Brainstorming a sci-fi setting, and justifying interstellar war

[Wofano Wotanto]

The BT canon is a lore warren few dare to delve deeply into, but suffice to say the conditions described there existed only for a small part of the timeline when Inner Sphere tech was at its nadir - and even then the Clan Worlds and (ironically) some of the Periphery States were in better shape overall. Unless you're right around 3025 things are usually better, although the more healthy the tech base is the more active the endless wars tend to be so there's no winning either way.

If anyone has a spare lifetime or two for research, I recommend browsing Sarna for more info. So much more info. Makes Warhammer 40K lore look shallow by comparison.

 

[RangerWickett]

I just personally find the whole, "Nobody saved any records on how to build reactors" or whatever to be pretty silly.

Disrupting supply chains is a thing, sure. Like, one narrative I read about the 'Bronze Age collapse' is really just that a few sources of raw materials had local disruptions, which messed up a bunch of trade routes and forced people to switch to ironsmithing, which once people worked out where to source minerals and how to make good steel, changed what ports and such were most influential.

But if every physicist died today, there'd still be a bunch of textbooks that explain this stuff. It might take a couple decades to rebuild the infrastructure, but Battletech presumes a much bigger collapse than I think is, like, possible, at least not after humanity spreads out across multiple star systems.

 

[Journey Mountain Studios]

Agreed! But this is where lore steps in again to keep the setting all backwards.

One third-party faction who controls all interstellar communications, a sort of AT&T Vatican cult, also wants to be the only one to "save" humanity by suddenly revealing all the tech they've been hoarding. To keep anyone else from doing this, they actively intercept all comms about innovations or tech records, plant agents among all the empires to stall progress, steal data, or kill key scientists, and coop or outright destroy any ancient archives they find. No one realizes they are doing this because they assume one of the other empires is behind it. Having this quasi-Church controlling what people read and think dovetails with the whole "space feudal" setting thingy.

 

[Morrus]

Unless something like unobtanium exists it’s hard to imagine a resource based war—there’s nothing I can think of that would gain more than the cost of the journey. Minerals? Water? Oxygen? Gold? It’s all abundant in the universe.

So we’re talking ideological or religious stuff—which of course doesn’t need to be logical.

 

[RangerWickett]

Hence why I think I'd prefer going with my own setting. I just don't buy it being possible to suppress all the scientific knowledge before people figure out what you're up to and stop you.

I dunno. Maybe if, like, every planet got bioweaponed or nuked, and civilization entirely collapsed everywhere, and people had to rebuild everything from scratch, only to occasionally come across a few bits of ancient tech in bunkers.

I suppose if you have a book that says, "Here's how fusion works," it'd take a long while to build the first reactor. Case in point: reality.

 

[RangerWickett]

Unless something like unobtanium exists it’s hard to imagine a resource based war—there’s nothing I can think of that would gain more than the cost of the journey. Minerals? Water? Oxygen? Gold? It’s all abundant in the universe.

So we’re talking ideological or religious stuff—which of course doesn’t need to be logical.

Now this is making me think about the Cold War, and how in an attempt to prevent 'dominos from falling,' the West got involved in a lot of local conflicts to try to keep different countries on their side.

And even if resources are ubiquitous, I guess it's still valuable to have access to affordable sources. You can theoretically get oil from all over the place, but we still made nasty deals with dictators in the Middle East to try to afford more of it than the Soviets could get.

 

[Journey Mountain Studios]

Hence why I think I'd prefer going with my own setting.

And the worldbuilding would be fun.

(Alternatively, while Battletech "starts" in 3025 when everyone has to scavenge for parts, you could start in the year 2786 at the start of the First Succession War. All the major players are there, but everyone still has high tech factories and the latest mechs and warships everywhere.)

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Unless something like unobtanium exists it’s hard to imagine a resource based war—there’s nothing I can think of that would gain more than the cost of the journey. Minerals? Water? Oxygen? Gold? It’s all abundant in the universe.

So we’re talking ideological or religious stuff—which of course doesn’t need to be logical.

The only thing I can think of that might be worth the effort of fighting over is a truly Earthlike world, one with a real shirtsleeve environment and perhaps even a compatible pre-existing ecological system that just hasn't evolved intelligent life. Despite sicfi tropes to the contrary and the discovery of vast numbers of exo-planets I don't believe we'll find that kind of world often if at all if/when we ever expand to the stars.

And even those would be hugely devalued if your setting includes implausibly easy and quick terraforming of close-but-not-quite worlds or human cultures that just abandon the idea of climbing back down the gravity well for living space and inhabit artificial structures and/or microgravity rocks instead. Or if interstellar travel is realistically slow and squishy organic humans aren't going anywhere - our machines (AI or otherwise) aren't going to care much about garden worlds when they're exploring the stars for us.

So yeah, if starfaring humanity does start warring with itself it's likely to do so for less than rational reasons - or possibly for survival, if xenos or a human faction decide actual genocide is a win button. That last probably doesn't produce gameable material well, planetary ecosystems are too fragile. Heck, Niven's Ringworld was too fragile, ultimately.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I am not 100% sure that I get what you want. From a "realistic" perspective Mechs make no sense. If you want to play with Mechs then one hand wave is as good as another.
The Jump ship stuff is pretty arbitrary and in my opinion, it is super unlikely that the defenders are not going to attack jump ships. I also find it difficult to swallow that one can operate and repair stuff like this and not be able to build it.
As for intestellar war, I would agree that economically it is very unlikely. Unless there is some mcguffin material that only exist is certain solar systems. Of course one would not need to mine the planets, the asteroid and outer belt objects would be better sources.

 

[RangerWickett]

From a "realistic" perspective Mechs make no sense.

I actually am going down this rabbit hole specifically because I came up with what I think is a rational technological justification for mechs.

The idea is basically instead of just armored walking tanks (which is what Battletech canon says), mechs have really strong forcefields that shed a lot of EM radiation that messes with remote communication and can fry any fragile transistors.

So like, a lot of the stuff we use today - cruise missiles, drones, and the potential of stuff like self-piloting computerized vehicles - don't work because the EM release of the shields will fry anything other than a pretty simple system with a lot of hardening.

The way shields would work is that they 'harden' against impacts from the outside, but normally they're uni-directionally permeable so you can launch your own missiles and fire your own ballistics. When something impacts, the shield pumps some energy into the spot hit to nullify the whole impact. However, if you get hit in rapid succession in different locations, the shield struggles to recalibrate to block them all.

Basically, multiple scattered hits bring the shield down faster than singular big hits. A big cruise missile like a 1 ton Tomahawk is less useful than peppering a mech with a half-dozen 10 kg rocket propelled grenades. This brings the range of engagement much closer than what happens with modern smart missiles.

You could also just totally obliterate a mech with a cruise missile (or a high-explosive tank shell) if you could hit, but you'd need to time it right to hit after you drop the shield but before the shield can get back up. The three main weapon types are thus:

Lasers - go through shields, but do fairly minimal damage.
Small Missiles - best at dropping shields.
High-explosives - best for killing shots.

Also, the shield has to be a complete shell or it quickly loses its stability and collapses. If you put a shield around, like, a tank, the tank treads would be spinning against the inside of the shield, but would barely transfer any force to the ground beneath. If you put a shield around a plane, the airflow would be blocked so you couldn't get lift.

But due to the way biped locomotion works, lifting the feet and then striding, you can put shields around a mech and still be able to move.