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If you go through the canon, its fairly obvious some sort of clan invasion theme was in the works from very early on - the exodus appeared extremely early as a deliberate plot device.

 

Yes, that was OK. It was the actual Clans themselves, and the scene-stealing that ensued, that sucked. Kerensky's heirs returning could have been handled much, much better than the Klingons-and-Mongols-in-Mechs that we got lumped with. Hell, look at the Dragoons for how it might have been.

 

 

Falken

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Yes, that was OK. It was the actual Clans themselves, and the scene-stealing that ensued, that sucked. Kerensky's heirs returning could have been handled much, much better than the Klingons-and-Mongols-in-Mechs that we got lumped with. Hell, look at the Dragoons for how it might have been.

Falken

 

I think this commentary on the plans sums it up perfectly.

 

Matt

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Guest JamesG123

The form and details of the Clan society and structure seemed very simplistic and even adolescent. To the point where it popped my suspension of disbelief circuit breaker and I rapidly lost interest in the game, and I was a BIG fan of the game since "Battle Droids". I know that they had to respond to competition to the card games and computer games, but I agree that it could have been handled much better. Perhaps if they had hired more reputable or intellectual sci-fi authors to do the structure and write the fiction...

 

I guess given the target market and business strategy it made sense (gotta have some way to sell new books and miniatures), but to me it really ruined the core of what made BT unique and interesting, the feudal, declining technology. A "giant robot combat" game isn't that hard to create, in fact I wrote a much more "realistic" one myself. It was the backstory that make BT a success for FASA, not the game system.

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in fact I wrote a much more "realistic" one myself. It was the backstory....

 

Very interested in it. Still have a copy that you can share?

 

The Battletech novels came out when I was still a student and thus lacked purchasing power. Most of the info I got was from ye olde computer games (Battletech, Battletech Crescent Hawks Inception [something like that], Mechwarrior 1, Mechwarrior 3 [which is the version that sits in my home 'puter's HD apparently, not MW4], the few Battletech game books that I borrowed, and the Battletech wikis). The novels are hard to come by these days, I don't recall seeing them in the last couple of years at the used books stores.

Edited by TomasCTT
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Very interested in it. Still have a copy that you can share?

Most of it was printed out and what was electronic was on 5 1/2" floppies that are now long gone.

 

Basically it took the Renegade Legion armor system and imposed it on Mechs, where the armor factor was its resistance instead of a "damage capacity" and a weapon's damage amount was its penetration level. Not only was it more realistic, but it also made game pace much faster.

 

The novels are hard to come by these days, I don't recall seeing them in the last couple of years at the used books stores.

 

Ebay.

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Heh, just pull out all my old Technical Readouts, damn there are alot of battlemechs.. Have you seen those tanks, they do soooo seriously pack some firepower..

 

That is from the Technical Readout: 3025/3026 era, before the art took a plunge. Before the Clans, too, incidentally....

 

 

Falken

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Many of the BT novels were quite good, especially the second Gray Death Legion book, about the guerilla campaing on Verthandi:

 

"There's a Panther on the roof!!!".

 

I lost track of the storyline, after the books started coming out en masse. I never did like the Clan stuff, though.

With time, it became less about the Mechwarriors or other Soldiers (and the battles) and more a Dune-esque (more than BT was to begin with, at any rate) political drama. All the novels started having the Big Men (Victor, etc) either being the Protagonists or the guy who the Protagonist trails. A far cry from the early days.

 

 

Falken

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Mechs are expensive and rare. The should be like the gendarmes of the French Wars of Religion. Effective when properly used but mainly pretty and cool. The heavy lifting should come from rather more plebian platforms like tanks and air.

 

Simon

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That is from the Technical Readout: 3025/3026 era, before the art took a plunge. Before the Clans, too, incidentally....

Falken

 

I thought the stuff in 3050 was OK, even if I didn't care for the munchy clan mechs. There were a few decent mechs after those, but not many at all. 2750 and 3050 are hands-down the best though.

 

Matt

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Was there a serious revision in BattleTech canon? Because I spent a good deal of time surfing a BattleTech wiki and the version on how the clans were stopped was distinctly different from the version the same wiki narrated years before.

 

First version I read was that the Fed-Com, along with other IS and perhaps ComStar launched a counter-attack in the Clan's own home worlds, winning in the end at Strana Mechty. That was a few years ago.

 

Fast forward yesterday, I could not find that version anymore. Instead, I read that the Clans were initially stopped at Tukkayid and there was a landing at Strana Mechty where a Right of Refusal was fought and won by the IS.

 

Anyone enlighten me, please? I am confuse. I really really recall reading the two IS operations which defeated the Clans and it was far more better than the one I read yesterday.

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You don't have mobility issues in a Gundam when your main fusion thrusters put out somewhere in the neighbourhood of 175,000lbs of thrust each (The GP01 from Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, according to a sourcebook I read). ;)
According to Bandai's gundamofficial.com GP01 tech page it's thrusters are rated for 108,000 kg(/ 237,600 lbs) total. Imho I rather stick with the source book, as the "quote" mecha info sites, official or not are wildly inconsistent with their information.

 

For anyone interested is a page of the Unseen and which anime they're originally from.

Edited by Rubberanvil
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Was there a serious revision in BattleTech canon? Because I spent a good deal of time surfing a BattleTech wiki and the version on how the clans were stopped was distinctly different from the version the same wiki narrated years before.

 

First version I read was that the Fed-Com, along with other IS and perhaps ComStar launched a counter-attack in the Clan's own home worlds, winning in the end at Strana Mechty. That was a few years ago.

 

Fast forward yesterday, I could not find that version anymore. Instead, I read that the Clans were initially stopped at Tukkayid and there was a landing at Strana Mechty where a Right of Refusal was fought and won by the IS.

 

Anyone enlighten me, please? I am confuse. I really really recall reading the two IS operations which defeated the Clans and it was far more better than the one I read yesterday.

 

IIRC the Battle of Tukayyid stalled the clan invasion of the Inner Sphere for 15 years, giving time for the Inner Sphere to regroup and counter-attack during that time. While the Battle of Strana Mechty ended the Clan War with the destruction of Clan Smoke Jaguar.

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MS Igloo is great - it largely did away with the "Uber kids from space" schtick that was so annoying.
Unless The second season did away with the robot-of-the-week format, Igloo is still stuck in the Super Robot mode.

 

You're not watching the right Gundam, then... :D
For UC Gundam, if it ain't directed by Kill Them All Tomino you ain't watching the right series. AC series it's whatever floats your boat.

 

there are three of them)... breakdowns, running out of ammo, size/weight/mobility issues... Maybe not super-realistic, but far better than more recent examples.
Those problems been in the Super Robot genre quite a while before the Real Robot genre came to being. Edited by Rubberanvil
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One thing that always irritated me about the BT setting (and that Fanpro started to fix) was the utter dismissal of the fact that you have thousands (tens of thousands, perhaps, if you count the Deep Periphery) of inhabited worlds, many with large populations......and yet almost none of them can field the same level of military power that the United States could field in the 1970s.

 

Additionally, States (the Magistracy, certain other Periphery States, and the Houses themselves) and planets that should (given the description of their level of technological quality of life) have been able to reestablish Battlemech (and Jumpship, etc) factories, even if just by copying* existing facilities 1:1 Soviet-style.......don't.

 

99% of planets are, evidently, the 30th Century equivalents of Somalia or Tuvalu.

 

Fanpro started to fix this by revealing that, yes, there were planetary navies and giving more focus to infantry (who <gasp!> started to appear in illustrations), artillery and supporting arms. The Periphery States and local entities (Houses Minor, planetary governments, corporations) began to build factories and stand up forces.

 

Falken

 

*-it's established in canon that it's no problem to license-build someone else's mech design in your own factory, implying they can create new tooling and have a general pool of knowledge.

Edited by SCFalken
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I used to be a BT player in high school, and now have digital copies of most of the TRs and source books. There were a lot of problems with the BT canon. The biggest, IMHO, was the short ranged weapons. Basic machineguns were only capable of firing to something like 300m. I routinely fired my POS M60 out to about 900m in 1998. An MG mounted on a 10m high robot couldn't shoot farther than my MG on a tripod? Ditto for all the other weapons...

 

Before I gave up tabletop gaming, I'd revised the BT universe for my own purposes, merging it with parts of the Renegade Legion universe, which in many respects was much more militarily thought out and realistic than the BT one ever was. Basically, I quadrupled the effective ranges of everything, relegated Mechs to a secondary role, made powered armor and grav tanks vastly more important, and established navies. In essence, the RL military forces in the BT universe.

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Guest JamesG123
I used to be a BT player in high school, and now have digital copies of most of the TRs and source books. There were a lot of problems with the BT canon. The biggest, IMHO, was the short ranged weapons. Basic machineguns were only capable of firing to something like 300m. I routinely fired my POS M60 out to about 900m in 1998. An MG mounted on a 10m high robot couldn't shoot farther than my MG on a tripod? Ditto for all the other weapons...

 

Sigh... this has been explained again and again and again....

 

BT was designed as a tabletop, beer and pretzels game. The ranges are trunchated to facilitate this while still allowing strategies and tactics based on different ranged weapons.

 

To justify this, the "Canon" states that the ranges and to hit values are against manuvering targets and took into account the degradation of fire control. Bill Keith published "extended range" rules for BT that gave the weapons logical ranges.

 

Before I gave up tabletop gaming, I'd revised the BT universe for my own purposes.... I quadrupled the effective ranges of everything,

I bet you never actually played like that more than once. We tried it, it sucked to have to use an entire garage to accomodate the realistic ranges.

 

99% of planets are, evidently, the 30th Century equivalents of Somalia or Tuvalu.

 

Thats exactly what they were supposed to be.

 

You had isolated pockets of technology, but the underpinning civilization and knowledge base had eroded away. The industrial base that has supported the technology had been destroyed by the wars along with the information about how to construct or repair it.

If your city has been destroyed by rampaging Mechs and the countryside laid waste by orbital bombardment, the surviving technicials and scientists no longer have the luxury of working in their shops or labs, they had to go out and become farmers to have enough to eat. After a generation that no longer practical knowledge (particle physics doesn't have much to offer a potato farmer) it would be gone.

This gave the BT universe its hard edge and made the game interesting. You couldn't just order a regiment of Mechs and a dozen jumpships, you had to scratch and work really hard to get anything. The best, most rewarding MW/BT campaigns I ever played was one in which the GM used the usual setting from medieval fantasy RPGs for his BT campaign. Weapons and technology were "magical", and the people who knew how the worked or could fix them were magicians and those who operated Mechs or spacecraft were gods in the eyes of the common folk.

 

But... then FASA realized that they couldn't keep selling Technical Readouts and minis if their universe was in a decaying state. So they first brought back every Mech, tank, and starship that had been created back in the good ol' days, then they completely watered down the game's model and character by making all of these factories and technologies pop into existence.

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Thats exactly what they were supposed to be.

 

You had isolated pockets of technology, but the underpinning civilization and knowledge base had eroded away. The industrial base that has supported the technology had been destroyed by the wars along with the information about how to construct or repair it.

If your city has been destroyed by rampaging Mechs and the countryside laid waste by orbital bombardment, the surviving technicials and scientists no longer have the luxury of working in their shops or labs, they had to go out and become farmers to have enough to eat. After a generation that no longer practical knowledge (particle physics doesn't have much to offer a potato farmer) it would be gone.

This gave the BT universe its hard edge and made the game interesting. You couldn't just order a regiment of Mechs and a dozen jumpships, you had to scratch and work really hard to get anything. The best, most rewarding MW/BT campaigns I ever played was one in which the GM used the usual setting from medieval fantasy RPGs for his BT campaign. Weapons and technology were "magical", and the people who knew how the worked or could fix them were magicians and those who operated Mechs or spacecraft were gods in the eyes of the common folk.

 

Except that it never held together, and canon contradicted itself more often than not.

The canon number of Jumpships in the Inner Sphere, for instance, was simultaneously too small to support the level of trade or military operations and too large to fit the idea that Jumpships are only cobbled together at the rate of a handful a decade.

Also, there were planets (such as New Avalon, Tharkad, New Samarkand, etc) that hadn't seen a full-scale battle in centuries, supported an administrative Capital, and had the neccessary division of labor. Many of these should have each been able to support several times the level of industry and science that the entire Inner Sphere managed in canon.

 

Lastly, the "isolated pockets of technology" were nothing of the sort, save in an astrographic sense. While many planets might have lost the cutting edge of technology (realistic, as the post-Helm Core military "Lostech" was thin on the ground, even in the Star League's day), there were (canonically) dozens of planets that had the capability to construct, repair and analyze all of the 31st Century's technology.

If Hesperus II can build X number of mechs per year, you cannot tell me that they don't understand the technology and are just painting by numbers. Ergo, the House Lords would have spared no expense regenerating their industrial base (essentially copying it several times over) during the post-Second Succession War era (when people stopped levelling factories). The UK, Germany and Russia managed to do this, in the depth of the strategic bombing era, but Davion and Kurita cannot?

 

Your particle physicists did not all become farmers, or you wouldn't have any fusion reactors (you cannot build such without knowing how it works or what parts it consists of, and how they are made) or Jumpships at all, not just fewer. Functional factories would have been expanded and damaged ones rebuilt (with tooling copied from the functional ones).

 

If you have all this functional technology running about (which you do, or you wouldn't have an interstellar war with huge mecha), know how to build and repair it (which they do) on any scale...you can certainly bootstrap your industry back up towards (if not really approaching*) Star League levels.

 

This was all lately addressed by FanPro, who had to reconcile the fact that (for example) the Magistracy of Canopus manages to run a 30+ planet interstellar civilization, but cannot build cars or power plants or their primary weapons system. Result: they always could, but it wasn't really worth mentioning, in comparison to the Successor States, who had super-robust economies and industrial bases all along (which were, in turn, somewhat understated in canon, as the canonical POV was that of people out in the sticks).

 

 

Falken

 

 

*-due to the fact that the Star League had a "globalized" peactime economy, and many public works projects.

Edited by SCFalken
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Guest JamesG123
Except that it never held together, and canon contradicted itself more often than not.

 

BattleTech wasn't supposed to make sense (its a game about giant robots fer Christ's sake!). It was supposed to be be a novel game/story background. The shaddow of the successor states reduced to "scavenger warfare" against each other etc. Like I said, FASA began backpedaling on their original concepts and "sold out" to sell product.

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BattleTech wasn't supposed to make sense (its a game about giant robots fer Christ's sake!). It was supposed to be be a novel game/story background. The shaddow of the successor states reduced to "scavenger warfare" against each other etc. Like I said, FASA began backpedaling on their original concepts and "sold out" to sell product.

 

Except that now the BT Universe is (somewhat more) internally consistent.

 

FYI: FASA has been defunct for the better part of a decade. All the retcons are the work of FanPro and Catalyst.

 

Falken

Edited by SCFalken
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Guest JamesG123
Except that now the BT Universe is (somewhat more) internally consistent.

 

To you. To me its just another generic sci-fi game now. That illogical dichotomy of high and low tech mixed together is what made the game interesting. And if you don't think it can't happen, come over to Afghanistan with me and I will show you people talking on cell phones while riding a donkey cart, or people watching satellite TV in mud brick homes.

 

FYI: FASA has been defunct for the better part of a decade. All the retcons are the work of FanPro and Catalyst.

 

No kidding. I was speaking of the early-mid nineties when they began to put out the source books that fleshed out the universe. IF they had stayed true to the original concept and kept it unique, as well as made the transition to electronic formats more gracefully, then they might still be around instead of Jordan and Wiesman punching out and selling to MS.

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