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They usually shuffled low level people between stations to make sure nobody got too friendly with local governments. You only get to stay at one post a long time once you're high up in the ranks and your loyalty is considered absolute.
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 20:50 |
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BattleTech: Restoration Campaign – Episode 10: Take the Bull by the Long Tom Artillery Cannon. I mean Horns.![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Mission 56: Weakest Link (Assassination, No Commentary) Rewards: 296,625 c-bills Reputation: Capellan Confederation +8, Taurian Concordat -6 Noteworthy Salvage: 3 CPLT-C1 Catapult parts (‘Mech complete), 1 SRM-6++ (+4 damage) ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() PTN’s note: We’re stuck with Kamea on this one. She kinda sucks. Mission 57: Raising the Dead (Story, Commentary) Rewards: 2,215,200 c-bills Reputation: Arano Restoration +9 Noteworthy Salvage: SRM-6+++ (+4 damage, +2 stability damage), PPC+ (+2 accuracy), Medium Laser++ (+3 accuracy), a bog-standard PPC (salvage on this mission is awful) ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Mission 58: Escape (Story, Commentary) Rewards: 1,700,400 c-bills Reputation: Arano Restoration +9, Taurian Concordate -7 [Loathed (we can’t shop with them anymore)] Noteworthy Salvage: 1 AWS-8Q Awesome part, 1 BLR-1G BattleMaster part, 1 ZEU-6S Zeus part, 1 LRM-15+++ (+50% crit, +2 Stability Damage), Arm Mod+ (+40 stability damage), 1 FS9-H Firestarter part, 1 PNT-9R Panther part ![]() Seraphic Neoman posted:why do we hate the Taurians? ![]() ![]() PTN’s note: The game tries to make it look like this matters, but it really doesn’t. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() PTN’s note: The SLDF Highlander is ok. I’ve just never been a fan of the Highlander. I’ll be dumping it into storage and taking its double heat sinks. ![]() Training Results: Five Aces: 10 in all stats, he’s our first 10-10-10-10 Glitch: 10-10-10-10 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Mission 59: Carrier (Recovery, No Commentary) Rewards: 141,750 c-bills Reputation: Taurian Concordat -10 Noteworthy Salvage: 1 BL-6-KNT Black Knight part, 1 CTF-1X Cataphract part, 2 Medium Laser+++ (+3 Acc, +50% Crit), 1 SLDF Wargear (+1 Initiative, +1 injury resist), 1 QKD-5A Quickdraw part, 1 TDR-5SS Thunderbolt part ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Mission 60: Drop Interception (Battle, Commentary) Rewards: 338,450 c-bills Reputation: Restoration vs. Directorate doesn’t matter Noteworthy Salvage: 1 COR-6R Corsair part, 1 VTR-9S Victor part, 1 CT Computer (+Called Shot), 1 Autocannon/20++ (+4 Acc) ![]() Training Results: Dekker: 10-10-10-10 ![]() ![]() ![]() Mission 61: Drop Interception (Battle, Commentary) Rewards: 368,900 c-bills Reputation: Doesn’t matter Noteworthy Salvage: 1 AWS-8Q Awesome part, 1 HGN-733 Highlander part, SLDF Wargear (+1 Initiative, +1 Injury Resist) ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 02:27 on May 14, 2021 |
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Gun Jam posted:IIRC, one does not "just" put guns into orbital platforms. And drones are expansive, pilot are cheap... you mean modern, real-life drones, not AI-piloted mech? Sorry I was too vague. I meant modern flying drones. I fully accept the "because it's not a cool as hell walking 'mech" as reason for not having them ![]() IMJack posted:Long story short, that's not what BattleTech is about. In a game about giant fighting robots, there's going to be some story fig-leaf over any technology or approach that obliviates the giant fighting robots. Mutant Headcrab posted:The in-universe reason is kind of complicated, but boils down to a lot of hobbled industry, gentlemen's agreements between noble houses (because unrestricted orbital bombardments made up the majority of the Amaris Civil War and the first couple of Succession Wars and it wasn't pretty), and Space AT&T (ComStar) disappearing folks who come up with ideas like "what if we designed a warship with the tech we do have." ![]() This was more or less what I was expecting. Obviously it'd ruin the fun of throwing hilariously oversized guns on walking tanks, but I wasn't 100% sure on the in-universe reason for that. ![]() fennesz fucked around with this message at 23:35 on May 13, 2021 |
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fennesz posted:Sorry I was too vague. I meant modern flying drones. I fully accept the "because it's not a cool as hell walking 'mech" as reason for not having them BattleTech is a universe where technology went in a different direction. Computers are big and inefficient, power generation and storage are tiny and incredibly powerful. That kind of miniaturized computer control doesn't exist.
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Computers in BattleTech are simultaneously near sapient and dumb as a sack of rocks.
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Oh hi Jensen, didn't expect to run into you. Also Ep 59 is marked as having commentary but doesn't have it.
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The commentary in video 60 seems to be out of sync- you mention something happening before it happens at least three times that I noticed.
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So uh what if you were stupid enough to become an SLDF vaulthunter and kept up the codebreaking on an isolated system? Cause that sounds like a plan for a roleplay campaign and riches if I ever heard one.
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VolticSurge posted:The commentary in video 60 seems to be out of sync- you mention something happening before it happens at least three times that I noticed. poo poo, that's going to be hard to fix. I'll see what I can do. ![]()
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I hate that escape mission. Even knowing what happens to the mechs doesn't actually matter, it still feels really bad, especially if you get lovely RNG and start losing weapons and limbs.
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Seraphic Neoman posted:So uh what if you were stupid enough to become an SLDF vaulthunter and kept up the codebreaking on an isolated system? Cause that sounds like a plan for a roleplay campaign and riches if I ever heard one. Plays Battletech RPG Rolls Character Creation Goes LosTech Hunting Rolls "0"! Decides to try again. Rolls "0"! Looks at GM. "So, I hit the motherlode, right?" GM: "You might have broke the Campaign." Me: "Tell you what, the rest of the party is my crew, and we have our own Dropship under my ownership. I'll use my success here to make sure we're solvent." GM: "But the mech combat! You'll have nothing to do!" Me: "How about I pick a Dropship with Aerospace assets and Artillery and act as fire support for the team?" GM: "That works." Campaign: Dies three sessions in when the GM fails to realize that in the chosen time, 3022, ComStar was still openly seen as neutral and trustworthy and they aren't WoB asshats from top to bottom. I made a decision perfectly in line with what my character knew, and not what I as the Player knew, and the GM folded.[
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Were I the GM in that situation, I would have had ComStar come and buy you out, like they did with Brion's Legion, rather than stick to my guns and kill the party. Since you were clearly interested in using Star League tech to crush outmatched units, 1st Division would have been a great fit for that team.
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ComStar recruited mercs all the time until 3048. Anyone who seemed even remotely pliable got to be a shiny new Acolyte inside a year.
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To be fair, the price of my dropship was the party having limited access to SLDF stuff, like a couple ERPPCs and a half dozen DHS's and the like in exchange for a reliable base of operations. We would have had to carefully ration the good stuff, just in case. We did have a single SLDF non-Royal Heavy, but it had parts replaced due to age and the like. The GM ... was inexperienced at the time, but passionate. The plot thread they had in mind was that the party would be given incredible and incontrovertible evidence that the Jumpship they were on was (memory fails) stolen or Pirate or something that we would be Totally Justified in taking it for ourselves. I, being more detail oriented in terms of doing my background research and testing my limits vis a vis the plot, instead, on our next trip to a planet to look for jobs on the MRB, went over to C* and handed over copies of all our evidence and said "Hey, this isn't a Merc Problem, this is a C*/House problem, right?" The GM metaphorically Bluescreened, and couldn't adapt. I told him afterward while we were in a different setting/system/campaign that I half expected him to roll with it, and have us be basically "ComStar Mercs" with his same plot, but our backers changed. He told me that C* was going to be the enemy thanks to my stupidly lucky rolls. So yeah, you and I were on the same wavelength there, but my luck, plus my adherence to character over player, doomed the campaign.
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That's a shame. It's the Inner Sphere, just flip-flop the protagonists and antagonists and play out the same story except now the players are having to hunt down some other plucky group of LosTech finders. ![]()
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Have Primus Tiepolo show up and say things like "Prepare the battlefield... FOR MASSACRE!!!"
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Nice callback/foreshadowing to the Lyran Fortress dropship squadron Evidner in the 4th Succession War that gave the Draconis Combine a bloody nose.
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Not sure what rules they are using for those long tom barrages here, is it representing multiple rounds coming down and instant kills whatever us under its template?
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I have to say I always loved the reaction of that Taurian scout when facing a lance of SLDF 'mechs, especially one containing some real heavy hitters. I kinda wish the enemy had spent the first turn just running away at full speed, both to sell how scary that stuff is to face and also because it's not fun being on the receiving end of the enemy attack without being able to act until they've all fired :vv:
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Ostergaard's voice actor is a pretty big name but he was in both Battletech and Mechwarrior 5. I wonder if PGI & HBS sought him out specifically for something, or if he's a fan of the franchise - sometimes big names get involved with smaller titles because they like the IP. It's good to have missions with Glitch again after the story missions' glum pilots, too. Yes Glitch, we can go make snowmen after the murder. What a delight she is.
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Reynard was probably the best of that lot, at least he sounded he was enjoying himself.
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aniviron posted:Ostergaard's voice actor is a pretty big name but he was in both Battletech and Mechwarrior 5. I wonder if PGI & HBS sought him out specifically for something, or if he's a fan of the franchise - sometimes big names get involved with smaller titles because they like the IP. That's Elias Toufexis I think, and he's a huge Battletech fan that really wanted to be in the games.
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He was also the second choice to play Amos Burton on the Expanse, and since he didn't get that part he had some extra time.
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aniviron posted:Yes Glitch, we can go make snowmen after the murder. What a delight she is. ![]()
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Ostergaard is pretty much everything Victoria should have been. He's a great antagonist who has a real. personal. beef. with Kamea and her pet Mercenaries. Edit: He's also short, so he's got a bit of a Victor Steiner-Davion complex ![]() PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 19:06 on May 15, 2021 |
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I wonder if it was this "malicious code" that caused the argo to crash in the first place. Maybe not though. Incidentally, I actually enjoy reading the between mission text more than watching the videos, I'm not sure what that says about me.
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The Locura was something Dr. Murad downloaded from Nautilus, the Castle Brian on Artru. It's explicitly part of the Star League's Space Defense System (SDS), which was used to protect Terra with a massive fleet of drone warships. Whether the Locura is an early version of the Terran SDS or an experimental upgrade that got mothballed before it entered production remains to be seen, but the TLDR is: The Locura is a semi-sentient computer program that has been taught to kill. If that sounds like an immensely stupid idea to you, congratulations! You're smarter than House Cameron.
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Everyone is smarter than House Cameron. Those idiots were just lucky Albert Marik existed. brb working on new AU, no Albert Marik
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PoptartsNinja posted:The Locura was something Dr. Murad downloaded from Nautilus, the Castle Brian on Artru. It could just be the original SDS code that they managed to recover after a jump. I know they tried to make fully autonomous stuff, but as soon as it went through a jump it went crazy, Event Horizon style so they always had to shut it down when jumping. That's what I always thought it was, the AI was stuck on an air-gapped computer and jumped so that it could be isolated and studied afterwards to try and fix the problem.
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![]() Edit: the real conspiracy is that the Nautilus code is probably Moderbjorn, which was deactivated after an "accident" wiped out the city it was put in place to "protect." PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 20:53 on May 15, 2021 |
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PoptartsNinja posted:
Love the LP, it's entertaining so see the missions I struggled with getting handled like this, turns out I'm just a bad mech pilot.
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Trenchdeep posted:I request elaboration! There is a large distance between "bad mech pilot" and what PTN is doing in this LP. A lot of it is down to mech design, too. E: You could be a mediocre or even decent mech commander and still struggle with these missions if you didn't design amazing murderbots. pun pundit fucked around with this message at 06:24 on May 16, 2021 |
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Knowing what triggers events in the campaign, what 'mechs you can expect and when to find them is an absolutely massive part of being able to clown on the story missions. I wouldn't take it too hard if you struggle ![]()
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Trenchdeep posted:I request elaboration! All I know is that I would switch the order of those two words that make up that name.
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Trenchdeep posted:I request elaboration! Ok, so, first up: this is all behind-the-scenes theory / spoilers for the "Of Unknown Origin" flashpoint. MB (whose name was chosen for the initials, I'm certain, and who I will refer to with feminine pronouns) was created to "protect" a certain city, which was later nuked (presumably during the 1st succession war but really, who nukes a rando planet in the periphery?). Mother Brain then got to sit and stew for 300 years with nothing to do, and eventually got so bored that she decided to try to drone control an SLDF WarShip, the Dobrev, which had been abandoned in the periphery by parties unknown Clan Wolverine. The Dobrev was intercepted, so the supposedly non-sapient MB came to the completely logical conclusion to hire the first group of mercenaries capable of beating her limited supply of drones to help her find the Dobrev so that she could ??? --> profit! To say the ability to drone control WarShips was heavily restricted by the SLDF would be an understatement (they were dumb, but not that dumb!). Even if she could only give the Dobrev basic commands--which may be more due to the Dobrev's damage than any actual limitation on MB--the fact that MB could control the ship at all is remarkable and terrifying because it implies that: A) MB was aware of her surroundings B) MB was equipped with an HPG C) MB was designed to supplement (or control) an SLDF Space Defense System D) MB's SDS code was viral and capable of seizing control of ships. That's what the Locura tried to do to the Argo when Dr. Murad downloaded it. Presumably when Dr. Murad attempted to prevent the Locura from gaining control, the Locura attempted to scuttle the Argo. E) The Dobrev was abandoned for "reasons unknown." MB claims it then "drifted into range" but that's not how interstellar travel works in BattleTech. This means the Dobrev actually entered MB's range and was then abandoned for "reasons unknown." F) The Locura code actively sabotaged the Argo, killing power and threatening to destroy the entire ship. The Dobrev is in similar condition when it turns up. So, here's our timeline: 1) The SLDF was experimenting with SDS systems at Nautilus. With some promising data, they built MB and deployed a prototype. This prototype kept in contact w/ Nautilus via HPG, but was stationed far enough away that Nautilus was not within range of a direct transmission. 1a) The Argo, a failed survery vessel with huge industrial capacity, was likely used to construct, deploy, or directly monitor MB as part of its normal duties. 2) MB went full Skynet and wiped out the population of the city it was protecting. 2a) The Argo was in MB's HPG range, and MB attempted to seize control. When the crew worked to prevent this, MB crippled the Argo which crashed into a moon. 3) Nautilus remotely deactivated MB, and copied its code for study. This copy becomes the Locura. 3a) The Locura was deemed too hostile and dangerous and was quarantined (but not isolated) in Nautilus's files. 4) Time passes 4a) MB reactivates at some point, but has nothing to do. MB is only interested in the SLDF and too limited in scope to rampage. MB becomes aware that the SLDF has left the Inner Sphere. 5) The CWS Dobrev jumped into a system within MB's range. 5a) MB infects the Dobrev and attempts to seize control. When the crew of the Dobrev resists, MB attempts to scuttle the Dobrev. 5b) The Dobrev is abandoned. MB achieves full control but the ship is too badly damaged. MB manages to get its jump drives charging at a minimum level, but it will take years before the Dobrev can jump. [Campaign timeline] 6) The Argo is repaired 7) The Argo returns to Nautilus, Dr. Murad downloads some files she really shouldn't have. 7a) Locura attempts to seize control of the Argo (again?). When the crew resists, Locura attempts to scuttle the Argo. [Career timeline] 6) The Argo is repaired 7) The Argo discovers MB. MB has either mellowed or grown considerably more cunning. 7a) MB convinces the crew of the Argo to load her aboard. 7b) MB leads the Argo to the Dobrev. She really wants that ship, because she would like to know where Kerensky took the SLDF. 7c) For revenge? [Post-game timeline] 8) ComStar gets their hands on the Argo and either gets Locura or MB in the process. 9) ComStar (Word of Blake) reactivates Terra's SDS using MB's code. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 14:41 on May 16, 2021 |
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If we're getting into speculation/conspiracy, did anything ever come up about why that ship from a few plotmissions back was *secretly special*?
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The Newgrange? We found out last update. It was a Taurian Concordat gun runner captained by the son of the antagonist who was just introduced.
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Negative_Earth posted:If we're getting into speculation/conspiracy, did anything ever come up about why that ship from a few plotmissions back was *secretly special*? The one we blew up? I'm pretty sure that it wasn't, and the information that it was hauling weapons or whatever was planted because Ostergaaard's son was the captain and his death would secure the alliance between the Directorate and the Taurians.
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The evidence wasn't planted, it really was a gun runner. The Newgrange was just part of an arms deal sanctioned by the Concord Navy rather than the clandestine smuggling ring that Angry Noble thought it was. Angry Noble just wanted the Newgrange hit because he thought it'd make Espinosa angry and possibly throw a wrench in the Directorate's talks with the Concordat. He had no way of knowing Espinosa had already secured an alliance with the Concordat who would view the destruction of the Newgrage as a declaration of war. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 16:38 on May 16, 2021 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 20:50 |
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I think it's the way she storms in going "You have no idea what you've just done!". I guess that's just her talking about the war with the Taurians going public and hot, but it sounds a lot like a "forces beyond our ken will be unleashed!" line. Like you just blew up a ship full of proto-wobbies who'd been using that prison camp to test out neural interface technologies, hence the people with broken brains.
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