After your previous failures in working down Rime, you were far less tolerant of fuckups. As such, you ordered an operational pause so you could recruit more cannon cockers, and get all your systems online.
God, you said that with a straight face. Your status as a flag officer was terminal.
What these two weeks boiled down to, though, was mostly sending out the builders to keep slapping together a shitload of the little light patterns to serve as picket watchposts, and hoping that little shit-tobbagan rocket battery parked outside your base didn't actually finish whatever project they were on about. The sporadic rocket fire was getting really damn annoying, with incoming pattering itself all across your frontline. Worse, it kept you from getting anything done at night- the enemy katushyas would roll in, dump a salvo close enough to break some patterns, and roll out. It was driving your builders and gunners nuts, since neither the mortar batteries nor the Wolfhound gunners had a reliable response to them.
It didn't take long before you snapped, called Theresa, and put in an express order for the new Huber Lariat 120mm guns. It took a few days, but they were shipped down fairly posthaste, and you managed to get them installed where they could fire into the rapid decay zone for practice fairly easily. From there, you had to assemble a battery crew, and get ready to drill the stuffing out of them.
The first, and most important, thing you learned about your new guns was they had a minimum range of 100m. That didn't sound like a lot, but you had to consider visual sighting distances. At a hundred meters, without field glasses, you could make out what uniform someone was wearing, the general color of their skin, and not much else. At two hundred meters, you'd start having trouble with uniforms, with Warden horizon blue and Colonial green blending together with the sky or the land, with details of the individual impossible to see. At three hundred meters, you'd get movement first, before being able to pick out any identifying remarks- and past three hundred meters, you'd need field glasses. Even with the binos, though, you'd be looking to barely get spots past 600m.
By the way- your new guns? Yeah, standard maximum tested range of 2,400 meters, and make that 2,760 if you were firing with the wind.
Fact of the matter was, that was a bit out of shouting distance, and was well into the point of pushing radio distances. You'd need to organize radio communication for the batteries, which meant developing radio communication protocols, which meant-
-fuck. The language barriers.
Your regiment, the 15e Flying Artillery, spoke English as its command language. At home and on some of the work crews, French and Japanese were bandied about, but it was secondary to the fact all your officers and NCOs were fluent in English first and foremost. However, the 62e and 64e were both Ukranian all the way, even if their officers spoke reasonably good English. That meant that if they wanted artillery fire support, it would need to either go through a fairly high up individual, or be a pre-scheduled fire.
Needless to say, you wired both Kazoo and Zairman about that. Zairman's telegram back was simple and short- all his officers had been getting English pounded into them as part of their officer training, and he expected scheduled fire patterns to be enough. If you were really worried, he insisted, then you could attach a Fire Control section to each of his companies, and then they'd handle the fire direction for the big guns.
Kazoo was much less phlegmatic about it when he dropped by your bunker core the next day.
"Melanie?" he asked, testing out your first name with some trepidation.
"Yes, Kazoo?" you asked, looking up from where you were signing off on staff rotations and leave requests. You'd known him long enough you could afford some informality.
"I'm going to need to get some help with fire direction," he admitted. "We just got the books in from Intelligence, and I'm the main person in my regiment who speaks English."
"Yeah, that's a problem," you muttered. "I'm still figuring out how to actually do the fire direction on the guns, being honest."
"One girl with a Drummond, one girl with a pair of field glasses, call in corrections to fire as you need. Maybe make them use a King Spire, if you want them to stay safe," Kazoo said, shrugging. "That's all I've got for practical advice."
"It's more than I was starting with," you shrugged. "It won't help the translation issue for instantaneous fires, though."
"I honestly don't think that'll be too big a deal?" Kazoo opined. "I mean, Melanie, you've still got mortars and the forties. If you ever have a problem we need to solve immediately, our people know enough to get a gun pointed where it needs to be."
You let off a soft chuckle. "First you tell me the sky is falling, then you tell me I've got the pillars to hold it up?"
"That's what we're here for, yeah," Kazoo said with a slight grin. "It'd be better if we had more help, though."
"Ah?" you asked. "What kind?"
"More infantry. My boys are good, but we're not exactly the most metal-heavy regiment out there."
"I'll put that in the notes," you said lightly. "Would having more tools help?"
"Honestly? Not really. The other three Ukrainian regiments are mostly folding towards Tymur and I, and we're both seen as outgrowths of you- for understandable reasons," Kazoo said, tapping the rainbow-and-wheat on his right shoulder. "It's better than the hamburger-fest that is the Band of the Red Hand, though, or the rumors I'm hearing of Les Coqs."
You snorted a little at the name. "Let me guess, that's where the incompetent French go?"
"Yeah, and they're slamming their way through the Nevish Line competently. They're about as vulgar as their name suggests, too."
"Wonderful," you said, shrugging. "Not my side of the map, not my problem."
"Good attitude, that," Kazoo said with a smirk. "That being said, the ball is coming up. Had any thoughts on who to go with?"
"Uh-"
"Oh come now, I'm sure you've got someone to go with!" Kazoo said, grinning. "If you don't know who to ask, though, invite Zairman. He's practically beside himself with the thought of having to attend."
"They didn't mention him by name, like they did to me," you grumbled.
"He's one of six armored- proper armored, with tanks and everything- regimental commanders in the game, and four of them have already RSVP'd. If Zairman isn't there, he'll be the laughingstock of the tankers, and people will try and poach his good tank crews."
"That's very stupid."
"That's MMOs for you."
Rolling your eyes, you sighed. "I am very bad at this whole social business. The Folkvangr will not be holding any such celebratory balls unless someone puts a gun to my head."
"Duly noted, General."
"Thanks, Kazoo."
///
Gun training continued, rather painfully, as you learned the whys and wherefores of the artillery pieces. Calculating the dispersion tables was a bitch, what with the winter winds twisting and turning, but you finally figured it out. At 100m, minimum distance, it had about 5m of dispersion, and an 80% rate of normalization. This continued pretty linearly, to 300m where it had about 18m of dispersion, with 50% normalization to land within 9m of aim point.
Then shit got scary. For every 100m past 300m, the math (and the mathematician you were talking to was
not confident in their numbers without an Intel Center's computers to double-check) you gained roughly 1m of dispersion and 1% less normalization. Therefore, at 1,000m which was going to be a Doctrinally Important Number, you had 26m of dispersion and 43% normalization towards 13m of dispersion. At 2,000m which was another doctrinally important number, you had 36m of dispersion, plus a mere 33% normalization of shells to 18m of dispersion. At maximum, bleeding edge of the range, your shells would fly 2,760m, before hitting 43m dispersion and having 26% normalization to fall within a 21.5m circle.
It was better than mortars, but you still had no real ability to calculate where in the high holy fuck a shell would land. Working off 1,000m as your assumed "opening arguments" of fire ranges, that meant you couldn't reliably hit anything smaller than a large pattern: they wouldn't be able to get shells to hit the dispersion of much else. If you had to open the fight at longer ranges, even monstrously huge modernist bunkers would be nigh-impossible to hit. These guns were postal code pasters at the longest extents of their range, and you didn't like to think about that. Accuracy was lethality, which was why your 40mm gunners practiced their precision when they could, and everyone had talked these up as the next best base killer than sliced bread.
Still, you wanted to put faith in these guns, so to Rime they went.
///
You learned more about your Huber Lariats in setting them up to bombard Rime than you did in testing. Digging them in around an old Y-pattern and a series of hastily-converted trench dugouts, your crane operator had a devil of a time getting everything properly set and prepared. You had placed Klasse in charge of the guns for this operation- and quietly promoted her to Lieutenant- and from your position in Kazoo's bunker could hear her swearing. Sporadic salvos of rocket fire were, needless to say, rather detrimental to the art of getting guns operationally emplaced. Still, your work crews were energetic, and soon enough the guns were in position and repaired, with a few of the cannier builders setting up a small gravel Facility Pad to serve as a place for truckers to dump shells and to uncrate containerized shell loads.
Once ammo stockpiles were built up a tad, and the rockets died down, Klasse started her first pre-planned fire mission. It was supposed to clean out a row of particularly stubborn G-houses. Instead, it ended up dropping shells right onto friendly lines- a sudden headwind, combined with poor normalization, forcing the first three volleys into Kazoo's boys.
Needless to say, you had a lot of phone-wrangling to handle with that one as Silica frantically told Klasse to stop shooting for the love of fuck. Once the wind direction issue was sorted out- and you got a gun spotting team up in with Kazoo's front line- it was back to firing.
And firing.
And more firing.
Christ on a bike you were shooting a lot.
It took the better part of an hour for your people to figure out, through a messy chain of orders and some bad discipline salvo-firing, that the wind had shifted to the northeast, meaning you were now landing shots long towards the town hall. Wrangling that battery correction in took a good half hour, and then it was back to the monotonous thunder of the guns.
In the end it took the better part of six hours of firing to get that damn line of G-houses down, but it did in fact bring the houses down- and more importantly, let you take the leash off Asuna as she decided to take the 40mm battery south and interdict those approaches. She didn't catch much, but every little bit counted as you moved targets over. The important thing was it helped support the south flank companies, who were getting stuck in on the regular in the penny-packet squad fights that denied them their machine guns and instead brought every alleyway into a viscous battle of lobbed grenade and submachine gun squirt.
After the G-houses were done, you started work on reducing the Town Hall- only to find out those rocket batteries had been reinforced at some point by the Colonials' own 120mm guns! You didn't know where the bastards were shooting from, but spurts of counterbattery fire were quite frustrating, as the odd miss or three played havoc with your trucks and shell supplies. A lot of Theresa's drivers were not willing to make the last leg when there was a risk of death, so you needed to commandeer members of 3 Battery to make up the shortfall. Everyone got to learn every position on the guns, as shell fragments killed trooper after trooper who had to plant their feet on the gun training and loading platforms. At times, you tried to counterbattery fire them, but counterbattery fire was hard when your enemy had mobile guns they were more than willing to move every time they saw your shell-splashes approach. Between the inexperience of the spotters and the gunners, first salvo hits were impossible on the bastards, so you couldn't stop them: just scare them off.
At the discretion of Calico, 2 Battery took to the field, embedding themselves tightly in with Kazoo's boys to provide point fires. Rather embarrassingly, it was quite effective, each gunner cutting swaths out of makeshift defenses that the Colonials were trying to fight to the death over.
Late in the evening, about 18 hours into the fight, news came in: the Town Hall was downed. Fires shifted to the Safe House, and you retired for the night. When you woke with a groan, you got the news in: the Safe House had fallen, and the Colonials were conducting an organized retreat to the docks, leaving behind most of their heavy equipment. It was with a heavy hand you had to clamp down on the urge to pursue: the troops were tired, the gun crews were exhausted from nearly 24 hours of continuous bombardment, and most- or least- importantly, when the CV team finally worked its way west into Rime, you got another few medals.
- Brigit's Medal
- Silver Wings: Live at time of Victory Point capture
- Titania's Medal: Capture a Victory Point as a Brigade Officer
- Cinnabar Cross: Serve as the Brigadier General of the capturing Brigade
- Silver Hawthorn: Live at time of Victory Point Capture
- Weathered Expanse Campaign Badge
- With Honors: Be involved in the capture of the Victory Point
- White Angel with Oak Leaves x4
Oh, but for these bits of virtual tin and ribbon to make up for the one thousand, one hundred, and fifty two cases of shells that had been expended- not counting the 40mm ammo, of course, or the countless shirts, several vehicles, and precious time of your people.
Oh well- it'd look good at the ball.
Fuck. There was that ball.
///
After frantically throwing your old base at 142 Locomotive as a "thank you for joining the regiment" move you should have done a lot earlier, you got to work planning for the ball. Oh god, the fucking ball. You needed a plus-one, too, which was going to be annoying; you needed a 'mess dress', whatever that was, and you needed to get all the way over to Stonecradle on the other end of the damn map. The last one was easiest to fix: booking transit on the Warden Bus System wasn't hard, and Kazoo agreed to keep a handle on things for the ball and the day of transit time it would take both ways.
The mess dress, though, involved going up into the Great Warden Dam- and requisitioning one through the Town Hall of all things! When you got it though, it was a hell of a garment.
Starting from the skin, it was a set of actually quite comfortable underwear, with a light corset that wasn't nearly so restricting as the word 'corset' would make most people think. Below that were straight 120-denier stockings, leading down to a pair of smart monk-strap shoes in black, with silver buckles.
A layer up was a simple navy blue dress skirt that was so dark as to be practically black, to be paired with a white satin shirt with a prominent high and ruffled collar. Your lack of decolletage would be unnoticable next to the throat's ruffle, although there was a slight v-neck and stealth button to hold the affair closed. On top of this went a cumberbund, and over it all a large, velvet and royal blue coat. The shoulders were high-built, with gold braid instead of epaulets, and your brigade's insignia was worked into a rainbow aiguillette on your right side- a rainbow cord, with the circle of wheat at the terminal button. On the left of the
single-breasted coat, your awards sat in a nice cluster of four rows. God forbid anyone get handsy with you, though, since the Brigit's and Titania's medals looked pointy even in miniature, and there was enough awards to cover most of your left breast.
Finally, terminating things off, were a white-and-blue half-cape for your right shoulder with the Warden Angel on it and your Regimental Blazon, for commanding the High King's Own artillery, and a massive dark-blue coat cut suspiciously similarly to the infantry coat as a weather guard.
The best part? You didn't even have to wear a hat with this.
Once you got your hair properly settled into two braids, thank you automatic clothing interaction interface, you blinked. [A Caovish Reminder] had transformed on you once again, this time turning into a stylish cane with a silver head and ebony wood that struck the ground with a clang. It was strangely heavy, and as you fiddled around with it, you heard a 'click', before the head separated.
No way.
You had a cane-sword now.
It was official- you may, at some point, might actually need to hold a ball just to style on someone with this. Plus, if you looked this good in the mess dress- and you looked fucking amazing- then imagine how other people would look in it. Like, say, Loup. Or Asuna. Or Zairman.
Or you could just take any of them to the ball as your plus-one. Oh yeah. Now
that's an idea…
///
Votes
THE BALL
(Choose One)
[] Zairman, your right hand and thundering fist, is a good choice. It'll signal brigade unity, and more importantly it reduces the number of wild cards you've got floating around this event. Plus he'll look great on your arm.
[] Takamachi, as your quasi-girlfriend, is not a bad option. Bringing her will also get her to talk tech with a lot of the other people that she'd normally never meet, so that tech could get explained.
[] Asuna might not look it, but there's a political animal hiding deep under the ambitious junior officer there. She smells like money, and that means she knows how to wheel and deal so your work comes together with everyone here.
[] Silica might be the least romantic option to take to this event, but the petite brigade officer has one big advantage: she knows everyone. Yes: everyone. That's a lot of gossip, and the radio stations have loose lips, so put two and two together to steal a march on the rest of the crowd.
BUNKER
(Choose One Two)
[] Expand your bunker base with additional infrastructure to sustain larger troop numbers.
[] Expand your bunker base with Defensive Patterns (Requires techniques, vote to begin development)
-[] With small patterns (x24 to go to New Base Completion)
-[] With medium patterns (x17 to go to New Base Completion)
-[] With heavy patterns (x4 to go to New Base Completion)
-[] With artillery firing positions
-[] With infantry fighting positions
-[] With Modernist patterns (x4 to go to New Base Completion)
[] Begin developing Concrete (Write-in base to begin concrete development on)
[] Develop a new bunker base in a better location
-[] Write in hex and town/Relic, as well as distance to front line or intended purpose.
[] Get your builders to stop expanding the base for now.
[] Gift, Assign, or Abandon a bunker base.
-[] Write-in base by location.
[] Begin design for a new, planned base.(Architect is busy!)
[] You don't need to build right now: put that time and manpower into the Brigade functions! (Grants one Brigade action)
PERSONNEL
(Choose One Two)
[] Go and recruit more personnel
-[] Mass recruitment: whatever you can get, get more of it! (Recruits 4d10+4 White personnel)
-[] Selective recruitment: Look for people who aren't clueless. The Logistics Union has a lot of folks. (Recruits 3d10+3 Green personnel)
-[] Picky recruitment: Get people who are at least as skilled as you are! (Recruits 2d10+2 Yellow personnel)
-[] Frontline recruitment: Go to the front and snag some blueberries! (Recruits 1d10+1 Orange personnel)
-[] Elite recruitment: Go find a group of lunatics, and shanghai them. (Recruits 1d10 Red personnel)
(You cannot recruit units of higher rating than yourself.)
[] Commit training!
-[] Vehicle training: Teach everyone drive good. Car goes on right hand side of road, revolutionary concept. Might as well also learn to drive a flatbed, or your Drummond if you're feeling nice.
-[] Rifle training: Everyone will spend time practicing the fine art of "bullet go plink"
-[] Administration Training: Basic delegation has been mastered, but the more officers you have the more the parts move. Therefore, figuring out how to grease the gears is important.
-[] Infantry Training: You've spent some time on the front, it sucks. Get better so it sucks less.
-[] Mobile Warfare Training: You know how to fight out of a truck bed. Now it's time to get good at that.
-[] Artillery Training: It is time to actually learn what the limitations of these guns are. It'll be expensive, but you need to know to keep mistakes from happening.
-[] Combat Vehicle Training: Your people know how to drive trucks and push guns, but the sort of work and operations needed to utilize an armored car or tank is completely outside your wheelhouse. Get some domestic tankers ready- you'll need them if you ever use armored contingents or self-propelled guns.
[] Extra work shifts
-[] More Scroop: Get everyone to do more rounds of scrooping at the scrap fields. You do your part, and more importantly, can use the B-mats to get useful stuff like more trucks or dedicated equipment.
-[] More Mines: Get everyone to do more rounds on the component mines and oil wells. Components mean R-mats, R-mats mean flatbeds, and more importantly: trains
-[] More Building: Put everyone to work on getting your bunker upgrades planned. If you don't have some planned, the bunker will get what the troops think it needs.
-[] Frontline Support: Put your people in the trenches on secondary duties: terminal logistics, machine guns, fortification, and other 'mostly safe' jobs to stiffen them up.
[] Begin operational planning for Something Big
-[] Write-in Something Big.
[] Begin Operation Planning (+1 to all rolls when the next operation starts)
[] You have enough spare brain cells in this department: put some time and manpower into the Brigade functions! (Grants one Brigade action)
UPGRADES
(Choose One Two Three!)
[] Go out and get yourself a lieutenant! (You may have one per twenty Regiment members, minimum one)
-[] Teach them the way of the builder, as much as you know how that works. (Adds one action to Bunker)
-[] Teach them the way of the talker, so you don't have to do that crap! (Adds one action to Personnel)
-[] Teach them the way of the organizer, so you have more time to put out more fires (Adds one action to Upgrades)
[] Find a, uh, techmaid, and get some prototype kits by hook or by crook.
-[] Willow's Bane Model 845 Flamethrower: A backpack mounted engineering and pyrotechnical weapon. It brings fire and death, and more importantly prevents building repair.
-[] Clancy-Raca M4: A sniper rifle with a potent optic and no theoretical maximum range. Takes 7.62mm rounds.
-[] Balfour Falconer Field Mortar: A very heavy demoltion charge deploying 250mm mortar, and the gun most responsable for letting infantry tear up concrete.
-[] 74-c2 Metora Gunship: It's like a Ronan except its got 2x 120mm instead of 1x. That's about it.
[] Requisition Material
-[] Logistics Support: Flatbeds, Fuel, and other niceties.
-[] Artillery Systems: 40mm guns, 120mm guns, mortars, and 'soft' upgrades.
-[] Base Support: More concrete, more faster.
[] Get in touch with another regiment that does something you need (Discovers and improves relations with one random regiment inside the search group)
-[] Logistics
-[] Production
-[] Frontline Combat
-[] QRF
-[] Water Logistics
-[] Techmaids
-[] Partisans
-[] War Bureau
-[] Great Warden Railroad (GWRR)
-[] 58e Intelligence
-[] 26e Commando
-[] 14e Medical
-[] 22e Chemical Warfare
[] Find a way to get your guys some quality of life upgrades so things suck less out here.
[] Go talk to someone specific/Meet a Specific Regiment
-[] Bug Kirito, the leader of your commandos for rent
-[] Go talk to Zairman before you end up with his regiment living out of your base,
-[] Write in named character or regiment number (this includes in-regiment characters)
[] You have enough spare equipment and kit: put some time and manpower into the Brigade functions! (Grants one Brigade action)
BRIGADE
(
Choose One!)
[] Begin preparing for a gradual push
-[] Slowly, the noose tightens on Port of Rime. Get in, and do a little daily walking fire to keep them on their toes.
-[] Huntsfort taunts you, and you can get some scab garrison troops to hold things down while you reach out and take a nibble
-[] Invest and secure Crow's Nest: You want to eat it.
-[] Begin piling on to Frostmarch, so you can let Zairman raid the backline and begin isolating Fortress Foxcatcher.
-[] Avenge the Navy, and put the boots to Wightwalk so you can have a hole of naval resupply.
-[] Time to go for the big one: Invest Foxcatcher, and begin the siege on a refinery town. (Locked, must take 2/4 approaches to the area first)
[] Search for more regiments to add to the Brigade: you have to catch them all!
-[] Write-in Regiment Number, CO, or name.
[] Promote an officer to Brigade Staff
-[] Scout from another Regiment in the Brigade
-[] Write-in Officer Name.