Atlan
11/15/08 03:41 AM
121.73.102.51
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The First and Second Succession Wars must have been an absolute bloodbath. They hit the inner sphere so hard that they lost most manufacturing capability, and destroyed most knowlege of how to re-create jumpships, HPGs, and most other advanced technology.
Yet all over the world today, there are computers. Computers full of information. If we lost every factory in the world, the knowlege of how to make new ones is stored in someone's memorystick. Even given the intensity of the Succession wars, it seems almost imposible that so much could be lost, even with Comstar helping along the process of loosing.
Now, this means one of two things, to my mind:
There were some amazingly violent computer viruses involed
There were many, many EMP deviced used all
Something must have crippled the electronic databases of the innersphere. This has another implication- they must have lost more than just scientific principles and schematics.
Maybe they lost planets?
Think about it. Say you have the Federated Suns. Thats, what, 500 planets? No-one can remember each and every one. With the changing landscape due to wars and politics, any hard copy listing of the planets and locations of those planets would be quickly obselete.
All it would take is one HPG breaking. If the planet was unimportant enough, you'd have a planet that would be quickly forgotten in the rush of war, and no way for the planet to comunitcate with the rest of the universe. If 2000 planets can forget how a K-F drive works, surely they can forget a planet. With how little people know about how the K-F drive works, who would try and find new planets in the middle of colonised space?
There could be dozens of planets in the inner sphere who have simply been forgotten by the rest of the universe, especially in the Free Worlds Leage.
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Zandel_Corrin
11/16/08 05:44 PM
123.2.140.247
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Ok as for the EMP devices.....
They nuked everything back then.... As i'm sure you know nukes cause EMP blasts as well as death.
Also you had COMSTAR doing everything it could to hide tech... they were destroying references to it everywhere....
Whenever something came up they tried to hide / destroy it.... grey death memory core anyone?
And as for the lost planets.... good idea... i can see how that would work...
still comstars explorer corps are out there seeking anything and everything so who knows?
Galaxy Commander
Zandel Corrin
Night Dragon Clan
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Brian_Paxt
11/17/08 03:22 AM
97.92.80.62
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If you think about how war was during the first two succession wars nothing was out of bound for targets. This left cities, HPG stations, battlemech facilities, as well as any factories. Now this caused a lot of whole sale slaughter among the the wars but also to keep information out of enemy hands computer hard drives and memory cores for the large ones were wiped. That alone will destroy hundred of years worth of information in a matter of minutes.
It has been posted in another area on these forums that from all of the maps that have been published there has been a loss of over 200 planets from the maps.
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Dester
11/17/08 12:06 PM
216.57.96.1
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The thing with "lost tech" that people fail to relise is that it really only existed in the Terran Hemogony or TH controlled worlds. The Rest of the Innersphere didn't have access to most of that tech, so when they all made a grab at Hemogony worlds most of it got smashed up and became "lost".
And yes worlds dropped off the map at an alarming rate because they became either un-inhabbited or so sparsly populated that they were deamed no longer significant.
Dester
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Christopher_Perkins
11/17/08 11:33 PM
76.104.32.151
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Some LosTech was Available to the Houses...
The TR2750 Units were the Versions that the Houses Had (Retcons, Gotta Love Them...) I.E. the Export Models (the US does this today too...)
The Terran Hegemony Units in the SLDF (the So Called "Royals" Units) had Access to the Units on the Royals Page of TR3075
Christopher Robin Perkins
It is my opinion that all statements should be questioned, digested, disected, tasted, and then either spit out or adopted... RHIP is not a god given shield
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GiovanniBlasini
11/27/08 08:02 AM
64.183.4.46
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Quote:
Yet all over the world today, there are computers. Computers full of information. If we lost every factory in the world, the knowlege of how to make new ones is stored in someone's memorystick. Even given the intensity of the Succession wars, it seems almost imposible that so much could be lost, even with Comstar helping along the process of loosing.
Think of it from another perspective for a moment: sure, the knowledge might be there, it's just not all in one place. If the rest of the world lost all their technology and manufacturing capability tomorrow, but my home town of San Diego didn't, could San Diego put brand new cars into production? Sure, perhaps eventually, but it wouldn't happen overnight.
The Inner Sphere was a completely interdependent system: each world had varying degrees of self-sufficiency (remember, there are some worlds that, even in 3025, that relied almost exclusively on food imports to feed their populations), along with varying degrees of high-tech industry.
Take building a BattleMech, for example: one planet might have the factories to build the fusion reactors, which actually consist of a number of factories that build innumerable parts: shielding, computer control systems, electromagnets, etc. The guys at the end of the line just put it all together. Move up the chain to the 'Mech manufacturer, and it's pretty much the same thing - just leaf through, say, Tech Readout 3025, and you can see the number of manufacturers that go into some BattleMechs. The ones that survived and tended to stay in production during the Succession Wars were the ones whose manufacturing subcontractors were clustered close together.
For a real world example, I have a friend who, before he got fed up with it and decided to become a professional artist, was an electrical engineer doing work in digital signal processing. He'd get an assignment that said the company's client is looking for a digital signal processor (DSP) that receives one kind of input, and switches it to another kind. He had no idea what kind of data was being carried on the signal coming in, nor did he know what was going out, nor did he know what the device he was building was going into. The engineers working on the components that would transmit the signal input had no idea what my friend was building, nor did any of them know what the components the output signal was going to looked like. Remarkably, not only was this for a commercial, not a military, application, this kind of stuff was common.
Could any of these engineers designing one of these figure out what one of the other engineering teams had built? Maybe, but they'd need a working copy, time to reverse-engineer it, along with knowledge of what signal types are going in and out.
Here's where we get back to our Inner Sphere example: you're a member of an engineering team on one planet that makes, say, skeletal systems for BattleMechs. You've got a subcontractor who happens to be on the same planet as you who makes the myomer bundles for your skeletal structure, which your company then strings onto your skeletons before you ship 'em out to the main manufacturer. Your company designed and built the skeletal system on contract with the main manufacturer, since you could do the job cheaper and easier due to local labor costs and resource availability. The First Succession War hits, your planet gets attacked, and while your manufacturing facility weathers the attack just fine, the myomer manufacturing business got hit by naval PPC fire and is out of business, with their manufacturing tools and computers fried. Worse, the weapons manufacturer happened to be on a planet that just got hit with a bioweapon - everyone there is dead, the planet's completely unsafe to visit. The manufacturer of the cockpit systems and control computers was on yet another planet, and they just got hit by sustained nuclear bombardment - there are survivors, the physical manufacturing equipment is intact, but its electronics are shot, and EMP fried their computers.
Now, the main manufacturer of that BattleMech asks you to take over making the myomers. The only problem is that you can't, because you've never done it before: sure, you've got a book that gives the general principles on how to do so, but the actual detailed engineering data you need to make myomers isn't there, and the equipment needed to make them in the first place isn't on-world.
So, the first thing you do is try to contact one equipment manufacturer, only to find out that, oops, they were on the same planet as the guys who made the weapons. You try checking with another, but you never get responses from them, and you're not sure if it's because the HPG network, which just took a severe beating during the Star League Civil War, hasn't been patched, or if the world on the other end you're trying to reach is dead. All you do know is that your local HPG company, which just renamed itself from Starlight Communications to "ComStar" in a merger with their competitor, says they can't get a connection to the other end.
So, you charter a JumpShip and have them try to make contact, sending a company rep with buying power out to get what you need from them. Unfortunately, that JumpShip is never seen again, and you're forced to presume it was destroyed.
You end up paying a local company to to try to make myomer, and they make real progress, but they keep getting hung up on something: maybe they can't make the length myomers you need because every time you try, theirs break because there's something they're doing that's not quite right in their manufacturing process. Maybe they've got an abnormally high failure rate, with myomers burning out far faster than normal. Whatever it is, they just can't get it quite right in time, and the main manufacturer closes their doors, since they can't get the parts they need to keep the production lines open, and they were just a final assembly plant, anyway.
Your government shifts purchases over to the guys whose 'Mechs always cost more, but whose manufacturing were centrally located on the same planet, who've managed to retain enough of their own production, despite damage to their facilities. With your customer out of business, you're not selling any 'Mech skeletons, either, and your company goes into bankruptcy.
That other manufacturer? They end up buying your company, fire you and your fellow engineers, and bring their own people in to retool your factory lines to produce skeletons for their 'Mech design, and the design your company made, with its manufacturer out of business, doesn't have the steady stream of parts coming in. As combat losses mount, your company's 'Mech becomes extinct.
Meanwhile, you're out on the street with far fewer job options, because most of the companies that would hire you are being bombed into nonexistence. You have to end up taking a crappier position in a field that's only tangentially related, and your wife insists you do it in a non-military industry, 'cause she doesn't want you to be on the receiving end of a naval PPC any time soon - your neighbor's wife worked for the myomer manufacturer and was killed in the attack, while her husband was drafted, sent out to fight, and killed, leaving their kid orphaned, and your wife insisting on taking them in, since the kid's grandparents lived on that world that got hit by the bioweapon.
Pretty soon, fewer people are going into your field, because there's just not enough jobs, not to mention your life expectancy has been shortened. Those that are soon find that there's a real shortage of experienced engineers, because they were the guys killed during the bombardments/nukings/gassings/etc. Pretty soon, and you're looking at a real "brain drain" and loss of specialized manufacturing knowledge.
In steps ComStar with Operation Holy Shroud, where they start bumping off a few of the people who stayed in your field. The pool becomes smaller, more specialized knowledge becomes lost. Pretty soon, you're talking about some real technological regression.
Member of the Pundit Caste
"Which side are we on? We're on the side of the demons, Chief. We're evil men in the gardens of paradise, sent by the forces of death to spread devastation and destruction wherever we go. I'm surprised you didn't know that." -- Col. Saul Tigh, BSG2003
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Cray
11/27/08 09:36 AM
68.205.198.74
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Quote:
Something must have crippled the electronic databases of the innersphere. This has another implication- they must have lost more than just scientific principles and schematics.
Maybe they lost planets?
Canonically, the Inner Sphere and near Periphery did lose planets. The mapping convention of the the Inner Sphere's primary map maker - Comstar - was to only show the systems of the Inner Sphere with significant populations. (Which is usually a good thing, since there's 1000 uninhabited systems in the 500 light-year radius of the Inner Sphere for every inhabited system.)
When the first Succession Wars destroyed about 250 planets one way or another, those were removed from the maps. You can watch the removals by flipping through the maps of the recent House Marik, House Steiner, and House Davion Handbooks and seeing some planets removed era by era.
The situation in the Periphery was even worse, since Comstar only showed politically significant systems. The Outworlds Alliance had 3/4 of its planets "over an area the size of the Draconis Combine" willfully secede from the Alliance during the Succession War, about 160 planets removed from the maps simply because they left a union with a "major" Periphery power. A total of about 750 planets were removed from the common Periphery maps during the Succession Wars.
The classic example is Jardine, noted since the early BT game as being the source of "tabarinth riding cats." Jardine was simply lost to humanity during the Succession Wars. The "tabbies" lived on, bred on many planets, but the planet was gone.
And, it turns out, it was lost willfully by the Inner Sphere's mapmaker, ComStar, who wanted a series of secret bases.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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Communibus
11/28/08 11:56 PM
68.37.176.10
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Like if you wanted to hide...say...I don't know...5 worlds?
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Cray
11/29/08 11:42 AM
68.205.198.74
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Quote:
Like if you wanted to hide...say...I don't know...5 worlds?
Exactly. When you're the premier mapmaker for the Inner Sphere and want a few worlds to disappear for your own uses...
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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Zandel_Corrin
11/30/08 05:45 PM
123.2.140.247
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Not to mention that comstar was Activley atempting to destroy all records of tech other then there own.
Galaxy Commander
Zandel Corrin
Night Dragon Clan
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Prince_of_Darkness
12/01/08 12:51 AM
205.202.120.139
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Quote:
Not to mention that comstar was Activley atempting to destroy all records of tech other then there own.
Those were the good ole' days...
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