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Tindahbawx posted:Waco Rangers! Fantastic, Battletech really does cater for everyone. You have no idea. While they were a fairly successful mercenary outfit, their CO also had an obsessive hatred of Wolf's Dragoons. Combine that with heavy losses during the Battle of Coventry, and they eventually did something incredibly stupid that got most of them killed and led to the remnants being hunted down with extreme prejudice.
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Mar 8, 2018 21:01
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Jimmy4400nav posted:
Minnesota Tribe was fine up until they got tarred by association when someone decided a few years ago that Clan Wolverine were perfect and honorable sorts who never did anything wrong and everything was just a setup. In other words, if you know anything about Battletech, making them literally the only major group in the entire setting like that. Or, to try and explain, as the initial story went Wolverine detonated two nuclear devices as they were abandoning Clan Space - one in their own capital, and one in the capital of the Clan they were currently heavily engaged with, Snow Raven. This actually does make some sense, as McEvedy, in addition to her positive traits, was rather quick-tempered and mercurial - annihilating your own capital denies it to the person you despise trying to claim the resources there, and the nuke against Snow Raven as a final "screw you" to the society she'd come to hate. Then some author decided ~10 years back on the Battlecorps website that this story was too nuanced, and Wolverine needed to be complete white hats. So the nuke in their capital was really another Clan (Widowmaker) sneaking one into their capital and detonating it, and the other was Snow Raven accidentally nuking themselves. The Widowmaker one I could almost believe, as they were fairly treacherous and eventually got destroyed themselves, but the Snow Raven one was explained as a hilariously stupid freak accident, and it is just idiotic on multiple levels.
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Mar 9, 2018 19:59
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To be entirely fair, the only available contract above 10% salvage rights was the Davion one and, as mentioned, planetary assaults tend to be rather lethal. And the other aspects of the contract that we got hosed on weren't really visible from the mission select. On the other hand, with 40% salvage rights the Davion contract is kind of a picture perfect example of "yeah, many/most of you will die, but the survivors will be rather rich." At which point you can cash out of the merc business, or rebuild on a more financially secure footing.
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Mar 14, 2018 17:01
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Radio Free Kobold posted:Do we even know what this thing is, in-character? Or, rather, isn't the only reason we know it's a Toro and Toros are bad is because someone looked it up on Sarna? Not quite, or at least not entirely. Even without knowing the name, the techs can see it's a 35-ton mech with a really lovely engine and completely outdated armor. That alone would be reason enough not to keep it, even aside from any historical/cultural value it might be worth to sell.
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Mar 17, 2018 01:15
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Weissritter posted:Some of them are at least visibly more...sane? If that is the right word. Hell Horses recognise the value of combined arms, Ghost Bear (at least nowadays) integrated with an Inner Sphere state, Wolf(in-Exile) is an edge case since they are barely hanging on and it was mostly Ulric Kerensky who made the warden Wolves more sensible like having mechs be more energy heavy to prevent themselves from running out of ammo, Snow Raven had a strong navy (not everyone is going to let you land mechs unopposed). Of course you also have the Diamond Sharks. Honestly, if anything Hell's Horses are a bit TOO obsessed with vehicles, and it's caused problems for them multiple times. For balanced combined arms you're more looking for structures like RCTs, and I want to say there are one or two Clans that get a bit closer to that ideal than the Horses. If you're far enough in the history to have the Ghost Bears integrated with Rasalhague, than by that point so have the Snow Ravens (with the Outworlds Alliance) and the Goliath Scorpions (with Nueva Castile, though more accurately they conquered it and then integrated). Neither are Inner Sphere states (the Alliance is a major Periphery state, and Castile is in the Deep Periphery), but the general gist is the same. To stretch the point a bit, the Falcons, Wolves, Sharks, and Horses all had to make at least some slight changes as well since they're all now limited to their Inner Sphere holdings (or migratory within it, in the case of the Sharks). Honestly, the Snow Ravens probably represent that integration the best simply because they're the only one that didn't actually conquer said people they integrated with - the Bears decisively conquered Rasalhague, they just eventually decided to allow the conquered some say in the government for certain reasons. On the other hand, Snow Raven forces were shattered during the Wars of Reaving before they wandered into Alliance space, so they didn't have the force to conquer it but still had the most overall power, thus both sides basically eventually came to the conclusion they had to reach an agreement.
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Mar 21, 2018 08:05
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Gnoman posted:
While not quite the ideal of an AC/2, there's a reason the Rifleman has always been the iconic mech AA platform with its four AC/5s - the fact it has AA targeting if you're using design quirks is just icing. Sadly it's one of the Unseen though. Comedy option of course is a Bane, because 10 Ultra AC/2s is something no pilot wants to fly into. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Mar 25, 2018 |
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Mar 25, 2018 08:02
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I'm going to pretend I was talking about the -6D variant, and Light AC/5s, instead of admitting to a bad case of "really not paying attention when writing that up."
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Mar 25, 2018 17:46
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hooman posted:An iATM 12 and an iATM 9 can get you a Locust 1E. For real comedy, just an iATM 12 with (Improved) MagPulse ammo will get you a Spider 5V (and very nearly a 7K). Though admittedly you really don't need anything larger than a iATM 6 for those pieces of bullshit unless you're expecting lots of AMS systems (at which point you probably want a 9).
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Mar 27, 2018 05:37
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The Kerensky Cluster being relatively resource poor has always been a thing in the lore - it's one of the initial practical reasons for the whole Trial system, after all. You just kind of have to justify some reason why they can't just go find lots of asteroids to mine. Maybe some aspect of battlemech construction just requires some exotic material that's rare in the Deep Periphery overall for some reason. As for some new impending resource scarcity, maybe it's more just a fair chunk of resources are currently practically inaccessible for reasons? A decent number of worlds were rendered fairly unlivable during the Reaving for various reasons, so it might just be that as opposed to flat-out not being there.
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Mar 28, 2018 06:22
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Jimmy4400nav posted:I mean, considering their founder was a military general whose brilliant solution to the collapse of the Star League was to take as many people and shiny objects as they could carry on a multi-year journey into uncharted space with no know places to stop and resupply or settle down in safety, they seem pretty par for the course. Not to say anything about what followed, but what, exactly, do you think Alexsandr Kerensky should have done? He outright rejected overthrowing the High Council, and he spent two years fruitlessly shuttling between members to try and reconcile differences between the various lords, who just ignored ignored him in their march to war. Hell, one key reason to just flat out leave was to prevent the various lords from trying to suborn SLDF units that had been drawn from their Successor State into their militaries for the conflict about to unfold - in fact one of the Houses doing so was the final trigger. Sure, setting out into the great unknown isn't the greatest idea, but if you need to flat-out make all that military power permanently vanish there aren't that many options - and even if you spent the years or decades required to send out explorator missions to find something (time not really available), that'd still leave traces behind.
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Mar 28, 2018 19:56
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Shoeless posted:Because the people who created Battletech didn't really understand hard sci-fi or economics, I'd wager. Alternatively (though that's probably true as well), because I don't think we ever see a sign of remote automation in Battletech, do we? So you actually have to set up manned mining operations on said uninhabitable worlds. Which means you have to set up some sort of outpost, unless you're expecting your miners to just work out of the dropship itself. Oh, and there's the slight issue of said mining operations probably taking years to set up if you're starting from scratch. And similarly months at least if you're restarting operations at an abandoned preexisting mine.
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Mar 28, 2018 21:16
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Shoeless posted:There is remote automation. That's what the Star League Space Defense Systems were; automated fighters, dropships and even warships. Plus later on there's automated robot cockpits for mechs. But it's not really a focus of the setting nor really used for anything but combat. Yeah, I really wasn't clear as to what I meant. Stuff like Caspar SDS and the like exists, but industrial uses of that technology seems nonexistent - that's why we have stuff like agrimechs and mining mechs, because everything has to be about mechs even when it doesn't make any sense (on any level).
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Mar 28, 2018 21:53
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| # ¿ May 23, 2024 15:44 |
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Well, it was mostly just creating a huge case of alarmism that this new Star League Reborn was also imminently poised to invade Clanspace, even aside from the outrage over one of the Houses forming some "debased" version, that really provoked it. If it was just outrage over the latter it probably wouldn't have been an effectively clean sweep in the votes, given the Warden Clans generally just wanted to remain isolated from the IS. And yeah, the Dragoons were nominally just a Clan unit sent ahead of time to gather information before a potential invasion, created as a compromise by the Wardens in order to stave off an invasion around the year 3000. They were just operating under separate orders from Wolf leadership to subtly prepare the IS for a potential invasion as well, and ultimately went dark 15 years later. The real irony about Outbound Light, and the ComStar Explorer Corps in general, is that they were out there specifically looking for threats that could challenge ComStar's supremacy, rather than any attempt at benefiting humanity. Well they found one, and it sure worked out great for them. Scalding Coffee posted:http://www.sarna.net/news/harmony-golds-case-against-harebrained-schemes-dismissed/ That it was Dismissed With Prejudice is honestly great.
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Apr 17, 2018 01:26
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