Is it possible to have different Story Types (for taxonomy purposes)

I've started creating content for a site.

So far, the content all fits nicely into the story content type so i don't see a real need to create any new content types.

My requirements are that all stories must be tagged with 1 or more terms. To enforce this requirement, i put a check in the checkbox to make my vocabularies mandatory in the admin settings.

One "type" of story (lets call it A) requires the following vocabs:
- Type of Media
- Region
- Topic

The other "type" of story (lets call it B) requires a different set of vocabs:
- Service
- Industry

This creates a problem. Because BOTH A & B are defined as STORY CONTENT TYPES (the basic simple node type drupal ships with), whenever you go to add a story, you will ALWAYS SEE ALL 5 REQUIRED CATEGORY SELECT MENUS AND YOU WILL BE FORCED TO CHOOSE AT LEAST ONE FROM ALL OF THEM. This means that if you want to create a TYPE A story, you will also need to enter terms from both Service and Industry categories even though they have nothing to do with TYPE A stories. If you create a TYPE B story you will also be required to select terms from the TYPE A categories Media, Region, Topic which have nothing to do with TYPE B stories. This basically results in false classification.

NOTE: i do NOT want to fix this by turning off the "required" checkbox. That's not a solution.

Something tells me others have run into this before.

Hopefully i'm overlooking something really simple to fix this.

In sum:

1) Any idea how to solve my dilemna without having to create another node type for TYPE A and B?
2) is there a way to differentiate or create children of the story content type (maybe we can clone them into new types easily)?
3) if i have to create new node types and i want them to be exact duplicates of a story content type except a different name, how would i do that?
- clone to a CCK (is that possible)?
- or maybe even just duplicate the story.module and simple change it's name?

thanks in advance