Hello again everyone. Hope you are doing well. Over the past three years of making BattleTech content, I've received quite a few comments expressing confusion about how space travel works in the setting. I've frequently thrown out terms like "quick charge" or "pirate points" in my videos, and while most folks have a loose understanding of what that would mean in context, I've never taken the time to properly explain things thoroughly. I also suspect that there are a lot of misconceptions about how these things work among the community, so I'm hoping that this bonus episode will clear things up. I wrote it to be non-specific timeline wise so I can place this one back at the start of the playlist as a proper introduction to these concepts before the main history begins. It's been six weeks since I last uploaded anything. Apologies for the lengthy absence, but I'm happy to report that I'll be back to making Lore & History videos in July now that the scripts for the Third Succession War are finished. If all goes to plan, you'll see the first premiere next weekend. I'll hope to see some of you there. Thanks everyone.

“Humans tend to be more susceptible to rocks materializing inside of them.” 😂😭😂😭

Welcome back Sven!

"Sorry guys it seems we arrived later than usual to our destination. Hey, why are all your ships painted white?"

I just love the whole concept of space travel in Battletech as it feels much more grounded and "risky" rather than a push of a button and you're there. I love that Battletech makes the setting work with itself rather than slap on some elements and not put too much thought into it.

Replacement cores not being able to be jumped as replacements is a fascinating aspect I never thought of

Good stuff! The way space travel in BattleTech works is one of my favorite parts of the entire setting. Compared to 'push button/throw lever, get to destination' stuff it feels so much more real.

Okay, now that I've watched the full video- that was fantastic. As always, exceptionally well done. This is definitely worthy of praise.

All BT writers need to see this video. I've noticed many inconsistencies, and it drives me nuts!

I think this is the only video that goes into depth about interstellar travel in Btech, so good on you for making it! Also, welcome back Sven

Finally more actual lore. Only a very small few actually release actual lore videos. Everyone else seems to forget that robots aren’t food, infrastructure, building materials, jobs, day to day life, clothing, historical artifacts and more. There is clearly enough there. Just most have no vision beyond metallic giants

Its like a technical manual but video form! I love it!

Lore for the Lore God! Knowledge for the Fluff Throne!

A small bit of trivia... something that came up when discussing various Sci-fi - the K/F Drive is one the fastest FTL drives in scifi. That 30 LY jump in one week is... hard to match in most of the more reputable sci-fi. It is faster than the Traveller J6 drive (yes, the TL 16 you can never have it fast boat drive), TNG era Trek ships have to burn a full week at low Warp 9 to catch up to the jump ship before it recharges to jump again (not that you can sustain the engines that long), Honorverse ships are having to travel in the Epsilon and Theta bands to catch a Jumpship before it recharges... so unless things move at the speed of plot (Star Wars), the BT Jumpship is one of the best sci fi FTL ships, even with that week recharge times. Puts the scale of the Inner Sphere into a bit of a new light when you start thinking of things like that. Just a fun thing that came up in a conversation. There are faster but we liked those three universes when we were discussing and well, those universes have maps that aren't trash!

Well-said. Battletech does a great job of having an internal logic and system of rules that generally aren't broken (occasionally weird stuff happens, but they usually come across as rumours or exaggerations). It's impressive to see how much thought was put into this system of space travel without really getting too deep into the actual science of it all. Great video, as always.

Dude hell yeah. I absolutely love blackwater and aerospace stuff in Battletech, I know why they don't get more attention in the lore but I wish they did. It's just a unique take on FTL, especially when you throw in how FTL communications work in the setting This and hearing about all the epic space battles from your Reunification War, Star Leauge Civil War and 1st Succession War vids it really makes me want to get some WarShip minis even if nobody plays blackwater stuff lol. Also thank you for shouting out Stratops one of your big sources, that helps out immensely.

i genuinely loved this video. i know it may not perform well, but you made nerds like me very happy i am thankful for your effort, and listing those sources. this has enhanced the lore. for example, the Malagrotta affair and Tintativa are now much more interesting. that many ships misjumping all at once has me wondering what happened at malagrotta, and now that i know just how risky pirate points are, the battle of tintativa is even more stunning. considering kf drives are a cornerstone of how the setting works, its suprising how little its discussed

It actually is possible to jump in a replacement drive, it's just extremely difficult and expensive. You basically have to construct an entire temporary JumpShip around the new core (i.e. attach the drive, cooling systems, controls, and everything else you need to make it jump), jump it to the system with the stricken ship, disassemble the components around the core and tow it to the ship whose core needs replacing (after having removed and towed away the original core, as even broken the mass of germanium will interfere with the new core if too close). For understandable reason this isn't normally done since at that point you've already almost built another JumpShip already, but it could be practical to, say, salvage a WarShip whose core has been destroyed, as WarShips have a lot of other expensive and hard to manufacture components in addition to the core (chiefly the massive transit drives). Also, there is a theoretical possibility of taking advantage of the phenomena where misjumped ships sometimes end up emerging far outside their normal jump range by using a precisely timed activation of a LF battery during a jump to trigger a sort of controlled misjump, sending the ship across far greater distance than normally possible. However, since this would invariably destroy the KF core and would result in destruction of the ship if the calculations were even slightly off, by 3025 nobody has ever been crazy enough to actually test out that idea.

Another great video, it's great to see the inner workings of the BT universe

I wasn't going to watch this video, because I already know how these work, but I will listen to you talk about any Battletech stuff Sven. Cheers for another video!

Ginally got around to watching this and, even though you lore videos mention the different jump points, it just dawned on me how much more use of the three dimensional plane the BattleTech interstellar travel lore uses. I think that adds to the realism, because its not just about getting from point A to point B, but rather also factors in the need to respect real life orbital mechanics at the two endpoints.

This is great, never got a great explanation for space jumping in BattleTech!

Absolutely outstanding Sven and well worth your research time!! A perfect blend of BT lore/cannon and our own current scientific knowledge. Special gratitude on including Lagrange points. When I first learned of them years ago my brain overclocked itself trying to calculate the 1000+ or more possible L points in our own Sol system. Kudos & Huzzahs!! Keep up the great work Sven and can't wait for next Succession war episode!!

Jump ships and Dropships was a great book. It gave us the mighty Baron!

what a lovely Monday Surprise! New Sven!

A fantastic Battletech palate cleanse. Not everything is blood and thunder in 3025. Thanks so much.

Masterfully explained. Thank you! ❤

Great video! I had the Jumpships and Dropships book, until a "friend" at university stole it with a few others books and BT games boxes....

Well now i know what a Lagrange-point is and already ideas of how to use it in a sci-fi rpg is popping up. Great video as always.

Long time no hear, thank you again for your dedication and work.

Sven, you're the man! Best low lore videos out here.

Thank you so much for all the time and effort you put into making this video! It’s deeply appreciated and I enjoyed the video. I knew some of the basics of this but I never realized how little I knew the jump drives and the ships that use them which a big deal because I like WarShips a lot.

Welcome back Sven ! Good video to signal your return, as not everyone take the time to explain fully the basics of space travel in BattleTech.

Thank you for the information. I've always been curious about the zenith and nadir points, and their importance. Along with pirate points to. A lot of info, but very straight forward.

Amazing as always mate

As always great work!!

An awesome video! I have always preferred Battletech's take on interstellar travel than those used in other sci-fi franchises. It just seems more 'realistic.'

So maybe things are different in the BattleTech fluff, but in ours the L1 Lagrange point isn't the point where the gravitational pulls equalize. In the case of the Sun-Earth L1 point the Earths pull is tiny compared to the Suns pull. Which makes some sense when you remember that objects at Lagrange points should be orbiting the sun, and orbits require gravitational attraction to work. You can do the back of the envelope math really easily: Earth-L1 distance is about 1.5 million kilometers. Sun-L1 distance is about 150 million kilometers (i.e. about 100x the Earth-L1 distance) The Sun is about 330,000x the Earths mass. Gravitational attraction is proportional to M/r^2. For Earth at L1 we can call this "1" (1 Earth mass / 1 Earth-L1 distance) For the Sun at L1 this is 330,000/100^2 = ~33 (330,000 Earth's mass / (100 Earth-L1 distances)^2)

Really enjoyed this. I’d be very interested to see more videos about specific items of technology and their evolution through time.

Great video, well worth the wait! Thank you so much sir!

Excellent work Sven!

Good to see you back and awesome video. Thanks so much for all you do.

I'm so glad you did this! For the longest of times I didn't quite understand how it worked. I knew it was different than lightspeed for Star wars and other such things, but I couldn't quite grasp what the difference was. This dose a great job of explaining it. And in many respects I actually like this system better than say Star wars or Star Trek because it feels more grounded believable. Plus the extra rules in place add restrictions that are fun to play around with, mechanically speaking.

thank you so much for doing such an important video. for all the work you are doing establishing game canon, please spend some more time in warship classifications and all things regarding the space-side of the game because it simply hasn't gotten enough love

Great video as always. Glad you're back brother.

Hell yeah, new Vanderplank

I thought the Lagrange points WERE the pirate points... I'm learning! Fantastic video and something I've only ever picked up in bits and pieces from lore videos talking about other things.

Awesome video!!! I love it!!!! More of these would be great!

Awesome!!

Great video! Thank you!

One of my favorite videos you've done! Very interesting! I'd love to see a follow up on any of the different weapon types; how the tech was invented and evolved to the "modern era". Battlefield uses and limitations. Your videos are some of the best I've seen, in depth and extremely detailed. I've loved the game and setting since I was a teenager in the 80's. Several friends and I still play tabletop at least once a month. I can't wait to see what you have next time.

Thank you for making this video, it's wonderfully detailed. You're diligent video maker!!!

Great work as always.

Thank you for this video! It was most enjoyable.

Sheeeesh. This is EXACTLY the topic I've been ruminating about this past week. Thank you.

Well done sven, this is actually a super cool video

Ahh @Sven van der Plank. You are doing the seminal aspects of the Battletech Universe that make it different from all other SF/Game Universes. These both limit and give it greater depth. I expect you will soon cover other such videos, such as for Communication and Water. This can then lead on to one of the aspects of Battletech that long-time players take for granted, but new players find hard to wrap their heads around - the Neo-Feudalism found in the Inner Sphere and Periphery.

Very well done. Thanks for the great work.

These videos on the internal mechanics of the setting are really useful Especially with how spread out information on a lot of stuff in BattleTech can be.

The Kearney Fuchida drive works very well thank you

I believe you might have made a mistake (by omission!) during the Lagrange point explanation - not all Lagrange points are valid for K-F Drive usage, only the L1 points. This is elaborated upon in _Strategic Operations: Advanced Aerospace Rules_ on pages 122 and 123, which states: "Anyway, the short of it is this: in any set of LaGrange points, only the L1 point－well, a place near it－is a valid jump point. The actual jump point will wiggle around the real L1 point due to the influence of the local stars and planets." Earlier the text explains that this is due to the fact that, of all the Lagrange points, the L1 is the only one where the gravitational pull of the planet and star _actually_ balance out, which is what matters for the K-F Drive to do its K-F-y things.

Nice Video As always

As always.... wonderful

Thanks, this was really fun to watch

Great to see another educational vid. Thank you so much!🎉❤

Love these types of videos!

Welcome back!

Great summary

I'd been wondering about use of Lagrange points after some of the warship battles of the early succession wars. The risk of there being more mass there than your jump could otherwise displace is a pretty good reason to avoid them normally.

Always happy AF when I see a new BT video drop from you Sven

Love your vids.

Great episode. I would love a few more like these, maybe focused on the basics of battlemech technology, warships, fighters, and the like. Altough i understand the main focus of the channel is on history.

Yay new video, thank you sir!

About time somebody made this up.....

Good video.

Hello Sven. A very nicely made video, and informative. Even to us old 'Grey Warriors' that have been around for 4 decades. The L-4 and L-5 jump points are not used as often as the polar points of the target star, even in solar systems where the orbital paths are well known, and maps are highly detailed. The systems where this is done regularly are, in the vast majority, highly developed and with substantial space-based infrastructure, military outposts, and military bases. Although 'safer' than using a 'Pirate' point, it is 'risky' to use such jump points in a system that is now well documented. This has not kept various military uses for such jump points from being leveraged to shorten the time needed to transit to a target. It can take upwards of a week or more to boost out to, or inwards from, one of the Polar jump points for interstellar transit. Jumping to the L-4, or L-5 points results in a far shorter transit time to the target planet or space-based target. The reduction in the transit time from Emergence Point to Target makes it worth the risk of using such jump points for military purposes. Civilian cargo shipping though, usually uses the Polar Points for safety reasons and takes the 'hit' on transit times between a planet and a jump point. It is just better to take longer to deliver goods than risk the ship to an accidental mis-jump. Civilian Jump Ships that do use the L-4 and L-5 points are usually crewed by personnel that have extensive databanks about the systems they will most likely jump to, or have former military personnel that have experience using such points. After the initial newness of Battletech wore off on my playing group, we all started to keep records of our battles, salvage, money, etc. About 7 years after the initial release of Battletech, My Mercenary Company had been successful enough to buy a 'spare' Overlord Drop Ship, which they towed out to the L-4 point in a fairly busy solar system. There, they outfitted it with the equipment necessary to recharge jump ships via the use of microwave beaming of power. After a few more years, another Overlord was obtained and the two were mounted base to base (engine area to engine area) and spun for 'gravity'. Since neither had workable engines and had to be towed into place, the engine areas were useful for the resulting 'space station'. To make things 'easier', I had caused to have built a 'connector' that the two Drop Ship hulls would anchor to. Accessible via the axis of spin, since the 'connector' looked like a 'tin can', and had docking ports built at the zero Gee axis of spin points of the 'can'. Over the years, these two former Overlords were extensively refitted as spin-gravity habitats with all the 'bells and whistles' one could want in space. Accommodations, hospital, aid stations, gardens, hydroponics bays, power generation decks, etc. After a couple of character decades, this 'station' was making more money than the Mercenary Company itself, and the profits were used to 'tide things over' when contracts were either sparse or proved less than profitable. Since this 'station' was not in a high-traffic solar system that already had extensive space-based infrastructure, it did well for itself. Further expansions to the L-5, and L-1 points were invested in, with a deal with the planetary government and an understanding with the planetary militia. The resulting solar system became my 'base of operations' for what was now a Mercenary Regiment, and the planet became the 'home' of the Regiment's dependents. The technical staff were split between the various stations and planet-side bases. By the time we 'gave up' playing (sometime during the Dark Age) as a group, my Mercs had expanded operations to include several other stations. Including extensive ones at the Polar Jump Points. The unit also was engaged in extensive mining efforts on several of the available moons of the other planets, as well as mining a fairly extensive asteroid field. I figure that by the time the game got to the ILKhan Era, that solar system would be a major trade hub, and the Mercs would have expanded to upwards of three Regiments in size, as well as their 'spin-off' corporations investing in building a manufacturing facility to build Jump Drives out at the System's edge. By the way, the System in question is located outside the Inner Sphere, and just past the nearer Periphery governmental areas.

welcome back :D

Good stuff

Great video.

Super well done vid... defintely expands my understanding of the BT universe. Also, the idea of a ship misjumping and arriving in some unknown Time/Location makes for a fun story in my head (not sure if thats something that been explored by anyone officially...)

Good job thanks

First episode I get to watch when it drops, yay!

I thought this was great. Thanks for this, I love it

Yei! You are back with more videos! Happy I am! 😁

"I said I was going to do something with the article on jump points on Sarna back in October, and I've got this 12 kB text file of notes and references sitting on my desktop I haven't done anything with since then, maybe I should actually..." "Meh, it looks like nobody else has touched anything since then anyway. No rush. I doubt there's much demand anyway." --me, literally last freakin' Tuesday

BABE! SVEN IS BACK! QUICK!

Kinda wish you had made mention of how JumpShips, WarShips, and the like are internally arranged. While the function of the drive was laid out early in the IP many of the early artists didn't follow the "skyscrapers in space" concept and stuck to the old "space is an ocean" orientation for their designs.

love the tech lore

awesome

Great vid as usual. Also just to ask, while I love your battletech lore videos, I remember a while back you mentioned wanting to do other projects. Do you have anything in the pipeline?

The sheer amount of raw STUFF related to FTL travel in BT is one of the reasons I love it so. And more importantly, the lore NEVER flexes on this (except in some outliers, like Far Country, but thats Far Country) There is no "Last Jedi using a tiny shuttle to cross half the galaxy in less than a day because we said so" kinda stuff here, no. You're locked in by what is set before and the hard rules do not bend. Even stuff like the Fortress Wall for the Republic of the Sphere has a solid logic to it that works within the universe. Thats rare in sci-fi these days.

The Manassas from Living Legends is one such warship with an experimental Jump Drive that popped up after 300 years stuck in hyperspace from the Exodus. While the RPG adventure states that the vessel should be destroyed, crippled or captured by Com Star at the end, it's whereabouts are still unknown. If I ran this adventure again, I'd have it make another 'time-jump' from 3058 to.. maybe the Jihad, Dark Age, or Il Clan era. I whacky way to deliver your players from the 3050 on to the new eras.

Whooo! Let's go!

Hope you had a good break, thanks for the Friday upload

OK, found the reference I was looking for about Rudolph Ryan and his fleets of iceships (AKA the Ryan Cartel). To solve the water shortages on many worlds, they would jump giant icecubes between stars. They would cut off chunks of asteroid ice 2km on a side. Tug them out to a jump point. Then a fleet of 16 ships in a precise formation (roughly globe shaped) would jump them to the system that needed them. This was in 2177. (House Kurita Source book p15-17) This should of course be impossible due to the core proximity issue. (this was published a year before the release of D&J so obviously like in so may other cases the details of story and technology had not quite been locked down yet)

Hell yeah. Not only did some of the authors offer contradictions, only a few of them explained it all correctly, and yet not as well as this rendition.

Awesome video! Would not mind more videos of the various technologies of the BattleTech universe.

Waiting for the Plasma Rifle armed MF version...... Great video! \o/

Can you somewhat expand upon it, and make a video on how a pirate/mercs raid on a planet would go? The process, how long will it take, etc. (and the time it will take for the reinforcement sent by nearby garrison after receiving the sos hpg to get there to help)

Battletech jump drive: "You may randomly disappear or re-appear in the middle of solid objects in the course of a interdimensional jump." (Looks at Warhammer 40K) "On the other hand, you will not be required to traverse demon-infested hell dimensions to use it, nor let said dimension's madness and their extremely disagreeable denizens into sidereal space. So there's that."