- -----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE HORDE
The Horde may be the most effective marketing ploy in the history of
human civilization. It is the only known instance of a single coordinated
advertising/marketing/manufacturing campaign turning a large but
unremarkable company into an Imperially recognized megacorporation,
and its fruits are seen and accepted every day by literally trillions
of people across the entirety of known space. To date, the profits it
has netted its originators have been calculated as being enough to
purchase the fifty most populous and prosperous worlds in the Imperium
and everything on them... and the cashflow shows no signs of slowing down.
In the early centuries of the Third Imperium, starship travel was both
risky and rare, as the regrowing nation strove, often unsuccessfully,
to assure travellers of easy access to the materials and parts they needed
to keep their ships, which represented their lifelines, in working order.
It was not uncommon (as it is now, in the Rebellion, again becoming
common) for a ship to be grounded many parsecs from home because a single
part that could not be replaced by local manufacturers was lost or broken.
Even worse, this situation extended to the much more common nonstarships
that were relied upon in every system even when Jump travel was a lost
art, and forgotten until they broke down and caused trouble by their absence.
Imperial military contractors had some degree of standardization in their
gear, but this suffered from sector to sector as Solomani designers in
firms like GSbAG locked horns with Vilani designers at Sharurshid and refused
to compromise on various design points. This made waging war relatively
straightforward when the ships fought and were built in the same area, as
in the Frontier Wars, but when ships had to be moved across wider ranges
of the Imperium itself, such as in the chaos of the Civil War in the early
600s, the problems of resupply became hellish. There was no guarantee
that a naval fleet could resupply from a depot of the same Navy! The
situation was ripe for change, technological advances into the realm of TL 12
coming at the same time as turmoil and unrest in the political arena,
and it was only a matter of time before someone saw an opportunity to
make money, and leaped on it in a big way. That someone was a tiny company
on a planet with unremarkable characteristics but a fair amount of
historical import, only recently reintegrated into the Third Imperium.
The company was called General SpaceCraft, Inc., and the planet was Terra.
The Horde was conceived of by three young executives working in various
branches at the General home office on Terra. Their names have been
forgotten now, except where reverent design engineers and marketing
strategists have engraved them on their hearts while still in college.
They were led by Peter Broom, an advertising trainee who was already
showing a killer instinct suitable for a Crested Jabberwock. His two
compatriots were Stewart Provost, an Assistant Technician in R&D, and
Shannon Mills, a newly-employed manager in the Shipwrights' Division, where
actual ship construction took place. The two hardware men were constantly
harangued by their fellow employees for their shared and rather uncommon
penchant for outlandish schemes for making the firm rich. Broom, however,
knew talent when he saw it, and risked the jeers of his superiors in
Marketing when he began sitting with the pair at lunch in the Executives'
Cafeteria and listening, first with feigned interest and later with genuine
enthusiasm, as The Twins (as they were usually called) sketched out
weird profitmaking ideas on placemats and napkins. Broom's business aplomb
flattened most of those ideas in the birthing stages, but the others
didn't mind: there was a good, WORKABLE idea in there somewhere, and
sooner or later they'd find it. And when they did, the Imperium's newest
member world was going to give it one hell of a shock.
Their first major breakthrough was the discovery of certain properties of
Tevlac, a plastic recently developed on Warinir and enjoying a fair degree
of popularity among industrial chemists for its sturdiness and easy
machinability. Tevlac, Provost discovered, developed a strong affinity
for temporary molecular rebonding upon fracture lines when stimulated with
a trickle of electric current: it would be broken into pieces, and stick
together along the breaks as long as it was connected to a battery. The
adhesion wasn't much, but it was enough to solve one of the starship
industry's biggest headaches-- how to get the little hole that always
remains when an Iris Valve closes up to seal airtight every time. Soon,
Tevlac valve-seats were in use all over known space, and the patent money
and licensing fees began flowing in. People took notice of Provost's
inventiveness, of the risks Mills took in trying the new technology on the
line, and Broom's aggressive marketing of the idea, and lights began
turning green at higher levels of management.
Mills's invention of gravitationally-induced hull fitting, where hulls
were friction-fit for spotwelding by the application of tight antigrav
fields, sped up spaceship hulling by 3%-- not much until one considers the
long haul, where it added up to substantial increases in productivity.
This was adopted over pin-fitting by all Imperial Navy contractors by
order of the Navy in 597. But the real boon, and the discovery that
got the corporate gears turning, was the development of the RAMKS by Provost
and Mills in 601. Up until that time, the welding and fitting of superdense
hulls was considered an expensive luxury, due to the difficulties in
getting the impenetrable materials to bond together easily. The RAMKS (an
acronym for Robo-animechaniakatasthyser) was a man-portable device
incorporating fusion and grav technology to induce superfluid states in
confined areas of superdense hullmetal, allowing smooth joins as easily
as two copper pipes could be soldered together with a brazing torch.
The explosion outward of this technology removed the last vestiges of
resistance from the Board of Directors-- what Broom, Provost and Mills
wanted, by God they got it.
The stage was set for the Horde.
In early 604, the three men, now division directors of a rapidly-expanding
company, politely asked to meet with the President and Board in a closed
session. They had, Broom said mildly, an idea. With the dollar signs
barely hidden by their contact lenses, the Board set up the meeting. It
lasted over fourteen hours, and the written records of the session were
kept sealed for nearly two hundred years. But when the meeting let out,
the President looked twenty years younger, the Board were sweating
profusely, and the Three Amigos were grinning like the cats that had just
eaten the canary. The next day, things started moving.
R&D shifted over to component design optimization. Overnight, virtually
all of the R&D division's time went into designing structured-modular
avionics and engine control circuitry-- the essential idea being an
interlocking design for electrical and mechanical subsystems with a
stepped degree of throughput based on the Tech Level of each component,
the lowest one in a given subsystem being its least common denominator.
These components were strictly standardized in easily-made forms, and
optimized at Tech Levels ranging from 9 to 13 (the maximum available
at the time). What this meant was that if a module blew, a TL 11 design
could use a replacement fabricated on a TL 9 world with a positive,
documented understanding of exactly which functions would be limited
and how. This degree of centralization was unheard of, except perhaps
among the Vilani megacorporations, whose designs were standardized
by default but uniform by Tech Level with little or no crossreferencing.
At the same time, the Shipwrights began building prototype hulls using
techniques easily available over the same spread of Tech Levels. The
main manufacturing areas were divided into a dozen sample field ship
construction areas, with spotwelders hobnobbing with fusioncutters
and RAMKSers and cable-trays next to fiberbundles and infralinkups.
A microcosm of ship construction techniques under one roof, carefully
hidden from the press by a normally-talkative company, began to get
tongues wagging.
Marketing used the firm's past history and future prospects with surgical
precision. Investors eager to cash in on the fledgling firm's latest
breakthrough went anywhere from buying shares on speculation to writing
blank development checks. Some of these, like Hortalez et Cie and Antares
Holdings, would later be rewarded with shares in the new company; others,
like Beechcraft Interstellar, would resist going the way of their old
rivals like Cessna and Piper (now a division of GSbAG, which watched the
proceedings with some interest and much discomfort) by merging with General
to profit more directly in what was to come. These were great risks, but as
it turned out, this early risk-taking paid back in incredible measure. The
chaos of the Civil War, which caused a great deal of damage to the Navy and
the Core sector but had little effect elsewhere, merely served as cover
for what happened next.
In 609, ships began leaving Terra for parts unknown. Properties were bought
at starports on many worlds, and carefully sealed off from public view,
first hundreds and then thousands of them. The planning had been meticulous--
each property was tiny, and raised little or no speculation on its own.
No one saw the larger pattern until it was far too late to do anything
about it. By 615, there were worlds from Jewell to Spica with these small
properties on them, and supplies were flowing from local factories to
stockpiles nearby. The only places deliberately avoided were worlds where
the Sharurshid shippers had a stranglehold on the industry-- the Vilani
weren't even given a whiff of what was about to happen.
In that same year, advertisements began to be posted on thousands of different
worlds, each bearing the same words: "The Horde is Coming." Public speculation
ran riot, and the overtaxed investors, certain that their long wait was about
to bear fruit, held their breath.
On Holiday of 616, the Horde was unveiled simultaneously on every planet
in the campaign. Local investors took one look at the degree of local
capital involved in the project, and began shoveling money into the
company's gaping maw. Shipping firms read the specs, watched the promo
films, conducted tests of their own, and began buying. The project built
up momentum and never stopped. Its first major victory came in 620, when
Tukera Lines began replacing old craft with the Horde. Soon after that,
the first Tech Level Boost Program, a system for upward compatibility
as the Imperial TL climbed, was announced, and the Imperial Navy and
Scout Service began using the Horde for non-critical tasks in thousands
of backwater bases and fringe areas. The final victory came over twenty
years later, when Sharurshid purchased the license fees to begin building
the Horde itself, and the Vilani megacorporation completed what is now
taken for granted as the base standardization of non-milspec ship parts
in the Imperium and surrounds. Broom, Provost and Mills were rather older
by then, but they were present on Vland when the agreement was signed,
and they were present before the throne of Arbellatra a year later when
the Limited Imperial Charter was granted to the new megacorporation of
General Products, LIC.
And what, precisely, WAS the Horde? Let me give as an explanation the words
of Peter Broom, taken from that first board meeting:
"Gentlemen, people are sick and tired of being strangled by the inability
to rely on standardizations when they travel. No one will agree to a set
of standards-- they have to be RAMMED down the shipping industry's
collective THROAT. What we are proposing here is not a glamorous action,
or even one that will be remembered, oh, five hundred years from now. What
we are about to do will lay so basic a foundation for the construction
and support of starships and orbital-support spacecraft along accepted
and standardized lines, that our designs and parts will not only be a
household word in a decade or two, but in a century the Vilani will have
caved in as well, and in TWO centuries people will have largely forgotten
that there ever WASN'T a standard! When people of the year 1100 pick up
a copy of "Traveller: Science-Fiction Gaming in the Distant Past," and
read about the spaceship designs that were just becoming standard when
the Imperium was cracking under its own inertia and those upstarts from
Earth who'd been in the Imperium for less than twenty years were turning
things on their collective EAR.... I want them to read about OUR designs."
And so it has been. Although General Products has taken a lot of flak
recently for its starship designs, its spacecraft, now manufactured
under subcontract by every shipping firm in the Imperium to some degree
or another, are so standard as to have been forgotten... and the industry
has upgraded them as the Tech Level advances, so that they are now on
the market from TL9 to TL16, with TL17 designs on the way.
Or, in game-design terms--
We the designers (Scott Kellogg and Rob Dean) and the storyteller/historian
(metlay his-SEFF) are proud to ceremoniously dump upon the TML community
a collection of standardized and Imperially accepted "norm" designs for
non-Jumping support craft of every type, guaranteed to work better at
all TLs than the designs written up in the MT rules and to serve in each
and every campaign that requires a TL-appropriate "vanilla ship" for
any purpose at all....
THE HORDE!