Battletech Lore - Space Travel, How Does It Work?
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- Опубликовано: 31 янв 2022
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In this episode we go over the basics of space travel in the Battletech universe. Enjoy!!!
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Hello Grim.
Great Video my friend. One that answers a lot of questions most people would have about the K-F Drive and Jump Ships in particular. Well presented, and excellently read.
As I've said before, I used to play with a 'Playing Group' at the Emperor's Headquarters game shop in Chicago from the mid-80's through the early 2,000's. This information was debated upon exhaustively, and we came to the conclusion that the designers of the game had tried to make a Drive that was 'reasonable' and not some sort of 'hand-wavium' like Warhammer 40K.
The consensus eventually settled upon a few conclusions. Which I will enumerate here for you and for those looking for a more 'reasonable' system.
The Titanium-Germanium Core of the K-F Drive is more likely a more complex alloy... we determined that due to the value of certain 'rare earth' elements, that the Core also contains Lithium, Neodymium, Rhodium, and most especially: Hafnium.
All of these are Very Rare elements. Especially in planetary crusts, and require extensive and very expensive mining and refining stations if mined as asteroids. Even planetary sources would require extensive, expensive, and high maintenance factories to produce even small amounts per year as 'production'.
Since all of this would be true, new Jump Ships would be very hard to produce, maintain, and build parts for replacement of worn equipment. Thus it is not unreasonable to see why only the Star League, and later the Major Houses were the only ones to keep such production facilities in operation... however limited in scope.
Lithium, Gadolinium, Hafnium, Rhodium, all are also required for the complex computing systems, secondary 'booster' computers, sub-system management computers, etc, required to make a Mech work, or to build a Drop Ship.
This means the best 'factories' for computers would be located in 'near-zero Gee' (micro gravity) manufacturing plants, usually located near their source of the rare elements, such as a Solar System's Asteroid Belt. Such factories would be prime targets during the 1st and 2nd Succession Wars, and most would have been destroyed by the end of the 3rd Succession War.
It is known that several sites still produce Jump Ships, Drop Ships, and such high end computing systems. And before the Helm Memory Core's discovery, were VERY highly prized, protected, and treated as the insanely expensive and rare instances of 'LosTech' that they were.
So, it is not 'out of reason' that such facilities that survived were damaged and NOT able to produce anywhere near their 'rated' capacity. And that the ability to return that capacity to full production was not really possible with the remaining Tech available to the Houses.
It would be sort of like a series of multiple limited nuclear wars ruined the world. Some production of computer chips would perhaps survive, but they would be producing, at the very best, fractions of a few percent of their original capacity. And without the infrastructure needed to expand that production capacity further. Can you even imagine trying to use mechanical 'Babbage' machines to replace the high speed, precision computers needed to do gas deposition to make Silicon wafer computer chips? It would be a total Nightmare to even try!
The Helm Memory Core put an end to all that... Although it did nothing for the rarity of the elements needed to manufacture such 'high end' equipment.
Now, having said all of the above to 'set the stage', you can see why building space-based refining, construction, and manufacturing facilities were so important to my Colony in the Styx (Stygian) System. Several of the larger moons of the two largest gas giant planets had most of the needed elements, but were too close to the massive gravity wells of the gas giants to place such delicate manufacturing sites anywhere near them. This meant putting such facilities further out into the star system's expanses and into the Asteroid Belts. This led to the 'hollowing' of a large asteroid (nearly the size of Saturn's Ceres) to build a 'Space Port facility inside it. This Asteroid became known as 'Casper', due to one of the Engineers referencing an Ancient cartoon character's name for a 'friendly ghost'. And thus Casper Station was designed and built to service, recharge, rebuild, and redesign Jump and Drop Ships.
This process took all of five decades to accomplish and put into full production. Since the 'micro gravity' of the Asteroid was just barely small enough to allow the construction of 'high end' computer systems, it became one of the key component manufacturing sites for Advanced Computing systems.
Being located in one of the three Asteroid Belts of the Stygian system, it was hard to locate for anyone unfamiliar with the solar system. In addition, the entire conglomerate set of factories, manufacturing, and construction facilities were all inside an asteroid of around 700 miles in diameter. This would be like putting it miles deep into a planetary crust, without the associated 'heavy' gravity well to contend with.
Yeah, trying to find it by emissions would be worse than finding several needles inside of thousands of haystacks, by hand, by touch, at midnight on a moonless night, half blind, and suffering with palsy. Good Luck!
So, once built, Casper Station would be VERY hard to find. And an unauthorized Jump that puts someone into the System, would result in word of such an 'arrival' rapidly spread at the speed of light, via encrypted communications lasers, to re-route any supply ships away from Station to further 'hide' if from detection, and possible harm.
And to further 'confuse' any searchers, the entire asteroid would 'look' to be a primitive space colony and nothing more, that was using Nuclear Power Generation instead of more 'advanced' Fusion systems to supply it with power.
It is unlikely that any 'invader' would even consider such 'Ancient' technology as Fission Nuclear Reactors to be useful enough for any 'high demand' power needs. But, being in Space, one can build such Reactors deeply into the solid rock of the asteroid, thus giving them near unlimited radiation shielding. And that being true, one could put literally hundreds of such reactors into place over time.
My final notes never got to the 'hundreds' of such reactors... perhaps as many as 60 or so. Enough to recharge K-F Drives and power all the needs of Casper Station itself for centuries to come, with a factor of expansion only limited by the size of the asteroid.
In summation: Casper Station was the crowning achievement of the Ghost Lions Legion and one of the most important sites in the Stygian System, even including the BattleMech Production Factories and Weapons manufacturing sites. I took 'great pains' to make the entire System look like a 'failed' Ancient Colony that was struggling to get back to near Star League technology, space faring, space industry, and general re-population after some, unspecified, calamity. Thus making the entire System only remarkable in that it was 'pulling itself up by it's boot straps' to reach that level of technology.
I think that the additional 'complexity' of the needed Elements required to make K-F Jump Drive Cores merely added to the already complex nature of such devices, and added more 'flavor' to the Universe. Agree or not, as you choose.
spoken, Frank-ly
Post Script: I am sorry for such a long posting, but the 'details' added make my explanations more meaningful, in my honest opinion.
Okay, you have put my nerdery to shame. My people never took it that far. Congrats? Lol
You make all nerds proud, Frank. And that's a compliment!
Video idea? I was wonder that to it could also be how the ship navgates moves in Hyperspace as if the meterals a do able but the math,sensors and maps assuming youR riding hypder spacelike a jet stream or ocean currents. are not it's not going to matter maybe a reason why new jumpships had to be trail and error?
@@bugiroff9926 :Thank You. Although I do have to admit that having several Engineers, Chemists, and at least two people with Physics Degrees in the 'Group' did help a lot in hammering all this out to a 'workable' shape that all could agree to use.
@@GreenBlueWalkthrough : Your concept of Battletech Hyperspace travel is 'flawed'. The vessel does not 'move through' anything. It accesses a 'folded space' realm where all points in the universe are at, or near, a single point. So, the ship just 'jumps' from one such point to another. In the case of the K-F Drive, the total possible 'safe' jumping distance is up to 30 LY from point to point. K-F Drive Theory and the Physics of Hyperspace have no such limitation, though. Humanity would need several centuries of study and experimentation to get longer 'safe' jumps. So far, Humanity's propensity for War has halted all such experimentation. Perhaps, in a thousand years or so, Humanity might put aside War and spend the time necessary to develop better K-F Drives.
Battletech is a great game . The creators put a massive amount of thought into it's Lore , Science , Politics . You present it Well . Thanks .
Thanks for watching.
Well, it don't exist, so I can't tell you definitively that your idea is not right. But, according to how I have read how K-F drives work, you sort of 'teleport' up to 30 LY. While in Hyper, there is no time, no space, and no duration. You just disappear in your location, and reappear up to 30 LY away. And the reason you do this at the zenith and nadir locations of stars is that those are easy to plot, and have the least 'gravity' disturbances from planets, moons, asteroids, etc inside the star system. Also, you are doing this far enough out that the Star's gravity well isn't messing with your K-F drive field, distorting it and doing terrible things. So far as anyone knows, K-F drives work 'instantaneously' (there might be SOME 'time' used, but given the vast distances traveled, no one has ever recorded a reliable duration for Hyper travel). It does take time to build up the field and collapse it, but the 'jump' seems to be instantaneous. Remember, it takes weeks to recharge a Jump Drive, so Jumping to a star, charging, and Jumping back, would not really tell you if it took a few seconds, or not. So, no 'currents of space' thing. This is Hyperspace Jump Drive, NOT Warhammer 40K 'rip a hole in space to another dimension' type thing. And before you bring up Han Solo and the Kessel Run... Han was piloting through an area with densely packed stars. He just happened to find a 'shortcut' route by playing VERY loose with safety zones and 'safe' routes through the volume of space. This is something that you definitely DON'T want to do with a K-F drive ship!
Ah, thus halcyon days of warp travel at the dawn of the dark age of technology. No warp demons, cliques of obnoxious navigators, nutty psychedelic, warp currents, or thirsting gods. Just a clean, serene, if kind of slow, travel from one star to another.
'Kinda Slow'... yeah, right. You are going up to 30 LY with each Jump. Charging the drive for 3 or 4 weeks, and Jumping again. Call it 3 total Jumps... that's up to 90 LY in less than 8 weeks. If you 'average' this to one Jump a month (30 days), this comes out to a maximum distance of 360 LY. In ONE year, you've traveled 360 Light Years... not too shabby really. At this kind of speed, one can cross the Milky Way Galaxy in 'only' 290 to 295 years! A distance of 106,000 LY, each way. 580 years to cross the Galaxy from edge to edge and return isn't slow. BTW, the above is not including the use of Jump Drive Battery Systems that allow two Jumps before recharging. If you did the edge to edge like that, 290 years there and back... respectable speed. Even Star Trek's Warp Drive at maximum of Warp 9 is 'only' 1,516 times the Speed of Light. That 'edge to edge' distance of 106,000 LY takes 69.9, call it 70 years, one way. 140 round trip. So slow? Depends on the yardstick. Given Battletech technology? 30LY instantaneous jumps with an up to 4 week recharging time isn't all THAT slow.
@@franksmedley8619 The only slow part really is the recharging, but maybe that can be improved.
Update: That 'Warp 9' speed thing. Not many starships can do Warp 9 indefinitely. Usually, the ship can maintain that speed for up to 8-12 hours, at most, and then HAVE to shut down or reduce speed to a low warp number (say warp 4) for weeks to do repairs and maintenance, or the ship runs the high risk of exploding. Battletech Jump Drives operate at very high energy states for very brief periods. This allows for maintenance and repair to be done while the drive recharges. So, a much 'safer' and more stable star drive, overall. And remember, the vast majority of 'Jumps' are less than the maximum rated jump distance of 30 LY. Averaging, for a long trip, something like 22 to 26 LY per jump. Stars are just not conveniently 30 LY away from each other.
Another aspect that is not mentioned in the various stories and novels, nor in any of the Source Books and other printed materials of Battleech, is the use of 'barren' stars. Stars without any 'useful' planets, or planets of any kind at all. Such stars WOULD have 'jump points', and be able to recharge jump drives normally and be useful to moving ships and goods from point A to B effectively, and not be limited to only jumping between settled systems.
So, a starship's captain can choose stars as far apart as possible, and as near to the 30 LY limit as they can manage, and thus reduce the total number of required jumps to get to that 'point B' as quickly and efficiently as possible, thus reducing their costs in fuel, food, parts, supplies, etc. Now, point A and B can both be 'settled' worlds, habitable, or used by Mankind, but the stars between used to get there might be those 'barren' systems.
Some of those 'barren' systems might have, over centuries of use, be 'nodal points' for multiple 'star lanes' and might have variously sized and capacity space stations at either, or both, jump points. Fully able to recharge a jump ship via microwave power transmission, hydroponic gardens to refresh food stocks, and perhaps cradles for jump ship and drop ship repairs.
None of this is mentioned in the vast sea of data on the background of the game. More is the pity. But, logically, most, if not all, of the above should be there.
Agree, or not. Your choice.
@@aurelian2668 : Hello. To have a faster transit time along a trade route, you might want to avoid 'normal' stars. Ya know, G Class stars like Sol. Instead, you would want to transit to the larger class stars, which are far brighter, and output more energy. ALL stars have the two jump points, both Zenith and Nadir (above and below). Most of these larger stars would not have usable planets for mankind, but some might have 'super-earth' type planets.
If you have sufficiently accurate star charts (I.E. a copy of the Helm Memory Core, or at least the portion with the stellar maps), you might be able to use the 'pirate' point by slipping into the planet's Lagrange point. If you did, you'd be closer to the star and thus able to harvest more energy for your sail per hour than you could out at the 'normal' jump points. But even if you didn't use the pirate point, the star's normal energy output would be greater than a typical G Class star. In this case, 'larger is better', even though the jump point would be much farther from the star than 'normal'.
The only other way to 'speed up' solar sail harvesting of energy, without a human-built microwave projector system, would be to have the ability to deploy more than one solar sail, or a larger overall sail. Multi-solar sail tech just isn't possible in Battletech. Although, larger solar sails are possible. That is sort of a 'gray area' in ship design.
Another way to decrease time to recharge would be to have the capital to build stations around such massive stars, at their jump points, or very nearly so, and have the station built with the equipment to 'beam' microwave energy into your ship's solar sail when deployed. Such a station could also have massive capacitors to store vast amounts of energy to recharge jump ship's drives, while not interfering with its ability to harvest energy.
All that equipment would need a 'crew', which would also need defenses.
For instance: Aerospace Fighters, Torpedoes, massive beam weapons, etc. Nuclear mines would be a 'cheap' defensive option. Especially ones built with the ability to kamikaze a target within the range of its short-duration drive system. Another good defensive option is dedicated drop ships carrying half a dozen, or so, Fighters each.
Drop in at a pirate jump point. Gentle burn in towards the system. Drop in, shot till they stop moving, grab the goods a burn like hell out of there. The pirates life for me!
You are welcome to 'try'. Pirate points disappear from time to time, and are usually only open for a short period of time (a few days at most). By the time you burn from roughly Jupiter's orbit to Earth's orbit, decelerate, do your 'business', and return, the Pirate Point is gone. Now, you have to 'burn' for either the Zenith or Nadir points, which, in my star system, are heavily patrolled. Yeah, go ahead and try. I would love to add your drop-ships to my 'fleet'. Your 'emergence' can be detected for billions of kilometers, so knowing you've jumped into the system via a pirate point isn't a problem, and predicting your vector is dead simple. And even if your little raid is successful, a fleet can retrieve its drop-ships and jump to the jump point you are headed for long before you arrive. Checkmate. The ONLY way you 'get away' with such a raid, is if you're raiding a system that has few, if any, defenses. Which means you're not really risking much, and the 'rewards' will be paltry in comparison to a more defended system. So, you are 'chicken stealing'. Low challenge, low rewards, raiding.
Always love to see more about BT space stuff, it's my favorite part of the setting.
I've been a BT fan since the first three boxed sets, and the original Battlespace was amazing. Agreed on the hard science feel, save for one thing...
...the zenith and nadir points aren't an area of stability. You'd have to be in orbit around the star, just in a polar orbit. A gravitational stability point (Lagrange) requires another massive body. For a star, that would have to be another star. I get why the original designers chose those locations - it makes calculating travel from the points to a planet in the system much easier - but it just doesn't work. That also doesn't address the absolutely titanic amount of ∆v you'd need to get to and from a heliocentric polar orbit to an orbit in the ecliptic, where all the planets are.
Humm... I see your point, but you're missing out on some others. From the Zenith or Nadir points, you can reach ANY point in a solar system. You are 'diving down' or 'flying up' to the Ecliptic. You have fusion powered Drop Ships that can accelerate half the distance, and then 'slow' by spinning in place and thrusting against the momentum gained. Thus making the trip faster than if you boosted up to a certain speed, coasted, and then decelerated. At 'constant' boost, Mars is only a week or so away from Earth. Drop Ships from Jump Ship to Planetary orbital is likely to be in the order of 3 weeks each way. More than enough time to recharge a Jump Drive's capacitor system for the next Jump. Given how B-Tech plays, KF Drive ships hit their Jump Points at a distance far enough out to not have the heavy gravity field of the Star distort the KF field. This could mean closer distances to the star and shorter 'constant thrust' duration times for the Drop Ships. Who cares if the Jump Ship is 'falling' towards the Star if by the time it recharges it's drive, it's still outside the 'KF boundary' area?
@@franksmedley8619 You can't stay at the zenith or nadir points, any more than you can park a satellite over the north or south pole of Earth, and not be in orbit. You're going to be in an orbit, you don't have a choice in this. Everything that is remaining in any particular solar system is in an orbit around something - a planet, a moon, an asteroid, the star, whatever. Even the Lagrange/Trojan points are moving, they're just stable only relative to their secondary (smaller) body.
A Jumpship that arrives at the zenith/nadir point is going to have to be in (or put itself into) a polar orbit, crossing the ecliptic twice and the opposite point in each orbit.
If you're not in an orbit, you're leaving the system, or you're very soon going to engage in a lithobraking (or in the case of our canonical Jumpship, heliobraking) maneuver.
And I'd venture that the crew of a jumpship care very much that if their jump doesn't work right, or anything goes wrong, that they're going to plunge into, or pass far too near, the star that they're falling towards.
@@noahdoyle6780 Good point... but a Jump Ship does not have to 'orbit' out there. They just need to be far enough from the star that it does not interfere with their Drive. Even if the ship 'falls' towards the star for a few weeks, it's not going to go all THAT far from it's Jump Entry Point. So, if you plot your course right, you exit at a point where your 'fall' distance will be still outside the interdiction zone by a safe margin while taking upwards of 3 to 4 weeks to recharge the Drive.
A good example of what happens when 2 drives are in close proximity when one Jumps happened during the battle of New Avalon. A Fox Class Corvette initiated an emergency Jump near a Avalon class Cruiser, and ripped the Cruisers Drive Core right out of the hull. Gutted it like a fish.
One has to be amazed how little missjumps and catastrophies happened when Kerensky stormed Terra
@@Paerigos : Good planing, timing the jumps, and allowing for ships to maneuver away from the Emergence Zone.
I enjoy all of GrimDark Narrator videos
Thank you.
Always nice when a setting fully explains the rules of space travel. Great video!
Actually - the setting has only a wild guess of hyperspace works :D :D like even the Fortress and the Grey monday event is just - yeah well we have experimented with the technology by changing things, we have no idea how it works.
plus - there are still K-series transmitters which just work like omnidirectional radio in hyperspace and noone knows how or why.
Supposedly one author essentialy said that the original Kearny Fuchida theory is designed as "slightly off" - its a misconceptions that has some fundamental (small) flaw which is close enough for things to work, but its not "exactly right".
@@Paerigos The rules of what a ship can and cannot do is pretty clear however, unlike most settings that either have almost no clear rules how ships actually work, or the rules exist only to be broken once or twice a month to make the wiz kid look good.
@@catsareevil101 : This is true, I agree. But some Players seem to confuse Lagrange Points with 'Pirate' Jump Points. All Lagrange points are around a two body system, like the Earth-moon system. And being so, are WAY inside the 'Hyper Limit', where a Jump Drive could not possibly function. According to the rules of the game, Jump Ships cannot jump closer than 5 to 7 Astronomical Units from the Star of the system (depending upon type of star). Thus, Pirate points are on the Ecliptic plane, outside that limit. Making them between Jupiter and Saturn's orbits. Large planetary bodies like Jupiter and Saturn would have frequent 'transient' jump points, due to the many moons gravity wells interacting with the parent center of gravity (sort of like a mini solar system). One can thus infer that such pirate points occur above and below large gas giant planets, outside the 'Hyper Limit' of the main star.
Being a old nerd, you had no new information for me here. However, I still enjoy listening to you as always. Now then, back to Trellwan...
Might I suggest a perusal of my own posting?
Really enjoyed this. The science was really cool:)
Thanks George.
Great video on the science of the KF drive GDN. 👍
Always come back to this series to listen again, makes flights and long car drives all the better. Any chance we will get an episode on Rasalhague?
I'll try at some point.
Great video, will you highlight the secondary part of the space travel? The DropShips? Since they're essential part of the method travel used in Battletech.
I made a video on dropships in general already and several on dropship classes.
@@GrimDarkNarrator Oh, i completely missed them. I will add them to the wiki.
Would be fine if you mentioned the lack of "artifical gravity tech in the setting and explain the gravity simulation by spinning on the ships (possibly highlighting the crew quarters and dropships in the process).
No setting is perfect :)
Most of the original artwork for B-tech was drawn by those not having any idea about 'spin gravity' systems. If they had, the ships would have looked pretty much like Babylon 5 Human ships, with large rotating habitat sections.
This video made me cry, or possibly the onions I'm cutting for dinner
Huh... That is actaully very hard sci-fi or as hard as most distant Sci-fi gets any way... What the drive is doing based on your descitpion is making the ship or bubble have higher mass then space time can hold up... Like how Halo does it but in a completely differnt way... Halo's Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine or slipstream drive generates little black holes to punch space time to death to make a hole wich you can pass into it's form of hyperspace then you navgate it like normal space just faster/more compressed... The Kearny-Fuchida Jumpship drive just sinks/falls into Hyperspace and I asume ride the hyperspace streams like a weather ballon rides the jet stream... That's a great solution to FTL. Which in theory it's more feasible then 100 meteric mulit story mechs are... it just reallies on their being a hyperspace and the Universe had to have come from some where after all.
Very good!
Thanks!
You are correct all of the terms mean things that could refer to what you are talking about. The only issue I heard is that the "jump points" do not have a natural mechanism to clear out space junk. A crew would have to be stationed their 24/7 to keep rocks an metal shards from slamming into ship as they jump in.
the stars gravity or solar winds can do that. the relative speed to star without the solar sails.
@@Paerigos Yes but the gravity in that two spots is so weak that it would not be very effective and solar winds need time to reverse or blow off objects. For a jump point to be commercially viable "cleaning teams" would need to be assigned on a permanent basis.
@@jasonulysess3652 battletech ship armor is capable of tanking hits from heavy railguns so even ship pieces is "dust" in this regard.... and you can just sweep it with lasers if need be.
but anyway - since the tech regressing few people were willing to shoot around jumpships, those things are too hard to replace.
@@Paerigos O.K. I will trust you on that point but the dangers of space above the gravity well of a solar system include exo-rocks traveling in excess of 100,000 miles an hour. Being inside the gravity plane of the sun and inside the gravity planes of the planets offers natural protections from such dangers. Me I would not want to trust the ships armor, but I am a bit of a coward.
@@jasonulysess3652 : I tend to agree that most Jump Points in fairly important star systems would have regular 'sweep patrols' to deal with the occasional object that might get past a Jump Ship's armoring. But, having said that, I don't think the problem is nearly as bad as you paint it to be. Since the Jump Points are at the stellar 'poles', no orbit is possible. Thus, any materials would be 'transient' in nature, and tend to either be blown outwards by the solar wind, or fall inwards due to the star's gravitational pull to be burnt up on arrival. Anything large enough to endanger a Jump Ship would be easily detectable at long ranges (several Light Seconds), and low enough velocity, for the ship to use 'station keeping' thrusters to avoid with plenty of time to spare.
2:20 now I'm wondering wether anyone has bothered to convert helium gas to liquid form
It's still funny that they can move large ships through hyper space but took forever to send messages through the same distances.
They do have ftl communications tho, just theyre so expensive and need such big towers that only the biggest ships can mount them, and only at huge compounds on planets or huge space stations
Not really. The Speed of Light is a Harsh Mistress after all. And distances in Space are VAST. And if you are referring to ComStar's Hyper Pulse Communications facilities... remember that it takes an Immense amount of power to create the momentary 'rift' in space that is the 'pulse' and beam compressed messages through it. ComStar most likely takes time to collect a number of messages going in roughly the same direction and combines them into a single pulsed communication. It might take days, or even weeks, to assemble enough messages going in the same direction to make the cost worth while.
@@franksmedley8619 You can actually go far cheaper with a K series transmitters.
infantryman can carry a viable K-series transmitter - its a suitcase device.
Its something Federated suns and Lyrans digged up from some long forgotten SLDF archive.
Then Kuritans stole some during one war with Fed-com and some were then captured by Ghost Bears during the many clashes with the combine.
it was prototyped during the Amaris civil war but not field utilized so it was actually forgotten even by Clans.
its an omnidirectional "radio" which can send few pages of text in FTL, but another K series transmiter can evesdrop, so you have encrypt the message.
the range is generally smaller then HPG. but it was also completely immune to "grey monday" event, its completely unaffected by fortress...
@@Paerigos : To the best of my memory, the device you are talking about is the famous 'Black Box' which had a very limited range in FTL. HPG pulses can travel farther than a Jump Ship can travel (30 LY per jump), which I think I remember being somewhere around 50 or 60 LY per pulse. The 'Black Box' can only pulse a single message out in a spherical pattern out to around 10 LY, AND it can be 'read' by anyone else having a black box device, unless you encrypt the text only message. So, instead of needing a few thousand HPGs, you'd need Hundreds of Thousands of Black Boxes... and I understand they were ultimately rare in their time. I don't know if the knowledge to build black boxes was part of the Helm Memory Core's data pile, but I doubt it. It seems like some 'one off' special purpose, black ops type device made for the SLDF in emergencies.
@@franksmedley8619 it wasnt. Lyrans stumbled upon some SLDF research base and the technology was recovered from it.
in fact Comstar didnt get it for decades. it proliferated trough Fedcom and then few were lost to draconis combine.
And trough it to Ghost Bears. But in essence the tech was not even preserved on Exodus flotila.
Like... noone in Battletech has exact idea how hyperspace works...
Hell inventors of the Fortress didnt understand why it works like it does.
KF drive is kind of right guess... HPG is imprecise guess...
and K-seriers transmitters are just completely - yeah it works, we know how to build it, but fuck - noone has a clue why...
FTL travel in 40K is hell hard... pun intended 😁
It works bc Todd Howard says it works
With 16 times more dropships too.
I wanted to put this comment on the latest battle tech novel post. ( and i will) why is there such anmiosity towards melee weapons in the books? Grayson death caryal hated the hatchet man. But in my campaigns i have found them quite effective. I pilot an BRZ- A3 BREZERKER and have found very very good results. So it baffles me that even in the books we see mechs fighting hand to hand and no melee weapons or hand held sheilds are used. Even in mechs that crealrly have hand actuators.. My question is this. Do you grim dark Narrator support mech held hand weapons?
I think melee weapons on mechs can have a use in particular situations. But overall, I always thought destroying the enemy from afar is preferable.
I tend to agree with Grim on this one. It is usually far better to destroy, or drive off, attacking Mechs before they get into hand-to-hand melee range. Having said that, however, I agree that such Mechs can have useful functions in certain situations. A Mech with a CCW and TSM can do a staggering amount of damage in a single blow. But the same can be said for any Mech with TSM installed, via 'kick' attacks. It is usually far more efficient to melt, or blow one's opponent's Mech into scrap, or near scrap at long ranges, than to allow them to close and be a serious danger to yourself and your own Mech.