Legend-Killer's abilities?

[Colt Ward]

Also page 41:

Jaime Wolf was not the kind of commander unwise enough to assume he would win every fight.  He knew a bunch of Dragoons salvage could give the game up.

A point for and a point against . . . first, we do not know the IC writer of Legends and the way entries are written with the occasional statement that is not definitive.  Since it seems to be written by a IC voice and the statement is not a first hand account from Jaime, but rather a second or third hand source, it is not a total block on the Dragoons using some stuff ahead of time.  Additionally, I know of one sentence that is point blank wrong in Legends which escaped fack-checkers.

But Occam's being what it is, IF they had anything at all advanced or kept some special stuff like Swarm LRM ammo around for special occasions.  Then it would not have been much and they would have had to meet the criteria I listed previously.

[glitterboy2098]

Those short on skill tend to make such claims. It's easy to ignore them.

i've actually run into some very skilled players who have fallen for such claims. and i've seen a lot of new players falling for such claims. MWO and HBS have skewed a lot of new player's understanding of technological availability in during the succession wars and early clan invasion. and many of those newer players, seeking out older BT fans to dive deeper in the lore, keep falling for some really inaccurate claims.

[Hellraiser]

The shogun -2F was built after the tech rennisance started (3029 intro date. Technically before the erppc was reintroed, but that date comes from older material than the erppc date. Suggesting this is a continuity research fail on catalysts part rather than a Dragoon's conspiracy)

I disagree.  I don't think its a continuity error at all. 
Its a tiny example of the Dragoons getting prepped for what is coming in the future and their need to rebuild after the losses in the 4th SW.
There were very few Shoguns running around so it could easily be a test bed run for them to start doing what they hadn't been doing for 25 years, which is using some SLDF tech.
We know by 3050 they were full on producing clan tech and had stored SLDF tech available but not used.

(And honestly it isn't hard to just assume that for the first 6years of use the mech carried a standard PPC being refit once ER's entered the market, and the change wasn't given enough of a notice to warrant a new versions. Especially since by the point there were only a handful left anyway)

I'm not sure what your saying.   1st 6 years?    The only change from the 2E to the 2F was swapping out the PPC for ERPPC.
If they were running 2F's w/ PPCs then it would be called the 2E.
The Dragoons simply had access to SLDF era ERPPCs that the IS didn't & started using them on the sly.
Kinda how Natasha expanded the Widows from a Battalion to a "Cluster" formation a decade before the clans showed up.

The CASE on the -2E is an question given it's 3005 introdate, but since case is integral to the structure of a mech odds are they just couldn't remove it easily. And we know they weren't building more of them, because the fluff says so.

CASE got removed from the Marauders they brought among other things.
I think the real reason its there is a typo on the original WDSB TRO section page.
But they added in a nice little hint in the way they say "they never seem to reduce the # of Shoguns even though they aren't producing them".
Hinting that any ammo explosions aren't fatal since the CASE is there.
The TRO page had ammo in the wrong locations IIRC & was under weight by a ton, hence the missing CASE that showed up on the RS version.

Still does not mean that the dragoon's were actually running secret star league ubermechs as so many claim.

Agreed.
My points above were just to show that they did have a couple small instances of neglecting some tech removal or adding tech back on early.


Honestly I wouldn't have cared if Kerensky had been piloting a 2R when she came to the IS & that was the source of the BH's 3015 upgrade.
She was a Blood Named Star Colonel known for breaking the rules, so if anyone in the Dragoons had kept an edge, I'd imagine it being her.
But him having found a SLDF cache is just as fine too since we know he had NightHawk armor & it had to come from somewhere.
I'd have been fine however it turned out.

[Hellraiser]

i've actually run into some very skilled players who have fallen for such claims. and i've seen a lot of new players falling for such claims. MWO and HBS have skewed a lot of new player's understanding of technological availability in during the succession wars and early clan invasion. and many of those newer players, seeking out older BT fans to dive deeper in the lore, keep falling for some really inaccurate claims.

The way they do the Hero mechs is a bit off from a lore stand point with all the XL this & full DHS & Endo that, but, what might have been cool is if the game had access to the Wo39 prototype weaponry & they had used some lesser variants/upgrades to give the Hero mechs a bit of a boost w/o breaking the tech barrier completely.

[Liam's Ghost]

I could imagine any original Marauders the Dragoons brought with them having CASE, just because its an original component. But not much beyond that.

But I think there are some additional nuances worth considering:

First, the Clans didn't have a complete picture of how badly degraded the inner sphere's tech base was when they were outfitting the dragoons. So there's room for mistakes being made in selecting the right equipment to blend in (this is actually the canonical explanation for some of their idiosyncrasies, like the fact that they didn't realize that Mercenaries wouldn't have WarShips and had to abruptly stash them at the last minute).

Second, the Dragoons are operating for an extended period far from the homeworlds with resupply happening only every few years. Any advanced equipment they do use is basically irreplaceable aside from those supply runs, so it simply makes sense to use equipment they can replace outside of those.

So I think even if the Dragoons did have advanced technology with them, they were likely to replace it once they had a feel for what the inner sphere actually had available.

[Mendrugo]

Given the way the DLC was framed, I'm okay with the proliferation of LosTech in that portion of the Periphery. 

Pirates get ahold of a crashed Wolverine? ship packed full of LosTech and decide to get rich selling it throughout the region, sparking a massive surge in tech availability until such time as the ship goes blooey and the guns sold around end up destroyed, without having much of an impact on the broader Inner Sphere.  There must be similar outbreaks of local LosTech availability whenever a LosTech prospector hits it big and unloads their haul onto the market.  Surely people buy the old gear with the intention of using it, rather than putting it in a museum.  This was just an exceptionally large and advanced haul.

Interestingly, a close read of the specs on the lasers that increase damage based on movement suggests those weren't from the crashed ship.  They are of ComStar manufacture - apparently something ComStar was field testing in the region.

So even if someone found a piece of LosTech in a Dragoon 'Mech, that shouldn't be considered impossible, even circa 3015.  Granted, functional LosTech guns are incredibly rare, but anyone seeing them in action won't say "that's impossible!" - they'll say "that lucky stiff - make it a priority target - I want its tech as salvage."

[Frabby]

Brush Wars does not mention what 'Mech the Bounty Hunter piloted on Nova Roma.
The "he had a Griffin when he stole Kerensky's Marauder" thing is from the Wolf's Dragoons sourcebook, p. 124 (The Widow Speaks) text box. That's framed as a ComStar document from 3030. The document quotes Natasha herself, as documented in files from a Dragoon board of inquiry: "I saw the Bounty Hunter's 'Mechs and several Marik regulars busily salvaging the remains of my lance. The Hunter himself was in his Griffin, dragging away my Marauder."
Even assuming that Kerensky's assumptions are correct, this does not rule out that the Bounty Hunter may have piloted a Warhammer up until the ambush but temporarily switched to the Griffin of an associate during the subsequent recovery and salvage operations.

The interview part in Shrapnel reads "Q: O.K., then where did you get your current 'Mech? A: From the wreckage of dozens of battles. The left arm was mostly captured on New Wessex. Both of the feet, or maybe just one of the feet, came from New Delos. You can't tell the pieces apart."
...which, I have to admit, doesn't amout to the express rejection of the idea that it was the Bounty Hunter's ride that I remembered. I still maintain that it's extremely unlikely that she could have obtained the Bounty Hunter's Warhammer.

So even if someone found a piece of LosTech in a Dragoon 'Mech, that shouldn't be considered impossible, even circa 3015. 

There's that quote that I couldn't find in a rush from Liao techs who had inspected a downed Dragoon Hoplite and concluded it was relatively new but not built in any known factory. Of course, the higher-ups didn't listen to them. But the Techs knew someting weird was going on with the Dragoons.

[RifleMech]

The TRO entry in Operation Klondike for the Firefly says

Ironically, the Firefly model brought to the Inner Sphere by Wolf’s Dragoons (the FFL-4A) bore a startling similarity to the most downgraded of the factional Fireflys and it is possible the examples used by the mercenaries came from cached factional militaries.

Why couldn't the same be true of other Dragoon Mechs? Especially their post Exodus variants? What if Natasha's Marauder wasn't a 2R or a 3R but something that had been downgraded by the Pentagon Powers or even downgraded Dragoons themselves? A downgrade that was similar enough to a 3R that any discrepancies discovered during salvage wouldn't cause any problems? After all it wasn't the variant of Firefly that drew attention. It was that the Dragoons had Fireflys. Besides, the Dragoons had their own Wasp and Archer variants. Maybe the Dragoon variant of the Marauder is close enough to the 3R for people to call it a 3R. Only the Dragoon variant had a bunch of quirks to make it more effective? Like improved life support, a combat computer and improved targeting? Things one wouldn't know unless they captured one intact? And since Natasha's Marauder wasn't intact when captured, and the cockpit was destroyed when she bailed out, no one noticed the difference when it was repaired?

[wolfspider]

How about this angle, the Lia techs report their finding to the higher ups and nothing is done. A certain organization takes the report seriously and decides to investigate that report further. They hire the bounty hunter to recover a mech which he does. As part of his payment they agree to give him an upgraded mech from their vast supply of lost tech machines.

You know on second thought that sounds to far fletch,,,or does it? 😉

[Frabby]

You know on second thought that sounds to far fletch,,,or does it? 😉

On a strictly technical fact-checking level, yes, this is exactly how things work in the BT universe in the early 31st century. Absolutely plausible. Though we know that canonically, ComStar was extremely interested in the Dragoons right off the bat, and then only got more and more interested as they found them a nut they couldn’t crack. Escalated all the way up to Anton Marik gunning down Joshua Wolf. (Unless you believe ComStar didn't pull the strings on that one.)

From a storytelling/meta perspective, on the other hand, I'm getting bored out of my skull by ComStar puppet mastering the entire Inner Sphere without a hitch (despite being at the same time totally clueless as to where they want to go with it; but that's quite another can of worms).

[mikecj]

The Star League did that too- they bum rushed a Ronin and took his 'Mech apart.  Then they started the Gunslingers program.