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Hans Von Lohman, on 13 September 2013 - 09:46 PM, said:
The main thing to remember about all of this lore is that it servers a purpose.
The big one is that it gives a reason why so many small scale conflicts can happen, yet those would have major political impact. It was not unusual to have nothing more than a single Mech Battalion (36 mechs and 2 aerospace fighters) guarding a whole planet.
However, the real reason was that 12 vs 12 on a tabletop game was about as much dice rolling and record keeping as a human being could handle without going nuts. I know, I've done a company vs company fight before in the table top, and it took the whole weekend.
I think the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome of broke down, rebuilt, salvaged, cobbled together from 6 wrecks of miserable war machines marching over wastelands of the former Star League sort of went out the window really quickly within the lore. It was a bit much.
So, the vibe of 3025 was war is a way of life. Mechs fight, are destroyed, rebuilt, replacements are brought in at about the same rate as they're lost, the nobles who run the whole thing throw their dinner parties, conscripts train, fight, and are discharged back to their civilian life and share stories with their kids who are off to boot camp, and occasionally something interesting happens, but mankind will always have The War.
It wouldn't make a lot of sense to write the lore of BattleTech/Mechwarrior to take place in just a few years of conflict in a massive scale. They went for the epic, slow slogging match of war so that the players of the board game have more toys to buy next month when the next book comes out. Peace in our Time is sort of a no-no if you are making a war game.
The big one is that it gives a reason why so many small scale conflicts can happen, yet those would have major political impact. It was not unusual to have nothing more than a single Mech Battalion (36 mechs and 2 aerospace fighters) guarding a whole planet.
However, the real reason was that 12 vs 12 on a tabletop game was about as much dice rolling and record keeping as a human being could handle without going nuts. I know, I've done a company vs company fight before in the table top, and it took the whole weekend.
I think the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome of broke down, rebuilt, salvaged, cobbled together from 6 wrecks of miserable war machines marching over wastelands of the former Star League sort of went out the window really quickly within the lore. It was a bit much.
So, the vibe of 3025 was war is a way of life. Mechs fight, are destroyed, rebuilt, replacements are brought in at about the same rate as they're lost, the nobles who run the whole thing throw their dinner parties, conscripts train, fight, and are discharged back to their civilian life and share stories with their kids who are off to boot camp, and occasionally something interesting happens, but mankind will always have The War.
It wouldn't make a lot of sense to write the lore of BattleTech/Mechwarrior to take place in just a few years of conflict in a massive scale. They went for the epic, slow slogging match of war so that the players of the board game have more toys to buy next month when the next book comes out. Peace in our Time is sort of a no-no if you are making a war game.
TL;DR - They took the Warhammer 40k route and had a slow, never ending meat grinder of a war across thousands of worlds.
(Except that in WH40K, its more like millions of worlds, with trillions of deaths per day for an uncountable toll of human life over 10,000 years of war.)
