MekTek 4: The Final Issue

Dave Hardwood drew issue four's cover, a friend from days when I lived in Southend-on-Sea who also drew the cover, and a bunch of interior illustrations for OHMU War Machine. 

 

This turned out to be a bumper final issue with articles by Bob Nicholls, Dayfdd Neal Dyar, Helen McCarthy & Steve Kyte, Mike Timbers, Marcus Rowland, Glenn Wallbridge, Alex Stewart, and me. 

Mechs at Large my editorial promised that the next issue would have the article on cybertanks, and I promised the next issue would come sooner (Oh, how I laugh now). You can blame money, and me focusing on OHMU War Machine, which was my answer to the problem of introducing cybertanks into BattleTech.

The editorial also included a battle report of the 1988 Boston BattleTech Competition by the late Bob Nichols, the man behind Mechforce UK. RIP Bob, you were a force to be reckoned with.

Finally, I added a quick note about the then Panasonic NTSC VCR that could be rented in the UK. Those were the day when renting TVs and video recorders was still a thing. 

Japanima Dayfdd Neal Dyar provided an extensive article on the genesis of BattleTech's mechs. He described how they were drawn from several anime series including 1981s Sun of the Fang Dougram, 1982s Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, and 1983s Crusher Joe. Dayfdd's thoroughly covered the three shows plots, and their characters various story arcs. 

Snapshots Short one paragraph reviews of five fanzines that fell into my hands.

Animé Contact List Helen McCarthy provided a list of useful addresses for beginning to get into animé. This covered magazines, shops, clubs, and organizations promoting animé.

Hover Mechs Mike Timbers delivered an article on adding hover mechs to BattleTech as a way to address the weakness of hover vehicles. 

Warnography With three reviews. The first was Alex Stewart write up of his experience playing Palladium's Robotech RPG. Describing it as a fun game beset by problems with how the rules were presented, and the restrictions of the setting. The main focus of the game was blasting alien battlepods, limiting  play focused on character development.

The second piece was a short offside review of the Robotech RPG by Simon Kemp who was less satisfied with the rules, which he found unsatisfactory for a game of mech combat.

And finally, Helen McCarthy reviewed the Panasonic NVL 28B NTSC VCR, which would play NTSC video tapes on a PAL TV monitor.

Manga, Manga I was reading the following manga: Cobra; volume two of Crying Freeman; Yukinobu Hoshino  2001 Nights; Black Magic and Dominion, both by Masasume Shirow;  the Lost Continent, by Akihiro Yamada; and last, A Plague of Angels by two Western artist's – Adam Warren and Toren Smith –  delivering the third outing of their homage of the Japanese Dirty Angels.

I mentioned in passing other manga I'd seen too: Captain Harlock; Lensman; and Broid, which were all disappointing for reasons of availability, or other issues

I was also reading Aliens Earth War;  Revolver a Dan Dare comic; Give me Liberty by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons; and the wonderful Starstruck by Elaine Lee and Mike Kaluta. With the passage of time I'd forgotten how many comics I was reading back in the late 80s, early 90s. Those were the days.
 
A Question of Identity Marcus Rowland provided an article for the Mechwarrior RPG, which would add to the 'fun' of piloting a mech.

House Rules had two contributors. Mike Timbers gave a list of tweaks he made when playing BattleTech and AeroTech, which he found useful to clarify the rules. Glenn Wallbridge wrote about anti-personnel guns, high explosive and armour piercing ammunition, and indirect fire, also adding starting fires too. 

Mech Modelling  Glenn Wallbridge provided an extensive seven page article on how to convert mechs, how to cut and pin limbs for more dynamic poses, and finally, how to paint and base them. Given that Glenn had sculpted a series of mechs and vehicles for a manufacture he brought a wealth of experience to the topic.

MekTek LOCs Twelve pages of letters and replies to questions, which showed how much the game had grabbed the players back in those early days of BattleTech. 

Mechforce Finally, a two page advert for MechForce UK run by the late Bob Nicholls.

So, that's it, the last blast from the past.

MekTek 3: Letter's of Comment Explode

The final piece of artwork generously donated by Steve Kyte adorns the cover of issue three.

Again all uncredited articles and artwork for issue three were me, while Alex and an article by Helen McCarthy. 

 

Mechs at Large editorial rant about shenanigans in the media and how not to inflame opinions, and an announcement of the 1990 Eastercon having a Japanese anime stream run by Helen McCarthy (it was great).

Japanima Helen McCarthy talking about what animation was available to buy and watch on video cassettes. Titles available included Robotech, World of Taisman, Speed Racer, Once Upon a Time, Crushers aka Crusher Joe, Warriors of the Wind a cut of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Space Cruiser: Guardians of the Galaxy a cut version Space Cruise Yamato.

Manga, Manga  Me talking about Akira, Appleseed, Grey, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Cyber 7, and Outlanders by Johi Manabe, which has nothing to do with Sean Connery, or Scottish romance. I covered a lot of comics this time, including Dirty Pair by Toren Smith, not Japanese but a homage to Japanese manga, Dark Horses Aliens, and Alien Legion, which all interested me.

Adepticus Titanicus reviewed by Alex Stewart, praising the big box of toys, and the introduction of mecha-on-mecha action in the WH40K universe.

Not listed in the contents was a one page cartoon by me called Saucer Story. 

Little Big Mechs was me taking the BattleTech rules and showing how to convert them for playing on the tabletop with terrain etc. Today that would be unnecessary, but this was the early days of BattleTech, and we had to make do with home made rules. I discussed the problems of converting an area based ground scale hex game into a free-form movement.

Snapshots by me looked at some wargame fanzines that were available in the UK. 

Mech Force was a long article by me about how to expand the game by converting the BattleForce rules into representing single mechs rather than a platoon. Think of this as Alpha Strike done thirty years ago. It was running games using these house rules that spurred me to go on and write Oversized Heavy Mechanized Units aka OHMU War Machine.

PBM Campaign I wrote up the rules I'd written for a campaign game that I had run for the wargame club I was a member of when I lived in Southend-on-Sea.

MekTek LOCs Ten pages of letters from the readers of the previous issue of MekTek. My readers had opinions, and were largely enthusiastic about what they'd read. The next issue would showcase a lot of the ideas discussed here.

Anyway, hope that brief glance of the past has been of interest.

Catch you all on the bounce. 

 

MekTek Issue 2

Again another beautiful piece of artwork from Steve Kyte adorns the cover of issue two.

All uncredited articles and artwork contents for issue two were again me, and was again joined by Alex Stewart, and Simon Kemp who read the first issue, sent me a couple of reviews too.  

Mechs at Large editorial offering pointers to what I was interested in and what I would be writing about.

Japanima Talking about mecha animation shows on American syndicated TV, and how this fed back to influence what the Japanese animation studios were doing.

Manga, Manga  Started with me praising the American mecha comic Dynamo Jo by Doug Rice, which should be much better known that it is, followed by his four issue mini-series of Star Blazers. Also, mentioned were the translated Japanese properties Xenon, Area 88 manga, and Mai Psychic Girl.

Warnography Alex Stewart reviewed Price of Glory by William Keith, and The Devils Hand by Jack McKinney, with again a harsh, but fair review of the latter.

Encounter on Ice was a scenario inspired by watching Mad Max with four mech designs by me for the intruders to give Max's lance a hard time.

Snapshots Simon Kemp reviewed Aerotech, Technical Readout 2, and the Succession Wars Battletech boardgame. While I reviewed Stardate Vol 3, issue 2, and my thoughts on the first three issues of Battle Technology (buy MekTek instead).

Meka of Design was a long article by me breaking down the battlemech construction rules.

MekTek Trio I reviewed the BattleTech Manual comparing the rules against the original BattleDroids and BattleTech box set rules.

MekTek LOCs I published a letter by Sam Lewis of FASA, and two letters by readers of issue 1.

The plan is to put all four of the MekTek issues on DriveThruRPG at some point this year, along with the revised OHMU War Machine rules, which requires some work to make if a PDF.

MekTek: A BattleTech Fanzine 1

MekTek was a British BattleTech fanzine produced by me, which came out in 1988. The cover of the first issue was by Steve Kyte.

All the uncredited articles and artwork in issue one were done by me, while the Warnography article was written by Alex Stewart, aka Sandy Mitchell author of Ciaphus Cain.

Mechs at Large was my 'raison d'être' for producing the fanzine, bemoaning the direction FASA focusing on setting, rather than game mechanics (oh boy, did that change later with excessive rules bloat).

Japanima I looked at mecha in Japanese animation, describing the three series that were combined into what became Robotech.

Warnography Reviewed the William Keith's first two Gray Death books, and Ardath Mayhar's The Sword and the Dagger. Alex wasn't kind to the latter.

Thundering Guns described a number of new weapons (Gauss gun; disruptor; fusion cannon; grenade launcher; two sizes of auto-flechette shot guns; medium range missiles; heavy missiles), with a table defining their stats.

Heavier Metal added two variant mech types. The first was armless bipedal mechs, which added the internal arm structure to the torso. The second was the Tetra mech, which was a different way to record a quad mech structure (a record sheet was included). Tetra mech records sheets made it possible to construct quad mechs up to 200 tons (divided into weight classes).

Grunts'n Groan'n When Rock'n Roll'n expanded the infantry rules (mechanized; body armour; platoon organization), and added troop quality too (militia; conscripts; regulars; veterans; elite), and a mechanism for tracking combat experience. A table defined the stats.

Apocalypse Choppers was my way of adding helicopters to the game. At the time this was written, CityTech had just been released, and I had opinions.

So, I'm noodling whether or not to put MekTek up on DriveThruRPG as a PDF, but I'm not sure an old British fanzine from the late 1980s holds any interest for todays BattleTech fan.

BattleTech Alternate Universe

  

I read a fun thread on Twitter a little while back asking what opinion would get your BT fan card revoked.

I wrote Kerensky's Exodus was dumb, dumber than a bag of hammers; and later added, The Republic of the Sphere was the best thing ever introduced into BT canon. Obviously, these are just throwaway comments, made in jest, but with elements that stand some further reflection.

It's hard now for those fans who weren't there back in 1984 to understand the appeal of the original 3025 setting.

What you have to remember is that the game was tapping into the whole Mad Max vibe that swept the West, click here for a wiki article. Not forgetting the timing of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome released in 1985.

So when FASA's BattleDroids arrived, the whole 'previous technology was 'made better in the past' resonated with me and countless other wargamers. Yes, it was obvious that this would have to change, because the Inner Sphere would have had to have been knee deep in Battlemechs to keep them on the battlefields of the future.

Hence my love for the William Keith Grayson Carylisle Gray Death stories, which is all about finding lost tech.

The recent successful KickStarter, with the new plastic mechs from Catalyst have revived people's interest in BattleTech. I haven't played a game in quite a long while, but have fond memories of fun times. Okay, I'm totally obsessed with stompy robots!

However, later on, I got into a bit of a tiff with a guy on FaceBook about combined arms games, which was resolved after some comments.

My assertion remains that there's a sweet spot for playing games of classic BattleTech, and furthermore hover tanks used aggressively can unbalance the game. I was told that using fusion powered hover tanks was cheesy. I kind of agree, but only because I think that cheesy is just shorthand for edge cases breaking the rules.

On further reflection, I think that BattleTech would be better focused on gladiatorial arena games, because the super crunchy game mechanics are already borderline rpg character focused. Furthermore, one could tinker with the time and groundscale for more in the cockpit verisimilitude. Yes, this would turn BattleTech into a Solaris game, but that's not a bad thing.

I think the original Solaris game was a road BattleTech should have taken. Obviously, opinions will differ. Then focus the desire for combined arms battles using Alpha Strike. But that's just my opinion.

But, here we are entering a revival of the classic game, and that I think all would agree is a good thing.

Gencon BattleTech

  

Over on the BattleTech Facebook page there is announcement about new products from Catalyst Games.  I pulled these four pictures from their post to spread the word.  The one above shows the new box set that will have eight mechs; new plastic designs.  What is of interest to me is the return of William H. Keith to the BattleTech fold with fiction by him called the Golden Rule.

Colour me impressed, as he's my favourite BattleTech author because he had a vision of the universe that resonated with me.  In fact at one point I seriously thought about writing a fan fiction novel based on his Gray Death trilogy, but based from the other side, seeing the story through the eyes of Duke Ricol and his subordinates.

You can read a scene I wrote here.

The back of the box lists the contents.

Next up is a beginners box set with only two mechs at slightly less that half the price of the big box.

I think this is a pretty astute marketing move as $60 is a pretty big chunk of change to slap down for a game.

And the last shot is of the contents.

I'm not quite sure where I stand on buying these for myself, because truly I have more mechs stacked away for a rainy day than you can shake a big stick at.  But I hope I can get a copy of the fiction book, because I'm a big fan of Keith's writing.
  

Technical Read Out 3055

 

I had the good fortune to be asked to write for the BattleTech universe by Sam Lewis.  I had written to him suggesting a TRO to cover the Clan second line mechs and Inner Sphere combat support vehicles.  My idea was to do a version of the 3025 book but using the new Clan technology rules.

Sam wrote back and said this was an interesting idea but given that I was in England it would be too difficult to coordinate this project.

You have to remember I was writing this stuff in the late 80s and early 90s before the advent of the internet we all know and love today.  There was also the little thing of just having one person write a whole TRO.  I was game, but the people at FASA thought it would be better if the work was given to more than one writer.

I remember having a conversation and asked what I would like to write for the book?  I said the Clan second line mechs, which made "Black" Mike Nystul happy.  Mostly because it seemed that no one had any interest in doing them because they were considered boring.  They sent me a bunch of drawings and told me to design stats to match.  At the time I knew nothing about the Harmony Gold problem and I was blissfully ignorant of any developments happening within FASA.  All I wanted to do was produce stats for classic Inner Sphere mechs I liked.

I Also remember Mike apologizing about cutting the text down for the TRO after insisting on it for the original specification.  I knew several of the other British based contributors to this product, and they all moaned about the amount of fluff text that had been specified.  It's quite difficult to write things which have any relevance to the game.

FASA wanted five of the design optimized for Solaris, which back then had a different ground and time scale. The designs had to take advantage of the rules, and I was told that if there was any spare tonnage that this would be a good thing.  Because they had ideas for scenarios with extra surprises. 

They also told me that certain mechs were to be Diamond Sharks and to mention this when writing the text.  I didn't have the first clue about who or what they were, other than they had plans.  Also, I didn't design the Jenner that is in the Clan second line mech section.

The following are links to the full text I wrote for FASA.

BBN-1V Baboon

BEH-0M3 Behemoth

GRF-3BN Griffin

GSH-0VK Goshawk

KKN-5N Kraken

The AC2 version of the Kraken was optimized for then original version of Solaris.  This used a different time and ground scale combo.  The rules  allowed certain weapons, like the AC2, to fire either every turn or on more turns than a lot of other weapons. 

LCT-3WU Locust
 
MAD-4R Marauder

MTD-0R Matador

What I called the Matador became the stats for the Phoenix Hawk. 

PER-G1N Peregrine

RFL-6LP Rifleman 

SHD-3J Shadow Hawk

VPR-0S1 Viper

VXN-2S Vixen

WHM-9U Warhammer

WVR-6MU Hellhound

Name changed from Wolverine to Hellhound by FASA.

I later learnt Herb Beas rewrote the rules because of my designs.  Seems the mechs were a popular choice for tournament games. Due to the combined bonus to hit from having pulse lasers and targeting computers.

My design philosophy at the time (even now) is to design mechs which over heat slowly, and as they take damage, degrade gracefully. This suits my style of play.  I'm not a frother who likes to overheat a mech for one extra shot on the enemy which ends up shutting down your mech.

This comes from a steep learning curve with unforgivingly brutal opponents like Glenn Wallbridge.  Though I think I can say that we were fairly evenly matched?  I've seen him reduce people's units, who were considered pretty good players, to shambling wrecks without breaking into a sweat.

He taught me a few things I had missed.  I remember playing a MechForce UK game against I think Neill Fowler Wright?  I fought his then unbeaten Jenner trio to a standstill with a Black Jack BJ-1D & Rifleman RFL-3D team. He reconsidered his tactics, and I started using Jenners after that.
   

BattleTech Infantry: Player Offside View

  
Today a guest post by my good friend Clive who sent me a very apposite set of observations that pointed out the Elephant in the Room about infantry in BattleTech. Over to Clive who hopefully won't mind the bits of editing and pruning I've done to turn his email into this post?

The problem with infantry is as follows:

1) Lack of Mobility (by comparison to everything else)
2) Fragility
3) Artillery
4) Mechs

Numbers one to three have been the PBI problem since the Stone Age, and they still seem to be important, even today. BattleTech has gone out of its way to make them unimportant, when compared in the modern era, where it is possible for an infantryman to carry a weapon that will total a MBT 1000m+ away

So BattleTech has from day one emasculated the PBI, because otherwise they get in the way of fighting it out mecha-a-mecha, because combat is scaled to battlemechs. Given the premise that battlemechs are masters of all they see, and basic infantry are one hit wonders, everything that isn't a battlemech ends up just being so much roadkill.

In my opinion infantry are only capable of two jobs; holding a building , or observing the enemy and bringing down an artillery strike

Given that agroup of powered battle armour (not basic infantry) attacking a battlemech did frankly derisory amounts of damage over several rounds, at no point did I get the feeling the battlemech was in any real danger. The main balancing in most cases is that mechs don't normally have a whole load of anti personal weaponry.

In the last battle the queen of battle, artillery, was back with a vengeance, but 20 points will wipe anything but a battlemech. Given an artillery strike of 1 will kill basic infantry, logically you would set the burst up to 20 times the size, or at least spread it out by N, where N is the number of guns in the battery, and accept an attack of 20/N. Perhaps one of the first things that could be tried is to tie the FO cards to how many actual artillery battery cards have already been dealt, which would cut their impact by half, or so?

So, what is the correct use of the PBI in Battlemech?

I think the only use they appear to have is to stop the other side easily acquiring buildings to hide their infantry from all the things that kill everybody's infantry, or have I missed something really subtle?

So as they say, let the discussion begin.
   

BattleTech Canon 3

  

As I have mentioned in the two previous posts I have after my jury service found myself musing on rules of law and playing with the idea of the consequences of having canon versus apocrypha.

One of the recurrent themes on the official forum is that Catalyst Games Laboratory is somehow moving the game back to its one true path, and that the things that happened in the MechWarrior Dark Age by WizKids will be corrected, and that the game will get back to its core values of being about hundreds of battlemechs swarming across battlefields conquering all before them.

Unfortunately none of this is true.

CGL has pretty much the same core of creative people developing the BattleTech franchise as when it was owned by FASA. The original creator of BattleTech owned Whiz Kids, and the current line developer has said on several occasions that while details might change in the new Dark Age, they will not be rewriting the future of BattleTech.

Furthermore, I would add that BattleTech the game has never been about massed battles, and while we see stories of the massed conflicts in the Inner Sphere, the board game as always works best at the small and personal level of a lance/troop/platoon per side. And there is a reason for that, and the reason is fundamentally embedded within the rules as they were originally written. Furthermore CGL seem driven to make that more so, not less so. Judging by the enormous rule books that they have published that go ever more into the minutiae of things to do with battlemechs when playing a game.

What I do is just ignore all the extra rules. Keep the game simple. Keep the game flowing along nicely. YMMV.
   

BattleTech Canon 2

 

In Part 1 I laid out the idea of rules as being canonical and playing games as liturgy, or service to the rules. This time I want to look at the books that make up the BattleTech bible, so as to compare and contrast them in order of canonicity. From this we can ask what books are apocryphal and what this means to the BattleTech universe?

Starting with the easily categorisable books, which are all the various editions of the rules found in the boxed sets that have been released over the years; BattleTech, CityTech, AeroTech, BattleForce, Solaris VII, BattleTech Reinforcements I & II etc. After this are the Technical Read Outs starting with the original 3025 and now up to 3085, plus and XTRO Prototypes.

All of these were written as part of the rules and therefore are part of the primary canonical sources for the game.

Now we can move on to those books that add to the background, but are not rules, or catalogues of things that are made using the rules for playing games of BattleTech. Here things become less clear, because there has been a move to categorise information in some of the books as rumours, or beliefs held by the in-universe narrator. I think that this is rather a slippery slope, which is further developed as the novels are now described as the characters point of view and is not necessarily totally true i.e.: they are biased.

For me the end sum of this stance is to make such books Apocryphal, and therefore no longer canonical. If you agree it means that large swathes of the BattleTech universe history are now just one point of view of what happened, but not necessarily facts, or even for that matter true.

Perhaps the whole history is a conspiracy to hide the truth that the Wolverines are holding back the alien hordes from over running the Inner Shere.

How's that for a thought?
   

BattleTech Canon 1

Canon comes from the history of the Romans and the Catholic church and the idea of rules and law to govern. It is literally a "need" for society to function. In this case BattleTech Canon is needed to play a game of BattleTech.

The BattleTech canon is quite interesting if you look at it as a liturgical process. By this I mean I am equating being a fan of the game as "worship", and that "service" is following the rules of the game. There is no implication of religious idolatry here, just a functional behavioural comparison that sees both as being a similar process.

Liturgy derives from the ancient Greek concept of service to the state, and carried with it a financial burden taken on by the citizen. Using this we would see that buying BattleTech products as the financial burden undertaken so as to be able to follow the rules of the game; the "service".

As you can tell this post was driven by my previous post about citizenship brings service.

Rules are generally written down in books, and law is the literal enforcement of the rules. So, when we play a game of BattleTech (or for that matter any other game with a set of rules) we are engaged in a lawful act (thereby being good citizens). No wonder people get involved with arguing the finer points of the rules, because otherwise they would be seen as acting unlawfully (this is probably worth a post all of its own, and again I find myself inspired by my recent experience as a juror).

The first canon, now redacted, were those rules found in the BattleDroids game from FASA. Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of this book, because as soon at the second edition of the game came out I moved to using those rules, because they were expanded and had clarified, or changed how things happened. For instance the sequence of actions within a turn were changed, and the construction rules for making battlemechs were also changed, as just two examples.

From this canon came the first Technical Read Out, or TRO as I will now refer to these works.

The famous and much loved TRO:3025. I will now suggest that a TRO is a catalogue of legal things that the rules allow you to use. This is a bit like "case law" under the British legal system. Case law is known as common law from precedent, which means quite simply if something has been agreed on before that it is only fair to apply the same ruling when it happens again. So if a battlemech designed under the rules appears in a TRO it is part of the canon of BattleTech.

So by extension all books that are based on the game canon, become canonical, which means it is the normal standard one plays by. However, just to remind you, I am not talking about BattleTech being a religion whereby errors and omissions become heresy, but a game where the terms and conditions are that errors and omissions will be corrected in later errata, which is more like British case law that I mentioned earlier. To be continued...
   

Reprising Progress

I meant to post this a few days ago, but didn't quite find the time to sit down and write it on Wednesday afternoon as planned. Went to the dentist instead of writing a blog, I know which I prefer.

Anyway, been painting and doing basing of figures for my Mummerset campaign.  The basing being the problematical bit as after playing four games BattleTech with miniatures using our house rules certain things have been brought into focus for me and the group I play with.

Infantry are really tiny in comparison to mechs and vehicles and are readily confused by people who need glasses to read. BattleTech is not at heart an infantry centric game.  The clue is in the title, and while there are rules to expand the repertoire of infantry types, those rules tend to add to the rule burden, rather than actually creating a wider focus on combined arms.

As a result we have already gone from "realistic" platoons with mixed weapons by squads back to generic platoons that have a theme e.g: this is a laser platoon, or SRM launcher platoon, which is a shame in a way, because it loses flavour.  However, we are still employing squads that fire as platoons, which is good, and one of the things I've been doing is re-examining the way I base the figures.

BattleTech is a boardgame that has one hex equaling 30 metres, which means that infantry platoons are tripped up by the granularity of the time and ground scale assumptions; 10 seconds per turn for those who are not familiar with the game.

Therefore the game is working to a 1:1000th ground scale where the models are nominally 1:300th scale so we start from the position where the models are just over three times too large.  Now one solution is to use smaller models, say 2mm miniatures, but this is not to everyone's taste, and one can argue that one might as well use counters at that point.  Depending on your taste for such things. The other side of the coin is that you change the ground scale, which funnily enough is exactly what the official rules recommend.

Of course the eagle eyed alert reader will of spotted that even increasing the ground scale from 1:1000th to 1:500th still doesn't make the model scale equal to the ground scale.  Not generally a problem except for two things.  BattleTech miniatures are notoriously inconsistent in scale, with the dreaded scale creep over the last 25 years making newer models larger still, and the original smaller models were in my opinion closer to 1:220th scale (Z gauge in model railway terms) to begin with.  What you are left with is how to decide what compromise works best for you?

I'll be direct and to the point here and say that my tastes run towards mechs being shorter than the nominal 40 foot height that the board-game assumes,  and having a larger range of sizes depending on weight class.  So I visualize a light mech at around 20 to 25 feet tall, a medium mech around 25 to 30 foot tall, a heavy mech 30 to 35 feet tall, and assault mechs 35 to 40 foot tall.  Just my opinion.

So measuring up mech models and making some choices about how to interpret their size we can chose a scale that makes us happy.  My choice is to assume 1.6mm to the foot, or around 1:160th scale. Now that choice means that even with a a larger ground scale the models are still about three times larger than the ground scale.  So all that examination has lead us precisely no where.

Therefore one just has to be pragmatic and accept that one's choices have costs and benefits and decide what is important to you.  I want the infantry to based as squads that make up platoons, but given the size of the infantry models the most I can get on a 25mm base is three to four models, which to me is not enough to represent a squad.  So I've ended up having two bases per squad, and four squads squad platoons require eight bases in total.  However, as we have played games the need to be able to remove single casualties became apparent, and after some experimentation the solution I have reached is to add to single figures bases, and one base with two figures on it.

My reasoning being that the double figure base represents the platoon commander and RTO, while the two single figure bases represent a sergeant and runner.  The second single figure base is not strictly necessary for playing the game, but does keep the numbers even, which for some reason pleases me, as the number is 28.  The same a standard British platoon, and nominally the size of a standard BattleTech platoon.

We shall just ignore the whole frontage that a platoon occupies, as we've already accepted that the figure to ground scale is an abstraction to make the game playable on the size of table we have available.
   

Evil is as BattleTech Does?

Over on the Classic BattleTech Forums there has been a certain amount of banter about evil in the in game universe with particular respect to two of the developed powers that people can play. This made me think about what is evil, or what makes something evil?

One definition of evil is that it is something defined by some source or another. For instance, from deities, religion, nature and evolution, morality, or from common sense, whatever that means? Such an approach can be described as one of moral absolutism. Here if an action is wrong, then regardless of any good that might arise, it remains a wrong thing to do.

The dichotomous opposite would be that there is no such thing as evil per se. So killing someone is neither right or wrong. Obviously, the consequences will depend on whether or not the action takes place within a framework where the rules permit, or do not permit such an action, and therefore the term evil is something we create to describe the breaking of rules that have been made by mankind.

Another stance is to look at evil from the perspective of moral relativism, which leads to the position that what is evil is a subjective product of local customs, mores and prejudice. To me this seems so open minded as to be a position where one has no brain because it has fallen out.

Finally, another approach to the definition of evil is to come from the position that one has to compromise between the absolute and the relativist position to find a third way. This way posits that morality has to be flexible and one must finds ways of measuring happiness and suffering to find the common denominator of what is considered evil.

Needless to say all of these arguments are rooted in ethics and philosophy and can make for an interesting discussion in any group, depending on the definition of the word interesting?

Within the BattleTech universe background I think that one can see that all the majors powers have done things that would be considered evil from at least one of the above four perspectives. Depending on one's beliefs the individual details of the various evils will appeal, or disgust you accordingly. Therefore I am of the opinion that any Inner Sphere polity that either all are evil, or none are truly evil.

  

BattleTech Troper

BattleTech is a wargame that has not one, but two main pages on the TV Tropes site. Who'd have thought huh?

The link above deals with the general tropes of BattleTech, like duh! BTW: that is of course me using a trope.  However, more importantly, as an introduction to the world of BattleTech I really can't recommend this page enough for the casual person who wants to know what's it all about Alfie? Sorry for that shout out.

This next link is to a page on how FASA allowed the BattleTech universe to be expanded and the various tropes that have become signature items of the franchise. Be warned that clicking on either of these links will take you to pages with lots of other links on them that form a hypertext database, or Wiki as they are now called.

So what is a trope, apart from the content of a site called TV Tropes that is?

It is a figure of speech, or a metaphor if you prefer, that describes something using words whose literal meanings are different from what they say, for example "road works", which means a road that is being dug up, or repaired, but not one that is literally working. Using a metaphor allows people to explain concepts that are not easily understood using language that describes something else. Often these end up as common clichés, for instance "blue sky thinking".

Metaphors can then become metonyms, which are figures of speech that become the thing. For instance I have my wheels meaning I have a motor car. Funnily enough a trope can become ironic through meaning the opposite of what was originally intended and this trope has many flavours too. My favourite being Socratic irony, or the "Colombo gambit", where you start off by stating how one doesn't understand something and ask the other person to explain it. This then leads the inherent contradictions being spotted in what has been said.

When you have a trope that contains two words that have opposite meanings you then move into the realm of the oxymoronic, an obvious example is "living dead", and another is "military intelligence", the latter having been described as "a highly refined organisation of overwhelming generalities, based on vague assumptions, and debatable figures drawn from undisclosed activities, pursued by persons of diverse motivation, and questionable mentality, in the midst of unimaginable confusion".

Of course that is a gross exaggeration of the process behind "military intelligence" for comic effect, which therefore make it hyperbole, which funnily enough is another example of a trope. Ironic huh? Probably a bit of an understatement to describe military intelligence in this manner too, something that we Brits do with a certain amount of aplomb. I always remember an RAF chap being interviewed after a raid over Berlin who described that whole death defying ordeal as a bit of a "whizz bang". In trope terms such understatement is called a litote. A more modern example of a litote is of course the use of double negatives.

Any metaphor/trope that starts off as a counter proposition is counted as an antithesis, and you thought that it was just a part of dialectics. Well it is, but dialectics is a part of rhetoric, which uses metaphor as the basis for constructing arguments. So finally we get to the end of the different categories of tropes with the synecdoche. This is the mirror of the metonym in that the description has replaced the thing to the extent that it starts to become a cliché, though not all synecdoches are clichés.

So BattleTech is all of the above and more, which is probably why I like it in spite of the ludicrousness of the central conceit.
   

Aliens: A Rant

  
There has been recently what I consider to be a rather fraught thread on this topic on the CBT forums, which I'm not going to link to for two reasons.  First it is has been moderated, and second it is dead.  My post here is a slightly revised version of my last post to that thread, which is as much about getting stuff off my chest as anything else.

I kind of assume that most people are au fait with the real world arguments for aliens.  I suspect this is a wrong assumption on my part.  The arguments around whether or not aliens should, or should not exist in the BattleTech universe, tend to be a discussion on what different types of aliens would add interesting opponent's to the boardgame.  The arguments then tend to degenerate into:

• I'd stop playing BattleTech if aliens were added.
• Aliens don't add anything to the game that can't be done with human protagonists.
• The TPTB said no aliens.

I'm not interested in arguing the these points in any shape at all, because as I agree that it's either down to personal opinion, or taste.  Also, I have no control over the direction of the BattleTech product line at CGL.

What I do want to do is throw a big spanner into the works and prove that the probability of aliens existing in the BattleTech universe is high enough that some explanation for their non-existence has to be provided, which has to be better than "because we say so".  Though if they say "it's FASA's biophysics, move on nothing to see" I'd be okay with that, because we would at least have acknowledged that there is a problem, even if it can't, or won't be corrected.

Now let me start with three current ideas around aliens in our universe; the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equations and Panspermia. I'm not going to expound on these at great length, but I will give a couple of links to help those whose Google Fu is weak, and or genuinely don't understand the concepts.

Fermi Paradox

Basically Fermi was a scientist who in 1950 asked why haven't we met aliens, given how long we've been around etc?  Worked from the optimistic assumption that even at slower than light speeds it doesn't take forever to actually explore the Milky way galaxy (about 300,000 years, which is a very long time, but it can be done.  Or as one NASA scientist allegedly said, "Getting to the stars is a biological problem, not an engineering one").

Quote, "The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations."

Drake Equation

Once you read the Fermi Paradox link you will see mention of the Drake Equations.  Drake being another scientist who thought to himself it must be possible to calculate the probability of the existence of life on other worlds, and come to some conclusions about the chances of meeting aliens?  He was a bit more pessimistic than Fermi, because he assumed that technological civilisations will always destroy themselves, or have a natural life span that ends up with them dying out.

Quote, "The Drake equation (sometimes called the Green Bank equation or the Green Bank Formula) is an equation used to estimate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.  It is used in the fields of exobiology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).  The equation was devised by Frank Drake in 1961."

Panspermia

Panspermia has to do with the origins of life in the universe in general.  It predates both of the above ideas by a considerable margin as it was first proposed around the 5th Century BC.  In the 1950s the astronomer Fred Hoyle promoted the concept, but tied it into "intelligent design", much to the detriment of his professional standing in the scientific community at the time.  In more recent years space probes have provided supporting evidence for panspermia.

Quote, "Panspermia (Greek: πανσπερμία from πᾶς/πᾶν (pas/pan) "all" and σπέρμα (sperma) "seed") is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, and planetoids."

Three Theory Argument

Now in our real world all of the above is subject to a lot of problems from having what statisticians would call a "very sparse data set" i.e: life only known to exist here on Earth.  While we now have astronomical data on 200 or so extra-solar planets, we are still fumbling around in the dark that is the vastness of space, if you'll pardon the pun.

However, in the BattleTech Universe this is not the case, as we have a background where there are 2500 colonised planets, and IIRC, 7500 or so other explored systems with no life.  Even if these figures are wrong it hardly affects the basic answer, which is that we have (within the game) now tested the Panspermia hypothesis, and can put all of data into the Drake equation, which will answer the Fermi Paradox.

I know from reading various source book and novels that there are planets in the BattleTech Universe with dinosaurs, proto-humanoid hominids, and at least one tool using alien race called the Tetatae.  Now some of you might be thinking, but the Tetatae could be any where in the universe, not just the Milky Way galaxy.

Well actually no, because even though FASA physics suck, we do have some limits from in game sources about the limits of the jump drive.  We know from the Word of Blake (WoB) use of super-jumps, during the Jihad, is how far a jumpship can jump, given the energy it has stored on board.  From this we can make some educated guesses, on the upper limits, about how far a jumpship that has miss-jumped can go.

My best guess, using the worst case scenario, is that the miss-jump radius is within one or two orders of magnitude larger than 800 light years.  Based on the distances from the WoB super-jumps during the Jihad, this would mean 8,000 light years up to 80,000 light years away.  This is well within our Milky Way galaxy, and really not all that far in cosmological terms.  Assuming one order of magnitude, a missjump radius of 8000 light years is certainly within the possible travel distance of a jumpship in the BattleTech Universe (about 61 jumps to get to the Tetatae homeworld).  Given no other hard data in any of the sourcebooks, it is difficult to firm-up this educated guess.

Alternatively, even if you took the argument that the miss-jump in Far Country was a jump forward in time as well as space, this would still not invalidate the the existence of aliens in the BattleTech Universe, because the Drake equation looks at the statistical probabilities of aliens existing over a set period of time.  Given that we only have one reference in the source books to a jump-ship miss-jumping forward in time, it is hard to have any meaningful discussion of the physics of time travel in the BattleTech Universe.  My best educated guess would be a minimum of one year forward for every light year travelled, because this would fit in with what we know about time dilation and general relativity, and is a very rough approximate fit for the events as described the book Living Legends.

Statistical Probability of Aliens

Now I know that the mention of statistical probabilities tend to turn most people off, but such tools allow us to make educated guesses about the number of aliens that could exist in the BattleTech Universe.

There are minimum of 100,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way.  This figure could be four times higher, and the astrophysicists will no doubt get back to us in due course when they've finished arguing over the numbers (I've taken the conservative position to make my argument stronger).

In BattleTech we have a distribution of life supporting planets per system that is approximately one in four (it was unclear to me whether there are 7500, or 10,000 star systems in the BattleTech's known space.  Taking the larger number makes my arguments stronger, because it reduces the chances of aliens existing). That is 10,000 known star systems with 2500 having "habitable" planets, very roughly one in four.

Using that data ratio, as our assumption for the Drake equation, we end up with 100,000,000,000 divided by 10,000 divided by four, which if I've done my maths right is 2,500,000 planets that are capable of supporting life.  That's a lot of planets.

From here we then go back and look at the number of planets that had life on them that developed life in the BattleTech known sphere before humans arrived.  A minimum of 5 planets (may be higher, but I'm being conservative here to strengthen my argument), but the number at this really doesn't affect the answer all that much.  So 10,000 systems divided by 5 equals roughly 1 in 2000 had an intelligent life form.  Arguable as just being humans in the BattleTech Universe.

Now, divide 2,500,000 by 2000 and we get a possible 1250 technological aliens species living in the Milky Way.

They're Dead Jim

Of course, as Drake suggests they may be all extinct, so the question becomes what would be the chance of that being true?  The answer again lies in the Drake equation, and handily enough he guesstimates that a technological civilisation will last about 10,000 years.

Human technological society may have arguably been around for about 8,000 years, in the BattleTech Universe, if you make the assumption that we became technological started around 5000 BC or so.  However, a different definition of technology based on social infrastructure to support artisans, would require moving the clock forward to the changeover from hunter gathering to formation of agrarian city states, rather than tool use per se.  Then we are talking around 2500 BC or so, which would make our human technological society about 5000 years old.  Pick a figure really.

Anyway, the "timey-wimey" thing.  Are all these aliens civilizations around at the same time?  Clearly not, but regardless there would be archeological ruins from dead civilizations to find.  Even so how many aliens might be around now?

All I can say is more than one, but less than 1250.

My best guess, maybe one in ten.  So maybe up to a 125 technological aliens exist in the BattleTech Universe Milky Way galaxy.  Probably with technology comparable to the Inner Sphere, in the time period that BattleTech is set.  Could be a lot higher number of aliens, or they could all be technologically much further advanced, or behind, depending on your assumptions and other variables.

What Are They Good For?

Now the aliens are not out there thinking "what do we add to the game of BattleTech ", because this is not a discussion of the merits of adding, or not adding aliens to BattleTech?  IMNSHO the aliens just exist.  One just has to accept that they may add nothing new, it is just inevitable from the assumptions that underpin the BattleTech universe as a place where "mankind can go forth, multiply and die".

If FASA had set BattleTech at a time when the whole galaxy had been explored, and the first empire had fallen during the long night, like Asimov did in the Foundation series, then FASA could say that there are no aliens in the BattleTech Milky Way galaxy.  FASA would still not be able to say that there are no aliens in the BattleTech Universe, because there are more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in this galaxy.  However, they didn't.

Hopefully I've demonstrated that aliens are like economics, physics, and other stuff that FASA made up a bunch of stuff about, holds very "little water" when you examine it closely.  I remain, neither for, nor against aliens in BattleTech.  I can see how if done badly they would suck.  OTOH I can imagine that if done well they would be good.  What I know is that unless there is a change of heart by TPTB at CGL then the introduction of aliens is very unlikely, which I think is bad, because I think an open mind is better than a closed one.

Disclaimer: All posts are condensed & abbreviated summaries of complex arguments posted for discussion on the internet, and not meant to be authoritative in any shape, or form on said subject, T&CA, E&OE & YMMV.
   

Battlechat

  
Talking about the future of BattleTech here is a link to one of the Battlechats with Herb.

If you scroll down the page you find a more readable edited version to peruse and think about. I can see the logic in CGLs approach, but the cost is the loss on any real chance of updating BattleTech for the 21st Century. This is in spite of the fact that all the elements to introduce a new Starter Set exist.

My vision would be an introductory set with Quick Start Classic and Quick Strike fast play, which would go a long way to addressing the major complaints of new players coming across BattleTech for the first time, which are; that too much detail slows down play, and one can't field large numbers of units.
   

FASAnomics

Good old FASA economics lies at the heart of BattleTech, though some of you who might be reading this will probably go huh? 

FASAnomics describes the phenomena in the BattleTech game where the economic implications of game background decisions really don't make a lot of sense. However, I would have to say that since the game is based on giant battling stompy robots that make no real world sense, it is really the equivalent of quibbling over how many angels can stand on the head of a pin.

So why even talk about such a pointless thing?

First to kind of tell everyone that it is pointless, because believe you me, on the CBT forum these issues are discussed all the time. Mind you everything is repeatedly discussed to the point that one begins to lose the will to live. Furthermore, people never hesitate to tell you everything they believe with the full force of righteous belief delivered from high. 

I wonder how the CGL crew really stop themselves from screaming sometimes? 

There again what is the bottom line here? Money. You can only make money by selling product, and to do that you have to keep and expand your customer base. Want to know how to make a small fortune in gaming? Start with a large one. 

So, perhaps the screaming is all about the horror of losing money?

All joking aside, we also have the dual problem of CGL trying to square the circle. In this case reconcile the contradictions implicit within the universe, while at the same time not adding things to the BattleTech universe that is seen to be a retcon (retroactive continuity). 

Retcons really annoys the fan base, but it does look like the tail is wagging the dog at times, as can be seen in these threads.

Amount of Churn & Burn among mech Designs?

Master Unit List.

Does this all sounds a bit like tilting at windmills? One of my contributions to these threads was that of all things the Jihad provides the best agent for an invisible retcon. Saves a lot of work really. 

Standard answer, it got nuked. The end.

However, I'm reminded about the time when the story "Crisis on Infinite Earths" by DC was released. It was a multiple issue comic book plot-line that attempted to reconcile the timeline and alternate Earth stories, while at the same time removing inconsistencies and confusion. 

I understand from my friend Rob Hansen that since Crisis on Infinite Earths was published that DC have needed to repeat the process over again on two further occasions. Only going to show the futility of such an exercise in the first place; something largely driven by the fact that it is a shared universe with lots of different writers all contributing their unique vision to it. 

OTOH it sold a lot of comics, which makes money for everyone.

Well everyone apart from the readers, but their contract is to pay for stuff and be entertained.

Sounds a bit like BattleTech, but instead of various versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, Superman et al, we have various novels with different authors who stress different aspects of the giant stompy robot action.

This started from the time the very first novels were published. 

IMHO William Keith's version of the Inner Sphere is notably darker than Michael Stackpole's. The current Dark Age line has the further problem of different writers writing about the same character in a follow-on novel. 

For example, the first time we meets Anastasia Kerensky she is a sexy high maintenance risk taker and excellent mech pilot. Several novels down the line she now is portrayed sans-sexuality as a harridan, who is frustrated at every point either by the men around her, or by one of the two blond protagonists both called Tara that thwart her "evil" plans. Link.

Another name given to the phenomenon of story discontinuity on the CBT forums "is that the character took the stupid pills."

It is what you get when you have writers who are interested in their own vision, and their own character archetype having to write about established characters written by other writers. So in one book the leader of one house is shown to be a genius, yet the story unfolds to show that he or she has got it so wrong that they are really more stupid than a very stupid thing. 

Making a character look stupid is a bad thing to do to another authors creation. Got to have a common vision of the universe for this to work, and that means people do things because they believe it is the right thing to do. IMNSHO best to leave the other writers character alone, or only obliquely mention them in passing, rather than showing the reader your version. 

YMMV on that opinion.

Coming back to the whole future history of the BattleTech Universe, the thing is that I can go and read a history book and get one perspective and some data. Later on another history book will come along and give another perspective and perhaps new data. Afterwards there is a synthesis of both perspectives that shows error in both the data sets. 

This is fine with historical facts. 

However, the BattleTech universe is fictional, and there are no historical facts, just fiction. While we live in a world where the last major world war had villains who wore black, and who did monstrous things, but if you are writing a story as fiction people are going to say that this is a tired old trope. Link here.

So, on one hand you can retcon anything, just because you can, but OTOH why even bother? 

I mean, at the end of the day BattleTech is just a game. The simplest non-retcon retcon that can be done is to just say that the figures are wrong, because the in character source got them wrong. Have source books with facts as seen from one perspective, but the novels should not be seen as reliable canon, as they are they are character points-of-view. At the moment novels are a canon source of data, whereas I would see them as "in-universe" self serving hagiographies.

Take the problem that the population numbers too high. 

Simple answer, ComStar made a computational error in their census. Still too high? The House Lords were subject to errors from poor accounting practices. The real figures? No one knows since all the computer records have been lost in the wars.

Perhaps it's time for a post Jihad census story? It would make the basis for a good novel. 

No really. The plot would be about the characters finding out that population levels have been falling for centuries, but everyone high up has just assumed that the figures they were working with were right, and that evidence to the contrary was a glitch. 

People on the ground never had the time to worry about the consequences due to having to face the fact that property values dropping from mech invasions, and the Jihad. It would be a dark tale that would put the consequences of three centuries of war at the heart of the story again.

I can dream...

Loving the Alien

Or, how I learnt to enjoy BattleTech in spite of the Clans. 

Over on the Classic BattleTech Forum there is a long and rambling thread about aliens in BattleTech that started as a hate fest for the idea of all things alien being added to the game background, but which has settled down to a more reasoned discussion through polite persistence...

As an Old School Renaissance player (or Retard, depending on you point of view) I really don't care what is, or is not in the BattleTech game, because I see the official rules as merely a buffet that I can choose to pick from as I like. 

However, the tirade of anti-alien hate rather puzzles me. 

I can see that the anti-alien proponents feel that aliens add nothing to the back ground that can't be done by using humans, which is a circular argument that leads no where useful. 

OTOH, BattleTech has always been driven by back ground fluff. 

As I've discussed in previous blog entries, this is a board game that feels like an RPG campaign. Not a bad thing, though I have never been a faction player in BattleTech, I observe that now that I have MechWarrior armies to play with, I have become very faction orientated. 

Go figure I guess? 

I think this is down to the simple matter that MechWarrior miniatures come pre-painted, which makes compiling a force in one faction relatively easy. 

In BattleTech I've always been pretty faction neutral. My main army was nominally mercenaries that were loosely attached to House Kurita, as I like the Japanese culture for the background, but I did not want to tie myself down to specific units in the canon literature of the game. 

Recently, since returning to the game about three years ago, I've started adding more canon markings to my OPFOR armies, making them loosely House Steiner and Marik by the addition of the appropriate decals. 

However, BattleTech remains a game where I haven't invested greatly in the canon background to any great degree, other than dressing mechs with paraphernalia as a nod of acknowledgment to the rules background. 

Rather I'm interested in using the stage that BattleTech give me as set dressing for my own aims, and goals that I want from any game I play. Namely the ability to create interesting scenarios that are based on historical precedence, which require the players to do more than kill the enemy, kill all of them. 

So aliens, what's the big deal?  

They aren't human for a start. Some objections can be raised here about the ability of writers to write about aliens in a way that is meaningful can be raised here. However, as an SciFi fan of many years, I know that the history of the genre is full of examples of really alien aliens. 

Now, admittedly, a lot of these aliens won't fit into a game involving giant stompy robots. 

Mind you, I think that a game of giant stompy robots is so far out from any reasonable definition of plausible that the addition of other implausible elements is hardly a big factor. Though again one can argue that too many implausible things would dilute the verisimilitude of the game to the degree that one's sense of disbelief will destroy any feeling of involvement with what is going on.  

This after all is the main reason why lots of historical wargamers will not play Sci-Fi or Fantasy wargames. 

So, what kind of aliens might be added to Battletech without destroying the background of the universe. For me, it would be aliens that were "interesting", because of their unique perspective. 

What can added to the game is more variety of unit types. Everyone likes a new mech, and the more the merrier. Otherwise why do we need the 1300 plus mech designs we already have? 

Arguably we don't, but players like new designs. Players like new weapons. Now while you don't need aliens to have either, alien mecha and weaponry would appeal to those who like rules for different technology, in pretty much the same way as some players like Clan tech, which is arguably the shape of BattleTech to come, if my understanding of MW:DA/AoD is correct? 

Some of the factors to consider would be the visual design of the alien mechs. which would mean for me non-bipedal mechs like quads with arms, or six-legged mechs with turrets, and or eight legged mechs.

The aliens may, or may not have a different underlying reproductive biology, for instance marsupials, reptilian, insect, or arthropod. We could add more fluff and make them hermaphrodites too. Or ,perhaps they're a race that has uploaded themselves into virtual worlds. This would lead to different minds, more like a hive collective, or one where replication of a mind was routine. 

So, for instance, we could have a dispersed technological hive mind that is limited by the laws of the physics, as they pertain to the BattleTech universe. 

This could be used to generate scenarios where we only meets small forces that wreak havoc and destruction, who then disappear off stage for years, because the travel times are so long that it slows down their communications. So, the aliens are effectively at the end of a very long logistical chain.

There motive is purely xenophobia, they can't tolerate other races.  

However, I agree that the real question of whether or not BattleTech should have aliens is not about the how, but what purpose do they serve?  

The one big question that has never been answered in the BattleTech universe is where are the advance alien civilisations that should exist? Did they all destroy themselves in wars, and ultimately mankind is doomed to the same fate? 

If they didn't destroy themselves, who did destroy them? Or, are we the first to survive and reach the stars?  

Depending on how you spin these answers out, you either create a story where mankind is either going to die out from self inflicted conflict, or a story where mankind goes and destroys any possible alien race that might develop (i.e: we are the destroyers of worlds), or a story where we find the big bad out there and it awakens to the threat that we represent, or one where we are all alone in the dark? 

Any alien threat has to be bigger than just another faction of humans gone stir crazy, or rabid from drinking the local water, or being out in the sun too long, or inbreeding etc. The trick is coming up with ways to maintain the game balance of said alien force; otherwise you end up with the humans being wiped out through superior technology. 

The whole aliens as gods/angels versus puny things like us humans. 

This question and its answers are what could be added to the background of the universe that would then allow the RPG side of the rules more scope for non-military play. 

I favour the latter idea.

Disclaimer: All posts are condensed & abbreviated summaries of complex arguments posted for discussion on the internet, and not meant to be authoritative in any shape, or form on said subject, T&CA, E&OE & YMMV.