45 replies to this topic

[HellsBlackAces]

Small computing devices are available almost everywhere (shirt pocket size). Think super smartphone. According to A Time of War touchscreen tablet computers are so common the average 13 year old has one. That might be a few years in the future so possibly only really good worlds like the FedSuns Golden Five or sector capitols.

~SD Card size memory chips are still much better than ours, but not insanely better. Battletech video codecs have to be massively better than ours to get holographic video down to the size they do. I'd have to go look at the numbers to compare it to Blueray.

It won't be to long before full sensory VR holographic holodeck light home theaters will become available again (the new Free Worlds League House Book). In the meantime you'll have to settle for holographic TV in your house.

Comstar has some left over data centers on Terra that are staggeringly huge. The planetary defense grid on Terra is running on a 100 yotabyte data center.

The cars on Terra are all fusion powered. Most of the other worlds are lucky if they have fuel cell engines in their hover cars.

We know specifically Arcturus has planet wide multiplayer computer gaming (A Time of War).

Periphery Handbook
[quote name=']Most Taurian worlds also boast a computer network robust enough to support online gaming. Guerrilla-warfare games based on incidents from the Reunification War are perennial hits' date=' as is just about any game with Davions as the enemy.[/quote']

Hand Book House Steiner mentions holographic game consoles.

Battlemech computers are good enough to almost pilot the mech itself. They can handle routing and complex multispectral (visual light, IR, Magnetic, Radar, etc) analysis of the terrain to determine foot placement at hundreds of kilometers an hour (Tech Manual). The Locust 6M can hit 302km/h while firing sideways. The pilot is not picking where the feet go or making sure it doesn't run into a ditch or too big of a tree. The DI computer handles all of that.

Edited by HellsBlackAces, 03 December 2011 - 11:27 PM.

[EDMW CSN]

This is how BT looks like in urban cities.
Holo vids and holographic computers and all the works.

Credits to Flying Debris.

Edited by [EDMW]CSN, 03 December 2011 - 09:22 PM.

[HellsBlackAces]

Prosperity Park, on 03 December 2011 - 10:52 AM, said:

fire control systems, target tracking and acquisition, personal mobile computing power (i.e. laptops and military-type smartphones coupled to GPS, etc.) and stuff like that...

In Battletech long range missiles in air to air combat became obsolete due to advancement of ECM sometime in the near future in our terms. Old school Terran Alliance pre-Jumpship fighters where back to using rockets. It hasn't really gotten much better on the ground. Thunderbolt missiles not withstanding. That said there are rules in the tabletop for reaching out and nailing someone with your large laser or AC-5 out to the horizon, so anyone saying Battletech has short ranges on the ground doesn't know what their talking about. In the same situations that British Challenger tank scored a tank kill at ~5km (longest known tank kill vs tank kill IIRC) in Desert Storm a mech will be hitting you at closer to 12km.

That was actually an interesting scenario. From what I've been told the Challenger fired an Explosive Squash head round. It fires at a lower muzzle velocity but uses explosives to do damage. A SABOT round (the usual tank killer) wouldn't have still been going fast enough at that range or so I've been told by the boffins over on tanknet.

Quote

I'm asking because the cockpit looks a little 1980's...

The mechs computer does most of the work of piloting the mech so that isn't that much of a problem. The pilots display is a compressed 360 degree display. On a HUD or helmet mounted varying by description. As to aiming the weapons the computer does most of the work. The pilot just tells it what and where he or she wants to kill.

The book Unbound describes a FedCom project first proposed in 3047 (a couple of years before MWO starts) that made a very effective controller-less cockpit called the Virtual Reality Piloting Pod. The problem being the tech was apparently lost. The inventor was using the VRPP as a cover for his Direct Neural Interface tech research. He used himself as the test subject for the second series DNI prototype and he went on a mad rampage in a mech full of clan tech. Invention makes inventor go insane and go on a mad rampage with a giant robot doesn't really go hand in hand with widespread adoption anyway even if the tech wasn't destroyed putting down the crazy scientist.

[Nik Van Rhijn]

With regard to the PBI, they have good com's -( built into their helmet's?) and a wide variety of weaponry, skewed by Battletech ranges. The Heavy sniper rifle has ranges which can easily be bettered even by a Lee-Enfield (1930's) with iron sights. The light sniper rifle is basically an M16 with scope. Organisation seems almost to be 50's rather than 80's even. As it was a mech game guess they didn't bother so much. Proper anti-mech training was rare (in fluff) until GDL (and of gourse Wolf's Dragoons).

[Korbyn McColl]

phelanjkell, on 03 December 2011 - 11:14 AM, said:

Military vehicles are also built to handle the extremes of nature. Hop into any military vehicle of today and you'll see its not the fancy looking stuff in sci-fi movies.

Remember these are war machines, sometimes being in use for 300+ years.

OP, I think it is tough to estimate, but they do have some futuristic technology. I think the biggest thing to take out of the universe is that at one point in time, the golden age, of the star league there was incredible technologies being used. Terraforming of planets etc...

This.

Try finding an automatic choke on a Hummer (a real one, not the civy version). It's not there. There's a manual choke. Why not? To quote Scotty, "The more you overtake the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the works".

[jojobear]

I didn't realize just how dated btech has become. It's so glee-fully 80's.

It's like when I re-read Neuromancer last month (a cyberpunk novel written before the internet).

[CaveMan]

With all the nuclear weapons that were being lobbed around in the Age of War, and radiation from reactors, and cosmic rays in space and on planets that are barely habitable, and the huge pulses of energy from JumpShip K-F drive cores going off, and huge amounts of heat, and EMI from various sources including jammers powerful enough to make guided missiles obsolete and radars strong enough to punch through that jamming over a few km, you really think BattleTech's computers are using integrated circuits?

Hell no, they're using something akin to miniaturized vacuum tubes. The kind of computers we have today would last about 5 seconds in the BT universe.

Why else would these things weigh multiple tons? These machines are designed to take incredible levels of abuse that you'd have to be insane to subject delicate microelectronics to. Their architectures are probably thoroughly super-modern but the actual components are macroscopic. They'd have racks and racks of vacuum tubes and hardened transistors scaled to the size of sand grains, all inside Faraday cages and fitted into heavy-duty casings designed to take weapon hits.

Yeah certain civilian equipment would be using nanotechnology so you could have a wristwatch that would do the job of a smartphone, but anything military-grade would need to be entirely too durable.

[Felicitatem Parco]

Poor sperm... I would not want to be one of those little guys in the Battletech universe...

[Dihm]

Keep in mind the ranges in the tabletop are done for practicality. It wouldn't be overly fun killing each other from 4 whole maps away all the time. Lots of people don't have the kind of space in their playing area to make ranges 'realistic'.

Edited by Dihm, 05 December 2011 - 11:23 AM.

[Grotonomus]

Ahem, Its a game.......A sci-fi game. If this was DnD i would say

[Felicitatem Parco]

So... according to what I've heard so far on this thread, the Houses have great computational capacity with optical computers that still work just fine, they CAN afford to [and do] outfit their infantry units with exceptional mobile computers and personal electronic gear, Battlemechs are limited in using technologically-advanced tracking systems and long-range weaponry because ECM is used by everybody, all the time, however, it isn't until 3050 that you can link-up 3 Mechs into a network.

Is that right?

I thought the Succession Wars brought the quality of fielded electronics down a bit, but it seems like they're just as well off as they were in 2700...(?)

[Dihm]

Prosperity Park, on 08 December 2011 - 12:22 PM, said:

Is that right?

That's about how I see it, though I don't know about them giving much expensive computational power to infantry. Maybe special infiltration units, but not the grunts.

ECM everywhere.

[Jack Deth]

I think one of the things that confuses people is the lack of something akin to "the internet" in the MechWarrior universe. Gotta remember that even with Hyperpulse Generators off-world communication is relatively slow. Locally on one world network speed could be hella-fast, but off-world messages could take days or even weeks to reach their recipient across the vast regions of space. This is one of the things that makes the whole idea of running the Inner Sphere on a feudal-type system realistic, because a lot of decisions have to be made locally due to the lag time to get a hold of central government superiors.

[Hunter McGee]

jojobear, on 05 December 2011 - 02:39 AM, said:

I didn't realize just how dated btech has become. It's so glee-fully 80's.

Please disparage not the 80's. Some of us barely remember then. Not because we were too young, or not even born... but because we were mostly drunk.

[Darkmoose]

They have everything we have today and then some. They have access to planetary sat networks, everything from weather, seismic, radar, heat, visual, and comms, every planet apparently has GPS. Other things like Targeting Computers and Fire Control Systems seem vastly archaic, 1 Ton of computer for 4 or 5 tones of Direct fire weapons, you can land a Ballistic missile in a window with something the size of a PS3 today. Missile Guidance System like Artemis should be the size of a TI-85 not half a ton. Then they have the holly grail, holographic immersion tanks, think holodeck from star trek but used to manage war like command and conquer instead of entertainment.

[Anthony Kufahl]

Prosperity Park, on 03 December 2011 - 11:35 AM, said:

Don't get me wrong, I think it's "deliciously" 1980's, just like it's supposed to be. But, when it comes to what's fielded in battle, can the Houses afford to give all their infantry personal computers and health monitors and all that techy jazz? I'm wondering what all the succession wars has done to the common troop load-out. Also, do these Mechs have the ability to link up to command vehicles for linked fire control or data sharing?

the data linking is more C3 technology but the mechs can dump data to each other through an advanced type of wireless communication from my understanding through the novels .... ask apple inc. what they are planning for the third century lol

[Darkmoose]

Jack Deth, on 08 December 2011 - 01:20 PM, said:

I think one of the things that confuses people is the lack of something akin to "the internet" in the MechWarrior universe. Gotta remember that even with Hyperpulse Generators off-world communication is relatively slow. Locally on one world network speed could be hella-fast, but off-world messages could take days or even weeks to reach their recipient across the vast regions of space. This is one of the things that makes the whole idea of running the Inner Sphere on a feudal-type system realistic, because a lot of decisions have to be made locally due to the lag time to get a hold of central government superiors.

They have internets, planetary, and spanning individuals empires and the inner sphere as a whole if Comstar, but the game is about mech combat not downloading MP3's and playing video games. The Clans have the Chatter Web.

[Darkmoose]

Anthony Kufahl, on 08 December 2011 - 01:56 PM, said:

the data linking is more C3 technology but the mechs can dump data to each other through an advanced type of wireless communication from my understanding through the novels .... ask apple inc. what they are planning for the third century lol

Maybe the 31st century, The bible was barely written in the 3rd, and books created by hand.
In the first warriors of Kerensky book the P.Kell used a medium laser like laser comms, to stop snooping.

[Mason Grimm]

Prosperity Park, on 03 December 2011 - 10:52 AM, said:

How does battlefield technology in the MWO launch window compare to early 21st century technology?

All I can say is that in the year 3048 they have Hula Physics™ and they have that shizzit locked down!! We can't get it to work properly without Matt to model for us!!!

Edited by Mason Grimm, 08 December 2011 - 02:03 PM.

[CaveMan]

Prosperity Park, on 08 December 2011 - 12:22 PM, said:

Battlemechs are limited in using technologically-advanced tracking systems and long-range weaponry because ECM is used by everybody, all the time, however, it isn't until 3050 that you can link-up 3 Mechs into a network.

Is that right?

ECM is easy. All you have to do is generate enough noise (a spark plug, a big AC generator, and an antenna are all you need), and the other guy's signal-to-noise ratio is too low to use.

Counter-ECM is hard. That takes lots of fancy equipment to cut through the noise.