Atlan
10/02/09 11:42 PM
123.255.60.181
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A while back, Cray posted an idea- what if there was a reason for the utter failure of Smoke Jaguar during Operation Bulldog? What if there was an ongoing battle, Vietnam-style, which was sapping their strength. I thought about it, and combined that with another point: Smoke Jaguar were the ones to invent the Protomech.
...
In the 23rd century, mankind was in colonization overdrive. They had KF drives, letting them jump light years in an instant. The Terran Alliance tended to foot the bill-after all, what else could a colony do but join up? If they were going to join (and become proud, tax-paying members) then helping to foot the bill was more of an investment for the Terran Alliance than anything else. So those hard working, honest people were off to the frontier. They had the technology, they had the motivation.
Some had more motivation than others.
Before the Terran Alliance became the Terran Hegemony, there were no Successor States, just planets under one rule. If you didn’t like that rule, well, tough. But several groups had different ideas.
People who wanted to live under different laws than those of the Terran Alliance had an option, if they were clever enough. Start a new ‘loyal, taxpaying colony’…. and then take the jump ships, and run like hell.
One of these groups was the Daughters of Sappho. A large group, they were entirely composed of lesbians who liked the idea of a world with no men at all. After all, the technology existed to have children without a man being involved- sperm donation had existed for centuries, and there were other, less man-involving methods. (Scientists today have worked on the concept of impregnating a woman with another woman’s cells, and found the idea feasible. In Cannon Battletech, Terens Amaris had several children with her lover, Heather Durant, if you read it that way.) As a group, they planned, and saved. They dutifully requisitioned/bought Jumpships from the Terran Alliance (on their usual terms. Low deposit, long term repayment, high interest. Just another way to keep a new colony under the thumb of the TA), and loaded dozens of Dropships with everything a prospective colony would need.
And then they ran like hell.
They wanted to be damn well sure that the TA wouldn’t be seeing them anytime in the next few centuries, so their trip took years. By the time the TA realized something was wrong, the Sappho fleet was long gone.
It was three years and 800 light years from Terra before they stopped, and found a place to live. Their chosen planet was unusually wet- 85% water- but the land was good enough to live on, and the Sea was both Earth-like and filled with native life- quite tasty life too. They named it Lesbos. They settled there quite happily.
250,000 women landed on Lesbos, and they settled quite happily into the colonial mind set. The population grew quickly- while accidental impregnation was impossible, artificial insemination was free, and children were more of an asset than a liability (this is true even today in third world countries. In America, or any other developed country, a child has cost its parents tens of thousands of dollars by the time it leaves home. In a developing nation, where a new child is another farm hand, one who only requires food and board, a baby is a blessing. Combine that with modern immunization and pre-natal care, and you have a steady baby boom). They landed on Lesbos in 2297- by 2400 the population was at 5,300,000.
As successive generations were born, more and more information was pruned from history books, until by 2450, the Terran Allaince was known as a dark place, where women were chained to the floor all day, while Man (a figure which was understood to be 2 ½ meters tall, and have reproductive equipment the length, width and shape of a human leg) did strange and painful things to women. This led to a growing paranoia about Men returning, and doing even worse things to the people of Lesbos. In 2486, a law was passed, requiring that at all times there was sufficient Jumpships and Dropships to evacuate the entire population of Lesbos if the TA ever found them. This lead to a continuing Jumpship development program, and a growing fleet which maintained crew readiness by patrolling the nearby stars.
By 2600, they still had no word of the TA, or the rest of humanity for that matter. Several ships were dispatched to scout out what the rest of humanity was up to.
When they returned, they painted a scary picture. They had covertly entered the Rim Worlds Republic, and brought back stories of war, where the ‘Star League’ conquered all, forcing them to live under harsh rule, using metal men to break armies. After the panicking stopped, the government put their heads together and tried to figure out what to do.
The ‘metal men’ they decided, must be some sort of powered armor. After all, stories of 100 ton giants had to be exaggerations by a recently conquered nation. But a Star League of 1000 planets? That wasn’t something they could stand against. So, some argued, they needed to run. Others argued against- they loved Lesbos, and they weren’t going to let any Men take it from them!
The final decision was to hide on Lesbos itself. Over the next century, they managed to move all their manufacturing centers underground, and a city was built under the ocean. After it was proved safe, women from all over Lesbos moved under the Ocean, turning the small city of Refuge into a sprawling undersea metropolis. By 2780, all that remained on the surface was a few abandoned towns and cities, and farms (farm houses were build underground, with the government offering financial aid in return for large underground storage facilities, to be used in case of invasion).
In space, the Jumpship fleet (when not scouting the nearby stars for sign of invaders) was kept in orbit around a Gas Giant near a pirate point, with ECM letting the ships (and attendant facilities) appear as an unusually high metal debris belt.
Military development was long and leisurely, but by 2786 the development of power armor had been so successful that the entire army was equipped with it. (Development had been aided by the fact that underwater HEV suits had been necessary to build Refuge). Of course, development never stopped, as engineers proceeded to keep making bigger and bigger models. 2890 saw the first 8 ton power armor.
2904 was a crisis year for the women of Lesbos. A pirate ship caught sight of one of Lesbos’s Jumpships, and eventually made its way to Lesbos. When a scan revealed several radio transmissions, they decided to raid Lesbos. A squadron of aerospace fighters tore apart a Jumpship, and several platoons of infantry landed on the surface.
Those infantry lasted about 20 minutes.
Two dozen Powered Armored soldiers took the pirate Dropship ten minutes after that.
Four days after that, the captured Dropship re-united with the Pirate Jumpship, and the Lesbos forces took control of that too.
As the people of Lesbos, convinced that the Star League was coming, tried to reverse engineer the advanced technology found onboard the Jumpship (fighters which could fight in BOTH air AND space, directed energy weapons, and a method to affix dropships to the OUTSIDE of a Jumpship), they had no idea what was coming.
The Clans.
In 3047, Clan Smoke Jaguar noticed Lesbos’s farms, and concluded that it was a failed colony, with a few thousand people on the planet, and decided to invade- mostly because it would make a good staging point for their invasion of the Inner Sphere. A Star of Elementals landed in 3048- and was wiped out to a man by the Lesbos soldiers.
A month later, Smoke Jaguar tried again, this time with triple the force, and to the exact same result.
Embarrassed about their defeat on a mere Periphery planet, the Smoke Jaguar’s didn’t mention it to the other clans, choosing to land a Trinary of mechs instead. The destruction of that force was only made more irritating by the fact that they had NO idea HOW it happened.
As the pirate raid had taught the people of Lesbos, they needed to watch their radio transitions. By the time Smoke Jaguar had shown itself, there were no outward signs of advanced civilization at all. Their underwater city was covered by so much water that the Jaguars didn’t notice it, and the farmers didn’t tell the Jaguars anything at all.
The Smoke Jaguars tried again in 3049, landing a mixed cluster on the planet. With no immediate attacks, they set about interrogating the farmers left on the surface. Each and every one of them swore that they had no idea what happened to the destroyed Clanners. Yet whenever the Smoke Jaguar cluster sent patrols out, they disappeared.
It was from one of those destroyed patrols that the Smoke Jaguars finally figured out what had been happening.
Their ‘mechs were ambushed, by what looked like a small ‘mech- no bigger than ten tons. These mini-mechs- the Jaguars dubbed them ‘Proto Mechs’- would attack the much larger Clan ‘mechs in huge numbers, then disappear into the trees carrying as much ‘mech parts as they could. The Jaguars took two Trinarys of OmniMechs, and followed the trail. The trail led to a farmhouse barn, which initially seemed to be empty. Closer examination led to the discovery of the fact that the entire barn floor was actually a covering for a tunnel.
The tunnel self destructed seconds later, burying the entrance, but the damage was done- the clan had finally figured out what was happening. All of the farms were actually covers for various entrances into an underground tunnel network, used to move Protomechs covertly.
The next six years settled into a routine. The Smoke Jaguars would land more Battlemechs, Elementals and infantry on Lesbos. These forces would constantly search for the enemy forces, and entrances into the underground network. The women of Lesbos would attack Jaguar patrols whenever they out massed them by a wide enough margin, and keep digging more tunnels (and blowing up the ones the clan could find). Jaguars were frustrated by the fact that they were incapable of capturing a single prisoner- there were over five centuries of culture teaching the people of Lesbos that outsider=Man, Man=Slaver/Rapist. The cultural indoctronization was so strong that it the orders from the top to keep the secret of Refuge at all costs were virtually unnecessary.
It wasn’t until 3056 that the Smoke Jaguars managed to capture even a wreck of a Protomech. The usual suicide method of captured Lesbian soldiers was to detonate the engine of the Protomech, leaving nothing but twisted metal. When a lucky Gauss Rifle shot tore through the cockpit of a Protomech, the Jaguars captured the remains and rushed them back to Huntress.
Due to the sheer difference in component parts of a Protomech from a Battlemech (700 years of technological divergence) caused some problems for the Smoke Jaguar scientists who were trying to reverse-engineer the Protomech. The cockpit was completely destroyed, and the Jaguars had such trouble trying to reverse engineer it that they ended up having to use Aerospace pilots, and EI hardware. In the end, the Jaguars approached the Protomech as if it were a small Battlemech, while the people of Lesbos had designed it as oversized Battle Armour.
The planet Lesbos, and all the failures Smoke Jaguar had there, was considered one of the most important secrets the clan had, wanting not only to hide their shame, but to keep the potential source of advanced technology secret.
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Karagin
10/03/09 12:43 AM
72.178.75.99
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It seems that you have given this a lot of thought and it reads very well. Has all the trappings of how things can go wrong for the high tech wonder warriors when faced with the unknown.
Do you plan on expanding more on this or is this a one shot event?
Karagin
Given time and plenty of paper, a philosopher can prove anything.
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