/btg/ Battletech General!

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>>51873375

Nova Cats, Cloud Cobras, Goliath Scorpions were all the same spiritual bullshit.

>mfw one of them had a literally jewish cluster with a star of david and everything

>>51873344
>>>51873375
>What exactly is the difference between the Nova Cats and the Goliath Scorpions? Both clans with mystical bullshit, lover their accurate energy weapons, both Wardens...

They honestly should have been a fairly large single Clan, with various internal factions based on slightly different mystic ideas, strong wardens vs moderate crusaders, trying to convert other Clanners or not, etc.

If you're really trying to pare down on Clans, you could also include Cloud Cobra in the mix, and possibly some Fire Mandrill, and have little clusters of Goliath Cloud Cats following different Seekers, visionaries, etc. and competing both internally and externally.

>>51873244

Don't a lot of the Clan machines have some crappy heat management and not just those of Nova Cat origin?

>>51873441
Technically you forgot the Coyotes too

GS - drug-induced visions
CC - religious people
NC - spiritually based on dreams and visions
C - traditions inspired by North American natives

>>51873441
Well the Cloud Cobras were explicitly divided into different groups based around religions, so that's not too weird.

Hey does anyone remember that eurosite that had alt minis?

>guys,no matter how little sense it makes, we need a religious clan
>dont we have like, two of them already?
>we NEED religious clan?
>okay boss, what religion?
>uhhh, all of them

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Cloud_Cobra#Culture

>>51873526

of course, another shitty background clan no one gives a shit about I literally forgot that they existed alongside with the burrocks

wait a second, wasnt the burrocks also religious?

>Anasaz - Inspired by an ancient Terran civilization, the Anasaz Cloister practice ancestor worship and believe the Supreme Being is a triumvirate, composed of Aleksandr Kerensky, his son Nicholas and the Way.

lel crazy tube-babbies

>>51873441
I mean, not *quite*
Nova cats were crazy hippies operating from a book on "indian spiritualism" they found in a collage book store for two bucks
The goliath scorpions are similar, except they bought theirs at a Grateful Dead concert
The cloud cobras are a bunch of retards trying to into abrahamic religion despite the fact that literally everything about the clan way of life is maximum haram by every standard they claim to follow

>>51873541
You're talking about the Russian site that sells MWO minis?

>>51873574
Russian you say. Got a link?

>I only just realized that MASC rolls only increase on consecutive uses, not total uses

Well I feel dumb now

>>51873547
>wait a second, wasnt the burrocks also religious?
No

>>51873526

Too bad the Wolverines took that whole injun thing with the Minnesota Tribe.

You'd think a clanner with a boner for redskins would take MARTIAL things from their culture, braves, dog warriors, staking their cloaks to the ground, raiding, spirits hunts and the like, not taking drugs and staring in the sun till you hallucinate.

The fucking CONCEPT of a religious clan irks me in every possible way. Some mysticsm like the Nova Cats did it, sure, but full blown religion and shit? SEVERAL of them?

I just want to go through all these background clans and retcon/rewrite them or at the very least give them something to do. Look at the Hells Horses, great combined arms concept, great decals, they do fucking nothing at all except getting shat on in the Great Refusal by literal nobodies.

>>51873600
http://warhansa.com/index.php/katalog/robomechs.html

>>51873499
Oh, and the Cloud Cobras have the Rossei Cloister which is apparently based on the Nova Cat mystic traditions.

I'm not too sure how the Cloisters are supposed to work, since they apparently have followers in other Clans.

>>51873547
>>51873526
Yeah the Coyotes have vision quests too

Although from the little I know about them, they don't really give a fuck and are more into science and shit, while the other clans are genuinely into the spirituality.

>>51873633

Yeah right, I had to go and check it. Burrcucks are also completely ridiculous, cucked and humiliated since their inception, literally written just to be a background and a doormat.

>Clan Burrock was assigned to Dagda during Operation Klondike with its first Cluster primarily featuring heavy and assault 'Mechs and Aerospace Fighters, while its single vehicle Star contained light and agile scout vehicles.[2] On Dagda the Burrocks primarily fought on the continent of Dratha, operating alongside Clan Widowmaker. Their overall performance was slow and steady, and while this met Kerensky's expectations he still preferred to rely upon other forces for the final operation on Dagda. As a result, Clan Burrock was sidelined during the final operation of the Pentagon campaign, securing the area around the Black Brian while Clans Wolf and Jade Falcon assaulted the fortress itself.

Also,

>totem
>a fucking burrowing cockroach

>>51873733
Shame, too, because their whole "Don't mind these dark castes" thing is interesting. And could have had a lot more.

Definitely need a new totem animal and name, though.

>>51873815
Nuclear Roach, the only Homeworld Clan worth to survived the WoB cleanse

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>>51872564
>>51872568
>>51872573


MY BIRD BROTHERS!

>>51873891
>FWL motto
>not "me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousins, me and my cousins against the world"

>>51873525

Depends on the machine.

>>51873655
Too bad the Wolverines took that whole injun thing with the Minnesota Tribe.

lol they're barely known

And nothing about them was Indian.

>>51874082
>Wolverines
>barely known

They are literally behind every little thing happening in Battletech since 2800s

Comstar? WOLVERINES
Clan Invasion? WOLVERINES
Jihad? WOLVERINES
Wolverines? WOLVERINES

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>clans in charge of coming up with decent insignias for their galaxies

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>this is just screaming Snow Raven!

>>51873993

There's a difference between the official motto and the unofficial motto.

>>51874400

We Kappa Galaxy now, Sibkin.

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>M.O.D.O.K. joins the clans

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>UGGA, ME ROCKWARRIOR

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>a fucking turd

>>51873733
>Burrcucks are also completely ridiculous, cucked and humiliated since their inception, literally written just to be a background and a doormat.

It's no more than that waste of a faction and their scuttling fanbase deserve.

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>>51874384
Steel Viper Omega galaxy is God tier, though

>>51873815
I dunno, at least their totem was unique. Not a mammal, bird or snake.

>>51874298
You said it yourself. Their schtick is conspiracy theory crap, not Indians.

>>51874565
Yeah I have no objection to it being some sort of insect-crustacean-thing, but I suspect part of the reason they struggled as a faction is because "Burrock" is utterly forgettable compared to Steel Viper or Smoke Jaguar.

>>51874604
>Steel Viper

Now THERE is a pointless clan.

Reposting this here.
>>51874637
>I'm confused. Do you just...not want to? Or do you not know the rules for stuff like VSPs and MMLs?
I know the rules (though what is VSP the acronym for?) It's more that every time I start looking through the TROs/record sheets I get overwhelmed by the sheer choices and retreat back into the mechs I know best.

>>51874604
I don't think Burrock was ever really even given a chance for fluff. We had Wolf, Falcon and Jaguar hogging the limelight. I honestly don't even remember anything being mentioned about the Burrocks before we were told they're being absorbed.

>>51874444
>>51874467
Whose are these?

>>51874693

Like half of the clans never did anything and barely even got mentioned. The Goliath Scorpions, Blood Spirits,Cloud Cobras, Hell's Horses Coyotes and Fire Mandrills surprised everyone by actually existing, Its a shame because some of them actually had a pretty nice theme or schtick going on. I really wanted to see more eighties-disco Hell's Horses and their combined arms warfare or some fire themed infighting-samurai Fire Mandrills

>>51874565

Widowmaker could have served that role but they were absorbed as well, Only the original 4 invasion clans and the Adders are allowed to do anything

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>>51874470
>their scuttling fanbase

>>51874744

Coyote

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On the subject of Clan Burrock, in the original fluff (Invading Clans) only Clan Nova Cat was known for having a founder not from the SLDF.

Looking back at the Operation Klondike Historical the writers (CGL?) had the Burrock founders also be Rim Worlders now.

>>51874825

Wow, they don't miss any opportunity to shit on them. Now I really can't decide who had it the worst, Blood Spirits, Burrocks or Wolverines.

The Clans are laughable at best. . . I can buy into the SLDF returning to wreck havoc on the Inner Sphere, but as a unified, twisted version of itself, bent on the annihilation of the Great Houses that destroyed the Star League. Not so much with the poorly written Clan concept that now plagues battletech, and we're stuck with.

>>51874944

They were supposed to be Nicholas' magical realm gone too far all along. A twisted, inhumane society where duplicitous "honor" rules but only when its convenient, otherwise its a brutal cult of the warrior. It was only stable till they were isolated to shit on eachother.

Also, the Annihilation of the Wolverines and the semi-exile of the Blood Spirits show how much of a shithead Nicholas and the clans were the get to, they even used a honorable SLDF remnant ally as meat shields and killed them all when they became expedient.

Its such a shame Operation Bulldog didnt go all the way through and bombarded Strana Mechty from space.

>>51874999
Yep. Already know about the lore, but, frankly it was poorly written and stupid. They could have done it so much better. And, I agree with you on Operation Bulldog.

>>51875067
>They could have done it so much better
How so?

>>51875067

No, it was written perfectly, They got exactly what they wanted. You are not supposed to agree with or root for the clans.

Speaking of ded clans, out of the WoR losses, which one do you guys think would have been the most interesting as a flee-to-the-sphere clan?

>>51875143
Fire Mandrills would have been a fun addition to the clan protectorate

>>51874942
Not so much shitting on them but on the fluff. I mean how hard is it to keep tabs on the origins of the Clan founders?

They literally could have just reviewed the first paragraph or two of each Clan in Invading Clans.

>>51875143
Blood Spirits. Could probably stick them in former Rim Worlds space and have them slowly come out of their isolationist shell.

Or for maximum tsundere action have them end up in the Concordat.

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>>51875135
I don't know man, I kind of think their society would ideal for us. Think about it, a place for everyone and an orderly society. No racism , no sexism, no gender identity politics, etc. Plus their genetics programs. We could breed out undesirable traits and diseases. Sure they aren't perfect but then no society is. And we'd still have the Chatterweb to shitpost.

As follow up questions, where would you put them, and how do you think their new neighbors and situation would change them?

>>51875256

weak bait

>>51875256
Freebirth get off the Chatterweb! This is for Trueborn only!

>>51875178

>I mean how hard is it to keep tabs on the origins of the Clan founders?

The problem is that you expected them to do *any* fact checking. At all. Or even give a shit about internal consistency.

Shut up and buy a copy of Touring the Stars: Assfuck Nowhere World, another exciting supplement about a dead planet that was irrelevant before it got killed. We had to increase the price to $9.99 though.

>>51875225
>Or for maximum tsundere action have them end up in the Concordat.
>I-I just helping you invade the Pleiades because I h-hate the great houses
>I-it's not like I like you or anything
>S-stravag

>>51875143
Clan Crushed Spirits, but with Clan Blazing Ape a very close second

Does anyone know if there design software for Support Vehicles? I'm wanting to design a couple of submersibles (on missile, the other a carrier), The construction rules seem to be way too complicated then I think they need to be. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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>>51874479

Uzumaki!

So which is the most efficient method of organization.

The Inner Sphere Regiment or the Clan Cluster?

>>51876847

Davion RCTs because the Suns can do no wrong.

>>51876847
Inner Sphere: Base 4
Clans: Base 5
Comstar/WoB: Base 6

>>51876002
>Does anyone know if there design software for Support Vehicles?
I am sorry that I must inform you that there is not and will quite probably never be.

>>51876847
SLDF standard regimental scheme the Inner Sphere follows.

The Davion RCT >>51876868 helps once you get out of the Starl League era Big Ole Formations.

Clan clusters are fine for an insular dueling culture. Once the tech gap is closed you end up having to fight as entire galaxies.

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So I see the Falcons took both Steiner BattleMaster factories on Pandora and Twycross.

Did House Steiner get production on it started anywhere else?

>>51874690
VSPs are Variable-Speed Pulse Lasers.

>>51877334

J.B. BattleMechs, Goldenboro after 3053.

>>51875225
Stop shilling this stupid fucking idea

>>51877781

I guess it's marginally more likely that they'd unite with the faction that claims to be the last true surviving element of the SLDF than that they'd ally with the Suns, so there's that.

>>51877851
Just damn tired of >muh tsundere

>>51877781
Unless he's selling some kind of factional VN where you play as the TC and waifu anthropomorphic factions with the Spirits as the tsundre route, he's not shilling anything.
actually, a VN with anthropomorphic faction girls would be fucking hilarious, I'd play it. Maybe the girls could be clans and the player is nicky k
Also, why so mad?

>>51877909
That was the second time it was mentioned since it was first brought up four threads ago.

>>51875225
>Rim World space
No stay away from that shit it's the last under-defined frontier left in meaningful space in the whole of the Inner Sphere. All those Amaris caches and secret factory worlds... it's a damn playground and I'd rather it stay that way.

If anything, blood spirit would be the shy girl who's afraid to admit her feelings for fear of being rejected again, not tsundere

>>51877851
>I guess it's marginally more likely that they'd unite with the faction that claims to be the last true surviving element of the SLDF than that they'd ally with the Suns, so there's that.
There's at least precident in the form of like a score of SLDF (brigades?) and about a dozen fucking WarShips defecting from the SLDF to the TC in the '65 uprising
And besides, they hated the capellans almost as much and look what happened there
Of course the funny thing would be that even with the Blood Spirits, the TC would STILL have less clantech than the suns by the DA considering how raggedy-assed the spirits were

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>/btg/ last thread
>mfw Ivanova has all the green drazi switch to purple at the end of the episode
PURPLE BURD STRONK

>>51876877
IS is really more 3. Only at the Platoon/Lance level do they use 4-unit elements.

Given the relativity small size of armies in Battletech the flexibility of breaking down into comparatively small sub-units is reasonable. 3 lances with 4 'mechs each allows a company to undertake 3 missions at once, while a binary with two stars of 5 'mechs each can only undertake 2 missions at once.

>>51874999
I can't help but think kicking the warrior class off their most important manufacturing world, seizing it and then fighting over who gets to loot the fuck out of it would have been more fitting and humiliating.

>Mad Cat factory ripped up and shipped back to Luthrin. By 3070 all the new ones have HORUBU DRAGON on them.

>And they scratch out "TIMBER WOLF FACTORY" to write "MAD CAT"

>>51878753

To be honest, after Tukayyid, Huntress and Strana Mechty the clans should have just fucking disbanded. Their entire raison d'être, their sole purpose, their biggest focus was war. And they sucked at it. They showed how they cant conduct a proper invasion, they showed how MUH HONOR hamstrings them at every turn and then they showed how the IS soldiers are actually better warriors too and all the advantages the clans had was because of better technology. Victor showing up and BTFOing all the crusaders should have caused a huge crisis and absoute desperation about the clan wa s.

>>51877941
It's been a Blood Spirit meme for years

Imagine this:
>SLDF flees with Kerensky
>finds the Pentagon Worlds and settles the Homeworlds as normal
>Nikky never happens; instead he's sane and keeps everyone unified as the SLRF (Star League Reunification Force)
>years go by as they scrape and scrimp and build
>map the surrounding systems
>eventually attack Nueva Castille and subjugate it
>get more resources and build more
>decades later invade the Hanseatic League
>you see where this is going
>in 3049 the SLRF arrives on The Rock
>as a unified force, they blitz through the Wrasslehogs and push for Terra
>nobody can stop the tide because the Inner Sphere is too fractured
>panic overtakes everyone and they try to unify to repel the invaders
>Terra is taken in late 3062
Where do we go from here?

>>51879183

They actually do what Kerensky bitched out of doing and restore the Star League over House troops.They probably elevante some descendant of Kerensky as First Lord and offer lenient peace treaties to the successor states, maybe after balkanizing them a bit.

The funniest thing is, the clans could have easily just crushed the Inner Shere if they had just brought all the clans along the ride Why not invade with all 17 extant clans instead of 4 and 2 reserve? What was their reasoning?

>>51879244
>Why not invade with all 17 extant clans instead of 4 and 2 reserve? What was their reasoning?
Muh Honor

>>51879183
>30 worlds, most of them minimally habitable by humans.
>Providing enough people to subjugate 2000 inhabited worlds, many of them terrformed for more then a century.

There were never enough clanners to provide enough warm bodies to take over the inner sphere.

>>51879272

But that wasnt even honorable, just stupid. It directly goes again Kerensky's famous quote"we all return we shall" or whatever and locked out most of the clans out of even competing to be the ilClan. Why didnt the other clans just call for the grand council vote about it?

>>51879293

Bodies don't matter. All they had to do was drive by with Warship squadrons, demand a surrender, and glass the entire planet except for the square mile around the HPG (so word can get out) if they refuse to surrender.

After the first 50 or so worlds, the "war" would be over.

There's no reason at all that the clans can't take over the entire Inner Sphere using this; there's not a damn thing the entire Successor States working together could do to stop it.

>>51879244
>>51879272

A bunch of clans didn't want to invade and considered it a terrible idea. They forced strong limits on the invasion as a condition of allowing it at all.

>>51879335

Facts are no defense against complaining that the Clans are stupid.

>>51879332

>Weapons required to kill a Warship:

>1 fusion warhead

Yeah, no. They'd burn the Aries Convention and the clans would be ashes. If the clanners switched to using nukes to attack worlds they wouldn't get the great powers to surrender. They have vastly more experience in that kind of fighting in the Bad Old Days and might not fight like that anymore but they sure as fuck remember how.

Second reason that's stupid..

>Ghost Bears have the largest warship fleet

>They'd burn the Smoke Jags and Green Burds for trying.

>>51879293

Guess people would be more conductive to the mythical SLDF returning and reinstating the Star League than a bunch of tribals with animal mascots screaming about muh honor. Striking together and not actively fighting eachother would mean they might have a shot at successfully blitzing to Terra and taking Tharkad and Luthien in the process.

It could be a space WW2 if handled well.


>>51879339

>dayum, it looks like Operation REVIVAL is a thing, those crusaders are going to invade no matter what and one of them will be the ilClan, the clan of clans, the highest honor achieveable
>me? competing in that naaah dude, we jus chillin
>why would we want to protect the inner sphere as wardens or actually take place of the promised return?

Accurate representation of home clans. The pussy wardens even bitched out of a great refusal aganist the crusaders themselves. It just show how duplicitous and stupid clan "honor" actually is.

>>51879369
Also the Cobras, Ravens, and Cats are all strongly warden and have big fleets

>>51879332

>doing the EXACT thing that would make everyone unite aganist them

Because it worked out so fell for the jags, right? Bombarding ONE city eventually marked them for Annihilation.

>>51879369
>>Weapons required to kill a Warship:
>1 fusion warhead
>Yeah, no

That will work for about 1 month, until word gets around, and then the Clans will just start using pirate points to jump in and atomize everything in orbit.

What are the Successor States going to use to launch their nukes? Capital missiles don't exist for them until the mid-3050s. They can use, at best, massed ASF attacks with underwing ordnance, which the Clanners can just <run away> from since they have massively higher fuel reserves and use their superior ASFs to attrit the IS ASFs to nothingness and run them out of fuel.

You seem to be operating under the delusion that the IS can somehow magically know when and where the Clans are going to attack next and mass nuke-capable units at both the nadir and zenith jump points, plus blanket the system. It's a delusion. Get over it.

>oh God it's another clan glassturbstion episode
Face facts, if FASA had intended for WarShips to actually matter in the invasion, the IS would have recovered/had them all along
Any form of
BUT WHAT IF X DID Y THAT'S AGAINST WHAT THE WRITERS SET CONDITIONS TO BE LIKE BUT THE OTHER SIDE DOESN'T GET THE SAME CONSIDERATIONS
fanfiction is pure trash and y'all should be ashamed. You'll are straight out Medron Pryde but the Pryde is a bloodname this time

>>51879397

Yeah, 13 years later.

By the time the IS can figure out what's happening, have their leaders meet up, get joint production and operation protocols up and running, and have built enough of a production run to give them a chance in hell, the Clanners will have conquered or completely wiped out everything "north" of Terra at a minimum. With LF batteries, and all 17 Clans attacking with full Warship bombardment as the <first> option, they'd be taking 60-90 light-years worth of "depth" per month. The IS is looking at 2 months to get the word out, a month to arrange meetings, a month to set up joint protocols at BEST, and 6-10 months of dedicated production. At a bare minimum time and bare minimum advance distance (9 months at 60 LY/month), that's a 540 light-year penetration of the IS, which is basically from The Rock all the way to Terra.

With 17 Clans and no holds barred SLDF-level warship deployment, the IS is completely, irretrievably, fucked. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Warrior caste. It has everything to do with "Warships Win" and the IS has no reasonable counter, and won't until the late 3050s (in canon).

>>51879411

And the MUH HONOR clanners would be willing to wage total war when they even refused to attack with all their forces in actual lore. And they would magically know all the pirate jumps the in the IS. And they would be magically untouchable, even aganist the ComGuards massive fucking naval reserve they dont even know about.

>>51879432
>if FASA had intended for WarShips to actually matter in the invasion

Face facts, we aren't talking about that. We're talking about what the Clans are actually capable of in a setting <where the writers let the Clans actually do everything they're capable of>

The IS can do likewise, btw. But they don't have a viable answer for mass Warship deployment. Which is also why the writers didn't want the Clan warships to matter during the invasion, because the IS has no counter to it. Which was the right call for the writers back then. But that's not what we're talking about NOW.

>>51879411
>I forgot dropships were a thing.

Clanners don't have a perfect plot on pirate jump points of the inner sphere, but even close pirate points tend to be 12 hours or more from inhabited worlds..

And once you jump in you can't leave for a week.

And the clock doesn't start on that week until you stop accelerating and deploy the sail.

>>51879487

Did you miss out the entire point of clan culture? They even bid away their ground advantage for the gudfite and muh honor, they would never wage total war.

This is either just brainless wank or shitposting.

>>51879508
>where the writers let the Clans actually do everything they're capable of
Well, if we're doing that, tossing FASAnomics out the window makes equal sense, because it made equally little sense to MUH HUNOR MAGIC
The clans should have been facing tens of thousands of 2300s-style WarShips in space and a couple trillion infantry on the ground, plus millions of ASFs and nukes in the air
Hell, if we're playing this faggot game, why not have the IS delivering KKV ROCKS FALL EVERYBODY DIES on every one of the clan homeworlds once they recover a single nav database from a ded.JumpShip

Hell, if you're willing to play your game to the logical conclusion, why wasn't humanity exterminated by le fractional-C rocks as soon as the first intersteller war or at the most the end of the Reunification War? A bunch of butthurt peripheryfags with a single DS+JS combo could end human civilization on sheer spite if they felt like it, with no possible prevention.

>>51879411
Space combat is weird in BT because of how FTL works.

If you jump in you are stuck there, but the other guy can call for help, maybe days before you can get to the planet. If he does then every ship the opposing force has within 50 light years can jump in before you can leave, arriving within a day of you.

If those ships are all loaded down with hardcore dropships loaded for bear, you are going to have a bad time.

Especially if you are a dumbass with a warship because those have a gigantic disadvantage in that they leave the jump point to try to go fuck up a planet, and to leave have to stop, change course and travel all the way back to a jump point. (No FTL from anywhere else).

>>51879490
>even aganist the ComGuards massive fucking naval reserve they dont even know about.

Not to jump in to the IS wanking, Clan wanking, and WarShip wanking...but the ComGuard reserve fleet was more or less in mothballs until relatively late in the Clan Invasion, and it didn't really get significantly operational until 3055 or thereabouts.

Additionally, most of the ComGuard Fleet is escort-class vessels: Lola IIIs and Essexes. There's a couple of Aegis's, a Congress, and a Cameron. The Dante and Suffren WarShips which stiffen the fleet arm don't come online until the very late 3050's and early 3060's. At the absolute most, they have 16 ships (the 3062-era list, minus the stuff the ComGuard built in the 3050's).

The Clans have ~260 WarShips. They aren't evenly distributed between the 17 Clans, but assuming they are, that's about 15 WarShips per Clan, and in the hypothetical, all the Clans are invading, so we're going to see basically all the WarShips. So the ComGuard Fleet is a match for about 1 Clan, ignoring the fact that the Clans have WarShip classes which can take on 4-5 ComGuard WarShips and win *easily*.

>it's probably worth discussing whether we're talking about tabletop capability or fluff. Because in the fluff, the WarShips *were* unstoppable when they were used; only Tyra Miraborg's suicide run into the bridge actually even slightly inconvenienced a Clan WarShip. Tabletop rules, of course, are totally different and the IS might have a chance if those are the ground rules of the discussion.

>>51879612
>IS has literally zero ships other than Cuckstar
>Clans have 260

Speaking of things which are fucking idiotic...

>>51879645
>Speaking of things which are fucking idiotic
FASAnomics SON

What the Clan Invasion *should* have been is extremely skilled soldiers with the Star League way of war and Star League tech trying to make way against the more technologically advanced and numerous but disorganized and small-scale Inner Sphere forces.

>>51879645
Warships are, because of how FTL works in BT, sort of stupid and it's a solid idea to just discontinue them. If you build a K/F drive you are better putting it on a jumpship, and if you need something to fight in space you can always just build a dropship.

>>51879645
When one side has a lot of the fleet that the SLDF left with, and the other fought two Succession Wars where the name of the game was "geek the warship", you're damn right the IS won't have any capital ships.

>>51879001
Been there. Done that. It was called the Wars of Reaving, anon.

>>51879670
By small-scale I mean "used to operating at the lance and company level most of the time"

>>51879673
>you're damn right the IS won't have any capital ships.
Aside from the insoluble question of "if 2300 terra could into hundreds of warships on it's own, why can't a 2800 planet of a few billion do the same"

>>51879608
>Hell, if you're willing to play your game to the logical conclusion, why wasn't humanity exterminated by le fractional-C rocks as soon as the first intersteller war or at the most the end of the Reunification War?

I like the way you think. Clearly, the entire BattleTech universe should be an empty space devoid of life, where players get together and just stare at each other over a couple of Moonscape hexmaps with no active units because everyone's already dead.

It's the only reasonable answer.

>>51879526

The "pirate point" is a a mostly-dumb argument (it's feasible that many non-standard jump points are cyclical due to orbital mechanics, and thus would exist in SLDF navicomputers), but you're making a mistake in terms of how jump mechanics work. Drives *can* be charged via the ship engines, Clan WarShips can use their large fuel reserves to simply retrograde away from anything they feel like while they charge their drives, and on top of that, you're neglecting the presence of L-F batteries completely.

>>51879645

Still not as retarded as assuming the clans would ever break zellbrigen so hard and conduct total war. Thats as unclanlike as it gets. Might as well suck a couple freebirth cocks and praise Amaris and Clan Wolverine while doing it.

>>51879699
HOLY SHROUD and ROM. I ain't gotta explain shit. Go back to Helm or Glengarry and farm dirt.

>>51879538
>Did you miss out the entire point of clan culture?

In fairness, it looks like the original hypothetical was, "what if the Clans didn't develop their honor culture and invaded the IS with no honor rules, en masse, and were willing to exploit their technology advantage to the fullest?" Clan culture isn't in keeping with the hypothetical at all.

IMO, the IS could eventually stop the hypothetical Full Clan Balls-Out Invasion. Probably a third of the IS would be an outright smoking ruin, because until the IS gets desperate enough to deploy nuclear-loaded DropShips en masse in systems they think the Clans will hit next, and are able to convince all those crews to go on low-percentage suicide runs (and this will NOT be their first response, or even their 5th or 6th), there ISN'T a lot they can do against fluff-accurate WarShips piloted by people with no ethical concerns in the way of winning.

Sheer numbers wins the war for the IS. But basically every major state but St Ives and CapCon will be shattered by the end (since they're on the opposite end of the IS). With 17 Clans invading, the invasion corridor will end up being much larger. Dracs, FRR, and Lyrans are shattered, guaranteed. The Davions and FWL could be, depending on how far to the "sides" the invasion spreads. Whether that happens would require exploring the hypothetical in detail. But the CapCon and St Ives will likely survive by sheer happenstance of stellar geography.

>>51879699
Because BT warships are a terrible idea if someone starts throwing nukes around. They vanish into a cloud of gas and take with them the wealth of nations.

Dropships and Jumpships can do everything a Warship can, without the cost.

>>51879645

its fasanomics. Same exact reason why a hundred or so robots count as an amazingly huge force to invade a single planet of billions.

>>51879610
Or you adjust your course and slingshot around the planet to get to another jump point or just the edge of the system, out of the gravity well.

Takes days or weeks, but you're ahead of your pursuers, can hotload the jump battery from your fusion reactor (or just use the LF-battery many warships have anyway) and get the hell out with fresh intel and meticulously updated maps.

Not saying it's a risk-free plan, you'll have to tangle with the planetary ASFs if they decide to put up a fight, but then again you wouldn't have come to this hood if you weren't sure you could handle it.

>>51879759
>Because BT warships are a terrible idea if someone starts throwing nukes around.

Except people don't do that. Why doesn't matter. People in Battletech don't, and you need to deal with that. The only time massed nukes come out is at the last ditch, not the first.

if you can't accept that, you have no place in this conversation.

>>51879717
>I like the way you think. Clearly, the entire BattleTech universe should be an empty space devoid of life, where players get together and just stare at each other over a couple of Moonscape hexmaps with no active units because everyone's already dead.
>It's the only reasonable answer.
So-called ""hard sci-fi""fags are a blight on every game they venture out of spacebattles and reddit to ruin with their autism, and the only thing shuts them up is doing what they do but riding it one stop past masturbation to fuck-you-geddon

On an unrelated note, in your 50/50 space/mech AU, what ideas do you have about the various great house naval design philosophies?

>>51879673
That's another stupid thing. The SLDF should have been strong enough to beat any two houses and hold off a third. Not put a ship over literally every planet that can beat any ship the Houses have.

Fellow anons, I just had a moment of realisation, followed by a minute of research:

Marching Through Georgia, publication date 1988
Technical Readout 3050, publication date 1990

I submit the thought that the Clans were loosely based on the Draka. Discuss.

>>51879778
>People don't do that.

That's literally why there are no warships in the inner sphere, in the face of total war they are an expensive and pointless luxury.

If we are asking "how would warships do in total war?" then we sort of already have the answer from the succession wars.

>>51879791

Hard-sci fi space combat is actually pretty great. Its two ships across a star system desperately trying to avoid detection and evade or intercept eachothers missiles over a course of days or even weeks before a single errant caress dissolves them into an expanding cloud of cas and microscipic fragments. Too bad its terrible to mix it with sci-fi.


>>51879816

They were mongols from the get to.

>>51879746
That is to say, arbitrary magic nonsense effects the IS but not the clans because metagame shit
I still don't see any reason beyond masturbation where one side gets to shed metagame nonsense but the other doesn't

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>51879812
Yes, but the original fluff mentioned that the Star League could BTFO the entire IS. It's stupid, kind of. I do love that the invasion of Terra basically turns into a gigantic clusterfuck of ships at the end, because CASPARs are best.

>51879841
>one set of factions has one faction dedicated to fucking the rest of its fellows over, all while there's a massive interstellar war happening
>the other just descends into civil war leaving caches of warships alone because they would be too time consuming to reactivate during a war

You get no (you)s. This is tired bait.

>>51879759
>>51879778
>>51879829

Warships dont mattter in your regular low-intensity succession war because they are expensive as fuck to build and maintain and cant really do shit with them without committing war crimes that would get you Interdicted or total warred by all the other factions.

Warships dont matter in a total war because they are expensive as fuck to build and maintain and its so much cheaper to destroy them by nukes they are essentially worthless.

>>51879841

Going by the same levels of wank IS warships appear over Strana Mechty when Nick is still busy playing magical realm with his 50-warrior clans,.

>>51879753
>But the CapCon and St Ives will likely survive by sheer happenstance of stellar geography.

Fucking Xin Sheng fiat REEEEEEEEE

>>51879791

>LC
Heavy focus on massive dreadnoughts, with a weakness in escort craft. Should steamroll everyone, but their military tends to being absurdly incompetent and throwing away huge numbers of massive ships.

>DC
Mix of heavy battleships and a selection of solid escorts. A focus on energy weapons tends to see them running hot, and a moderate weakness in synergy between craft because of a preference on ships being able to fight one-on-one duels.

>FS
Cannon armed cruisers should not be as effective as they are, but they always seem to come out ahead.

>CC
Electronic warfare escorts and long ranged missile battleships at what people think of first, but their ships are generally quite solid. Crazy leaders and always fighting the lucky bastard FS hurts the fleet until they get a clever oriental stereotype to Just As Planned things for them.

>FWL
It's all trash.

>>51879917
But purple bird fighter carriers shit all over everyone else

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>>51879791

I'm thinking I'm going to keep that quote about hard sci-fi. I mean, if we're going to insist on talking about hard sci-fi for the WarShips, why not for the Mechs too? Pic related.

>what ideas do you have about the various great house naval design philosophies?

As I've said before, the Great Houses are fairly similar in their philosophies. It's similar to the breakdown between ship construction philosophies between the great powers circa WW1.
>Davion
Speedy, lighter-than-average armor and SI, with an emphasis on long-range bracketed gun power canted to the broadside. Basically, use your speed to control the range, turn to the broadside, and level somebody. Average AAA, average numbers of parasite craft and on-board ASFs. Very few dedicated carriers, somewhat high cargo fractions.

>FWL
Purple Burd ships are canted to rear armor, and tend to mount more-than-average capital missiles. They're willing to use retrograde movement and exploit bearings-only missile launches more than other factions do. Their non-missile weapon mounts tend toward medium-and-short range heavy-caliber weapons; if they have to close in, they want to hit as hard as possible. Average AAA, very few dedicated carriers, normal ships include above-average on-board fighter complements.

>cont

>>51879885
>Going by the same levels of wank IS warships appear over Strana Mechty when Nick is still busy playing magical realm with his 50-warrior clans,.
Pretty much
If we're doing that, the OA leverages neutrality to assemble ten thousand carriers with a million nuclear ASFs, hunts down and murders the would-be clans, and returns to ensure that every single family in known space gets a hundred and sixty acres of really good farmland, a church and the right to marry their cousins and siblings, thus ensuring eternal peace

>>51879973
>cont


>Dracs
Offence and maneuver. Dracs will skimp on armor and SI in order to attack. They'll tend to front-cant their armor and weapon loads; they acknowledge broadside battles happen but prefer to attack and get in relatively close where their superior maneuverability allows them to more accurately attack damaged sections. They successfully use bracketing fire on forward weapon mounts in order to increase accuracy while boring in on "evasive movement". Very poor AAA, always include dedicated large carriers in their formations instead of a 4th/8th capital ship, and lots of ASFs.

>Lyrans
Bricks in space. "A ship's primary purpose is to remain afloat." Lyran ships will tend to skimp on bracketing gunpower (2-gun bays instead of 3+ gun bays), and will err more on the side of close-range engagements (meaning that they're optimized for medium/long-range brackets instead of long/extreme). Extremely good AAA, but low numbers of parasite craft and an average number of dedicated carriers which sacrifice fighter support structure (fuel/cargo/ammo stores) for more armor/guns. Lyran ships in general have very short logistical legs.

>Cappies
Fleet is largely split between lightly armored, fast, extreme-range-heavy gunships, and close-range fast gunboats with very heavy armor/SI and very few weapon mounts. Everything mounts Naval C3 (which is used in small numbers by other factions but the Cappies LOVE it). Vulnerable to defeat in detail. Average AAA, above-average number of parasite craft with a heavy emphasis toward assault ships intended as fleet screening elements. Non-carriers have few fighters. Lots of smallish dedicated carriers (field 2 small CVs where everyone else fields 1 large one); if a normal CV airgroup is 100 aircraft, a Capellan airgroup is ~60.

>Periphery
Generally use the philosophies of a nearby Great House which doesn't directly border them. Also, generally take what they can get.

>>51879812

Well, it was. Deal.

>>51879900

I know, right?

Not my fault the Clans are on the other side of the IS, though. Blame FASA.

>>51879984
>Lyrans will never blot out the sun with Eisensturms

Feels bad man.

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>>51880006
>IT'S NOT EVEN A SIGNIFICANT ANNIVERSARY! IT'S THEIR TWENTY SECOND AND HANSE IS INVADING AGAIN! CHECK THE PLATES AT HIS CHILDREN'S BIRTHDAY PARTIES!
A damn shame Max was dead by 3050.

>>51880006

Oh I do. The worst thing that ever happened to the game was FASA. The next worst was Fanpro and CGL. The game would have been just fine if they'd never been involved in the first place.

>>51879973
>>51879984
Different anon who asked this question a while back. Here's my thinking on the periphery
>Taurians
I reckon their general fleet concept would be built 80% around making things unreasonably costly for any Great House navy wants to fuck with them and the rest around murdering pirates. Which brings out a good question, , drunkenly, MIDWEST CHOPPERS: WarShip Edition, that is to say, what in the way of WarShips, missile boat DS et al would pirates and mercs be putting on the table?
But anyways, I'd figure a fondness for missile boat DEs, straight flakboat DDs (since they're dual-purpose), and FFs through BBs all devoted to playing the more armor, more SI, long guns game at varying scales. Perhaps they'd be mass-driver types if they didn't objectively suck

The Canopians would almost entirely be concerned with convoy protection and pirate-killing. I'd expect them to *love* Q-boat covers on this lighter hulls, and their handful of serious capitals rigged as pure gunboats to dissuade anyone from trying something dumb
But hell, I would honestly reckon them to do something like turn an old DD into an actual cruise liner/whorehouse/casino with only minor armaments.
Peace without slavic paranoia would encourage such a thing, though it wouldn't do so well come the 30s

The outworlds I would figure to be the big carrier boys, everything from a corvette to their last battleship a carrier for both fighters and Assault DropShips (which to me are S-Bosts, SBDs, Commerce Raiders, baby CVEs, PBYs, and LCTs allbat various times and models)
Basically their navy is supposed to be fast boats and far too much flak, because it's for murdering pirates, but they've still got enough big guns around to surprise anybody tries it
The small powers would really depend on what this AU lets them have

>>51879900
>>51880006

If the Clans had invaded from the bottom of the map, the Ghost Bears would have fused with the CapCon.

We bitch about the individual fiat of the Bears and Caps, why the everloving fuck would anyone want to combine them?

>>51879949

>But purple bird fighter carriers shit all over everyone else

The fighters do. The Theras are a bit meh. Pretty tough for the size, but the ASFs are what's doing the killing.

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>>51880054
>The worst thing that ever happened to the game was FASA. The next worst was Fanpro and CGL. The game would have been just fine if they'd never been involved in the first place.

>This game would've been better off without the people who created it
>This game would've been better if it had never been created!

... not sure if serious.

>>51880738
"Anarchists was the worst thing that happened to Anarchy"

>>51874604
As arthropods go they should have done something like the Iron Crab clan, but then maybe there's the possibility of confusion with L5R...

Also I feel Coyote and Burrock feel a lot more forgettable because they don't have an adjective. Lots of the clans are more memorable because of the adjective association - the plain old Bear or Falcon clan sound a lot more boring. Wolf gets a pass; they're supposed to be the boring standard clan.

>>51879411
>clans
>superior asf
It's established by *the Clans* that their asf aren't superior even during the invasion, that it's the one arena the inner sphere is even in.
Get over it.

>>51881094

Invasion-era fluff does put their Phenotype as strictly better than IS pilots, and the XL-engined craft they flew are *also* strictly better than what the IS had in the skies at the time.

Then there's this weird turn out of nowhere in the Twilight of the Clans arc that lolno, the ASF phenotype was shit which is why the GB never used it (pls ignore the text in early sourcebooks saying that ASF bloodlines are weedy, poor at physical combat, and die a lot on Clawing rituals so ASF pilots are under-represented as officers compared to Elementals and MWs) and the skill bonuses Clan pilots used to have abruptly disappear.


Please also ignore the IS characters gawping at Carews exploits even though he is considered a shit-tier pilot unlikely to ever advance beyond his current rank, much less win a Bloodname.

Damn, ol' Grayson wasn't bullshitting when he said even a lance needed a lot of people to make sure those four giant robots work. I'm starting a new MWRPG campaign and just for once it's going to be a small unit instead of the PCs being part of some bigger one, and since a small unit encourages that "everyone knows everyone" feeling, I thought about putting together exactly that.

So, according to the rules, it'll be 4 'Mechs, 4 Techs, 24 Astechs (8 of whom will be the significant others/children/old friends etc. the mercs have managed to press gang into service, the remaining 16 will be of the "local muscle hired at deployment location" type) plus per the Campaign Ops Rules, 3 admins. That's 35 people.

Then I started to think what you would actually need in a self-contained task group, and the numbers started going up.

For one thing, three desk wallahs are not nearly enough. That's one chief clerk and his two minions, and even they have to wear multiple hats. So I added an Ops group (one officer and his assistant), an Intel group (which is necessary when you're self-contained and being utterly dependent on employer intel is a no-no - an intel sergeant and a scout), a Logistics group (QM sergeant, clerk and storeman), plus a Medical group (calculating the medical needs as 1 per 20 personnel, so 1 actual doctor and 1 medic) and finally one rear services officer to manage the herd.

Now we're at 45 people. Add an infantry platoon for local security, and the number shoots up even more.

Thank God for the character generator in MekHQ. At least it's not the GDL circa Mercenary's Star, with 186 people dedicated to making seven 'Mechs run.

>>51881364

Well, in modern armies you have between 50 and 150 logistics personel for every soldier out there on the field. War is more about hauling crates of food, fuel and ammunition than shooting people these days.

>>51881382

>these days.

It's always been that way, anon.

>>51881382
Oh I know, and for all the stick the logistics people and the desk drivers get, nothing would get done without them. Well, except for stores maybe ("it's called Stores, not Issues!")

I actually pared the support people down to an absolute minimum to what I think would be realistic, and many people have to multi-hat (Astechs and Techs driving any unit lorries and such instead of a specialised MT group, for example).

>>51880373
>The Theras are a bit meh. Pretty tough for the size, but the ASFs are what's doing the killing.

I mean...that is kinda how carriers work...

>>51881364
It's possible that some of these jobs will be automated away in our future due to advances in computing and AI, so you could justify smaller numbers of logistics/administrative personnel that way, but Battletech is a very 80s future and you might lose that feel.

>>51881364
If you go by what is absolutely essential for repair and maintenance in Stratops, you only really need one or two proper techs to skate by and all mechwarriors also double as astechs in their offtime. Techs are worth their weight in gold though, so be sure to pick them up when you can. You're a bunch of guns for hire, not a properly staffed state unit so understaffed should be a way of life.

Also, don't be afraid to dip into the dispossessed for your infantry/techs/astechs. They work for less than anyone else if they got a chance to boot up into a machine at some point. They're like the illegal mexicans of merc work.

Last, you go through hiring halls and the MRBC/C* for contracts or subcontract under bigger merc units for temp jobs and leverage their information apparatus instead of trying to maintain your own as a single lance.

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>>51881364
You mean you can't repair and maintain one mech with only one technician? DOUGRAM HAS LIED TO ME!
But seriously, it reminds me more of Patlabor with the huge cadre of techs just to keep 2-3 operations machines that weren't even 10 tons operational.

>>51881477

Bro, targeting computers weigh a ton, burning EPROMs is cutting edge clantech and they downgraded back to CDs as data carrier of choice. If anything they need more support personel.

I mean, even doing as simple as loading ammunition into a mech requires 5-6 people at the very least and thats nothing compared to actual repair work when they need to take apart the entire thing with cranes and shit. and thats just the hand-on crew, discounting all the wrench monkeys, forfklift drivers, quartermasters, specialists, and the like.

>>51881516
Each mech only needs 15 minutes of maintenance a day by one tech team. Battletech technology is really robust. You only feel the tech crunch if you have multiple machines needing major repairs in a battle situation.

>>51881533
>downgraded back to CDs as data carrier of choice.

Datacrystals have always been the carrier of choice. They've just upgraded the capacity of them in the fluff over the years from Gigabytes in the 80's to not even mentioning it now. Not to say CD's and EPROM's don't get several mentions but when they're talking large amounts of data, they're always talking data crystals.

>roll for lance 'Mechs
>Marauder-3R, Locust-1V, Wolverine-6R, Phoenix Hawk-1

It's so 3025 I could cry from joy.

>>51881513
>Techs are worth their weight in gold though

Yep, and this is why I chose to have a full tech crew instead of having the 'Mech drivers do their bit. Four Techs should be a reasonable number for the unit boss to coax into the life adventurous from his old service. The Dispossessed bit is taken care of, two of the in-unit astechs are dispossessed MWs doing their bit until they can be mounted again (I'm a forward-thinking commander, always looking to expand).

>>51881553
IIRC data discs were the most common format in the novels, at least in the Stackpole ones. Can't remember what the others used, data chips (like USB memory sticks?) perhaps.

>>51881582
EPROM's/Datachips are the same thing. Modern flash and SSD's of all types are varieties of EPROM. It's just the latter has fallen out of use as a term.

>data discs were the most common format in the novels, at least in the Stackpole ones
Crystals are peppered all the way through from the beginning to the end, and are the only thing used in anything post-FCCW. Data discs are old school but actually saying CD ROM is something restricted to Bulldog/FCCW era material I'm pretty sure.

>>51881476

IRL yes, but consider the Leviathan, which eats McKennas for breakfast while carrying 50% more ASF than a Thera.

>>51873499
In Path of Glory, there were some Cloud Cobra warriors mentioned as having been part of the NC touman that were taken as part of the Harvest Trials.

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>>51881516
>But seriously, it reminds me more of Patlabor with the huge cadre of techs just to keep 2-3 operations machines that weren't even 10 tons operational.

A chicken coop, a tomato patch, and the maintenance crew are all out fishing ... and they call themselves police officers?!?

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>>51882452
That's the Nipponese version of Dunkin Donuts.

>>51881908
>Cloud Cobras
>taking nova cats
>in harvest trials

Wut

>>51882689
He said the Nova Cats took in Cloud Cobras.

>>51882727

Yeah but the Harvest Trials were held by the Wolves and Falcons to scoop up Home Clan Crusaders and bolster their numbers...

>>51882830
He probably mixed that detail up since Star Colonel Steiner popped up as prominent in the Nova Cats around the same time.

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What was the Black Dragon Society thinking?

>Zane understood. Yoshio wanted to know how the Nova Cats had known about the Alshain Avengers' plan? He decided to tell the truth. "You will not accept the answer, but I will tell you anyway. Simply, it was the vision I had on Tengoku Mountain. Though it took me weeks to understand the strange images, I finally saw the meaning and realized that the Alshain Avengers would attack the Ghost Bears. And though it might cost me my life and has already claimed the lives of many of my Clansmen, we had to stop you."

>His voice echoed across the field of battle, but Yoshio did not answer.

>"Do you have any idea what you could have done, Yoshio? I have heard you speak of Clan Ghost Bear with respect. And yet, you take their reticence to expand their borders or involve themselves in the power struggles around them as a sign of weakness.

>"Do you not understand the nature of the Bear? For months he sleeps in hibernation, but do not dare disturb him. The Bear's anger is unforgiving once provoked. The Ghost Bears did poorly in the invasion, yet look at them now. Strong and whole where others have been broken and destroyed."

>"We know well the strength of Clan Ghost Bear!" Yoshio retorted angrily. "That is why we are just one of the regiments sent to take back our homeworld. We know what the Ghost Bear can do, but it does not matter. The cave they occupy was ours long before your Nicholas Kerensky was conceived! That is why we fought this night. We must return Combine worlds to Combine hands and cleanse ourselves of the Clans!"

>Zane sat speechless, too stunned to fully register the vulgar slur against The Founder. The death of almost the entire Dragoncat Cluster had been for naught. The Eleventh Alshain Avengers were just one of the regiments planning to attack the Ghost Bears. How could they be so blind? An attack on Alshain would rouse the sleeping bear, and there would be blood to pay.

>>51883514
>What was the Black Dragon Society thinking?
GEE HOW CAN I RUIN EVERYTHING FOR THE NATION I'M AN ALLEGED PATRIOT OF TODAY?

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>>51883514
>Ninyu paused again, as though ordering his thoughts. "There is strong evidence pointing to Black Dragon involvement. In fact, it now seems obvious that Tai-shu Uchida and a good portion of the Avengers were members of the Society. I am also certain that high-level, non-military aid was arranged. There is no other explanation for how four DCMS regiments could turn traitor and attack a foreign power without our knowledge."

>Theodore continued to gaze fixedly at his most trusted advisor as several scenarios occurred to him. "Duke Ricol," he said finally.

>"Hai."

>"You believe he has become a member of the Black Dragon Society?"

>"We both know his past. He only holds his current position as Duke of the Alshain District because he gave the Combine the Gray Death memory core to get it. Considering his aspirations of the past, it is highly like that he assumed a leadership position."

>"Is there evidence?" Theodore asked, knowing the answer. The Red Hunter had always been a careful one.

>"Iie, Tomo. Nothing that links him to any of this."

>"Then we must let him be for now."

Was Theodore fucking retarded? Takashi would have just had Ricol's head and been done with it.

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Guys is Battletech p2w?

>>51883514
Where's that from? The only time I read about the Alshain Avengers against CGB was in the beginning of Trial of Vengeance.

>>51883686
And that's why Theodore stepped in. Acting without regard of evidence is how fucking wars start. If Theodore goes and knocks off one of his top generals for suspecting there being perfidy, what's to stop someone else like Samsonov from trying a coup?

>>51883708
The joke is that Ricol turned out to be the leader of the BDS and would go on to cause trouble for Teddy C3 for at least another decade, including turning a Sword of Light regiment and causing the battle on Luthien.

>Acting without regard of evidence is how fucking wars start
It's also funny because that meeting is Teddy C3 asking how the fuck a war with the Ghost Bears had just started. Hint: It was Ricol :)

>>51883514
>What was the Black Dragon Society thinking?

>what's the best way to make things worse for the Draconis Combine AND intensify edgyness at the same time?

>>51883708
Path of Glory. Not to be confused with Paths of Glory.

>The 'Mech plummeted. Buffeted by the howling winds of its passage, it fell at terminal velocity through the gloomy skies of a rain-washed afternoon on the world of Alshain. Only five kilometers distant, the ground rushed upward to crush the falling machine. Cocooned in the cockpit in the 'Mech's head— fashioned in the likeness of the mythical demon for which it was named—Chu-sa Jennifer Kiyaga knew fear; a pulsing, throbbing sensation that suffused her being and threatened to block out every other sensory input.

>It wasn't the combat drop that frightened her. She had participated in a number of near-orbit drops in which her AKU-1X Akuma was jettisoned from a DropShip. The drop pod protected it through the fiery interface with a planet's atmosphere, allowing the 'Mech to descend safely on jump jets that were either integral to its design or had been attached to it for that purpose. The maneuver was dangerous, but she was confident in her ability to bring her 'Mech to the surface of Alshain without mishap. It was what she had seen in the last several hours that had evoked her dread.

>As commander of Second Battalion of the Fourteenth Alshain Avengers, she had waited for this moment with barely suppressed excitement for almost four straight weeks after leaving Courchevel. As they entered Ghost Bear territory—which she would never think of as the Ghost Bear Dominion—she knew that the exhaustive training given all the Avenger regiments would finally pay off. After ten long years, they would finally avenge the injustice of the Clan invasion and take back their homeworld. Knowing the terrible fight that was to come, but supremely confident of victory, Kiyaga—like all the Avenger warriors—had strained against the enforced inactivity of space travel, yearning to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting Ghost Bears.

>>51881382
>50/150:1 tail to tooth
wat
pretty sure it's only something like 10:1

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>showed up in personnel market as a VTOL pilot
>noticed the perks
>use her as a pilot? fuck that
>buy her in a Crowned Eagle CE-12, use her as gunner
For those not in the know about some of the fan designs that come with MekHQ, the CE-12 is basically that one Karnov with the AC/20 but with the gun forward mounted.

the remainder of her VTOL unit is some poor Green SOBs in rocket Ferrets who I imagine as basically Kiowa Warrior pilots but even more balls to the wall/suicidal

>>51880006

As Romano pointed out, why should they help their enemies?

The did the right thing during the Clan Invasion by actively antagonizing their neighbors and getting rid of Justin, the former of the two being something that would eventually aid in the sundering of FedCom.

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Who here is a fan of Cataphrachts?

>>51884281
Better question who isn't?

>>51881820

Yes, that's what happens when you have 2.5x the tonnage to play with.

>>51884281
But when then Caesar exists?

>>51884632

Voting for the alternative wouldn't have been much better so really you were fucked either way.

>>51884632
Fuck off with this shit back to /pol/

>>51883844

And doesn't her unit end up hot dropping directly into Zeta Galaxy and being wiped out to the last man before they can even form up?

>>51884765
>>51883844
>Then the cherished dream had been twisted into a nightmare. Knowing that the Ghost Bears would have WarShips guarding both the nadir and zenith jump points, the Avengers had used their intimate knowledge of the Alshain system to plot a pirate point. What would normally have been a transit time of nine days from jump point to planet was reduced to a scant two days from the pirate point. Having synchronized their arrivals, all the Avenger regiments should have arrived within hours of each other.

>The first shock occurred when the Eleventh Alshain Avengers did not arrive as scheduled at the rendezvous point. When three more hours passed without any word or sign of the regiment, the other three could no longer risk detection and began their high-speed run toward Alshain.

>With an aerospace fighter escort composed of a full regiment of some one hundred fighters and the inspiring sight of the Tatsumaki Class WarShip The Dragon's Last Tear, the three combined-arms regiments had pulled a punishing two gravities to make planetfall as quickly as possible.

>The invading Combine troops were surprised when the Ghost Bears did not respond to the attack with a batchall, the challenge of combat required by the Clan rules of warfare. Either the Ghost Bears had renounced the Clan way, which was unlikely, or Alshain was simply too important for such niceties. The doubts had begun.

>As they neared the planet, swarms of aerospace fighters pushed through the atmosphere to meet the incoming invaders in the deathlike silence of space. Following close behind were Clan DropShips, bringing more fighters and their own weapons to the fray. The Tatsumaki was unable to target ships as small as the aerospace fighters, but it made short work of the DropShips, which scattered like minnows before a whale.

>>51884813
>The second shock of the day appeared on the far horizon of Alshain. Cocooned in her 'Mech's drop pod, Kiyaga and all the other battalion commanders had been patched in to visual feeds of the attacking DropShips. Magnification brought a sight like nothing she had ever seen, and silence filled the commline for a full minute, broken only by distant explosions muffled by the DropShip's hull.

>Where before there had been no naval shipyard, one now floated above the world of Alshain. Massive in proportion, it was easily as large as the Combine's Wakazashi Enterprises shipyards at Chatham. It was not so much the size of the facility that struck dumb the invading fleet, but the ship berthed in the unpressurized repair facility that spanned the length of the shipyard.

>The open metal latticework of the facility looked like the rib cage of some monstrous mechanical beast, each rib thicker then the largest of the incoming aerospace fighters and some thicker than a DropShip. The Alshain warriors were given an unobstructed view of the largest WarShip the human race had ever constructed. There had been rumors and speculation about the Leviathan Class, of which only two were said to exist, but the WarShip stretched a mind-numbing one point six kilometers in length. Even more terrifying was its mass. The ISF had been unable to obtain complete reports except that the Leviathan was rumored to mass almost two million four hundred thousand tons. Now it was more than rumor, and the rumors were true.

>Staring at the behemoth, Kiyaga was stunned by the colossal technological edge and military advantages of such a vessel. The Tatsumaki, the pride of the Combine fleet, was insignificant beside such magnificence.

>>51884826
>What finally broke through the battalion commanders' stupor was the realization that massive sections of armor were absent all along the side that was visible, giving a glimpse into the cavernous interior. This ship would not be used against them. Why such a new vessel would need an extensive overhaul so soon Kiyaga couldn't even imagine.

>Then the view of the naval yards was suddenly blocked by another WarShip, this one much closer and moving at all speed toward the invading Combine ships. Turning toward it, The Dragon's Last Tear positioned itself between the approaching vessel and the Avenger DropShips.

>Watching her screen closely as the DropShip captain punched up the magnification on the approaching WarShip, Kiyaga's heart sank. Unlike the Leviathan, which no one in the Combine had seen until this moment, the approaching WarShip was known. The Nightlord Class was more than double the size of the Tatsumaki, and Kiyaga knew this fight could have only one outcome. She prayed that the Tatsumaki's valiant stand would buy the DropShips the final minutes they needed to begin the combat drop.

>The Fifteenth Alshain reached the drop zone first and began to jettison 'Mech drop pods as quickly as possible. Exactly three minutes later, Kiyaga's own Fourteenth began their drop. Completely cut off from the outside world for another handful of minutes, she was deaf, dumb, and blind, impotent to affect the unfolding battle.

>When her Akuma finally passed through the upper atmosphere, it emerged from the exploding drop pod into a scene from some infernal nightmare. All around, Clan fighters dove at the descending Alshain 'Mechs, destroying many still in their pods. Though the Avenger aerospace fighters were making a heroic attempt to hold the Clan OmniFighters at bay, her trained eye estimated that the Ghost Bears would have air superiority in less then an hour.

>>51884838
>The final shock was the thunderous and fiery entry of The Dragon's Last Tear into Alshain's atmosphere. She had known that the Tatsumaki was simply and completely outclassed in this clash of titans. But seeing the graceful ship plummet out of control into the atmosphere that began to tear it apart, she mourned the loss of it and the two hundred-forty warriors who had given their lives trying to take this planet back from the Ghost Bears.

>It hurt even more knowing that they had given their lives in vain. Kiyaga, only a fair MechWarrior at best, had been given her command and made executive officer of the Fourteenth Alshain Avengers because of her skill at high-level strategy. Several of her suggestions to the original plan of Operation Batsu had, in fact, been implemented.

>Now, as she fell through a sky filled with fire and death, she knew they had gravely underestimated the importance of Alshain to the Ghost Bears. With a shipyard like that and WarShip protection, she had no doubt that an entire Galaxy, possibly two, of elite Ghost Bear Mech Warriors awaited them.

>Together, all four Alshain regiments just might have plucked victory from the jaws of defeat. But with the unexplained absence of the Eleventh and half of the Eighth destroyed in their DropShips by the Nightlord before they could drop, there would be no victory this day.

>Still, she would fight and die like the samurai she was. If today brought her death, then she would take as many Ghost Bears with her as she could. She only hoped this defeat would not result in a disastrous reprisal against House Kurita.

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>>51884849
>Clearing her mind, Chu-sa Jennifer Kiyaga freed herself of all fear by composing a death haiku. In the cockpit of her Akuma, she spoke the words aloud as they came to her:

Blue-white cold engulfs
Dragon slumbers in twilight
Rouse, fury unbound.

>Then she smiled. Perhaps this day would be the start of a great awakening. Once the ultimate sacrifice by the Alshain Avengers became known, perhaps other warriors of the Combine would remember that it was the Dragon's destiny to rule the entire Inner Sphere.

>Yes, she would die like a samurai.

Fin.

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>>51884632

Jesus, I've had actual wank fantasies less masturbatory than this shit

Would the Puma/Adder be common to find in any of the invading clans during the Revival era?

I'm trying to get an idea for mechs common to all the invader Clans.

>>51880244
The Outworlds military never ceases to remind me of the Rebels from Star Wars. That's probably why I like them so much. You really get the sense that they're just a bunch of farmers who are sure of their victory despite being in over their heads.

>>51885319
I love the Outworlds. And funnily enough, Snow Ravens were my original favorite clan long before they ever met.

Somehow their joining has not been too thrilling. I mean at first their meeting was cool, with the Corax and all.

In AtB, is there any easy way to order replacement parts from the repair bay? Particularly replacement limbs. The only way I've figured to do it is write down the tonnage of the unit that needs the replacement and order it that way through the 'buy parts' screen. You'd think they'd make it a little less cumbersome than that.

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>>51885686
There is. Check out the top of the middle panel (the one with the "replace armour"/"repair centre torso" style boxes). You'll see two tabs - "Repairs" and "Acquisition". Click on Acquisitions, and it'll show you exactly what you have to order.

>>51885686
Forgot to add two important points: one, you can order the stuff straight from the Acquisitions tab, just click on Do Task and the best Tech (or whoever you have set to do the acquisition rolls) will attempt to buy it.

Two, and this will save you C-bills: if you headcap something like I did to that Wasp, DO NOT order the Mech Life Support System and Mech Sensors. A new head comes equipped with both.

Looking for some good quadmechs, preferably heavy weight or lower. Any suggestions?

>>51886467
That's a toughie. Some of the Goliaths, maybe?

>>51886467
Tarantula, Phoenix Scorp and Stalking Spider 1/2 are all pretty fun.

>>51884813
>The invading Combine troops were surprised when the Ghost Bears did not respond to the attack with a batchall
...what now? They were expecting the *defenders* to issue a batchall?

>>51886467
Stalking Spider is awesome as fuck.

Great Turtle is a personal favorite but I wouldn't blame anyone for not liking it.

Tarantula and Scorpion are solid machines, if unexciting.

>>51886583
Is there a better version of the Scorpion than the upgraded 3050 machine?

>>51886583
>Great Turtle is a personal favorite but I wouldn't blame anyone for not liking it.

The one thing the Great Turtle is good for is drawing fire. Your opponent will try to kill it to the neglect of all your glass canons while you pound him into scrap with everything that's not the Great Turtle.

>>51886467
The Barghest.

It may look like rancid ass, but it's a fine heavy cav mech

>>51886611
Project Phoenix, dude.

>>51886467
The Barghast gets work done. LBX20 and a pair of ERLL is a fair amount of hurt, although it doesn't have the heat sinks to use all of them at once.

>>51886625
I've had good results with the Great Turtle in city fights. It's got hops, which is handy to get around, and it packs a moderate punch at good numbers with the XPLs. I wouldn't take it for much, but when its good, it's great. Nothing absorbs fire or ties up enemy assets like a Great Turtle.

>>51886554
Perhaps she meant the Dracs issued a batchall and the Bears didn't respond? Or not. The Dracs are really dumb.

>>51886903

>>We just threw 5 regiments, a Warship and a bunch of Jumpships to their deaths in a pointless failure of an attack because we couldn't be bothered to conduct intelligence gathering prior to attempting to retake a planet, but we're totally destined to rule the Innner Sphere!

That's like exactly what the crazy Drac commander was monolouging there.

>>51886994
The Alshain Avengers never made sense to anyone, even back then. I remember everyone calling that shit retarded back in the 90's.

The worst part is Ricol getting George Hasek Syndrome. Or would it be the other way around?

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What Clan should I belong to as it's ultra hottest / bestest Ristar?

>>51887167
Looks like one of Hazen's fucktoys to be honest.

>>51887050
>The worst part is Ricol getting George Hasek Syndrome

I think the worst part is that Ricol was turned from a "man looking out for himself first" into a Black Dragon ultra-conservative. The Red Hunter we saw in the GDL books was an arsehole, yes, but he was a reasonable arsehole. Turning to the Black Dragons when Teddy C3 was clearly the ristar in the Combine would go completely against the grain. He should have gone 120% Teddy in order to maximise his own power.

>>51887214
>Turning to the Black Dragons when Teddy C3 was clearly the ristar in the Combine would go completely against the grain. He should have gone 120% Teddy in order to maximise his own power.

That's exactly what he did in Heir to the Dragon, back when he still made sense.

>>51887191

Nope. Jade Falcon's aren't sexy enough.

>>51887167
She doesn't look like a Clanner at all! She looks like one of Maria Morgraine's pirates.

>>51887255
Precisely. A man like Ricol wouldn't go for the underground ultra-conservatives, he'd identify the man or woman offering the best opportunities for his own elevation, and the Kokuryu-kai were the exact opposite of that.

>>51887050
Technically we should call it Ricol Syndrome. Hasek getting it made equally no sense. He gets established as a reasonable leader who cares for his people.

If he wouldn't invade the Confederation to save St. Ives during the "Xin Sheng" campaign when his own forces were at full strength and doing so could distract them from taking sides in the looming civil war, why the fuck would he do so RIGHT AFTER the civil war was over, the CCAF was stronger than ever, and the AFFS was at 50% strength?

How they retconned and fucked over George Hasek always bugged me.

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>>51887258
>>51887258
>Jade Falcon's aren't sexy

You look at that ass and shut your whore mouth

>>51887374

That's a dudes ass bro. Me no rikey.

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>tfw you will never be taken as a bondsman and shown the clans ways

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>>51887424
>she issues a Trial of Position for your genetic legacy

How do you choose to fight the trial?

Why does ATB insist on always staggering out your deployments across 6-10 turns? I know it's based on movement speed, that makes sense from a standpoint of units needing to travel to the battlefield, but why is it every single battle type? If you're defending a location, it makes sense to me that you'd have all of your forces deployed already. Why are some of them still hoofing it to the combat zone?

Now that I mentioned Maria Morgraine, I feel I should vent about how much I wish the Clans had invaded along Kerensky's original exfil route. It would have the benefits of:

>still hammering both the F-C and the DC, thus making both realise they had a common enemy to fight
>leaving one of the most fun factions (the bandit kingdoms) alive and even make them stronger, since the IS forces on the Periphery would have to be redeployed on the spinward rim
>it would leave the FRR alive
>it would give the Lyrans an actual grudge for the eventual Civil War or separation ("Why, exactly, are our forces being fed into the meat grinder in the Fed Suns?")

And most importantly,
>it would still allow Victor to bang Omi

>>51887489
You forgot
>Eliminates the Outworlds and Antallos
Acceptable casualties IMO.

The hogs should get folded back into the DC proper though. They're great as dracs but fucking suck on their own.

>>51887486
As for the defense mode, imagine that those reinforcements are guys who were guarding other areas, but when the attack fell on the specific portion of the defense that the map is, they started hoofing it over there. Or they were held in a central reserve, with the same results.

>>51887457
Unaugmented, and that woman better choose my bunk as the location.

>>51887486
It's a miracle provided by the gods of war if your reinforcements ever get to their battle location in time.

Remember, each turn is only 10 seconds. So if your reinforcements deploy in six turns, that's just one minute into the battle. You could simply say that it's the heavier units lagging behind the light, fast ones.

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>>51887489
>>it would give the Lyrans an actual grudge for the eventual Civil War or separation ("Why, exactly, are our forces being fed into the meat grinder in the Fed Suns?")
This.

Breaking off of the military powerhouse that helped keep your nation alive seems... really dumb.

Yet another reason Katherine's easy taking of power made zero sense.

It would have made MUCH more sense if Victor, being a fucking Lyran born and raised in the Lyran state, educated in a Lyran school and assigned to Lyran military units, who spoke goddamn German as his first language, had been obsessed with staying on Tharkad and handling the Clan front.
You know, like how we were always told he was: obsessed with the Clans.

Then Katherine, born and educated on New Avalon, would raise her influence in the Suns half and get Feddies asking "why are we dying for Lyrans?"

When Sunny invades she stays out with the Suns half by saying "Sarna March is Lyran, its Victor's war" or whatever.

Then when Vic goes off to fight the clans for Bulldog and leaves Yvonne as regent, she's unpopular because she's viewed as a Davion type born in the "colonial" Sarna March the Lyrans didn't ask for.

Seriously, yeah my ideas might not be perfect but what we got for the lead up to the FCCW made no sense.

>>51887457
Grenades. Clanners won't get me alive

>>51887374
I miss when the novels had art inserts. CGL tried to bring it back in the early Battlecorps Anthologies, but gave up. It really made some scenes extra memorable back when. The little TRO entries in the back of the books too.

>>51887457

aerospace combat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ln6cZ21heo

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>>51887656
>when the infidel Davions get crushed under your Panther's 35 ton boots

>>51887617
Victor actually did rule from Tharkad for the couple of years he had the whole state. It pissed off some traditional Lyrans as he was "A Davion Prince" on their throne and the Davions were pissed because of what appeared to be his Lyran favoritism.

Actually, can someone remind me how Kat took the Lyran half in '57? Wasn't it because he left the capital to go fight Falcons or some shit?

>>51887335

> the CCAF was stronger than ever, and the AFFS was at 50% strength?

And he still had the CCAF on the ropes with his meager March forces and what mercenaries he could hire.

I think Talon Zann, Ion Rush and the boys dropped the ball like Max's boys did in 3025.

>>51887787
Wasn't it because of Op Guerrero? The justification being that she didn't want to subject her loyal Lyran citizens to what was basically a grudge match between the Fed Suns on one side and the FWL and the Caps on the other?

>>51887787

Everything about katherine and the fedcom split just screams "conflict ball" The feds were too strong, they were obviously winning despite everyone and everything stacked aganist them. So they went out of their way to break them up with all this bady written shit.

Why on fucking earth the martial suns would hate THE literal warrior-prince personally decapitating the ilkhan?

Who will be the good samaritan to provide the new Touring the Stars pdf?

>>51887828
True. The CCAF has always been overrated in eras it's considered strong. Had Yvonne not been a dumb cunt and kept the AFFS half disarmed, the Suns wouldn't be in the damn situation they are now.

If Hasek had invaded the Confederation to save St. Ives in 3062 or whenever it started, he'd have had troops on Sian within six months.

It's important to note, relating to the plot, that George Hasek literally isn't even mentioned in 3 of the 4 books dealing with the St Ives conflict.

Coleman practically just ignored the Capellan March and its military.

>>51887787

Due to hostility in the Lyran realm regarding the assassination of his mother, he left Katherine in charge of the Lyran half as Regent in his stead.

When League-Confederation aggression came knocking in the Sarna March, Katherine saw it as her chance to gain power and enacted an emergency clause in the FedCom accords that allowed the Lyran half of the nation to secede from the combined nation.

This came at the cost of many of the AFFS Jumpships stationed in the Sarna March and in Lyran space as the Lyrans seized them in their flight from the Sarna March or refused to return them until a settlement was later reached between what remained of FedCom and the Lyran Alliance.

Also worth mentioning that the Lyrans had command of all worlds within the Sarna March, meaning it was Katherine that sabotaged the defense of those worlds.

>>51887457

>trial of position
>genetic legacy
>implying anyone gives a shit about the genetic legacy of a freeborn scum

spot the freebirth.

>>51887902

>Had Yvonne not been a dumb cunt and kept the AFFS half disarmed, the Suns wouldn't be in the damn situation they are now.

To be fair, the Suns likely wouldn't be in the dire straights they're in right now if they had just left the Confederation alone from the start.

As I understand it, the Suns created the Capellan issue to begin with long before the current era.

>>51887906
>Victor made her Regent

I forgot that. He was still King Bigshot in '56. Well, another in a series of his greatest retarded decisions. Why is it that he never learned that putting his other siblings in charge was never a good idea?

Still, how the hell did she pull that rug out from under him when he was right goddamn there?

>>51887940
That's going back a bit far. It's easier to discuss characters I've seen in the books.

Besides which, given BT's nature it's not like the Cappies wouldn't have found a reason to fight the Suns anyway.

>>51887940
To be fair, the Capellans reasonably were completely broken and only Thomas being retarded and thinking he could make them his FRR buffer instead of finishing what his boys started in the 1st War is the reason there's any Capellan issue. That's not even touching Hanse and his Sandoval-tier obsession with the Dracs.

>>51887961

>Still, how the hell did she pull that rug out from under him when he was right goddamn there?

Victor wasn't as popular in the Lyran half of the Alliance and many of the individuals that had a say so in how things were run in that half of FedCom weren't fond of Victor's Davion lineage or his father Hanse before him.

>>51888003
It's not even Tommy's fault. The Confederation's recovery was literally space magic. Look at their invasion of the Sarna March.

>>51888008
It's just it's not like he was dicking around on New Avalon or something. He was right there on Tharkad.

>>51887940

>To be fair, the Suns likely wouldn't be in the dire straights they're in right now if they had just left the Confederation alone from the start.

Bro, the succession wars have been going on since the fall of Star League. If anything Hanse should have finished them off when he had Morgan-Hasek standing on Sian. Why not just kill or capture the entire Liao family and then parade Max around on a victory march on New Avalon

>>51888008

Its still a fucking retarded reason. the clans were shitting on the Lyrans and the AFFC wee desperately trying to stop them. If anything they should have been much more unified because of wartime propaganda.

>>51888008
Which made 0 sense, since Victor was schooled at the Nagelring and respected in the LC. That and his earlier characterization had him less respected in the Suns half because he was too Lyran. Aside from attacking Ryan Steiner, who was ostensibly responsible for assassinating Melissa, the only people who could really have an issue with him are Nondi Steiner and the rest of the "as long as I have wads of cash and act like General Melchett, the LCAF will hold" coterie.

>>51888045
muh ComStar intervened.

>>51888035
I mean giving them any chance to recover in the first place instead of getting in on the feeding frenzy. Betelgeuse to Grand Base to Victoria should have been flying the eagle.

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Was Victor made to be hated by Lyrans and loved by Sunners because the writers didn't want to write Davion troops as the "bad" guys in the inevitable civil war?

I mean how would a civil war where Victor is backed mostly by the LCAF and Katherine is backed overwhelmingly by the AFFS have looked?

Them Davion Guards wrecked a lot of Lyrans iirc.

>>51888073
Ryan was already rebelling in '56, so he should be a nonfactor in VSD approval ratings.

>>51888045

I'm referring to the events that saw the Confederation founded.

From what I gather, the aggression of the Federated Suns is what lead to the Confederation's founding and that, most of the time, the Suns have been the aggressor in most of their serious conflicts.
>If anything they should have been much more unified because of wartime propaganda.

In the books at least, many Lyrans felt that the AFFS wasn't doing enough.

In fact, some Lyrans call Victor on this when they question why the AFFS didn't send more than what it did.

Victor's response was that Romano Liao would have likely made trouble had they attempted to divert more forces into Lyran space to combat the Clans.

The Lyrans don't buy that for a second.

>>51888083
With the trauma of the 4th Succession War, the Marik succession crisis, and trying to reclaim Andurien without stripping the borders elsewhere, I think Thomas wasn't interested in opening more border space for FedCom to place troops. Perhaps better, in his eyes, to leave the CapCon as a speedbump or early warning service.

>>51887828
Well, until they yelled XIN SHENG harder and broke out the consequence-free nukes

>>51888139
>Victor's response was that Romano Liao would have likely made trouble had they attempted to divert more forces into Lyran space to combat the Clans.
>The Lyrans don't buy that for a second.

That's a fair point. The Capellan March could have invaded the Confederation alone and won easily while the FedCom stripped troops out of the Sarna March and to the Clan front.

>>51888139

That just reeks of shitty writing, they were trying to force that civil war shit in so bad.

>>51888145
Refresh my memory, did Hasek's troops ever throw nukes back?

>>51888112
Victor had to take a ton of the Suns from Suns officers by force. Just look at the battle of New Avalon.

Hasek stayed out of both camps, and the Draconis March thought it was a fantastic time to go invade the Snakes as they tend to do when nobody is watching them too closely.

>>51888145

Now to be fair, they weren't the only ones using nuclear weapons against the Suns.

Unless I'm mistaken, the Suns were hit in much the same way by the Word and Taurians, but still fought a largely conventional campaign against them, with the Taurians only seeing such weapons used against them by mercenaries in Davion employ.

Though if I'm wrong and they did hit the Word or Taurians with some, feel free to correct me. I've been wondering where the Davion nuclear arsenal is for quite some time now.


>>51888164

>and won easily

Maybe they were expecting a violent and bloody campaign and didn't want to go that route.

>>51888143
The Andurien war wasn't until after the 4th War. He could have actually headed it off by throwing his support behind them instead of making them act alone.

>>51888234
That was Janos' call. Tommy came to power like halfway through the Andurien war. Remember: the succession crisis. First Janos had a stroke, Duncan and Duggan jockeyed for power, Thomas came home to help his father rule, then after recovering Janos got blown up. A lot was going on and all the while they felt like the FecCom allies were breathing down their necks.

>>51888233
Like 80% of JHS:Terra in the Suns theater is about winning "without stooping to the Word's level"

Hasek may have used some nukes, or maybe it was Free Capella before Candice got cratered on Sian.

>people bitch about the AFFC not fighting the clans enough
>people bitch about the AFFC not fighting the dracs
>AFFC is not fighting the capellans


Where the fuck they were? What were they doing? They had a gorillion regiments, enough to take on the rest of the IS combined

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>>51886467
>Looking for some good quadmechs, preferably heavy weight or lower. Any suggestions?
The Tarantula is a very, very nice replacement for the Wasp, especially with Quirks in effect (since it has a turreted torso, even with those fragile-ass legs). The model's a little spindly but it looks really good. -3A is a nice backstabber, and the -4A is a c3s sniper for cheap as piss.

The Scorpion has a couple of useful variants. The -1TB is a good, fast Light-hunter and harasser: the -12S can stiffen a scout lance with SRMs and buckshot. The Goliath is kind of shite - everything it does, something else does better. It's basically a tall tank.
I know you wanted non-Assault units, and the Xanthos may be ugly, but the XNT-5O has performed pretty well for me in Jihad games. It's mean as FUCK as a bodyguard, and being 3/5/5 means you can land 20-point kicks in a lot of places your opponents would rather you didn't.

The Thunder Fox would be good if the main variants had any fucking armor or speed at all. The -L8 is decent, though; it's a 5/8/5 with a pair of Snubbies and an LB-10X. Plays a lot like like a babby Marauder or one of the better Wolverine variants.

The Clans get a few good quads as well.
The Stalking Spider is actually excellent, and the SSII (and its turret..) are pretty useful even with an HLL and a torso bomb. As long as you handle it like a Light and not a Clan Heavy you're doing good. Plus it's on the Merc General list in the Dark Age.
Fire Scorpions are slow and hard to manage well, but hit like trucks. Good in knife fights and not much else - which is a shame,given how easy it would be to drop those fucking A-pods and a little armor to get it the jets it desperately needs.

>>51886467
Goliaths are great fire support platforms. I like to stick a command console on them to make them commander rides while I'm at it.

>>51888863
Enjoying garrison life brah.

>>51888863
>Where the fuck they were? What were they doing? They had a gorillion regiments, enough to take on the rest of the IS combined
They had almost no top-end manufacturing, and all of their heavies/assaults were either irreplaceable legacy machines or shit like Longbows and Riflemen. Hell, they were pulling all their Mediums and many Heavies out of reserve formations and replacing them with Valkyries because the front-line units were dying too fast to repair. The problem the Suns always had was that they optimized their lighter 'Mechs for taking on heavier stuff, their heavier stuff for survival, and turtled because any really severe losses were going to leave them permanently ass-fucked. It's not like they could go to the Taurians and buy Warhammers and Archers like everyone else to supplement that shit production, either. That's why Hanse started shit LITERALLY the instant he had Heavy production back, on the grounds that they could finally replace attrition on the big boys.

>>51888971

They produced more mechs than anyone else in the Inner Sphere.Remember the hardon the steiners had for heavies.

>>51884281
My love of all things Byzantine compels me.

>>51883514
Had to kill the Nova Cats one piece at a time

>>51881476
>>51881820
>>51884503
The Thera is a carrier. As anon pointed out, the Lev II and III effectively has a second Thera, plus a Impavido, stapled to its side. The Leviathan is a hybrid. Imagine a Thera with another 1,440,000 tons to devote to fighter wings...

>>51884849
>>51884838
>>51884826
>>51884813
Did they just completely ignore any sort of intel gathering?

>>51887050
>>51886994
Apparently so...

>>51889020
Derp, read "AFFS", not "AFFC" there. My bad.

>reminder
>something happens in the metaplot
>why did it happen?
>if I agree with what happened, then there are these reasonable justifications
>if I disagree with what happened, then it's just shitty writing

No writing can be "good", because no matter what happens, somebody is going to disagree with it.

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>>51889079
bt is serious business

>>51889079
Most of the time the writing is bad because it is hard to believe those things could happen. Even worse are the people defending said nonsense as if it matters

Who cares, anyway. I'm here for the robots

>>51889079
You're forgetting when the planets align and everyone universally agrees something is retarded and shit. Just look at the Hasek and Ricol stuff a little upthread.

At least the contentious stuff has a possibility of actually being good.

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Looking for more BT pics that remind us these battles take place on all sorts of alien worlds.

>>51889307
99% of it will be Chaffee stuff. God bless that man.

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Out of curiosity, what Clans would have been most willing to take in Jaguar refugees?
I ask because I recall an anecdote that Blood Spirits are rarely taken as bondsmen because they're so uncooperative to outsider. So what other Clan might Jaguar survivors fit in the best with?

>>51889488
Ones that deal with the Dark Caste. That's what wound up happening in canon.

>>51889176
>because it is hard to believe those things could happen

But it's hard to believe it because people want to disagree with it in the first place. Confirmation bias and all that. Even a cursory study of history proves beyond a doubt that people do stupid shit all the time for utterly inane reasons, and national leaders are no exception.

How can people be so immensely ignorant of history?

>>51889274
>You're forgetting when the planets align

I'm not saying that can't happen. That happening is such an incredibly tiny minority of the time, though, that it's not really worth focusing on.

>>51889545
A lot of time people aren't bitching about the total metaplot, just the details or the focus.

Like Bulldog. Almost everyone likes Bulldog. A bunch of people don't like how the novels didn't reflect the Snake's major role as shown in the sourcebooks or how the Great Refusal shook out, but it's not the same thing.

>>51889601
True. It was a fun arc (even if it had its shortcoming as you say) and the 3-book arc with Task Force Serpent is arguably the best BT novels ever got.

In regards to Task Force Serpent. Do we know who, exactly, was shadowing them to Huntress?

>>51889775
WoB

>>51889833
Thanks. Remember reading the novels, but couldn't figure out who the mystery force was. Is there a source that states it was WoB?

>>51889870
Not definitively. The writers pretty much dropped it. Just makes the most sense given we know they were playing with jump tech.

Speaking of that. What if the Shadow Divisions hadn't been recalled to the Inner Sphere? How much damage could they have done in the homeworlds with their nukes and bloodhouse viruses? How would this affect the Society and the Reavings?

>>51889997
now that would have made a great story arc. Could of had a few good source books just on that conflict. I could actually see the Society joining forces with WoB, only to turn on each other, before wiping out the Clans, and the surviving Clans merging into a singular force to fight back. Then fast forward 100 years and have a new (hybrid) culture lurking in the deep periphery eyeing the Great Houses. History repeats itself, but, in reality, it always does. . .

>>51889997
Probably killed a lot of people since the Clan worlds are barely habitable for humans anyway. But their kill spree wouldn't have lasted long or probably been very effective. Without intel on the ground they wouldn't know where to hit, and any important worlds would have SDS and warships to ruin their day.

>>51890083
I really don't think the Wars of Reavings effectively explained away clan warships. I know they (developers) were trying to kill of warships, but wasn't done very well (let alone how they handled IS Warships).

>>51890152
What happened to IS warships anyways? I haven't read quite a few of the Jihad sourcebooks, but it seems that they all just disappeared.

>>51884503

The Thera's weapon mass could still have been used more effectively. It's not actually that hard to fit the firepower of at least an Aegis onto it, they just didn't.

>>51886554
>>51886903

Nobody should have been expecting that, the Ghost Bears loudly announced they had done away with the Batchall and Zellbrigen against *all* IS foes in like 3051. It's just that thanks to authors even then not bothering to give a fuck about fact-checking they forgot about that and did things like create Omega Galaxy, who are famous for... not issuing Batchalls to IS foes or fighting with Zell against them, which the rest of the Clan hates for some reason.

>>51887214

According to everything up to that point he was a strong ally of Theo. Until he turned out to have been a Black Dragon all along, like the rest of Theo's close friends and advisors because those were the only Dracs the authors knew the names of.

>>51885265

Number 3 most common for the Wolves after the Ice Ferret and Gargoyle.

>>51890083
You know, I don't recall any SDS stuff until the one novel with the approach to Strana Mechty. It just never made sense to me how a bunch of clans could own tiny fractions of planets if there were space defense systems around them.

>>51890177
SDS would be bid away as dishonorable. Even the resource-poor Jaguars had an SDS around Jaguar utilizing drone ships. Thanks to Trent its C&C was taken out and Task Force Serpent was able to invade.

>>51889775

No. As much of a dropped plotline as who killed Morgan, which Victor was totally going to find the answer to until eh fuck it let's get the Civil War shitshow on the road you guys, that's more important and who was Morgan again?

>>51890168

Most died during various fights in the Jihad. Othrs disapeared into Oystein's memory hole and were errata'd out has having died at some unspecified point because oops.

>>51890168
>>51890227

Shit like these is why I advocate a full reboot of Battletech. Or at the very least, alternate universes.

>>51890168

>What happened to IS warships anyways?

The Pocket WarShip.

>>51890168
There's a ton of warship battles in the Jihad books. They're just done piecemeal except the big fights against the Blakists.

You'll see something like "Prince Titus took the Exploderator and a an invasion fleet to Oriente where the Oriente fleet of three Warships wrecked his bitch ass. But he also took one of their destroyers with him."

There were a few missing at the end though. The Blakist ones all got lumped into the escaped fleet in Final Reckoning."

>>51890260
Reboot is a stupid idea. Better to slap on some patches and move forward. Wouldn't fix the problem of bad factchecking anyway. You'd just get a new mess of the same old problems.

Now advocating some good factchecking. That I can get behind.

>>51890173
>Number 3 most common for the Wolves after the Ice Ferret and Gargoyle.
Would it be found commonly in other Clans though?

So far I've figured the most common OmniMechs likely to be found in any clan are the Mad Dog, Hellbringer, and Summoner, with the Gargoyle probably the most common assault. Plus the Nova being rare but "evenly spread" among the toumans.

>>51889545
>But it's hard to believe it because people want to disagree with it in the first place.

I see. Yeah, I think you're partially right. Bt has its stupid parts, but if we forced enough we could believe it. The real problem comes from the universe stupid being originated by a bunch of ignorant (in the true meaning of the word) writers trying to fill holes they don't know nothing about

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Beginning and ending at an awesome note...
New thread
>>51890303

>>51890338
why do you always make the threads so early?

>Despite their preeminent position the warrior caste is not the largest of the five castes: as of 3062 there were around 115,000 Clan warriors, or just .01% of the Clans' total population. Members of the warrior caste also had the shortest lifespan, with an average life expectancy of 45.2 years.[4]

>The Korean People's Army (KPA) is North Korea's military organization. The KPA has 1,106,000 active and 8,389,000 reserve and paramilitary troops

Best Korea annexing Strana Mechty and the Pentagon Worlds when?

>>51890328
>The real problem comes from the universe stupid being originated by a bunch of ignorant (in the true meaning of the word) writers trying to fill holes they don't know nothing about

I get you, but that's almost all writers, ever. Especially in something where building a fictional universe is required, since it's impossible for a writer to have enough of a knowledge base.

I mean, let's take BattleTech. What would the writers need to know to get it right? At a minimum I reckon: all the science top create a plausible universe, plus the alternate science to make it plausible, plus all the human psychology for the characters, plus enough of a grasp on history not to just rip things wholesale, plus a working knowledge of military operations and how any fictional technologies introduced would affect them.

It's totally unreasonable for somebody to be picking on a writer for not knowing all of that. It's easy for us to pick at things, because we all have personal specialities. I make fun of BT radio procedures a lot because I was a Marine radioman. But it's not at all fair for me to say that the BT universe is terrible because they get commops completely wrong: that's some really specialized knowledge I have, and unless an author had the same sort of training I did, it's unfair for me to expect them to know that. Extrapolate that to a lot of other stuff, with everyone with their personal specialty telling the authors "that's wrong and you're bad."

If we expect authors to know everything they SHOULD know before writing a story...nobody would write stories.

>>51890460

9.5 million vs 115,000? That's 82 to one. And they're Norks, so 75 of those are dudes with an AKM rifle and a winter coat. I'd take the Clans every day of the week, even without orbital bombardment. Sit back at extreme laser range and tape your triggers down; you'll outrange the Norks, never run out of ammo, and you can always walk backward to keep the range open.

You don't even have to worry about artillery or rockets. Unless you're the ocean, Norks can't hit shit.

>>51890507

>expecting a writer to write consistently and do research is too much now

>>51890546

>Of all KPA branches, the Ground Force is the largest. It has approximately one million personnel divided into 80 infantry divisions, 30 artillery brigades, 25 special warfare brigades, 20 mechanized brigades, 10 tank brigades and seven tank regiments.[161] They are equipped with 3,700 tanks, 2,100 armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles,[162] 17,900 artillery pieces, 11,000 anti-aircraft guns[163] and some 10,000 MANPADS and anti-tank guided missiles.[164] Other equipment includes 1,600 aircraft in the Air Force and 1,000 vessels in the Navy.[165] North Korea has the largest special forces and the largest submarine fleet in the world.[166]

>North Korea possesses nuclear weapons, but its arsenal remains limited. Various estimates put its stockpile at less than 10 plutonium warheads[167][168] and 12–27 nuclear weapon equivalents if uranium warheads are considered.[169] Delivery capabilities[170] are provided by the Rocket Force, which has some 1,000 ballistic missiles with a range of up to 3,000 kilometres.[171]

>According to a 2004 South Korean assessment, North Korea possesses a stockpile of chemical weapons estimated to amount to 2,500–5,000 tons, including nerve, blister, blood, and vomiting agents, as well as the ability to cultivate and produce biological weapons including anthrax, smallpox, and cholera.[172][173]

>The military faces some issues limiting its conventional capabilities, including obsolete equipment, insufficient fuel supplies and a shortage of digital command and control assets. To compensate for these deficiencies, the KPA has deployed a wide range of asymmetric warfare technologies like anti-personnel blinding lasers,[174] GPS jammers,[175] midget submarines and human torpedoes,[176] stealth paint,[177] electromagnetic pulse bombs,[178] and cyberwarfare units.

Sorry bro, some stalinist hellhole that barely occupies half of a tiny peninsula fields more shit than literally all the clan toumans together.

>>51890617
>Sorry bro, some stalinist hellhole that barely occupies half of a tiny peninsula fields more shit than literally all the clan toumans together.

And it all dies to one good orbital bombardment. Cry more about it.

>>51890832

Too bad orbital bombardment isnt a thing in battletech anymore.

>>51889307
Which tonk is that? Looks like a Bradley on steroids IN SPAAAAAACE!

>>51887881
my personal preference would have been for the Fedcom to conquer everything eventually but then quickly be forced into breaking up into St Ives style statlets under the nominal control of a Terran Hegemony based Victor as first lord. They are constantly feuding however and the central government is basically only able to intervene to prevent the conflicts from getting too big.

Would have been great from a gaming perspective.