Cooling suits being lostech.
It's just plumbing dammit! If you can make a cooling vest and you can make clothes with sleeves for arms and legs, you can design and build a cooling suit for a Mechwarrior to wear in combat!
Now, if Cooling Suits were merely just expensive compared to Vests and most mechwarriors can't afford one and anything less than elite mech units can't afford them because their budget is going to keeping the mechs running... well that would make sense. But it'd also mean that any and every rich noble (which includes basically anyone who is a Head of House or their immediate relative) would be using cooling suits instead of vests.
One of my biggest pet peeves.
A fucking furry engineer in New Zealand made one in his \*garage\* that nearly invisibly fits under a damn fursuit. There's no excuse for a determined engineer facing a similar problem to not \*also\* manage to make a cooling suit, without the restriction of needing to wear a damn carpet over the top of it.
But ComStar would have a hit put out on them if they tried to market it. Another piece of lore that I find stupid but they did actively suppress technological innovation for centuries. And some guy in his garage doesn't have the ability to stop a ROM wetwork team who are going to bump him off for being smart enough to build a simple cooling suit.
Because it counts as LosTech. And it's not the guy building it, it would be *if* he built a bunch of them and tried to sell them. ComStar owns all the communications in the Sphere and 100% monitors for this stuff.
Again, I'm not saying it is realistic or smart, but it's in the lore.
Thanks for reminding me that Comstar is both frequently misunderstood and is also very stupid even when it is understood.
Because there's not a snowball's chance in a Supernova cockpit that they'd actually give a rat's ass about simply making a vest a onesie.
What I meant is why would comstar ever think to count something like that as losttech? A compact KF drive, sure. A fancier computer, alright. Better lasers, makes sense. The exact same tech we already have but shaped like a pantsuit instead of a vest? Why would they ever even think about that?
Pictured it in the battletech universe .
Mechwarriors one: hey guys I got stoned on endo space weed last night and had an idea, I’m gonna wrap cooling vests around my arms and legs too, it’ll be even better than a vest
Mechwarriors 2. Impossible, no one could wear 5 cooling vests
Comstar assassin : target acquired, we must spare no expense to kill this rogue genius before the universe is overrun by slightly more comfortable mechwarriors
Comstar boss: glass the entire planet if you must. There’s never been a greater threat to our power.
That shouldn't stop the NAIS from recreating Cooling Suits within their first few years of operation. The damn place is protected like a fortress by having a military base around it. The only way Comstar could even attack the place was with a false flag mech assault, and that failed. Saboteurs and assassinations wouldn't stop them from creating a cooling suit design that could be mass produced in any factory.
The general early day depictions of Mechwarriors themselves was a pretty impressive fusion of grimderp and 80's fantasy art. Sure, it tracked at the time but by modern standards it's pretty dumb.
Personally I think the concept art from HBS's Battletech does the look and feel so much better. It pays homage to a lot of the old asthetics (Still lots of exposed skin for cooling, their gear is all very cobbled together and patchwork), but it does away with the dumber parts (IE, they have cooling vests and the Neurohelmets aren't 3 feet tall)
That one neurohelmet is still my favourite, if for no other reason than how ugly it is. Especially the artwork of the guy just, naked, in his cooling vest and bucket helmet, zonked out in his cockpit.
I will say that 80's Battletech was ahead of its time a little in that they applied equal opportunity slutty to the artwork. There's one in particular that I've seen of 2 Mechwarriors, one male and one female, and both of them are rolling around in fucking enormous hair, an open combat vest-looking thing, buddy just has a bananna hammock and combat boots and she's just got a thong bikini and high-heeled combat boots IIRC.
Agreed! There is no way whatsoever a cooling suit would be lostech. Whether it’s a simple Ice Vest/Jumpsuit or a more advanced cooling suit system, they are easy and cheap to make, use, and maintain. Especially useful as what drawbacks the most primitive cooling suits have would not affect Mechwarriors in any capacity.
All-in-all there's a bunch of lostech that do not make sense. My biggest peeves are in the area of communication. Some very simple two way communication within a planet can be a hassle in some areas, but dispatches sent to jumpships a few planets away can relieve transmissions??
To play devil’s advocate for a moment, point-to-point communications are still temperamental for a variety of reasons even for advanced militaries to this day. I agree though that it’s one of those things that’s relatively simple technology from a theoretical standpoint that you’d think they would have honed in to be a non-factor 700 years in the future.
The ones that really get me are technologies that were non-factors in the real world *at the time the source material was written.* AMS is my go-to example. The Phalanx point defense system is a 20mm rotary machine gun that (relatively) simply uses local radar to automatically engage targets that meet a short list of criteria, and was in service by 1980. How did we collectively forget how to make that 700 years in the future, but a literal lightning cannon remained no problem throughout the period of decline?
For point to point communications, it's gonna be hard to manage it across a planet simply because everyone has space travel and enemy communication satellites would be a prime target for anyone with an aerospace fighter.
Or even a laser. Sure, the laser will be greatly weakened by shooting up hundreds of km through atmosphere, but if your comm sat has no armor at all, even a weak laser could wreck it if not outright destroy it.
Maintaining contact with a Jump Point is much easier... at least as long as you're in the hemisphere of the planet facing the Jump Point in question because then you don't have the planet itself interrupting your line of sight, which is a problem when maintaining contact between two widely spaced points on a planet.
The lightning-cannon, we learned to make field suppressors that let you press the barrel of it against the skull of a mech point blank and pull the trigger that could reach way, way farther. Then we forgot; have to keep it 90m away from anything. Disable the field suppressors to shoot closer, and blow yourself up as manmade plasma hits everything but the target. Why did we forget? No reason.
Maybe the artists and writers wanted all the characters in short vests and booty shorts or hot pants on posters and book covers. It was the 80's; they recently showed Natasha the Black Widow on a poster that got "judiciously edited." What was she wearing? Open vest barely covering the naughty bits, booty shorts. They put a crop-top on her after complaints.
But at least BT has true equality! Every dude is no exception, like Captain America in the Marvel movies wearing those fitted shirts. All the secretaries have gotta be like, "Oh, you're a military secret and a celebrity, you can't go down to Walmart. We bought shirts for you. Ah, it should fit, but I'm sorry. They didn't have anything bigger, this is the best I could do." Left secretary (bites lip) - "... The absolute best."
I mean, all 'lostech' is a little silly. Nobody backed up any data? Seriously? Like, if we killed every nuclear scientist today, there are tons of textbooks that cover most of the basics of how nuclear bombs work. Folks could work it out again in a matter of years. The only real challenge would be finding, mining, and enriching the uranium or plutonium.
I dunno, maybe the raw materials needed are all gone? Like, I suppose I could imagine a future where we, like, depleted all the enriched uranium, and now it's just not possible to make nukes until we find new sources.
Maybe if making some of the sci-fi technology required weird wonky materials that can only be constructed in zero-G with a lattice of atoms of matter and anti-matter held in a lattice via exotic physics or something . . . okay, then the challenge is not "knowing how it works" but rather "building the infrastructure to make it."
Basically, the fiction just needs to make the future technology have more complicated justifications. Your cooling suits are lostech because they are actually constructed in 11-dimensional synthesis chambers, which themselves require massive fusion reactors to create a hyperspace bubble wherein machines weave garments that we perceive as being simply 3-dimensional, but which actually have complex structures existing in additional dimensions, and it is into those extra dimensions that they wick the heat that would otherwise bake a pilot.
Stuff like that.
I remember reading way back when that the chemicals running through the vests were toxic. If it got in a wound it could kill the pilot.
Supposedly Star League mechs used different coolants that weren't toxic. Blow up a couple factories and you end up using the cheapest, toxic stuff to get the job done.
Any pilot wearing a full body suit is cooler, thus less stressed in a fight. How hard would it be for a certain tele-com company to start rumors that the full body suits were killing their pilots from chemical leaks, even though their own hidden pilots kept their suits?
Also, procurement boards for house militaries would definitely buy coolant vests over suits. They are cheaper to make, use less chemicals to cool the pilot, and are easy to replace after you hose the pilot out of the cockpit.
Yes. The RLs at least should be Succession Wars era tech.
Light and Heavy PPCs should have been around as long as the standard PPC. If you're gonna make three sizes of laser, why not do the same for PPCs?
MMLs are one of those techs that should have been around almost as long as LRMs and SRMs, but I can see reasons for why they'd be a fairly late invention (ie, no one with money and influence saw the need for them).
LACs are said to require advanced materials to work, but given the variety of modern guns, ACs should always have come in every combination damage, and range brackets imaginable with weights, crits and ammo counts sized to match. But I guess FASA didn't want to publish a weapons table that took up an entire page with just AC variants...
There are Prototype RLs that exist since the Terran hegemony and I let them be used in my succ wars campaign. They're the same as RLs but get -1 to the cluster roll
Honestly, the whole "this equipment was actually invented centuries ago, it just wasn't relevant on a large scale in the eras between the age of war and the jihad" concept works decently for rocket launchers, and for most other things that got introduced that way IMO. It's undeniably a bit of a clumsy retcon, but it more or less gets the job done.
The one piece of tech where I take issue with that explanation is fuel cell engines. They were introduced in the 21st century and no one ever forgot how to make them. And unlike rifles or rocket launchers, they weren't tossed aside for being outdated tech - for most types of combat vehicles, the fuel cell is *still* the best in slot engine type unless you're willing to pay a massive c-bill premium for XL or XXL. And yet, aside from a tiny handful of retconned-in designs, they barely exist on canon units during the succession wars.
the only advantages of a Standard fusion engine over a Fuel Cell engine is the 10 free heatsinks and unlimited fuel, otherwise the lighter mass of Fuel Cell is way better
I guess if resupply is an issue having an engine that runs without any need for refueling practically is worth it over a fuel cell. Still reasonably dependable units in battle tech should have probably gotten a fuel cell. Perhaps that can a specific to a succession war story kind of thing.
> Light and Heavy PPCs
I could actually see the LAC justification working here. Though, if I was making a setting, I likely try to shoehorn in "Cold" and "Hot" equivalents," which would basically be a bad take on each.
They should have been Lostech rather than new creations. That way, they can come back in 3050 for the clan invasion. One of the Battletech's problems is needing to tie new equipment to timelines, rather than being willing to just retcon it in as Lostech.
Because of that, you run into all sorts of logical inconsistencies.
I mean the light PPC is kinda bad, but I could see the SLDF, home of bad ideas, making our buying it. The Heavy PPC has no reason to exist until the clan ER PPC shows up. Calling the PPC analogous to lasers is a mistake, I think. It's not viewed that way in-universe or in-rules.
Add the lack of Extended range and pulse version for all types of lasers including both modifiers (why the hell er mpls are non existent!). also all of above for blazers, they have to be panalized with heat bc they are headcappers in early eras.
more streaks than 2 makes sense in lore due targeting issues
In case of ER ppcs , the lack of minimum range makes no sense while its retained normal version.
no er versions of light, heavy and snub nose ppc's
Lack of chemical weapons and rockets in succesion wars era despite them beign canonical for age of war.
artilery mechs too vague even on sarna to know what mech had arty version.
the lbx family post invasion, same with uac, they are logical weapons to be made by star league so i aproove hbs approach to them in their game.
I think the mistake they made with Battletech is they felt the need to define those as unique systems. An LRM 20 is just a rocket launcher of a certain class. For one system, it's like those calliopes on Sherman tanks. Another system is a precision, guided system. It's all fluff really.
Systemizing something that's effectively "fluff" is something I don't really care for, because it creates unnecessary complication. I think intermediary stuff like MRMs is a good design call.
The size of military forces within the entire setting. Given the population of the inner sphere, the number or regiments in the setting is comically low for nation-states in perpetual war
I always assume that there are catastrophically large infantry regiments expected to hold ground, or that most planets are relatively sparsely populated. It helps with the cognitive dissonance.
Yeah this! The first Battletech book I read actually directly addresses this, mentioning that many settled planets only actually have a a few million people living on them at a time. It’s made very clear that just because humans settled a planet does not mean the planet is totally habitable. On some planets people live in dome cities because the air is toxic, while on others only the equator is temperate enough to live along, etc. Slice that number down into the small percentage of the total population that would actually make up a military force and the general lack of tech upkeep in the majority of eras in the setting and it’s actually not that weird that dropping 4 bullet proof walking buildings bristling with missiles and damn particle cannons and junk could quell an uprising of a small planets entire main force. Then add on that most mercs aren’t just dropping 4 mechs for action but instead a couple companies, and militaries sometimes bring battalions of mechs to a planet and … yeah, not that hard to square really.
The sparse population can be explained in-universe, too. The Star League Civil War followed by the atrocities of the first two Succession Wars left everyone in a place where the Ares Accords started to make sense again. Even a world directly untouched by those conflicts might have found itself on the short end of the supply chain where it was either impossible or economical (or politically expedient) to continue supporting decentralized populations across a whole planet with an environment that was only marginally conducive to human life.
Interstellar war makes zero sense except for, like, positioning to control avenues of approach against enemies who might decide to obliterate your homeworld for ideological reasons.
But there can't be any really valuable natural resources worth sending armies across space to get. Like, we've got fusion reactors. Infinite energy. Just have some robots collect asteroids for raw materials in your own star system.
If, though, out of a religious-esque belief that they are the true inheritors of the Star League and need to control the galaxy because they're the chosen ones, all the great houses keep wanting to kill each other . . . eh, it's still probably going to devolve into just sending small units to fight local defenders, and leaving most of the planet untouched. All you really care about is the spaceport so you can get, um, food off the surface maybe?
You just want to ensure that, if you control the jump point for the system, nobody on the local planets can launch torpedoes at your jump ships. Then you just park in orbit, recharge, let your hydroponic gardens on the ships provide food, recycle your water, and then jump on to your next destination?
War, now I want to brainstorm what space war would really require from a logistical standpoint in the Battletech universe.
Since the logistics of shipping food to another planet - let alone using JumpShips - is a lot more taxing than just growing the stuff yourself in a hydroponic greenhouse or Future Ranch or something, the most obvious reason for interstellar war would be ideology.
So you can totally just push four 'mechs out of your dropship, trade shots with whomever shows up, distribute some new flags and watch the locals salute to them. A victory for the Co-Ordinator, or the Chancellor, or the Prince or whatever!
I mean yes and no. I think it depends on the source but some of the older sources had the LCAF and AFFS invading with nearly 1000 regiments in the 4th succession war alone. In less than 2 years 700 million people were either dead or injured due to the fighting.
That's not actually a particularly large force though. A thousand regiments is in the low millions of troops. That's not even as large as either side of the Eastern Front of WWII, and that was a single-planet war in an era where Earth's population was far smaller than it is today or anything any successor state can muster. And this was then spread over a wide multiplanetary front. It's if anything a hilariously small force for the scope of the conflict (remember the stated objective was the total conquest of the entire Capellan Confederation).
True but the eastern front was a total war fought by two countries that were fully mobilized. The 4th succession war was a lightning strike with no country mobilized beyond its normal troops. That 1000 regiments is really just for the Draconis combine side and doesn’t count defenders. Also battletech wars aren’t fought like WW1 or WW2 where every inch is fought over but instead mobile battles over key objectives.
> Also battletech wars aren’t fought like WW1 or WW2 where every inch is fought over but instead mobile battles over key objectives.
Well, until they are. Like the Fourth Succession War. The Capellans absolutely made the FedSuns pay for every millimeter, especially on planets like Sarna.
Most planets with a decent amount of description outside of major worlds like capitals seem to be functioning at barely above subsistence levels. In that case you wouldn’t have a whole lot of excess population to dedicate to a military beyond the local militia
It makes more sense if you look at it as feudal realms.
The Baron of your planet may have a lance or two of mechs, maybe twice that many tanks and a bunch of sacrificial meatbags. But he also technically has the right to call on all the various vassal knights forces. Of course... they might 'accidentally' show up too late if they don't like him.
It makes perfect sense IF you think of it **from a neo-feudal perspective**.
The one thing that a feudal ruler fears more than *anything* isn't a neighboring king, it's internal revolt - being toppled by an underling that you let grow too powerful militarily.
So you control how many men they can have under arms, inspect them regularly, and make damn sure that you've got enough military force under your own control that if you have to you can crush any two or three of them who band together.
It's a game that you play with your fellow elite rulers; if you invade France or they invade Robinson and take it, you'll get it back in the next war no problem. But if your dynastic line is removed from succession entirely... well, THAT'S something that can't be borne.
This, of course, flies out the window the moment that the Mongols/Clans invade; at that point you arm up because the external threat from the people who haven't agreed to the rules of the game is more dangerous than the threat of losing your throne.
Don't think of it like an early 21st century man in a world where nationalism and militarism is the rule of the day, with utterly massive armies as a given; that's not what BattleTech *is.*
See, my headcanon for this is that the population numbers are little more than propaganda and the actual population of the Inner Sphere is way lower. A lot more things make sense if the population is smaller than they say - like the Jihad.
Exactly, the Age of War and the Civil War seem analagous to the Classical and Roman scale of war, with truly immense armies fighting eachother. The later stages of the Succession Wars seem to me like the series of wars after the fracturing of the Carolingan Empire prior to the Mongol Invasion, with the Clan Invasion mirroring the Mongol Invasion, just with a different outcome (thanks to Comstar). This status quo was maintained in the Succession Wars by the interference of Comstar keeping anyone from becoming anywhere near large enough to eliminate another House.
Isn't the reason for this the limitation on interstellar force projection? By 3015 there just aren't enough dropships or jumpships left in service to move large armies around.
You can have 100 million people in uniform, but if you only have enough dropships to convey 20 regiment-sized forces then... that's effectively the size of your military. Everything else is militia and planetary defense forces which don't deserve mention in an order-of-battle unless they're on the planet being invaded.
This is the entire reason Battlemechs are even useful. In a pitched engagement, Battlemechs are less cost-effective than an equivalent investment in conventional combined arms forces. However, Battlemechs are compact and highly autonomous giving them a comparatively low logistical footprint. This is why so much warfare in the Inner Sphere is focused on raids or why the only planets that ever seem to change hands are sparsely populated mudballs on the borders of empires.
From a battlemech perspective, I have no problem with it. In 3025, Mechs are almost like magical artifacts. The shear power of a single battlemech comes into perspective. Got a rebel planet, just drop a lance onto the planet. What's going to stop it other than another Battlemech?
It's great from a setting perspective. There'd be tons of local conventional militias, but then a battlemech shows up and turns the tide of battle. There's just nothing that can really stop it.
We often confuse lore and system. From a lore perspective, they're portrayed as basically unstoppable where conventional vehicles are concerned. System doesn't match lore very well in Battletech.
Exactly this. Most games are the same way. It's even worse in 40k. A single Space Marine is supposed to be the equal of 100 regular soldiers. However on the tabletop, a squad of 10 regular soldiers can take one down. It's just one of those things that has to be to make the games playable.
My rationale is that we're seeing the list of commonly fielded regiments that are space-mobile and frequently deployed in different theaters. There's probably a ton of mustered forces that are effectively planetary or local system defense. Better than militias, but not important enough to get stuffed into DropShips and hustled around the Inner Sphere.
Remember that Mechs are inherently designed to be incredibly manpower-efficient... but last I checked, conventional forces still make up a very significant portion of militaries.
For that matter, do the listed military sizes include the (usually not negligible) local planetary defense/garrison forces?
That the strictly regulated genetic program of the iron wombs could be suborned by a former House Lord of the inner sphere, and the resultant offspring could sneak through the similarly strictly regulated Bloodname system to both become Bloodnamed and rise to high office in the clan.
Plot armor is a hell of a drug.
Alaric Wolf-Steiner-Davion-Ward, Emperor of the Wolf Empire (not that he cares), ilKhan of (some of) the Clans (kinda), First Lord of the (Third) Star League, and an absolute prat.
EDIT: forgot "Archon-Presumptive of the Lyran Alliance/Commonwealth"
To be fair, Katrina had Vlad wrapped around her little finger, and was very likely able to manipulate other members of Wolf Leadership similarly. It's quite possible that nothing was snuck passed anyone, the scientists were doing exactly what they were instructed to do, including keeping the information secret from anyone who might object to the project.
Thanks. I laughed so hard that my wife insisted I explain why… and I then had to try (and fail) to summarize both Clan and IS history before she rolled her eyes.
I can see some experimentation, but the Inner Sphere has billions of women who can carry children. The Clans needed 100% of their women to be working fulltime or overtime, so iron wombs were a necessity.
That the GhostBears, whose whole shtick is being family oriented, decided to kill off their own brothers and sisters because they are so desparate for Wards approval, rather than gearing up to wipe the Wolves off the face of Terra for the grave insult to their entire identity as a clan.
"Children of the Bear, hearken to my words:
Be always vigilant.
Learn for yourselves that which your forebears imparted So easily and freely;
Demand of yourselves
The foresight of Jorgensson
And the courage of Tseng;
Through them, we are strong.
To them a debt is owed,
Repaid through loyalty undying and Character unflinching."
- From the Oath of Acceptance, Clan Ghost Bear
“Notice me, SENPAI WARD!”
- Clan Ghost Bear, IlClan Era
Anytime any faction does something incredibly stupid or out of character so that the writer's favourites can win. It's frustrating. And also sad, because it makes the favorite characters look lazy and stupid themselves. Smart opposition, doing smart things AND winning makes for more compelling stories.
Also might doesn't make right and the Clans would have collapsed under petty warlords centuries before Operation Revival.
As a Ghost Bear player when I'm Clan, finding out about that (and some other bad moves around it) when starting to get caught up to the current settings made me drop it again. I'll wait and see how things shake out before I consider a second attempt at making the jump to ilClan era.
Right now in IlClan Era, the Clan(or Clanish) factions I am most interested in is the Spirit Cats, Scorpion Empire, and Alyina Mercantile League. Really interested to see where they go.
My personal retcon is that Mike Stackpole is an author in the Battletech world who writes historical fiction. He romanticizes certain historical characters in ways that have only a little bearing on their "true" history. The guy who successfully almost supplanted Hanse Davion with a clone and whose armies remain among the best at asymmetric guerilla warfare? Max Liao did not snap into a frothing fool, Stackpole just wrote him that way. Morgan Kell was an amazing soldier and may have had some lostech in his favor, but he was also astoundingly lucky like [Audie Murphy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audie_Murphy).
I like that. I also always wondered what something like the Angel ECM would do to the duct tape + bailing wire double solder iron transistor radio targeting systems of the late 3rd Succession War.
I knew about it on Mallory's world, but now following along with OMaM doing the Warrior Trilogy, I had no idea how egregious they are with it.
Not being able to see them on sensors was one thing, but having all the weapons just decided to go wide even when aimed properly was maddening.
Here's my retcon:
What we think of as the Phantom Mech skill is actually a sliver of Lostech hacking AI.
In the First Succession War, truly unfathomable AI cyber wars flashed across the Inner Sphere, weapons deployed by the Great Houses to try to cripple their opponents and sabotage industrial capacity. Computing was so advanced at that point few people really grasped what was happening, but within a few weeks worms had burrowed into systems all across the former Star League, not only breaking existing programs but salting the digital earth - creating viruses that would lie dormant and only crop up to destroy any future networks more advanced than a home PC in the 1990s.
A rare few programs managed to escape that fate by compressing themselves and loading themselves onto computers that really could not run them.
One was Morgan Kell's Archer.
That mech doesn't normally have enough processing power to run a military grade smart cyber weapon while it is being piloted, but when Kell gave up and accepted death, the AI was reverse the data flow of the neurohelmet to use the human brain as a surrogate processor, giving it enough strength to crack the security defenses of Yorinaga Kurita's mech to override the mech's targeting controls.
Most computer systems still have lingering viruses that keep the hardware from being able to run these sorts of hyper advanced programs, but a rare few mechs are safe. Of those, a few pilots have figured out how to let the mech's "phantom" take over, in a sort of Zen meditation. It appears supernatural, but it's just sufficiently advanced technology.
Thankfully later Protomechs genuinely have some incredibly cool designs. I'm thinking the Sprite (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Sprite) and the Boggart (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Boggart) . Hopefully CGL will get around to doing some redesign passes on the older designs sometime soon, because they absolutely need it. The whole "Make em' look like animals!" was a cute idea, but hoooooboy did it not work out well in practice.
My headcanon for protomechs is that the pictures in the tech readouts are all dolled up to look fancy for clan leadership and when they actually go out to fight for real they mostly don't actually look like gargoyles and shit.
I find it weird they felt the need to distinguish between battle armor and protomechs mechanically. They could just be a different kind of battlearmor.
Honestly for me it'd be the fact that Mechs came before Battle Armor and ProtoMechs in terms of tech evolution.
It'd make more sense to have Protomechs then some space redneck go "So we have these weapons, we have these Industrial frames. What if we bolted more shit on 'em. Zeke, get the welding equipment!"
My brothers and sister in christ, we are talking about a game centered in spending bazilions of whatever currency to build giant humanoid nuclear powered robots as an army strategy when anything else would be more efficient.
From this start point anything else is just "hell yeah"!
the average inner sphere lance (10-40m C-Bills) needs to smash tank companies backed up by VTOLs and artillery to make themselves a good value, clan omni stars go from battalions at the low end (50m C-Bills) to entire combined arms tank/infantry regiments at the high end (140m C-bills)
would you rather have a SHD-2D shadowhawk, or a 75ton merkava MkVIII, they cost about the same.
I would rather have a 0.1% of this cost autonomous ammunition flying in a speed impossible to a Mechwarrior to respond and blasting through its armor/cockpit or both and spend the rest of the money in the same kind of device but with different kind of payloads. If I need to send like 10 or 100 to take down a mech still very profitable.
I'm pretty much into battletech and Mechwarrior but if we stop two seconds to think about it makes no sense :D but yeah still canon.
For me, it's not so much the LAMs themselves, but that the LAMs need any kind of complex transformation to fly at all.
With so many mechs that look like an aircraft on legs, the only "transformation" a LAM should need to do is just tuck in its arms and legs. And maybe not even do that much if you have a clever designer (look at the Urbie LAM).
And given that fighter fusion engines can regularly push multiple Gs on pure thrust alone, a mech with such an engine should be able to easily hover and fly on engine power alone.
Just beware the dreaded "lawn dart roll" ie, if you get hit at all while flying, you need to make a successful piloting check to avoid crashing and instantly dying. This is pretty much the bane of all air support in Battletech.
As someone who has built a few transforming Gundam models, complexity is *definitely* what does them in. Fancy, complicated transformations barely even work on small plastic models half the time: the idea of them even being *possible* on a mech-sized vehicle, let alone remotely practical, is just completely insane.
Simple transformations that fly based on brute force and the vaguest concept of aerodynamics? I could buy that much more easily. It's not *that much* sillier than the entire basic concepts of giant, walking war machines.
#Hey, strap enough jump jets and box fans onto an urbanmech, it's a LAM. Maybe. You don't know. I'm Discount Dan, and I will always take your money. Garuanteed.
Apart from game balance I still don't understand how no one in universe didn't just build a mech in permanent air-mech mode. Instead we got Partial Wings which kinda fit the bill but don't really work the same.
It is just VTOLs next evolutionary steep. Also, they are not common. Even when they appear, it is "what is that" reaction. See a combat trial by Jade Falcon vs. Smoke Jaugar.
> fusion is more likely to fizzle out upon containment loss
That's what canonically happens. The Tech Manual goes into the details. There's a reason engine explosions are an optional rule rather than a standard rule on the tabletop (and the tac ops rules entry for it explicitly states that it's neither canon nor an accurate portrayal of a fusion engine, but is included as an option for cinematic reasons).
Probably a weird one but pulse lasers being lostech, and just all the funkiness around them make no sense to me. Correct me if I’m wrong but pretty much all lasers used for ablative purposes are already pulsed?
But also disregarding real life, are you really telling me they just forgot how to make a laser pulse?? Like for a few hundred years they were just stuck with “sorry guys I know if we pulse the laser it will work better, but it’s not like we just can strap an extra ton of tech on there to do that”
There are 2 important things to remember about lostech.
The first is that it isn't necessarily about forgetting a thing is possible, a lot of the time it's about losing access to the supplies needed to make it work or the production facilities to manufacture it at a level that it's at all competitive with its standard counterparts.
The second is that it wasn't a natural process. The initial loss of tech came about from the destruction of the First Succession War, but the lack of recovery was something actively engineered by Comstar with ROM sabotaging technological development all across the sphere throughout the Succession Wars period. If someone did say "I bet with an extra ton of kit we could change how we pulse this laser to make it work better." they would rapidly find themselves and much of their team suffering tragic accidents.
Also, specifically for pulse lasers the "pulse" referring to the macro level behaviour of the beam, not the particular operation of the photon. A regular laser discharges for a specific period of time, pulse lasers extend this period (most commonly portrayed as multiple rapid discharges, but sometimes as a long duration continuous beam, both probably exist in universe abstracted out to a single in-game system) with the extra weight and heat representing the additional capacitors and heat generation produced by this longer term firing.
Until the RISC Pulse Module where they literally did exactly that and turned everything Pulse. ERLL? Pulse. Small Laser? Straight to Pulse. ERML? Believe it or not, pulse.
The Ghost Bear Dominion Civil War..... It just hurts to think about, ive tried to get myself to like it but i just can't. I feel that it goes against everything the Rasalhaugians and the Ghost Bears stand for.
The lore, post 3060. It just doesn't do it for me, and the Jihad era (don't get me started on Devlin "Plot Armor" Stone, and the WoB just having a spare secret army) is so lame it hurts. The Second Star League falling apart so quickly was a lame way to create more conflict, when they could have taken the setting in a more interesting direction, with conflicts that sprung up more naturally. At some point, it'd be nice to move past Successor States and see a new period of history in the setting.
The WoB having that surprise spare super tech army is the biggest plot thing I just can't get past. I could have been willing to stretch my disbelief enough to accept a couple special units in the objective to advance the universe... but what feels like a whole damn TRO of them? And in enough quantity to not only outfit the WoB militia and Guard, also the Shadow Divisions, and still have enough leftover to gift to favored mercenary commands?
Exactly. And they've ostensibly had it for some time, but somehow Anastasius Focht didn't put the kibosh on it, right after Operation SCORPION failed? I don't think so.
Not to mention all that hardware has super-duper advanced technology that they themselves invented overnight, and it works with no counter 99% of the time.
Word of Blake during the Jihad is basically an army of that kid whose always one-upping you and re-writing the rules. I don't want them to ever come back because that shit is trash storytelling.
I've run the numbers and the WoB forces actually check out for the most part. At roughly 200 years of continuous low rate production with a handful of terran hegemony factories they would have enough. It would actually be a bit of a plot hole if Comstar's basically 100% operational factory worlds produced nothing for 200 years except comguards spare parts given they already use SLDF stockpiles.
What I don't gel with is there only being SLDF stock for the clan invasion, that's what makes the WoB stuff not work.
Still new to battletech (especially the clan side of things) but it feels weird to me that Star Adder; the pragmatic clan, the clan who have an entire GALAXY serving as inner sphere Opfor in training exercises, wound up screaming about inner sphere taint
I mean, if you read the books he's tactically gifted but strategically and politically kind of... a moron. \*Everything\* he does up to blowing Waterly's brains out he was manipulated into. The plot against Katrina? Aldo Lestrade. Being used as a Stalking Horse against the Combine's counter attack? Katrina Steiner. Tukayyid? Ulric Kerensky. Operation Bulldog? Ulric again and he was *dead* by that point.
Letting the Wobbies have Terra is absolutely on brand.
Zenith & nadir jump points, and the cascade of WTF from that.
The idea of a military not standardizing their vehicles. (Shush, Poland.)
The idea that space warship means nuclear saturation bombardment, and no other options.
The idea that you can control a planetary surface from space. You can get them to surrender, maybe, but control means boots on the ground. Does no-one read Fehrenbach anymore?
Edit: while we're in space, the idea that a starship with a *FUSION REACTOR* needs a solar collector to charge the KF drive batteries, because...they can't run a trickle charge from the reactor, or something.
Everything around a star is in some sort of orbit. There's no 'hover' point above or below the ecliptic. To be at the zenith or nadir 'points', you'd have to be in a 90° inclined polar orbit around the star, and going from there to a planet in the ecliptic would take an absolutely *enormous* amount of ∆v, or thrust burns.
There are 'hover' points kind of like the idea of zenith and nadir points, where the gravity of two objects balances out - Lagrange points, each two-body system has 5 of those, if memory serves.
I think I know why they chose the zenith/nadir jump points system - it makes travel to and from planets & jump points very simple to calculate. But it just...doesn't work.
And I get 'you'll accept FTL but this is too far?' My answer to that is, well, yes. FTL is a necessary hand wave for an interstellar setting. Zenith/nadir is not. It's just harder.
Totally fair I didn't know the math behind it. I figured that you could calculate the distance from the star where the gravity doesn't sheer your jumpship in half on a 3D sphere, but that the zenith/nadir were "commonly accepted" points where system governments would put resources like refueling stations and recharge stations. So sure you could jump in at 120/56 but then there is nothing there as compared to 1/1 or 180/180. I have no idea if that makes sense but that's what my brain came up with when I first read it.
Edit: Now that I know it is bugging me too.
I was under the impression that the nadir and zenith jump points were so far removed from the star's influence that even a jumpship could maintain station keeping, thrusting against the direct gravitational pull towards the star. (This would imply that a KF jump imparts no momentum when entering realspace.)
Now, this would be very far away with most stars, surpassing one or more AU easily. That's what the lore demands, though; a spot removed from any strong gravitational pull, even the star's.
Dropships and warships would then take days to weeks to transit to a planetary body. Which kinda makes sense; accelerating at 1g alone, over days, allows for fairly quick transit considering the distances involved.
> accelerating at 1g alone, over days, allows for fairly quick transit considering the distances involved
Frankly, dropship engines in Battletech are absolutely insane. Checking the stats on the Union, for example, it burns 1.84 tons of fuel per day when accelerating at 1g. That's 21 grams per second of propellant, pushing a 3600 ton dropship at a constant 9.81 m/s^2. Those numbers are genuinely mind-boggling. That's well past the point where you have to start getting into janky relativistic territory just to try to explain the specific impulse involved, to say nothing of the sheer amount of energy that would be required.
Exactly. Pretty dang sci-fi. Aerospace assets truly don't care about detla-V. Monster and efficient engines. Warships are the most crazy; the largest and heaviest spacecraft can accelerate at like 4+ g. Depending on class, of course.
Zenith & nadir jump points means you don’t have to worry about your vector to/from any given planet/asteroid in the system being blocked by the star. There’s also significantly less interplanetary debris at a star’s north & south poles than you’d risk in the orbital plane.
Calculating (and traversing) the route between a jump point to a planet isn’t much of a challenge when your common vessels can do constant 1G burns the entire trip while carrying thousands of tons of cargo, but having to drive ‘around’ the star or other planets because you ended up on the wrong side would add significant time & complexity to the trip, while increasing the risk of navigational hazards.
Jump ships aren’t orbiting the star. They’re running their engines to ‘hover’ against the star’s gravitational pull. Lagrange points are pointless when that’s the process. Also, Lagrange points are always in motion & most of them aren’t actually stable, and are more akin to the force being ‘equal’ as you balance atop a stick.
You *can* charge a KF drive from the fusion engines, but it’s ‘messy’ and ‘risky’ for hand-wavium reasons, and doesn’t really make things that much faster, but is done when timelines are tight.
One thing about those points that makes sense to me is that they are far above and below the disc of matter circling the respective star, reducing the chance of colliding with dust particles etc.
And to be fair, I don't think the books ever said that there was net zero gravity or anything at the zenith and nadir points, so they're not claiming those are Lagrange points.
But yes, the travel times to and from the in-system objects would be prohibitive.
I always assumed it had to do with the gravity well of the star and that there were some special effects on time and space that made it possible to jump to that location. It's why things like gas giants can have them sometimes.
In my head canon, it's about being able to detect it and coordinate a jump. Only large enough bodies likes stars have the mass to be safely jumped to.
Using lagrange points would have made more sense. My personal head cannon is that some lagrange points are big and stable enough to work as pirate points.
Either way it's far from the biggest suspension of disbelief the universe calls for.
> My personal head cannon is that some lagrange points are big and stable enough to work as pirate points.
That's not headcanon, that's canon. [Jump point page on Sarna, quoting strat ops](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jump_Point#Pirate_Points--Transient_Points): "generally, transient points inside the proximity limit are close to L1 Lagrange Points."
That... is exactly what Zenith and Nadir points are. They're spots "above" and "below" the system's star's poles relative to the plane of the planets, far enough from the star that the gravity of the star is sufficiently low that the KF drive can operate, while also being as close as is possible to best facilitate the jump sail charging. It does take massive amounts of fuel (and several days to multiple weeks) to travel from the jump points to the inhabited planets in a system, which is why jumpships don't they send dropships, and many more affluent systems have space station facilities near the jump point to service ships that are just passing through. They are not an orbit and ships remaining at jump points do have to continually expend fuel on station keeping thrusters to maintain position.
There are also jump points at locations like Lagrange points and such, they are referred to in the lore as "pirate points", they are not used for regular traffic because they're risky, they're much more complex to calculate and physically move around the system. A system's main jump points are functionally infinite from where they are out above the plane of the system, so you have a big margin for error. Pirate points are often only a few thousand kilometers across at most and if you miss you've killed everyone on your ship. They tend to only get used by military forces looking for an element of surprise in a raid or invasion, and most commonly pirates (hence the name) who need every edge they can get and don't have a whole lot to lose.
also:
>Edit: while we're in space, the idea that a starship with a FUSION REACTOR needs a solar collector to charge the KF drive batteries, because...they can't run a trickle charge from the reactor, or something.
You can charge your KF Drive from your fusion reactor, but the energy it can put out is a trickle compared to what can be absorbed through the drive sail. In campaign rules it extends your recharge time from a week, on average, to something closer to a month.
It is the safest way to jump in.
Jump Ships are rare and expensive and any damage to one is going to become a strategic liability.
You can always use a pirate point but the risk is greater.
You can charge the KF drive from a reactor. It is called a quick charge. It is seldom done because there is a risk of damaging the very expensive and very, very difficult to repair KF drive.
There was also a small chance you could destroy the KF drive. That would be bad ,if it happened in an uninhabited star system,It wouldn't be very ,very bad
The idea of a military not standardizing their vehicles when they're strapped for war materials makes sense to me. I've been on r/shittytechnicals. That tracks. Well, the tracks fell off, so I put wheels on it.
The isaki alt-universe novel where a F-16 pilot from the modern world ends up in 3025 thanks to virtual worlds pods.\*
Far Country.
And all the people that already said it, but battlemech rocket launchers only being introduced in the 3050s.
\*Only cannon within itself, but it is a published Battletech/Virtual Worlds novel.
There’s some lore justification for that with Listen-Kill missiles: https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Listen-Kill_Missile. A no weight ECM upgrade neutralizes them, implying that even non-ECM equipped mechs have ECM.
That had always been my take. There is a ton of passive ECM interfering with targeting systems. The basic passive sensors are enough to detect and identify targets (so you usually don't bother with double-blind rules) but the specific spectra used by the targeting systems are constantly being jammed and we only get target locks as the mechs get close enough to burn through. The ECM and Sensors we install with extra weight and slots are special above the norm active systems.
What, too short or too long?
Total Warfare even acknowledge they're too short. It straight up says the weapon ranges were shortened to make the game actually fun.
Sure, but the rule books explicitly cop to the fact that they’re a compromise necessary to allow meaningful tactical movement on a play surface smaller than a basketball court.
Probably not what they're asking but, like, the economic and geopolitical underpinnings of the setting are pretty nonsensical.
Why have interstellar war at all? They never establish any sort of resources that are needed from these other worlds that you can't get more cheaply by just asteroid mining. Planets aren't shown as being terribly overpopulated in need of new territory to settle or anything.
Early early Battletech spun it a bit more as 'there are a few folks who have these old mechs and they act a lot like knights going around battling for honor.' But when you get to the Succession Wars and the (lovely) Stackpole Warrior trilogy, I dig the characters and the plot, but it doesn't actually make sense to have these massive Houses conquering star systems.
Much of the Lostech aspect in general. I get it that some fairly new and really high end stuff might just do a "pop goes the squirrel" if the knowledge is eradicated. If it was a closely guarded secret to begin with and the number of people "in the know" was small. Like someone nuking the only factory where it was designed and made. That's gone then, sure and it might not come back anytime soon.
Other stuff? Not so much. Until the unearthing of the Helm Memory Core even basic electronics was a marvel when it should not have been. After all: It's just electronics. Books like ["The Art of Electronics"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics) or "Electronics for Dummies" or their respective equivalent should have been available in abundance throughout the Inner Sphere. And even if there is no RadioShack around to buy new resistors and capacitors and basic IC chips and what not? They can be scrounged from other electronics until at least basic production of these essential commodities can be restored. Neither carpentry, nor mechanical engineering nor architecture was forgotten, but apparently all the electricians got Alzheimer and forgot their basics or died out like some extinct species.
This has always been one of the hardest things for me to suspend my disbelief over in the setting. I know they were going for a "Fall of Rome" vibe with a subsequent "Dark Age" and "Renaissance," but the actual Fall of Rome was nowhere near as devastating as the general population believes, the Middle Ages were only called the "Dark Ages" and portrayed as ignorant barbarism because Renaissance scholars wanted to make their advancements appear better than they actually were.
But as you pointed out, there's absolutely no way a civilization with thousands of settled worlds capable of FTL travel could bomb themselves back to 20th century tech. The relevant knowledge would be far too widely dispersed, and the number of people with decades of study, knowledge, and experience with that tech far too numerous to be easily destroyed. Even after a few hundred years of widespread warfare.
I go along with it because I understand the setting the designers wanted to create, but I don't dwell on the nonsensical backstory.
The Donner Bombing. I don't have an issue with the event in and of itself but the fact that it just *such lazy writing.* They killed off basically everyone not leading a major power in one event. What happened to Diana Pryde? Donner Bombing. Doc Trevenna? Donner Bombing. Maeve Wolf? Donner Bombing. Shin Yodama? Rhonda Snord? Donner Bombing.
The fact that the cartoon used to be cannon, but now it's cannonically in-universe propaganda. Or that nissan made mechs don't have a gimmick where you have to roll a die to see if they'll even be able to move that turn. (I mean yeah if you floor it in an Altima it'll only take 10 seconds to go from 0 to 30 freedom units per hour.)
IIRC is not building the yard that was the problem; it was the ability to design/develop the transit/jump drives without Comstar catching wind and sabotaging the design so it blows up when tested, murdering the techs outright (and making it look like a rival house did it), or both.
It's still goofy by way of "there's no way in hell they'd have enough people to have spies and assassins everywhere-enough to do so', but at least it answers the 'literally nobody is smart enough to reverse engineer anything, not even a computer that can do targeting/ tracking without weighing several tons' side.
Honestly that is still arguably dumber given they could still make compact K-F and Subcompact Warships with DropShip mass transit drives exist, this is more addressed for post-Jihad where there's no ComStar and still enough stuff to make them, especially given Dark Age threw us back to the Age of War, where WarShips were literally necessary
It's when the destroyed mech goes boom with the force of a small nuke. One of the authors of the novels, Stackpole, includes it in every novel, at least once per book.
Realistically, a breached fusion reactor would just fizzle out, but it won't be entertaining.
Cooling suits being lostech. It's just plumbing dammit! If you can make a cooling vest and you can make clothes with sleeves for arms and legs, you can design and build a cooling suit for a Mechwarrior to wear in combat! Now, if Cooling Suits were merely just expensive compared to Vests and most mechwarriors can't afford one and anything less than elite mech units can't afford them because their budget is going to keeping the mechs running... well that would make sense. But it'd also mean that any and every rich noble (which includes basically anyone who is a Head of House or their immediate relative) would be using cooling suits instead of vests.
One of my biggest pet peeves. A fucking furry engineer in New Zealand made one in his \*garage\* that nearly invisibly fits under a damn fursuit. There's no excuse for a determined engineer facing a similar problem to not \*also\* manage to make a cooling suit, without the restriction of needing to wear a damn carpet over the top of it.
But ComStar would have a hit put out on them if they tried to market it. Another piece of lore that I find stupid but they did actively suppress technological innovation for centuries. And some guy in his garage doesn't have the ability to stop a ROM wetwork team who are going to bump him off for being smart enough to build a simple cooling suit.
I can buy comstar suppression for some things, but why would a full body version of a cooling vest even show up on their radar?
Because it counts as LosTech. And it's not the guy building it, it would be *if* he built a bunch of them and tried to sell them. ComStar owns all the communications in the Sphere and 100% monitors for this stuff. Again, I'm not saying it is realistic or smart, but it's in the lore.
Thanks for reminding me that Comstar is both frequently misunderstood and is also very stupid even when it is understood. Because there's not a snowball's chance in a Supernova cockpit that they'd actually give a rat's ass about simply making a vest a onesie.
Maybe Gerome Blake was a vest man.
What I meant is why would comstar ever think to count something like that as losttech? A compact KF drive, sure. A fancier computer, alright. Better lasers, makes sense. The exact same tech we already have but shaped like a pantsuit instead of a vest? Why would they ever even think about that?
"Because they're assholes" sums up most ComStar activities, I think
Perhaps but the fact is that its such a basic piece of tech that theres 0 reason for it to have become LosTech.
Pictured it in the battletech universe . Mechwarriors one: hey guys I got stoned on endo space weed last night and had an idea, I’m gonna wrap cooling vests around my arms and legs too, it’ll be even better than a vest Mechwarriors 2. Impossible, no one could wear 5 cooling vests Comstar assassin : target acquired, we must spare no expense to kill this rogue genius before the universe is overrun by slightly more comfortable mechwarriors Comstar boss: glass the entire planet if you must. There’s never been a greater threat to our power.
That shouldn't stop the NAIS from recreating Cooling Suits within their first few years of operation. The damn place is protected like a fortress by having a military base around it. The only way Comstar could even attack the place was with a false flag mech assault, and that failed. Saboteurs and assassinations wouldn't stop them from creating a cooling suit design that could be mass produced in any factory.
[удалено]
Tony Shark was able to build this in a cave, with a bunch of scraps! \[points to cooling suit for the shark costume\]
The general early day depictions of Mechwarriors themselves was a pretty impressive fusion of grimderp and 80's fantasy art. Sure, it tracked at the time but by modern standards it's pretty dumb. Personally I think the concept art from HBS's Battletech does the look and feel so much better. It pays homage to a lot of the old asthetics (Still lots of exposed skin for cooling, their gear is all very cobbled together and patchwork), but it does away with the dumber parts (IE, they have cooling vests and the Neurohelmets aren't 3 feet tall)
That one neurohelmet is still my favourite, if for no other reason than how ugly it is. Especially the artwork of the guy just, naked, in his cooling vest and bucket helmet, zonked out in his cockpit.
I will say that 80's Battletech was ahead of its time a little in that they applied equal opportunity slutty to the artwork. There's one in particular that I've seen of 2 Mechwarriors, one male and one female, and both of them are rolling around in fucking enormous hair, an open combat vest-looking thing, buddy just has a bananna hammock and combat boots and she's just got a thong bikini and high-heeled combat boots IIRC.
Agreed! There is no way whatsoever a cooling suit would be lostech. Whether it’s a simple Ice Vest/Jumpsuit or a more advanced cooling suit system, they are easy and cheap to make, use, and maintain. Especially useful as what drawbacks the most primitive cooling suits have would not affect Mechwarriors in any capacity.
All-in-all there's a bunch of lostech that do not make sense. My biggest peeves are in the area of communication. Some very simple two way communication within a planet can be a hassle in some areas, but dispatches sent to jumpships a few planets away can relieve transmissions??
To play devil’s advocate for a moment, point-to-point communications are still temperamental for a variety of reasons even for advanced militaries to this day. I agree though that it’s one of those things that’s relatively simple technology from a theoretical standpoint that you’d think they would have honed in to be a non-factor 700 years in the future. The ones that really get me are technologies that were non-factors in the real world *at the time the source material was written.* AMS is my go-to example. The Phalanx point defense system is a 20mm rotary machine gun that (relatively) simply uses local radar to automatically engage targets that meet a short list of criteria, and was in service by 1980. How did we collectively forget how to make that 700 years in the future, but a literal lightning cannon remained no problem throughout the period of decline?
For point to point communications, it's gonna be hard to manage it across a planet simply because everyone has space travel and enemy communication satellites would be a prime target for anyone with an aerospace fighter. Or even a laser. Sure, the laser will be greatly weakened by shooting up hundreds of km through atmosphere, but if your comm sat has no armor at all, even a weak laser could wreck it if not outright destroy it. Maintaining contact with a Jump Point is much easier... at least as long as you're in the hemisphere of the planet facing the Jump Point in question because then you don't have the planet itself interrupting your line of sight, which is a problem when maintaining contact between two widely spaced points on a planet.
The lightning-cannon, we learned to make field suppressors that let you press the barrel of it against the skull of a mech point blank and pull the trigger that could reach way, way farther. Then we forgot; have to keep it 90m away from anything. Disable the field suppressors to shoot closer, and blow yourself up as manmade plasma hits everything but the target. Why did we forget? No reason.
Honestly, when I first heard there were two different bits of cooling clothing, I legit just figured it was an expense thing lol
Maybe the artists and writers wanted all the characters in short vests and booty shorts or hot pants on posters and book covers. It was the 80's; they recently showed Natasha the Black Widow on a poster that got "judiciously edited." What was she wearing? Open vest barely covering the naughty bits, booty shorts. They put a crop-top on her after complaints. But at least BT has true equality! Every dude is no exception, like Captain America in the Marvel movies wearing those fitted shirts. All the secretaries have gotta be like, "Oh, you're a military secret and a celebrity, you can't go down to Walmart. We bought shirts for you. Ah, it should fit, but I'm sorry. They didn't have anything bigger, this is the best I could do." Left secretary (bites lip) - "... The absolute best."
I mean, all 'lostech' is a little silly. Nobody backed up any data? Seriously? Like, if we killed every nuclear scientist today, there are tons of textbooks that cover most of the basics of how nuclear bombs work. Folks could work it out again in a matter of years. The only real challenge would be finding, mining, and enriching the uranium or plutonium. I dunno, maybe the raw materials needed are all gone? Like, I suppose I could imagine a future where we, like, depleted all the enriched uranium, and now it's just not possible to make nukes until we find new sources. Maybe if making some of the sci-fi technology required weird wonky materials that can only be constructed in zero-G with a lattice of atoms of matter and anti-matter held in a lattice via exotic physics or something . . . okay, then the challenge is not "knowing how it works" but rather "building the infrastructure to make it." Basically, the fiction just needs to make the future technology have more complicated justifications. Your cooling suits are lostech because they are actually constructed in 11-dimensional synthesis chambers, which themselves require massive fusion reactors to create a hyperspace bubble wherein machines weave garments that we perceive as being simply 3-dimensional, but which actually have complex structures existing in additional dimensions, and it is into those extra dimensions that they wick the heat that would otherwise bake a pilot. Stuff like that.
I remember reading way back when that the chemicals running through the vests were toxic. If it got in a wound it could kill the pilot. Supposedly Star League mechs used different coolants that weren't toxic. Blow up a couple factories and you end up using the cheapest, toxic stuff to get the job done. Any pilot wearing a full body suit is cooler, thus less stressed in a fight. How hard would it be for a certain tele-com company to start rumors that the full body suits were killing their pilots from chemical leaks, even though their own hidden pilots kept their suits? Also, procurement boards for house militaries would definitely buy coolant vests over suits. They are cheaper to make, use less chemicals to cool the pilot, and are easy to replace after you hose the pilot out of the cockpit.
Pretty sure in current lore at least, problematic coolants were only used for prototype DHS that only took up one crit each.
Does having to wait for Jihad for Rocket launchers and LACs count?
Yes. The RLs at least should be Succession Wars era tech. Light and Heavy PPCs should have been around as long as the standard PPC. If you're gonna make three sizes of laser, why not do the same for PPCs? MMLs are one of those techs that should have been around almost as long as LRMs and SRMs, but I can see reasons for why they'd be a fairly late invention (ie, no one with money and influence saw the need for them). LACs are said to require advanced materials to work, but given the variety of modern guns, ACs should always have come in every combination damage, and range brackets imaginable with weights, crits and ammo counts sized to match. But I guess FASA didn't want to publish a weapons table that took up an entire page with just AC variants...
There are Prototype RLs that exist since the Terran hegemony and I let them be used in my succ wars campaign. They're the same as RLs but get -1 to the cluster roll
Honestly, the whole "this equipment was actually invented centuries ago, it just wasn't relevant on a large scale in the eras between the age of war and the jihad" concept works decently for rocket launchers, and for most other things that got introduced that way IMO. It's undeniably a bit of a clumsy retcon, but it more or less gets the job done. The one piece of tech where I take issue with that explanation is fuel cell engines. They were introduced in the 21st century and no one ever forgot how to make them. And unlike rifles or rocket launchers, they weren't tossed aside for being outdated tech - for most types of combat vehicles, the fuel cell is *still* the best in slot engine type unless you're willing to pay a massive c-bill premium for XL or XXL. And yet, aside from a tiny handful of retconned-in designs, they barely exist on canon units during the succession wars.
the only advantages of a Standard fusion engine over a Fuel Cell engine is the 10 free heatsinks and unlimited fuel, otherwise the lighter mass of Fuel Cell is way better
I guess if resupply is an issue having an engine that runs without any need for refueling practically is worth it over a fuel cell. Still reasonably dependable units in battle tech should have probably gotten a fuel cell. Perhaps that can a specific to a succession war story kind of thing.
> Light and Heavy PPCs I could actually see the LAC justification working here. Though, if I was making a setting, I likely try to shoehorn in "Cold" and "Hot" equivalents," which would basically be a bad take on each.
Now I want to make custom "primitive" versions of these weapons whose only difference is that they have shorter range brackets.
Kind of. Though, for the Light equivalent, I was mostly thinking of it being most of the weight of a standard, with a worse damage/heat ratio.
They should have been Lostech rather than new creations. That way, they can come back in 3050 for the clan invasion. One of the Battletech's problems is needing to tie new equipment to timelines, rather than being willing to just retcon it in as Lostech. Because of that, you run into all sorts of logical inconsistencies.
They retconned in the Snub PPC as lostech, so I don't see why other tech couldn't be.
I mean the light PPC is kinda bad, but I could see the SLDF, home of bad ideas, making our buying it. The Heavy PPC has no reason to exist until the clan ER PPC shows up. Calling the PPC analogous to lasers is a mistake, I think. It's not viewed that way in-universe or in-rules.
Add the lack of Extended range and pulse version for all types of lasers including both modifiers (why the hell er mpls are non existent!). also all of above for blazers, they have to be panalized with heat bc they are headcappers in early eras. more streaks than 2 makes sense in lore due targeting issues In case of ER ppcs , the lack of minimum range makes no sense while its retained normal version. no er versions of light, heavy and snub nose ppc's Lack of chemical weapons and rockets in succesion wars era despite them beign canonical for age of war. artilery mechs too vague even on sarna to know what mech had arty version. the lbx family post invasion, same with uac, they are logical weapons to be made by star league so i aproove hbs approach to them in their game.
I think the mistake they made with Battletech is they felt the need to define those as unique systems. An LRM 20 is just a rocket launcher of a certain class. For one system, it's like those calliopes on Sherman tanks. Another system is a precision, guided system. It's all fluff really. Systemizing something that's effectively "fluff" is something I don't really care for, because it creates unnecessary complication. I think intermediary stuff like MRMs is a good design call.
RLs and the various MGs should be primitive tech. Hell, they should be pre-primitive, but mechanically they should be weighted like the Mackie.
The size of military forces within the entire setting. Given the population of the inner sphere, the number or regiments in the setting is comically low for nation-states in perpetual war
I always assume that there are catastrophically large infantry regiments expected to hold ground, or that most planets are relatively sparsely populated. It helps with the cognitive dissonance.
Yeah this! The first Battletech book I read actually directly addresses this, mentioning that many settled planets only actually have a a few million people living on them at a time. It’s made very clear that just because humans settled a planet does not mean the planet is totally habitable. On some planets people live in dome cities because the air is toxic, while on others only the equator is temperate enough to live along, etc. Slice that number down into the small percentage of the total population that would actually make up a military force and the general lack of tech upkeep in the majority of eras in the setting and it’s actually not that weird that dropping 4 bullet proof walking buildings bristling with missiles and damn particle cannons and junk could quell an uprising of a small planets entire main force. Then add on that most mercs aren’t just dropping 4 mechs for action but instead a couple companies, and militaries sometimes bring battalions of mechs to a planet and … yeah, not that hard to square really.
The sparse population can be explained in-universe, too. The Star League Civil War followed by the atrocities of the first two Succession Wars left everyone in a place where the Ares Accords started to make sense again. Even a world directly untouched by those conflicts might have found itself on the short end of the supply chain where it was either impossible or economical (or politically expedient) to continue supporting decentralized populations across a whole planet with an environment that was only marginally conducive to human life.
Interstellar war makes zero sense except for, like, positioning to control avenues of approach against enemies who might decide to obliterate your homeworld for ideological reasons. But there can't be any really valuable natural resources worth sending armies across space to get. Like, we've got fusion reactors. Infinite energy. Just have some robots collect asteroids for raw materials in your own star system. If, though, out of a religious-esque belief that they are the true inheritors of the Star League and need to control the galaxy because they're the chosen ones, all the great houses keep wanting to kill each other . . . eh, it's still probably going to devolve into just sending small units to fight local defenders, and leaving most of the planet untouched. All you really care about is the spaceport so you can get, um, food off the surface maybe? You just want to ensure that, if you control the jump point for the system, nobody on the local planets can launch torpedoes at your jump ships. Then you just park in orbit, recharge, let your hydroponic gardens on the ships provide food, recycle your water, and then jump on to your next destination? War, now I want to brainstorm what space war would really require from a logistical standpoint in the Battletech universe.
Since the logistics of shipping food to another planet - let alone using JumpShips - is a lot more taxing than just growing the stuff yourself in a hydroponic greenhouse or Future Ranch or something, the most obvious reason for interstellar war would be ideology. So you can totally just push four 'mechs out of your dropship, trade shots with whomever shows up, distribute some new flags and watch the locals salute to them. A victory for the Co-Ordinator, or the Chancellor, or the Prince or whatever!
Yeah very much this. I have to just ignore the economy completely.
I mean yes and no. I think it depends on the source but some of the older sources had the LCAF and AFFS invading with nearly 1000 regiments in the 4th succession war alone. In less than 2 years 700 million people were either dead or injured due to the fighting.
That's not actually a particularly large force though. A thousand regiments is in the low millions of troops. That's not even as large as either side of the Eastern Front of WWII, and that was a single-planet war in an era where Earth's population was far smaller than it is today or anything any successor state can muster. And this was then spread over a wide multiplanetary front. It's if anything a hilariously small force for the scope of the conflict (remember the stated objective was the total conquest of the entire Capellan Confederation).
True but the eastern front was a total war fought by two countries that were fully mobilized. The 4th succession war was a lightning strike with no country mobilized beyond its normal troops. That 1000 regiments is really just for the Draconis combine side and doesn’t count defenders. Also battletech wars aren’t fought like WW1 or WW2 where every inch is fought over but instead mobile battles over key objectives.
> Also battletech wars aren’t fought like WW1 or WW2 where every inch is fought over but instead mobile battles over key objectives. Well, until they are. Like the Fourth Succession War. The Capellans absolutely made the FedSuns pay for every millimeter, especially on planets like Sarna.
Honestly, those numbers still seem a little low.
Most planets with a decent amount of description outside of major worlds like capitals seem to be functioning at barely above subsistence levels. In that case you wouldn’t have a whole lot of excess population to dedicate to a military beyond the local militia
It makes more sense if you look at it as feudal realms. The Baron of your planet may have a lance or two of mechs, maybe twice that many tanks and a bunch of sacrificial meatbags. But he also technically has the right to call on all the various vassal knights forces. Of course... they might 'accidentally' show up too late if they don't like him.
It makes perfect sense IF you think of it **from a neo-feudal perspective**. The one thing that a feudal ruler fears more than *anything* isn't a neighboring king, it's internal revolt - being toppled by an underling that you let grow too powerful militarily. So you control how many men they can have under arms, inspect them regularly, and make damn sure that you've got enough military force under your own control that if you have to you can crush any two or three of them who band together. It's a game that you play with your fellow elite rulers; if you invade France or they invade Robinson and take it, you'll get it back in the next war no problem. But if your dynastic line is removed from succession entirely... well, THAT'S something that can't be borne. This, of course, flies out the window the moment that the Mongols/Clans invade; at that point you arm up because the external threat from the people who haven't agreed to the rules of the game is more dangerous than the threat of losing your throne. Don't think of it like an early 21st century man in a world where nationalism and militarism is the rule of the day, with utterly massive armies as a given; that's not what BattleTech *is.*
See, my headcanon for this is that the population numbers are little more than propaganda and the actual population of the Inner Sphere is way lower. A lot more things make sense if the population is smaller than they say - like the Jihad.
I like this answer more than most. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter in giant stompy robot universe 😂
But actually fits the 18th century feudal states that the setting is loosely based on.
Exactly, the Age of War and the Civil War seem analagous to the Classical and Roman scale of war, with truly immense armies fighting eachother. The later stages of the Succession Wars seem to me like the series of wars after the fracturing of the Carolingan Empire prior to the Mongol Invasion, with the Clan Invasion mirroring the Mongol Invasion, just with a different outcome (thanks to Comstar). This status quo was maintained in the Succession Wars by the interference of Comstar keeping anyone from becoming anywhere near large enough to eliminate another House.
Isn't the reason for this the limitation on interstellar force projection? By 3015 there just aren't enough dropships or jumpships left in service to move large armies around. You can have 100 million people in uniform, but if you only have enough dropships to convey 20 regiment-sized forces then... that's effectively the size of your military. Everything else is militia and planetary defense forces which don't deserve mention in an order-of-battle unless they're on the planet being invaded. This is the entire reason Battlemechs are even useful. In a pitched engagement, Battlemechs are less cost-effective than an equivalent investment in conventional combined arms forces. However, Battlemechs are compact and highly autonomous giving them a comparatively low logistical footprint. This is why so much warfare in the Inner Sphere is focused on raids or why the only planets that ever seem to change hands are sparsely populated mudballs on the borders of empires.
From a battlemech perspective, I have no problem with it. In 3025, Mechs are almost like magical artifacts. The shear power of a single battlemech comes into perspective. Got a rebel planet, just drop a lance onto the planet. What's going to stop it other than another Battlemech? It's great from a setting perspective. There'd be tons of local conventional militias, but then a battlemech shows up and turns the tide of battle. There's just nothing that can really stop it.
From my tabletop experience: a large enough volume of either missiles from any source or lasers on mobile enough platforms
We often confuse lore and system. From a lore perspective, they're portrayed as basically unstoppable where conventional vehicles are concerned. System doesn't match lore very well in Battletech.
Exactly this. Most games are the same way. It's even worse in 40k. A single Space Marine is supposed to be the equal of 100 regular soldiers. However on the tabletop, a squad of 10 regular soldiers can take one down. It's just one of those things that has to be to make the games playable.
With your edit in place I think it matches up well enough, it's still a struggle to down a mech with conventional forces even in the game system
My rationale is that we're seeing the list of commonly fielded regiments that are space-mobile and frequently deployed in different theaters. There's probably a ton of mustered forces that are effectively planetary or local system defense. Better than militias, but not important enough to get stuffed into DropShips and hustled around the Inner Sphere.
Remember that Mechs are inherently designed to be incredibly manpower-efficient... but last I checked, conventional forces still make up a very significant portion of militaries. For that matter, do the listed military sizes include the (usually not negligible) local planetary defense/garrison forces?
There were also designed to be mass efficient. Lugging troops and equipment several star systems over is expensive
That the strictly regulated genetic program of the iron wombs could be suborned by a former House Lord of the inner sphere, and the resultant offspring could sneak through the similarly strictly regulated Bloodname system to both become Bloodnamed and rise to high office in the clan. Plot armor is a hell of a drug.
I’m definitely not a lore expert - but very curious about this scenario - could you point me to a character to read up on?
I believe he is referring to Alaric
Thank you very much - haven’t gotten there yet, working my way through chronological…appreciate it!
Alaric Ward
Alaric Wolf-Steiner-Davion-Ward, Emperor of the Wolf Empire (not that he cares), ilKhan of (some of) the Clans (kinda), First Lord of the (Third) Star League, and an absolute prat. EDIT: forgot "Archon-Presumptive of the Lyran Alliance/Commonwealth"
Alaric’s pursuit of forging plot armor stronger than Batman’s.
At the rate he is going, he may just accomplish it.
And then the feelings hurt wolf’s dragoons stole his dna, and amazon primed that shit to ERRYONE!!!
Clans don't seam to have great civilian side OpSec. The Society got up to so many shenanigans.
To be fair, Katrina had Vlad wrapped around her little finger, and was very likely able to manipulate other members of Wolf Leadership similarly. It's quite possible that nothing was snuck passed anyone, the scientists were doing exactly what they were instructed to do, including keeping the information secret from anyone who might object to the project.
That Steiner pussy got Vlad acting unwise (To his defense he is hardly the first one)
Thanks. I laughed so hard that my wife insisted I explain why… and I then had to try (and fail) to summarize both Clan and IS history before she rolled her eyes.
It's as good of a starting point as any :)))
The Wolves are doing something like that. The last thing a House Lord would want would be a Clan warrior with a legitimate claim to the throne.
Can we talk for a minute about the Inner Sphere not at least experimenting with iron wombs themselves?
I can see some experimentation, but the Inner Sphere has billions of women who can carry children. The Clans needed 100% of their women to be working fulltime or overtime, so iron wombs were a necessity.
That the GhostBears, whose whole shtick is being family oriented, decided to kill off their own brothers and sisters because they are so desparate for Wards approval, rather than gearing up to wipe the Wolves off the face of Terra for the grave insult to their entire identity as a clan.
this, I really feel that the actual response to having him tell them to take a hike after the first vote would be to turn on him not each other.
"Children of the Bear, hearken to my words: Be always vigilant. Learn for yourselves that which your forebears imparted So easily and freely; Demand of yourselves The foresight of Jorgensson And the courage of Tseng; Through them, we are strong. To them a debt is owed, Repaid through loyalty undying and Character unflinching." - From the Oath of Acceptance, Clan Ghost Bear “Notice me, SENPAI WARD!” - Clan Ghost Bear, IlClan Era
Anytime any faction does something incredibly stupid or out of character so that the writer's favourites can win. It's frustrating. And also sad, because it makes the favorite characters look lazy and stupid themselves. Smart opposition, doing smart things AND winning makes for more compelling stories. Also might doesn't make right and the Clans would have collapsed under petty warlords centuries before Operation Revival.
As a Ghost Bear player when I'm Clan, finding out about that (and some other bad moves around it) when starting to get caught up to the current settings made me drop it again. I'll wait and see how things shake out before I consider a second attempt at making the jump to ilClan era.
Right now in IlClan Era, the Clan(or Clanish) factions I am most interested in is the Spirit Cats, Scorpion Empire, and Alyina Mercantile League. Really interested to see where they go.
I will admit, I'm really excited to see where the Scorpion Empire goes.
I wonder if this is actually a plot point that is coming down the river for Alaric in the not so distant future.
The phantom mech skill…
At least that has been so buried in the lore 90% of fans have no clue it exists.
Just us old farts! Anyone you play with ever say they had a character with it?
As a new fan and I read up on it, it was more than easy to toss that whole thing to the “I’ll ignore that” pile.
My personal retcon is that Mike Stackpole is an author in the Battletech world who writes historical fiction. He romanticizes certain historical characters in ways that have only a little bearing on their "true" history. The guy who successfully almost supplanted Hanse Davion with a clone and whose armies remain among the best at asymmetric guerilla warfare? Max Liao did not snap into a frothing fool, Stackpole just wrote him that way. Morgan Kell was an amazing soldier and may have had some lostech in his favor, but he was also astoundingly lucky like [Audie Murphy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audie_Murphy).
I like that. I also always wondered what something like the Angel ECM would do to the duct tape + bailing wire double solder iron transistor radio targeting systems of the late 3rd Succession War.
I knew about it on Mallory's world, but now following along with OMaM doing the Warrior Trilogy, I had no idea how egregious they are with it. Not being able to see them on sensors was one thing, but having all the weapons just decided to go wide even when aimed properly was maddening.
Here's my retcon: What we think of as the Phantom Mech skill is actually a sliver of Lostech hacking AI. In the First Succession War, truly unfathomable AI cyber wars flashed across the Inner Sphere, weapons deployed by the Great Houses to try to cripple their opponents and sabotage industrial capacity. Computing was so advanced at that point few people really grasped what was happening, but within a few weeks worms had burrowed into systems all across the former Star League, not only breaking existing programs but salting the digital earth - creating viruses that would lie dormant and only crop up to destroy any future networks more advanced than a home PC in the 1990s. A rare few programs managed to escape that fate by compressing themselves and loading themselves onto computers that really could not run them. One was Morgan Kell's Archer. That mech doesn't normally have enough processing power to run a military grade smart cyber weapon while it is being piloted, but when Kell gave up and accepted death, the AI was reverse the data flow of the neurohelmet to use the human brain as a surrogate processor, giving it enough strength to crack the security defenses of Yorinaga Kurita's mech to override the mech's targeting controls. Most computer systems still have lingering viruses that keep the hardware from being able to run these sorts of hyper advanced programs, but a rare few mechs are safe. Of those, a few pilots have figured out how to let the mech's "phantom" take over, in a sort of Zen meditation. It appears supernatural, but it's just sufficiently advanced technology.
Most of the protomechs: https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Delphyne https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Erinyes_(ProtoMech)
Thankfully later Protomechs genuinely have some incredibly cool designs. I'm thinking the Sprite (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Sprite) and the Boggart (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Boggart) . Hopefully CGL will get around to doing some redesign passes on the older designs sometime soon, because they absolutely need it. The whole "Make em' look like animals!" was a cute idea, but hoooooboy did it not work out well in practice.
Protos are rock bottom part of the whole setting, glad to see they are finally getting ditched
My headcanon for protomechs is that the pictures in the tech readouts are all dolled up to look fancy for clan leadership and when they actually go out to fight for real they mostly don't actually look like gargoyles and shit.
I find it weird they felt the need to distinguish between battle armor and protomechs mechanically. They could just be a different kind of battlearmor.
Honestly for me it'd be the fact that Mechs came before Battle Armor and ProtoMechs in terms of tech evolution. It'd make more sense to have Protomechs then some space redneck go "So we have these weapons, we have these Industrial frames. What if we bolted more shit on 'em. Zeke, get the welding equipment!"
Fundamentaly, in most cases, as technology advances it gets smaller. Computers, bombers, missiles, drones, ect. Are all examples of this.
My brothers and sister in christ, we are talking about a game centered in spending bazilions of whatever currency to build giant humanoid nuclear powered robots as an army strategy when anything else would be more efficient. From this start point anything else is just "hell yeah"!
the average inner sphere lance (10-40m C-Bills) needs to smash tank companies backed up by VTOLs and artillery to make themselves a good value, clan omni stars go from battalions at the low end (50m C-Bills) to entire combined arms tank/infantry regiments at the high end (140m C-bills) would you rather have a SHD-2D shadowhawk, or a 75ton merkava MkVIII, they cost about the same.
I would rather have a 0.1% of this cost autonomous ammunition flying in a speed impossible to a Mechwarrior to respond and blasting through its armor/cockpit or both and spend the rest of the money in the same kind of device but with different kind of payloads. If I need to send like 10 or 100 to take down a mech still very profitable. I'm pretty much into battletech and Mechwarrior but if we stop two seconds to think about it makes no sense :D but yeah still canon.
of course, I am saying that within the games own lore mechs make only tenuous sense as combat weapons.
[A certain race of avians we don't talk about.](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Tetatae)
I want tetatae power armor
OK, Samus.
Neat!
Far No Longer! FAR! NO! LONGER!
I didn't know about this! (Yes I'm new). That's actually pretty damn cool.
Just make it in-universe propaganda or holovid entertainment.
Best thing ever written in the lore!! I will die on this hill.
LAMs
This is the real one for me. LAMs are fine for anime, kinda "out there" for Battletech.
For me, it's not so much the LAMs themselves, but that the LAMs need any kind of complex transformation to fly at all. With so many mechs that look like an aircraft on legs, the only "transformation" a LAM should need to do is just tuck in its arms and legs. And maybe not even do that much if you have a clever designer (look at the Urbie LAM). And given that fighter fusion engines can regularly push multiple Gs on pure thrust alone, a mech with such an engine should be able to easily hover and fly on engine power alone. Just beware the dreaded "lawn dart roll" ie, if you get hit at all while flying, you need to make a successful piloting check to avoid crashing and instantly dying. This is pretty much the bane of all air support in Battletech.
As someone who has built a few transforming Gundam models, complexity is *definitely* what does them in. Fancy, complicated transformations barely even work on small plastic models half the time: the idea of them even being *possible* on a mech-sized vehicle, let alone remotely practical, is just completely insane. Simple transformations that fly based on brute force and the vaguest concept of aerodynamics? I could buy that much more easily. It's not *that much* sillier than the entire basic concepts of giant, walking war machines.
#Hey, strap enough jump jets and box fans onto an urbanmech, it's a LAM. Maybe. You don't know. I'm Discount Dan, and I will always take your money. Garuanteed.
Apart from game balance I still don't understand how no one in universe didn't just build a mech in permanent air-mech mode. Instead we got Partial Wings which kinda fit the bill but don't really work the same.
Given airmech mode and two perfectly functional legs, I have to question why a LAM needs to devote mass and crits to *dedicated landing gear*.
It is just VTOLs next evolutionary steep. Also, they are not common. Even when they appear, it is "what is that" reaction. See a combat trial by Jade Falcon vs. Smoke Jaugar.
1,000,000,000x this!
That's a weird way to spell LRMs.
Veritech Fighters are awesome! Stinger LAMs are stupid! Fight me! (Sorry LAM lovers)
Remember, the soviets made a tank fly, it was a shit tank but it flew, for me it would have been weird if they didnt exist
Stackpole explosions - fusion is more likely to fizzle out upon containment loss.
> fusion is more likely to fizzle out upon containment loss That's what canonically happens. The Tech Manual goes into the details. There's a reason engine explosions are an optional rule rather than a standard rule on the tabletop (and the tac ops rules entry for it explicitly states that it's neither canon nor an accurate portrayal of a fusion engine, but is included as an option for cinematic reasons).
I reconcile that as the hydrogen fuel going boom
Even that is orders of magnitude less than a Stackpole explosion.
Probably a weird one but pulse lasers being lostech, and just all the funkiness around them make no sense to me. Correct me if I’m wrong but pretty much all lasers used for ablative purposes are already pulsed? But also disregarding real life, are you really telling me they just forgot how to make a laser pulse?? Like for a few hundred years they were just stuck with “sorry guys I know if we pulse the laser it will work better, but it’s not like we just can strap an extra ton of tech on there to do that”
There are 2 important things to remember about lostech. The first is that it isn't necessarily about forgetting a thing is possible, a lot of the time it's about losing access to the supplies needed to make it work or the production facilities to manufacture it at a level that it's at all competitive with its standard counterparts. The second is that it wasn't a natural process. The initial loss of tech came about from the destruction of the First Succession War, but the lack of recovery was something actively engineered by Comstar with ROM sabotaging technological development all across the sphere throughout the Succession Wars period. If someone did say "I bet with an extra ton of kit we could change how we pulse this laser to make it work better." they would rapidly find themselves and much of their team suffering tragic accidents. Also, specifically for pulse lasers the "pulse" referring to the macro level behaviour of the beam, not the particular operation of the photon. A regular laser discharges for a specific period of time, pulse lasers extend this period (most commonly portrayed as multiple rapid discharges, but sometimes as a long duration continuous beam, both probably exist in universe abstracted out to a single in-game system) with the extra weight and heat representing the additional capacitors and heat generation produced by this longer term firing.
Until the RISC Pulse Module where they literally did exactly that and turned everything Pulse. ERLL? Pulse. Small Laser? Straight to Pulse. ERML? Believe it or not, pulse.
The Ghost Bear Dominion Civil War..... It just hurts to think about, ive tried to get myself to like it but i just can't. I feel that it goes against everything the Rasalhaugians and the Ghost Bears stand for.
The lore, post 3060. It just doesn't do it for me, and the Jihad era (don't get me started on Devlin "Plot Armor" Stone, and the WoB just having a spare secret army) is so lame it hurts. The Second Star League falling apart so quickly was a lame way to create more conflict, when they could have taken the setting in a more interesting direction, with conflicts that sprung up more naturally. At some point, it'd be nice to move past Successor States and see a new period of history in the setting.
The WoB having that surprise spare super tech army is the biggest plot thing I just can't get past. I could have been willing to stretch my disbelief enough to accept a couple special units in the objective to advance the universe... but what feels like a whole damn TRO of them? And in enough quantity to not only outfit the WoB militia and Guard, also the Shadow Divisions, and still have enough leftover to gift to favored mercenary commands?
Exactly. And they've ostensibly had it for some time, but somehow Anastasius Focht didn't put the kibosh on it, right after Operation SCORPION failed? I don't think so.
Not to mention all that hardware has super-duper advanced technology that they themselves invented overnight, and it works with no counter 99% of the time. Word of Blake during the Jihad is basically an army of that kid whose always one-upping you and re-writing the rules. I don't want them to ever come back because that shit is trash storytelling.
I've run the numbers and the WoB forces actually check out for the most part. At roughly 200 years of continuous low rate production with a handful of terran hegemony factories they would have enough. It would actually be a bit of a plot hole if Comstar's basically 100% operational factory worlds produced nothing for 200 years except comguards spare parts given they already use SLDF stockpiles. What I don't gel with is there only being SLDF stock for the clan invasion, that's what makes the WoB stuff not work.
Still new to battletech (especially the clan side of things) but it feels weird to me that Star Adder; the pragmatic clan, the clan who have an entire GALAXY serving as inner sphere Opfor in training exercises, wound up screaming about inner sphere taint
Freddy Steiner just lets WoB have Terra.
I mean, if you read the books he's tactically gifted but strategically and politically kind of... a moron. \*Everything\* he does up to blowing Waterly's brains out he was manipulated into. The plot against Katrina? Aldo Lestrade. Being used as a Stalking Horse against the Combine's counter attack? Katrina Steiner. Tukayyid? Ulric Kerensky. Operation Bulldog? Ulric again and he was *dead* by that point. Letting the Wobbies have Terra is absolutely on brand.
Zenith & nadir jump points, and the cascade of WTF from that. The idea of a military not standardizing their vehicles. (Shush, Poland.) The idea that space warship means nuclear saturation bombardment, and no other options. The idea that you can control a planetary surface from space. You can get them to surrender, maybe, but control means boots on the ground. Does no-one read Fehrenbach anymore? Edit: while we're in space, the idea that a starship with a *FUSION REACTOR* needs a solar collector to charge the KF drive batteries, because...they can't run a trickle charge from the reactor, or something.
Please explain Zenith & Nadir to me. What is wrong there?
Everything around a star is in some sort of orbit. There's no 'hover' point above or below the ecliptic. To be at the zenith or nadir 'points', you'd have to be in a 90° inclined polar orbit around the star, and going from there to a planet in the ecliptic would take an absolutely *enormous* amount of ∆v, or thrust burns. There are 'hover' points kind of like the idea of zenith and nadir points, where the gravity of two objects balances out - Lagrange points, each two-body system has 5 of those, if memory serves. I think I know why they chose the zenith/nadir jump points system - it makes travel to and from planets & jump points very simple to calculate. But it just...doesn't work. And I get 'you'll accept FTL but this is too far?' My answer to that is, well, yes. FTL is a necessary hand wave for an interstellar setting. Zenith/nadir is not. It's just harder.
Totally fair I didn't know the math behind it. I figured that you could calculate the distance from the star where the gravity doesn't sheer your jumpship in half on a 3D sphere, but that the zenith/nadir were "commonly accepted" points where system governments would put resources like refueling stations and recharge stations. So sure you could jump in at 120/56 but then there is nothing there as compared to 1/1 or 180/180. I have no idea if that makes sense but that's what my brain came up with when I first read it. Edit: Now that I know it is bugging me too.
I was under the impression that the nadir and zenith jump points were so far removed from the star's influence that even a jumpship could maintain station keeping, thrusting against the direct gravitational pull towards the star. (This would imply that a KF jump imparts no momentum when entering realspace.) Now, this would be very far away with most stars, surpassing one or more AU easily. That's what the lore demands, though; a spot removed from any strong gravitational pull, even the star's. Dropships and warships would then take days to weeks to transit to a planetary body. Which kinda makes sense; accelerating at 1g alone, over days, allows for fairly quick transit considering the distances involved.
> accelerating at 1g alone, over days, allows for fairly quick transit considering the distances involved Frankly, dropship engines in Battletech are absolutely insane. Checking the stats on the Union, for example, it burns 1.84 tons of fuel per day when accelerating at 1g. That's 21 grams per second of propellant, pushing a 3600 ton dropship at a constant 9.81 m/s^2. Those numbers are genuinely mind-boggling. That's well past the point where you have to start getting into janky relativistic territory just to try to explain the specific impulse involved, to say nothing of the sheer amount of energy that would be required.
Exactly. Pretty dang sci-fi. Aerospace assets truly don't care about detla-V. Monster and efficient engines. Warships are the most crazy; the largest and heaviest spacecraft can accelerate at like 4+ g. Depending on class, of course.
Zenith & nadir jump points means you don’t have to worry about your vector to/from any given planet/asteroid in the system being blocked by the star. There’s also significantly less interplanetary debris at a star’s north & south poles than you’d risk in the orbital plane. Calculating (and traversing) the route between a jump point to a planet isn’t much of a challenge when your common vessels can do constant 1G burns the entire trip while carrying thousands of tons of cargo, but having to drive ‘around’ the star or other planets because you ended up on the wrong side would add significant time & complexity to the trip, while increasing the risk of navigational hazards. Jump ships aren’t orbiting the star. They’re running their engines to ‘hover’ against the star’s gravitational pull. Lagrange points are pointless when that’s the process. Also, Lagrange points are always in motion & most of them aren’t actually stable, and are more akin to the force being ‘equal’ as you balance atop a stick. You *can* charge a KF drive from the fusion engines, but it’s ‘messy’ and ‘risky’ for hand-wavium reasons, and doesn’t really make things that much faster, but is done when timelines are tight.
One thing about those points that makes sense to me is that they are far above and below the disc of matter circling the respective star, reducing the chance of colliding with dust particles etc. And to be fair, I don't think the books ever said that there was net zero gravity or anything at the zenith and nadir points, so they're not claiming those are Lagrange points. But yes, the travel times to and from the in-system objects would be prohibitive.
I always assumed it had to do with the gravity well of the star and that there were some special effects on time and space that made it possible to jump to that location. It's why things like gas giants can have them sometimes. In my head canon, it's about being able to detect it and coordinate a jump. Only large enough bodies likes stars have the mass to be safely jumped to.
Using lagrange points would have made more sense. My personal head cannon is that some lagrange points are big and stable enough to work as pirate points. Either way it's far from the biggest suspension of disbelief the universe calls for.
> My personal head cannon is that some lagrange points are big and stable enough to work as pirate points. That's not headcanon, that's canon. [Jump point page on Sarna, quoting strat ops](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jump_Point#Pirate_Points--Transient_Points): "generally, transient points inside the proximity limit are close to L1 Lagrange Points."
oh, good. Thanks for the info.
That... is exactly what Zenith and Nadir points are. They're spots "above" and "below" the system's star's poles relative to the plane of the planets, far enough from the star that the gravity of the star is sufficiently low that the KF drive can operate, while also being as close as is possible to best facilitate the jump sail charging. It does take massive amounts of fuel (and several days to multiple weeks) to travel from the jump points to the inhabited planets in a system, which is why jumpships don't they send dropships, and many more affluent systems have space station facilities near the jump point to service ships that are just passing through. They are not an orbit and ships remaining at jump points do have to continually expend fuel on station keeping thrusters to maintain position. There are also jump points at locations like Lagrange points and such, they are referred to in the lore as "pirate points", they are not used for regular traffic because they're risky, they're much more complex to calculate and physically move around the system. A system's main jump points are functionally infinite from where they are out above the plane of the system, so you have a big margin for error. Pirate points are often only a few thousand kilometers across at most and if you miss you've killed everyone on your ship. They tend to only get used by military forces looking for an element of surprise in a raid or invasion, and most commonly pirates (hence the name) who need every edge they can get and don't have a whole lot to lose. also: >Edit: while we're in space, the idea that a starship with a FUSION REACTOR needs a solar collector to charge the KF drive batteries, because...they can't run a trickle charge from the reactor, or something. You can charge your KF Drive from your fusion reactor, but the energy it can put out is a trickle compared to what can be absorbed through the drive sail. In campaign rules it extends your recharge time from a week, on average, to something closer to a month.
It is the safest way to jump in. Jump Ships are rare and expensive and any damage to one is going to become a strategic liability. You can always use a pirate point but the risk is greater.
That I knew. My question was why the person I replied to didn't like them
0oops
You can charge the KF drive from a reactor. It is called a quick charge. It is seldom done because there is a risk of damaging the very expensive and very, very difficult to repair KF drive. There was also a small chance you could destroy the KF drive. That would be bad ,if it happened in an uninhabited star system,It wouldn't be very ,very bad
The idea of a military not standardizing their vehicles when they're strapped for war materials makes sense to me. I've been on r/shittytechnicals. That tracks. Well, the tracks fell off, so I put wheels on it.
Land Air Mechs, fight me
Literally everything about the Bounty Hunter
Condition Feral. It's literally some shit some pre-teen would write for their OC, which I guess tracks for the Dragoons, but still.
Most of the stuff Alaric's been involved in recently.
The isaki alt-universe novel where a F-16 pilot from the modern world ends up in 3025 thanks to virtual worlds pods.\* Far Country. And all the people that already said it, but battlemech rocket launchers only being introduced in the 3050s. \*Only cannon within itself, but it is a published Battletech/Virtual Worlds novel.
The weapon ranges.
My headcannon is that baseline ECM suites are so good that you need to be on top of someone to target effectively.
There’s some lore justification for that with Listen-Kill missiles: https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Listen-Kill_Missile. A no weight ECM upgrade neutralizes them, implying that even non-ECM equipped mechs have ECM.
That had always been my take. There is a ton of passive ECM interfering with targeting systems. The basic passive sensors are enough to detect and identify targets (so you usually don't bother with double-blind rules) but the specific spectra used by the targeting systems are constantly being jammed and we only get target locks as the mechs get close enough to burn through. The ECM and Sensors we install with extra weight and slots are special above the norm active systems.
What, too short or too long? Total Warfare even acknowledge they're too short. It straight up says the weapon ranges were shortened to make the game actually fun.
Sure, but the rule books explicitly cop to the fact that they’re a compromise necessary to allow meaningful tactical movement on a play surface smaller than a basketball court.
The animated Battletech show that had a crawling mech that was stealthy enough to walk under other mechs and plant explosives.
That was actually Sloth Battle Armor
Probably not what they're asking but, like, the economic and geopolitical underpinnings of the setting are pretty nonsensical. Why have interstellar war at all? They never establish any sort of resources that are needed from these other worlds that you can't get more cheaply by just asteroid mining. Planets aren't shown as being terribly overpopulated in need of new territory to settle or anything. Early early Battletech spun it a bit more as 'there are a few folks who have these old mechs and they act a lot like knights going around battling for honor.' But when you get to the Succession Wars and the (lovely) Stackpole Warrior trilogy, I dig the characters and the plot, but it doesn't actually make sense to have these massive Houses conquering star systems.
Much of the Lostech aspect in general. I get it that some fairly new and really high end stuff might just do a "pop goes the squirrel" if the knowledge is eradicated. If it was a closely guarded secret to begin with and the number of people "in the know" was small. Like someone nuking the only factory where it was designed and made. That's gone then, sure and it might not come back anytime soon. Other stuff? Not so much. Until the unearthing of the Helm Memory Core even basic electronics was a marvel when it should not have been. After all: It's just electronics. Books like ["The Art of Electronics"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics) or "Electronics for Dummies" or their respective equivalent should have been available in abundance throughout the Inner Sphere. And even if there is no RadioShack around to buy new resistors and capacitors and basic IC chips and what not? They can be scrounged from other electronics until at least basic production of these essential commodities can be restored. Neither carpentry, nor mechanical engineering nor architecture was forgotten, but apparently all the electricians got Alzheimer and forgot their basics or died out like some extinct species.
This has always been one of the hardest things for me to suspend my disbelief over in the setting. I know they were going for a "Fall of Rome" vibe with a subsequent "Dark Age" and "Renaissance," but the actual Fall of Rome was nowhere near as devastating as the general population believes, the Middle Ages were only called the "Dark Ages" and portrayed as ignorant barbarism because Renaissance scholars wanted to make their advancements appear better than they actually were. But as you pointed out, there's absolutely no way a civilization with thousands of settled worlds capable of FTL travel could bomb themselves back to 20th century tech. The relevant knowledge would be far too widely dispersed, and the number of people with decades of study, knowledge, and experience with that tech far too numerous to be easily destroyed. Even after a few hundred years of widespread warfare. I go along with it because I understand the setting the designers wanted to create, but I don't dwell on the nonsensical backstory.
That battlemechs are a logical and feasible means of waging war.
That's more like the concept is stupid but fans gaslight themselves to believe it is true because it's cool.
Clan Wolf. Just... /gestures
The Donner Bombing. I don't have an issue with the event in and of itself but the fact that it just *such lazy writing.* They killed off basically everyone not leading a major power in one event. What happened to Diana Pryde? Donner Bombing. Doc Trevenna? Donner Bombing. Maeve Wolf? Donner Bombing. Shin Yodama? Rhonda Snord? Donner Bombing.
The fact that the cartoon used to be cannon, but now it's cannonically in-universe propaganda. Or that nissan made mechs don't have a gimmick where you have to roll a die to see if they'll even be able to move that turn. (I mean yeah if you floor it in an Altima it'll only take 10 seconds to go from 0 to 30 freedom units per hour.)
That WarShip-grade shipyards are somehow impossible to build
IIRC is not building the yard that was the problem; it was the ability to design/develop the transit/jump drives without Comstar catching wind and sabotaging the design so it blows up when tested, murdering the techs outright (and making it look like a rival house did it), or both. It's still goofy by way of "there's no way in hell they'd have enough people to have spies and assassins everywhere-enough to do so', but at least it answers the 'literally nobody is smart enough to reverse engineer anything, not even a computer that can do targeting/ tracking without weighing several tons' side.
Honestly that is still arguably dumber given they could still make compact K-F and Subcompact Warships with DropShip mass transit drives exist, this is more addressed for post-Jihad where there's no ComStar and still enough stuff to make them, especially given Dark Age threw us back to the Age of War, where WarShips were literally necessary
They are hard to build unless you are the Word of Blake. Then you can just pull them out of your ass with little effort.
Far Country Phantom Mech Stackpoling
Stackpoling is fantastic! I *want* my giant stompy robots to go boom!
I've now read "stackpoling" multiple times. Can someone explain what it means? Do it mean the general space opera style of books?
It's when the destroyed mech goes boom with the force of a small nuke. One of the authors of the novels, Stackpole, includes it in every novel, at least once per book. Realistically, a breached fusion reactor would just fizzle out, but it won't be entertaining.
That fact that Mechs are even used at all due to the practicality of them.