When asked what gas their PPCs used, Mechwarriors said "Argo-n"
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- Опубліковано 6 чер 2024
- Honestly, Mechwarrior's Argo is a pretty awesome ship. It's just fascinating that the concept has - as far as I know - never been implemented in other 'verses or structures.
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0:00 Intro
0:56 We talk about ship names
3:24 Let's get into it - Наука та технологія
Fun fact: GM invented commercially viable fusion engines in the Battletech universe.
Btw, that supposedly happened in 2020 according to the timeline, so they've been hiding it from us for 4 years.
@@StefanAmarisDidNothingWrongThose jerks! Give us our fusion!
@@CptJistuce Unfortunately in this timeline the researcher who invented it died from Covid.
@@FakeSchrodingersCat Dagnabbit!
The Latin script actually DOES exist in Star Wars, called "High Galactic" it was an outdated language mostly used by nobility which is why it most often snuck in at Imperial installations and for ship names that were meant to sound fancy or exotic, like how companies name cars
And the greek stuff is Tionese if I remember.
Right up until George Lucas released the Special Editions and replaced the instances of it with the standard Aurebesh.
And the Greek Alphabet is Tionese. We need to make him read the full epic poem of Xim the Despot
Reminds me of High Gothic being English in Warhammer 40k.
@@FrederickApollyon
English is a strain of low gothic. High Gothic is really awful latin reverse engineered from science textbooks
To cut to the chase, the Argo can carry a drop ship while being attached to a jump ship via "LosTech". LosTech being the BattleTech version of "A wizard did it."
Seriously the argo is large enough they could have just had an internal hanger big enough to fit a leopard into it. Or used drop shuttles from its two aerospace hangers to deploy mechs
No, LosTech is what happens when, to paraphrase the words of Mr. Tex, 'anything with a production capacity larger than a backyard tool shed or institute of learning larger than a magazine rack becomes a legitimate target for strategic nukes'. The Succession Wars were rather insane.
It’s a twofer or a threefer. One docking clamp for the jumpship and multiple docking clamps for dropships. It isn’t lostech. It’s redundant engineering reinforced to take the strain of a jump on multiple dropship docking clamps. It’s just jumpship engineering on a non-jump ship.
Since it isn’t jumping itself, it can detach at the jump point to defend the jumpship. It will be at full power when the jumpship is effectively dead in the water recharging. It’s a poor man’s jump-capable battleship.
This is likely the middle stage between the jump-capable battleships and the jumpship without any weapons.
Lostech is literally lost tech lol
Is it really that controversial?
It just sounds like "Big ship extend field to smaller ship, but not to another big ship".
BattleTech refers to the setting as a whole, and more specifically the mecha shooting at each other especially as the RPG as a battle simulation.
MechWarrior was the character level RPG.
Beyond that, the computer game names are all over the place.
Till the recent RPG system "BattleTech: A Time of War"
yeah, the BattleTech video game itself is almost exclusively about the mech combat, it leaves out all the other important things
I -demand- _request_ a deep dive in the whole Boeing fiasco. I would expect the dockmaster to have some insight into that.
Here! Here!
That reminds me. I'm gonna have to rewatch his Titanic submarine talk.
Well Boeing can't make the dock master have an accidental suicide, bit they might do something about it's connection to our internet.
Holy crap, that'll be brutal.....I'll fetch the popcorn.
@@blackc1479 Considering the Dockmaster's mechanical nature I suspect he'd be more happy with mixed _nuts._
As a KF tech and theoretical KF professor, we don’t talk about the Argo. She just starts breaking physics like a Federation science team in a tight spot. So the Argo is a hero ship. A station that can move at 1g for days.
To be fair to the Argo, all ships in Battletech have extreme efficiency fusion thrusters. Both the Leopard you use as a landing craft, and the big egg ships that mech companies like to use as a home base, can pull off the same physics hacks with their delta-V.
The Battletech classification system is a little counterintuitive if you're used to other settings - it basically comes down to how you FTL.
If you use a regular K-F Drive, you are a JumpShip.
If you use a Compact K-F Drive, you are a WarShip. Yes, even if you are unarmed.
If you use a docking collar to piggyback on a JumpShip or WarShip, you are a DropShip.
And if you land in a smallcraft bay rather than using a docking collar, you're a shuttle. And some of the oldest Jumpships had a detachable KF drive, and they'd come into the system, get loaded by dropshuttles, then go back, bolt the KF drive back on, and hope it didn't jump away without them. Dropships were a quantum leap in safety.
The Argo is a Drop ship that carries another Drop ship.
See, not confusing at all!
@@patrickkenyon2326 which you technically couldn't do normally before the video game came out, so when canonizing the main game the product line developers had the Argo using a one-off piece of technology that ultimately couldn't increase the dropship capacity of a Jumpship, but rather offset the downside of many larger Dropships physically blocking other Docking Collars.
@@logion567 I just assumed the Argo was meant to carry a Fighter, not a Leopard.
@@tenchraven From what I read early jumpships normally would have been classified as warships (transit drives and KF drives (which has to be compact considering normal KF drives take 90% of jumpships and does not really allow transit drives))
The battletech warships can carry dropships too like the potemkin class troop cruiser with 25 dropship collars or the mckenna class battleship with 6 dropship collars, and it was also for tactical purposes too since most large warships didn't carry much anti aerospace fighter weapons on-board, that was the assault dropships job to not just carry troops dirt side but also escort warships in system between jumps
Dropship as a term in Battletech actually refers to any ship that lacks it's own FTL drive. They dock with large, FTL-capable Jumpships, go through FTL, and are "dropped" off at the destination. Their ability to land on a planet (or lack thereof) is irrelevant.
Came here to say the same thing, albeit with more punctuation. In my youth, I built a whole SLDF patrol group, down to the dropships and carried cargo. Ran to something like 30 pages on my old dot-matrix print outs. One McKenna, one potempkin, two texases, and a whole slew of smaller warships. Even had the regiments of battlemechs, armored companies, etc. 300 and some odd total craft counting dropships. My potempkin corn cob always had pride of place right behind the flagship.
@@johnathan651 Nah, DropShips have to carry a K-F boom to interface with the JumpShip's core. Without that, _bad_ things happen to whatever is attached to the docking collars. The game just doesn't spend much time looking at ships that can't leave the system that built them.
The changeable configuration with swing hab modules, folded down when under constant thrust, swing out then spin, and when not under constant thrust was done in Jovian chronicles also. around about the mid 90's.
And more recently by The Sojourn (Spacedocks audio drama, although it has it's own channel now too).
Ah, such a beautiful ship. I kept a wallpaper of her after playing the game. Staring at the pods slowly spinning is just relaxing
1 The Argo is unarmed it had no weapons at all. The mention of wepons on the argo was from a desine document and was never implemented.
2. The Argo was a compleat creation of Harebrained schemes to get around the technical limits of the unity engine and was retroactively added to cannon by catalyst games
It's a good design though, and the lore they added actually makes a lot of sense. It's a better fit to the IP than the entire Jihad was, though that's not a high bar. As for the weapons, it would carry some, the game not having them is fine because it's a prototype, but in space you NEED some form of point defence just for space rocks.
Technically the Argo drops stuff from a jump point into planetary orbit. She just can't "drop" into atmosphere.
It mobile space station it has 3 dock 1begin for docking jump ship
" land on its tail as god and Heinlein intended"
So very true
In the game the Argo is a former exploration vessel, a mobile space station would be more accurate. Never intended for anything resembling combat .
Warships can mount K-F hardpoints, but many don't. the Potemkin troop cruiser, for example, can transit with 25 dropships.
As soon as you started talking about ship names I went to "Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath", but you got to The Culture before I could finish typing it out.
Observation I hadn't had in over half a decade of gushing about the damn thing: The drive section actually looks wide enough to still serve as a shadow shield when the pods are unfolded.
Or maybe I just forgot.
Battletech drop ships don't drop cargo on a planet, they drop off of jumpships.
A friend of mine is working on a sci fi universe of his own, and the Argo was a huge inspiration for how he wanted to do ship design. He loved the transitional pods idea, and having both spin and thrust gravity on a ship seemed like a cool idea to him
Moving parts.
Moving parts that hold inhabited portions of the ship .
Potentially dangerous point failure source.
Especially in a vessel that is likely to be shot at.
They’re glorified door hinges. If a screw coming out threatens the ship in any way, not only are there bigger concerns to be worried about, but they have no business building ships in the first place. That would be a flaw on the existential level of space travel as a concept.
@@ornerylurker8296 Hinges fail .
Hinges are a stress point.
These particular hinges are supporting many tons.
A stress fracture could result in death for many crew.
Yes. Pray tell HOW does a broken hinge kill everybody living inside of sealed, shielded, reinforced, and environmentally self contained canisters entirely independent of said hinges in every way except what bones connect to which others.
@@ornerylurker8296By being ruptured when it tears free? Maybe from hitting other parts of the ship? Of course a smart design wouldn't have *all/most* of the stress on the hinge(s) while under thrust, and would have multiple redundant fasteners.
Actually, the reason that drop ships and jump ships are never targeted is because they don’t know how to build them anymore so there is a treaty called the treaty of Aries, which prevents any of the major powers that being the inner sphere from destroying them because once they’re gone, they’re gone sort of the same thing with HPG stations which is hyper pulse generators, which is the way they communicate think of AT&T or Mabel the stars deny deny attack treaties that everybody assigned and that if you break those treaties even a mercenary group, you’re pretty much down in persona non grata in the inner sphere
DropShips are fair game; JumpShips are sacrosanct. At least since the last shipyard for them went boom a few centuries back.
oh many warships and even some jumps do have similar habitat pods but it’s internal to keep them protected.
Warships in BattleTech can have and jump with dropships, they can not move under thrust until the dropships detach or the docking collars get crunched.
MechWarrior is a series of videogames set in the BattleTech universe, and also the name of the tabletop role-playing system set in the same, which is designed to be interoperable with the rest of the tabletop games in the setting.
There are a number of non-atmospheric dropships that aren't capable of landing on planets with any significant atmosphere. Instead, they tend to be used for deliveries to space stations or meetups with other ships in orbit.
Warships can actually carry drop ships, just the module to carry dropships consumes a ship's mass allowance so smaller warships aren't designed for it. The largest capacity jumpship is actually a warship.
A dropship is essentially any ship that drops off a jumpship, carried on the outside.
There are also dropshuttles, which are obsolete and have to be carried internally rather than externally and were thus far more limited in size.
The specifically Naval AC-10 is different from normal AC-10 in that the NAC-10 is essentially an AC-100 by standard damage scaling.
In one of my favored bit of lore I think from the book A mote in god's eye was that to deal with this problem they made the concept of "floor" relative. In motion the "floor" was aftward. On station it was outboard. Within various spaces most equipment, bunks, desks, etc could swing or be moved easily. So spaces had large vaulted ceilings near one wall to be later used as floor space.
if i remember a funny thing in BattleTech, there are a few vessels categorized as warships even though they have no weapons and are not equipped with anything even close to combat equipment, but because they have a compact jump drive, its a warship.
This sistem is used in the sci-fi Audio Drama series Sojourn, specifically on the Tripathia Class Tird-Rate Ship of the Line.
If you have not heard of the Sojourn audio series published by the people from the SpaceDock UA-cam channel you need to look it up. Other then their FTL the ship designs follow hard sifi rules, their is a lot of back story and world building, and the characters are well written.
Ah, I was wondering how far I would have to scroll to find a Sojourn comment. The answer: way too far!
With Battletech (2018) set in the year 3025 there are 4 big reasons, why not more of those ships where constructed, the Amaris Civil War (2766-2779) and the first three succession wars following it. The Argo is an experimental design from 2762, starting its shake down in only 3 years before the civil war.
The Inner Sphere lost much of its technical advancement during it, also called Lostech.
Ships in Ian Douglas books use the same methodology, although often with a huge "mushroom cap" of water storage as shielding against relativistic velocities.
Been a BT player for 35 years. Yes, math is a weird and a "ton" seems to be as much about volume as mass. Warships in Battletech usually have docking collars, as they can't land. It make the dropships more like dropshuttles, but that is pedantic. The Argo is unique in it's classification- it's a warship that is basically without weapons and needing a jumpship herself. There are other "dropships" that are too big/fragile to land, even on a moon, so they use shuttles as lighters. In theory they could dock with another dropship, but not with another dropship and then a jumpship. The Argo is a case of the lore outrunning the rules, which has never happened before... except... AI... Cloning... Ostscout... Exterminator... yeah... it happens a lot.
Ok,
Warships can carry dropships depending on mission design.
Dropships get the name from dropping from the jumpship not necessarily dropping into atmosphere.
Pretty sure that the larger franchise is called Battletech and Mechwarrior is a brand within that franchise referring to specific games and books under the Battletech brand.
Battletech was the original name for the battle chess style of play in Battletech, Areotech and Citytech. Mechwarrior was when the RPGish rules were added to the series. Hopefully that helps settle some of the confusion.
Hey, if Pan Am flies people to the space station in 2001, Boeing surely will stay around to make starships in 3000 and change.
Do note that Warships and Jump Ships in the Battletech universe (yes, Dockmaster, that's name of the setting. Mechwarrior refers to both the pilots of the combat dedicated Mechs - the battlemechs - as well as the game where the player gets to play being a Mechwarrior) have the choice of having Grav Decks for the centrifugal gravity. And they even take into account how these Grav Decks are locked into place when Warships that have them are in transit.
I love the in-universe backstory behind the Culture's "Gravitas" running gag: another race criticized Culture ships for not having names with enough gravitas. The Culture shipmasters and Minds took that personally.
"Nope, no gravitas here" is a named ship.
Just went back to playing this game the other day. The in game animations do a good job of capturing everything that you discussed.
Boeing:
Explains why the whole ship had to be rebuilt throughout the game.
I mean it DID crash into a moon, that didn't help in terms of what needed to be repaired.
@@Destroyer_V0 IIRC it wasn't _crashed,_ but rather landed quite hard. And than continued to decay durung decades (if not centuries) of neglect.
For reference, dropships are dropped off the jumpship when the jumpship arrives in system. That's the point they become a dropship. The Argo is not the only dropship that can't make planetfall, there's an entire class, the behemoth class, that are basically big slow cargo bubbles.
The K-F drive doesn't need to be "above" or "below" the star. It's just it's the usual best place to pop in. Near the plane of orbit has random stuff around that can hit the ship (and attached boats). Also jumping into any mass is a *bad thing* (tm).
Other places that are kinda decent places to jump into are "pirate" points which are basically LaGrange points.
Final point; when jumping into a system at one of the normal points you usually couldn't come in closer than about Jupiter's orbit. Pirate points could drop you in closer in, relatively close to a planet you want to go too. But some have junk there that can, again, make your day be bad
That is a really smart solution, I am surprised nobody else has adopted it.
It's the Battledroids universe.
Between george lucas and harmony gold, FASA couldn't catch a break.
I didn't see this mentioned, so I thought I'd bring it up. Back in either the 60's or 70's I think it was AMC made a really cool model kit, the Pilgrim Explorer.
Was that the one with its own little shuttle with a nose reminiscent of a duck’s beak?
That was a great model kit.
I believe it's referred to as the pilgrim observer
@@markfergerson2145no that was the Leif Erickson, also known as the UFO Mystery Ship.
The Pilgrim Observer was an Apollo related space station/interplanetary explorer.
And it was MPC who did the Pilgrim Observer and AMT who did the Leif Erickson
@@JimmyBlether I think you're right. I've seen pictures of it a few times, my dad says he thinks he had it back in the day.
The Argo solution to simulated gravity is similar to how it was done in the novel Project Hail Mary by: Andy Weir. The Hail Mary used thrust to create artificial gravity while traveling to its location, once there it stopped its engines and used spin to create artificial gravity.
No One will ever convince me the Argo isn't supposed to be a JumpShip
I'm willing to bet it has (had) jump capability before it was crashed on that moon where The Not-so Dread Pirate Miss Nasty found it. They were busy scavenging for stuff and pulled the jump drive parts first because they were the most valuable. They got sold before our intrepid merc's could take over the entire base on with a medium lance. The "pirates" probably also took any weapons that were on it, because they were also pretty valuable on the black market. So yes, OP I agree, and think HBS should have stuck those bits of wisdom in some of the "decision points" in game.
@@gofoats I'm willing to accept it wasn't a military WarShip but ya Pirates selling a Jump drive on a salvaged ship would make sense
Batteltech is the table top war game, where you strategically control one lance of BattelMechs.
Mechwarrior is the TTRPG, where you play a character in the Batteltech universe.
About the math, it is best to know just enough to play the game, but not so much as to know what the math represents. The math needs a complete overhaul and rebalancing, but that would take many months of work. People seem to love the game with bad math, so bad math it shall have.
Alot of warships come with Docking collars for dropships aswell
the argo not really an drop ship. it’s an mobile base designed for exploration ships. that’s been retrofitted “that’s why you find different tonage” to do other jobs like support combat mission within an system after being dropped off by an jump ship. or to be used with in a system as an makeshift space station. but it’s not original design for war just old it was from the star league era the highest point of the inter sphere technology age and expansion into solar system
The Childers Series of books by Richard F. Weyand uses starships where the crewed portions of the vessels are cylinders spaced around the ship. The gravity under thrust is down in the cylinders. Once they reach a orbit, the swing out the cylinders 90 degrees to the rest of the hull, interconnect them with tubular passages and rotate the entire ship to provide gravity. Time to leave orbit, fold everything up, and get only way. Only time anyone is in free fall is during the transitions. While complicated, its much simpler to rotate the entire ship then one single section. This design also avoids the whole under thrust vector issues.
It's a portable moon base!
when designing my own forward colony ship I didn't even realize gravity under thrust would even be a problem. Instead I was focusing on the habitation ring being too large to be structurally sound for a very early-generation exploratory vessel, so instead I made 2 general quarters pods each outfitted with a command cupola, and these would rotate on the hardpoints they'd attach to on the arms of the ship, and they'd rotate opposite of each other so the vessel wouldn't deviate from its position/course. I also made it only those pods to reduce the cost of the replacement parts and maintenance. Sure, it'd still take extensive amounts of labor to troubleshoot faults or repair/replace broken parts, but they'd be a lot cheaper to manufacture than if it were a whole habitation ring rotating about the ship's spinal axis.
Don't worry, each of the cupolas would each come with their own life support/hydroponics module, which would rotate independently of the "upstairs" living quarters... which now that I think about it that part's unnecessary, and the life support should be part of the same structure as the main living/command module. Oh well, I was building with legos and having fun with it.
The art at 4:00 makes me think the ship is named ARG(zero) because the O/0 is narrower than the other letters of the font.
I suggest looking at Space Battleship Yamato in the anime both the classic and reboot versions again, because there's alot that you're missing.
I think the Dockmaster has already mentioned earlier that anime and animated movies in general might be left out of the content at least for now...
...As much as I'd like to see something like the Captain Harlock's Arcadia reviewed, both anime and 3d versions, though especially the 3d one, as it pays so much more attention to the details of the ship's mechanics.
Battletech does tend to try to make sense with their vehicles. That said, I wonder what the writers were thinking with some of their submarine designs. You see, they have your usual nuclear boats in both fission and fusion flavors and that's well and good. They also have some submarines that run on internal combustion engines which could make some sense as we still have diesel boats that we use for situations where a nuke boat is either too expensive or overkill or whatever. The problem with the Battletech diesel subs? They're not diesel-electrics. They just run straight combustion cycle. This is a problem because sometimes a sub can't exactly operate at surface or snorkel depths so you need to carry an oxidizer on board to run deep. So what did they select for this air-independent propulsion system? High Test Peroxide. Granted, we used HTP towards the end of WWII for the same purposes but those were one-off experimental designs that were fairly quickly abandoned given how HTP has a tendency to be enthusiastically unpleasant compared to running liquid oxygen or other more stable oxidizer sources.
The Sojourn's Tripathia and other ships would like to have some words...
Technically Gundam's Argama also has a similar idea with its extendable centrifuge blocks.
Edit: For the LosTECH thing. The idea apparently was mentioned way back in an old 80s era book but was never given rules.
And Dropship, Warship, and Jumpship also get their terms from their expected usage and their construction methods.
Battletech timeline has already diverged in 1988 where the USSR collapsed in BT universe.
I'm fairly certain the dockmaster here is only jealous of the crushing ability that massive stompy robots have.
The output is so... inelegant, though.
@@SacredCowShipyards Fair point.
The Sojourn audio drama has ships with similar systems.
Fair, I wasn't aware of the exploration use of the Argo but definitely got the FOB side of things that might possibly be able to make a planetary landing if required. Definitely never qualified as a dropship as it lacked both the armour and armament required for the job.
Important thing to note about jumpships - they are unarmed by agreement only simply because they cannot be replaced, the factories no longer exist in the Inner Sphere. Meanwhile the Clans never agreed to any of this shit and their jumpships are effectively armed carriers who only don't nuke you from orbit because they consider is to be "dishonourable" (while using tech literally centuries ahead of the Inner Sphere is perfectly reasonable).
Also the Taurian Concordat never agreed as they still have armed jumpships and jump capable warships but they got screwed over by the Cappellans so have a simple of approach of saying "Get off my lawn" but making sure it has teeth.
The Argo was a late Star League era design and a bit revolutionary. Built in 2762, unfortunately the Star League would basically fall apart due to a coup in 2766 only 4 years later. This is why only one was built because the Succession Wars started and a lot of technology was lost between then and recreation of tech or records of how to engineer some things found in 3028.
By the mid 3000s when the game in question takes place the major states were only just starting to manufacture jumpships at a rate of more than a handful a year again, and started building warships once more. They hadn't been able to do that for the last 250 to 300 years because the first targets of massive nuclear strikes in the First (of 4) Succession War was warship capable ship yards.
The battletech lore and the history of the human sphere is complex and gets fiddly at times.
Speaking of Argo why not look at the Yamato again and it's weaponized rocket drones the Argo system.
The folding habitation pod was a thing in Zeta gundam in 1985. Admittedly it was a thing on a single ship, the argama, but it was the main characters ship.
The Sojourn (Spacedocks audio drama) actually has multiple ships with almost exactly this set up (mostly warships)! First one that comes to mind is the Tripathia-class third rates.
DP9 game "The Jovian Chronicles" is pretty cool, a lot of the larger spaceships have a similar swinging habit pods
I think the rotating hab 'gravity deck' at least is jumpship tech. But the transition to and from thrust gravity just feels like I should have seen it everywhere in sci-fi before without actually being everywhere. I think a gundam series may have done it without a pivot by just pulling stuff in and not pivoting for thrust gravity? A lot of hard sci-fi settings don't seem to treat orbiting with much attention.
from my understanding they are the same universe. Battletech is the table top game and mechwarrior is the TTRPG. Unless it's morden video games where battletech is the statargey game and mech warrior is the fps
The original BattleTech* was a tabletop tactical game and the name BattleTech is typically used for the franchise as a whole. MechWarrior was an RPG released as a companion to the tactical game (Mech pilots are also known as MechWarriors.)
For the computer games MechWarrior titles are generally cockpit sims for fighting as a MechWarrior. BatteTech titles are typically anything else, but there are exceptions.
*Actually, the first edition was release as BattleDroids. But that name hasn't been used since.
All the strain of the spinning doesn't need to be taken up by the hinge. You can have clamps that engage once the pods are extended and before you start to spin.
I saw the Argo as something like a space-floating dock or barracks ship
One of my favourite all time ships for space exploration, the design would fit almost any sci-fi except the really hardcore hard sci-fi, where the issue of thrust to mass and enough remas would ruin it XD
Also heat dispersal.
A yes, the great space blimp. I did like the idea of this ship but thought it should have been armed. It did manage most of the issues of gravity and power.
For the confusing mess: Battletech is the original tabletop war game, and generally the setting as a whole (plus a couple random video games). Mechwarrior is the spin-off tabletop roleplaying game, and the long running series of sim style video games (plus the abomination of a Wizkids collectable heroclix style game that nearly killed off the entire franchise). Plus you have Aerotech which is the spin-off game for atmospheric and space combat that scales from fighters to warships. I think that's all the -techs...
That bit about having 3 folding and rotating habitation modules and what they do depending on thrust or spin 🚀➡ look up the _Pilgrim Observer_ designed by G. Harry Stine of model rocket hobby fame and marketed as a plastic model kit by MPC starting in 1970.
Would like to hear your indepth thoughts on the Baron, a Destroyer class ship in BattleTech, that fails its role in many ways because of... I'd rather leave more of the fun part to you.
The starships in James Cameron's Avatar had the same system for gravity, in-line while under thrust, spinning when stationary.
I had no idea no one else did use such an obvious and pretty doable solution.
Sure got some movable parts, and those makes things more complicated somewhat.
But this solution solves SO many other problems.
Redundancy for one.
Not everything gets taken out by a stray asteroid making a hull breach thrue one section.
Heck if some kind of catastrophic event happen to the ship, one may perhaps detach each unit from the whole ship.
3:40 Since you didn't ask, I'll explain. It is the Battletech setting. Mechwarrior is a term in universe for a Battlemech''s pilot, as well as the name of the FPS game series in that universe. The SEGA game is an outlier.
If the Argo had more weapons...she'd be reaching warships area & summoning ComStar to fuck it up...take it or destroy it.
The Argo was Star League era and had a data base full of lost Star League facilities, Comstar is going to want it anyway.
@@jlokison but didn't...because catalyst sucks & doesn't know the basic lore.
@@xxxlonewolf49 That's why I like the fan theory that whatsherface science girl is a barely disguised ROM agent collecting data while working as the main engineer.
ua-cam.com/video/Tv_zfZ09d4w/v-deo.html
@@jlokison make more sense than most of the in game pilots AI that have zero care for their own lives
Actually at this point Battletech is an Alt History because...where tf are my nuclear fusion reactors GM?
They're waiting to unveil them with some early mark Bolo.
Battletech usually refers specifically to the tabletop board/miniatures game. Mechwarrior generally refers to videogames in the Battletech Universe.
...you even mentioned it today... my disappointment is immeasurable
UNSC Infinity when
you forgot mechcommander it's the rts name for battletech
Comstar: Pay your bills, or else!
No one tell the shipmaster about the Sojourn Audio Drama where some of the Ship of the Line battleships have folding habitats that spin when not under thrust. We can’t have him loosing his mind that someone is doing something reasonable
Interesting , Thank You . And to think that in the game , you do a mission to salvage her after she crashed 200 years ago . After the mission , the patron gives the mercinary company the ship to use in missions, and ocasionaly missions for the patron . very brief and compressed . a fun game if you like that type
Honestly Battletech is so wierd about scale in so many places. But as far as surface ships go, the largest I can find are 85 tons which for a Navy ship is really small since destroyers come in at a few thousand (2100 long tonnes for uss Fletcher)
The construction rules allow for up to 300 tons for watercraft. Mind, that may no longer be canon because that same book allowed for BattleMechs as small as 10 tons, and subsequent rules have changed that figure to 20.
Battletech doesnt really do surface ship there a thing but aerospace Fighter going to make pop fast
Not true, Tycho Station in The Expanse used both spin and thrust gravity. It had centrifugal hab sections, but they were gimballed so they could be spun down and reoriented so the floors pointed "down" when the station was under thrust to its next job location.
There are in fact a handful of spacecraft designs for interplanetary flight IRL (or hard-er sci-fi) which have gimballed centrifuges akin to those on the Argo.
There's a classic model kit called the pilgrim observer which, has some issues in regards to radiation safety, but has its centrifuge arms on pivots such that it can keep down being down in regards to the floor when it does an engine burn (albeit as they're short burns at only a fraction of a gee the arms need not angle down a full 90 degrees).
It can be done with centrifuge rings too if sections of them can be rolled to angle right for thrust gravity. There are numerous examples of all of these on the website atomic rockets.
What I've been wondering is with all the advances made in the 21st century, how big would an actual organic crew actually be in the 31st? Wouldn't most of the functions be automated by that point?
The Battletech lore has a period of technological loss. Heavily automated systems would be "lostech" and would require very dedicated and knowledgeable techs to keep functioning. At least in the beginning.
I have seen a similar folding grav-hab design before (possibly influenced by this, I'm not sure), from an acquaintance I've since lost contact with. He got pretty fucking wild with near future designs. The first one was just a regular Orion Drive battleship. Then came the design I just mentioned, which was a nuclear saltwater rocket. And then he decided to meme on Mike Sparks by designing an ICBM-deliverable M113 Gavin-based drop pod.
A ballistic Gavin? Fucking legendary.
@@ornerylurker8296 Truly, a battletaxi meant for a helldiver.
Technically dropships are 'dropped off' in systems by the interstellar-travelling jumpships.
And while it's rare, some warships CAN carry dropships. It's usually not done as carrying dropships blocks the firing arcs of the weapons that are the reason you have a warship rather than a dropship in the first place. But there is one class, the Potemkin, which can carry a whopping 25 dropships - leading to it being called the 'corncob cruiser'.
The Argo gets away with carrying so much because the 'compact' F/C jump drive takes up nearly HALF the mass of any ship it's installed on - 47,5%, if I recall correctly. The standard model on dropships is far cheaper, but takes up 95% of the mass of the ship. Jumpships rarely travel far in 'real space', instead hanging around in a fixed spot while it recharges it's jump drive, so don't use big fusion drives to maneuver, just a small station-keeping drive.
I love how I am able to listen to this well thought out video on the Argo. All the while playing the mod "Rogue Tech" for said game.
The Dock Master makes a fair point. Why does it seem like so few space fairing ships take a cue from the Argo?
At least in setting, because grav plates were invented. Same goes for halo, where the UNSC and covenant both have artificial gravity. then there are more fantastical settings like star wars.
Only settings with hard sci-fi rules in place that need to design ships as skyscrapers to allow gravity under thrust, would designs such as the argo be needed given their extra mechanical complexity when in orbit of a planet, long term.
Damn getting in early on this one. And cute pun yardmaster.
Ok, since other people have the name situation covered (though I'd like to throw into the ring the fact it was originally known as Battledroids with the mechs' being called droids.... then angry Lucasfilm lawyer noises happened), I'll cover the mass issue. It's simple art bloat that isn't helped by the fact the game used (Battletech 2018) used Mechwarrior Online model assets that oversized the mech's even more so they could Godzilla stomp tanks. If you go back to the original artwork, the mechs' were nowhere as big as they are now depicted, there's art showing a admech (a mech' mechicnic) coming up to a Shadowhawks knees. A Commando could use the average tank as a small bed. But when you're playing a video game, it's funner to go Godzilla on puny tanks so the trend was to make the mech's bigger and bigger and that bigger style became the norm since it made them look cooler.
As for the Leopard, it checks out quiet well, you just have to understand that the ships in Battletech are effectively low thrust touch ships, so they have really, stupidly, efficient drives (Battltech is harder then a lot of sci-fi, it's just was never meant to be hard sci-fi). They're just not as powerful as, say, the Epstein Drive form the Expanse. Oh, and the Argo's mass difference comes from the fact that the video game just estimated the ships weight while the table top version was actually stated out using the drop ship construction rules found in The Battlech Tech Manuel (which is a really cool book by the way, it lets you build everything from conventional fighters, to civilian mech's, to just normal cars and motorcycles, to dropships. Rules from jumps and warships are in another book, Strategic Operations). Gotta say, still pretty impressive that estimated things that close to it's "actual" value.
The average BattleMech is ~12 meters tall because one elevation level on the board is 6 meters, with one level giving partial cover and two blocking the mech's line-of-sight. Which makes a dude as tall as a ShadowHawk's knee a little out of scale, too, since that puts him somewhere around three meters tall.
I am excited for your level of pedantry to take on this universe.
Probably one of my favourite ships in sci-fi, and not just for the practicality. Does the Enterprise have a swimming pool? Does Voyager?
Actually, the Enterprise DOES! The Enterprise D goes one step farther and has entire decks flooded for aquatic crew.
@@CptJistuce Cetacean Ops doesn't count, it's not a recreational space. Desperately covering for forgetting about Cetacean Ops? No, surely not.
@@LAJ-47FC9 That's fair. But the NCC-1701-no-bloody-a-b-c-or-d had a swimming pool. I have to assume the D had one as well, just because it's the luxury cruiseliner of warships.
@@CptJistuce ... I knew the OG had a bowling alley, but a pool? Okay, wow.
The sun deck was immediately astern of the deflector dish.
I'm sure it was fine.
If we ignore the lore issues, the pick and choose nature of this could be a great mobile clan stable to select exactly the fair* choice for a trial.
I have actually seen the rotating pods that are lockable for thrust before in the Sojourn by fellow spaceship youtube Spacedock. The Tripathia Class ship comes to mind as the main one doing this. This is however a battleship
Also theirs has... weird problems when it goes under thrust.
Oh neat. Honestly started thinking I was crazy if no one else seriously considered the concept. Hell, solving the problem of getting in and out of the hinged parts is equally brain dead easy; stick an L bend in the middle of it and extend the ship side opening into an arc. Could probably even get away with just using an umbilical tube hidden in the shadow of the pods. Maintenance is only going to be concerned about keeping the parts mobile and ensuring the integrity of the outer casing anyway. After that you only really have use for an airlock at the far end of the pod that engages with the central hull when fully folded back. It’s just a glorified cargo container on a door hinge after all, no matter how jank the solution is it’s going to be pretty straightforward and cheap.
Near as I can tell, the reason it doesn’t appear much is because most sci-fi designers don’t actually care. It’s not as futuristic and fancy as artificial gravity generators and spinning rings. But on the opposite end of the spectrum of design philosophy are people who think ANY complexity is too much and therefore bad and will invariably lead to guaranteed imminent doom.
But like,… it’s literally just the equivalent of one of those arctic research and exploration vehicles. It excels in finding novels ways to make even the most mundane features even more pragmatic.
The Sojourn!