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PoptartsNinja posted:Well, it basically started when the Star League Explorer Corps started actively sabotaging potential colony worlds to keep humanity from expanding too quickly and to force those planets to be reliant on their neighbors (and the ice fleets) for basic necessities. Regardless, making it explicit is a good reason for some changes, and if it was discovered in-universe, then it would be a big deal... Night10194 posted:Okay, I have to ask: What exactly happened with the first Star League and why is Amaris the Devil to the Clanners? I think I got an incorrect summary of what the haps were from someone else, because the impression I'd gotten was that Kerensky was a frontier general for brutal space rome that came back to declare the Emperor incompetent, started a civil war, tried to become Emperor himself, got told to gently caress off, and went off to make his own space rome that would be ruled by Strong Military Men Like Alexsandr Kerensky. Is that entirely off base? Canon timeline, and very abridged: Aleksandr Kerensky was the head of the SLDF, not a frontier general, and he was technically regent to the last First Lord of the Star League, Richard Cameron, who was a child and also not very smart. Stefan Amaris was head of the Rim Worlds Republic, with a long grudge against the Camerons, but cozied up to Cameron so he could encourage his worst tendencies and then backstab him later. Amaris secretly supported anti-Star League uprisings in the Periphery, and arranged to have his own troops garrison the worlds around Terra while Kerensky and the SLDF were playing Periphery whack-a-mole. I'm sure you see where this is going. When Amaris makes his play, Kerensky first leads his forces against the Rim Worlds Republic, then grinds out a campaign to liberate Terra. There's a lot of WMDs and orbital bombardments on both sides, and Amaris basically goes full scorched earth with nukes on every planet his forces withdraw from. Eventually the SLDF hits Terra, cleans out the last of Amaris's forces and captures Amaris himself before he is ultimately executed. The Great Houses, absent a First Lord (or any vestige of the Camerons at all), then strip Kerensky of his position as Regent and basically tell him to go gently caress himself, because they are all afraid he actually would do what you are suggesting. And so Kerensky takes most of the SLDF and fucks off to parts unknown, until their descendants eventually return as the Clans, who thusly see Stefan Amaris as basically Space Superhitler. Anyway, Kerensky certainly didn't instigate the civil war like whatever you were told, and there's not much indication that he ever intended to take power afterwards. Which is, itself, probably a good thing, since it's also made fairly apparent that he's shaky on political matters at the absolute most charitable reading. In PTN's timeline, we know that while Amaris was apparently still killed on Terra (I think?), the SLDF was ultimately unsuccessful in seizing Terra itself, and so Kerensky hosed off in defeat rather than in self-imposed exile. It is very possible that in this timeline the circumstances surrounding Amaris's coup could be a bit different, although PTN's comment that Terra was the first major indication of a divergence leads me to believe that most major events pre-Terra probably happened mostly the same. But I'm sure we'll find out as the thread progresses further. Fraction Jackson fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 4, 2016 23:57
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I wonder if Amaris just wants to fight the clans for a political purpose. Like the atrocities he'll put on their heads will strengthen his position in the nwr
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Feb 5, 2016 00:43
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 Things are really swinging around, the NRWR is apparently everywhere and has been secretly developing its sphere of influence above and beyond what the clans managed in about as much time. The clans are busy organizing Clans 2.0 but Amaris has already set up Clans 3.0 before they could even get started. Capcon is busy trying to play T-Mobile to Comstar's AT&T and there's going to be too much going on for Comstar to really do anything focused about it in the near term, what with the reorganzations taking place, especially once the second clan invasion kicks off and especially if a rim world invasion starts just the same -- because both are going to head ramming-speed towards Terra from opposite ends while Comstar's trying to rebrand a bit in the middle.This is excellent. I hope the brave salaryman, his girlfriend, and his office chair are somewhere safe.
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Feb 5, 2016 02:50
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Man the CC and Comstar deserve each other as enemies so hard.
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Feb 5, 2016 02:52
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Chronojam posted:This is excellent. I hope the brave salaryman, his girlfriend, and his office chair are somewhere safe. See, this is a man who has his priorities straight.
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Feb 5, 2016 02:57
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Well, this took a turn. Somebody set the Capellans on fire before they get the notion their version of Fortress Republic makes them important. P. S. Dear Snow Ravens: Please remember the words "proximity point." You are the descendants of the SLDF and know exactly how the Bug Eyes got around. If you get yourselves punked in a dumb jump point ambush I will be so cross with you.
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Feb 5, 2016 04:04
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So where is the Tetatae homeworld? Is it in Amaris' turf? 
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Feb 5, 2016 04:09
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Fraction Jackson posted:
This is actually underplaying Amaris a bit, as he'd starting using nukes and committing atrocities well before the end of the 13 year civil war. Specifically, he was using them way back at the very beginning, against Terran Hegemony units that survived the initial surprise attack and managed to consolidate. Those who actually surrendered were, of course, forced to dig their own graves and then summarily executed. Oh, he also rounded up all the remaining members of the Cameron clan on Terrra in the Star League throne room, from elder to child, gave them the standard "join me or die" spiel - then murdered the first one that actually agreed to do so. Then he murdered all the rest and had the throne room sealed, before sending out orders to kill all members of the clan his forces could find in the Hegemony. The throne room massacre was incidentally what got his own dumb rear end shot, as he WAS being held humanely and in luxury while they tried to decide what to do with him after his capture - riiiight up until they unsealed the throne room and saw what was inside.
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Feb 5, 2016 04:10
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Lord Koth posted:This is actually underplaying Amaris a bit, as he'd starting using nukes and committing atrocities well before the end of the 13 year civil war. Specifically, he was using them way back at the very beginning, against Terran Hegemony units that survived the initial surprise attack and managed to consolidate. Those who actually surrendered were, of course, forced to dig their own graves and then summarily executed. Everyone was using large-scale nuclear bombardment at the time so that's not really saying much. The SLDF's entire military doctrine centered on the concept of unrestricted warfare from the beginning of the Reunification War until they became the Clans. For example, the Pentagon Worlds degenerated from Star League technology levels to 3rd Succession War levels just in the time the Clans were in exile. It took the Great Houses two hundred years to do that. The SLDF didn't really do "take and hold." Their overall objective tended to be to absolutely destroy anyone who tried to oppose them. The only reason the Pentagon Worlds survived at all was that the SLDF navy had been taken out of active service by that time. Defiance Industries fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 04:14
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Chronojam posted:
Part of the expansionism of the NRWR is probably in part due to the policies in place about handing out Orbital Facilities to systems/planets that join in. Still, that is a mind-boggling amount of territory that Amaris has under the current NRWR banner. The only difference to consider compared to the Clan territories developed in that same time-period is the relative levels of productivity for each actual system within the territory. If I recall some earlier AU fluff correct, most of the NRWR systems aren't nearly all that productive. Much like the Great Houses, it probably has industrial centers within the territory while the bulk is made up of outright non-productive planets or industry-limited agrarian societies paying fealty to the NRWR. This may well have been accounted for by Amaris in his taunting of the Triumvirate Task Force. The NRWR certainly has an apparent tech advantage on ClanTech, and they currently have high morale. Plus the Minnesota 331st adding in a fair amount of additional elite units. But, like the Clans, perhaps Amaris has a shortage in overall numbers to properly protect the full vastness of his territory? Its a guess, but has similar trappings to the concentration of force strategy that worked on Tukayyid in the original canon. Just an even more lopsided set of advantages to wreck Clanners. Andurien is going to be a bloodbath. I almost feel bad for the clanners involved. I will be sad if it means Clans Raven and Sea Fox outright cease to exist after Andurien, actually. PoptartsNinja posted:I have not been asked. And I hope this changes swiftly. Also, I assume you caught my request to join the __ As far as CapCon versus C* goes, we may finally see ComGuard units being purposefully deployed en masse. Which may or may not spell disaster for the newly formed
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Feb 5, 2016 06:43
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What excites me the most is the second crusade being clans pissed off and ignoring zell. Their warships will blot out the sky!
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Feb 5, 2016 08:30
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If the Clans had been in full "burn them all" mode from the start and showed up in the Inner Sphere looking only to glass major population centers until the survivors unconditionally surrendered, would the Sphere have been able to stop them?
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Feb 5, 2016 09:35
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I think we've had that argument three times already this thread.
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Feb 5, 2016 10:06
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To be fair, that averages out to having that argument roughly once every 500 pages, which is the kind of page-to-repeated-argument ratio that most threads would kill for.
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Feb 5, 2016 10:08
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Dolash posted:If the Clans had been in full "burn them all" mode from the start and showed up in the Inner Sphere looking only to glass major population centers until the survivors unconditionally surrendered, would the Sphere have been able to stop them? It only takes one fighter with a nuke to pop a WarShip. The Houses have WMD stockpiles on most key worlds. i would imagine the Clans will run out of WarShips first. Also once you get close to the planet, Peacemaker nukes. I think that expanding the nukes' role would have been a much better solution to the WarShip problem than "get rid of WarShips entirely" like they did. If planet-to-ship missile defenses become more common then you can't just have WarShips roll up and blast your ground forces, but ship battles at jump points and in transit are still a thing. They don't get used on planets because they're way too powerful or something so you still need ground forces, and maybe DropShips are too small to accurately hit. Boom, universe fixed. Defiance Industries fucked around with this message at 10:16 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 10:12
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I was under the impression the heavier warships can withstand a few nukes, though they will still run out of ships before nukes.
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Feb 5, 2016 10:37
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I've been working under the assumption that nukes in a vacuum, lacking an atmosphere to transmit the bulk of their explosive shockwaves, are mostly a weapon for generating a flash of extreme heat. So a nuclear blast wouldn't necessarily hit a warship with apocalyptic force but it's still an extremely powerful, and irradiating, weapon to unleash. I have no idea how correct this assumption is btw
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Feb 5, 2016 10:46
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Mostly correct I think, the whole energy of the nuke goes out in radiation without an atmosphere to turn it into a mechanical effect. Still going to vaporize hull and irradiate everything of course but less deadly.
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Feb 5, 2016 11:05
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T.G. Xarbala posted:Also among those hidden NRWR listening posts/"pirate" staging grounds scattered across the periphery, there's one funny little blob of blue in the RWR's original territories right outside the Lyran Commonwealth. It's the Rim Territory(?) in the regular canon, which is notable for being an entirely unremarkable periphery faction. It actually does consist of a good portion of a former RWR province by the Dark Ages though, which may make that area of space interesting if the Lyrans knuckle under. The spot up near the homeworlds is most likely the system where the Word of Blake cached some Mechs that the Scorpions found during the Reavings. Ronin Of Dreams posted:Andurien is going to be a bloodbath. I almost feel bad for the clanners involved. I will be sad if it means Clans Raven and Sea Fox outright cease to exist after Andurien, actually. If it were up to the Bears, they'd have charged in with revved murderboners already. I'm half-expecting the Foxes to show up with a counter offer Amaris can't refuse, while the Ravens intend to strike a devil's bargain.
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Feb 5, 2016 11:07
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T.G. Xarbala posted:I've been working under the assumption that nukes in a vacuum, lacking an atmosphere to transmit the bulk of their explosive shockwaves, are mostly a weapon for generating a flash of extreme heat. So a nuclear blast wouldn't necessarily hit a warship with apocalyptic force but it's still an extremely powerful, and irradiating, weapon to unleash. An old NASA report claims that heat would be negligible, as that's mostly from interactions with the air. So you're mostly left with the effects of strong x and gamma rays as well as whatever fun particles your reaction produces. The lack of atmosphere makes the effective radius huge: the 1.4 megaton Starfish Prime test exploded at 250 miles altitude and produced EMP effects over 900 miles away in Hawaii.
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Feb 5, 2016 11:11
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So nukes against warships is mostly an emp effect
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Feb 5, 2016 11:20
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Guess so! I mean, that's not gonna stop Battletech Physics but this is interesting stuff. DeepThrobble posted:It's the Rim Territory(?) in the regular canon, which is notable for being an entirely unremarkable periphery faction. It actually does consist of a good portion of a former RWR province by the Dark Ages though, which may make that area of space interesting if the Lyrans knuckle under. The spot up near the homeworlds is most likely the system where the Word of Blake cached some Mechs that the Scorpions found during the Reavings. I know of the Rim Collection in canon, and the fact that it exists is the extent of what I know, it's just nice to get confirmation that it still exists in PTN's timeline. And that it is, sensibly, a part of the NRWR. Nice catch on the Wobbie cache, though. That one I'd missed completely.
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Feb 5, 2016 12:09
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Affi posted:So nukes against warships is mostly an emp effect If figure there's also the direct effect of the radiation to consider. With no air to dampen the neutrons, there might well be enough radiation coming through even the thick hull of the ship to incapacitate or outright kill much of the crew. Not to mention that it'd render much of the ship itself so radioactive that it wouldn't be feasible to have a human crew on it. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 13:08
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Affi posted:So nukes against warships is mostly an emp effect Fun stuff with nukes in space. Instead of letting all that delicious X-ray energy bleed off in every direction, you can (theoretically) mount collimators around your bomb and turn it into a gigantic 1-shot laser. Bomb pumped X-ray lasers are fun.
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Feb 5, 2016 13:43
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dis astranagant posted:An old NASA report claims that heat would be negligible, as that's mostly from interactions with the air. So you're mostly left with the effects of strong x and gamma rays as well as whatever fun particles your reaction produces. The lack of atmosphere makes the effective radius huge: the 1.4 megaton Starfish Prime test exploded at 250 miles altitude and produced EMP effects over 900 miles away in Hawaii. Alas, that study was not an actual nuke in vacuum. It was still far too close to the planet, hence the EMP effect. Out in space, there is no meaningful EMP effect. Effectively, there are 2 scenarios to consider. 1) Impact detonation. The nuclear weapon hits your warship and detonates. Depending on warhead design, anywhere from half to 75% of the warhead's energy is delivered into your warship and unless it is exceptionally well armoured, this is almost certainly enough to reduce it to scrap. Even if it's not reduced to scrap, a large part of that energy is in the form of ionising radiation which will happily kill the crew. Sufficient armour to stop the nuke from shredding your craft is probably doable. Sufficient mass to prevent the radiation from killing everyone aboard requires magical forcefields or a total disregard of physics. 2) Proximity detonation. This is the interesting one, because while nuclear weapons on planets have massive kill radii, a large part of that is from blast effects which the warhead won't have in space. Even missing by just a kilometer is going to reduce the thermal effects to the point where you're unlikely to cause any damage at all and cuts the radiation effects down so much, your target's crew could survive, depending on the ship's orientation and armour. The latter part is why nuclear weapons in space is mostly a non-issue. If you have fusion drives like they do in BattleTech, kinetic warheads are much cheaper, don't require any radioactive materials, almost as well against planets and kill warships just fine. Simply get your warheads going at 30+km/s. Include a small bursting charge to create shrapnel if you're shooting at even higher velocities or against soft skinned targets.
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Feb 5, 2016 13:56
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Z the IVth posted:mount collimators around your bomb Remmon posted:1) Impact detonation ... if it's not reduced to scrap ... Is it standard in BattleTech for WarShips to have vacuum-gapped bulkhead regions?
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Feb 5, 2016 15:07
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This is battletech, it probably is already but it only survives one hit before evaporating.
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Feb 5, 2016 15:20
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Weissritter posted:I was under the impression the heavier warships can withstand a few nukes, though they will still run out of ships before nukes. http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Kentares_(Individual_Fox-class_WarShip) Put a K-F drive in a LO satellite. Warship jumps in, satellite drifts close and activates K-F drive.
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Feb 5, 2016 15:41
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Endomorphic posted:If you have a material that can withstand / reflect a nuke going off, I coat my warship in it. I think it still needs direct line of sight exposure to the epicenter of the detonation.
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Feb 5, 2016 18:47
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The entire outer surface of a jumpship is actually made up of adapted pusher plates from Orion NPP drives.
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Feb 5, 2016 18:50
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This is great. Everything is great. Write a book, PTN.
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Feb 5, 2016 18:57
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Endomorphic posted:If you have a material that can withstand / reflect a nuke going off, I coat my warship in it. I think you misunderstand - the lasing rods or collimators aren't surviving the nuke blast, they get destroyed in the process of lasing. Look up Project Excalibur from SDI back in the 80s. Coating your ship in something which is designed to self-immolate in a nuclear blast seems foolish.
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Feb 5, 2016 18:59
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On top of the whole "what if the nuke goes off against/inside the hull" thing, which would make perfect sense, you may not even need nukes against something as big and slow as a WarShip depending on how advanced your existing space facilities are. It seems to me it would be fairly easy in a society that already has tech for mining rocks in space to just start fashioning crude bunker buster bombs. You don't have to carry the load out of a normal planetary gravity to get it to space, and once you get it moving, it'll keep trucking on its own. You could just have a few aerospace fights hauling a few tons of rock up to speed outside of normal engagement ranges and let them go. No air to slow it down, not much gravity to pull it off target, and it's a big punch of kinetic energy when it hits the WarShip. A bigger, slower gauss rifle.
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Feb 5, 2016 19:27
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When you get that point you start referring to atomic rockets or the aliens tech manual which had a pretty thorough bits on space combat I think. Anyways, the problem with that are that the fighters and rocks are detectable at a long range, allowing the ship to evade and fire back. You need a missile that has terminal guidance but yeah, it doesn't really need any explosives.
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Feb 5, 2016 19:53
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The real problem with kinetic weapons in space is predicting where your target will be when the impactor arrives, since your target can see and therefore calculate the trajectory of your weapon, and (presumably) accelerate appropriately to make it miss. The more kinetic energy you invest in your missile, the more difficult it will be to change its vector to match the changing vector of your target. However. If we assume that your missile is continuously powered, has no need for life support etc., and has at least the same propulsion technology as the target, it should always be more maneuverable than the target for a given mass; but, the faster you push your missile (to increase transfer of kinetic energy on impact), the more energy it takes to make a given change in delta V. Putting a nuke on the tip of your impactor presumably gives you the same sort of advantages as the shaped charge on the tip of an RPG; you melt the point of impact and inject a squirt of nasty poo poo into the hollow interior of your target, and that means you can get a lot more killing power with a lot less mass than otherwise. So, I assume a nuclear weapon built specifically for anti-ship use would be a very small nuclear charge designed specifically to enhance penetration. You don't need to irradiate or vaporise an enemy ship full of people and air - all you need to do is make a decently big hole. If it has sealable bulkheads, then you want to make holes through a lot of them. And if you're fighting a space battle and you're not an idiot, you want to win the space battle and then have the privilege of salvaging your enemy's space ships reasonably intact. The more valuable those enemy space ships, the less you want to just obliterate them; although the less ability you have to make use of them (say, because you're firing from the surface of a planet and have no orbital facilities capable of salvaging and repairing a space ship), the less you want to leave those ships in salvagable state, so then in that case I guess you err on the side of "smithereens." Another intriguing possibility is using nuclear fission to power your missiles, but this is a setting that already has compact nuclear fusion engines, so I don't guess that it's worth all the trouble. A fusion engine is more than capable of producing ample thrust as long as you have anything to use as a reaction mass. e. The poster above makes the extremely salient point that if I'm shooting at you with kinetic weapons, but you have energy beam weapons like lasers, then shooting my missiles with your lasers should be trivial and effective. Unfortunately, this is battletech, where lasers have ludicrously short effective ranges and are ridiculously inaccurate even at point blank range. Whatever idiocy renders a targeting computer unable to hit an object moving at sublight speeds with a laser 100% of the time presumably infects every other aspect of battletech warfare, so I guess maybe my nuclear missiles remain an effective weapon against your laser-armed warship. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 20:00
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Zaodai posted:On top of the whole "what if the nuke goes off against/inside the hull" thing, which would make perfect sense, you may not even need nukes against something as big and slow as a WarShip depending on how advanced your existing space facilities are. It seems to me it would be fairly easy in a society that already has tech for mining rocks in space to just start fashioning crude bunker buster bombs. You don't have to carry the load out of a normal planetary gravity to get it to space, and once you get it moving, it'll keep trucking on its own. You could just have a few aerospace fights hauling a few tons of rock up to speed outside of normal engagement ranges and let them go. No air to slow it down, not much gravity to pull it off target, and it's a big punch of kinetic energy when it hits the WarShip. Wrong universe and about bombarding a planet, but... 
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Feb 5, 2016 20:08
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Space warfare is really hard and really loving depressing. Please don't blow things up in orbit.
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Feb 5, 2016 20:11
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Clan Invasion 2: Twice as crazy, half as prepared.
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Feb 5, 2016 20:30
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SIGSEGV posted:When you get that point you start referring to atomic rockets or the aliens tech manual which had a pretty thorough bits on space combat I think. Battletech has guidance systems that can't hit a 100 ton robot the size of a building half the time. Their weapons have arbitrary ranges you can launch from outside of, and anything jumping in canonically has an enormous energy spike that appears minutes before the ship arrives letting you know where they are arriving. Under those limitations, having a couple fighters fly directly at the big energy source and launch huge dumbfire missiles in advance would actually be more likely to hit than using Battletech computers to try and aim the shot. Outside of orbital space, anyway. I certainly wouldn't rely on battletech computers for point defense.
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Feb 5, 2016 20:35
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goatface posted:Space warfare is really hard and really loving depressing. Please don't blow things up in orbit. Especially don't blow up things in orbit around your planet unless you really weren't planning on going to space afterwards anyway. Actually, has anyone ever done a setting where induced Kessler Syndrome is a viable military tactic?
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Feb 5, 2016 20:38
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