i did a study like this many years ago so i wanted to see where we are. what does natural obsolescence look like? the most obvious metric is to see how the tech is being utilized over the course of the timeline on new designs and variants. one can also look at which units are still being actively produced that utilize said tech. i'll be sticking to the former here as that doesn't violate my NDA by releasing internal data. so let's dig in.
for the purposes of this exercises, i'm going to define "modern use" as anything 3081 or later. it's where TO gear really begins to spill into mainstream unit design.
Total Units introduced 3081-3151: 1326 IS + 7 clan that have introtech equipment (there are an additional ~750 pure clan entries introduced but obviously they would not use introtech)
Weapon (#uses) - Most Recent year [notes]
AC/2 (1) - 3131 [DA industrialmech]
AC/5 (5) - 3134 [3 DA IM, a Mongrel, and a Scapha config]
AC/10 (3) - 3132 [IM, Storm Raider. The Blade XS is the only actual mech]
AC/20 (1) - 3100 [XTRO Royal Fantasy unit]
Machine Gun (85) - 3149 [most used introtech gear]
Flamer (23) - 3145 [16 mechs, 7 vees]
Vee Flamer (10) - 3084 [8 vees, 2 IM]
Small Laser (15) - 3149 [9 mechs, 4 vees, 1 IM, 1 ASF]
Medium Laser (79) - 3150 [efficient damage to heat will keep it around forever]
Large Laser (9) - 3132 [7 mechs, 1 vee, 1 IM]
PPC (14) - 3148 [9 mechs, 5 vees]
LRM-5 (22) - 3151 [18 mechs (6 Ares configs), 4 vees]
LRM-10 (19) - 3141 [15 mechs, 4 vees]
LRM-15 (34) - 3146 [15 mechs, 9 vees, 2 ASF, 2 Small Craft, 5 CS, 1 Zugvogel config]
LRM-20 (18) - 3135 [7 mechs, 2 vees, 1 ASF, 8 DS]
SRM-2 (20) - 3151 [12 mechs (6 Ares configs), 8 vees]
SRM-4 (37) - 3146 [15 mechs, 15 vees, 7 IM]
SRM-6 (37) - 3146 [20 mechs, 14 vees, 1 ASF, 2 DS]
Hatchet (23) - 3148 [we stay wanting to chop shit]