Lecture Series Episode 06

This week's tutorial covers my personal favourite slice of the Periphery... sure, it has less corn and fewer maniacs than Van Zandt, but it has war, intrigue, and a really snappy colour scheme.

Good colours schemes count for a lot in my book.

Welcome to the Aurigan Reach! We're just going to brush the surface this time, in preparation for a longer lecture series in the future, but I hope y'all enjoy it!

Transcript

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Welcome to Battletech Legends and Mechs, a short story podcast telling tales from around the inner sphere and beyond. Good day everyone. Let's see if we can get through today's class without starting a brawl. Not that I don't enjoy a good scrum as much as the next retired Mac Jockey, but I did decide to try and get a PhD for a reason. Mostly self-loathing, if I'm being honest. I'm sure there are other reasons to get a doctorate, but be damned if I have one. As always, my name is Marks, and this is tutorial section one from Professor's History of the Inner Sphere. This week we're going to be taking a bit of an apocryphal dive to our lore, but just because it's not canon doesn't mean it isn't awesome. Besides, a lot of the possible history we know eventually becomes formally ratified into actual history when some scholar posts exactly the same information everyone else has already known, but does so in a peer-reviewed fashion. So let's talk about the little slice of the periphery known as the Oregon Reach. Now, for those of you who aren't aware, the Reach is a section of space that exists in the no man's land between two big periphery states, specifically the Magistry of Canopus and the Taurian Concordate. Two important notes here. When I say big periphery state, note that I mean big for the periphery and not like actually big. The Magistry controls around 40 systems at one time, and the Taurians claim to about 50 to 60. Compare that to the Capellans, the smallest of the great houses, with their paltry 200 or so systems, and you get an idea of the scale we're working with. But, as the Torians would be quick to point out, just because they're not as large as the industry of government doesn't mean they're not big enough for your mother. Taurians are like that. Anyway. So we have two periphery states that have come to blows a few times, because if the two of them were to unite, they would be legitimately the same size and power as one of the successor states. Trouble is that the two governments are radically opposed on both political and social levels. The Concordate is a constitutional monarchy with heavy isolationist tendencies and an inclination towards violence if anyone glances towards them. In their defense, they have been invaded more times than ancient Poland, which is a statement of some weight, and since they never signed the Ares Conventions, they have been at the frequent receiving end of nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare attacks. Across a few dozen star systems is the Magistry, which has an entirely elected government, a thriving vacation economy, and which values individual freedom over almost all other considerations. The Torians see the Magistry as fat and lazy. The Magistry sees the concordant as iron-booted fascists, and both are armed well enough to make everyone else's life miserable. If only there were some kind of, I don't know, buffer state, a nation, much like the Raslahag Republic, which lays between these two violent neighbors that would resist invasion from either side. So everyone can go back to happily ignoring each other because if either side attacks, they have a second front to worry about. And usually most military planners know that fighting more than one direction at a time is from a tactical perspective what we like to call a really bad idea. And thus House Rano and the Arabian Coalition. Now, I'm going to assume that many of you are already familiar with a highly popular and extremely good Hollow Vid recreation of a little portion of House Arrano's history. But for those of you who aren't familiar, just go and play it. It's one of the best, if not the single best, strategic simulation of being a mercenary mechanier ever made. It's spectacular. And there are mods that allow you to do all sorts of crazy stuff with it, but even without the mods, it's still pretty gosh darn good. Also, everything I'm saying from this point now until the end of the lecture includes massive spoilers. So if you want to play the Hall of It with fresh eyes, skip the rest of this lecture. Okay, without it out of the way, let's continue. The Regan Coalition was an alliance of approximately twenty star systems that formed around the mid-2800s and lasted until at least the end of the Fourth Recession War, and potentially much longer. They were a minor power even at the height of their strength, and their only real contribution was to keep two slightly less minor powers from each other's throats. Oh, and for clarity, the sector of space referred to as the Oregon Reach, but the government is the Oregon Coalition. But I use the terms interchangeably. So why should we care about the Reach? Well, you don't have to care at all, I suppose. But the reason that I care is that the Oregon Coalition is a very clever little encapsulation of intersphere politics wrapped in pretty red and gold ribbon. There's backstabbing, political machinations, war crimes, cover-ups. It's just glorious. And proves once again Sun Tzu's maxim that spies are the most important things in warfare. Uh, sorry, that's the original Sun Tzu I'm quoting, although I suspect that the Liao one would agree with the statement. Anyways, let's discuss the history of the Oregon Civil War. In 3022, a brief and highly successful coup d'etat occurred in the Oregon Coalition, and the new Oregon Directorate formed, replacing the existing head of government, the High Lady Kamehameha, with Director Santiago Espinosa. There's more to it than this, but basically it was time to crown Lady Arano, and so all the lords of the major houses in the Reach were on Cormandir for the ceremony. House Espinosa snuck military dropships into the system, while their technicians sabotaged as many of the forces loyal to House Urano as possible, so that when they launched their attack, it was swift, brutal, and extremely effective. Overnight, the Ariga Coalition, and almost all support for House Arano was wiped out. After a few years hiding with her relatives in the Magistry, Lady Arano returned and launched an aggressive campaign to reclaim her throne. After a few early successes, Lady Orano uncovered some startling evidence of the Directorate abusing its power, locking up political prisoners in a death camp. Using this to leverage political favor with the population and to curry support from the founding houses of the coalition. Lady Orano and her army of the Restoration continued to strike at the Directorate. The plan was to free each of the coalition's founding houses from direct control from the Directorate Military Forces. In order to secure the support of Hescarosis, the Restorations had to destroy a dropship responsible for smuggling weapons to the Directorate. Excuse me. I should say a dropship claimed to be smuggling weapons for the Directorate. Order to stand down, the dropship captain refused, and the Restoration destroyed it, killing the crew and whoever else happened to be aboard. Coalition historians claim it was a smuggler ship, too heavily armed and armored for any civilian transport. The Torian Concordate has given no indication that it was smuggling for them, although few governments will ever actually acknowledge directly financing smuggling operations at any point. Why does it matter what the Torians think? Well, very quickly, the Directorate began fighting back against the Restoration using weapons far beyond the capabilities of House Espinosa's private military. Even as Espinosa increased military budgets and spending, the sheer scale of the forces brought against the Restoration was far beyond worst case predictions. The Restoration was winning every engagement and still losing the war through slow attrition, while the Directorate seemed to have a constant supply of fresh troops and mechs whenever and wherever battle was joined. To make matters worse, a Torian Commodore named Ostagard began hounding Lady Arano for her role in the destruction of the potentially smuggling dropship. Turns out his son was the captain of that ship, and whether he was smuggling or not mattered little to Ostagard. He just wanted Arano's head on the platter and was willing to use the full power of his fortress class dropship, named the Iberia, to do it. Ostergard completely obliterated House Camos from orbit, and in the process pushed the Restoration and its army into a corner. Lady Arono scrambled the mercenary forces to various hotspots around the reach, using them to keep the directorate off balance and unsure where she'd appear. Finally, through political maneuvering and espionage, the Restoration found evidence that proved Espinosa himself ordered a civilian massacre in Taurian space, and then blamed it on the Magistry in order to curve political favor with the Torians. The Taurians immediately withdrew their official military support from the Oregon Reach, but Ostrogard refused to leave without killing Lady Arano first. Instead, Lady Arono's mercenaries managed to upload a computer virus to the Iberia as it burned hard to catch the Oregon Restoration's forces. The ship's engines died, although only for a few minutes. Turns out that if you're already close to maximum thrust when your engines quit, well, to quote a great man, an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless an outside force is applied. In this case, the object in motion was a fortress class dropship named the Iberia, and the outside forces applied was the surface of Cormadir. High Lady Irano reclaimed her throne, but the aftermath of the war left scars, both actual and socioeconomic, on the coalition and its people. The Oregon military, in particular, was in tatters, and every world had been touched, if not torched, by the war. A period of desperate rebuilding was launched, and ironically or tragically, the Reformed Coalition retained many of the changes imposed by the short-lived directorate as emergency measures. From here on out, we transitioned from mostly canon into completely unknown. The official history of the Ariga Coalition stopped sometimes around 3029, at the start of the Fourth Secession. That's not to say the coalition itself stopped, but they no longer appear on any official star charts. That might be a political move by their enemies. The whole Oregon Civil War was, to a large extent, directly caused by Victorian's unwillingness to recognize them as an independent political entity. It's certainly not impossible that future star charts, financed by Comstar of the Great Houses, may have intentionally suppressed further information about House Rano and the Oregon Reach as a concession to the Concordat. See, the original charter that formed the coalition started outside, but directly adjacent to the Concordate, and during their expansion, they claimed several worlds that were claimed by, but not administered by the Torians. Kamea's father, Tamati, was attempting to negotiate terms with the Taurians for a peaceful transfer of power, but his unwillingness to impose a dictatorship on the Origian people resulted in Espinosa seeing him as weak. The director immediately imposed the dictatorship and as a result was able to strike favorable terms with the Torians. Although that was only possible because Espinosa made protector Cauldron, newly appointed head of the Concordate, believed that House Davian was responsible for a massive terrorist attack known as the Perdition Massacre, a chemical weapons attack that killed 11,000. I mentioned earlier that Espinosa blamed the Magistry for this, and it's important to note that the Davians and the Magistry are considered buddy buddy enough that to the Taurians it was one and the same. In the aftermath of the war, the Restoration found itself with an economy in ruins, planets reduced to smoking rubble, and almost no military remaining. The Taurians were looking for an excuse to invade, sorry, to peacefully return lost planets to concordate rightful rulership. The magistry couldn't directly support the Oregons, even if they wanted to, because it would be seen as specifically provoking a military buildup along a paranoid Torian border. And none of the other houses really cared that much about the Thai periphery state in the first place. Enter the Oregoni Regulars. This, for the record, is not what they were actually called, but for the whole host of reasons that I think will be made clear, I'll be referring to them as that in the future. Basically, Lady Arano needed her military force as a product of strength as quickly as possible. And so she dispatched both her prize military force and several ex-house Arano regular battle mech pilots throughout the periphery and inner sphere to track down and retrieve any battle mech that was, quote, lost during the Civil War when pilots started going AWOL. If the pilots came back, great. But with or without the pilots, the Uregan Reach needed those mechs. I think that'll do it for this week, since I've already rambled on longer than usual. As I mentioned, I love the Reach, and its scrappy can-do attitude. I love the color of their mechs, I love the Atlas II that Lady Arano claimed for herself, and I love that in the end, the war was won by both battlefield capabilities, but also a critical spy network and some very fancy Lost Tech computer buyers. Just great stuff all around. Next week I think the professor's lecture is on tactile warfare, so I may spend some time with the little brown book that Jamie Wolfe translated. It's a classic in the most extreme sense of the word. As always, I would like to thank Catalyst Games for their generous stewardship of the Battletech property, and you guys are doing great work. And if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, you can reach me at marx.battletech at gmail.com. I also haven't thanked Joel Morelli for his phenomenal music recently, and I would like to do so again because it continues to be really good. Thanks, Joel. Until then, have a great couple weeks, and I'll see you all for the next lecture. Class. Dismissed.