Hope you enjoy this little diversion from the Succession Wars. Wanted to revisit some of the earliest lore in the timeline and create a more complete history of the Terran Alliance. I promise this is all REAL BattleTech Lore. I didn't make any of this up. I'm not even gonna bother telling people not to talk real-world politics in the comments because I know some of you lot won't be able to help yourself. Just know I ain't gonna engage.
Between your jumpdrive video and this one, I started wondering, are there remnants of say the Terran Alliance or other older star nations whose colony ships misjumped further a field in the Milky Way? Or is there a Maximum range during a misjump before a colony ship gets totally destroyed?
@deamondeathstone1 There are no rules on misjumps since they inherently break all the rules. If there were enough people onboard to sustain a colony and they had the good fortune (after their initial bad luck) to end up somewhere habitable, then it's entirely possible that there are some people who left during the 22nd century who remain unaware of everything that's happened since. Plenty of examples in the lore of fringe Star League era colonies who are oblivious to it's downfall until the Explorer Corps comes along centuries later.
great vid! I love Battletech but it's lore can be a bit silly sometimes; the idea that the EU could, or would even want to, merge with NAFTA without the US economy and without the US's ok is utterly bonkers XD And it'd be so simple to just write it as the US joining from the jump but disliking the equal voting in the initial Western Alliance, and this causing tensions going forward. They could have even used this to create a structural shift after the resolution of the Japan Crisis, like the US colluding with China and Japan to force the introduction of an upper legislative house where wealthier nations have a stronger say as a stipulation of the Osaka Agreements, which ultimately causes Earth's later political difficulties. These are very small changes, but they'd improve the story massively.
It was blocked out in the Kurita Housebook and Star League sourcebook in the late 80s, but a lot of the detail comes from 2010's Jihad Hot Spots: Terra sourcebook.
This stuff is absurdly early in the setting. Like it's almost impossible to see the BattleTech in it. But over the next 300 years, the world begins to transform into something that starts to resemble the setting we're familiar with. Even then, it's another century before BattleMechs appear.
Well this was every tiny scrap of info I could find on these first 40 years, but there are four more chapters covering the next 290 years releasing later this month.
Our timeline is more absurd than that. He put away the mob in the 80s as an US attorney and se ny district attorney. If he ran for president instead of mayor of New York he could have beat Bush Sr. He would have been assasinated because the CIA wanted Bush Sr. A former member of the CIA in office. How our timeline unfolded in hindsight is wilder than any fiction.
Great stuff, Sven. The Rudy callout is especially hilarious, today. I was six miles from the East German border when the wall came down, as people say now. It was a bit more complicated than that, at the time, at the sharp edge of the Warsaw Pact, but the alternate history gives me a warm glow and this was a great moment of canon.
Thank you. It's an interesting snapshot into what people in the 1980s thought might happen when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. They were closer to the end than they realised.
Thanks. This stuff is CRAZY early in the timeline. Feels like another universe. It was a real challenge to piece together, both the scripts and the video.
@SvenVanDerPlank - I always thought these early years, and how they diverge from our own, were fascinating. I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this from you. Honestly, as a 34-year-veteran of BattleTech... you, Tex, BigRed, and MechFrog make up much of my preferred listing. I greatly appreciate your work. Maybe one day I can afford to support, but for now I keep listing.
What's wild about that particular piece of lore is that at the time it was written, the author was essentially predicting what for them was going to be the next election in 2012. They thought Giuliani would beat Obama that year (probably not really, they were just pulling a semi-plausible name out of a hat).
Started your battletech lore series a month ago, finished it two weeks ago. Really cool to see how far youve come by seeing your first video covering this era and this one so close together
Great video, o Renowned Lorekeeper of the Inner Sphere! I love learning of the early BT history and how it overlaps with our own in more detail! Keep up the good work!
Excellent work, not only in researching the information, but stitching it together into a cohesive and engaging narrative. I also appreciate that you cited the works you used to put together the video. You are certainly a boon to the greater Battletech community.
Dude! Hell yeah. This is one of the eras that interests me the most from Battletech - how we got here. Kudos for redoing this Sven. I'm eager to see the rest of it!
Congrats on three years! Sven you have done such a service to the IP & for the community by making these videos so thank you! This was a great video & I'm stoked for the series!
I really like this explanation of why Fearny and Fuchida were so looked down upon. Rather than putting forth an odd theory and getting laughed out of town for it, they were spending years on far fetched research that contradicted modern physics based entirely off some odd data from a new and not fully understood technology. Further they started doing unauthorized experiments with a research accelerator to prove it (which I'd guess is specifically what cost them their jobs). that sounds much more like a pair of crack-pots. the kind of people who would have a bobbybroccoli video about them. The fact that Fuchida was sleeping with and later married a much younger researcher probably didn't help his reputation. Also I have no reason to believe this but for some reason I think the battletech presidents may have gotten out of sync with ours.
Oooh, I love this sort of thing. the backstory bits in a space opera that explained how we got here that inevitably turn into alternate history or, get ignored. it's cool in Star Trek, it's cool in Babylon 5, it's cool here. It's even cool in really old stuff like Last and First Men, which end up being completely gonzo in hindsight of how off-base the predictions were.
Hello Sven. I have long been a fan and follower of your channel. I have enjoyed your more detailed look through Battletech's history, and I like what I have seen to date. This latest sampling of your maturing style has presented facts that most players either did not know or only vaguely knew about. Even someone like myself, that has been playing the game since 1984, can get a much clearer picture of the events that shaped the Battletech Universe. Keep up the good work my friend. You are appreciated.
Thank you very much. I'm really pleased you've been enjoying the lore & history series and I've been able to include enough detail to keep even veterans interested and learning something new.
Somehow that's one of the things that sounds the most weird about this alt-history to me, even though that's closer to reality than anything else mentioned.
President Giuliani? I didn't even know that was a bit in the Lore. Its pretty crazy some writer back in the day projected forward with that. Unless its someone else aside from four seasons Giuliani. I'm hyped for more videos for the earlier lore! One thing I love about the Battletech books and such is how they talk about things from the ancient past and how crazy distant the Modern 31st century is from our 21st century world to them and what transmit through history especially after all the dang wars.
Giuliani's name popped up in a 2010 sourcebook, so not from the 1980s if that's what you were imagining. It is still pretty wild knowing how things played out. And yes, the scarcity of knowledge on this era really makes it feel like looking back a thousand years.
I am super keen for this. Being new-ish to Battletech these are the eras I really struggled to find more than token information on. One of the things that hooks me in good sci-fi is authors speculation on 'if this thing happens/if this technology comes into existence, how do people/society/institutions react in the near and long term?' and build out from there. FASA were champions at this with Shadowrun. As a kid in the 80's, money was limited and I couldn't buy into both properties and went with Shadowrun. But kept ogling all the Battletech publications and dearly wanted to read them figuring they'd be just as good as the game I did try, and still love. So Sven, your videos have been a delight.
The writers made a pretty good decision in having the timeline diverge from our own almost immediately (so 1984), by going "Yeah this SDI think? In our story that shit WORKS." Now you don't have to do that thing Star Trek does where you're trying to explain why a third of the world wasn't ruled by Khan Noonien Singh by the late 90s.
Yeah, I think most folks are unaware it goes this far back. I've seen a lot of people suggesting 1988 and the fall of the Soviet Union, but even before that we had the Excalibur satellites going up in '85.
10:20 This is why I prefer Battletech to other sci fi "FTL" ideas like with Dune in Battletech the Jumpships travel without moving, by sort of "jumping through an alternate dimension of sorts. Simply the ships seemingly disappear only to appear several light years away... Battletech is indeed a phenomenon of the ages. Great video Sven I greatly appreciate your passion for perhaps the best sci fi franchise.
If it were that simple( fiction seems better) RL is so much more chaotic. KF( suspension of disbelief) Nice fictional history from what's been written. I very good and entertaining presentation of canon. Out of the park, Sven!
Wow... Fusion reactor research in 2018?? We are 6 years behind time, we need to get General Motors to start investing into Fusion Power, we need to make sure our descendents get to see Marauder mechs stomping around by 2612!
Cheers. I'll probably redo the Age of War at some point down the line, but for now I just wanted to bring that first forgotten era of the Terran Alliance up to scratch.
Cheers, ebla. Thought it was appropriate to revisit this era for my three-year anniversary of working on BattleTech Lore & History (not to mention it coincides with BT's own 40 year anniversary).
Along with Giuliani, he's the second of two famous city mayors the sourcebook writer in 2010 predicted would become future heads of state. They were a little closer on Boris, but I did laugh when I read that it was him who suggested the creation of a new super-EU.
He was always a bit of a populist, so if the public sentiment was leaning that way after a massive Soviet war that resulted in millions of deaths, I can actually buy him making that suggestion.
Aww, we gotta wait to the next video to see the most important event in IS history! You may know of it. A little event in the early 22nd century... I refer, of course, to the founding of the longest-lasting unit in the Inner Sphere, the Second Donegal Guards, who were mustered on September 3, 2128 as the 11th Terran Rangers. They celebrate it every year; I hear Colonel Steiner is planning something wild for the 900th anniversary.
This is an exciting digression. I imagine the 3SW is going to be sufficiently difficult to turn into a coherent Sphere-wide narrative that periodic digressions to cover (or redo) more focused eras that are easier to adapt and produce will be useful for the overall channel, and BT has a surprising amount of foundational lore that isn't very well known. I like it when future histories are firm in their timeline divergences and don't try to retcon things to keep updated with real-world events.
Well I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that I'm prepared to cover the Third Succession War through to its conclusion after this now. I already wrote a history of the era earlier in the year, but I've gone back to change the way that history was told by combining the individual episodes that were focused on just one Successor State at a time into one cohesive chronological timeline.
This part of the timeline is almost a different genre in a way. Alternate history/near future sci fi. Then it's dropping Battletech specific pieces throughout as it slowly builds out from our parallel world today to the future of the setting. I also like stories where only one or two big tech break throughs occur at a time so the impact can be shown. Lasers in the mech available eras is just another weapon but, there was a point where lasers were novel on the field for example. So this older era will hopefully have some of those paradigm shift moments as the tech we know comes together over the centuries. Tuning in for more for sure.
Filling that blind spot post FedCom was what I originally started this series to do. I believe there are so many people who would be interested in the ilClan if they had a summary of everything that happened after 3067. Unfortunately, the series went a different direction and focused on the early history so it's down to someone else now.
Its a great idea to shine some light where it all started (to go wrong) with the battletech universe. As you mentioned in the vid this part of history gets very little attention normaly because theres a distinctive lack of stompy robots, genocidal noble houses, and religious telecom companies. But it none the less is an important part of battletech lore.
@SvenVanDerPlank very true, but I'm also extremely excited: season 2 of a project me and my buddy are working on has finished writing! He's gotta do editing, but after that? Production starts. First time in 15 years I got back into writing, and I'm so excited I did.
this detailed approach is better tbh, if you would revamp your old vids on the succession and terran wars as well then that would be a very welcome change, your old vids are good but this format of giving us more in-depth information rather than just glossing over some of them in order to cover a period ASAP is better for me, who wants to delve deeper into the lore but have little time to read the source novels :) thank you for these vids mate.
Thank you. That was definitely my intention. That original Terran Alliance video was just 8 minutes long. This series is going to be around 90, so there is certainly a lot of history that got skipped over before. I think it was midway through the Reunification War (certainly from the Golden Age onwards) where I really started to slow down and take my time. One day I'll probably go back to the Age of War and try to cover it more comprehensively, but I do want to continue with the Succession Wars at the moment.
Once upon a time, two dudes with easily-hyphenated last names discovered a hole in Physics. This is universally recognized as a bad sign, but unfortunately, humanity failed to heed this warning until it was too late.
Funny enough, if I had a quarter or dime for every time an FTL drive was named after two dudes who were white and Japanese, I'd have around 2 to 4 coins.
Well I'm not remaking the whole thing, just the very first video on the Terran Alliance. Felt like there was so much history in those first 300 years I skipped over.
This was interesting and very good. HILARIOUS is President Giuliani 😉😄😆😂🤣 Really FASA should have listened to Rick James "COCAINE IS A HELL OF A DRUG!"
I had someone with the surname Von Rohr confused about why searching their family history had led to one of my early BattleTech vids. Seemingly had no idea what I was rambling about.
Would be interesting to have BattleTech games set during this time period. That said such games would not be that much difference from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and tabletop systems for more real world military systems do exist. Guess you could still make missions in said tabletops (as well as for something like ArmA) that are scenarios from this early part of BT lore.
Can you imagine how mad BattleTech fans would be if they announced a new game coming out and it was set during the 21st century 😂 People would be up in arms.
This is pretty cool man. Do you think you will end up at a point in the future where you look back at even this new content and redo it? Also, do you know at what point battletech and our timelines diverge? Is it really just late 20th century? It would be interesting to know if any of our actual history was different in battletech. Maybe WW1 ended slightly differently etc.
I've always assumed that the official point of divergence would be the 29th of August 1984, the day the first Battletech product ever was published. That's not official though.
I'm in agreement with Tom Rowlette. Some of the Great Houses' earliest known members date back to the World Wars (and Cameron goes back to the medieval age), but there's nothing to suggest that the timeline had branched off until Excalibur goes up in 1985. And to your other question, I'm pretty sure I'll remake my original introductory video once I reach 3025 and at some point in the future I'll go back for the rest of the Age of War, but I don't want it to become a perpetual cycle.
@@tomrowlette9573 Ha! Well played. That being said, who is Tikonov? I mean, you don't get to be in charge of the USSR just out of the blue. He had to have some kind of background? I suppose we could this thread pulling all day and go back pretty far.
Besides 15,000,000 dead in a Soviet Civil War? No mention of viruses I suppose. Somehow China and the US ended up on the same page, but that makes you question what sort of government was in power at that moment.
@@SvenVanDerPlank Ye it does, but by the sounds of it, atleast people were getting along, i look at the world now and i cant help but sigh, 15 million dead, id take that over constant wars between god knows who
I do love the armoured vehicles in BattleTech but I think there are other YT channels who are better qualified to discuss the technology, capabilities, stats and rules than I am.
10:51 "They earned the ignominy of their peers". You can say "but their peers came to hold them in contempt" or something like that. You can't use the word "ignominy" like that; ignominy is the shame or disgrace that one has; it's a status. Ignominy is a loss of reputation that can be suffered or felt by the one who loses his or her good name, but it is not the feeling that people feel for the person who is an object of contempt. The phrase "the ignominy of their peers" would mean that their peers were the ones who experienced disgrace, which is not what you're trying to say.
@@SvenVanDerPlank i’d say its more accurate to say that they underestimated how quickly governments would pull funding for certain projects and prefer to stagnate to maintain established money streams.
So the entire Battletech universe can be summed up as "What if the Star Wars Program worked?"
Hope you enjoy this little diversion from the Succession Wars. Wanted to revisit some of the earliest lore in the timeline and create a more complete history of the Terran Alliance.
I promise this is all REAL BattleTech Lore. I didn't make any of this up.
I'm not even gonna bother telling people not to talk real-world politics in the comments because I know some of you lot won't be able to help yourself. Just know I ain't gonna engage.
Between your jumpdrive video and this one, I started wondering, are there remnants of say the Terran Alliance or other older star nations whose colony ships misjumped further a field in the Milky Way? Or is there a Maximum range during a misjump before a colony ship gets totally destroyed?
@deamondeathstone1 There are no rules on misjumps since they inherently break all the rules. If there were enough people onboard to sustain a colony and they had the good fortune (after their initial bad luck) to end up somewhere habitable, then it's entirely possible that there are some people who left during the 22nd century who remain unaware of everything that's happened since. Plenty of examples in the lore of fringe Star League era colonies who are oblivious to it's downfall until the Explorer Corps comes along centuries later.
Just a question about the 3rd succession war,when you get back to it , Is the Helm Memory Core discovered during the war or after it?
@Rellana1 Afterwards in April 3028
great vid!
I love Battletech but it's lore can be a bit silly sometimes; the idea that the EU could, or would even want to, merge with NAFTA without the US economy and without the US's ok is utterly bonkers XD And it'd be so simple to just write it as the US joining from the jump but disliking the equal voting in the initial Western Alliance, and this causing tensions going forward. They could have even used this to create a structural shift after the resolution of the Japan Crisis, like the US colluding with China and Japan to force the introduction of an upper legislative house where wealthier nations have a stronger say as a stipulation of the Osaka Agreements, which ultimately causes Earth's later political difficulties.
These are very small changes, but they'd improve the story massively.
Most excellent! Keep in mind guys, most of this timeline was written in the 1980's.
It was blocked out in the Kurita Housebook and Star League sourcebook in the late 80s, but a lot of the detail comes from 2010's Jihad Hot Spots: Terra sourcebook.
I always liked this lore. You can clearly see the point where the timeline converges from our world to the BattleTech timeline.
The EARLY 1980s. The way people viewed the world shifted drastically in tbe second half of the decade as the Warsaw Pact began imploding.
@@SvenVanDerPlank Star League is one of my favorite sourcebooks. Also there was a campaign called Living Legend with some time travel stuff.
@@Steven-dt5nu Forward only
Didn't even realise this era had lore
This stuff is absurdly early in the setting. Like it's almost impossible to see the BattleTech in it. But over the next 300 years, the world begins to transform into something that starts to resemble the setting we're familiar with. Even then, it's another century before BattleMechs appear.
I love this alternate timeline. This is great. We need more.
Well this was every tiny scrap of info I could find on these first 40 years, but there are four more chapters covering the next 290 years releasing later this month.
I'm definitely looking forward to that @@SvenVanDerPlank
@@SvenVanDerPlank Glorious!
"Sarna Unified Cartography Kit" 😆 I bet that was a helluva project.
I dunno. I hear it was a real vacuum and went no where.
@@Vagabond820 I see what you did there
SUCKit!!!!
President Giuliani? I guess it's no more absurd than the history we got...
Our timeline is more absurd than that. He put away the mob in the 80s as an US attorney and se ny district attorney. If he ran for president instead of mayor of New York he could have beat Bush Sr. He would have been assasinated because the CIA wanted Bush Sr. A former member of the CIA in office. How our timeline unfolded in hindsight is wilder than any fiction.
Great stuff, Sven. The Rudy callout is especially hilarious, today.
I was six miles from the East German border when the wall came down, as people say now. It was a bit more complicated than that, at the time, at the sharp edge of the Warsaw Pact, but the alternate history gives me a warm glow and this was a great moment of canon.
Thank you. It's an interesting snapshot into what people in the 1980s thought might happen when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. They were closer to the end than they realised.
absolutely the best video about the origin of the BT universe
Thanks. This stuff is CRAZY early in the timeline. Feels like another universe. It was a real challenge to piece together, both the scripts and the video.
@SvenVanDerPlank - I always thought these early years, and how they diverge from our own, were fascinating. I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this from you. Honestly, as a 34-year-veteran of BattleTech... you, Tex, BigRed, and MechFrog make up much of my preferred listing. I greatly appreciate your work. Maybe one day I can afford to support, but for now I keep listing.
Hey, no worries. Don't want people to feel they have to donate in order to support me. Reading these comments is always super rewarding.
President Giuliani? That didn't age well.
What's wild about that particular piece of lore is that at the time it was written, the author was essentially predicting what for them was going to be the next election in 2012. They thought Giuliani would beat Obama that year (probably not really, they were just pulling a semi-plausible name out of a hat).
@SvenVanDerPlank How hilarious then. Well, Giuliani won or Obama one, either way wasn't really gonna end well.
Started your battletech lore series a month ago, finished it two weeks ago. Really cool to see how far youve come by seeing your first video covering this era and this one so close together
Well thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed them enough to watch all the way through.
President Juliani and Prime Minister Johnson combo is great.
A recipe for disaster.
Best Battletech Lore series going on right now
Aw, thank you very much.
Great video, o Renowned Lorekeeper of the Inner Sphere! I love learning of the early BT history and how it overlaps with our own in more detail! Keep up the good work!
Excellent work, not only in researching the information, but stitching it together into a cohesive and engaging narrative. I also appreciate that you cited the works you used to put together the video. You are certainly a boon to the greater Battletech community.
Thank you very much.
Great video, very special time in Battletech universe not people are familiar with. Thank you for highlighting it!
Cheers Wrangler, and I corrected the video title as per your suggestion.
Love the alternative timeline that evolves into the BT setting. Great new entry into the series!
Thank you, glad you enjoyed it.
Dude! Hell yeah. This is one of the eras that interests me the most from Battletech - how we got here. Kudos for redoing this Sven. I'm eager to see the rest of it!
Thank you. Just finished the fourth chapter this evening so you should see at least three more videos this August.
Congrats on three years! Sven you have done such a service to the IP & for the community by making these videos so thank you!
This was a great video & I'm stoked for the series!
I really like this explanation of why Fearny and Fuchida were so looked down upon. Rather than putting forth an odd theory and getting laughed out of town for it, they were spending years on far fetched research that contradicted modern physics based entirely off some odd data from a new and not fully understood technology. Further they started doing unauthorized experiments with a research accelerator to prove it (which I'd guess is specifically what cost them their jobs). that sounds much more like a pair of crack-pots. the kind of people who would have a bobbybroccoli video about them. The fact that Fuchida was sleeping with and later married a much younger researcher probably didn't help his reputation.
Also I have no reason to believe this but for some reason I think the battletech presidents may have gotten out of sync with ours.
Oooh, I love this sort of thing. the backstory bits in a space opera that explained how we got here that inevitably turn into alternate history or, get ignored. it's cool in Star Trek, it's cool in Babylon 5, it's cool here. It's even cool in really old stuff like Last and First Men, which end up being completely gonzo in hindsight of how off-base the predictions were.
These journeys into history are nice to see. With your presentation and script they feel alive. Great work sir!
Thank you, I'm so glad so many folks have enjoyed learning about this very early time period.
president rudy giuliani is the most terrifying thing i've heard in a while lol
6:06 No way Boris Johnson is a canon character in the Battletech universe lol
And he was like the most anti-Brexit character haha!
Hello Sven.
I have long been a fan and follower of your channel. I have enjoyed your more detailed look through Battletech's history, and I like what I have seen to date. This latest sampling of your maturing style has presented facts that most players either did not know or only vaguely knew about. Even someone like myself, that has been playing the game since 1984, can get a much clearer picture of the events that shaped the Battletech Universe. Keep up the good work my friend. You are appreciated.
Thank you very much. I'm really pleased you've been enjoying the lore & history series and I've been able to include enough detail to keep even veterans interested and learning something new.
You can really tell when this was written before the 90's, but having prime minister Johnson mentioned for the UK gave me psychic damage.
He was added to lore in 2010
Somehow that's one of the things that sounds the most weird about this alt-history to me, even though that's closer to reality than anything else mentioned.
@@SvenVanDerPlank And he's pushing for economic integration into Europe, which is hilarious
President Giuliani? I didn't even know that was a bit in the Lore. Its pretty crazy some writer back in the day projected forward with that. Unless its someone else aside from four seasons Giuliani. I'm hyped for more videos for the earlier lore! One thing I love about the Battletech books and such is how they talk about things from the ancient past and how crazy distant the Modern 31st century is from our 21st century world to them and what transmit through history especially after all the dang wars.
Giuliani's name popped up in a 2010 sourcebook, so not from the 1980s if that's what you were imagining. It is still pretty wild knowing how things played out.
And yes, the scarcity of knowledge on this era really makes it feel like looking back a thousand years.
Sven, you NEVER disappoint!
Thank you.
I am super keen for this. Being new-ish to Battletech these are the eras I really struggled to find more than token information on.
One of the things that hooks me in good sci-fi is authors speculation on 'if this thing happens/if this technology comes into existence, how do people/society/institutions react in the near and long term?' and build out from there. FASA were champions at this with Shadowrun. As a kid in the 80's, money was limited and I couldn't buy into both properties and went with Shadowrun. But kept ogling all the Battletech publications and dearly wanted to read them figuring they'd be just as good as the game I did try, and still love. So Sven, your videos have been a delight.
Thank you. Really pleased you've enjoyed them and that I was able to shine a light on this forgotten early history of the setting.
i didnt realises there was lore back to the 80s
i thought 91 was the split
this is pretty cool!
The writers made a pretty good decision in having the timeline diverge from our own almost immediately (so 1984), by going "Yeah this SDI think? In our story that shit WORKS." Now you don't have to do that thing Star Trek does where you're trying to explain why a third of the world wasn't ruled by Khan Noonien Singh by the late 90s.
Yeah, I think most folks are unaware it goes this far back. I've seen a lot of people suggesting 1988 and the fall of the Soviet Union, but even before that we had the Excalibur satellites going up in '85.
10:20 This is why I prefer Battletech to other sci fi "FTL" ideas like with Dune in Battletech the Jumpships travel without moving, by sort of "jumping through an alternate dimension of sorts. Simply the ships seemingly disappear only to appear several light years away...
Battletech is indeed a phenomenon of the ages.
Great video Sven I greatly appreciate your passion for perhaps the best sci fi franchise.
Thank you. I'm really pleased you've been enjoying the BattleTech videos I've created.
Hell yeah i love exploratory stuff keep at it hope its fun and you get to try stuff ya dont normally get to try but wanted too
Absolutely excellent!! Well done
If it were that simple( fiction seems better) RL is so much more chaotic. KF( suspension of disbelief) Nice fictional history from what's been written. I very good and entertaining presentation of canon. Out of the park, Sven!
Goddamnit even in Battletech everything is Regan's fault! :P
From the beginning...
There was... the **CUBE!**
@@griffingamer8624 I didn't realize Sacred Cow Shipyards was getting involved...
I love these detailed breakdowns, fantastic work.
the bit with ‘prime minister johnsson urging intergration with the European common market’ is the most hilarious idea I’ve heard all week.
Sweet naivety. Sourcebook was written in a pre-Brexit world.
@@SvenVanDerPlank Rasalhaguexit means Rasalhaguexit
The early 2000's era of Battletech is a really interesting alternative timeline in its own right.
Thank you very much for the time and effort you put into this!
Love it, keep up the great work.
Really interesting to hear battletechs alternative history of the modern era
President Guiliani...
I legitimately spat out my drink.
Can't wait for more of this series!
I really enjoy all the work you've done on all of your lore videos. These will be a great addition to the early history. Keep up the great work!
Cheers, glad to hear it.
So this is the time line we live in…
Thanks!
Thank you very much for the kind donation, Jim.
This was a nice surprise.
Cheers, Bill. Glad you enjoyed it.
@@SvenVanDerPlankMany thanks, good sir.
Amazing vid. Thanks.
Nicely done
This is great, well done! Love your content/work.
Thank you, pleased you're enjoying it.
Great video, I’m looking forward to Fourth Succession War video series that conflict is one of my favorite in Battletech.
Wow... Fusion reactor research in 2018?? We are 6 years behind time, we need to get General Motors to start investing into Fusion Power, we need to make sure our descendents get to see Marauder mechs stomping around by 2612!
Very well made, nice vid
Cheers, glad you liked it.
@@SvenVanDerPlank always, don't think I've seen a vid i don't enjoy yet
It's good to see you revisit some of the earliest lore, and the oldest videos with your newer tone and skillset.
Cheers. I'll probably redo the Age of War at some point down the line, but for now I just wanted to bring that first forgotten era of the Terran Alliance up to scratch.
Excellent work Sven!!! I love the videos showing the origin of Battletech. You are doing marvelous work.
Cheers, ebla. Thought it was appropriate to revisit this era for my three-year anniversary of working on BattleTech Lore & History (not to mention it coincides with BT's own 40 year anniversary).
@@SvenVanDerPlank well you are doing very well. I enjoyed the style of your earliest work, and I love how it has evolved. Very fine work.
Awesome vid ❤
This is interesting to see how BattleTech started and diverts from what we know.
Really enjoying the deep Boris Johnson lore.
Along with Giuliani, he's the second of two famous city mayors the sourcebook writer in 2010 predicted would become future heads of state. They were a little closer on Boris, but I did laugh when I read that it was him who suggested the creation of a new super-EU.
@@SvenVanDerPlankthat just pushes this timeline into the realms of extreme fantasy!
He was always a bit of a populist, so if the public sentiment was leaning that way after a massive Soviet war that resulted in millions of deaths, I can actually buy him making that suggestion.
Aww, we gotta wait to the next video to see the most important event in IS history! You may know of it. A little event in the early 22nd century...
I refer, of course, to the founding of the longest-lasting unit in the Inner Sphere, the Second Donegal Guards, who were mustered on September 3, 2128 as the 11th Terran Rangers. They celebrate it every year; I hear Colonel Steiner is planning something wild for the 900th anniversary.
Hahaha, now THAT is an obscure bit of lore. Hope they have a good party.
Great video!
This is an exciting digression. I imagine the 3SW is going to be sufficiently difficult to turn into a coherent Sphere-wide narrative that periodic digressions to cover (or redo) more focused eras that are easier to adapt and produce will be useful for the overall channel, and BT has a surprising amount of foundational lore that isn't very well known.
I like it when future histories are firm in their timeline divergences and don't try to retcon things to keep updated with real-world events.
Well I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that I'm prepared to cover the Third Succession War through to its conclusion after this now. I already wrote a history of the era earlier in the year, but I've gone back to change the way that history was told by combining the individual episodes that were focused on just one Successor State at a time into one cohesive chronological timeline.
Man hearing this what if future from the 80s is WILD
Happy Anniversary. Looking FWD to the rest
Cheers, hoping to finish it this August.
This part of the timeline is almost a different genre in a way. Alternate history/near future sci fi. Then it's dropping Battletech specific pieces throughout as it slowly builds out from our parallel world today to the future of the setting. I also like stories where only one or two big tech break throughs occur at a time so the impact can be shown. Lasers in the mech available eras is just another weapon but, there was a point where lasers were novel on the field for example. So this older era will hopefully have some of those paradigm shift moments as the tech we know comes together over the centuries. Tuning in for more for sure.
thanks mate for catching me up on
im still waiting for someone to catch me up from 3067 to what we are at now 31 somthing
Filling that blind spot post FedCom was what I originally started this series to do. I believe there are so many people who would be interested in the ilClan if they had a summary of everything that happened after 3067. Unfortunately, the series went a different direction and focused on the early history so it's down to someone else now.
@@SvenVanDerPlank well ill be tuning in mate your doing a amazing job keep it up
and thank you
Awesome
Its a great idea to shine some light where it all started (to go wrong) with the battletech universe. As you mentioned in the vid this part of history gets very little attention normaly because theres a distinctive lack of stompy robots, genocidal noble houses, and religious telecom companies. But it none the less is an important part of battletech lore.
We had Return Of The Living Dead on the Kill Count, a new Roanoke Gaming video, and a BattleTech lore video? Very good day indeed!
That's a diverse range of entertainment.
@SvenVanDerPlank very true, but I'm also extremely excited: season 2 of a project me and my buddy are working on has finished writing! He's gotta do editing, but after that? Production starts.
First time in 15 years I got back into writing, and I'm so excited I did.
you have done Good!!
this detailed approach is better tbh, if you would revamp your old vids on the succession and terran wars as well then that would be a very welcome change, your old vids are good but this format of giving us more in-depth information rather than just glossing over some of them in order to cover a period ASAP is better for me, who wants to delve deeper into the lore but have little time to read the source novels :) thank you for these vids mate.
Thank you. That was definitely my intention. That original Terran Alliance video was just 8 minutes long. This series is going to be around 90, so there is certainly a lot of history that got skipped over before. I think it was midway through the Reunification War (certainly from the Golden Age onwards) where I really started to slow down and take my time. One day I'll probably go back to the Age of War and try to cover it more comprehensively, but I do want to continue with the Succession Wars at the moment.
Once upon a time, two dudes with easily-hyphenated last names discovered a hole in Physics.
This is universally recognized as a bad sign, but unfortunately, humanity failed to heed this warning until it was too late.
We did do our best to bury the research for 80 years.
Funny enough, if I had a quarter or dime for every time an FTL drive was named after two dudes who were white and Japanese, I'd have around 2 to 4 coins.
Good 'ol Hitchhiker's Guide reference.
@@anionleaderHalo, BT, and what else?
@spartanalex9006 It's a video game but I am not too sure.
Rudi Guliani became President?😂😂😂
Assuming the election dates remain the same, he ran instead of Mitt Romney and won in what would have been Obama's second term.
@@SvenVanDerPlankI seem to remember 1 btech source that said mccain became us president in 2000.
I've never come across anything that mentions his name, but that might have been said somewhere out there.
Your old videos are good enough.
Well I'm not remaking the whole thing, just the very first video on the Terran Alliance. Felt like there was so much history in those first 300 years I skipped over.
This was interesting and very good. HILARIOUS is President Giuliani 😉😄😆😂🤣 Really FASA should have listened to Rick James "COCAINE IS A HELL OF A DRUG!"
Great video…I had a bit of a laugh at “President Rudy Giuliani”
this video is going to pop up in the results of people researching the actual cold war and M.A.D. and they're gonna be so confused
I had someone with the surname Von Rohr confused about why searching their family history had led to one of my early BattleTech vids. Seemingly had no idea what I was rambling about.
Comment for the algorithm
Sweet!!!!
Would be interesting to have BattleTech games set during this time period. That said such games would not be that much difference from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and tabletop systems for more real world military systems do exist. Guess you could still make missions in said tabletops (as well as for something like ArmA) that are scenarios from this early part of BT lore.
Can you imagine how mad BattleTech fans would be if they announced a new game coming out and it was set during the 21st century 😂 People would be up in arms.
@@SvenVanDerPlank It would be HILARIOUS! I'd love it!
And so.. The history of the future begins.. The beginning of the beginning.
This is pretty cool man. Do you think you will end up at a point in the future where you look back at even this new content and redo it? Also, do you know at what point battletech and our timelines diverge? Is it really just late 20th century? It would be interesting to know if any of our actual history was different in battletech. Maybe WW1 ended slightly differently etc.
I've always assumed that the official point of divergence would be the 29th of August 1984, the day the first Battletech product ever was published. That's not official though.
I'm in agreement with Tom Rowlette. Some of the Great Houses' earliest known members date back to the World Wars (and Cameron goes back to the medieval age), but there's nothing to suggest that the timeline had branched off until Excalibur goes up in 1985.
And to your other question, I'm pretty sure I'll remake my original introductory video once I reach 3025 and at some point in the future I'll go back for the rest of the Age of War, but I don't want it to become a perpetual cycle.
@@tomrowlette9573 Ha! Well played. That being said, who is Tikonov? I mean, you don't get to be in charge of the USSR just out of the blue. He had to have some kind of background? I suppose we could this thread pulling all day and go back pretty far.
@@chadweirick Probably he's based on this guy, but who knows? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Tikhonov
Man, the near future parts of 1980s scifi were goofy AF
Woot!
Is it just me or does this history sound alot better then our current (real) one...
Besides 15,000,000 dead in a Soviet Civil War?
No mention of viruses I suppose. Somehow China and the US ended up on the same page, but that makes you question what sort of government was in power at that moment.
@@SvenVanDerPlank Ye it does, but by the sounds of it, atleast people were getting along, i look at the world now and i cant help but sigh, 15 million dead, id take that over constant wars between god knows who
The world actually uniting in 2024...god I miss the optimism of the 80s lol
Not quite the whole world yet. Unfortunately, the Western Alliance becomes dysfunctional pretty quickly.
@@SvenVanDerPlank Now THAT is what I alway loved about Battletech lore. The inevitable, looming stupidity, malevolence, and of course war crimes.
Do one on Battle Tech tanks. They are more dangerous than you think
I do love the armoured vehicles in BattleTech but I think there are other YT channels who are better qualified to discuss the technology, capabilities, stats and rules than I am.
For the part of the timeline this video covers the relevant designs would be things like the M1A2 SEPv3, T-90, T-72B3, Leopard 2A7, and Challenger II.
Knowing the reality I wonder what the wrtiner of the 2010 sourcebook thinks in hindsight about saying Guliani becomes president
10:51 "They earned the ignominy of their peers". You can say "but their peers came to hold them in contempt" or something like that. You can't use the word "ignominy" like that; ignominy is the shame or disgrace that one has; it's a status. Ignominy is a loss of reputation that can be suffered or felt by the one who loses his or her good name, but it is not the feeling that people feel for the person who is an object of contempt. The phrase "the ignominy of their peers" would mean that their peers were the ones who experienced disgrace, which is not what you're trying to say.
Cheers for the correction. Poor writing on my part there.
So a President Giuliani is legit lore canon?!
And so it begins. But greed, greed never changes.
Fucking Rudy Giuliani.... That's hilarious!!
While not ideal, many aspects of this origin rock. A moon base by 2016.
Yeah, they were a little too ambitious with their science predictions.
@@SvenVanDerPlank i’d say its more accurate to say that they underestimated how quickly governments would pull funding for certain projects and prefer to stagnate to maintain established money streams.
A tad early for prime minister bojo
Ah yes, the Mackie of Innersphere houses.
Not quite a dynasty yet, but we'll start to see the first of a future noble family in the next chapter.
Just thinking if BT was invented today, the lore would possibly suggest that Musk was the founder of what would eventually become Comstar. Lol
🤣 President Giuliani
When was that alternate backstory written? Oh nm, Boris Johnson is in it.
It was written in 2010
God, I knew that Giuliani became president in BT, but you saying it killed me.
So... we can blame the state of humanity in BattleTech on Boris Johnson. Got it.