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Are the pimps...girlbosses? e: nice
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Aug 10, 2022 22:18
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It's Canopus IV, of course they are.
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Aug 11, 2022 02:59
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feedmegin posted:The book centers around a small band of heroic right wing freedom fighters led by a struggling sci-fi writer and his improbability attractive redhead girlfriend, Lol, I've heard writers tend to write what they know about and do self-inserts in their fiction. Stephen King does the same thing too (Most of his main characters are struggling/successful writers, see Big Bill from IT). That sort of thing makes me real worried about Bill Randall though, given that all of his protagonists are clinically depressed, self-loathing social Clutzes. Is anyone keeping an eye on Bill over there?
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Aug 11, 2022 20:40
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So after spending hours reading and catching up to the policies of Battletech (last time I was up to date it was 3025...) and reading threads on the Battletech forums...how are the large empires still in existence if no one has FTL communication and there's less than a half dozen (?) places making jump ships? Is it a matter of "bad writing" or am I missing something? Hard to have a war if no one can actually co-ordinate little lone transport more than a company of mech's at a time.
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Aug 14, 2022 14:14
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There's more then half a dozen. A bit into double digits. As for the empires crumbling after Grey Monday took the HPG network down, that's exactly what's happening, to a point. Small nations like the Tamar Pact, Vedet Brewer's Vesper Marches, the Jade Falcon Remnant states, etcetera are breaking away from their former larger member-states. Mostly because of just what you say. Anything outside of a few jumps just takes too long for orders and intelligence to flow back and forth. (not to mention the cautious nature of some of the leadership, the Lyrans STILL haven't got off the pot when it comes to reclaiming their lost world (which is why the Marches and the Pact were formed, people could rally a few regiments under one banner and take over several worlds, because the Lyrans were sitting on their thumbs and fretting "What if this is a big trick and the Wolves and Falcons aren't gone towards Terra but are waiting to Ambush us!!!!" Even a year+ after the formal end of the Battle of Terra and the formation of the ilClan, people on a good swath of planets don't know what happened on Terra. As we translate into this area, it does look like the Sea Foxes will be able to restore the HPG grid (So not only are they Walmart/Blackwater, they've taken ComStar's role as AT&T as well), and avoid that issue going forward.
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Aug 14, 2022 14:37
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DropShip/JumpShip numbers are way out of whack. I personally view most of the numbers as "the number of sites producing military DropShips / JumpShips" with the civilian production being an order of magnitude higher. Even when the HPG network was working, most "mail" was still carried by JumpShips so I imagine the old courier services (jump into system, find a ship going closer to the message's destination, transmit message to that ship; etc) were working just fine for anything that wasn't hyper-secure time sensitive military orders. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Aug 14, 2022 |
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Aug 14, 2022 14:43
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Low priority but also low bandwidth type things like entertainment (no Solaris Results, not they were running Solaris events during wolf empire owning the world) just.. went away. And I'm sure this did a number on the economy because you couldn't spend a few hundred c-bills telling your superior "Hey, we're burning through our supply of (widget) here, get more or we'll be sitting around doing nothing". Compare it to the shipping situation during the pandemic.
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Aug 14, 2022 15:11
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Comstar posted:So after spending hours reading and catching up to the policies of Battletech (last time I was up to date it was 3025...) and reading threads on the Battletech forums...how are the large empires still in existence if no one has FTL communication and there's less than a half dozen (?) places making jump ships? The fourth succession war was a large level of woopsie where mechtechs were basically pulling off superhuman feats of spit and bubblegumming people's 'mechs together for the most part, but the technology was more or less rediscovered by the Grey Death Legion when they found the Helm Memory Core and were able to spread it amongst the stars. Clan invasion and post invasion also included a lot of really good tech being reverse engineered as well. Otherwise, you can control a lot of land even with a lance of light mechs. Most of these "massive interstallar empires" aren't *that* big, many of them are mostly just colonies, like mining colonies and such with relatively low populations. The threat of "we have a company of 'mechs we can dropship in and burn your loving homes to the ground in less than fifteen minutes" probably keeps most people in line. Otherwise, I assume it's like real life - most people do not commit crimes either out of a fear of dealing with cops and consequences, and the simple fact that many people choose not to. I don't remember the statistic but isn't it like if 20% of America decides to just never follow the laws again the country turns into a mad max hellhole?
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Aug 14, 2022 15:49
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Important think to remember when it comes to the whole Lack of Communication/Why Haven't These Empires Dissolved thing is... the HPG is a relatively new technology by interstellar metrics. It was only developed /after/ the formation of the Star League, and all the Succession States predate that by a wide margin. Make no mistake, the Blackout is still devastating as gently caress to the various factions, but seeing as all these empires formed before FTL Communications existed, it's not as much of a Keystone keeping the entire Inner Sphere from collapsing as you might think it would be.
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Aug 14, 2022 17:06
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The Star League was designed to keep each of the successor states about as big as possible without them collapsing under their own bureaucratic weight. And at this point everyone still has House Kurita's directional fax machines to fall back on, it's just that those only transmit text and they're slower than the HPGs were. They send messages using hyperspace rather than teleporting messages through hyperspace like HPGs do. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Aug 14, 2022 |
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Aug 14, 2022 17:19
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Economy and logistics never made sense in battletech imo. It’s expensive to move mechs around but somehow in the background there’s whole jumpships apparently moving water between worlds. Every sci fi or fantasy universe has some “this makes no sense, don’t think about it” elements. For BT one of those is the interstellar logistics situation. For game purposes, moving military forces around is a pain, and for setting purposes there’s interlinked economies of base commodities between worlds, and those two are opposites. But these sorts of contradictions are in every setting if you really dive into it. Best Friends fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Aug 14, 2022 |
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Aug 14, 2022 17:24
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It's less that it's expensive to move mechs around and more that it's expensive to move them around in a ready to use state. Technically you could move around an RCT in a mule or two, but it's not going to be in a state where it can immediately go into combat. The real cost also comes from docking collars, which is why the ship in the HBS game is really absurd.
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Aug 15, 2022 00:51
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Taerkar posted:It's less that it's expensive to move mechs around and more that it's expensive to move them around in a ready to use state. Technically you could move around an RCT in a mule or two, but it's not going to be in a state where it can immediately go into combat. The real cost also comes from docking collars, which is why the ship in the HBS game is really absurd. Indeed. It's one thing to stack 'Mechs like cargo inside of a hold, it's entirely a separate thing to turn that hold into a Mechbay that your machines can actually /operate/ out of. It's no so much that it costs more to transport 'Mechs so much as it's a case of 'You're transporting all that empty space the 'Mechs need to maneuver in, as well as for the tech crews to maintain the machines, and quarters to house the Mechwarriors'. A normal transport can pack their holds to the rafters with storage crates and operate on a skeleton crew, but a military vessel /needs/ a dedicated support staff to operate at acceptable levels.
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Aug 15, 2022 02:16
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It's a combination of docking collars and 'Mech Bays in dropships. The biggest dropships that can carry more than a company are comparatively uncommon, and the number of dropships required to transport 'Mechs in combat order rapidly fills up most jump ships. The ship from the HBS game gets you net +1 collar, which... doesn't do anything at all for the number of dropships that may actually be available, and if all you have available to fit on it is a Leopard then who loving cares.
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Aug 15, 2022 02:23
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The Argo also will crumple like a beer can if it ever scrapes atmosphere. There's a reason ComStar didn't give a poo poo about someone having it.
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Aug 15, 2022 03:01
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It’s jumpship capacity it gets contradictory. The biggest (and rare) jumpships hold 9 drop ships, most hold 3. The biggest drop ships hold about the same cargo capacity as a freight train (maybe less?). That’s not compatible with commodities moving freely and regularly between planets in bulk in a universe where some mech units have trouble scheduling a jumpship. Which is fine. Literally no sci fi universes make total sense, that’s why they’re sci fi.
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Aug 15, 2022 05:31
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Best Friends posted:It’s jumpship capacity it gets contradictory. The biggest (and rare) jumpships hold 9 drop ships, most hold 3. The biggest drop ships hold about the same cargo capacity as a freight train (maybe less?). That’s not compatible with commodities moving freely and regularly between planets in bulk in a universe where some mech units have trouble scheduling a jumpship. Up to 25 in one rare case. https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Potemkin The most sense would be that interstellar trade is essentially only for finished goods, as the amount of energy it takes to push raw material up a gravity well and across multiple K-F jumps would make it worth it for only the rarest of the rare materials. Which would also make planets that have easilly harvested resources that much more valuable.
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Aug 15, 2022 11:23
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Best Friends posted:It’s jumpship capacity it gets contradictory. The biggest (and rare) jumpships hold 9 drop ships, most hold 3. The biggest drop ships hold about the same cargo capacity as a freight train (maybe less?). That’s not compatible with commodities moving freely and regularly between planets in bulk in a universe where some mech units have trouble scheduling a jumpship. I don't think I've ever read in any of the novels units having trouble scheduling jumpships. If I remember correctly, most jumpships are privately owned, while House Kurita has 5,000+ all state-owned that they micromanage. Given that Kurita also has 200-300 planets, that's a good amount of jumpships per planet to facilitate some trade. It makes sense though that trade between planets would only be luxury/unique goods/raw materials for 'mech factories, and that most planets should be self-sufficient otherwise. It also made more sense back in the original setting when most planets were supposed to be literally medieval feudalism settings, with peasant farming the mainstay of most people. As BattleTech slowly adjusted the standard of living on most planets to our current SoL, so stories could be more interesting, it did disrupt some internal logic.
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Aug 15, 2022 11:31
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GD_American posted:Up to 25 in one rare case. BattleTech is a setting that runs on plentiful clean fusion powered entirely by hydrogen; the energy requirements for getting things out of gravity wells is basically completely irrelevant in terms of economic feasibility. Leaving orbit is the part of interstellar travel that BT handles with contemptuous ease compared to getting it to another system.
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Aug 15, 2022 20:34
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I haven't been keeping up with Catalyst and what they are selling until just yesterday, have they stopped selling their really nice mat battle maps? They have just the paper maps available on their site now that I can see. I knew I should have bought all four of the fabric battle mats when I had a chance.
I said come in! fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 21:56
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As far as I know they're still around: they just regularly get hit by sellouts followed by waits for new stock to arrive. I haven't seen any announcement or other indicator that they're planning to cancel them.
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Aug 15, 2022 22:35
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There are like 20 of them now, too, between the grasslands series (definitely still exists but not on the site right now), the Tukayyid series, the Alien Worlds/Desert series, the Strana Mechty/Circle of Equals, and the BFM.
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Aug 15, 2022 23:58
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Strobe posted:BattleTech is a setting that runs on plentiful clean fusion powered entirely by hydrogen; the energy requirements for getting things out of gravity wells is basically completely irrelevant in terms of economic feasibility. Well, they did cover some of that in the Explorer Corps (And Battlespace) book where in they added fuel calculations for dropships that also took into account "Fuel expansion" as well as "Coasting" and how far nadir/zenith jump points are from various planets. But this is largely glossed over in the main books so you're still technically correct, even if you may not be aware that they covered it at some point. (Edit: Forgot that the second half is in the Battlespace suppliment/game) Major Spag fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Aug 16, 2022 |
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Aug 16, 2022 00:05
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Strobe posted:There are like 20 of them now, too, between the grasslands series (definitely still exists but not on the site right now), the Tukayyid series, the Alien Worlds/Desert series, the Strana Mechty/Circle of Equals, and the BFM. Life saver! Thank you. That is what I was looking for, I saw that yesterday too but I think I misunderstood what I was looking at.
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Aug 16, 2022 00:06
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Major Spag posted:Well, they did cover some of that in the Explorer Corps (And Battlespace) book where in they added fuel calculations for dropships that also took into account "Fuel expansion" as well as "Coasting" and how far nadir/zenith jump points are from various planets. Fuel consumption is a part of the game, but it doesn't really seem to be much of an economic factor. They're strictly a logistical concern where eventually you need to stop by a planet and suck some air into your tanks with a hose like mega maid.
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Aug 16, 2022 02:41
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I mean they ARE dealing with mostly military procurement since the game mainly covers military units and their lives. That also tends to cover that of mercenaries because fuel costs are likely negotiated as being covered in the Merc contract anyway by whatever nation/march/planetary governor is hiring. Sending the 29th Regulars to the Capellan front typically just means you have to ask the military quarter master to fill your tanks by order of the Archon or something. Kinda hard to bring money costs into that unless we start getting into the day to day of a non-military star base, ya know?
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Aug 16, 2022 02:53
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Most contracts give you transport on state-owned vessels. That's because they don't want you to be able to decide to gently caress off. If you bring your own, they seldom are willing to do more than go halfsies on gas.
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Aug 16, 2022 04:02
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I haven't read any BT books yet. Is fuel kind of treated like reaction mass in The Expanse? The ships have macguffin engines that can generate nearly infinite clean energy, but they need reaction mass to push against to propel the ships in space. Usually that mass is water. So it's not that refilling is expensive, it's just the logistics of making sure you have enough and where you're getting it.
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Aug 16, 2022 14:36
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Floppychop posted:I haven't read any BT books yet. Is fuel kind of treated like reaction mass in The Expanse? It's not really touched on much, except when people are at a drop-port and waiting for their ship to be "refueled".
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Aug 16, 2022 16:03
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Only of the early references to such facilities is the Olympus station, which has the capability to refuel and recharge jumpships and dropships (and even service the latter)
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Aug 16, 2022 16:17
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Floppychop posted:I haven't read any BT books yet. Is fuel kind of treated like reaction mass in The Expanse? Yeah pretty much. BT engines are impossibly (literally, science fiction magic) efficient so when moving between planet and jump point just accelerate at 1G halfway there then flip and do the same thing in reverse the other half way. A Dropship carries enough fuel to 'strategic burn' like that for typically a couple months, when a "long" distance from jump point to planet is 10 days.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:57
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Been trying to ease back into reading some of the novels since the current era seems to be getting more interesting than Dark Ages was to me. Picked up Redemption Rites and A Question of Survival; any other "current era" fiction worth checking out? Also, is it me or is Alaric self-sabotaging so badly he might as well be deliberately trying to do so? He pisses off Wolf's Dragoons (the people who made a VERY big mess for the Combine the last time they were this desperate and hosed with this badly), he's repaid the loyalty of the Wolves who didn't go by utterly abandoning them, and now he's thrown a hissy fit and hit the Ghost Bears right in their family by being mad a democratic vote wasn't unanimously in favor of bowing to him and licking his boots even though I expect the losers would have sucked it up and been loyal. I haven't read any of the ilClan Technical Readouts, but do they actually indicate the ilClan dominates the Inner Sphere by that point? Because given how well Alaric is emulating his genemother in political arrogance, it's starting to feel kind of unrealistic for him even with Terra to rule too many worlds given what a good job he's doing undermining his allies and antagonizing everyone else. Kind of hoping the setting goes the way it feels like it's going, where it feels like a bunch of smaller factions fighting things out. I'm pleased the two books I read were down to much smaller forces going for relatively small goals instead of RCTs smashing together. Feels exciting to have things down to just a handful of Mechs again.
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Aug 17, 2022 02:00
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Floppychop posted:I haven't read any BT books yet. Is fuel kind of treated like reaction mass in The Expanse? There was a book where a stranded Dropship crew generated hydrogen for fuel somehow with a laser from a Locust. But that book is pretty hated by the fandom for.....other reasons. So.
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Aug 17, 2022 02:10
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MadDogMike posted:Been trying to ease back into reading some of the novels since the current era seems to be getting more interesting than Dark Ages was to me. Picked up Redemption Rites and A Question of Survival; any other "current era" fiction worth checking out? Also, is it me or is Alaric self-sabotaging so badly he might as well be deliberately trying to do so? He pisses off Wolf's Dragoons (the people who made a VERY big mess for the Combine the last time they were this desperate and hosed with this badly), he's repaid the loyalty of the Wolves who didn't go by utterly abandoning them, and now he's thrown a hissy fit and hit the Ghost Bears right in their family by being mad a democratic vote wasn't unanimously in favor of bowing to him and licking his boots even though I expect the losers would have sucked it up and been loyal. I haven't read any of the ilClan Technical Readouts, but do they actually indicate the ilClan dominates the Inner Sphere by that point? Because given how well Alaric is emulating his genemother in political arrogance, it's starting to feel kind of unrealistic for him even with Terra to rule too many worlds given what a good job he's doing undermining his allies and antagonizing everyone else. Kind of hoping the setting goes the way it feels like it's going, where it feels like a bunch of smaller factions fighting things out. I'm pleased the two books I read were down to much smaller forces going for relatively small goals instead of RCTs smashing together. Feels exciting to have things down to just a handful of Mechs again. Alaric is hosed as far as "dominating the Inner Sphere" goes unless something super wacky happens IMO, but it feels like the setting is going towards nobody being particularly dominant, which is cool with me.
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Aug 17, 2022 02:14
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I can’t believe you guys actually read the books. e: this isn’t intended as rude as it probably reads. I just never saw much beyond a reason to have robots fight. Apologies. Dr. Lunchables fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Aug 17, 2022 |
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Aug 17, 2022 02:16
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Dr. Lunchables posted:I can’t believe you guys actually read the books. Takes less time than playing a game!
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Aug 17, 2022 02:18
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I thought Hunting Season was decent, it's about the Mariks post-FWL reformation.
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Aug 17, 2022 02:44
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My issue with anything FWL related is that they really need to stop portraying Regulus as the faction's internal villain when they've been consistently right about everything. If Paul Masters hadn't stopped them from nuking the Wobbie leadership on Gibson they may have spared the Inner Sphere from the Jihad.
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Aug 17, 2022 03:17
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Regulus:
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Aug 17, 2022 03:54
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Everything I’ve read in my whirlwind tour in sarna since 3025 is the universe would work better if all the great houses and bigger clans are broken up so everyone has a side they can pick and not feel too bad about it. Though I would hope Wolf clan losses everything at some point. Again.
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Aug 17, 2022 05:28
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