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Gremlich Johns, on 07 January 2013 - 11:15 AM, said:
Totally missed the academic discussion, eh.....
If you've ever used ECM in the real world (which I have), I can accept your premise with some caveats. However, since you are undoubtedly ignorant of such things and cannot realize that the fiction created around the BT milieu was based loosely on reality, then your premise is fail. If advances in Clan tech were so exceptional, C3 and C3I systems would also have undergone some development, like enabling frequency-hopping (which the original writers knew nothing about) or how to employ jamming in pin-point or barrage modes without overheating the systems. ECM is intended to either be subtle (where the opposing force does not realize they are being affected until it is too late), or blunt force where they know without question that they are being jammed. The ECM system in the fiction is way beyond reality. The game version is mystical (it puts out no heat, what else could it be?).
For what it is worth, I know, after long association with the fiction (1983), that the Clans are not invincible, and your presumption actually places you with the ignorant faction of MW players, not me. The fiction could have been written better, but it was not. The Clans were intended to fail from the beginning when they were introduced. Any Clan "fanboi" (you cannot even spell) can imagine what the fiction would have been had it been written with a little more realism (instead of just making stuff up that went beyond suspension of disbelief). The Clans "know" the weaknesses and limitations of the IS equipment and the advances the IS had made up to the time of the Clan invasion were laughable. They would also have known from the SDLF history, that bidding and Zellbrigen would be wasted upon the IS and so would not have engaged in it when the two sides met. Remember, when the Exodus occurred, it was to remove power from those who would abuse it- why would anything have changed. And, if anything, the honor system would have been brought in after the invasion had well been underway. But I digress, while weapons superiority is essential, survivability on the battlefield is key. Science marched forward in the BT universe, but was limited by the research skills of the writers and the battlefield extranea suffered probably because it was too in the weeds.
You ascribe supernatural wisdom and clarity to the Clans, thinking 'they would know', when in fact, they were as blind as the Inner Sphere (in many ways moreso). That they grilled their captured prisoners so intensely on items most Inner Sphere warriors would know makes this quite clear, as well as how they were caught unprepared when the Inner Sphere did field equipment not in the Star League tech era. Indeed, you are looking at it from a modern military standpoint, and not that of the Clans as depicted in fiction and source material. They didn't think in terms of complete pragmatism and efficiency, but from the concepts of 'warrior honor' and pride in their superiority, and took it to extremes. Remember, conformity was considered the rule in the Clans, not innovation. You can toss aside Zellbriggen, the Clan's ignorance, their ideas about what needed to be known because you are -not- Clan, don't have their viewpoint, and it isn't what you would do yourself. Yet, history is full of people doing things that others would simple shake their head and wonder at.
Also, the point of BT wasn't to detail every single point of how things were being done, but to concentrate on the situations and tactics that the results produced. ECM was an example of this, not detailed in how it did what it did, just that it had the effects within the tactical situation described. It was the same with every part of BT, from the weapons used to the entire situation that prevented battlemechs from simply being very large targets for OTH weapons. There were no detailed analysis of the extensive electronic warfare that made fightiing at visual ranges necessary, nor made many weapons miss at even those ranges. This was left to the players to fill out, if they wanted to do so. Certainly the kind of equipment needed for such feats (including the ability to completely remove friendly or accidental fire from consideration even in close actions) is far beyond what we have even close to development.
As to my being ignorant, that's a personal opinion of yours, and you can certainly have it.
I'll close with as simple a summation of what I have been saying as possible. Just because you say something 'had to be so' doesn't make it so. The history of the Invasion, as well as many battles, the customs and viewpoints of the combatants, and the results, are well documented and if you want to go against that, then you must bring proof and not just personal opinions that things 'had to be so'. Just because you wouldn't do something in no way means others haven't, wouldn't and didn't, and the fact that the systems you may be familiar with work a certain way does not mean that the equipment in another universe does as well. I didn't make the Clans, and I don't know exactly how they will be portrayed in MWO, but I know how they are set in the BT universe MWO proports to follow, and within that universe, I have to keep with what has been established, not what I wish was established.
Edited by Jakob Knight, 07 January 2013 - 01:12 PM.
