Quote:
Originally Posted by jmurrell
I wasn't complaining. Just seeing what the limits were for different characters. Are my numbers correct?
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Pretty much. A child born in 484 will have been about eleven when the name changed from "Eichberger Foundation" to "Empire" and the condition from "war" to "peacekeeping". S/he will have spent at most one year in one of the reorganised schools. And s/he would be 48, with the barest minimum of experience of the classic fur-farm. Such an officer would be technically a graduate of the Imperial schools program, but would have been more shaped by some
ad hoc educational arrangement, and would remember understanding current affairs before the Empire. The general intention of s/his memesculpt would be the same as that of the Program, but the details would most likely be different, and the work perhaps less thorough.
Someone would have to be no older than 45 to have spent the whole of senior school in a fur farm, which I would call the point at which the modern arrangements would seem normal and natural. An officer born in 491 probably won't remember the Wars or the Treaty, will have started middle school in the Imperial Schools Program, will have gone to a Program senior school at a time when all the other students had known no other senior schooling arrangements, will show all the characteristics of farmed fur, and will be 40 or 41. A mink kit born in the beginning of the baby boom of 495— will be a native-born citizen of IDJ, will have started primary school in the Program, will be fully-operational farmed-fur mink, and will be 36.
In short, the characteristics of farmed fur background are phased in for officers between 36 and 45. The older officers aren't farmed fur, and the mink feature that they most likely lack is the formal treatment of outsiders. The farmed-fur accent is probably diffusing both ways.
Before there were Marines the Foundation and Empire had several types of more specialised units: spaceport security units, boarding teams on some warships, drop troops…. Counter-terrorism wasn't such a focus, and hostage rescue still isn't. It's not until after Survey that the Colonial Office Assistance Department is going to develop with its hundreds of thousands of field stations. Anyway, before 507 PDT there were hundreds of independent little units each created separately for a particular purpose, with no standardisation of organisation, training, or equipment. None was bigger than about five hundred all ranks, and there were no senior commands or general staff. No officer academy, staff college, or war college, either. Officers were trained by apprenticeships and learned from teaching programs.
So the Imperial Marines is really only 25 years old. The oldest officers who started as "wet-behind-the-ears Academy grads who think they know more than their superiors" are only about 41.
The oldest marine that BuPers would think of assigning to this mission might be 75, and might have joined an Eichberger Foundation security unit in, say, 475 PDT. That's early enough to have seen fifteen years of active service before hostilities petered out in 490, perhaps been a prisoner-of-war for years, changed cap badges in 495, been amalgamated in the Crime of '07, and served 25 years in the Imperial Marines. Hell of a corporal, though.