beamsurfer17, on 06 June 2013 - 01:37 PM, said:
um have u ever watched the battletech cartoon and btw yes they can its called crosstraining and in mechassault 2 u can pilot battlearmor in fact its the first thing u fight in
1. The Battletech cartoon is not a good place to go for canon material, which didn't exactly have fact-checkers on staff. For instance, they had a Mauler that existed in the war of 3039, when the Mauler wasn't introduced until 3048. In addition to creating the Daboku to explain this (long after the cartoon had finished airing), the official stance on the cartoon was that it was not canonized as a retelling of events, but rather appears in-universe as a series of popular fictional holovid broadcasts loosely based on the exploits the "real" 1st somerset stikers.
2. Mechassault is a worse place to go for canon material. It takes place several decades down the line from where we are now, and they actually pretty much butchered the source material when making the game, for the sake of including gameplay elements like battlearmor.
Elementals, as they exist in the timeline right now, are only found among the clans. What this means is that just about all of them are genetically engineered hulks, designed to be massively tall and muscular for a human. Clans are all about specialization, so no crosstraining for them- and besides, most of them are so massive they'd have trouble fitting into the cockpit of a battlemech to begin with.
Battlearmor among the Inner Sphere powers doesn't come till after the invasion, when it gets reverse engineered after exposure to the Clan Elementals. Crosstraining even in our real-life modern militaries is rare and reserved only for elite units, and even then the house militaries would want elite battlemech pilots in battlemechs, not risking their rare skills running around being infantry in powered armor. The two disciplines of piloting Battlemechs and wearing Battlearmor are so divergent there would be little utility and a lot of potential risk in training one for the other.
EDIT: And it occurs to me to name my sources:
Sarna, while not perfect, is well edited and reasonably trustworthy wiki to all things battletech canon.
Edited by TheMadTypist, 06 June 2013 - 02:43 PM.
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