22

Some months later, Lise's team came back to New Vandenberg.

The official version was that they had found two Mackies 6S that were so obsolete that they could only be donated to museums, the first one being the New Vandenberg War Museum and the other one a BattleMech Museum on Taurus.

The real important price was that the data core was now safely multi-copied and in my hands.

While it contained lots of full blueprints for military hardware, including several Royal grade equipment; the real treasure were the blueprints for many different kinds of factories, shipyards and vehicles. Unlike the military hardware, these were mostly of the non-Hegemony sort, meaning very few if any were state-of-the-art automated ones, but even so they were so much better than what the Concordat had right now.

To be honest, the hundreds of advanced hardware blueprints were utterly useless right now as the Concordat like most of the Inner Sphere and the Periphery could barely produce 'standard' hardware. Much more interesting were the blueprints of the 'black boxes' in use in the automated systems of today factories. With that, I could greatly contribute to the improvement of almost all the industrial park of the Concordat and that gave me a lot of leverage.

One thing that couldn't be built right now were the factories that produced advanced items. That meant no Endo Steel, no Ultra or LB-X guns, no Extended Range energy weapons, etc. While I had the plans for several of these factories, several critical components were beyond our capability to produce. And without the science behind to understand them, it would remain so for the near future. I needed the Helm or the Niops cores, the ones with the data on the principles and science behind these technologies.

I had also checked to see if I had any blueprints for the Nighthawks. But no, top-of-the-line hardware of the Hegemony were not included. Bugger. Oh! Well, we would try to get these from Niops in the future, if everything went right, after all.

By the way, several designs of 'obsolete' WarShips, JumpShips and DropShips, all obsolete by SLDF standards were also included. Many of these I had never seen in my original universe. One of the gems I found were the full data specs of the Leviathan JumpShip and thanks to it, we would be able to make a full refit of the JumpShip that Dr. Murad's team was trying to repair in the Badlands system.

Some civilian items came to my attention, one was the Super Caravan transport cargo plane; an improved version of the Antonov An-225 from back home. With 6 hydrogen powered engines, it could carry up to 200 tons of cargo and loaded, it had a range exceeding 15,000 km. Few were produced because by this time, the cheaper to operate fusion powered alternatives started to appear. But in a universe where fusion power engines were not so cheap (like right now), maybe they could have a future. The other interesting civilian items was a mix between a cargo shuttle and a short range DropShip. It could carry up to 2,000 tons of cargo to orbit or to a moon while having articulated, powered arms much like the space shuttle of my universe. It was the perfect design to support and expand an orbital industry. It too fell in disgrace with the massive DropShips entering full production.

These industrial blueprints provided me with several options to create production lines in VMI for almost everything from DropShips to 'Mech for civilian or military use. That is, if I could secure the necessary funds.

Before I could make any decisions on how to best use this new data, I was 'invited' to go to Taurus to 'consultations' with the Lord Protector. Joy.

Before I departed, I left instructions to my team to present the VMI board with options for possible upgrades and I took with me the latest plans of the future Snowden Lite prototype. Unlike the other times and because of a fortunate alignment of JumpShips, I managed to do the voyage in just about two weeks.

The reunion with Thomas Calderon, his son Edward and Grover Shraplen turned very differently from what I expected. Thomas, while very suspicious of House Davion, wasn't totally paranoid about them but Grover has a profound hate against the FedRats as he kept saying. On the other side, Edward wanted to reduce the tension between both realms and perhaps to start with some commercial openings, a position I was more than inclined to support. After several hours of discussions and negotiations, it was decided that the Concordat was going to try to open commercial relations with the Federated Suns but only of civilian products and if VMI wanted to participate, the earnings would have to be invested in new military lines whose production would be sold to the TDF at a reduced cost. While I couldn't decide for VMI, I was only one of several shareholders after all, I was asked to convince them to follow the plans made by this small council.

I also learned that the Far Lookers were going to be directed to the ex pirate location that I had recently cleaned. The two systems were viable and already had a small infrastructure after all. But this time, they would have to do it with only private financing, no funds would be diverted from the government.

Returning to VMI on New Vandenberg, I got involved in several meetings with the board of directors. In the end, the decision was taken to go along the will of the Protector. The new lines that would be created would be for modernized Toro and Talos BattleMechs. These tried and venerable Taurian 'Mechs would probably create a morale boost in the ranks of the TDF while the research part had already been done at V4RU, allowing V4RU to earn a percentage of the sales and also cutting the price down.

Unfortunately, all this forced me to delay the shift to the air and space assets I wanted to produce.

After all was taking care of, now it was time to start doing some marketing research on the Federated Suns. Not really an easy or a small task.