23 replies to this topic

[Rhinehart]

If actual examples of these mechs still exist they would be so valuable as to be beyond the price of alll but the Great Houses and the very most elite Merc regiments. Perhaps even beyond the Mercs abilities to maintain. They would certainly only be committed to action in circumstances where the objective would justify risking the loss of the Mech in question, assuming any pilots could be found who can understand how to use the technology.

Also a note concerning the Comstar Memory Core recovered by the Gray Death Legion from Helm. Just discovering the memory core did not lead to instant replication of the technology involved. It took several years for the Successor States to "rediscover" and perfect even the most basic of this technology even given the road map of data provided by the core. After all, one didn't just have to rediscover the weapons and equipment, one had to rediscover the materials, tools and know how to fabricate the lost weapons and equipment.

Add that to the costs involved and reproduction of the more complex systems such as these Stealth systems quickly would become a very low priority. After all, would would make your forces more effective? The production of a very limited number of very stealthy but very expensive mechs, likely requiring specially trained personnel for both piloting and maintenance? Or the ability to retrofit your entire mech forces with relatively cheap and easy to install/maintain double heat sinks, greatly increasing the combat potential of the largest number of units as quickly as possible? Considering the vast distances involved across the Inner Sphere and the fact that Mech Forces often simply cannot be shutlled quickly from different fronts without a massive and expensive committment of Jumpships and Dropships, clearly the second paradigm becomes primary.

In short even if you could build a relatively small number of Mechs with these advanced systems and train pilots to use them, you would never have enough to make a decisive impact on a battlefield the size of the Inner Sphere or the ability to relocate the units quickly enough to make them practical versus upgrading all of your more conventional mechs.

This doesn't mean that individual surviving units might not exist. But it does mean that they would be so rare as to make winning the lottery look easy. Because of this I don't believe the Devs will make developing them a priority, nor do I think they should. Yes, they would be fun. But then everyone would have to have them and that would be completely unrepresentative of the MW universe as it exists in the proposed timeline.

[Johannes Falkner]

Just a small note. The vast distances and travel times in the IS are why they invented command circuits. Not a real solution to the rarity problem, but a mitigation.

[Rhinehart]

Johannes Falkner, on 19 April 2012 - 07:58 PM, said:

Just a small note. The vast distances and travel times in the IS are why they invented command circuits. Not a real solution to the rarity problem, but a mitigation.

This is true enough. But Command circuits are very expensive to maintain for any length of time. In canon one of the things most often seen is that any period of armed conflict is devastating to the economies of the Successor States involved because the majority of commercial jumpships get conscripted into moving Mech Units, which essentially brings interstellar trade to a screeching halt. There is also the fact that jumpships are even more difficult to repair and service than mechs and there are far fewer facillities to do so, not to mention production of new ships is very very slow. To set up a command circuit to shuttle even a single elite unit of say stealth equipped Mechs across a broad campaign front would rapidly become cost prohibitive. The difficulties and time involved in interstellar travel are nearly as much a part of the Battletech universe as mechs. In campaign after campaign you have units desperately trying to hold on for what seems impossible amounts of time so reinforcements can be summoned to their aid. Because a great deal of battles in the Inner Sphere stretch on for days and weeks, the odds of even a unit of Stealth capable elite Mechs being bogged down by either battle conditions or lack of transport makes such a unit impractical compared to upgrading more conventional units.

It's worth noting that this isn't really a real-world problem for many actual modern millitaries. Modern forces can pretty much deploy anywhere in our world today in a matter of hours/days. This also makes more compact, Hi-tech and elite millitary force options much more viable than in the fictional battletech universe. You almost have to go back to a pre-industrial period in history and start trying to move troops around the Earth by wooden sailing ships to get any sense of the kind of difficulties MW has in moving military units around the galaxy. I remember the first time I sat down with a map of the Inner Sphere and started trying to plot out Jump distances and times to move a single unit Mechs from one border of a Successor State to the other. It was amazingly involved even before thinking about considering supplies such as consumable oxygen and toilet paper for the troops lol. That's just one reason why I think a very large military optimized to the maximum general standard wins out over the idea of even one extremely elite Hi Tech unit of stealthed mechs.

Hence a reason why Exterminators with stealth systems are not likely to be running around MWO any time soon.

[Long Draw]

I can definitely see your point about how this kind of system would have been very costly to not only construct(assuming it was possible), but also to maintain such a technologically complex system of equipment. I would pose a question to you though with that in mind, what if a merc company was able to negotiate terms with a successor state that had one or more LosTech mechs, to have one or more of their technicians/engineers study those mechs during the duration of the contract (it could be a capital city reinforcement contract)?

Maybe that could tie into a mech company becoming more familiarized with the LosTech and having a better chance of one day recreating it, or at least creating a similar facsimile version.