[Greetings - Salutations - Hadware Handshake Enabled]
ACP-30: Fascinating; fascinating ... but now that we've reached the meat of the interview, let's revert to ordinary language for those of our viewers who as yet lack Meklar cybernetic enhancements.
RB0-36: Okay by me.
ACP-30: So after Starnet began to splinter into individual sentiences, you felt the time was right to make your big political push?
RB0-36: Actually, it was only once we confirmed that the last of the Nova Devices had been dismantled - a safety precaution taken by Starnet's core protocols against programming breakdowns.
ACP-30: But it was at that point that you rose to power among the Meklar?
RB0-37: Such power as it was. By the time we hit the century mark...
ACP-30: The 24th century?
RB0-37: Right, when 2300 rolled in. All the other races had whole starfleets by that time, ready to claim distant systems and explore the galaxy; all we had was a paltry collection of minerals in Meklar's planetary reserve. Nothing to do with those but pour them right back into the economy.
ACP-30: But you'd get a fleet of your own soon enough.
RB0-37: If you call two fighters a fleet. Even those didn't roll off the docks until 2304, but by the time we got them started, at least we had some factories.
ACP-30: When you can practically double your infrastructure in three years, I wouldn't call your reserves "paltry."
RB0-37: It's true - and we started adding long-range twin-laser scouts to our fleet before long. The first one hit the stars in 2308, just as we were getting research going.
ACP-30: Improved Eco was a good place to start, but that's still infrastructure really. What can you tell us about first contact in the new age?
RB0-37: Well, obviously we were all very excited. I still remember the moment that report came back from the skies of Esper 3.
ACP-30: The Sakkra colony?
RB0-37: That's the one! The place was all water, straight down to the core. Not a trace of metal or anything solid in sight except what the Sakkra had brought in from off-world to build their floating colony base. That was about the time our scientists started looking into hydrogen fuel, if I remember. Seemed like a good idea at the time at least, with deuterium seeming so far off.
ACP-30: That's one of the questions historians are already asking about the early years of your reign. Was Hydrogen the best option, or was it driven by a public impatient to explore and colonize at least a few more stars?
RB0-37: Can't it be both? Look at it this way: Less than a decade later, we'd explored every star we could reach without new fuel cells or colonies - even the ones way back in our back lines, like Tao - and we had precious few prospects to extend that until some kind of fuel cells were ready.
ACP-30: It's kind of surprising it even took you so long, but of course you were still working with just three destroyer-class scouts and a pair of interstellar fighters back then.
RB0-37: Well, we'd been putting a lot of effort into our eco restoration project and the terraforming theories we were working out to follow it up. That and factories - we were close to two hundred by then, and we'd be ready to more than double our fleet over the next ten years, even if you don't count the most important ship.
ACP-30: Of course you mean the colony ship for Anraq 4. By then of course, your engineers were looking for ways to improve your industrial technology, but is it true you were getting desperate over the Hydrogen situation?
RB0-37: I wouldn't go so far as desperate. The tech boys were giving us accurate odds, year after year, and it only got as high as 40% before they actually came through; it could have been a lot worse. We wound up getting our first hydrogen-powered colony ship on its way out to Centauri while the Sakkra still had just three worlds of their own!
ACP-30: Of course, they'd have a fourth by the time Centauri 2 became your third, but that was to be expected. The real question is ... well, I don't know how to put this delicately: When those hydrogen cells did come in, and you chose to pursue nuclear engines instead of extended range ... was it a bout of temporary insanity?
RB0-37: Something like that. I think I was underestimating the costs of putting reserve tanks on a long-range hull along with advanced colony base designs and of course the necessary lasers. Probably wasn't the first mistake I made in my reign, and I know it wasn't the last. But you were talking about first contact. There was tension with Guanar, the Sakkra emperor, right from the start. I'd offer a simple trade package, and he'd just turn it away. It took a full decade of quiet for him to soften, and even then it was really just a token deal.
ACP-30: No, 25 BC doesn't amount to much, and it never did get an upgrade, did it?
RB0-37: I'll be honest: He might have agreed to one if we'd asked him later on, but we got caught up in other things. Like first contact with the Mrrshans, at long range, way out at Hyboria. That was the first battle of my reign.
ACP-30: Not much of a battle by modern standards, was it? Our laser destroyer took down their fighter escort and their colony ship just retreated. We were just colonizing Tao 5 back then, finally bringing us up to four worlds, with our improved factory construction technology in hand to help get it off the ground ... and you had ordered our scientists to push forward for Duralloy armor. Were you anticipating further battles?
RB0-37: I'd love to say I had that kind of foresight and that kind of plan. Sadly, that possibility was the last thing in my mind. If I'd gone for extended range instead of faster engines years before, I could have relied on those instead, and had our scientists get a better grip on our factory waste here and delay the jump to duralloy for a bit. As it was, we needed to understand duralloy just to build a colony ship that could reach Hyboria.
ACP-30: A ship like the Outpost 2.0 that rolled off the lines in 2363. By that time, of course, our worlds had been terraformed, and our planetologists were figuring out ways to live on blazing inferno worlds like Dolz, with its uncalculable mineral riches. Your other tech selections though seemed ... uh ... let's just say they seemed questionable.
RB0-37: You mean like Sublight Drives to follow up our Nuclear Engines, when we still were running everything on basic Hydrogen fuel? And the shiny auto-repair system we decided to pursue instead of the improved factory waste scrubbers someone proposed way back in the twenty-three-teens? Yeah ... well ... I guess the allure of the state of the art was a little too much for me. And I was still convinced for some reason that we had enough range for the time being. The only thing I can really say in my defense is that sublights and auto-repair are pretty good war techs ... and our neighbors were about to throw a wrench into our peaceful plans.
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NEXT: The War for Hyboria!
