Lolwut? Battletech has a single world government for Earth by 2014, the KF Drive theory was laid in 2018, they had working Fusion Engines in 2021 and flying infantry using jetpacks in 2025. By 2110 they'd terraformed Mars into an Earth-like planet using their massive spacelift abilities to throw comets at it and already had multiple colonies in other star systems. Their timeline diverges mighty quickly
Yes.
After the early
90s. It does change rapidly.
Timeline on Sarna
Relevant bit:
'The earliest events distinct to the BattleTech universe occur after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The
United States, Europe and Japan announced in
1994 their intention to jointly construct an orbiting industrial facility named Crippen Station, which was successfully launched eleven years later. A
1997 coup d'état by hardline communists restored a militant, Soviet-style government in Russia and sparked a "Second Cold War" with NATO that lasted until the start of peaceful reforms under premier Oleg Tikonov in
2005. The republic crumbled in 2011, igniting a civil war that drew in NATO and saw the successful use of the Western Orbital Defense Network (WODeN), successor to the earlier Strategic Defense Initiative, to intercept a preemptive Russian missile attack against western targets. The war ended with a
Western Alliance victory in
2014.'
The Cold War ended in December
1991. USSR collapsed, war was over. No major changes in the twentieth century until then.
This means that we had the same techbase until the end of the century. A lot happened in only
eight years.
It's worth noting that the 2 damage machine gun weighs 500 kilograms (The M2 is less than 40), these are not the same weapons. The browning is stated to require 0.6kg of shells to do its 0.94 damage while a machine gun uses 0.5 to do its 2 damage. Something is very fundamentally different about the weapons themselves.
The clan machine gun is also tech level B yet the Inner Sphere can't build them. Meanwhile, compound bows are tech level C. You're being way too rigid in what you're thinking of as tech levels, they are a mix of knowledge, industrial power, and whatever magic lets the clans build clantech and prevents everybody else from doing so.
So, what I got out of that was explosive rounds at .6kg over 10s will likely exceed 1 damage but end up rounded down to 1. Since .94 is with non-explosive ammunition, and being explosive is
key in dealing damage to BT armor.
And that means for 500kg I can probably do 2-4 damage with 1.2-2.4kg of ammo a round if I strap 2-4 M2s together. 500kg is at least one, if not 2 Oerlikon 20mm autocanno- sorry machine gun, at ~92kg a pop, plus all the bits and bobs you need it to be properly automated and ruggedized.
Actually, with 80kg of M2 (that's two), pretty sure
I could build a rugged, military grade, quarter ton gun mount using 80s level machine shops and materials for a hardpoint given that HMMWV's have turrets that with a M2 mounted are only like 150 kg if my napkin math is right (The turret is ~200 pounds). It's not like it has to go 360 degrees, or be armored, like the HMMWV's turret. Need a semi decent cone for aiming, the gun end of the automated ammo feed (pretty sure that exists already so I don't have to try very hard), and maybe set something up to clear jams. That last one might take some thinking.
And I'm not very skilled at that kind of work. But that's clan tech weight and damage on a tech level of B, just not ammo efficiency.
Most of the weight has to be in the controls and ruggedization packages. Armor is counted on the mech. So any armoring should not be weighed against the machine gun... pod.
And naw, I'm not being too rigid about tech levels, FASA just had no fucking clue what they were doing with techlevels because they're all over the fucking place. Like most of their stuff. Their timeline is all kinds of fucking weird, for instance. How old was McKenna again when he did his thing? Like 19? 22?
It is, however, canon. And using canon to avoid Loki's Wager is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, if I was being too rigid about tech levels,
you are being way too rigid about what makes a machine gun do 2 damage. Like it weight exactly 500kg. And using exactly .5kg of munitions over ten seconds.
How rigid are we supposed to hold to the rules? Because mechs have a nigh impossible density. And so many weapons have such shit range that we could pummel the fuck out of any BT force from far beyond their engagement ranges.
But what the tech rating is, is canon. A 12.5mm explosive round burst can, in 10 second segments, chip away at more than 1 ton of armor for .5kg is also canon. And it can be built with technology that we
canonically already have access to.
(I wonder what they did to get the ammo so light? Probably actually fires slower, but it is explosive. They might have better explosives that can be made with B tech but had to be discovered at a higher level.)
12.7mm explosive round burst, in 10 second segments, given the information that you've provided, Mr. Ribs, should clear
at least one point of damage pretty gracefully. Even if it isn't as efficient per ton.
We can absolutely do damage to mechs with "Modern"
infantry scale, crew serve weapons. And if we can do damage with an M2, we can absolutely use HE rounds in our tanks for much better damage numbers.
We haven't even gotten into if things like how well our artillery would do. Or our missiles.
We would not be helpless in the face of any BattleTech ground force. They would be extremely tough, but even against a sizable force, we could emerge victorious. Like I'm pretty confident LCT sizable. We could definitely beat an LCT (so long as they didn't have air and ignored their dropships) sized force.
Of course, we'd have to figure out that we
need to use HE munitions, and we might not do that before we actually lose.
That (and not dying too quickly because I haven't the foggiest about how our armor would hold up beyond 'not well') would be the crux, I think.
It's their ASFs and DropShips. Our airbreathers just couldn't hack it against that performance, laser weaponry, and toughness. I'm not sure how our anti-air defenses would work here either. And DropShips give ridiculous strategic mobility. And can be used to drop KKVs if they're feeling dickish.
Edit: Tapping out for the night. Bed time. Maybe pick this up tomorrow, depending on IRL shit. Was still good talk. Good fun, no hard feelings.