GblaRCS Chpt 26

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 26 -==
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"I drive a Crosscut loggermech all week to put food on the table for my family, but my ride at the weekend is a Blackjack to help keep all our families safe."Slogan from a recruitment poster for the Stafford Planetary Guard - 2845CE
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===Talk between soldiers & farmers===
Hartwood Township, Stafford – 2834
Roger Callahan wasn't sure if the majority of the town's population had turned out to watch as a mark of respect, or mostly just out of curiosity, but as his two companies of infantry and one of dismounted mechwarriors brought their rifles and carbines up in salute, and the Star League anthem started to play over a loudspeaker, at least the locals didn't seem to react negatively as the newly adopted flag of the Niops Association Hegemony was slowly raised over their community.
If he was forced to describe Hartwood in one word it would have been 'rustic' thanks in large part to the fact that the vast majority of the buildings here were made of wood, even if a few of them were quite large three-story constructions. Given the easy availability of lumber it was unsurprising that wood was the building material of choice on Stafford, but as a result the place very much resembled the stereotypical periphery backwater, with little more technology on display than you could have seen on Terra more than a thousand years ago.
There was a certain amount of mining going on up in the mountains yonder, Callahan knew, and a few small-scale industries had been established to supply low-tech farming, logging and mining equipment, but considering that their ancestors had arrived here in interstellar spacecraft it was hard to deny that Stafford had seen its technological level slide more than a little over the years.
They hadn't been completely ignorant of events in the wider galaxy before dropships from the Niops Association started arriving regularly in the last few years. Once or twice a decade a wandering JumpShip had turned up looking for trade, not to raid, and they knew from them that the Star League had fallen and the Successor States had subsequently plunged the Inner Sphere into the bloodiest war in human history, so on that basis a little forced isolation wasn't a bad thing they considered. As they had gradually regressed from computers to incandescent lightbulbs powered by waterwheels being as advanced as their society got however some pining for a long-lost 'Golden Age' of less back-breaking laboring in the fields, and more microwave ovens in the kitchen, was perhaps inevitable. 
As the flag reached the top of the pole a squadron of aerospace fighters hurtled overhead providing their own salute, keeping their speed below Mach 1 for the sake of both the windows in the town and everyone's hearing. Simultaneously pulled up into a steep climb as they cleared the town, accelerating off into the stratosphere and finally going supersonic once they were far enough away for that to be safe, a few people clapped and cheered which was at least encouraging.
Roger Callahan cleared his throat and took a deep breath before he began his speech. "By the lawful decree of High Associator Giles Olson and the Governing Council of Niops, by the authority invested in me by the Star League Defense Force, and with the agreement of the free people of Stafford" he began, "As of this date I hereby declare this system a protectorate of the Niops Association and its native population as Hegemony citizens from this time forward" he said grandly, hoping that he didn't look and sound as much of an officious, self-important idiot as he felt like he did standing in front of all these thousands of people in his dress uniform, a sword hanging by his side. "And now, as the people of Stafford joins those of Niops, Comstock, Francas, Algenib, Copernicus and Frobisher in becoming Hegemony citizens, living safe and free under the Cameron Star, I ask all present to offer a silent prayer to the God, or Gods, you may worship to watch over us all as we continue to expand outwards, bringing the light of civilisation, progress and the rule of law to those living under the shadow of tyranny, barbarity and ignorance."
It wasn't the speech he might have written for himself. It frankly had the fingerprints of Giles Olson all over it as the man loved this kind of phrasing, but enough people in the crowd bowed their heads at this juncture for Callahan to think it hadn't been too overblown and heavy on bombastic sentiment.
Getting the people of Hartwood onside in recent months by building them a school and delivering a half-dozen farm tractors and a combine harvester had certainly paid dividends, as a similar approach had done previously on Alphard and Comstock. The one slight difference in approach on Stafford was gifting a couple of dozen chainsaws to each of the larger logging camps too, while dangling the possibility of maybe even handing over a Loggermech or two later if the lumberjacks supported Stafford signing up for this 'Hegemony' thing. 
Winning hearts and minds was also the reason that for the flag-raising ceremony they had laid on a massive barbeque for afterwards, with meat imported from Francas and beer from one of the newly expanded breweries on Alphard. Whether it tipped the balance as regards local public opinion was in question, but it most likely boosted their attendance by quite a lot. The smell of burgers, hog roast and fried chicken drifting across the town square was certainly making Roger Callahan himself feeling pretty positive about how the day was going so far, as well as making him salivate. 
In order not to appear too intimidating Callahan had left his BattleMechs loaded aboard the battalion dropship that had set down in a clearing a couple of kilometres out of town, but after checking with the town mayor he would likely march them around later just to remind everyone why becoming a protectorate was a good thing. The next bunch of pirates that attempted to raid Stafford would soon come to regret their choice of victim as the SLDF was always looking for an opportunity to relieve some peacetime boredom, and more importantly get some use out of the mountain of unused war-materiel they had to justify the government paying for.
Hartwood Township was the largest city on Stafford, with a population well into the double-digit thousands if you included the farming communities and logging camps nearby that supplied it, but that had meant it had historically also been the subject of the most attention from various bands of scum with a JumpShip and a few BattleMechs to their name. Most of the other communities on the planet were village sized at best, although there were a good number of them so their combined population was larger than lived in the Niops system as a whole.
Smaller communities were less attractive for pirate raids, not much to steal, not many people to take as slaves and not as easy to spot from the air. It was thought likely that the presence of a permanent SLDF garrison would lead to greater urbanization across the planet in the future, but that cultural inertia would see Hartwood itself, the de facto planetary capital and the hub of interstellar trade, expanding first and to the greatest degree.
Persuading the population that they weren't pirates had taken the first survey teams that visited Stafford quite a considerable amount of time, effort and careful diplomacy. In one case a gunship VTOL that was being used to scout some forested hills had even been shot at by a bunch of farmers with old hunting rifles, presumably trying to scare them off thinking they were pirates. After a couple of rounds bounced off the armored canopy the gunship had turned back and hovered above them, the pilot on the loudspeaker patiently asking them to knock it off as they continued to fire at her tilt-rotor combat aircraft ineffectually.
Eventually, the pilot's patience exhausted, the gunship had turned its 30mm autocannon on a nearby grove of trees and blasted them to kindling with a long burst, ordering the farmers to surrender whereupon the panicked farmers immediately threw down their guns and did so as the cannon swung in their direction instead.
The pilot had then landed the VTOL, walked over to the farmers and angrily told them not to do that again, especially not to anything wearing the Red Cameron Star insignia, before getting back in her aircraft, complaining on the loudspeaker about trigger-happy hillbillies with no sense of self-preservation as she flew off.
Most encounters with the locals involved a lot less shooting fortunately, and the appearance of a VTOL in the sky above soon became a welcome sight across Stafford. The extreme number of small and widely scattered settlements that were spread over the main continent had made building a medical clinic in each of them simply unavailable, Niops just didn't have sufficient personnel or all the required medical equipment to spare, but fortunately someone had a bright idea on how to solve the issue.
A couple of old Cobra transport VTOLs that once belonged to the NAM had each been fitted out with a small clinic and operating theater in the cargo bay, which along with a high-tech Eligus Medical Diagnoser and a trio of medical personnel could handle most medical issues. The VTOLs would fly around visiting each settlement every few weeks to provide basic clinical care and check-ups, and in case of emergencies a settlement could radio for urgent help.
Although not the fastest machines in the sky the Cobra's had unlimited range thanks to their fusion power plants, and they could set down most anywhere making them a good choice for the job. The SLDF had actually used a version of the very same machine for casualty evacuation where they were attached to a MASH unit, and Callahan pondered that could have been what gave someone the idea for a flying surgical and medical team flitting about the Stafford skies in the first place.
Considering how little it actually cost to run the service in the big scheme of thing it was probably the most cost-effective means Niops had yet devised to get the population of a world the Association wanted to raise the Hegemony flag over to freely agree. It also looked good in the press back home as feel-good stories in the newspapers about the Association being out there saving lives as it restored civilization one world at a time made the voters, and hence the politicians, very happy.
The appeal of Stafford to the Niops Association was due to it being a very green world, offering something that Alphard most certainly did not, a potentially massive agricultural surplus. Much of the planet's surface was covered by forest and grassland, with only a few sparse patches of desert terrain and a small quantity of tundra near the poles unsuitable for farming. It was a generally pleasant world to live on too, orbiting a G type yellow dwarf that greatly resembled Sol in the Terran system and with similar gravity to the homeworld of humanity as well. Oceans covered around two-thirds of the surface, although the native fish were not regarded as particularly appetising so Terran species would need to be imported if they wanted to develop a large-scale fishing industry here as well as agriculture.
Stafford also greatly resembled Terra in climate, not so much the climate of Terra during the present Holocene era that had lasted since the last glacial period however, but rather Terra during the latter part of the Eocene epoch some thirty million years ago. It was some eight degrees warmer than modern-day Terra at the equator, with the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere several times higher than they had been there even before the development of fusion power had helped clean up the environment.
Warm weather with decent levels of annual rainfall across much of the planet and a goodly amount of CO2 to absorb made Stafford a veritable paradise for plant life, practically a planet-scale greenhouse. Plough up some grassland, or clear a few hectares of native forest, and you could plant most any crop and reap a good harvest for yourself.
It was so suitable for human colonization that it was a wonder why the total population of Stafford III was only slightly larger than that of Alphard IV, despite it being so much more hospitable than that arid world. There were far less pleasant planets that were much further out from the Inner Sphere than Stafford which had vastly greater numbers of people living there by the early 29th Century that only an unlikely chain of events could explain it. Events which had, of course, actually transpired.
Jumpships belonging to the Free Worlds League exploring outwards into the periphery, looking for new worlds to eventually colonize as the Mariks gradually expanded their borders, had actually come across Stafford as early as the 2390s. Unfortunately, in 2398 the Capellan Confederation invaded Andurien, then part of the Free Worlds League, an event that is generally regarded as being the start of the Age of War that kept the Mariks and every other Great House far too busy fighting each other to devote as much of their resources towards outwards expansion as they had previously.
A century and a half of near continuous interstellar warfare later the Age of War had eventually ground to a halt, although as much because of Terran Hegemony diplomatic efforts as it was because the Great Powers had been struck by the sudden realization that decade after decade of fighting had not really gotten them anywhere so far and that was unlikely to change anytime soon.
After the formation of the Star League in 2570, the Free Worlds League had started to expand outwards again, though resources devoted to the Reunification War of 2577 to 2597 and the costs incurred by rebuilding efforts afterwards did hamper this somewhat, and it might have come to pass that Stafford would have been colonized by the Mariks during the 27th century if not for another development, this one technological rather than political.
The invention of the Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier in 2622 made hundreds, if not thousands of previously uninhabitable worlds already within the borders of the Great Powers of the Inner Sphere suddenly viable for colonization. Why keep pushing out into the periphery to found new colonies when you could establish them right on your own doorstep only a jump or two away from systems you already had? It already took months to travel from one side of the Free Worlds League to the other, and shorter supply lines and trade routes were cheaper and more profitable, so it was only good economics after all.
Someone eventually did land settlers on Stafford III, which is why it had a name on the maps rather than a number and of course why there were people there already when scouts from the Niops Association first got there. However the founders had arrived only a couple of decades before the New Vandenberg Uprising of 2765 had plunged the entire periphery into war, cutting them off from civilization and any further waves of colonists.
From what Roger Callahan had heard the story was much the same for Islington, another periphery world with breathable air, good soil and a benign climate itself situated about half-way between Niops and Frobisher. Both Stafford and Islington could have been established breadbasket worlds with large populations by now if events had turned out different, but that they weren't was only good for Niops because it meant nobody had planted a flag on them yet.
His orders from headquarters were to mingle and play nice with the locals, and so after all the formalities, which included a speech by the town mayor that was about five times as long as his own had been, Colonel Roger Callahan put on his best smile and plate of barbecue in hand he mixed with the crowd making conversation. After showing off a few BattleMechs later, and maybe giving a few kids a ride inside an APC or on top of a tank, the infantry and the mechwarriors were planning to take each other on in a softball competition before it started to get dark which should make for good entertainment. The locals might not play the sport themselves, but they would surely be able to tell that both sides really wanted to win, hopefully drawing a decent-sized crowd of spectators.
Contact and survey teams had been visiting Stafford for a few years now, it was less than twenty lightyears further out from the Niops Association than Alphard was after all, and with the exception of a few backwoods types the populace tended to regard them with interest rather than intrigue these days which was not to say they didn't voice doubts when they were told something that sounded deeply implausible.
"When you say you fought against Amaris you mean your unit right? Not you yourself personally?" a young farmer who had come into town for the ceremony said in response to Callahan mentioning how the 11th Army had liberated Moscow from the Rim Worlds Republic Army back in 2777.
"No, I was there." Callahan replied honestly, though if pressed for details he would have to lie and say he was with the 295th flanking to the south, rather than with the 331st assaulting the city directly from the north.
"Bullshit, you can't be older than what, forty-five?" the farmer replied dubiously.
"I'm seventy-five." Callahan replied, grinning. "I've got kids in their late forties." he told the farmer, wondering if it would look greedy if he went back and got some more fried chicken.
"He's Terran, they live forever." someone else interjected. "Special drugs they never let anyone else have."
"They weren't available outside the Terran Hegemony, but Stafford is part of the Niops Association Hegemony now so you're one of us, not one of them now." Callahan responded. "Once we've reinvented the treatments, and can mass produce them cheaply enough for all, we're going to offer them to people on every world with our flag flying over it" he said, nodding towards the flagpole. "I'd better warn you that they only works if you get them when you're a kid, so don't start thinking you're going to get a jab one day and live another fifty years because of it" he told them apologetically.
"Why does it only work on kids?" the farmer wanted to know.
"Partially to do with telomeres I think, you'll need to talk to someone smarter and better educated than me to explain it all to you properly though" Callahan replied. "Not really my field of expertise, I shoot holes in people that are a lot larger than a needle makes for a living" he added with a grin.
"How much are you people going to charge for that?" someone asked suspiciously.
"Nothing" Callahan told him. "Don't go thinking that's it's entirely altruistic though, if you're healthy another fifty or more years then you're also working and paying taxes another fifty or more years, so from that standpoint it's a great investment" he said. "Most people on Niops that weren't born on Terra like I was get to retire at my age with a pension, I'm not eligible for mine until I'm a hundred and twenty-five."
"No such thing as a free lunch I guess" the farmer remarked.
"Technically you're all eating one right now" Callahan joked.
The farmer smirked. "Are we? I'll bet you want something in return" he suggested. He didn't like the sound of these 'taxes' but if you actually got something back from the government to show for what they took off you that wasn't too bad.
"Maybe you're right" Callahan conceded. "We need Stafford to help us feed people on worlds where it's a lot more difficult to grow food, like your neighbours Alphard and Copernicus" he said. "We'll provide the tools needed to help you do that but it's a two-way-street, Alphard can provide the raw materials to feed industrial growth and you can feed the workers in their mines and factories. Working together we can make everyone better off. It's not just doing the morally right thing to help each other out, it's enlightened self-interest too, working together we can build a better future. One that none of us could manage to achieve alone" he said. "Niops is probably the only world apart from Terra itself that hasn't regressed technologically in the last half-century, but we don't have the numbers or resources to make that really count, we all need each other to make this Hegemony thing work."
"Plenty of folks say you aren't to be trusted still." the farmer observed.
"I don't doubt it. But ask yourself why we're going about this the hard way instead of just making you all do what we want with BattleMechs and orbital bombardment." Callahan replied. "We could take the food you grow by force instead of paying for it."
"So why don't you?"
"Because we're not ******" Callahan explained earnestly. "There's more than enough of them already without us joining in. I know it seems like a radical notion these days, but the galaxy might actually benefit from a little more cooperation and a lot less confrontation" he suggested. "It's not that weird an idea is it surely?" he asked rhetorically.
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===Talk of trade and trees===
"I heard someone say that you're moving people from Comstock to Alphard to work in mines and factories there?" another person asked, their tone indicating they possibly thought that was a forced transfer of labor and Callahan was full of it.
"More like we offered a good wage and they queued up to board the dropship." Callahan replied honestly, smiling. "Most of them signed a five-year contract, earn enough cash to go back home and build a house" he said. "Niops money is good, the paper money is backed by germanium like the Star League Dollar was, and we're minting gold and silver coins now too that you can spend in places that don't take paper money" he told them. "I spent some time on Comstock myself, you were lucky that you weren't as dependant on food imports as they were when the Star League fell and everyone in the Inner Sphere started slaughtering each other" he said with a sigh. "It's taking us a while to help them put their society back together, it kind-of collapsed when most of the supply shipments stopped coming and if it wasn't for Francas continuing to send them as much refrigerated meat as they could, hundreds of thousands more people would have starved to death. They're good people on Francas, hardworking ranchers that look out for each other, good meat from there too" he added, picking up a chicken leg from his plate and taking a bite out of it.
"That was darned neighborly of them," an older man observed. "Sending food to Comstock I mean."
Callahan swallowed the chicken in his mouth and nodded. "It's always nice to see that just because the Great Houses are selfish jerks that there's still some people that actually do give a shit about their fellow man." he agreed. "If we weren't so worried about the Marik's turning up in Niops one day and doing to us what they did to the rest of the Terran Hegemony we'd have turned up here to say howdy decades ago, but after what they did to Brownsville, New Dallas and other places we thought it was better to keep our heads down. At least until we were strong enough to fend them off" he told them, sticking firmly to the cover story. "You guys aren't worth a full-scale invasion, neither is Alphard, Comstock or Francas for that matter, but we are because we've got more advanced technology than them. Tech that's worth stealing or just blowing all-to-hell to stop someone else stealing it first."
"I thought you had some old SLDF warships to defend yourself with already though?" someone queried.
"A couple of destroyers and a frigate might be enough to scare a pirate band shitless, but the Free Worlds League and the rest started the First Succession War with over a hundred warships each and we don't know how many they still have, we've got to assume dozens to play it safe." Callahan replied with a shrug. "Just telling them we were neutral wasn't going to get us left in peace. We needed enough nukes stockpiled to convince them they sure as hell didn't want to stick their dicks into our hornet's nest" he said laughing, his language a little more salty and coarse than it usually was with civilians because he had noticed the locals often swore a lot themselves.
The people nearby listening all laughed along with him. "My pappy always said you can get further with a two-by-four and a kind word than you can with just a kind word." a farm-hand agreed.
"Mine used to say that when you've got them by the balls their hearts and minds soon follow" the Town Mayor interjected approaching to join them with a grin on his face.
"Sir" Callahan greeted him. "Tried the food?" he asked.
"I have, as well as some of that fine ale from Alphard, even if it tastes a mite different from ours." the Mayor replied, a few people making room for him to stand closer to Callahan.
"Different grain, they grow a lot of something called fonio because it doesn't mind drier soils than barley or wheat." Callahan explained. "You'll probably make good money exporting thirstier kinds of crops to them as their population increases, most of their planet is dry as a bone so they have to be careful what they grow."
You couldn't feed an entire planet with imported food of course, not unless it had a small population anyway because even a Star Lord JumpShip hauling half-a-dozen Mule cargo dropships could only carry about fifty-thousand tons of cargo per round trip, but a world or two producing an export surplus would certainly help with temporary shortfalls elsewhere.
With enough irrigation projects Alphard could potentially sustain a population in the low single-digit billions, orders of magnitude more than it did now. This however would require most of the northern continents there to be turned into arable farmland, an infrastructure project which would take decades to complete even if there was the manpower and heavy equipment needed to get it done, which there wasn't. If they could import enough food from Stafford to temporarily feed say another million or so workers on Alphard for a few years on the other hand, they wouldn't just be able to staff all the mines and factories the High Associator was dreaming of, they could actually turn the planet into a populous industrial powerhouse able to feed itself.
"One of your survey teams suggested we might want to grow cotton for export, that needs plenty of water, rice, sugarcane and soybeans too." the mayor told him. "Not that there won't be plenty of call for wheat or maze I guess."
"I like tropical fruits so make sure to grow plenty of those too." Callahan suggested, "Niops really doesn't have the climate for those. Most of the fruit we grow back home has to come from greenhouses heated by geothermal power and lit by UV lamps because we just don't get much sunlight."
"Yeah, we noticed a lot of you people were pale like ghosts when they first started to visit." the mayor told him. "At first we thought it was because you had been cooped up in spaceships for months or years on end, but then we found out we were only three weeks away from where you come from and it just never gets bright there, even at midday."
"There a good reason why you'll find more people living around stars like yours up there, rather than ones like ours, even though there's ten red dwarfs like Niops in the galaxy for every Yellow Dwarf like Stafford." Callahan replied drily. "There's no such thing as a bright summer's day and it depresses the hell out of you if you were born and raised somewhere else like I was" he said. "Doesn't bother my youngest, he's coming up eighteen and doesn't really know how nice it is to spend time outside somewhere like this instead" he added, looking up at a bright blue sky instead of a dim red one.
"How many kids have you got, Colonel?" the mayor asked him.
"Five, oldest two have kids of their own and it don't matter if I look younger than I am, the first time one of them called me 'Grandpa' I swear I felt ****** ancient." Callahan said with a grimace, a few people laughing at his expression of dismay.
There was a good reason why Roger Callahan was assigned to these jobs where making nice with the locals was required. It wasn't just that he had decades of command experience and could think on his feet, Callahan was amiable and friendly with a relaxed manner that made it easy for people to get on with him.
If the SLDF ever wanted to provoke a war with someone they would send the abrasive Colonel Jax Benedict instead. It paid to have a diverse group of senior officers to choose from.
"Someone said you've got no trees on Niops?" a man that seemed to be a lumberjack from his build and clothes asked Callahan curiously. "That true?"
"Used to be until we got hold of some from another system with a star not that much hotter than ours that we're just starting to grow now." Callahan replied. "It'll take a while though, too cold for them to grow near as fast as they do here."
The lumberjack nodded his understanding. "Best timber for construction here comes from up in the mountains where it's colder." he noted. "Slower means tighter grain and denser, stronger timber than for the exact same species of tree down here closer to sea level" he said professionally.
"Algenib has some decent forests, not massive like yours it's a bit cooler and drier than here, but I liked it there." Callahan told him. "Reminded me of climbing trees as a little kid on Terra."
"Their trees look like ours?" the lumberjack asked.
"It's surprising how much alike trees on different planets actually look" Callahan confirmed, recalling how the Circean Oaks that grew in profusion in the forests around Great Hope had been named that because of just how much the alien tree resembled oak trees back on Terra.
The lumberjack nodded. "Convergent evolution" he explained. "Plants everywhere finding the same solution for the same problem of surviving in a certain ecological niche." he said, the man surprising Callahan with his depth of scientific understanding. "Learned about it in school," he said. "Did you know that the Horse Chestnut tree on Terra is more closely related to broccoli than it is the Sweet Chestnut tree?" he asked rhetorically. 
"Really?" Callahan replied, raising his eyebrows.
"Yup" the lumberjack confirmed. "Convergent evolution." he said once more. "Like how dolphins, sharks and ichthyosaurs on Terra all ended up the same shape eventually, even though they all evolved from completely different species."
"Yeah, I knew that one, never heard the broccoli thing before though so thanks for that." Callahan said, smiling.
"Don't go thinking that because we don't have fancy holographic televisions that we're all ignorant rednecks Colonel" the mayor interjected, deciding that this was a good opportunity for him to make a point. "We never stopped teaching our kids science here, we just couldn't maintain the industrial base needed to keep making all the fancy toys that you could."
"Fair enough, Mr. Mayor." Colonel Roger Callahan responded, mentally reassessing his view on the people of Stafford and other colonies that had technologically regressed. "But trust me on this, if you think owning a holographic television is a mark of an advanced, sophisticated society then you've never watched some of the crap the gameshow channel broadcasts back home on Niops." he told the man in all seriousness.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : According to Handbook: Major Periphery States the planet Stafford is one of the breadbasket worlds of the Marian Hegemony, along with Islington and New Venice, which indicates that it's considerably more hospitable than most colonized worlds. Since it doesn't have a Romanesque name I'm assuming it had a decent sized population even before Imperator Johann O'Reilly turned up and added the world to his growing empire, but it wasn't present on the star maps before him so it couldn't have been particularly developed.Mostly for the sake of novelty on my part while Stafford is much like Terra, in terms of climate it's like Terra during the late Eocene rather than it is today (hotter, more humid and with a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere so plants love it).Having most of the people on Stafford living in small scattered communities seems like one way to avoid dealing with too many pirate raids but it made it difficult for Niops to help each one. On Alphard where most everybody lives in the same part of the planet (the cooler parts of the Northern continents) it was easy to make medical care available to most everyone, simply by setting up hospitals and clinics in a few locations everyone could reach, but that wasn't so easy on Stafford hence the Flying Doctor service in their Cobra VTOL aircraft. The Eligus Medical Diagnoser was a technological miracle of the Golden Age of the Star League (and it's a lot more portable than all the equipment it replaced).Alien trees looking much like trees on Earth on sci-fi shows doesn't require near as much suspension of belief as some may think (the Horse Chestnut being more closely related to broccoli than it is the Sweet Chestnut is apparently true, convergent evolution at work).Stafford will export lumber as well as food to other worlds in the new Hegemony. You can fell a lot more trees in a short space of time with a Crosscut loggermech than you can with a chainsaw (or especially an axe) and as a bonus your part-time weekend warriors in the Planetary Guard get in plenty of cockpit time during their day jobs.And finally, as the Niops Association Hegemony nears the day that it reveals itself to the wider galaxy by reestablishing HPG contact here's the flag they're raising over their member worlds beforehand.
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