OBT Forum

I will have more comments later- I'm running out of the house right now- but my first impression is that this feels like Periphery as presented in Periphery 1e and Mechwarrior 1st Ed spread to all of the IS states. Your basic notes on Communications and Travel look good- one thing I would add to travel is that Jumpships would be heavily escorted for protection from pirates and raiders. 

Wow, seems like you've done a lot of work here since I commented last time.

Anyway, some thoughts on transport & communication:

In the civil sector, I would expect three developments after destruction of the HPG network to take place.

A) Every trading company begins to trade in information. This sounds obvious, but is very important. Since you can transport practically indifferent amounts of data aboard of a jumpship/dropship without cutting back on the cargo you can transport, the information transfer between world may be slower, but the frequency of information "packages" arriving is only limited by the general jumpship traffic. This also makes sending data from one world to the next not more expensive (or probably even cheaper) than with the HPG.
Since time can be very important for some people (military, business, etc.), there could be two different kinds of sending data.
First, on a data disk (or crystal or what ever else), transported by dropship from one planet to the next (the slowest & cheapest form).
Second, transmitting the data via radio to the jumpship and from the jumpship via radio to the target planet once in system. This would be several days to a couple of weeks faster than the first method and probably more expensive, since the amount of data you can transmit via radio while recharging and waiting for new dropships is limited.

B) Since data transfer and cargo shipping is the same business without HPG, ComStar would probably be in on it. This means, ComStar is in direct competition with every other shipping company out there, since they would operate there own fleet of jumpships. If a shipping company has a monopoly in a nation or sector of space, this could seriously hamper ComStars effort of spreading there and rebuilding the HPG network in those parts of the Inner Sphere.

Now, for the military implications:
Since the lack of HPGs means, that a central authority would have even less means to coordinate with forces away from home (distant garrison forces or invasion/raiding forces). This would mean, that the commanders on the scene would have greater autonomy in leading their forces. I could see this developing in two different directions:

A) The military high command trusts the commander enough or forces away from home are so far away from any form of control, that the commander in charge can do what ever he or she wants or thinks is right. A commander could only be judged/punished for his or her actions after returning home. If the commander thinks, he or she has failed their nations, he or she could decide to go rouge instead of returning home. Such a system would only be effective, when the nation does not punish every form failure (like retreating from a superior force).

B) On the other hand, when the ruler or military highcommand does not trust their commanders, they could always use some form of secret service to control them. If there are several spies/assassins embedded in every force away from home, commanders would be very motivated to reach their goals and very paranoid towards their own forces and could lead to infighting between secret service and army. While this would seriously hamper the performance of the military, it would give the rulers or the highcommand a greater feeling of control and would be, in my opinion, a logical model for the more autocratic nations (Draconis Combine or Capellan Confederation).

You may also see the rise of certain competing Trade/communications cartels, based in various regions and likely family owned, like the Rothchilds of old.  These shipping companies may be activly engaged in try to stop ComStar or capture and reverse engineer HPG tech with thier main client state.  It could make an interesting alternate event if the first major war of a reconnected Inner Sphere was a traders war where the vital JumpShips assets and bootleg HPG tecnology were at stake between the cartels, ComStar and the various states.  Not only could the war be a dealy overt one, but the shodow war would be drak and convouted in the extreme.  Add in the discovery of the Black Boxes and all merry hell breaks loose.

It was whilst Kat Steiner was playing pirate as the red corsair so somewhere outside of the Lyran Commonwealth.........

Thinking about it, it could be in the same general area as Rim Outpost #27.

That's why I'm thinking of different ways to broker them as neutral. I figure using them as neutral commerce middleman and humanitarian aid organization might go a long way to helping them maintain Sphere-wide operations. Certainly corporate, but also
a "calling?" So like a corporate Peace Corp?

I was also thinking that more of these JumpShip cartels are going to look suspiciously like the Ryan Cartel...they'll have major pull because they own the ships. Sure you could pay decent prices for ComStar but you might have to wait extra months, maybe years. So these guys make a killing or a planet starves/waits longer for goods.

Hmm...

Speaking of which, do we know the exact date and location those Black Boxes were found? For the life of me I can't remember.

According to the table on page 182 of HBHD the K-0 Black Box model was a Star League experimental model.
Hope that helps.

I had thought that HBHD contained the information you asked for KM, but sadly this is not the case.

Ciao
Hessian

That's enough information for me.


Seems likely then that the tech was "found" sometime in the early 3000s - which works out perfectly for the AU. Not that I mind changing anything else, I was just curious.

Thank you gentlemen.