- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
interesting idea
I can sort of see that happening, with the Jihad basically managing to unite both the Wardens and Crusaders and the higher tech that the WoB uses being enough to make them take it seriously
BattleTech Ideas and Discussion
- Thread starter XelianEmperor
- Start date
I can sort of see that happening, with the Jihad basically managing to unite both the Wardens and Crusaders and the higher tech that the WoB uses being enough to make them take it seriously
I had 12% of an idea for a fan-faction which was a very deep periphery fallback colony for the Cameron Dynasty ruled by Exo-Womb progeny which was highly fanatical in wanting to restore the proper rulers of humanity to their throne.
Then there was an ISOT event, which brought a new faction into the universe.
This had the effect of knocking the winds out of their sails, making it suddenly cosmic horror in their point of view. And then the Terran Hegemony In Exile went from being S.M. Stirling's Draka to the Xeelee Sequence's Interim Coalition of Governance.
Then there was an ISOT event, which brought a new faction into the universe.
This had the effect of knocking the winds out of their sails, making it suddenly cosmic horror in their point of view. And then the Terran Hegemony In Exile went from being S.M. Stirling's Draka to the Xeelee Sequence's Interim Coalition of Governance.
GSpectre
Lurker
- Location
- USA, Earth
After a Cannonshop binge over on CBT, and wondering why there weren't more FedSun's stories, i threw together the beginings of a story. It includes AU elements to fix some of the continuity issues that have popped up due to the franchise being long running. Feedback would be appreciated.
March 7th 3014
Brockton Bay space dock
Brockton System, Federated Suns
Duke Andrew Brockton wasn't sure about his guest, his family had been dealing with them since Takiro's fraud but they had never sent such a high-level representative before. This was an unsettling turn of events. Not even the data transfers which had given both the Concordat and the Magistracy the ability to build their favored Swordsman had an heir travel to Brockton. For all its industrial potential the Brockton system was mostly forgotten, and even when it wasn't no one wanted to remember them.
That was the consequence of the first war. Having the Federated Suns premier ecology, biology, and genetic engineering college hadn't done them any favors. Especially when the duke at the time had deployed a large number of bio warfare containment units to the front in an effort to keep the plagues which all of the houses had unleashed contained. No one today remembered that, they just remembered that when the Storm Crows arrived on world, there were good odds that world died. Which had resulted in no one being too broken up when the Alliance college of Terraforming was nuked off the map in the lead up to the second go around.
These days Brockton was known as a bucolic farming world, of little note, with a dark and twisted history. Sure, spacers knew about the Bay and its repair bays, but never having been a production site had turned out to be for the best. Brockton had the good fortune of only being nuked once, and despite their losses Andrew was proud of how his people had recovered. No one in his family had let it be known that they had rebuilt the college as best they could, thinking it better to let sleeping dogs lie. They especially hadn't let on that the colleges library hadn't been destroyed. They had simply scaled back the Storm Crows, deploying them in smaller numbers throughout the second war as if they were switching to an apprentice system. Andrew wasn't sure what he thought about that, after all the Storm Crows had been responsible for most of the cures and vaccines produced on the golden five to this day, but he hadn't been in his ancestors' shoes. Letting a few worlds dies in order to keep his own people safe wasn't a choice he was comfortable making, and so he was glad that it had been made by the time he had been born.
"Duke Brockton," Thomas's cybernetic eye gleamed in the low light, giving him a sinister appearance despite the boyish good looks his curly hair and soft face gave him.
"Heir Calderon," Andrew replied easily, giving the man a bow. "I hope that you had an easy journey?"
"Easy as it could be…" Thomas almost growled out. "I do not want to be here but I am loyal to my nation."
"Understandable," Andrew shifted, slightly uneasy with the blatant hostility in Thomas's tone. "Welcome to the Brockton system."
"Thank you," Thomas un bent a little as he said that. "I was surprised to find out just how extensive your industry is, especially this ship yard. I would have thought it would have been stripped a long time ago to feed the insatiable appetite for carnage that your first princes seem to possess."
"How much do you know about the history of the Brockton system your grace?" Andrew asked, letting the insult pass easily. It wasn't as if it wasn't true after all. The Davion family had always been militarily inclined, and Ian's reign had hardly been out of the norm.
"Very little," Thomas allowed himself to be led deeper into the complex they were on, his cybernetic eye recording everything as he walked. Despite his distaste for the Davion's and their minions he was well aware that the Dukes of Brockton had been useful to the Concordat. Besides this was the first look that TMI would be getting of an active shipyard built into an asteroid. That was something they could use in the Taurus system. Kerensky had crippled the Concordats ability to produce jump ships when he had pulled out, and rebuilding hadn't been possible since then. Perhaps with a little luck something that his eye recorded would allow them to reclaim their place as a naval power. Admittedly Brockton was listed as a repair facility, with an attached civilian dockyard, but TMI had suspicions that there was more to it then that. The outback had too many Liberty II class jump ships running around, someone had to be building new ones even if officially they were all rebuilds of derelict hulls. "Assume that I am completely ignorant and you wouldn't be too far wrong. We have the Star league official atlas… but I don't need to tell you just how useful that is."
"Brockton was one of the Terran alliances furthest official colonies in this direction," Andrew said easily even as he guided the younger man down the corridor. "Before the outer reach's rebellion, it was also one of the centers for the Terran navy and explorer corps. If the rebellion hadn't happened, we would have been the center for the next wave of colonization in this direction. After it? Their bases were abandoned and we found ourselves very much on our own. We signed on with the Suns at their founding and kept up what we could… which was mostly the college."
"Ah…" Thomas thought about what he had been told and then cocked his head to the side. "Genetic engineering? Planetary ecology?"
"Quiet, our ecologists and genetic engineers were critical in colonizing this region of space. Not that it helped us." Andrew gave a self-deprecating shrug. "By the time Ian Cameron had his brain storm we were already lagging behind the Terrans in terms of colonization science, and the Davion's had more pressing interests then pushing the pace out here. We had hoped that we could improve our lot through the league… it didn't happen though. Alliance was downrated by the department of education to a third-tier institution and the promised funds for upgrading never seemed to appear, for some reason our people were eased out to make way for Terrans."
"Is that how you ended up in the bio weapons business?" Thomas noted the stiffening shoulders of his host.
"That is a base slander spread by ignorant fools," Andrew hissed before restraining his temper. "When the league collapsed, we were the Suns main source of trained geneticists, and so our people deployed to counter bio weapons releases…"
"I would have thought that the golden five would have had that knowledge?"
"Oh, they did, but despite being a founding member of the Suns we were outback hicks, expendable in other words, while the more important people on the five were recruited into the weapons programs…"
"Your people were deployed to the front lines." Thomas had to admit it wasn't a story he was terribly surprised by. "How did a founding member of the suns become on of the largest suppliers of the secret army in this region then?"
"Corean and Amaris." Andrew said with a snort. "After Takiro's fraud… we went looking to defend ourselves because everyone forgot about us during that little dust up. We got funding from Amaris, I'm sure you know just as well as I do why, and used that funding to put up a Corean annex on world."
"I'm surprised that wasn't looted by Kerensky, or blown up by the blackhearts."
"Why would it have been? We made locusts." Andrew shrugged as he opened the door to a well-appointed conference room. "Swordsmen, Whitworths, and Icarus IIs? We didn't have the tooling to do that."
"And yet you did and do." Thomas reminded the duke that he was just as versed in that particular history as his host. "Along with Talos and Riflemen. Not to mention the Lions."
"The Lion's weren't that difficult, dropships aren't that different from Drop shuttles, and when the Alliance pulled out, they left a lot of space-based infrastructure behind. Drink?" Andrew offered.
"Tequila if you have it."
"Trinity gold from the free worlds league," Andrew poured. "During the waning days of the league we put a lot of effort into our civilian yards. They aren't the biggest, never have been, but by keeping up the production of Jumbos and Drost class vessels it kept trade flowing despite disinterest from New Avalon."
"Space based… interesting turn of phrase. You couldn't have rebuilt the mech yards without a solid industrial base and an active R and D establishment. Not after Corean came in and ripped everything out to rebuild on New Avalon."
"It took us forty years to get back to close to where we were after that happened. Twenty-eight forty-seven wasn't a good year here."
"But you did it… and sold at least some machine tooling to a couple of other nobles as well." Thomas said, his eye glinting as he became much more focused. He was tempted to take a drink, but restrained himself for the moment. "There's a reason why the outback has less pirate problems then one would think given the disinterest on New Avalon in the region."
"Because we have militia mechs? Free worlds league was the first to introduce those, bringing back the Sarissa after their tiff with Comstar was just about the only reason they didn't lose more worlds."
"They did that by converting industrial mech lines, you didn't." Thomas stated flatly. "You built all new equipment, and while it might be crap compared to the stuff that comes out of Krupp or any of the larger manufacturers… it exists. That doesn't even get into the fact that I know you are building front line equipment again. There have been too many shipments of Swordsmen over the border for you not to be, between us and the Magistracy? Two battalions' worth in the last fifty years alone, those mechs are too new for you to have been pulling them out of reserves as well."
"Limited production of front line equipment, you'll note we don't sell Talos or Riflemen anymore." Andrew's voice was guarded.
"You still rebuilt on your own, so I have a commission for you." Thomas said flatly, enjoying the gleam he could see in the duke's eye.
"What do you want?"
"Machine tooling to build…" Thomas paused and dug a chip out of his pocket, passing it over to the noble. "This. It's the newest wonderwaffen out of Coventry."
Thomas took a sip of his tequila as the duke slid the chip into his portable reader and looked over the information. Surprisingly the free worlder's seemed to have managed to put together a fine tequila and Thomas made a mental note to see if he could get some for his own liquor cabinet. It wasn't often he came across such quality which wasn't Taurian. Given his preferences having some inner sphere quality booze on hand would be a good way to throw off anyone who thought him a complete backwater hick.
"Interesting…" Andrew spoke up, looking up from the information that TMI had gathered. "We played around with this very idea about a century ago… but never put it into production."
"Why?"
"Because people who work on weapons development have a bad habit of ending up dead, along with the entire city they were living in." Andrew said flatly. "Our security services are good but we have never been good enough to stand up to the MASK or ISF, on a good day we might be able to take SAFE."
"And yet you've been trading with us for centuries…"
"If that connection isn't well known in the fox's den, I will eat this table." Andrew said flatly while rapping his knuckles against the veneered steel. "As long as we don't rock the boat and make waves everything is all well and good, but should that change?"
"Selling us the technical specs for the Swordsman wasn't rocking the boat?"
"How many Swordsmen do you see in the Suns?" Andrew shot back. "It's a better machine then the Icarus or the Whitworth but getting a loyal soldier of the Suns into one is more trouble then its worth. They're still considered a Rostov machine, and a sign of disloyalty. If we had sold you those designs it would have meant trouble… but not that one."
"Idiots."
"Agreed." Andrew blew out a breath and frowned as he thought.
"Can you, do it?" Thomas asked, his voice displaying his eagerness despite his self-control. The Multiple missile launchers would be a game changer for the periphery powers, and if the Taurians could get them into production before the Magistracy got their Andurien derived MRM's into production… it would be worth the trouble of dealing with Davion lackeys in his eyes. Especially if he could rub it into that smug cunt Kyalla's face that TMI had for once beaten the much-vaunted MIM to the punch.
"Yes."
March 7th 3014
Brockton Bay space dock
Brockton System, Federated Suns
Duke Andrew Brockton wasn't sure about his guest, his family had been dealing with them since Takiro's fraud but they had never sent such a high-level representative before. This was an unsettling turn of events. Not even the data transfers which had given both the Concordat and the Magistracy the ability to build their favored Swordsman had an heir travel to Brockton. For all its industrial potential the Brockton system was mostly forgotten, and even when it wasn't no one wanted to remember them.
That was the consequence of the first war. Having the Federated Suns premier ecology, biology, and genetic engineering college hadn't done them any favors. Especially when the duke at the time had deployed a large number of bio warfare containment units to the front in an effort to keep the plagues which all of the houses had unleashed contained. No one today remembered that, they just remembered that when the Storm Crows arrived on world, there were good odds that world died. Which had resulted in no one being too broken up when the Alliance college of Terraforming was nuked off the map in the lead up to the second go around.
These days Brockton was known as a bucolic farming world, of little note, with a dark and twisted history. Sure, spacers knew about the Bay and its repair bays, but never having been a production site had turned out to be for the best. Brockton had the good fortune of only being nuked once, and despite their losses Andrew was proud of how his people had recovered. No one in his family had let it be known that they had rebuilt the college as best they could, thinking it better to let sleeping dogs lie. They especially hadn't let on that the colleges library hadn't been destroyed. They had simply scaled back the Storm Crows, deploying them in smaller numbers throughout the second war as if they were switching to an apprentice system. Andrew wasn't sure what he thought about that, after all the Storm Crows had been responsible for most of the cures and vaccines produced on the golden five to this day, but he hadn't been in his ancestors' shoes. Letting a few worlds dies in order to keep his own people safe wasn't a choice he was comfortable making, and so he was glad that it had been made by the time he had been born.
"Duke Brockton," Thomas's cybernetic eye gleamed in the low light, giving him a sinister appearance despite the boyish good looks his curly hair and soft face gave him.
"Heir Calderon," Andrew replied easily, giving the man a bow. "I hope that you had an easy journey?"
"Easy as it could be…" Thomas almost growled out. "I do not want to be here but I am loyal to my nation."
"Understandable," Andrew shifted, slightly uneasy with the blatant hostility in Thomas's tone. "Welcome to the Brockton system."
"Thank you," Thomas un bent a little as he said that. "I was surprised to find out just how extensive your industry is, especially this ship yard. I would have thought it would have been stripped a long time ago to feed the insatiable appetite for carnage that your first princes seem to possess."
"How much do you know about the history of the Brockton system your grace?" Andrew asked, letting the insult pass easily. It wasn't as if it wasn't true after all. The Davion family had always been militarily inclined, and Ian's reign had hardly been out of the norm.
"Very little," Thomas allowed himself to be led deeper into the complex they were on, his cybernetic eye recording everything as he walked. Despite his distaste for the Davion's and their minions he was well aware that the Dukes of Brockton had been useful to the Concordat. Besides this was the first look that TMI would be getting of an active shipyard built into an asteroid. That was something they could use in the Taurus system. Kerensky had crippled the Concordats ability to produce jump ships when he had pulled out, and rebuilding hadn't been possible since then. Perhaps with a little luck something that his eye recorded would allow them to reclaim their place as a naval power. Admittedly Brockton was listed as a repair facility, with an attached civilian dockyard, but TMI had suspicions that there was more to it then that. The outback had too many Liberty II class jump ships running around, someone had to be building new ones even if officially they were all rebuilds of derelict hulls. "Assume that I am completely ignorant and you wouldn't be too far wrong. We have the Star league official atlas… but I don't need to tell you just how useful that is."
"Brockton was one of the Terran alliances furthest official colonies in this direction," Andrew said easily even as he guided the younger man down the corridor. "Before the outer reach's rebellion, it was also one of the centers for the Terran navy and explorer corps. If the rebellion hadn't happened, we would have been the center for the next wave of colonization in this direction. After it? Their bases were abandoned and we found ourselves very much on our own. We signed on with the Suns at their founding and kept up what we could… which was mostly the college."
"Ah…" Thomas thought about what he had been told and then cocked his head to the side. "Genetic engineering? Planetary ecology?"
"Quiet, our ecologists and genetic engineers were critical in colonizing this region of space. Not that it helped us." Andrew gave a self-deprecating shrug. "By the time Ian Cameron had his brain storm we were already lagging behind the Terrans in terms of colonization science, and the Davion's had more pressing interests then pushing the pace out here. We had hoped that we could improve our lot through the league… it didn't happen though. Alliance was downrated by the department of education to a third-tier institution and the promised funds for upgrading never seemed to appear, for some reason our people were eased out to make way for Terrans."
"Is that how you ended up in the bio weapons business?" Thomas noted the stiffening shoulders of his host.
"That is a base slander spread by ignorant fools," Andrew hissed before restraining his temper. "When the league collapsed, we were the Suns main source of trained geneticists, and so our people deployed to counter bio weapons releases…"
"I would have thought that the golden five would have had that knowledge?"
"Oh, they did, but despite being a founding member of the Suns we were outback hicks, expendable in other words, while the more important people on the five were recruited into the weapons programs…"
"Your people were deployed to the front lines." Thomas had to admit it wasn't a story he was terribly surprised by. "How did a founding member of the suns become on of the largest suppliers of the secret army in this region then?"
"Corean and Amaris." Andrew said with a snort. "After Takiro's fraud… we went looking to defend ourselves because everyone forgot about us during that little dust up. We got funding from Amaris, I'm sure you know just as well as I do why, and used that funding to put up a Corean annex on world."
"I'm surprised that wasn't looted by Kerensky, or blown up by the blackhearts."
"Why would it have been? We made locusts." Andrew shrugged as he opened the door to a well-appointed conference room. "Swordsmen, Whitworths, and Icarus IIs? We didn't have the tooling to do that."
"And yet you did and do." Thomas reminded the duke that he was just as versed in that particular history as his host. "Along with Talos and Riflemen. Not to mention the Lions."
"The Lion's weren't that difficult, dropships aren't that different from Drop shuttles, and when the Alliance pulled out, they left a lot of space-based infrastructure behind. Drink?" Andrew offered.
"Tequila if you have it."
"Trinity gold from the free worlds league," Andrew poured. "During the waning days of the league we put a lot of effort into our civilian yards. They aren't the biggest, never have been, but by keeping up the production of Jumbos and Drost class vessels it kept trade flowing despite disinterest from New Avalon."
"Space based… interesting turn of phrase. You couldn't have rebuilt the mech yards without a solid industrial base and an active R and D establishment. Not after Corean came in and ripped everything out to rebuild on New Avalon."
"It took us forty years to get back to close to where we were after that happened. Twenty-eight forty-seven wasn't a good year here."
"But you did it… and sold at least some machine tooling to a couple of other nobles as well." Thomas said, his eye glinting as he became much more focused. He was tempted to take a drink, but restrained himself for the moment. "There's a reason why the outback has less pirate problems then one would think given the disinterest on New Avalon in the region."
"Because we have militia mechs? Free worlds league was the first to introduce those, bringing back the Sarissa after their tiff with Comstar was just about the only reason they didn't lose more worlds."
"They did that by converting industrial mech lines, you didn't." Thomas stated flatly. "You built all new equipment, and while it might be crap compared to the stuff that comes out of Krupp or any of the larger manufacturers… it exists. That doesn't even get into the fact that I know you are building front line equipment again. There have been too many shipments of Swordsmen over the border for you not to be, between us and the Magistracy? Two battalions' worth in the last fifty years alone, those mechs are too new for you to have been pulling them out of reserves as well."
"Limited production of front line equipment, you'll note we don't sell Talos or Riflemen anymore." Andrew's voice was guarded.
"You still rebuilt on your own, so I have a commission for you." Thomas said flatly, enjoying the gleam he could see in the duke's eye.
"What do you want?"
"Machine tooling to build…" Thomas paused and dug a chip out of his pocket, passing it over to the noble. "This. It's the newest wonderwaffen out of Coventry."
Thomas took a sip of his tequila as the duke slid the chip into his portable reader and looked over the information. Surprisingly the free worlder's seemed to have managed to put together a fine tequila and Thomas made a mental note to see if he could get some for his own liquor cabinet. It wasn't often he came across such quality which wasn't Taurian. Given his preferences having some inner sphere quality booze on hand would be a good way to throw off anyone who thought him a complete backwater hick.
"Interesting…" Andrew spoke up, looking up from the information that TMI had gathered. "We played around with this very idea about a century ago… but never put it into production."
"Why?"
"Because people who work on weapons development have a bad habit of ending up dead, along with the entire city they were living in." Andrew said flatly. "Our security services are good but we have never been good enough to stand up to the MASK or ISF, on a good day we might be able to take SAFE."
"And yet you've been trading with us for centuries…"
"If that connection isn't well known in the fox's den, I will eat this table." Andrew said flatly while rapping his knuckles against the veneered steel. "As long as we don't rock the boat and make waves everything is all well and good, but should that change?"
"Selling us the technical specs for the Swordsman wasn't rocking the boat?"
"How many Swordsmen do you see in the Suns?" Andrew shot back. "It's a better machine then the Icarus or the Whitworth but getting a loyal soldier of the Suns into one is more trouble then its worth. They're still considered a Rostov machine, and a sign of disloyalty. If we had sold you those designs it would have meant trouble… but not that one."
"Idiots."
"Agreed." Andrew blew out a breath and frowned as he thought.
"Can you, do it?" Thomas asked, his voice displaying his eagerness despite his self-control. The Multiple missile launchers would be a game changer for the periphery powers, and if the Taurians could get them into production before the Magistracy got their Andurien derived MRM's into production… it would be worth the trouble of dealing with Davion lackeys in his eyes. Especially if he could rub it into that smug cunt Kyalla's face that TMI had for once beaten the much-vaunted MIM to the punch.
"Yes."
So is DBC's Union of Sovereign Republics going to make an appearance?
Aztez Fan
Self-Requested Ban
- Location
- California
Nit pick but theirs 13 Flags in the FWL, yet only 12 Stars on the nation flag. So which nation is getting the short end of the stick from not having their star added like their Porto rico.
Edit, make that 19 flags and only 12 stars.
Last edited:
Mal-3
Fun Tyrant
Nah. Trying to be marginally more original this time around.
It's symbolic, like the EU flag. Besides, if I was counting individual states within the FWL I'd have to have a star for all 200-odd independent planets in the FWL or they'd riot.
No, symbolic is better, smarter and future-proof.
(Also you counted wrong: there's 19 flags in the FWL section!)
Aztez Fan
Self-Requested Ban
- Location
- California
Why do i feel like this can be a geuine question brought up during Senate meetings to kill time or score browny points with people.
Will there be some Nebula California weirdness seen with the Spark?
- Location
- The Midlands.
Idea for a rather meta fanfic just came to me. Are there any mods or Council members reading this? And if there are, how would you feel about roleplaying as your own very distant descendants during Nicholas Kerensky's permaban tribunal under the Pirate Principle, after a thread in Creative Discussion and Worldbuilding where he was trying to workshop his ideas for some sort of neo-Mongol society descended into complete and utter chaos on a scale not seen since the great House McKenna Apologist Purge?
- Location
- The Underdark
Okay, that sounds hilarious, and I would love to be involved.
And it does not have to be mods/councilors, and certainly not just current councilors. It is a project where so long as you have some interest in lawyer roleplay, it just kind of works.
Suryn
On the wings of a Dragon
Am I blind, or do neith the Lyrans or the Fedsuns not show up on the pic?
Mechanis
Confirmed Extremely Screwed
- Location
- Absconding with Alacrity
It's for an AU where BattleTech takes place in the distant future of the Girl Genius universe; both polities imploded into dozens of smaller states during the story.
Mal-3
Fun Tyrant
Weeeeeellll, technically they didn't implode, just... reorganized. The Steiners were thrown out to go cosplay Jacobites on Taurus while the Commonwealth restructures as a hopefully-functional demsoc federation. Meanwhile, the Davions found themselves the last great lords still standing with sufficient relevance so they rebranded as the New Star League and continue to be Davions.
Aztez Fan
Self-Requested Ban
- Location
- California
And then you got the FWL where effectively nothing changed.
Mal-3
Fun Tyrant
New year, new map. Enlarged the main map window, added a minimap, cleaned up some things for ease of comprehension. All in all I think presentation-wise this one looks pretty good. You be the judge:
IT IS (STILL) A GALAXY RULED BY MAD SCIENCE~!
Poorly.
So poorly that it's only in the last couple decades that the people of the Inner Sphere really became aware that there was, in fact, a galaxy outside their borders. To be entirely fair, the lax educational standards set in place by a bunch of neofeudal warlords looking to keep their subjects complacent so they didn't end up getting tossed into the landfill with the rest of the trash are not the fault of the people subjected to those standards. And most of the people who did or would've known about it in the Inner Sphere didn't pass that knowledge down for their own reasons. And on top of it all, given what the Inner Sphere got up to for the last few centuries the people of the Outer Sphere didn't have a lot of interest in regular contact with them, either.
But the world changes and, for the first time in a very long time, the Inner and Outer Spheres have been making tentative contact and making noises about strengthening those connections.
Before we get started, some quick definitions: The Outer Sphere is a somewhat lumpy bubble surrounding the Inner Sphere beginning at about 950 light years from Old Earth and extending as far as 2,500 light years out. The area of space between the edge of the Near Periphery nations and the Outer Sphere proper are bounded on two sides by the Aquila and Orion Rifts, large areas where stars of any kind are sparse, and the majority of them are dim red and brown dwarfs unsuitable for standard jumpship use. To the rimward is the Perseus Cloud Complex, a gigantic molecular cloud that messes with navigational sensors to the point that, while not impassible, it's difficult enough to prevent all but the most intrepid explorers from braving it.
There are around 4,500 known systems within the Outer Sphere, and probably another thousand or so more that are staying thoroughly off the grid. The majority of worlds in the Outer Sphere aren't organized into large multi-world nations – though there are plenty of those – but instead remain independent system-states that trade, diplomacy and conflict with their neighbors as per the usual. The bigger nations tend to clump into specific regions throughout the Outer Sphere: names like the Aquila Trace and the Persean Gulf echo through song and story in the greater galaxy beyond.
Today however our focus will be on the region immediately downspin from the Inner Sphere, the Orion Sphere. The space around the famous Orion Nebula has a long – if largely forgotten – history with the Inner Sphere, and it is the only place where something that could be considered a peer to the Old Star League ever formed.
This is the story of the Orion Empire, and what happened afterwards.
The Old Star League is often compared to the glories of the ancient Roman Empire, and if that's the case then the Orion Empire was its Parthia. Like the Parthians to the Romans, Great Orion was just as large as the Old League, just as populous, as economically productive and militarily capable, and it sat behind a screen of client kingdoms and difficult to traverse terrain that made any expedition against it prohibitively expensive regardless of success or failure. The Orion Sphere started out much as the Inner Sphere did: colonists from Old Earth venturing out into the unknown until they found somewhere nice enough to settle and developed into their own cultures and nations. The Terran Alliance never really ventured beyond the Orion Rift, having its hands full with the colonies closer to home, and so the people of Orion never rebelled against Old Earth's control, because there really wasn't any control to rebel against. The colonists on the far side of the rift were ignored and forgotten (a trope that will come up again more than once in the history of the Outer Sphere) leaving them to develop as they would.
It's here that we see the first truly interesting divergence between the two regions. In the Orion Sphere the Consolidation Wars began in the early 2400s, as the kings of Coruscant reached out their hands and began to assimilate all the system-states and small nations found in the Orion Sphere. Unlike the Inner Sphere's Age of War however, the Consolidation Wars never saw the unrestricted deployment of strategic weapons. The wars were brutal – war always is – but for whatever reason the people of Orion never abandoned the old laws of war they inherited from their homeworld. While things like the Geneva Convention often ended up honored more in the breach than not, even in extremis Orion continued to play by the rules set by their ancestors. People died and cities were reduced to rubble... but worlds never burned. There was no Tintavel in the Consolidation Wars, nor was there the severe reaction of the highly formalized Ares Conventions.
The Consolidation Wars ended with the surrender of the Belkan royal family to Justinian the Completor in the 2530s, a full generation before Ian Cameron began his diplomatic push to build the Old League. What few states still existed outside Coruscant's grasp were left in place as clients, exchanging tribute for nominal independence, but with the conquest of the Belkan Empire the Great Orion Empire was complete and held a pretty firm grip on the Orion Sphere. And just in time too, because as Great Orion finished consolidating the Old Star League and began the great campaign of Reunification.
First contact between the two empires happened near the end of the Reunification War, when a party of imperial deep traders working out of the client kingdom of New Delphi were detained and interrogated by Star League Defense Force troops on account of being weird neobarbarian foreigners with possible pro-Periphery sentiments. The party removed themselves from SLDF custody (causing a bit of a mess in the process) and returned to New Delphi with the news that Old Earth was apparently doing a Consolidation War of their own and didn't see fit to stop with just their own territory. Back on Old Earth, Ian Cameron was made aware that there apparently was another large group out there in the middle-deep Periphery that hadn't heard the good news of the Pollux Proclamation.
Reunification was winding down at this point, and the people of the Old League weren't super-interested in continuing the war at this point, but if there was a power equivalent to the Taurian Concordat hiding out there on the edge of the Orion Rift, then it needed to be dealt with while the iron was still hot. An SLDF squadron was sent in the direction of New Delphi to see if they couldn't do a little Black Ships action and get the nation to submit to the Star League peacefully. That squadron was met by a bigger squadron of the Imperial Navy which then proceeded to engage in a month-long standoff while ambassadors from the imperial court explained to the SLDF that New Delphi was a trusted ally and friend to Her Majesty the Empress Cassandra and thus under the protection of the Great Orion Empire, that the Great Orion Empire couldn't give a single rat's ass about the Pollux Proclamation, and if you want to come back you're welcome to trade but if you show up with warships again the Navy would consider that fucking around and would proceed immediately to the finding out stage.
This went over with the Court of the Star League about as well as you might imagine. House Cameron never quite managed to figure out how to deal with Great Orion as an actual peer power. There were a few brief skirmishes between the Empire and the SLDF during the 2600s – these ultimately doomed expeditions were often sold to the Inner Sphere as "deep Periphery exploration missions" and when survivors came back they were sworn to secrecy and assigned to opposite ends of the Inner Sphere to keep them quiet. Mostly though, the Camerons decided that ignoring the problem was the best policy. If the Orions were content to stay on their side of the rift, then they might as well just let them rot in their neobarbarity over there, right? This policy didn't work out as well as it could've; secret reports of Great Orion's military strength probably contributed a lot to First Lord Jonathan Cameron's mental instability. For a man plagued with paranoia about a Periphery invasion, learning about a Periphery state that could invade, definitely make it hurt and possibly make it stick was perhaps the worst thing anybody could've done. But he was the First Lord, so.
And Jonathan Cameron wasn't entirely wrong to be worried. While for the most part the Empire wasn't interested in expanding across the Rift – mainly because the cost of such an invasion would be ruinous, for one – by the 2700s the emperors were watching the Old League with wary eyes. In particular, the League's expansion of the Outworlds Alliance in the direction of New Delphi raised a lot of eyebrows. If this continued, the Star League would be in a position to actually invade New Delphi in a generation, leaving the other client states of the Orion Gap and possibly Great Orion itself open to outside threat for the first time.
Perhaps, they thought, it was time to be a little more proactive about the Star League.
In the year 2743 Emperor Nestor secretly decreed that Great Orion would begin building its forces to cross the Gap and take the downspin elements of the Outworlds Alliance away from the Star League. The idea was, he claimed, to protect the territorial integrity of Great Orion and it's tributaries, and demonstrate to the Old League that they couldn't act with impunity. For the next several years preparations were made; the Navy was assembled, tactics drawn up, legions mustered and outfitted with the finest weaponry. The Emperor himself turned to a cabal of sparks (Bet you thought we'd forgotten about the sparks, right? Remember, this is the old days so sparks weren't quite so numerous as they'd be in years to come.) who promised him a weapon that would allow him to not just take but hold the Outworlds Alliance, and possibly even the whole of the downspin Star League if he so desired. By weaponizing the very nature of hyperspace, they could deny entry to any system the Emperor wished save by imperial forces. A perfect defense and siege weapon all in one.
(In another time and place, one without sparks but with its own problems, the underlying theory behind this weapon would be turned into the Wall, the ultimate defense of the Republic of the Sphere that lasted until thedevelopers decided it was ilClan time the Wolves broke through in the mid-32nd century. But that is a tale for someone else to tell, my children.)
Wanting any advantage to make the invasion easier, Nestor agreed. And so it came to pass in the Terran standard year of 2751 that the sparks unveiled Nestor's Lantern and, for the first and only time, fired it up as part of a public demonstration. It worked a little too well; nobody survived to report exactly what happened but remote astronomical observations recorded the bang let off when whatever the Lantern did destabilized Coruscant's star. At the same time it also destabilized hyperspace in a region almost two hundred light years across, with great rifts extending like cracks outwards from the whirlpool of broken hyperspace across the entirety of the Orion Sphere.
With the capital world literally disintegrated and the Imperial core now inaccessible, Great Orion collapsed. The full collapse wasn't complete until the 2770s, but the damage done was too severe to weather. The Old League might have capitalized on this and tried to expand through the Gap, but by the time news of Courscant's explosion reached Old Earth (hampered by most of the SLDF's best spies having been on Courscant when the deal went down) First Lord Simon Cameron had had his "tragic accident" with a mining drone and... well. The Star League was not going to be Reunifying with Orion any time in the immediate future.
While their only true rival was dealing with their own problems, the Great Orion Empire had it's heart ripped out in one day, and the rest of it was left to pick up the shrapnel as best they can and carry on.
History happens.
It is the end of the year 3019, Terran Synchronized Calendar. Five years ago, ships from the Inner Sphere approached New Delphi for the first time since the fall of the Camerons, and for the first time ever they approached in the name of (relative) peace. This sudden influx of goods, people and ideas has started changing the Orion Sphere, but nobody knows whether or not it will be for good or ill. The eruption of the spark in the 2970s has also dramatically changed the landscape of Orion. Some nations like the restored Belkan Empire have taken hold of the spark like a long-lost sibling, while others like the almost paranoiac luddite kings of Dendara seek to burn out the spark "infection" before it can take hold. And then there are the enigmas; the people of the far edges of the Outer Sphere like the Rae, the Daryens and the quiet folk of the Spinward Confederacy who seem to be more fey than human, or the strange tale of Queen Albia, who has ruled the Albionic Empire for literal centuries since the fall of Great Orion.
It's a region in transition, as renewed contact with the heartlands of humanity causes disruptions in society almost as severe as the Maelstrom itself. New goods, people and ideas are arriving every day, and they can cause a hell of a stir. Symphonist activists from the Orchestra butt heads with neo-Gorbachevist realists in the Soviet Republic of New Mars, potentially souring attempts at spreading symphonism to the Outer Sphere in a grand alliance. New Delphi grows wealthy on the influx of trade, and spends that wealth as soon as it arrives on BattleMechs and other weapons of war as their long twilight struggle against the Laconian Dominate and New Macedon continues with no end in sight. The last vestige of Great Orion, the Reformed Empire of Orion, convulses as the twenty Great Houses of the Landsraad scheme against each other and the population wonders if their evangelical kinsmen in the Republic of Orion aren't wrong about this whole nobility business.
For the adventurer coming to Orion from the Inner Sphere, Orion is an ancient land with history largely disconnected from the long struggles of lord and MechWarrior they're familiar with. Split apart by the Great Maelstrom, the faults in hyperspace only passable with help from the Corbettite Order, there are plenty of exciting things to find, see and almost get killed by.
If that interests you, then go see the Orion Sphere. Tell us what you find out there.
right-click for big said:
IT IS (STILL) A GALAXY RULED BY MAD SCIENCE~!
Poorly.
So poorly that it's only in the last couple decades that the people of the Inner Sphere really became aware that there was, in fact, a galaxy outside their borders. To be entirely fair, the lax educational standards set in place by a bunch of neofeudal warlords looking to keep their subjects complacent so they didn't end up getting tossed into the landfill with the rest of the trash are not the fault of the people subjected to those standards. And most of the people who did or would've known about it in the Inner Sphere didn't pass that knowledge down for their own reasons. And on top of it all, given what the Inner Sphere got up to for the last few centuries the people of the Outer Sphere didn't have a lot of interest in regular contact with them, either.
But the world changes and, for the first time in a very long time, the Inner and Outer Spheres have been making tentative contact and making noises about strengthening those connections.
Before we get started, some quick definitions: The Outer Sphere is a somewhat lumpy bubble surrounding the Inner Sphere beginning at about 950 light years from Old Earth and extending as far as 2,500 light years out. The area of space between the edge of the Near Periphery nations and the Outer Sphere proper are bounded on two sides by the Aquila and Orion Rifts, large areas where stars of any kind are sparse, and the majority of them are dim red and brown dwarfs unsuitable for standard jumpship use. To the rimward is the Perseus Cloud Complex, a gigantic molecular cloud that messes with navigational sensors to the point that, while not impassible, it's difficult enough to prevent all but the most intrepid explorers from braving it.
There are around 4,500 known systems within the Outer Sphere, and probably another thousand or so more that are staying thoroughly off the grid. The majority of worlds in the Outer Sphere aren't organized into large multi-world nations – though there are plenty of those – but instead remain independent system-states that trade, diplomacy and conflict with their neighbors as per the usual. The bigger nations tend to clump into specific regions throughout the Outer Sphere: names like the Aquila Trace and the Persean Gulf echo through song and story in the greater galaxy beyond.
Today however our focus will be on the region immediately downspin from the Inner Sphere, the Orion Sphere. The space around the famous Orion Nebula has a long – if largely forgotten – history with the Inner Sphere, and it is the only place where something that could be considered a peer to the Old Star League ever formed.
This is the story of the Orion Empire, and what happened afterwards.
The Old Star League is often compared to the glories of the ancient Roman Empire, and if that's the case then the Orion Empire was its Parthia. Like the Parthians to the Romans, Great Orion was just as large as the Old League, just as populous, as economically productive and militarily capable, and it sat behind a screen of client kingdoms and difficult to traverse terrain that made any expedition against it prohibitively expensive regardless of success or failure. The Orion Sphere started out much as the Inner Sphere did: colonists from Old Earth venturing out into the unknown until they found somewhere nice enough to settle and developed into their own cultures and nations. The Terran Alliance never really ventured beyond the Orion Rift, having its hands full with the colonies closer to home, and so the people of Orion never rebelled against Old Earth's control, because there really wasn't any control to rebel against. The colonists on the far side of the rift were ignored and forgotten (a trope that will come up again more than once in the history of the Outer Sphere) leaving them to develop as they would.
It's here that we see the first truly interesting divergence between the two regions. In the Orion Sphere the Consolidation Wars began in the early 2400s, as the kings of Coruscant reached out their hands and began to assimilate all the system-states and small nations found in the Orion Sphere. Unlike the Inner Sphere's Age of War however, the Consolidation Wars never saw the unrestricted deployment of strategic weapons. The wars were brutal – war always is – but for whatever reason the people of Orion never abandoned the old laws of war they inherited from their homeworld. While things like the Geneva Convention often ended up honored more in the breach than not, even in extremis Orion continued to play by the rules set by their ancestors. People died and cities were reduced to rubble... but worlds never burned. There was no Tintavel in the Consolidation Wars, nor was there the severe reaction of the highly formalized Ares Conventions.
The Consolidation Wars ended with the surrender of the Belkan royal family to Justinian the Completor in the 2530s, a full generation before Ian Cameron began his diplomatic push to build the Old League. What few states still existed outside Coruscant's grasp were left in place as clients, exchanging tribute for nominal independence, but with the conquest of the Belkan Empire the Great Orion Empire was complete and held a pretty firm grip on the Orion Sphere. And just in time too, because as Great Orion finished consolidating the Old Star League and began the great campaign of Reunification.
First contact between the two empires happened near the end of the Reunification War, when a party of imperial deep traders working out of the client kingdom of New Delphi were detained and interrogated by Star League Defense Force troops on account of being weird neobarbarian foreigners with possible pro-Periphery sentiments. The party removed themselves from SLDF custody (causing a bit of a mess in the process) and returned to New Delphi with the news that Old Earth was apparently doing a Consolidation War of their own and didn't see fit to stop with just their own territory. Back on Old Earth, Ian Cameron was made aware that there apparently was another large group out there in the middle-deep Periphery that hadn't heard the good news of the Pollux Proclamation.
Reunification was winding down at this point, and the people of the Old League weren't super-interested in continuing the war at this point, but if there was a power equivalent to the Taurian Concordat hiding out there on the edge of the Orion Rift, then it needed to be dealt with while the iron was still hot. An SLDF squadron was sent in the direction of New Delphi to see if they couldn't do a little Black Ships action and get the nation to submit to the Star League peacefully. That squadron was met by a bigger squadron of the Imperial Navy which then proceeded to engage in a month-long standoff while ambassadors from the imperial court explained to the SLDF that New Delphi was a trusted ally and friend to Her Majesty the Empress Cassandra and thus under the protection of the Great Orion Empire, that the Great Orion Empire couldn't give a single rat's ass about the Pollux Proclamation, and if you want to come back you're welcome to trade but if you show up with warships again the Navy would consider that fucking around and would proceed immediately to the finding out stage.
This went over with the Court of the Star League about as well as you might imagine. House Cameron never quite managed to figure out how to deal with Great Orion as an actual peer power. There were a few brief skirmishes between the Empire and the SLDF during the 2600s – these ultimately doomed expeditions were often sold to the Inner Sphere as "deep Periphery exploration missions" and when survivors came back they were sworn to secrecy and assigned to opposite ends of the Inner Sphere to keep them quiet. Mostly though, the Camerons decided that ignoring the problem was the best policy. If the Orions were content to stay on their side of the rift, then they might as well just let them rot in their neobarbarity over there, right? This policy didn't work out as well as it could've; secret reports of Great Orion's military strength probably contributed a lot to First Lord Jonathan Cameron's mental instability. For a man plagued with paranoia about a Periphery invasion, learning about a Periphery state that could invade, definitely make it hurt and possibly make it stick was perhaps the worst thing anybody could've done. But he was the First Lord, so.
And Jonathan Cameron wasn't entirely wrong to be worried. While for the most part the Empire wasn't interested in expanding across the Rift – mainly because the cost of such an invasion would be ruinous, for one – by the 2700s the emperors were watching the Old League with wary eyes. In particular, the League's expansion of the Outworlds Alliance in the direction of New Delphi raised a lot of eyebrows. If this continued, the Star League would be in a position to actually invade New Delphi in a generation, leaving the other client states of the Orion Gap and possibly Great Orion itself open to outside threat for the first time.
Perhaps, they thought, it was time to be a little more proactive about the Star League.
In the year 2743 Emperor Nestor secretly decreed that Great Orion would begin building its forces to cross the Gap and take the downspin elements of the Outworlds Alliance away from the Star League. The idea was, he claimed, to protect the territorial integrity of Great Orion and it's tributaries, and demonstrate to the Old League that they couldn't act with impunity. For the next several years preparations were made; the Navy was assembled, tactics drawn up, legions mustered and outfitted with the finest weaponry. The Emperor himself turned to a cabal of sparks (Bet you thought we'd forgotten about the sparks, right? Remember, this is the old days so sparks weren't quite so numerous as they'd be in years to come.) who promised him a weapon that would allow him to not just take but hold the Outworlds Alliance, and possibly even the whole of the downspin Star League if he so desired. By weaponizing the very nature of hyperspace, they could deny entry to any system the Emperor wished save by imperial forces. A perfect defense and siege weapon all in one.
(In another time and place, one without sparks but with its own problems, the underlying theory behind this weapon would be turned into the Wall, the ultimate defense of the Republic of the Sphere that lasted until the
Wanting any advantage to make the invasion easier, Nestor agreed. And so it came to pass in the Terran standard year of 2751 that the sparks unveiled Nestor's Lantern and, for the first and only time, fired it up as part of a public demonstration. It worked a little too well; nobody survived to report exactly what happened but remote astronomical observations recorded the bang let off when whatever the Lantern did destabilized Coruscant's star. At the same time it also destabilized hyperspace in a region almost two hundred light years across, with great rifts extending like cracks outwards from the whirlpool of broken hyperspace across the entirety of the Orion Sphere.
With the capital world literally disintegrated and the Imperial core now inaccessible, Great Orion collapsed. The full collapse wasn't complete until the 2770s, but the damage done was too severe to weather. The Old League might have capitalized on this and tried to expand through the Gap, but by the time news of Courscant's explosion reached Old Earth (hampered by most of the SLDF's best spies having been on Courscant when the deal went down) First Lord Simon Cameron had had his "tragic accident" with a mining drone and... well. The Star League was not going to be Reunifying with Orion any time in the immediate future.
While their only true rival was dealing with their own problems, the Great Orion Empire had it's heart ripped out in one day, and the rest of it was left to pick up the shrapnel as best they can and carry on.
History happens.
It is the end of the year 3019, Terran Synchronized Calendar. Five years ago, ships from the Inner Sphere approached New Delphi for the first time since the fall of the Camerons, and for the first time ever they approached in the name of (relative) peace. This sudden influx of goods, people and ideas has started changing the Orion Sphere, but nobody knows whether or not it will be for good or ill. The eruption of the spark in the 2970s has also dramatically changed the landscape of Orion. Some nations like the restored Belkan Empire have taken hold of the spark like a long-lost sibling, while others like the almost paranoiac luddite kings of Dendara seek to burn out the spark "infection" before it can take hold. And then there are the enigmas; the people of the far edges of the Outer Sphere like the Rae, the Daryens and the quiet folk of the Spinward Confederacy who seem to be more fey than human, or the strange tale of Queen Albia, who has ruled the Albionic Empire for literal centuries since the fall of Great Orion.
It's a region in transition, as renewed contact with the heartlands of humanity causes disruptions in society almost as severe as the Maelstrom itself. New goods, people and ideas are arriving every day, and they can cause a hell of a stir. Symphonist activists from the Orchestra butt heads with neo-Gorbachevist realists in the Soviet Republic of New Mars, potentially souring attempts at spreading symphonism to the Outer Sphere in a grand alliance. New Delphi grows wealthy on the influx of trade, and spends that wealth as soon as it arrives on BattleMechs and other weapons of war as their long twilight struggle against the Laconian Dominate and New Macedon continues with no end in sight. The last vestige of Great Orion, the Reformed Empire of Orion, convulses as the twenty Great Houses of the Landsraad scheme against each other and the population wonders if their evangelical kinsmen in the Republic of Orion aren't wrong about this whole nobility business.
For the adventurer coming to Orion from the Inner Sphere, Orion is an ancient land with history largely disconnected from the long struggles of lord and MechWarrior they're familiar with. Split apart by the Great Maelstrom, the faults in hyperspace only passable with help from the Corbettite Order, there are plenty of exciting things to find, see and almost get killed by.
If that interests you, then go see the Orion Sphere. Tell us what you find out there.
I'm seeing some Dune and Expanse influences from those names.
Also, are you saying the Camerons hid the existence of the Orion Empire from the rest of the Star League?
I got to say, that mini-map? Does a lot to make me want to know moar about the rest of the Outer Sphere.
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Jonen C
F.M.D.G.
- Location
- Lincopense, Ostrogothia, Suecia
I get confused by the BT starmaps projection. (I play Elite Dangerous - that starmap is a lot newer and thus closer to the real galaxy, so North is from Sol to Sag A* and South is Sol to rim (Barnards Loop). East is from Sol towards Vela nebula and West is from Sol towards the Cygnus Loop (Veil nebula) - though the latter of those is a bit coreward of true west)...
Lets's see. Coreward is coreward... Wait... Hm. Rotate. A fuck it.
Okay, so coreward in a BT galaxy map looks like it isn't actually what I'd consider coreward, but something like 45 degree's off coreward. I'd say the Hanseatic League is directly coreward of Sol.
This map. The Cross dividing the map into quadrants is the directions - corwards rimwards is the Upper Left to Lower Right divider, coreward is around about Upper left.
Pleiades are rimward, might be on the wrong side of the Zero line between Sol and the Core but about inside the margin of error (besides, BT star names sometimes have a very teunous connection to where they'd actually be - I'm looking at you CANOPUS)... Coalsack and Chameleon nebulas are about correct, as is Barnards loop if much too close (and it's supposed to be more or less centered on the Orion nebula)... eh, distances are tricky, the BT map is older than the ED one and the ED one is outdated too.
I think Withchead nebula would be about where the Deep periphery map puts the Barnards loop if I've got it right (except maybe a bit further out, eh)...
The Orion molecular cloud complex (orion nebula, horsehead nebula, barnards loop etc) is on the near edge of the Orio-Persean Gap (which is the nearer of the spaces between arms of the milky way which have a dearth of bright stars)...
The Aquila rift of BT might approximately map onto the great rift (which is a bunch of nebulas and dustclouds coreward of Sol) - though that goes all across the coreward direction and starts at about 300 LY... But, again distances...
I'm not sure what the Orion Rift of BT might map onto, though. (Amusingly, I think it would map roughly onto the Col 70 exclusion zone of Elite: Dangerous - though that is a bit larger (and a somewhat complex shape) and supposedly spilling over with angry flowers...)
The gap to the Persean would be about 1kLY rimwards and the gap to the Scutum-Sagitarius arm upwards to 2-3kLY Corewards. The Clan Homeworlds should be edging up on that gap if I got it right.
California nebula lines up correctly if you tilt the galactic map. So does the cygnus loop.
Hm, helix nebula... Is supposed to be one of the nebula closest to earth (planetary nebula), so the BT map one is probably another one furhter along that axis...
God knows what the Gum Nebula is supposed to be in reality - I suppose the BT lore has it as a region recently or in the process of being hit by a supernova, so probably not an actual nebula yet... It's a bit coreward of being centered on VY Canis Majoris, otherwise that could be fun. (I think the Aldrin Nebula lines up about correctly located to be centered on VY Canis Majoris, though.)
Anyway, yeah. New Delphi Compact is almost Directly Coreward of the Great Maelstrom. Orion nebula is not quite directly rimward of Sol.
Got myself a bit confused by the gross stellar cartography.
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As for Nestors lantern.. Given (some canon) has BT fusion doing funky stuff with hyperspace, and Stars are big gasbags doing fusion by gravity, I'm assuming turning off hyperspace does bad things to all things fusion. Hm. Race to the core collapse button.
Lets's see. Coreward is coreward... Wait... Hm. Rotate. A fuck it.
Okay, so coreward in a BT galaxy map looks like it isn't actually what I'd consider coreward, but something like 45 degree's off coreward. I'd say the Hanseatic League is directly coreward of Sol.
This map. The Cross dividing the map into quadrants is the directions - corwards rimwards is the Upper Left to Lower Right divider, coreward is around about Upper left.
Pleiades are rimward, might be on the wrong side of the Zero line between Sol and the Core but about inside the margin of error (besides, BT star names sometimes have a very teunous connection to where they'd actually be - I'm looking at you CANOPUS)... Coalsack and Chameleon nebulas are about correct, as is Barnards loop if much too close (and it's supposed to be more or less centered on the Orion nebula)... eh, distances are tricky, the BT map is older than the ED one and the ED one is outdated too.
I think Withchead nebula would be about where the Deep periphery map puts the Barnards loop if I've got it right (except maybe a bit further out, eh)...
The Orion molecular cloud complex (orion nebula, horsehead nebula, barnards loop etc) is on the near edge of the Orio-Persean Gap (which is the nearer of the spaces between arms of the milky way which have a dearth of bright stars)...
The Aquila rift of BT might approximately map onto the great rift (which is a bunch of nebulas and dustclouds coreward of Sol) - though that goes all across the coreward direction and starts at about 300 LY... But, again distances...
I'm not sure what the Orion Rift of BT might map onto, though. (Amusingly, I think it would map roughly onto the Col 70 exclusion zone of Elite: Dangerous - though that is a bit larger (and a somewhat complex shape) and supposedly spilling over with angry flowers...)
The gap to the Persean would be about 1kLY rimwards and the gap to the Scutum-Sagitarius arm upwards to 2-3kLY Corewards. The Clan Homeworlds should be edging up on that gap if I got it right.
California nebula lines up correctly if you tilt the galactic map. So does the cygnus loop.
Hm, helix nebula... Is supposed to be one of the nebula closest to earth (planetary nebula), so the BT map one is probably another one furhter along that axis...
God knows what the Gum Nebula is supposed to be in reality - I suppose the BT lore has it as a region recently or in the process of being hit by a supernova, so probably not an actual nebula yet... It's a bit coreward of being centered on VY Canis Majoris, otherwise that could be fun. (I think the Aldrin Nebula lines up about correctly located to be centered on VY Canis Majoris, though.)
Anyway, yeah. New Delphi Compact is almost Directly Coreward of the Great Maelstrom. Orion nebula is not quite directly rimward of Sol.
Got myself a bit confused by the gross stellar cartography.
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As for Nestors lantern.. Given (some canon) has BT fusion doing funky stuff with hyperspace, and Stars are big gasbags doing fusion by gravity, I'm assuming turning off hyperspace does bad things to all things fusion. Hm. Race to the core collapse button.
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Aztez Fan
Self-Requested Ban
- Location
- California
Im more focused on the mini map there of the wider known sector. And i noticed something a little funny yet oddly concerning. That being Coreward near the clans there's a distinct lack of....anything really. Sure its flanked by lots of nations and states but...otherwise its empty as fuck. Which in all honestly might by why Kerensky when that direction. because he knew there would be next to no one Relevant in that way for his fleet to bump into and accidentally start a war.
Although that doesn't explain why the clans didn't decide to go full empire on everyone to their left or right. Considering in canon we know that if they find a colony near their space or even close by they desire to take it over or at least fight everyone there in their Honor duels. Save those more inclined to trade that is. The Dimond Sharks no doubt are fairly well known even before the clans started imploding. Since they had ships going as far as the jarnfolk.
In a more populated Battletech, the clans would not be as much of a secrect. Although the true nature of who they are to anyone the in the innersphere beyond rumors would no doubt still be unknown to all but the most hungry of Historians and explorers. And since i would no doubt see them as having at least 2 second to 3d Largest Warship fleet of anyone out that far, i doubt anyone even if their strong would dare try and fight the clans on their home worlds. Lest they want to become the target of a Crusade of crazy folks.
Again, pre imploding that is. Although if theirs anything that units folks like that its an outside invader. So who knows. Also who's that orange faction up to the North east?
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Hell, Remember the slow genocide the Cloud Cobras pulled on the Tanite Worlds? If there were survivors who escaped, I'm betting they'd run into the other Outer Rim polities and made people wary about the Clans coming to finish the job.
Mal-3
Fun Tyrant
Congratulations, you've found my eternal bugbear. my white whale, the thing about BattleTech I will die mad about: the map makes no goddamned sense.
In this particular map, there are in essence two maps sort of slapped on top of each other with my own additions and annotations frosted atop that. There's the original Inner Sphere map, which according to legend and dubiously-sourced CBT Forums posts was actually built using a copy of the Yale Bright Star catalog (maybe the 4th Edition, hopefully so because otherwise they're using a catalog from the 1960s) which then had horrible mathematical things done to it in order to convert the 3D coordinates into the XY system used for BattleTech. This causes all of the hilarity with major stars you noticed, not to mention some of the weirdness with distances and directions.
So on top of that is the map you linked, the Jihad Conspiracies 3 map. I... honestly don't know how the devs came up with that map, how they determined the positions of anything or if they just splatted shapes on a black background, assigned names based on real(ish) astrographical features and called it a day. Probably the latter, if I'm going to be honest. Most of this stuff is there to explain why nobody explored or expanded in any of the other three directions. The rifts are almost certainly fictional, or if they're not then they're wildly misrepresented. But you knew that.
(Incidentally, I think the Gum Nebula is supposed to be this, it's roughly the right distance though it's way bigger than I'd expect an emissions nebula to remain recognizable. Enh, whatever.)
Finally, there's my additions to the map, which are entirely about artistic interpretation and creating interesting "geography" to act as a constraint or explain why nobody's talking to each other if jump travel is so common.
*sigh* Yeah.
So this is my attempt - a bit of a flailing one - to try and keep some vague sense of the canon Clans' isolation despite the fact that the Outer Sphere is several orders of magnitude more populated than the canonical Deep Periphery. I mean, you're not wrong - in this situation the Clans would've landed in a more populated Periphery than they expected (well, Alex K might've expected it; we're told he took all of the SLDF's maps of the Deep Periphery with him on the exodus) and probably would've ended up starting to build the Star League-in-Exile on the back of preexisting populations, and then the Clans would've happened. Which, I mean, not the end of the world but it does raise a lot of questions about how the Clans managed to stay a secret once the Inner and Outer Spheres start talking.
There's a lot to be workshopped there.
That's the proud nation of New Canada, the true kings of the galactic north.
(It's actually smaller than it appears, only 80 worlds or so overall, but spread out over a much larger volume than most other nations.)
Jonen C
F.M.D.G.
- Location
- Lincopense, Ostrogothia, Suecia
Look at the galaxy top down, Zoom out so you've got the Orion spur on screen and not much else, tilt your head and squint and you can sort of line up at least half of the major features on the map - quite a few have (or had at the time of making) ongoing debates about size and distance - but any attempt to render it is going to have errors and pure fiction anyway, let alone in 2D, or god forgive trying to make the 2D representation have interesting geography (say what you want - the BT starmaps are leagues above the Honorverse ones).So on top of that is the map you linked, the Jihad Conspiracies 3 map. I... honestly don't know how the devs came up with that map, how they determined the positions of anything or if they just splatted shapes on a black background, assigned names based on real(ish) astrographical features and called it a day. Probably the latter, if I'm going to be honest. Most of this stuff is there to explain why nobody explored or expanded in any of the other three directions. The rifts are almost certainly fictional, or if they're not then they're wildly misrepresented. But you knew that.
Now that I can line things up, I'm willing to forgive a lot by attributing it to colonization projects wildly misrepresenting where they are going by false advertisement using known names over accurate stellar catalog designations and that sticking.
...
Also, on a binary scale, how inaccurate is calling the Nestors Lantern superweapon a "core collapse button"?
Mal-3
Fun Tyrant
Ironically, for the Inner Sphere you should be looking at the galaxy from the bottom up. No, I don't know why they made that decision.
Admittedly one of the things I've kicked around making one of these days is an Actually Accurate (Within Reason) Map of the Inner Sphere and see how things line up. Like, actually take all the current data on what's where within the range of the Inner Sphere then start backfilling in with canonical systems and see what that looks like. I've got a hunch that it would be very different, but also potentially very interesting. But that's the sort of timesink project that demands compensation, so I'll probably never get around to it.
As for Nestor's Lantern, in concept it's really more of an instant Eye of Terror button, but calling it that adds context and implications that aren't intended (this is a 100% Chaos God-free zone, thank you very fucking much).
Enh, probably. Which likely speaks to sparky hubris if nothing else.