GblaRCS Chpt 20

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 20 -==
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"The only thing that frightens badly-trained infantry more than a thirty-ton BattleMech running towards them at over a hundred and fifty kph, fifty-cal machine guns blazing away and breathing fire, is when the damn thing just blew up their APC with a freaking great laser cannon first."Major Marcelo Gao - 2836CE
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===Live Fire on a Remote Island===
Reykjanes Island - Niops VII – 2830
One advantage to living on a planet that was slightly larger than Terra, but barely had the population of a small city, was that when you requested a piece of land to conduct live-fire exercises on the government response was to ask whether an unpopulated island roughly the size of the Indian Subcontinent would be enough, or was that too small for the intended purpose?
General Jenna Romanov wasn't sure if they interpreted 'live fire exercises' as being that they thought the SLDF would be testing multi-megaton yield thermonuclear devices or something, but she had the presence of mind just to nod and say that would be fine as she found herself with four million square kilometers to do with whatever she felt like.
Situated halfway around the world from the capital, although fortunately at roughly the same latitude so it wasn't the frozen wasteland Niops VII was nearer the poles, an active chain of volcanoes ran across the island like a spine, the older extinct ones snow-capped and the remainder a little too hot at the summit for that. One of the latter kind was currently erupting in the far distance, providing a somewhat epic backdrop to the rows of Battlemechs, and the dropships that brought them there that lined up across an ancient lava field that Romanov had chosen for the exercise that day. "If the Army Corps of Engineers ever finishes their ever-expanding list of high priority projects we should build a permanent base here, maybe even a budget Castle Brian." Romanov observed to Franklin Hallis as they walked along the first row of mechs together.
It was a rather impromptu parade of the two full regiments assembled in ranks. After the general officers had made their informal inspection the units would separate into two teams and head for the where they would start from for the exercise. With six battalions involved the exercise would cover a pretty large area, which was why Romanov and Hallis would be observing proceedings from a VTOL overhead rather than from the ground.
Colonel Hermann Bostick would be commanding the regiment formed of mechwarriors from the 331st. Formerly the commanding officer of the 102nd Strike Cluster, part of Clan Wolverine's old Beta Galaxy, he wanted to climb the ladder demonstrating that he should be put on the fast-track for promotion to Brigadier-General by obtaining a quick decisive win over the regiment from the 295th, itself commanded by one Colonel Alexi Kaempen. For his part, Kaempen was too old and frankly a little too jaded to care much about getting to wear a shiny star on his collar, he only wanted to show that his people still had plenty of fight left in them and to not let down either the Blue Star Division or General Romanov herself.
"Maybe we build a little further away from the volcanoes than this though." Hallis suggested wryly, looking over towards the eruption. The sky on Niops was a dull red at the best of times, and despite it approaching mid-day all that ash spewing into the sky, and the glow of distant lava flows was making the whole place look as ominous as some kind of apocalyptic Swords and Sorcery style fantasy movie. It was a reminder of why Niops utilized geothermal energy as well as fusion reactors to power their society. Dig down deep enough anywhere on the planet and you would soon find out what effect the star's gravity was having on the planet's molten core as it tried to tidally lock Niops VII as it already had all the other worlds orbiting it.
"It's a big enough island that we don't have to worry about the whole place going Krakatoa on us." Romanov replied. "I hope you told your people not to go easy on mine just because they've hardly worn a neurohelmet in half-a-century?" she checked. "The whole point of this exercise is to let them know just how much they've forgotten."
"No, Ma'am." Hallis responded, shaking his head. "They all know they're supposed to put aside any respect they might have for their elders and give them a whupping" he told her. "If these boys and girls get back up to speed as fast as your other people did who fought on Algenib then the rustiness shouldn't last too long though."
Romanov laughed. "The youngest of them is past seventy-five, so I'm not sure calling them 'boys and girls' is an accurate description" she observed, "but it was nice to get the chance to prove the adage that old warhorses can still kick ass" she said. "This all remind of one of your clan trials a little, does it?" she asked curiously.
"They were rarely fought on anything like this scale, no more than a handful of mechs per side was the norm" Hallis replied. "Plus of course we didn't use dialed-down lasers and training rounds in the autocannons" he said, smiling. "Nicky K treated it all like a sport, or a game, but it was played for keeps."
Romanov stopped next to a Flashman heavy, one that had arrived from Buffalo Meadows on the Ulithi and had yet to be either upgraded or re-painted with the Red Cameron Star. "I've been thinking about that, the notion of a military force that are all shit-hot mech-jocks like they've come straight out of the Gunslinger Program but they don't train for combined-arms operations and they don't train for large-scale engagements" she said, looking thoughtful. "Once we've gotten both expeditionary brigades put together we should probably think about running annual, or even bi-annual training exercises, pitting them against each other. Three regiments of mechs, two armored cavalry regiments and an artillery regiment per side."
"Most of the clans don't favor artillery that much, so in some of those exercises we might want to have one of the brigades running as an OPFOR without that kind of support" Hallis suggested. "A lot of their aerospace fighter jocks lean heavily towards the honorable 'Knights of the Sky' thing too, training much harder for air-superiority missions than they ever do ground support, so that's something else to consider."
Romanov nodded. "It's a pity we can't just adopt a military doctrine aimed specifically at countering clanner tactics, and specialize towards that aim, because we have to plan to take on the militaries of the Great Houses too" she said regretfully.
Hallis smiled. "The Great Houses fight smart, well most of them do, but have bad gear and the clans fight dumb but have good gear." he observed. "Guess we're going to have to be the ones to show them both what an army that fights smart with good gear can do."
"On the subject of good gear the prototype of that new model Hussar should be ready for testing soon." Romanov said, starting to walk again. "I was surprised at how quickly your engineers and technicians managed to get it done considering it was practically hand-built apart from the endo-steel skeleton."
"We were still mostly hand-building mechs not long before Klondike" Hallis replied. "If you've built a Devastator from scratch like the one over there a Hussar doesn't seem too daunting a project." he said, pointing to the towering assault 'mech a couple of hundred meters away. "If we ever put those things into serial production we're going to need to come up with a good cover story as to how we got the plans, because all the prototypes left with Exodus. Maybe something like the SLDF sent out back-up copies of the blueprints to Niops at the start of the Amaris War for safekeeping?" he suggested, thinking about it.
"Less suspicious than us suddenly producing a brand-new type of assault mech from scratch anyway." Romanov observed, "even if it's not a Pulverizer." she said, smiling. "You're still leaning towards the idea that we should choose the DVS-2 as our heavy assault once we're at the stage of expanding the army?" she asked.
Hallis nodded. "It just makes sense in terms of the image we're going to be trying to project." he replied. "The Niops Association as the continuation of the Terran Hegemony and the Star League, but not just stuck in the past" he said. "The Devastator would have been the SLDF's next big thing if the Star League hadn't fallen. That, the Rifleman II and probably an Atlas III if Kerensky Senior was still calling the shots."
Romanov chuckled. "Oh, we'd be on the Atlas IV by now at least. He really loved the look of those things, like a gigantic anthropomorphic personification of death wearing a bulky suit of armor instead of a black cloak" she said. "You can't imagine how surprised I was that he had the corpse of Stefan Amaris cryogenically frozen and given to that university, rather than using his skull as a paperweight."
"If he loved them that much I wonder why he commissioned the Devastator as well." Hallis remarked. The BattleMech had been specifically designed according to his own specifications, albeit to replace the flawed Titan rather than his beloved Atlas.
"Two gauss rifles and a pair of PPCs have their own charms." Romanov observed, smiling. "Not that you people didn't look at that and think 'undergunned' did you?" she asked rhetorically.
"Swapping out the PPCs for ERPPCs for the ones we made for Klondike just made sense?" Hallis replied. "Same range on all the primary weaponry." he explained the thinking. "Later swapping out the ERPPCs for our Enhanced ERPPCs once we had them was just as obvious an upgrade, and it also means that while the Atlas may look like death incarnate, at long range our model of the Devastator actually is death incarnate" he boasted and not without justification. The big assault mech mounted four long-range weapons, all of which could blow another mech's head off with one shot if it managed to score a hit there. Trying to take one on at its preferred engagement range was therefore just an astonishingly bad idea, even if you were big and mean enough to survive the sheer battering it could inflict on you for a while. Eventually it might get lucky and end you there and then, and the ****** thing had four chances every salvo to get lucky.
It would be years before they had the spare production capability to even consider putting something like the Devastator into mass production of course, more's the pity. Thanks to that treasure trove of refined germanium discovered on Alphard the budget was available to make it feasible to start turning out the new model of Hussar soon, and maybe also the Blackjack for garrison duties if they could get the blueprints and sign a licensing agreement for its production, but they weren't going to be making any new heavies and assaults until the end of the decade at the earliest.
Given that it was likely going to take another three to four years just to upgrade all the Battlemechs and aerospace fighters they already had with improved weaponry, a considerably more cost-effective means of increasing SLDF firepower than building new machines anyway, it was hard to argue the point with the bean counters.
Realistically, the two new expeditionary brigades, the off-world garrison troops and the Niops Association Militia was more than adequate a military force to defeat anything short of a full-scale invasion by the Free Worlds League or the Clans. With another three whole regiments of Battlemechs being mothballed as an emergency reserve, they could even absorb fairly severe battlefield losses and still be able to put a very formidable army in the field for round two of any conflict.
Of course, since the SLDF wasn't going to keeping every BattleMech it had in active service that meant they found themselves with a surplus of mechwarriors, hence the training exercise of the day. A lot of the old soldiers of the 295th who thought they were going to get their old jobs back were going to be disappointed, and it would hopefully help them accept the situation if they could be shown, not just told, that they weren't as sharp as they used to be.
Even with Terran Hegemony anti-agathics, a man or woman near a century old did not have the reaction times they had when they were in their thirties.
"The latest report from the R&D people seemed promising" Romanov commented as they passed by a Royal Sentinel, the gauss rifle mounted where the medium mech's left arm should be always making the thing look more than a little ungainly and lopsided. "I'm not sure if I would have prioritized some of the things they did, but at least we should be ready for the next round of upgrades by the time all my machines are up to your spec."
Hallis frowned. "Anything in particular you're querying, research wise?" he asked.
"Well, better flamers and machine guns for a start" Romanov explained her comment. "It's not like we're not already well equipped to do horrible things to infantry."
"Oh, that just because the clans already had those in advanced prototype before we left, so it's something we could get to the production stage faster than we could with something complicated and finicky like better pulse lasers with more range." Hallis explained. "They're really going to help with the new model Hussar anyway, they're light enough that we can hang a couple of machine guns and a flamer on the thing, as well as the new model ER Large Laser replacing the old one, so we'll get more use out of them than just scouting."
Jenna Romanov thought about that and then suddenly laughed out loud. "Did you know that the Hussar was originally supposed to be an anti-infantry mech?" she asked.
"No." Hallis replied honestly.
"Well, it was. Back when I was an officer cadet, that was when 'mechs ran on coal and targeting computers were clockwork." she joked, "I read an article about the development of the thing because I had the notion that I might be easier to get a place in a Royal Division if I said I always wanted to ride a HSR-200-Db, knowing that most people didn't because of the Hussar's rep. After not achieving the required specs they just decided to make it a reconnaissance platform instead." Romanov told him. "You've managed to achieve the original design goals by accident without making it a worse scout."
"It's even a better machine in a fight against other lights as well" Hallis noted, smiling. "The new laser has more range, and we might be able to increase the armor by another half-ton too" he continued. "It'll have the speed to keep out of range while still getting in its own hits, and unlike those Jackrabbit mechs with peashooter AC/2s we ran into on Algenib it'll do more than just annoy what it's shooting at, they'll feel it."
Romanov nodded her agreement. It was no eERPPC, but she had seen the prototype of the new laser being tested and it definitely brought the hurt. "If there was ever a mech that needed more armor it's the Hussar" she stated with absolute certainty. The original model boasted a mere ton-and-a-half of armor, which could make riding around in one practically suicidal, hence the bad rep. The Royal version upped that to a considerably less horrifying five-and-a-half tons, and if the new model raised that to a full six it would actually have four-times the armor of the original machine.
They might even have to change the unofficial motto of mechwarriors that rode a Hussar; Live fast, die young and leave a badly mangled corpse.
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===Aerial Tour of the Live Fire Exercise===
"You mentioned the old Gunslinger program just now, I know some of your people went through it, maybe any of them that don't make the cut to still do the job can teach it instead?" Hallis suggested.
"More of my people went through it than most did in units that weren't Royal." Romanov confirmed. "A lot of that was down to Leigh MacArthur and her quest to get us our fancy title back. That and transferring anyone out of the unit that wasn't Hegemony born." she recalled. "It's certainly an idea, maybe have a few instructors from your people too, the boys and girls that won you all those trials they boast about winning when they've got a few beers in them at the bar."
Hallis shrugged. "We did win more than our fair share of trials, but because we didn't specialist as much in training for that kind of duelling there were a few clans that were still better at it than we were overall" he freely admitted. "I mean, we'd have kicked the shit out of them in a real battle, mostly because they thought combined arms warfare and proper logistical planning was cheating, but there are some really good mechwarriors to be found a couple of thousand lightyears coreward of here."
"Another reason to set up our own program then." Romanov replied. "It would also give us an excuse if anyone ever queries why the military of a Periphery nation that has supposedly barely fought anyone for half-a-century seems weirdly well-practiced at it."
"Something else for the cover-story. Like if anyone asks my people are your people's kids." Hallis agreed. "Right Mom?" he asked, tongue-in-cheek.
"Pah, you only wish you heathens from the 331st were really part of the glorious Blue Star Division." Romanov retorted.
"Aren't we all the Red Star Division now?"
Romanov thought about that. "I don't like it. Makes us sound like a load of commies" she eventually decided. "We should get moving, I want to see how many of your people get to learn the hard way that age and guile is a better match for youth and enthusiasm than your bunch of juveniles think it is."
"Yeah, we'd better mount up on the VTOL. If we don't start soon your people will have forgotten why they're out here." Hallis replied, smirking. "Maybe we should have a Project Workshop manufacture a few mech-scale Zimmer Frames to help them dodder to the objective points."
"No matter how much you try and provoke me I'm not stupid enough to bet on my people to win Franklin" Romanov replied knowing full well what he was up to with a crack like that. "Most of them spent decades ploughing fields, while yours were getting into firefights. I might be proud of my unit but I'm not gullible, Junior."
Hallis sighed. "It's bad enough that my girlfriend can see right through me, my commanding officer being able to do it as well is disheartening" he said sadly. "What if I offered favorable odds?"
"No." Romanov told him with finality, wondering if the man was developing a gambling problem or if it was just another weird clan thing.
"It was worth a try." Hallis conceded defeat, in the sense that they were both sure his regiment would emerge victorious, the only difference being that Romanov expected her old farts to put up a much better fight than the kids expected.
It was always possible that a few of the 295th facing retirement would find a home in an expanded Niops Association Militia. Brigadier Nellis was pushing for his ground forces to actually field a mech-heavy brigade-sized unit and to this end the salvaged mechs that had once belonged to the Blood Rain had been allocated to him. Once they were all repaired the handful of Dragoon heavies, a couple of Rampage assaults and a company's worth of Phoenix and Jackrabbit medium and light mechs would not only give the NAM a noticeable increase in firepower they helped round out his equipment roster.
Given that they were all Rim Worlds Republic designs the SLDF regulars were only too happy to hand them over. They had plenty of machines that weren't tainted by the touch of pirates and war-criminals, and if the NAM weren't as fussy about what they rode that was their choice.
Two hours later, watching the proceedings below from the vantage point of a Vector VTOL, Romanov observed that they had certainly chosen a cinematic place for the clash between her 295th and Hallis's 331st. Even dialed way down from full power, so they would only scorch paint, not sear off armor plate, the laser and PPC fire looked spectacular in the dim red fight especially when a change in wind direction brought the vast pall of volcanic ash heading their way.
Mixed in with all the dust being kicked up by six battalions of battlemechs on the move, the smoke from blank autocannons rounds and the exhaust from training missiles the oncoming cloud began to look positively apocalyptic. Hundreds of SRM and LRM warheads exploding as they struck their targets looked just as spectacular as they would have if the missiles were arriving with HEAP high-explosive-armor-piercing warheads fitted rather than mere flash-bangs, and they only added to the overall illusion that armageddon was here.
Romanov quietly wondered to herself if she was about to be faced with several dozen cases of [PTSD] being triggered among her people. Visually it was all too reminiscent of fighting under the twilight of a recent nuclear exchange, something the 295th had done more than once during the campaign to liberate the Terran Hegemony from Amaris.
It did look epically cool though, she had to admit. Hallis certainly seemed to think much the same judging from his awed expression as they continued to monitor the exercise, pointing out important losses and interesting developments to each other.
Both sides had been instructed that this was supposed to be a testing of the skills of the mechwarriors concerned, it was not meant to be an opportunity for the two commanders to demonstrate their tactical brilliance, which was why Romanov had chosen an arena which was fairly flat and utterly devoid of vegetation.
If one side won because of some fancy feigned retreat, a flashy sweeping flanking maneuver or just a fortuitously timed counter-attack that wouldn't answer the questions being asked. Romanov and Hallis wanted a slug-fest, they wanted to see who among the 295th could still hack it and hopefully show some of them that still thought they could that they couldn't.
A disproportionate number of the 295th on the field that day were in fact those considered by their commanding officers to be too much of a liability to still be doing the job. They skewed above average in age, which was saying something, in many cases had never been regarded particularly highly compared to their peers anyway, but were all invariably all too damn stubborn to admit it.
It showed particularly among light-mech pilots, where you needed quick wits and quick reactions to stay alive because you didn't have the armor to help you dodge incoming fire or survive an error of judgement. A ninety-five year old might still feel twenty-five in his heart, although a cardiologist might disagree with that assessment, but when you reached late middle-age (by Terran standards) you weren't quite as well suited to running about in a Hermes at 151 kph being shot at with missiles as you used to be.
Faced with a healthy dose of reality being injected into them by getting their ass shot off, albeit figuratively, would hopefully lead a few of those in the 295th that were utterly convinced they were just as good as the kids that they weren't. Some would undoubtedly still disagree, stubbornness was not a trait that diminished with age after all, but that could be handled with a combination of medical screening and perhaps by running some basic drills to show them that it wasn't just bad luck why they lost a firefight to an actual twenty-five year old.
It would be a little different for officers, particularly senior officers that weren't ever expected to run around like lunatics in MASC-equipped light-mechs, because experience was more important to a command position than trigger-pulling ability. Hallis freely agreed that officers like Colonel Kaempen, for example, knew a hell of a lot more about how to handle a regiment as part of a brigade or particularly a divisional-sized engagement than he any of his own serving officers did. The clans did actually have a formation that size, the Galaxy, but that was mainly just an administrative designation with variable numbers of unit assigned to each, it wasn't really intended to fight as a cohesive unit.
With the VTOL pilot warning that if the ash cloud got any closer he would have to either land or fly further away, because he wasn't sure how his rotors would handle it, Romanov gave him permission to get clear. She had already agreed with Hallis that once the exercise degenerated into the expected slugfest that, as expected, the skill gap between the sides was largest in fast-moving light mechs and smallest between lumbering assaults where speed mattered less than careful shot-placement.
With the computers inside each machine registering the hits they took, and automatically disabling systems that would have been destroyed if they were doing this all for real with full-powered guns, eventually combat-loss-grouping started to become an issue. What had begun as equal sides, both numerically and in equipment quality, gradually shifted in the former category as the regiment from the 295th was being whittled down in number faster than the younger mechwarriors of the 331st were.
Despite getting the better of their foe Romanov pointed out that some of Hallis's people still had an apparent tendency to fight as individuals not a group, and that this was causing them to take a some entirely unnecessary losses because the ones that went rogue were soon knocked out of the fray by her 'team-players' that ganged up on them. The mechwarriors of the Blue Star Division had learned their trade in large-scale engagements and were soldiers, not warriors, and she drew an analogy with how the Draconis Combine and Federated Suns had fought differently in the Second Hidden War of 2725 to 2729 which she had studied as a cadet. The average Combine mechwarrior was often more skilled than their average FedSuns equivalent, but while that mattered a great deal in single-combat, or even a small skirmish, in larger engagements unit-cohesion and the concentration of firepower on a single target had more than made up for it.
Combined arms warfare was not a completely alien concept to the clans of course, but a cultural bias towards 'Trials' that were often just duels of skirmish size or smaller, was probably something that could be used against them.
If nothing else it would be academically interesting to see what one of her new expeditionary brigades, these being modelled in part on an SLDF Regimental Combat Team, would do to a Clan formation of similar size. It was one thing to understand large-scale combined arms warfare theoretically, it was another thing entirely to be any good at it in practice.
The 295th were stubborn and experienced but when everything degenerated into a confused mess as the endgame approached they found themselves with a serious problem as the larger number of fast light and medium mechs remaining on the other side used their mobility advantage to flank around Kaempen's battalions, hitting them in the sides and rear.
As Romanov and Hallis continued to watch the exercise from above as it gradually drew to a conclusion, the 331st 'bloodied' but looking to be victorious, they had no idea that someone else was monitoring events from below, if unwittingly, as on the other side of the world the seismographs buried on the island to monitoring volcanic activity had been going absolutely nuts.
Since the geology department at the university had never imagined that anyone would be stomping across the unpopulated region in a couple of hundred bipedal war machines, each massing at minimum twenty tons and with some, like the Devastator for example, five times as heavy as that, their equipment was deeply confused and started giving warnings that the entire area was about to resemble the Toba eruption on Terra seventy-five thousand years before. The one that nearly made homo sapiens extinct as a species.
After issuing some urgent warnings to the government, and being told after a few minutes of frantic, panicked conversation that the SLDF were conducting some-kind of large-scale military exercise there so that might be why the monitoring equipment was giving such anomalous readings, a deeply irate Professor Samantha Jeffs blew her top in a somewhat volcano-like manner. After issuing several graphic and convincing threats of violence to the various idiots that hadn't bothered to keep her department properly informed, despite it being official registered they kept a virtual electronic presence there, she slammed down the telephone, becoming the subject of a judicial restraining order that barred her from entering the Administration Council building the next day.
With the election coming up, Jeffs was so angry she momentarily considered throwing her hat into the ring and running against Giles Olson for High Associator on a platform of putting science back to the fore on Niops. She quickly dismissed the notion, mostly because she didn't think she had a chance of winning, but also because the man delivered a hell of an inspiring speech at his election rally that made Jeffs, and others, reassess the Association's place in the galaxy.
With the Great Houses seemingly intent on rolling back at least a thousand years of technological progress, while simultaneously making sure that a few billion more people who were lucky enough to make it through the First Succession War alive weren't going to survive the Second, there was a growing feeling that in the end that it might actually be up to Niops to save civilization.
This was certainly not a role that the Association had ever envisioned for itself, and not one that it was even sure it could achieve, but that didn't mean it was wrong to try.
Let's face it, who else was there? The Clans were still out there true enough, but that wasn't the kind of society anyone on Niops wanted to see ruling over humanity, and the only other candidate at present was the ****** telephone company, and there was definitely something badly off about ComStar as they increasingly started to resemble some kind of pseudo-religious cult.
If the future of humanity was going to end up in the hands of the psychos, the weirdos or the nerds then the latter were pretty sure they were the best alternative, not just because they were smarter, but because they were frankly a lot less unhinged.
Giles Olson's rallying cry that 'We might live under the dim light of a Red Dwarf but we have it within ourselves to ensure our values will shine out from Niops like a Blue Hypergiant. A beacon to the galaxy, a shining city on a hill, the champion of liberty and scientific progress not oppression and ignorance' resonated with the public and helped him achieve a decisive victory in the general election the following month. It helped of course that food imports from other systems had ended rationing, and that tens of billions of dollars in germanium meant that taxes wouldn't have to go through the roof to support an outsized military-industrial complex, but he was offering something other than a continuation of technocratic government, something larger and more inspiring.
Thus it was that after the election that when General Jenna Romanov jokingly declared, 'To hell with it. We'll make our own Star League with Blackjacks and Hussars' she was taken very seriously by the press, and Olson was forced by public opinion to dispatch the trade mission to obtain the licenses and blueprints for the BJ-1 battlemech way ahead of schedule.
It would of course be a few more years before the Blackjack factory on Alphard even started construction, let alone be fully staffed, up and running, but the first production model HSR-250-Dn Hussar strode out of the manufacturing plant on Niops V in 2835, the same year that the Beagle Active Probe it carried effectively became lostech in the Inner Sphere because nobody else could make them.
That was also the same year that ComStar introduced the C-Bill, making interstellar commerce easier, the year Niops reestablished HPG contact with the Inner Sphere, and because of that also the year in which Niops told ComStar to stick their 'Communications Protocol of 2787' where the sun don't shine because the Niops Association never signed it and was perfectly capable of maintaining their own Hyperpulse Generators thank you very much.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : In canon, the Niops Association utilizes geothermal power, as well as building its own fusion power plants. This makes sense in that Tidal Heating is a thing and the processes that saw the star Niops tidally lock all its planets except Niops VII are going to be working on the molten core of the latter. The continent where most people live was chosen because it was less geologically active but you are going to find other locations like Reykjanes Island here where things are a little more exciting. Because of the chain of volanoes, and no shortage of less geologically dynamic places, to set up home nobody lives on Reykjanes and this led to a belief that nobody would care what happened there. Unfortunately, the geology department cared very much because what other people hate about the place they love.The Devastator was a late Star-League design assault mech that never entered service beyond a full prototypes. The Clans hand-built a few for Operation Klondike and the Wolverines upgraded the ones they had later with their Enhanced ERPPC. Like the Atlas it sprang from the creative mind of Aleksandr Kerensky but he didn't insist upon the head resembling a human skull.The Hussar was originally intended for infantry support but ended up in the scout role with a very different weapons load-out. Thanks to several clan weapons already being at the prototype stage a few years before the Wolverine Secession, and the clans cooperating on research projects until after Klondike, they are able to get them into service only a few years after the clans manage that themselves. These include the Clan ER Large Laser (in prototype 2820), the Clan Machine Gun (in prototype 2820) and the Clan Flamer (in prototype 2821). These lighter, and more compact versions of Inner Sphere weapon designs make it possible to make a Hussar that's still just as good as being a scout but can now do other work as well.The SLDF's Gunslinger Program was developed in response to Draconis Combine mechwarriors continually challenging them to duels during the First Hidden War. The Combine produced some truly first-rate mechwarriors but the result of several battles during the Second Hidden War between them and the Federated Suns showed that made them far from unbeatable when up against better tactics.And we finally reach the point in the timeline where the quotes at the start of Part I (Chapter 1) and Part V (Chapter 5) are actually said, and Niops veers into a less isolationist future.
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Chapter 20