Tom Clancy's Endwar Earth ISOT to BattleTech.
- Thread starter Spartan303
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Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
I have one. I wonder what all the decently high end stuff Earth can make can buy it on the wider Periphery and Inner Sphere Markets.
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
Of course the industry of our planet would need to massively expand to be competitive in certain areas. The electronics industry might make a lot of high end stuff but compared to the demand all of BT would want for it ....yeah. Still I suppose between Asteroid mining and fusion power you wouldn't need to worry about resources nearly as much
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
I'd think it would work pretty well. The old joke about hunting your supper with a bow and arrow before riding a horse to the spaceport in order to catch a DropShip off-planet has a certain amount of truth in BT. There's some pretty gaping holes in their consumer goods market, and there is likely to be a good market for cheap sedans, microwave ovens, and TVs even if EndWar technology falls apart in a few decades instead of lasting for centuries. Earth might wind up the "Made in China" of the Inner Sphere.
Shipping is likely to be a bit of an issue of course. I actually did some math on the basic though and found that once you actually have some ships, it's surprisingly profitable. Presume Earth has three Mules it managed to buy off Kamea somehow, perhaps by selling most of the national store of Germanium and using it to repair her damaged JumpShip, and has a contract with an Invader JumpShip to haul them.
It costs 50,000 per collar to jump, so each hop is 150,000 Cbills. According to Field Manual: Mercenaries it costs 800Cbills a week to maintain a DropShip*.
We'll presume that for whatever reason, EndWar has an excess of microwave ovens. These tend to weigh between 50 and 80 pounds, we'll presume 75 pounds. Each Mule carries 8500 tons of cargo. The crew will eat 20 tons of consumables every 200 days, so 5 tons of space for 50 days is a reasonable amount of space for that for a 3-jump jaunt, they can always buy food at ye old agrarian planet where people ride horses to the Spaceport. This means each mule can carry 226,533 microwaves. Assume that, being crap that barely lasts fifty years in storage, Microwaves are cheap and sell for only 20Cbills profit each. Note that a pair of leather work boots runs 36Cbills and a pair of pants are 35Cbills so this is fairly low-key and I don't feel unreasonable.
Presume they have to make 3 jumps to find buyers for all of EndWar's spare Microwaves, and being morons they don't think to add any more cargo on those jumps to increase profits.
Expenses:
Maintenance: 800*3*3=7,200Cbills
Jump Costs: 50,000*3*3=450,000Cbills
Profits:
Microwave Sales: 226,533*20*3=13,591,980Cbills
So overall we can presume that there is actually a decent profit to be made in EndWar's consumer goods. We might go more conservative and presume only 10Cbills profit per microwave, and perhaps twice as many jumps, but there would still be a healthy profit to be made, and more reasonably they would want to unload all the cargo in as few jumps as possible and also haul profitable cargo back to Earth. I once did the calcs for hauling only bananas in DropShips (It was for a Tropico/BT crossover) and there was still a healthy profit to be made on 8500 tons of bananas.
Of course, and this is the ringer, they would need to get three Mules first. If they didn't have that, the Mules would likely still come, lured by the irresistible scent of highly profitable microwaves. Earth would make much less as the Mule owners would be gouging as much profit as possible for themselves, of course, but the general impression seems to be that there simply aren't that many worlds that aren't either largely agrarian with their most advanced manufacturing being blacksmiths, or churning out mostly War Materiel at this point in time. A planet dense with cheap consumer goods could be a veritable Germanium mine.
*There are various other books with different ways to calculate but that one is flat and makes this easier than me having to also do all the math to calculate out variable maintenance costs.
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
on another note isn't the C-bill worth a lot in comparison to the dollar?
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
The game has the disadvantage of legendarily bad FASAnomics that makes it very hard to figure out anything regarding prices because many aspects of economics and pricing seem to run on pixie dust. It further has the same problems most games have of pegging items that players don't use all the time and don't provide mechanical benefits as very cheap to encourage roleplaying, which are unfortunately also the items that overlap the most with modern-day goods we might compare.
Looking at a few items we might reasonably expect to find on Earth from the Warriors Catalog I get this:
Pants: 25
Leather Boots (Good): 36
Leather Boots (Cheap): 25
Socks: 5
Jacket: 28
Woman's Swimsuit: 12
Man's Swimsuit: 7
Fedora: 12
Hatchet: 10
Combat Knife: 8
Katana: 250
Compound Bow: 15
Bolt Action Rifle: 60
Six-Shot Revolver: 40
Vintage Gatling Gun: 450,000
Honestly, it's all over the place. The Vintage Gatling Gun is probably the easiest to compare as one sold for a little under 300,000 a few years ago. That would suggest a C-bill is between 1.5 and 2 dollars. However, that would also imply the compound bow is ludicrously cheap, selling for under 30 bucks. OTOH archery seems to be a thing that just constantly shows up in BT for no apparent reason and an insane number of MechWarriors practice it so it's plausible compound bows are simply that common and the price is reduced as they're a basic necessity mass-produced everywhere. The Katana is likely to be primarily ceremonially used in the Combine so it may not have any real reflection on modern prices.
The Combat Knife seems really, really cheap for a quality blade compared to the guns. Bolt Action Rifles and Revolvers seem somewhat low-priced to me on that level so perhaps we could peg a C-bill closer to 3 or 4 dollars. It's worth noting that between societies, every good will not have the same relative price, this is the basis of much of globalism's trade. So even if some things don't fit the pattern we can still roughly estimate a C-Bill and ignore outliers. It could simply be that because knives and more primitive weapons can be produced in 18th century tech level shops, they are abundant and very cheap compared to more advanced tech.
Clothes, it's bad, we notice BT fails at Wokeness by making women pay a pink tax for their more expensive swimsuits. I wonder if we need to boycott the franchise for that. A set of pants are priced about right for the 1.5-2 dollar costs and the swimsuits and socks fit that pattern. Boots seem a touch cheap to me but not outrageously so, it's possible all the giant cattle ranches in the Concordat are exporting leather boots and driving the price down.
Overall it looks to me like you can peg a C-bill somewhere around 2-5 dollars each with some goods being on the high side and some the low, skewed towards higher-tech being more expensive and anything that can be made by a guy in his workshop with modern-day or poorer tools being much closer to the low end.
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
As I recall there are offical figures for the value of the C-bill. Also given its a 1000 years in the future I imagine the vintage gatling gun probably is worth a lot more than it would be today
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
There are, officially a 3025 C-Bill is worth just under 12 US Dollars and in 3040 a C-Bill is worth 9.72. By 3062 a C-Bill is officially worth 4.78.
However, those are FASAnomics numbers and suggest that every rando civilian on planet Sheepdip is paying a hundred bucks for each pair of socks. Additionally despite the C-Bill apparently hemorrhaging value, everything keeps the exact same C-bill price across that period of time so... yeah.
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
On another note I wonder how long it takes Earth to procure the tech to start making BT grade AFVs in terms of weapons and armor at the very least.
Maybe a generation on the outside. Hardest part is really building the tools to make the tools to make the factories to make cool wartech.
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
Or getting the cash and influence to buy those from say Defiance or Earthwerks
Unfortunately, for this Earth, they are out in the Periphery, and far away from ANY sort of logistical hub. All that richness being so close to the CC is a recipe for invasion once word gets out.
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
if you can call what three or four jumps close
It is for Battletech.
That's why this Earth probably won't become anything pivotal. It has a proximity problem.
That's why this Earth probably won't become anything pivotal. It has a proximity problem.
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
the good news is that the Capellans have Sun shaped problems and not very many available forces
The amusing thing about this? Since Battletech was designed/built in the 80's (roughly), they built their vision on the future on what they thought 70's and 80's tech would evolve into. We see the same aesthetic in Alien and films around that time, too.
Even a modern smartphone shits over whatever's floating around the Inner Sphere (and possibly even Clan Space, since Clan Space stuff comes from more developed Inner Sphere technology) as standard issue, since they were based on what (then theoretical) tablets/mobile devices would look like using the technology of the time.
All those chunky tablets they use? Well, here's a device that uses true touchscreen, has full colour, and is a fraction of the size. Oh, and its processing power is like twenty of those plus combined.
Neurohelmets? Those chunky things? What about implants or something as slim as a skull cap?
Hell, I think a supercluster of Playstation 3's would shit over a lot of their computation power. Playstation-fucking-3's!
Retro-eighties future technology doesn't stand up well to what reality eventually produced decades later.
Give Modern Earth enough breathing space, and let it grow as rich as fuck from all the entertainment/luxury goods/history it could export to the hungry Inner Sphere (and Clan Space, amusingly enough) nations and groups, and you'd most likely have mechs and armoured vehicles that actually surpass those currently floating around, once they fully understand the technologies involved, being rolled off assembly lines. Hell, even copied mechs with better fire-control and computation systems from modern processors would be a gamechanger.
Plus, another thing I've noticed is that a lot of the Inner Sphere and Clan groups/nations aren't as, well, tactically flexible as modern day Earth is -- half of the time it's like watching 17th and 18th century combat with mechs and guns. smh
A more interesting scenario, I think, would be what if the remnants of Clan Wolverine found Modern Earth decades before anyone else did -- you'd have what, at the time, would have been some of the most technologically advanced Inner Sphere/Clan tech being modded and improved on to Hell and back by Modern Earth, before anyone else comes knocking.
I like this. I like this a lot. I want to heat more.
namar13766
Well-known member
Would BattleTech exist as a fictional IP on EndWar Earth, or would the Clancies be in the dark about the situation? That’s the most important question you need to answer First.
One thing I absolutely despised about Entry with a Bang was that they had all the future knowledge and essentially went to fuck over the entire Inner Sphere. And in the new rip off story it gets even worse.
Here? No future knowledge of events in BattleTech. No familiarity. It's just a fight to survive.