/btg/ BattleTech General

So optic camo would only cause regular infantry probably to scream, "Get to da choppa!"

He is just the resident "fuck the Periphery, mechs are too good for them" fag. Judiciously ignore him.

>let's try again

Is it not possible for inferno to ignite clear hexes in megamek anymore? I have the optional rule turned off, and there still appears to be no effect.

This goes back many versions.

I think a well written story could circumvent those options.

Ok.

I just think it would be fun to speculate possible storylines for different factions that usually don't get a focus. Not just the Taurians, but any faction.

I mean the short answer is obviously step one reunification of all the assorted bits, fixing up their military and then staying put for a while.
Alternately, if the capellans and canopians get their shit pushed in a bit, grabbing detroit back would be a massive jumpstart to the military recovery thing
Of course this could all be sped up into like a 20 year span instead of 'most of the IlClan timeskip' by playing the classic "magic warehouses" and "sudden nationalism" fiat cards, but you were asking for without that

Quick question is the clan 80 ton Naga built using the same leg assembly as the Gargoyle and Executioner?

What might your "average" Smoke Jaguar and Wolf front line binaries look like at the beginning of Operation Revival?

In talks with a friend about doing a trial over a world in the deep periphery. Going for fluff, not really BV balancing.

Steiner > Alle

check the wolf phone book, it has literally all of their front line binaries in it, so just pick which one you want to run
as for the jags, I'll check and see

I thought about the phone book but that would leave me with six Ice Ferrets, three Gargoyles and a Timber Wolf. Not literally but it seems like that.

Not many pictures portray the Space 80s so well as this one.

I actually wonder if some of the old crew who made BT back at FASA was sporting hairstyles like this.

>its going to be another thread of this shit
for once, can we please not start the peripheREEEE shit. please.

hey, it's been civil so far, but OK, let's try another discussion

How would you undo the massive overpowered nature of the Capellan Confederation and Ghost Bears as part of the 3250 timeskip?

remove lev 2. if they arent totally retconned or other ships advanced to be as powerful as they are just fluff nuke them and all of their blueprints. shit is ridiculous. get whats left of the home clans to rebuild following the reaving and invade for rasalhague buttfucking 2: electric boogaloo.

just give the caps another insane ruler LOL. but in all seriousness the periphery rebuilding would probably help solve that problem

Ghost Bears? IDK.
Cappies? Why use the force of their culture against them. They crap on citizens too long, word is had about the old St. Ives-whatever. Maybe a region-wide civil war that may or may not be taken advantage of by the other powers. Cappies survive with possibly part of their old territory in a new mini-nation, or chopped up by others. They maintain enough of a combat force to keep the piranha principle in their sense active.
Hamburgers and curry for everybody!

Sneak some old Blakist or SW-era bioweapon onto the Levs. Infect the crews.

Have them misjump and then go full Dead Space and Event Horizon with that bullshit. It's better than they deserve.

>Capellan Confederation
FCCW-style messy breakup with the MoC that doesn't go well for either of them
>Ghost Bears
wrasslehogs remember that they're wrasslehogs and their OZ turns into space afghanistan 1989, levs get terrorist nuked and that's done. Dracs take advantage of this to mess with their shit hardcore

Bingo

I mean, the CC was just a shitty Periphery state at that point and it worked out.

wut

If you have the rule turned off of course it won't work

Wouldn't even take twenty years necessarily, if the TC and Calderons merge peacefully as it looks like they might and they pounce on Detroit, that could realistically happen within a couple of years, and then they're set to chill for a while. In fact, the weakness of the Capellans could be the trigger for the merger - strike while the iron is hot and all that.

Hyperdimensional Blakists.

Wouldn't it fit story wise for the Capellans to face a setback?

>FCCW-style messy breakup with the MoC that doesn't go well for either of them
Oooh, a 2x fiat reduction combo, it'll never happen but it'd be nice

Space bitched periphery state still alive? Or did they get btfo'd? I mean, the power of TnA compelling mercenaries to serve is funny as.

>Space bitched periphery state still alive?
literally a suburb of the capcon, but the most powerful periphery state nontheless, best at everything by magic vampirization of their neighbors
>Or did they get btfo'd?
as the fuck if
>I mean, the power of TnA compelling mercenaries to serve is funny as.
Thing is, it also compels sourcebook authors, which is what made things the way they are

Really? Authors didn't get enbarassed by their obvious fetishbait faction?

>leather and spikes female Dom society
>somehow not erp fetish faggotry

Why are they cappellan though?

What with cappellans thinking barefoot and pregnant and chained to the kitchen being too good a treatment for most women I'd have thought they'd be vehement foes, what with being culturally and politically diametrically opposed and all.

...yes. That's what I was saying.

>What with cappellans thinking barefoot and pregnant and chained to the kitchen being too good a treatment for most women I'd have thought they'd be vehement foes, what with being culturally and politically diametrically opposed and all.

Haha no, sense is only a thing for stupid factions that don't get the writers dicks hard, like the FWL or Outworlds

>Authors didn't get enbarassed by their obvious fetishbait faction?
you must not have seen the photo of the author in question in his homemade MoC uniform and that is very good luck for you, because it will scar your soul for eternity

It turns out you can bond with Amazon princess over the traditional MoC national sport of hunting pirates like animals.

The only fiat was Sunny's state not going to complete shit in the year he was running around, especially since it was basically a victory lap after Guererro when he should be securing systems. Even the entire Sarna Supremacy campaign was while he was AWOL.

Victor disappears for a year to bag a whole clan and he comes home to no country at all.

Ironic how the "matriarchy" faction became utterly subservient to an outside king the second he starts giving their queen the dick

To be fair, he was dicking the younger sister who was a pushover and got really lucky that first princess Butch Killstuff got killed fighting clanners with VSD.

See. This is why the setting is 'off' to me. Its so Narm-tastic in parts. Like how the fuck does anyone like keikaku sun tzu bullshit?

West-hating Chinaboos.

Because that was a reckon they pulled out of their ass.

Retcon, not reckon

Sunny doesn't really have great ideas. Everything just kind of falls in place for him.

>Gee, what if I offered basic schooling to the Canopians in exchange for some troops. I mean it's their technical skills that suck and they don't need it but why the fuck not?
>Holy shit they said yes! SLAM DUNK SUNIRITO YOU GENIUS!

Actually, imagining him as a total dudebro is more fun.

>Dude, that princess is kind of hot. I wanna bone her. Let's go on a road trip to Astrokazy!
>I wonder how I can dump Isis without calling her a whore?
>I want you to genetically engineer my firstborn into a seven foot tall basketball player
>Freeze me like Walt Disney. I'm gonna live FOREVER!

In parts?

The entire setting is retarded so it seems silly to get so upset over one single part of it. The setting has run on FASAnomics, yellow peril, lack of scale, variable mad max-ness since the beginning.

I don't know why, but I felt like doodling it. Tell me if the Naga's supposed to share the same lower body (legs and pelvis) assembly as the Gargoyle and I'll try and finish it later.

>Outworlds
>joining with the literal embodiment of everything they have fanatically opposed for literally half a millennium
>sense

I mean, that's women in general. Basically adopt the beliefs of whatever guy they're with and if they get knocked up it turns their fervor up to 11. Hot but weird. It's no wonder poking fun at women in politics goes back thousands of years.

That's biology. The result of hundreds of thousands of years of going along with things to ensure their offspring lived.

They don't really join with anyone. They're occupied territory. They just had the sense to give up the fight after they saw what the Clan Cold Coot did to Galedon and their own navy.

>leather and spikes female Dom society

Wasn't there a pic of an MOC Mechwarrior in a battle bikini in the Periphery 2e sourcebook? How the fuck is that not blatant fetishbait?

...so, just like the historical Amazons and Hercules?

I mean, sure, it's dumb. But it's not like this is anything NEW. If anything, this is possibly one of the oldest story tropes in human history.

>All hail the conquering penis.

It's a tale almost as old as time.

Just because it happened doesn't mean it's acceptable to put in a story.

CGL calls themselves authors. If they can't come up with something original, that isn't a trope, then they should quit.

Good authors create, great authors steal, user. After three thousand years, there's not exactly a lot of unexplored territory in literature. Sounds like you may be too young to post here if you haven't learned that.

>great authors steal, user.

If that was true, then why would anybody have a problem with how CGL wrong the MOC-Capellan alliance happening?

And clearly, a bunch of people do.

I gotta say Victor and the Invisible Truthinauts was one of my more favorite arcs.

Looks good. I'd push the Naga's "underbite" back a little though.

So I finally started a new AtB campaign. Holy shit the "new" version of the PDF apparently had some secret of the universe in it because things are going way more smoothly now. I still face forces that are about 20% higher than my BV, but it's not the 100% increases I was seeing before. A few missions didn't resolve properly afterwards but I know it's buggy. Less than a year into my Garrison contract with the FWL and already had a Thud and a Grasshopper shot out from under me. Started with that Grasshopper, a Griffin, a Shad, and an Urbie. Still have the Griffin and Urbie; sold the Shad to get a Wyvern. Still just rolling a lance but considering expanding once this contract is over.

Can you try that again in English user?

I would say that they have very similar lower bodies. The Naga's pelvis looks a little more pointed and it's feet a bit more boxy than the Gargoyle's. Otherwise, considering they're both built as successors to the Woodsman, I would say that they're pretty similar.

Also would you happen to have a single picture of your emperor? I noticed you'd finished it.

am the other user you were talking to last thread. good for you man, objective raid contracts seem to be the best at least for me. high pay, 3 months long, the enemies can be rough but the salvage and cbills are worth it. good luck

No, it has its own structure.

Wolf is probably looking at 4-6 Ice Ferrets, 1-3 Gargoyles, 1-3 Adders, and 1-2 Timber Wolves.

Jags, 4-6 Mad Dogs, 1-3 Storm Crows, 1-3 Warhawks, and 1-3 Dire Wolves.

Bon apetit.

It gets worse as the sum of its parts. Individual things you can explain or hand-wave away, but it's now like 30 years of consistent bad writing, pile-ups of idiocy, and constant power swings for the sake of map balance rather than story.

Sun-Tzu is just the fucking worst, though.

So, late to the party, but they did in various semi-official productions. There's Clan ones in Unbound and/or Maximum Tech, which were ported over for later consumption.

>There's Clan ones in Unbound and/or Maximum Tech
Source: your ass, since both are official products and neither of them have RACs. You're thinking of the MechForce UK guns which ended up in the Heavy Metal program, but nothing otherwise.

What's a better purple burd battle armor: Xiphos or Kopis?

Whoa, careful with all of that edge there kiddo. Maybe I am, but tone it down a bit, 'kay?

I lean to the Kopis myself

It isn't in either of those, but they WERE in the old mechforce UK stuff, which is totally unofficial but occasionally gets bandied about as being 'semi official' in the manner of the old Battletechnology magazine stuff

>as to the errors we have the Northwind Highlanders being listed as house troops instead of mercs, for example.
The first RPG had them as House regulars too, so them being mercs during this period must be a later retcon. Not really an internal error. (I think the book changes the Thunderbolt's date of introduction, and it seems to get Sirius and Styk mixed up, but those don't have anything to do with the deployment table.)

>Why does the number have to be 60?
I found the Liao count (it's on the book's first page for some reason): 45 line and reserve regiments, backed by 15 merc units of varying size plus 8 Warrior regiments. The mercs and Warrior Houses amount to about 15 regiments together, which would bring a lazy count to 60. The other Houses are all convenient multiples of 5, and the first RPG also puts Liao at 60 regiments.

>seven more regiments worth of mechs would be too noticeable to go unmentioned, I would think.
They'd be lance and company sized units. People generally agree that there's a fair number of those floating around unementioned.

Not really a good comparison. MFUK was always non-canon fun while Battletechnology was 100% canon material until it was demoted to apocryphal, oh I want to say Fanpro era, maybe early CGL. Anybody remember?

I know they aren't the same at all, I'm just saying that I've known people to claim that they are, and possibly that is the source of user's confusion

BattleTechnology was semi canon unless contradicted by other sources then non canon. It occupied a gray area where the material and events technically happened but didn't unless otherwise confirmed. Stuff that got added back in later is because the authors involved either worked for CGL later or let that stuff get reused.

Makes sense to me. RPE always did give MFUK a lot of love with their frankenminis and stuff. Man, I should have bought a set when they were still making them. Now the prices are stupid and all the stock is in euroland.

The count appears to reference regiments on rolls, not actual combat strength. Liao has about 45 line and reserve regiments on the lists, but many if not most are understrength.

That sounds like the Fanpro policy. I'm pretty sure it was full canon when it was coming out in the late-80's/early-90's. But fuck, it's been so long I can't trust memory.

The guy that wrote the Gray Death Trilogy was the editor at least.
>All those random contributors who later became novel writers like Gressman

I forget how deep the fan roots run in this sometimes. If this was still old school, the Cincinnati and Toronto boys would be being groomed as the next generation of staff.

>If this was still old school, the Cincinnati and Toronto boys would be being groomed as the next generation of staff.
And what a nice future that would have been

There's no call to be sarcastic. They wouldn't have been any worse than CGL has proven, that's for sure. Judging by Pope and NEA, I wager they'd be a damn sight better.

Buddy, I'm 90% sure he wasn't being sarcastic.

I wasn't being sarcastic, actually, I agree with you

>If you have the rule turned off of course it won't work

The rule is for no igniting clear hexes tho. For giggles, I turned the rule on and same result.

Oh. I'm sorry. The internet has ruined me, I think. Every time I see something positive I assume it's bitter or angry sarcasm, and that's doubly true here.

...

...

I've always loved the Naga, specifically Plog's drawing of it.

It's why I've cut myself off so heavily. It really says a lot about American society when you stop using facebook and feel happier and better about people in a week.

>How would you undo the massive overpowered nature of the Capellan Confederation and Ghost Bears as part of the 3250 timeskip?
For the Cappies- FCCW style split between nations, beginning with revelations of Daoshen's incestual relationship and the Capellan military simply becoming overstretched and tired. Give some wins to-
TC and Calderon Protectorate retake Detroit in a moment of weakness and hold it using the warship
Republic getting cappies on the wrong foot and actually grinding them down
FedSuns shoring up the march due to increased infighting with resurgent Black Dragons in the DC, who see the Bears as being a bigger threat.

>Republic doing anything but imploding
>Taurians holding anything in the Cap new colony region when they don't even have a foot in Fronc
>Anybody giving a shit about Danai but the Caps who would be scared a MoC-raised Moblin has a direct claim to the Celestial throne

Not that my idea is any better, but it is more fun. Dao Shen goes absolutely fucking apeshit, like the kind that makes Mad Max or Jinjiro Kurita seem like balanced human beings when Based Humphreys starts sending sex tapes of himself and the super milf to her brother, NTR style. Her moaning that she's a slave to Andurien dick, that the beanpole's little beanpole could never satisfy her the way the Duke can, the whole cliche nine yards.

And just imagine. With the HPG network down, they have to be hand-delivered by Comstar courier, and you know those sick wizards read all the mail anyway.

Yeah I'm going for shorter contracts next time. 14 months is a long ass tour. Also the FWL has breached twice. Assholes.

good luck lad. i got a few lucky breaks and ended up with star league caches, king crab and a couple others i sold for cash. units for sale are usually pretty mediocre but battlefield salvage can be gnarly. also beware during clan invasion youll get your contracts extended almost every time

I NEED to see that!

thred is ded, let's see if we can spice it up.

is this image telling truth, or telling dirty Star League lies?

Can confirm image is truth.

The SLN had around 1 McKenna for every ship everyone else had. It's the best of the canon ships aside from the Lev II/III and can easily solo pretty much anything else.

Do not fuck with the SL. Doing so will get you a McKenna plus escorts, wrecking your shit.

Depending on the source, the SLN had somewhere around 1500 McKennas, which feels like way more than 1 per other Warship in the other factions, closer to 1 per world.

So the followup question is this: Whenever warships get brought up in my local group, our grognard declares that warships don't matter and that the solution to them is to just throw 10,000 ASF at them, because that's how many ASF you can build for the cost of a single warship, and the aerospace fighter swarm will easily down the warship. From a pure price standpoint, this seems to bear out, but I can't help but feel that nobody actually has that many aerospace fighters just kicking around.

Should Battletech lore be rewritten/retconned

That actually makes me like Sunny, wtf

wut

Only if you've got a time machine to fade back a couple of decades or so at least so you can retain something of the social climate that produced the unique texture.

If you tried to write the basis in the modern era there's no way the rage-addicts on social media would let you be successful.

Phalanx D. But the Kopis is harder to pass up than the Xiphos.

It definitely used to be possible, so maybe a new version broke something