GblaRCS Chpt 24

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 24 -==
<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
"It'll be a good long while before we've got anything to compare to one of the huge automated factories the Terran Hegemony used to build their BattleMechs in, but if the Successor States had any inkling at all what we've already got in the way of armaments manufacturing capability on Niops V they would be queueing up to try and invade us while they still could without getting their teeth kicked in."Colonel Trish Ebon - 2840CE
----
===Reluctant Meeting Attender===
Project Workshop III-A – Niops Association (Niops V) – 2832
Samantha Hollister had never particularly wanted any kind of long-term position in government, she found all the bureaucracy annoying as hell, but because no good deed goes unpunished her success in chairing the old steering committee had led to her being appointed to head the Department of Trade and Industry in Giles Olson's second administration.
In Hollister's opinion 'appointed' was a misleading description of what had actually happened, with 'railroaded' being closer to the mark, but now two-and-a-half years into the job it had at least become somewhat tolerable, at least when she managed to get out from behind her desk for a reason she could justify like an inspection tour of the expanding manufacturing facilities on Niops V.
Long the industrial heart of the Association, Niops V was not merely home to Project Workshop III but other manufacturing facilities as well. Factories that turned out I.C.E. powered vehicles, domestic appliances and consumer goods surrounded Chapterhouse, the only city on the planet remotely worthy of the name, and away from the civilian population a pair of munitions plants that had been built by the NAM to supply their war machines with missiles and autocannon ammunition could be found.
As the smallest of the three habitable worlds in the system Niops V also had the lowest surface gravity, being about two thirds that of Niops VII, or indeed Terra. That was enough to not cause major health problems for long-term residents, but still made life just a little easier for construction workers and indeed mining operations. As the closest to the star it was also the warmest of the three, at least on the light side of the tidally-locked world, and because it was far more arid than Niops VI the weather wasn't as unpleasant either.
It was always windy of course, the atmosphere was constantly trying to transfer heat from the light side to the dark one, but at least there wasn't enough surface water to result in perpetual, torrential rain falling across much of the planet like there was on oceanic Niops VI the least populated of the three.
A spring in her step thanks to the lower gravity, Hollister watched the workshop staff beavering away through a viewing window in the supervisor's office that overlooked the workshop, the supervisor himself down there somewhere sorting out some kind of problem. She found herself thinking upon the truth that being fortunate enough to possess the facilities like this one when civilization collapsed was what had really set Niops apart from the rest of the galaxy, well that and not being complete lunatics bent on destruction. During the Amaris War, and then the First Succession War, the ability of these workshops to reproduce most any piece of advanced technology had allowed the Association to maintain a Terran Hegemony level tech-base and a standard of living that most other worlds could only dream of, and they did so despite decades of isolation.
Effectively a stable autarky until the SLDF-in-Exile arrived at their doorstep, Niops was now steadily abandoning its isolationist stance, looking for resources elsewhere and building new manufacturing capability as needed. No longer were the workshops merely replacing worn-out-parts or building the occasional war-machine for the NAM, they were being used to create an entire interstellar industrial civilization, one piece of equipment at a time.
Putting the Hegemony back together like a giant kit, was how one commentator had described it.
The workshops were a miracle of engineering with only one major downside. Niops had exactly three of them, one having been being built by the Star League on each of the habitable worlds in the system, and because they only had those three and a myriad of jobs for them to do they had always a crippling industrial bottleneck.
Worse than that, currently they only really had two available to meet orders because Project Workshop III on Niops V, or to be more accurate III-A since the renaming, would be completely tied up and unavailable for other tasks until at least late 2834, or more likely early 2835.
For over a year now Project Workshop III-A had been working nearly flat-out, sometimes the staff even working double-shifts, to speedily construct Project Workshop III-B which was being installed in the identical building constructed to house it right next door.
Through the viewing window Hollister watched a hefty piece of equipment that seemed to be a powered hoist that had just been manufactured was picked up by an identical powered hoist and loaded onto a cart ready to be wheeled into the next building.
It was the sort of sight that gave truth to the joke being told by the staff that Project Workshop III-A had been turned into a Von Neumann machine with unionized labor.
If it had not been for the automated factory producing electronic components that had once graced Camelot Command, but was now happily working away for the Association instead, they would not have been able to free up Workshop III-A for nearly that long. There was always something important breaking down somewhere after all, but with the autofac churning out replacement circuit-boards as required Project Workshops I and II could just about cope with all the other work alone.
Pushing III-A hard to get III-B finished was putting a strain on the machinery there though, for a major maintenance overhaul. Then it would be put straight back to work manufacturing III-C although at a rather more sedate pace.
The backlog wouldn't start reducing until III-B was online, and they certainly couldn't think about pushing ahead with another major project, like an orbital shipyard for example, until III-C was completed and available too, but at least they were making progress.
Naturally progress would have been faster if the High Associator didn't keep coming up with new 'High Priority' jobs for the workshops. Repairing or replacing the aging and overworked lab equipment at Frobisher would tie up a workshop for months at least, and if they were really going to go ahead with turning out Iron Wombs for them as well something else was going to have to be shelved for now, most likely the manufacturing line for Arrow IV missiles that the military was pressing for.
If Olson's ambitions could be reined in a little then eventually they would have enough workshops to do everything they wanted them for, just not for a couple more decades at least. The long-term plan was to have one new additional Project Workshop on-line every five years starting with III-C, which should be up and running by 2840. They could be brought online more quickly, but then Niops would just run into another bottleneck instead, not enough skilled people with the necessary technical qualifications to staff them all properly. Sweating the manufacturing equipment in III-A to breaking point to get new workshops operational ahead of schedule when you didn't have the engineers and technicians needed to run the things anyway would just be stupid.
The new Technical College on Niops VII might have annoyed the university when some of their funding was diverted to there, but it should start churning out the people that would be needed to staff both the workshops and other factories being planned. Olson was at least smart enough to have pushed for that, facing down the academic lobbyists who still wielded considerable influence over society.
At some point it would likely be politically necessary to make a few new orbital telescopes for installation in other systems, most likely starting with Alphard for convenience, but Olson certainly couldn't announce that anytime soon, it would be interpreted as a bribe to keep the astronomers happy.
The only departments that actually were happy already, ecstatic even, were Geology, because they were having money and resources thrown at them to survey new worlds for potential mineral wealth, and High Energy Physics, because the SLDF wanted better lasers and particle-beam weapons and had a good sum of money in their budget to fund R&D projects.
The SLDF had of course stipulated that Professor Ogbert Farnstrom was not to be left unsupervised near any directed-energy-weapons. He might well be the smartest man in the department, perhaps even the smartest in the entire star system, which was really saying something for Niops, but genius or not he was also one mech short of a full lance in their opinion.
As a nuclear chemist by background herself, with contacts in several related departments, Hollister also knew that the materials science people were chasing a share of that military budget as well. Unfortunately for them they had been told point-blank that unless they could come up with how to make a better heat-sink, or superior armour plate, then they weren't going to get money thrown at them anytime soon.
"Excuse me, Madam Secretary." Hollister's aide interrupted her thoughts.
"Yes, Daniel?" Hollister replied, looking away from the viewing window towards him. The guided tour of the workshop earlier had actually turned out to be more interesting than she had expected, and afterwards she had found herself looking at the facility and the workers there with more respect.
"Just to remind you that we still need to visit the new defense plant this afternoon, and that you also told the High Associator that you would make your decision today on what you think we should do about the steel shortage" the aide reminded her.
Hollister checked her watch. "Still plenty of time to get to the new factory comple.x" she told him. "I don't want to get there too early, we'll just have to sit through another lecture about BattleMech construction if we do, and probably suffer through a war story or two from the retired SLDF people they put in charge of getting it running on schedule" she replied. "If you've heard one rambling tale about righteously putting Stefan Amaris's goons to the sword you've heard them all."
"I don't know, Ma'am, I think it largely depends on who's telling the story." the aide disagreed. "Some of them are pretty funny, at least they are if you can cope with the gallows humor." he opined. "What about the steel shortage?" he nudged again for a decision.
Samantha Hollister sighed. "We drastically overestimated how many mining robots we could get our hands on didn't we?" she asked rhetorically. "Ones that still worked anyway."
The aide nodded. "I guess Earthwerks are putting most everything they have into meeting their military contracts these days, and most of the other suppliers had their assembly lines destroyed by either Amaris or one successor State or another." he said. "We did manage to find plenty of them in scrap yards that we got cheap enough" he added in a more upbeat manner, smiling.
"Most of which are going to take us forever to get running again.." Hollister replied glumly. "If it wasn't for the Engineering Department at the university offering course credits to students if they fixed them it would be ten years or more before we had the number we need to meet existing resource commitments, let alone any new ones Olson comes up with."
"Strange to think we've got a glut of germanium, but not enough iron of all things" Daniel remarked.
"We've got more of every type of metal than we know what to do with, the problem is that most of it is stuck in floating rocks and we just don't have the manpower or the necessary EVA equipment to dig it out by hand" Hollister noted, groaning at the situation they found themselves in. Mining robots, particularly the first-rate ones made by Earthwerks, could not care less if they were working in a vacuum and they could work right around the clock without ever needing to rest bar the occasional service or repair.
If they had a spare Project Workshop or two available then they could made a few of their own robots to help out, but they didn't so they couldn't.
"Screw it." Hollister eventually decided after considering the options again. "I'm going to recommend we trade with the Illyrian Palatinate." she told her aide. "They've got enough in the way of steel production to meet our needs until we can get our own up to speed, and we're not exactly short of transportation to haul it back here."
The aide nodded. "There is the matter of what we might have to trade for the metal to get the best deal" he pointed out. "They don't have much call for germanium and that's the only thing we have to trade except for…"
"Weapons" Hollister finished the sentence for him.
"The SLDF might not be happy about that" the aide warned.
"They're not using the damn things" Hollister replied, unmoved by what the military might think about it. "All those Star League era lasers and autocannons are just sitting in a warehouse gathering dust since they replaced them with improved versions. It's not like they're ever intending to use them, they're already planning to replace their new gear with even newer gear, like that fancy new Extended Range Laser they're hoping to put into mass production soon, it's more use to us now for trade than it'll ever be for our defence needs."
"Part of their objection is likely to be us arming a potential hostile neighbour" the aide reminded her. "The Palatinate does have a history with the Star League, and it wasn't always an amiable relationship."
Hollister laughed. "If our military argues that the Illyrian Palatinate is a threat then you know that they're stretching for an excuse not to give up their aging reserve stockpile of increasingly obsolescent guns" she said, amused by the very idea. "Romanov herself says she's confident that our military could give the Free Worlds League enough of a shellacking to make them back off from an attempted invasion, and the Palatinate itself barely has a military. That's why we can get a good price for our old guns from them, they have enough of a problem fighting off the larger pirate groups. We're so far out of their league we're not even playing the same sport."
The aide frowned. "They do have BattleMechs" he pointed out.
"According to the data I've seen we've got more BattleMech regiments than they have BattleMech companies" Hollister retorted, "and that's putting aside the fact that half their hardware dates from the Reunification War or earlier" she continued. "Hell, I'd bet good money that the NAM could probably take them on its own these days. They're certainly much better trained and equipped than they used to be. "Did you see that a NAM mechwarrior got into the top ten in the heavy BattleMech division in the latest Gunslinger ratings?" she asked rhetorically. "We all used to think of them as nothing but paper tigers, only fit for taking on pirates, but Romanov and her people really whipped them into shape."
"Yeah" the aide agreed. "Jason Carmichael, that Mechwarrior you mentioned, I've actually met him a couple of times, my sister went to school with the guy" the aide replied. "Joined the NAM because his grades weren't very good according to her. She put a Newton on him to win his last match just because she knew him, got six-to-one odds because nobody thought a NAM guy would pull it off."
"It's all about the Newtons" Hollister replied, chuckling as she quoted the line from many a popular rap song, and at least one children's rhyme about the laws of motion.
"Don't let the Leibniz posse hear you say that" the aide warned in jest, grinning. "You know the military are going to ask why we don't just import steel from somewhere else."
Hollister shrugged. "I'm happy to argue it out in front of the High Associator" she replied. "Steel from the Palatinate is a lot cheaper than from the Free Worlds League, that's why the Mariks import from there themselves, and if we bought from the League, or the Magistracy for that matter, we'd have to pay in germanium and do we really want either of them to know we've got that much of the stuff yet?" she asked rhetorically. "We had no option but to pay in germanium for the industrial plant and machinery we needed to import from them, but we're being careful to spread out our purchases over time, so it looks like we're gradually digging it up, not that we've got warehouses full of the stuff already."
"It's a balancing act certainly, Ma'am" the aide agreed. "It's really just a shame the team of geologists sent to Copernicus to investigate the iron ore deposits discovered there by the initial surveys found they weren't as sizable as first thought."
"Meh, not every system we plant a flag on is going to be a treasure trove of easily extracted mineral wealth" Hollister replied. "It was still important to claim it before someone else did, it's only one jump from AJC after all, same reason we're talking to the people on Stafford."
"Regarding Stafford, the Department of Agriculture is still pushing for us to move the purchase of agricultural robots to a higher priority, and it we can't get any we should build a manufacturing plant for them" the aide told her. "They are adamant that Stafford is a breadbasket world waiting to happen and it's likely Islington will be too further down the road."
"Robots harvesting grain from fields twenty-kilometers across might make for quite the mental image but they'll have to make do with tractors and combine harvesters for a while yet because there is no way we'll be building our own factory for agricultural robots, or any other kind of robots, for a generation." Hollister stated flatly. Niops had hit the ground running when it came to industrial development, but all the infrastructure that would have to be put in place first before they could get to that stage was staggering to contemplate. "Wait. Why were the Department of Agriculture looking at Islington?" she asked, nonplussed. "That's got to be five jumps from here, halfway to freaking Frobisher for Pete's sake!"
"It's closer than Algenib and the people there are actually asking to be made a protectorate, so I can't imagine the High Associator not wanting to raise the Red Cameron Star over them before the next election" the aide supposed. "My guess is that people are just looking at the map and assuming that we're going to claim every system rimward from here all the way to Frobisher any day now."
"And populate them with who exactly" Hollister asked rhetorically, rolling her eyes.
"I doubt they're really considering that particular issue Ma'am" Daniel the aide told her. "At the risk of a little hyperbole people are drawn to dreams of empire and glory. It's the vision thing, aspiring to being something greater than ourselves."
Hollister rolled her eyes to the ceiling. "I blame Olson and his 'Manifest Destiny' schtick" she muttered to herself. "All those speeches about the Niops Association lighting the way to a glorious future for humanity are rotting people's brains. Everyone is losing their freaking perspective and sense of scale" she continued before turning back to look through the viewing window. "We're practically hand-building the future, and that takes a little time" she said drily.
Daniel, the aide, laughed. "Yes. Ma'am." he agreed.
"It's a damn good thing that the SLDF arrived with their own production lines for equipment because I've got no idea how we would have been able to build those ourselves this century" Hollister remarked, only exaggerating a little bit. "If they kick up a fuss about trading their surplus weaponry to the Palatinate maybe we should tell them we need the steel to make all that reinforced concrete they're pushing for."
"That might work, Ma'am." Daniel replied, thinking about it. "It was a pretty smart idea to build their Battlemech factory at the bottom of an old open-cast mine, but it'll need one hell of a second roof on it so it doesn't collapse when they dump a few million tons of backfill on top of it."
"Still a lot quicker and cheaper than digging a bunker complex that size from scratch." Hollister noted. "I'll bet they're looking at all the other mines right now thinking 'budget Castle Brian' or whatever so we'd better make sure they know they can't have them until they're no longer economically viable."
"I heard that someone was talking about maybe using fusion reactors to melt rock into lava and pouring that on top of the first couple of layers of backfill like cement" the aide told her. "Stabilise the whole thing, reduce the load bearing down on the structure and have a shield against orbital strikes and bunker-busters."
Hollister stared at him. "Letting those old guys from the Star League Department of Mega Engineering loose in the university was not the smartest thing we have ever done" she opined. "It's unleashing everyone's inner mad scientist I swear" she said, shaking her head in disbelief. "One sniff of building a secret underground lair surrounded by liquid hot magma and they all start laughing maniacally" she said. "Yes, I know it won't actually still be liquid rock" she added before he could correct her. More like a layer of basalt or similar igneous rock, cooled off and set, maybe several metres deep with more backfill then dumped on top. "How do you get to find out all this stuff anyway?" she asked suspiciously. "You're often better informed than I am."
"Humble minions like myself are wont to talk to humble minions in other departments Ma'am" Daniel explained. "As long as its not actually secret we try and share useful information."
"What do you tell them about me?" Hollister wanted to know.
"Nothing you need to worry about. The occasional hint that you care enough about doing your job that it annoys the crap out of you when people mess with your plans" the aide replied.
"Do you tell anyone how often I moan about the High Associator?"
"No point, everyone knows that already including him." Daniel told her. "It stopped even being interesting gossip when you bawled him out over the Francas investment thing in front of everyone in the council."
"That was a mistake, he cashed in on it by saying that in his administration he welcomed opposing views because in his heart he was still a scientist seeking objective truth, and if your hypothesis cannot stand up to counter-argument then it's a crappy hypothesis." Hollister complained. "My life would be so much easier if he was just a blithering idiot like all too many of his predecessors" she said dejectedly. "If anything the most aggravating part of the whole thing was that he wasn't mad enough about it to hold a grudge."
"I suspect he's wise to any attempts you might make to get yourself replaced by someone else" the aide theorised. He knows you're far too diligent and professional to deliberately screw up so pinning your hopes on an 'irreconcilable personality clash' with the boss might be your escape plan" he said, smiling. "We really should get moving if we want to inspect the new factory complex and still have time to get something to eat before catching the dropship back home though Ma'am" he told her.
"You're probably right on both. Where would I be without you, Daniel?" Hollister asked, smiling back at him.
"Late, Ma'am, you would always be running late." the aide replied. "And you would have to read more of the memos that cross your desk instead of trusting me to only put the important ones in front of you" he added, knowing full-well that she still occasionally checked a few of the others just to make sure he was doing his job properly.
Hollister grimaced. "Why anybody thinks I give enough of a crap to copy me in on what particular jumpship is going where, or recruitment decisions outside my own department, I will never know" she said, bemused as to the logic there. It was oner thing to be a details person but knowing the minutiae of issues outside your own remit was all too rarely useful, at least in government anyway, in science a decent grasp of other fields could pay off on occasion. "I'll say my farewells then we can get going. The VTOL ride should be fun" she said sardonically, the fierce crosswinds that were a constant feature of air travel on Niops V were something that were best avoided if you were a nervous flyer and Hollister wasn't exactly an enthusiastic one.
"It's a little too far to travel by road given how valuable your time is Ma'am" Daniel replied apologetically as she headed for the door.
"Remind me to sign off on building more maglev on this planet." Hollister told him.
"Will do" the aide replied, mentally filing that instruction in the category 'probably not being serious', as he followed her out of the supervisor's office.
----
===Production challenges for the times ahead===
One slightly hair-raising VTOL trip from the Project Workshop facility to a now defunct open-cast mine later Hollister stepped out of the tilt-rotor craft onto the landing pad where she was greeted by a handful of workers, including the man in charge of building the factory there. Hollister was pleasantly surprised to find that down at the bottom of the enormous pit that had been dug into the ground by heavy machinery the air was actually quite still, and she could not help but feel it was a pity that they intended to fill the hole back up eventually.
"Weather's quite decent down here, isn't it?" the engineer in charge observed, seeming to read Hollister's mind somehow. "Reminds you how much nearer the star we are here when you can actually feel the sunlight hitting you, and not just the breeze."
Only calling it a 'breeze' was underplaying the constant prevailing winds here, Hollister thought to herself, but she nodded anyway as she was led towards the manufacturing plant. Basically just a collection of blocky concrete buildings that were entirely lacking in external windows because they were all going to be deep underground eventually. Before they were buried concrete arches would be constructed right over them to support a second roof above the first, this being required so that millions of tons of rock dumped on them from above as back-fill didn't simply squish the factory flat, but they weren't nearly at that stage of construction yet.
Inside the first and largest building the production lines were already taking shape. Most of the engineers and technicians involved were SLDF personnel, rather than the civilians workers of the Project Workshops, and Hollister noted the difference in working environment almost immediately as they seemed to be operating at a near frantic pace.
"Got to get everything finished ahead of schedule" the chief engineer told her. "No point having new BattleMechs rolling off the production line too late to influence the outcome of the war." he stated with quite some authority.
"You're speaking from experience I imagine?" Hollister replied, watching as a crew of engineers were assembling what she thought were a set of giant rollers for some kind of BattleMech-sized conveyor belt.
The chief engineer nodded. "If we'd had the production lines for the Pulverizer, the Stag, and the Mercury II running on Circe a year earlier, hell maybe even only six months, the other Clans would have been a lot more reticent to take us on." he said confidently. "We were the first to got our shit together in terms of new production, excuse my language, but just not soon enough to get meaningful numbers of the new machines in the field before we really needed them."
"We're not exactly short on war material at the moment." Hollister pointed out.
"No, but if the Clans find us in the next five years, or the Free Worlds League invades us, then having a warehouse full of brand-new HSR-250-Dn Hussar mechs and another rolling off the line every two weeks is going to come in handy" the engineer suggested. "With the new laser and the anti-infantry armament, they're good for more than just scouting even if they are a great scout mech."
"Only one BattleMech every two weeks? I thought production was supposed to be faster than that?" Hollister queried, frowning.
"It's not producing the mech itself that's the problem in terms of speeding up production." the engineer told her. "The Guardian ECM system it carries, and the Beagle Active Probe it mounts as well, take a while to put together, they're highly advanced and technically demanding pieces of kit." he said. "We're only lucky that the Mercury II mounted both, so we already had the production lines for them, they're just not capable of turning them out as fast as we would want in a ideal galaxy."
"Somehow I got the impression that the tricky part was the fusion engines?" Hollister responded, frowning.
"The extralight fusion engines used in more advanced Battlemechs like our Hussar are certainly 'tricky' to make, the Successor States were well behind the Hegemony when it came to manufacturing those, but fortunately for us the Stag medium we had in production utilized a 270XL engine that has the same mass and power output as the one needed by our new Hussar so we're just using those." the engineer told her. "The production line for them is next door" he added. "We should be capable of turning out one of those a week once we're operating at full production rates if we need to, the excess ones not needed for the Hussar might come in handy for other purposes."
"Such as?" Hollister asked him, curiously.
"The Royal version of the Phoenix Hawk Battlemech uses a 270XL engine, if we ever want to put those into production at some point and we might because it's a good machine." the engineer told her. "Until then we can also use them to replace the regular 270 fusion engines fitted to our standard model Tomahawk and Ahab aerospace fighters, upgrading them to Royal configurations with more mass available for weaponry and armor" he explained. "They'll even fit into a Highlander assault, but I'm not convinced having more mass for weapons and armor is worth it in that case. XL engines can't take as much punishment as regular ones and the Highlander is supposed to stand there and take it. It can't just run away when things get too hairy like a fighter or a fast mech can."
Hollister nodded, she had heard before that there as a trade-off if you wanted one of the lighter engines in your BattleMech, that being the war machine couldn't take as much abuse before it went down. Mechs with XL engines were sometimes described as 'Glass Cannons' in military parlance, the extra weaponry they could mount meant they could dish it out harder but they couldn't take it nearly as well. "How much of the machine is actually going to be made here?" she asked. "As opposed to being merely assembled from parts made elsewhere?"
"In some ways it's as much assembly as it is manufacture to be honest" the engineer told her. "The endo-steel frame has to be manufactured in a freefall or zero-gee environment, so most of the chassis and limbs are going to be produced at the orbital facility up there and brought down by dropship" he said, pointing upwards. "The fusion engines, myomer muscles and electronics will be made in-house, but armor plate will also be made elsewhere. Another engineering team is putting up a plant that'll produce ferro-fibrous armor in quantity, but I've heard a rumor that they might be running way behind schedule, if they are we might be forced to use standard plate for the first few Hussars that roll out."
Hollister frowned, thinking to herself she should look into that rumor because that was the first she had heard about it. "Weaponry?" she asked, moving on.
"One day they'll all be manufactured at a new armaments factory that will eventually be installed in one of the buildings we're putting up here, but for the foreseeable future we'll be relying on weaponry made elsewhere" the engineer replied. "Once we've upgraded all the mechs belonging to the 295th our existing armaments production capacity will be freed up, and for now we can't really justify having far more capacity to turn out weaponry than we actually have machines to hang it off" he said. "I know there's a debate on whether or not to re-tool the line that makes the Improved Large Laser to make the new model Extended-Range Large Laser instead, or to make a whole new one, but that's not my department."
"I suppose the ability to make spares is the reason why you would want to keep the old line as well?" Hollister asked him.
"That, and I guess if we ever found ourselves needing something to sell to pay the bills the Successor States would offer their first born for them." the engineer replied, grinning. "They might be a generation behind our new toy, but they're still a generation ahead of what everybody but the clans have."
That was certainly worth considering as a long-term investment, Hollister considered. Mothballing rather than re-tooling old production lines so they could be used to make money in the future meant more up-front expenditure right now to replace them entirely, but the pay off in a few years could be truly massive.
They would have to make sure that the qualitative edge over the Successor States remained just as large as it was now of course, or ideally even larger. They weren't just potential future customers they were potential future enemies.
As she was given a tour of the rest of the facility Hollister realized that the reason everything seemed to be going to smoothly here was that the engineers and technicians putting the machinery together were the same ones who had made and assembled it in the first place way back in clan space. Not only that, they were also the people that had taken it all apart again and loaded it onto the ships which had carried it from Circe to Niops.
They all seemed happy in their work too, which largely seemed to be due to the fact that all the bulky equipment weighed noticeably less here than it had the last time they had to hump it around.
----
==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : Niops V is the closest of the three habitable worlds in the Niops System to its star and in canon seems to be the one where the Association maintains most of its industry (Project Workshop III was where Niops manufactured their Nigthhawk powered armor in canon, though not for a couple of centuries). I'm placing Project Workshop I on Niops VII (the most populous world in the system) and Workshop II on Niops VI (seemingly the least populous) with the assumption that you wouldn't want all your eggs in one basket production wise.Project Workship III-A (formerly just III) is currently busily putting together III-B and after that will make III-C and eventually there will also be additional workshops on the other planets too (I-B, II-B etc.). Given how advanced the workshops seemed to be, and the requirement of trained staff to operate them, I'm running with the idea that it'll take about five years to add another new one each time (eventually an A, B, and C Workshop on each planet but that's for decades in the future).The only reason why they can get their version of the Royal Hussar into production this soon is because they already had a production line for a compatible fusion engine (the 270XL used in the Stag) and the ability to manufacture the specialist electronics needed for the Guardian ECM and Beagle Active Probe (both carried by the Mercury II).We saw Samantha Hollister back in Part XIX. She was punished for the competence she demonstrated chairing the Steering Committee by having a job foisted upon her by the High Associator after he won the 2830 election. Every new thing he wants done requires something else to be delayed, robbing Peter to pay Paul as it were, because Niops has limited resources. The Illyrian Palatinate was a fairly major exporter of steel to the Free Worlds League in canon, and quite unique in that the usually isolationist Niops was seeking diplomatic relations with them so they must have been thought of by the Association in a more positive light than most.
----
<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
Chapter 24