49 replies to this topic

[Tyra]

GHQCommander, on 09 June 2012 - 02:49 AM, said:

How I read this is canon fills in blanks and the story of not having a lot of technology by saying it was lost in a war. Which is fair enough, I agree the game works great as it is.

However there will be holes in canon that MMO's pick at and MMO balance issues often require innovation and new items or abilities that didn't really exist before. Nothing wrong with it either, I strongly feel MMO's must advanced the franchise canon and is part of an old franchises evolution to ensure the next couple of generations accept it.

It's the same excuse used in Star Wars to explain the general way in which advancements occur. There are so many wars that you get spurts of rapid development interrupting thousands of years of decline and loss. Star Wars is a universe that has stagnated.

It's the same in Battletech. They reached a certain level of technology and then repeatedly reduced themselves to worse tech, then built back up. Rinse, repeat.

Here's the thing. The stuff you want? Doesn't exist in the timeline that MWO is set in. They cannot and should not add things that change the basic feel of the game.

If MWO was set farther into the future of the franchise, where nothing yet has been written or set in stone? Maybe we would see some of that stuff.

But this is 3049. We're sticking with 3049 tech. Adding anything else would change the flavor of the game.

Also, you're way off base if you think teleporting people is going to be feasible that easily. They can barely transport a single proton right now.

Now, they can make the mechs, the weapons, the cockpits and the screens all updated. They did it with Star Trek (updated the look without adding a ton of crap that shouldn't exist in that time period).

But they're not going to fundamentally alter the baseline technology.

[Adrienne Vorton]

AdamantVallation, on 08 June 2012 - 09:23 PM, said:

Myomer bundles[color=#000000], [/color]again something we don't have, but I don't see it as too far off.

japanese are working on that for a few years now, and they even call it myomere-fibers... they react/ contract like muscles on an electric impuls... i´ve seen a tv report about that last year or the year before...

Edited by Adrienne Vorton, 09 June 2012 - 06:12 AM.

[Adrienne Vorton]

this is not the one i remember of, but its close to it enjoy

[redplauge]

how far does technology have to advance for it to be called science fiction? nearly everything, technology wise, predicted by the early pioneers of sci fi has been at least tested.
as for the bt universe, during the 1st star league, there where various breakthroughs that where kept secret, but are now completely lostech. due to the first 2 succession wars as well as the wars fought before the creation of the clans.
the question i have is why are the ships (dropships, jump ships, and warships) using heat expansion drives and not some sort of plasma based system based on the fusion reactors they have. i mean there's an experimental plasma drive in nasa's jpl, as well as some ion based drives. but most ships in bt run water over a nuclear pile, and shoot the steam out the rear.

[Karyudo ds]

Well to be fair the only thing we lack from Startrek in any capacity is the starships...and the weird dystopian society thing. I think that's a general Sci-Fi thing though. We come up with an idea, share it, then a bunch of people decide to build it, inevitably before it was "written" to take place in. Unless you wrote Patlabor.

If you really updated Battletech to what we might be able to achieve by 3049 I honestly doubt Battlemechs would even exist still.

[DireWolf307]

GHQCommander, on 09 June 2012 - 02:49 AM, said:

How I read this is canon fills in blanks and the story of not having a lot of technology by saying it was lost in a war. Which is fair enough, I agree the game works great as it is.

However there will be holes in canon that MMO's pick at and MMO balance issues often require innovation and new items or abilities that didn't really exist before. Nothing wrong with it either, I strongly feel MMO's must advanced the franchise canon and is part of an old franchises evolution to ensure the next couple of generations accept it.

Those of you screaming about canon all the time, nearly flaming at me in other threads. Have you considered how the Mech world will be accepted in 20-30 years if it does not adapt and be realistic. Kids will be far more intelligent than we were, real technology will suggest things are missing in this MMO if its still on the rader. 10 year olds won't want to play in machines that don't have technologies humans are close to having for real.

In 20 years time kids will be asking where the shields are on mechs and why they can't teleport long distance on the battlefield etc. Will the reply still be, sorry that tech was lost in the war?

I really find your little crusade hilarious.

You do realize that Battletech has been around almost 30 years without all these things you think it "needs" to stay "fresh"? And the few times that games have added the things you want in order to capitulate to the 10-year-old-ADHD-sufferer, the games have not been very successful and are derided in the community?

Ever thought that one of the main draws to Battletech is the fact that it isrelatively low-tech? If you want a chrome-coated, super-high-tech game, look elsewhere. That's not what Battletech is, and it should never be either.

Sounds like someone needs to go wait for Hawken and give it a rest over here. Don't try to make MW:O something it should never be. Battletech is Battletech and there's no reason to change it just because you think it's not "fresh".

[GreyGriffin]

BTU also has holographic projection, but really, the miracle of Battletech is metallurgy.

The modern tank cannon is modeled as doing approximately 3 damage in Battletech terms. (I believe this info is in Tactical Operations.) The ability of battlemech armor to ablate damage on such a scale, without having any real mobility kill vulnerabilities (owing to endoskeletal motive systems) is what made the battlemech the king of the battlefield.

As for missile guidance technology, I read somewhere that there was a brief period where electronic warfare was so ridiculous that weapons designers started employing more primitive guidance systems that couldn't be jammed, and as a result, EW equipment was rapidly sloughed off of war machines. This is ramping up again somewhat with Artemis, TAG, Narc, but the power of Guardian ECM to basically negate these systems sort of demonstrates how EW equipment rapidly stacks up on diminishing returns.

[Brotherchaplain]

Ive always had the image in my mind of the Star League being like Rome. When SL/Rome falls we get centuries of warfare and decline both in society and technology. When they find the Grey Death Core is when the Renaissance starts.

I am sure at some level this was originally intended or perhaps it is just the cyclic nature of time and history creeping in.

[Aelos03]

BenEEeees VAT GROWN BACON, on 08 June 2012 - 10:21 PM, said:

Meh, if your mind is too open you might start ignoring the evidence for want of fantasy.

well you know there is a particle that went ftl, so its maybe possible we can bend rules of physics.

[Okie135]

I've been running calculations on the way they do space travel. For non ftl flight, I think they use a variant of this: http://en.wikipedia...._thermal_rocket

It gives approximately three times the exhaust velocity than that of the shuttle. They main difference is BT's use of fusion bleed off instead of a uranium gas.

Now here's the fun part... The fuel capacity, travel times, constant acceleration, etc. It all checks out. Whether a lucky guess or proper research on the subject, the authors of the universe got this one right.

The only reason we don't use it today is the public aversion to anything related to 'nukes in space.' It might be safe, but that doesn't change the public's view and the politics.

[Lipot]

I wish I could find the paper but there was one that was written about 7-8 years ago about the topic of FTL travel. It is a math theorem and it proved that it is theoretically possible to go faster then light but not with our current technology. Most of our modern communications come straight out of Star Trek as well as a few other things. But as much as I hate to admit it, war does bring about massive changes. Think about modern flight. Currently things have really changed much in the past 60 years. Things have gotten to be more refined. But from 1903 to 1940 we went from barely able to keep a plane in the air to starting to see jets. What happened in that time span? Two major world wars, the Spanish civil war, the Russian-Japan War, Russian Revolution, Mexican Civil War, Persia Civil War, 2 Balkan Wars, Chinese Civil War plus dozens of others. But we have also seen entire countries blasted back to the stone age and being rebuilt. (France, Germany and England for the greater extent. Parts of Japan thanks to nuclear weapons.) There are also certain things that people want to protect versus total destruction. The canon does explain how war can bring things to a complete destruction and lost of technology.

[StriplingWarrior]

BenEEeees VAT GROWN BACON, on 08 June 2012 - 10:07 PM, said:

Besides, "jumping" to find a planet-sized source of platinum would be against their interest as prices would fall next to nothing overnight.

Not so, If you know anything about the DeBeers company, you know they control many more of the worlds diamonds than are allowed on the market, keeping the price high.

Any company that developed FTL to jump to a planet of platnum could easily bottom out the platnum market, bankrupting the competition and ensuring their dominance in the marketplace.

That is not really the point and I know it. However I like playing devils advocate.

Unfortunately the loss of technology due to war is very easily explainable even though it seems inconcievable to most of us.
We are dealing with war on a massive galactic scale. Whole planets were laid to waste. Millions killed. Seems pretty easy to lose some tech to me. One example that springs to mind almost immediately

Marauder was suppossed to be equipped with some really spiffy armor whose manufacturing process was lost. Ferro-fibrous or what does not matter. The scenario is simple. Company A develops a process to manufacture said armor, Company B who resides in Liao territory instead of Cappellan space....(hey Im making this up as I go, work with me)wants the tech and through espionage and intrigue fails to get the tech. So what to the Liaoists decide to do? They raid the plant and take all the hard drives on site. Then nuke the site from orbit(being the only way to be sure), only to find out the information was not on the drives. Unfortunately the information was on site but the HDD in question was taken by a scientist(he was trying to keep it from the Laoists) who was fried in the blast along with the drive. Tech is no more. Since internet comms are limited to HPG transmissionsn and we dont want ComStar to get a hold of said tech. It only goes from planet to planet in hard copy form, under heavy guard. blah blah blah,

I thought that up in about 5 minutes and it is only a little far fetched, still plausable, however unlikely. The fact remains that greek fire and the process of making sinew skeins for ballistae are lost to time. It happens during long periods of war. Libraries in Alexandria are burned destroying thousands of years of knowledge, setting medicine back centuries. Religous zealots kill each other denying most of northern Europe bathing as a form of personal hygene(for fear of dying) for hundreds of years. Not that hard to understand if you know your history and can see the records of things that simply dont exist any longer.

[Alfred VonGunn]

Brotherchaplain, on 09 June 2012 - 10:50 AM, said:

Ive always had the image in my mind of the Star League being like Rome. When SL/Rome falls we get centuries of warfare and decline both in society and technology. When they find the Grey Death Core is when the Renaissance starts.

I am sure at some level this was originally intended or perhaps it is just the cyclic nature of time and history creeping in.

SOmeone who gets it...^^^^

[LackofCertainty]

GHQCommander, on 09 June 2012 - 02:49 AM, said:

How I read this is canon fills in blanks and the story of not having a lot of technology by saying it was lost in a war. Which is fair enough, I agree the game works great as it is.

However there will be holes in canon that MMO's pick at and MMO balance issues often require innovation and new items or abilities that didn't really exist before. Nothing wrong with it either, I strongly feel MMO's must advanced the franchise canon and is part of an old franchises evolution to ensure the next couple of generations accept it.

Those of you screaming about canon all the time, nearly flaming at me in other threads. Have you considered how the Mech world will be accepted in 20-30 years if it does not adapt and be realistic. Kids will be far more intelligent than we were, real technology will suggest things are missing in this MMO if its still on the rader. 10 year olds won't want to play in machines that don't have technologies humans are close to having for real.

In 20 years time kids will be asking where the shields are on mechs and why they can't teleport long distance on the battlefield etc. Will the reply still be, sorry that tech was lost in the war?

Someone already replied rudely to you, but I wanted to give a non-hostile/non-fanboy response.

Not every sci-fi series needs to be about super-advanced techs. A lot of sci-fi series like to mix high and low tech (via some plot device) so that you get an interesting juxtaposition. MechWarrior is one example. Another is Steel Batallion.

In Steel Batallion, someone designed and released an bio-engineered type of algae that eats plastic. This abruptly destroys pretty much every computer in the world along with many military devices. So in that fiction, the armed forces of the world marry their current designs (mechs) with whatever old tech they can come up with that doesn't require computerization. The result is that you have mechs in a world with WW2 style innards and aiming. The whole reason why that fiction is interesting is that it takes place in a future where a lot of the automation that humans have come up with no longer works. If you change Steel batallion to have teleportation and advanced military tech then you're completely removing the only interesting thing about that setting.

To relate it back to Mechwarrior: Mechwarrior combat is pretty primitive. Like Steel Batallion, MechWarrior comes up with pseudo-science explanations for why the combat is so close range. I mean, if we look at the tech of today, you could argue that MechWarrior is silly, because combat ranges in the future will extend past the horizon. You'll never physically see your opponent because vehicular combat will have the range and accuracy to target via satellites.

Sure, all that may be a possible future for our military, but does that make the game more interesting or enjoyable? No.

MechWarrior is fun, because you have mechs running up to each other and having fights at ranges relatively comparable to old west shootouts. (where two guys could stand on the opposite side of the street and still miss each other several times) Hell, melee combat between vehicles is completely ridiculous if you think about it, and yet that's an option in MechWarrior. There's even some mechs designed around it.

Flavor is more important than being a perfectly accurate representation of future tech.

P.S.
If we advance to the point as a civilization that MechWarrior is no longer sci-fi, then that's fine. We'll rebrand Mechwarrior to "Alternate History" setting and keep playing it with the same fiction.

Edited by LackofCertainty, 09 June 2012 - 01:33 PM.

[UnLimiTeD]

Edit: Ninja'd by LackofCertainty, who managed to say exactly what I wanted to say, and probably better.

We all need to be aware that the pure concept of a mech is even more preposterous than late WW2 german tanks;
It's all nice and powerful and proves technological capability, but it is a useless waste of resources on something that in the end just looks cool.
Why use all the fancy tech and computer power to develop a huge warmachine that is a great target for entrenched Infantry from miles away and uses a relevant part of it's internals and electronics just to not topple over at every step, when the same money could flow into a half dozen drones carrying several tons of guided vacuum bombs?

The main reason warfare needs people is that
A) You wage war against people, and they may come up with unexpected things
So the machines don't fail and stuff might happen.

You'll also note that all that "mech" technology is developed for people to directly control it, the only way a battlemech is feasible is if it is completely controlled like that Exo in the video, with hand movement for weapons fire, or, even better, by mind; Even then, being a small target is invaluable.

I've been playing a very low-graphic 4X game, Aurora, for a long while, and recently, the developer is making a version with full newtonian physics.
It's interesting to note that a 1kg ball of copper, or whatever cheap metal, accelerated by a low energy gauss cannon or railgun from a ship accelerating at 1g for a day, will transmit 361 Gigajoules of energy on impact, the equivalent of 86 tons of TNT.

The war of the future will be a very cold place that actual people will try to avoid at all costs; unless we manage to develop cloned supersoldiers anytime soon, and I mean the disposable ones.

All in all, we shouldn't worry about it too much, as long as battletech stays consistent enough to keep up the players suspension of disbelief, we need not complain and should enjoy it. And Teleporters would certainly kill my immersion.
Everything inside the games universe needs to make sense, the universe itself needs not.

Also, subtle change will always come along.
Look at the old scribbles of a mechs cockpit, as seen, for Example, in this post. Compare it to what we will get in MWO; Holographic info screens dynamically displaying information, and real life controls that need only half the buttons.
It's those small changes that keep the story fresh and beleivable; Compare the "mobile phones" of old Star-trek with todays, new films will just discretely omit them.^^

Edited by UnLimiTeD, 09 June 2012 - 01:36 PM.

[Sybreed]

Aelos03, on 09 June 2012 - 10:55 AM, said:

well you know there is a particle that went ftl, so its maybe possible we can bend rules of physics.

they just proved not long ago that they did some mistakes calibrating the instruments and such, the particle never went FTL

[Pht]

AdamantVallation, on 08 June 2012 - 09:23 PM, said:

So reading through some other topics earlier, it occurred to me, there are a lot of assumptions and probable misconceptions about the level of technology in the BTU. Think about it, technology really isn't all that super advanced.

...

The succession wars were pretty bad, yes. That said - you should really bone up on the tech levels of the first star-league. The BTU is massively ahead of us.

For instance, say ... armor that is a few millimeters thick that can stop a 250kg slug traveling at hypersonic velocity; and usable fusion engines, myomers, .. on and on.

[Zynk]

AdamantVallation, on 08 June 2012 - 09:23 PM, said:

Gauss Rifles: There are a few Discovery Channel shows all about these, we have them right now, they just aren't practical yet.

Navy counting on new stealth ship. At $3 billion per ship it’s a hard sell in Congress, but the U.S. Navy is hoping its fancy new boat can sneak up on China and shoot electromagnetic “railguns” at them.

[Karyudo ds]

Brotherchaplain, on 09 June 2012 - 10:50 AM, said:

Ive always had the image in my mind of the Star League being like Rome. When SL/Rome falls we get centuries of warfare and decline both in society and technology. When they find the Grey Death Core is when the Renaissance starts.

Funny thing about that... we sort of owe fighter aircraft, radar, synthetic rubber, atomic bombs, and possibly some structural engineering R&D related to harbor building directly to war. That's largely why I never bought into Battletech's "low tech" premise.. and also why the new Steel Battalion just looks stupid to me. Sure it's plausible you COULD obliterate all of your enemies R&D and production facilities but if Axis couldn't stop the US from building the uber-bomb do you honestly expect to find that "uber-bomb" and the many more like it scattered across a galaxy? It just seems like it would nearly impossible to do.

Of course, it's just fiction.

Zynk, on 09 June 2012 - 05:17 PM, said:

Navy counting on new stealth ship. At $3 billion per ship it’s a hard sell in Congress, but the U.S. Navy is hoping its fancy new boat can sneak up on China and shoot electromagnetic “railguns” at them.

If that fails we can fire them from the safety of our leather theater recliners. They want a 200 mile range but why stop there? Rex could lob a nuke onto a target from anywhere in the world. That's what you need, easier just to scare kids off yer lawn than to chase them with battle boaties.

[OcO]

GHQCommander, on 09 June 2012 - 02:49 AM, said:

Those of you screaming about canon all the time, nearly flaming at me in other threads. Have you considered how the Mech world will be accepted in 20-30 years if it does not adapt and be realistic. Kids will be far more intelligent than we were, real technology will suggest things are missing in this MMO if its still on the rader. 10 year olds won't want to play in machines that don't have technologies humans are close to having for real.

In 20 years time kids will be asking where the shields are on mechs and why they can't teleport long distance on the battlefield etc. Will the reply still be, sorry that tech was lost in the war?

I only want to comment on this part of your post Commander as I simply do not believe that will be the case.

Jordan Weisman the man who basically created both Shadowrun and Battle Tech commented recently on a Shadowrun Reddit about how he was amazed at how much of the tech he had envisioned for Shadowrun was already reality. One thing that he was way off on and surprised at was the prevalence of wireless technology today. In the first 3 editions of Shadowrun cell phones and most wireless capabilities are extremely limited and rare. It wasn't until the 4th edition that the Shadowrun universe became wireless.

By your statement you'd have thought then that the majority of players interested in the Shadowrun world would be clamoring for more wireless tech to match what we currently see in the real world. However every poll I've ever seen, including the recent polls for the upcoming Shadowrun Returns game overwhelmingly like the 1st - 3rd edition non-wireless setting more.

These are games. Any and all real world parallels are meaningless.