Battletech - Also known as Trannytech

[Urbanmech]

No, ComStar was responsible for some punctual, targeted technology losses, but most of it was just the Inner Sphere being too nuke-happy in the first two Succession Wars. The more advanced the technology, the more of an industrial "tail" it has, so any disruption to the chain means you can't produce the product anymore. And once the surviving factories are shuttered and forgotten, or repurposed into something else, it's easy for data to just rot away. Remember, BattleTech was made in the 80s. Storage media at the time was tapes (it still is in some applications) and it wasn't such a networked world as it is today. It was very possible to important data to be lost and the concept of off-site backups didn't seem to dawn on FASA back then.

Also, it's not like the Inner Sphere completely lost everything. What they had left by 3025 was still ridiculously advanced. Fusion engines were still being made. Standard 'Mech armor is a very complex composite of many materials that requires very specialized procedures to produce. Autocannons were still firing without jamming even if the arm they're mounted on was used to punch another 'Mech. Even the humble Small Laser, the tonnage-filler weapon in the setting, is a free-electron laser the likes of which we can barely imagine due to how sturdy and reliable it is. The IS lost access to its most advanced technologies from the Star League days, but overall it still held on to more tech than the Star League had starting out.

The real problem was disruption of supplies and destruction of facilities. Sure, your Gauss Rifle production line might still be intact after the Second Succession War, but if the factory two systems over that produced the rifles' superconducting coils is now a smoking crater and no one had an updated, reliable copy of the blueprints, you're hosed. And even if you had the blueprints and the resources to build another factory somewhere else, if the rare-earth mining facilities that produced the exotic minerals required to create those coils was gone, or if the branch of the company that built the control circuitry for the Gauss Rifle magnets got atomized by a trigger-happy Kuritan naval officer... guess what, you still can't built the damn Gauss Rifle.

IDK just seems like a stretch that 'muh Nukes" got rid of everything. Granted all this history and fluff is from a Military perspective only and we get very little of the civilian perspective at all in this, which may explain the stretch itself.

 

[Corn Flakes]

IDK just seems like a stretch that 'muh Nukes" got rid of everything. Granted all this history and fluff is from a Military perspective only and we get very little of the civilian perspective at all in this, which may explain the stretch itself.

It wasn't just "muh nukes", no. Entire planets were depopulated when the terraforming equipment that kept them alive malfunctioned or was destroyed, or when shipments of vital supplies stopped coming. That accounts for a lot of manufacturing lost deep in their territory, and any manufacturing facility within striking range was fair game for raids and offensives. That's not even mentioning civil unrest, sabotage by enemy powers, pirates/raiders, and all these fun things that tend to happen when you try to run a galactic economy on war footing for decades. Technology was lost not just to indiscriminate nuking, but because trying to take out your enemies' weapons at the source is considered a great strategy in warfare. See: the US bombing the shit out of German factories in WWII.

Basically, ComStar didn't need to interfere in order for there to be LosTech. But once certain technologies were recognized as being lost, it was much easier for them to take out point targets to prevent these things from being rediscovered. And despite all that, they couldn't do it. I said it a couple times before, but even before the Helm Memory Core was discovered, Star League technology like Double Heat Sinks had been re-developed and the New Avalon Institute of Science was hard at work trying to crack more LosTech whether ComStar let them or not.

 

[Balr0g]

IDK just seems like a stretch that 'muh Nukes" got rid of everything. Granted all this history and fluff is from a Military perspective only and we get very little of the civilian perspective at all in this, which may explain the stretch itself.

First of all the major producer of most of the high tech (The Terran Hegemony) was laid waste to. Kerensky managed to get some producers back running again on planets the SLDF recaptured during the SLDF's invasion but most of those were military factories. And thanks to the measures of the Camerons to make the IS dependend on the Hegemony a lot of SL tech never propagated out of their hands. And I am not talking about weapons tech more like what the Department of Mega enginnering was capable of. Heck Comstar themselves couldn't rebuild the sun shades that protected Venus despite being the inheritor of Terra and all of it's archives. Or the quasi AI technology of the Caspar drone network was never replicated though the Word of Blake somehow manged to make a shallow copy of it.

Also while Comstar did indeed hunt down IS head scientists or engineers they themselves never had the full knowledge base the Terran Hegemony aquirred. After all Comstar was hunting Star League memory cores for their own. The Helm memory core gave the IS a boost to speed up research but the Helm memory core was only a part of the overall SL database - the so called Prometheus data base. AFAIK this particular database was never recovered and for lostech propectors it is the Holy Grail. The New Dallas memory core which was discovered during the Jihad was also part of the Prometheus database.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

And I would not be surprised if during all this, quite a number of technologies went extinct not just due to destruction but also due to good old fashioned brain drain.
It would be an understatement to say that the Succession Wars changed the IS economy and working world. Countless billions of people were displaced.
Some places might have become depopulated cause there were so few jobs available. Similar to many places in ageing societies nowadays, the population shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until an entire town just dies. It might even have had access to rare materials, but once there are no more schools, hospitals and super markets, even these places die off.

This would not affect factories that make, say, Gauss Rifles, but maybe places that gather materials that are used for technology that is used for make Gauss Rifles.

Interstellar logistics also play a large part here. Maybe you need your products to go rimwards, but the only JumpShips entering and leaving your system go spinwards or counterspinwards. So without the ability to sell products, you are forced to move on.

All that being said, I wonder, is there an estimation how many people died during the Succession Wars in total? It must have been an unfathomable amount of bloodshed. Entire planets got nuked into becoming uninhabitable...

 

[Corn Flakes]

First of all the major producer of most of the high tech (The Terran Hegemony) was laid waste to. Kerensky managed to get some producers back running again on planets the SLDF recaptured during the SLDF's invasion but most of those were military factories. And thanks to the measures of the Camerons to make the IS dependend on the Hegemony a lot of SL tech never propagated out of their hands. And I am not talking about weapons tech more like what the Department of Mega enginnering was capable of. Heck Comstar themselves couldn't rebuild the sun shades that protected Venus despite being the inheritor of Terra and all of it's archives. Or the quasi AI technology of the Caspar drone network was never replicated though the Word of Blake somehow manged to make a shallow copy of it.

Also while Comstar did indeed hunt down IS head scientists or engineers they themselves never had the full knowledge base the Terran Hegemony aquirred. After all Comstar was hunting Star League memory cores for their own. The Helm memory core gave the IS a boost to speed up research but the Helm memory core was only a part of the overall SL database - the so called Prometheus data base. AFAIK this particular database was never recovered and for lostech propectors it is the Holy Grail. The New Dallas memory core which was discovered during the Jihad was also part of the Prometheus database.

To add to it: the Terran Hegemony had allowed the rest of the Inner Sphere to start producing some of their own technology by the time the Star League came together, but it was always the industrial and technological heart of the Inner Sphere. Hell, the Star League started as a plot to secure the "landlocked" Hegemony resources their own worlds were starting to run out of after centuries of intense industrial output.

The other future Successor States had their own industrial bases (and the Lyran Commonwealth was already an economic powerhouse by then), but most innovation came out of the Terran Hegemony. And, IIRC, through the Star League the Hegemony also supplied the other states with high-tech components and tooling which were then used in the manufacture of a million different things across the Inner Sphere. Without the Hegemony, those supplies dried up. And with Amaris' fall resulting in close to a hundred worlds being put through scorched earth tactics, all that industry was mostly gone by the time the Successor States rushed in to carve out the Hegemony's corpse in the wake of Kerensky's offensive. Even ComStar, with better access to Star League and Hegemony records than most, was left with a pretty fractured database to work with.

And I would not be surprised if during all this, quite a number of technologies went extinct not just due to destruction but also due to good old fashioned brain drain.
It would be an understatement to say that the Succession Wars changed the IS economy and working world. Countless billions of people were displaced.
Some places might have become depopulated cause there were so few jobs available. Similar to many places in ageing societies nowadays, the population shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until an entire town just dies. It might even have had access to rare materials, but once there are no more schools, hospitals and super markets, even these places die off.

This would not affect factories that make, say, Gauss Rifles, but maybe places that gather materials that are used for technology that is used for make Gauss Rifles.

Interstellar logistics also play a large part here. Maybe you need your products to go rimwards, but the only JumpShips entering and leaving your system go spinwards or counterspinwards. So without the ability to sell products, you are forced to move on.

That's exactly what I was talking about, yeah. It takes a lot of different materials and factories to build just one BattleMech. For a slight taste of how difficult actually building a combat vehicle is, here's how much we managed to fuck up in WWII. And that was a World War II tank. An enormously primitive machine compared to a 'Mech. And it still needed parts from over a dozen different companies to assemble. You'd need parts from all across your Successor State and beyond just to be able to put a bog-standard Locust together, and all that requires not only companies to build that shit, but also DropShips to carry it up to space, and JumpShips to bring it to your factory. Plus more of that to take these Locusts out to their "local" supply depot.

All that being said, I wonder, is there an estimation how many people died during the Succession Wars in total? It must have been an unfathomable amount of bloodshed. Entire planets got nuked into becoming uninhabitable...

I don't remember any actual hard numbers or even an estimation. I do recall at least a billion people dying in the Federated Suns alone during the First Succession War, and that might be only referring to people in planets where fighting actually happened. Probably doesn't even mention worlds far from the frontlines where disruptions in logistics and trade resulted in famines or unrest. The Third Succession War was probably the least lethal, since by then the whole thing had devolved into border skirmishes by very depleted armies.

 

[Balr0g]

To add to it: the Terran Hegemony had allowed the rest of the Inner Sphere to start producing some of their own technology by the time the Star League came together, but it was always the industrial and technological heart of the Inner Sphere. Hell, the Star League started as a plot to secure the "landlocked" Hegemony resources their own worlds were starting to run out of after centuries of intense industrial output.

The other future Successor States had their own industrial bases (and the Lyran Commonwealth was already an economic powerhouse by then), but most innovation came out of the Terran Hegemony. And, IIRC, through the Star League the Hegemony also supplied the other states with high-tech components and tooling which were then used in the manufacture of a million different things across the Inner Sphere. Without the Hegemony, those supplies dried up. And with Amaris' fall resulting in close to a hundred worlds being put through scorched earth tactics, all that industry was mostly gone by the time the Successor States rushed in to carve out the Hegemony's corpse in the wake of Kerensky's offensive. Even ComStar, with better access to Star League and Hegemony records than most, was left with a pretty fractured database to work with.


That's exactly what I was talking about, yeah. It takes a lot of different materials and factories to build just one BattleMech. For a slight taste of how difficult actually building a combat vehicle is, here's how much we managed to fuck up in WWII. And that was a World War II tank. An enormously primitive machine compared to a 'Mech. And it still needed parts from over a dozen different companies to assemble. You'd need parts from all across your Successor State and beyond just to be able to put a bog-standard Locust together, and all that requires not only companies to build that shit, but also DropShips to carry it up to space, and JumpShips to bring it to your factory. Plus more of that to take these Locusts out to their "local" supply depot.


I don't remember any actual hard numbers or even an estimation. I do recall at least a billion people dying in the Federated Suns alone during the First Succession War, and that might be only referring to people in planets where fighting actually happened. Probably doesn't even mention worlds far from the frontlines where disruptions in logistics and trade resulted in famines or unrest. The Third Succession War was probably the least lethal, since by then the whole thing had devolved into border skirmishes by very depleted armies.

I remember from the Jihad books that Terra alone had over 10 billions people before the start of the 1st Succession wars and nearly half of them left Terra because it was run like shit (thanks General Kerensky) And you also need to account for the many planets of the Hegemony (and the Successor states) that fell of the map because the extensive terraforming gear was destroyed / fell to pieces due to lack of parts. The best example would be NBew Dallas which was heavily terraformed during the Hegemony days and later fell of the map after the House lords nuked the planet into submission

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

That's exactly what I was talking about, yeah. It takes a lot of different materials and factories to build just one BattleMech. For a slight taste of how difficult actually building a combat vehicle is, here's how much we managed to fuck up in WWII. And that was a World War II tank. An enormously primitive machine compared to a 'Mech. And it still needed parts from over a dozen different companies to assemble. You'd need parts from all across your Successor State and beyond just to be able to put a bog-standard Locust together, and all that requires not only companies to build that shit, but also DropShips to carry it up to space, and JumpShips to bring it to your factory. Plus more of that to take these Locusts out to their "local" supply depot.

To make contemporary examples: German car manifacturers are having trouble making cars cause there's a shortage in Chinese microchips. Earlier this year, a whole lot of international companies got into trouble due to the Evergiven shutting down traffic through the Suez Canal.

These are just minor inconveniences, imagine some sort of catastrophe that makes international shipping impossible for 90% of container ships for decades/centuries.

 

[SITHRAK!]

IDK just seems like a stretch that 'muh Nukes" got rid of everything. Granted all this history and fluff is from a Military perspective only and we get very little of the civilian perspective at all in this, which may explain the stretch itself.

There are apparently still lost caches of weapons, equipment, art, gold etc still hidden all over Europe, Asia and the Pacific after WW2. War causes some crazy to happen. Throw in weapons that create massive electromagnetic pulses and magnetic media and you have a recipe for all kinds of shit going missing.

 

[thx1138]

I remember from the Jihad books that Terra alone had over 10 billions people before the start of the 1st Succession wars and nearly half of them left Terra because it was run like shit (thanks General Kerensky) And you also need to account for the many planets of the Hegemony (and the Successor states) that fell of the map because the extensive terraforming gear was destroyed / fell to pieces due to lack of parts. The best example would be NBew Dallas which was heavily terraformed during the Hegemony days and later fell of the map after the House lords nuked the planet into submission

The Fourth Succession War Scenario book mentions that 600,000,000 died during the 4SW. Or maybe it was The Galtor Campaign scenario pack introductory text where they mention that body count. Wherever, that's your casualty amount.

As to Earth, it is very much depopulated. There's an attorney you have to meet with in...I can't recall, it's one of the adventure modules for the 2nd edition of the Mechwarrior RPG, where they give the guy's background and how he became such a slick lawyer. When he was a kid, he grew up near the ruins of the abandoned city of Seattle, pretending he owned various buildings and would "lease" them to people, etc., basically becoming a real estate mogul. If in the early 31st century, Seattle is abandoned, I would imagine (all jokes about how much Seattle sucks, now, aside) that Earth has a very, very thin population indeed.

Aside, I kind of don't like how almost immediately after Hanse and Melissa began to benevolently rule a stellar empire, the writers at FASA went full on No You Can't Have Nice Things. I get it, I understand why from a standpoint of keeping the game interesting they did, it's just that I was so happy that the good guys seemed to be taking a big W...ah, well.

 

[Corn Flakes]

As to Earth, it is very much depopulated. There's an attorney you have to meet with in...I can't recall, it's one of the adventure modules for the 2nd edition of the Mechwarrior RPG, where they give the guy's background and how he became such a slick lawyer. When he was a kid, he grew up near the ruins of the abandoned city of Seattle, pretending he owned various buildings and would "lease" them to people, etc., basically becoming a real estate mogul. If in the early 31st century, Seattle is abandoned, I would imagine (all jokes about how much Seattle sucks, now, aside) that Earth has a very, very thin population indeed.

Terra has a population of over 12 billion by 3130. Being the heart of ComStar and the most heavily industrialized planet in all of the Inner Sphere means it needed a large population. It also weathered the Succession Wars without a scratch, and even the Jihad didn't hit it as hard as other worlds. Either way, population would likely be concentrated around spaceports.

The thing with the ruins of Seattle might have been an oversight, because Unity City (AKA, the Court of the Star League) was built on Puget Sound. Seattle wouldn't exist, it would have been paved over by the construction of Unity City. Regardless, even if it did exist and was destroyed/abandoned, ComStar seemed to have a more Atlantic bent, since it had its main named facilities on the East Coast (ComStar HQ, Hilton Head) and the British Isles (Sandhurst College, England) instead.

Aside, I kind of don't like how almost immediately after Hanse and Melissa began to benevolently rule a stellar empire, the writers at FASA went full on No You Can't Have Nice Things. I get it, I understand why from a standpoint of keeping the game interesting they did, it's just that I was so happy that the good guys seemed to be taking a big W...ah, well.

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war... wait, no. Wrong game.

Same reason, though. Unfortunately for anyone hoping for peace and prosperity, it's called BattleTech, not TruceTech.

 

[Techpriest]

Cities get abandoned for various reasons historically, not just because of depopulation. Sometimes it’s viewed as not safe, or resources are depleted in the area. Considering how close Seattle is to Unity City, it’s probably population movement and the danger of being near a bunch of UXO, some of which is probably nuclear, plus the mass emigration of the population from Earth following the Amaris Civil War.

 

[Balr0g]

Terra has a population of over 12 billion by 3130. Being the heart of ComStar and the most heavily industrialized planet in all of the Inner Sphere means it needed a large population. It also weathered the Succession Wars without a scratch, and even the Jihad didn't hit it as hard as other worlds. Either way, population would likely be concentrated around spaceports.

The thing with the ruins of Seattle might have been an oversight, because Unity City (AKA, the Court of the Star League) was built on Puget Sound. Seattle wouldn't exist, it would have been paved over by the construction of Unity City. Regardless, even if it did exist and was destroyed/abandoned, ComStar seemed to have a more Atlantic bent, since it had its main named facilities on the East Coast (ComStar HQ, Hilton Head) and the British Isles (Sandhurst College, England) instead.

Terra "depopulated' after the Civil War but build up it's population slowly again. So 12 billion in the middle of ther 32nd century isn't a stretch. The majority of the population live in the urban metropolis while large tracts of lands were renaturlized during the heyday of the Hegemony. Incidentaly the damages done to nature were also repaired (in essence the Terra in Battletech is the wet dream of any nature activist). Though several cities in the former US are still in ruins. IIRC Unity city was never rebuild and Stone decided to let several ruins stay as a reminder what happened during the Jihad (there is a mention in Sword of Sedition when a shuttle flight over the ruins of US cities by the three Captain generals and Julian Davion shows the battle scars) Not to mention the Blakists used cobald laced nukes over large swaths of arable lands in the US making the lands unusable for decades.

 

[MG-34]

Tried the battletech game. It was alright but man does the game have problems running on modern computers. Also why the fuck are none of the main characters white? It's like a riding in a new york city subway in my dropship. Anyway how do I get the game to perform better on a modern PC?

 

[Corn Flakes]

Tried the battletech game. It was alright but man does the game have problems running on modern computers. (...) Anyway how do I get the game to perform better on a modern PC?

Not that I know of. Welcome to lazy unoptimized Unity coding.

Also why the fuck are none of the main characters white? It's like a riding in a new york city subway in my dropship.

Because the developers were so woke they went fully around the scale and ended up being racist.

In the source material, the Periphery has just about the same ethnic makeup as the rest of the Inner Sphere, because it was colonized essentially the same way as everywhere else, the ships just took longer to get there and they weren't incorporated into large empires early on, which stunted their development as colonies even before they got their asses kicked by the Star League during the Reunification War. Their stereotype is cultural and technological and not ethnic: everybody in the Inner Sphere just thinks they're all a bunch of broke fuckwits.

So by making the Periphery brown, they're perpetuating the stereotype of brown people being dumb and poor. Hooray!

 

[Balr0g]

In the source material, the Periphery has just about the same ethnic makeup as the rest of the Inner Sphere, because it was colonized essentially the same way as everywhere else, the ships just took longer to get there and they weren't incorporated into large empires early on, which stunted their development as colonies even before they got their assed kicked by the Star League during the Reunification War. Their stereotype is cultural and technological and not ethnic: everybody in the Inner Sphere just thinks they're all a bunch of broke fuckwits.

So by making the Periphery brown, they're perpetuating the stereotype of brown people being dumb and poor. Hooray!

Well ironically the Taurian Concordat had the best education system before the Reunification War even besting the one of the Terran Hegemony. And the standard of living was as good as the Great Houses (except the Hegemony). The Magistracy was also on it's way up but had a weak military (mostly paramilitary to deal with prirates). The exception was the Outworlds Alliance but that was more due to the pacificstic and tech-shunning leadership and beliefs. But the Reunification War laid waste to the Concordat, depopulated the Aliiance and wrecked the Rim Worlds. Only the Magistracy escaped major damage because Marion Marik decided to play by the rules of the Ares convention. Though the fall of the Star League also showed that the Periphery seems like a horde of Karens who complain loudly and then get the reciept for their actions.

 

[Techpriest]

Tried the battletech game. It was alright but man does the game have problems running on modern computers. Also why the fuck are none of the main characters white? It's like a riding in a new york city subway in my dropship. Anyway how do I get the game to perform better on a modern PC?

The ethnic makeup of the periphery is pretty random. Also that section of space IIRC got a decent amount of Indian colonization, plus Chinese and random ancaps. There’s not really ethnic homogeny in any area of the Sohere aside from some oddball worlds. Swedenese is a language.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Because the developers were so woke they went fully around the scale and ended up being racist.

Think of the Argo as a kind of Noah's Arc for token ethnicities.
It's not so bad, except one, the characters in the game are pretty okay. The one that isn't okay, though... hoo boy. That muslim blob moralfag jfc. If I was in full control of the Argo, I'd space that fat bitch the moment the last system is fully upgraded.

 

[SITHRAK!]

Tried the battletech game. It was alright but man does the game have problems running on modern computers. Also why the fuck are none of the main characters white? It's like a riding in a new york city subway in my dropship. Anyway how do I get the game to perform better on a modern PC?

Increase page file size, run it off SSD not platter drive, there are lots of guides out there.
Where you’re going to start having fun is when you realize how janky and slow it is for the shallowness and grindiness of the gameplay, and look at modding it. I have a 6-month old PC that would have been beyond cutting edge when BT came out and it struggles at times with both vanilla and BattleTech Advanced 3062.

As far as characters not being white, it’s virtue signalling from a design team headed up by an ugly, non-passing, white-hating tranny. Funny how I’ve been playing BT and other tabletop wargames since the mid-80’s and it’s only in the last few years that SUDDENLY! we need minority representation in games.

My local games club sees 50-70 people a night. One or two token Asians and one chick who only ever plays 40K with her BF. Everyone else? Fucking cisgender straight white males. BT was going to be a success even if it was a dumpster fire filled with pro-minority propaganda (which it is) but no doubt we have a hideous tranny gargoyle beating his girldick to how he stuck it to those straight white males by making the Inner Sphere 90% mystery meat.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Increase page file size, run it off SSD not platter drive, there are lots of guides out there.
Where you’re going to start having fun is when you realize how janky and slow it is for the shallowness and grindiness of the gameplay, and look at modding it. I have a 6-month old PC that would have been beyond cutting edge when BT came out and it struggles at times with both vanilla and BattleTech Advanced 3062.

As far as characters not being white, it’s virtue signalling from a design team headed up by an ugly, non-passing, white-hating tranny. Funny how I’ve been playing BT and other tabletop wargames since the mid-80’s and it’s only in the last few years that SUDDENLY! we need minority representation in games.

My local games club sees 50-70 people a night. One or two token Asians and one chick who only ever plays 40K with her BF. Everyone else? Fucking cisgender straight white males. BT was going to be a success even if it was a dumpster fire filled with pro-minority propaganda (which it is) but no doubt we have a hideous tranny gargoyle beating his girldick to how he stuck it to those straight white males by making the Inner Sphere 90% mystery meat.

The horrifying irony of it all is that BattleTech has always been a very diverse game, lore-wise. There were a lot of different ethnicities on display, and both male and female characters doing a lot of shit both good and bad (hello, Katherine Steiner, Sharilar Mori and Natasha Kerensky, just to name a few...).

Sure, none of the Successor Houses are headed by a family of coal-black Africans but... it's probably for the best, considering how much every house has to play the role of asshole. It's easy to have the Kurita and Liao being utter bastards, no one cares about unflattering depictions of Asians these days no matter what the #stopasianhate crowd says. Imagine if House Khartoum, head of the Sudan Association, had to pull off shit like even the Davions do on occasion? Wars of aggression, underhanded tactics, sabotage, body doubles... we'd be hearing the twitter brigade's rage all the way out to Strana Mechty.

 

[SITHRAK!]

The horrifying irony of it all is that BattleTech has always been a very diverse game, lore-wise. There were a lot of different ethnicities on display, and both male and female characters doing a lot of shit both good and bad (hello, Katherine Steiner, Sharilar Mori and Natasha Kerensky, just to name a few...).

Sure, none of the Successor Houses are headed by a family of coal-black Africans but... it's probably for the best, considering how much every house has to play the role of asshole. It's easy to have the Kurita and Liao being utter bastards, no one cares about unflattering depictions of Asians these days no matter what the #stopasianhate crowd says. Imagine if House Khartoum, head of the Sudan Association, had to pull off shit like even the Davions do on occasion? Wars of aggression, underhanded tactics, sabotage, body doubles... we'd be hearing the twitter brigade's rage all the way out to Strana Mechty.

Yes, diverse as in ‘Japs in this part, Chinese in that part, Germans in that part’ not necessarily the ‘multicultural society free from hate’ we see in HBS BT.
Sure, there are minorities in each of the successor states, but HBS seems to have made minorities the majority for some reason. You go to the hiring hall on Tharkad and it’s 100% black and 80% women and you just have to wonder.