Lore Question

[rcemezodiac]

So I have been reading up as best i can into the most upto date timeline of BT, but I am wondering was the HPG black out really an unknown cause? A virus and targetted strikes seems hard to cover up, unless your maybe Comstar. Though i see a new book is coming this fall Shattered Fortress? Obviously a ref to the republic of the sphere declaring a fortress republic and consolidating on their territory.

 

[TaurianMerc]

Comstar?
But why could you possibly suspect them? The Comguards they definitely didn't have have been disbanded (again). They've purged the mystical/religious elements of their organisation, honest. They're just interstellar telephone engineers.

Could be Blakists?

Could just be a bad plot device to link CBT to the Dark Ages.

 

[crabby]

Could be WoB elements. Could be some other rogue Comstar group. Could be Devlin Stone spilled some coffee on an HPG terminal before he split.

 

[rcemezodiac]

Could just be a bad plot device to link CBT to the Dark Ages.

I take it this dark age is the red headed step child Thats not accepted completely?

 

[TaurianMerc]

I take it this dark age is the red headed step child Thats not accepted completely?

Yes, no, sort of.
There's a lot of folk don't like the dark ages (but there's more than a few on here who don't consider clan invasion onwards to be Battletech) and dismiss it.
It is what it is, a new game that tried to return to the feel of a lost golden age, whilst also trying to bring young blood into the game. I can't fault it on either point, but those of us already invested in the game felt, rightly or wrongly, a little bit cheated.
So when CBT was picked up again it was clear that somewhere down the timeline something had to happen to bring about the Dark Ages.

 

[Timaeus]

So I have been reading up as best i can into the most upto date timeline of BT, but I am wondering was the HPG black out really an unknown cause? A virus and targetted strikes seems hard to cover up, unless your maybe Comstar. Though i see a new book is coming this fall Shattered Fortress? Obviously a ref to the republic of the sphere declaring a fortress republic and consolidating on their territory.

@Frabby and a few others would be able elucidate better, but I believe the short answer is there are rumors about who caused the HPG blackout, but not a definitive answer to the question.

 

[Stuckenschmidt]

It is just a temporary malfunction. AT&T will fix this. Please hold the line.

 

[MeiSooHaityu]

Jihad? Dark Ages? Whats' that? As far as I know the

It is just a temporary malfunction. AT&T will fix this. Please hold the line.

 

[rcemezodiac]

PDF of shattered fortress is out, havent read it yet but i hear its good, dark age is over, now its the ilclan era

 

[Prussian Havoc]

@rcemezodiac, from BattleTech's creation forward, first FASA and now Catalyst Game Labs have at times liberty included undeveloped plot hooks in BattleTech's timeline. Plot hooks that may set for years before they are used, if used at all.

Was it Devlin a Stone behind the Blackout? Or another contemporary Major/Minor State or Non-State Actor?

I do not know. Though moving forward CGL or some authorized Aurthor just may weave that particular plot hook into the larger skein of the BattleTech narrative. : )

 

[Stuckenschmidt]

Hello everybody. Since the first Expansion is on the way, I intend to write a new FanFic. But I have two questions and maybe those experienced in BT Lore can help me with it.

1. Do JumpShips leave a "trace", so people may find out, where they jumped to?
2. The first question maybe boils down to the concept of Jump Points. I have read, that there are irregular or Pirate Jump Points. How do they work and how do they differ from normal ones?

Any help here is appreciated.

 

[Prussian Havoc]

Hello everybody. Since the first Expansion is on the way, I intend to write a new FanFic. But I have two questions and maybe those experienced in BT Lore can help me with it.

1. Do JumpShips leave a "trace", so people may find out, where they jumped to?
2. The first question maybe boils down to the concept of Jump Points. I have read, that there are irregular or Pirate Jump Points. How do they work and how do they differ from normal ones?

Any help here is appreciated.

As ever Sarna is a great reference: http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jump_Point#Pirate_Jump_Points

As to tracking Jumpships... there are Jumpship routes and lanes. So while I do not recall any mention of "trails", some keen deductive reasoning and some knowledge of cargo, passenger manifests, etc just may give you what you need. : )

 

[Timaeus]

Hello everybody. Since the first Expansion is on the way, I intend to write a new FanFic. But I have two questions and maybe those experienced in BT Lore can help me with it.

1. Do JumpShips leave a "trace", so people may find out, where they jumped to?
2. The first question maybe boils down to the concept of Jump Points. I have read, that there are irregular or Pirate Jump Points. How do they work and how do they differ from normal ones?

Any help here is appreciated.

They shouldn't be trackable per se since how would you get the information sent to you about the destination unless there's an HPG transmitter at the end point which leads to you do know when they arrive since there is distinct EM spectrum burst from emergence. That said, there are typically only so many locations a JumpShip will want to jump from the destination and the following ship should be able to calculate the same jumps. Also, it's better think of jumps points as more of spheres of influence that a JumpShip can't jump from rather than can since it's gravity wells that prevent jumping.

Pirate points are where the mass of stellar bodies cancel out and there is no, or almost no, influence of gravity in the area. eg. the L1 Lagrange Point would be an example. These pirate points are used much less, because they are much smaller (the zenith and nadir jump points are so far from the gravity wells of systems, and therefore more bigger with and a greater margin of error allowed) due to shifting gravitational forces in the area.

The entire page (not just the pirate point entry) PH linked is helpful.

 

[TaurianMerc]

So while I do not recall any mention of "trails", some keen deductive reasoning and some knowledge of cargo, passenger manifests, etc just may give you what you need. : )

Indeed, I also cannot remember of any way for tracking jumpships beyond abductive reasoning.

 

[RecklessCaution]

Of course, while you can't track a JumpShip's trail, you can detect one coming before it appears iirc. In an interesting, causality-breaking way - despite the jump being instantaneous, to the point that theoretically if you had a HPG on recharge stations at both origin and destination you would be able to have a real-time chat with someone at the other end and the instant the jumper flickers out of existence at your end it pops into existence at the other, the other end could detect the incoming jumpship for anything from seconds to hours, depending on the mass that's jumping - to the point they can detect the incomer not only before the jump, not only before the button is pressed to initiate jump, not only before the capacitors start dumping energy into the core to get ready for said jump - but before the decision is made to jump at all. The jumper might have been hanging out at the jump point for weeks waiting for a dropper to arrive, and then a warship or another jumper loaded with assault droppers and ASFs jumps in, and the captain of the civilian jumpship orders an emergency jump out - but because they've got two behemoths and a mammoth hanging off their collars when they press the button, the place they jump to has been detecting their arrival for the last day and a half.

Raises interesting questions about the nature of hyperspace and reality, as well as the existence of free will in the Battletech universe.

Of course my memory is horrible, so I might have remembered this as how it is in the Battletech universe when it actually belongs to an entirely different fictional universe, but considering I've seen it used in a fanfic recently and all the discussion around it was about the other things that happened in the chapter, not how this wasn't how jumpers worked at all and the author was pulling things out their butt, leads me to believe that I'm remembering correctly - or at least that if I'm not, I'm not the only one.

Also, for the earlier question of what caused the HPG blackout? I think this was recently answered, as well as why we've never heard of the Aurigan Reach before now. A certain virus, that showed learning capabilities and could very well have been an attack AI. That was transmitted to a dropship and disrupted every computer system aboard at a crucial phase of flight. That likely spreads as computer viruses do, transmitting itself from system to system, from dropper to jumper, to the computers in the new system - one by one HPGs in the Reach go dark in an attempt to both prevent its spread and keep clean systems from being infected. Interstellar trade shuts down, as after some time enough systems are infected that it leaves the Aurigan Reach a bermuda's triangle equivalent in space, where any given system of it has a good chance there's an attack AI just waiting to attack anyone jumping in, with multiple jumps before you leave the danger zone - ships come in, they don't come out. And one day, decades from now, it manages to crack a locked-down HPG, and in a flash spreads through the entire network, leaving the entire Sphere blacked out.

tl;dr Locura was SHODAN/Ultron/pick your attack AI, and we caused the HPG blackout by releasing it, as well as turning the Aurigan Reach into 'Here be Dragons' territory on everyone's starmaps.

To be clear though, that's just my somewhat tongue-in-cheek theory. It certainly would be no less unlikely than some of the things that have happened in canon, but I make no claims to it being canon itself.

 

[Stuckenschmidt]

Thanks for all the answers.

 

[wundergoat]

IIRC the pre-jump signal at the destination is observable minutes before jump initiation and not days, but still enough to bring up causality issues for very short intra system jumps.

As for tracking, it isn’t mentioned in the fiction and I doubt that it is possible. There are hidden facilities in interstellar space where the only realistic way to find them is with infiltration.

 

[Timaeus]

Of course, while you can't track a JumpShip's trail, you can detect one coming before it appears iirc. In an interesting, causality-breaking way - despite the jump being instantaneous, to the point that theoretically if you had a HPG on recharge stations at both origin and destination you would be able to have a real-time chat with someone at the other end and the instant the jumper flickers out of existence at your end it pops into existence at the other, the other end could detect the incoming jumpship for anything from seconds to hours, depending on the mass that's jumping - to the point they can detect the incomer not only before the jump, not only before the button is pressed to initiate jump, not only before the capacitors start dumping energy into the core to get ready for said jump - but before the decision is made to jump at all. The jumper might have been hanging out at the jump point for weeks waiting for a dropper to arrive, and then a warship or another jumper loaded with assault droppers and ASFs jumps in, and the captain of the civilian jumpship orders an emergency jump out - but because they've got two behemoths and a mammoth hanging off their collars when they press the button, the place they jump to has been detecting their arrival for the last day and a half.

Raises interesting questions about the nature of hyperspace and reality, as well as the existence of free will in the Battletech universe.

Of course my memory is horrible, so I might have remembered this as how it is in the Battletech universe when it actually belongs to an entirely different fictional universe, but considering I've seen it used in a fanfic recently and all the discussion around it was about the other things that happened in the chapter, not how this wasn't how jumpers worked at all and the author was pulling things out their butt, leads me to believe that I'm remembering correctly - or at least that if I'm not, I'm not the only one.

Ehh...I think that's off. The translation of the ship from one point to another does take time, and can inadvertently can take a very long time if there is a misjump (the Manassas being the prime example in Living Legends) but it can't be forecasted before the jump actually starts from my understanding. The field is detectable at the end point, but only once it has started forming. Anything that is causality breaking is explicitly not allowed in BattleTech per the Line Developers.

relevant info from Stat Ops. p 134:

Now, there is some disconnect between hyperspace and real space when it comes to time. The shipboard perception of time spent “jumping” is actually mostly in real space as the drive’s field is forming, which can really distort human perceptions. The actual shipboard time spent in hyperspace is too short for shipboard humans to notice, though minutes may pass for external, real space observers. This does lead to the experimentally confirmed possibility that a flawed jump may seem to leave a ship “stuck” in hyperspace. It’s an elaborate form of suspended animation, not time travel in the usual sense. And I don’t know if it’s actually possible with a full K-F drive, it’s just something that’s been done in labs with subatomic particles and HPG transmissions.

 

[Frabby]

For what it's worth, there are several instances in canon where an individual JumpShip or even a fleet is tracked or followed. One example I can recall offhand is that ComStar somehow tracked the Minnesota Tribe for some time.
It is never explained how this is done, and technically it shouldn't be possible to determine the destination of a jump simply by analyzing the shockwave of the outbound jump. The only fan theory I'm even aware of to explain the tracking is extensive use of picket ships with mobile HPGs.

German BattleTech canon is a bit different. There are several German-only short stories and even novels (Clanwächter in particular springs to mind) where outbound jumps are tracked by analyzing their jump signature. Of course, this is apocryphal.

 

[TaurianMerc]

One example I can recall offhand is that ComStar somehow tracked the Minnesota Tribe for some time

It's probably me who's in the wrong here, but I always read this not in the "track it on radar" way, but in the sense of tracking an animal by following the evidence they left behind. But it's been a while since I read anything related to that, so memory could also be playing me up.