182 replies to this topic

[Paladin1]

Chou Senwan, on 26 May 2012 - 07:47 AM, said:

200+ years, and no one says, "Hey, let's build some science academies"? I mean, NAIS is the only one, right? On Earth we have how many today? And in all the Inner Sphere, there's just one noteworthy institute trying to understand physics?

I dunno. Maybe the authors of the novels just didn't paint the universe as dark and gritty enough. "Mankind wars itself back to the Industrial Revolution" could explain some stuff, but I can't imagine a planet of billions of people not having scientists who can advance technology.

Oh, and also, the game came out before the internet and SIRI. Mechs should all be drones. But that's a change that would make the game less fun.

Well, there's two things you have to remember.

First, NAIS wasn't the first of it's kind, it was the first to be built since the Star League era. The years between the fall of the Star League and the building of NAIS weren't kind to science in general, between the Succession Wars destroying the Universities and supporting infrastructure that allows advanced research and Comstar killing those who understood the technology enough to teach others how to understand it.

Second, NAIS wasn't a normal university. There were other universities out there all along, but not in great numbers and most had to rely on whatever their planetary governments could scrounge up for research and development. NAIS was different because it had the backing of an entire House as well as the ruling family and funding was not a problem. Also, NAIS was founded on the information that was recovered when the SLDF library on Halstead Station was discovered and recovered before the Draconis Combine could claim it all for itself. Even the data that Kurita did recover, though, led to the Combine opening a scientific research University of it's own that rivaled the NAIS.

Other Houses have their own research facilities as well, but they've suffered greatly during the Succession Wars.

[Egomane]

Sorry, my mistake! You are right, Chou Senwan.

[Demi-Precentor Konev]

The entirety of Clan society.

[Zakatak]

The idea that you could just lose 500 years of knowledge is completely ridiculous to me. How do you lose every blueprint, every scientist, every idea, every instruction manual, and degrade to 21st century technology within a matter of years after the fall of the Star League? You think somebody within the 300 year time period that was the succession would have the education and intelligence to make something new, but no. New mechs weren't being produced until 3025.

Also? Clanners are too weird. Davions are too good. That is all.

Edited by Zakatak, 26 May 2012 - 09:07 AM.

[William Petersen]

Zakatak, on 26 May 2012 - 09:05 AM, said:

How do you lose every blueprint, every scientist, every idea, every instruction manual, and degrade to 21st century technology within a matter of years after the fall of the Star League? You think somebody within the 300 year time period that was the succession would have the education and intelligence to make something new, but no. New mechs weren't being produced until 3025.

Well it's quite simple really, there's this group called [REDACTED]. And that's pretty much all you need to know.

[GreyTemplar]

Agreed on both Land/Air mechs, and The Dark Ages. However much I loved the Clix game (yes I did play the actual Battletech Tabletop for a long time before transitioning), the whole "Word of Blake" Jihad and transition just made want to put my face through a brick wall.

[Buddah]

GreyTemplar, on 26 May 2012 - 09:13 AM, said:

Agreed on both Land/Air mechs, and The Dark Ages. However much I loved the Clix game (yes I did play the actual Battletech Tabletop for a long time before transitioning), the whole "Word of Blake" Jihad and transition just made want to put my face through a brick wall.

The whole Clix thing killed it for me, a bunch of peasants can zerg a 'Mech, I do not think so, the 'Mech would just walk right through them and squash them all, they are enemy combatants after all.

[Engineering]

As just about everyone else here has mentioned The Dark Ages

[Sychodemus]

The way the Clans never quite lived up to their potential. The more and more they write about them, the less interesting they become. The premise was fine, it was the execution that really left me disappointed.
The way they were written, it just felt like the Clans were meant to eventually betray everything they claimed to stand for; in the end, they became fairly pointless and laughable to me.
This would have been bad enough but the writers could never seem to agree on anything about the Clans; one bad interpretation after another.

I'll use my own versions, thanks.

[CaveMan]

Zakatak, on 26 May 2012 - 09:05 AM, said:

The idea that you could just lose 500 years of knowledge is completely ridiculous to me. How do you lose every blueprint, every scientist, every idea, every instruction manual, and degrade to 21st century technology within a matter of years after the fall of the Star League? You think somebody within the 300 year time period that was the succession would have the education and intelligence to make something new, but no. New mechs weren't being produced until 3025.

Europe managed to do it after the fall of Rome.

Whatever passed for the Internet in the Star League era would have been a major target in the first succession war. Without that, planets would be cut off. The HPG network itself would have been obliterated during the first wave of nuclear and orbital bombardments. After that, every 'Mech factory, every supply depot, every data center, every research facility, and every university that was conducting research even tangentially related to the war effort was bombed. Anyone trying to restart technological development would have been a target, since the first priority in a war of attrition is to keep your enemy from gaining any advantage.

And then you have the whole thing with ROM actively hunting down and assassinating people who tried to rediscover technology. Not a hard thing for them to do when they literally read everyone's e-mail. Try to refurbish a 'Mech factory? You died mysteriously. Discover the secret of fusion reactors? You died mysteriously. It's no wonder people started thinking high tech was magic. Just working on the project could kill you if you were one of the uninitiated.

Any technological development program would have to be conducted in total secrecy, on a black budget. By the time things got really dire, technologically speaking, the successor lords were too busy just holding onto power to try and undertake an effort like that. Plus ROM had sleeper agents at the highest levels of power actively undermining any such efforts.

[DFDelta]

Zakatak, on 26 May 2012 - 09:05 AM, said:

The idea that you could just lose 500 years of knowledge is completely ridiculous to me. How do you lose every blueprint, every scientist, every idea, every instruction manual, and degrade to 21st century technology within a matter of years after the fall of the Star League? You think somebody within the 300 year time period that was the succession would have the education and intelligence to make something new, but no. New mechs weren't being produced until 3025.

That has always irritaded me too, but the tech loss is actually quite logical.
Remember there is no quick and casual way to link information from planets together (jumpships are slow, and HPG is expensive) like our modern internet does with information available on out planet. One planet will likely not have knowledge of tech it does not need, one world living of farming could have 3 highly industrial planets in the direct neighborhood and know nothing of producing mechs or weapons.
Combine that with the common combat doctrine of the first succession war which pretty much said that the best tactic was to just orbit any planet with a few warships, drop a dozen A-bombs on every place that has more then 200 inhabitants and leave again. Even if those planets had information networks (like internet) all datacenters would have been destroyed.
Core worlds were save from such threatment, but they had their own sources of technology loss.
About halfway into the first war ComStar started to work towards its goal of universe domination.
I don't know if you have read the novels, but maybe you know the part where CS tried to destroy the NAIS during the 4th SW.
Back during the first war CS did 3 such raids before breakfast every morning.



What irks me the most would be the Jihad.
Not the idea or even the outcome, but how it was made. The wobbies doing something like that was something I was actually anticipating ever since they split away from ComStar.
I expected them to play friends against each other, using subtle methods to infiltrate every faction and then spring the trap. Instead they pulled out an army that is much bigger then anything they could possibly have (at least the ComGuards make a bit of sense) and starting nuking everything, like any generic great house has done before.
I always feel like that whoever came up with this kinda missed the point of what he was supposed to make.

Edited by DFDelta, 26 May 2012 - 09:45 AM.

[Nik Van Rhijn]

Everything after 3049

[HanaYuriko]

The Jihad was an annoyance to me. It's like they just rehashed the entirety of BT lore into a Cliff Notes version turning the Star League into the Republic of the Sphere. If the writing was better (I'm sorry Stackpole, Bills, and Coleman - I'm sure you tried your best), or at least if the plot was better constructed instead of trying to patch up a marketing idea, then it may have been more successful. I understood that the developers tried to reset the universe to make 'mechs kings of the field once again. The rare war machine hidden in a grain silo for a couple of centuries was an intriguing idea.

And then everyone suddenly had full regiments again breaking the original concept.

The one thing I REALLY disliked was how they tied the The Minnesota Tribe/Clan Wolverine to the WoB. Supposedly hiding them on Mars for a couple of centuries and mutating them into cyborgs.

[TheMagician]

The clans rub me the wrong way. The whole 'we preserve waste by using a bidding system'. Yet, they'll still do massive builds. If they had true honor, why not just always use single combat or a star at most? Sure, fighting was a way to train themselves to be better than the IS. But the clan system had a lot of flaws. Yet, the clans are a lot of fun.

I'm also bugged a tad by the 'super hero' IS MechWarriors.

Edited by TheMagician, 26 May 2012 - 11:35 AM.

[Insidious Johnson]

The lack of information on the 2nd succession wars. The hindsight of leaders who know the 1st succession wars are coming. They KNOW the highest tech will be targets, since they target the enemies' high tech stuff first, yet down to a man forget to protect their own. So many vital resources are left on borders (LfrigginOL) to be moved to the interior much later on. The entire string of plots seem to be made piecemeal by so many authors, there is no clear over-arching story other than there was only one SLDF and it simply will never be again. There is no loyalty to the whole story, just fans trying to grab a hold and endear whatever part of it identifies with them. There are bright stars of work within the collection, but overall, its pretty dim. Most novels are just horrible cut n paste jobs on battle descriptions. The greatest amount of time spent on BT was the vehicles then the people. Many of the characters are 1 dimensional plot drivers. The whole thing looks like a roofing job done by a blind man having an epileptic fit. So we just don't look at the whole thing, just the parts we like.

Edited by Insidious Johnson, 26 May 2012 - 04:38 PM.

[Dmitri Ravenoff]

Quentin Yatoki, on 26 May 2012 - 07:22 AM, said:

I pretty much have to agree with everything else said in this thread. WoB? How could that have happened with out any one noticing. Also, the whole fact that there is a religion around Jerome Blake made no sense. I mean, there isn't anything mystical about HPGs, they may be a pain to maintain, but this isn't 40k....So yeah, after 3067, everything just stops making sense.

Also, AC ranges....my AC20 has a shorter range then a AC2? How the heck does that work?

A .22 cal rifle has a longer range than an AK-47. Bigger bullets slow down faster.
The AC-2 is shooting pebbles at long range. The AC-20 is lobbing beer keg sized shells a very short distance with devastating effect.

[Skye Storm]

Infine, on 26 May 2012 - 07:24 AM, said:

1) Davions. The WoB, the ComStar, the Clans - they all happened later. Davions are the indicator that BT lore wasn't heading in any likeable direction from the start. Davions are the Knights In Shining armour. Always just, always right, always the winners. They can kick puppies and eat kittens and it still would be justified. Other fractions are the foil. They take turns holding either villian ball (Kurita, Liao, finally even Steiner) or ***** ball (Marik obviously).
2) Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kerensky, son of Nikolay Kerensky. No, really, critical research failure.

I'm strickly davion loyal but one can not say they were always right. In the 23 dark ages novel, the main davion character was a mechwarrior who raped the main character. This caused her to get all emotional and ruin the entire book. Would have been so much better had she hunted him down.

[Gendou]

Far Country.

Jihad / Dark Ages.

'Mechs over 100t.

[SovietKoshka]

imma say the WOB was just sence none making sometimes maybe i aint no not a pineapple

[Atomfire]

Three things, Word of Blake, Dark Ages, and land/air.