Battletech's technical background is absolutely and completely inconsistent. You need to remember that this was started as a game back in the 1980s to cash in on the first Mecha craze, and was made into a real universe only after people realized they really had something there.
That said, there's some absurdly pathetic elements to Btech, some rather impressive elements, and some that just make no sense. An example of the first would be the relation between armor and kinetic impacts, something LordChaos has argued makes Btech absurdly low teched. He also takes the original rules as the highest level of canon, ignoring what both most fans and the people who make CBT consider the highest level of canon-the sourcebooks and novels which portray the universe, of which the board game is a simulation of.
A "wow, that ain't bad" element of Battletech is their aerospace fighters. They have mass/power ratios that make Star Wars fighters look sad (setting aside Superscience affections like inertial dampening). A hundred ton fighter can easily accelerate at four or five gees, with a powerplant massing considerably less then a fifth of that 100 tons. Smaller fighters can hit as high as twelve gees, and this is a universe, again, that doesn't resort to superscience for very much.
There's also something to be said for durability in their construction. In the first book of the Blood of Kerensky trilogy, Tyra Miraborg, well, "Miraborgs" her <i>Shilone</i> fighter into the bridge of the Clan flagship <i>Dire Wolf</i>. Not to piss of any of the Warsies here (Yet, anyway.
) but you're talking about a fighter which masses almost three A-wings, and was accelerating over a distance considerably greater then what that A-wing pulled in RotJ. It impacted directly on the forward part of the bridge (The <i>Sovietskii Soyuz</i> class CA being the only Btech warship to have its bridge convienently designed like that), which was at the forward most extremity of the ship.
The resulting kinetic impact and rather spectacular explosion didn't even breach the airlock on the aft end of the bridge. In fact, the ship's HarJel system was able to seal the breach, long enough for a DamCon crew to look for survivors. The ship remained combat capable, and if not for the fact the IlKhan of the Clans had been standing on the bridge at the time, would've done diddly squat.
Of course, then there's just the plain absurd, like the fact that 29.62 tons of diatomic hydrogen fuel being sufficent to accelerate a 2.4 million ton dreadnought at 1 gee for a full 24 hours, but *eh*.
In terms of dimensions, Battletech builds its stuff considerably larger then Star Trek. Dimensions wise (Length/width/beam) the <i>McKenna</i> or <i>Texas</i> class BBs are actually about the same size as your bog standard Impstar Deuce. The <i>Leviathan</i> (the aforementioned 2.4 million ton monster) is actually smaller lengthwise, but is considerably larger in the other two dimensions.
And while 3050 or 3067 warship fleets are nothing to write home about, the 2765 era warship fleets are another story entirely. The Star League Defense Force had a <i>MINIMUM</i> of 15,000 jump-capable warships, the smallest larger dimensionally then an <i>Excelsior</i> class ship. This doesn't count combat capable dropships, of which the number is literally uncountable. They almost all tend to be larger then the <i>Defiant</i>, to boot. The SLDF built sixty of an escort carrier class (the <i>Riga</i>) at a single shipyard in less then twenty years, and that's far from the most produced design out there.
In addition to that number, you've got the fleets of the five Great Houses and the four primary Periphery states, which while considerably smaller individually then the SLDF, they'd add together to another 20,000 ships easily.
And while, yes, a nuke hitting a warship will *kill* that warship, no questions asked, take a real objective look at exactly how many warships in any universe would survive a direct surface-to-surface detonation from a fifty or sixty megaton warhead, with all their technobabble systems off. The fact that during the Amaris Coup and the First Succession War something like fifty or sixty worlds were completely depopulated and rendered lifeless (or nearly so) with nuclear warheads and orbital bombardment says something. The Combine used 250 megaton nukes like candy in their invasion of Dalkieth, and it wasn't even an important world.
The industrial base at the time would be nothing to sneeze at either. You're talking about nearly three thousand worlds, with a combined population of four or five trillion, and it wouldn't have been devestated by three hundred years of war. Even in 3050, the Inner Sphere could probably outproduce the Federation in terms of sheer GNP, all things considered. The biggest problem is that most of that GNP during the Succession Wars was devoted to A: Maintaining a technical base that had been deliberately cripped by Comstar on no less then four occasions, B: Fighting the Succession Wars, and C: Maintaining the infrastructure neccesary to sustain the needs of nearly a hundred several billion people plus worlds that couldn't even grow their own food.
The original designers made something of a mistake when emphasizing how small the IS's JumpShip fleet was, while at the same time setting up worlds like Tharkad, New Syrtis, or Al Na'ir, all systems with populations in the billions range that couldn't feed their population. The fact that those numbers were maintaned in later publications-the FedCom Civil War Sourcebook, for example-but the "We've got no JumpShips' angle was dropped, seems to make things clear that the lack of JumpShips for military operations was a matter of being unable to divert transport from missions they literally couldn't be spared from as opposed to a simple lack of hulls.
But *eh*. Everyone at Spacebattles knows I'm an unabashed Battletech partisan. I'm not denying it. I also happen to have access to virtually every significant sourcebook ever written, and when one considers that the weight of fluff for the universe outweighs the stuff published for Star Trek and Star Wars put together, that's nothing to sneer at.
, and a whole myriad of other things we know is wrong with BT and then try to come up with (im)plausible explanations for.
