I have a video dedicated to this topic on the channel that'll give you an in-depth answer (assuming you want to start in the first era). If you search BattleTech Novels on YT you should be able to find it. What sort of thing interests you? Are you looking for combat and campaigns or are you more interested in plots and politics? The writing across most of the novels isn't exemplary, but there are a couple authors whose work stands above the rest. It's good enough if you're just interested in some light pulpy science fiction. Every now and again there's a really great one.

Thinking about this more: it would have made more sense for the 8th Sword of Light to have fought with the 4th Arkab on Chandler. The 8th were stationed on Stanzanch, considerably closer to Chandler, while the 5th was stationed on Scheat on the Davion front.

@MrOhidunno Weird movements like that are usually just a case of a throwaway line on one of the old sourcebooks mentioning the presence of a unit in some random battle now conflicting with the more thoroughly mapped out lore in the later historical series sourcebooks.

​@@SvenVanDerPlankoh wow, first of all, huge fan, love everything about this channel and the work you do. Every video is an absolute joy to view. I saw the line in question in the 2nd succession war Sourcebook for the attack on Chandler, and I'm kinda wondering if a 5th was typed when an 8th should have been. On a monitor with less definition and small text, it's super easy to switch 5 and 8 on a quick glance. (I've done this quite a bit myself.)

There's more about Ryan's Iceships in other sources. All those jump drives were controlled from a command vessel. Each was communicating with each other to create an overlapping field.

Strategic Operations rulebook

yeah despite all that's good about Andor, the time it takes takes to jump between systems felt simply and wrongly way too quick, giving the impression of mere hours when in much older media it felt like it should take days at the VERY least

And then there are the in-universe command chains. For sovereigns, warlords and moguls who spend money like water. Thirty light years per HOUR.

@@djolds1 Yup, command chains rapid give you communication speeds that in credible. Only the practically time travel fast speeds of say Babylon 5's BabCom (no time delay between Earth and Epsilon Endri) or the insanity of Trek's subspace communications grid (again, no time delay what so ever over incredible distances... but Trek also has ultra-poor writing/able to see into the future with not just FTL sensors but real time FTL sensors that can see for light years instantly when the plot says it can)... but when you are used to say a Traveller game where speed is barely as fast as the fastest jump ship... the command chain trick can get rather impressive. The HPG network, even more so. 60 LY near instant transmissions are incredible, especially the circuit design.

@@Khymerion HPGs are another example of a well thought out tech with restrictions, in BTech. The Clans have arranged near-real time Kurultais using HPG, yet it's difficult. Now if we could just get rid of the stupid walking robots, and swap in the fusion powered hovertanks...

@@djolds1 Shhhhhhhhh... we are not allowed to talk about Renegade Legion.

Lots of questions there. I'll try to answer them all. They are still manufactured but much of the infrastructure was destroyed during the early Succession Wars so new ones are quite rare. There are several references to certain components being manufactured in automated factories, but not necessarily the whole vessel. The challenges in building the machines that make those parts is the reason there are still very few shipyards in the 31st century. I can't think of any reason why you would want to move an enemy shipyard without their permission. There's no way to transport them to another system because they're far too large to attach to a JumpShip. But if you want to try, go for it. There's no friction in space, so theoretically anything that can move itself could move a shipyard, but a JumpShip would be the worst way to do that. Because they never leave the jump points, they're only designed with very small boosters to hold their position. They would almost never traverse through a system in any significant way. There are a couple instances in the lore of the much more powerful WarShips use their own hulls to prevent a sabotaged shipyard from tumbling into the atmosphere of a planet. The ability to manufacture WarShips was lost in the First Succession War. When the Great Houses started to recover that technology around 3050, their first prototypes did use some parts recovered from old hulks that had been left drifting for centuries. They didn't have the ability to manufacture the massive thrusters at first so they just reconditioned some ancient ones they had found. As for whether a destroyed JumpShip can be repaired, depends how badly it was damaged. Because of the difficulties of moving a new jump drive through space, it's almost always easier to just build a new one from scratch. I don't know what interesting things you're thinking of, so it's up to you.

@@SvenVanDerPlank "Not necessarly the whole vessel" Alrighty thats the answer I was looking for thanks. I've had people try to tell me the setting's entire ship production is automated. They didn't like it when I suggested the possibility of comstar uploading a hostile AI as a way of sabotauging the locals, or sending mechwarriors to raid the shipyard for the tech that I want to steal (not needing the entire shipyard makes that easier!) I keep thinking this is a cyberpunk setting where awesome things happen and the fanbase keeps telling me otherwise because "The ability to manufacture WarShips was lost in the First Succession War." What exactly is the part that is irreplaceable? Is this like the support vehicle rules where your ships have the inferior BAR armor becase no one can build an Armored Chassis anymore? Or is it more like Starsector where you can't manufacture new Ship Components but you can aggressively salvage components from other people's ships?

@alecciarosewater7438 The compact drive cores are the most advanced piece of tech that disappeared first. Though the enormous thrusters are less sophisticated, once the factories were destroyed they had no reason to rebuild them as WarShips were pretty much extinct by then.

@@SvenVanDerPlank So what's the point of the warship building rules? Is there no enclave of spacefarers who have the remaining compact drive cores and a lingering resentment for the planet-dwellers? The more I look at this setting the less interesting it gets

@alecciarosewater7438 WarShips are only absent during the Succession Wars era. They are still a part of the setting during the other 650 years of history. They first appeared in 2300 and at their height around 2765 there were thousands and thousands of them. But then a long series of massively destructive wars started to destroy them one by one. The last WarShip battle took place in 2853. 200 years later, the Inner Sphere is starting to recover the technology and so WarShips reappear, though now they're incredibly scarce and precious. The most powerful empires might only have a dozen or so. There are exceptions to that. The SLDF took 400 surviving WarShips on their exodus into deep space, but those would remain mothballed until their return to the Inner Sphere 250 years later. Cultural changes during that period would mean they saw little actual use beyond transport. ComStar also had a dozen surviving vessels hidden in the Inner Sphere. Revealing their existence would have immediately turned everyone against them, so they only reappeared once the rest of the humanity was starting to rebuild.

That line about L1 is a mistake. Just put it down to that section being spoken by a character giving their own presentation. There are countless examples in the lore that contradict that, and as another commenter pointed out, my explanation of L1 is incorrect. It's actually closer to the sun than the point where the two gravities equalise. It's just close enough to the planet that its gravity stabilises it's trajectory into an orbit whereas it's natural velocity would have it fall into the sun. So if what you said was correct, none of the Lagrange Points would be valid, which is obviously not the case.