hmm........................maybe there is a treaty that do not allow warships to fire on the planets. well the emerald jade orbit skye but did not bombard it. i think the republic do have some warships. maybe only frigate size not battle ship size as frigate are cheaper and easier to maintain than battleships which are over a Kilometer in length

not a bad book overall; but as usual it was a bit of a PR effort to include all the "new" JF mechs that WK is pushing - since I've quit the game, it's a bother to read those parts of the novels that try to advertise the game.

nice to see Clan Sea Fox making the best of their situation - tho the ending was a bit "Deux ex machina"; for those who know what I'm talking about.

all in all, a nice book - could have been a Lot Worse.

now if they could only stop trying to make them into MWDA literary commercials...

Between the earlier Succession Wars, the Word of Blake Jihad, and Devlin Stone’s Military Material Reclamation Program, not to mention their own sundry resource requirements, it’s perfectly conceivable that warships are now scattered to the winds. The Classic Battletech fan knows that they were always rare; the events of the past century have only increased the dirth. House nor Clan can afford the massive infusion of LosTech, money, and minerals at a time when their communications networks and regular trade routes are more or less shot through and through.

As for why the battleship wasn’t used to raze enemy worlds in Flight of the Falcon, there were several reasons:

(A) We are told that orbital bombardment is considered a crime so grave that it can unite multiple former enemies into a coalition against oneself, something a Clan looking to send its Touman across half known space and through the territory of other, unfriendly powers doesn’t need;
(B) We are told that the spearpoint thrust by the Emerald Talon and its attendant jumpships was meant to hold and consolidate worlds for later use as depots, something that can’t be done in the wake of indiscriminate planetary bombardment (which one assumes would scattered radioactive wastes and noxious gasses on global scales).
(C) So rare are fleets and so limited enemy resources that the Jade Flacons might have bet that so long as the Nightlord kept out of trouble, nobody would come after it. After all, is it really worth it that the Steiners hunt the Falcons into RotS space? Not necessarily. And one assumes that Stone destroyed most of his own larger vessels, leaving behind only a handful of cruisers, destroyers, and frigates at best.

On a side note, Stone pisses me off to no end. It’s one thing to say that he tried to emasculate the Inner Sphere – but the other Houses and Clans? Some of the reasoning that Milan tried to use about how keeping one’s own defenses was tantamount to a declaration of offensive intent were clearly meant to seem ludicrous and ironic in retrospect, but I find it difficult to believe that peace-loving hippies really make up that strong a component of Inner Sphere political bigwhigs to be able to force demilitarization on such a huge scale as that described in the Dark Age books.

Continuing on what Axis Kast was saying

(D) The invasion commanders were specifically ordered to use the Warship only as something to scare away any potential enemies, not to attack anything with it.

does It bother anyone else that the falcon's have killed so many civvies without warning? I mean the one incidence where the Jags wiped out edo was what pushed them to the top of the IS's hitlist and now the falcons killed fifty thousand on chaffee , anoth like 68 thousand on ryde, and the unknown amount in that district alek wiped out. I mean are they stupid? that many civvies death, premeditaded no less, would be all steiner would need to mobilize an attack on the OZ plus you throw in the fact the Wolves in exile, and crusader Wolves are always looking for a reason to go turkey hunting and depending on the Hell's horses and sea foxs current situation they might like to get their hands on a few dozen falcon worlds. It just seems like these falcons are trigger happy psycopaths just asking for a reason to be eradicated (not that i would shed a tear if the buzzards got waxed though).