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razenWing, on 13 January 2019 - 08:10 AM, said:
3: Mechs are build as contrary to popular beliefs, as more defensive tools. They are self sustaining and can take a crap load of punishment. As such, pilots will probably have better survival rate than... infantry. This is no different than modern day. (also, mechs can eject if severely damage)
Unless its an organized team...
(Both of these are supposed to be Thunderbolt).
Another fun thing worth noting, mechs aren't as big as MWO would have you believe. If you ever played Mw3, you might notice the infantry seem pretty big.... the fact is your mech isn't all that big.
Big targets are not all that feasible. 100 ton tanks in BT can still fit on one-to-two lane roads (depending on the design). So then, why should a mech like the Atlas be 18.8 meters as it is currently sized in MWO?
It shouldn't. The latest manual from Catalyst expanded mechs from the old 7-to-15 to 6-to-16 meters tall. Tallest mech up til 3070-something is the Executioner at 14.4 meters, in MWO it is almost 19 meters tall according to this official image.
Meanwhile the SHK-2D's official height is 9.63 meters... For comparison to MWO's current height, that's slightly over 15 meters. I don't remember exactly what the original height is, but here it is next to a slightly taller than 9.63 meter attempt at recreating the original artwork. (It is worth noting the SHK 5-series are described as "towering over its predecessor by a hair bit more than 2 meters. Such was a necessity to fit the XL to power it and the larger double heatsinks that kept it from becoming an inferno."
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I once start a thread discussing how real mech universe would look like. Assuming everything said in the lore is true, about how mechs are ultra rare and more for show. Then combat involving mechs are probably a super rare sight. I don't know how much 19 million space dollars are actually worth, but I imagine it's not a sum to throw around lightly. You probably don't even deploy mechs until the battle is 90% done, and you just need a sweeper. No point risking the big stuff.
Admittedly, Mechs are usually deployed after it is safe to land (or in an area safe to land in) (See video later). Often in either case, they are deployed far from the field and allowed to go in. IS Mechs have toilets, provisions, a rather cramped fold-out cot/bed to sleep in. Some go in the field for weeks or months. Provided only a basic firefight or two, a Mech's fuel lasts for a few months. The more intense the firefight, the less likely the fuel will last if the machine is heavily energy dependent. Running out of fuel in a couple of weeks has happened to high-energy draining 'Mechs after a couple of prolonged battles from defensive positions. Machines with high volumes of lasers such as the HBK 4P are especially vulnerable to it.
The big thing is... most of BT is set after brutal warfare, sure there's 2765 but even long before that time warfare is so methodical thanks to the Ares convention that akin to Metal Gear Solid 4, "War has become routine" and everything is under "Control." Just remove "nanomachines", and you have Warfare prior to the Amaris Coup. Mechwarrior (RPG) first edition states that once the Star League is established and the Ares Convention is established, nobles of the great houses would use mini-wars in strictly controlled environments to settle everything from territorial disputes to demanding an appology for an insult.
(This is prior to the star league, but it gives you an idea of what might get a miniwar.)
After a fateful day decades later the Amaris Coup begins, and warfare gets large scale. 'Mechs not only dominate the battlefield, but are common.
Once that ended, Kerensky made a choice. More than 70% of the 'Mechs joined him, along with many of those that knew how it worked.
(This speech is sent via radio, but doesn't reach Terra for 1,500 years after 2786, though it'd reach the outer rim by 3800).
After Comstar is formed and takes Earth and then immediately declares itself neutral... it begins systematically eliminating anyone believed to have knowledge of how to produce entirely new designs. The process is slow, but by 3015, only a couple of people out there remained... One of them made the Axman after evading multiple assassination attempts.
In the face of this of Kerensky's Exodus and with it the Star League, the First Succession War begins. The first thing out the window is the Ares Convention as the first nukes fly in short order, warships duke it out, and many planets with multiple factions on them engage in all out land combat. Nothing and no one is spared.
(This history is beautifully depicted in the opening for HBS's Battletech. 2571, Star League is made and the first "First Lord" is ascends to the throne. 2765, terrorist attacks destroy a heavy assault regiment of the Star League, disputes about the Taurian Concordant has members refuse to sign, the First Lord's family line is systematically slaughtered. Civil unrest, class wars break out. 2766, the Amaris Coup "officially" begins and the Star League fights itself with Amaris' forces fighting outward from Terra versus Kerensky fighting inward to reclaim it and give it to the next proper first lord. But with the Cameron family line slaughtered, there is no next in line and the Great Houses fought over whom should have it thus the Exodus. Though the conclusion of the video ends with imagery of events during the fight against the Coup.)
By the third Succession War, battles are less all out massacres and closer to those of the Ares Convention in an unspoken agreement as most sides realize that it can no longer be sustained. If they keep destroying dropships, there'd be no way to invade planets as they can't make them anymore. This doesn't mean its stopped, but a preference to capture them arose. Jumpships became forbidden targets altogether and are completely neutral.
(Art: Griffin, not sure what it is doing Article, how something akin to Ares Convention started up, but it is NOT the Ares Convention. The Ares Convention does not govern any post-2780 gameplay what-so-ever.)
In between the wars, smaller conflicts arise on occasion. Often due to influence from the great houses.
In the periphery, soldiers that abandoned their duties often brought whatever they had, yes that includes mechs.
There's some 200,000 mechs left in the IS after the Exodus, and some 80,000 planets (each "planet" you see on the map is actually a system of planets, each typically has at least one inhabited planet, even if it is only a mining colony, the stats of each inhabited planet tells you a lot about its state if you know how to read it). Of those mechs, there's less than 18,000 assault mechs.
(1/13/19: I just put those numbers into a ratio calculator to get a percentage. Only 9% of accounted for Military Battlemechs are Assault mechs).
The one image I had in an earlier post says that they're being built about as fast as they're being completely obliterated, meaning that number is more or less steady at least until 3030+ as the Helm Memory Core's contents are being spread piecemeal across the IS by merchants thanks to the Gray Death Legion (and I suspect the Wolf's Dragoons for leaking its whereabouts, considering that they're actually Clan Wolf spies meant to gauge IS preparedness and help build them up so the Clans have a challenge, and so that the Clan Wolf could have an edge.)
Mercs often bring their Mechs to the field for any strike. The military uses mechs both defensively and offensively, but it isn't usually the first thing on an all out battlefield.
It is however, often one of the only things sent on a surgical strike..
Think of it like the Strike series, where they send in the helicopter without any support real support for "deniability".
"War, eh, war...just isn't what it used to be."
Mechs are deployed primarily on "Commando" operations such as this one. However bad intel and some habbits from the third/fourth Succession War and typical combat against Clans invading planets leads to being completely vulnerable to a counter attack before even landing. Given the nature of the target, they didn't expect planetside anti-capital ship weaponry, as they haven't been used in so long. Clans typically issued Battle Challenges, declaring a location, force composition, and will fight for control of a planet with just a few men against a few men whenever possible. IS prefer to capture dropships whenever possible and as such do not shoot to destroy them but to cripple.
Small groups of mechs don't spark all out wars. Neither do surgical strikes.
If one reads the lore of the Crab in the 2750 TRO...
It implies that the tabletop game of Battlefield... is actually a bored pilot running a simulation on his computer while waiting for some action.
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(also according to lore, aren't most pilots royalties? I have a hard time believing that those are easily expendables...)
Some kind of nobility, not necessarily royalty. As 'Mechs became more and more rare, either you were nobility (and as such had the money to make it work), or you went to an academy and were assigned to a 'Mech.
You have to own the machine to customize it, as such nobles customized their machines. Mercs did. Pirates that brought their own, etc.
But your typical warrant officer / Mech Jock in the military... he ran what he was given. After all customizing is expensive, and more often than not, those that did customize their rides without the big funding and highly skilled technicians...often wound up with botched jobs. And a highly customized rig is a whole lot harder to fix than the standard issue.
As an example of customization:
Though a Jenner costs very little, with a 19 million cbill budget, trying to make the change from a Jenner D into a Jenner K three different times with Scotty the Miracle Worker and another god-mode technician (basically impossibly perfect)... and two times I had collosal failures.. The third time I had a partial success, except a leg actuator became permanently fused in the process, making the mech completely immobile. Jenners, given their lack of torso twist in canon, do not make good turrets. And this was just changing the armor out to ferro, cutting half a ton's worth of armor, and installing CASE to protect the core of the mech from its SRM ammo.
Two perfect God-mode Mech Techs with the inability to make mistakes...still couldn't get a perfect customization job in a Mechbay....as such a change in design is best done in the factory as the machine is being built. These two techs had full compliments of AsTechs and a Powerman for any heavy lifting..and they still failed not once, not twice, but three different times each after a reset. (One of those times, one of the techs decided he wasn't being paid enough and quit despite making 7 times more than the pilot already, taking the mech with him, the other two were failures). As such major customizations are rare. (The more skill a pilot has, the more likely they'll bail unless paid absurd amounts. When Scotty bailed, he was being paid the USD equivalent of 3,600 dollars per 8 hour shift plus overtime at 5,400 USD for an 8 hour shift and it wasn't enough. He stole the 'Mech to sell it to get what he was "owed.") (This was done on Megamek HQ in an Against the Bot campaign).
(Sorry if you see more quotes than necessary in your notification, just adding more to this. This should be the final edit.)
Edited by Koniving, 13 January 2019 - 09:31 PM.
