Author Topic: What if?: Periphery state brings back retrotech Mechs and Aerospace fighters.  (Read 3895 times)

Izzy193

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Now this Scenario is set in the 3rd SW period and assumes that Primitive Battlemech, industrialmech and Aerospace Fighter tech is still available just not used as much.

What if a Periphery state started reintroducing Primitive mech and Aerospace fighters along with support vehicles into their army?

Would they be used in conjunction with or temporally replace standard tech designs?

How would they go about producing them?

And How would the Inner Sphere at large be impacted by this in the 30th century and early 31st century?

This also assumes ComStar Does not interfere and I'll let you list the answers to each periphery states actions in this scenario.

glitterboy2098

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given its the periphery, in such a situation i'd actually figure comstar was the entity behind it. especially if it was a lesser periphery power, C* did a lot of power building in the periphery during the 3rd war period. funneling resources to pirates, manipulating the periphery powers, and so on. all meant to weaken the main 5 powers of the inner sphere.

and a lot of the effect on the setting is going to depend on factors like how many primitive mechs can they produce, and which types. and how willing they are to export.
« Last Edit: 06 August 2023, 16:53:23 by glitterboy2098 »

DOC_Agren

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None of the major periphery power block would be really change much if they have retrotech units.  It might "expand" their military some but not enough effect major change.

The TC might a larger defensive military, but they aren't going to go on offensive well.  Still limited by transport ability.  But you might end up seeing some showing up in the Merc forces as the TC sells them

Comstar if as glitterboy2098 said wasn't behind this power upgrading, then not sure they care as the tech is not advanced.
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RifleMech

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Militaries overall would be a bit bigger by a few regiments.
Frontline units because they'd requisition standard units from the Militia. Militia because Primitive Units are cheaper than standard units.

There would be more IndyMechs in support units. There would also be more mechs available to mercenaries so losing one's mech isn't as big a deal. And there would also be more mixed tech units and fewer lower tech units as as primitive fusion engines are used instead of ICE.

wanderer25

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   Pirates would have a harder times has there would be allot more mech/asf garrisons to spread around !

Sure those primitives  ASF might not be on part with modern fighters but  all the suddent there's a dozen of them coming after  me  and the two  I've got on my Leopard/Union!

Izzy193

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   Pirates would have a harder times has there would be allot more mech/asf garrisons to spread around !

Sure those primitives  ASF might not be on part with modern fighters but  all the suddent there's a dozen of them coming after  me  and the two  I've got on my Leopard/Union!

what I saw when I read this post from the [Insert periphery ASF Garrison here] Suddenly sees an incoming pirate raid:

RifleMech

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   Pirates would have a harder times has there would be allot more mech/asf garrisons to spread around !

Sure those primitives  ASF might not be on part with modern fighters but  all the suddent there's a dozen of them coming after  me  and the two  I've got on my Leopard/Union!


With more mechs available, there could be more pirates.

wanderer25

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With more mechs available, there could be more pirates.

Maybe, but they also need dropships/jumpships and there are only so many of those around!

Zematus737

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The House Arano campaign has a hint of this with some very old tech being used in an Atlas, if I remember right.  There is also a unique jump ship being used, the Argos.

truetanker

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Argo is a prototype dropship , not a jumper.

Only one made and that's all, located in system.

Now, however, CGL could allow more, but as is, that game is only canon so far.

Besides, the amount of time needed to get there is close to the OG Exodus Road in terms of jumps needed.

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cray

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With more mechs available, there could be more pirates.

Could be. However, most pirates tend to be Inner Sphere House or merc units fallen on hard times. They don't grow much on Periphery unit salvage, and they'd grow less in this situation.

So, barring a Periphery state with the retro-tech factories going pirate kingdom, this would reduce the pirate activity of the Periphery.
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RifleMech

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Maybe, but they also need dropships/jumpships and there are only so many of those around!

True but but that would depend on how full their mech bays are.


Could be. However, most pirates tend to be Inner Sphere House or merc units fallen on hard times. They don't grow much on Periphery unit salvage, and they'd grow less in this situation.

So, barring a Periphery state with the retro-tech factories going pirate kingdom, this would reduce the pirate activity of the Periphery.


Some but not all. And the Periphery areas are their favorite targets as they have fewer defenders.

Zematus737

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You're right!  I looked back and confirmed this thing has 2 docking collars, but it is not jump capable.  What a shame.  A strange ship...  What's the purpose of a MDCS on a dropship?  To save fuel?

Argo is a prototype dropship , not a jumper.

Only one made and that's all, located in system.

Now, however, CGL could allow more, but as is, that game is only canon so far.

Besides, the amount of time needed to get there is close to the OG Exodus Road in terms of jumps needed.

TT

Zematus737

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Argo is a prototype dropship , not a jumper.

Did you know you could slap a compact K-F drive to this bad boy!?  It has a 57k bay and a compact drive with a sail is just under 50. 

Intermittent_Coherence

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Did you know you could slap a compact K-F drive to this bad boy!?  It has a 57k bay and a compact drive with a sail is just under 50.
Not quite.
While it has the tonnage allowance, the construction rules for a compact drive on vessels with a maneuver drive puts a minimum total mass of 100,000Tons. The Argo is below this limit.

Zematus737

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Not quite.
While it has the tonnage allowance, the construction rules for a compact drive on vessels with a maneuver drive puts a minimum total mass of 100,000Tons. The Argo is below this limit.

All true.  In the Aerospace 2 construction rules you need 50k per docking collar, yet the Argo has three, one for itself and two for two 2k ton dropships.  It's a weird ship but it is crying for a K-F drive.  Maybe the best next thing is to just figure a new ship based on the same chassis idea with MCDS on a pansy warship.  The argo cannot enter atmosphere anyway, just like the Behemoth.  Just makes you wonder a little though.  Either way, the conversions for the engine and system control favor warship in terms of tonnage anyway.  Control systems for Dropships are massive by comparison, even if the engines are nearly comparable by tonnage (at least at this maximum range for dropships).  To be short by 3,000 tons on that 97,000 is a darn shame, but rules are rules.

theagent

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Not quite.
While it has the tonnage allowance, the construction rules for a compact drive on vessels with a maneuver drive puts a minimum total mass of 100,000Tons. The Argo is below this limit.

Which is why you go for the Sub-Compact K-F drive...although I don't understand why it's limited to a max of 25k tons...

Zematus737

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Which is why you go for the Sub-Compact K-F drive...although I don't understand why it's limited to a max of 25k tons...

The size of the KF drive is established by the construction rules.  So, if the sub-compact drive is 50% of the total mass of the Argos, it would be 47,500 tons (well over the 25k limit), but would have been enough to send the Argos by itself into hyperspace.  But the restrictions would make little sense of the multi docking collars that the Argos does already have and render them even further uselessness by the inability to take dropships into hyperspace with it.  Has to be a normal compact, or designate it entirely as a jumpship rather than a warship.  It would have to drop all the habs and that would, once again, imo, make the entire design no different than just using a normal jumpship.  Best bet is to redesign, add that pesky 5k to bump it into the 100k range for compact drive eligibility and bring everything else with it to make it play by the rules.
« Last Edit: 18 December 2023, 19:05:58 by Zematus737 »

glitterboy2098

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to be honest the fact that the Argos could be replicated as a warship or primitive jumpship if scaled up another couple thousand tons is probably why they only built two of the things. it's an interesting experiment, but for the star league which could build entire fleets of battleships while barely blinking at the cost, it didn't really offer much in the way of utility over other options.

but that same uniqueness is what makes it so valuable during the late succession wars. because all the stuff it was competing with was gone by then. (or in the hands of Comstar, which amounts to the same thing)
« Last Edit: 19 February 2024, 19:58:48 by glitterboy2098 »

Terminax

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The Argo was designed before QA,/fact checking caught it. It was originally a small FTL ship before they were clued in that BT uses a very particular kind of FTL. It's setup was adjusted to make it the ship it was in the released game and the canonization it got later in the House Arano book. It's weird because of that history.

Marveryn

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The Argo was designed before QA,/fact checking caught it. It was originally a small FTL ship before they were clued in that BT uses a very particular kind of FTL. It's setup was adjusted to make it the ship it was in the released game and the canonization it got later in the House Arano book. It's weird because of that history.
I always assume it was made for in game to explain why you can have a company of mech but could only drop 4 as the argo was just a cargo ship with benefits while link to the leapord that did the actually work. I seen the MW$ mood that treat the leopard like it a union when its hold isn't that large to carry 12 mechs.  Of course this is a topic drift but to the original question.  Nothing change the if your relaying on your mech for on retrotech then you may in danger of losing a large portion of it to modern design.  All your doing is just lowering tech what was original there.
In fact i am sure some of those world did include retrotech as well as star league depending on what time frame on when they were arm with mech.

glitterboy2098

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The Argo was designed before QA,/fact checking caught it. It was originally a small FTL ship before they were clued in that BT uses a very particular kind of FTL. It's setup was adjusted to make it the ship it was in the released game and the canonization it got later in the House Arano book. It's weird because of that history.
skeptical of this claim given that the team that created it included one of the original FASA battletech game designers, one of the guys who literally came up with the KFdrive and its status as the only FTL system in BT.

Far more likely it was always meant to be what it is, to give the player a unique upgradable base of operations.

Stormlion1

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Cottage Industrie could account for Mech Construction in that period. A entire warehouse setup with a full crew that get a order and spend a year just building a single primitive mech almost as a custom job. There was a Jimmy Stewart film about Lindbergh and the Spirit of Saint Louis being built that I could kind of see how that would work.
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theagent

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The size of the KF drive is established by the construction rules.  So, if the sub-compact drive is 50% of the total mass of the Argos, it would be 47,500 tons (well over the 25k limit), but would have been enough to send the Argos by itself into hyperspace.  But the restrictions would make little sense of the multi docking collars that the Argos does already have and render them even further uselessness by the inability to take dropships into hyperspace with it.  Has to be a normal compact, or designate it entirely as a jumpship rather than a warship.  It would have to drop all the habs and that would, once again, imo, make the entire design no different than just using a normal jumpship.  Best bet is to redesign, add that pesky 5k to bump it into the 100k range for compact drive eligibility and bring everything else with it to make it play by the rules.

It's not the drive size that's limited to 25,000 tons, it's the size of the ship it's mounted in.  But it does further illustrate the size issue:
  • Standard Drive:  for use with JumpShips (50,000 to 500,000 tons), mass is 95% of JS mass, so drive units will range from 47,500 to 475,000 tons, KF cost multiplier is x1
  • Compact Drive:  for use with WarShips (100,000 to 2,500,000 tons), mass is 45.25% of WS mass, so drive units will range from 45,250 to 1,131,250 tons, KF cost multiplier is x5
  • Sub-Compact Drive:  for use on "ultra-small" WarShips (5,000 to 25,000 tons), mass is 50% of WS mass, so drive units will range from 2,500 to 12,500 tons, KF cost multiplier is x16

JS construction rules show that it's possible to build a K-F drive for a vessel as small as 50,000 tons.  WS construction rules show that it's possible for a Compact K-F drive core to be lighter than a Standard K-F drive core.  So theoretically, it should be possible to build a heavier Sub-Compact K-F Drive (& therefore build a larger "Sub-Compact" WarShip that's under 100k tons in mass).

Now, one of the things I noticed based on the construction rules in SO on p. 149 is that the minimum K-F Drive Integrity for a Compact K-F Drive is 4 (2 base + drive weight / 25,000, round up to next whole number; 45,250 / 25,000 = 1.81; 2 + 1.81 = 3.81, rounded up to 4).  For the Sub-Compact, the minimum and maximum are both 3, as it uses the same formula (2,500 / 25,000 = 0.1; 12,500 / 25,000 = 0.5; 2.1 rounds up to 3, 2.5 rounds up to 3).  So, if we set the maximum K-F Drive integrity for a Sub-Compact Drive to be 3, then the maximum drive mass would be 25,000 tons...which means you could install them in a ship as large as 50,000 tons (or the minimum size of a JS).

Alternately, since the Compact Cores can be lighter than the Standard Cores on the lower end, we could say that the 100,000 ton standard WS size cut-off is due to that requirement, & set the upper size limit for a Sub-Compact Drive unit at a close number.  If we set it at 40,000 tons, then you could go up to 80,000 tons for ship size; if we set it to 45,000 tons, then our Sub-Compact WS limit is 90,000 tons.

Either way, I feel like 25,000 tons is an artificially small cut-off.  Even with the much more expensive base drive cost, you're somewhat offset by the lack of ability to carry DS collars, which have a much larger effect on the cost of the K-F Drive than any other factor.