EDIT: For the preservation of this thread, I will abstain from further commentary along this line, though others should feel free to rebut my views as they see fit.
Topically, the Manticore has been my conception of a BTU MBT since
MW1E and likely always will be. I am so looking forward to the revised models I find it hard to believe!
This boggles me since 2750 & 3050 were released "less than a year?" apart from each other IIRC.
How you "can't" use them when they were introduced (historically) & reintroduced (currently) right after each other is beyond me unless you stayed in 3025 forever.
Heck, 2 of them were fluffed as still being in production IIRC even before the TRO3025R came out.
(Guillotine from House Marik & Champion from TRO2750 itself.)
Because none of the groups I played with departed from the contemporaneous timelines: it was 3025 until it was the 4th SW, then it was the Clan Invasion. (And there was a groovy Solaris VII campaign that ran for a long,
long time spanning from
MW1E to well past the boxed set release). It never really occurred to us to play in the Star league era (and still doesn't, to me) and like you said yourself, 2750 and 3050 were close enough in the real-world* that it was time to get slaughtered by the Clans. Who had time to play with machines no one had** since the real choices were running the derelicts you had dragged through the 3rd/4th Succession Wars or cadging some new-tech upgrades from an unwary House procurement office[r]?
*
TRO 2750 was released in 1989,
TRO 3050 in 1990. Given the vagaries of life, release dates, and the state of the world back then (no internet, finding things by chance in bookstores because game stores were not A Thing for me nor my friends), the release dates were
at least a year between
availability, not 'less than'.
**I think you should reread
2750 for yourself; there is no indication any of those designs survived as viable entities into 3025. The
Champion's line about production is clearly written in the 2750-era tense; every other entry has a bracketed Editorial entry discussing times after the SLDF era.
As an aside, it might be worth noting that while the ComGuards became official in the
20 Year Update (FASA 1639, dated 1989), I can't ever remember anyone actually considering them to be a
playable faction until maybe
ComStar (FASA 1655, dated 1992) was released, but more likely not until
Tukayyid (FASA 1685, dated 1994). Nearly twenty years later, after the FedCom civil War, Jihad, etcetera, that may seem strange. But back then, they were just people who were in the background and assumed to be awesome enough that it wouldn't pay to go against them except in some specialized RPG campaign. Besides, 3025-era players still remembered that attacking ComStar was the prelude to a Series of Unfortunate Events for your faction...
