New Mercia

Kingdom of New Mercia
System Info
World Name: New Mercia Map ID: R 19 Surface Gravity: 9.96 m/s2 Climate: Frozen Atmosphere: Oxygen-Nitrogen
Population: Population Breakdown: Capital: Landing Type of Power: ZOCU
Infrastructure
Wealth: 550 + 165 PIP: 900 + 165 CIP: 700 + 165 Delta Dust: 650 Theta Dust: 100 Military: 37,500

Sphere 2

Paths

Final Stats

SP: 43

SP Limit: 25

Population: 522 Base bonus: 261

Trangene: 30

Morale: 12

Wealth: 450 + 274.05

PIP: 1000 + 261

CIP: 800 + 274.05

Fabbers: 0

Delta Dust: 830

Theta Dust: 100

Military: 52500

Doctrines: 25

Logistics: 70

Global Tech Level: 19

Applications: 318

Stockpiles: 0

Debt: -2

SP Expenditures

Additional Limit: 0

Wealth: 0

PIP: 0

CIP: 0

Dust: 15

Theta: 0

Pop: 12

Mil: 0

Tech Indices: 2

Apps: 14

Transgene: 0

Doctrine: 0

Logistics: 0

Technology

Tech Indexes

Global Technology Level: 19

Shipbuilding: 16

Parasite Construction: 19

Carrier Construction: 19

Aviation Warship Construction: 51

Aerospace Construction: 22 (+3)

Mecha Construction: 26

Ground Construction: 29

Projectiles: 19

Lasers: 19

Railguns: 21

Particle Weapons: 19

Mega Particle Weapons: 51

Missiles: 19

Propulsion: 19

Power: 26

Materials: 26

Shields: 26

Electronics: 19

Stealth: 19

Transgenics: 20 (+1)

Mass Production: 20 (+1)

Civilian Technologies: 16

Xenotechnology: 19

Basic Theotechnology: 46

Advanced Theotechnology: 19

Applications

315/318

ZOCU standard

Aerospace Construction III (90)
Ground Construction III (80)
T-Forced Fusion Cells II (85)
Iridium Forging (50)
Theta Jumpdrive (10)

Transgenics

10% Omoikane template (+2 Intelligence, +1 Reflexes, +1 Social)

Doctrines

Need to finish this

General Ground Template + 10 points

Line 1, Superiority 1, Strike 2, Combined Arms 2, Partisans and Patriots 2, Ramparts 2, Recruitment 2, Reserves 1

Morale

Public Order: 4

Diplomacy: 2

Military Discipline: 6

Societal Closure: 3

Taxes: 0

Space Monarchy (Autocratic): +3 Military Discipline, +3 Societal Closure, -2 Public Order, -2 Diplomacy
Internal Collapse: -2 Public Order
Fight in the Jungle: +2 Military Discipline

General Information

New Mercia is one of several moons of the gas giant Deria in the Mintaka system. It is well known as a source of delta dust, owing to significant precursor deposits all over the planet, and for an extremely erratic climate with variations from extreme cold to tropical heat owing to the elliptical orbit of Deria and the tidally locked nature of New Mercia and it's planet. More recently a civil war, running concurrently with the larger ZOCU war, has made New Mercia infamous for extremely high civilian and military casualties, use of WMDs (particularly what has become known as the Mercian Zombie Plague), political extremism and disastrous overreaction.

Politically, the moon is divided between the Kingdom of New Mercia, the government that arose from the original UN/EU chartered colony, and the Federal Republic of Albion, the breakaway polity that is the result of the New Mercian Civil War. The Kingdom is a ZOCU member state, while the FRA is an EU affiliate. Also present is an ARROWs peacekeeping force, intended to enforce compliance with the ceasefire that brought an end to the Civil War. As both sides are well supplied with advanced weapons and the UN force small and under-equipped in comparison, the effectiveness of this attempt is low; raids by both sides are commonplace, although the forbidding mountain chains that for the boundary between the two polities make any large scale attempt at military action difficult and the well developed aerospace defence infrastructure of both nations makes leapfrogging their natural boundaries difficult, at best.

Geography

Arcologies

Landing Arcology
New Anglia Arcology
Highfoss Arcology
Tamwold Arcology
Whelworth Arcology
Windermere Arcology

History

Early History

New Mercia is one of the youngest colonies in the expanse, settled at the tail end of the last gasp of the EU's colonial expansion policy. Initially, the moon that would become New Mercia was passed over for colonisation due to it's extreme and variable climate; the gas giant Deria has an elliptic orbit, with two summers and two winters per year at perihelion and apehelion respectively.

While New Mercia is tidally locked to Deria, and thus warmed by infra red radiation from the gas giant, less than a third of the ice-free land area is directly exposed. Known now as 'planetside,' this is an area of permanent tundra and taiga throughout the year with minor shifts in climactic conditions depending on the season, excluding the massive storms that occur throught the equatorial areas of the entire moon in the summer. The rest of the plant shows an extreme variance in weather patterns depending on the season; in the warmer months, large areas of land - most notably the Fuller Plateau - are almost tropical in termperature and experiance massive rainfall. In the winter, the majority of these areas freeze solid, leading to the creation of 'ice jungles' and other unique features as the local flora freezes and enters a hibernation phase. As a result of Deria's orbit, a single planetary year is almost 28 Earth years in length. Without altering the orbit of Deria itself, something not fesable, terraforming would have been impossible.

Nevertheless, in the late 2090s, interest in settling the moon grew as speculative mineral surveys has revealed a geologically rich world ripe for exploitation. A colony expedition was eventually assembled and dispatched, but the nature of the original colonists would emerge as a permanent problem and the source of much of the trouble that followed over the next century. At the time, it was obivous that the colonisation drive was starting to lose steam if one knew where to look. As a result, many of those who wished to escape the grasp of the EU were joining any expedition they could find a place on. As a result, the expedition was considerably larger than expected, and the majority of the original colonists were leaving Earth specifically to escape the authority of the EU.

At the time, this was not a large problem; the business of setting up a colony occupied the attention of all the settlers. The wild climate and weather of New Mercia had been well plotted before the colony left Earth, and many architects and designers had taken the opportunity to put their own pet theories and ideas as to how cities and colonies should be built into practice. The result was eventually a world of scattered arcologies linked with high speed maglev lines, but in the early years of the colony, the majority of the population lived inside prefab undergound shelters that had been prepared by automated drones despatched beforehand.

The discovery of delta dust deposits was initially not of great import; many worlds possessed some seams of the precoursor nanocomputers. As more and more was discovered, however, it was clear that there were major deposits on New Mercia, and this was compounded by te discovery of a working posthuman data core in an otherwise dead spire. Interstellar companies and government agencies descended on the moon in droves, and the result was ultimately catastophic.

EU Administrative Period

Although theoretically the EU had always been the legal authority on the colony, they had been content to allow New Mercia to be relatively autonomous - the Colonial Assembly effectively appointed the Governor through 'reccomendations' to the EU, native concerns were mostly responsible for expanding resource exploitation and most Transtellars were involved as partners to local firms rather than in their own right. When the large corporations moved in proper after the dust find, they rapidly diversified their operations into more mundane mineral extraction and quite apart from denying local industries access to the new resource, actually drove many of them out of business. At the same time, the EU, having decided that such an important resource base required more scrutiny, began asserting it's legal authorities more strongly. The colonial Assembly was greatly reduced in power, and the Governor position filled with men and women more suited to creating a favourable environment for businesses, and less willing to listen to the requests of the colonists themselves.

As a result, New Mercians saw little benefit from the dust discovery, and many of them were actually worse off as the 'natural' local economy was crushed beneath the EU and it's corporate juggernaughts. The outcome was a vicious guerilla war, as the impoverished, disaffected and radical, finding that doing things the 'right way' simply resulted in them being ignored, decided to take matters into their own hands. Despite the enthusiasm of the 'freedom fighters,' they lacked skill and modern weapons. While the conflict was loud, very visible and attention grabbing, it was contained with relatively few troops, and public order was never threatened, despite the private sympathies many New Mercians held with the revolters.

Then came the Breakdown.

Initial hopes that the cause would quickly be found and rectified faded within the first several months, leaving the EU administration and security forces isolated and spread thin. At the same time, New Mercians who has privately been sympathetic to the insurgents but unwilling to take direct action under the threat of an EU response started to participate openly. In early 2153, an open revolt siezed Whelworth arcology, subduing the EU security troops through sher wieght of numbers and sanding off a hastily organised attempt at recapture from teh authorities in Landing. A similar revolt in Highfoss failed, but only just, and it was increasingly clear that the colonial administration would be unable to maintain order. With attacks on EU troops increasing in intensity and number, and casualties mounting, the governor could see the writing on the wall.

There was no telling how long the Breakdown would last, and New Mercia would have been in a precarious situation in the best possible scenario; the outbreak of a civil war would have been disastrous. Three months aftr the Whelworth Revolt, Governor Galtierei summoned the Coloial Assembly to a constitutional convention intended to provide an interim, stable governmental structure until contact could be reestablished with the EU. The ultimate form that said constitution took was rather more extreme than Galtierei had expected, establishing a ceremonial monarchy - with the popular guerilla leader John Wooltorton sitting on the throne as John I - and an appointed aristocracy, as well as a bicameral parliament divided into Lords and Commons. Commentators at the time joked that the framers of the constitution had deliberately set out to re-create the British political structure of the early 21st century.

Whatever the case, the new government, free of the taint of association wtih the EU, was able to take the drastic actions required to prevent complete economic collapse. Widespread application of keynsian economics and inventic tax legislation went some distance to converting the economy from a nearly pure primary industrial resource base and an industrialised economy. While nobody was rich, nobody starved, and some areas of growth became self sustaining.

by 2162, however, the policy of robbing Peter to pay Paul was becoming unsustainable. New Mercia had demonstrated impressive growth figures, but large sectors of the economy had been created out of whole cloth over teh preceeding decade; compared to nothing, any growth would have been impressive. The tax base had expanded, but not enough to plug a massive hole in government finances, and internal credit markets were scraping the bottom of the barrel. The previous colonial administration had not held any foriegn currency reserves - and they would have been worthless in isolation in any case - and the whole house of cards was creaking alarmingly.

Thus, when the ZOCU diplomatic boat Kepler made the jump to the New Mercia system in 2163, ZOCU became the obvious solution to the problem. At the time, concern was already growing ovr the Magnates, and ZOCU had taken the decision to assemble a dedicated military command beyond the purely local units needed to deal with feral drones. New Mercia had not had even that problem, and was compeltely de-militarised, but the prospect of being even tangenitally involved in a war prompted the creating of a national military - the Royal Mercian System Defence Force - initially based heavily on those EU troops that had been stranded on the planet a decade before. More importantly, Mercian economic policies had created a large pool of industry that had been underutilised, and was available to supply the Combined Militia and ZOCU in general. Limited shipping was a problem, but with ZOCU technical help, New Mercia dedicated the majority of it's theta dust production to interstellar transportation. Although still not exactly healthy, this shot in the arm revivified the nearly moribund New Mercian economy until recontact with the EU.

Recontact

New Mercia was the first ZOCU world to be recontacted by the Core, when the EUS Galapagos made transit from Lylat in 2177. Initially, there was panic, but no invasion force followed, and EU officials seemed willing to tolerate the status quo, at least for the time being, even going so far as to ask the permission of planetary authorities to construct a catapult. The prospect of being tied into the lucrative trade network of the Core's catapult chains and subsequently the massive markets of Earth and the first stage colonies was too good an opportunity to pass up. Indeed, the majority of the delta dust used in the construction of the two catapults in the New Mercia system was locally sourced.

As time progressed, however, initially favourable relations began to break down. Neither side was the sole cause of the problems, but both suffered from a fundamental misjudgement of the other side and how far their opposite numbers were willing to go- a situation that was a microcosm of the entire ZOCU conflict. The EU seemed unable to shift away from a solution that would return New Mercia to it's pre-breakdown status of a directly administered resource colony, makign only minimal allowances for the 'unplanned' economic development that made such a course difficult, if not impossible to implement, while New Mercia was unwilling to contemplate surrendering much, if any, sovreignty back to the EU, at least as a colony. At the time, there were semi-serious suggestions of applying for EU membership as a full state, although any plans for such a radical course were obliterated by the outbreak of the civil war.

More practically, the reappearance of the EU changed the political situation radically. Those who had favoured the EU before the Breakdown but had reluctantly aggreed to the new constitutional framework because they had had no other choice, saw an opportunity to set the situation aright. It took less than a month for the first bomb to explode in a busy shopping district of Landing Arcology, killing more than a hundred people and wounding five times that many. Although the perpetrators calimed allegance to the EU, the Europeans attempted to distance themselves from teh architechts of what became a series of ever more destructive attacks. Direct EU support to the Mercian National Liberation Front was never proven, and EU and UN security troops actually took an active role in combatting the terrorists, in addition to providing specialist training to RMSDF Ground Command troops who had almost no institutional or personal experiane in counter insurgency operations.

Nevertheless, public perception linked the EU with the MNLF, and as opinion in the street soured, so too did the prospects of a substansive settlement between Europe and the colonial government.

The April Fools Coup - War Begins

The situation at the turn of 2181 was tense, but not so extreme that most observers expected the outbreak of widespread violence. Indeed, the economic situation on New Mercia was improving rapidly - to the point emergency measures had to be taken to prevent overheating - and the general consensus accross the Sphere was that New Mercia, and ZOCU in general, would eventually back down and submit to those that legally controlled their worlds, albiet with a great deal more autonomy than they had possessed before the Breakdown.

The security forces on New Mercia had been made aware of a major MNLF attack being planned, but were unaware of the detail when on the 1st of April, the pro-European fighters made their move. Equipped with surplus EU military gear smuggled in from Earth through a customs service that was still trying to adjust to a hugely increased volume of traffic, the MNLF militants attacked the palace, Parliament, the Ministry of Defence, Home Office and Foreign Office, as well as a number of RMSDF bases in Landing, internal train stations and the arcology's fission plants.

Surprise was total; nobody had believed that the MNLF had the capability to mount such an attack, especially in light of the fact that, up until that point, they had restricted themselves to bombs left in public places. The militants secured Parliament and most of the government buildings in the capital very quickly, but poor timing led to the attack on the palace goign in late, and the defenders had had time to make at least some preparations. Fighting reduced the compound to ruins, and by the end of the day, most of the defenders, including a company of EU infantry who had been in a position to render assistance, were dead, along with the entire Royal Family on the planet at that time.

The militants also succeeded in securing control of the internal train system and the external maglev stations, effectively isolating Landing from outside support. By the time a joint RMSDF/EU/UN response force could be assembled and aireal transport arranged, the MNLF fighters had succeeded in killing 482 out of 500 MPs, most of he head civil servants and a fair proportion of the central government's administrative and management personnel and destroying huge quantities of electronic and physical data. It was an atrocity that shocked the Sphere, and engendered a blistering wave of hatred towards the EU on New Mercia. Almost every major public figure, from news broadcasters to children's television hosts raised their voices in furious condemnation, and it rapidly became unsafe for EU and UN troops to leave their bases in anything below platoon strength.

Moreover, violence against anybody percieved to be a 'Yurp Sympathiser' skyrocketed. In the planetside arcologies, the violence was limited; there were fewer pro-EU inhabitants in the oldest settlements, and those that had once lived that had moved to newer sunside arcologies where there were more immigrants and thus a friendlier attitude to Europe. In the newer sunside arcologies, the population was much more severely split; immigration immediately before and after teh breakdown had mostly been funneled into the newest settlements with the most free space, and the riots that exploded throughout the region were so violent that the military was deployed to cointain them.

In the confusion immediately after the coup attempt, it was not immediately clear who was responsible for the violence, and the assumption was that MNLF agitators were orchestrating the violence to take advantage of the coup and force the Core to send a 'police force' to remove what was left of the sitting government. To many enlisted men and women, and a smaller but still significant number of officrs, it seemed like they were being told to hold their family and friends down for the mob to kill. MRSDF units in the sunside arcologies tore themselves apart as thsoe from pro-EU backgrounds fought to protect 'their' civilians from the anger of the mobs and equally incensed comrades. Had the central government reacted immediately to send fresh units with clearer orders, the situation might have been salvageable, but the damage done my the coup meant that swift response to any situation was impossible.

The pro-EU factions eventually emerged in control of msot of the sunside arcologies, and as it became clear what was happening, EU-leaning officers and men in so far intact MRSDF ground and air units mutinied. Several units defected to the rebels almost entirely intact and marched on loyalist arcologies. Petershaven Arcology fell on the 14th of December 2180, and New Anglia - along with it's vital orbital elevator - was saved only by the suicidally determined stand of General Grossman and what was left of the First Army's 2nd Corps in Stirling Pass. Foreign news crews who had come to the moon to cover the coup attempt foudn themselves instead covering it's collapse into civil war.

Fiction

Voodoo Patrol