TAZ3

==Chapter 3 - The Absolute Zero==
FWLS Legacy
League III-Class Destroyer
Free Worlds League Space
3159 CE
Is there a 'new ship smell'?  Nikol had challenged the corporations of the Free Worlds and gotten back a response that left her military advisors deadlocked. It damned near set the League's senate into a recreated civil war over the design selection process.
In the end, she'd stepped in and stopped local pride from sundering a League her mother had worked tirelessly to reunite.
Is there a new ship smell? Yes, yes there is.  While her group weren't as ostentatiously oversized as the one Trillian Steiner was bringing, she had a pair of new-production League Block III's and a pair of D-54s.  All four were new production ships, all four were the compromise she'd imposed, the two leading designs were being built at alternating yards, with subcontracted parts from every world in the Free Worlds League that had a factory to make something.
Thus, every district had a piece of the Naval Expansion pie.
Compromise.
The other side of that compromise was that by spreading out the contracts the way she had. The prime contractors had a strong reason to upgrade and update local facilities for their subcontractors, or to invest in infrastructure to free themselves FROM those subcontractors.  Unlike the Succession Wars Era, Nikol had been able to force through a model that didn't have a single point of failure that could be hit with a multi-megaton strike and rendered dust. Even the final assembly was being spread out in the same way that Trillian's Naval Reform Act had geometrically increased ship and naval production in the Lyran Commonwealth.
The side-benefits were already showing with a 7% increase in GDP (averaged) and a reversal of the post-Republic economic recession, dropping unemployment rates nationwide. For every military contractor, a few hundred local businesses, markets, and traders were being stimulated.
She sat at the rear of the command deck, reading the reports of economic analysts in the League, including portions that were less-than-supportive of her rule.
"Milady Captain-General, we are about to enter Capellan space."
Nikol looked up, "Are we ready?" she asked.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Please proceed." she told the officer.
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