RangerWickett
Legend
I recently got bit by the nostalgia bug for Battletech.
Big robots, no magic or psychic mumbo jumbo. Fun times.
But thinking back on the novels I read in the 90s and the video games over the past couple decades, and comparing them to the understanding I have today about how war works, and my knowledge of space, and my enjoyment of series like The Expanse that care about realism a bit more, I find the lore of Battletech lacking, and the logic of its warfare a bit silly.
I have an urge to run a mecha campaign for my friends, maybe not in the real Battletech universe but in my own knock-off version, so I'm trying to come up with more compelling rational reasons for conflict. Let me explain.
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OG Battletech works on sort of feudal logic. Your mechwarriors are your knights. Their mechs are their armor and steed. They might be accompanied by infantry and tanks and such, but mechs serve as the focus of military engagements, which serve to help various lords maintain control of planets spread across the galaxy, and then those planets pay taxes or whatever.
But technology and distance makes running an interstellar feudal state very different from doing it in medieval Europe. The biggest factor is how faster than light travel works.
In Battletech, you need to maneuver a jumpship (which always stays in space, and are a few hundred meters long but are almost entirely the 'jump drive' with limited internal cargo) to somewhere with 'simple' gravitational tidal forces -- usually above the poles of the local star. Then you need a gigantic amount of energy to create a field that does some funky math akin to finding the square root of a negative number, with the result that basically removes everything within the field from space and then shunts it in a particular direction. You don't actually move, just calculate where - if you were to draw a straight line through the cosmos - you would next encounter a gravity well. Then the math works in reverse order, and the ship suddenly appears in a new location, which has to have very similar gravitational parameters to where it left. (So jumping close to planets is likely to get you killed.)
Once you arrive, the jumpship usually stays in place, and they launch dropships (which go between space and ground). The largest of these have cargo capacity far less than a modern cargo container ship, and a single jumpship might have docking points to carry 9 dropships with it whenever it jumps between systems.
It takes a week or two to recharge the jump drive, and getting a dropship from the arrival point to a planet takes at least a few days. (I think the setting is unreasonable in letting ships zip around at 1G for days at a time without worrying about fuel, but let's ignore that.)
Each jump takes you about 30 light years. And the setting describes interstellar nations spanning like 200 light years, so we're talking 3 jumps for stuff to get from the edge to the middle. Several weeks of travel, all to bring a relatively small amount of cargo. What resources are you extracting from another star system that warrant all the time and cost, instead of just going to asteroids and planets in the same system you live to get that stuff? How long would it take to strip mine the whole solar system for resources before it becomes cost effective to ask for 'taxes' from other systems.
Like, what are people even fighting over?
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Maybe instead of conflicts being fought over resources, instead the concern is positioning. If different nations distrust each other and fear annihilation, they'd want to set up their capital planet somewhere far from enemies, so if anyone wants to invade, they'd have several lines of defense by positioning orbital bases around the arrival points, letting them blow up invaders before they can recharge and jump again.
That might be neat sci-fi, but it doesn't give you a reason to deploy walking humanoid tanks to control territory.
I guess if you need to resupply, it could work. But what sort of warfare are you intending at the final objective? You don't need a ton of people for an orbital bombardment with nukes or 'relativistic kill vehicles' (e.g., big rocks accelerated to a high fraction of the speed of light). But maybe if you want to seize a planet and control it, and you want to bring in, like, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, you might first need to control planets along the way so you can resupply all those people after each jump.
In a sort of grinding fight over land and resources, though, how expansive is the conflict? Like, these planets have been inhabited for centuries, and if we look at how long it took somewhere like Australia to bring in colonists and reach a population of tens of millions, are we going to assume all these worlds have huge populations? Are we sending dozens, even hundreds of mechs to try to claim a whole planet? Is that feasible?
Or would the focus be more on things like objective raids - sending in a small force to blow up infrastructure and then get out, hoping to keep border planets from having enough resources to serve as a launch point for an invasion? But in that case, well, just hit it from orbit, right? You'd only need mechs to go into underground facilities, and I would struggle to see why anyone would leave conveniently-huge tunnels in their fortified bunkers for enemy mechs to get into.
So instead there's the 'formalized duel' idea, where each world has someone assigned to defend it, and if you want to claim it you challenge them to a duel, and everyone agrees to have roughly equal forces and abide by the results for the sake of honor. That's the way things work with the setting's "Clans," which are a separate culture. I guess you could do it with the rest of the Inner Sphere, and most citizens would just shrug as long as the fights happened away from any settled areas. But it's . . . well it's kinda silly, right? Why even use mechs if it's all just an honor thing? Why not hand over ownership of a multi-trillion-dollar planetary economy after losing a game of Halo or something?
In universe there is some lore about how a few centuries ago everyone went 'total war' and launched nukes all over the place, and it was so terribly counter-productive that all the survivors agreed to chill a little and abide by the Ares Convention (similar in spirit to the Geneva Convention), laying out what's allowed in battles. One of the restrictions was "Don't blow up each other's jumpships," which, okay, fair. It's like 'don't screw with shipping' in the modern day.
But why tolerate letting mechs even land on your planet? Why not invest in orbital defenses to shoot down dropships with torpedoes and rail guns and the like?
I'm struggling to think of situations where interstellar war with mechs on the ground make sense. Maybe I could just skip the whole 'interstellar' part, and make it instead be conventional warfare between nations on the same planet. And like, interstellar combat would be less 'invasion' and more 'backup for whichever local nation we are allies with.' Y'know, more akin to the US helping the Kuwaitis in Operation Desert Storm, and less "Crossing the British Channel on D-Day."
Or or or or again, another way to think of it might be more like the island hopping in the Pacific Theater of World War 2, and to have most planets be very under-populated? Maybe few planets are pleasant enough to support large populations, so instead you have like one city of 100,000 people, and some farmland and mines around it, all designed to support a spaceport that launches resources so they can build ships in orbit and sell food to passing jumpships? If we imagine that the setting has some super-efficient fuel so getting out of a gravity well isn't that big of an expense, it would be safer to grow food on planets with atmospheres instead of doing it in domes on moons or asteroids with lower gravity.
I've rambled a lot. If you have ideas or opinions, lemme know.
I suppose ultimately what I'd want to design is a single military operation - from arriving in system, to traveling to the planet, to landing, to fighting and negotiating, to getting out or setting up long-term shop. Maybe I could just pick a real life battle and model it on that, but ideally I'd find a way to focus on a smaller number of characters, instead of having thousands of soldiers like real war does.
Big robots, no magic or psychic mumbo jumbo. Fun times.
But thinking back on the novels I read in the 90s and the video games over the past couple decades, and comparing them to the understanding I have today about how war works, and my knowledge of space, and my enjoyment of series like The Expanse that care about realism a bit more, I find the lore of Battletech lacking, and the logic of its warfare a bit silly.
I have an urge to run a mecha campaign for my friends, maybe not in the real Battletech universe but in my own knock-off version, so I'm trying to come up with more compelling rational reasons for conflict. Let me explain.
---
OG Battletech works on sort of feudal logic. Your mechwarriors are your knights. Their mechs are their armor and steed. They might be accompanied by infantry and tanks and such, but mechs serve as the focus of military engagements, which serve to help various lords maintain control of planets spread across the galaxy, and then those planets pay taxes or whatever.
But technology and distance makes running an interstellar feudal state very different from doing it in medieval Europe. The biggest factor is how faster than light travel works.
In Battletech, you need to maneuver a jumpship (which always stays in space, and are a few hundred meters long but are almost entirely the 'jump drive' with limited internal cargo) to somewhere with 'simple' gravitational tidal forces -- usually above the poles of the local star. Then you need a gigantic amount of energy to create a field that does some funky math akin to finding the square root of a negative number, with the result that basically removes everything within the field from space and then shunts it in a particular direction. You don't actually move, just calculate where - if you were to draw a straight line through the cosmos - you would next encounter a gravity well. Then the math works in reverse order, and the ship suddenly appears in a new location, which has to have very similar gravitational parameters to where it left. (So jumping close to planets is likely to get you killed.)
Once you arrive, the jumpship usually stays in place, and they launch dropships (which go between space and ground). The largest of these have cargo capacity far less than a modern cargo container ship, and a single jumpship might have docking points to carry 9 dropships with it whenever it jumps between systems.
It takes a week or two to recharge the jump drive, and getting a dropship from the arrival point to a planet takes at least a few days. (I think the setting is unreasonable in letting ships zip around at 1G for days at a time without worrying about fuel, but let's ignore that.)
Each jump takes you about 30 light years. And the setting describes interstellar nations spanning like 200 light years, so we're talking 3 jumps for stuff to get from the edge to the middle. Several weeks of travel, all to bring a relatively small amount of cargo. What resources are you extracting from another star system that warrant all the time and cost, instead of just going to asteroids and planets in the same system you live to get that stuff? How long would it take to strip mine the whole solar system for resources before it becomes cost effective to ask for 'taxes' from other systems.
Like, what are people even fighting over?
---
Maybe instead of conflicts being fought over resources, instead the concern is positioning. If different nations distrust each other and fear annihilation, they'd want to set up their capital planet somewhere far from enemies, so if anyone wants to invade, they'd have several lines of defense by positioning orbital bases around the arrival points, letting them blow up invaders before they can recharge and jump again.
That might be neat sci-fi, but it doesn't give you a reason to deploy walking humanoid tanks to control territory.
I guess if you need to resupply, it could work. But what sort of warfare are you intending at the final objective? You don't need a ton of people for an orbital bombardment with nukes or 'relativistic kill vehicles' (e.g., big rocks accelerated to a high fraction of the speed of light). But maybe if you want to seize a planet and control it, and you want to bring in, like, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, you might first need to control planets along the way so you can resupply all those people after each jump.
In a sort of grinding fight over land and resources, though, how expansive is the conflict? Like, these planets have been inhabited for centuries, and if we look at how long it took somewhere like Australia to bring in colonists and reach a population of tens of millions, are we going to assume all these worlds have huge populations? Are we sending dozens, even hundreds of mechs to try to claim a whole planet? Is that feasible?
Or would the focus be more on things like objective raids - sending in a small force to blow up infrastructure and then get out, hoping to keep border planets from having enough resources to serve as a launch point for an invasion? But in that case, well, just hit it from orbit, right? You'd only need mechs to go into underground facilities, and I would struggle to see why anyone would leave conveniently-huge tunnels in their fortified bunkers for enemy mechs to get into.
So instead there's the 'formalized duel' idea, where each world has someone assigned to defend it, and if you want to claim it you challenge them to a duel, and everyone agrees to have roughly equal forces and abide by the results for the sake of honor. That's the way things work with the setting's "Clans," which are a separate culture. I guess you could do it with the rest of the Inner Sphere, and most citizens would just shrug as long as the fights happened away from any settled areas. But it's . . . well it's kinda silly, right? Why even use mechs if it's all just an honor thing? Why not hand over ownership of a multi-trillion-dollar planetary economy after losing a game of Halo or something?
In universe there is some lore about how a few centuries ago everyone went 'total war' and launched nukes all over the place, and it was so terribly counter-productive that all the survivors agreed to chill a little and abide by the Ares Convention (similar in spirit to the Geneva Convention), laying out what's allowed in battles. One of the restrictions was "Don't blow up each other's jumpships," which, okay, fair. It's like 'don't screw with shipping' in the modern day.
But why tolerate letting mechs even land on your planet? Why not invest in orbital defenses to shoot down dropships with torpedoes and rail guns and the like?
I'm struggling to think of situations where interstellar war with mechs on the ground make sense. Maybe I could just skip the whole 'interstellar' part, and make it instead be conventional warfare between nations on the same planet. And like, interstellar combat would be less 'invasion' and more 'backup for whichever local nation we are allies with.' Y'know, more akin to the US helping the Kuwaitis in Operation Desert Storm, and less "Crossing the British Channel on D-Day."
Or or or or again, another way to think of it might be more like the island hopping in the Pacific Theater of World War 2, and to have most planets be very under-populated? Maybe few planets are pleasant enough to support large populations, so instead you have like one city of 100,000 people, and some farmland and mines around it, all designed to support a spaceport that launches resources so they can build ships in orbit and sell food to passing jumpships? If we imagine that the setting has some super-efficient fuel so getting out of a gravity well isn't that big of an expense, it would be safer to grow food on planets with atmospheres instead of doing it in domes on moons or asteroids with lower gravity.
I've rambled a lot. If you have ideas or opinions, lemme know.
I suppose ultimately what I'd want to design is a single military operation - from arriving in system, to traveling to the planet, to landing, to fighting and negotiating, to getting out or setting up long-term shop. Maybe I could just pick a real life battle and model it on that, but ideally I'd find a way to focus on a smaller number of characters, instead of having thousands of soldiers like real war does.
