Battletech Clan Invasion of UC Gundam Earth

[Ritterin Sophia]

Then the mechs will start using LB-10X's. There are no range limits for ballistic weapons in space, after all. Just targeting problems.

That's still not going to help, worst you're going to do is take out the optics.


Oh and I just noticed this.

And unlike a Gundam warship, which are rather small and lightweight in comparison, you can't take out a BT WarShip with a few shots from what amounts to an AC20.

The weapon that Zaku II had was a 120mm MG and they hit a weapons magazine, particularly a six-tube missile launcher.

According the the Jormungand page, an effective range of 300km is still well beyond most other weapons in the Gundamverse.

Given that those ranges are when in heavy Minovsky Particle jamming.

[Imperial Overlord]

The typical Clan fields a dozen Jump capable warships and a much larger assortment of armed and armoured dropships and aerospace fighters. Now the four invading Clans aren't typical. The Smoke Jaguars and Ghost Bears have larger than normal fleets because they have large and powerful militaries even if their navies are a considered a minor part of their war machine, but Clan Jade Falcon and Clan Wolf field, by Clan standards, huge fucking armadas clocking in at the forty odd vessels range (by Clan standards, both Wolves and Jade Falcons are rich as hell and have huge dick waving competitions when they're not trying to kill each other). Clan Star Adder also has a large number of ships and Snow Raven has the largest fleet of all, but all told the Clans don't have huge numbers or large production facilities. Total number of warships isn't going to be too much higher than five hundred and they sure as hell aren't going to be bringing them all with them.

[SAMAS]

(It should be noted that when BattleTech talks about Mech-/Vehicle-/Battle Armor-scale machineguns, they're talking closer to 20mm Vulcan guns or at least the minigun, not something like an M2 Browning.)

That's nice, except before fall of 0079 beam weapons aren't portable enough for MS, so unlike later unit the early Zeon suits actually have sufficient armor to survive 60mm autocannon fire.

Typical Anti-MS Machineguns range from 90-120mm during the OYW.

I figured the proper response would be that the "light" head guns of a Gundam or GM are 60mm, but I suppose that works. :p

[lord Martiya]

Uhm... I think we are forgetting a factor about Gundam and a possible second round: Newtypes. I mean, not all Newtypes have powers even approaching Lalah Sune (for people who never watched Gundam, she's Char girlfriend/lover, and apparently the most powerful Newtype ever), but ALL Newtypes have some sort of premonition and can use remote-controlled cannons with their minds.
At the start of the war, the technology is still not advanced enough to be of any use, but it was combat-capable in the waning days of the war, when Lalah Sune was devastating the Federation Fleet at the captured Solomon base. Now, I don't know what the Clans will be able to throw at Earth in the second round, but if the Federation and Zeon didn't destroy each other by then... Well, try to picture an hundred JEDIs with mobile armors and remote-controlled anti-warship guns that cannot be jammed, because that's exactly what the Clans will face.

[Ritterin Sophia]

I figured the proper response would be that the "light" head guns of a Gundam or GM are 60mm, but I suppose that works. :p

That's what I'm talking about.

FYI a 20mm a gun becomes a cannon, the design of the 'vulcan' is a rotary cannon, and ergo an autocannon or 'automatic cannon'.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Newtypes.

Won't be a factor. The first combat ready psycommu mobile weapon wasn't ready until November. This will be over long before then

apparently the most powerful Newtype ever),

I'm pretty sure Tomino has said Kamille was the most powerful.

[Balrog]

Which is going to take some time for the Clans to do, about two decades to be precise. Remember that they will have to grow a shitload of new recruits , raise them from childhood and train them, flunking the bulk of these new warriors out.

They have the breathing room to do so, and the patience, if required. They might even go long-term and just expand into every other empty system between the Clan worlds and Earth, gaining access to resources no longer held down by IS factions.

Look what you just did, you posted the erroneous 'Official Stats' and then followed up with a source that blows those stats completely out of the fucking water.

Because clearly, red ones go faster?
But more seriously, can you demonstrate that those maneuvers require higher acceleration figures than the official stats state.

The weapon that Zaku II had was a 120mm MG and they hit a weapons magazine, particularly a six-tube missile launcher.

Exactly, it's analogous to an AC/20, and the weapons magazine (and bridge) will be just as exposed to WarShip fire. Plus the non-nuclear bazooka rounds we see taking ships out left and right.

Given that those ranges are when in heavy Minovsky Particle jamming.

Which is a given whenever Gundams fight.

[Dark Hellion]

I think something that has been missed (but probably should be ignored for this vs.) is that Minovsky Particles don't just disrupt sensors but also disrupt electronic circuitry in the area as well. Now, the idea of all the Clan Warships losing power shortly after starting the invasion is funny but probably should be removed so that they can actually engage the enemy forces.

[Zor]

Which is going to take some time for the Clans to do, about two decades to be precise. Remember that they will have to grow a shitload of new recruits , raise them from childhood and train them, flunking the bulk of these new warriors out.

They have the breathing room to do so, and the patience, if required. They might even go long-term and just expand into every other empty system between the Clan worlds and Earth, gaining access to resources no longer held down by IS factions.

Still is going to take time. And if they loose a number of Jumpships in the process in a manner which leaves them salvagable, i would not hold back on the Earth Federation and Zeon reverse engineering Battletech FTL given a period of two decades. The basic physics behind Kearny-Fuchida Drive were discovered around 2018 before they managed to develop fusion power.

Zor

[LaCroix]

Still is going to take time. And if they loose a number of Jumpships in the process in a manner which leaves them salvagable, i would not hold back on the Earth Federation and Zeon reverse engineering Battletech FTL given a period of two decades. The basic physics behind Kearny-Fuchida Drive were discovered around 2018 before they managed to develop fusion power.

Zor

Actually, you don't even need fusion to power the KF-drive. A huge ship can be powered by a ~500 m radius solar sail, by earth's sun, from the Nadir position(which would be about the distance to Pluto or something, I assume), in 168 hours. Do the math, this is ridiculously little for a FTL drive. They have to charge it in the same time when using a fusion power source to avoid damage to the system, but I think you might be able to power it reasonably well by a zaku handcranking a dynamo as well...

[Ritterin Sophia]

But more seriously, can you demonstrate that those maneuvers require higher acceleration figures than the official stats state.

Seriously? The one you pointed to as evidence that conventional weapons work against ammo magazines has a Zaku II going from standstill to exiting the frame in less than a second, hell look at Char's Zaku II it's 0.09, yet we clearly saw it moving fifty or so meters in totally disparate directions.

Exactly, it's analogous to an AC/20, and the weapons magazine (and bridge) will be just as exposed to WarShip fire. Plus the non-nuclear bazooka rounds we see taking ships out left and right.

Except the weapons magazine going up didn't destroy the ship.

Which is a given whenever Gundams fight.

Exactly, this means outside of Minovsky Jamming they'll be operating at a much longer range.

[Nephtys]

Still is going to take time. And if they loose a number of Jumpships in the process in a manner which leaves them salvagable, i would not hold back on the Earth Federation and Zeon reverse engineering Battletech FTL given a period of two decades. The basic physics behind Kearny-Fuchida Drive were discovered around 2018 before they managed to develop fusion power.

Zor

Actually, you don't even need fusion to power the KF-drive. A huge ship can be powered by a ~500 m radius solar sail, by earth's sun, from the Nadir position(which would be about the distance to Pluto or something, I assume), in 168 hours. Do the math, this is ridiculously little for a FTL drive. They have to charge it in the same time when using a fusion power source to avoid damage to the system, but I think you might be able to power it reasonably well by a zaku handcranking a dynamo as well...

There's something weird about KF-Drives that requires this. Because the ships themselves by all means should not need a 'sail' to charge the drive. If you destroy the sail or damage it, the ship is stranded unless it wants to risk wrecking the drive with a bypass directly to their powerplant. I don't think it's the power requirement as much as something else bizzare.

[PainRack]

There's something weird about KF-Drives that requires this. Because the ships themselves by all means should not need a 'sail' to charge the drive. If you destroy the sail or damage it, the ship is stranded unless it wants to risk wrecking the drive with a bypass directly to their powerplant. I don't think it's the power requirement as much as something else bizzare.

Running in power too fast apparently frags the drive/super condutors. The Star Lord for example retains a second fusion drive to power the K-F drive as mentioned in Jumpships and Dropships.

The Sail is just..... a fuel-less mechanism.

Also.... is this thread a necro or what? I seen the same old arguments and stuff come out before, and I'm quite sure I haven't solely addressed this on SB only.
WW2 militaries for example....... The whole ballistic sucks but laser weaponery is lethal... I know I specifically addressed that point to Bats before.

Shrugs. Let's do a rerun then.
Btech vs modern day militaries. Their conventional ballistic and missile weaponery sucks, due to over specialisation meant for the Btech universe. Their laser weaponery is overpowered and ranges should be for AT figures. Their armour.... do I really have to do the whole Btech armour has "shields" and the whole deflection and ablation bits again?

The Jihad nuke rules are........ Well, when they resolve the issues regarding x 10, nuke crits and etc, let's come back and discuss this. lol. Hell, I settle for when they reconcile the NAC and naval gauss near MT firepower with the LRM or AT ballistic scale weapons...... The gap is.... absurd.

Fuck. The MT firepower of NAC using the simulation of KE is absurd when one compares it to the nuke rules which is KT. Which gets screwed over even more when warships meet up with asteroids... At least the mechs physical damage for falling is within the same order of magnitude.

The initial Clan invasion force consisted of elements of Clan Ghost Bear, Jade Falcon, Wolf, and Smoke Jaguar, with three additional Clans arriving later, though this was part of a political intrigue by Clan Wolf to keep the other Clans occupied (the reinforcements just happened to be old enemies of the other three starting Clans).
Clan Wolf's forces were the largest of the starting four, consisting of 17x Clusters in 5x Galaxies, all but one of the Galaxies also containing a Command Trinary, and another Command Trinary for the Wolf forces as a whole. If we go for a conservative estimate, with each Cluster consisting of 4x Binaries, each of 2x Stars, that makes for 680 Battlemechs, 1,360 Aerospace Fighters, 3,400 Elementals, and 17,000 regular infantry. This excludes the Command Trinaries.
In turn, Ghost Bear forces included 12x Clusters, Smoke Jaguar included 8x Clusters, and Jade Falcon included 11x Clusters (Command units + additionals left out as before), making for a total of 48 Clusters along with Wolf forces.
Going on the same basis, that makes 1,920 Battlemechs, 3,840 Aerospace Fighters, 9,600 Elementals, and 48,000 infantry.

Is there... supporting quotes? Invading Clans and Warden Clans made it clear that the traditional GB galaxy is 5 clusters strong, although I can't recall the unit composition. The SJ is understrenght, but the traditional unit composition is 4 cluster strong.
It would be nice if someone knows where Sarna got their details from.

An uncritical reading could go 'OH LOOK IT CAN CHEW THROUGH ANY ARMOR', but these TROs are really all like that in silliness. There's comments about 'Iron' being used as armor in some older sources, which is nonsensical. As well as other very literal game mechanics translations of this or that. This is also notable since TROs are all in-universe documents from ComStar, who aren't exactly the most sensible phone company in the world either. There's a bit of confusion in the text on what exactly this mech is even used for, as would be expected from a third party source.

If you want to rationalize it, the bullets can possibly ding some hard to armor bit, like a joint, sensor, or heat sink. That's of course, ignoring the Clan ER Lasers. I suppose one could also read it as 'An M1 Tank's machine guns are very deadly. The tank can destroy any enemy vehicle it gets in it's sights'. Well sure. This is true. It's just the main armament, not the machine guns doing it. You could say the very same for the Piranha, since the Clan lasers are equivalent to much heavier IS weaponry.

Bollocks Nephtys. The Piranha still exist in universe, and its 12 MGs, in reality, 20mm autocannons still do damage to armour. As for the Crab, it IS entirely relevant, considering what it describes is the ferror fibrous component of the SL variant being replaced by the Crystal Aligned Steel of the Succession era.

The quote makes it clear that its referring to rear attacks, and in reality, 24 damage is pretty effective against light 40 ton IS mechs of that era.

Shrugs. You COULD point to the current FanPro attempt to use hypersonic gauss and etc, but it merely makes the problem worse when comparing it to the scale of how the fuck they get damaged by hatchets and falls.

[PainRack]

NVM. I found the source. They took it from Invading Clans and the respective Clan Touman portion. The problem is such figures as listed in the Touman were POST tukayyid although Wolf/Falcon forces were pre Tukayyid and had casualties inked in.

[Ritterin Sophia]

hell look at Char's Zaku II it's 0.09

That should be 0.09Gs faster according to the 'Official Stats'.

[Imperial Overlord]

Trying to figure out Pre-Tukayyid Touman strength is extremely difficult. Only Wolf and Jade Falcon have rundowns for that and they're rundowns of invasion forces only. Smoke Jaguar, for example, had a huge ground force that was massacred almost to a man on Tukayyid, inflicting casualties that the Clan never recovered from.

Battletech is really a poor choice for a versus debate anyway. Not only is there the issue of game mechanics having been treated as tech specs for most of the game's history by the fluff writers with only latter products saying things like weapon ranges are shortened for game play considerations, it carries the following additional issues:

1) The universe in question was never too high tech in the first place. They have fusion power plants and FTL and then nothing terribly awesome. There power storage and materials tech are better, but nukes are still king. Sure they have beam weapons and rail guns, but autocannons and missiles with conventional warheads perform competitively.

2) The game mechanics don't translate very well or very consistently.

3) They laid waste to their own industrial and scientific infrastructure in the Succession Wars and they did it more than once. The Clanners didn't dig themselves a hole quite as deep, but their worlds are mostly marginal at best. They're still trying to pick up the pieces and available high tech industrial and scientific resources are extremely limited despite every major power being a multi-system empire.

4) A tradition of highly limited warfare followed by almost all parties, because of just how badly total war fucked them.

That's a lot of disadvantages to carry into versus fight.

[lord Martiya]

hell look at Char's Zaku II it's 0.09

That should be 0.09Gs faster according to the 'Official Stats'.

Char on a Zaku is not exactly typical: while the Zaku II he uses (MS-06S, recognizable from the 'horn') is confirmed being 30% faster than the MS-06F (standard space model after Loum), he's regularly depicted as being 3 times faster than a standard Zaku (first confirmed by Amuro, that in the initial meeting regularly missed him exactly because he expected him to be slower. Amuro never managed to compensate until much later).
While at Loum he used a MS-06C (heavier than the F model as equipped with a radiation shield), he's still faster (so much that in Origins's depiction of the Battle of Loum a pilot mistook his Zaku for the rare MS-06R-1A High Mobility Type because he was three times faster), so we could treat Char's performance as the upper limit of what a Zaku II can do.

[Ritterin Sophia]

hell look at Char's Zaku II it's 0.09

That should be 0.09Gs faster according to the 'Official Stats'.

Char on a Zaku is not exactly typical: while the Zaku II he uses (MS-06S, recognizable from the 'horn') is confirmed being 30% faster than the MS-06F (standard space model after Loum), he's regularly depicted as being 3 times faster than a standard Zaku (first confirmed by Amuro, that in the initial meeting regularly missed him exactly because he expected him to be slower. Amuro never managed to compensate until much later).
While at Loum he used a MS-06C (heavier than the F model as equipped with a radiation shield), he's still faster (so much that in Origins's depiction of the Battle of Loum a pilot mistook his Zaku for the rare MS-06R-1A High Mobility Type because he was three times faster), so we could treat Char's performance as the upper limit of what a Zaku II can do.

That's not relevant to my point though, the point is they are accelerating considerably faster than their sub 1G official stats imply, faster even than the official stats for MS-06R-2 (0.8 G) or even Zeta's RMS-108 (made six years later, 1.26G) imply they could achieve.

[Ronsu]

I have no knowledge of battletech capability (other than reading about their ludicrous game mechanic-derived weakness), but I was wondering how accurate their FTL drop-out is. If they have to burn in-system on STL from, say, Mars orbit, do their ships have any measures to counter colony lasers such as the one converted from an O´neill cylinder in Zeon home space, or will they get sniped on approach?
Apparently there was some political resistance to constructing even one of the things at the tail end of the One Year War even with Federal fleets bearing on Zeon homeland fortresses in the original timeline, but I´d imagine an alien invasion would encourage building more colony lasers.

[CSJM]

If the Clans jump in at standard points, they'll be around 10 AUs away from the Sun itself, directly above or below - the so-called Zenith and Nadir points. If they see the tactical necessity though, they can use the Earth's "pirate points", essentially Lagrange points where the Earth's own gravity lessens that of the Sun so that the KF drive can function. If the navigators feel up to it, a JumpShip or two can even appear right inside Moon's orbit.

edit: I guess if they feel really desperate to win, they can load a WarShip with as much nukes as will fit, and just shove it as close to Earth as possible. The ship will be wrecked on arrival, but if its cargo goes off, it'll be a very big problem for the defenders.

[OmegaChief]

How will it be a big problem for the defenders? Unless you phsyically crash it into the planet or a space colony, detonating some nukes in orbit won't achive much.

[CSJM]

Radioactive fallout? Yeah, unless it physically crashes into something, it won't cause much physical damage, but detonating a few hundred warheads above a densely populated area is bound to cause some problems. It'll be like a starship-sized dirty bomb. Not to mention that the mere arrival of the ship will severely mess up any electronics in the vicinity, and may cause an earthquake (a slight one, but nevertheless) on the surface as well.

[Norade]

Radioactive fallout? Yeah, unless it physically crashes into something, it won't cause much physical damage, but detonating a few hundred warheads above a densely populated area is bound to cause some problems. It'll be like a starship-sized dirty bomb. Not to mention that the mere arrival of the ship will severely mess up any electronics in the vicinity, and may cause an earthquake (a slight one, but nevertheless) on the surface as well.

Um, fallout will go in every direction if it explodes in space and what does reach Earth will be deflected by the atmosphere and the magnetosphere. The moon would be less easy to clean, but you'd need to live in radiation proof bunkers buried deep anyway so you could just leave it there. Space stations and ships are radiation and EMP shielded so you just wasted a ship to do fuck all. Also Earthquakes, unless it's the drive doing this, are right out unless you can actually reach the planet before your poorly rigged suicide bomb truck goes off.

[OmegaChief]

Radioactive fallout? Yeah, unless it physically crashes into something, it won't cause much physical damage, but detonating a few hundred warheads above a densely populated area is bound to cause some problems. It'll be like a starship-sized dirty bomb. Not to mention that the mere arrival of the ship will severely mess up any electronics in the vicinity, and may cause an earthquake (a slight one, but nevertheless) on the surface as well.

Alright, so we have a warship jumping into earth orbit, packed with nukes and going off, aside from a breif radation spike over a tiny area (Which I'm pretty sure would be inconsiquental compared to the amount of radation the earth's magnetic field soaks up on a daily basis anyway) hows it going to cause all these effects?

Though perhaps you mean crashing the ship into the planet and detonating the nukes then? There's no other way you could make an earthquake in that scenerio, unless Battetech has ships with mass similar to Luna that I don't know about.

[CSJM]

Actually, chalk that up to my misreading of the Sarna wiki. It mentiones tidal forces felt within 27 kilometers of the emerging ship, not some unbelievably large amount I imagined. Still, how feasible would it be to destroy a heavily armored ship (weighing in at around half-a-million to seven hundred thousand tons) appearing, say, at 180k kilometers from Earth, loaded with nukes and possibly firing in all directions?