All things Mechwarrior & Batteltech Universe: the boardgame, the stories, books & updates etc..

Hi all,

After doing a search for this specific subject and coming up with only a few mentions of this game within a couple of threads I wanted to try and make a collaborative working thread with the fans on this subject since I'm still a big fan but haven't kept up with it over the years.

From some of the you tube postings I keep seeing comments of "Where's this game at!" & "this is cool!" heh heh.. I think this game is the reason why, if not one of the very few games, that have spawned other movies, such as the 3rd part of the Matrix where they ACTUALLY have a mech in human city Zion which I thought was excellent idea, TV shows (in which Westley Crusher plays a Mech Sim in Star Trek TNG, i might be wrong on the TV show, but do remember seeing it on TV) etc. IMHO, all the 'mech' types you see in the movies, TV etc, comes from this concept of which makes up the Battletech Universe. #1 fan site located @ www.battletechuniverse.org...

My fan Profile
~I have played the board game pretty extensively, collected 32 miniatures, some Inner Sphere but mostly 3025(?) (all lost now) with an entire landscape for a standard 6ft table,
~went to a gaming convention in Portland OR, and met the original game designer just after he sold it to FASA and saw him lose a game to fan playing on a HUGE battlefield (6ft x 12ft?) in which his squad of Jump Troops(?) lost to a single mech and rewarded the winner with hardcover Rules Book with a gold embossed Mad Cat on the front. That was pretty cool.
~I was working at Intel Corp, when they demo'd a multilayer match for us in the auditorium way back in 98' I was stoked ! LOL
~.I've written a short script of a opening scene for a movie I still have in my head if I should ever get rich to lunch my idea. )
~Played the video games, original, mercenaries, Mech Commander. Haven't played them in a long time, but, haven't really researched if they are more recent ones out there; however I did see this tidbit YT vid and got me interested again which was posted in 2007


~watch all the Animated Series which I'll post the first one here .. definitely not HD. ;(


~And is the very reason I used choose my ATS username Although I can't find a picture the mech called Komodo of which was my favorite. I've check online but, it might have been an altered mech I designed and just renamed it.
~and have read a couple of paper backs though I don't remember which titles they were but, one I do remember was the history of the Clans, which really started me down the Clan path in the game itself.

Anyways, what really got me sucked into this game was the incredible Back Story. To me it was entirely believable because seeing the technology advance as it was, and being in that industry just made it sound completely believable. As I look at it today even with all the changes, I still can't help to wounder if we are heading still in that direction; seeing the computer technology advances not to mention AI. What really interested me was the FTL (Fast Than Light) communication and spaceship concept that was the base for the launch into colonizing our planets and space itself. (Brings a cold shiver down my spine every time i think about it)

Here's a snip-it of the history.. kinda.. eerily similar today with what the corps could be heading toward year after year..

Early history
The earliest events distinct to the BattleTech universe occur after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The United States, Europe and Japan announced in 1994 their intention to jointly construct an orbiting industrial facility named Crippen Station, which was successfully launched eleven years later. A 1997 coup d'état by hard-line communists restored a militant, Soviet-style government in Russia and sparked a "Second Cold War" with NATO that lasted until the start of peaceful reforms under premier Oleg Tikonov in 2005. The republic crumbled in 2011, igniting a civil war that drew in NATO and saw the successful use of the Western Orbital Defense Network (WODeN), successor to the earlier SDI, to intercept a preemptive Russian missile attack against western targets. The war ended with a Western Alliance victory in 2014.

Beginning with the establishment of the Alliance Space Command in 2016, humanity began moving out into the solar system. The first lunar settlement was established in December 2016, and the first manned mission to Mars launched the following year. The advent of fusion power in 2020 led to the first fusion-powered interplanetary spacecraft, the AS Columbia, which launched from Crippen Station on October 12, 2027. Colonies were soon established on Mars and the Moon, and automated probes launched to neighboring star systems which returned evidence by 2050 of nearby habitable worlds.

By the beginning of the 22nd century the Western Alliance had grown to become the Terran Alliance, and despite discontent from some of its poorer constituents pursued an agenda of rapid technological development. Faster-than-light travel, the theories of which were first postulated by Thomas Kearny and Takayoshi Fuchida in the early 21st century, were realized on September 3, 2107 with the successful voyage of the first FTL spacecraft, the TAS Pathfinder, which made a 12-light year jump to the Tau Ceti star system.

wiki source


For me, I'll always be a big fan and will try and post what I can here. Should you be a fan, enthusiast, or just drawn to the game itself, feel free to post anything Mechwarrior or Battletech Universe past, present, future, and/or the possibility of our world reaching such a point in history. I'm looking forward to to seeing your posts and maybe we can make ATS the #2 spot for all things Battletech.

Well, I'm off to watch the series on YT, it's been years since I've watch them. Enjoy!!

~Komodo

I dabbled in the mechwarrior video games; from Mechwarrior 3050 on the PC and its expansions including Ghost Bear Legacy. To MW2:Mercs, even the sega genesis version, believe I did a ps1 version or dreamcast.

Mechwarrior 3 for PC was epic, however the demo was even better than the game, as I could move the target reticle with just the mouse key... suppose it made it too easy for FPS freaks.

Mechwarrior4:Merc was the sauce tho.

and I played bunch expansion black knight and such...


Mercs2:platinum? was the first game I played that required a video card.

I spent many days and nights playing the classic btech. I cut my mini-painting teeth on plastech and ral partha minis which eventually lead me away to warhammer 40k....I sold all of my btech book, maps and minis to a good friend, regrettably.

Anyone else ever read The Mote in God's Eye series? I thought FASA was inspired by that novel's back story with the CoDominium.

thx for the replies, good to see some avid warriors out there. Think I dabbled in the Black Knight (?) as well. Just reloaded MC2 and went to a couple of website out there that have made an expansion for Win XP; however, both crash horribly. the one
I dL'd was www.wolfman-x.net... He's got some good work up on there but, the expan crashes to much for me.

I dunno, out of all the plausible outcomes of our technology, the back story just seems increasingly creepy.