A Kzinti war call out.. Really, I'm into deep cuts, but B-side of a B-side?

"One of the most iconic Mechs... the Timberwolf." Clanner spotted! I repeat, Clanner spotted!

The Trade Federation had an interesting take on the flying ball concept. The central section of the Lucrehulk could detach and be used as a landing craft and then hook back up with it's parent ship in orbit.

Our DropShips peal out thunder, shrieking down through cloven skies; As a planet's grim defenders gather in a host to die; Then open hatch! Forward men! Enemy in sight! They're closing now, the battle's joined. All 'Mechs prepare to fight! Our heavy 'Mechs deliver volleys stroke on burning stroke; As the company advances through the battle fog and smoke. Now open fire! Target lock! Deploy the Recon Lance! Then it's blasting guns and stabbing beams as Battlemechs advance!

"There is the bigger brother, the Direwolf, but that's not that much more heavily armed, just more heavily armored." *laughs in Direstar*

*clears her throat and smiles innocently.* "Oh no, spaceballs, there goes the planet."

Great video but a detail that I think was missed is that in the battletech universe, at least at the time the union was designed, it doen't have artificial gravity. the union and most other dropships are designed to take advantage of 1g acceleration to create gravity on the ship. They accelerate at 1g most of the way in and the turn around and decelerate at 1g for reentry. This is also dictates how the ship lands and the orientation of its internal space. One of the details I always liked about the BT universe is that artificial gravity isn't hand waved away with magic

The thing was, when the Union was designed in universe, it was not exactly meant to fight by itself or even in a squadron of them. They were the landing ships, your LSTs and Higgins boats of a planetary assault. You hinted at during the video that there were greater ships, the warships, and they were supposed to be the massive assault ships that would be running escort for the Unions and their smaller and larger counterparts (Leopard, Overlord, Fortress) as well as smaller 'assault' dropships that, if you think Union is intimidating, pack withering amounts of firepower that would be flying in along side these transports during the era that they were designed and built. So yes, this is a universe that your troop ships have an assault mech strapped onto each side of the ship as defensive weapons. That was the glory days of the Star League on display there and the fact that three centuries and four major catastrophic wars later, they are still functioning and actually are intimidating in terms of weapons in the era of the pre-clan invasion... that is a statement that should be considered. There is something scary about a battalion's worth of union transports grounded and being able to support each other.

Ah yes the Union drop ship aka we needed maximum space for mech deployment. Also the Japanese source book design has the landing gear housed in 4 large fins which add stability in landing and takeoff.

Spherical ships are ideal in the Battletech universe. As they're always powered regardless the aerodynamics don't matter. But they do need to worry about mass issues and a sphere give the greatest ratio of volume to hull meaning that as little mass as possible is wasted on the ship while the most space possible is left over for cargo. Also a round drop ship fits into a jump ship's K-F drive better, so FTL is simpler.

At 6:05 you refer to the mech on screen as a Timberwolf. It’s called a Mad-Cat. Naming things is reserved for people that *Win*. Fight me Clanners.

I am a simple meatbag, I see my favorite franchise, I click like button. I enjoy content, I click subscribe.

Not just compressed to a cube, but the SCS logo impressed upon it. I'm just trying to figure out if that was a golden ship or a wooden ship. Either way, the Treasure Planet guys better validate their parking.

In my head canon, there's at least one mercenary Union captain, probably originally from Steiner space, who drops with classical music troupe, AC/DC's "Big Balls" blaring on the ship PAs, no matter how combative or mundane the landing mission. It's actually in his contract too. Anyone who questions his landing procedure practices will be jettisoned in high atmo. In effect, they can land themselves.

I love this, doubly so because the union is a 'standard' not assault style dropship. There are a ton of fun designs that use more aerodynamic designs and are ment to PUNISH everything that trys to mess with the balls on their way to the landing zone.

Note that the reason going above 1.5G isn't advised isn't due to stress on the ship or anything like that, but stress on the crew and troops carried, who would basically have to spend multiple days strapped to a G-couch doing nothing but putting up with twice their normal weight pressing down on them. Troops subjected to this tend to be less combat effective after a hard combat burn. Plus given the distances and time it takes to cross, surprise is kinda out the airlock anyways so taking an extra couple days to come in rested and fully ready to party is considered preferable unless there are circumstances that would have coming in a couple days early worth the degraded combat efficiency of the troops. Often in these circumstances they'll alternate between high G burn and standard G burns to shave some time off but also allow the crew time to rest. Battletech isn't a universe with gravity tech so pushing at high G means everyone is subjected to it, there's not some magic where the passengers of a space ship are immune to the accelerations of the ship they're on

Ah yes hot combat drops from hovering drop ships, you should ask the clans how well that worked for them at Tukayyid. I have enjoyed my time here but if you excuse me I have to go pay my HPG bill. Damn space AT&T.

06:05 SCS - "...Timberwolf." Me, a BlackPantsLegion viewer - "MAD-CAT."

speaking of balls, you should totally do an episode on Ork Roks from 40k the rants would be amazing lol (apparently, take an asteroid, through a hilarious amount of engines and shooty bitz on it, then crash it into a planet)

I would disagree about the most iconic mech, primarily because some of us played before the Clans were even a thing. The iconic mechs were the ones referred to as the "Unseen" owing to their disappearance for legal reasons. I would argue that the most prominent of these are the Marauder and the Warhammer, mostly because they were very heavily featured in the artwork and are relatively decent compared to the likes of the Phoenix Hawk, Shadow Hawk, Wasp or (*shudder*) Battlemaster. Of course, any current player knows that the most iconic mech nowadays is the humble Urbanmech. Slow but suited to their environment with a startling amount of armour and firepower above their weight they are cheap. You can get five of them for the price of one Atlas and have change left over. Beware the Urbanmech, mock him at your peril. Because nothing says "I've had enough of your shit" more than a dirt cheap walking trashcan armed with a nuke.

nobody tell the quartermaster about Heavy Object, he isn't ready for more balls

Burning to a Nadir or Zenith point of a star would be somewhat faster than burning all the way out of a Solar System to find the Alderson Jump Point between a pair of stars as in the Mote in God's Eye series. But yes, it would require a ton of time and fuel.

I have heard that at some point FASA was trying to get the license to do a Dune game and after failing to get said license reworked what they had into what eventually became Battletech. So that might explain the whole Jumpship/Dropship thing.

you misunderstand the burn limitations, in battletech, burn limitations are primarily concerned with crew comfort for long term transit between the zenith/nadir it is assumed that all vessels are capable of much higher accelerations, but spending 2 weeks at 2.5G or higher doesn't sound very comfortable does it?

Not gonna lie, I'm so happy someone talked about BattleTech and the ships in it. I feel BattleTech doesn't get enough attention, so thank you for talking about it

Personally i love to use the giant fusion torch as a target during lift off to kill them. Weak armor around the torch. LRM20s, auto cannon 10 or better, or Long Toms work great for turning said drop ships into giant hand grenades.... Also... Stupidly, when fueling for launch, lighting up the fuel tankers filling it tends to make them go splodie too. Lol

The commonwealth saga was like that. The prime ships came down and cooked the defenders shooting at them with their fusion drives. That's what I call a hot landing zone.

It is also funny that in battletech the battlemech wasn't actually that great a weaponsplatform. It was good, certainly better than any planet bound systems, but it only got started because of the shock value and then developed an avalanche effect, without anyone asking wether it was actually a good weapon. And then they had doctrine developed around them so much that everyone just went with it

At last, we see an example of an over parked ship. It's truly a beautiful cube... and makes wonderful ammo for the Shipyards Defensive Railguns.

Well this is technically the third episode featuring a ball shaped artificial construct. The first was that clusterfuck of a space station from the Kelvin timeline of Trek.

The union class is so iconic

Honestly, the only magical thing about battletech mechs is the artificial muscle. That alone lets the components be held in tension and prevent buckling of the metal. After that, the actual systems are much less complex than your average drive train and transmission, and the bipedal design makes for better use of armor. Fite me on this, nerds.

The esteemed dockmaster has my greatest thanks for presenting this particular kind of ball for his viewers‘ pleasure. It saddens me, that i could not come up with any kind of decent joke about balls being tickled, but there you go.

Wait till he sees some of the bigger ones folks, or looks into pirate points for jumps (the main reason for the normal jump points being safety )

Congrats on doing this for a year, Dockmaster! May your cube-based reign of terror extend for many more orbital rotations!

There was a group who used hover drop tactics out of their drop ships, and was kind of good at it until someone figured you could just throw aerospace fighters at them en masse and make them crash.

The whole idea is to give us squishies a fighting chance by armoring ourselves up. Riding a Union class dropship down often feels like a roll-a-coaster ride in an oven when you're coming down fast.

When Star Wars parodied Spaceballs. Odd-ball times...

You ask “why do you humies have an obsession with balls?” I ask “why do you have an obsession over turning my ships into cubes??!! That’s the third one this cycle and I’ve old ever been two minutes late getting back to my ship!! Your shipyard is huge!! And convoluted!! I can do everything I need to in under 24 hours cause ya don’t let me fly from place to place! Come on! When do I get a punch pass? Loose five ships, get one replacement scotch free?”

"THE INTERNET FIXED MY BAAAAAAALLLLLS!" -Random Dalek

I'd think the biggest advantage to a spherical ship comes down to getting the best possible volume to surface area ratio. If you're ship is spherical you can get more volume to put cargo.fuel, crew inside it for a given mass or hull plating used in building the thing.

*Robot complains they don't know why they're still doing this series* Robot seems to be suffering from the 'send a robot to a store to buy groceries' problem.

In addition to what you said there are are some other advantages in Battletech for the Sphere design. 1) A ball has the best volume to surface ratio from all geometrical forms. That is not only a thing if you want to add armor. It's important if you want to dock on Jumpships. because the safe region in a jump is not a sphere around the jumpship. Its more a tube than a sphere. So relatively long and large dropships can need more than one docking port. 2) With exeptions for maneuvering with 0 to 0.something g, the gravity Points always in the same direction. The Main engine. No matter if the ship accelerates, deaccelerates or stays on the ground. 3) You don't need a runway and you don't need a 2nd drive that can provide several g's to a second direction. 4) The interior has the "Skyscraper in Space and on the ground" design but it is way more stable on the ground than a ship with a "longer" design. And some other points: - There are rules for Starting and landing Dropships. It's a while since I played. But I think you don't want to be in about 90 meters in heavy armored vehicles and mechs and the room where Light armored vehicles or infantry would be cleared should be something up to 180 meters or more. I know I used that as a weapon in the past, using official rules. - Landing in a hot landing zone can happen but is not what these ships normally do. They use a cold Landing zone, drop the mechs to clear a landing zone or use the fighters for protection and Landing zone clearance. And fighters are really deadly for ground units. - The comparison with a Mad Cat/Timberwulf is not ideal. The Mad Cat is a clan mech while the union is equipped with up to 3025 Inner Sphere tech. The mad cat would have half the weaponry with inner sphere tech or the Union would have two to three times the weaponry with clan tech.

You talking about the weird/cool/stupid stuff that encompasses battletech is most welcome.

Spheres can be stable, you just have to put the center of mass more on one side, this is how the apollo capsules didn't spin their crew to death. Scott Manley did a video about this, think it was called Aerothermodynamics.

Yes! He's starting to cover battletech(mechwarrior is just the roleplay game based on the battletech universe)

Somebody show this to tex, someone somewhere is talking about battletech!

Spheres have the highest volume to surface area ratio of all shapes. Means if you want to carry the most stuff for the least amount of material (specifically, armor) and also get maximum effectiveness for a given thrust, spheres are the way to go. Perfect for something like a dropship. Also means that there are no pointy bits to catch drag while on atmo entry, either for atmo heating or for force concentration, so minimizes risk of burning or breaking up on high-velocity atmospheric travel. Perfect for something like a dropship. Also since you have nothing that sticks out in any direction, it minimizes the target profile you present to any enemy from every angle at the same time, making it less likely that you'll get hit in the first place. Perfect for something like a dropship meant for hot landings. Regarding jumps in the battletech universe: You don't HAVE to jump at the zenith/nadir of the system. You can jump to Lagrange points as well, you just need to do more maths, risk getting destroyed in exciting and interesting ways, and also explain to any law enforcement that spots you why you're not coming through the "correct" jump points. Also, while non-jump-capable ships exclusively relied on jump ships, "warship" is a label for pretty much any ship that is capable of self-jumping, something that was VERY common in the earlier eras of the battletech lore. It's only in the game eras when most warships have been blown up and the technology, industrial capability, and political will to rebuild them has been largely lost that jumpships are the standard of travel - and even they are stretched thin as it is. Doesn't mean warships are entirely gone, just that they're much rarer than they used to be, and owning is a Big Deal. Another thing to consider is that in pretty much every battletech game where you're traveling from system to system (like the most recent ones - Battletech, Mechwarrior 5) you're in charge of a ragtag mercenary company. You can't AFFORD to either seize, operate, or hold a self-jumping warship with any significant force projection. If the running costs don't bankrupt you (most Destroyers - considered SMALL warships - hold more fuel tonnage than the entire mass of a Union dropship, have hundreds of crew, and cost in the billions of cbills), then drawing the attention of governments with many more and much bigger forces than your single ship is generally a very bad idea.

You should take a look at some of the ships from Red dwarf, specifically the titular ship and the Starbug

Imma just leave this puppeteer vessel in your dock, and laugh when your cube compressor becomes a sphere compressor.

Suggestion for an opening text: _"Welcome to the Sacred Cow Shipyard, where no cow is safe from being butchered and roasted... I mean, ship"_

The reason they went with a Sphere and in some cases an Ovoid (overlord class) is due to the internal volume advantages. There is also the fact that it takes more force to crush a sphere than a cube or a rectangle and in the case of the ovoid it takes even more force from certain angles to do the same. I still don't know why they have upright cylindrical dropships though... Disclaimer: Honestly I've been trolling battletech tabletop and RPG's by landing pairs of spheroid dropships that are slightly differently sized for at least two decades. Oddly no one's ever caught the joke.

The 40K universe took the Navigator idea from Dune. And smaller Marine squad sized ball drop ships.

It is kinda crazy how three universes practically influenced basically all of popular Sci-Fi. Dune and Foundation and Starship Troopers can collectively be blamed for Battletech, 40K, Star Wars, and so many others. I really wouldnt have it any other way.

Two balls are better than one, but three are just weird. Joystick or not.

"The most iconic mech in [Battletech] would be the Timberwolf." Ah a Clanner, I see.

A Jumpship USUALLY used the Zenith and nadir points of a system, but it does not have to exclusively use those two points. "The two most commonly used jump points are at the zenith and nadir of the gravity well, along the line that passes through the system’s gravitational center and is perpendicular to the plane of the star system (generally above and below the poles of the star). These two points lie at the minimum safe jump distance from the main star and simplify navigational calculations." (Strategic Operations p 86.) "The zenith and nadir are the most commonly used points, especially for civilian traffic, but are not the only options. A jump capable unit can travel to any point in a star system that is at least as far away from the star as the distance listed on the Proximity Point Distance Table (see below). These jump points form a sphere around the star, although the gravitational fields of large planets might distort this." (Strategic Operations p 86.) The time taken does vary depending on the star type, and the table shows that it ranged from 137.91 days (B0 Type) to 7.96 days for a M9 type star. Oh and one suggestion as to why the Union is a Spheroid type (what we call them, BTW), is because of gravity, or rather the need for us "squishes' to be in a gravity field.

Big balls from space touching down could mean giant mechs looking for salvage, an incompetent droid army or a Saiyan from Earth who had just finished his month long physical training under a million times gravity.

You know I like the idea of a "jump ship", it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to exist in a realistic sci-fi universe. It would be much more particle to have 1 FTL drive that carry's multiple space craft.

“Please be advised that any ships left on the e docks will be compressed to a cube” The Borg would like to know your location

When it comes to ball ships nothing beats Perry Rhodan. Spheres from 50 Meters to 2500 Meters. Spherical ships carrying smaller spherical ships, which might carry even smaller ones (carrying discus shaped ships, carrying hover tanks). Spheres stuck together. Also cubes crewed by a species that is part robot, part biological long before star trek did it.

We're probably descended from the Space Balls, so it makes sense we're obsessed with balls.

The mention of Q-ships took me off-guard. Nice touch. Also, you should look at Perry Rhodan. Their entire fleet is a mass of giant balls... Ugh.

In Canon battletech, aerodyne dropships like the Leopard generally don't have VTOL capability. So the reason for a spheroid dropship like a Union or Overlord is that they are able to land on a planet (provided they have a suitable landing zone) without having to first secure a safe airfield or runway. While there are a variety of options to deploy mechs, dropping from low orbit, dropping from atmospheric flight, etc. most pose significant danger to the mechs and/or dropship if they come across hostile forces while making the drop. And they will be unable to retrieve mechs until an airfield or suitable installation with a runway is captured or brought under control of the invading forces. So really it's a mixed bag, the Leopard makes great sense for things like garrison duty or reinforcing a world under attack, while the Union or Overlord is a better option when invading a hostile world or hit-and-run strikes.

Wait until you see a Fortress class: Bigger, more weapons, more troops, and a huge artillery piece on top. Plus 12 vehicles and a command deck. The artillery piece is basically a WW2 battleship gun, called the Long Tom.

E. E. 'Doc' Smith [Interplanetary and Lensman Series], father of Space Opera, wrote his human ships as spheres. FTL was a nascent concept at that time. Space was ether, not vacuum, when he wrote. Combat between ships and boarding parties have many a naval aspect held over from the days of: privateering, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, Ironclads, and Dreadnaughts.

Audio is good. Editing is on point. A well given message. I say you've got the correct coding for "content creation". Please continue sending more videos for us squishes to enjoy; and as my Meklar buddies would say "have a nice solar period."

I hope there's a little aside into how the videogames espescially the most recent two get the Leopard wrong from the lore.

On the side of traveling through space. Macross (original of Robotech) is using Space fold technology to travel through super dimension space. In later series they are using fold busters to allow smaller units for folding space or faster folding. There were also Fold Faults, a places in Super Dimension Space that hinder the use of folding, making the journey longer. On the side note. "Spice must flow!" Or so they say. And what is spice? Well. It is substance that is mined from the sands of Dune. It is very dangerous because there are very huge Worms living on the Dune, or Arrakis. They roam the whole desert planet, and they hunt anything that are making regular sounds while moving on the sandy surface. Worms are also filtering sands thru their bodies as they travel and once in a while they secrete thing that they do not need. So... Making long dissertation short, Navigators are getting high on worm's "leftovers"... Like Riders in Fallout. Those are getting high on bramin shit fumes in form of Jet.

about that ships being left on the shipyard for more than 24h will be compressed into a cube: What about a borg cube ? compressing a borg cube into a borg cube ... your argument is futile! your shipyard will be added to my back yard

a big part of the reasone the dropship has so much firepower is to protect it while it's on the ground as much as anything else. mechwarriors, much line marines don't like it when their ride home disappears in a cloud of radioactive dust.

The "cone with curved bottom" design is pretty interesting. You'd think we came up with that one by just doing a lot of math but oh no. It's actually inspired by something, that something being minerals that have gotten caught in a meteor impact, super heated, thrown out of the atmosphere and then cooled as individual droplets as they were coming out of reentry. So they're basically the shape you get if you happen to be molten glass that's falling back into the atmosphere and then managing to stay in that configuration for long enough to become embedded in soft ground. That has got to be an inspiring thought for someone coming in from low orbit...

YES, BATTLETECH! FINALLY!

Biggest point about spheres is that they offer the most storage with the least amount of hull around it.

Like the Kzinti-War call out. For those not familiar with Larry Niven's Man-Kzinti Wars brief bit of background. The First War was a bit of a harsh learning curve for the Kzinti, who had skipped a lot of steps in the tech tree because they were just reproducing the tech that a race of slavers had after they overthrew and ate them. End result they didn't exactly understand the fundamental principles of things between iron age and their own advanced technology. When their psychers first scanned the crew of a human survey ship and none of the humans considered it armed, they thought it was going to be easy prey leading to the conquest of a new species. The human vessel had a fusion torch drive, a long range communications laser (designed to get a signal across light years to the Sol System receivers), and I think a overly powerful radar system. The humans ended up destroying a Kzinti warship as a result during this first contact. When the Kzinti arrived at the Sol System for the first time they ended up haveing to also deal with other things the humans did not consider weapons. There were massive electromagnetic accelerators in the asteroid belt and lunar orbit used to move ore and other inert bulk cargoes across the solar system. There were also massive lasers in solar orbit that were used by light Sail craft to move from the inner solar system to the outer, they had to user reaction drives to return, but the sails were very efficient and saved resources. The reliance of the Kzinti on psychics to gather intelligence on their enemies became one of their biggest problems during the 1st War. Because the humans had been trying very hard to be a peaceful species for several generations and not make weapons or even think of violence. So they didn't think of these system as weapons, even though they very easily became weapons when humans were threatened. The Kzinti did succeed in makeing the humans give up on the concept of being complete pacifists though. If first contact occured a couple generations later the Kzinti might have won.

My problem with this particular lander is loading it. The heavy vehickle bays are halfway up the thing, making you have to take a limping mech up a steep ramp, under fire, with no cover. For mechs that jump in and out, you're wasting jump fuel or running low before you get back and have to gas up at the bottem each way. If you tacked a cone skirt to this thing, and just had hanger space there, you could just pop open a door or extend an armored plate to walk around for each and every mech, solving those problems without even majorly altering the internal structure except majorly simplifying the landing gear structure.

If you want a really nasty dropship, go look up the Fortress class. 12 mechs, 12 heavy vehicles, 3 platoons, and 125 shells of "frag your grid coordinates!" at a range of yes. THAT one is actually designed to clear the zone and hold it while providing long range fire support. You want late stage crazy, check out the Duat.

Not only do us Battletech players use our balls, but we also have eggs to throw at you when we need more firepower...

Leopard class drop ship: basically the Imperial troop transport ( or murder brick ) with wings and bigger, It is the UH1 Huey for 'Mechs, (4x mechs, 2x fighters) or how to deliver an armored platoon with air support and hostile intent.

There are rules for cooking mechs with dropship thrusters and if doing so, a dire wolf will be a puddle in about 18 seconds of close area or immediately if close enough.

Union's a gold standard ship. 10/10 beast of a vessel, dare I say. Mostly because of its absurd simplicity. It's basically just an armored engine with storage stuffed around it. Pocket Warship variants are exceptionally hilarious. Take that firepower, up it to 11, and make whatever you're landing on cry. Or whatever is trying to land, I guess, but they're not really all that grand for space combat. The Inner Sphere uses what it can, ever since they got the bright idea to use nukes to destroy every major technological advancement of the last three or four hundred years. God bless those crazy bastards.

I'm fond of the capital warships of Poul Anderson's _Polesotechnic League_ books. They mostly use some sort of gravity based drives (and shields, and FTL I think) that allow a ship to look pretty much as you want to. Smaller ships might be streamlined, big freighters might be built around cargo handling. The big brutes (IIRC the core of one is surrounded by "radial kilometers" of very angry ship) do minimize their surface area which in turn helps with the aforementioned shield. Incidentally the shields don't help with lasers or, I believe, plasma type weapons. They "only" keep projectiles out. Anyway, in this universe ships can look like whatever but when things get serious the BALLS come out.

According to early interviews and developer discussions... The Jumpships were based not on Dune but Macross tech. Basically, they use a Macross-style Jump Drive, at least what the 80s described it as before Macross retconned it in later series, only they tried making it seem more realistic in universe. Also, some Warships carry Jump Drives. with some even being able to dock smaller ships on them.

Balls of Fury jokes would have landed in this episode.

Soo... If I leave a sphere on the docks I get a cube? Would you be up for haggling getting a sphere if I leave a cube? Great video this time around. The Battletech setting is a great one. Sure the walkers and vehicles with a profile that screams "shoot me!" is debatable. But the lore stays reasonably consistent and logical. Looking forward to any other videos you decide to make of this setting.

KSP players know exactly what you mean about DeltaV and the cost of changing from a polar to an equatorial orbit.

One thing about the battletech universe, is that the much popularized succession wars where most of the game revolves around the factions literally blasted each other's technology bases, and sometimes their own to spite the Victor's, to the point that they had to Agree on rules like no more nukes, accept surrender and prisoners, don't slaughter the subjugated civilians because they had an opinion etc. The had warships which where basically jumpships but with armor and "naval" class weapons that can swat a tiny, in comparison, dropship but again the facilities that produced even parts fit for these monsters were targeted and obliterated. I would suggest checking out tex talks battletech because he does a great job talking about the history about that universe.

Well, the Union isn't the most "Ballier" of the ships of Battletech universe. Also, she isn't even designed to combat, it's a glorified battle transport with some weapons for self-defense that had the dubious luck of being one of the few models of dropship whose assembly factories weren't entirely destroyed during the Succession Wars. If you have to use your Union weapons in space or the ground you know you are fucked up. IMO the Fortress is closer to a be a perfect ball and also is armed with everything and the kitchen sink... plus an artillery cannon to attack targets on the ground, making her upper cupola a HUGE turret. Still, Battletech balls have more sense than the aerodyne dropships of the same universe with all those gravity switches between the decks. In a spheroid dropship the floor of the ship is the same no matter if it is on land or traveling in space under its own thrust at 1G. With an aerodyne during space operations, the floor is on a wall and before entering the atmosphere you have to move everything to put it on the actual floor.

Won my Heart with the First Law of the Kzinti War.

Ball Ship....Blue Origin....Ball Ship. meta joke...youtube recommendations is playing a meta joke. I had a teacher sequence like this....in high school....the middle one reminds me more of W's VP or Nixon...yeah we joked about it.

Yes! Awsome... Can you do the Leopard class drop ship from Battle Tech? Please non squishy space dock overlord?

Sphere's look efficient. It would be hilarious watching an RB-79 "ball" ace pilot take out all the Gundam/Zaku in a space combat because of realistic physics. Probably not going to sell toys though.

I feel like I’ve discovered a future space tech cult. And you’ve fucking hooked me in hard.

If you want spherical, there's always Doc Smith; take your pick of the Skylark or the early Bergenholm-type ships. Sometimes there are technical reasons. In one of my pet universes (in which I'm completely failing to write any actual stories), FTL is vaguely Nivenesque, with a couple of twists - one of which being that the hyperdrive wraps the ship in a pocket universe, and making such a universe non-spherical, or any larger than it needs to be, gets ruinously expensive, the required energy being proportional to the enclosed hypervolume. Ergo, any FTL ship, when configured for a jump, is a featureless sphere (with the interior very tightly packed). Not very screen-friendly.

You want to talk about a ball fixiation? Just about everything in Perry Rhodan uses Orb ships or 'Kugelraumer'. A sphere is very efficient in space with no weak spots like the Enterprise nacelles and the most volume for surface area.

Balls. big balls of steel. And gun , don't forget Gunz

Liked for Kzinty War Reference! Thank you Sacred Cow Shipyards for all your references and information. You are a wonderful sentient being.

hello Cow. Nice shout out to Larry Niven's 'Known Space' series. Myself, I am an old hand at Battletech, in that I have been playing off and on since 1984 when the game was first released. Yes, there are spherical and 'spheroid' Drop Ships. But there are also a LOT of 'Aerodyne' designs as well. You made several good points about the rounded shape giving the Drop Ship more 'effective' armor thickness, and thus more overall protection from weapons fire. And of course, the comment about just 'fanning' your drive's plasma plume across emplacements is somewhat sound. You did fail to note that while doing this, the Drop Ship is for all intents and purposes, at a stand-still and easily targeted by anything with the range to reach it from the ground. Usually, Drop Ships do not have to deal with 'contested' drop zones. They mostly land at per-prepared Landing Fields, or off at some location that is not heavily guarded. The 2nd option being somewhat preferred, since it allows the Drop Ship to offload it's cargo of fighting vehicles (yes, including Mechs), and return to orbit, or to the Jump Ship, to return with further reinforcements. Also of note, is that any decently planned attack would entail the usage of multiple Drop Ships of several configurations, each of which would offload it's own load of combat equipment, personnel, vehicles, and Battlemechs. The vast majority of times when a single Drop Ship is used, it is against a 'lesser' defended planet, and the landing zone is usually at some remove from the usual Landing Field (which would be highly protected), or at some location that will take the Defenders time to arrive it in force. This gives the Attacker time to offload and set up defenses of their own, or set up various traps and such to further delay Defending forces while other Attackers land and reinforce the Landing.

Congrats on a year!!!!!

If you like rant on balls, you really should take a look at the ships of the german scifi series "Perry Rhodan", which in my opinion, are among the best out there.