So what the hell IS Battletech?

 What IS Battletech?

For those who might wonder what the hell i'm actually talking about, Battletech is a long running tabletop game that's been around since 1984. Its had surges and lapses in interest, has nearly died off several times, been the subject of legal cases and even the irate attention of George Lucas, but its still going and is currently seeing a renaissance thanks to a very successful Kickstarter a few years ago which has seen a huge surge in interest in the hobby and setting.

For the setting itself, the best way I can put it is 'Game of Thrones in space'. Unlike say 40k, the setting isn't one of utter doom and dispair, and is a somewhat 'hard sci-fi' setting. Unlike many other scifi series or settings, there's no intelligent alien life that has been discovered. At least officially.

But there's a lot of space out there and in terms of the scale of things, the Human controlled 'Inner Sphere' is around 1000 light years across and around, and on a galactic scale, that's tiny, so there's always room out there.

Split up into many eras in which you can play, these and the history of the Inner Sphere are best explained by the amazing fan run wiki https://www.sarna.net/

The Inner Sphere is divided among the Great Houses, hereditary families who have control over large areas of space and are often fierce rivals with one another, with feuds and centuries of bloodshed between the Great Houses ensuring that many of the Great Houses are at each others throats.

But its not always the case, there's alliances, even unions in the setting, and whilst there has been some truly immense and horrifically bloody wars, there's also smaller scale skirmishes where the fate of a planet and its population can be decided in a single clash between Warriors like the Knights of old.

The mounts for these are the settings most icon thing, the BattleMech, a walking combat vehicle weighing anywhere from 20 to 100 tons that have become the premier combat vehicle after their development. This does not mean that tanks and infantry don't have their place, but 'Mechs are the settings main feature.

These fusion engine powered warmachines are piloted by a single person, a MechWarrior, who are viewed as an elite, even knights or noble warriors, as well as mercenaries and sell swords depending on who it is. Armed with energy and ballistic weapons the largest 'Mechs can take a huge amount of abuse whilst the smallest and lightest are fast and agile.

The technology of the setting is quite grounded,whilst some very clever people have worked out that the fusion engines that power 'Mechs or propel their space going carriers the DropShips are absurdly efficient as to be almost magical, there's no energy shields, no artificial gravity and the technology is very much a case of 'The 1980's but in space' in many regards. Yet they're not stuck entirely in the past, on the most developed worlds, there's skyscrapers that reach miles into the sky, where computer controlled transport networks run with a level of efficiency that we could only dream of and travel between the stars is commonplace.

The setting is huge, its also wonderfully diverse in terms of games, you could do a grand strategy campaign, or the Battletech version of D&D where you and a small group of friends go on missions for the all important CBill to pay for repairs to keep your 'Mechs running.

The setting is also wonderfully diverse in terms of representation, and whilst some of the older books and art do represent the thinking of the eras in which they were written or drawn, the setting has moved with the times, and is always moving forwards, and is very much a living, breathing universe.