FWL 3025: the three unnamed ASF sites

I know from HM:FWL (page 118) that the League manufactures 325 Aerospace Fighters at eight sites, including Westover, Lopez, Helm, Marik and Atreus. The other three sites aren't specified. (Bordon may have an LAM site, but LAMs may not count.)

Danais, Regulus and Wisconsin

The Silver Hawk Irregulars are "well supported with light AeroSpace Fighters and light tanks" (HM:FWL page 98). The light tanks are built on Amity (page 160), which suggests another member may build the light fighters. Kalidasa builds 'Mechs, Callison is a trade world, and Shiloh has nothing of value, which leaves Danais. Danais also happens to be one of the tax zones in the Succession Wars boardgame.

Some of the tax zones (Megrez, Bella, Sierra, Landfall, Tellman, Xanthe and maybe Furud) appear to be named for their outermost world. But most of the others are production sites: Westover, Marik and Atreus (fighters); Oceana, Oriente and maybe Ryerson (ships); Oriente and Calloway ('Mechs). Since the last two--Regulus and Wisconsin--aren't at the edge of their zones, I think it's likely that they're production sites too.

Grange Class YardShip

[This has been sitting on my desktop for ages. Haven't got around to full stats yet.]

How do I not remember the Sales Bug of the Year?

Customization: Veteran Techs & Repair Facilities

You can make a veteran technician (one capable of designing permanent changes to a 'Mech) as a PC, but where do you find them as NPCs? MW1e doesn't give even a 1/36 chance that a MechWarrior would be randomly assigned one, which suggests that a typical regiment would have one or two at most. That's rare enough to be the regiment's chief technician--or working at a repair facility behind the front lines, which may be where the regimental technical pool is headquartered anyway.

It's hard to say how many BattleMech repair facilities exist in 3025. I'd expect them (based on nothing more than my gut, mind you) to be more common than factories, so maybe one in three regimental HQ worlds has a repair site? That would make the factory:repair facility ratio about the same as the repair facility:regiment ratio.

Ray Lederer art from Chaos March, page 65

Unaffiliated 'Mech Production (Part 3: TDF)

3025 BattleTech has fourteen core 'Mech designs.

All three periphery states build Locusts, Stingers and Wasps. The Magistracy adds the Shadow Hawk. The Taurians add the Griffin, Thunderbolt, Archer, Warhammer and Marauder. None list the Phoenix Hawk, Wolverine, Rifleman, Crusader or BattleMaster.

It's interesting that none of the Kallon designs (Wolverine, Rifleman and Crusader) were claimed. I wonder if that says something about Kallon's history. Or maybe Kallon had a storehouse on Alpheratz, from which Alliance Defenders Limited slowly salvages their "assortment of medium and heavy 'Mechs?"


First Look at the Taurian Concordat

The Taurian Defense Force has thirty battalions in 3025. (Ostensibly they have twelve regiments, but three of those regiments are short a battalion, and another two replace half their units with conventional forces.) At the Magistracy's ratio of 'Mechs/yr:rgts, the Concordat would produce around 95 'Mechs/yr. However, like the Lyrans, the Concordat seems to have chosen durability over quantity; they've also somehow acquired a number of Lyran exclusives (Hatchetman, Commando, Rommel). At the Lyran ratio of 500/yr:75rgts, the Taurians would build 67 'Mechs/yr. (At the overall Successor State ratio of 2700/yr:385rgts, the Taurians would build 70 'Mechs/yr.)

The Concordat, Magistracy and Outworlds Alliance have a combined total of 17.33 regiments. At the Successor States' overall ratio of 2700 'Mechs/yr:385 regiments, the periphery states would build a combined total of 121.5 'Mechs/yr. Counting the Magistracy at 50/yr (assuming the excess is disproportionate for the MAF's size) and the Outworlds at 11(+/-2)/yr would leave 60.5(+/-2) for the Taurian Concordat.

If the Taurians and Canopians really do build the same number of 'Mechs, perhaps the MAF was close to luring another regiment of mercs (most likely Gordon's Armored Cavalry) away from the TDF. (That would help bring them closer to the ten that HM:FWL says they pledged to the Andurien alliance.)

The Magistracy and the Outworlds Alliance have six light production lines and one medium, which produce about half as many 'Mechs/yr as six average FWL light lines plus one average FWL medium line. If the Concordat's heavy lines are likewise half as productive as an average FWL heavy production line, they'd each build about 6 'Mechs/yr. (The Griffin line would be about 7/yr.)


To Be Continued: a more detailed look at the Taurians, and a first look at ComStar.

Abridging Devlin's Divide

I originally posted this somewhere else in February of last year.

Apologies to Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.

my face were this what Catalyst's writers actually planned

Tucker Harwell:	"Gentlemen, the future cannot influence the past, right? Wrong. We're going to prove that: lop-sided temporality. Today we're going to prove that we didn't just push a tachyon to its limits, we pushed ourselves to the limit. We did what he," Tucker points to Kael Pershaw's current body, "couldn't. This is our bridge, we built it, and he can't take that away from us."
Devlin Stone:	"That's it. An army. You're breeding an army to import from the future."
Kael Pershaw:	"He's quite simple for such an intelligent young man, isn't he?"
Fidelis:	"He made your fiction real."
Kael Pershaw:	"Your whole race will soon be fictional, along with all that other genetically inferior filth! My Jade Falcons, my army of the future, will rid our universe of you and your kind."
Devlin Stone:	"Tucker! You've got to destroy the bridge! Destroy it!"
Tucker Harwell:	"But we'll be the first ones, boss, we just got to see if we did it. Just for a millisecond. It's too important."
Devlin Stone:	"Tucker! No!"
Tucker Harwell:	"An elder sign... it worked!"
A figure drops through the aperture of the time bridge. It rises on a pair of long, skinny bird legs to its full one-and-a-half meter height, revealing a long, ovoid body with two huge eyes centered over a short beak. It shrieks an almost human shriek and leaps toward the gathered humans. The second one through the portal carries a pulse rifle, and opens fire. More follow.
Kael Pershaw:	"No. IMPOSSIBLE!"
Tucker Harwell:	"Blake's Blood, what have I done..."
Kael Pershaw:	"No, no this is wrong. You're supposed to be--"
Tetatae:	"--your superior race? WE ATE THEM."

Skilled Technicians (part 2)

After doing a fair bit of math, it looks like the chances of a BattleTech character getting a regular technician instead of a green one basically amounts to rolling 2d6 against a Target Number (hereafter TN) equal to the pilot's base gunnery plus their base piloting. And MW1e technicians almost always work faster than technicians in later editions- an average "Green" technician uses only 70% of the time listed for a repair, and an average "Regular" technician needs only 30%.

You're never going to roll a veteran (MW1e skill level 6 or 7) technician.

For most skills in MW1e, each level of skill reduces the TN by one. But repair rolls work differently. Each kind of repair has a fixed TN (and requires a set amount of time), which you modify per the charts below.

Comparing how your Learn score modifies repair rolls with how Attributes usually modify skill rolls, the author seems to be using base target number of 6. (When MW2e converted the repair difficulty chart from TNs to TN modifiers, it also assumed a base TN of 6.)

Technicians need to buy two levels of skill to improve their TN by one, which I think is meant to balance their progression against MechWarriors, who need to buy levels for two skills (piloting and gunnery). (MW3e tackled that issue from a different direction, by fragmenting the MechWarrior MOS and Technician MOS into similar numbers of sub-skills.)

Skill Level	Target Number	Total Cost
1	7	free
2	6	10
3	5	30
4	4	60
5	3	110
6	2	190
7	1	310
8	0	470

MW1e gives each character type a free level (the first level) in their core skills, and attributes don't affect a skilled repair roll, so a technician character can be "Green" for free, or "Regular" for only 60 points. "Veteran" skill would require 190 points, just about the maximum a new character would squeeze in. In contrast, MechWarriors spend 35 points on attributes, plus another 40 for "Green" level skills; or another 90 to rate "Regular;" or another 170 to rate "Veteran."

Repair rolls accrue XP more slowly than combat does, however, so technicians advance more slowly during actual play. That may be one reason skilled technicians are less common than skilled MechWarriors.

Techs have shorter careers than MechWarriors, too--maybe ten years vs. twenty-five. A technician attached to a 'Mech unit encounters a wide variety of technology and swaps knowledge with colleagues from other backgrounds; at some point, this experience may become valuable enough for the technician to get lured away into the civilian sector. Workplace injury no doubt plays a role too--although MechWarriors and technicians both face radiation hazards, live ordinance, and the threat of being crushed by multi-ton objects, MechWarriors do so for only minutes at a time from behind a half-ton of armor and strapped into a harness and neckbrace; technicians do so for hours at a time with few of the same protections.


To Be Continued: repair yards, Solaris VII, and the march of technology

Unaffiliated 'Mech Production (Part 2: AMC)

But first:

Second Look at the MAF

Magistracy fighter production seems to be based on FWL fighter production. At a ratio of two fighters per company and nine companies per regiment (because the Periphery author is ignoring command elements, I guess, and the MAF doesn't have independent attack wings), the FWL's 60 'Mech regiments would have 1080 fighters; the FWL builds 325 fighters per year, which would be 30.1% turnover/yr. That's a very good match for the MAF's "roughly 30" per year out of "fewer than one hundred."

The FWL produces 500 'Mechs/yr for 60 regiments. At that ratio, "less than 60"/yr could imply that the Magistracy possesses 7 'Mech regiments. On the other hand, MW1e claims that the MAF has experienced phenomenal growth in recent years (aided by a source of supply "somewhere beyond the periphery"), so building 60 'Mechs/yr instead of 50/yr may be a sign the MAF has only 6 regiments but is still growing.


First Look at the Outworlds Alliance

The Alliance Military Command has two 'Mech regiments of two battalions each. "Two-thirds of the Alliance BattleMechs are light, Wasps and Stingers mostly, and the rest is an assortment of medium and heavy 'Mechs produced on Alpheratz."

Alliance Defenders Limited is the Alliance's largest manufacturer and the only one to build 'Mechs (Wasps, Locusts and Stingers). At the Magistracy's ratio of production:regiments, it would produce about 13 'Mechs/yr--not enough to include "an assortment" of mediums and heavies. Considering the Alliance's friendship with the Concordat, I suspect that's supposed to read "Taurus" instead of "Alpheratz."

The AeroSpace arm has "a total of 240 AeroSpace Fighters of various types. Though many of these craft are the salvaged remnants of previous conflicts, some 40 percent are less than two generations old." A generation is what, 20-30 years, so taking the 40th or 60th root of 51% to 60% survivors to get an annual survival rate, which converts to production of... 2/yr to 4/yr. Applying the FWL's ratio of ASF:Mech production would give us 8.5 fighters/yr instead.

Applying the FWL's (instead of the MAF's) ratio of 'Mechs/yr:rgts, the Outworlds would produce 11 'Mechs and 7 fighters per year. Using ratios from the Federated Suns, Draconis Combine (or both combined) would mean 8.5 to 10 'Mechs/yr and fewer than 5 fighters/yr.


To Be Continued: First looks at the Taurian Concordat and ComStar