Iron Rants (Follow-up): FTL in Battletech/Mechwarrior

The Voice of Iron

My last rant on Battletech/Mechwarrior contained a slight error: How the FTL works. So, I decided to look into it, and what I found was pretty neat! Figured I'd make a follow-up rant on it.   Original rant here: https://youtu.be/uH4dEHkdLy8   Music Used: https://ironsmith.bandcamp.com/track/downtime   Image courtesy of me (My models, Catalyst Game Labs wrote the primer in the picture)   Music site, for those who want to check out more of my music: https://ironsmith.bandcamp.com/   Originally Uploaded to YouTube on May 6th, 2024   NO GENERATIVE AI WAS USED IN THE MAKING OF THIS VIDEO.

Transcript

00:00Hello and welcome to the Voice of Iron. And this is kind of a follow-up rant on

00:06something that I ranted about last week. Battletech. First off, I love Battletech

00:11and if you didn't listen to that rant and don't particularly care to, the long

00:15and short is it is a setting where battle mechs are the main way of doing

00:19combat because it's the future and just nuking planets that you actually want to

00:23take over turns out not to be very conducive. So limited engagements mean

00:27you need big stompy things with lots of guns in a very small area so that you

00:32can limit the number of civilian casualties. In theory I mean there's

00:36still a lot of war crimes in space but hey that's humanity for you at least

00:40according to Battletech. Battletech is the same setting as MechWarrior by the way

00:44for those more familiar with that. Again the other rant went over that in detail

00:48and I'm not about to re-rant on it because there is one particular aspect

00:52that I need to correct or more specifically kind of go into more detail

00:59on. I was a little wrong about how the FTL works in Battletech. Obviously as a big

01:10setting, as a setting that takes place in between multiple star systems throughout

01:16the galaxy or more specifically a small chunk of the galaxy, the inner sphere, there

01:23needed to be a narrative way to get people to and from places you know light

01:29years apart in reasonable amounts of time. And in my last video I said that they

01:37treat FTL as this very long process that takes a long time between star systems. Well

01:44that's not exactly true. And by that I mean transit between planets in different

01:51star systems does take that long for the average person. If you left, I don't know,

01:56Earth and you went all the way to, you know, a relatively nearby star system like

02:04Outreach, you would still be taking about a week or two in order to get there. That's

02:11not because of the faster than light part though and that's what I just found out

02:16and that's what I'm gonna rant about today. You see, the actual FTL is instant but it

02:26has a lot of limitations. So here's what I found out. I did a little bit of research

02:31and so I wanted to find out how this worked exactly because I don't see it

02:35talked about too much in, you know, I love playing MechWarrior 5 and the reason I

02:39said it took so long was because in MechWarrior 5 when you see the ship jump in

02:44it tells you that it takes X number of weeks or days to get from one system to

02:48the next and I just kind of assumed that was the entire FTL time. That's wrong.

02:52Turns out that they use what's called a Kearney Fushida Drive to get from one

02:59system to the next and this is wild because it is both a great narrative tool

03:06but also they try to keep it feeling as hard sci-fi as possible by putting a lot

03:12of strict limitations on it. So let's get into it. I'm gonna be glancing every now

03:17and then at Sarna.net the official MechWarrior Battletech wiki so bear with me

03:24here but in short the Kearney Fushida Drive uses a complex series of mechanisms

03:36based around for some reason a titanium germanium alloy wrapped in a liquid

03:41helium jacket of course and a controller, initiator, tankage and other assorted

03:47equipment. Apparently this core acts as a capacitor to store the energy needed to

03:51burst through space. That's some fun techno babble we got in there but in

03:58short doctors Kearney and Fushida, more specifically Thomas Kearney and

04:04Takeyoshi Fushida in the Battletech setting discovered a way to basically

04:09teleport very very long distances in get this 2018 or rather Battletech

04:19timelines version of 2018. But we didn't have the technology in this timeline to

04:25actually test their theories until 2107. That kind of mirrors where we are with FTL

04:33theories right now if I'm gonna be honest. The idea of what is the what is the

04:38really reasonable FTL theory that we've got going on now? The Alcubierre Drive.

04:43That's it. And you know that's an interesting theory but we just don't have

04:49the energy or the ability to bring that to fruition. Well Battletech kind of

04:53assumed something similar exists in that setting as well except it's the Kearney

04:59Fushida Drive instead of the Alcubierre Drive. Anyway, whereas something like the

05:03Alcubierre Drive is meant to be kind of like Star Trek warp where you're still

05:07moving in real space but just very very fast and you know kind of breaking that

05:13speed of light barrier. The Kearney Fushida Drive again it jumps you from one

05:19place to the next but you can't just do that anywhere otherwise FTL times would

05:24be pretty much instant all over the place. In order to actually safely jump you have

05:34to find basically a spot in space where there's no gravity interference getting

05:39in your way or more specifically where I guess gravity is aligned properly so

05:44that you can actually get a good jump going and this is also limited to only

05:48about I believe it was 30 light years at a time so you can't just warp your way

05:55all the way across the galaxy. Well unless it's an accident but we'll get into

06:01that in a minute. The point is a lot of the time for some reason the safest spot

06:07known as the zenith jump point or sometimes the nadir jump point of a star

06:14system is right over the star. Like if you park right over top of the star we

06:21assume that the solar system is flat which it's not but let's assume that it is

06:25for the purposes of this thing. You know those like solar maps that you've seen that

06:30have the Sun in the middle and then all the planets orbiting around it like a disc.

06:33Just imagine you're plopped straight in the middle of the disc right over to the

06:37Sun. Simple as that. Or if you've ever played Elite Dangerous just fly over top of

06:41the Sun when you first jump in. That's about how it goes. You park a jump ship there.

06:48A massive vessel equipped with a Kearney Fushida Drive and then it jumps from that

06:56spot to a designated spot in another star system basically over or under its Sun.

07:04One of the poles. I should have just said one of the poles to begin with but yeah one of the

07:09poles of the Sun. Now then you might be thinking well if this thing can only

07:14teleport then how do you get to different planets in a reasonable amount of time.

07:19Well that's where drop ships come in. See FTL is kind of a two ship buddy system. You've got

07:26the jump ship which is the ship that actually has the giant FTL KF drive in

07:31it and then you have jump ships which are designed to latch onto it in such a way

07:37that it can be caught in the envelope that's generated to teleport everything

07:43at once. And then once the ship jumps into the new system then the drop ship

07:52detaches and flies manually to the planet using sublight engines. Now I couldn't

07:58actually find a hard figure on exactly how fast a drop ship can go but it's it's

08:06pretty much implied to be nowhere near the speed of light. I mean maybe 0.8 I saw

08:13someone suggest online but regardless the overall idea is that that's why it takes

08:23so long to get to the planets. It's not the actual jump that takes so long you

08:28have to use a slower than light ship within a solar system. Now that cuts

08:32things down immensely. Heck in real life if we really really wanted to I mean we

08:39we technically done it with probes before we can send something to Mars when

08:44Earth is close enough to it in like was it two months I think we've gotten it down

08:50to at this point and that's not using sci-fi engine technology so the idea of

08:55only taking a couple of days to maybe a couple of weeks to fly slower than light

09:01straight across the system to a planet that's not too crazy. I wouldn't want to

09:06fly to Pluto using this kind of method but it is what it is. So that is the kind

09:14of correction that I wanted to make is in my last Battletech overview video I

09:19mentioned that they're faster than light takes a very long time. That's only true

09:23on a practical level on a person level to the average citizen in the stars yes

09:28faster than light travel is an extremely long process but to the actual FTL part

09:35of that journey it's not it's not that long at all takes a matter of seconds and

09:40that's it. I know this wasn't a terribly long rant or anything but I just kind of

09:47wanted to go over that and just mention oh hey yeah this is what I learned about

09:52the faster than light travel in the Battletech universe it's just a kind of a

09:57quick follow-up rant plus I want to talk more about Battletech in the future I think I

10:03might do more serious lore readings at some point kind of like the sort of

10:09readings that I do for SCP or for anything like that because Battletech is a lot of

10:14fun but for now I just wanted to kind of make that very loose unscripted kind of

10:20hey here's what I learned about the FTL because I think it's neat anyway thank you

10:26uh for sticking around to the end of this particular rant if you have and uh thank you for listening to my voice

10:33um

10:40you

10:42you

10:44you

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