I still think that the Clans are a very noble attempt at making an alien culture without having them be actual aliens. Clan society is as alien and strange to us as the Ancient Greeks/Romans would view ours or we'd view theirs.
But its definately something that could have done with a few more passes and tidying up to make it not collapse like a failed souffle.
For me one of the oddest things is that the Clans are like Elves. We're told that they have a fairly limited population base and that they can't sustain heavy losses. But you can have several clusters of them get wiped out and its barely a blip on the radar. The only Clan that ever suffered manpower issues was the Smoke Jags who never really got back on their feet following the horrific losses sustained on Tukayyid and Luthien.
Your typical Clan Warrior takes 16 years minimum to 'make' and final graduation is a live fire battle with horrific casualties. So Clan Sibko's must be planned far far in advance and whilst we've no idea of how many Sibko's are running in any individual Clan at any one time the whole system is set up to deliver a comparative trickle of personnel and reacts poorly to huge casualty losses.
The real world analogue of this is the pilots of the Imperial Japanese Navy in WW2. Pre war they went through a HUGELY rigerious training regime as well as an exceptionally stringient test to get into the pilot program. They had huge amounts of flight training, deck landings etc as well as tactical training and more that was considerably longer than pilots underwent in the USN or RN. The result was that only the very creme of the crop was able to pass and failure rates were very high, and if you failed once you was gone.
Again, it was set up to deliver a slow but steady trickle of pilots and reacted poorly to any sudden need to replace loads. Even during the initial period of Japanese involvement in WW2 the IJN refused to alter this policy and even though pilot numbers were dropping, they'd not suffered any mass casualty events.
At the pivotal battle of Midway, the IJN carriers went into battle with about 75% of their airgroups in total as pilots and aircraft hadn't been replaced.
The losses at Midway were bad, but the true gutting of the IJN's pilot cadres was the meatgrinder of the Solomon Islands and the battles around it and only belatedly did the start cutting back on training and the requirements to get in.
This kind of happens with the Clans, with the Falcons using battles like the attack on Coventry to be a Warriors trial of position but it still takes a very long time to grow and train a warrior.
The other issue the Clans have is also echoed in the IJN. As the war went on, the IJN's best pilots were kept on the front lines or on island bases etc and it was a case of 'they don't send you home unless its in a box'. The USN on the other hand was rotating experienced pilots back home, and they'd teach the new pilots going through training the tricks and tactics they had learned. The IJN didn't do that, so any new pilots who's mistakes might have been caught by an experienced veteran are missed, and they go into battle with these mistakes not addressed and often died for it.
The Clans and their treatment of older people is quite simply insane. You eliminate any body of knowledge by either fighting and killing an older and more experienced Warrior, or they don't cover themselves in glory and are consigned to being solhama where their usual fate is clearing minefields with their faces.
And for a society obcessed with not wasting anything, this is a massive waste (along with you know the death battles in giant robots that usually leaves one or two smashed up).
One idea i've seen floated around is going and having a more feudal system with the Trueborn being limited in numbers but massively well trained and equipped, and they're supported by serfs or men-at-arms IE Freeborn who would support their 'Knightly' betters with less decent kit and inferior training. The honour duels etc still happen but its almost always a 1 v 1.
As was said in another thread, the Creche and Iron womb system has the solution to the Clans problems, as they could be hugely efficient and churn out people by the absolute bucket load, the Clans could have expanded, turned to massive use of asteroid mining or strip mining worlds around the Cluster and Homeworlds.
There's a lot that could be done to fix some of the issues without changing the Clans too much in terms of a society and people.
The other problem the Clans have, is that Nikki K. was
green. I'm not talking color either-the society he created is
obsessed with ecological issues. (Read Warriors of Kerensky if you don't believe me). this means a LOT of what you suggest as a solution requires a change of a fundamental sort at a fundamental level in the morality of the Clans as a
civilization.
They use wind and solar instead of fusion or nuclear for their nonmilitary/non-shipping infrastructure, for example, which would be fine if they were, say, using solar collectors on satellites to beam power to the surface, but that's not what they
do. The practice of "Enclaves" means a terrestrial focus, making spaceborne industry like you describe the freak, not the rule (see entry on Clan Ghost Bear, who worked out spaceborne mining and industries with the Snow Ravens, and it's a big deal instead of being a common practice.)
Their economic structure doesn't work for developing prosperity on purpose-the 'zero waste' practices aren't really 'zero waste', because they're focused on limiting
economic surpluses-that is, it's a command economy, and it's easier to command an economy if you can put the boot to the proles with, y'know, actual boots (or foot actuators).
Per the descriptions we've been given of the actual planetary conditions, most of the Kerensky Cluster and Pentagon worlds were probably BETTER than much of the settled 'Wealthy' inner sphere worlds whose surpluses astounded Clanners on arrival, because their system doesn't
permit the sort of growth or investment that turns hellhole almost-habitable nasty planets into liveable real-estate with booming industries and widespread prosperity.
Average lifespan of a common worker (even a dirt farmer) in the Inner Sphere is around seventy, seventy five in the bad parts. In the Homeworlds the average lifespan of their majority population of workers is around 56.
Their currency is two-tiered and separated by caste, if you're not a Merchant, you don't own anything and you don't have the ability to save against the future-your bank account resets to zero every payday before your current work credit is deposited, meaning that things like
Pensions, health insurance, or major investments we in the west take for granted, don't exist. When you get too old to work, your allotment goes away and your family can't do a damn thing about it-you're expected to gracefully let them leave you to starve. (Source: Warriors of Kerensky), and anything you had, that you might sell in another culture to live a few days longer?
well, that's the Clan's resources and if it has any value it will be redistributed without consideration for anything but meeting quota.
The Clan system is basically engineered to hamstring them from the get-go on
every level except producing good fighters, the real miracle is that the Clans
advanced at all with that system in place.
Further, it's not a production economy, it's a
redistribution economy. Yes, they produce goods, but anyone who is productive stands a very good chance of being traded around like the slave they are to whoever has the most aggressive big stick...and is expected to perform as good property when the exchange takes place. Failure to do so results in things like Londerholm.
