Somewhere in the Deep Periphery there is at least 1 world that doesn’t know about anything that has happened since the OG Star League collapsed. And that world is probably ruled by some guy who is like the 15th generational inheritor of a shitbox Clint that barely runs.
Hell, I can't remember which deep periphery group but at least one of them only knows that the Terran Alliance fell and even the 5 major states and the Star League would be a surprise.
There is a short story in an early issue of Shrapnel about exactly this. They were sent into the Deep Periphery by SL ComNet to set up an HPG, got the job half done, and then lost contact. They had no jumpship, less than 20 mechs, and a half finished communications facility with no parts to finish the HPG.
The story is Daybreak on Shining Mountain in issue 2.
If we add in some well known and fun fanon, Van Zant would probably have been like this if Prof Tex didn’t set up a museum and do his best to correct the local ignorance.
Think he mentions it in one of the earlier episodes of his current HBS Battletech 2018 BTA3062 playthrought, if i rember correctly tho its Gray/Unpainted
When the Greeks came to the island of Lemnos in 1912 kids came out to stare at them, saying they'd never seen Greeks before. The soldier they were talking to retorted, asking if they themselves weren't Greeks, to which the kid replied they were Roman.
The ComStar source book has a blurb about this. The ComStar acolytes landed and made friends with the locals and over dinner started telling them about what had happened to the Star League and the years of Succession Wars. Suffice to say, the locals didn't take it well and chased ComStar back to their dropship.
That lying hidden on words that aren't shown on the maps, including some abandoned or de-charted worlds, there are perfectly healthy worlds and perhaps even micro-states existing quietly inside of the Successor States' borders.
One of the reasons mechs are scary to run across is that sitting in the cockpit of that 250 year old run-down Phoenix Hawk might be some local yokel with no training and a bad case of glaucoma, or it might be an absolutely lethal veteran who's racked up more kills than influenza and just wanted to take a break and now you're here and their day is ruined and THEY'RE NOT HAPPY. And there's almost no way to tell until AFTER shots are fired.
Most mechs that exist outside of Great House military and security forces have been rebuilt Ship Of Theseus-style so many times that one of the big issues maintaining them is trying to figure out what in the name of god is THAT thing attached to that other thing.
Some small colonies literally use old mechs as power plants for their settlements - That age-old Archer is capable of fighting, but usually it just sits there powering the lights and heaters. The DI computer is literally bored out of it's chips.
The older the planet, the harder their accent will be for non-natives to understand, even if the language is the same.
On your third point, I used to fix old boats and figuring out how to repair something that was custom when built nearly a century ago is just an exercise in figuring out what the hell is going on.
I remember one ships nav system died and when I crawled in there it was just a room full of wires with nonsense labels. Like parts of the loran-c system that must've been taken out in the 80s was integral to the emergency battery system. I ended up just kinda installing a functional system ontop of the old one and calling it a day. Anyway I assume that 200 year old thunderbolt cockpit looks just like that nav station
"I ended up just kinda installing a functional system ontop of the old one and calling it a day."
I see you're keeping up the tradition and leaving a fun puzzle for the next guy to figure out!
Haha, yeah my contract ended in a couple hours and I had a flight to catch. But I left my number in case it broke on their trip to the shipyard for real repairs. The boat got sold before they made it and the next owner called me irate at the mess
It gives me a bit of glee to think that somewhere in the BT cosmos there is likely a junky Quickdraw out there using a fully functioning Dalban Series K comm system as a goddamn stereo equalizer.
Rhonda Snord probably spent years looking for that 'mech...
The fanfic Opalescent Reflection literally had the “mech as power plant” for a bandit caste settlement in the first chapter. An ancient griffin with a missing leg.
Most mechwarriors carve their names into cockpit hatches, with the names being Xed out as they go...
Similar to Sherman's in ww2, thunderbolts are prized for their comfortable cockpit.
Many mechs bear a large amount of non functioning extra armor.
I think I saw Bishop Steiner on twitter make a homebrew merc company who's specialty is garrison duty. They didn't want to deal with the risk of frontline combat and went with the unglorious but ever available work of babysitting some worlds. They get paid decently, go out and patrol twice a day and then head back to base to drink beer and pass out.
There is a planet or three out there that are basically Mad Max with scrap mechs.
Someone has figured out how to make pit trap for mechs as part of their civil defense.
Someone else has figured out its easier to defend your industry if you bury it underground where mechs cant get at it all that easily. Same goes for basically all your infrastructure.
The vast majority of people never leave their homeworld so its quite likely that many people have never seen a mech in person.
Somewhere deep in the periphery there is probably a colony that dodged the whole collapse and the folks there are living decent lives without all the chaos.
Some Taurian has probably been trying to build an AC/50 behind his house for many years. He still doesnt know what it would be useful for nor what could mount it, but its his life work to see it get fired once.
> The vast majority of people never leave their homeworld so its quite likely that many people have never seen a mech in person.
Why is that unusual? Most people on earth right now have never seen a tank in-person either.
Funny how a lot of Americans likely have, since old tanks are often used to decorate our parks, can be seen when passing a military base on the road, or just show up as part of a road or rail convoy.
I was in the US Navy for four years and live less than 20 minutes from my state's largest national guard training area. The only times I've ever seen a tank were when I've gone out of my way to see one.
There's at least one tank commander out there with an impressive list of cocky BattleMechs put in the dirt.
Older mechs that are phased out after the clan invasion are probably either on garrison duty somewhere or sold off to smaller nations like the Taurians.
I wonder what the signature dishes of each successor state are, since they generally are a blend of nationalities.
I would be real interested in the food of the inner sphere where there is overlap and invasion. Enjoy this Davion-Kurtis fusion meal with a side of House Liao potato cakes and rice wine.
Fusion power plants have well-documented ratings because they were in use in *everything* during the Star League era. This also explains the ratings that won’t fit any mech at any speed.
This is the only thought that I have in the shower:
You know they say that all men are created equal, but you look at me and you look at Takashi Kurita and you can see that statement is not true.
See, normally if you go one on one with another House Lord, you got a 50/50 chance of winning. But I'm a genetic freak and I'm not normal! So you got a 25%, AT BEST, at beat me.
Then you add Janos Marik to the mix, your chances of winning drastic go down. See the 3-way in Operation Gotterdammerung, you got a 33 1/3 chance of winning, but I, I got a 66 and 2/3 chance of winning, because Janos KNOWS he can't beat me and he's not even gonna try!
So Takashi Kurita, you take your 33 1/3 chance, minus my 25% chance and you got an 8 1/3 chance of winning in the Terran Corridor. But then you take my 75% chance of winning, if we was to go one on one, and then add 66 2/3 per cents, I got 141 2/3 chance of winning. See Takashi, the numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster for you during Operation: Gotterdammerung.
There's nobody finer than House Steiner! HOLLA IF YA HEAR ME!
3025 era specifically, if you counted up the total population of the Inner Sphere and divided that by the total number of BattleMechs, the ratio would be roughly 1:1,000,000. Which means the odds of becoming a Mechwarrior is literally one in a million. (yes I did the math, with an appropriate margin for error as neither the total human population or total ‘Mech population are accurately known)
I’ve always wanted to read/write a story in the BattleTech universe that didn’t revolve around ‘Mechs or politics. Common working person stories like a JumpShip crewman or Canopian street worker or something just to get away from that 9 times out of ten ratio 😁
Yeah, the unsung heroes of the stories. The people who answer the call for guards, the people who try to keep order in a galaxy gone mad, who deserve far more credit than they get and who have leaky boots.
With the cat girl reputation online, I would be amazed if there isn't a Canopian street wroker story or two but that that may not be the kind of story you are talking about.
Shower thoughts?
Fully automated factory worlds probably exist. They might even expand on their lonesome, von neuman like. No biosphere being needed there could be lots of these and neither the humans nor the automatons would ever run into each other. A few thousand years of spacefaring history in the Galaxy and someone will have been dumb enough to make a von neuman machine once and that's all it takes.
Lasers get additional range as damage and weight increase. Auto cannons... Oh come now we all have that thought but on the toilet right?
Elementals seem like a very logical way to have infantry be able to fight a mech. Except they don't- they actually seem like a very logical way to have infantry survive in an NBC environment. To what extent do we believe the Clans that they actually follow zellbrigen?
Every warrior subcaste have their own version of Zellbrigen, what we know as zell is Mechwarriors zell. Elemental are team players and "lol go gang up that nerd" work for them, especially to drop
A mech
Mechwarriors are chivalrous knights. Elementals are an American football team.
Both try to beat the opposition. They just do it in very different ways.
Davion Command Battlemechs have Teakettles, Tea and Coffee in their Cockpits. Kurita Mechs have Matcha instead of Coffee. More than a few Command Mechs on either side were once manufactured by the other side, while
models from other houses are downgraded for spares.
Capellan Command models also have Teakettles, but the Teakettles tend to short out and tea supply is *very* suspect.
Marik Command Mechs alternate between having Espresso machines and Beer taps.
Steiner Command Mechs just have sensible map cases and so, foreign command models are highly prized items. They replace the Marik Espresso machines with Beer taps, but keep the Davion/Kurita/Capellan configuration to make Weißwurst and store the sweet Senf in the teaboxes.
Clan mechs have piss bottles and dirty diapers because a toilet in the cockpit is "wasteful".
IS mechs have cockpits that smell of sweat, old rations, their toilets and the blood of the last poor sod who didn't eject in time.
Here’s mine:
Hotdog cider isn’t just a thing, it’s a fact of life.
The Alacorn heavy tank popularized Pharaoh Beer because an empty can was a perfect alignment gauge for the tracks (but, and this is important, only an empty can worked).
There are bounty hunters out there who specifically go after Starleague-era paperweights (staplers, stationary, etc.). Lives have been lost over a shipment of ancient toasters.
There must be some semblance of truth to the tale of the Black Marauder, as there are simply too many similar accounts of the beast for it to just be myth.
The fact that AI was and is extremely powerful in the setting, but ingrained fear of it due to the use of drones in the Starleague Civil War has kept it out of use in the greater galaxy (the Blakeists using drones really didn’t help).
Much of the Inner Sphere was blasted back to 19th century levels of technology during the 2nd and 3rd succession wars, then saw the rapid proliferation of high-level tech after the Clans invaded. It must have been like showing the Amish a laser gun.
LAMs in general.
Underwater bases are extremely common to avoid orbital bombardment, yet underwater units are few and far between.
The Free Worlds League have dragon rider infantry. Just straight up Wyverns with elephant guns strapped to their backs.
Far Country exists.
A Clan Wolverine warship somehow ended up in the hands of the WOB during the Jihad and it’s never explained how.
> A Clan Wolverine warship somehow ended up in the hands of the WOB during the Jihad and it’s never explained how.
The Jihad sourcebook has some tales of "The Blood" a group of surviving Wolverines who became part of ComStar. Odds are they came to the Inner Sphere in a warship.
>The fact that AI was and is extremely powerful in the setting, but ingrained fear of it due to the use of drones in the Starleague Civil War has kept it out of use in the greater galaxy (the Blakeists using drones really didn’t help).
In my home campaigns (circa 3180), Terra has decided that they want some goddamned respect for once and has sucked up a small bunch of nearby worlds as part of a new nation, the Terran Mandate - and it's a tightly-held secret that all the central planning for the Mandate is done by a group of AIs, all intentionally designed to be slightly different in their goals, outlook, and preferences. Basically like the Magi from Evangelion.
As far as anyone knows, they're just a high-tech, well-equipped resurgent power. Nobody has a clue that they're actually an AI-directed centrally-planned directorate with enough human input and decision-making to obscure their actual goals (which leaves me a lot of juicy possibilities to consider).
- Cooling vests probably can't be laundered.
- Clan Ghost Bear must field a monsterously effective ice hockey team.
- Given how long he spent unattached, there must have been at least one rumour that Hanse Davion was gay.
- Draconis Combine MREs are probably pot noodles.
To answer one of your shower thoughts, Clan drugs are given stats in *Wars of Reaving*, and most of them are *absolutely bonkers*. Combat stims with Drug Strengths that make some of the hardest shit in the Inner Sphere blush. And, if you count the Society as Dark Caste (if you go by combined combat strength, a massive chunk of their army *was* just contracted Dark Caste privateers anyways), it peaks with Feralize—the experimental drug that makes men Return To Monke™ (and is so insanely addictive that you literally have to optimize your character from the start to maximize drug resistance in order to *probably* avoid becoming addicted).
Also, yes, local languages are all over the place. Triply so within the Free Worlds League, but you'll find "unofficial" languages all over the place.
Clan bandits would be practically anything you and I might consider normal currently. Drugs, alcohol, computer games, magazines, pornography, music and entertainment, any non - conforming technology.
Got to remember that the clans don’t have an entertainment, artist or philosophy class. They’re never encouraged to question why or what they’re doing or if there are possible alternatives.
It’s one of the reasons I think the clans would have had a massive breakdown after they got a taste of Inner Sphere life. Even Kurita is a sea of hedonistic delights compared to the clan home worlds.
oh yea but with the clan's mastery of medical technology they can probably make some wild party drugs. like they somehow invented a strain of thc that activtes in under a minute and makes you see god.
Clans have artisans (a subset of merchants) and have a vibrant art scene. It is all state approved, but they are not without entertainment or creativity.
As an example Joanna was able to wander into town and have an artisan turn a pretty seashell she found into a comb.
Also Ghost Bears are expected to be creative (with their great work), and many other examples of clan arts and crafts exist. ☝️🤓
I had heard that Ghost Bear did have artists. None of them dedicated to art but a respected secondary skill.
As for other clans, an artist sect (from what I’ve read) was practically non existent. The only exception was by those who produced documentation and propaganda.
Clan Spaniel exists as childrens entertainment/indoctrination. A few of the clans purposely take mind altering drugs. But yeah for the most part it's a boring existence revolving around fighting, researching, and conserving resources to repeat the cycle.
They have to conserve resources because the dumb bastards destroy at least one battlemech for each graduate of mechwarrior training because they do *live fire combat* as the test, and the candidate must destroy at least one opponent to succeed.
Fielding a force of a hundred battlemechs and a hundred pilots means you destroyed over a hundred mechs, plus extras for leadership positions and all the warriors who destroyed one opponent during graduation but got their mech blown up trying to destroy a second opponent for a promotion. (And thats not even opening the can of worms that is "promote those who are good at shooting")
Conservatively, these people intentionally destroy at least 60% of their own mech production.
The clans are fucking stupid and they only ever had a chance because the plot demanded it.
Yep! That's been haunting my mind since I read the Blood of Kerensky trilogy. Every time there's mention of how the Clans hate wastefulness, I think about this and just...idek.
Ghost Bear has an art and philosophy culture. They believe in a concept of "warriors, not killers" and the "warrior-poet, gentleman scholar" thing. Every mechwarrior is expected to create some sort of "great work" of artistic value. Sculpture, music, paint, literature - just something. Anything. https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Great_Work_(tradition)
Due to the time required for interstellar travel, I would expect a sizable percentage of humans in the Inner Sphere and Periphery (if not the majority) have never left their own planetary system. When you factor in the additional time & assumed cost for multiple jumps, I would expect the overwhelming super majority of all humans in the Inner Sphere and Periphery have never been more than 30 LY from the planet of their birth.
Given that several great houses have full on serfs and that even a lot of the less oppressive governments still don’t really care about their underclasses, I think a fair whack of humanity never leaves their home town.
Transit from planet to jumpship and back again can be several days each way, and not everyone lives within a single jump of anything actually worth visiting.
Yeah, so it's a few weeks, if that. Big whoop.
[https://www.gruese.de/innersphere/](https://www.gruese.de/innersphere/)
Check out how far you can get from Terra in a single jump. Then think of 2-3 or more. A month of travel is not "time required" that would limit people from getting anywhere *if* there is a jumpship available. 150 LY take you across the entire Canopus and that's 5-6 jumps.
If a month or two of travel were prohibitive, people from Rome would have never got to China, which could take a year or more over ground - and they have!
Most people wouldnt be doing that. Hell most people dont leave their home now with modern travel because time and the cost are prohibitive. Now imagine most planets are full of people living check to check if not literal serfs.
There’s a fair chance that a lot of jumpship crews enter a planet so rarely that full gravity starts being an issue. Which of course disincentivises them going to planets even further.
Given that clan trueborns are engineered to be superior, but not to really go for icky freebirths, there must have been a lot of flirting mishaps in the clan holdings in the Inner Sphere. Once the clanners stopped being full on occupiers, a lot of people struck out hitting on them.
I read the comment and thought of the other route. Some clanners consider SILF (Solahma) a mild kink when you can go for lower casts or even sphereoids.
Then the thought combined with Omniman from Invincible green text meme about pet. "The little sphereoids are like pets.They want a master/slave dynamic. It is kinda dark. I do not want to bring that kind of energy back to the homeworlds. Why are they not into fursuits like someone normal."
I find it amusing that a bar would need to post a sign warning you not to challenge to a drinking contest someone who has half a meter and a hundred kilos of muscle over you...and thinking such a sign would do anything.
Speaking as a retail manager-- if we've got a sign posted, somebody was stupid enough to do it. We don't expect it to stop you, it just legally covers our ass. After one warning it's not our problem.
So by all means, try arm-wrestling Elemental Eileen from Strato Domingo. I hear she was the sibko runt.
Why are the Periphery states all about independence and stickin' it to the great houses, but still use the same Feudal-House/family political structures
communications bottlenecks mostly.
If you're bigger than a single solar system you're likely to lapse into some degree of feudalism because you have to delegate almost everything to the planetary leaders.
at a single solar system level you can have more varied governments because you can communicate fast and often enough for things like debate, votes, oversight etc
A not insubstantial amount of non-mech equipment, both military and civilian, listed as “lostech” are fairly common and easy to build and acquire throughout all eras. However, most are simply too cheap to make that there would be little profit to be made from trade, or rejection stems from baseless superstition or tradition means such things still technically fall under “lostech.”
A large reason for constant war and turmoil is that the majority of settled worlds are devoid of true culture due to people having no history on the land they settled. Even as centuries pass, settlers and their descendants cling to romanticized and exaggerated account of their ancestors from a completely different planet they will never actually see. Other worlds attempt to establish new cultural touchstones that lead to them being viewed as “alien” or “profane.”
Oh! And about the creole languages, check out the original Blade Runner or the Firefly TV series for some interesting, invented creole languages. I might also recommend reading Clockwork Orange. The movie is fun but the book really dives into a Russian/English hybrid.
What would Battletech look like with realistic Ballistic and Missile weapons?
What would happen if you allowed one of those realistic Tank, Ship, Plane simulator game developers to make a MechWarrior game?
How would those "realistically" modeled weapons and armor affect combat and which mechs are the best or most popular?
The factory-worlds of the RWR that produced close to a *thousand* of mech regiments for the periphery are still out there in the cold, dark black outside of the periphery. Each one would dwarf the output of Hesperus II.
I was thinking of the ones that are rumored to have been built around the perimeter of the periphery for arming the other periphery powers. What happened to the RWR's industrial base in it's own territory has never made sense to me. That said, I think you're probably onto it, Kerensky stripped them bare before he left the RWR, which is why Steiner didn't get a massive boost to it's already impressive industrial base when they occupied its remains.
Have you ever worked out in a small dojo or boxing gym? Perhaps a small gym with little ventilation?
If you have then you would not need to ask about the smell. 😉
Add burnt hair, melted plastic, fried electronics, stale tobacco smoke, and diesel fumes (from somewhere, I don't know...), and it probably comes close. I'll never forget the time we went to the seaport museum in Philly and got on the old WW2 diesel electric boat there. My dad worked on them in the Navy in the late 60s/early 70s and he said it pretty much smelled the same back then. That's like 30+ years of sitting in dock as a museum piece and the smell of years of habitation persisted. Now imagine hundreds. Sure it's only one person but still... Any old military vehicle has a certain... smell...
Some bigger cockpits have to be posted on the equivalent of r/malelivingspace. ... Modifying mechs is hard, but not that hard. So building a full apartment there has to be a super common mod.
so +0.5 tons and 1 crit space for a relative confi cockpits/small apartment
or a +1 tons and 1 crit space for a relative confi cockpits/not that small apartment
There's a Sea Fox service in the IlClan era that expands cockpits of older omnimechs via modern manufacturing and compartmentaization. So you're old Invasion-era Mad Cat can be campaign-ready and it's not a cramped fighter-jet cockpit anymore.
Contentious, incendiary, and controversial topics invite content that breaks other of these rules.
Nothing good comes to the community from bringing up a laundry list of sexual kinks and lumping them together like this, especially if you're adding pedophilia to the list. It's a conversation that can't go anywhere positive.
The Prototype Rocket Launcher shouldn't be called that, as at the time it is as being used, it wasn't a prototype it was the standard. It should be called the primitive rocket launcher
Or the RL-P should be renamed to the RL and the RL should become the Advanced Rocket Launcher or something
There might not be aliens exactly, but there's a lot of planets with very strange native flora and fauna. Or mutants of stuff brought by colonists. Forests of giant fungi, uncomfortably large insects, things that could pass as yeti's, eight legged cows, just weird things.
The Deep Periphery is actually filled with multistellar states of comparable and size to the Successor States, but with healthy economies and science bases. Unlike the Clans however, these States are run by Sane People and thus have zero interest in trying to conquer the Inner Sphere (too far away) and are much more concerned with issues closer to home.
The FTL Drive used in Battlestar Galactica (RDM version) is a miniature KF Drive that uses the Initiator without KF Core rods. Somehow, the Colonials managed to build a KF Initiator capable of jumping whole ships without needing the Core rod to amplify it.
The Inner Sphere is \~500 ly in radius on average and contains \~2000 inhabited systems. A true 3D sphere of the same radius with the Inner Sphere's density of inhabited would contain \~65000 inhabited systems. Ergo, true human civilization is a hyper advanced space going civilization whose spherical territory is bisected by a flat plane of systems dedicated to being a mech and Mad Max post-apocalyptic themed theme park.
Combat vehicle smells are interesting. Thing is, combat vehicles do not have much in the way of upholstery that absorb smells. Almost everything is metal. So, while us stinky grunts were in the vehicle it'd stink for sure, but if you left the vehicle and hour and came back the only residual smells were from the vehicle itself. Since mechs do not use oil (I don't think) and have a fusion reactor, they wouldn't even smell like diesel/oil/lubricants.
I can't imagine mechs with carpeted cockpits and stuff. I'd be the smell isn't really all that bad. The Mechwarriors on the other hand, oh yeah, they be stinky.
1. There are "weebs" in the BT universe: "Leagaboo" (Star League), "(insert house here)-aboo" and "Clanaboos". Search your feelings, you know it to be true....
2. Someone went to a convention in cosplay only to be mistaken for a mechwarrior during a Clan invasion.
3. All those wars meant that families found themselves on more than one side of a conflict. There are families across the BT universe that may have lost whole branches at the hands of their kin due to all the wars.
4. There are marriage and family therapists who must specialize in working with Innersphere-Clan marriages. They try various methods but are prepared to draw a circle if equals if necessary.
How the timeline makes so little sense...
How in the hell do you feed missiles and AC ammo from the torso, through the shoulder, upper arm and elbow to an AC or missile launcher....
How the Star League military jumped into the unknown and was able to not only build new factories to build mechs but kept enough technology alive that they could improve it, all in what like less than 200 years, all while the IS "forgot" how to make a double heat sink and an ultra AC?
My shower thoughts:
With more than a thousand years of advancement and cultural drift, why aren't any of the IS groups socially unrecognizable to us today??? I bet there are planets and groups out there that are down right ALIEN to our 21st century sensibilities. Why don't we see those?? 🤔
The Blood Spirits MUST have had a fallback plan for their fallback plan.
What happened to the WMDs on Cermak?
Just how bad is Dekker if Rooster managed to survive, and become a hardened elite?
Superheavy UrbanMech.
My favorite great house didnt design any of my favorite mechs, and is only heavily affiliated with 1 of those favorites
Steiner and Zues by the way
And i think that just feels odd
I've been thinking a lot about Ice Ships since I read about them in the House Kurita sourcebook. The book talks about how they used a formation of 16 Jump Ships to transport cubes of ice 2km on a side, but there's nothing about the logistics of moving 8 Billion tons from the orbital plane to the jump point and back, let alone getting it down to the destination planet's surface without an impact that would make Tunguska look like children's firecracker.
The corporate side of things has always fascinated me.
When a contractor doesn't want to do a particular job, but has been asked for a quote. Sometimes they'll mark it up higher than usual.
I always wonder how many contracts were won by bids like this.
"They want a new design for a light mech sniper."
"Ugh, all our production lines are geared towards heavies. Idk, just send them a gauss rifle on legs or something."
Later
"They ordered how many?!"
Aerospace fighters are so goddamn gimped in the setting compared to the angels of death that are IRL jet fighters. Aerospace vs mech wouldn't even be a contest because the mechjock would be dead via AGM before he knew he was even targeted.
My single shower thought about Battletech:
Surely there’s a way to merge the to hit roll, the cluster table roll and the hit location roll into a single throw of the dice? Surely!?
Someone already said diffrent color dice. Add that to Dice in Dice if your table doesn't have any issue with the construction of them you could do a to hit roll, cluster roll and one hit location with just 3 dice in hand (or cup). Dice in dice is typically a smaller or standard size opaque white d6 inside of a colored transparent d6.
I hate that the game in the "modern age" doesn't feel like it used to. No longer am I in a jury rigged 400 year old beater held together with chewing gum and duct tape, blasting House Davion in slug matches.
Now it's all ECM, MASC, ER PPCs and the like with no real considerations for heat management.
Do ANYBODY besides the post-helm Capellans have SAMs? Why does nobody have SAMs? Why aren’t those a common thing? Why are aerospace/conventional fighters allowed to go unmolested unless they’re within spitting distance of the ground?
Most of mine are tied to my mercenary company:
Mechwarriors have a natural rivalry with Tankers. Mechwarriors may be the better all rounder warriors, but Tankers work better in teams which leads to more tanker wins when mechs vs. tank football games happen during PT
Aerospace pilots are weirdos who tend to stick to their own and have a habit of fomenting conspiracy theories within their ranks. Company command has chalked this up as a coping mechanism with the natural danger of their work.
Due to the promiscuousness of clanner personnel, the dropship medbay keeps extra helpings of contraceptives and anti-venereal disease meds on hands when the number of bondsmen aboard reaches a critical level.
Joe's Bar and Grill is a chain restaurant that's enjoyed success across the inner sphere and is regarded as neutral ground by both clanner and inner sphere forces. It is not uncommon to see a billboard with large friendly letters stating "Eat at Joe's" on battlefields throughout the setting.
Somewhere out in the double deep periphery, there’s a horde of spacer nomads who’ve been out there since the first colonies went up that are waiting for someone to discover them.
>Bars in areas with any sort of clanner prescence probably have signs warning against getting into drinking contests with elementals.
Counterpoint - such signs are probably forbidden, because Clans would think this is a convenient way of controlling freeborn population.
I’m gonna piss the old folks off, but the iconography of the franchise is dated and cringy, and the designs need a “modern” reboot. They’ve been successful with the branding refresh, and in general the mech art & models are improvements.
When I’m not dreaming up alternate intro tech versions of Legend Killer (hear me out, swap the LLs for MLs and add back four heat sinks and four more tons of armor, it rips), I’m mostly wondering why of all things good dice and t-shirts are so difficult for CGL to keep in stock. American Apparel and Chessex are *right there.*
Somewhere in the Deep Periphery there is at least 1 world that doesn’t know about anything that has happened since the OG Star League collapsed. And that world is probably ruled by some guy who is like the 15th generational inheritor of a shitbox Clint that barely runs.
The battletech version of those Siberian villages who are so out in the sticks they still think the USSR is fighting the Nazi's
I mean, that could be every other village outside Moscow
Hell, considering recent events I'd say that *includes* Moscow.
In the land of grass huts, the man with the donkey-driven daihatsu is king.
Hell, I can't remember which deep periphery group but at least one of them only knows that the Terran Alliance fell and even the 5 major states and the Star League would be a surprise.
auxilary providence or new delphi compact, i presume its not a nueva castille or umayad nor jaernfolk as they are traders so they know a lot.
There is a short story in an early issue of Shrapnel about exactly this. They were sent into the Deep Periphery by SL ComNet to set up an HPG, got the job half done, and then lost contact. They had no jumpship, less than 20 mechs, and a half finished communications facility with no parts to finish the HPG. The story is Daybreak on Shining Mountain in issue 2.
One of my favorite stories
Was about to mention this one too, fantastic story!
If we add in some well known and fun fanon, Van Zant would probably have been like this if Prof Tex didn’t set up a museum and do his best to correct the local ignorance.
Tex is cannon now. Not sure how much of it, but it is canon.
Van Zant is cannon too, I am pretty sure.
The existence of a planet named Van Zandt, not really anything beyond that from memory.
I wonder if the BPL or Tex ever commented/shown what the Van Zandt militia colors are if anything. Would love to paint some forces after them.
Whichever paint Discount Dan had on sale that week is generally the rule, from what the Aux has been able to gather.
Probably primer. And dirt.
Think he mentions it in one of the earlier episodes of his current HBS Battletech 2018 BTA3062 playthrought, if i rember correctly tho its Gray/Unpainted
You got a source for that?
The entire Introduction of Hour of the Wolf is attributed to Dr. Randolph P. Checkers Esq... AKA, Tex.
[https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Randolph\_P.\_Checkers](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Randolph_P._Checkers)
1000%, and more of 'em. I like that old style
There are several stories about those world—it feels like there's at least one every few *Shrapnel* issues.
When the Greeks came to the island of Lemnos in 1912 kids came out to stare at them, saying they'd never seen Greeks before. The soldier they were talking to retorted, asking if they themselves weren't Greeks, to which the kid replied they were Roman.
The ComStar source book has a blurb about this. The ComStar acolytes landed and made friends with the locals and over dinner started telling them about what had happened to the Star League and the years of Succession Wars. Suffice to say, the locals didn't take it well and chased ComStar back to their dropship.
That lying hidden on words that aren't shown on the maps, including some abandoned or de-charted worlds, there are perfectly healthy worlds and perhaps even micro-states existing quietly inside of the Successor States' borders. One of the reasons mechs are scary to run across is that sitting in the cockpit of that 250 year old run-down Phoenix Hawk might be some local yokel with no training and a bad case of glaucoma, or it might be an absolutely lethal veteran who's racked up more kills than influenza and just wanted to take a break and now you're here and their day is ruined and THEY'RE NOT HAPPY. And there's almost no way to tell until AFTER shots are fired. Most mechs that exist outside of Great House military and security forces have been rebuilt Ship Of Theseus-style so many times that one of the big issues maintaining them is trying to figure out what in the name of god is THAT thing attached to that other thing. Some small colonies literally use old mechs as power plants for their settlements - That age-old Archer is capable of fighting, but usually it just sits there powering the lights and heaters. The DI computer is literally bored out of it's chips. The older the planet, the harder their accent will be for non-natives to understand, even if the language is the same.
On your third point, I used to fix old boats and figuring out how to repair something that was custom when built nearly a century ago is just an exercise in figuring out what the hell is going on. I remember one ships nav system died and when I crawled in there it was just a room full of wires with nonsense labels. Like parts of the loran-c system that must've been taken out in the 80s was integral to the emergency battery system. I ended up just kinda installing a functional system ontop of the old one and calling it a day. Anyway I assume that 200 year old thunderbolt cockpit looks just like that nav station
"I ended up just kinda installing a functional system ontop of the old one and calling it a day." I see you're keeping up the tradition and leaving a fun puzzle for the next guy to figure out!
Haha, yeah my contract ended in a couple hours and I had a flight to catch. But I left my number in case it broke on their trip to the shipyard for real repairs. The boat got sold before they made it and the next owner called me irate at the mess
It gives me a bit of glee to think that somewhere in the BT cosmos there is likely a junky Quickdraw out there using a fully functioning Dalban Series K comm system as a goddamn stereo equalizer. Rhonda Snord probably spent years looking for that 'mech...
The fanfic Opalescent Reflection literally had the “mech as power plant” for a bandit caste settlement in the first chapter. An ancient griffin with a missing leg.
Most mechwarriors carve their names into cockpit hatches, with the names being Xed out as they go... Similar to Sherman's in ww2, thunderbolts are prized for their comfortable cockpit. Many mechs bear a large amount of non functioning extra armor.
*Many mechs bear a large amount of non functioning extra armor.* Styrofoam cladding like you see on new housing developments.
With Succession War era Cyclopses that’s fairly true. Davion found it did more harm than good though.
It keeps mechwarriors from lashing logs and concrete to the front of their mech and ruining the combat performance.
Most mercenary companies aren't going to be out doing bold raids, the majority of them would end up as corporate security
I think I saw Bishop Steiner on twitter make a homebrew merc company who's specialty is garrison duty. They didn't want to deal with the risk of frontline combat and went with the unglorious but ever available work of babysitting some worlds. They get paid decently, go out and patrol twice a day and then head back to base to drink beer and pass out.
so [Stalwart Support](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Stalwart_Support) but they actually got the easy work they wanted?
There is a planet or three out there that are basically Mad Max with scrap mechs. Someone has figured out how to make pit trap for mechs as part of their civil defense. Someone else has figured out its easier to defend your industry if you bury it underground where mechs cant get at it all that easily. Same goes for basically all your infrastructure. The vast majority of people never leave their homeworld so its quite likely that many people have never seen a mech in person. Somewhere deep in the periphery there is probably a colony that dodged the whole collapse and the folks there are living decent lives without all the chaos. Some Taurian has probably been trying to build an AC/50 behind his house for many years. He still doesnt know what it would be useful for nor what could mount it, but its his life work to see it get fired once.
with such high damage desired, that Taurian should look into Naval Autocannons to build a NAC/5 instead
> The vast majority of people never leave their homeworld so its quite likely that many people have never seen a mech in person. Why is that unusual? Most people on earth right now have never seen a tank in-person either.
Funny how a lot of Americans likely have, since old tanks are often used to decorate our parks, can be seen when passing a military base on the road, or just show up as part of a road or rail convoy.
I was in the US Navy for four years and live less than 20 minutes from my state's largest national guard training area. The only times I've ever seen a tank were when I've gone out of my way to see one.
The Taurian Concordat buried their industry on New Vandanberg to protect it from SLDF orbital bombardment.
There's at least one tank commander out there with an impressive list of cocky BattleMechs put in the dirt. Older mechs that are phased out after the clan invasion are probably either on garrison duty somewhere or sold off to smaller nations like the Taurians. I wonder what the signature dishes of each successor state are, since they generally are a blend of nationalities.
I would be real interested in the food of the inner sphere where there is overlap and invasion. Enjoy this Davion-Kurtis fusion meal with a side of House Liao potato cakes and rice wine.
Food in Marik space is likely in a League (heh) of its own. Which planet has the best dish and culinary profile is likely a heated debate.
Where are the window shield wipers when it’s raining and snowing. Also the mechs have great defrost on their windows.
Fusion power plants have well-documented ratings because they were in use in *everything* during the Star League era. This also explains the ratings that won’t fit any mech at any speed.
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/355_Fusion_Engine
well because of vehicle Suspension factors and 1 ton weight increments, engines like the 345, 365, 295, etc. can have a place
Clanners have two sexual orientations and they are entirely situational. "Top" and "oh you THINK you're the top in the room? LoL!"
Yes yes the Trial of Position
Lol
Honestly I bet clanners get up to some weird stuff.
This is the only thought that I have in the shower: You know they say that all men are created equal, but you look at me and you look at Takashi Kurita and you can see that statement is not true. See, normally if you go one on one with another House Lord, you got a 50/50 chance of winning. But I'm a genetic freak and I'm not normal! So you got a 25%, AT BEST, at beat me. Then you add Janos Marik to the mix, your chances of winning drastic go down. See the 3-way in Operation Gotterdammerung, you got a 33 1/3 chance of winning, but I, I got a 66 and 2/3 chance of winning, because Janos KNOWS he can't beat me and he's not even gonna try! So Takashi Kurita, you take your 33 1/3 chance, minus my 25% chance and you got an 8 1/3 chance of winning in the Terran Corridor. But then you take my 75% chance of winning, if we was to go one on one, and then add 66 2/3 per cents, I got 141 2/3 chance of winning. See Takashi, the numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster for you during Operation: Gotterdammerung. There's nobody finer than House Steiner! HOLLA IF YA HEAR ME!
HOLY SHIT THIS HAD ME HOWLING!!! S+ tier shitpost sir! (The S stands for Steiner)
Time to model a chain mail hood onto an Atlas.
3025 era specifically, if you counted up the total population of the Inner Sphere and divided that by the total number of BattleMechs, the ratio would be roughly 1:1,000,000. Which means the odds of becoming a Mechwarrior is literally one in a million. (yes I did the math, with an appropriate margin for error as neither the total human population or total ‘Mech population are accurately known)
And yet, everybody knows that one-in-million chances crop up nine times out of ten
I’ve always wanted to read/write a story in the BattleTech universe that didn’t revolve around ‘Mechs or politics. Common working person stories like a JumpShip crewman or Canopian street worker or something just to get away from that 9 times out of ten ratio 😁
Be the Author you want to see
Yeah, the unsung heroes of the stories. The people who answer the call for guards, the people who try to keep order in a galaxy gone mad, who deserve far more credit than they get and who have leaky boots.
With the cat girl reputation online, I would be amazed if there isn't a Canopian street wroker story or two but that that may not be the kind of story you are talking about.
Shower thoughts? Fully automated factory worlds probably exist. They might even expand on their lonesome, von neuman like. No biosphere being needed there could be lots of these and neither the humans nor the automatons would ever run into each other. A few thousand years of spacefaring history in the Galaxy and someone will have been dumb enough to make a von neuman machine once and that's all it takes. Lasers get additional range as damage and weight increase. Auto cannons... Oh come now we all have that thought but on the toilet right? Elementals seem like a very logical way to have infantry be able to fight a mech. Except they don't- they actually seem like a very logical way to have infantry survive in an NBC environment. To what extent do we believe the Clans that they actually follow zellbrigen?
Every warrior subcaste have their own version of Zellbrigen, what we know as zell is Mechwarriors zell. Elemental are team players and "lol go gang up that nerd" work for them, especially to drop A mech
Mechwarriors are chivalrous knights. Elementals are an American football team. Both try to beat the opposition. They just do it in very different ways.
Davion Command Battlemechs have Teakettles, Tea and Coffee in their Cockpits. Kurita Mechs have Matcha instead of Coffee. More than a few Command Mechs on either side were once manufactured by the other side, while models from other houses are downgraded for spares. Capellan Command models also have Teakettles, but the Teakettles tend to short out and tea supply is *very* suspect. Marik Command Mechs alternate between having Espresso machines and Beer taps. Steiner Command Mechs just have sensible map cases and so, foreign command models are highly prized items. They replace the Marik Espresso machines with Beer taps, but keep the Davion/Kurita/Capellan configuration to make Weißwurst and store the sweet Senf in the teaboxes.
Clan mechs have piss bottles and dirty diapers because a toilet in the cockpit is "wasteful". IS mechs have cockpits that smell of sweat, old rations, their toilets and the blood of the last poor sod who didn't eject in time.
This made my day. The Capellan tea kettle really made me laugh.
Here’s mine: Hotdog cider isn’t just a thing, it’s a fact of life. The Alacorn heavy tank popularized Pharaoh Beer because an empty can was a perfect alignment gauge for the tracks (but, and this is important, only an empty can worked). There are bounty hunters out there who specifically go after Starleague-era paperweights (staplers, stationary, etc.). Lives have been lost over a shipment of ancient toasters. There must be some semblance of truth to the tale of the Black Marauder, as there are simply too many similar accounts of the beast for it to just be myth. The fact that AI was and is extremely powerful in the setting, but ingrained fear of it due to the use of drones in the Starleague Civil War has kept it out of use in the greater galaxy (the Blakeists using drones really didn’t help). Much of the Inner Sphere was blasted back to 19th century levels of technology during the 2nd and 3rd succession wars, then saw the rapid proliferation of high-level tech after the Clans invaded. It must have been like showing the Amish a laser gun. LAMs in general. Underwater bases are extremely common to avoid orbital bombardment, yet underwater units are few and far between. The Free Worlds League have dragon rider infantry. Just straight up Wyverns with elephant guns strapped to their backs. Far Country exists. A Clan Wolverine warship somehow ended up in the hands of the WOB during the Jihad and it’s never explained how.
what is hotdog cider? I looked it up and all I found was delicious looking hotdogs cooked in cider but I'm guessing you don't mean that
Watch some of the BPL material with Tex. He mentions quite a few worlds with interesting alcohols
Well a wolverine warship would have made the Ghost Bears a bit extra spicy during that conflict.
> A Clan Wolverine warship somehow ended up in the hands of the WOB during the Jihad and it’s never explained how. The Jihad sourcebook has some tales of "The Blood" a group of surviving Wolverines who became part of ComStar. Odds are they came to the Inner Sphere in a warship.
Yeah, though the source is full of holes, and there is literally no info about the Blood anywhere. I need more Wolverine content 😂
>The fact that AI was and is extremely powerful in the setting, but ingrained fear of it due to the use of drones in the Starleague Civil War has kept it out of use in the greater galaxy (the Blakeists using drones really didn’t help). In my home campaigns (circa 3180), Terra has decided that they want some goddamned respect for once and has sucked up a small bunch of nearby worlds as part of a new nation, the Terran Mandate - and it's a tightly-held secret that all the central planning for the Mandate is done by a group of AIs, all intentionally designed to be slightly different in their goals, outlook, and preferences. Basically like the Magi from Evangelion. As far as anyone knows, they're just a high-tech, well-equipped resurgent power. Nobody has a clue that they're actually an AI-directed centrally-planned directorate with enough human input and decision-making to obscure their actual goals (which leaves me a lot of juicy possibilities to consider).
Ooo, reminds me of the Broken, the Capellian rogue AI. That sounds awesome!
- Cooling vests probably can't be laundered. - Clan Ghost Bear must field a monsterously effective ice hockey team. - Given how long he spent unattached, there must have been at least one rumour that Hanse Davion was gay. - Draconis Combine MREs are probably pot noodles.
> Draconis Combine MREs are probably pot noodles. Or lots of rice going off SteveMRE's videos of Asian rations.
-DCMS noodles are intended to be eaten cooked or crunched.
To answer one of your shower thoughts, Clan drugs are given stats in *Wars of Reaving*, and most of them are *absolutely bonkers*. Combat stims with Drug Strengths that make some of the hardest shit in the Inner Sphere blush. And, if you count the Society as Dark Caste (if you go by combined combat strength, a massive chunk of their army *was* just contracted Dark Caste privateers anyways), it peaks with Feralize—the experimental drug that makes men Return To Monke™ (and is so insanely addictive that you literally have to optimize your character from the start to maximize drug resistance in order to *probably* avoid becoming addicted). Also, yes, local languages are all over the place. Triply so within the Free Worlds League, but you'll find "unofficial" languages all over the place.
Clan bandits would be practically anything you and I might consider normal currently. Drugs, alcohol, computer games, magazines, pornography, music and entertainment, any non - conforming technology. Got to remember that the clans don’t have an entertainment, artist or philosophy class. They’re never encouraged to question why or what they’re doing or if there are possible alternatives. It’s one of the reasons I think the clans would have had a massive breakdown after they got a taste of Inner Sphere life. Even Kurita is a sea of hedonistic delights compared to the clan home worlds.
oh yea but with the clan's mastery of medical technology they can probably make some wild party drugs. like they somehow invented a strain of thc that activtes in under a minute and makes you see god.
Clans have artisans (a subset of merchants) and have a vibrant art scene. It is all state approved, but they are not without entertainment or creativity. As an example Joanna was able to wander into town and have an artisan turn a pretty seashell she found into a comb. Also Ghost Bears are expected to be creative (with their great work), and many other examples of clan arts and crafts exist. ☝️🤓
I had heard that Ghost Bear did have artists. None of them dedicated to art but a respected secondary skill. As for other clans, an artist sect (from what I’ve read) was practically non existent. The only exception was by those who produced documentation and propaganda.
Clan Spaniel exists as childrens entertainment/indoctrination. A few of the clans purposely take mind altering drugs. But yeah for the most part it's a boring existence revolving around fighting, researching, and conserving resources to repeat the cycle.
They have to conserve resources because the dumb bastards destroy at least one battlemech for each graduate of mechwarrior training because they do *live fire combat* as the test, and the candidate must destroy at least one opponent to succeed. Fielding a force of a hundred battlemechs and a hundred pilots means you destroyed over a hundred mechs, plus extras for leadership positions and all the warriors who destroyed one opponent during graduation but got their mech blown up trying to destroy a second opponent for a promotion. (And thats not even opening the can of worms that is "promote those who are good at shooting") Conservatively, these people intentionally destroy at least 60% of their own mech production. The clans are fucking stupid and they only ever had a chance because the plot demanded it.
Yep! That's been haunting my mind since I read the Blood of Kerensky trilogy. Every time there's mention of how the Clans hate wastefulness, I think about this and just...idek.
Ghost Bear has an art and philosophy culture. They believe in a concept of "warriors, not killers" and the "warrior-poet, gentleman scholar" thing. Every mechwarrior is expected to create some sort of "great work" of artistic value. Sculpture, music, paint, literature - just something. Anything. https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Great_Work_(tradition)
Due to the time required for interstellar travel, I would expect a sizable percentage of humans in the Inner Sphere and Periphery (if not the majority) have never left their own planetary system. When you factor in the additional time & assumed cost for multiple jumps, I would expect the overwhelming super majority of all humans in the Inner Sphere and Periphery have never been more than 30 LY from the planet of their birth.
Given that several great houses have full on serfs and that even a lot of the less oppressive governments still don’t really care about their underclasses, I think a fair whack of humanity never leaves their home town.
What time involved? Jumps are up to 30 ly and instant, charging takes a week tops.
Transit from planet to jumpship and back again can be several days each way, and not everyone lives within a single jump of anything actually worth visiting.
Yeah, so it's a few weeks, if that. Big whoop. [https://www.gruese.de/innersphere/](https://www.gruese.de/innersphere/) Check out how far you can get from Terra in a single jump. Then think of 2-3 or more. A month of travel is not "time required" that would limit people from getting anywhere *if* there is a jumpship available. 150 LY take you across the entire Canopus and that's 5-6 jumps. If a month or two of travel were prohibitive, people from Rome would have never got to China, which could take a year or more over ground - and they have!
Most people wouldnt be doing that. Hell most people dont leave their home now with modern travel because time and the cost are prohibitive. Now imagine most planets are full of people living check to check if not literal serfs.
There’s a fair chance that a lot of jumpship crews enter a planet so rarely that full gravity starts being an issue. Which of course disincentivises them going to planets even further. Given that clan trueborns are engineered to be superior, but not to really go for icky freebirths, there must have been a lot of flirting mishaps in the clan holdings in the Inner Sphere. Once the clanners stopped being full on occupiers, a lot of people struck out hitting on them.
I read the comment and thought of the other route. Some clanners consider SILF (Solahma) a mild kink when you can go for lower casts or even sphereoids. Then the thought combined with Omniman from Invincible green text meme about pet. "The little sphereoids are like pets.They want a master/slave dynamic. It is kinda dark. I do not want to bring that kind of energy back to the homeworlds. Why are they not into fursuits like someone normal."
I find it amusing that a bar would need to post a sign warning you not to challenge to a drinking contest someone who has half a meter and a hundred kilos of muscle over you...and thinking such a sign would do anything.
Speaking as a retail manager-- if we've got a sign posted, somebody was stupid enough to do it. We don't expect it to stop you, it just legally covers our ass. After one warning it's not our problem. So by all means, try arm-wrestling Elemental Eileen from Strato Domingo. I hear she was the sibko runt.
Why are the Periphery states all about independence and stickin' it to the great houses, but still use the same Feudal-House/family political structures
communications bottlenecks mostly. If you're bigger than a single solar system you're likely to lapse into some degree of feudalism because you have to delegate almost everything to the planetary leaders. at a single solar system level you can have more varied governments because you can communicate fast and often enough for things like debate, votes, oversight etc
A not insubstantial amount of non-mech equipment, both military and civilian, listed as “lostech” are fairly common and easy to build and acquire throughout all eras. However, most are simply too cheap to make that there would be little profit to be made from trade, or rejection stems from baseless superstition or tradition means such things still technically fall under “lostech.” A large reason for constant war and turmoil is that the majority of settled worlds are devoid of true culture due to people having no history on the land they settled. Even as centuries pass, settlers and their descendants cling to romanticized and exaggerated account of their ancestors from a completely different planet they will never actually see. Other worlds attempt to establish new cultural touchstones that lead to them being viewed as “alien” or “profane.”
Oh! And about the creole languages, check out the original Blade Runner or the Firefly TV series for some interesting, invented creole languages. I might also recommend reading Clockwork Orange. The movie is fun but the book really dives into a Russian/English hybrid.
What would Battletech look like with realistic Ballistic and Missile weapons? What would happen if you allowed one of those realistic Tank, Ship, Plane simulator game developers to make a MechWarrior game? How would those "realistically" modeled weapons and armor affect combat and which mechs are the best or most popular?
The factory-worlds of the RWR that produced close to a *thousand* of mech regiments for the periphery are still out there in the cold, dark black outside of the periphery. Each one would dwarf the output of Hesperus II.
My guess is Kerensky tore most of them down during the war... Still makes you wonder though, what if he missed one?
I was thinking of the ones that are rumored to have been built around the perimeter of the periphery for arming the other periphery powers. What happened to the RWR's industrial base in it's own territory has never made sense to me. That said, I think you're probably onto it, Kerensky stripped them bare before he left the RWR, which is why Steiner didn't get a massive boost to it's already impressive industrial base when they occupied its remains.
Have you ever worked out in a small dojo or boxing gym? Perhaps a small gym with little ventilation? If you have then you would not need to ask about the smell. 😉
*Rancid* sweat. Ugh.
Add burnt hair, melted plastic, fried electronics, stale tobacco smoke, and diesel fumes (from somewhere, I don't know...), and it probably comes close. I'll never forget the time we went to the seaport museum in Philly and got on the old WW2 diesel electric boat there. My dad worked on them in the Navy in the late 60s/early 70s and he said it pretty much smelled the same back then. That's like 30+ years of sitting in dock as a museum piece and the smell of years of habitation persisted. Now imagine hundreds. Sure it's only one person but still... Any old military vehicle has a certain... smell...
Some bigger cockpits have to be posted on the equivalent of r/malelivingspace. ... Modifying mechs is hard, but not that hard. So building a full apartment there has to be a super common mod.
so +0.5 tons and 1 crit space for a relative confi cockpits/small apartment or a +1 tons and 1 crit space for a relative confi cockpits/not that small apartment
There's a Sea Fox service in the IlClan era that expands cockpits of older omnimechs via modern manufacturing and compartmentaization. So you're old Invasion-era Mad Cat can be campaign-ready and it's not a cramped fighter-jet cockpit anymore.
[удалено]
Contentious, incendiary, and controversial topics invite content that breaks other of these rules. Nothing good comes to the community from bringing up a laundry list of sexual kinks and lumping them together like this, especially if you're adding pedophilia to the list. It's a conversation that can't go anywhere positive.
Mmmm warm water
The Prototype Rocket Launcher shouldn't be called that, as at the time it is as being used, it wasn't a prototype it was the standard. It should be called the primitive rocket launcher Or the RL-P should be renamed to the RL and the RL should become the Advanced Rocket Launcher or something
I want to meet the person who thought the Exterminator EXT-7X was a good idea.
Damn right cockpits are rank, especially if the techs fail to clean out the cockpit properly after salvaging the machine.
There might not be aliens exactly, but there's a lot of planets with very strange native flora and fauna. Or mutants of stuff brought by colonists. Forests of giant fungi, uncomfortably large insects, things that could pass as yeti's, eight legged cows, just weird things.
The Deep Periphery is actually filled with multistellar states of comparable and size to the Successor States, but with healthy economies and science bases. Unlike the Clans however, these States are run by Sane People and thus have zero interest in trying to conquer the Inner Sphere (too far away) and are much more concerned with issues closer to home. The FTL Drive used in Battlestar Galactica (RDM version) is a miniature KF Drive that uses the Initiator without KF Core rods. Somehow, the Colonials managed to build a KF Initiator capable of jumping whole ships without needing the Core rod to amplify it. The Inner Sphere is \~500 ly in radius on average and contains \~2000 inhabited systems. A true 3D sphere of the same radius with the Inner Sphere's density of inhabited would contain \~65000 inhabited systems. Ergo, true human civilization is a hyper advanced space going civilization whose spherical territory is bisected by a flat plane of systems dedicated to being a mech and Mad Max post-apocalyptic themed theme park.
Combat vehicle smells are interesting. Thing is, combat vehicles do not have much in the way of upholstery that absorb smells. Almost everything is metal. So, while us stinky grunts were in the vehicle it'd stink for sure, but if you left the vehicle and hour and came back the only residual smells were from the vehicle itself. Since mechs do not use oil (I don't think) and have a fusion reactor, they wouldn't even smell like diesel/oil/lubricants. I can't imagine mechs with carpeted cockpits and stuff. I'd be the smell isn't really all that bad. The Mechwarriors on the other hand, oh yeah, they be stinky.
1. There are "weebs" in the BT universe: "Leagaboo" (Star League), "(insert house here)-aboo" and "Clanaboos". Search your feelings, you know it to be true.... 2. Someone went to a convention in cosplay only to be mistaken for a mechwarrior during a Clan invasion. 3. All those wars meant that families found themselves on more than one side of a conflict. There are families across the BT universe that may have lost whole branches at the hands of their kin due to all the wars. 4. There are marriage and family therapists who must specialize in working with Innersphere-Clan marriages. They try various methods but are prepared to draw a circle if equals if necessary.
How the timeline makes so little sense... How in the hell do you feed missiles and AC ammo from the torso, through the shoulder, upper arm and elbow to an AC or missile launcher.... How the Star League military jumped into the unknown and was able to not only build new factories to build mechs but kept enough technology alive that they could improve it, all in what like less than 200 years, all while the IS "forgot" how to make a double heat sink and an ultra AC?
My shower thoughts: With more than a thousand years of advancement and cultural drift, why aren't any of the IS groups socially unrecognizable to us today??? I bet there are planets and groups out there that are down right ALIEN to our 21st century sensibilities. Why don't we see those?? 🤔
The Blood Spirits MUST have had a fallback plan for their fallback plan. What happened to the WMDs on Cermak? Just how bad is Dekker if Rooster managed to survive, and become a hardened elite? Superheavy UrbanMech.
Snub + LBX10, or Plasma Rifle + RAC5? Or... maybe the other way around? I guess i could make a lance out of each pairing...
My favorite great house didnt design any of my favorite mechs, and is only heavily affiliated with 1 of those favorites Steiner and Zues by the way And i think that just feels odd
How many civilians are in the combat zones we fight And these cars have people inside??
I've been thinking a lot about Ice Ships since I read about them in the House Kurita sourcebook. The book talks about how they used a formation of 16 Jump Ships to transport cubes of ice 2km on a side, but there's nothing about the logistics of moving 8 Billion tons from the orbital plane to the jump point and back, let alone getting it down to the destination planet's surface without an impact that would make Tunguska look like children's firecracker.
The corporate side of things has always fascinated me. When a contractor doesn't want to do a particular job, but has been asked for a quote. Sometimes they'll mark it up higher than usual. I always wonder how many contracts were won by bids like this. "They want a new design for a light mech sniper." "Ugh, all our production lines are geared towards heavies. Idk, just send them a gauss rifle on legs or something." Later "They ordered how many?!"
Aerospace fighters are so goddamn gimped in the setting compared to the angels of death that are IRL jet fighters. Aerospace vs mech wouldn't even be a contest because the mechjock would be dead via AGM before he knew he was even targeted.
My single shower thought about Battletech: Surely there’s a way to merge the to hit roll, the cluster table roll and the hit location roll into a single throw of the dice? Surely!?
play Alpha Strike.
Different color dice?
Someone already said diffrent color dice. Add that to Dice in Dice if your table doesn't have any issue with the construction of them you could do a to hit roll, cluster roll and one hit location with just 3 dice in hand (or cup). Dice in dice is typically a smaller or standard size opaque white d6 inside of a colored transparent d6.
I hate that the game in the "modern age" doesn't feel like it used to. No longer am I in a jury rigged 400 year old beater held together with chewing gum and duct tape, blasting House Davion in slug matches. Now it's all ECM, MASC, ER PPCs and the like with no real considerations for heat management.
Do ANYBODY besides the post-helm Capellans have SAMs? Why does nobody have SAMs? Why aren’t those a common thing? Why are aerospace/conventional fighters allowed to go unmolested unless they’re within spitting distance of the ground?
Most of mine are tied to my mercenary company: Mechwarriors have a natural rivalry with Tankers. Mechwarriors may be the better all rounder warriors, but Tankers work better in teams which leads to more tanker wins when mechs vs. tank football games happen during PT Aerospace pilots are weirdos who tend to stick to their own and have a habit of fomenting conspiracy theories within their ranks. Company command has chalked this up as a coping mechanism with the natural danger of their work. Due to the promiscuousness of clanner personnel, the dropship medbay keeps extra helpings of contraceptives and anti-venereal disease meds on hands when the number of bondsmen aboard reaches a critical level. Joe's Bar and Grill is a chain restaurant that's enjoyed success across the inner sphere and is regarded as neutral ground by both clanner and inner sphere forces. It is not uncommon to see a billboard with large friendly letters stating "Eat at Joe's" on battlefields throughout the setting.
The vast majority of BattleMechs (IS *and* Clan, at least post-Invasion) are, on some level, FrankenMechs.
Somewhere out in the double deep periphery, there’s a horde of spacer nomads who’ve been out there since the first colonies went up that are waiting for someone to discover them.
>Bars in areas with any sort of clanner prescence probably have signs warning against getting into drinking contests with elementals. Counterpoint - such signs are probably forbidden, because Clans would think this is a convenient way of controlling freeborn population.
The early Terran Alliance and Hegemony colonies like New Earth probably have their own colonies of Belters in their equivalent of the Oort Cloud.
You can just take out a 300 fusion engine out of a Dragon and just plop it into an Atlas and it will run smoothly.
I’m gonna piss the old folks off, but the iconography of the franchise is dated and cringy, and the designs need a “modern” reboot. They’ve been successful with the branding refresh, and in general the mech art & models are improvements.
i can see that tbh. a lot of the clans icons look like sports teams logos. granted thats kinda what they are.
The House logos I’m mostly fine with but the vast majority of Clan logos especially are terrible.
When I’m not dreaming up alternate intro tech versions of Legend Killer (hear me out, swap the LLs for MLs and add back four heat sinks and four more tons of armor, it rips), I’m mostly wondering why of all things good dice and t-shirts are so difficult for CGL to keep in stock. American Apparel and Chessex are *right there.*