101

Ever since I had appeared in this universe (3015) and had been given access to a computer, I had been thinking of what could be done by adding the technology from the universe I had come from.

It took me decades to be able to do something. My first company, V4RU, had nothing to do with computers and even when I became first a member and then the CEO of VMI, I had the same problem as it was not a company dedicated to producing / developing computers.

Only when I bought a stake in O-P Computer Electronics in the 30s, was I able to start investigating other chip building techniques. Finding / hiring like-minded researchers was extremely difficult, not even counting the limits imposed by extremely tight security.

It didn't help that my background was as a programmer, with little knowledge in this peculiar field.

Only in the mid 40s did we see the apparition of new techniques by some small laboratories , which allowed for the reduction of chip sizes.

But it was only in the early 50s, with a company / lab specifically dedicated to the problem and built on Coromodir V, that the first components, smaller and faster than the original ones, started to be produced. Obviously because of the lack of applied researches in this field for centuries, they were fragile and could only be produced at a small scale and were not yet up to the military specs, meaning they could only be used in some places that needed much computer power and were considered safe. Fragile, being for me a very relative term, since by my standards, they were incredibly robust, but by local standards (with BattleMechs lasting hundreds of years), they were fragile and short-lived.

It was also in the 50s that we finally started building industrial models of the equipment we had taken from the Argo. For all intents and purposes, they were a kind of highly advanced and versatile 3D printers, capable of building almost anything within the dimensions of the unit, provided (quite obviously) they had access to the necessary raw materials and blueprints. Difficult and time-consuming to build, extremely expensive, they were the ultimate state-of-the-art technology from the Star League. A small factory on Coromodir V was, to my knowledge, the only one that produced them in 3058, and even then, less than a dozen unit per year.

Whether integrated in the Concordat or not, Kamea's plans (and mine) were to make the Aurigan Province as independent in terms of resources, factories, universities and even military capabilities as possible. To this end, Coromodir V, Mechdur and Detroit had been chosen as the major industrial centers. Since Coromodir V was personally controlled/owned by our family, I had spent the time from the early 30s until now quietly moving as much as I could of new and/or more profitable departments of the companies I controlled or had a stake in there or into the province

Not that we were planning to get our independence back, far from it, but we wanted to leave a solid and secure inheritance to our children and Kamea would always consider the Aurigan Province as her own.

However, we (me and Kamea) only achieved a partial success in that objective. For one side, while the Calderons and Edward in particular were our allies and friends, ultimately, they were the ruling family of the Concordat, and to maintain / secure their power they couldn't let any other family, not even their closest allies gain excessive power. So, several of the movings we had planned had been blocked, and several big contracts distributed to competitors. The construction of the Concordat class frigates or of the Winchester II Heavy Cruisers and the work on the Texas battleship, were awarded to shipyards controlled by the Calderon family, for example.

And while our political opponents, while good at this game but lacking in the industrial ones, were not blind enough to let us grow too much, without some counter moves. In that they were supported by the Calderons – to a point.

Evidence that the Calderons had started to take measures to guarantee their supremacy was pointed to me by Kamea – I'm a bit blind in that area, I confess. She noted several facts that seemed to prove it:

- in the Marian Hegemony Crisis, we didn't receive any benefits, even if our forces (with our Heir included) were the only ones apart the federal ones involved.- following the creation of the Fronc Reachs – the territory between us and the Magistracy / FWL, no world was added to the Aurigan Province with the best ones directly under the Calderons' control and the rest 'gifted' to our political adversaries.

- while we needed to pay in full the upgrades in the Mechdur shipyard to be able to make Ajax Destroyers, the one in New Vandenberg received generous federal subsidies for that.

- only federal units had been sent to fight the Clans, gaining experience and controlling the advanced tech captured. That turned in a spectacular blow-back with the disaster in Jeronimo.

Yep, the Calderons had started to limit our growing and to secure their position as the leaders of the Taurian Concordat.

Note: the following is based on some ideas I get reading the excellent Cannonshop Ngoverse.

I had launched several pet projects to expand the capabilities of the Coromodir system. These included a new variant of the Snowden-L, with a bay for more mining 'Mechs of a variant that used cheaper fission reactors, a special type of DropShip / thug that was basically a cockpit, engines, K-boon connector and an articulated rib-cage that could 'capture' the Snowden and move it to the desired position and / or transport it via JumpShip to another system.

To complement these, a 'ferry' was designed – a very small JumpShip, using a very old, experimental, type of K-F drive that could only jump up to 3LY, (thanks to the use of modern alloys and techniques of construction) with two K-boom connections and super-capacitors in place of LF battery, to transport the above mentioned units to the Coromodir Oort cloud.

That type of K-F drive, with only 10% of the range of those in use today, even if it used much less energy, had long been considered an evolutionary dead-end and abandoned, but for the ferry job between the inner part of a system and the distant Oort cloud, it was perfect, being much cheaper and smaller than a conventional one. 

All of these models were the product of the work of Dr. Murad, the locally resident genius.

So far, none had moved past the theoretical design and / or proof of concept, but together, they would greatly facilitate the expansion of the local economy, provided that we could develop and produce them locally. After all, the tech, tools, trained personnel, and raw materials were already there, I was "only" missing the budget to finish these projects.

The idea of the ferry type JumpShip came out during a dinner with the Murad family. Her adopted daughter, Gabrielle, was working on K-F drives theory and was a very good story teller. She talked about the early 15LY range drives, the experimental 50LY one and even about the tentative to obtain one more compact, simpler and less energy hungry. The last one proved to be an evolutionary dead-end that never exceeded the 3 LY range, quickly forgotten by almost everybody. At the time I was starting to look on the resources of the Oort cloud – too distant to be obtained by DropShip only and using conventional JumpShips would be too expensive and attract too much attention. The story brought me some fresh perspectives and was the start of this project.