OBT Forum

You are such a tease...

Guess the Sinclair Fusiliers aren't the 13th. 

There's either a retcon or an error here- according to the C* SB (p. 13 - how ironic) the 13th Royal Infantry fought for C* on Terra. Maybe the Era Report Writers (I mean the in game writers) were unaware of this. 

Both the C* SB and the FM refer to C* having 8 divisions of former SLDF troops (half mech divisions) and several small units. That's definitely less then all of the unknown units.

I'll address those concerns about the C* issue right now. You are going to find the conclusions... rather interesting.

Part II: Fuzzy Math and Known Unknowns

Okay, as has been stated here already, ComStar (the organization, not any of the books) claims that 17 divisions and 14 ind. regiments went missing. That's the first problem, the SL SB shows 15 ind. regiments unaccounted for, as I listed in my first post. As such, ComStar's information on these matters has been shown to be unreliable, to put it mildly. In fact, they change their story on the number of missing divisions from book to book!

On pg. 91 of the 2e Periphery SB, the fate of the 295th Battlemech Division is revealed. As already noted, they tried to set up a colony in the Deep Periphery after their attempts to join the Exodus Fleet failed. Their descendants had low birth-rates and died out after three generations or so. It's also mentioned Explorer Corps missions had found other dead colonies like this from other SLDF units. Numbers are vague, but the text implies they are rare, and the 295th was probably the largest of these discoveries, so that rules out other divisions meeting a similar fate.

The other strange thing is that the book mentions 30 missing divisions. A typo? Likely, but perhaps closer to the truth than you might believe. But I'll get to that later. Right now, we need to talk about Operation Silver Shield.

Silver Shield was Jerome Blake's successful master plan to obtain Terra's neutrality and make it the base for his ComStar organization. To accomplish that he basically lied to the House Lords to get their support for a blanket neutrality agreement before they entered the First Succession War. Having accomplished this he set out to dislodge the remaining small forces the Lords had put on Terra after the end of the Amaris Civil War for "security" purposes. In this mission he had the help of a large force of former SLDF troops under the command of General Lauren Hayes, of the 151st Battlemech Division. During the course of the fighting, two SLDF Mechanized Infantry divisions not in on the plan opposed Blake, and were taken down in a brief but brutal campaign in the Amazon rainforest.

Now this is where a reading of the original C* SB text becomes critical. ComStar is described of having "a force of eight full division, half of them mech-equipped."

Read that carefully. Out of eight divisions, only four had mechs. That's a far cry from the standard interpretation of eight SLDF divisions often assumed by readers. Remember, all SLDF divisions had mechs regiments, even the ones designated infantry. That means the four conventional divisions Hayes commanded were not necessarily analogous to original SLDF divisions, but perhaps new units formed out of various armor and infantry brigades that had survived the war but had no parent formation. In the old SL SB, it shows even divisions that went off on the Exodus often had elements join House armies instead of going into exile, and there were a number of disbanded divisions that most likely had surviving elements, but no fate for them is given. This is supported by a reference on pg. 13 of the C* SB to "remnants of the 251st Battlemech Division's 3rd Strike regiment." A division I should point out that was listed in the SL SB as having been disbanded before the invasion of the Rim Worlds Republic in 2767. That's right, elements of a division disbanded over two decades before the start of Silver Shield participated in it!

That leads me to another point: the "assortment of smaller units" supporting ComStar's eight divisions. They are not necessarily analogous to the fifteen unaccounted independent regiments, because they could have come from a variety of other sources, not the least of which mercs. Blake had hired a number of merc Battlemech regiments before Silver Shield to bolster his SLDF forces, promising them spare parts and equipment in lieu of monetary payment. How many regiments is "several" is up for debate, but there were a lot of merc regiments running around in those days. FM: C* adds that all of Hayes's troops assumed mercenary identities for the campaign for purposes of secrecy. Were the real merc regiments sprinkled within the divisions, or were they part of the independent commands, we don't know. All we can really say is that the situation was a lot more complex than initially assumed.

That's if you can even trust what was written in either C* book, because the Blakists corrupted the data in both of them. Have fun trying to unravel that one.

In summary, what do we really know? There were seventeen divisions that were listed as having an "unknown" fate in the original SL SB. One of them, the 295th Battlemech Division is accounted for, as a failed colony. Next, there were 10 divisions of SLDF troops involved in Operation Silver Shield, but we can only identify two (151st Battlemech and 13th Royal Infantry) with any certainty. If it's true many of the SLDF formations were provisional formations formed out of the remains of other units, then that means that in addition to six divisions that cannot be accounted for by any current sources there may be anywhere from one to six others in the same category. And that still does not address another critical question.

What did Blake do with the SLDF personnel he had after Silver Shield wrapped up?

At this point, I'll stop for today and let everyone go over and read what I've put forth. Tomorrow however, I'll get into some interesting (and terrifying) speculation about the fate of various SLDF commands. Was there a ComStar conspiracy to murder large numbers of ex-SLDF soldiers? Or is there another "hidden empire" of SLDF descendants besides the Clans out there in the Deep Periphery, just waiting for the day when they can strike back against the Inner Sphere? Or maybe save it?

...Stay tuned!

Do you have ER 2750, as it provides a mysterious end to one of these divisions?

I assume you're referring to the 13th Royal Infantry? Hard to say at this point what happened to them. I'll take a guess and say they were on Terra for Silver Shield and that the story given in ER 2750 is merely a cover. The intro says that the in-universe writers used ComStar's archives, so it's possible they were duped by falsified info, or not. As I've pointed out in my previous post, it's hard to tell at this point.

Yeah they are beyond the Capellan Marches waiting to strike. The New Terra Republic oh it could be awesome.

As promised, I now present to you the third part of my little report. This time, I speculate on the fate of the "lost units" of the SLDF who served ComStar.

Part III: Where are the Boys of the Old Brigade?

To start, we have to address a critical question: What did Jerome Blake do with the remaining SLDF personnel after the conclusion of Operation Silver Shield? It's an issue that has never been directly issued within the text of any source material, least of all ComStar's. After the surrender of the SLDF Mechanized Infantry Divisions that opposed Blake to General Hayes's army, no direct mention is made to any of these troops ever again. Blake's mercenaries also disappeared from the record at this time. There is a mention of ComStar dropships heading to New Earth a week later to clean out all remaining military equipment from Kerensky's headquarters and putting it into storage on Terra, but it doesn't say it was the ex-SLDF forces who carried out the operation. Blake saw the massive number of mechs, fighters, and other military vehicles he recovered from New Earth as an insurance policy against further aggression, but the next reference we get to ComStar's military capabilities is more than two decades later, with the formation of the intelligence agency known as ROM.

ROM was formed in 2811 on the orders of Jerome Blake to provide security to ComStar's staff and facilities across the Inner Sphere from increasing aggressive attempts by the House Lords to acquire the company's assets by any means possible, including the use of armed proxies to invade and occupy HPG stations. Its function was partly paramilitary by nature, often using force to keep the rank and file of ComStar in line with accepted doctrine, kill foreign spies and internal moles, and physically guard HPG stations and other high value targets from "hostile takeovers".

At no point is it mentioned that ComStar possessed other military assets at that time other then the SLDF equipment that was mothballed decades earlier. ROM took almost a year to form because there seemed to be no preexisting security organ to help organize it. For all intents and purposes ComStar had no standing military force, had not had one for quite some time, and would not again until the Com Guards were formed in 2933.

So in the space of twenty-three years, the mighty force of eight divisions and supporting units that Kerensky had left to Blake seemed to fall into the mists of history. What happened to all of these men and women? They must have numbered in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands, and yet not even a small honor guard of them were left by 2811 to help Blake fight off the predations of House agents. What's more, Blake seemed to put much of their equipment into storage, feeling as if he would not need to use it again except in an emergency. What would have lulled him into such complacency? The explanation that the House Lords were too busy fighting each other in the Succession Wars explains some of it, but not all.

I have four major theories regarding the fate of the soldiers:

1. They retired and demobilized. A very boring theory, but one that makes a lot of sense. Blake got lazy about his security needs and needing to cut ComStar's budget somewhere (the company did not turn a profit until 2802), gave his soldiers the pink slip. General Hayes and her men quietly blended into Terra's population, joining the workforce of the rapidly rebuilding world. But if this was the case, why so much secrecy  about what happened? The Houses knew that Blake had military forces in 2788, and they also knew by 2811 he had none, so if it was an attempt to cover up ComStar's lack of defenses at the time, clearly it was a poor one.

2. They were converted into Terra's police force. Blake kept them on the rolls, but as lightly armed paramilitaries who kept order among Terra's population. Another good possibility, but why no mention of it in any sources? And if Blake had an armed police force in 2811, why didn't he build ROM from their ranks? As it stood he needed to recruit within the company and train the personnel from scratch. Terra almost certainly did have had a police force in 2811, but clearly not a top-level one organized and headed by battle-hardened ex-military men. Many veterans of Silver Shield would have still been young enough after twenty-three years to have a strong presence in such an organization, but the records seem to show they were not present at all. Which leads us to...

3. Blake had them all murdered or imprisoned, along with any surviving anti-ComStar SLDF units who surrendered, and the mercenaries he hired. It makes a lot of sense in a sick sort of way. If they had been allowed to live the soldiers would have become a powerful bloc within ComStar's structure, and one that Blake or his successors might not have been able to fully control. These troops still were organized along SLDF lines and thought of themselves as SLDF personnel, loyal to a government that no longer existed. Without a counterweight force to balance their tremendous military might, they could potentially subvert ComStar's goals for their own purposes. And remember ComStar was in a very precarious place in those early years, using most of its resources to rebuild the HPG network. Blake simply did not have the funds to radically restructure his military forces in a way that would make them politically reliable.

It makes even more sense that he killed the mercs. They were even more unpredictable then the SLDF, and I doubt Blake had any intention of giving away the valuable military technology that he had promised them. The whole goal of ComStar was to horde that technology for their own use later, why would they give it to money soldiers who would one day depart to the Successor States with shiny new mechs decked out with Lostech?

As for the SLDF troops who actively resisted Blake's takeover, why would he grant them any mercy? They were a huge security threat that could never just be released back into the civilian population where they could agitate against ComStar's control over Terra. They would have to be dealt with one way or another.

And would these actions cause disgruntlement among the pro-ComStar SLDF? These were their former brothers-in-arms after all, even if now they were on opposing sides. Even a small crack in the loyalty of his military force could have had disastrous implications for his new order. Better to have all of them taken out quietly and discreetly.

How would Blake have accomplished the task of killing thousands and thousands of troops? That is the one major flaw in this theory, however compelling it is. Unless he duped the soldiers into marching to an isolated base and then had them promptly gassed or poisoned, it seems nearly inconceivable he could have killed that many people on the sly without some rumor leaking out among the order or Terra's civilian population. And the physical evidence... where would he be able to hide that many bodies? It is possible he could have burned them and had the ashes dumped out in space but still... it seems overly elaborate, bordering on the fantastic. So that leaves us with one last possibility...

4. They left Terra. All the troops headed out somewhere either of their own free will or because Blake told them they were endangering the welfare of Earth by making it a military target. Maybe they joined up with the other missing divisions and regiments at this point, forming a second Exodus fleet that settled in the Deep Periphery. The Inner Sphere was in total chaos at that point, the HPG network was down, it would have been easy to sneak away with all of the other refugees, helped by the fact that they probably lacked warships, which would have drawn attention to them. While not as large as Kerensky's fleet, and lacking in warship assets, they would have made a mighty force by most standards. Maybe they survived... in some form.

That concludes the third part of my report. Next time, I speculate on how these forces might still exist, or if they still exist at all. Also, I wrap up some loose ends... and bring up some more questions. Stay tuned!