I would think after being hit with any combination of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, or at least hearing the reports about it from other worlds, no one would really want to rebel against the WoB.

I'll second this one. WoB was willing to use weapons that the Successor States generally weren't. Many a planet now has large "hot" zones from the nuclear bombardments of the Word of Blake. It doesn't matter how many 'Mechs you've got on a planet when someone is lobbing nukes from orbit, after all...
On top of that, there are also mentions of chemical and biological warfare by the Word of Blake forces. I seem to recall a mention in Target of Opportunity about a WoB traitor who gassed an entire ComGuard BOQ as her first act of betrayal when leaving to join up with the Word of Blake.
Generally, the Successor States didn't want to use such weapons, because they wanted to maintain control and production on the planets they conquered. WoB seems to have had an attitude of "if we can't have it, nobody can." As crash341 said, after a few planets get wiped out that way, other planets become more willing to lay down their arms and surrender, just to have a chance at survival.

a) Berserk, I assumed that the IS were unable to build KF drives (hence no jumpships/warships) at all until the core was found. That was, if I'm correct, the basis for the Ares convention, aside from the WMDs, can't build the stuff to go to war with, so no attacking it, and repatriate the stuff difficult to build (in the case of mercs). Kathil yards operated before the loss of KF drive tech, and restarted operations after the SL core was found by the GDL. In the meantime, there were no new JS built. Correct me if I'm wrong, though, with evidence please.

b) WoB knew they didn't have enough forces to hold much, so they blew what they couldn't (note, NOT a case of scorched earth). the Successor States, during the succession wars, blew up production facilities (mech/JS/WS/etc). They didn't mean to hold those either, since initally, there were enough for everyone. It was after the Ares convention that those installations could not be attacked directly, only captured, to prevent them from being damaged. The psychological effect, especially on humanity that hadn't seen the widespread use of WMDs for a long time (the last time a nuke was fired was during the FC civil war, before the Jihad), must have been devastating.

OK.....now I'm not so sure about a) anymore.....so if anyone has proof that JSs were built prior to the SL core being found and after, what, the 2nd/3rd SW, please tell me with the passage from the source. Thanks. I'm pretty sure no WS were built, though, since JS were hard enough to come by.

At the current time the Successor States produce a minute fraction of thier original FTL ship construction capabilities. Estimates indicate that only a dozen new jumpships are produced each year amoung all the Successor States. This low level of production can barely keep up with the Annual number of number of Jumpships lost to war and age related breakdowns. The remaining vessels number about 2000 an amount that has remained constant for decades.

BattleTech 1619 Dropships and Jumpships.

Right, thanks very much for the confirmation.

What do all of these things have in common: small electronics packages. The entire BT universe is built upon the computer and electronics technology that was available in the early 80s. What had taken place since the introduction of the game has had no impact (or very little impact) on the game's history.

Considering that the technology of small targetting computers and cruise missiles dates back to the 70's or earlier, while the ability to do non-biological bipedal locomotion didn't exist in the 80's, that argument doesn't really carry much water with me. Sorry.

@ cavingjan: are you trying to tell us that BattleMechs and other military vehicles in the 31st century have computers on board which essentially are Commodore 128s and Atari 2600s?

;)

"You know, for 5 tonnes, I would expect better than 256 colours." - Targetting System Retrofit, BattleTech CCG

Okay so WoB used nukes. What prevented everyone else from using them, again?

The Ares Convention.

Moral conscience, perhaps?

For that matter, anytime you actually want to _keep_ any land, nuking it is a bad way to go... radiation from a nuclear detonation takes a while to die down, after all...

It seems that the Jade Falcons have taken a liking to them now. :ermm:

About the mechs: Didn't you know that the good word of Devlin Stone had everybody putting Mechs in museums and, more importantly, using assault mechs to build skyscrapers and light mechs to pull plows?

Seriously though, I don't think the Republic politicians fooled anyone but it's general populace. The exarch still required military service for real citizenship, and the rest of the sphere seems like its life as normal.

I think the reason battlemechs haven't been commonplace until now is the HPG blackout has slowed logistics to a crawl, so even if all the sphere had mechs, it took them several years to get them from the storage facility to the battlefield.

Of course, I'm just a Mechwarrior. They don't tell us anything down here on the front.

The really convenient deus ex machina in the BT universe which I think no one ever gives enough credit is the active hand that ComStar took in selectively winnowing out of public hands those technologies which it felt posed a threat to its own mission. Until 3132 ComStar had a stranglehold on almost all communications everywhere in the Inner Sphere and all they had to do was just "lose" any communications which might be trying to spread word of some rediscovered knowledge or technology which had been lost during the Succession Wars. A ROM agent would then promptly be dispatched to engineer an "accident" for the poor researcher and the knowledge would remain remain tightly in ComStar's hands.

Even if the knowledge is sent by private courier (Although how would anyone know to be wary of using the HPGs?) ComStar has many sharp ears and agents even within the academies and households of the Great Houses.

No one can even get very suspicious about so many "accidents" befalling prominent researchers in certain fields because who would send word across the Inner Sphere that anyone had died? If ComStar doesn't want anyone to know, it's very difficult to get the word out.

ComStar wanted the Successor States to keep bludgeoning themselves back into pre-history so they let the combatants keep the most rudimentary weapons technology like missiles which can fly for only a kilometer and targetting computers which are comically inefficient and weak but still just barely get the job done. At the same time, they make sure that more complicated things can still be built, like myomer muscles, gyros and life support systems, so that 'mechs can keep being produced to let the nobility of the Inner Sphere continue their self-destructive and resource draining wars of pride and ego.

Belief in ComStar's ability to actually accomplish all these things is something of a leap but, if one is willing to accept it, ComStar's power over information and, now, the blackout help to explain many of the glaring breaks in logic which the universe can suffer from.