/btg/ Battletech General!

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The family mech ain’t gonna make it edition

The /btg/ is dead - long live the /btg/!

Old thread: =================================

BattleTech video-game pre-alpha gameplay
youtube.com/watch?v=FjEeDz51pHE

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>BattleTech Introductory Info and PDFs
bg.battletech.com/?page_id=400

>Overview of the major factions?
bg.battletech.com/universe/great-houses/
bg.battletech.com/universe/the-clans/
bg.battletech.com/universe/other-powers/

>How do I find out which BattleMechs a faction has?
masterunitlist.info/

Unit Designing Softwares
>SSW Mech Designer
solarisskunkwerks.com/
>MegaMek Lab
megamek.info/
github.com/MegaMek

>/btg/ does a TRO:
builtforwar.blog(not spam)spot.com/

>How do I do this Against the Bot thing? (old)
pastebin.com/pE2f7TR5
NEW! - Against the Bot pastebin updated link: (old)
bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,40948.0.html
(new)
bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=56065.0
Current 3.21 rule set is included in the mekhq package

>Map of /btg/ players (WIP):
zeemaps.com/map?group=1116217&add=1

>Rookie guides
pastebin.com/HZvGKuGx

>Sarna.net - BattleTech Wiki
sarna.net/wiki/Main_Page

>Megamek - computer version of BattleTech. Play with AI or other players
megamek.info/

>BattleTech IRC
#battletech on irc.rizon.net

>PDF Folders
mediafire.com/folder/sdckg6j645z4j/Battletech
mediafire.com/folder/cj0tjpn9b3n1i/Battletech
mediafire.com/folder/tw2m414o1j9uj/Battletech_Archives

/btg/'s own image board: - (2017-02-13 - Still getting worked on & now has 11079 pics!)
bgb.booru.org/index.php

More goodies! (Rare manuals, hex packs, TROs, discord server, etc.) Last updated 2017-02-13!
pastebin.com/uFwvhVhE

Other urls found in this thread:

sarna.net/wiki/Axumite_Providence
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

haha butte hold

The Holy Trinity of BattleTech Eras

>Best introductory ruleset
>Best advanced ruleset
>Best story

if your favorite era is not in this picture you have shit taste and should consider sudoku

>hatchetman
>the family mech
Damn greenhorns...

What happens here?

Mostly? Fuck and All. Space is big, etc.

here where?

Little to nothing, sadly. Also, Jarnfolk.

dumb question here
what are rifts and nebulas and they have any purpose in BattleTech universe?

sarna.net/wiki/Axumite_Providence

> The Axumite Providence was established on October 11th, 2245 by colonists fleeing from the Outer Reaches Rebellion. The Uhuru Settlement Group was composed of settlers from twenty-first century North-eastern African regions of Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, and Ethiopia

What a cornucopia this polity must be.

>have any purpose in BattleTech universe?

They make it sound more hard science-y. Protip: It's not.

The rifts and nebulas are real stellar phenomenon, the former being light opaque and the latter being light emitting. Mostly they don't have any purpose beyond being real things in space and presumably being hard as hell to transit and map.

It's apparently actually pretty well off for an obscure deep periphery colony stretch.
Most of the other ones turned out to be horrible disasters, but the Axumites actually did fine

>being hard as hell to transit

Real stellar nebulae are functionally hard vacuum. The lunar atmosphere is a dense ocean of air compared to them.

Something something Jump drives something something magic. Watch Jumpships not be able to charge in them because reasons.

>Was that really him shitting his pants? I thought it was a "just as planned" thing.

It was the fight to determine the overall result of the Refusal War and Chistu knew he didn't have so much as a snowball's chance in hell if he fought fair.

I wonder why the humans in battletech just stopped expanding. There must be literally millions of worlds out there, why not just push your borders out, absorb periphery states and colonize every possible planet instead of just bickering over borders? They have Hitlers wildest dream of Lebensraum going on, the galaxy is functionally infinite, just go and grab it-

There shouldn't be any reason for a JumpShip to not be able to charge in them. Granted, they'd likely have to charge using their engines rather than solar sails, but that should be fine. Jumping out may be hard, as depending upon the nebulae's composition there may be severe magnetic and similar effects that will play merry hell with any kind of sensor and electronic.

Easy. Time for expansion. Jumps take a lot of time between them, which means you're limited to what supplies you can carry. You have to find planets that are of marginal habitability and have resources that justify the expense required in settling them. The further out you go, the harder it is to get supplies and more in, so unless you're literally landing on a planet of solid , it makes it less practical to do so.

Something about that is scary. All the human civilizations so far from Terra living and dying in the dark while the great houses and clans don't even know of their existence.

Wasn't there an ISP book that talked about corporate or ComStar explorers finding distant worlds in the periphery that looked like they'd been nuked over or something?

You dont just expand for immediate resources. You will eventually gain population and power from even the tiniest dirtball. Seeding worlds with colonists and making them self-sufficent isnt hard. Getting to the world is hard.


Just imagine how we would explode over Mars if we could easily travel there. You always have a slew of wannabe prospectors, loners, adventurers, refugees, people wanting to start a new life and such for prospecting colonists. Slap a couple thousand of them down, give them tools and some hydroponics then wish them good luck and go next planet.

Personally I view it as one big HFY thread for the setting. If I was going to be insane enough to add Aliens, all humanity finds are signs circa 2781 that scream ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE in the various trade languages of their species. 300+ years and humanity is still bashing each other over the head for control of the Homeworld.

>Although a campaign in which the Regulan Hussars, Orloff Grenadiers, the Legionnaires, Knights of the Inner Sphere, and Marik Militia form a five-man band fighting a guerilla war to keep freedom alive in the Inner Sphere would be fuckin' sweet.

FUND IT

KotIS as the protagonist
Orloff Grenadiers as the wise big guy
Regulan Hussars as the hot-blooded chick
Legionnaires as the sarcastic anti-hero
Marik Militia as the smart youngster with potential

The science aspect of BTU does not make sense. It seems no one wants to create new things or explore new places. The loss of technology during SW or the technology curve of the Clans are just two examples of how writers don't give a fuck about how scientific evolution works

For a science fiction game Battletech is very outdated. It truly feels like 80s in space, more than it should

So Revelation Space, basically?

>all of those RWR outposts

Interesting...

I wonder what if just fanatic ComStar guy sent out a colony ship thousands of lightyears away and then find a hidden colony somewhere to preserve humams if something horrible happened to the inner sphere. What if those humans completely forgot about their heritage and think their colony as their homeworld? What if they advanced real fast with all the SL databanks and got together an explorer armada with some improved KF drives? What if they bumped into the clan homeworlds?

And then they all fight eachother!

What you get out of said colonization is important, too. If the planet had some kind of resource that could be easily exploited, but was far less Earth-like and required some kind of techno-adaptation (anything from heatsuits or snowsuits to full on biodomes), it'd be a higher priority for explorers and settlers than a near-Earth planet with no significant resources.

People do though.

It's just that for a period of time between roughly when the Star League fell and the early mid 3030s ComStar was killing anyone who looked into anything more advanced than "Maybe there's a more effective way to light fires than banging two rocks together" and everyone was spending their resources fighting to stay alive rather than on colonisation programs.

The desire was there, but the ability wasn't.

See also: Muninn's occasional post about his dream of Battletech's Age of Discovery plot line. He was talking about it a couple of threads ago, should be easy to find.

Probably not quite so bleak, but instead a general "avoid these fucking man-apes at all costs, they like their atomics."

>For a science fiction game Battletech is very outdated. It truly feels like 80s in space, more than it should
BattleTech was pretty blatantly Mad Max in outer space with mechs instead of Police Interceptors. Exploration was unfeasible because no one could build the ships necessary or even keep them running properly.

Take the Succession Wars for example. You live in a shit world affected by nuclear war and you have the option to run away to a shit but peaceful world.

We know what real people would chose, as similar situations happened through our history, but in Battletech human race is too apathetic to colonize space on its own

Frankly, it would be worth it just to set up a manufacturing facility your opponents can't find to raid and where you can do research without ComStar having easy access.

And then they invent robots and the robots turn on them and the survivors rally in a ragtag fleet based around one capital ship and they try to find their way back to their ancient homeworld?

Every planet must have some kind of resources. As long the planet isnt actively hostile it can be colonized. Hell, even hostile planets can be dome citied up eventually. The sooner you seed them the sooner you will have planets with billions of humans sprawling on them

What's up with them? They're so far from home.

Spooky.

>yfw the FedCom conquers the Dracs and Caps and turns to the FWL...only to discover they used a couple hundred years of peace to create a sprawling network of colonies that have advanced science and manufacturing without anyone fucking with them.

Assuming you knew how to set up a manufacturing plant worth a damn, or could get the stuff to research, much less do that without ComStar noticing.

These are kind of the basic conceits of the setting though. It's like complaining about cowboys being in a western movie otherwise.

Imagine if Hanse had set the NAIS up somewhere it couldn't be fucked with.

Admittedly, imagine Hanse had set up more than one school, or that ComStar can't get away with hundreds of thousands of assassinations without anyone figuring it out, or...

The setting and its "basic conceits" are shit, the mechs are cool.

There are justifications for centralized and limited advanced research like that, especially with centuries of war and entrenchment into political sides like the sphere has by the time NAIS was set up.

Do we think it's stupid? Yes.

But it also does make sense if you filter it through the situation at the time. Kind of. The fact that Hanse is also an autocrat likely played a factor as to why NAIS is only one campus on New Avalon.

>Imagine if Hanse had set the NAIS up somewhere it couldn't be fucked with.

I mean, he pretty much did. He stopped 36 Com Guard mechs and the NAIS janitors and night staff stopped however many commandos you can cram into an Overlord that's already carrying mechs.

Speaking of which, how many infantry could you cram on an Overlord full with mechs?

Technically none. Infantry really can't be fitted into cargo bays due to lifesupport and similar requirements.

Depending upon security staff and warrior status, you could probably drum up a platoon's worth on short notice, but they wouldn't be proper infantry.

>ComStar was killing anyone who looked into anything more advanced than "Maybe there's a more effective way to light fires than banging two rocks together"

This is the most stupid thing in the entire fluff and most of the fans accept is as plausible.

Think of your city. It probably has a college where some hundreds of students go. The college will have some doctors, masters and many graduates. Everyone there has the capacity to improve their field of work in some way. Your city also have other professionals and people that learn on their own how to do things. Okay? Now expand this to the entire known universe of the Inner Sphere.

What the fluff claimed C* did is impossible to accomplish. We have two options here:

- comstar killed EVERYONE that could provide any scientific progress. That means it would kill every college professor, every student and most of the professionals in the space. The universe would fall apart, not enter in Mad Max mode. you don't have medics, engineers or anyone that could become a medic or engineer; it is the fall of any civilization.

- comstar killed only the most important scientists. Bullshit, lesser professionals would pick up their place. Knowledge can be passed to others. Backups exist, reverse engineering exist. For this supposition work we have to believe that who's left has no desire and capability to improve things, which is also impossible.

In both cases C* not only don't have the manpower for such but they would attract so many attention to them it would be their downfall. and even if they actually managed to do this impossible task, there's no way the Inner Sphere could had revert this state from 3025 to 3050


My headcanon to explain this bullshit is that they never lost the knowledge, it was simply a lack of resources allied with financial struggle of centuries of war. Blaming comstar is too unbelievable

Well the Overlord has something in the range of 50 tons of cargo space and six aerospace fighter cubicles (as far as I know the Com Guards didn't use planes in their raid).

Not calling you wrong, and purely spitballing here, but what would you have to do to convert any of that space to carry infantry? And what are the rules of how many infantry per ton?

Just asking for the sake of working that raid out in my mind.

Pick one and give feedback on what you do or don't like.

BTW, I'm not bitching at anyone here. Is just that I'll never find acceptable the in-universe explanation

>Hanse stopping the raid

Best moment in BT history! Read this:

>The BattleMaster's canopy shattered as an SRM burst against it. Hanse felt the stinging fire of shrapnel as pieces of the polarized glass sliced into his left arm. A trickle of blood slicked the command couch's left arm. Hanse narrowed his eyes and tightened his grip on the left joystick control. There it is, Mr. Green. I bleed for the Federated Suns. Is it not my right to demand the same from my people?

I like the look of the cockpit on I more than III. Also not fond of III's shoulder pads.

And yet amusingly, most BT fans I've seen talk about this seem to think le robe assassin man is the more plausible of the two.

Left looks like a young Hauptman, right looks like Warhammer IIC. I chose left

IIRC in the original fluff colleges and technical schools weren't that common. Hell, at least one sourcebook from the era Holy Shroud was mentioned said most inner sphere worlds aren't self sufficient in terms of water.

>most inner sphere worlds aren't self sufficient in terms of water.
>one of the easiest things to produce given BT's fusion/fission power

>Hell, at least one sourcebook from the era Holy Shroud was mentioned said most inner sphere worlds aren't self sufficient in terms of water.

That sounds fucking retarded. If you have the energy, like space magic fusion reactors you can literally make water out of rocks through the wonders of chemistry. Or just eternally recycle and purify it.

That 31 (actually) tons of cargo is split amongst fuel, spare and replacement parts, ammunition, and other odds and ends to support said 36 'mechs and 6 ASFs. Note that none of it is actually part of the DropShip's own spare parts cache -- that's counted separately, including a separate cache of food+water for all personnel: DropShip, warrior, and bay technician.

Each platoon of infantry will take up 5 tons per bay. That gives them the life support necessary to exist and not cause the ship to need to visit a planet sooner rather than later due to overtaxed CO2 scrubbers and more. That does NOT include food+water, which needs about 1 ton per 200 people per day. The Overlord carries 19 tons of said supplies, which lasts about 30 days for its 126 personnel. Simply dropping 5 tons of cargo space and adding in an infantry bay makes 30 days go down to 25.

I mean I agree, I'm just trying to provide some context for Holy Shroud. If BT was rewritten I'm sure they'd change it.

The new BT fluff basically makes it a different universe from that of the early characters like Hanse and Justin.

Dude, if you put more than three seconds of thought into it you considered the problem a lot longer than FASA ever did.

Honestly I just tend to say "ComStar" as short hand. They were by far the biggest culprit but the Houses were merrily trying to researchers to defect, raiding research outposts, and killing off each other's scientists as fast as they could as well.

And once you fall to a certain point, reverse engineering may well be impossible. Consider handing a Blackbird to the Wright brothers before they got their flyer working. OK, they now have physical proof that you can fly, and fly faster than they thought possible, but how far are they going to get in reverse-engineering it? That's where the Houses were pretty much after the 1st SW with a bunch of SL tech, much less by the time of the 3rd.

>And once you fall to a certain point, reverse engineering may well be impossible. Consider handing a Blackbird to the Wright brothers before they got their flyer working. OK, they now have physical proof that you can fly, and fly faster than they thought possible, but how far are they going to get in reverse-engineering it?

Measure it and do high-school tier physics to achieve functional wing ratios, lift coefficent and other data that can help you downscale. Take apart the engines and realize how simple the concept of a single-axis jet engine is. Chemically analyze the metal alloys.

Its not hard to reverse engineer the general working concept of something.

They'd have to invent the tools to take it apart first, then grapple with the way the Blackbird was designed, then the materials, then the automation, then...

By the end of the 3rd SW, 'Mechs were bordering on being magical for how well they were understood. They may as well have been produced by Leprechauns for all anyone was able to grok the science behind them, much less shit like JumpShips or SL mega-construction or terraforming.

Or, ya know, they controlled the communications between institutions, they could just tamper with the knowledge share so that no-one could reproduce anyone else's work and it's grind to a stand still without really requiring all that many assassinations.

One man working in a vacuum wouldn't push very far into development, especially if he didn't have advanced workshops to support it.

This is bullshit though. If you actually participated in any kind of cutting edge research or manufacturing, you'd know there's very limited little groups of people that pidgeon hole into very specific fields and only their students and maybe a couple rivals actually know what's going on there.

You could bomb the shit out of Texas A&M and completely destroy the last 50 years of pecan breeding research and a good chunk of wheat genetic modification as well.

In Battletech, this scales up the more advanced you get in technology, in an exacerbation of the real world. In 1850, you could be cutting edge in three fields. Today you get to be a small fraction of one.

Combine that with not having Federal Repository style backups of knowledge and it's really easy to cripple both the knowledge base and the the manufacturing of a place.

But user, reality is unrealistic and you don't get to just bring facts and reason into things like that.

I've tried similar arguments in the past and you just get "but that's retarded" and/or "but BT doesn't have to be like that."

>They'd have to invent the tools to take it apart first

You can take apart everything if you have enough time or force.

>then grapple with the way the Blackbird was designed

No they dont. They dont have to know how the avioics wortk in order to know how it flies.

>then the materials

Deducing the composition of metal alloys is trivial even by early 20th century standards.

>then the automation,

What the fuck they have to automate?

You take engineers for idiots.


>By the end of the 3rd SW, 'Mechs were bordering on being magical for how well they were understood. They may as well have been produced by Leprechauns for all anyone was able to grok the science behind them, much less shit like JumpShips or SL mega-construction or terraforming.


They had LosTech but it was not space magic, they still manufactured new mechs here and there.

>No they dont. They dont have to know how the avioics wortk in order to know how it flies.
>What the fuck they have to automate?

Hahaha holy fuck.

I really hope you're not in charge of anything more critical than tying your shoes of a morning, because a cursory Wiki read will reveal how wrong you are about pretty much everything in that post.

That's also very easy to discover. In the first few years of practice the researchers would have found out, publish a shitload of papers about this and have invented their own "pidgeon mail" system to share knowledge. C* should control in-planet communication too, or this wouldn't work in the biggest and most important planets in IS.

The technology loss is not a simple matter to discuss because we don't know how a generalized loss of basic knowledge in a civilization with so many ways to share information. At the end of the day we will not have an answer, but IMO it is nice to theorize

>You take engineers for idiots.

I actually an engineer bro. You slid down to schoolyard insults because you got so upset over an interner arguement.

And that was even just your analogy, your actual point was just as wrong.

>C* should control in-planet communication too, or this wouldn't work in the biggest and most important planets in IS.

Not him but they do canonically. They're the cable company, the mailman and the interplanetary bank on top of their HPG stuff.

>i can't spell
>but i'm rly rly smart
>you should believe me, i'm on the internet

The Blackbird's design came about because a bunch of autists sat around and said "I know the conventional wisdom says we should do /this/, but what if we do /that/ instead?", several aspects of it rely on it being able to fly faster than the Wrights could have imagined, and the whole fucking thing is computer controlled because it's too unstable for a human to handle it, even if they are the best test pilots of a generation.

This is about the same problem a 'Mech researcher in 3020 faces. The fusion engine is barely understood. Gyros are extremely complex. The sensor system and electronics verge on being a mystery. How the whole thing goes together is beyond anyone short of Dr. Banzai.

And that's for 'Mechs, one of the most ubiquitous elements of the setting.

>This is bullshit though. If you actually participated in any kind of cutting edge research or manufacturing

Except I do, user. Computer scientist here working R&D for a Silicon Valley company.

You used TI as example, but that's not what happened in Battletech. It is like they destroyed the entire semi conductor industry plus every document generated by them plus the people who trained those professionals working in semi conductor industry plus the material used to train those professionals plus any equipment used for manufacturing semi conductors. And then comstar found and killed everyone who tried to replicate the lost semi conductor technology

That's really, really, really, really stupid.
Then again, we use Google and Google products all day and it is literally the same thing.

Actually you didn't use Texas Instruments as example. Damn, I'm tired. I'm going to sleep. good night, fellow Battletech fans who had to read my rants

If it flies physics apply to it. You can measure the airframe with a bunch of tape and apply high school physics. Its not magic. Its physics. Staying in the air has nothing to do with how advanced it is. The same basic rules apply to everything. Its like comparing a hollowed out log to a carrier. Yes its vastly more advanced but you dont have to know whats its antennae for or how its internal lighting works to understand why it stays afloat.


>This is about the same problem a 'Mech researcher in 3020 faces. The fusion engine is barely understood. Gyros are extremely complex

And again, wrong as shit.They were still producing mechs in 3025, just not as good as the SLDF ones.

I like the arms of the right better, but that may just be down to them being cleaned up. I like the weapon locations better on the left for the most part shoulder mounted triangle lasers for sweet Predator reference except for the lrm15s/APgauss(?) where it looks better on the right.

Honestly the right looks like something out of Marik while the left looks either clan or heavily influenced by clan, like someone said a young hauptmann. So depending on where its supposed to come from thats my vote.

I'll give you three guesses as to what Operation Holy Shroud and the Succession Wars did.

No it's not. They're still clear in the realm of 26th century technology in most respects in the late 3rd War.

This is more like if you destroyed intel's ultramodern silicon wafer facilities and all the company secrets for 10nm production as well as the people working on the project.

>And again, wrong as shit.

Try reading the fluff, user.

'Mechs were being produced. The processes involved in that were largely as well-understood as 'Mechs themselves. Which is to say barely, if it all.

Things changed dramatically after the Helm revival, but before that things were pretty damn bleak.

And then if AMD and AT&T killed anyone at Intel who tried to re-start the research, while Intel and AT&T tried to kill off everyone at AMD doing the same.

For over 200 years. While also destroying lesser tech.

That was more FASAnomics than lost technology.

Literal corporate warfare. You know it's bad when you're handing the interns assault rifles to protect the pentium lines.

>Honestly the right looks like something out of Marik while the left looks either clan or heavily influenced by clan

What makes you say that?

I know BattleTech is relatively big in Germany - what other countries have notable BT presence?

In regards to BT balance, I actually think Battletech is more comparable to historical-style wargames; it's much bigger on recreating scenarios and simulating conflicts (within the confines of its own universe, of course), rather than a "bring your own list" type wargame in the style that WFB and 40k pioneered.

That doesn't necessarily invalidate the balanced list style of play, just that the game system in the 80s probably wasn't really designed with that in mind - BV didn't come around till much later.

If I recall it's actually the most popular miniature mecha wargame in Japan as well. I also hear there's someplace in South America where it's also popular... I want to say it's Argentina or something. I don't even know where I heard that but I do remember hearing it.

Ships work fine in them, but they are stellar formation areas and get blown away by mature stars.

A practical effect? There will be zero planets remotely capable of supporting life in one, as the stars there will be 1-2 billion years old.

Nope?

New Avalon, Terra, Luthrin.. there were a lot of planets that understood perfectly well how fusion engines, advanced computers and nurohemlets work, and every other part of a 'mech is pretty much Tech Level B if we are being honest.

The Inner Sphere, even in the darkest days, never dropped under Tech Rating D. New fusion engines and jump drives were being made in 3028

Darkest days was earlier. Hanse and crew had already starting kicking things back into gear with the NAIS in 3015. Not too fair to use Terra as an example either since they were cut off from the rest of the universe and maintained full SL tech level and knowledge.

Your main point is right though. People had Tech D. It's just technology never spreads around whole states very well no matter the era. Most of the computers and stuff sold around the sphere use the same philosophy as those hand crank things sent by the boatload to unstable parts of Africa. Doesn't help that a lot of Inner Sphere stuff gets undercut by its own populace. You have stuff like the population of Glengarry rioting to keep robots out of service jobs and locals of even planetary capitals preferring ICE and Fuel Cell vehicles by the score over anything more advanced.

Part of that is because most Battletech worlds don't give a shit about the environment or pollution or things like that, so they just go with whatever is easiest and cheapest outside their military.

>New fusion engines and jump drives were being made in 3028

They really didn't understand how though.

Seriously in the old lore they're like "Well, we give it this much raw material, and then a while later the factory gives us the thing." Jump drives are even more poorly understood than that, in the 3020s they genuinely feared, and genuinely had reason to fear, that within a generation or so fusion engines would become lostech and jump drives would follow.

But then the Helm core hit.

It wasn't just a big deal because it taught people how to make LB-Xs.

Map scale get on my level.

Finish your kickstarter you lazy nigger

But I'm busy ilclanning D:

Who cares? Finish one thing. Then finish the next thing. And work harder.

Gray Norton, a nobody from nowhere, knows enough to talk at length about fusion engines in Thunder Rift.

In some places yeah, people were Legit Retarded tech wise and had hit Tech Rating B or god forbid A, but there were still schools teaching people how to build and maintain fusion reactors up to the size used by major drop-ships.

Unless the FedCom snowballing it's way to victory drove everyone else to start nuking every major world and production center it wasn't realistic that you'd hit the collapse of society and the loss of everything past stone age tech.

Major shipyards in the inner sphere might only be making a dozen jumpships a year at the worst of it, but they were still building K-F drives, parts for K-F drives, and understood how K-F drives worked and would preserve that knowledge..

Unless/until they got nuked to fuck of course. New Avalon isn't a great example of the average of the inner sphere, either. There were places where fusion engines had reached lostech, and plenty of worlds where even maintaining internal combustion engines and water desalination plants was lost.

>water desalination plants

My understanding is most of them were more having problems maintaining the terraform scale plants and dealing with heavy metals and toxic chemicals, as well as the sheer volume required. Little towns in bumfuck could run completely off the power plant of a bug and several did. But planetary scale water for tens or hundreds of millions required much bigger power plants, almost none of which were fusion.

Even in the Dark Age, there was that one collection of worlds that had very advanced recycling but needed water imports to make up the difference. One was trying to build a fleet of processing satellites for ice asteroids in their home system but their offworld technicians abandoned them and the project after the HPG net went down.

I think you mean Grayson Carlyle, and he's always been played up as a tech genius. Not necessarily to Banzai levels, but still.

K-F Drives also weren't fully understood. They knew how they worked in broad strokes, IE, you charge them up, you run the calculations, you jump, but why they were constructed the way the were was completely off the table and the mechanics of K-F travel even more so. They were only just beginning to be re-learned at New Avalon in the Warrior trilogy.

You know, I just can't believe that. it would be like saying that today you could wipe out everyone who knew how to fix and build cars. Someone has to repair the mechs and make new parts for them, someone has to patch up the drives of broken jumpships, etc.

There might be a rough patch as everything crashed and the surviving astechs and such figured it all out again, but I just can't believe that things would ever get that mystical in terms of tech.

>Relearned

K/F drives are sort of a terrible example because even in universe literally nobody has ever understood what the hell they do, other then maybe the scientist that invited them. NAIS figured out how to slap a battery on them and that was the most they'd ever advanced after being invited.

>Grayson Carlyle

Is also the one in Thunder Rift. A very smart cookie.

Not him but even in later years, hyperspace theory is so complex that only sections of comstar and a few clanners really could grasp it on the most advanced level to actually do new shit instead of aping existing designs.

Even Tucker Harwell in the Dark Age described as the best genius they've had in generations, knows less about advanced hyperspace mechanics than the best robes in 3025.

So people knew roughly stuff about hyperspace cores as far as "this needs to be a single germanium crystal this size, and needs to be charged at this rate, and can extend a KF-field this size, and has this range" but as far as why, not so much.

People never lost the knowledge of how to build them, it's just that in cannon the fundamental principles of how they operate aren't resolved with quantum mechanics or relativity. So magic-tech but not lost-tech, because they never had it.

Lostech is more that some things were getting destroyed, and the infrastructure to keep making them destroyed, faster then they could be replaced.

From the start of the succession wars to the 3030s there was less places that could build fusion reactors or nurohelmets each year.

Extend the trend forward, and sooner or later 'less' could have become 'zero'.

Of course it wasn't steady loss. 90% of it was lost in the first orgy of violence where nukeing orbital foundries, shipyard, factories and training centers was a valid tactic.

By the time the game properly 'starts' in 3025 there was a deliberate attempt by almost everyone to keep the basic infrastructure intact. No targeting HPGs or jumpships, no matter how tempting, and no nukes.

>someone has to patch up the drives of broken jumpships

You don't. Busted drives have always needed a brand new replacement. Ones that are actually busted anyway, not like a blown helium seal. Mainline jumpships are even designed to be able to be taken apart in space to remove the core from the spine.

>You know, I just can't believe that

Well, tough luck. That's how the setting was written.

>People never lost the knowledge of how to build them, it's just that in cannon the fundamental principles of how they operate aren't resolved with quantum mechanics or relativity.

Well, kinda. They had no idea how the black-box factories made stuff worked, but they understood X materials in, Y product out. The intervening steps may as well have involved Svartálfar blacksmiths for all they knew.

The WoB was making Superjumps or whatever, and someone made the Wall.

So 3025, which the other user is saying is the worst period in terms of knowledge loss and such, is better off than the 31XX's?

>Well, tough luck. That's how the setting was written.

I don't care, it's still dumb.