OBT Forum

I think it would be great to see the old Terran Hegemony come back into play. Though, I do not like that the clans would leave behind that many people to needlessly die. They could build ark ships. Clan Ghost Bear built the Leviathen Battleships and used them as ark ships. If they want to claim a new Star League how could they with that stain on there honor of letting 85-90% of there civillian laborers die.

I think it can't be accomplished, but if pushed the discovery should come around 3000, with the Dragoons mission a chance to scout the TH, routes and resources.

This gives the Clans five decades to prepare, time likely needed to uproot so many and mount a 1300 LY campaign.

These are the 3050 population figures for the Clans, based on 3062 number in Warriros of Keresnky and backed up to 3050 using the 2.35% anual growth figure Phelan gives there.

Caste Percent Number 3062 Number 3050
Warrior 0.01% 110,500 83,620
Scientist 6.41% 73,820,500 55,863,110
Merchant 18.58% 213,976,500 161,925,113
Technician 7.87% 90,635,000 68,587,357
Labourer 67.13% 772,979,000 584,946,066
1,151,521,500 871,405,266


Even leaving the labourers behind, it is still heading towards 300 million people.  Fifty times the Exodus.  You would require, based on those numbers, 67 500 jumpships and 250 000 DropShips, based on the numbers from the Exodus.

The Clans better get busy building Ark ships.  Perhaps modified Newgarnge hulls, like the Levithan Tranpsrts capable of lifting huge numbers in one go.

Most humane thing to do would have the scientist caste create a painless, leathal biowepaon to kill those left behind and prevent them suffering after all thier industry, power and most food production and transport assets are taken away.

Yes, I am well aware I just advocated the killing of over 700 Million people, but from a clan Warriors point of view, it is efficient.

A couple of questions:

1.  Will each Clan have a slice of worlds from the TH border to the core, or more globular holdings.  As the pie slice allows access to Terra and access to a ready enemy.

2. After a few decades of holding the Hegemony, the Clans could be well positioned to actually strick out from interior lines and actually take huge portions of the Inner Sphere.  Do you have plns this way?

Most humane thing to do would have the scientist caste create a painless, leathal biowepaon to kill those left behind and prevent them suffering after all thier industry, power and most food production and transport assets are taken away.

Yes, I am well aware I just advocated the killing of over 700 Million people, but from a clan Warriors point of view, it is efficient.

A couple of questions:

1.  Will each Clan have a slice of worlds from the TH border to the core, or more globular holdings.  As the pie slice allows access to Terra and access to a ready enemy.

That is what this discussion is for.  If it is feasible, and if we can come up with some reasonable numbers, then we can take a look at each Clan's assigned sector (province, enclave, whatever) in the Old Hegemony.  I thought that perhaps it would be best to have seventeen slices each with either 8 or 9 worlds, so that every Clan borders Terra and every Clan borders one of the Great Houses.  Might not work out in practice, but I leave that you to guys.

2. After a few decades of holding the Hegemony, the Clans could be well positioned to actually strick out from interior lines and actually take huge portions of the Inner Sphere.  Do you have plns this way?

Ahem . . .

"We are the Clans.  We are restoring the Star League which fell to honor the Great Father Aleksandyr Kerensky, the man who led our forefathers into exile long ago.  Join us or die, barbarian scum.  Resistance is futile."

Or something like that.  And it probably won't take more than few months before one or more Clans sends that message, not a few decades.  They are a . . . little bit arrogant, aren't they?

Master Arminas

Something I looked into a while ago was a means of moving a lot of people and equipment at a time. The answer I came up with is a space station right at the top edge of what can be jumped at one time. A Potemkin can carry six and a Monolith can carry two. Each station can carry 16,000 people with food and other life support rated for a year, plus over a quarter million tons of cargo. The price tag is approximately 1/30th that of a Leviathan and of course they can be built in much smaller yards. It would be relatively straightforward to alter the design to carry 40,000 people and only 30,000 tons of cargo. The advantage of these is that on arrival they can simply be left to be towed into orbit, without having to worry about delivering to a planetary surface or even planetary orbit.

Class/Model/Name:  Transit Station
Tech:              Inner Sphere / 3067
Vessel Type:       Space Station
Rules:             Level 1, Standard design
Rules Set:         AeroTech2

Mass:              400,000 tons
Power Plant:       Standard
Safe Thrust:       0
Maximum Thrust:    0
Armor Type:        Standard
Armament:          None
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Class/Model/Name:  Transit Station
Mass:              400,000 tons

Equipment:                                                            Mass 
Power Plant, Drive & Control:                                        4,800.00
Thrust:  Safe Thrust: 0
      Maximum Thrust: 0
Structural Integrity: 1                                              4,000.00
Total Heat Sinks:    142 Single                                           .00
Fuel & Fuel Pumps:                                                   1,548.00
Bridge, Controls, Radar, Computer & Attitude Thrusters:                400.00
Fire Control Computers:                                                   .00
Food & Water:  (370 days supply)                                    30,000.00
Armor Type:  Standard  (606 total armor pts)                         1,514.00
                           Capital Scale Armor Pts
   Location:                            L / R
   Fore:                                101
   Fore-Left/Right:                  101/101
   Aft-Left/Right:                   101/101
   Aft:                                 101

Cargo:
   Bay 1:  Cargo (1) with 10 doors                                 250,000.00
   Bay 2:  Small Craft (20) with 4 doors                             4,000.00
   Bay 3:  Cargo (1) with 1 door                                     3,000.00

DropShip Capacity:  4 Docking Hardpoints                             4,000.00
Grav Decks #1 - 16:  (50-meter diameter)                               800.00

Crew and Passengers:
     21 Officers (20 minimum)                                          210.00
    104 Crew (104 minimum)                                             728.00
  1,000 1st Class Passengers                                        10,000.00
  5,000 2nd Class Passengers                                        35,000.00
 10,000 Steerage Passengers                                         50,000.00
    100 Bay Personnel                                                     .00
Weapons and Equipment      Loc        SRV    MRV    LRV    ERV  Heat    Mass
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOTALS:                                                Heat: 0     400,000.00
Tons Left:                                                                .00

Calculated Factors:
Total Cost:        937,397,340 C-Bills
Battle Value:      10,804
Assumptions
This version and the 40,000 person version are built in equal numbers. The Clans set up a command circuit of Monoliths/pairs of Star Lords from the Clan Homeworlds to a point in the near periphery that they can use as a staging area, reducing the distance to evacuate across. Allowing time for docking an undocking, this can reasonably reduce the transit time to 1 week, followed by a week of jumpships moving back in the other direction to reset. So two Transit Stations plus a dropship or three can be moved every fortnight.

That's still only 1,456,000 people moved in a year. Not very efficient.

So let's assume that all those jumpships instead are matched up with warships, carrying as many such stations as possible. Assuming fifty Monoliths, that's potentially 100 Transit Stations at once. Assume that the Clan Warship fleet can be converted for personnel transport, working on a basis of steerage accomodations and 400 days food etc that's 7 tons per person crammed into the cargo bays. (Ship numbers taken from sarna.net). Plus as many of the stations as possible on their dropship collars. Let's assume the 40,000 people 30,000 tons cargo versions.

24 Carracks (9,000) = 216,000
18 Vincent (13,000) = 234,000
3 Whirlwind (9,000) = 27,000
7 York (9,000) = 63,000
12 Essex (17,000) = 204,000
19 Lola III (15,000) = 285,000
16 Aegis (12,500) + 16 Transit Stations (40,000) = 840,000
6 Volga (27,500) + 6 Transit Stations (40,000) = 405,000
5 Congress (22,500) = 112,500
5 Black Lion (9,000) + 5 Transit Stations (40,000) = 245,000
14 Sovetskii Soyuz (29,500) + 14 Transit Stations (40,000) = 973,000
3 Liberator (10,000) + 3 Transit Stations (40,000) = 150,000
7 Cameron (25,000) = 175,000
7 Night Lord (23,500) + 7 Transit Stations (40,000) = 444,500
31 Potemkin (53,000) + 186 Transit Stations (40,000) = 9,083,000
5 Texas (41,000) + 5 Transit Stations (40,000) = 405,000
7 McKenna (36,500) + 7 Transit Stations (40,000) = 535,500

This adds up to 18,222,500 people and 10,470,000 tons of cargo being moved. It would require 349 transit stations, something that would need to be built up to over time, and could still only carry this many over a single 1 year journey, before then needing another year to go back and collect the next load (preferably with new transit stations built over that time).

It would take more than a hundred years (127) to relocate the entire Clan population (assuming that population remained static) and thirty years if Laborers are left behind. Still it's somewhat feasible.

And of course they need to keep a lot of manufacture - shipping mostly - in place to build all this shipping.

Probably the sane thing - since they can't just announce "we're leaving most people behind" is to declare that they're going to be relocating parts of their civilian castes to worlds closer to the Inner Sphere as staging grounds for the Invasion. They then commence the build up of shipping (converting warship cargo bays and building transports) while scouting for a suitable world or worlds that they can take quickly. Probably somewhere in the Periphery. They also begin a quiet cull of the civilian castes, secretly sterilising a proportion of the children assigned to the Laborer Caste (and to a smaller extent, members of other civilian castes). Advance expeditions with relatively balanced populations from all the Clans set out as soon as possible to start laying the groundwork.

With great fanfare the first major shipping expeditions set out carrying the frontline forces of every Clan, along with factories and shipyards to support them and (secretly) a large fraction of the warrior breeding programme and associated scientists. Two years later most of the fleet returns and reports that things are looking good, initial scouting indicates the Inner Sphere will have little chance of repelling them. It loads up another huge shipment of garrison forces, supplies and colonists for the 'paradise worlds' of the Inner Sphere (plus most of what remains of the warrior breeding programme). Quietly, more marginal Clan worlds are being left increasingly to their own devices - stripped of space transport and communication, the upper castes having departed, much of the population now aging and childless.

The invasion begins with the Clans using frontline forces and only those warships with minimal cargo capacity (destroyers and corvettes). The first year probably goes very well indeed for them - the Terran corridor of the FC is well fortified, as are nearby Kapteyn worlds, but this is before they've seriously upteched and they have no experience against the Clans so losses will be terrible for them. And of course, the two halves of the FC are divided, probably with the ruler of one side stuck on the other.

At least one more convoy will be sent back to collect more of the upper castes, leaving less-valued warriors, scientists and merchants to run the diminished Homeworlds while the rest of the Clan breeding programme, weapons research, and what manufacture they can't replace from their new acquisitions is removed. The Homeworld population will be beginning to drop naturally as the relatively high death rate exceeds the new, much reduced birthrate among the laborers. More worlds are dropping out of contact as they are stripped of spacefaring resources and abandoned. The convoys keep coming but get smaller and smaller as shipping is needed for relocating from the staging world(s) to the Hegemony and as shipyards in the Homeworlds are torn down and shipped off.

After twenty years and with 120-150 million Clanners shipped to the Inner Sphere, the last convoy leaves Strana Mechty, leaving no jumpships or HPGs and few if any dropships or shuttles behind. For that matter, fusion reactors and other valuable infrastructre have been taken so there's little in the way of power and water left for those abandoned.

The lights are going out...

Would they compete for the "Provinces" to conquer?

A solution for the overpopulation would be to "simply" make Trials...

Stations or Behemoth-style 'evacuation' transports with a thrust of 1/2 or 2/3 seem to be the way to go here.  Additional JumpShips would be have to be produced as well, but single 100,000 evacuation Behemoth should be able to carry 7,500 passengers, plus 5 tons of cargo per passenger, using steerage compartments (you could cram a lot more in using infantry bays, but spending a YEAR in an infantry bay?, bad form old chap).  That is with a 2/3 thrust.  Four of these (and a Clan Odyssey) could carry around 30,000 passengers and take far less time to produce than a compact core transport, and cost far less even with a L/F battery.  A Clan Monolith with L/F batteries (with 6 or 7 docking collars; you can't get more than that I believe) would be a little more expensive, but allow for 45,000-52,500 passengers per ship.  You'd still need 7,000+ JumpShips to evacuate ALL Warriors, Scientists, Merchants, Technicians in one go.

But on the bright side, if you aren't aiming for a total evacuation, and are instead looking at only (say) 60 million evacuatees, that would only require 1,500 JumpShips and 15,750 DropShips.  Of course, the evacuation DropShips also need to be able to land (once) and will probably be designed to be dismantled and provide equipment for Clan enclaves.

So, anyone have any clue as too how many JumpShips the Clans have at this time?  Civilian and military?

Master Arminas