An IS Succession Wars era game, how to approach LosTech?

[Beazle]

There should be enough LVL 2 tech around to make your game fun.

Seriously, don't worry too much about sticking to canon.

This is BT, even the canon doesn't stick to canon.

[kaliyama]

[deleted]

[Garner]

Assuming that the players haven't really accumulated enough experience to rise up to 'elite' level by the time the clans are introduced, I would imagine their survival rate against clanners while armed with only intro tech is near to zero...

[Beazle]

I disagree - there was no, or very very little, weapons lostech available.  Comstar aggressively destroyed or seized even the smallest amount of it.  I think the best illustration of this is what an outlier Wolf's Dragoons was for having been rumored to have star league technology in its mechs. 

That's funny, because I use that same example to illustrate exactly how little Comstar cared about lostech weapons (as opposed to manufacturing, or databases).

Think about it, the Wolf's Dragoons was already an outlier because of it's size (far more company sized merc units than there are units 5 regiments strong), so they should have been on Comstars radar already.  Then rumors start going around about them having found a cache of Star League gear to get them started and Comstar does fairly little about it.  They investigate, sure, but do they arrange accidents?  Do they sweep in with a few hundred ROM agents and kill them all in their sleep?

Nope.

They way I see it Comstar has 2 mayjor objectives. 

1: manipulate technology in the way we all know and love.

2: keep quiet about it so the Houses don't gang up and crush them. 

So you have to ask your self, is a small merc unit walking around with a bit of lostech that's bound to be destroyed in battle in a year or two worth the risk involved in launching an operation to destroy such tech and risk revealing themselves?  Or would the wiser course be to simply sit back and observe until the very nature of war does your job for you?

[Gustav Kuriga]

That's funny, because I use that same example to illustrate exactly how little Comstar cared about lostech weapons (as opposed to manufacturing, or databases).

Think about it, the Wolf's Dragoons was already an outlier because of it's size (far more company sized merc units than there are units 5 regiments strong), so they should have been on Comstars radar already.  Then rumors start going around about them having found a cache of Star League gear to get them started and Comstar does fairly little about it.  They investigate, sure, but do they arrange accidents?  Do they sweep in with a few hundred ROM agents and kill them all in their sleep?

Nope.

They way I see it Comstar has 2 mayjor objectives. 

1: manipulate technology in the way we all know and love.

2: keep quiet about it so the Houses don't gang up and crush them. 

So you have to ask your self, is a small merc unit walking around with a bit of lostech that's bound to be destroyed in battle in a year or two worth the risk involved in launching an operation to destroy such tech and risk revealing themselves?  Or would the wiser course be to simply sit back and observe until the very nature of war does your job for you?

That's what I think happens.

[Acolyte]

I think ComStar has different responses depending on what you do with the tech. Mount it on your 'Mech? Go ahead! you'll just be contributing to the grinding of humanity and they get that much closer to Blakes vision. Give the weapon to Tharkad University for study? Pity about the fire. #P

   - Shane

[kaliyama]

[deleted]

[idea weenie]

So you have to ask your self, is a small merc unit walking around with a bit of lostech that's bound to be destroyed in battle in a year or two worth the risk involved in launching an operation to destroy such tech and risk revealing themselves?  Or would the wiser course be to simply sit back and observe until the very nature of war does your job for you?

Or even encourage it.  I.e. dump a few extra C-Bills into someone's pocket in the Periphery to hire the characters for a pirate hunting mission.  Comstar gets a good contact with the person they gave the money to (or they just donate locally and the funds are freed up), the pirates get sufficiently damaged to go away (or destroyed), and the LosTech gets ground down.

Win all three ways.

[Beazle]

First, however, they would have to know that a unit is using some small amount of Lostech.

Think of the thousands of planets in the innersphere, and the hundreds of mechs in private or merc hands scattered across those planets.

Not even comstar could afford to sent teams of ROM agents to sneak in and verify which units actually do or do not have said tech.

I think it's far more likely that they would just sit back, monitor HPG traffic for somebody making a big deal about Star League stuff (putting plans up for auction, finding a functional asteroid factory, sinking billions into R&D) and then act.

Comstar operates on a national level.  A handful of mercs with some ERPPCs just don't mater on that scale.

[FedComGirl]

I don't think Comstar would go after a merc unit unless they had something big. A cache of weapons/mechs isn't big. They didn't even go after the Big Mac's Spectors. They did go after the Grey Death because they sat on a SLDF library Facility. Rachan didn't even care about the mechs stored there. He was using them as payment and they could have been filled with lostech. What mattered was the memory core. It would allow, and did, technology to recover. All those other incidents Comstar was involved in was tech research. They didn't want tech to be recovered or improved. Weapons themselves aren't a big deal. Someone selling genuine plans to a lostech water filtration system would be a much bigger concern to them.