/btg/ Battletech General!

Suns gets both the widest selection and best stuff in every category except WarShips, user.

Taurians for early Periphery and then the Outworlds Alliance or Magistracy later on for that area.

Let's be honest, AK is mostly to blame for that feud. And where is he now? If he didn't get booted like NEA, then there's a seriously lopsided application of the code of conduct.

I don't know why we're taking a receipt as being proof of a single damn thing. A receipt can be faked just as easily as a screenshot.

should I do an image dump so I can get this thread to autosage too?

>And where is he now?

Promoted and given additional responsibilities.

What did you really expect was going to happen?

Please. Now that the OF is here to defend their idiotic decisions, let the thread die. It's either going to devolve into even more OF drama, or bullshit faction shitposting as a result of a completely reasonable question () anyway.

>If he didn't get booted

Promoted, actually. And he continues to spew stupidity everywhere on the OF he goes.

The moral of the story is that if you work for CGL, you're signing a loyalty oath to never, in any way, criticize anything they ever do, for any reason. It doesn't matter what you do for them, nor how much you defend them, nor how much you help them: if you disagree with a beemer in public you're toast.

>A receipt can be faked

Depends on it it's printed on normal paper or on carbons or acid paper. With that said, there's literally no part of any of this that couldn't be faked by somebody determine or bored enough. There's no possible way to sort it out, so the sane thing to do would accept that CGL is basically a shit company that will allow somebody to steal $750,000 and get away with it, but will fire somebody who goes out of their way to defend the company if/when they have a disagreement with someone who is proven to be objectively wrong.

MWO style Thanatos. Now with actual legs, and actuators!

I love you, new art user

Great stuff.
I'm going to be upset if that's one of the four mechs they add for the era change.
Speaking of which:
What are your predictions for the picks?
I'm thinking Sunder and Mad Cat Mk II at least.

I'm the one who originally questioned DW's account last thread, and I'm sorry I ever did so, because fuck this shit is awful.

Please make the hurting stop.

I would vote against those two. We have unfucked versions of both, he should redesign really shit mechs such a Ninja-To

You shit your bed, now you have to lie in it.

But let's get off that shitride, and answer the most pressing question of our time: How do we fix the dracs?

>dracs

Whats wrong with them exactly?

They have gunnery issues, because they can't see well through those slanty eyes.

Oh, and yellow skin indicates chronic jaundice.

>How do we fix the dracs?

We don't. There's too much shit there that is bound up in other plotlines and trying to untangle it is like trying to deal with the Gordian Knot.

The only real hope of a solution is that they do a timeskip after resolving the 3145 nonsense, give everyone a suite of competitive designs, and write fluff where factions win by being smart or badass rather than their opponents herping derps for decades at a time and letting them win.

Not design wise, I'm talking about what MWO is adding this summer.
I just realized I didn't clarify that, my bad.

Better MREs and optics coverage in their health care, then. Problem solved.

Get rid of the Black Dragons.
90% all of the dumb shit Kurita has done post SS is their fault.

The Dracs were quite able to shit the bed until the Clan Invasion without their help.

Inner sphere tends to get shafted with poor designs more reliant on nostalgia rather than actual usefulness in game terms. Could seriously be anything, from Thanatos, Osiris, Argus, Fafnir, Legacy to Viking and even to Vanquisher.

As for the clans, it's a toss up between Fire Moth, Arctic Wolf, Cougar, Nova Cat, Blood Asp, Mad Cat mk II and possibly the Black Lanner.

Personally I'd love to see the Bandersnatch and the Cerberus for the Inner Sphere, and the Blood Asp and Nova Cat for the clans.

Those would fill critical roles in both tech bases, mainly multiple high caliber ballistic capable 75 tonner and 95 tonner for IS, a 90 ton omni (because PGI fucked the HUElander IICs capabilities and the Supernova is gonna be superdisappointing) and a 70 ton battlemech for an alternative to the super limited Summoner.

Yes user, that's why I said POST SSW.

Who was likely worse overall?

Claudius Steiner or Hohiro Kurita (the one that was Takashi's father)?

I'd bet on the Nova Cat desu

Yeah, but I really don't hold out any hope of the Dracs not doing the most counterproductive shit at any given moment even without their influence.

It's basically the Drac trait. "What's the absolute dumbest thing we could do right now? Right, let's get started on it!"

>Fix MRMs
>Retcon availability of DHS refits and upgrade percentages
>Let MadDrac retcon them some factories for 3058 SL shit
>Give them the HB:HL treatment, retconning most of their lolwarcrimes crap to being 1st/2nd SW only, with 'muh samurai bushido' eventually becoming basically the classic 3sw "honorable limited warfare" thing.
>Make the BDS not clinically retarded
That fixes most of the not plot related idiocy

You right

>The Dracs were quite able to shit the bed until the Clan Invasion without their help.

The Black Dragons existed before that. They just weren't called that. Hell, they inducted Teddy into their little club in 3018. It's one reason they were so fucking pissed when he went all reformation. It wasn't just an upstart changing things, they saw it as the deepest betrayal.

Hohiro died like a bitch to a hog. So him.

Did he?
Like a literal hog?

"Rasalhague" is also made fun of as "Rasalhog".

His Wrasslehog bodyguard killed him. It's basically the opening scene to Heir to the Dragon. Takashi shows up all covered in blood and little Teddy asks "A battle? Were you killing Fedrats father?" He literally uses fedrats, it was great.

Then Takashi shows him the scene and is all "If you are the Coordinator, you can't be weak or this will happen to you too."

And Teddy instead of crying like a little eight year old bitch goes "I want revenge." Classic example of back when the dracs reveled in being hardasses. Man I loved it. Plus wrasslehog really was best as a Drac state. All the plotting and the nobles and samurai. Way better than the Black Dragon shit that replaced it.

Is there a new boxed set out? I read that some were available in January.

DHS were actually already retconned against the Dracs. We'd need to retcon the retcon.

Looks good and makes sense, but
>with 'muh samurai bushido' eventually becoming basically the classic 3sw "honorable limited warfare" thing.
feels like it'd kinda make them feel too generic. They need SOME samurai weirdness, just not full retard

Speaking of the early books, how much of a threat was Duke Ricol Hassid?

They painted him as significant threat to the Commonwealth, yet his machinations wind up being unraveled by the Grey Death Legion and later he seems somewhat diminished after the 4th Succession War.

Also, how did he get away with owning his own Behemoth anyway?

>Speaking of the early books, how much of a threat was Duke Ricol Hassid?

To the Gray Death, pretty big. To any of the major powers? Laughable.

>Also, how did he get away with owning his own Behemoth anyway?

DropShip? They're not that rare. Unusual but he's really righ so whatever.

The thing I'm still mad about is him being a Black Dragon when his established identity before the Jihad was of opposing the hidebound traditionalist bullshit of the Combine and working to strengthen it through reformation and pragmatism.

But when only like five Drac characters have any sort of name recognition in the fanbase and you need someone to be the big bad evil guy, well...

>him being a Black Dragon when his established identity before the Jihad was of opposing the hidebound traditionalist bullshit of the Combine and working to strengthen it through reformation and pragmatism.

I thought he was using them to his own ends and nothing more?

Likewise, I thought he was just going along with the reforms because they guaranteed him a place of authority and or power?

They need to be full retard but with the skills to go with it. Like the old fluff where some would duel clanners in the invasion and win in their 3rd war shitheaps. Sure, most got stomped, but I want to see some of that old Sun Zhang magic.

Plus we need more of the old Dieron Cowboy Samurai or the Former Outworlds Amish Samurai or the Azami Arab Samurai.

>he seems somewhat diminished after the 4th Succession War
He was already falling out of favor in the Imperial Court of Luthien by the end of the 3rd War. It's why he made his move when he did.

Also, he was a Duke of 5 worlds. That's basically one level under a proper Warlord. He had a good amount of money and influence because of that. Puts him in the top 25 or so people at court anyway.

>when his established identity before the Jihad was of opposing the hidebound traditionalist bullshit of the Combine and working to strengthen it through reformation and pragmatism

He was more out for himself than anything. He wouldn't have helped the Rasalhague independence movement otherwise. He's always on the side that seems to give him a way up. Teddy's reforms seemed to offer that at one point, and later on a Black Dragon shakeup of the existing power structure did.

>I thought he was using them to his own ends and nothing more?

Nope. He was Ruby, as close to a leader as they had at least during the Jihad and a key figure leading up to that point. Also the one who ensured his "heir," arch-traditionalist and counter-reformer Kiyomori Minamoto was in position and had the support to effectively rule the Combine in place of Hohiro.

He gets retconned into a True Believer for the BDS during the Jihad.

After two day of gruelling hiking, I have discovered that Australia has thoughtfully made cell reception available at the top of their tallest mountain. Thus, I am able to observe Australia Day weekend by joining in the national pastime - shitposting.

>We'd need to retcon the retcon.
That's what I meant, yeah
>They need SOME samurai weirdness, just not full retard
I'm going to agree and also agree with
>They need to be full retard but with the skills to go with it.
They absolutely need to be full of samurai sillyness, it just shouldn't be in the form of lolwarcrimes.
They should do things like release prisoners with no ransom if they sign a document "on their warrior's honour" not to ever fight the dracs again, but also behead them and confiscate their mechs if they go back on it
Death-duals and sepukku on a moments notice should absolutely stay, along with all the dueling stuff

Sometimes I forget how retarded the Black Dragon and Council of Gems writing is in the Jihad.

>Be Diamond, President of LAW and one of the most influential nonmilitary people in the Combine
>Cripple entire state and influence by destroying pristine LAW Luthien, the whole reason Luthien was called the Black Pearl of the Combine, the sprawling factories that survived unmolested since the fall of the Star League
>Get found out as a Black Dragon later and hung out to dry by the rest of the Gems

I mean holy shit, on what planet does that make sense? And why would any Black Dragons destroy both one of the most sacred traditional places in the Combine (the Imperial City) and their ability to make war?

No fucking sense at all.

One thing I've never been clear on is whether the DA fluff even required the main LAW complex to be destroyed or not.

I mean, shit, since the Dracs gave the district they relied on economically along with pretty much every other factory world over to the RotS you'd think the first job of the continuity savants like Roosterboy and MadCap and Alex Knight would have been to say "Maybe don't blow up LAW, you guys, they're gonna need that."

But no.

>One thing I've never been clear on is whether the DA fluff even required the main LAW complex to be destroyed or not.

It required the Imperial Palace to have been burned down (the modern one in Sword of Sedition is mentioned as a reconstruction because of that), but didn't say anything about LAW being destroyed.

all this when they could have just said WOB did it, wtf

Someone mind explaining why the Combine are disdainful of Medium Mechs when they were, and still are, the back bone of most House armies?

The section above that in FM:DC says they consider mediums a poor compromise between the speed of a Light and the firepower of a Heavy.

Please to ignore how the premiere Light of the DCMS is the Panther and their premiere Heavy is the Dragon.

That was the original implication, until someone realized the fleet they parked over Luthien were the moderate Expatriot Blakists instead of the 6th of June nutjobs. So they had to reconcile that.

Unfortunately, they did this with a battlecorps story that made the Black Dragons out to be the real culprits.

The whole thing could have been avoided by either not destroying LAW in the first place or by sending a different Blakist fleet to Luthien. If they would have sent the Expatriots to New Avalon instead since they hated the Davions, they could have done the Siege of New Avalon and freed up the other guys for Luthien.

The Combine is the exception to that "most mechs deployed by the Sphere are mediums" statement then?

Confirmation bias. In the 3020's, the only medium they make is the P-hawk-1K. So mediums are both uncommon and the only one they make in any quantity is inferior to both the Panther and the Jenner in the field. That colors their opinions on the weight class.

3039 retconned that though. Really, nobody should be using any sources for pre-Clan Invasion discussion published prior to TRO 3039. They just confuse the issue.

It depends on what you mean by "most."

By the fluff, across all realms, *most* 'Mechs will be a Wasp, Stinger, or Locust. Those are by far the most numerous types.

It's just that the average overall weight of 'Mechs winds up being in the Medium range, probably around the 40-ton mark in early eras and moving to 50-55 tons in later periods.

Regardless of whether they were "good guy WOB" or not, WOB blowing it up to deny the Dracs a major asset still makes a shit ton more sense than "loldracs."

TRO:3039 is a hot mess. Really, nobody should be using anything with 3039 in the title for reference. I can't wait until they publish a new TRO:3025U with the Shimmyseens to fix it.

That said, TRO:3039 does not give them any more medium production in 3025. It only gives them a new Wolverine line by 3039.

So no, that was not retconned.

Echoing other user, even the most current sources still have the Dracs only making Pixies for their mediums.

Speaking of artist, does anyone know what happen to Eric Ou @ Eriance @ Amuscaria that did majority of artworks for the fan made TRO?

He's said he's busy with school when I've tried to commission him for /btg/RO. I'd love to get him if possible, he did some great pieces for 3063

Too bad his deviantart and pixiv accounts have been closed. Drat, should have save all his mech works!

He was in the BDS before the Jihad. He instigated the moronic attack with the Alshain Avengers that lost all those regiments, a warship and woke the Bears.

>retconned
Nope, his membership was long established.

Guys! GUYS! What if, what if we give quirks to every single variant of every mech in the game, and put it in one book. And until CGL does that, we pester the devs because we are physically incapable of using our best judgement on the basis of quirks applied to weapons. Do they apply to alternate configurations' weapons? Could they?

Where is it said they're the Expatriates? Turning Points Luthien?

And did they ever flesh out any other Blakist task forces as being mostly members of one faction? Because the True Believers, who were the majority, seemed to just disappear.

We were only using the Mechs from the Introductory Box and the Record Sheets from 3039, so there were no Clan Mechs. The only Clan Mech the Introductory Box set came with is the Mad Cat and it's Record Sheet isn't in 3039.

As if half the devs aren't literally this guy.

I have a feeling their going to introduce IS omni mechs and bring in the Sunder and Avatar.

That should have been done within 6 months of the Quirks coming out in the first place. Make it a $5 PDF download.

There's no point at all in creating official rules and then trusting players to adjucate between themselves what should apply to what.

Yes, but before the Jihad shit he was supposed to just be using the Dragons to further his own interests.

Which was retarded enough since he fought with Takashi over how ass-backwards he wanted everything to be any way.

If they were one of the original ten Divisions it'll be in FM:C*. Otherwise you might need to try Blake Documents or TP: L.

Honestly I have no idea one way or another, I stopped paying attention to the clusterfuck on Luthien the moment the Second Sword of Light declared for the Black Dragons. That was dumb enough by itself and everything after it happened made it look like genius-level writing.

Hi /btg/ never posted here before. I took a circuitous route into battletech starting with the mechwarrior games as a kid and kind of rediscovering it with MWO a couple years ago (and presently). And then I started reading up on factions and history on Sarna and recently picked up the classic beginner set for table top. I'm totally hooked and love the lore.

So I have a friend that likes to make maps of fictional universes (Star Wars star chart, Dante's description of hell etc.) and I asked if he would look into a Battletech star chart for the 3052 era. I didn't realize what I was asking. THERE ARE SO MANY STAR SYSTEMS. This glorious bastard has tediously gone through and relationally mapped about every damn star in the Inner Sphere (FASA wasn't big on exact coordinates from what he tells me). I realize there are some existing detailed star maps, but his whole thing is making beautiful prints of these maps once they're finalized and I think it will look great on the wall when I'm hosting a tabletop session in the near future.

So there's some room on the side for flavor text, and I figured I would make it look like a communique from a high ranking ROM agent regarding Operation Scorpion planning/intelligence. I could sneak his name on there as the sending party to give him credit. The main thing is I want to use the side bar to do a summary of faction strength (Clan Wolf: x Galaxies, x WarShips etc.) for all Invading Clans and Inner Sphere powers. I know I can comb through Sarna but I don't have any technical readouts and I'm pretty green with this universe other than reading a lot about faction history. Is Sarna the best place to look or would you guys recommend other resources to get an accurate count of top level force strength for each faction in 3052? Thanks in advance.

>the Second Sword of Light declared for the Black Dragons

Sarna is terrible and the closest information we have on troop deployments for that year is in Objective Raids, which is a book filled from top to bottom with all kinds of bullshit.

I would seriously just stick with the map. Anything else is going to be fanon'ed to a reasonably logical degree at best, or chock-full of idiotic things that have been retconned decades ago at worst.

You can blame that on the Dark Age novels, like many extremely retarded moments. The number of throwaway lines offhandedly mentioning bizzarre shit that happened in the Jihad 50 years prior, that did the dumbest shit is in the dozens.

It's in the Battlecorps story. Pretty sure it's in one of the anthologies, but I can't track down the name.

Wait, found it. Eye of the Beholder in Anthology 3 Weapons Free.

I never realized Ben was responsible for that particular fuckup. Too many years of smacking dracs in the face with bear dick I suppose.

"But I'm actually a Drac fan really, the Bears are my second-favourite faction after them!"

Well, he didn't directly say that but if you criticised what he was saying at the OF or what he cut-and-pasted (sorry, can't say "wrote" with a straight face) in the books that's what he'd come back with, sometimes with Herb backing him up.

>Is Sarna the best place to look or would you guys recommend other resources to get an accurate count of top level force strength for each faction in 3052? Thanks in advance.
Unfortunately, nothing of the sort exists. We have accurate numbers for 3050, exceedingly dubious ones for 3054, incomplete numbers for 3058, but nothing for 52 itself, and any attempt at interpolation would be a nightmare of a clusterfuck of a mess and fanon anyhow

It feels unusual to see the Draconis Combine being talked about much here, so...

What's your favorite Kurita:
>mech they produce
>variant of a mech they don't produce
>vehicle
>aerospace fighter
>battle armor
>historical moment

store.catalystgamelabs.com/products/battletech-battlemech-manual-open-beta

...why are they charging $10 for a beta version .pdf?

Speaking of the Dragon, what's the best use of one? As in, the introbox one.

>Speaking of the Dragon, what's the best use of one? As in, the introbox one.

Pretend it has a PPC instead of an autocannon and shoot stuff with it!

>mech they produce
I like the Orochi and the Omni Blackjack, and some of their DA designs are nice too
>variant of a mech they don't produce
Always liked their Warhammers and Shads
>vehicle
I honestly can't think of any that stand out much to me
>aerospace fighter
Stinger LAM
I don't really do aerospace, but I like the look of the Saber
>historical moment
ONE BULLDOG WASN'T ENOUGH

>>historical moment

I once read Takashi supposedly hammered metal from his first mech into a drinking cup with his own hands.

If that isn't a monument to an iron will, then I don't know what is.

>what's the best use of one?

Selling it and buying a good Mech. 4.95 million Cbills will buy you a Crab-20 and a million CB worth of parts.

Do the PPC refit and play it like a fat, groundbound griffin

Get people to play with quirks. It's actually quite good that way

Anyone else here notice a discrepancy between the number of DCMS regiments listed in the 20 Year Update, what's lost in action in the Clan Invasion handbook, and then what's reported leftover in Field Manual: Draconis Combine?

There's several regiments mentioned as destroyed in the invasion in FM:DC that aren't listed in combat during Operation Revival.

webm related, Drac culture

>Implying you can get a Crab on the open market
That's like prying a Grasshopper away from its owner, except even rarer.

Yes, about a dozen disappeared clean in that time, around Objective Raids.
Don't ask about it on the OF because they'll give an idiotic answer and make it canon, fucking us all

Yes, it's been discussed a number of times in these threads.

The culprit, unsurprisingly, is Objective Raids where several dozen regiments disappear for the Dracs and FedCom. The battle reports from the Clan books (JFSB, WCSB, Invading Clans) don't account for losses so heavy, it's just poor fact-checking like so much of that book.

No explanation is ever offered for this and headcanon of regiments being ground down into dust isn't supported by canon either. The Clan front wasn't active enough to justify the better part of a hundred regiments ceasing to exist in the space of three years.

And yes, this isn't hyperbole, it's literally that bad. It's also what we're stuck with since the writers of the Field Manual series used OR as their primary source.

>>historical moment

When the Combine welcomed, with open arms, the son of the man whom had tried his hardest to destroy them in 3039.

I prefer the bit where Kai Allard-Liao's ex-girlfriend cucked the Dracs out of any novel representation in Operation Bulldog at all.

Takashi's REEEEEEEEEEEEE was legendary, especially when he found out Jaime Wolf was in the same force.

The reason is the survey, which, while very helpful to CGL, has also thrown a wrench in the Manual's pricing. In order to incentivize the survey, they give you a 5$ off coupon at the end of it for the Catalyst webstore. It's assumed people will generally use that for the Manual, which would make the usual beta-to-final path only 5$.

Basically it was decided that they didn't want to give away the Manual for five bucks, so they detached the beta from the final.

Serious question.

Do each variant of the Mechs have their own models or can I, say, use the Atlas AS7-D from the Introductory Box Set as an Atlas AS7-RS from the 3039 Record Sheets?