69 replies to this topic

[Jonathan8883]

tankermottind, on 04 April 2018 - 08:11 PM, said:

How would such a monstrosity move? The {Godwin's Law} had a design for a 1000-ton supertank called the Ratte that would have been almost completely immobile because the ground pressure would cause it to sink into the ground and destroy roads and bridges.

Size for increased ground pressure. They usually have at least 12 sets of wide treads, and tend to be in the range of 50 to 250' long and 25 to 150' wide.
Fusion engines for power... usually multiple in the later Marks.
In some versions - "Contragravity" - also useful for assault drops

[Koniving]

Reading Dropships and Jumpships...

There's an incident that sounds like it could be any number of things, including alien intervention and/or dimensional traveling... in April, 2128, the FTL Colony Ship "Liberator" jumped out of the Sol system but never arrived at its destination and never heard from again.

From what I understand, the only other time something like this happened.... led to "Far Country" and the alien race Tetatae.

According to the Tetatae page, they first encountered humans in 2510 though it isn't said where they were from. It is clear however that those humans did not possess any military equipment or mechs.

So I have two theories.

These either "were" humans at one point....
Or the colonists of 2128 had wound up in 'Far Country' as those humans displaced in time.

Apparently sometime around then, the Tetatae split into two groups, with one group beginning to construct wooden huts (an apparently foreign concept before that point in time), use a "slightly higher level of technology", and foster a religion.

I'm thinking the second theory is more on point.
And I have a feeling that this wouldn't be the first issue of time travel with the drives of jumpships.

[evilauthor]

Koniving, on 09 April 2018 - 10:53 AM, said:

Reading Dropships and Jumpships...

There's an incident that sounds like it could be any number of things, including alien intervention and/or dimensional traveling... in April, 2128, the FTL Colony Ship "Liberator" jumped out of the Sol system but never arrived at its destination and never heard from again.

From what I understand, the only other time something like this happened.... led to "Far Country" and the alien race Tetatae.

According to the Tetatae page, they first encountered humans in 2510 though it isn't said where they were from. It is clear however that those humans did not possess any military equipment or mechs.

This is explained in the Far Country novel.

The basic gist is that there's a cosmic fault line for lack of a better term that runs through human space and the Tetatae planet. On rare occasions, the fault line becomes active, and if a Jumpship is jumping out of certain star system when that happens, it gets carried to the Tetatae planet instead of its intended destination. This cosmic fault line is totally unknown to human science, and two misjumps in over 500 years isn't enough to clue anyone to its existence. Hell, no one in the Inner Sphere in the 3050s even remembers that the first misjump happened.

That said, misjumps are known to happen even if they're rare. The ones actually described aren't the only ones to ever exist in the BT universe.

For that matter, there's a third described misjump in TT Lore. This one involves the SLS Manassas, which suffered a misjump that took it 274 years into the future.

And on the topic of who was what on the Tetatae planet, the humans that colonized the planet in 2510 were DCMS soldiers who were jumping out of the same system that the new arrivals in the 3050s were jumping out of. However, since the original arrivals were SOLDIERS on a military mission, they couldn't maintain their 26th century equipment for very long and reverted to ~19th century tech base with some steampunkishness (steam tanks for example). The "advanced" Tetatae living in villages are basically the natives the colonists enslaved to support their new colonies.

The new arrivals in the 3050s were a merc lance hired by the Draconis Combine for an anti-Clan mission of some kind plus a squad of DCMS troops.

Edited by evilauthor, 09 April 2018 - 02:07 PM.

[Koniving]

Whelp that theory didn't pan out....

But the theory of unintended time travel did!

Yay!

This said some of SSarna's descriptions need fixing. No mention of who the humans were and the different sect of more advanced tetatae were just described as changing for an easier life. Nothing about being enslaved etc.

[evilauthor]

Koniving, on 09 April 2018 - 03:02 PM, said:

Whelp that theory didn't pan out....

But the theory of unintended time travel did!

Yay!

This said some of SSarna's descriptions need fixing. No mention of who the humans were and the different sect of more advanced tetatae were just described as changing for an easier life. Nothing about being enslaved etc.

"Enslaved" might be too strong a word by the time the second batch of humans arrived, but they were definitely second class citizens in the human run city states.

[-Spectre]

Bombast, on 27 March 2018 - 08:53 AM, said:

As I recall, the Inner Sphere isn't even big enough to find aliens. There literally aren't enough planets populated in the entire inner sphere to overcome the math that dictates how likely populated planets are.

Admittedly the math is highly speculative, but it's something to consider. The IS is tiny.

If you are going to go there, there actually aren't enough planets in the universe for there to be a single populated planet. The odds against a single organic protein forming abiotically (which is the first step in the proposed process of evolution) are bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe.

[Metus regem]

-Spectre, on 20 April 2018 - 06:31 AM, said:

If you are going to go there, there actually aren't enough planets in the universe for there to be a single populated planet. The odds against a single organic protein forming abiotically (which is the first step in the proposed process of evolution) are bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe.

Three words:

The
Drake
Equation

math says it's possible...

https://en.wikipedia.../Drake_equation

[evilauthor]

Metus regem, on 20 April 2018 - 08:54 AM, said:

Three words:

The
Drake
Equation

math says it's possible...

https://en.wikipedia.../Drake_equation

The Drake equation is highly speculative. The MATH is more or less solid, but almost all the values being plugged into the variables are highly speculative simply because there's almost no data for them. How frequent are worlds in Goldilock zones? How many such worlds develop life. How many worlds that develop life actually develop some kind of sapient species that goes on to develop high technology?

No one knows the answer to any of these questions IRL.

However, Battletech isn't real life. And their sample size is better than a thousand lightyears in diameter. So, life bearing (or at least easily terraformable) worlds seem to be fairly common, about one every 30 lightyears or so (ignoring the fact that the Inner "Sphere" is more a plane than an actual sphere). But INTELLIGENT alien life is so uncommon that none has been found in the Inner Sphere (at least nothing advanced enough to be recognized as intelligent), and the one unambiguously intelligent alien life are stone aged primitives who are an unknown distance from the Inner Sphere.

If we assume the Clan Homeworlds as representative of how far humanity has actually spread (there are scattered human colonies in the Deep Periphery in all directions away from the Inner Sphere), and no other intelligent life has been found by any of them, that's a radius of ~1300 lightyears (~800 lightyears from Terra to the edge of the Inner Sphere and another ~500 lightyears to Clan space). I think that's a fairly representative sample size for the galaxy as a whole (1 high tech species for AT LEAST a 2600 lightyear wide space if not larger).

With that level of rarity for intelligent species, an "Angel and Apes" scenario is even more likely. Given the age of the universe, any intelligent species that the Inner Sphere discovers is extremely unlikely to be around their tech level. They're going to be either so much more primitive as to look like apes to humanity (like the stone aged Tetatae), or they're going to be so much more advanced as to make humans look like stone aged primitives in comparison.

The former don't contribute anything to the BT universe that a primitive human colony couldn't. And the latter basically removes all agency from any human protagonists; if super advanced aliens are involved, the only things humans can accomplish is whatever the aliens let them accomplish barring any "advanced alien stranded among primitives" story which while interesting, doesn't really help the overall BT narrative which is about factions. And if an advanced alien faction is involved in the goings on of the Inner Sphere, then humanity as a whole has about as much chance against them as a stone age tribe in the Amazon has against modern real estate developer that's been given the go ahead by the Brazilian government to clear cut their rain forest.

[-Spectre]

Metus regem, on 20 April 2018 - 08:54 AM, said:

Three words:

The
Drake
Equation

math says it's possible...

https://en.wikipedia.../Drake_equation

From the first bit of the article you linked: "the uncertainty associated with any derived value [of the Drake Equation] is so large that the equation cannot be used to draw firm conclusions." One of the variables is the number of planets that could support life. We have yet to find one. We have found close candidates, but none that meet all of the requirements.

However, I really don't feel like getting into this debate here. Get the last word in if you want, but I will not respond.

[VonBruinwald]

-Spectre, on 22 April 2018 - 06:19 PM, said:

One of the variables is the number of planets that could support life. We have yet to find one. We have found close candidates, but none that meet all of the requirements.

Life as we know it.