Mariborians - Turn 1

Upkeep - 1 fuel/food/water. Old totals: 6/2/10 | :black_medium_small_square: | New totals: 5/1/9... -3raw -2exo - 7 -> 4 and 8 -> 6
The Mariborian ship, the "TMS Hope of Maribor" holds their distance from the rest of the fleet - enough to pick off any unwanted shuttlecraft with manned kinetics. The nobles aboard bicker with their bureaucrat counterparts, eventually coming to a four-fifths majority deciding to reject all hails that don't come from pre-approved sources - rather, source, the DCS SOC cruiser Jormungand. Anyone wishing to speak to the 'shorties' - a derogatory nickname for Mariborians they had heard circulating around the fleet before cutting comms - would have to go through military brass. The two comms centers aboard the Hope of Maribor broadcast twice each to all receiving or recording, "Don't call us, we'll call you." before the panicked council resumed its bickering.

1) Taking stock of the current food shortage aboard, the council knew they had options. Given the fleet's ultimate destination, and knowing that it would be nearly futile to do so in the future, a party of ex-military Mariborian volunteers was given one of several shuttlecraft, along with personal arms and armaments, with the orders to scavenge food from wherever possible, as well as other possible items of value - such as other ships or shuttlecraft. Likely targets would be intact civilian stations that had 'gone dark' - been evacuated in haste - or agricultural areas of habitable planets, if there were any in the area that had been (mostly) abandoned. In addition, the volunteers were told only to engage if escape were not an option.
--(Peaceful Pillage - Food)

2) In addition to the foresight that well-developed areas of space would thin out as the density of stars - resources to exploit - thinned, the council made the logical (but completely unfounded) leap that resources such as bodies of water-ice and metals of all sorts would become less exploited, if fewer in number, as the fleet progressed onward. Believing this the case, and having had the design documents ready in advance, the council gave approval to the engineers and hydroponicists aboard to construct a farm aboard the ship, albeit a water intensive one. Some eggheads could be told to brainstorm more efficient methods at a later date, they supposed - people could be going hungry soon, and it's not like the council had geographic or numeric advantages against the civilian population - not yet.
--( Complete Advanced Hydroponics (Completion Cost: 3 Raw Metal, 2 Exotic Metal)) -- Free Action

3) As for more pressing matters. The council worried about the potential losses they might undertake - not personnel losses from the scavving party, but the materiel loss if they were to somehow return without their assigned shuttlecraft, or if it were to return damaged in such a way as to prevent further casual use. As Maribor was DCS in name only - they, functionally, were of no significance to the DCS, having never left their home system due to its bounty, and having kept the organization distant as it functioned as a 'higher power', literally and metaphorically looking down on Mariborians for their behavior and their development as a species. The bureaucratic side of the council thought it best to upgrade or upscale the Curie module aboard the TMS Hope of Maribor, after having engineers and scientists pore over it for any signs of inefficiency. Life without factories - life without a planet that hadn't been fully exploited yet, even - would be tough. Things couldn't be replaced as easily, not if they were much bigger than a couple dozen Mariborians packed like sardines. The closest thing on-board to a factory was the curie module - any improvements or beneficial modifications that could be made to it would be better than a hundred, even a thousand artisans given the same space, time, and every other parameter imaginable. The nobles, on the other hand, thought it best to secure a supply of water - especially a recycling system, as lossless as possible. It appears that the nobles had forgotten similar technologies already existed and were awaiting implementation, so the bureaucrats won that argument - but only at a 10% majority - a great majority of the nobles were too pride-driven to reconsider.
--(Research Curie Module upgrades - focus on upscaling parts/items produced by significant margin if possible)

4) The Mariborians were not beyond subterfuge. Belonging to the DCS had its benefits - namely that you fit in among almost any mixed-crew environment. The council decided - nearly unanimously - that it would be best to begin spying on the DCS Jormungand. Ex-volunteers (Read: Ex-spies) that had worked with the DCS previously were given priority, and were to be smuggled in with an observed shipment of food en-route to the ship. If successful, it was hoped they would be able to redirect supplies, personnel, or preferential treatment to the TMS Hope of Maribor, if not outright steal any potential leads beneficial to the Mariborian population. If unsuccessful, the spies knew they would be disavowed as rogue actors abusing their previous positions to help family or friends aboard the TMS. More complicated schemes could wait until the council had laid tendrils in the civilian fleet, so this extended rush-job would have to be performed with care and aborted until it would be safe to do so again. Wisely, the council chose not to send *every* ex-DCS volunteer in one go - the agents could work with those Mariborians inevitably stationed on the Jormungand (they numbered in the low-hundreds of billions before the Enemy, not bad for a single-system single-planet species fresh into the FTL age).
--(Espionage on the Jormungandr - Goal: Data acquisition, operations influence.)

Rolls in order:
42, 24, 21, 73