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Baron Porkface posted:Ok am I misreading this: Wizkids designs Dark Age clix game and in the instruction manual it says there was a Jihad and then an HPG blackout without saying what it was about. And so every published story about the Jihad is retroactivly filling in the non-story of the Dark Age box set? FASA had a novel publishing deal with Roc that fell through when FASA folded, and the timeline was stuck in "Forever '67" for a few years after. After the Dark Age lore was established, the Battletech writers had to backfill events without a line novel series like Blood of Kerensky or Twilight of the Clans to guide people through the major plot beats and character motivations. They had plans for a Comstar-Wobbie war for the next arc that got vastly expanded in scope (and stretched credulity because lol at blindsiding everyone with dozens of bullshit divisions) to meet the "only Stone could have saved us from certain death" Dark Age narrative.
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Jun 12, 2020 19:50
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Floppychop posted:What's the ACW again? I'm relatively new to Battletech lore and the only thing that comes to my mind that ACW is related to is the Arctic Wolf. The (American) Civil War. Protagonists in novels by Pardoe have a tendency to reference it despite it occurring over a millennium ago because it's what Pardoe knows.
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Jun 28, 2020 01:38
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Sadly amidst all of the rancor over Dominions the real setting-shattering revelation was missed, despite staring everyone in the face: the Isle of Skye is back.
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Jan 30, 2023 02:06
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Defiance Industries posted:Well there's still a couple Rec Guides to go (I think there's four remaining) so it's not impossible. I have this feeling they like to draw ATMs with unusual launchers but I am not sure where I got that impression from now. Unless I missed out on an announcement the upcoming Vol. 32 ought to be the last for now. (I'd be happy to be wrong.) The Project Phoenix variants all depicted ATMs with the same distinctive launchers, though like the protrusions on the heavy laser barrels from the same TRO those features appear to have been largely dropped from later designs.
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Feb 14, 2023 23:30
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Defiance Industries posted:There's a few different sequences sprinkled around various books at the time where someone goes "hey there's an incoming jump signature. It's really big, like a Monolith? Oh poo poo it's so big that it must be a WarShip. Oh poo poo now it's bigger than a Potemkin, it's the biggest jump sequence ever" and one of them is when they're on the way to Huntress. Obviously nobody knows what they are at the time though. I recall the scene where some pro-Katherine warship laying in ambush for Victor gets increasingly nervous as an incoming jump signature goes beyond fully-loaded Potemkin scale before being offscreened what was later revealed to be a Word Aegis super-jumping from Terra, but that was probably not the case with Serpent. AFAIR, they were a few days behind schedule because they ran into a Ghost Bear fleet and had to effect repairs and barely noticed an incoming jump seconds before they left and had to check sensor records to be sure. No time for things to look unusual, plus superjumping renders the K-F drive unusable, which is a really bad idea for trailing a fleet beyond the red line.
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Feb 16, 2023 02:18
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Sidesaddle Cavalry posted:They were in Damien Reburn's spooky secret Fidelis force setting up the Fortress Republic before then. No need to wonder; the neo-Jags are getting fleshed out on the MUL just like the other new factions of ilClan era. Filtering out the clantech stuff provides quite a few examples of inherited equipment. MadDogMike posted:It’s worse, he’s actually caused a ton of internal fighting in each Clan already. I’m half wondering if the Wolves are gonna fall and Sea Fox will take the title or something; at the current rate them buying out the Inner Sphere seems more likely than Alaric conquering much of it. Vlad's Wolves have always felt lacking compared to the green bird's villainous verve, so I wouldn't mind them sidelining the ex-exiles before charging the Capellans and getting their collective faces warcrimed off.
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May 16, 2023 02:54
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I believe that the relatively recent Victor C mech profile in Issue 6 of Shrapnel is the source of the dates on the MUL. The invading Clans dusted off old plans from the pre-Omni era to upgrade cached introtech SLDF mechs, back when they were expanding and wanted to fight with the fancy new toys whenever possible. Which does raise the question of why it took so long for this to exist.
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May 17, 2023 05:30
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Defiance Industries posted:This whole thing was enough of a shitshow to wake the founder of the subreddit. He opened it 15 years ago and hadn't posted in years, saw what was going on and fired all the mods. Good to hear. File me under the former posters of the official BT forums looking askance at a CGL-backed alternative being pushed.
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Jun 4, 2023 21:32
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Bloody Pom posted:As someone who is dreadfully out of touch with everything after the Civil War era, have they managed to sort out the whole 'HPG no worky' thing as of ilClan or does news still move at the speed of courier? Yes, but the fix is presently (3151-2) only starting to roll out.
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Jul 19, 2023 07:36
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FrostyPox posted:He's no longer writing Battletech stuff because Catalyst kicked him to the curb. I don't remember specifically why, I think it was for homophobia and/or transphobia? Nothing specific was given. Though I take the word of another BT writer in much better standing to heart and suspect his frequent and increasing public outbursts of narcissism were matched by similar private outbursts while working with CGL.
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Nov 11, 2023 00:53
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Strobe posted:I do find it really encouraging that barely a year later literally the only context I hear Pardoe come up in is agreeing with how lovely he is. His side lost the publicity contest decisively. You love to see it The whole shebang made it trivially easy to mark the content creators and grievance-culture tourists with at-best incidental knowledge and interest in the IP. Not to say there aren't homegrown chuds in the fandom; as the sample from the realm of surviving unofficial forums from the pre-Facebook era demonstrates.
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Nov 11, 2023 02:03
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The Patton/Rommel thing was largely due to someone official botching what ought to have been a PR layup and letting people read more to it than there actually was.Arquinsiel posted:The official forums were pretty terrible back in the day too. I've been told that pre-firing the mods were regularly petitioning the company staff to let them boot chuds faster. Oh, do I ever know. poo poo moderation in general and specific people clearly being allowed to continue posting in bad faith was the main reason I left there a long time ago.
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Nov 11, 2023 03:01
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PoptartsNinja posted:I forget, did Isis Marik (the last real Marik?) and Victor ever have a child? BattleMaster posted:And for gently caress's sake, stop changing your name based on the ecological status of your mascot As for the rest, I know Big Red has been Definitely Not Mad About ComStar's Death in regards to the Foxes, but his takes tend to wildly deviate from what was printed.
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Nov 21, 2023 20:43
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GD_American posted:Clan Sea Fox -> oh no, sharks killed them all, now we're Clan Diamond Shark -> oh wait they're flourishing? We're Clan Sea Fox again I've heard it before, and I've also heard it was all about branding. I just want a source. It wouldn't be the first time I've seen a common assumption by BT fans wind up having no basis, though things get understandably thorny when an IP's been around for 40 years.
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Nov 22, 2023 05:49
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I see. I failed to adequately specify and thought the MWDA mention was enough: I don't know why they changed back. What CGL has written and the Touring the Stars series elides on the subject, AFAIK.
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Nov 22, 2023 06:37
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BattleTech's a big, dysfunctional universe where in one system diamond mining requires tunneling deep enough into the crust to practically hump the planet's mantle, while one jump away diamonds are so abundant that people have to inspect produce from their garden because they're embedded throughout the soil. Gold bars can open a lot of pockets in a lot of places, particularly the further out from Terra you go.Saint Celestine posted:Is there a good book or single resource to give someone to read who is not familiar with the battletech universe/lore, so they can get up to speed? Sven van der Plank's ten minute introductory video for the introductory era remains the gold standard for me. If you like his tack, he's been taking a chronological approach to the history and has just completed his second series on the First Succession War. There's also a PDF on the official site which will take you to the 3060s, but as mentioned above CGL's going to drop a book like this with more detail and later eras.
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Dec 21, 2023 13:57
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Exodus Road is serviceable, albeit because Blaine was set on rails by the writers' consensus on how the Twilight of the Clans would play out and it's a largely self-contained story about one guy who amounts to a cameo on the space opera later on. He wanted to have the Star League seize the ship Kerensky the Elder's embalmed body is on and bombard the Clan's council chambers, which he later had the Wolverines do. After all the carefully stated reasons why the Jaguars alone were targeted to avoid escalating the conflict, that is the dumbest possible course of action which would've resulted in the Clans immediately killing everyone in Serpent/Bulldog and going all in on conquering the Inner Sphere. While there are many different products and layers to BT over the years that get people hooked, that is why I can't take people who put him on a pedestal seriously. Well, that and they like him because of all the Lost Cause poo poo.Crazy Joe Wilson posted:If I'm not mistaken, wasn't Franklin Osis like most Clan founders super messed up from the Amaris Civil War, renounced violence, then when his brother got killed, went bezerk and all in on violence again? Nah, he was one of the generation that grew up afterward. He was a strict pacifist who avoided the House-aligned street gangs in the Pentagon until seeing his brother die finally broke him and set him on the path of ultraviolence being cool and good. I don't think he ever repented of it either, AFAIK he said after decades of ruining people's poo poo it was growing dull.
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Jan 4, 2024 21:46
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PoptartsNinja posted:It's the real Phoenix Hawk IIC, yeah. That's the Grendel, though it's easy for it to claim Blackjack parentage with that brutalist exterior.
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Jan 19, 2024 20:18
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Defiance Industries posted:It is, by a few years. It predates the entire "IIC" nomenclature, which is why it never gets called a "Wolfhound IIC" until years later. Congratulations/Sorry that happened to you.
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Feb 14, 2024 20:18
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The same book also has Vlad's Wolves, the only ones still on the Crusader traditionalist bandwagon in the Dark Age outside of the Falcons, conquer Arcturus and leave the civilians alone because they figured out that bullshit doesn't work and just causes problems. Then after the Wolves left the Falcons rolled up and decided aggressive rationing of medicine and mass murder of peaceful protestors was a good way to compel compliance, with millions subsequently dying. How the Falcons were able to kill their scientists in the 3070s, including Inner Sphere civilians they classified as scientists after they invaded, and not have every Falcon found alone outside their barracks grabbed by LOKI-supported civilians and rendered like Elijah Wood’s character in Sin City (among other dishonorable ways to get murdered) is beyond me. If the Falcons lost a galaxy on Terra to civilians emboldened by ~Japanese spirit~, they sure as hell aren't imposing their will on anyone outside their gunsights.
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Feb 15, 2024 03:20
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Ivan Prisypkin posted:RE: Neo-space feudalism, I was listening to Yanis Varouvakis's latest book talk and his case that Amazon's business model is a new form of "technofeudalism" focused on rent-seeking over profit in a way that he argues abandons capitalism altogether for a desire to control entire markets. The concept that the old aristocracy and new money capitalists would converge isn't particularly new. It's not heavily emphasized, but the space feudalism in Dune(which absolutely influenced BT) likely grew out of corporate consolidation. The Atreides get Arrakis as a fiefdom, as well as shares of and a directorship in The One Company That Makes and Sells Everything.
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Feb 17, 2024 00:03
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GD_American posted:Are there any canonical training Mechs in the IS besides the Chameleon and Crockett? Trying to make a full 5000BV lance Pretty sure I've heard of the Stinger being used as a trainer, though the other bugmechs are also prolific enough to serve as a babby mechwarrior's first ride.
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Feb 23, 2024 06:13
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