It's too expensive, yes. And they don't see it as necessary. Your average civilian doesn't need the strength, endurance and reflexes of a MechWarrior, and even for heavy physical labor there are enough Elemental washouts and their Laborer caste descendants to pick up the slack.
Freeborn who display exceptional valor and skill absolutely get brought into the Clan's eugenics systems. Usually by having their genetic makeup added to an existing Bloodname, which is how they add genetic variance (literally, new blood) to a Warrior bloodline, but the IlKhan has the power to just declare the creation of a new bloodname if a Freeborn's achievements are impressive enough. Even the most radical hardline Trueborn-or-Bust Clans end up getting some of that fresh genetic material over time as they fight for other Clans' genetic legacies.
I'm convinced the whole Society plotline was just an excuse for the Home Clans to not make an appearance in the Inner Sphere, ever.
It should say something how high they hold this honor and being a proper mech warrior still, instead of being pushed up the ladder like the IS or real world where even old man Vic Davion, Adam Steiner etc became leaders teachers etc.
Oh, the way the Clans handle things is incredibly fucked from an actual military perspective. Constant low-level warfare like in Clan Space? Works great to run all your soldiers off an assembly line with planned obsolescence every 10 years or so. Inner Sphere where you never know just when you're going to lose a battalion of your best men? Better have plenty of older reservists around for an emergency. Its why when shit went down thanks to Tukayyid the Happy Merchants were able to yank all their retirees out of the Merchant Caste (no, seriously, anyone deemed too old to fight properly got arguably a promotion given how they operate) and have them fill out their ranks with some still quite capable soldiers. The Clans also don't even think about putting all their old and/or wounded vets in charge of sibko training, relegating that to the fuckups of the Warrior Caste. Its a miracle they learn anything, really.
Its all Flower War shit. Its not that they have so little value for life, but that the war itself is the point. Take away the war, and the warrior will kill himself. Blame this faggot for why everything is so fucked up.
While I'm a clan wolf fan boy, Nicky K is a furry and did EVERY THING wrong.
Eh. I really hated that part of clan lore. To me it makes no sense the Clans didn't just use warships (which no IS house had) to destroy the majority of IS forces using their technology edge Gulf War Style while Trueborn warriors piloting Omnimechs and Elementals take the role of SOF units, dropping into planets, blowing up objectives then bugging out and letting garrison forces worry about occupying the now unguarded planet. I feel the clans needed a few more months of writing before they actually revealed them. Tuykyid was pretty awesome though, they needed more of that kind of meatgrinder.
See, the problem is: the Clans were never meant to win. Narratively speaking, they were never going to get their objective. FASA didn't start with "hey, let's logically build this bunch of ruthless, highly efficient warriors. fling them at the Coreward edge of the Inner Sphere, and believably wargame what happens". Their starting point was "how do we create an alien culture that feels like an existential threat to the Inner Sphere, without actually breaking the balance of power in any way so we still have a setting when we're done with this storyline?", and then they kept working from there. (Spoiler alert: the same thing happened to the Federated Commonwealth. It was never meant to last, it was just a vehicle for the FedCom Civil War storyline.)
So do I, but I wouldn't get my hopes up about it. The chances of anything getting retconned in such a large scale are basically nil.
They did. As soon as the Drac resistance forces proved a little too capable on a planet named Turtle Bay the Smoke Jaguars vaporized an entire city just to ensure there would be no more resistance. That said, even with what the dude above me posted, they're surprisingly realistic despite being created backwards. Yeah, they were obviously set up to fail, but things are reasonably consistent as to how and why they fail. Its certainly better than 40k where despite being a dying race with no hope of reclaiming any greatness the Eldar die like Guardsmen whenever something might threaten the status quo.
I might have sounded salty about the way the Clans were written, but I actually like the Clans as a concept for the reasons you stated: the writers started with the conclusion and wrote their way backwards to the premise, but they did it well. They clearly put in the effort. The Clans can be infuriating because their irrational actions are usually justified by something in their backstory. Sometimes it feels a little flimsy, but when we remember how small the Clans started out (there were only 200 Clan warriors in total when Nicky K. was done reshuffling what was left of the SLDF after the second exodus, and that's all they had to conquer the Pentagon Worlds with) and how desperate their beginnings were, it starts to make sense why they became such a weirdly structured society.
The Society was dumb as hell with how they managed to do all that shit completely under the Warrior caste's nose (remember: the Watch was a Warrior organization, and despite their terrible intel on the IS, the Clans were usually good at sniffing out unrest), but the Home Clans doing another culling made sense to me. I don't expect them to ever make an appearance in the Inner Sphere (and I really hope they don't), but I'd be interested in seeing how they develop with only four isolated (and mostly weakened) Clans controlling the entirety of the Clan Homeworlds.
The reason the Watch was shit was because it was where most of the washouts of the warrior caste ended up, who generally didn’t really see their job as anything but a shame and thus didn’t really assume anyone could do things like “lie.” Clan culture encourages honesty, and abhorres deception. And clanners are great at self delusion. The Society is dumb but it’s easier to understand when you consider the scientist caste was given a lot of leeway in clan society because of how vital they were for the breeding program. It’s a sort of fridge logic.
The Dracs deserved it. Fuck the Dracs. That's the one faction I wish they wrote off as being destroyed.
They're only mostly spaceborn, actually. They maintain a fair bit of planet-based infrastructure scattered around.
My bad, I was referring to the Clan's main presence. Yes, they have planetside infrastructure but we know the focus of their activities is the merchant fleet. I didn't expect them to have half a billion people scattered around, though. That's more people than the entire population of a lot of planets, and Clanners tend to have fairly low populations condensed in smaller areas. Either way, I stand corrected.
The Society being able to sneak around was fine, my problem is how much heavy military equipment and personnel they had available to them. I know the game is about Giant Stompy Robots, but if there was a conflict in BattleTech that should have been operated as an insurgency and a low-level civil war instead of full-on Giant Stompy Robot warfare, that's the one.
Well, keep in mind they've managed to stay out of all the big wars while selling weapons to everyone with the money, so they fact they have that many people shouldn't be a surprise. They don't even fight 'Mech duels to destruction anymore, just the first lost limb. Although in 3135 when shit started going down they lost those worlds, so who knows how many got evacuated versus left behind.
The thing is though the Warships were never meant to play any big role in Clan warfare. Orbital bombardment of troops is deemed "honorless" and destroying infrastructure by Orbital Bombardment is deemed "wasteful". The Jaguars were condemned by the other Clans for their excessive use of force over Turtle bay. That's also the reason why most clans crew their Warships with tecvhnician castes under the command of a few warriors (probably except the Snow Ravens and Clioud Cobras). This attitude changed after the IS won the Great Refusal and went into "Bomb first ask question later" during the Wars of Reaving (they justified it with the "taint")
