284 replies to this topic

[Threat Doc]

Okay, sickness, isolation, depression, all manner of mental illnesses, especially PTSD... two years in captivity, on board vessels designed like many of the BattleTech universe Dropships, JumpShips, and WarShips are compact, not designed for extended journey's like that. Methinks this was not all that well thought-out and, because folks are ignoring my realities, I'll just close on this conversation with a real fact: it is science fiction, and leave that gracefully at that.

[Alexander Fury]

Another factor that could explain the clans ulitmate defeat was their inherant arrogance. The clans, through their genetic program, believed that they were naturally supperior to the unwashed barbarians of the IS. They went in to Tukayyid expecting easy victory. Only clans wolf, Ghost Bear and Jade Falcon took ANY preventative measures to give their force longer staying power in a long drawn out campaign.

With the Inner Sphere victories on Wolcott, Twycross, Luthien and ultimately Tukayyid, the myth of genetic superiority was already being eroded. You cannot breed good soldiers, just because a person shares traits with a warrior progenitor does not mean that their skills and judgement will be passed down. This was ultimately shown with the resounding success of Operation Bulldog and Serpent during the annihilation of the Smoke Jaguars. The combined might of the IS was able to annihilate a clan, something that only the clans had been able to do previously!

So ultimatelly victory for the IS forces was all down to the perceverance and tactital skills of their commanders. Genetically bred super-warriors or not, the clans are still human and suffer from the fault of arrogance, ultimatelly to their detrement.

[Fusea]

After a day and a half I got the end of this thread... Huzzah! So one of the things I noticed people commenting on in this thread is the level of technology of the Com guards. Firstly, everyone knew they had hot tech, but no one new how hot it was. I'm guessing its pretty hard to tell visually that a particular mech has double heatsinks, or that its packing an ER large laser instead of a standard sunglow. Since that's the case, I'm betting that the Com guards were just strutting around in the stuff openly. As for acclimating to a new mech, I don't think many pilots had been issued things radically different from what they had to start with, and remember that Comstar was planning this for months, providing plenty of time to train pilots up to their new rides.

As far as how much of an actual advantage it was in combat? Well, when Victor Davion was planning to liberate Coventry he noted that previous wisdom had insisted that a 2 to 1 advantage was needed against the clans when using 3025 tech. Since he was using the recovered star league tech he commented that the gap had narrowed to 1.5 to 1 or even 1.25 to 1. Now the Com guards had shiny new 300 year old vintage Star League mechs So they were certainly enjoying that narrowed gap. So the battle of Tukayyid from a strictly numerical stand point was probably a lot more favorable to the Guards than it looks like at first blush. This is especially true since no one on the clan side was expecting anything other than normal IS mechs. Remember that up till that point refit kits were few and far between. Certainly no one had fielded regiments of nothing but upgraded mechs prior to that date.

Now as far as the slowness of the FC response to the clan invasion versus their performance in the 4th Succession war. The thing no seems to remember is operation Galahad. The Federated Suns had been doing dry runs of the events of the 4th for years prior to actually launching it. Hanse intentionally allowed everyone to think of his saber rattling as old hat and get used to it before actually launching the offensive. To further throw his opponents off their guard, he launched the offensive from good old Terra,at his wedding, while all his enemies were sitting down for desert. Short version, 4th war: planned and practiced offensive. Clan invasion: surprise poorly understood defense.

[Strum Wealh]

Kay Wolf, on 03 December 2013 - 06:37 PM, said:

Okay, sickness, isolation, depression, all manner of mental illnesses, especially PTSD... two years in captivity, on board vessels designed like many of the BattleTech universe Dropships, JumpShips, and WarShips are compact, not designed for extended journey's like that. Methinks this was not all that well thought-out and, because folks are ignoring my realities, I'll just close on this conversation with a real fact: it is science fiction, and leave that gracefully at that.

That's basically how both versions of Battlestar Galactica (that is, both the original BSG and the RDM BSG) did it (with the later rendition getting into more detail regarding the negative aspects of the situation).

[Threat Doc]

Strum Wealh, on 03 December 2013 - 07:10 PM, said:

That's basically how both versions of Battlestar Galactica (that is, both the original BSG and the RDM BSG) did it (with the later rendition getting into more detail regarding the negative aspects of the situation).

Actually, I hated the new BSG from the middle of second season on... it was {Scrap}, entirely too negative, and I despised what that {Dezgra} Ron Moore did to it. It's no wonder the thing was canceled.

However, case in point... the Galactica, and several of the other ships -not all- in the fleet were basically luxury liners, and NONE of the ships in the Kerensky fleet would have been. In BSG you have places to move, but not so much in Tech. Sorry, the Clans just DO NOT hold up in any sort of reality... which is, in all likelihood, why it's science fiction.

[Victor Morson]

LoPanShui, on 05 November 2013 - 01:46 PM, said:

While the Clans like to have quick, brutal fighting that emphasizes personal achievement over coordinated tactics, the ComGuards refused to meet them head on, cut off their supply lines, and when forced into battle relied on subterfuge, superior numbers, heavy use of ambushes and mining in order to keep the Clanners from doing what they did best, which was kill 'Mechs head on.

The ComGuard literally constructed fake towns and cities on the planet specifically as ambush points, since the Clans let them chose the battlefield. It was pretty great.

[dal10]

how to beat the clans, insult them to the point they suicide into an ambush.

[Fusea]

Actually, there is no reason to believe there were no places to go. In the canon, it's not unusual for militaries to hire or impress luxury liners into service transporting troops and dependents. I can't imagine that Kerensky planning to make off with that large of a force for parts unknown would think to kidnap useful skill sets, and not think of a way to transport them. Grand Theft Dropship seems like the perfect way to get the extra room and entertanment facilities he would need.


Additionally, most Mech carriers are described as largely open space with mechs arranged around the sides. And that makes sense. While traveling they have to be strapped against a support to keep them from toppling over or floating away, but to get to the places they are going to be locked in, they have to have room to maneuver. So most dropships are going to have mech sized corridors for movement, and for ease of repair and maintenance, the mechs are most likely clustered around a central open area so that parts and equipment can be easily moved from one location to the next. As an example, think of an aircraft carrier hangar bay. Its basically a single open cavern just below the flight deck. Since most of the mechs wouldn't need any kind of heavy maintenance, it would basically be a giant open meeting area.


Whats more, unlike BSG most of the ships in the Kerensky fleet would be physically docked to the jumpship and whatever other ships were in transit at the time allowing for easy movement from one to another. As for the lack of real gravity, way back in The Price of Glory its established that a jumpship at station keeping can use itself as a pivot for 2 drop ships to create spin gravity, helpful in keeping people healthy.


The passenger DropShip in which Duke Irian's party travelled could be extended from the Mizar's central axis on a webwork of monofilament strands, counter-balanced by a second DropShip on the far side of the ship, with the entire structure set rotating in order to generate artificial gravity aboard the DropShips through centrifugal force. Short of using the main ship's station-keeping thrusters to accelerate at 1 G— impractical while the jump sail was deployed—it was the only way of generating gravity so that the assembled multitude could strut about in their jeweled and beribboned costumes rather than float helplessly. - The Price of Glory, William H Keith.



So most of the points you bring up (really good points btw) are actually covered in the material... if you happen to have read all of it.

Edit to correct spelling and finish my thoughts.

Edited by Fusea, 04 December 2013 - 08:13 AM.

[dal10]

Disclaimer: this post is serious bizness. It applies actual logistics, which frankly is my biggest issues with the clans, to a fictional event. so don't get your panties in a knot.


they have bays, not corridors. only way to transport mechs between bays is to walk it out and go around.

on a side note, all my math is going to use black lions as all 402 warships, because they are roughly in the middle size wise, and invaders as every jumpship, because they are the most common jumpship. i will go half union half overlord for the dropships. because common.

by my estimate, the exodus had, assuming previous assumptions plus each ship carried max possible dropships, 5565 dropships. unless they were all infantry transports which are unlikely, each dropship, warship, and jumpship would have to hold 823 people on average. The black lion's crew compliment is 208. invaders have a crew of 24, unions had a crew of 14, and overlords had a crew of 43. while yes this is exaggerating the problem by not putting in troop transports, it wouldn't change it so much that this doesn't apply.

do any of you guys think the union's life support systems could even handle that many people?

then there is cargo. food alone is going to be at least a third or more of the fleets overall storage. likely they would have as much as 5-6 years of food available before they would set out on something like this. that is 25 to 30 million tons of food. there goes the entirety of the warships storage, and that is kinda of light for how much they SHOULD bring, which is at least double that. water will be partially resolved by recycling, even then you are looking at having to take on significantly more water than the ship usually holds, because you are massively overpopulating each ship.

cramming that many people into the ships will also result in extreme sanitation issues, likely you will have entire ships wiped out by disease. medicine will be used up and be unreplaceable. people will start going nuts after being stuck in an overly cramped ship heading towards the middle of nowhere. the exodus is unsustainable with that level of resources.

if you doubled or even tripled the ships involved, it could work. but that many people on that few ships, no way.

[Fusea]

Actually, we were both wrong. Paraphrasing from the tech readout 3057, a Union has a central bay holding 2 lances of mechs in 8 cubicles with an open area 50 meters in diameter at the center with 3 cranes and access to the lower decks through a large hatch. The Overlord, has a single open mech bay spanning 6 decks using the union as a guide and comparing the size of the 2 with a little math... we have a 50 meters in a ship 81.5 meters across or about 61% of its diameter, so the larger overlord spanning 99 meters could offer an open space 60 meters across and at least that high. So that's a lot of space even with mechs backed up to the outer walls. And of course, as the journey continues space becomes less of an issue, you literally eat your way to roomier accommodations as time goes on.

But this misses the point that the SLDF was combined arms from the word go. They wouldn't be cramming troops into a convenient mech carriers any more than the Army crams tanks into convenient aircraft carriers. Add to that, they just ended a long campaign that started at the far end of nowhere and ended at the very heart of their own supply lines. So we have every reason to assume troop transports, dedicated fuel tenders, supply ships and even cruise liners for dependents are included in that fleet.

Additionally we actually know some of the ships that went with the exodus as the descriptions of the various ships in the same TRO cited before tell us how many went with the fleet. I added it up because... well I have a lot of free time, obviously. Starting with the heaviest and working down we have:
Mckenna Class 255,565 tons x 18 ships for 4,600,170 tons of supplies and 108 dropships.
Texas class 288,833 tons x 7 ships for 2,021,831 tons of supplies and 36 dropships.
Potemkin Class 373,677 tons x 30 ships for 11,210,310 tons of supplies and 750 dropships.
Avatar (Liberator) Class 71,430 tons x 5 ships for 357,175 tons of supplies and 30 dropships
Sovetskii Soyuz Class 209,861 tons x 35 ships for 7,345,135 tons of supplies and 140 dropships.
Black Lion Class 63,732 tons x 10 ships for 637,320 tons supplies and 40 dropships
Volga Class 195,551 tons x 20 ships for 3,911,020 tons of supplies and 80 dropships.
Total 125 warships, 30,082,961 tons of supplies and 1184 dropships.

Note these are the ones that have specific numbers of ships, a couple of ships quoted dozen an I counted that as just 10 per dozen. So we have marginally exceeded the supply estimates with just about 1/3 of the available warships.

For water, BT lore includes the infamous 'water cartel.' A company that used linked jumpships to transport water ice comets all over the inner sphere and far rim for the purpose of terraforming. So Kerensky and his crew would just have to find a comet and drag it along for the ride to have all the water they needed and recycling be damned. And of course, since you have all that free water and basically unlimited power in the form of all those thousands of fusion reactors not powering giant weapons of destruction sanitation becomes a pretty simple issue of making everyone bathe regularly and tossing the mess out the airlock when you're done as noted in my earlier post, they don't even have to use zero G showers most times.

But here is where comparisons to BSG really fall down. BSG was the surviving dregs of whatever was left after the attempted ******** of humanity. The Kerensky exodus was planned by a military genius who had just finished moving a similar sized force around the rim worlds and inner sphere for years while pursuing a pair of protracted wars. They had the best equipment and the best minds planning this for nearly a year and pulled supplies equipment and personnel from 50ish systems. Assuming that he and his staff were somehow unaware of the requirements of their undertaking or unfamiliar with the limitations of their equipment is really short sighted, and panning it off as 'just science fiction' is selling the creators short when it really appears they put quite a bit of thought into it.

And this is why I don't visit the forums often. I need to get out more.


Addendum: Just as inference, it looks like the 30 Potemkin's and 20 Volga's weren't counted among the 'warship fleet' but were instead included among the transport detachment. Since the most numerous warship in the fleet was the Riga/York with 22 ships followed by the Lola with numbers unknown.

See what I said about too much free time?

Edited by Fusea, 04 December 2013 - 07:48 PM.

[dal10]

how in the world do you transport a comet across jumps with anything besides a newgrange? jump fields are explicitly said to destroy things. I call this the writers breaking their own canon. you couldn't do it without internal storage or modifying a jump field.

also to be fair, i made all my numbers based on averages.

[pbiggz]

Jumps are relatively short events to my knowledge, you jump, wait 2 weeks for your engines to recharge, and then jump again, in that time they could fire their engines once and then coast on their inertia indefinately until their engines recharged. In that time not taken up by jumps, its entirely plausible that they could harvest and store water from comets before jumping again with their reserves full and on board.

[dal10]

harvesting comets without specialized equipment sounds like a bad plan. plus you would have to have the luck of having one nearby.

[pbiggz]

Even today we have a pretty good idea of where comets will be and when, and what they're made of. In 800 years, i'd say we'll have an even better idea, and once again, its reasonable enough to assume that among the pre-fabricated equipment they brought from the hegemony equipment to harvest comets or ice in space would be among them, especially since those factories and equipment were likely originally intended for colonization of water-poor periphery planets.

[Fusea]

Jump fields are supposed to destroy things by causing enormous tidal forces on anything within 27km of the ship. The exception is dropships physically secured to the jumpship. They include a boom that tells the jump drive how to bring them along without damage. The trick is convincing the drive that the comet is a really fat dropship. The Ryan Cartel (I mistakenly called it the Water Cartel last time, my bad), used multiple jumpships in constant communication and sharing navigational solutions to blanket the comet in overlapping fields and drag it along for the ride. What I don't remember is if the Cartel had specialty equipment to make this all so tidy, or if it was just the navigation data that was important. But I do know that anything caught in that 27km envelope around the jumpship when it jumps is coming with it to its intended destination. Now the tidal forces of a nearby jump field are bad for a ship (read: tin can full of air) caught too close, but for a giant solid lump of billion year old ice, its really no big deal. After all, if it breaks apart under stress, well that's just making it more portable right?

And lest you think this is more ex machina after the fact to cover things the writers forgot, I first read about the Ryan Cartel in the first edition rule book fluff for battletech back in grade school... so 1990ish.

Btw this is really esoteric lore here so thanks for giving me a chance to share it.

[Strum Wealh]

Fusea, on 04 December 2013 - 09:02 PM, said:

Jump fields are supposed to destroy things by causing enormous tidal forces on anything within 27km of the ship. The exception is dropships physically secured to the jumpship. They include a boom that tells the jump drive how to bring them along without damage. The trick is convincing the drive that the comet is a really fat dropship. The Ryan Cartel (I mistakenly called it the Water Cartel last time, my bad), used multiple jumpships in constant communication and sharing navigational solutions to blanket the comet in overlapping fields and drag it along for the ride. What I don't remember is if the Cartel had specialty equipment to make this all so tidy, or if it was just the navigation data that was important. But I do know that anything caught in that 27km envelope around the jumpship when it jumps is coming with it to its intended destination. Now the tidal forces of a nearby jump field are bad for a ship (read: tin can full of air) caught too close, but for a giant solid lump of billion year old ice, its really no big deal. After all, if it breaks apart under stress, well that's just making it more portable right?

And lest you think this is more ex machina after the fact to cover things the writers forgot, I first read about the Ryan Cartel in the first edition rule book fluff for battletech back in grade school... so 1990ish.

Btw this is really esoteric lore here so thanks for giving me a chance to share it.

From the additional information found here and here, it seems like the Ryan Cartel's "IceShips" were only used to ferry ice and water (stored internally, after being chipped off of spaceborne icebergs) from the jump points (where the icebergs were brought into the system via JumpShip fleets) to the planet(oid)s where they would be used by the populace.

It might make sense, then, if certain ships within the Exodus Fleet were tasked with sheparding some icebergs along to provide drinking water and fuel for the fusion reactors.
Alternatively, since the jump field evidently extends beyond conforming to a JumpShip's hull (or things physically docked to it), might it even be possible to modify a K-F Boom to effectively "dock" a comet/iceberg to a single JumpShip as though it were a DropShip?

[dal10]

i am not saying dues ex machina. I am still saying that that it shouldn't work unless internal storage. Hell, the clans can't do precision jumps with jumpships, and you have to worry about the fields on both ends. this sounds like a bad plan. (and by precision i don't mean they can't hit pirate points, i mean they can't say i am going exactly here.)

plus, i don't think the star league knew where they were going when they left besides a general direction. i may be wrong on that though.

[Fusea]

Actually, jumping is very precise... from the start point. The start point is where you are now. Your relative position and velocity are moot since the KF drive and your own navigational plotting will tell you what they will be when you arrive. It's the end point that tends to be a bit more haphazard. But really, it's not overly relevant. The fleet would pick a star or number of stars, and the only requirement for precision is on the order of 1-5 AU. Close enough to the star to soak up power without falling into the thing. Since a jump point is theoretical location above or below a star, it has effectively infinite space. As far as field effects on vessels in space, most of the novels agree that jumpships tended to take up positions about 5,000 to 50,000km from each other. At that distance speed of light lag is negligible and you have plenty of room to maneuver, fire your engines, deploy your sail, drop giant chunks of ice and fling frozen bits of poo without issue of offending your neighbors.

And your are 100% correct in thinking that Kerensky had no idea where he was going when he left. But again, he had nearly 2k ships capable of FTL travel, some of the warships are even equipped with HPGs. So it's perfectly reasonable to assume they were progressing across a wide front 5 or more systems wide. This may not be true for the first few jumps when they were worried about being tracked. They would want to keep the whole fleet close for protection, but once you were relatively sure you had ditched pursuit it just makes good sense. Spread out, increase your chances of finding anything out there to find.

[dal10]

1.7k* i have to have something to be nitpicky with...


other than that, all i can say is that you didn't count that storage was probably much more full between the ships standard cargo and food to the point that likely the warships were full before you got to all the secondary stuff. but that is just a minor scruple.

[ManaValkyrie]

To be honest the exodus journey itself was pretty rough, and the travel did result in a set of shipbourne mutinies part way through the travel outbound to the pentagon worlds, even the best plans still end up with human wrinkes