What is the weakest or most unbelievable aspect of the BT Universe?

[BrianDavion]

The homogeneity and the stability of the Successor States.

the most unbelivable about that is people thinking the great houses are homogenius despite massive evidance to the contrary :)

[Adrian Gideon]

Don’t believe the memes.

[GRUD]

Don’t believe the memes.

What about the, "Meanwhile, in the Periphery . . ." Memes?  :D

Are you saying those are false or misleading in some way?  ;D

[General308]

What about the, "Meanwhile, in the Periphery . . ." Memes?  :D

Are you saying those are false or misleading in some way?  ;D

That depends if it a picture of a catgirl in it then it is likely true  :D

[Orin J.]

They expect me to beleive an interplanetry government can accomplish anything? When intercounty work is bogged down for years because of random yokels wanting to grift everyone on every side? No, i don't believe it. The chickens were right, the galaxy is mad.

[idea weenie]

That higher-tech items require less maintenance as a percentage of their cost.

Proof:
Campaign Operations (Corrected 3rd printing) -> p24 -> Stage 4: Determine Operating Expenses -> Spare Parts (bottom of left column, top of right column):
The following units use .1% of their mass every month in spare parts: ’Mech, fighter, vehicle, DropShip, WarShip, or battle armor
The cost of the generic spare parts is 10,000 C-Bills per ton.
This is before the multipliers (i.e. easy to repair, hard-to-find parts, etc)

So you could have a basic 3025-era Mech massing 100 tons that costs 1,000 C-Bills per month in maintenance.  You could also have a 100-ton Clan-tech Mech that has an XL fusion engine costing 4* as much as the 3025-era Mech's engine, but that Clan-tech Mech also costs 1,000 C-Bills per month in maintenance.

Proposal: monthly maintenance costs should be proportional to their purchase cost before multipliers, not to the unit's mass.

[BrianDavion]

Don’t believe the memes.

I've always thought that battletech didn't do eneugh to play up how wonderfully wackily multicultural the inner sphere is

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

That higher-tech items require less maintenance as a percentage of their cost.

Proof:
Campaign Operations (Corrected 3rd printing) -> p24 -> Stage 4: Determine Operating Expenses -> Spare Parts (bottom of left column, top of right column):
The following units use .1% of their mass every month in spare parts: ’Mech, fighter, vehicle, DropShip, WarShip, or battle armor
The cost of the generic spare parts is 10,000 C-Bills per ton.
This is before the multipliers (i.e. easy to repair, hard-to-find parts, etc)

So you could have a basic 3025-era Mech massing 100 tons that costs 1,000 C-Bills per month in maintenance.  You could also have a 100-ton Clan-tech Mech that has an XL fusion engine costing 4* as much as the 3025-era Mech's engine, but that Clan-tech Mech also costs 1,000 C-Bills per month in maintenance.

Proposal: monthly maintenance costs should be proportional to their purchase cost before multipliers, not to the unit's mass.

Nothing regarding money and how much things cost in Battletech actually makes sense.

[RifleMech]

The rebuilding of the CCAF into the power house it is now.   
Vlad saving Katherine.
Katherine becoming a Mech Warrior.
Stone and the Republic.
Alaric Ward and the Wolf Empire.
Fortress Republic.

[Caedis Animus]

The entire Waco Rangers beef and the issues resulting from it.

[Adrian Gideon]

I've always thought that battletech didn't do eneugh to play up how wonderfully wackily multicultural the inner sphere is

Yup. The memes don’t help.

From the latest BattleTech Bible:

CULTURAL UNITY AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY
Simplicity may have led to giving each major state a cultural style all its own, but we have regularly acknowledged that most states are home to a cosmopolitan blend of ethnicities. The language of the Draconis Combine—the most culturally homogeneous Great House in the game—may be Japanese, but the vast number of the state’s inhabitants are non-Asian, and you can even find sizeable populations of African, Arabic, and northern European influences living under the Dragon. It is therefore more accurate that while each state has an overarching culture that everyone in the state shares, they are melting pots of heritages and cultural identities, much like Canada and the United States today.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

One thing I've noticed is that the novels often don't mention a character's race, or if they do it's only a single, easy to miss line.

[VensersRevenge]

Which I'm very happy about. The Yellow Peril elements of the first few books was very uncomfortable to read.

[Jal Phoenix]

When I'm writing, especially a short story with limited word count, I won't bother with details like race unless it is somehow relevant to the story. I prefer to focus on the personality of a character, as that's much more relevant. Besides,  there are other ways you can leave clues for the reader to interpret. I wrote an entire story from the perspective of a mentally handicapped middle-aged man without spelling it out. Of course, no one picked up on it, but still.

[BlackLanner05]

One thing I've noticed is that the novels often don't mention a character's race, or if they do it's only a single, easy to miss line.

Thank God. Who cares what their race is? It's a largely post racial universe and all the better for it. Yes House Liao is "Chinese" but the Fedcom's top ace pilot and most popular Solaris champion Kai Allard Liao is also Chinese.

The Clans don't care about race at all. Just effectiveness.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Which I'm very happy about. The Yellow Peril elements of the first few books was very uncomfortable to read.

Very true, but it also means that most of the Successor States get portrayed as being heavily of a single ethnic type.  Except, ironically, for the Draconis Combine due to how explicitly it's got non-Japanese characters in positions of importance.

[Jal Phoenix]

The Clans don't care about race at all. Just effectiveness.

They care a great deal about birth status. And age. The Clans are astonishingly bigoted.

[GoGo Yubari]

They care a great deal about birth status. And age. The Clans are astonishingly bigoted.

One thing which kinda bugs me about the Clans (or the setting, or just aligning game mechanics with the intended setting, not sure where to place the blame really) is that clearly the Clans aren't succeeding in what they claim they are doing, ie. creating better and better warriors from generation to generation. On one level, we don't see a progression of game mechanical skill levels. Even waving that of as a pure abstraction (which I'm not sure I even want to do), I'm not sure the progression is there in fiction. Certainly their sibkos breed better warriors than 20 years of mispent youth in the Inner sphere, accounted for their +1 skill levels, but that's the result of their utter specialization. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing an actual mechanic where the Clans know how to breed SPAs into sibkos out of genetic material, which would go a long way to at least validating their approach somewhat without leaning too hard on the eugenics.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

It's because their beliefs are effectively a religion, not a science.  Without taking a more proactive stance toward genetic engineering, they're not going to get consistent improvements to specific phenotype traits.  And even then they'd have trouble doing it without adding undesirable side-effects like early-onset Parkinson's or something.

[Jal Phoenix]

I think a lot of that has to do with early writers wanting to show how their characters were special, so their freeborns and older warriors were able to defeat the genetically engineered super soldiers with relative ease. This got carried forward in ways that unfortunately made the Clans seems something of a joke. Kind of like when the early writers for ST:TNG always had their super alien beat up Worf every week, leading to Worf being regarded as a joke for several seasons.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Eh, a defining part of the Clans has always been hypocrisy and a refusal to recognize anything that contradicts their own worldview.

[SteelRaven]

WoR showed the Crusader Clans are very self destructive. The Wolf/Falcon/Jag Il Clan has to change to survive as Terra cost them allot though signs point to them still being jerks to some extent but maybe just Successor Lord 'my name makes me special' level Jerks vs 'You have a mother? Gross!" level jerks.

[Crimson Dawn]

I would much rather have the prowess of clan mech warriors being derived more from genetics to continue to appear to not matter so much.  The clans focus on that is something that feels more and more gross as time has gone on for me.  The fact that they still believe that and yet I don't think they have ever really put the claim to a true test considering they always stack the deck for trueborns and IS warriors were not put through such a long and intense training program leads me to hope that in actuality the benefit of being trueborn outside of society factors is almost nil.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Yes, starting their kids training at age 8-9 is going to do a lot more to make their skills than some sort of purity of genetics.

[Charistoph]

One last thing to consider, Clan eugenics are bred for a certain type of warfare, i.e. Zellbrigen.  What they classify for success is primarily along what succeeded in that environment.  That doesn't really compensate well for indiscriminate warfare with soldiers, as they found out when the Inner Sphere actually started applying it to them.

[SteelRaven]

The Clans are meant to be a dark reflection of the IS. IS has Feudalism and a heredity based social structure and the Clans of that Cast system and creepy eugenics. Problem is writers started shaving off layers of Feudalism from the IS to make the Houses more contemporary and relatable (thus no one acknowledging the great houses are not democracies which should be a issue) Ether way, things have already significantly changed for the Clans in the IS, from the Ghost Bear Domintion to the new Il Clan. I wont pretend what this will lead to but guess ether the Clans will continue being the creepier faction replacing Com Star as those weirdos or we will start seeing something new, like mix of of Feudal System with a Warrior hierarchy. Still messed up but we are talking the Inner Sphere.         

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

One last thing to consider, Clan eugenics are bred for a certain type of warfare, i.e. Zellbrigen.  What they classify for success is primarily along what succeeded in that environment.  That doesn't really compensate well for indiscriminate warfare with soldiers, as they found out when the Inner Sphere actually started applying it to them.

That's definitely training, not eugenics.

[BrianDavion]

Playing devil's advocate the inner sphere mechwarrior is often from a noble family of mechwarriors. you can't exactly point to Kai Allard-Liao and claim that he proves the clan eugenics system is meaningless given he's the child of two extremely gifted mechwarriors and likewise effectively trained from a young age.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Playing devil's advocate the inner sphere mechwarrior is often from a noble family of mechwarriors. you can't exactly point to Kai Allard-Liao and claim that he proves the clan eugenics system is meaningless given he's the child of two extremely gifted mechwarriors and likewise effectively trained from a young age.

And to counter that, there are many mechwarriors from noble families who are barely competent enough to know which end of the PPC to aim toward the enemy.  Protagonists from the novels tend to be individuals of exceptional skill regardless of what the circumstances of their parentage is.

[Cannonshop]

Eugenics itself is a discredited philosophy from the late 19th to early 20th centuries.  Once you've got the ability to build and control fire, make reliable tools, and communicate with language, (IOW once your brain's big enough in the right areas) nature's pretty much done all that can be done without physically rewriting the DNA strands.  iow beyond that point, you don't get improvements, you get inbreeding.  for a specifically ugly example, look at Central European Royalty-the Hapsburgs.  They bred in a very characteristic lower jaw line, along with Haemophilia.

or the Pharoahnic lines in Egypt, which inbred to the point of failure.

Humans, in the real world, don't domesticate real well through breeding.  They DO develop superior skills through things like culture and upbringing.  Take an embryo from a poverty-stricken third world nation, incubate and raise in a First World nation, and they're not going to suddenly know how to hunt with primitive tools, but the might know how to fix your computer.

What you learn and where you learn it has more to do with martial talent, than who your parents were, because (Especially with Technological societies) modern warfare is more about your education, training, self-discipline and group discipline, than about whose Zygotes you spawned from.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson's ancestors were slaves, forbidden to read, he's one of the most recognizably great astrophysicists in a generation.  Nurture counts for more than Nature by a long shot, and Nicky Kerensky's criteria for his breeding programme is based on disproven Lamarckian theory anyway.