/btg/ - BattleTech Genera

>Hanse Davion will be forever remembered for throwing the most violent wedding party in history

That shit is pure gold user, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Ultimately, who would you reckon for the most purely tragic iconic character in BattleTech?

Minobu Tetsuhara is pretty far up there. Zane Nova Cat is up there for me too. Teddy K? (Seems like the trend for me involves Kuritans)

Shit, really, this thread's oldest pal Wayne Waco is up there. He's tragic in the oldest sense. He's not a bad man, but he's a man betrayed by fortune and ultimately his fatal flaw, vendetta.
I mean, look at the man. A man works hard at his job, and his family, looses the family, and there's actually folks to blame. After that, the man dedicates himself to his job, works his whole life, picks a man he thinks a decent successor, for lack of a lost son. Less than a dozen years in, that successor makes a fool of himself, gets him and the men who followed him on the words of their old best boss killed. A man works his whole life, and at the end, seventy-odd years on, ain't got more to show for it than he started with, maybe less, no family. So at the final extreme he dedicates himself to the last vendetta, and succeedes, not really at the cost of his life, but at the cost of all those who followed him, even into the dark.
If that isn't tragic, ain't much else is

Except Wayne Waco blows the Goons to hell, so it's not really tragic at all.

Victor probably even though most of it was his own fault. The man was always looking to the good of the whole sphere instead of what would bring the most advantage to his own country, and that's what led everything to ruin.

He would have made a great First Lord, but he made a fucking terrible Archon Prince.

The man who shot Jaime Wolf
He shot Jaime Wolf
He was the bravest of them all

A man needs to unrustle his jimmies.

A man had over a year of his life wasted by a girl, and a man could not care less.

Grayson Carlyle mebbe, but that's because the author of the dying time was a cunt.
He was a pretty stand up dude, just kept getting fucked over.

He tore the Wolves a new one and got Jamie but failed to destroy the Dragoons... hell even the wrath of god they unleashed for hitting Terra failed to kill the Dragoons. Which by the way, is when I finally respected the Dragoons.

What about that made you respect them?

He's actually one of the better writers for the series' books, usually applying some realistic military sense to what's going on. It's not his fault the folks writing BT's arc wanted the GDL to die. Just saying.

It's not that they died as much as how.
They went out like a bunch of bitches, and it just wasn't consistent with their character.

Generic question for those assembled:
What got you into Battletech and big military realistic robits in the first place? I'm sure there is a few interesting stories here.

They went from being the Yankees to being the Cubies, and I'll be damed if the few of them that were left didn't just keep on fighting, I respect a man who can lose and keep losing and just not give up.

TLDR They just don't have any quit in them.

Dying in war isn't always consistent with character. Shit like Lori getting hit with a grenade just happens. I love the GDL but I like the book.

Saw MW4 was freeware download about five or six years back, gave it a shot and loved it.
I'd always been a fan of mechs and robos, wanted to get into the sauce so I bought the intro box. Started reading the novels and other lore, ended up here.
Funnily enough it was also a contributing factor to me getting into the animu with Robotech, though Crimson Skies is actually what really got me into it.

Not like they had a choice. Losing all their warships and getting rekted hard was some poetic justice for having to put up with all their Sue BS for so long.

Honestly it's a shame they couldn't stay dead. They're so out of place in the post-Jihad universe.

That's my point though, they went from the Mary Sues to absolutely nothing, when they had nothing and kept going I finally respected them.

Saw a friend playing mechcommander. Got a copy of MW2 Titanium ed out of a bargain bin, along with a burned copy of MC from my buddy shortly thereafter. There was no hope for me.

And then they crawled back up through the power of Sue. What would have been worthy of respect was going out like a boss, not lingering around because the authors are afraid to kill you and then returning to a giant strength that threatens most states in the post-Jihad era, maintaining elite status and equipment despite having no access to any of the tech, factories, or Clan resources they once did.

More appropriately I saw them lose some forces on Outreach and Mars, heard they weren't *all* dead, and rolled my eyes wondering how they'd make another comeback.

You know what's telling about them in the Dark Age? In Bonfire of Worlds when the Wolves and Falcons are bringing the Lyrans to their knees they hire the Wolf Hunters. The Kell Hounds fight to the last man. They go begging to the Davions for help... and in name Wolf's Dragoons never even comes up.

>Wolf Hunter
Yuck, there are too many Wolf subfactions.

Weren't the Dragoons off working for the Combine then?

>Kell Hounds fight to the last man
Now see, there's a merc unit to respect. Humbler origins, go out swinging, etc. Yeah they had their own Sue moments, but they were never five reinforced regiments, plus scores of support regiments strong Sue.

My story revolves around being impressed with actual effort. When I was a kid, robots were ugly crap like the two links below.

s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/1f/b1/3b/1fb13bfd55b0f398536fe56a1cf1e635.jpg

i.ytimg.com/vi/7MXg2yhQIBE/maxresdefault.jpg

However when the Transformers cartoon came out, I was stunned at the level of detail that was going into the box art for the toys. One of the original G1 TFs was Jetfire / Skyfire, in which the toy was based on the old Macross Super Valkyrie which became the Phoenix Hawk in Battletech.
I used to go to bookstores in the mid-80s and Battletech's second edition caught my eye because it had that level of intricate detail. The back of the box art had those various Macross mechs at the top and it looked professional, like an "adult's" product and not a kid's toy. This got me interested.
From trying Battletech, I got into realistic military robots when they looked like the artist gave a damn, which led me into animu and watching things like Macross and MOSPEADA to find the source of Battletech's art, and later things like Fang of the Sun Dougram when that guy (who I think went by the name X Nebula) subtitled them a few years ago.
It was the professionalism in art that drew me in, and I never looked back. I'm a mech-nerd for life.

Also it sucked the Gray Death Legion got killed off as well. Are there any heroes anymore in the Dark Ages? So depressing, man.

Word of Herb is that if you have a problem with how Dying Time was written, you actually are the cancer that's killing Battletech. Everybody wanting happy results for their factions all the time instead of accepting the fact that in the majority of the time, your favorite people from your faction should die scared, alone, and far from home. The fans' inability to accept this is the reason why the devs have to keep compromising their vision of the universe and keep fucking everything up. The Dying Time is the way almost every character in the Battletech univers should end, and the GDL dying like bitches is a feature, not a bug.

Real life is shit, and if you expect your game fluff not to reflect real life, then you're the problem. Not the writers.

>this is not an edge troll
>that actually is Herb's response to this exact point
>I genuinely wish it was an exaggeration

He's not entirely wrong though. It's BattleTech, not SafeSpaceTech.

I've got no problem with characters dying, and things ending. But if you're going to write a capstone to a series, it needs to match the tone of the rest of the series, otherwise it's going to be offputting as hell.

I liked Robotech. My uncle bought me the 2e boxed set for Christmas (1986) thinking it was a Robotech-related product. It wasn't. It was better.

Fuck, I remember that post and the shitstorm that followed. IMO TPTB deserved every bit of the fan rage they got for essentially blaming the fans for wanting the characters they liked to get an ending they could be proud of and not die like complete bitches. There was a Terry Goodkind book that did something similar; it spend ~400 pages developing a new (interesting) character, and then like 100 pages from the end the main characters of the series basically just rode by and smashed his head open with a mace, and not another mention of him was made and the book ended by following the main characters for the last 100 pages. Building a character and killing him like a bitch betrays the audience's trust in the author that you're going to be told an interesting story, and an author who thinks that's OK by all rights should find themselves without an audience at all pretty quickly.

I agree. However, I feel that it should be expressed by having characters and factions should probably die MUCH more often than they actually do.

I don't think anybody is really upset that the GDL died. Honestly, I don't even think anybody is that upset at the way Grayson himself died; traitors happen, and the cancer that killed him was a logical consequence of things that happened to him. It was the way the REST of the GDL died that gets people upset, especially Lori. The fact that they killed off Alex in a footnote (one of those, "oh yeah, he was on this world when X happened...guess he died too) was just the capstone on it.

It's realistic to kill them off that way. But it is bad *storytelling*. The two things are different, and I don't think it's unreasonable for people to be upset by the abrupt, unannounced, and never-repeated shift in tone from "storytelling that is roughly in the low-powered hero range" to "GRRM on a bad day". The fact that this shift in tone was used explicitly to kill a very popular and long-running faction just made things worse. If TPTB had been killing off units like that for 4-5 IRL years and then moved on the GDL that way, I don't think the backlash would or should have been so great. But they basically did it for the span of a single novel, just to kill off a fan-favorite merc unit. That's pretty much asking for trouble, and doubling down on it in defense of the move the way Herb did is also doubling down on the stupidity.

This
Yeah, people die, and that's normal. Even the situation where they got fucked over by Katrina, that's fine. But there were many other times where for example Lori was sure they were gonna die but she never before exhibited a "run away and hide" response. It's inconsistent. It's shitty storytelling and it's intentionally kicking the fans in the nuts.

Wasn't she like in her late 60s and behind enemy lines on her own? Stuff like that will change your actions.

Not really anything she hadn't done before. I don't think it would change her fundamental character.

She was on her own for like 2 minutes. She was performing rear-guard duties in her Victor, and got caught up in a fire. Even though she'd very explicitly beaten the "fear of fire" thing 30 years prior, she reacted just like she did on Trellwan, panicked, and ejected from an otherwise functional Mech. She hit the ground and ran, still panicked, and was chased down by a couple of infantrymen, who shot her in the shoulder. While she was lying in cover, they threw a grenade next to her.

Basically, she reacted as though the author read Decision at Thunder Rift, never read any other GDL books, and then the author wrote her death scene.

And yet I can't be too mad at the writers. This is what you get for supporting a Mary Sue faction, and aside from the Hounds, Dragoons, FedSuns, Capellans, Falcons, Wolves, Bears, MOC, and WOB, the GDL are the biggest bunch of Mary Sues in the setting.

You forgot Focht

Wasn't there another ending that the author of the majority of the books had in mind?

She was in her 60s. People lose their edge, believe it or not. They lose it a lot earlier than that if they're exposed to constant stresses of warfare, and say maybe just lost the love of their life.

I'm starting to wonder if this is all real criticism of the boom or just demonstrating how many introverts here have never been in combat or love.

Losing their edge =/= directly contradicting previous character development.
Also sacrificing good storytelling for muh realism is a shit trade.

It actually is the same thing.

There's plenty of other stuff going on in the book that illustrates Lori is losing her edge. The better way to end the book would have been some moment of clarity where she rallies a bit, before going out.

Yeah but not for a stand-alone novel, so far as I've heard.

What I heard was that Keith was going to write one of the books set on Huntress during Serpent and the Legion would dissolve after Grayson, sick of war, wandered off into the swamps and was never heard from again.

youtube.com/watch?v=vz3e2hpbo50

>Humbler origins
>"Deny this man, Morgan Kell, nothing."

It is super weird and totally nonsensical in the setting for a brigade-sized unit to just up and die. Get reformed under another name, sure. Get absorbed by a House, sure. But someone's got to be top dog, and the biggest, or best reputed, or most elite units are never going to suffer for want of skilled recruits or wealthy sponsors. The most realistic way to "kill" them would be to break the survivors up into multiple competing groups, and then let those splinters either fade into obscurity or feed into the new generation of "hero" units.

The year was 1996, the family had just gotten our first PC. Dad got one game with it, loaded it up, and I saw this:

youtube.com/watch?v=-X3GD0UnBCk

Played the game, read the lore, loved it. That Christmas I got the 4th Edition starter pack for the tabletop game.

That next summer I got "Bred for War' and read my first BT novel.

My brother and I saw the movie "Screamers" five minutes in on tv and at first thought (due to the glory of simple cable) maybe it was a BT movie about the Exodus civil wars or something.

>implying a note used 18 years after the founding of the unit isn't humbler than starting out with 840 Clan Wolf Star League Era mechs, a similar number of Wolf/Scorpion trained MechWarriors, scores of aerospace fighters, six bloody WarShips, scores of dropships and jumpships, and shitloads of support personnel, vehicles, etc, etc

Give your brain a chance.

>It is super weird and totally nonsensical in the setting for a brigade-sized unit to just up and die.
Not under the circumstances presented. Their homeworld nuked and occupied, all their infrastructure and logistics elements gone, Home Guard gone, Alpha, Beta and Epsilon Regiments destroyed in the opening moves, Zeta Battalion also destroyed, Delta shattered in 3070 and disbanded, and so forth.

Literally nothing weird or nonsensical about them dying in the Jihad, or at least being reduced to maybe a regiment. Coming back with three regiments plus three independent battalions in the Dark Age is serious Sue bullshit.

>implying the note wasn't used to found the unit
>implying literal carte blanche applies less to the Kells than to the Dragoons

>Give your brain a chance
You first.

>making shit up
>ignoring that the startup for the Hounds came from inheritance money

Seriously, give your brain a chance instead of passive-aggressively meming at me.

>>implying the note wasn't used to found the unit
Nope, it was money from Arthur Luvon that was used for that. Read the lore before joining these types of discussions. It'll help.

>Coming back with three regiments plus three independent battalions in the Dark Age is serious Sue bullshit.

Yes, god forbid that over a period of 80 years they grow by like a regiment an a half.

Picking a war with a larger state is going to be bad for them, unquestionably - Misery sure didn't end well - but they are strong enough and well organized enough that at least some combat units would survive. And since the Dragoon supply infrastructure isn't confined to Outreach, they unit should be expected to rebound. They still have their skill and reputation, so it's not even surprising that they'd become top dogs again.

I'd be curious to know who took that top dog spot while they were rebuilding, though.

>three regiments plus three independent battalions in the Dark Age
Was that during the part of the Dark Age when everybody was battalion-sized, or after the Houses all built their armies back up to normal size?

>Implying I've forgotten the exposition from when Morgan used the note to cut in line at a ball on Tharkad
>Implying my meming isn't mere reciprocation
user...

The Dragoons had emptied their caches of gear after the Dragoon Civil War, and had to rely on whatever they could manufacture on Outreach. Hilariously, the destruction of Outreach had to involve Waco and the Word obliterating the Dragoon Sibko program. And we never hear from Brian Cameron again. The ultimate spaghetti/friendzone character, and he's sidelined just like Caradoc Trevena and that other sucker who isn't Galen Cox.

>I'd be curious to know who took that top dog spot while they were rebuilding, though.

Probably the Kell Hounds, the other large units were either destroyed or like the Highlanders went state forces.

It's also worth noting that the Dragoons' size and strength in the DA is a large part of the Dracs' success against the Suns, since the DCMS by itself is too shitty to win the way they have been. You can attribute a good quarter to third of where they are to the Dragoons. And at least half of it is down to Caleb.

How much this says about the fiat involved for the Dragoons or the Dracs, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

The Dragoons had suppliers in Davion, Steiner, Liao, and even Taurian space. They weren't dependent on any single source.

I was briefly interested in MWDA because giant robots are cool as shit, and I was ten. I was looking in a new store for more booster packs when the guy working there suggested that maybe I should buy an old 4e introbox they had, instead. I did and never looked back.
Later, I sold all my MWDA models to a buddy and bought copies of 3025, BMRr and 3026, and went full battletech

>during a period of strict arms restrictions and with none of their old resources

Yes, odd isn't it? And that's more than a regiment and a half. They lost 4/5 regiments in the opening of the Jihad.

All of which were blown away or committed to national interests. So where are you getting this?

Most of their stuff came from Outreach and had for decades. Not to mention they lost 99% of their personnel and support base.

I can't recall if I found Mechwarrior 2 or Battletech first. It's been too long. But it was one of the two, around that time.

We need a new MW game, and it needs to be as good as MW2: Mercs. We could have had it, but Piggy went online with it instead, because writing is hard.

So out of curiosity, why is the first battlemaster, the 1G designated the G?

Honestly, it's because star league-era manufacturers just kinda stuck whatever the fuck they wanted letters at the end of mech designations, though -R, -G, -Q and-H are generally the most common

I more felt because MMO is everything now. Plus MMO=$$.
I can't get MW3 or MC1 to work on my PC :(

>I can't get MW3 or MC1 to work on my PC :(
I know that feel.

Is it a Windows 10 issue? I still have an old toaster running Vista 32-bit and both runs on that old thing.
Although MW3 seems to have a few bugs in the first few missions that crashes to desktop that I haven't been able to track down.

>PHX
This doesn't look like a Phoenix Hawk, it looks like the love child of Master Chief and a Gundam.

I'm rather computer dumb, but I am 64bit win7u.
MC1 just won't play and MW3 plays at like an unusable slow pace IE moving targeting could take 10 seconds to cross the screen.

youtube.com/watch?v=1pcZjNC0ypk

>with apologies to Edgar Allen Poe

"The Raven" is among my favorite poems ever and Duncan Fisher is equally fabulous. This is truly amazing.

youtube.com/watch?v=tR1vJOEeqII

>all this Poe
YES

There any other units that use tiger stripes in their camo schemes?

There's one unit that uses a full mech zebra stripe pattern. Can't remember the name, though I remember that they're a merc unit.

>full mech zebra stripe

That would be Little Richard's Panzer Brigade.

>bought copies of 3025, BMRr and 3026, and went full retarded

You had everything to not be a grog and you still failed yourself

Some people prefer real BattleTech to WizKids™ Presents Derp Age

>he did the Voice of Kerensky speech
youtube.com/watch?v=FcyKB4nMjlg
fuck yeah

loved the Jade Falcon pilot, but forgot her name. I love women with dominant voices.

>I like Clan mechs
>friend likes IS mechs
>sometimes we have "Freeborn scum" and "Clanner scum" banter
>have argued in the past about whether to call Ebon Jaguars by the proper name or to call them Cauldronborn
>normally it's a friendly, meaningless argument but today he's really insistent on it, even going so far as to saying I'm inserting my own fanon
>he says that since only Clan Smoke Jaguar referred to them as Ebon Jaguars, I should be calling them Cauldronborn if I'm not Clan Smoke Jaguar
>I say that I'm not an actual person in that universe, just a guy who likes playing Clan mechs, so I'm right to call them by the name Clan Smoke Jaguar gave them and at worst it's directly equivalent to referring to Goku as Kakarot
>neither of us have budged on our positions but he's shut down and gotten mopey because I didn't agree with him
Why do we nerds have to have arguments like this?

Too much free time. I had arguments like that until I got a gf

But I'm here now I will say this, it's Ebon Jaguar and Jaguars forever!
youtu.be/SOJQbsbpQzo?t=40

Oh boy, I remember everything.

Back in 2001 or 2002 a friend of mine bought MW3 and I watched him playing it. Back then, it looked boring as fuck to me. Ugly robots on a desert map, slow gameplay and stuff, I repeat: boring as fuck (I was 11/12 back then).

A few months later I went to holidays with my parents. There was a store which sold second hand stuff and also books. And between fantasy books and stuff there was one used book which grabbed my attention. It had a big robot on it and the name "BattleTech" above it. Even though the name "MechWarrior" didn't appear, I just knew it was from the same universe. The book's name was Riposte by Michael Stackpole. The second book of the Warrior trilogy, as the cover told me.
I bought it for 0.5 or 1 Euro and started to read it at the beach.

The thing is: Even though I thought the game was shitty as hell, the fact that books about this did exist made me curious.

And holy fucking hell. I didn't know shit about what's going on. I remember like it was yesterday when I read the prologue with Myndo Waterly arguing with Tipolo, Dan Allard coming the Morgan Kell on Zaniah III and all that stuff. I was confused as fuck.

And when Hanse Davion gifted the Capellan Confederation to Melissa, I fell in love with BattleTech.

Afterwards I bought MW3 and it is still one of my favorite game of all time.

Interesting sidenote: It took nearly 10 years for me to get the third book of the trilogy. And it was a reprint with minor changes compared to the first print (I am German and the translator translated the Mech's names for the German audience, the reprint had only the English names which were confusing as fuck sometimes) and I got my "real" print of Coupe only a few months ago.

I recently played MW3 after nearly 15 years. There is a patch that should fix your shit up. It worked for me though.

replaying.de/files/mechwarrior-3-patch-fuer-windows-7-8-1-x64/

So what exactly is the point of the Longbow?
It just seems like a shittier Archer to be honest.

Well, the Archer has 40 tubes and the Longbow has 50.
The Salamander has 60 but I suppose that comparison is rude.

Star Colonel Aisa (can't remember her last name, though), callsign Falcon. Good God but did it feel good, beating the Green Birds fair and square and then hearing her squawk when she heard you were taking her as a bondsman.

It's more boss because it carries more tubes usually. 50 tubes is a lot of LRMs.

That is some crap acting. Yet I kept playing that game SO MANY TIMES it was worthy of caps lock.

Macross Destroid holdover. They used the Tomahawk, Defender and Spartan, so why not the Phalanx?

Anybody remember the line in the expansion pack Pirate's Moon where one of the allied pilots tells the chick pilot it's good to have her back, "wide hips and all"?

The Longbow that user posted in the -12C, which carries 70 tubes (2 -20s, 2 -15s). The Longbow also has the six MML-7 variant and the double AIV variant, both of which are pretty slick.

Archer is just a shittier Mad Dog

t. furfag

Mad dog is a shittier timber wolf.