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Veni, Vidi, (Re)aedificavi "I Came, I saw, I (Re)built" (A Commissioned Battletech Isekei)
- Thread starter MarkWarrior
- Start date
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- Tags
- battletech capitalism ho!
Fragment of Serenity
Yu-Shan's Paperwork Ninja
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A good first showing. Let's see what the next steps lead to.
Also, what would Duncan's stat line be as of now, in terms of gunnery and piloting?
Also, what would Duncan's stat line be as of now, in terms of gunnery and piloting?
MarkWarrior
Occasionally decent writer
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- Dec 28, 2019
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A regular. 5/5
Jarrik32
Not too sore, are you?
- Joined
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Honestly I suspect that beyond a few real 'death or glory' fights most of them probably aren't this bloody. I suspect 'big name' fights are set up to be flashy but not as destructive as they look. Especially as a pilot that gets a reputation for deliberately killing opponents* isn't likely to stay a contestant long assuming they don't have an 'accident' in the arena themselves.
Plus from what I can tell it's macro scale logistics that cripple nations rather than tactical losses. I'd imagine for an actual nation the mech losses are a rounding error. Except of course for a few mech models where they genuinely don't make them anymore.
*It may be legal to a degree but there is a limit to what local authorities will tolerate and more importantly I imagine the arena managers won't be amused.
Chapter 34
New
MarkWarrior
Occasionally decent writer
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- 53,416
Chapter 34
Date: September 12, 3029
Location: Kalidasa, Free Worlds League
Back home, I hadn't really ever been into guns or the outdoors. Sure, it's fairly stereotypical for tech startups to lock themselves inside until they've solved their most recent problems. In my case, it'd been true. For one thing, redheads and the outdoors didn't always mix well. I was particularly susceptible to the sun, and as a kid I'd learned taht even judicious applications of susncreen and covering my body didn't always work.
Here in this strange world in which I'd found myself a budding entrant into the military industrial complex, that had changed. I now had a fiance who wouldn't let me slack off in anything. When we'd first started discussing FireFlight industries, one of her primary statements had been that we couldn't sell a product that we wouldn't use ourselves.
Which is why I'd found myself at a privately owned shooting range in the middle of the desrrt, the sun beating down on my pale skin., and a pair of massive trucks loaded up with every type of weapon that we could or might produce for the new company.
Thankfully, the combat uniforms/clothing that Rebecca had pushed us towards was lightweight, kept the sun from killing me, and actually left me feeling like I wasn't going to die out here after a few hours.
Yes, getting to shoot machine guns, assault rifles, and everything was 'cool' at first, but the novelty quickly wore off after the fifth or sixth iteration of a slightly different operating system I shot.
My shoulder ached from the heavy caliber of the squad machine guns, and I was drenched in sweat despite the nice uniforms. The only thing that kept me here was just how hot Rebecca looked right now. And not in the 'it's the desert' heat kind of hot. But the uniform she was wearing hugged her just right and made it all worthwhile. Especially when I knew that after we were done with the shooting that we'd be spending the rest of the week camping to test the other kit she wanted to sell.
There was a part of me that whispered. "She's already tested this gear, she didn't need to drag us out here to die in the desert." I silenced that part of me. Even if she had tested everything, this view was absolutely worth it. Especially when she finished a pattern of fire and stood up, resting a weapon on her shoulder before looking back at me with an inquisitive look.
I'd never thought I'd find something like this attractive before. Hell, I'd avoided romance and anything to do with it like the plague for years. Now, I was discovering that I most definitely had a type, and I was looking right at her.
"What?" She asked, arching an eyebrow over the Aviators she wore.
"Nothing," I shook my head, finishing the water before standing up and heading back over to her. "Just wondering how many more of these do we have to test?"
"Well, part of the reason I brought you out here was to see how intuitive some of the weapons are. Not everyone we sell to is going to be experts at this kind of thing," She said, handing me the next weapon and expecting me to figure it out. "Once we're done with this, we'll get all of the weapons for each class, and I'll have you pick out the ones that were easier to figure out the proper handling procedures. Whatever's easiest for you to figure out will probably be the same for everyone else. Then, I'll do some reliability testing outside of this, run it through the mud, sand, dirt, heat, cold, and anything else it might need to stand up to and we'll select hte weapons that are both easy to use and last the longest for manufacture."
"You couldn't have explained that earlier?" I asked.
"I thought I had," Rebecca replied, cocking her head to the side before facepalming. "No, nevermind, I didn't explain it. I thought I'd explained it after I went over the safety rules. But I just handed you an SRM launcher and told you to shoot that hill."
She pointed across the desert a few kilometers away where the missile had detonated.
"Yeah, that was freakin' awesome," I admitted. No matter how divorced I had been from media, firearms, etc. I didn't think there was a man alive who didn't appreciate an explosion. Especially one that he had set off himself.
"So, yeah," Rebecca said sheepishly. "I'm running tests using you as the primary testor to see what works best for people new to this kind of thing."
"I mean, it makes sense," I shrugged. "So, how many more do we have to go through."
She coughed and said something that I thought sounded like thirteen.
"Thirteeen isn't bad," I said to the brunette.
"Sorry, we have thirty," She chuckled at the miscommunication. "But after that, we get to spend a night together out under the stars. It'll be fun!" She winked.
I shook my head and did what every boyfriend, infantryman, and military member has done for thousands of years. I grumbled and did what I was told.
Date: September 29, 3029
Construction costs, fees, and delays were one of the things that no one really talked about when it came to startups back on Earth. Starting a store, storefront, or restaurant was actually fairly easy. Usually, there was already a building someone had built that you could lease out to get started. Or, as had been the case with my old tech startup, we'd bought an older office building and done some minor remodels.
Here though, I couldn't settle for a leased building, or an older factory building nearby. For one thing, even the factories around here weren't big enough to fully handle battlemech production unless I managed to buy one of Kali Yama's facilities outright. And I didn't know a singlep person that would be able to afford the kind of buyout that would require.
That, and there were certain security and safety measures that had to be baked into every facility that was geared towards 'mech production beyond industrialmechs. It was the kind of thing that made every new building on the property more expensive, take longer to build, and a nightmare to handle when it came to inspections.
So, a regular factory complex might take two years to build. A MilitiaMech factory could go at about the same pace given there were slightly less security measures to follow. A Battlemech factory? That was the sort of thing that was a three to five year project.
At first, I'd thought that the Mercury facility would take the same amount of time that our Mackie and Phoenix facilities took to build. I was wrong, very wrong. In fact, when I saw Andrew Shepherd lay out the timeline I had frowned. I hadn't given anyone my preliminary estimates for what I expected out of the factory within the next two years, and I was exceedingly grateful for that now. Because I'd have to move everything in my timeline back. I'd been planning to release pre-orders for the Mercury within six months of the factory opening for business.
With a heavy sigh, I rested my head on my desk. Deeply appreciating the cool metal compared to the heat of the factory surrounding me. I'd grown used to how fast things had been moving and had forgotten that things were going to take time.
There wasn't anything I could do to speed up the construction. In fact, any intervention I made would probably end up with delays or worse. Yes, I knew that the big boys on Kalidasa probably had deals worked out with the inspectors to get them to look past a few violations here or there. Because doing everything by the book was expensive. But I also knew that in this case, the rules and required measures existed for a good reason.
A part of the rules and measures were probably things that the big corporations had pushed for in order to help prevent startups from coming and taking market share. Not that it was really a problem in the current climate. With the Free Worlds League Federal Military and militia purchasing everything they could get their hands on, there was plenty of money to go around.
The big problem I was faced with, was that I didn't know how long this 'boom' would last. It could endure for years, or it could come crashing down arounds us. If I threw everything into expanding and it didn't pay off, then we'd be facing some pretty severe consequences.
So, I knuckled down, put a fresh pot of coffee on, and began crunching numbers. Assuming that things slowed down significantly, we would still be operating at a profit. If a small one. After all, our biggest market was the militia, and after a war of this scale, they'd need to replenish losses and do whatever else a military might need. So, now I needed to figure out something that could give us a leg up on the competition. Something that set us apart aside from militiamechs and durable products.
Eventually, it struck me that I'd been ignoring something that I could and should have been planning on selling for years. I had built a rought version of Windows 98 on our current system, and people had loved how intuitive it was. Now I just needed to have it able to be put on a separate installation section along with a basic suite of software and it could net us a lot of money,
There was just one problem though. I hated the subscription model. I didn't want to have to force people to keep paying for something when a product was already doing well enough to suit their needs.That said, I did understand the merits of charging a fee to maintain software that cost money to continue development and pushing into.
I'd have to find some sort of middle ground. Where people who just wanted the basics got what they needed with no frills, but people who wanted support for longer could get it if they were willing to pay for it.
Some issues that I could already foresee was the need to train people, to have a possible IT call center of some kind, as well as a way for companies to get an 'enterprise' license of the software instead of a personal license.
I also needed to figure out a way to build hardware. Corporations would be the largest purchaser, but they wouldn't be willing to buy something if there wasn't already hardware attached to it. I laid my head down again. It looked like I was going to be dipping my fingers into three separate pots of potential gold. Mechs, information technology, and infantry gear.
"Susannah," I called out, and my assistant appeared. "You're the most experienced in the computer systems we have outside of myself, and I've got a few things I want to pick your brain about."
"What would I know that you don't already know?" She asked, taking the seat across from my desk.
"I built the system, and I know that it's a bit expensive. My question is about potentially building out systems like the one we have and selling it and the software to other companies as well as individuals if we can scale it down."
"Don't do it," Susannah shook her head at me, her eyes serious. "Selling your work for it to be broken and stolen by someone else isn't worth it."
"I'll copyright or patent it first," I replied.
"Doesn't matter,' She said. "You haven't really seen it yet, because we don't intrude on anyone's business yet. But you cannot give people who are going to be competing with us a single centimeter. They'll use it against us, drive us out of business, and they won't stop at the computers and software. They'll take everything they possibly can. Keep the software, the computers, everything in house. Selling it might make you a ton of money at first. But it'll end in disaster, trust me."
Date: September 12, 3029
Location: Kalidasa, Free Worlds League
Back home, I hadn't really ever been into guns or the outdoors. Sure, it's fairly stereotypical for tech startups to lock themselves inside until they've solved their most recent problems. In my case, it'd been true. For one thing, redheads and the outdoors didn't always mix well. I was particularly susceptible to the sun, and as a kid I'd learned taht even judicious applications of susncreen and covering my body didn't always work.
Here in this strange world in which I'd found myself a budding entrant into the military industrial complex, that had changed. I now had a fiance who wouldn't let me slack off in anything. When we'd first started discussing FireFlight industries, one of her primary statements had been that we couldn't sell a product that we wouldn't use ourselves.
Which is why I'd found myself at a privately owned shooting range in the middle of the desrrt, the sun beating down on my pale skin., and a pair of massive trucks loaded up with every type of weapon that we could or might produce for the new company.
Thankfully, the combat uniforms/clothing that Rebecca had pushed us towards was lightweight, kept the sun from killing me, and actually left me feeling like I wasn't going to die out here after a few hours.
Yes, getting to shoot machine guns, assault rifles, and everything was 'cool' at first, but the novelty quickly wore off after the fifth or sixth iteration of a slightly different operating system I shot.
My shoulder ached from the heavy caliber of the squad machine guns, and I was drenched in sweat despite the nice uniforms. The only thing that kept me here was just how hot Rebecca looked right now. And not in the 'it's the desert' heat kind of hot. But the uniform she was wearing hugged her just right and made it all worthwhile. Especially when I knew that after we were done with the shooting that we'd be spending the rest of the week camping to test the other kit she wanted to sell.
There was a part of me that whispered. "She's already tested this gear, she didn't need to drag us out here to die in the desert." I silenced that part of me. Even if she had tested everything, this view was absolutely worth it. Especially when she finished a pattern of fire and stood up, resting a weapon on her shoulder before looking back at me with an inquisitive look.
I'd never thought I'd find something like this attractive before. Hell, I'd avoided romance and anything to do with it like the plague for years. Now, I was discovering that I most definitely had a type, and I was looking right at her.
"What?" She asked, arching an eyebrow over the Aviators she wore.
"Nothing," I shook my head, finishing the water before standing up and heading back over to her. "Just wondering how many more of these do we have to test?"
"Well, part of the reason I brought you out here was to see how intuitive some of the weapons are. Not everyone we sell to is going to be experts at this kind of thing," She said, handing me the next weapon and expecting me to figure it out. "Once we're done with this, we'll get all of the weapons for each class, and I'll have you pick out the ones that were easier to figure out the proper handling procedures. Whatever's easiest for you to figure out will probably be the same for everyone else. Then, I'll do some reliability testing outside of this, run it through the mud, sand, dirt, heat, cold, and anything else it might need to stand up to and we'll select hte weapons that are both easy to use and last the longest for manufacture."
"You couldn't have explained that earlier?" I asked.
"I thought I had," Rebecca replied, cocking her head to the side before facepalming. "No, nevermind, I didn't explain it. I thought I'd explained it after I went over the safety rules. But I just handed you an SRM launcher and told you to shoot that hill."
She pointed across the desert a few kilometers away where the missile had detonated.
"Yeah, that was freakin' awesome," I admitted. No matter how divorced I had been from media, firearms, etc. I didn't think there was a man alive who didn't appreciate an explosion. Especially one that he had set off himself.
"So, yeah," Rebecca said sheepishly. "I'm running tests using you as the primary testor to see what works best for people new to this kind of thing."
"I mean, it makes sense," I shrugged. "So, how many more do we have to go through."
She coughed and said something that I thought sounded like thirteen.
"Thirteeen isn't bad," I said to the brunette.
"Sorry, we have thirty," She chuckled at the miscommunication. "But after that, we get to spend a night together out under the stars. It'll be fun!" She winked.
I shook my head and did what every boyfriend, infantryman, and military member has done for thousands of years. I grumbled and did what I was told.
Date: September 29, 3029
Construction costs, fees, and delays were one of the things that no one really talked about when it came to startups back on Earth. Starting a store, storefront, or restaurant was actually fairly easy. Usually, there was already a building someone had built that you could lease out to get started. Or, as had been the case with my old tech startup, we'd bought an older office building and done some minor remodels.
Here though, I couldn't settle for a leased building, or an older factory building nearby. For one thing, even the factories around here weren't big enough to fully handle battlemech production unless I managed to buy one of Kali Yama's facilities outright. And I didn't know a singlep person that would be able to afford the kind of buyout that would require.
That, and there were certain security and safety measures that had to be baked into every facility that was geared towards 'mech production beyond industrialmechs. It was the kind of thing that made every new building on the property more expensive, take longer to build, and a nightmare to handle when it came to inspections.
So, a regular factory complex might take two years to build. A MilitiaMech factory could go at about the same pace given there were slightly less security measures to follow. A Battlemech factory? That was the sort of thing that was a three to five year project.
At first, I'd thought that the Mercury facility would take the same amount of time that our Mackie and Phoenix facilities took to build. I was wrong, very wrong. In fact, when I saw Andrew Shepherd lay out the timeline I had frowned. I hadn't given anyone my preliminary estimates for what I expected out of the factory within the next two years, and I was exceedingly grateful for that now. Because I'd have to move everything in my timeline back. I'd been planning to release pre-orders for the Mercury within six months of the factory opening for business.
With a heavy sigh, I rested my head on my desk. Deeply appreciating the cool metal compared to the heat of the factory surrounding me. I'd grown used to how fast things had been moving and had forgotten that things were going to take time.
There wasn't anything I could do to speed up the construction. In fact, any intervention I made would probably end up with delays or worse. Yes, I knew that the big boys on Kalidasa probably had deals worked out with the inspectors to get them to look past a few violations here or there. Because doing everything by the book was expensive. But I also knew that in this case, the rules and required measures existed for a good reason.
A part of the rules and measures were probably things that the big corporations had pushed for in order to help prevent startups from coming and taking market share. Not that it was really a problem in the current climate. With the Free Worlds League Federal Military and militia purchasing everything they could get their hands on, there was plenty of money to go around.
The big problem I was faced with, was that I didn't know how long this 'boom' would last. It could endure for years, or it could come crashing down arounds us. If I threw everything into expanding and it didn't pay off, then we'd be facing some pretty severe consequences.
So, I knuckled down, put a fresh pot of coffee on, and began crunching numbers. Assuming that things slowed down significantly, we would still be operating at a profit. If a small one. After all, our biggest market was the militia, and after a war of this scale, they'd need to replenish losses and do whatever else a military might need. So, now I needed to figure out something that could give us a leg up on the competition. Something that set us apart aside from militiamechs and durable products.
Eventually, it struck me that I'd been ignoring something that I could and should have been planning on selling for years. I had built a rought version of Windows 98 on our current system, and people had loved how intuitive it was. Now I just needed to have it able to be put on a separate installation section along with a basic suite of software and it could net us a lot of money,
There was just one problem though. I hated the subscription model. I didn't want to have to force people to keep paying for something when a product was already doing well enough to suit their needs.That said, I did understand the merits of charging a fee to maintain software that cost money to continue development and pushing into.
I'd have to find some sort of middle ground. Where people who just wanted the basics got what they needed with no frills, but people who wanted support for longer could get it if they were willing to pay for it.
Some issues that I could already foresee was the need to train people, to have a possible IT call center of some kind, as well as a way for companies to get an 'enterprise' license of the software instead of a personal license.
I also needed to figure out a way to build hardware. Corporations would be the largest purchaser, but they wouldn't be willing to buy something if there wasn't already hardware attached to it. I laid my head down again. It looked like I was going to be dipping my fingers into three separate pots of potential gold. Mechs, information technology, and infantry gear.
"Susannah," I called out, and my assistant appeared. "You're the most experienced in the computer systems we have outside of myself, and I've got a few things I want to pick your brain about."
"What would I know that you don't already know?" She asked, taking the seat across from my desk.
"I built the system, and I know that it's a bit expensive. My question is about potentially building out systems like the one we have and selling it and the software to other companies as well as individuals if we can scale it down."
"Don't do it," Susannah shook her head at me, her eyes serious. "Selling your work for it to be broken and stolen by someone else isn't worth it."
"I'll copyright or patent it first," I replied.
"Doesn't matter,' She said. "You haven't really seen it yet, because we don't intrude on anyone's business yet. But you cannot give people who are going to be competing with us a single centimeter. They'll use it against us, drive us out of business, and they won't stop at the computers and software. They'll take everything they possibly can. Keep the software, the computers, everything in house. Selling it might make you a ton of money at first. But it'll end in disaster, trust me."
Kuroji
Not too sore, are you?
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2016
- Messages
- 355
- Likes received
- 6,870
Ah, there's that Inner Sphere crabs-in-a-bucket mentality we've all come to know. This is why we can't have nice things, ever.
Baron Heterodyne
Getting some practice in, huh?
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2022
- Messages
- 8
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- 13
Talk about cutthroat business
Waruiko
Versed in the lewd.
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2014
- Messages
- 1,282
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- 5,818
Now now we don't know for sure shes comstar
Rothgaar001
Getting out there.
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2020
- Messages
- 17
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- 116
The guy has been here for years now right? why can't he seem to get with the program about how ruthless business is in the interfere? I just don't get how he can build up this much and not have a clue. They will literally hire mercenaries to go after each other.
MarkWarrior
Occasionally decent writer
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2019
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- 53,416
Because so far it's still just stories told to him. Hearing about something isn't the same thing as witnessing it yourself.
Kuroji
Not too sore, are you?
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2016
- Messages
- 355
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- 6,870
It's not a matter of her potentially being Comstar, it's a matter of this being such a highly likely scenario that it is depressing. And yet, completely on brand.
Then again, if the intention is to spread the better interface far and wide, rather than making a mint...
Baldrick the Wise
Not too sore, are you?
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2025
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- 3,413
Fiancee dragging him to a firing range with a truck full of guns and ammo? I truly feel for the guy.