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ShadowDragon8685 posted:You are the Sperglord. Goddamn, I hope not. ... But yeah, I really can write about the 'tech that gets mentioned but never really explained in the books, but I only will if people are interested. Since Mike Stackpole is solely responsible for people's misunderstanding of Battletech FTL Jump "Physics" (he's the one who's constantly having the ships pop in only a few light minutes above a planet--a location a JumpShip could very easily visit but couldn't jump to) I kinda feel compelled to clear up some other things that he Things like Myomer,
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May 2, 2011 05:22
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Tell us about the 
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May 2, 2011 05:26
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PoptartsNinja posted:Goddamn, I hope not. Why not? Around here, as far as I can see, that puts you as the king of the heap. Anyway, put me down for wanting you to  about "Small Arms in the BTech Verse."Small Arms: because not every goddamned heroic story has to have a goddamned BattleMech in it, gorramit! ShadowDragon8685 fucked around with this message at 05:42 on May 2, 2011 |
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May 2, 2011 05:40
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I want to hear a breakdown of why you hate the Gray Death Legion so much. C'mon, what's not to love about ending every spoken sentence with an exclamation point?
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May 2, 2011 05:48
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PoptartsNinja posted:how Stackpole was setting up the Federated Suns to be loving Camelot in space (with Ardan Sortek as Lancelot) in the main timeline before someone decided what really needed to happen was an 18-year time-jump and an invasion by the Mongols I really want to hear your take on this, as a bit of a Fedrat fanboy myself (though in my case, it's because I think sourcebook-wise they're portrayed to be the least assholeish society mostly, and also Hanse is a goddamn interesting character at least even if he is more than a bit of a Mary Sue in a setting full of Mary Sues).
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May 2, 2011 05:48
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Talk about Swedenese fusion cuisine.
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May 2, 2011 05:49
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PoptartsNinja posted:Goddamn, I hope not. You seem well adjusted, for someone with a lot of internet board game friends. What parallels would you draw between battletech future history and our actual history, both from a national, individual, and technological viewpoint? (sorry if that sounds like a test question for BattleTech 201)
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May 2, 2011 05:49
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Dropship Troopers Part 1 of ? The Dropship is a surprisingly simple vehicle. In its most basic form, the Dropship is simply a platform which lifts a cargo from a planet’s surface into space (and vice versa). Dropships in battletech come in two forms: Spheroid like the Union-class Euphrates, and Aerodyne like the Leopard-class Tigris from our mission with the Second Donegal Guards. Spheroid ships are more prevalent, since they make better use of space and can therefore carry more cargo; while Aerodyne ships are smaller, usually winged, and have better performance in atmospheres. The smallest dropships are unable to carry any ‘Mechs, while the largest, the Behemoth, is incapable of entering a planet’s atmosphere due to hull stresses (rendering its classification as a ‘dropship’ a bit misleading). The most commonly-mentioned Dropships are the military ones, which are predominantly spheroids (due to their greater hauling capacity, superior weapon coverage, and ability to transport Battlemechs); and of those the Leopard, Union, and Overlord (and their Clan refits) are the most common; with other military-capable vessels such as the Excalibur and Fortress vessels being far less common. There are several factors that make the common Military transports superior to their less-common competition. The most important is factor is, simply, carrying capacity. A military dropship will almost always be specialized to carry some combination of ‘Mechs, Vehicles, Infantry, and/or Aerospace fighters, the most-common Union-class is primarily a Battlemech hauler. Able to carry a company of twelve Battlemechs, the Union was typically able to deliver ‘sufficient’ forces to garrison worlds—and was the most common Dropship—during the 3025 era. During the later Clan era, it would be replaced by the Overlord-class as the military troopship of choice. Although the far larger Overlord was not significantly better armored or gunned than the Overlord, it is capable of carrying a full Battalion of 36 Battlemechs (while the Clan upgrade was capable of carrying up to 45—an entire Cluster). While nothing compares to the hundred-thousand ton Behemoth when it comes hauling cargo, it’s pitiful half-G maximum acceleration (and inability to operate under planetary gravity) sorely limits it as a military transport. Speed is the second-most important factor for a Military dropship, and this is where the Union- and Overlord-Class ships stand heads above their less-common counterparts. Able to sustain up to 5 standard gravities of acceleration, the Union and Overlord are able to quickly make planetfall. Very few military commanders are willing to use such extreme acceleration due to the stresses on the human soldiers under their commands, so most military ships tend to limit their acceleration to 2.5 gravities at the highest. Military Aerodynes such as the Clan Titan-class Dropship (a dedicated Aerospace-fighter carrier) are capable of even more extreme acceleration in short-term operations, but the most common of them—the Leopard class, is capable of carrying only four Battlemechs and two fighters; and is used primarily as a light raider. But, honestly, who wants to read all that? What I've been talking about can pretty much be summed up with pretty pictures:  Dropships: BIG!  Jumpships and Warships: BIGGER enough to be TIMG'd for table-breakage! MJ12 posted:Nitpick: The Union and Overlord can sustain a max of 2.5G acceleration, since they have 3/5 thrust profiles. Each thrust point is 0.5 G acceleration. I play a lot of Battlespace space warfare. Basing my acceleration on Operation Excalibur, one of the Gray Death Legion books, wherein it is explicitly stated that Grayson Carlysle pushes an Overlord to 5 Gs in order to reach Defiance in 5 days (as opposed to 2 weeks). Also, one of the reasons I hate the Gray Death Legion since that'd pretty much kill everyone on the ship (but doesn't because they're the Gray Death Legion). I agree that 5 Gs is definitely not a safe level of acceleration, which is why PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 06:34 on May 2, 2011 |
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May 2, 2011 06:20
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Nitpick: The Union and Overlord can sustain a max of 2.5G acceleration, since they have 3/5 thrust profiles. Each thrust point is 0.5 G acceleration. I play a lot of Battlespace space warfare. If you want me to, I can cover WarShips and Pocket WarShips (basically, take a dropship, rip out the cargo space, and use it all for guns) and their armaments and whatnot for you.
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May 2, 2011 06:26
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If the Behemoth can't make an atmospheric landing what do they use it for? I suppose you could use it for operations on planetary bodies lacking atmospheres, but that doesn't seem like it would happen enough that it would need a dropship class devoted entirely to it. I can't imagine scientist and technicians sitting down to develop a new dropship and overlooking the detail that it can't actually be used on habital worlds.
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May 2, 2011 06:35
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cafel posted:If the Behemoth can't make an atmospheric landing what do they use it for? They use shuttles and smaller dropships like the loving tiny Confederate-class (a Spheroid twice the height of an Atlas and 18-times one's mass) to ferry cargo. Also, they'd be pretty easy to convert into massive Aerospace-fighter beehives if anyone in Battletech other than the Snow Ravens was capable of thinking in terms of air superiority... but since that's not a danger, they're used almost entirely for hauling bulk raw materials and as passenger liners. Basically, they're the Space Titanic. Edit: They're also rare as hell since most people realized right away that the design is stupid. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 06:40 on May 2, 2011 |
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May 2, 2011 06:38
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PoptartsNinja posted:Basing my acceleration on Operation Excalibur, one of the Gray Death Legion books, wherein it is explicitly stated that Grayson Carlysle pushes an Overlord to 5 Gs in order to reach Defiance in 5 days (as opposed to 2 weeks). Also, one of the reasons I hate the Gray Death Legion since that'd pretty much kill everyone on the ship (but doesn't because they're the Gray Death Legion). http://yarchive.net/space/science/g_tolerance.html NASA says that 4.5Gs is sustainable for ~30 minutes safely if you're strapped down perpendicular to the axis of acceleration. Anything longer than that is probably going to cause permanent damage. So do you or do you not want a writeup on Pocket WarShips and WarShips later, PTN? I can do that for you, like I said, since I've played a hell of a lot of StratOps.
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May 2, 2011 06:48
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PoptartsNinja posted:They use shuttles and smaller dropships like the loving tiny Confederate-class (a Spheroid twice the height of an Atlas and 18-times one's mass) to ferry cargo. Also, they'd be pretty easy to convert into massive Aerospace-fighter beehives if anyone in Battletech other than the Snow Ravens was capable of thinking in terms of air superiority... but since that's not a danger, they're used almost entirely for hauling bulk raw materials and as passenger liners. Also, before they mostly blew up or were scrapped for lack of parts and what not, there used to be a reasonable number of space stations you could dock at. So you'd jump into a system, the Behemoth would go to the local space station and unload, then it'd load up with new stuff from the space station, and the station would take care of sending what the Behemoth brought to where it needs to go and also accumulating whatever stuff the Behemoth was going to leave with. With relatively few space stations left, that system is pretty much borked, and the Behemoths with it, which is another reason no one makes 'em anymore.
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May 2, 2011 06:54
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Since it's Ask/Tell stompy robot hour I have a question. How does a typical BT war/border dispute look like,is it mostly small skirmishes on border planets that last a couple of days or more like year long trench warfare with the odd mech battle? And what about the commanding officers, it seems to me like the command structure is fairly loose and a unit can do whatever it wants if it somehow benefits their side and doesn't directly clash with their orders, am I correct in that assumption or are BT-armies well structured and disciplined? Also, how prevalent are off world vacations? Are there any space backpackers and family vacations to the beach planet or is it only military and the big cats? hankor fucked around with this message at 08:12 on May 2, 2011 |
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May 2, 2011 08:09
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hankor posted:Also, how prevalent are off world vacations? Are there any space backpackers and family vacations to the beach planet or is it only military and the big cats? The other questions I'm not certain on, but this one's easy if I'm remembering my fluff right. Battletech is basically Space Feudalism. When we hear about Fuedalism we think of knights and castles and poo poo, but really, 99.9% of the population were serfs who made barely enough money to keep sheltered and fed, and in some years not even that. Space serfs are in essentially the same boat, only they get air conditioning and better health insurance, and instead of plowing the fields they're working in factories. While there are planets where the average standard of life is fairly decent - like Tharkad, for instance, making this a digression that's vaguely relevant to the current scenario - the vast majority of Battletech citizenry are extras in the universe's major motion picture. They don't get much camera time, they're not important to the plot, and depending on which genre of movie the universe feels like playing they're either bored out of their skulls or dying horribly for dramatic effect. Now, the Inner Sphere is still pretty drat big and has a shitload of planets with a shitload of people on them - so even if only a small fraction of those people would be considered wealthy, a small fraction of a shitload is still a shitload. So there's room to have the occasional Space Vacation and poo poo, but it's an industry that caters exclusively to the wealthy; the vast majority of the population is too busy worrying about how to meet their quota down at the armaments factory or something to take trips to exotic Blowmiwad IV (the 'Mom, we're out of Kleenex' world).
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May 2, 2011 08:22
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I don't think most BT planets practice serfdom. The only people who do on a wide scale are ironically the Clans, who don't call it that. Your average IS citizen's quality of life varies wildly depending on where they live. A good planet like Tharkad or Furillo, it's like modern-day Earth with some new cultural window dressing, but the tech is different in that weird BT way. On Earth itself, it's a goddamn paradise where the average person works 15 hours a week and owns their own flying fusion-powered car. And then if you live on a lovely world you are an 18th century farmer.
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May 2, 2011 09:03
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Cooked Auto posted:I'm surprised no one has mentioned the 40k ships. But then again they are pretty much the sheer epitome of overkill in this case I guess its just simply a dumb idea to involve them. I had thought about it, but don't really know enough about Battlefleet Gothic to make an educated argument beyond "Well a Tyranid hiveship would show up and eat everything."
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May 2, 2011 09:35
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Defiance Industries posted:I don't think most BT planets practice serfdom. The only people who do on a wide scale are ironically the Clans, who don't call it that. Most don't practice legal serfdom (i.e. 'you are pretty much the property of the local feudal lord'), but certainly practice an economical equivalent - which is to say, just because technically you're a citizen with rights doesn't mean you're not, as you say, an 18th Century farmer. Don't have to legally be a serf to live like one.
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May 2, 2011 13:13
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hankor posted:Since it's Ask/Tell stompy robot hour I have a question. That depends on the successor state, honestly. Most have at least a core of extremely well-disciplined troops, but in an individual battle things usually vary wildly. Trench warfare is uncommon, but most 'wars' really boil down to long-term raiding. Any actual conquest is rare, as most of the Successor States lack the money and forces to truly garrison a conquered planet in the long term. Plus, most of the Successor Lords view their Mechwarriors as knights and allow them a fair bit of autonomy. That's what made Hanse Davion's successes in the 4th Succession War so astounding: He was writing orders and battleplans for thirty or more regiments right down to contingency plans for each 'Mech lance (and he did so because of the library he used to found the NAIS, due to a history (of World War II) he discovered that changed the way he thought of Battlemechs). hankor posted:Also, how prevalent are off world vacations? Are there any space backpackers and family vacations to the beach planet or is it only military and the big cats? Travel from world to world is both prohibitively expensive and surprisingly cheap. If you're trying to go to a specific planet RIGHT NOW, then yes, the average citizen can't afford that. Most of the time, though, you can sign on for a 'tour ship' which will stop at many systems along the way and allow you to simply leave when you've reached your destination. Sure, you might have to wait six months for your world's supply dropship to turn up to take you to a more populated world; but a 'cruise' from Tharkad to New Avalon only cost around 2,000 C-Bills; which is pretty expensive but not unreasonably so. Most people view interstellar travel as a "once in a lifetime" opportunity, but when has that ever stopped a tourist?
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May 2, 2011 13:53
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How prevalent are pirates, or space pirates? Is it something limited to the periphery, or do instances exist within the inner sphere proper? Are they generally raids on planets, or dropships? What prevents space pirates from boarding a jumpship and then jumping away to some barren sun to lie low for a while? Given the sizes, I assume that there's plenty of room for perishables and supplies. I understand that destroying a jumpship is tantamount to war crimes, but why would that stop the desperate fringes of society?
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May 2, 2011 14:44
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Volmarias posted:How prevalent are pirates, or space pirates? Is it something limited to the periphery, or do instances exist within the inner sphere proper? Are they generally raids on planets, or dropships? More common than most people realize, even in Clan space (there's a reason the Clans haaaaate 'bandits'. Piracy isn't covered much, in Battletech, but I'll do a write-up of it because it's actually a huuuuuge problem in the universe. Volmarias posted:What prevents space pirates from boarding a jumpship and then jumping away to some barren sun to lie low for a while? Given the sizes, I assume that there's plenty of room for perishables and supplies. I understand that destroying a jumpship is tantamount to war crimes, but why would that stop the desperate fringes of society? Happens more often than the Successor States would like. Stealing a jumpship almost always results in a massive reprisal and the jumpship's recovery; so most pirates don't bother.
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May 2, 2011 14:48
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Also, you don't really have "merchant" jumpships. If you board them, you're going to be facing down guys armed with shotguns and the like that know the layout of the ship and may be ready to fight you every inch of the way, and you're still going to have to charge the drives for the outward jump once you've taken command of the ship. Assuming the previous crew didn't sabotage the jump drives while they were delaying you and sending out distress calls. A lot of the groups that would be pirates in the Inner Sphere end up just being mercenaries or extortionists instead. It draws far less ire from the Great Houses.
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May 2, 2011 14:57
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So how does being a pirate work alongside there not being any Jumpships. Pirates can't "Get the hell out of dodge" if there isn't any way to leave a system. Are pirates only an in-system problem or are there pirate bands with access to Jumpships?
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May 2, 2011 15:02
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Affi posted:So how does being a pirate work alongside there not being any Jumpships. Pirates can't "Get the hell out of dodge" if there isn't any way to leave a system. Some rather extreme examples, but yes, pirates with Jumpships do exist.
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May 2, 2011 15:31
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Zaodai posted:I had thought about it, but don't really know enough about Battlefleet Gothic to make an educated argument beyond "Well a Tyranid hiveship would show up and eat everything." For reference, the Retribution Class battleship from that game fires the Enterprise E as a torpedo. A torpedo that explodes into daemons. Yeah.
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May 2, 2011 17:07
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Shouldn't the Behemoth be cubish? I can buy the actual dropships being spheroid to be able to enter atmosphere without being ripped apart by friction but it's not like the Behemoth needs to think about that versus hauling space (and there's a reason the common truck isn't a round ball).
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May 2, 2011 17:11
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Pimpmust posted:Shouldn't the Behemoth be cubish? I can buy the actual dropships being spheroid to be able to enter atmosphere without being ripped apart by friction but it's not like the Behemoth needs to think about that versus hauling space (and there's a reason the common truck isn't a round ball). I believe the in-universe reason is 'design fuckup'. There's pictures of the Behemoth with landing struts - it was supposed to be able to land properly but real-world use found that it couldn't. The designer reason is probably either 'all dropships must be either a plane or a ball because that's our design aesthetic', or 'we were sued over the Robotech IP already, we do not want to be sued by Star Trek too and better safe than sorry'.
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May 2, 2011 17:21
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Pimpmust posted:and there's a reason the common truck isn't a round ball It's because of communism, isn't it?
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May 2, 2011 17:21
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Requesting Lord Sperglord to go over holoscreens and holotanks. 
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May 2, 2011 17:29
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Pimpmust posted:Shouldn't the Behemoth be cubish? The docking points in JumpShips allow only small cube-shaped ships to dock. Larger ships must be round in shape. Stupid and inconvenient? Yes, but then again it's the military.
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May 2, 2011 17:29
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Pimpmust posted:Shouldn't the Behemoth be cubish? I can buy the actual dropships being spheroid to be able to enter atmosphere without being ripped apart by friction but it's not like the Behemoth needs to think about that versus hauling space (and there's a reason the common truck isn't a round ball). The common truck doesn't operate with a single line of thrust, and doesn't have to deflect micrometeorites. A sphere is the most efficient shape in ratio of surface area(and thus cost of hull) to volume. Terrestrial design and space-based design are two entirely different ball games.
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May 2, 2011 17:36
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This is all evident in the rounded nature of our own spacecraft and their various storage tanks. It's not just a goofy Battletech choice.
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May 2, 2011 18:07
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Preechr posted:I want to hear a breakdown of why you hate the Gray Death Legion so much. C'mon, what's not to love about ending every spoken sentence with an exclamation point? This. I'd like to know more about this too.
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May 2, 2011 18:09
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I'd like to know what PTN's most hated faction is 
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May 2, 2011 18:16
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That graph really shows how Mechwarrior (4 especially) seemed to undersize the dropships.
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May 2, 2011 18:16
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Tarquinn posted:This. I'd like to know more about this too. In a universe of Mary Sue mercenary units, the GDL is possibly the Mary Sue-est of them all. And it was the first. edit: AFAIK the GDL was the first merc unit written about in a BT novel. Decision at Thunder Rift was one of the (if not the first) BT book in print IIRC.
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May 2, 2011 18:17
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Chronojam posted:This is all evident in the rounded nature of our own spacecraft and their various storage tanks. It's not just a goofy Battletech choice. Well... yes and no. You people want sperg? Okay. I can do this. See, the problem is, we tend to have to come back to Earth, and spheres are actually quite poo poo at reentering an atmosphere. For one thing, they are not particularly stable; your center of mass is NEAR the geometric center of the sphere, but is capable of moving or sloshing around (I hope you do not have big water tanks) and your center of gravity is always going to try to point 'downward'. If your center of mass is moving around near the center of volume, well... uncontrolled tumble. That is bad. So usually you design your vehicles that want to reenter such that the center of mass is quite close to one side or another, and that usually happens more with flatter vehicles than spheroid ones. The second thing is heating issues. The heat generated by an object slowing down in the upper atmosphere from orbital speeds or more to a few hundred miles per hour is pretty gimonstrous. And that energy is going to be close to the same no matter what shape you are for a given mass. So, to spread out that heat over as much area as possible and save yourself some pain, you tend to present a broader face to the atmosphere you are hitting. Add it all up, and you get shapes like the Apollo capsule; a section of a sphere below a section of a cone. It is still reasonably efficient space-wise, but it is "squashed" for both of the broad reasons above (and aerodynamic reasons that I do not want to particularly go into). It puts a broad front to the air, spreading out the energy of reentry, and it keeps the center of mass fairly close to that broad side. The Space Shuttle does the same thing with a different basic geometry. Naturally, things get less restrictive than what I am saying here when as in Battletech you have fuckoff huge fusion engines that can support your own weight for a few hours while you gently drift in to a landing, but this is the theory behind why our current spacecraft look about the way they do- and why my engineer brain accepts aerodyne dropships much more eagerly than spheroid. 
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May 2, 2011 18:18
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PoptartsNinja posted:Ask a question people can answer or I'll have to do something spergy again like talking about the difference between a Holoscreen and a Holotank or something. Eeep!  Okay, what are the defining characteristics of an "urbanmech?" The ones I've looked at in megamek don't seem much different than other more standard mechs. Does it have to do with a concentration of short range weapons or low speed?
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May 2, 2011 18:20
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WarLocke posted:In a universe of Mary Sue mercenary units, the GDL is possibly the Mary Sue-est of them all. And it was the first. Yes, the first three BT novels had the Gray Death Legion as protagonists. Personally, I think some of the stuff that came later was far worse. If you think that killing a Wasp with a truck mounted machine gun was bad, wait for that mechanic main character chick that disables mechs unarmed and in a ball dress. 
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May 2, 2011 18:23
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Trast posted:Eeep! Laughably low speed. Thin armor. No long range punch to speak of, and only a middling short range punch as these things go. Cheap as hell because infantry will probably kill it anyway and why invest a lot in one?
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May 2, 2011 18:24
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