15 replies to this topic

[BagOfMeat]

here you go buddy

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/

type in the search bar on the left for the things u want to know THERE IS LOADS !! i was amazed how much

nice signature dude +1

Edited by BagOfMeat, 03 March 2014 - 11:44 AM.

[CyclonerM]

Honestly the best place to find the info you are looking for is probably this sourcebook: The Clans: Warrior of Kerensky

[CoffiNail]

Bookfinder.com is a source to search for books, as it will give you the price including the shipping. Warriors of Kerensky is a great starting point. Field manuals Warden Clans or Crusader Clans are a good next step as well as Invading Clans Sourcebook. These will get you going and answer a lot of questions.

One thing to remember is we do not know a lot about the Clans. I always like to think there is a lot more political landscape going on in the Clans upper ranks.

Edited by CoffiNail, 03 March 2014 - 04:25 PM.

[Pihoqahiak]

As a fan of the Battletech source material this game is very loosely based on, I feel the story was very well done for the Clans just about up to the Dark Ages (which was almost all terrible storylines). The previous posts will definitely steer you in the right direction to learn more about the Clans. Be warned though, Mechwarrior Online will not have anything close to a true feel and portrayal of the Clans from Battletech. The Clan mechs will of course physically look like the Battletech Clan mechs, but that will be the end of the similarities. The implementation they are shooting for will not allow the spirit and impact that the Clans had to the Battletech story to be seen and felt in MW:O. To be fair, it would be a very difficult and possibly risky venture for them to accomplish it, and they just plain aren't willing or able to handle it, so we're getting a very watered down version of them to try and appeal to the newer fans of Battletech that only really knew of the game starting from the Clan era onward, while also trying to cater to older veteran fans that enjoyed pre-Clan Battletech, and also players that don't know much of anything about either era. It will be difficult to understand just how powerful and how dire of a threat the Clans were by seeing the MW:O version, so it will help you out a little to check out some of the differences in the stats and performance of their technology and pilots. That will frame the view of how the quite small population of Clanners were able to nearly conquer entire Houses of the Inner Sphere. Don't listen to some of the people in the forums trying to say the Clan technology had weaknesses or drawbacks. In terms of the Battletech board game, they really didn't. Almost every single aspect of Clan battlefield technology was superior. A few, like the Gauss rifles had a lesser margin of superiority, but many, like XL engines, and ER PPCs had huge margins of superiority. Also, they had many more fielded weapons that could one shot eliminate a mech by rolling a 12 using two 6-sided dice that are used to determine where a weapon hits (or in the original Battletech rules, if the target was in partial cover, a 6 rolled on one 6-sided die). This was due to the Battletech mech construction rules that all mechs, no matter what tonnage, only have 3 internal structure for the head and a maximum of 9 armor. This means that the Clan ER PPC, Gauss Rifle, and Ultra AC/20 (two chances if using double fire rate of course) will destroy ANY mech with a single head hit. On that same vein of danger, even the Clan ER Large Laser (10 damage for Clan vs. 8 for Inner Sphere), Large Pulse Laser (10 vs. 9), and Ultra AC/10 can potentially eliminate a mech in one hit as well since they all will do at least one point of internal structure damage giving them a chance to roll a critical hit, which if it does critically hit the cockpit, kills the pilot instantly. Almost all those weapons have longer range than the Inner Sphere versions. Keep this sort of thing in mind when you read up on the story of what happened with the Clans to give a better picture of the battlefield aspect of the Clan story.

Edited by Pihoqahiak, 03 March 2014 - 05:25 PM.

[CyclonerM]

Honor rules ARE a weakness for a Clan player if exploited by an Inner Sphere player...

[Jaroth Corbett]

Marack Drock, on 03 March 2014 - 11:25 AM, said:

How the Clans split into Wardens and Crusaders and why, and their interpretations of what they were supposed to do after Kerensky died.

[Jaroth Corbett]

There is & has never been any outside threat. The Wardens were full of shit.

[Jaroth Corbett]

Anything in the IS is internal.

[Pihoqahiak]

CyclonerM, on 04 March 2014 - 06:12 AM, said:

Honor rules ARE a weakness for a Clan player if exploited by an Inner Sphere player...

I'm not sure what part of the thread you're responding to with the comment above. If it's my previous post, I said nothing about their methods and conduct, I was specific in only discussing their technology. The Clan's adherence to their Honor code of conduct was heavily taken advantage of by Inner Sphere forces once they learned of it, as were some other aspects of their thinking, like their arrogance and over confidence, etc.

[LoPanShui]

Had the Clan Invasion never happened, then if the Jihad had somehow happened anyway, the Wardens might have been pro-invasion in an effort to stop the JiHad more than to conquer the Inner Sphere. That's about all I can think of.

[Gyrok]

In your quotes Jaroth, you outline it succinctly but peruse past the answer for the wardens.

Had it been our way, the invasion would never have happened, and the IS would have been left to their own devices. An outside threat that was unknown to them does not mean it does not yet exist.

For example, we can postulate about all sorts of extraterrestrial beings that may inhabit space; however, until they are officially known to us beyond the scrutiny of all sciences...these are essentially unknown threats. To quote Carl Sagan, "if we are truly alone in space, then it is an awful waste of space to have such an enormous universe with only one planet populated by sentient life forms". I think that best sums it up...additionally, while you may think the Crusaders are in the right, what would have happened if the invasion had never happened? Consider that and postulate at your leisure.

[Fr0z7y]

Marack Drock, on 04 March 2014 - 01:03 PM, said:

I don't know. When you look at it, Dark Age someone downed the Link (or whatever it is called), and no one knows who did it. How about the real identity of the Minnesota Tribe that some think is the not named Clan (but I believe to be something completely different). The Darkcaste groups that the Clans have never been able to destroy. Or all the different secret organizations in the Inner Sphere. We already know it is easy to act like the Inner Sphere (Wolf's Dragoons anyone). For all we know there is something out there that the Clans and Inner Sphere don't know about (and probably is which may be the direction of the Dark Age series). Anyways that is nothing but my conspiracy theory talking. Thanks for that bit Jaroth.

word of blake jihadists started the hyperlink crashes for the darkages, i read a couple of them. anywho, what karensky was stating was in case of aliens for other humans or anything else they needed (wardens) and in the respect that maybe some pirate faction in the peripherals were to grow tooo strong and try to take them over, or asteroids, or anything that would have been screwed up. they were, by the way, the "STAR LEAGUE DEFENSE FORCE" and you know how our constitution has changed here in the united states right? same..

[Jaroth Corbett]

Gyrok, on 04 March 2014 - 03:28 PM, said:

In your quotes Jaroth, you outline it succinctly but peruse past the answer for the wardens.

Had it been our way, the invasion would never have happened, and the IS would have been left to their own devices. An outside threat that was unknown to them does not mean it does not yet exist.

For example, we can postulate about all sorts of extraterrestrial beings that may inhabit space; however, until they are officially known to us beyond the scrutiny of all sciences...these are essentially unknown threats. To quote Carl Sagan, "if we are truly alone in space, then it is an awful waste of space to have such an enormous universe with only one planet populated by sentient life forms". I think that best sums it up...additionally, while you may think the Crusaders are in the right, what would have happened if the invasion had never happened? Consider that and postulate at your leisure.

Yes because as it says the Wardens could never articulate what they meant by "outside threat". During the invasion, during Tukayyid, during Operations Bulldog & Serpent, during the Great Refusal there has never been any "outside threat". I say it again, the Wardens were full of shit. Also leaving the IS to their own devices brings harm to the people because they practice total war. Anyone could be a target anywhere at anytime. How were you going to establish the Star League without placing yourselves where the problem is? If you call yourself a Clansman then follow what the Great Father & the Founder said, not what YOU think they meant.

Edited by Jaroth Corbett, 04 March 2014 - 04:32 PM.

[Strum Wealh]

Marack Drock, on 04 March 2014 - 12:30 PM, said:

Now that is fascinating. Outside threat.... What if Kerensky knew something no one else did??.... Now I want a book to release that will put everything into perspective for us to see.

Jaroth Corbett, on 04 March 2014 - 12:47 PM, said:

There is & has never been any outside threat. The Wardens were full of shit.

Or, given the wide range of extraterrestrial life known to the BattleTech universe (including two sentient species: the Neopithecanthropus (who appeared in The Sword and the Dagger, the second published BattleTech novel) and the Tetatae (who appeared in the infamous (and still fully canonical!) novel, Far Country)), Kerensky could have actually believed that there might be another sapient species within the galaxy (remember, the Inner Sphere is only ~1100 light years in diameter, centered around Earth, and contains ~2 million stars... while the Milky Way is ~1000 light years thick at its thinnest points, ~120,000 light years in diameter (with the Galactic Center being ~27,000 light years away from Earth), and contains at least 100 billion stars (or, up to as many as 400 billion stars)) that could be just as militaristic, expansionist, xenophobic, and generally-hostile as us.
Kerensky's own society (the Star League) had both achieved multi-light-year interstellar flight & encountered life originating on other worlds; it would/should not have been unthinkable to him that another society elsewhere in the galaxy could have achieved the same.

Alternatively, perhaps Kerensky had the foresight to know that some (if not many) among the generations following him and his original followers might lose sight of his vision (or come to (mis-)interpret his words & deeds) and become just as "corrupt" and "power-hungry" as the Inner Sphere that they left behind (basically, predicting the rise of something very similar to the Crusader Movement).
Given that the passage in question - General Order 137 - was issued in response to a mutiny/desertion, that the later Exodus Civil War started very shortly after Kerensky's death, that events transpired to bring about the Clans' "Political Century" and the associated power-games, and that the Invasion by the Clans (who had become a very "alien" society at this point) came a "mere" 249 years after Kerensky's death & provided exactly the sort of "outside threat" that he described (much as Ronald Reagan did in reality, in his famous 1987 speech to the UN - "Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.") would seem to have borne this out.

Marack: as far as books to read about the Clans & their background/lore, you would probably want some or all of the following:

• The Clans: Warriors of Kerensky
  
• MechWarrior's Guide to the Clans
  
• Wolf Clan Sourcebook
  
• Jade Falcon Sourcebook
  
• Invading Clans
  
• Field Manual: Crusader Clans
  
• Field Manual: Warden Clans
  
• Historical: Operation Klondike
  
• Era Digest: Golden Century
  
• The Blood of Kerensky Trilogy (Lethal Heritage, Blood Legacy, Lost Destiny)
  
• The Legend of the Jade Phoenix Trilogy (Way of the Clans, Bloodname, Falcon Guard)

Many of these can be fond through online sources (either as physical copies for sale through resellers like the previously-mentioned BookFinder or even eBay, or as electronic copies), in used bookstored, or even at the library (for some of the novels, at least).

Edited by Strum Wealh, 04 March 2014 - 05:06 PM.

[Gyrok]

Well, Strum Wealh seems to have clearly enunciated my entire point.

Thank you sir!

[CoffiNail]

Great post Strum.