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If they booted Charrette or Milan (RIP) I’d see it, but Pardoe was replacement-level.
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Aug 1, 2022 00:47
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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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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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What’s the 3250/Gunslinger reference?
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Aug 17, 2022 17:06
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I just never really bought that New Avalon, a capital super-deep in what was the most militarily strong state in the Inner Sphere, was endangered. Broke my suspension of disbelief
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Aug 20, 2022 00:21
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To be clear I’m not Fedabooing, just look at that ridiculous Kurita thrust Sidesaddle Cavalry posted:I mean what happened in the FedCom Civil War? That was literally a civil war though
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Aug 20, 2022 02:28
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I've definitely done poo poo like "can a lance of Atlases beat a company of Cicadas", but I gave up on "could an Atlas beat 20 Savannah Masters" because jesus was that hard to manage.
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Aug 20, 2022 20:28
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If you remember the original Mercenaries' Handbook, the hard luck unit in the back (Wilson's Hussars) made a template for the few times we'd do campaigns as mercs. It always seemed more fun to play down on their luck broke-rear end units than whatever Kell Hound/Wolf Dragoons powergamer bullshit most people wanted. About a year after the 3050 readout came out, and when people were still trying to figure how to make balanced games against Clan bullshit, our local gaming store tried to do a tournament in the form of a big overall planetary invasion, and most players chose Clans, even though I think they were only allowed 60% of the tonnage. (It was a failure for a lot of just organizational reasons on their part.) We had just wrapped up a campaign with a unit that had only seven working Mechs, most of them with damage. (We ignored the fact that the campaign ended in 3029). I remember the snotty little poo poo I played against; it bugged him that I was using an weird number of Mechs, with pre-existing damage, even though that gave me no advantage under the rules. This is before they even had minis for the Clanners- we were using cardboard cutouts for most Mechs. I know I was just under 400 tons, and I think he ended up using only 4 Mechs because he wanted to use a Mad Cat really, really badly. I remember he went apeshit when a headshot from an armless Hatchetman took out his Mad Cat's cockpit on turn 2. He hosed the rest of my unit up badly with a couple of Cougars and a Nova, but I ended up grinding it out and ending it with 3 basically hollowed-out Mechs (a Phoenix Hawk, a Clint, and I can't remember what else) just gang-stomping his Nova to dirt. I laughed my rear end off watching him fume outside waiting for his mom to pick him up.
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Aug 21, 2022 02:09
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I don't think I ever fully came back to the fiction after the big Dark Age timejump. The setting from 3025 to 3050ish was a progression of events, then all of a sudden oh yeah by the way everything changed, the big power of the IS is Terran Hegemony 2.0, the main factions are new poo poo like Steel Wolves, and I just never could adjust.
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Aug 21, 2022 02:54
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The Jihad stuff came after Dark Age, though. They literally filled in the backstory, after the time skip. I know 20 Year Update was also a literal time skip, but most of the stuff in there (the War of 3039, the beginning of Lostech fielding) had already been covered in novels like Heir of the Dragon.
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Aug 21, 2022 03:25
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OK, I see the point. I never made the distinction because I had long quit playing tabletop by that point and just kept tabs online on where the fiction was going.
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Aug 21, 2022 04:15
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I wish they had gone further down that path before the reveal, like even pushed it back to the second novel. The whole superpowered invaders thing was such a fertile story ground for the first month if the invasion there.
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Aug 25, 2022 18:38
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Defiance Industries posted:Ehhhh, I think the reveal needed to get out of the way pretty quickly. They laid the foreshadowing on too thick with Wolf's Dragoons. Once you meet Ulric it's pretty easy to connect the dots. See, they could have just had Phelan get shot down and then he disappears until book 2. Just make all Inner Sphere POV scenes across the front as they slowly figure out what the gently caress is going on. Stackpole couldn't write an untelegraphed twist to save his rear end, though, so it would have required a different author
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Aug 26, 2022 00:37
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https://www.sarna.net/wiki/161st_Royal_Dragoon_Regiment
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Aug 26, 2022 12:28
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I honestly wonder how deep that Not-Named Clan poo poo goes, and how far they were memory-holed. Is fresh-from-sibko Warrior Doofus going to recognize a snarling wolverine logo on a Mech?
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Aug 27, 2022 15:42
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Don't feel tied down to timelines. Play the Mechs and technology you want to play with
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Sep 3, 2022 20:53
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I dislike the Clans as a whole but only rocking one tech area is kinda dumb
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Sep 3, 2022 22:05
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Tempest_56 posted:People hold dumb grudges for a long time. I just always thought the Clans were a dumb idea, done dumbly. Of all the ways they could have solved the Kerensky mystery, they chose one of the dumbest. The dumbass arena football team-level names for the factions, the sociology that sounds like it was written by a 13 year old that's really into ninjas and Wolverine, etc. It was Rob Liefeld-level backstory. Decent writers came along over the years to backfill in with decent characterization and stories, but the core concept remains, to my opinion, just dumb and bad. The several years of powergaming horseshit on tabletop you mention didn't help at all, either. FishFood posted:I have disliked every Stackpole book I've read. His prose is fine, but his characters and plots are just awful. I see people recommend his stuff as good books to get into Battletech and I much, much prefer the Grey Death Legion books. They're not high literature or anything, but they're pretty fun, have relatable characters, and do a great job of showing the low-level conflict the game is mostly about. I have long advocated for suspending Robert Charrette's civil rights and chaining him to a laptop until he gives us eight timeline novels a year. He is by far the best writer Battletech has had (Vic Milan's a close second, but his stuff was more suited to quirky slice of life than moving-the-timeline).
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Sep 4, 2022 19:21
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One game shop I played at banned Masakaris because every munchkin loved the idea of a 4 CERPPC machine that could attempt headshots. Before CV came about, we kinda sorta tried a bid system like outta the fiction, but it didnt work very well. I thought the most overpowered Mechs from the 3050 era were the goddamned Dashers. They were like superpowered Jenners, just running around and carving up assault Mech backs.
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Sep 5, 2022 02:48
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In the 3100s when the tech bases are mixed, how do they handle IS Mechs with Clan weapons? Are they just extra-expensive, or just handwaved away with "trade/plunder"?
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Sep 6, 2022 06:30
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I could see them rebranding Clantech as something like C31 Tech to differentiate
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Sep 7, 2022 14:59
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BattleMaster posted:I like spheroid dropships but I never liked aerodyne ones because they don't really make sense. Interstellar ships are vastly undersized for the setting already, building a whole rear end dropship for 4 Mechs is incredibly silly
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Sep 12, 2022 04:43
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I can't imagine genre writing pays well but man sometimes they just publish some painfully bad stuff. If I was the line developer in 1988 (and I wasn't able to strangle the Clans idea in the crib), I'd have spaced out Stackpole's trilogy wayyyyy further, and pushed all of Phelan's post-capture poo poo to the 2nd/3rd books. The unstoppable, mysterious invaders was a great development that should have stretched out over a dozen slice-of-life novels across the invasion front, each dropping nuggets as to what these mysterious marauders really were about. Instead, you got Stackpole Protagonist #3 getting to be the audience insert for the chosen faction of the developers to munchkin up by like chapter 15. I understand their business model caters more to the grogs and fig painters nowadays than the just-reads-the-books crowd like me, but I still argue the books should drive the narrative and the sourcebooks should clean up, much like was said already.
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Sep 15, 2022 05:25
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Have to agree to disagree then
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Sep 15, 2022 20:42
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Fearless posted:I got this fellow finished: This is really, really loving sharp looking.
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Oct 10, 2022 18:40
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PhotoKirk posted:My grandfather was a quartermaster in the Army Air Corps. He called it requisitioning. Do you know how many thieves are in the Army? One. Everyone else is just trying to get their poo poo back
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Oct 15, 2022 17:23
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It wouldn’t hurt for the setting to have an equivalent of Armageddon in 40k- basically a planet where over a certain span of time you’ll see practically every faction putting their troops on the field at least once. The obvious choice is Terra, but if they don’t want to go that route it could be one of the adjacent systems.
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Oct 19, 2022 18:02
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I can't stress to you how unfair it felt at the beginning of the Clan era to have to figure out how to fight forces that didn't have to make compromises on the light/medium side. Anything from 3025 and even 3045-ish tech was a compromise- armor, guns, speed, pick two. But you'd face light/medium Omnis with max armor, Stinger/Locust level speed, and more or harder-hitting guns than many IS heavies. I know we had a no-Masakari rule that practically got turned into a no-CERPPC rule.
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Oct 31, 2022 05:45
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Floppychop posted:That was 30 years ago. Since then we've had two versions of battle value to balance it. Oh yeah it was very much just a "we had no loving idea" anecdote, not a jab at players today. I've never actually played a TT game with 3100s tech. The list of equipment and weapons got so huge since then I wouldn't be worth a poo poo unless someone was holding my hand.
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Oct 31, 2022 06:28
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That has got to be the dumbest possible hill to die on
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Nov 3, 2022 19:34
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As I'm catching up with the Mechs y'all are talking about and looking at the new TROs, I guess zombie Mechs are the new hotness?
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Nov 4, 2022 02:08
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Carbolic posted:Has Battletech had any LGBT viewpoint characters yet? Some of the early stuff had some I guess-not-too-surprising-for-the-'80s homophobia but how far has the setting actually progressed in this regard? Didn't the Aidan Pryde novels have some throwaway line about Joanna coupling (ie, raping) female cadets and male ones?
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Nov 4, 2022 05:18
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Meh. https://twitter.com/MikeStackpole/status/1588992963040145409
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Nov 6, 2022 01:10
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zharmad posted:
Thanks for the heads-up. I jumped on it.
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Nov 13, 2022 00:25
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I’d love to see a 90s Solo cup livery
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Nov 28, 2022 18:33
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Gifting the basic box set to my brother in law. What’s a decent inexpensive set of starter paints to go with it?
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Dec 2, 2022 17:56
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That goddamned Mech. I spent years trying to convince people it existed, because it came in a free handout I got from a FASA booth at Origins when they came to Dallas one year. It never got printed in a TRO though (and I lost the handout), so I tried to convince other gamers that there actually was a 15 ton Clan Mech that ran 14/21 and they thought I was making it up. (this is obviously way way way before Sarna) I just remembered, that handout is also where I first learned they were putting aliens in Battletech
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Dec 8, 2022 12:42
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Wait what loving King Crab variant had two more big guns?
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Dec 21, 2022 13:05
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Owlbear Camus posted:As part of campaign play as I build out the spreadsheet and generate her reserves I've decided there's a fifth ready reserve mech in the implausibly ample store's of my Daughter's merc lance dropship in case of combat losses. What should I throw in there to compliment Griffin, Blackjack, Locust, Commando? My thoughts are to keep her hungry with some squad goals (but make the first several missions close to walk overs as she learns the ins and outs), so not an Atlas obv. Valkyrie is a good Mech and makes for a choice of which 4 she fields depending on mission.
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Jan 7, 2023 19:38
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Hunchback is a great choice. It’s a smile generator.
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Jan 7, 2023 20:25
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