BattleTech fan since the early '90s, game design enthusiast since forever.

Friday, January 7, 2022

3025 production at 5 major sites

[Jan 10: edited formatting, clarity, and added the most essential backlinks]

Tikonov should produce about 6800 tons of 'Mechs/yr.

Thursday, December 30, 2021

3025-onomics noodling

I have

Discovered Tikonov's total production mass

Solved part of the Free Worlds production mystery

And confirmed my production numbers for Luthien, Hesperus, and New Avalon

Details will follow when able [see next post]

Monday, July 5, 2021

Confirming 385 Regiments & 450 Settled Worlds in 3025 Successor States

BattleDroids describes regiments as containing 108 BattleMechs (in 3 battalions of 36), and the regimental commander as Duke of a whole planet. MechWarrior 1st Edition counts about 450 settled worlds in the five Successor States. 

108 regiments * 450 commanders = 48,600 'Mechs

BattleForce 1st Edition says the Houses reorganized to 128 'Mechs per regiment (in 3 battalions of 40 plus an 8 'Mech regimental command group). If I recall correctly, it also says this new organization was copied from Wolf's Dragoons.

48,600 / 128 = 379 2/3 regiments

Wolf's Dragoons add 5 regiments plus Zeta Battalion to that total. 

379 2/3 regiments + 5 1/3 regiments = 385 regiments

Monday, June 28, 2021

[Mal] Was It Monkeys? [/Mal]

[As always, inactivity on my blog is consequent to inactivity in the rest of my life. Can't do anything in depth right now. Instead: UI complaints!]

Monday, May 11, 2020

The Spacecraft We Could Have Had

A well constructed discussion of where the space program could be right now with current technology, if we'd made more optimal choices.


Courtesy of Ashley R Pollard.

Friday, April 17, 2020

Map of FWL Military Organization

Made this ages ago.

The old HM:FWL book doesn't just have a map, and doesn't just list regimental deployments for summer 3025, it also has a list* of which provinces and worlds organize their military the way Marik does, or Oriente does, or Andurien does.

Seems like a pretty reliable way to start picking out smaller provinces.


*I forget which page, sorry. It's a purple(?) box in the bottom right corner of a right-hand page. [Next Day Edit: it's page 84, which also says
Across the Free Worlds, many minor variations of the three primary hierarchies exist, due to local government edicts and traditional grants and dignitaries. Below is the military organization used by each state. However, few states, especially the smaller ones, adopt the exact pattern set by their larger cousins. Note that one world is even listed twice.
Courtesy of Reddit user wycca. /Edit]

[Edit, May 15: somehow missed the Stewart Dragoons' Home Guards regiment on Stewart and Juggernaut regiment on Payvand. Now added. /Edit]

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Star Trek Episode Roller

I think I found this via Popfiend, years ago
In a perfect world, I could dissect all seven or eight hundred episodes to find the Star Trekkiest distribution of Starfleet missions, antagonists, motivations and NPC strategies. Such volume and detail is a sure recipe for burnout, though.

Each new Trek series self-selects what its writers thought was Trekkiest about the previous series, right? So maybe I can approximate the results of all that research by sampling episodes at random and taking different elements from each?


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There's a few other series I could mix in. Babylon 5, Farscape, Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, Shakespeare... and heck, if even Doctor Who borrows from Battlestar Galactica...

But at some point we stray from the themes and structures essential to Star Trek. Like, your average episode of Firefly has a fistfight, a gunfight, a word fight, some kind of spaceship thing, and involves a moral or ethical dilemma. Not too different from Star Trek TOS. Except TOS also adds a good dose of scientific method to everything - whether the problem at hand is mechanical, social or philosophical, the crew feels it out systematically.