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Hachiman and Dieron can pick up some of the slack, but that's mostly because Hachiman Taro Enterprises* could be retooled from making holotanks to BattleMechs in a month or two. Luthien Armor Works also exists on Dieron, but the Draconis Suns is pretty hosed in terms of ship production. I think they've been reduced to Federated-Boeing on Galax. *HTE doesn't have a page on Sarna, but it could pretty much be summarized as "Chandreskhar Kurita produces a ton of consumer goods to cover for the stuff he's making that people don't realize he's making." PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Jul 6, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 03:20
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Isn't Hachiman a post-3050 thing? I would dig out my copy of Objective Raids to check, but the impression I got from the old House Kurita book was that manufacturing in the Combine was pretty close to a LAW monopoly, and that most industry in the Combine (except for places like Dieron and Marduk, that were captured from other factions) just built parts of things that went to Dieron for final assembly. Kind of like mercantilism. e: McKenna Yards over Kathil is gone?
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Jul 6, 2014 03:39
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Kathil is in New Syrtis. New Syrtis is a couple of vote results away from being Capellan.
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Jul 6, 2014 03:46
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Oh yeah, I forgot about them. Smart move on Syrtis' part, cutting bait. Skye's in a similar situation of not having any JumpShip construction, unless they've expanded the DropShip yards at Skye or have somehow rebuilt the ones orbiting Hesperus II.
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Jul 6, 2014 03:48
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Sarna also claims it didn't come online as a JumpShip facility again until 3039, as prior to the 4th Succession War Liao raids made it too dangerous. ...Man, the Drac Suns is BONED. So, um, how're the Lyrans doing these days?
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Jul 6, 2014 03:49
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Kathil could at least do basic repairs to JumpShips. Still a huge deal before the 3040s. House Liao would be REALLY loving happy to be able to do that, since they don't actually get a JumpShip yard until Necromo comes online post-Clan invasion.
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Jul 6, 2014 03:52
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Well, they're facing 3 times as many Clans as anyone else and while Fred is doing a good job getting troops where they're needed Lestrade and the secession sunk the economy. He needs a reconciliation and you'll see next vote with Melissa and he needs it now.
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Jul 6, 2014 04:03
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True. More of a long-term issue for the neighbors compared to the incipient conquest of an entire FedSuns March, but that's what they get for bailing. Say, does the Suns have a DropShip plant anywhere other than Federated-Boeing? Because if they don't, there's an alarming point of failure right there.
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Jul 6, 2014 04:03
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goatface posted:The Imperium is loving empty. A million worlds? In the whole Galaxy? You'd be lucky to have one inhabited system in a space the size of the Inner Sphere. Nah it's not the whole galaxy. And the fluff says basically nobody knows how many worlds are populated by humans, and then there's also countless worlds covered in orks and tau and a bunch that have been stripped bare by tyranids or are claimed by necrons and etc. etc. They also don't pretend like people would bother to establish a colony on a really marginal world just because there's some cadmium there or something, because there are so many planets around that you're always going to be able to find one somewhere that has both the minerals you need, and a reasonably life-supporting climate. The main bag with the Imperium is that it's written so over-the-top grimdark that it's stupid, which was OK back when Games Workshop writers didn't take it seriously and it was all just basically a parody of grimdarkiness, but now they take it way too seriously and that makes it stupid and not fun. So I don't actually like the 40k setting so much. But I do like the idea that once humans colonize somewhere, they generally fill it the gently caress up with as many humans as it can support, and with advances in technology that's a hell of a lot of humans. Combine it with a really lovely fascist sort of government and you get countless trillions of humans living in downtrodden misery, but they deal with it because the alternative is being literally consumed by aliens and/or chaos. If only you could take a setting like that, throw out all the skulls and spikes, and just have battlemechs fighting on hexes with ablative armor and some reasonable rules for tanks that makes them not suck horribly, and you'd have the game I'd play forever. As is I settle for either Epic, or Battletech, whichever I can get someone to play with me. (Or warhammer fantasy, but that's a whole different thing.)
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Jul 6, 2014 04:09
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Okay, so Stackpole wrote the Cappellans as being driven to the point of collapse. My question is "Why not let them?". Could no good combat scenarios or storylines be had out of the collapse of a major power-block?
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Jul 6, 2014 04:12
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paragon1 posted:Okay, so Stackpole wrote the Cappellans as being driven to the point of collapse. My question is "Why not let them?". Could no good combat scenarios or storylines be had out of the collapse of a major power-block? They're unwilling to alienate the fans of a given faction. The Free Worlds League collapsed into a pile of gibbering micro-states during the Jihad. It spent about one real-life year like that while some sourcebooks were released to cover the time between the Jihad and the 3145-era post-WizKids fiasco, and then it was mostly intact again (barring having half the Wolf Clan crashing on its couch).
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Jul 6, 2014 04:21
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Wait wait wait. Luthien is effectively the industrial capacity of one of the five Inner Sphere powers? As in the Luthien that Clan Hell's Horses took? As in the Clan Hell's Horses that was so appalled by Inner Sphere living conditions that they phoned home and had civic engineers, doctors, teachers, and all the support equipment for those professions loaded into jumpships instead of more soldiers? Soldiers that they don't really need because they suckered another clan into taking over the front line for them. Is that what's going on there? How long has it been since Luthien fell, essentially without damage to the infrastructure?
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Jul 6, 2014 04:23
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paragon1 posted:Okay, so Stackpole wrote the Cappellans as being driven to the point of collapse. My question is "Why not let them?". Could no good combat scenarios or storylines be had out of the collapse of a major power-block? Well, the rumor has always been that the original plan was for the Clan Invasion to wipe them out, but that the writers decided that having the Clans knock over a faction that only had one worthwhile planet (Sian, their capital and only industrial site) would have made the Clans look like they swooped in on a completely crippled faction. Since that didn't fly they cooked up the FRR to take the fall with the rationale that a wholly-intact, much larger state with a bigger army than the CCAF would make the Clans seem more of a serious threat. Basically, if they were going to write a story about the collapse of the CapCon, it would have been the 4th Succession War. Any scenario about the CapCon collapsing after that is just Marik and Davion fighting over who gets Sian, because the Davions already took everything else from them.
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Jul 6, 2014 04:37
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Yeah, the Imperium 'owns' about a third of the galaxy tops, though in reality there are huge swathes of territory in that third that are unexplored/unreachable due to FTL mechanics/uninhabitable/filled with aliens, and the Imperium as a whole is more a cluster of inhabited islands. Even then, most Imperium worlds aren't Hives (the 25 billion population industrial hellscapes). In fact, Hives make up less than 5% of the inhabited planets in the Imperium. The vast majority of the Imperium is lovely low-tech pseudo-feudal agricultural or mining planets that, outside of their tithe, barely have contact with the Imperium (again, thanks to the FTL mechanics). Story-wise, they're only important as a way to 'siege' hive worlds by cutting off their resources.
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Jul 6, 2014 04:42
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PoptartsNinja posted:or (if you're the awesome and completely insane Goliath Scorpions) Elementals and Fighters. Okay, hold on - are you talking airdropping elementals? Like, an actual semblance of air cavalry tactics in btech? or something else. But please, elaborate.
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Jul 6, 2014 08:27
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TheParadigm posted:Okay, hold on - are you talking airdropping elementals? Like, an actual semblance of air cavalry tactics in btech? or something else. You can airdrop BA off of OmniFighters, yeah. Or you can just drop them off with a heli-taxi.
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Jul 6, 2014 09:06
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Which is admittedly only slightly less sane than dropping them off a speeding Fire Moth. One of the reasons the Clans love omni-everythings is because they can all transport a squad of Elementals for no extra charge.
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Jul 6, 2014 09:08
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TheParadigm posted:Okay, hold on - are you talking airdropping elementals? Like, an actual semblance of air cavalry tactics in btech? or something else. There is a specialized omnifighter configuration which is dedicated to dumping an Elemental point onto enemies. I imagine that if Clan aerospace tactics were up to snuff this would have been absolutely murderous. Sadly they weren't.  What I'm surprised about is that the Manei Domini did not resurrect the concept with the Striga or Rusalka. They were, in many ways, the anti-Clans. They had the same basic sketch of "Boogeymen the Inner Sphere unite against and eventually defeat because of their crippling numerical and industrial inferiority", but their shtick was mostly 'brutal cyborg efficiency' versus 'HONOOOOOR!' (Which probably explains why the Jihad managed to last longer than the Clan invasion despite the enemy being significantly more industrialized) MJ12 fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Jul 6, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 09:11
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Weren't the Manei Domini originally formed to fight the Clans? Because if so it looks like they're about to fulfill that purpose in PTN's universe.
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Jul 6, 2014 09:36
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Leperflesh posted:All the explanarions about superior future armor would be fine, if mechs didn't take armorndamage from falling over or walking into buildings. But they do, so I have to completely discount them as obvious propaganda. Anything can be damaged by itself. See: using diamonds to cut diamonds. Everything in Battletech is made of mech armor. Even the ground. Especially the ground. Defiance Industries posted:But because Stackpole is not very good at understanding these things, he thought that it would be units charging off to avenge the fall of the capital that would bring it down, not losing 70% of their total industrial capacity, including their ability to repair and replace JumpShips. He didn't even think to mention those things. You know, after doing some more looking into BT's older fluff and Stackpole in general, I've realized that he's just not a very good author, at least not at Battletech (or portraying non-MURRIKA factions as anything but dastardly villains). I feel significantly better knowing that there's a single person I can put a lot of blame for BT's early stuff on. PoptartsNinja posted:Kathil is in New Syrtis. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees...
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Jul 6, 2014 10:38
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goatface posted:The Imperium is loving empty. A million worlds? In the whole Galaxy? You'd be lucky to have one inhabited system in a space the size of the Inner Sphere. Yup. There are 300 billion stars in the galaxy. Most of them have planets. The Imperium has about a million worlds. Like I said a few pages ago, 40K is one of the few space opera settings that's actually interested in engaging with the bigness of space. Also, while it may technically be a galactic empire, probably 80% of the Imperium's planets are on Earth's side of the galaxy. The area around Earth is naturally the most heavily populated, while the opposite side of the galaxy is very sparsely settled. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 11:05 on Jul 6, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 10:49
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The worst thing any science fiction writer can possibly do is try and give anything in their setting any kind of justification since that opens the door for legions of pedantic internet posters to swarm all over it and sperg out
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Jul 6, 2014 11:09
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fool_of_sound posted:Yeah, the Imperium 'owns' about a third of the galaxy tops, though in reality there are huge swathes of territory in that third that are unexplored/unreachable due to FTL mechanics/uninhabitable/filled with aliens, and the Imperium as a whole is more a cluster of inhabited islands. Even then, most Imperium worlds aren't Hives (the 25 billion population industrial hellscapes). In fact, Hives make up less than 5% of the inhabited planets in the Imperium. The vast majority of the Imperium is lovely low-tech pseudo-feudal agricultural or mining planets that, outside of their tithe, barely have contact with the Imperium (again, thanks to the FTL mechanics). Story-wise, they're only important as a way to 'siege' hive worlds by cutting off their resources. That's going a bit far. The vast majority of the Imperium is made of relatively self-sufficient "civilized" worlds at various levels of technical development. Agri-worlds and mining worlds can be high tech. The Imperium doesn't make a systematic effort to distribute technology (or exert much control over planetary economies at all) so development level is guided by historical accident. The setting tends to focus on weird technological disparities because it's interesting. It also tends to focus on feudal bullshit because it's interesting. There are plenty of planetary governors elected by popular vote in the Imperium. The Imperium just absolutely does not give a poo poo about its member worlds' domestic policies except where taxes and religion are concerned. Also, the Imperium isn't even the only human polity in the 40K universe. They just think of themselves as the only legitimate one. Solar Macharius crushed a techno-utopian star empire out on the rim of Segmentum Pacificus that had been untouched since before the Great Crusade. I mean, the Imperium eventually got around to killing them all but they were out there doing their thing until the 39th millenium. There are gobs of human worlds outside imperial control for whatever reason, and not all of them are low-tech failed colonies.
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Jul 6, 2014 11:17
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Jonah Galtberg posted:The worst thing any science fiction writer can possibly do is try and give anything in their setting any kind of justification since that opens the door for legions of pedantic internet posters to swarm all over it and sperg out In Farscape the small arms are powered by a kind of plant oil. In later seasons the main characters can often be seen licking their cartridges to check the power level.
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Jul 6, 2014 11:24
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Jonah Galtberg posted:The worst thing any science fiction writer can possibly do is try and give anything in their setting any kind of justification since that opens the door for legions of pedantic internet posters to swarm all over it and sperg out
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Jul 6, 2014 11:35
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TheParadigm posted:Okay, hold on - are you talking airdropping elementals? Like, an actual semblance of air cavalry tactics in btech? or something else. MJ12 posted:There is a specialized omnifighter configuration which is dedicated to dumping an Elemental point onto enemies. I imagine that if Clan aerospace tactics were up to snuff this would have been absolutely murderous. Actually, aerospace-fighters dropping elementals is a pretty standard Goliath Scorpion combat doctrine. It's extremely effective. Imagine yourself walking along and some enemy aerospace flies over at an altitude too high to be strafed from. Then suddenly elementals to the face, and the fighters are coming around to strafe anything not swarming with friendly battle armor. The Goliath Scorpions' whole MO seems to be: "Do stuff that pisses off all the other Clans, but try to do so in a way that doesn't get you murdered." PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jul 6, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 12:05
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PoptartsNinja posted:Actually, aerospace-fighters dropping elementals is a pretty standard Goliath Scorpion combat doctrine. It's extremely effective. Imagine yourself walking along and some enemy aerospace flies over at an altitude too high to be strafed from. They seem like cool dudes.
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Jul 6, 2014 17:06
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Shoeless posted:You know, after doing some more looking into BT's older fluff and Stackpole in general, I've realized that he's just not a very good author, at least not at Battletech (or portraying non-MURRIKA factions as anything but dastardly villains). I feel significantly better knowing that there's a single person I can put a lot of blame for BT's early stuff on. Pretty much, yeah. He writes so-so tie-in novels where fans don't mind (usually) and nobody else reads them, has a real weakness for Super Protagonists. See also, X-wing novels. that said, it's not like his competition in the BT novel-writing arena was any better, though. In some cases, worse. Need I remind you of DRT. If I were to blame anyone it'd be blaming the empty chair at FASA titled "Editorial"
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Jul 6, 2014 17:18
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I remember reading some of Stackpole's X-Wing novels back when I was in Secondary School. The phrase 'applied some rudder' is now irrevocably burned into my brain. I still don't know what it means and I suspect he didn't either. Even so, I don't remember anything overtly offensive about his writing. Unlike Kevin J. Anderson. Even fourteen year-old me knew he was poo poo.
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Jul 6, 2014 17:23
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etheric rudder Didn't you move on to Aaron Allston's X-Wing books and be all "yeah, these are way better?"
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Jul 6, 2014 17:28
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Allston was Wraith Squadron and Iron Fist, wasn't he? If so then yeah, I vaguely remember them getting better over time. It was ten years ago, mind.
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Jul 6, 2014 17:38
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Psion posted:If I were to blame anyone it'd be blaming the empty chair at FASA titled "Editorial" I cannot argue with this. Sort of like George Lucas no longer having anyone to hold his leash post-original trilogy. Scintilla posted:I remember reading some of Stackpole's X-Wing novels back when I was in Secondary School. The phrase 'applied some rudder' is now irrevocably burned into my brain. I still don't know what it means and I suspect he didn't either. Even so, I don't remember anything overtly offensive about his writing. You know I keep hearing people badmouthing Anderson, and yet never hear a concrete reason. Can you clarify why you think his writing is bad?
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Jul 6, 2014 17:54
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Shoeless posted:You know I keep hearing people badmouthing Anderson, and yet never hear a concrete reason. Can you clarify why you think his writing is bad? I want you to go get the Jedi Academy trilogy and start reading. Come back and post when you give up. then ... you will know.
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Jul 6, 2014 18:09
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If you somehow get through those, read Darksaber. And let the hate flow...
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Jul 6, 2014 18:11
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Someone should do a let's read of 40K novels.
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Jul 6, 2014 18:32
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Psion posted:I want you to go get the Jedi Academy trilogy and start reading. Come back and post when you give up. Red the whole thing, want the Dark side to win now.
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Jul 6, 2014 18:40
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Arglebargle III posted:Someone should do a let's read of 40K novels. If you'd do that I'd say go for the earliest ones since they tended to be generally bad and somewhat inconsistent. Or you could just cheat and go for the blindingly obvious ones like the Dawn of War books.
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Jul 6, 2014 18:43
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Arglebargle III posted:Someone should do a let's read of 40K novels. A goon gave me two big boxes full of them. But I have so many other things to read, and not enough time anyway (and an unfinished dwarf fortress LP) that I don't really want to get into a Let's Read right now. But it might be a fun project for the future.
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Jul 6, 2014 18:51
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Cooked Auto posted:go for the earliest ones since they tended to be generally bad and somewhat inconsistent. I read one where the main character was an unlicensed rogue trader who didn't believe in Chaos and thought it'd be a good idea to trade in the Eye of Terror. I don't remember much from that book except the pre-heresy Dark Angel who stopped a Khorn/Tzeentch alliance in a final act Heroic Imperial Bravery and that the Not-Quite Rogue Trader's story culminated in his getting addicted to a wine made out of human souls. So basically the plot was centered around the throwaway Futurama Soylent Cola joke: "it varies from person to person." The book was appropriately titled "Eye of Terror" and it's one of the dumbest things I've ever read. And yet I remember the climax because I remember the Emperor putting in an appearance towards the end. Edit: Anyway, 40k chat is definitely a derail that'd be better taken up elsewhere. It's just: Eye of Terror was so stupid. 
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Jul 6, 2014 18:59
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Scintilla posted:I remember reading some of Stackpole's X-Wing novels back when I was in Secondary School. The phrase 'applied some rudder' is now irrevocably burned into my brain. I still don't know what it means and I suspect he didn't either. Even so, I don't remember anything overtly offensive about his writing. I have a similar memory. That one part where Stackpole decided that X-Wings had limited fuel and thus required drop tanks full of, well, he never mentioned what. Also I think at one point Corran Horn drops his drop tank on some imperial construction equipment and blows it straight to hell.
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Jul 6, 2014 19:15
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