/btg/ BattleTech General

Hmm. I don't know what seems reasonable still. I figure that the population needs to be about the OA total if we're assuming that the VFR has roughly 3 REgiments? (That's not very clear-cut but I'm sort of clustering hear - count the Stradioti as one regiment, all the People's Army as one Regiment since its mostly vees and infantry, and then the leftover air force and Presidential guard and other shit as a third)

Is there a place to discuss fluff stuff or worldbuilding like this on the Discord?

Just put it in the general tab, or ask for there to be a channel devoted to it. The IRC is unfortunately pretty dead. CA is the only thread regular who shitposts on the discord, so expect him being an ass depending on the time of day.

So maybe something around 2 million for the capital, another 2 million or so split between the next two or three biggest worlds, and a range from 40 thousand to 4 thousand for the rest. (Less total population than the OA, but the OA also has way, way more fighters.)

Sure, but maybe a biiiit more. Iunno. I suppose the Stradioti are kind of self-sufficient to a degree.

Fuck the pop numbers in BattleTech are fucking stupid. 40 thousand people is a small town worth of humans. For reference, the capital of Samoa, a tiny speck of a country, has ~39,800 people. Samoa is about 1.5 times the size of the state of Delaware. If you are seriously telling me that AN ENTIRE GODDAMN PLANET has less people than fucking Samoa then you're fucking stupid.

And no, I don't mean anyone in this thread, you're all alright folks (except "mechs are unrealistic" fag, you can go fuck yourself). I'm mostly yelling at FASA being absolutely dogshit retarded. This sorta shit is what AUs are for.

I know nerds get there panties in a twist over this, but if there was ever a universe in need of a reboot, its Battletech.

Buddy, where I grew up, the whole county was 42,000 people for over 400 square miles. 40,000 isn't a town, it's a decent sized city. Low populations are good on places that are basically outposts. That is a town with a stretch of asphalt for a drop port and that's about it. Look at places like Gallery that have 60K in a cramped cave network. That makes sense. Force sizes are geared toward that kind of thing.

Having billions of people on a world and twenty mechs to defend them is the retarded thing. FASA population numbers are too fucking big, not too little.

I mean, yeah, it really does need one. I'd be fine with a soft reboot back to 3025, with all the tech that it should have that was created since then, like primitives, blazers, rockets, etc. All the shit that *should* exist in 3025 but doesn't because it hadn't been written yet should be included. Additionally, changing up the aero game to improve numbers there would be good and fixing population numbers would be great too. Don't change the politics any, that was basically fine and I don't have an issue with how the universe shook out, but the tech and pop stuff needs to all be fixed.

>I'm not quite sure about having different ranks for absolutely everything - that sounds like a clusterfuck.
Considering the political and ethnic dynamics that would exist between planets from such diverse origins? Not to mention having several hundred years of history to build up traditional weight and inertia behind local variations? A Charlie Foxtrot is almost mandatory.

>Though I suppose if at least the ranks are equivalent you can play with the names some.
The central government would have to enforce an official equivalency structure, yes, so in the end the different insignia and names would mostly be a matter of local use for flavour or political reasons. People who travel a lot between the VFR's member-planets would have to spend a shitload of time learning alternate names for each localised variation, but it would all work off the same base chart.

>Having billions of people on a world and twenty mechs to defend them is the retarded thing.
Without wanting to start a shitfest over it, those billions of people are usually completely dependent on certain resources or services (like water purification or power) coming from only one or two major cities on the planet, usually the ones founded when it was first settled. Take those one or two key points - which is where the defending 'Mechs would *have to be* concentrated - and you either have the rest of the planet by the balls, or you've rendered it irrelevant.

>Battletech politics fine

Hahaha whatever you say buddy.

>playing AtB mission
>special mission where I have to go three against one
>playing it cautious and keeping the distance to make use of higher speed and range to slowly whittle them down
>turn 43, almost got it. just one mech left to take care of
>enemy derps AC20 across the map and headcaps me

I really hate dice rolls sometimes.

See, I feel like the low numbers on most planets don't make sense. If you sent people to colonize, they'd do what all colonists do: breed and expand.

As for "billions of people on a world and twenty mechs to defend them' the solution here is to increase the army sizes to something that makes sense for an interstellar empire, not reduce the population. Populations grow and their institutions grow with them, that's how the real world works and nothing about BattleTech is different enough from reality to warrant changing that fact.

Big armies suck. Just look at the misery that is the Star League era.

>Populations grow and their institutions grow with them, that's how the real world works and nothing about BattleTech is different enough from reality to warrant changing that fact.

Not so. There's all sorts of wars and die offs and migrations. It's not a one-way street. This is especially clear when refugees can hop off and head to a new planet. That's the entire colonial era of Battletech. With life much harder and on the edge in Battletech, it makes sense that many populations get crushed down from those things too. Look at the OA for example that has had all their population crash from tech failures in the 3rd War.

I mean if the population numbers went up, I assume the mechs numbers would go up too - and then go up again to cover for the stupidity.

Dude, even in third world shitholes, populations somehow expand over time. If you're telling me that the people with spaceflight can't manage to expand their population via farming over hundreds of years, then I'm gonna laugh and call you mean names. Sure, there are wars and migrations and shit, but those are temporary. Wars might affect population numbers for a brief period but they don't tend to alter the trends of population growth. Look at the US after the world wars, we had population *spikes* even though a bunch of people died. Why should BattleTech be any different than the real world's population trends? If you put 40,000 people on a planet and give them the tools they need to live (farming gear, supplies, etc) I have every expectation that they will prosper as a general rule. Maybe some planets fail, that seems reasonable (plagues, inter-colonial conflict, someone got frisky with the nukes, etc) but the majority should be growing and expanding over time and given that a *lot* of them were founded during the Star League or even before that, why the hell is every population so low? The reason is because FASA can't into numbers not because it makes sense.

Let's map things based on how humans actually behave in real life, not based on FASA's math being bad.

Finally,
>Big armies suck.
This is a subjective opinion. Not everything has to be regiments of Archers versus each other if armies are large, you know. You can have the mixed armies of current BattleTech, just on a larger scale. Let's include more combat vees and aero assets, let's have mixed composition battles, etc. This all sounds fun to me at least.

That comes out to like 4.2 million or so. I'm really wondering what kind of a military you can get out of 4.2 million people. New Zealand has more people than that.

Also just because the total armies are big is no reason you can't have fun on a Regimental scale. Big number organizations don't make your small number organizations go away. All it would mean would be that Regiments are more likely to fight as cohesive units.

What if every Great House had SLDF size armies?

Best 3050 or earlier Mechs for a group of Comstar privateers?
Preferably stuff with jump jets and hands

Is everything available? Because the Exterminator is pre-3050 and ComStar has access to it, and it has both jump jets and hands and is also excellent to boot.

Spiders are great fast jumping units with hands too, if you're into that sorta thing.

>Comstar Privateers
What do you mean by this?

Combat V's already outnumber mechs by 5 to 1 in the 3rd War and by even more than that in the Dark Age. You really don't seem to grasp the scale. Part of that is FASA's fuckup is rarely presenting that side in the novels since mech on mech action is what sells the spotlight. Besides, cranking up the scale past about a hundred to a hundred and fifty regiments of mechs for each major state means the borders won't shift dick. Not enough transport and not enough time to kill everyone before reinforcements show up.

Also, you're assuming all sorts of nice things about Battletech worlds that simply aren't true. Those kids starving in Yemen right now are in an Eden compared to most worlds. The heavy terraform scale machinery and imports used to keep those places alive have a hard cap, especially since a lot of it is Lostech that can't be manufactured anymore. Really man, look up the sufficiency rates of most worlds listed and it's almost 3:1 unable to maintain tech or feed themselves on their own. A few really nice breadbasket worlds carry a lot of others on their backs and tie up the majority of space shipping doing so.

What you should be using as a model for most small worlds is more like small towns that keep a fairly stable population over time with part of the younger generation staying and part of them leaving for opportunities elsewhere. Also, Earth is a tamed garden world. Humans are top of the foodchain. People evolved here, have thousands of years of familiarity with the local fauna. That is not the case on most Battletech worlds.

Someone in the IRC told me to do it, so have quite possibly the silliest mech I've designed to not be silly on purpose. Have the Heeliemonster (because hue Gila Monster and Heelies. Forgive me, my funny bone is KIA).

Privateers are basically pirates that work for one side that disavows them if they are captured. In this case, they work for Comstar. The actual plot of the campaign (I'm not the one running it ) will probably end up with us working for a different faction, but for the moment I've been told to use Comstar for the purposes of trying to prepare -_-;

...is this a 200 ton quadvee? Can you *do* that? Why did this abomination come to life?

I doubt we'll have access to anything as rare as an Exterminator, we are privateers, not special forces. As such, we are more disposable.

Then the First Succession War would have wiped out almost every planet within a thousand light years of Terra. On the plus side, there'd be enough salvage and crap floating around to make the original Battledroids setting feasible.

Well, Griffins and Shads have hands, then. Use those. They're nice and expendable mechs and you should have access to them easily enough.

>...is this a 200 ton quadvee?
Yes, yes it is.

>Can you *do* that?
No one has told me I couldn't, though by RAW, it'd be an illegal design, which is why I did it in excel rather than MML.

>Why did this abomination come to life?
Verbatim: "CA, I wanna make a superheavy 4v." I obliged, because sure why not. Note that you're spending 70 tons on the mech before you even get to the gyro.

Get Comstar SLDF stuff that's not extinct but will be in tip top shape compared to the average guy you fight. Griffins, Archers, Shadowhawks, Humanoid Bugs, those kind of things.

Starslayer if you need something unusual, otherwise Griffin, Shadowhawk, and Hunchback.

No JJS on the hunch, I know, but a fuckoff huge gun is useful for intimidation factor for privateers.

To whoever requested this dumpster fire: you are a monster and should feel bad about your life choices, but thank you for doing it in public where the rest of us can point and laugh.

To you, CA: you're a hero for putting up with this madness. How fast an engine can you stuff in the thing and how many meds can it mount with said fast engine? Can we make a 200 ton quadvee discoball?

What's really funny to me is how close this mirrors the DA Lyran superheavy tank.

>How fast an engine can you stuff in the thing
You're looking at it. A regular 3/5 engine would be a 600 rating one. The Large Engine chart goes up to 500, and a 500 XXLFE would *still* be 154.5 tons.

>how many meds can it mount with said fast engine
Since you can't stack 1 ton 1 crit weapons (a fact I wholly blame myself for, because no one thought of being such a little shit until I did, it seems. At least asked on the OF), 27 Medium Lasers, and you get 16 integral DHS. I'd probably add larger lasers, because assuming this same layout, you've got 63 tons left before weapons.

The Gulltoppr? Yeah they're similar, but there's not a lot you could do with the chassis type and speed.

>To whoever requested this dumpster fire: you are a monster and should feel bad about your life choices, but thank you for doing it in public where the rest of us can point and laugh.
Ahahahaha you're fuckin' welcome, friend.

Well I'll guess I'll lurk on the Discord and see if it comes up. I'd like to help but I'm not sure what needs to be done first.

>500 XXLFE would *still* be 154.5 tons
dafuq that's heavy. Damn, was hoping for a 4/6 200 ton quadvee but the dream is dead before it even lived.

>63 tons left
Yeah, looks like bigger lasers are go. How flashbulb can this thing get? With 63 tons you can probably mount like a dozen ER larges and a bunch of heat sinks to help with the heat.

>Damn, was hoping for a 4/6 200 ton quadvee but the dream is dead before it even lived.
The original requester wants me to work on a 5/8 100 tonner

>With 63 tons you can probably mount like a dozen ER larges and a bunch of heat sinks to help with the heat.
Might as well go maximum asshat and go for 4 LPLs, no waiting.

Only 4? Can't we do better than that? We have 200 tons here. Can't we upgrade to like 6? Or is there insufficient space? Never learned the superheavy construction rules, so I'm not sure how this works really.

Each super heavy crit is 2 regular crits, so every LPL and DHS can fit into one crit, but I was thinking of dropping down to a slightly less expensive engine to make it not in the neighborhood of 150 million plus C-Bills. But if you want, you'll need to fit the other 15 DHS in the slots.

Could you retrofit hands onto a falconer mech? I seem to recall they did something like that for the crab.

As long as the mech's got space for the actuators sticking hand on is always possible. In the case of the Falconer, the 8R would require moving an endo crit in the right arm elsewhere, the 9R's arms already have the available space.

As for the Crab, the CRB-27 always had a hand on the left arm, the CRB-C follows suit, the 20 has hands on both arms, and all the others don't have hands actuators at all.

Look at Finland,about 5,5 million people with standing army around 20-25k, with reserves for 300-400k, and those numbers where whole alot bigger before, something like 500-800k reserves.

These high numbers are due to Finland being a neighbour to really fuck huge Russia/Soviet Union. Alot of the other European countries of the same size have smaller armies but that's due to them being part of NATO and being right next to nation known to invade it's weaker neighbours if it can get away with it.

>Being part of NATO and NOT being right next to a nation...

I meant fluffwise

Finland and similar countries also have compulsory service too don't they? That helps with trained combatant numbers too, I'd imagine. Perhaps it'd be an interesting addition to the VFR.

Same for the fluff. If you've got the techs and the time, just about anything is possible within construction limits, and you certainly don't need techs near the level of the folks piecing together crazy shit like the Schwerer Gustav and Temax Cat Ninjabolt just to rig a hand actuator on to something.

Someone said to give drills to the Banshee pilot so here.

Thanks

So which books would you guys recommend for visual reference material (mechs, vehicles, equipment or uniforms, etc)? One of the TROs?

TROs for mechs and vehicles. RPG books for equipment, faction books for uniforms.

It already says that.

Yeah, but Finland is an Earth nation, stuck using a limited section of Earth, and a fairly cold section at that.

Eve if just one planet in an intersteller nation is mildly alright, then the population should logically be higher than finland.

Here's the thing, though. Not all planets may have wide swathes of land for a population to reside in. There may only be habitable bands near the equator, for reasons of weather or gravity. So a fairly small population would make sense in many cases where terraforming didn't or couldn't turn the world fully habitable.

Not to mention with limited resources and supplies it wouldn't be possible to have a large population without significant portions of them going without basic human necessities.

was asking what sort of military can a planet with 4.2 million people have, I used Finland as example for that.

A planet with only habitable bands near its equator could still support more people than Finland, if only by scale.

But in any case the point more is here, we seem to want to have at least one planet be not-shit. And a not-shit planet should be able to support more than 2 million people.

Minimally habitable alien planets wouldn't have much population pressure to counter growth, it'd be like the American West sans natives, just a bunch of undeveloped open space. Colonies cannot just be plopped down anywhere, because even with FASAnomics there's no way to import all the food, water, air, a/c, pressure, and radiation shielding a human habitat needs without absurdly valuable resources to pay for it. You might argue Star League arcologies or tunnel systems dug with forgotten technology might impose physical limits on habitable volume and I'll counter with the destructiveness of the Succession Wars would easily render large scale life support systems unusable. You'd best be a necromancer if your planet's survival dangling on whether the jumpship arrives on time. Spacestations and airless moons are fine if you've got a Earth-like planet inside the system to leech on/eject to. Space is a big place. There are lots of planets. The poorer you are, the more picky you should be about what neighborhood you move into, because help probably isn't coming and you couldn't afford it anyway.

Of course, all this ignores the socio-political factors that suppress population growth which Battletech has in abundance.

How did the OA even keep existing.

These are sweet, is there somewhere to find all of them?

By being right near the border of Draconis Combine and Fed Suns and them being too busy warring each other. Secondly almost all their systems with any sort of value where allready taken by Reunification War time. What was left was shit in comparison what the Dracs or FedSuns had in the area, and we are talking the outbacks of either nation so...

I think some of them are on that booru in the OP, but people are still tagging and keeping up with the influx of content.

I agree, but has a fair point. I don't think multiplying the populations by ten would hurt anything.

So are quadvees actually useful or are they just another gimmick unit?

I'm on my phone and can't use MML, but I'm reading that Marshal Sharon Bryan's Banshee on Huntress had two PPCs and a gauss rifle.

Could someone make a custom variant of the -5S that does this?

Scratch that, I was thinking of the -3S not having a gauss rifle. Looks like the -5S already did.

My bad.

Custom Banshee variants are still welcome.

But the 5S has two PPCs and a gauss rifle already?

Ah more wondering if the artist had a page. Are they under a certain tag?

They're useful in that they combine vee movement profile with mech sinks and durability. The first run is pretty gimmicky but the Boreas is pretty solid, and I dread the day a hovercraft type quadvee is fielded.

What about the Notos and Arion? They seem pretty good as well

>I dread the day a hovercraft type quadvee is fielded
How would that work in terms of the quad mode? Would they turn into jump jets or something?

say no more

Not yet. We need a nickname for our new user-artist.

They do have a place in clan v clan battles. If you play with bidding rules (which most clanners near me do) you can bid one star of quadvees as vees instead of mechs, essentially doubling your force size.

>You might argue Star League arcologies or tunnel systems dug with forgotten technology might impose physical limits on habitable volume and I'll counter with the destructiveness of the Succession Wars would easily render large scale life support systems unusable.
Except they didn't, canonically. Sure some places failed and some planets died, but many others kept barely creeping along, usually with major population hits as bit of the infrastructure failed. Even in the Dark Age, there's multiple planets dependent on water imports in the core worlds and that's the oldest civilized area in human space.

>You'd best be a necromancer if your planet's survival dangling on whether the jumpship arrives on time
Depends on how much your planet depends on outside help, whether your people are just in famine or dead without those ships. Like take that one world that just specialized in making shoes with no farming. They're fucking dead.

A Marik Banshee?

What kind of dirty things do you think female Clan Warriors say during sex?

A couple of my guesses:
>"Breed me like a surat!"
>"Make me have your freebirths!"
>"I want to smoke your jaguar!"
>"Choke me on your steel viper!"
>"Fill me with your hardjel!"

>hardjel
HarJel, there's no "d" in HarJel. But otherwise, pretty funny.

Nothing will ever beat the waifumental from Wolf Hunters who tricks the guy into a picnic date because she wants a taste of romance and then snu snu's him in the park.

Oh yeah, that was pretty great

thats the fastest joke to go over someones head that i ever did see

Huh. I did in fact entirely miss that joke. Well damn. Absolutely failure on my part.

Nice work. What name do you want as a tag for the booru?

We all have bad PSRs now and again

Fluff can be canon, but it won’t stop my insulting it for being dumb.

Every location with a USIIR code above x/x/x/x/F has agriculture, even if it’s limited. If you’ve got agriculture, then you’ve got a workable basis for inhabitation. It’s a world of difference importing exotics and nutritional supplements than trying to ship 1100 kcal/person/day across light years. Importing water is an order of magnitude larger idiocy than importing all your food.
There can be a lot of good reasons for an installation on barren property, all of them more important than money like research stations, missile silos, HPGs, jump ship recharging, orbital manufactureries, etc. A place to live or because we’ve always been here is not a good reason. In a Mad Max type universe, people either harvest what they need, steal it from those that do, or barter at exorbitant expense. If your food and air depends on SL-tech, by rights you’re a ghost town or propped up by a princely ransom.

Pick a classic mech design.

Tweak it slightly to make it custom and fit your gameplay style.

Give yourself a callsign and planetary homeworld.

Tell me so I can use you as an NPC in a campaign.

Please and thank you.

Most of the planet isn't good farmland nor grazelands. Lots of planets don't even have breathable air. On top of that lots of planets have been inhabitated for less than a thousand years.

These are space pioneers, they don't have exponential population growth because resources are limited and must often be artificially increased.

Backwater shotholes in Battletech don't receive assloads of food aid for no reason.

What technology level?

Executioner, Ost-series, eggmechs, Dervish, Phoenix, Eagle.

That basis for habitation being LOWER than the current population of worlds. Besides, you act like water raids Fallout style for terrascale filters and electronics aren't the oldest Succession Wars kind of raid. They do carve up each other for those parts. The ones with no value were left to die and the ones with high value continue to be supported for their industry. A place like Prosperina would have been ditched for all the damage done to it if it wasn't for all the important stuff there.

You also are glossing over the entire Battletech basis of ruggedness. It's the oldest tradeoff in their tech. They'll make something subpar that lasts five hundred years over something fancy that will last five. Star League tech is even beyond that. You see this in the mechs, the factories, the space habitats, the floating cities, the hollowed out moons and artificial suns. That stuff by and large doesn't break down at the drop of a hat.

It's the oldest thing in the world that FASA said outright worlds need support from shipping to survive. The FASAnomics fuckup was in making too few ships to do so. This is why jumpfleet numbers were retconned up a few factors of ten, not by changing the worlds themselves.