only now had she managed to divert enough funding to establish another civilian mining colony, the fourth belonging to the Commonwealth, and based on the asteroid of Van Briesbroeck this time. So far neither any of Kurogasai's or the Nicomachean Republic's people had gathered the funding or the interest to do likewise, leaving the Commonwealth and its people to dominate this field. A month later, the Republic finalised the plans for a module that would allow a craft of up to five-hundred tons to be conveyed by a larger vessel. While no official declaration was made about the development's purpose, some tentatively argued that it could be used for a sensor-equipped vessel, for exploration purposes of course. The fact that such a module would also allow a vessel with military-grade sensors to be carried was paid no heed, officially. Just a few days after on Earth, Lloyd Costigan and his team designed an improved ejection system for missile magazines as part of the Commonwealth's drive for enhanced health and safety.

The first of June saw Anita Fantasia and her team research improved sensor sensitivity for the Commonwealth's electromagnetic-spectrum receivers, rendering them as capable as the Nicomachean Republic's own, at least in theory. This effort was overlooked, when on the eleventh of June, 2053, something incredible happened; Val Ferreira and his team researched humanity's first viable Faster-Than-Light device. In appreciation of the distinguished intellectual who'd made it possible, transcending the bounds of human rivalry, he chose to name it the 'Pinfolder'. Just over a week later, a minor bureaucratic mistake sees the Commonwealth's pair of Seine class freighters despatched to Mercury to retrieve the growing mineral surplus there. The two vessels, with ten thousand tons of capacity between them, pick up only a thousand or so tons of the harvested minerals, and only the skilful use of the Pinfolder's development lets Chief Councillor Joaquin Bagg deflect criticism over the 'critical mismanagement of vital resources'.

Jin Colony Line launched yet another vessel, their eighth, a sixty-five thousand ton freighter in late August 2053, securing their lead over other competitors. The truly interesting news, had anyone known, was the events of just a fortnight later, when Kurogasai's work into 'upgrading' the human genome took a hefty step into reality. The Corporation's scientists had managed to unlock part of the DNA code to allow a human to subsist on ten percent less oxygen than a 'baseline' human, and the Board of Directors decided to keep it quiet. Nearly three weeks later, the shipyard of Ghio Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, a Commonwealth-registered company, finalised a thousand-ton upgrade to their slipyards, allowing them to finally build the Commonwealth's new Pinfolder-equipped vessel, the Apollo class Jump Ship.

Code: [Select]
Apollo class Jump Ship    10 700 tons     64 Crew     160.75 BP      TCS 214  TH 125  EM 0
584 km/s    JR 2-25(C)     Armour 1-43     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 9    Max Repair 33 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 5   

Hankins-Elvira JC22K Commercial Pinfolder     Max Ship Size 22500 tons    Distance 25k km     Squadron Size 2
Blackwood Limited 62.5 EP Commercial NT-Engine (2)    Power 62.5    Fuel Use 13.26%    Signature 62.5    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 60 000 Litres    Range 7.6 billion km   (150 days at full power)

That very same day, the company initiated a switch-over, turning the facilities from the layout required for the Seine class Freighter to something more suitable for the Apollo class. Two weeks later, the Commonwealth built a new research lab on Earth, bringing them to a total of twenty seven, far more than either of the system's other two powers. The last real event of note in 2053 was on the twenty-first of December; freed from their defence obligations by their newly-built sister ships, the Commonwealth's Task Force Alexander, consisting of the CSS Earth, CSS Turkmenistan, and CSS Congo are sent out on their first training exercise as a combined unit, cruising the star system's boundaries inside of Jupiter's orbital period. On the same day, Kurogasai's Tadeshi Services launched their largest vessel yet, a sixty-five thousand ton freighter to service the Callisto-Io trade lane.
 

Offline JacenHan

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Re: The Struggle Of Survival 2052-2053
« Reply #1 on: June 11, 2015, 10:56:26 AM »
Very nice story. and interesting background. Does the Corporation have any bonuses to help them compete with the larger factions?

Edit: Never mind. Looking in the setup thread, I saw that they have a large amount of labs compared to Earth or Mars.
 

Offline Viridia (OP)

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Re: The Struggle Of Survival 2052-2053
« Reply #2 on: June 11, 2015, 02:06:58 PM »
To be honest, I was thinking more in terms of differentiating them rather than giving some advantages to compensate for other failings. Kurogasai will be the ones tinkering with the human genome to take poor-quality but resource-rich worlds, while the others will most likely rely on terraformers and space habitats.