For those thinking we're supposed to be highly advanced in the 36th century...
There's several hundred thousand planets that this map and most of them don't actually account for as they usually list lore-mentioned inhabited planets and even then they fail to list them all.
Combine that even with faster than light travel, it takes weeks to months to get from system A to system B in the same space. This is a large reason combat is preferential to the ground.
Now consider that for the past 500 years, war has been virtually non-stop. Everyone, somewhere, was fighting some sort of war or another, and when one war stops another starts for a different set of factions. Meanwhile this elitist group called
Comstar that controls all communications for all factions, intercepts info about any cool tech and horde it, destroying the factories and people that produce it so that no one else can have it.
In this future, over 60% of battlemechs are over 50 years old. A Good 20% are more than 100 years old. Some, older than that with maybe 15% or less being "brand new." The tech is falling apart. The machines are largely unstable. They are often in a state of disrepair (Which is why R&R tried to replicate but too harshly).
In the worst moments of the closed beta economy, it wasn't unusual to see an Atlas go into battle missing an arm. Once saw a Catapult begin with one leg, but since he had LRMs it didn't really matter so long as no one got to him.
Mechs are often handed down from generation to generation. "This is the mech my father used and his father before him, which he stole by climbing to the hatch when the pirate raided our farms. Shot him dead inside. Now it's used to protect ourselves."
If you have seen Firefly, that is a far more pleasant universe and even there, technology ranges from the wild west style flint-lock rifles and hand-pump water faucets, to the most impressive and superior tech you've ever seen.
Examples of farm equipment like the
Harvester and the
Harvester Ant are almost always covered in heavy rust, with barely functioning internal combustion engines (gasoline). You might have 10 on an entire planet, and sometimes they are more than 200 years old and still barely in service.
In MWO because there's nothing to govern our upgrades, we're running in the high end of the Star League tech, before all the wars that dwindled tech into nothingness. There's a reason Hunchbacks only went 64 kph. There's a reason an Atlas trucked along at 40 kph or less. There's a reason most builds only have standard heatsinks.
Far as cbill earnings, we're making 4 times more than the average mech jock would. We're paid like Solaris Arena fighters.
(Brought over from where I posted it in the wrong thread.)
For some idea of what it used to be like.
November 2012. Atlas versus Atlas brawl begins after a short period of LRM bombing back when "An Atlas turned the tide of a battle." There's this
one, just weeks before open beta, with 19 standard heatsinks. Repair and rearm, standard heatsinks and lack of the new tech XL engines (which have existed for less than 25 years) kept things pretty well in line. In this
vid from July 2k12, a 90 kph Jenner was considered amazingly fast. When I retreat to the Dragon and the Catapult, watch their movements. Notice how different the game was, and how much closer the game was to the original Battletech that I described?
Another edit: In battletech lore, they literally use "Faxes" to transmit secure data. Yes. They slide a piece of paper down into a fax machine and press send after dialing a long security code / number. No. I'm not kidding. I'm dead serious.
Edited by Koniving, 29 September 2013 - 01:31 PM.
1
