A Geek History of Time - Episode 341 - Who Would Win Part One of Many, Warhammer vs Battletech

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

you know the thing is you have you have reached farther for less good to be blunt the money in tabletop games isn't great we have to wind up with the church of England because obvi I'll start you're here to be the expert but um but that doesn't stop that one oddly doesn't make me angry because you know who's the boss you know what I'm going to keep my head down and be as inoffensive as I can to everybody possible, and that's it. You want to fight? I'm going to dry hump your leg until we're friends. Of course, reminded me of that one woman that I went on a single date with who said, you know, the downside about my job is that we don't show kids drowning anymore. This is a geek history of time.

Where we connect nerdery to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a world history teacher here in Northern California. And earlier today, I don't even remember how it got started. Lee, my wife, went looking for some old photos from her high school days. And she wound up spending much of the afternoon going through a bunch of old photos. And in the late afternoon, you know, early evening before you and I sat down to start recording, she and I went out and as we were heading out she got kind of pensive for a moment

and she said you know I'm kind of having I'm having a little bit of a moment because I was looking through those old photos and some of my old yearbook stuff and you've seen the pictures yeah was I hot in high school because like I never thought I was but like I one of the guys in my sophomore year yearbook told me that he wanted to see what I looked like in a transparent bikini. And, and I said, well, he was saying out loud what I'm sure plenty of teenage boys were thinking, but knew not to say, because that's, that's stepping over several lines there. But, yeah, I, I, I, we've, we've said before that, you know, I would have totally, totally wanted to try to ask you out in high school and you would have had nothing to do with me. So, like, this is established. And yes, I'm not, I'm not sure where you're sitting and your complicated feelings on this.

But yeah, I have to confirm that you, you were actually hot in high school. So, yeah. and she showed me like because she had gotten into a conversation with her BFF about this and was you know sending sending pictures to her and uh yeah my wife my wife she said you know I knew that I was fun and I knew that people liked me because I was you know fun and bubbly and outgoing and all that I'm like yeah yeah you are yes and I'm sure you were then and but you know I didn't I didn't think of myself that way I said, yeah, no, I'm pretty sure every boy you interacted with did. Like having been a 15, 16 year old boy, yeah, yeah, you, yes. And, and, you know, I hope, I hope me telling this to you isn't some kind of, you know, identity shaking, you know, thing. But yeah, you were. So, so, yeah, I'm very glad that I met my wife when we were both in our late 30s.

and I had a shot. So, yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's what happened to me this afternoon. Um, how about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I am a U.S. history teacher at the high school level up here in Northern California. Um, and I actually, uh, I had a friend sent me a picture of himself from, uh, God, probably 10 years ago. Uh, and, uh, and, of course, um, and, of course, um, um, and, um, and, of course, course you know we all swell um and uh he's like he's like i was too skinny here right and then he

shows me a picture of like 10 years ago when he had a beard the thing is it was not much of a beard um because different people grow beards at different rates right yeah and now he's got a beard and you know it's a six week growth and it's approach like i told him i said the first picture looks like you're a guy who uh who will will knows how to detail my car um the second picture looks like you're a guy who knows where i can just get some discount stereo equipment um and then i sent him pictures of me uh from i was like well you know here i was at that time and and and yeah i used to have really red hair yeah you did don't now um but uh i i showed him you know i sent him pictures of me when i was you know around that age um and the uh the the the

difference in me at this weight versus that weight and you know like here i was it like you know at this weight and and he you know i was like also i was you know 20 years younger uh and stuff like that and then i sent him a picture of the night i got my master's degree and i was living in the apartments over by uh you know cal expo at the time which is where everybody in sacramento knows somebody who has lived there or did in fact live there themselves are you are you talking about the ones like right across the street from it yeah okay oh jesus okay right cool yeah so this is this was literally well let's see this is 20 like as of this recording it's 20 25 this was 20 years ago uh 19 years ago okay and i had

gotten cooked out in the sun that day, but the motorboard was right there. So I have this white strip across my head. Oh, man. And we talked about, like, taking a picture of it and saying your ad here and all kinds of stuff. But there was a picture of a buddy of mine who worked right across the hall from me. And there's a math teacher. And he was his second year into his career. I was like fourth year into my career, but like first year or second year at that site, You know, that kind of person. He was three years into his career. And I said, hey, do you recognize this guy?

He says, I don't. I said, oh, that's so-and-so. He's like, oh, man, what the hell? And it was pretty funny. And then I sent him a few other pictures of me when I was, you know, pre-William, post-William, you know, and you could start to see this well. All that to say is I got on the scale today. And I'm one of those people who gets on the scale every day because I like to see change over time and micro change and stuff like that.

And I also recognize that a number is a number, but some numbers mean more than others. Right. This morning, I weighed as much as I did on March 13th, 2020. Wow. I have not weighed my pre-COVID weight until today. Nice. now I have no idea when this is going to release so I might have already gone up 20 pounds again

but this means I can comfortably wear extra large shirts again nice yeah so I'm going to keep at it whatever it is I'm doing I'm going to keep doing it but yeah that's uh meanwhile my son by the way has has gained significant weight because we've been in the gym all summer oh and I

I don't know if I told this story on the air yet, but I, we, at the beginning of the gym in this, and I realize I'm stressed, my, my thing is let's keep this short and here I am stretching it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, whatever. At the beginning of our time at the gym, first thing I did was I, we have to establish our maximums at each exercise. So I know what to do because we're working toward endurance, right? Because of his cerebral palsy, endurance is good. And so we worked all our maximums. And then on the way home, I told him, I said, you know, to be perfectly honest, your physique, as it is right now, you absolutely, if you wanted to, we could stack mass on you and you could build some pretty big muscles. Like, you are right at that perfect spot.

To do that, you have the kind of build that will accept that and we'll turn it into shaped muscle. Yeah. We're not a McFoley family. We are maybe a Seamus family, but. okay um you know i told him that he looked at me and he sat there for a second he's like no i'm pretty happy with the way i look let's just work on endurance cool i've never been so proud so nice yeah anyway um that's that's what's going on with me what about you what do what do what are you bring into the party tonight well um so i got

thinking um i don't even remember what what conversation or what it was that that came up Uh, actually, now I do. Um, I got together with, with, uh, friend of the show, Sean. And, um, my former, uh, roommate and, you know, other brother from another mother, uh, Alex, um, few weekends ago. And, um, have I met Alex? At my wedding. I bet at your birthdays. He was, he was, yes, he was at, he was at, he was at my 50th. okay okay um yeah um and so we we got talking and the conversation came up that you know as science fiction nerds we have had the debate and we've seen the debate in in science fiction circles right in fandom you know it people always bring up well you know uh star trek versus star wars you know who'd win. Okay. And, you know, and we've, and we've heard that one. And like in comic books, it's just a thing all the time of like, well, you know, Wolverine should have kicked Spidey's ass or vice versa. There was literally a series called Avengers versus X-Men. Yeah. And then

there's another X-Men versus inhumans. Like, yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, wrote the intro to Avengers versus X-Men, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So, so like, there are these, these, these, kind of arguments you know Superman versus you know the Hulk sure one that's been done over and over and over again right but there are a lot of you know who would win kind of mashups that haven't gotten the same level of attention and talking with Sean and Alex I was like you know I want to know and like four or five just kind of kind of came out just thinking about it all right

See if I'm on the same page as you Let's hear yours Okay, well So first let me explain that like this This is going to be you've you've Dipped your toe in a few things that are going to be kind of one shot like every so often We're going to go back and revisit kind of series And this is going to be mine

This is science fiction who would win mashups That we don't hear about Like that you haven't heard people like spend a lot of time arguing about Okay And so my first one is, and now I remember exactly how the line of thinking, I remember how the line of thinking came about, it was like talking about battle tech and the universe of battle tech. Okay. And thinking about Adeptus Titanicus in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. All right.

And realizing that they are very similar narratives. viewed through very, very different lenses. And then I thought about, okay, no, seriously, if we take Warlord Titans and we throw them up against mecks from Battletech, who'd win? And so this is what this episode is going to be about. But like, what are you thinking of as other ideas? Because, like, I'm furiously taking notes about other ideas I can do this one.

So who's a better sexual partner, Batman or Robin? not the same thing but you know I think canonically it depends on which Robin no I don't think at all I think Robin will beat Batman every time because they'll go down

Batman doesn't do that so yeah which which author was it we heard that from like canonics now like similar canonical yeah my god really yeah so yeah but no okay

so like i i i'm thinking super power battles you know that kind of shit or like who'd win in a fight um like uh the highlander uh the adrian paul highlander obviously yeah um or uh or uh what's his fucking name uh strider um okay like you know things like that like or right now and down because that's a good one right um because you you're a sword nerd so you'd be all about like Yeah, I'm already, I'm already thinking about it like, well, shit. Right. Yeah. Or like, what else was I thinking?

So who would be better to go on a first date with? Okay. You know, Cap or Tony. Yeah, okay. I have my immediate answer right there. Yeah, but there's no guarantee of a second date. So, okay. All right, good point.

Do you, you know, do you want, like, yeah, It's one of those things, right? Like, do you want it for the experience or do you want it for like or do you want it for the bragging story, you know, that kind of thing? Yeah, stuff like that. So who would like a lot of fighting based, but also like other mundane task based. Yeah. See, now that you've brought that up, I've got to expand the range of what I was thinking about because all of mine are, you know, you know, match up. You know, versus, you know, kind of stuff.

Yeah. But I like that. Yeah. So, like, one of the other ideas that is part of my initial string of ideas for this. And the very next episode I plan on doing here, I'm going to need you to bring your A game because you're actually going to have to put in some effort on it. Okay. Because I'm going to want you to argue because I know the tyrannids from 40K really well. Okay.

Because 40K is my. That's your thing, yeah. But you, sir, are the expert on the Eujon Vong. Oh. And see, the Eugen Vong versus the tyranids, because the concepts behind them are really similar. Well, and these are both groups that are like, as I understand the tyrannids, and I may be wrong. Okay. It's their, they don't have.

one leader that you're like oh my god they don't have an alexander the grade they've just got basic leaders right and the usual they're wrong yeah while you have a few named guys to have a law and but they're easily replaced like you have again a whole system so that's a that's a there is some semblance of kind of a hive mind right that's whereas the tyrannids are explicitly a hive mind oh no no the eugenvong don't have a hive mind but they do have fanaticism Yes. So, see, that's, that's going to be, that's, that's what I have in mind for the next time I do this. All right.

So, but this time. I'm sorry, I'm still distracted. I'm like, speedball versus super boy. Good luck punching him. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So.

Okay. Okay. Tonight, though. Yes. Because this, this was the idea that gave me the, the concept for this series. This is the or episode, yes. Yeah, this is the URA episode. And we're going to talk about battle tech versus Adeptus Titanicus.

Okay. And so first we're going to talk about the background and the lore of the two games. All right. So just in case people want to go back to episode three. Yes. But also I think episode like 9 and 10 or something like that. Like you hit battle tech early. Yeah, I hit battle tech right out the gate.

You also hit you also hit, you also hit, 40K right out the fucking gate Yeah, but when I hit 40K right out the gate I didn't get very much into Titans True as a thing But I was just thinking in terms of lore Oh yeah, yeah And I did talk about very early on

I don't remember which episode it was But talking about the giant robot genre Yes I feel like those were all within the first 12 episodes Because like if you just take out the chunk of me doing pro wrestling It was you doing those three things yeah yeah yeah so battle tech mm-hmm of the of the two battle tech came first in 1984 is when battle tech was was first published and now to talk about the background of the

battle tech universe to paint with a very broad brush humanity develops faster than light travel sometime in the early 22nd century and by the way just as a side note we are already behind the the tech timeline of the battle tech universe when this was written in the 1980s they they looked into the future and saw commercial fusion plants working in 2021 you know we might have done that had you know we not had a dry drunk evangelical as president yeah well missed opportunities yeah missions to mars using fusion drives in 2027 okay so Still could happen. Yeah, you know, yeah.

Expansion from Earth happens, and 108 planets are colonized within 60 years. God damn. Yeah. And... Do some of them only have, like, three families on them, though? Is it like Wyoming? They are... Yeah, a lot of them are very sparsely populated.

Obviously, the ones closer to Earth grow faster, grow faster, grow... bigger, faster. Okay. At this point in the timeline. Sure. And sometime before this colonization effort, there was a unified Terran government called the Terran Alliance that was formed. Okay.

And so this is the 2100s. By the year 2235, there are over 600 worlds colonized. And in 2242, the Terran Alliance effectively grants. independence to any world more than 30 light years away from Terra. Okay. So you're far enough away. You're too far away. We can't maintain.

We have a clamp down on issues that we've got here closer to home. We're going to, on the one hand, we're going to stop micromanaging you and telling you how you got to do shit. On the other hand, you're on your own. Okay. Okay. And the great houses arise in the region's outside direct Terran control. The first of them is House Merrick, founded in 2247.

The last of the great houses formed is Lowe in the 2360s. I know these names. Oh, yeah, well, yeah, you spent enough time. Yeah. Well, I mean, I worked at virtual world, too. Yeah. But, like, those, that only signified what color your mech would have on, like, it's piping. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So the Terran Alliance eventually gave way to the Terran hegemony. Okay. Hegemony. Hegemony. We've never been able to figure out hegemony, which used a combination of technological blackmail and a threat of armed force to bring the great houses and their successor states. So there's, for example, there's House Lao, which is the great house that controls the state of the Capellan Confederation.

Okay. House Merrick is the great house in charge of the Free World League. Okay. House Steiner is the house in charge of the Lyran Commonwealth. Okay. So there's the distinction between the houses and the states that the houses run. Okay. And so I'm leaving, by the way, anybody who is familiar with with the

battle tech universe knows that I am jumping over a ton oh just so much shit um part of the thing that makes battle tech and the inner sphere so incredibly compelling to me is that everything is written like a history book uh the way the successor states backstories uh all got written uh means that there is a very very deep and very detailed alternative future history involved in the setting gotcha by the by yeah giant robots episode was episode 19 oh there we go like that far back oh yeah yeah um jesus literally years ago holy cow yeah wow that was that was when i was still had the bad habit of banging on the table um yeah yeah it was pre-covid yeah um so the star league which is which is what the the terran

Taryn Hegemini formed the Star League. They brought the successor states under their control, nominally, under their control. And the Star League managed to last until 2779. Okay. And it became also a hereditary, hereditary dynastic kind of government with the Cameron family, holding the position of first lord of the Star League. All right.

So think of, historically kind of think of a situation kind of like the Holy Roman Empire. So just a chin that's just getting out of control. Well, you probably, if it had gone on very much longer, almost certainly. But I mean more politically in that you have the figure who is recognized as being,

okay, this is the legitimate overall authority over everybody and he can you know legitimately tell people what to do but the individual barons or

electors in the case of the Holy Roman Empire electors all have their little territory and they have their own political power and military power that they can throw around you know and depending on who is the emperor, um, there's waxing and waning of like how much attention is really paid to what,

to what the, in this case, the first lord says, sure, you know, as opposed to, you know, if it's a weak first lord, then, you know, the houses kind of start throwing their weight around more. So the Star League ends in a massive, uh, civil war called the Ameris coup. Okay. Uh, the Cameron family are all killed off. The last, the last Cameron is, is murdered in the penultimate, uh, battle. Basically, the, the armies of the Starly, the armies that are loyal to the Cameron family,

uh, managed to, you know, make it back to Tara, uh, or wherever it is that Amaris was holding the last Cameron. And, uh, you know, as, uh, Kerensky, uh, you know, breaches the walls with his Atlas, uh, you know, basically Stefan Amaris, murder. ordered the last heir to the Cameron family before being crushed. And since the Camerons were the dynasty that had ruled the Star League, the great houses pretty quickly fell upon one another, each of them claiming the first lordship. And this is the root of what later becomes the clan invasions because the huge portion of the Star League military

pack up and leave because Kerensky and the units that chose to be loyal to him and to the idea of the Star League looked at what the great houses were doing and they were like no fuck this we're not going to be part of it

we're not going to get sucked into your petty bullshit we're taking our toys and we're going home or actually we're leaving home we're packing everything up you know in a little swag bag and we're leaving and so they you know huge

huge number of military units all of a sudden just you know disappear they they fuck off and for the purposes of the rest of this episode we're not going to talk about them because we're focused on the intersphere here

okay so the Star League era this whole period of time was a technological golden age with a remarkably high standard of living and a life expectancy of about a hundred and eight years in most of the inner sphere

uh and widespread high tech so battle tech never got the the the star league never got to like star trek level of magic woo-woo right but they got to uh you know very consistently you know remarkably high tech you know faster than light communications being relatively straightforward and easy

um you know know, and they, they figured out ways to, you know, fusion technology was commonplace. I'm trying to think of other examples, but just all kinds of, like, almost magical high tech was a thing. And, like, on the periphery, of course, if you're, if you're far away from the center of the inner sphere, life was not that easy. But in the setting, people look back to the start. League as a time of scientific knowledge, stability, and prosperity. It is, it is, you know, the golden age. Right.

So, the succession wars started almost immediately, and at first they were marked by the use of nuclear weapons and widespread total warfare. So there had been military agreements during, you know, the beginning early era of the Star League where everybody had agreed, hey, these. These are the Ares Accords, and we all agree we're not going to do these things. We're not going to target civilian populations. Wink, quake. Nuclear weapons are off the table.

We're not going to do that. Well, you know, Kerenzky fucks off and the houses look at each other and like, no, screw that. And they just start blasting. And so this meant that over the course of centuries, manufacturing and scientific facilities were destroyed. And the ability to reproduce a lot of this test. was severely diminished or lost completely okay and so by the third succession war in 2866 the inner sphere could fairly be described as having been had a pardon me as having been blasted into a dark age a relative dark age not a relative

a relative dark age yeah yeah uh mech warriors were piloting machines that in some cases had been handed down to them for four generations society operated on a feudal basis. Rulership by the great houses was more or less authoritarian, depending on where you were. Which house you mean? And even when a declared war wasn't being fought, low-level skirmishing and raiding between houses was constant. And so the game started, like the setting that they present to you in the first box set, is the year 3025. Okay.

So, um, there, there has basically been. So a thousand years from now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it was written in 85 or so or 84 or so. 83, 84. Yeah.

So, okay. So, um, and by this time, without there being a formal kind of written treaty about it, the great houses have all kind of agreed and Comstar, I haven't mentioned yet, um, has, as, as kind of enforced on the houses is something like a code of conduct. And one of the biggest things is in space battles, you cannot target jump ships, which are the ships that travel from star system to star system. Those are off limits because we like trying to build one of those now is like building a cathedral.

Like that's going to take 20 years to construct one now. And if you do it to one group, then they're going to do it like, It's, you're going to make it so nobody's connected anymore. Yeah. And then what do we have? Peace. Yeah, well, yeah.

And targeting communications facilities. So ComStar controls the hyper, call it hyperlink for, I don't remember the term of it, but essentially the communications relays that allow for faster than light communication between star systems. So they are the ones holding everybody kind of by the short and curleys because in order to govern effectively over interstellar distances, hyper pulse something generators, HPPG stations are really necessary. And if you target an HPPG installation, they will excommunicate you, which I'll get to in a moment, and cut you off. and nobody can nobody can afford to have that happen

so like particular kinds of infrastructure cannot be targeted and mostly warfare is being fought over control of technological infrastructure so you don't

want to blast the mech factory you want to capture the mech factory right right so most worlds are living in a reduced state of technology.

Worlds closer to the capitals of the successor states generally have a higher tech level than outlying worlds. Periphery states out on the very fringes of the intersphere are especially poor. Living is especially rough. And we have giant fusion-powered robots slugging it out with all manner of weaponry, including particle projection cannons and 100 to 500 megawatt lasers. yep and gouse rifles yeah well later on gouse rifles don't gouse rifles are lost tech okay that didn't get introduced to the game until oh it was the 30 damn when was it it was the star league star league um supplement for the game because it was basically

hey, as amidst the chaos of the fourth succession war, a bunch of Star League Star League tech has been discovered. Basically, we found armories that they left behind and they have all this high-tech shit. And gauze rifles,

the first time gauze rifles appear that was part of that. Okay. And then really good gouse rifles showed up during the clan invasions. But that's, again, a topic for another time. So, the one faction in universe that

still has access to genuine scientific knowledge is as I've mentioned Comstar and over the centuries they organized themselves or one of the leaders

of Comstar organized them as a religious order utilize their religious trappings as a way to maintain their control

of the knowledge and as a way to kind of manipulate the rubes right but over the centuries they've bought into their own k-fabe and by 3025 they are in fact religious fanatics they've worked themselves they've they've they've

worked themselves into a shoot yeah yes precisely yes um they I actually have the note here. They've started to believe their own K-Fabe and have become a techno cult. Yeah. So to explain what mechs are in the setting, a battlemec is a walking tank. Yes.

They stand between about 8 to 20 meters in height. So between 25 to 60 feet tall. They weigh between 20 and 100 tons. Yes. And before I go any farther with any kind of technical statistics here, all of this is entirely arbitrary and not attached to any kind of any kind of realistic calculation of hey what would a you know 60 foot tall walking tank actually weigh no if you want to try to impose reality on any of this it all falls apart almost instantaneously yeah like like any kind of giant robot anything but like if you really really want to look at specifics about tonnage or the wattage of these lasers or most famously engagement ranges right the distances are shooting at each other over you're going to be like

they're way like compared to to tank combat today they're way close like yes they are really they have to fit everything they have to fit everything on a map board that'll fit on a table so like yeah that's a kilometer in distance basically yeah so so everything everything everything is that comparatively short ranges to what we know like guided missiles today are like are you are you slightly beyond the horizon yeah i can hit you right in battle tech it don't work that way and they and they have they have tried in the fiction and in the in the setting to kind of try to explain why that is and like okay great whatever it's a game about giant robots blasting each other so it's it's Woo-woo, don't spend too much time thinking about it.

Just to get that out of the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so top speeds for battlemecks range from 35 kilometers per hour, 20 miles per hour, which, by the way, you being a mech warrior guy, you're familiar with mex. 35KPH, 20 miles an hour. You want to know what the example mech was that I found that had that slow, walking speed the annihilator that's a good one yeah but the one the one that

got listed was way smaller what's the what urban mac the what urban mac oh the urban mac yeah yeah okay those guys carry a fucking uh AC on them and it just hits hard oh yeah

all they got depending on yeah depending on which model it is yeah um I fucking in the game I fucking hate them yeah neck warrior I cannot stand urban mex I'm like guys go take that one out I'll go take out these other three yeah because you're so short too um for for listeners who who are completely unfamiliar or we're mostly unfamiliar with battle tech imagine r2d2 at like you know uh 25 feet tall yeah and that's that's an urban meck basically it's got a big dome head uh Two squat little legs.

Yeah, and two lasers and maybe an auto cannon. Yeah, and a big ass gun hanging off one side. Yeah. So, and that brings me to, Battlemax use a wide variety of armaments from auto cannons to guided missiles to the aforementioned megawatt lasers and lightning cannons, sorry, PPCs. which is basically what a PPC is it shoots a lightning bolt and battle necks are rare

they are expensive and as mentioned before many of them have been passed down for generations right now with that being said this is an important point when we get farther along they can still be produced at a rate of about two to three medium mex per factory

per month. Okay. And one heavy or assault mech per factory every one to two months. Okay. Now, this is not quite as fast as modern tanks or jet fighters at full production, but they're comparable. Yeah. Okay.

Takes a lot to go into them. Yes. Yes. Is this why you get so upset when you see how many atlases I have? Yes. Okay. Well, that's part of it. The only part of it is I see how many atlas.

as you manage to salvage. I'm just like, god damn it, anytime I go into a mission with a difficulty over like 85, I'm sweating. Like I, yeah, yeah. And to get that kind of salvage

in the video game, you have to be way up there. And working for somebody who really likes you. Oh, yeah. I absolutely am like the darling of Curita this time around. Yeah, that's a good one to be.

If you want a heavy mix, it's either them or uh stey vion i was the darling of davion last time yeah and yeah so it's kind of like decide what mex you want to collect a salvage and be the darling of their enemy yeah that's you know yeah that works that works so so yeah now i'm like trying so what you're saying is you're like you're blowing up a lot of steiner mex is what we're saying yeah oh stiner scout lances are your Yes. Independence. I go after the independence.

Rashlog or whatever they're fucking called. Rassel Hague. Yeah. Them. And who else? Oh, there's another group. Pirates. Depending.

Depending. So Merrick likes me pretty well. Lough and Curita love me. And so... Right now in the game I'm playing Lowe. Yeah. Absolutely fucking hates me. Oh, he hates me.

The only people that hate me more than Lao are the independent faction. Yeah. I think, I think my reputation with the independence is in the negative 500s. Oh, yeah. I'm in the negative thousands with them. Yeah. And the same goes for, God, who's the other group? It might be Davion.

Fedcom. What's that? Because there's house in, in the video game, there's House Davian. And separately as a faction is Federated Commonwealth. Them. Them. Yeah. See, right now, right now.

uh in my game uh carita likes me fedcom has just gotten to the point where they're like all right you're okay we'll do business um carita gives me a 75% bonus on most missions nice i haven't i haven't gotten there yet yeah so but um basically what you need to understand about battle mex narratively is that battle necks are rooted in anime and in the real robot genre specifically, which I talked about in episode 19 when I was talking about the different giant robot kind of subgenres. They're ridiculous when you look hard. Like if you peel back the first layer, like I said, they fall apart completely.

But at first glance, they seem like they might work. like you can look at it and kind of see that like it could be plausible and they're and it's rule of cool okay they they they they work because it's awesome and and it's just fun right so having established all of that adeptus titanicus came out four years later came out in 1988 88 and adeptus titanicus of course takes place in the universe of warhammer 40,000 Right. And if you've listened to any of the episodes here where I've talked about Warhammer 40,000, you know that what's about to come out of this is like absolutely fucking bonkers.

Because I will tell you. Over the top. Episodes four and five cover Warhammer 40K. Episodes 13 to 15 cover Battle Tech. So if you want deeper lore on both of those, go to those episodes. All right. And, and so where battle tech is, is rule of cool, Warhammer 40,000 is rule of bonkers. Like, this is a setting in which, in which ordinary officers in, in army units, carry sword-sized chainsaws as, as a hand-to-hand combat weapon.

okay okay because because space marines that's like the signature close combat weapon of space marines who are you know eight feet tall and you know wearing power and armor but there are also chainswords that are used by ordinary infantry so that gives you kind of an entree into just how bonkers everything is right right so now the designers of the game for adeptus titanicus set the game 10,000 years before 40K during the Horace heresy Oh, I remember you talking about that as well? Yes, yes, because I had a couple of episodes

talking about the primarks And this is where all of that lore Really got started being fleshed out around this time Because they said, hey, giant robots are awesome We've got to do something with that in the galaxy and so they put together Adeptus Titanicus and it's like

well we need a story for this hey I know a way that we can explain why we've got basically two of the same giant robot that are fighting each other. It's a civil war there you go and so they came up with the Horace heresy again in my notes

created specifically as a way to have two basically identical forces fighting against one another by the way the Horace episodes 229 and 2.30. Thank you. Sure. So to paint with an even broader brush, because the lore of Warhammer 40,000 is infinitely bigger.

Which, by the way, painting with a broader brush, much easier way to paint your miniatures in speed. So. Well, yeah. I have, I will admit, I have done dry brush armies before. It is a thing. Yeah. So now, first of all, in Warhammer 40K, we don't even know what fucking year it is.

The commonly accepted wisdom is that we're currently living, like today in the real world, we're living in the second millennium. Right. But we can't be sure. Interstellar travel begins in the age of terra, which lasts until the 15th millennium. Okay. Now, humanity discovered the warp, which is essentially, psychic hell, and it's the dimension that you have to travel through in order to make faster than light travel without time dilation and all the shit that goes along

with it. Okay. Okay. And humanity spread out across the galaxy in a centuries-long diaspora, thanks to the mutation that created navigators, humans who have the psychic ability to see in the warp. Now, this vast expansion and appears. of technological advancement that went with it is called the age of technology the age of technology ended sometime in millennium 25 with massive devastation caused by the rise of powerful uncontrolled psychers broadly across the human population all across the galaxy suddenly cykers started waking up and when that happened bad shit happened because psychics connect to the warp and like i said the warp is hell so to simplify it wasn't a good thing.

And at the same time, or around the same time, because all the time scale and all of this is massively huge, so this could be separated by centuries from each other, the wars against the men of iron, artificial intelligences that rose up against their creators. Now, the wars against the men of iron are basically stolen directly from Dune. Okay. But Lirian jihad. Okay. okay um when i've talked about dune in the past that's that's been part of the background there

this that's one of the things they stole was like oh hey we're going to use that okay so um sometime toward the end of the age of technology vast warp storms arose so the dimension of the warp became too chaotic for travel and that cut terra off from all of her colonies colonies were cut off from each other and this leads to the isolation of human worlds all across the galaxy during this time while terror was isolated the emperor the most powerful psychic in human history

decided this was the time for him to make his move he arose and conquered the tribes of techno-barbarians that had come to rule humanity's homeworld and so that those are the campaigns of unification okay around the same time that the campaigns of unification ended the warp storms

suddenly died out and this is at the start of millennium 31 doesn't that mean that he dies like who the emperor yeah no so in universe to explain the

roiling in the warp was caused by space elves which is say the Eldar which by the way is my fit for this video to paraphrase Dan McClellan. It's a t-shirt I have on. And the Eldar were

are the most psychically powerful species in the game as individuals. And they had existed for hundreds of millennia and they had fallen into debauchery and decadence

and the their fall into that was causing the roiling in the warp and when they unintentionally created the chaos god Slanesh

and their home worlds all got sucked into the warp as part of the birth pangs of Slanesh that is what caused the warp storms to stop because all of that

roiling energy got consumed by by Linish's birth. Okay. Anyway, that happens. And, hey, the emperor goes, all right, I can, I can see farther out into the galaxy now. We can, we can travel, and I'm going to take my newly created space marine legions, and I'm

going to go out and I'm going to conquer the galaxy and reunite all of humanity's colonies for the sake of the survival of the human species. And so the emperor began the Great Crusade. Okay. And the Great Crusade was coming to a close after one. roughly a century, so about a hundred years go by, and the Great Crusade, you know, reunifies

much of human space, and then Horus, the first of the prime arcs that was found by the emperor, which is the whole story by itself, gets corrupted by chaos, turns against the emperor, and

we have the Horace heresy. Okay. And half the space marine legions go with him, and notably for this episode, half of the Titan legions go with him. Now, the technological dark age of 40K started in earnest after the Horace heresy because huge chunks of technological knowledge were lost in that war. I'm seeing parallels. Yes.

But it's actually been in a state of stagnation and decline since the end of the age of technology. So since about the 25th millennium Technology has been stagnant Because the Adeptus of Mars Or Adeptus Mechanicus Control all of that technological knowledge In the Imperium They serve the Omnisiah

The Machine God in all things Okay They've been at the machine cult business For literally myriads I learned a new word doing this research longer than Comstar Myriad is 10,000 years And they have managed to convince the rest of the galaxy

That they're right So everybody in the galaxy Believes in the idea of machine spirits So Space Marines Paint kill marks on their bolters In order to honor the machine spirit of the weapon Et cetera, things like that

And technology is a scary thing in 40k there's a desperate desire to recover the lost secrets of the age of technology many kinds of tech are banned as heresy by the mechanicus because of the wars against the men of iron okay so these were used in these things therefore we think that they are radical yeah well anything anything uh so again stealing from dune anything that mimics human mind. So any kind of artificial intelligence is no bueno. Now, what this leads to is if you need something that acts like a brain, you use a human

brain for it. And that means plugging a human into a machine and often turning them into a servitor. So it kind of is dogmatic. It's intensely dogmatic. And it is built around the look at just. exactly how fucked things are in this in this universe

okay so humanity is ruled from Terra by a theo fascist regime under the Adeptus Terra the Adeptus Ministorum run the bureaucracy

and the Adeptus Munitorum and Imperial Guard sorry now it's called the Astro Militarum got to keep up with the times organize and fight the countless wars going on in the name of humanity's survival. Now, Titans, specifically.

Okay. A warlord Titan, which is the default in Adeptus Titanicus, generally stands about 33 meters tall, so 110 feet. Okay. They weigh in at between 1,000 tons to 2,500 tons, depending on what source you're reading. That's a bit of a variability. It's a little bit of a variability.

part of the thing is the way the way that Battletech builds the rationale behind Battletech is very technical the rationale behind Adeptus Titanicus is

really not and so in some novels Titans are described some ways and other novels are described other ways and things like just exactly really how much does a Warlord Titan way nobody's ever it's like it's not important to gameplay sure in a novel it's just flavor text so but like

i mean star wars had a thing where like everything had to have continuity to it i'm a little surprised that licensing this out didn't require that well the nerds that play the games well part of it is the sheer nut bar oh my god you know if big is cool then bigger is even cooler kind of nature and one of the things for a lot of fans of 40k one of the things that is

fun about it is the nobody really knows what the fuck is going on kind of sense of it and so that's kind of how that that has arisen now we do know that warlord titans

have void shields that can absorb the first few hits in combat. So they have gigantic big force fields. Now, Warlord Titans move at about 27 kilometers per hour or about 17 miles per hour. They are massive, lumbering things. Okay. Titans are like white boys.

They can't jump. Okay. Battle necks can, and many of them do, have jump jets as a way to maneuver over terrain and, you know, all that kind of stuff. Armament-wise, Titans kill them. They carry gigantic big fuck-off guns that have names like volcano canons, plasma annihilators, and they carry spaceship-scale laser cannons. Okay. Okay.

When a warlord titan has a missile weapon, it is one big rocket. Oh, so it's Boba fat. Yeah, they can fire once a game to like, you know, decimate something on the other side of the table. Yeah, it'll do a lot, but... Yeah, but you get one. Yeah. And so, like, they're, again, everything is huge.

The idea is, if big is awesome, then bigger is even more awesome. Right. Now, there are smaller, faster titans. There are a Reaver and Warhound Titans that are smaller. They're less heavily armed. Warhounds can actually hit 60 kilometers per hour. warhounds are the fastest class of full size titan it's 37 miles an hour warhounds weigh about 400 tons stand about 17 meters tall about the same height as an assault mech in 40k so all the jokes for those of you who know battle tech but don't know 40k all of the jokes you've ever heard about steiner scout squads um are are actually really apply to the end up

The Titan legions, that's actually like their thing. So now there is a category of, of tight, kind of sub-titon called a knight, which is the closest apples to apples comparison with a battlemeck. Knights stand between 9 to 12 meters, 30 to 40 feet tall. They weigh about 150 tons, and they can run at about 45 miles an hour. They carry two main weapons, usually one ranged and one melee, because again, this is Warhammer or 40,000, and we need to have the crunch of hand-to-hand combat. Now, worth noting, there are battlemecks that have come out that do carry close combat weapons.

It was a big deal in battle tech the game when the hatchet man first showed up in a technical readout, followed by its heavier cousin, the Axeman. Right. And there's Claymore's, there's assault fist, there's assault knuckles, there's I think longswords too. Yeah, in the in the in the in the in the in a mech warrior game there's all kinds variations on it. So now nights only have one pilot much like battle mechs battlemecs have a pilot

right? Larger titans have crews of between three to seven depending on size and who's writing the story. All 40k machines are piloted at least in part via neural link with the princeps, the essentially thing like tank commander of the of the Titan

having direct mental contact with the machine spirit of the Titan and the machine spirit is not an artificial intelligence but it is just below that level and it over

time over centuries develops kind of a proto personality so it's not it doesn't it doesn't violate the rules of the adeptus mechanicus but it is definitely like the ghost in the machine right okay which is amazing like color text and awesome but kind of gives you an idea of how how that works in universe sure um and now in my notes i have here a quick moment to point out in relationship to neural helmets um so in battle tech a mech pilot wears a helmet that is connected to their brain and the mech uses

their um and i'm forgetting the name of it your your your station tubes are part of it your balance your your your own okay your perception yeah thank you you're your yeah uh the the mech utilizes that as part of its ability to stand and walk and maneuver and do stuff a mechanic pilot points a hand or a finger

that's partly the neural helmet interfacing with the controls but in a lot of other ways piloting a mac is comparable to piloting a jet fighter or driving a tank so there isn't

really any hard and fast calculation out there for how long it takes to build a titan. Okay. But the sense that we get is it's like building a cathedral. Right. It's measured in decades. The technological regression of the whole Imperium means that the materials are hard to source. The crafting has to be done custom for each component like forging a massive sword. And the rituals the mechanic has performed to placate the machine spirits of each subassembly add

weeks to the overall build time. Titans are what you get when you take them massively over-the-top aesthetic and themes of 40K and say, oh, well, if they had a big fuck-off war robot. Right? Titans are ridiculous from the jump. They're stupidly over-the-top, massive and powerful and lumbering,

just like the Imperium they serve, coded in satire. So you're asking, Ed, who'd win? So, I want you to imagine that Zinch, the chaos god of magic and change, in his infinite cunning and capriciousness, decides one day to fling an Imperial Titan Legion. Let's just say it's Legio Ignus on their way to join the Third War for Armageddon. He decides to fling them across the multiverse into the Prosperina system.

at the beginning of the fourth Succession War. So it's the year 3026. We're in the very beginning of beginning, in air quotes, of the battle tech setting as we as players encounter it. Now, the assembled jump ships of the Corita and Davion forces already in the system

freak the fuck out. Because a literal portal to hell opens up, tears itself open. And a flotilla of ships three times the length of the largest war ship they've ever built float aggressively out of it. I won't get into the naval battle.

It would be ugly, but in the end, I'm giving it to the inner sphere because they have far, far better attack craft and way better targeting computers than the Imperium. That's a debate for another time, though. Okay. The Titans land, and then it's the turn of the ground forces to lose their shit. These aren't mecks.

they're walking artillery bases. On the other side of the board, as it were, the Imperials fill a potent surge of disgust. As they see the heretics before them using clearly anathema technology. Their righteous fury is tempered with concern. That's a lot of targets on the auspics.

And they're moving with great speed. The first engagement starts when the two forces reconnaissance elements meet up. Warhounds versus Corita, mecks. The warhounds operate in a pair with three warhounds lagging behind them, sorry, with three warlords, lagging behind them but in constant contact. They encounter a reconnaissance lance, five mechs from the ninth Benjamin regulars.

The regulars have two panthers, which are very speedy, small, but carry one very... 35 tons. Yeah, they're a 35-ton meck. With jump jets, they're very fast, and they carry, each of them carries one particle projection cannon. Yeah. So they have a big, they're, they can hit at range very hard. Yes, they are, they are very upgunned for their weight. Yeah.

Two griffins and one Phoenix Hawk. Now the griffin also carries a PPC and a long-range missile launcher. How big is the griffin? 55 tons. Okay. but it's a very fast 55 tons because it's not very heavily armed for a medium mac um and it also has it also has jump jets okay and you said one phoenix phoenix hot which is 45 ton mac uh with like a lot of lasers and yeah i was gonna say they're they're fairly moderately armed uh for their size

they're very well armed um and they're pretty quick they can turn on a dime too they haul ass yeah now just as a side note um ninth benjamin regulars doing the research for this for this episode uh number one prosperina is a carita world and um the ninth benjamin regulars are for carita they are a medium in air quotes uh regimen the thing is Corita has a disdain for medium mechs. Corita really likes heavies. Yeah, go big or go home. Yeah, they really like heavies. They like assault mechs, which are heavier than heavies.

And they have a lot of light mechs. But like medium mex as a concept, they're like pick one. Yeah. Okay. So when I was trying to figure out what specific forces to use, I was like, well, shit. Like, what am I going to put here? So this is reconnaissance. section so that's what this is

now feeling confident given the mass difference between their machines the warhounds precepts invoke the blessings of the omnisiah and call tally ho the griffins two of them coordinate fire on the foremost war hound

they engage from well outside the imperial's range they launch lrm missiles volleys from both mecks and the missiles hit there's a cloud of, cloud of smoke, and they have done nothing. Void shields crackle, soaking up the first LRM volleys, as the Cretea pilots watch in horror.

The Warhound fires its turbo-laser destructor and catches one of the Panthers napping. The awesome power of the gigawatt laser cannon vaporizes the smaller Mac instantly. The other panther scores a hit with its PPC as it flies past, boiling the Imperial Machine's cockpit and its crew of three. With renewed fighting spirit, the Corita Samurai used their mobility and superior striking range to take out the second warhound without further losses. It takes less than an hour for Corita Command to issue orders to all lances. For the glory of the dragon, ignore the Davian dogs and coordinate attacks to take down the giants.

The Davian forces on World make their first contact with a different manniple, and with different mecks. The Davian forces attacking Prosperina are the fourth Cruciss Lancer's regimental combat team. And although they don't have their artillery battery in place yet, because they're in the middle

of making their own combat landing, they bring multiple heavy and assault mecks to the party. They too watch in horror as the first warlord soaks up LRM volleys from archers and then takes a massive beating from lasers and other weapons fire as it

lumbers into range of its own weaponry. In a manniple of five, the warlords forced the Davian mech pilot to keep moving, trying to avoid their gargantuan hitting power of the Titans' weapons. Where they can, the warhammers and marauders of the Davian heavy lance shoot for joints and actuators on the Titans with their PPCs and lasers. The larger machines make it easier to select targets this way. Reinforcements arrive, and the first warlord goes down with a groan like a dying god of war. They don't call it math hammer for nothing.

To abandon the narrative for a moment, what the Titans have in sheer hitting power, the battle necks make up for in number of weapons systems. Each warhound has two ranged weapons, with comparatively short range. Each warlord has between three and four, depending on the class. Knights, the closest thing to a real analog to a mech,

generally only carry one ranged and one melee weapon, because of a space marine with a fuck-off chainsaw sword, is cool. A 40-foot-toll robot with a massive fuck-off chain saw sword is even cooler. The Shadowhawk by way of comparison is a middle of the road battle, like literally

a middle of the road battle. It's a 55-ton Mac. Yeah. It's my favorite just for aesthetic reasons. But it carries an auto cannon, a medium laser, call it 300 megawatts, a short-range missile launcher and a long-range missile launcher.

Mm-hmm. A smallest mech that Carita Fields is the locus. which carries a similar-sized laser and two machine guns. And they're about 20 tons. Yeah. Yeah. It also runs so fast that the Titans will not hit it.

Right. Anytime the Titan scores a hit, it's going to render a light or medium battlemeck or decombat. Just gone. Oh, yeah. It's like you can one-shot a locust pretty easily. I've done it with an auto-canon 20 in-game. Yeah.

It's one of the most satisfying. feelings um so so if i can do that with an atlas um then yeah the imperial titan is is going to yeah now assault mecs might be able to get in a shot after that but they're not going to be able to take more than one the scale of devastation in titanicus is simply on a different level with that said the tacticians of the inner sphere have been fighting each other for centuries and they're not nearly as hidebound as the imperium and the mechanicus void shields are going to make them shit their pants at first but once they figure out that those shields ablate

like we hit them five times with an LRM launcher and their void shields are gone right you drain them like you use those to soak it and then you get to the damage yeah yeah um intersphere pilots will start harassing with light auto cannon fire to shorten the void shields out then open up with LRMs once the shields go down longer firing ranges for most weapons

the sheer number of weapons intersphere mecks bring to bear will begin to count hard knights sadly are going to suffer the worst of it they're heavier and more durable than assault mecks but slower on average and undergunned

keratin panthers and Davian Jenners will eat them alive and Davy on hatchet men will keep night head assemblies as trophies imagine bears fighting off packs of Wolves, and you have a pretty good analogy for how I see this matchup going. The 40K universe is probably my most serious fandom after Middle Earth,

but I have to give this one to the inner sphere. It's going to be very ugly, but after the initial encounter, it's going to be very one-sided. Yeah. So. No notes, to be honest. Like, you know, you even. like the the titus or the titans yeah i almost said titus andronicus uh the titans

yeah um are the best that that galaxy has to offer and you didn't even throw the best that the inner sphere has to offer oh yeah no at them you you through this okay this reminds me and i so help me i need to just like bite the bullet and fucking do this this reminds me of that Livy, three sets of chapters of if Alex had turned left instead of right, what would have happened? And Livy's whole point is that Alexander is a great man, but you take him out and they have nothing. Whereas we have a great system. It doesn't matter who you take out. Somebody of approximate capability will show up. And this feels very much like that, because you went with like all these mid mecks all these mecks that i throw into cold storage until i want to

bump myself up by about a hundred million yeah uh currently by the way i'm about 617 million yeah i was i was at like 112 million yeah and i and i fell down to like 83 um because i bought some stuff and and went without like did a lot of traveling yeah without without taking out mission yeah because I was I was trying to see if I could find a uh you're doing a can'tina uh no no I wouldn't even doing that I was I was going from like oh hey there's a rare Mac here let's see if it's the one I'm looking for no it's not oh hey there's one over there yeah I'm I'm trying to find a marauder too and it's not working for fuck you so much so anyway um yeah and but yeah it's it's their mid stuff right yeah and these are again

these are things that i never fly like i have a hunchback that i keep in case they need to go 50 i've got this beautiful um oh god what's it called starts with a tea it's not a trebuchet thunderbolt this beautiful thunderbolt that has like 12 lasers on it oh yeah the medium laser gunboat. Yeah. And I just alpha strike everything. And then it's got one long laser. Yeah, one large laser.

Yeah. And so I just alpha strike. Medium lasers. Yeah. Alpha strike. Like I will core the head of an Atlas out with one shot. If you can get the head shot off. Oh, I do.

Like I fairly regularly. This is part of the reason I hate you so much because you've been playing the game so much longer than me that you're better at that. I try to go head hunting and I get rock. because I'm just not I'm not I can't target that well but like very often the missions that I take on right now are like yeah you need 270 tons at most I'm like all right two atlases plus my thunderbolt because it's 65 yeah I'm like okay and if if my thunderbolt's a little bit out of commission yeah I'll bring in my crusader oh you got you you bought the the the packs update oh yeah I've got all the updates I got all the updates so it's it's lovely but I don't have access to the crusader yet. But yeah, that'd do the trick, man. Yeah.

Yeah. But again, those are my, oh, if I need to round out a squad and not take it up, you know, and not come in over tonnage, right? You're not even, like, throwing those at these guys. You're throwing, like, fucking Shadowhawks, Panthers. So in the Davian, in the Davian encounter, I'm imagining heavies and, like, the lighter end of assaults so like archers yeah like i'm i'm seeing long-range missiles sure thing yeah warhammers with the with the ppses uh you know but i'm i was also thinking of you know the advantage

the advantage the intersphere has is we move faster yeah and that's the thing is you're talking about just swarming with mediocres yeah and again that's like i was expecting a a their best versus our best and you know i was like okay let's let's hear if you're going to go crab or if you're going to go uh atlas um or king crab rather yeah um which by the way those are fun yeah i have a mixed record using them but yeah yeah they're not as fun as an atlas but well yeah and that's the thing that i loaded up that thunderbolt with so many heat sinks like all the double heat sinks that i could and then filled it out with the other heat sinks like yeah but but yeah like what you brought you brought fucking locus to the fight

yep and still one like yep it's so yeah yeah because you know the the sheer size of a warlord titan is going to mean that it's got a lot of in battle tech it's got a lot of internal structure right right um and you know it probably has a lot of armor right but if you hit it with enough medium lasers it's you're gonna cook it yeah you're gonna you're gonna core a hole through it and yeah and it's so slow yeah and in in battle tech yeah um you know thinking thinking about the you know comparative um what's word i'm looking for the the defensive advantage right um you know the the issue here is um battle tech weaponry is still going to be effective against the physical body of a titan so like

if i hit you in head and your head is five times bigger than mine right so that's a called shot that like i can consistently make right you know since since we're not going with absolutely green mech warriors like they're going to be able to do that Like, yeah, it's, it's, yeah. So the, the overall aesthetic of 40K winds up becoming its biggest, uh, weakness. Yeah. Here. Because it gets too big to be, uh, defensible.

Yeah. It, you're going to, you're going to have, I mean, honestly, you could have a, a, a fleet of fire starters, stripped out all the fire the fire the flame throwers and just put in small missiles or not small missiles small lasers yeah right and just like

hit them with seven of those yeah and you would have like taken its legs out you wouldn't get any head shots but you would have taken its legs out and its own weight crushes it to death yeah well and and thinking about a meck like a fire starter that also moves really fast

97 other thing yeah The other thing is... 114, come to think of it. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, at a run. Yeah. And so the sheer size of... I didn't even mention this part.

But a warlord Titan, you know, a medium mech can run inside the range of its weapons. When you get underneath it, a warlord Titan doesn't have any way to fight that off. Yeah. That's like going against a fully armed... catapult yeah and just staying within a hundred yeah it's like yeah oh and I love doing that too yeah like oh hey yeah so yeah um now what what this what this simulation does not take into account and I pointedly left it out is there there is no uh there there are no space Marines involved in this.

Now, against Mex, space marines are still going to get rocked. I was going to say it's a scaling issue at that point, too. Yeah. Against Mex, space marines are still going to get rocked because they're not going to be carrying enough large-scale weapons to take Mex out. Against Intersphere Infantry,

the battle goes the other way. yes you know and 100% you know I I I

I for anybody listening who is like me a 40K fan I recognize when you bring a startes to the party the infantry picture changes

dramatically but mech versus mech and again it's Legio Ignis so that's it like I didn't bring guard

right nothing else that's that's what we're looking at here the intersphere the intersphere Interested wins.

Yeah. No, I love it. I mean, you know, this feels very similar to who would win Star Trek or Star Wars. Well, Star Trek. Like, as much as I love Star Wars, Star Trek's going to win. Like, they're so far advanced in their tech.

The nature of the magic is such. Yeah. It's like, you know. Yeah. Like, we're going to beam your weapon systems off your ship. Sorry. Like, what exactly is a turbo? laser by the way doesn't matter yeah it's floating next to you yeah once you've identified

it let us know yeah like yeah yeah yeah um yeah the ability to teleport uh like now i would be interested in seeing the defiant against the now the millennium falcon was built for getting away um i i okay so here's what i would want to see see. Okay. All right. And this can come right back to this, actually. I want kind of a trolley problem aspect to this. Okay. Right. Okay. So a trolley problem, right? You have one person, three people, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Do you throw the switch to kill the one? Like, if it's just person to person, do you? Yeah. You know, what if that one person was a criminal? A duly convicted murderer. Yeah. What if, what if that one person?

person was an infant right what if that one person was an infant with a heart condition that would kill it in a week yeah you know and i love trolleyism like this like i absolutely am like dial in where where do you switch sides like that's fascinating to me right yeah okay so do that with this how many would it take to defeat the squads that you said they met how many how many how many Titans or how many how many how many with what the Titans brought with them how many of those would it take to actually defeat the the Curita squad and or the Davian squad like how many would actually be effective enough to withstand to like because they're going to have to like focus all on one while the other one hits them right or they're going to spread it all around

but there's too many to spread it around to now. Yeah. So part of what I learned in the process of doing this is a Titan Legion is made up of 10 mannipoles. Each manipole has five Titans in it. Okay. So a Titan Legion is 50 Titans. Okay. Which when you think of the sheer scale of a Titan, this is, oh, my God, this massive, holy shit.

Yeah. Right. And within the universe of 40K, oh, my God, that's fucking terrifying. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. A regiment in battle tech. I'm trying to remember how the breakdown goes. So a company, I think, is three lances.

Each lance is five. Okay. So a company is 15 mechs. Okay. And a regiment is... three companies, no, 10 companies, sorry, 10 companies to a regiment. Okay. So a regiment is 150 mechs.

Okay. So if we're, depending on the scale at which we're talking about this, this thing happening, just as an organizational thing, you're going to have to bring more than one Titan Legion. To defeat a regiment. to defeat to defeat a mech regiment um because again if we're talking about you know meeting in the open field um the the mecks have it all over right if if we just take one lance though yes an individual lance against a a manniple of warlords is eventually

going probably going to go down okay because of the scale of the weaponry involved because again every time every time a Titan manages to score a hit yeah it's a meck is out of combat

like yeah both legs both legs are conned to take out five mecs yeah you're saying it's going to take a manipal which is five warlords five right so it takes five warlords now that's different than a titan though well warlord is the is the standard big guy class of titan okay okay so five big fuckers to take out a lance yeah so it has to be equal number to actually win yeah okay but a one-on-one and well one on one-on-one meaning one battle neck versus a titan yeah well okay see now we're getting into the trolley problem minutia right because if we're talking about because now this gets really complicated because um it's it kind of gets counterintuitive because number one i'm not going to say it's 100% in a one-on-one it's always going to be this guy

or this guy right but who has the better odds the speed or the power the better the better odds are actually going to be the lighter the mech is up to a point, the better its odds are. Because generally speaking, the lighter the meck is the faster it moves. Right. The faster it moves, the less likely it is

that a titan is going to be able to hit it. Yeah. And again, once a battlemec gets inside the minimum range of the gigantic battleship scale, you know, star battleship scale weapons of a Titan, the Titan is boned um if if the

mech pilot can manage to stay in that sweet spot where it's like i can stay down here you know and hit your knee actuators right you know and and just melt those with laser fire or hit them with auto cannons or whatever yeah um you know so then if we if we bring that up to like okay well then we get into medium mex Now, depending on what medium-mec, you're talking about what the armament is, it depends on the trade-off in mobility. Right. And it also gets to, okay, if we're talking about a catapult, for example. Yeah, 65 tons, but they're firing from...

Their engagement range is three times the distance or more of the Titan. So, like, I'm just going to sit out here. Yeah. I'm going to use one volley from one of my LRM 15s. Yeah. And that's, that destroys your fucking shields. Yeah. And now I'm just going to keep pouring missiles into you.

Right. And eventually I'm going to get enough hits on critical components that, like, I'm going to, I'm a blow an arm off. Right. Once I've done that, your, your capacity to hurt me is reduced by 50%. Oh, yeah. And as long as I stay out of your. range anyway.

Yeah. You know, I can do this all day. I would say, like, if I was to take a commando and, uh, 25 tonters. Yeah, yeah. Um, and, uh, or 20 tonners. No, they're 25. Yeah. They're 25.

I took one of those, loaded it up with smalls. I can almost guarantee you that the Titan will not, will not score a hit. Yeah. And I will take his legs. Oh, yeah. And I will start by taking his arms to be. be honest because then he really can't score a hit. Yeah.

You know, the, the tactical doctrine. Yeah. The tactical doctrine would develop really fast would be, okay, number one, spam auto cannon or missile fire to take down the void shields.

Go for weaponry systems. Yeah. Because they're gigantic fucking targets. Well, not only that, but like you're doing two things there, you know? Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. So a a standard lance could be beaten by five Titans

But in a long, ugly battle And there would only be one Titan left standing at the end of it But they win Yeah, just because power In numbers Where people can run into each other And get in each other's way and frankly have Cones of effective firing

Yeah, when the Titans are in a position To be able to go When the Titans are in a position to be able to circle the wagons Yes and and you know coordinate what they're doing right then it becomes more difficult for the yeah and all they got to do is like four of us are going to attack this one guy another one's going to harass another and then once we've melted this one guy because one of us is going to get a shot eventually yeah then we're going to switch over to the other one you've been harassing and then

we're going to come back to one of the other three like it's going to go real quick um but i was going to say like up to and including a phoenix hawk just a single phoenix hawk against a single titan that titans he's dead yeah what i'm what i'm picturing is a phoenix hawk using jump jets yeah and just

scaring the ever-loving shit out of the crew of the titan because what the fuck they can fly right yeah they fly now yeah they fly now and and and the image that i have in my head is of um the the the phoenix hawk landing on the top of the Titan and just opening up, just firing down until it finds the gooey center. Right.

Well, and then load that Phoenix Hawk up with two machine guns, not even to do damage, just to keep firing at its head to make them think that they're getting hurt. You'll feel the impact. Sure, it'll eat up, get eaten up by the void shield. but then meanwhile you're peppering the uh the the the the the knees so the other thing to consider about the void shields is if you get close enough yeah you're actually inside the void shield you can you can run through a void shield oh okay well and then your machine guns actually do something yeah the void shields work um kind of in a way kind of like shields in dune yeah in in that

um anything anything you know of of a certain size or energy level uh get stopped by them but you know if you if you are in a vehicle or on foot and you you run at it it's it's not gonna it's you're not gonna like run into it like you're running into a wall right right right so so a locust like you know slips the hounds yeah and you know send out every locust you've got in your regiment and they're just going to be able to run up and, you know, the Titan will have to get lucky to step on one of them, you know. Yeah. Okay.

So, uh, what is the crossover point of the one-on-one going the way of the Titan? Since we've, you know, again, this is the trolleyism thing. This is the stuff that I like. So what's the thing? What's the minimum speed that a Titan would, would, okay, now the Titans got the shot. The Titan is going to. start having a shot when the mecks are

slower I would say in in battle tech parlance if you're moving at a 4-6 or slower so

that's hex hex measurements oh um so like an atlas is I think a 3-5 okay so walking three, five running. Uh-huh. So, Alice usually goes about

48, I want to say. Although I've modded most of mine to go 55. Well, yeah, because... Sammy Hagar's inspiration. Yeah, but, so, like, really heavy assault mecks, like, here's the deal. The first time the inner sphere is like, all right, all right, we're going to fight fire with fire.

We're sending an annihilator. The annihilator is going to die instantly. yeah they're slow as shit and honestly their armaments don't justify their armament doesn't justify it and their effective range isn't long enough like they're gonna they're gonna have to they're gonna have to get out to like the outer end of titan engagement range for them to engage and and the titans like the second hit is gonna vaporize them so i'm wondering what an atlas k will do then because they've got the anti

anti-missile tech so anti-missile probably won't help you very much because again Titans don't use a lot of rocket weaponry right what the Titans are going to be bringing to bear

are gigantic big like think the biggest battleship cannon you've ever seen in your life or some kind of big starship scale laser sure or plasma cannon yeah yeah like you know um so so the anti-missile system isn't going to do them very much good

um what what's going to help them is their overall just sheer amount of armor um and the atlas pilot is going to have to adjust his worldview and and and not utilize his AC 20 because the AC20 is not very long range. No, it's not. I honestly, so I usually replace the AC2. I don't load up my atlases with AC20s. Okay. I load them over with Gauss rifles.

See, my only problem in game, in game, my only problem with the Gauss rifle in a video game, my only problem with the Gauss rifle is it's really slow fire time. Yeah, that's fine. That's why I have ERPPCs.

Okay, well, there you go. But so the thing is now in if we advance the battle tech timeline far enough that the Atlas pilots are able to do that, then it just gets worse for the Imperials. Right. And I'm thinking one Atlas, the way I've loaded it, versus an Imperial, I think I've got them beat. Even though I'm not going that fast, I'm hitting from farther range because I also have LRMs. Yeah, your damage curve starts farther out Yeah Especially with the gals rifle

As your main kinetic weapon And and again The fact that You have An easier time picking your targets Yes Now the way LRMs work You can't do that with the LRM

But you can short the shields out immediately And then you can stay You're going to you're going to be backing up a lot as the Titan is desperately trying to close the range. Yep. You're going to be backing up and sniping at its weapon systems with a gauze rifle. Yep. And, yeah, eventually, yeah, I think the determination on that one is going to come down to

how much credit are we giving the Titan for the ability to absorb damage from that gouse rifle. well and again that's what the LRM 20s are well yeah they're gonna they're gonna take care of the shields and then the Gauss rifle's gonna follow it and then the ER PPCs and then if I need to I'll use

medium lasers see well see here's the thing and I've already figured it out so the the Titan is gonna be running at you like what counts as full speed hell bent for leveler yeah like yeah trying trying to close the distance

because, you know, they're going to know that the moment they hit you, you're going to be borked. Right. The problem they're going to have is you then have two choices. You can backpedal at the same speed they're coming at you at and just stay out of range because they're not that fast. Or if you're a Corita pilot, you're going to charge them. I just work for these guys. I'm not one of them. Well, I know.

I'm talking about like, if you are, if you are in fact, you know, Tysaw somebody in the, in the, you know, DCMS,

you're going to, you're going to run at them. Yeah. And, uh, they're going to have a very short window to score a hit. Yes.

One of the things that's, again, another difference between battle tech and Adeptus Titanicus. Um, Battlemex, fire a lot faster. Yes. So they're going, this is going to be like you charging as a, as a cavalry trooper in the late 1800s,

which is to say they're going to get one really, really strong shot off. Yes. If they miss with it, you're going to be inside their range. and I eat PPCs. Yeah. You know. If they hit with it, I think, honestly, the armor of an Atlas can withstand one. It depends on more than one.

And it depends on where they get hit. It depends on where you get hit and what they hit you with. Mm-hmm. You know, an annihilator turbo laser would, I'm imagining it's going to cook off pretty much all of your frontal armor just because of the scale of what they hit with

you're still going to have internal structure left yeah um depending if they you know if we apply battle tech rules and they get lucky on crits you might be fucked yeah they stand a puncher's chance is what they call it in MMMA

yeah yeah um but with after after that shot you're going to be up in in their in their business and with an atlas you actually have enough punching power to do meaningful damage to their knees and legs and foot actuators and all that stuff and you're you're going to be too close for them to turn any of those big weapons down you know to right um yeah so they do now they do sometimes wield like sometimes warlord titans do have a close combat weapon um but that's designed to go after targets that are the same size or or like the size of of a war hound

right which is way bigger than you you know still many meters taller than you are so you know it's going to be very awkward yeah cool so yeah yeah well uh i encourage you to take it to the trolley levels like show me like here's how it will go and then here's what it would take to beat the other side. Yeah, yeah. And here's why. I think that that, yeah,

because that's where the, the, the, the sausage getting made is where it's the most interesting and intricate. Yeah. Yeah.

Cool. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's what I got this time. I liked it. Other, other ideas.

I've also had are, um, uh, Star Wars universe, uh, versus Dune. Okay. Yeah.

Um, because I, I, I think it would be entertaining to see what happens when the Betty Jesuit meet Jedi. Yeah. I would like to see Darth Vader in the Marvel universe. Oh, okay.

At what point do the heroes start beating him? Because I think Daredevil would lose. Oh. But I think Wolverine would win. And so, like, just kind of seeing where that goes. I think Batman, quite honestly. I know he's not Marvel, but I think Batman would beat Darth Vader.

well yeah ultimately yeah like that's the thing so like and I'm talking first meeting first battle okay go I still think Batman would beat Darth Vader because he would use the terrain completely to his advantage and make Vader chase him and take him down bit by bit by bit yeah well Batman would figure out really quickly that all the blinking lights on his chest are his biggest weakness yeah okay I need I need to I need to get out my my bat brass knuckles and just mash the fuck out of that panel on his chest so like i think spidey would uh you know or or take darth mall you know like pick pick a very powerful star wars character put them in the marvel universe or the dc universe and see who would win and then see at what point would that turn

like so you know i i i don't have much faith in in hulk quite honestly beating vader No. All of the super strongs, I don't have much faith in them beating Vader. Well, because, you know, all Vader has to do is, you know, pick them up and fling him away. Right. And then pull them into his lightsaber and, you know, stuff like that. But like, or just joking to death. Yeah, the one thing is that canonically, like, Hulk is nigh unkillable.

He is. You know, so that, that. But you could, you could sever his carotid. With a pinch, you know, like I mean, yeah, whereas I think other guys, yeah, I think other guys, I think Cap would actually stand a really good chance at beating Vader. This comes back to the debate from, from Twitter, between Mark Hamill and Chris Evans. Yeah. He was like, okay, how does Vibranium react to a lightsaber blade? Well, and that's MCU.

We're actually talking about a man team. vibranium alloy so but your point still stands yeah like like no I think Cap would keep his his shield intact I don't think yeah I kind of yeah I kind of think based on what we've seen in the Star Wars universe with you know Besscar which is you know adamantium essentially right right but I think there's there's good reason to say that you know the shield would stop a lightsaber yeah and you know it's it's going to be a very hard fought fight yes cap is going to have to figure out how to get around the force push force lightning shit yeah um but yeah it would be it would be

entertaining so yeah things like that i would i would love to see and again it's that trolleyism part like you know he's going to get tabled by thor he's going to get tabled by iron man um but to actually squeak out of victory against him and who's he absolutely going to beat you know yeah so yeah anyway those are my thoughts i would love to see that so yeah cool well what are you going to recommend for people to read imbibe uh watch or listen to um i'm very strongly going to recommend everybody go out and uh find the west wing okay um it's of course been off the air for forever but it is available on several different streaming services. And I have been watching a lot of clips from it on just on Facebook as reels and going to YouTube and watching bits of it.

And it is a thousand percent liberal escapism. Like I'm not even I'm not even going to try to try to try to call it anything other than, you know, fantasy. Um, but it has been soothing. Um, and I think those of us who, who, who, you know, believe in, in things, uh, kind of need that right now. Yeah. Um, I, I think, I think it's, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, finding a way to, to take some comfort and, and, and try to find the spirit to carry on. Okay.

So find the West Wing and watch the hell out of it to see people who are actually motivated by trying to make the world a better place. Okay. How about you? I'm going to recommend a book by, I think I've recommended this before, by Daniel O'Brien called How to Fight Presidents, Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country. There we go. So, you know, kind of keeping in with what we were talking about today. So just, you know, what is it about each person? resident that makes him easy to defeat or hard to defeat and go.

So just a schlocky, silly fun thing. So where can people find us? We collectively can be found on the internet at wauwobo-wobo-woba.giquehistorytime.com. We can be found on the Apple podcast app, the Amazon podcast app, and on Spotify. Wherever you find us, please take a moment to subscribe and give us the five-star review that you know we deserve. And where can you be found, sir? Well, let's see. You can find me and the rest of the crew at Capitol Punishment, both Justine and Emily, slinging puns, at the comedy spot in Sacramento at 9 p.m. on the first Friday of every month. So I'm going to recommend November 7th, if you

haven't missed that, December 5th, and January 2nd. Come on out, check out what we do. Go to satcommodyspot.com, grab their calendar and find our show, buy your tickets in advance so you can just chill out and bring some money for merch. We got really cool shirts. We're running out. So get those while you still can because they are a limited edition.

But yeah, first Friday of every month. Nice. Yeah. Well, for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock. And until next time, keep rolling 20s.