== Part 40 – Material Assets ==
"Our source prides himself on being a Cylon expert," Sharon told everyone. "He's done a great deal of trading with them as well as trying to sneak trade past them. So he's observed a great deal, talked to a good many Cylons, and thinks he has a good idea of what the Cylons have and how they're organized. We're not quite so confident in him, but given the lack of other sources of information, we've decided to take his information at face value until we find contrary evidence.
"First off, our source believes the Cylons have somewhere between five and six hundred basestars."
The room burst into uproar. That was over four times the Colonial Fleet's entire battlestar count!
"QUIET!" Sharon roared.
The hub bub died down as Sharon glared at them.
"As I was saying, the Cylons have somewhere between five and six hundred basestars," Sharon said again. "That's not as bad as it sounds. Most of them are what we might call well armed civilian ships, basestars specializing in industrial production or transportation activities and armed with enough firepower to make casual raiding on them – Inner Sphere raiders, not us – a dicey proposition if not outright suicidal.
"All of the old basestars the Cylons brought with them to the Inner Sphere – basically the ones used in the show – more or less fall under this category, although those basestars are more jack of all trades, do-everything-okay-but-not-any-one-thing-well type ships. But keep in mind that all these basestars including the old ones will be sporting Inner Sphere armor and Inner Sphere weaponry, so it's not as good as it could be either. And all their fighters will be Inner Sphere fighters with some Cylon tech grafted on, or Cylon designed hybrid tech fighters like those walking Raiders. So we definitely don't want to be tangling with them on a one on one basis until we can equalize the playing field tech wise.
"The Cylons have also done some reorganization since they moved into the Inner Sphere, because those basestars are split between what the Cylons call 'Constellations', which are essentially fleets of basestars with differing overall specializations. Each Constellation has their own set of human model Cylons, but they all have Centurions and Raiders – the Cylon model, not the fighter design though they have those too - which our source believes serves as a kind of cultural touchstone that keeps the Constellations united.
"There are five Constellations known as Number, Alphabet, Shape, Color, and Symbol. Every Cylon model barring the Raiders will have names that fit the name of their Constellation. The Number Cylons have numbers for names, the Alphabet Cylons will have letters from the alphabet for names, and so on and so forth.
"Number Constellation are the first Constellation, the ones that moved from Colonial space to the Inner Sphere. Their basestars are for the most part the original basestars they came here with, which as I already said have been reskinned with Inner Sphere armor and weaponry. As the oldest Constellation, they're the most respected and least specialized, but they also tend to handle the bulk of diplomatic relations with human governments. They've also added one new human model since moving here.
"Alphabet Constellation is considered a combat Constellation, which is to say they're specialized in fighting. However, their combat focus is primarily on policing duties: patrols, hunting criminals, inspecting, guarding civilian ships and installations. The Raiders we ran into back near Gaeta's World belonged to Alphabet Constellation. The Alphabets make the heaviest use of fighters out of all the Constellations.
"Shape Constellation is the industrial heart of the Cylons. Their primary focus is in harvesting resources and industrial production of technologies that's too inconvenient or too resource intensive for the other Constellations to make themselves. Their basestars tend to be specialized for either mining, factory mass manufacturing, or are mobile shipyards in their own right.
"Color Constellation is the Cylon transportation network. That means their basestars are freighters, merchants, and couriers. But the bulk of Color Constellation's fleet are basestars designed to fill the role of what the Inner Sphere calls 'Jumpships', ships whose primary job is hauling Inner Sphere parasite ships called 'Dropships' from star system to star system. The reason why they do this is a bit involved, and I'll cover it later when I talk about Inner Sphere conventions.
"Symbol Constellation is the newest and smallest Constellation and they were specifically created to fight the Clans. Symbol is the closest thing the Cylons have to what we would call a pure military force. They only have somewhere between ten and twenty basestars but all of them are designed purely for combat, mounting the thickest armor belts of Inner Sphere armor out of any basestar class and carrying entire batteries of particle beam weaponry like the one that shot the Vesta's flight pod full of holes."
The hologram Cylon logo blinked out and was replaced with the still image of a basestar that looked eerily similar to a Cylon war era basestar, except for being three sided radially symmetric instead of five, and having long, industrial looking pylons that jutted out from the saucers and were tipped with what looked like giant six barreled turrets. A Cylon War era basestar had been edited in next to it, to give a scale comparison. The double disk portions were roughly the same size, but the pylons clearly made the newer basestar far more massive.
"Now before you all get worked up again, no, the Cylons did not produce ten to twenty of these monsters in five years," Sharon told everyone. "They were making them well before the Clans invaded and gave most of them to Symbol Constellation when it was constituted. According to our source who was told by the Cylons, most of Shape Constellation's industrial output is currently going into building and maintaining these things and has been since the Clans first attacked. The Cylons call these specialized fighting basestars 'Warstars'."
And what Sharon didn't say out loud, what wasn't stated on the Fleet Intel's netsite, and what the Fleet's flag officers hoped no one outside the intel offices would run the numbers on and figured out, was that just one of these Cylon Warstars could probably solo the entire Colonial Battlestar fleet. Those big turrets carried at least six particle beam weapons each – and possibly other weapons - and their placement on the ends of the pylons meant they could fire all six turrets at a single target in nearly any direction. The trade off of course was that those turrets were easier to shoot off than if they had been mounted flush against the Warstar's main hull, but given how good Inner Sphere armor was, "easier" didn't actually mean "easy".
"Perhaps the biggest weakness of the Warstar is that they're high maintenance compared to the Cylons' more common basestars," Sharon continued. "They don't use nearly as much structural biotech as their other basestar designs. This makes them tougher to destroy, but it also means they're not self growing and their self repair ability is extremely limited. They take longer to build, longer to repair, and require far more hands on manpower to do both."
The Warstar's picture was replaced with an image of what the Colonials had been calling a Raider Alpha. The picture was zoomed in closeup still taken from the earlier video, showing the Alpha's extended legs.
"According to our source, the Cylons do not call this a 'Raider'. They call it a 'Harpy'," Sharon informed everyone. "The Harpy is a general, multipurpose design used by every Constellation. It's intended to be used as both a space fighter and a ground combat unit, which is why it has legs. The Constellations will have some variants of the Harpies customized for their own use. The Symbols will use Harpies with more advanced versions of the standard weapons than what the Numbers and Alphabet Harpies have. The Colors and Shapes' Harpies will often have fully functional arms and hands for utility reasons. Things like that.
"But that doesn't mean the Cylons don't still use regular fighters. They do, and will use a great variety of them, both of their own design and bought from the Inner Sphere."
The picture of the Harpy was replaced with a picture of the Harpy variant the Colonials had been calling "Raider Beta".
"Now, the Cylons do call this one a Raider, and it's the only fighter or other combat platform in their arsenal to be called a Raider," Sharon said. "And the reason for that is all the non-sapient Raider models have been moved into this Harpy variant chassis. According to our source, the Raiders exist as a cross between cherished pets and status symbols. The Cylons are not making any more of the non-sapient Raider models, and as the Cylon population gets larger, the fewer Raiders there are proportionally to the rest of the Cylon race, and the more cherished they become. And as more Constellations are created, the remaining Raider population gets redistributed so that every Constellation has the exact same number of them."
Which was probably one of the reasons why Iota threw a tantrum when Fido pulped itself on the Pegasus' hull, Sharon thought.
"Moving on to the Cylon's relationships with the rest of the Inner Sphere and the Thirteenth Tribe, our source tried to portray the Cylons in the worst light possible, which he described them as being overly micromanaging busy bodies," Sharon continued. "However, the Admiral and I suspect that he may be hugely biased given that he was trying to smuggle weapons past the Cylons. And we have an even stronger suspicion that he was trying to tell us what we wanted to hear given that the Cylons were are enemies and may still be.
"That being said, the facts that he was willing to admit to would suggest that the Cylons have a largely positive reputation in the Inner Sphere. And of course, anything anyone knows about us in the Inner Sphere is going to come from the Cylons. According to our source, the Cylons told everyone in the Thirteenth Tribe that the Colonies kept them as slaves, but somehow forgot to mention that human models such as myself," Sharon waved her hand down her body in a fluttering hand motion that drew the eye to well below her face, "didn't exist until after the war and the Cylons had left the Colonies."
Sharon paused and let that statement sink in. She didn't have to wait long before someone in the audience started cursing.
"Yeah, so if anyone from the Thirteenth Tribe says something about that, make sure to let them know in no uncertain terms that human models did not exist until after the Cylons left the Colonies," Sharon told everyone. "We're fighting an uphill battle here, people, and it's not just because we're so far behind the tech curve.
"Speaking of which, while the Cylons have been trading with the rest of the Thirteenth Tribe, they've been keeping certain technologies to themselves. Gas core FTL drives and gravity manipulators are the two big ones according to our source, which was why he was eager to purchase our Raptors. Before the Cylons arrived, everyone in the Thirteenth Tribe used solid core FTL drives which are apparently inferior to our own FTL drives in nearly every respect except jump range and fuel consumption. Now the Free World League and the Draconis Combine have somehow independently invented their own gas core drives since the Cylons arrived, but they don't have many of them. Their gas core drives are still inferior to ours, just not as inferior as their solid core drive. And without gravity manipulators they have to travel pretty far from a star to safely use them.
"Which incidentally is why we found so many ships above the pole of a star. It's a convenient, easy-to-describe location where Thirteenth Colony Jumpships can congregate and trade Dropships with each other.
"And that's everything I have for you," Sharon concluded. She turned her head to look at a specific member of the audience. "Admiral?"
"Thank you, Commander Tyrol," Admiral Lee Adama said as he got on stage. Sharon retired off stage as Adama faced the audience. Behind him, the hologram returned to the colored Inner Sphere map. "I won't lie to you people. The Colonies are in an even greater danger than we had realized after the encounter with the Cylon Harpies. It doesn't matter if we equalize the technology difference between us and the Cylons if the Cylons can bring the resources of even a fraction of the Inner Sphere against us and their biggest ally already controls half of it.
"What we need is allies of our own," Adama continued. "And the technologies that the Cylons won't trade can be our in with them. The Cylons enemies seem like our best bet. This Free Worlds League, or the Draconis Combine, or even these mysterious Clans. But maybe we can even wean the Federated Commonwealth off the Cylons with offers of technology.
"Unfortunately, I've read just enough history to know how fast nations can go from friends to enemies when it becomes politically convenient to do so. Facing down a human enemy with two hundred plus systems isn't much better than facing down the Cylons with a thousand backing them. So barring more spot of the moment trade like we did with the Hansa traders, I'm not going to commit the Colonies to any alliances and trade deals; I'm going to pass those decisions up the chain of command to the President.
"As Commander Tyrol said at the beginning, the reliability of our Hansa source is questionable at best. We need to find more independent sources to confirm his information, and I think we can accomplish that by our original mission: to contact Earth... Terra. Because according to our source and the all the documentation he provided us, there is one organization in the Inner Sphere that's truly neutral and impartial to all the conflicts of the Inner Sphere, and has the same goal as the Cylons to see peace and prosperity return to the Inner Sphere. And by some gods' luck, they're also the organization that has sole, uncontested control of Terra.
"We're going to contact Comstar."
