Stormwolf, on 18 March 2013 - 07:19 AM, said:
I think we are talking about two different things here, I was talking about border worlds which usually have 100,000 to 10,000,000 inhabitants on average.
We had this point already. TPTB have decreed that the average population of the Inner Sphere is ~ 3 billion people per planet. Even before the Dark Age-era publications set this in stone, several other sources spoke of "trillions" of Inner Sphere denizens, which works out to several billion per world.
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The best example here is Luthien, Clan Smoke Jaguar and Nova Cat assaulted Luthien and went after house Kurita itself. The result of this would have been that the DC would have splintered into several smaller factions incapable of mounting proper resistance.
The
plausible result would have been that the Clans would have been met by
thousands of conventional regiments on short notice. Again: Failure of scale and common sense.
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The DC people would have submitted to their Clan overlords since their military would have gotten whiped out and the Clans have these big scary warships that can glass cities without too much trouble.
There is no
plausible way that a state with hundreds of worlds and a total population in excess of 700 billion would be crippled by the loss of less than 1% of each. Once more: Failure of scale and common sense.
Warships are
just another element of the setting which does not make any sense. Why not? Because there
are nuclear weapons in the BattleTech Universe and there's no technological premise to neutralize them (unlike, for example, the
Traveller Universe, whose creators prudently introduced "nuclear dampers" along with capable point defense weapons,)
BattleTech has given us humungous WarShips (which, by the way, fall into the same amusing styrofoam category as the DropShips do)
and nuclear weapons
and delivery methods (NACs, NGauss, but also plain old missiles) which
cannot reliably be stopped by defensive systems. So the plausible result would be that any WarShip out there
would just get nuked, especially if the
announced attention of its owner to use it as a weapon of mass destruction itself would handily
obviate any reason to hold back for moral and/or political considerations.
Small, dispersed targets in an environment of limited war do make some sense even if the theoretical threat of nuclear weapons exists. Large, easy-to-hit targets which are intended to "glass" planets don't.
So here we go again: Failure of scale and common sense.
Maurdakar, on 18 March 2013 - 07:37 AM, said:
And no I'm not reading more battle-tech I read actual literature, just finished The Great Gatsby.
Good call. And good book.