@ Legerdemain: if I've read your contribution to this thread correctly, the bottomline is that Comstar Is Evil And Wants To Dominate Us All, Eventually. Apparently their only saving grace is that they're not actively nuking everyone, even though the Word of Blake was a proud Comstar™ subsidiary which went just a little bit out of control. And yes, that's what the well-read people call an understatement.

By the way, not only Clan Jade Falcon like to honour their traditions by using nukes. The military forces of the Capellan Confederation have also added the nuclear annihilation of enemy strongholds and civilian areas to their list of honorable combat actions.

Actually, the more likely reason for the general stand-down was that there was peace. Kind of like how the world's militaries reduced the size of their militaries following World War II. Destruction of 'Mechs would have been the result of treaties, similar to the USA and the USSR chopping up perfectly useable bombers and nuclear weapons in order to preserve peace during the tail-end of the 20th Century (man, it feels weird writing that as a history note...)
Sure, stories will talk about how Stone convinced everyone to give up their weapons, and how great he was, etc etc, but that's really just the same sort of thing humans do for any well-liked leader (look at some of the myths about George Washington for example). If the Battletech universe were reality, the military standdowns would have been the result of no longer needing to spend as much on defense and a lot of heavy negotiations over treaties.

Inevitably, someone will point out that historically, these different successor states never got around, so wouldn't they expect to go to war, and thus keep their equipment? In response, I'll point out that from the 50's up until the 90's it was considered practically inevitable that the United States would go to war with the Soviet Union. And while we did spend an awful lot on defense, we _still_ had a dramatically smaller military than we did during World War II.

I'm not buying the fact that the Great Houses were so humanitarian, or so conscious of the "rules of war". If they realized that they could beat WoB without nukes, and wanted to capture the territory intact, fine. But if they for one moment thought of WoB as a threat to their power, and were scared of the WoB's tactics, I think they would respond in kind.

The typical solution the Sucessor States and the SLDF took towards excessive battlemechs, vehicles and weapons is to store them in caches for later use. This is where the majority of the Splinter faction's weapons were coming from. We already know that Davion had been mass producing mechs and selling gimped versions to the ROTS. (Legionaires with AC-10's instead of Rac-5s, Valients in a variety of configurations, and tons of Vehicles. The Lyran Alliance was doing the same thing.)

We also know that the Hpg grid being down would only affect the militaries of a few major powers. The Rasehague Dominion would be unaffected due to the Ghost Bears access to Hpg technology. House Davion Steiner and Kurita have the black boxes which are typically used for military applications and would not slow down thier logistics at all.

I'm thinking that any arms reduction treaties would have a similar effect to the Japanese pre World War II. There would be a limit to the number of Battle Armor, Mechs and Vehicles you could maintain as a standing army. This was a serious flaw as one side the Japanese had nowhere near the amount that was the maxium allowed and the Russians were well past the mark. It would also be handled in a manner not unlike the Russian/American disarmament system. (The United States considers its Nuclear weapons disarmed if the Fissionable material is stored seperately from the warhead.) It was fairly obvious that the ROTS has been suffering under a self delusion about peacetime for 2 years and even worse has lost a great deal of its stored weapons to rebels within its boarders. I'm even more concerned about the dunderhead who left a salvagable Shipyard at Wyatt without completely destroying it or rebuilding and making use of it.

It looks a lot like the ROTS has been duped into believing its bordering nations were disarming, while they were simply rebuilding thier armies and designing new weapons systems waiting for the next war. I'm sure the Lyran Alliance dumped billions of C-bills it was spending on its military on economic recovery, like completely rebuilding Defiance industries main plant fully modernizing it. Or how the Federated Suns tossed Hundreds of Billions of C-bills rebuilding Kathil's shipyards to reach new production levels of Jumpships unheard of before the First Sucession War. With probably a quarter of those new Dry Docks large enough to build Avalon Cruisers or a new larger design. All the while the Successor States send in agents to sow discord and keep the ROTS from noticing the rebuilding of thier weapons. Simply waiting for the right moment to recover the territory they lost when they were ill equiped to deal with it.

Could also be the RotS actually has some secret mech plants operational, as was suggested a long time ago.....
Also, defense is a big industry. If the economy was booming, more money would be spent on defense. Might not be going to actual building of new tools of war, but definitely R&D, and this would explain why there are numerous new mech designs.

It appears that the Word of Blake faction inside Comstar who are rebuilding the Com Guards are responsible for the secret mech factories in the Republic. In the limited fluff we have recieved about the ROTS it seems all of the units the Republic's military uses is bought from either the Lyran Alliance, Federated Suns, Highlanders and Sea Foxes or is stuff they gained from the post Jihad. They don't appear to build thier own mechs, but do produce Giggins, Maxims, and Marksman tanks.

The Targe used to be manufactured in the Republic of the Sphere. I guess that the RotS leadership has at least reactivated the mothballed BattleMech factories on Terra.

The Targe is produced on Northwind for the Highlanders. Also its name is a Scottish Shield. Its not produced for the Republic, but it has probably been sold to the Republic.

The interesting thing is, it might not be a WoB faction in ComStar, but more like a resurgence. We don't know if the Primus knew of their existence, but I'm willing to be she does. If she didn't she wouldn't be so ready to deny all knowledge to the Republic. Quite chilling, actually, the ending of ToO. However, I can see that Harwell does belong to ComStar, and not the RotS, although I also understand why he thinks he's Republic (they did protect him).

As an engineering professional, I have to say you are wrong. The technology has not been lost. IF you have one surviving example, you can reverse-engineer it, or close to it. Take a look at the many web-sites where they discuss the actual construction and physics of trebuchets- and that is just working from tapestry pictures.


Take this for an example. I really like the new corvette. So I do my best to get a copy of the CAD files for its design, for its engine, and for the factory and tooling that is used to make it. I get a copy of the labor standards and build sequences the factory uses to build them. Then I lock it away for 100 years. Do you think that someone in100 years would be unable to read the documents, see the car, and figure out how to build it?

In the MW universe, there are numerous examples of battles for technology, or covert operations into factories to gather intellegence.

Very excellent point. And one that does not get much thought.

What was the REAL threat to COMSTAR posed by the clans?

Certainly not military- COMSTAR showed it was more than willing to allow massive attacks and damage as a matter of routine.

No, the clans represented an unrestrained and unrestrainable source of technological information. Technology that they thought they had control of for almost 300 years.

It was partly technology, but it was also military. ComStar knew that the Clans could reach Terra. ComStar knew the first Clan to do so would become the IlClan (God knows how, seeing there never was any 'victory conditions' and the number of trials would be destating). Comstar thought that if the Clans were unified under the IlClan, they'd basically control the IS. And then ComStar would just become another telecoms agency. I don't think Myndo Waterly was willing to become that, she wanted to be boss of the IS, something like First Lord with all the power, and thought that since ComStar controlled coms and technology, control of the Inner Sphere rightly belonged to them.

Does anyone run through speculative scenarios of "What if?" in the battletech universe as much as i do?

I'd never call anyone or any group of people evil or good. ComStar is just an organization full of very dedicated and faithful individuals with a lot of resources and a lot of energy to accomplish its pet projects. Not evil, just determined.

Do I think their determination is madness? In the very long-term, yes. But that doesn't mean that everyone in the organization is fully cognizant of what's going on around them. Many of the acolytes probably think that they actually are just following the ComStar line, that, in the short-term, they exist to preserve the technology which just tends to break down and disappear without caretakers. None of that means that they're any less capable of following through on the desires of those at the top, however. ComStar doesn't need saving graces or fatal flaws because it's not supposed to be anything more than a tool for its determined leadership.

As for the Word of Blake, they were ComStar concentrated, distilled and purified. Not evil but dangerous from my perspective, as a Marik supporter, because of their vision, determination and self-confidence.

I don't know an organization that kills 5 million people just to prevent the possible gain of a Star League library that might not even exist anymore seems pretty evil to me. Thats the one example we know of how many more millions did they kill in the process of thier attempts. They spent centuries murdering innocent people and manipulating multiple sides of an armed conflict to continue the conflict in the name of a man whose very ideals and morals they were trampling all over. I think Comstar is one of the organizations that is evil. Yes not everyone is, but every single member of the First Circuit certainly was. The Word of Blake quite simply was Comstar minus all of the good and decent people in it. They probably rank up there with the Nazis and Stephan Amaris in terms of evil.