I've yet to see a CD/DVD survive your basic fridge magnet without corruption.
Though that point remains. Consider the decline of film photography. Now imagine in 200 years, will anyone even know what a dark room is or recall Polaroid as a camera that had film that developed in your hand? And if there were just 50 years of war during which the digital age targeted retrograde technologies? It isn't far off.
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Hunka Junk, on 29 August 2016 - 04:21 AM, said:
So, by lore only Liao has ECM, but everybody has Beagles?
And sorry if I this is in the wrong section, but my first mech was the Arctic Cheetah.
With no idea about anything, I quickly decided that every mech I bought would have an ECM and jump jets.
Little did I know that I'd started with one of the decidedly small number of mechs that can run both ECM and Jump Jets.
God-Mode Jesus Box
That would be a great name for band.
Edit: Android auto correct has some weird solutions for correctly spelled proper nouns....
Looking into Beagles the only people that have them aside from the Liao are the Davion, due to theft and salvage and the Marik-comissioned, due to trade for XL engines which before the helm memory core if you wanted XL engines or double heatsinks the faction that could hook you up with both was the Mariks!
Consider this, all "M" variants are Marik-comissioned/made. Cicada 3m, Griffin 3m, Shadow hawk 5M. What do they all have in common? XL engines and double heatsinks. Don't get me wrong some factions had some DHS or XL engines left over from the SLDF or the first two Succession Wars, but not really the ability to manufacture them.
Even Marik lost the ability due to a campaign against the technology, however unlike most factions Marik stayed out of most of the fighting and as such lost very little tech or resources. Instead they profited by selling their stuff both for funds and for better diplomatic terms with its neighbors.
There is a reason most mechs have standard engines and single heatsinks.
On the Capellan Confederation (Liao), remember that they cannot produce assault mechs (not that there are much more than 12% of the IS's total mechs being assault in the first place) and possess a single manufacturing facility for Heavy Mechs... which doesn't actually manufacture new mechs but strips parts of three or four different mechs and slaps them together to create the Cataphract. Even then it requires salvaging Marauders from the Davions! No Marauder salvage, no Cataphract, no heavy mechs to replenish the front lines.
On the offense they send their best... on foot. You won't even know you've been tampered with so when they do send vehicles and a couple of mechs, Murphy's Law will come true in all the worst ways possible for you.
On the defense, Liao is known for its mechs being compared to the undead. In a prolonged battle a mech may be defeated only to get back to its feet with a new pilot. The policy where the only Citizens are those who earn it helps to ensure that the common people will fight, even if it means pulling the pilot's corpse from the seat and starting the mech back up to get back into the fray. One battle had a child as young as 7 do this, the pilot before him was his mother, whom took over the Urban mech just minutes before, who in turn just shoved the previous pilot aside. If the mech still has the ability to move, even if it no longer has any discernable weaponry, it will be put back into the fight if possible.
(post-edit note:. The BAP during play with double blind rules in Megamek, when it was finally successful, could identify targets over 3,000 meters away, through walls and barriers and targets on foot around 900 meters away including a series of troops hidden inside buildings, a few ac/2 carriers I had in basement floors and the four mobile mech taser teams I had in waiting in ambush, one of which the target with BAP almost entered range for. The other player was surprised at how surrounded some of his other mechs actually were since I kept my forces waiting in ambush. All 50+ powered units were exposed to a single BAP user, and this lasted for two turns due to back to back successes (20 seconds). His third successful roll didn't matter, however, due to me powering up a unit at 210 meters and putting him in my second ECM Mech's field by rushing at him. It's good he wasn't going full speed in this urban jungle, or he would have discovered my unpowered mech before I could react; even then it is lucky that initiative failed me to allow me to act first and him to react to me in our simultaneous turn match. The ensuing charge attack was also glorious, as I managed to ram his only BAP user into a building with a force so hard that his leg and arm were both crippled and my ECM pilot was killed; my mech still functional and jamming despite the pilot's death, giving me the time I needed to get a battle armor team over there to kill the enemy pilot, destroy the mech and replace the pilot for my unarmed ECM Raven.
Edited by Koniving, 29 August 2016 - 10:07 AM.