It would be like saying the entire state your in (clan) only gets pregnant every 20 years since that is a generation.
I don’t see this as an issue for the Clans, for several reasons.
One, it’s a five-year trueborn generation planning cycle, not 20 years (obviously).
Two, the trueborn generation cycle produces a huge excess of warrior candidates that wash out (or die) during training and ToPs, anyway. In some cases, the canon indicates that as small as a few percent of newborn sibkin become warriors. Even with a five-year trueborn generation planning cycle, Clan toumans are not suffering for a lack of sibkin. (In fact, all these excess trueborns was one of the secondary reasons the trueborn program was created in the first place, because it also helped artificially boost Clan population growth.)
Three, the trueborn population is a very small fraction (less than 1%) of the overall Clan population. 99%+ of the remaining Clan population is still making babies the old fashioned way outside the 5-year trueborn planning cycle.
Or like saying, that highschools only take in new students once every 4 years & they graduate that group as seniors before another group comes in.
Apply this to 2-year JR. highs & 6 year grade schools equally.
I don’t see this as a problem, either. If a four-year school needs X teachers to cover Y students, it doesn’t matter whether the students’ birthdates are spread over four years or one year. If it’s the former, then X/4 teachers will cover Y/4 students each year, as we do in our schools. If it’s the latter, then all X teachers will stay with all Y students for all four years, as I suspect (and I think the canon fiction indicates) happens in Clan creches, training centers, and other sibko whatchamacallits
To use my Basic Training analogy from above
I’m not current or ex-military, but I totally get the logistics issues you’re raising. They’re accurate and legitimate, and I have no argument against them.
That said, we’re not talking about your unit, service, or military. We’re talking about Clan toumans and societies, which are very different from the US and other modern-day militaries and societies. Clanner priorities are way out of whack compared to our own.
To use one example, in their ToPs, the Clans routinely destroy one, maybe two or more, top-of-the-line omnimechs just qualify a sibkin for the warrior caste and determine their rank. That’s just nutty. It would be like destroying one or more F-22s or Abrams tanks for every cadet out of fighter school or tank crew out of armor training. It gets even nuttier in Trials of Bloodright and Grand Melees. In those, whole clusters of mechs — the equivalent of wings of our fighter aircraft or battalions of our armor units — are destroyed just to identify one geneparent for future trueborn generations.
If the Clans are willing to expend that much horrendously expensive military material just to determine who gets to be a warrior and who gets to be a geneparent, then I have no doubt that the Clans are willing to expend whatever resources are necessary to support their five-year trueborn generation planning cycle. What’s the cost of additional iron wombs, training facilities, shooting ranges, and training personnel compared to the cost of all the omnimechs that get junked every five years testing the warrior and bloodname candidates that come out of those trueborn gestation and training programs? I’d venture it’s relatively small by comparison. (Maybe even an afterthought or rounding error in whatever constitutes a Clan or touman’s budget.)
Again, I absolutely think your logistical points about military recruitment, training, rotation, replenishment, etc. today are spot on. My point is that the Clans are not that kind of military or society, and we have to put ourselves in their somewhat alien minds to understand why certain things are the way they are in the Clans.
This may not help, but I think it’s no mistake that the Clans use Mongol terms like touman and khan. I think Boy Peterson or whoever is responsible for first writing up the Clans wanted to be explicit in how Clan society is more totally geared for war like those ancient “barbarian” societies, and not like the Houses in BT or our own modern societies. I dabble in Norse studies, and I find the Clans to have much more in common with the Viking mindset and outlook (and similar Migration Era and post-Migration Era peoples) than anything medieval or modern. Much like how the Clans expend multi-zillion Kerensky military hardware on Trials of Position and Bloodright, the Norse and similar societies buried swords, horses, ships and other invaluable (for them) resources with their warriors and leaders instead of handing them down to family and friends. I don’t think the similarities are an accident.
What do you think those Scientists & Techs would be doing for 5 years?
This is more in my wheelhouse as an astrophysics major turned engineering program manager.
I think the Clans and the Scientist Caste approach each trueborn generation as a major engineering systems development project. They’re trying to build the optimum touman (or optimum incoming element of their touman) with each new generation. It’s probably a lengthy process that’s not terribly dissimilar at a high level from how a new weapons system gets developed today.
The Scientist Caste probably has to start with requirements from their customer(s) in the Warrior Caste, which itself probably spends considerable time assessing threats, evaluating unit performance, setting goals, and making plans that impact those requirements for the next generation (e.g., we need how many warriors of what phenotypes with what spread of characteristics). In parallel, the Scientist Caste also has to gather and normalize tons of data on sibkin growth and trueborn warrior codex performance across their entire training program and touman.
Then, and I’m guessing this is what they spend most of their time on, the Scientist Caste has to turn that data into information, which probably involves endless debates over qualitative judgements. Do two codex kills against ancient limping Mercury mechs on a bandit hunt equal one cored assault omnimech kill during a formal inter-Clan trial? Are any of those kills evidence of the leadership, initiative, tactical thinking, or strategic insight that the Warrior Caste listed as its top four requirements for the next trueborn generation? Does that codex really indicate a proclivity for insubordination or did that warrior just have a string of bad commanders?
With that information in hand, the Scientist Caste then has to analyze what mix of geneparent pairings will give the Warrior Caste what it wants in the next generation balanced against other constraints and demands. This is unlikely to be as simple as just repeating or expanding the most successful geneparent pairings from the last generation. Older and/or popular female germline material may be limited, creating scarcity for some of the more desirable pairings, which have to be supplemented with less desirable pairings. There may be a lot of debate and judgement calls on how many genepairings to risk on certain new bloodnamed warriors, who may be performing great in the field but whose genetic material has not been paired before. There may be issues with genetic diversity that have to be balanced against having Natasha Kerensky (or pick your best warrior) in every genepairing. Not unlike systems analysis, there’s probably a lot of iteration and modeling (and maybe even simulation and red-team testing) to arrive at a final product.
And then that product probably has to be reviewed by the customer(s) in the Warrior Caste, which may be another iterative process if the Warrior Caste sends (maybe repeatedly) the Scientist Caste back to the drawing boards.
Even when well-planned and run, I could easily see this process taking years, just as we spend years designing, developing, and testing new weapons systems. Putting zygotes in iron wombs is not what the Scientist Caste spends the vast bulk of its time on. I think it’s the data-intensive, qualitative decision making, and iterative optimization processes that determine what mix of zygotes should be created in the first place that the Scientist Caste spends nearly all its time on.
The idea of cannibalizing 2nd line units for Front Line only happened because of the extreme 80% losses from Front Line forces in the Refusal War.
Even "Harvest" wars was something of a fluke idea Vlad had to take advantage of the lust so many Home clans had to get to the IS.
We don’t really know because there is so little information on the Clans pre-Revival. But I seriously doubt no Clan had brought secondline/garrison clusters into frontline galaxies prior to the Refusal War. And the Harvest Trials are just a fancy name for the Falcon and Wolf post-Refusal Trials of Possession, which the Clans have been doing for warriors and units for a couple centuries. Even in the limited material we have, there is evidence of contract bids and other measures pre-Revival
Again, I’m not the Clan canon cop. If my interpretation of the canon sources doesn’t work for you, then by all means, go with your own. But hopefully this explains where my headcanon on the topic is coming from.
