STONE RHINO | The greatest clan 'ego' project ever built | Battletech Lore

generic greetings and a welcome to science Insanity a channel dedicated to bringing my love of Science Fiction and all its often contradictory glory to you the viewer today we'll be covering a giant Stompy remarkably overpowered and undertuned Mech with a penchant for rolling around in the mud the stone Rhino may be one of the most Clan head things to ever be produced by the smooth brained worshipers of soup stock man this Mech sucks for a few reasons we'll get into but long story short go into this with the perspective of German World War II Wonder Weapons and you'll get the feel pretty quick but before we get into it if you'd like to support Psy get our content a day early in a mostly finished State and contribute ideas for future content then check out our patreon and buy me a coffee or feed Steve if space bucks are short then like sub share the video around and all that since every little bit helps and with that on to the video I forgot to introduce my co-host say hello Steve hello you'll also unfortunately have to forgive mediocre audio quality be today Steve is louder and more legible than he normally is but the quality is kind of crap because while he's had the new microphone for a few days he plugged it in 10 minutes ago and has never once used a microphone before outside of his phone so there's a bit of a learning curve that we're gonna have to go over hopefully next week things will be better basically an upgrade just so that he's easier to hear because before a lot of the time his laughter and what he was saying was horribly cut off by his terrible phone mic now though even when he shifts around in his chair or tries to fiddle with the Xbox controller under his desk which I know when you're doing it the microphone will pick that up so hooray Steve is more legible than he normally is I am no longer using Xbox Live to tune into these so are you ready for the stone Rhino would you like a picture before we really move on of course certainly excellent let me let me get you a picture of this absolute chubby boy we are going to be going over quite a few things because not only are we going to be covering the stone right I know we're going to be covering some of the variants and where it came from because it is a very very funny story The Stone Rhino is a middling at best Mech that failed to make waves utterly and often failed to do anything at all but not for the reasons you might think it's gonna get funnier as we go we're going to be covering a clan assault Mech with enough Firepower to vaporize smaller Stompy boys and enough armor to face tank for days the only downsides the thing could barely move at the best of time it had a habit of overheating to the point of melting every time you click the trigger and was almost never actually used since it was viewed in a reverential almost holy way by the smooth brain planners actually just a tiger that's that's why I was saying compare it to German Wonder Weapons man this thing is it looks really intimidating and on paper it really is but in real life man did it not live up to the hype so we're gonna start with the history of it because it's funny and we're actually gonna start with a completely different Mech now Steve you ever read any of those engineering horror stories where new technology is just not gonna work out and everyone knows that but for some reason people keep pushing it and trying to make it work yeah yeah I know of a few of those yeah yeah there's a few there's a few high profile examples that we can come up against but this one for BattleTech starts out very amusingly and we're actually going to I am going to get you a picture of another Mech called the matar and this thing brings us back to the good old amaris coup because there is some hilarity with this guy and what he was trying to do so here's an image of the matar now this was built when karensky was basically busy shoving his foot as far up amaris's uh where the sun don't shine regions as he possibly could absolutely stupid and it was another one of those Wonder Weapons that Amar tried to make and we we did a video on The Rifleman and remember there was that one version of it that had four railguns and it could barely move yeah yeah this looks just like a variant of of that it's it is not it is a super heavy Mech coming in at 110 tons at the time it was built it was the heaviest Mech of all time and was basically pushing the very edges of technology and by that it just doesn't work this is the matar which is the edge of the technology therefore refuses to work does nothing okay okay so I can't remember if you're a history buff or whether you just play War Thunder like me to torture yourself but the matar suffered from a chronic case of Porsche tiger engine syndrome ah yes little tiger pee [Laughter] for the for the audience's information the the tiger peas German tank terrible engine and transmission it would randomly burst into flames and when they were testing it they had to have a dude sit on the back with a fire extinguisher ready to put the engine out and that's that's about the quality you can expect you see the matar didn't work properly because it was so goddamn heavy there was basically nothing that could move this thing around the leg assemblies the actuators the myanmer muscles none of them were strong enough so when the matar took its first step The Joint actuators and leg assemblies failed and shattered under their weight this fat lad tried to stand up and broke his legs in the process it's great make sure your technology fails 101. oh it's fantastic so the project was a colossal failure and became known as fat ganger amaris's fault fat fat fat I'm too used to saying fat Genghis Khan something that is morbidly hilarious is that this project was a colossal failure right like everything was going wrong it breaks his legs whenever it tries to walk its bones are made of glass and its skin is made of paper so the bib wearing Fatso saw this absolute failure and despite the fact that he had ordered it and set out most of the design requirements he had the entire research and development team executed for and I quote treasonous incompetence like Jesus dude come on I would have too oh I mean smooth brain dictators think alike so like oh my god when karensky finally finished planting his boot firmly in Stefan's nuts he proceeded to round up all the remaining family and allies of the failed dictator find the plans and schematics of the matar being smuggled away and decided why not he just took all of the information about the mech despite the fact that it was an absolute [ __ ] show and just yanked it with him on the Long March to Clan space and here's where the story of the stone Rhino actually begins ready for a grand tale of how this Mech came to be Steve can you handle the raw unbridled manly force of nature that created this thing I don't know man I don't think so it's it's so Clan head it's not even funny the Clans the Clans just did it again they just straight up copied the design and used Clan Tech a few hundred years later to make the things work and it was cleanse smoke Jaguar the ones that just the the worst clan the stupidest Clan okay so initially the design was still hilariously incapable of like actually being useful but at least it could walk now and melt the slag every time it tried to fire for reasons we'll cover later progress man progress I can walk now finally thank you Father so I've been restored slightly so the the funniest part right so smoke Jaguar made it right it they dug the plans out of storage whatever the reason that they did this was one of the most smooth brain reasons I think you could possibly pick and it's something so stereotypically clannered it's smoke Jaguars so I mean I didn't really expect anything else if they didn't build this Mech because there was a need for a super heavy they they didn't build it because they needed like an ultra powerful breakthrough Mech or something they didn't need a Mech that could kill other assault Max the the Clans by this point had their their military-industrial complex well in swing and they were very much capable of answering all problems on the battlefield it was except for Logistics hey Clan wolf has Logistics and they come up a little bit later for some more plot armor BS but 107 does not count one out of ten is the exception to the role not the rule the entire reason that they took this shitty base Mech was because they wanted to prove that they were the Ubermensch the clanners have such smooth brains I'm convinced that they removed them each night to polish them before bed so the name for this Mech comes from a native inhabitant animal of one of the clan worlds just like all the names the claners have the stone Rhino being like borderline indestructible apparently it can just like face tank missiles and lasers and stuff which is hilarious but that's why they named it after that because they were planning on making a very prickly very strong very large Mech that would be able to basically deal with anything and the stone Rhino's history however doesn't end there but for the most part we'll cover the rest near the end when we get into why the mech is such a failure so this is like history and lore part one now let's move on to its equipment and some stats shall we because it's funny firstly this is still a very fat lad the the matar was so chunky it couldn't even move without needing kneecap replacement surgery and the stone Rhino is surprisingly pretty good sort of what it can move three miles an hour uh no it moves surprisingly fast actually it moves at 54 kph quite Speedy hey what's that in American uh uh excellent question I don't know look it up for yourself because I can't be bothered oh my God man all right get to editing go go search it up then come on 33 Okay and a half 33 miles per hour all right we'll give it the half well we'll give it we'll give it the half it needs it the stone Rhino can actually move fairly quick for its speed even though it does have relatively bad legs and it's not particularly maneuverable but the stone Rhino the reason it actually can move this fast is because they whacked a colossal engine into this thing for the time frame it's powered by a heavy Force 300 Fusion engine and this is one of the largest engines like ever put into a Mech by Clan Engineers for the most part the Clans stick around like a 200 rating with like 100 being the lowest and 400 being the highest so this thing is like 80 of the way through the engine scale in the actual like in Universe lore it is extremely powerful this reactor produced so much of a surplus of power that the stone Rhino actually had several subsystems that are hilariously out of place on such a large Mech first are the grand thrust Mark V jump Jets allowing this big boy way to thrust its way across the battlefield and compensate for its subpar ability to climb slopes with the use of assault scale jump Jets which was a little bit of an issue because this thing was so heavy and again its legs weren't weren't really that good for the assembly that it kind of couldn't climb Hills like if it came up against a gentle Hill there's a good chance it actually would pull like a tiger p and just not be able to do it or the engine would give out he really going back to the more Thunder moments oh no I've encountered a two degree grade oh no I can't do anything mom come home oh no my Crypt tonight a slight hill whatever will I do so in order to solve this problem of not being able to climb Hills they whacked a whole bunch of giant Rockets onto the back of it to try to get it to fly and this did not work very well because the size of the mech meant that the jump Jets were forced to either be very weak in order to not like damage it and it wouldn't really help the mobility or they would full burn but generate so much heat to get this thing to move that they might melt the mechs internals and overheat it like almost immediately because again you're trying to make something that's a hundred tons fly thing has to have actual space shuttle rocket boosters on it move foreign pretty much yeah the Rhino also came with one of the most occasionally accurate targeting systems in the form of the insta track brand version 8A which is a really good name I feel like I should explain that as well so most targeting systems the Clans use are very consistent and quite good however the stone Rhino is a very very old Design By the time of 30 25 to 3050 which is like the most popular era in BattleTech it's it's like 200 300 years old by this point as such a lot of the stone rhinos are hundreds of years old and have picked up a lot of quirks over the years that they've been repaired and rebuilt The Mex targeting system is excellent but it occasionally over performs to rather extreme degrees indication I decides not to be excellent no no no no the exact opposite actually it's it's consistently good but it over performs to extreme degrees randomly for no reason so there's examples where Stone Rhino is just chilling out at the edge of a forest and randomly it spots a light Max sprinting through the trees near maximum range and it's like barely even visible and the targeting computer locks on it's like him that guy you see him that guy him yeah kill him get him or somehow manages to lock onto targets that should in no uncertain terms not be locked on by the omnisaya occasionally the machine spirit will decide that guy needs to die and before we get to the weapons Loadout of the stone Rhino I also want to quickly mention the chassis name because it's great they didn't give it like a like a numerical designation or whatever like a lot of the inner sphere does oh no these are clanners having a soup can shaped indent in their skull is considered a beauty mark true stoop stock moment Rhino's chassis is named the star league monster or Monster of the star league which is just like come on guys really yeah I can understand how ugly it is but okay so let's let's talk about the weapons now let's talk about how the stone Rhino will feed you your own teeth from the other side of a city the weapons now normally assault mechs like to carry mostly close and mid-range weapons with a few long range additions since they like to well assault you know no way I don't believe you in indeed and that normally means getting close enough to rub foreheads with the guys you're trying to murder the stone Rhino is not like this it is an assault Mech that's entirely built to basically sit in the ass end of nowhere it is equipped with sci-fi's most nerdgasm-inducing weapons Loadout in each of its arms it carries the Giga big clan large pulse lasers those alone would be a spooky amount of weapons since it can strip armor and belt internals with just a few shots so you put that on like a medium Mech that's a very spooky media Mech those lasers also being able to outright unleg an enemy light Mech if you get a good volley just immediately bisect them at the knees just to make it an even Battlefield you know if if the Rhino can't move neither will you so despite the fact that Taste the rainbow is the national Call to Arms of Clan mechs everywhere with how many neon colored lasers they mount the clanners are also very good at one other thing and that is strapping enough terminal velocity [ __ ] you to their mechs to turn you into a crater so mounted in its back let me let me see if I can get you a better image of it because the one I gave you isn't so here's what the stone Rhino's big ass railguns on the back look like this thing carries around so many weapons of such a huge size so these weapons are so powerful that the stone Rhino is capable of coring mechs instantly from kilometers away you see the projectile moving solid Slug it can punch through their armor ignore it completely and poke holes in things that really really don't like that happening like the reactors containment shielding or the ammunition bins which everyone knows what happens when you hit those yeah nothing at all you know what yeah nothing at all it only fractions the other math come on now Another War Thunder moment ammunition racks are just extra spaced armor [ __ ] hate High tier that game is [ __ ] you didn't have enough explosive fillering around sorry you did nothing didn't I didn't didn't have enough explosive filler in my solid tungsten Dart okay sorry my fault I guess detonate half the ammo in the tank and nothing happened it just disappears I guess God decided to remove the explosion along with the ammo and my shell thanks Gaijin should have been using the aphe are there any are there any top-tier tanks that even have aphe isn't it just all dogs I know so at extremely long range the stone Rhino can potentially One-Shot enemy Max by double tapping them where it Hurst moats hurt hurts most and if that doesn't kill them the amount of damage done by the railguns can make a Target easy picking for the large pulse lasers overall this weapons Loadout makes the stone Rhino a terrifying opponent at long range as is capable of putting down withering weapons fire from like behind the hill or something because it probably couldn't climb it it also comes with a rather funny customary Clan anti-pigeon laser okay so if you look at the first image you notice how it's got the two big energy weapons in the arms right and it's got the two big kinetic weapons on its back you notice right underneath the cockpit it's got that little that little red looking uh looking laser thing is that the pigeon like yep that's the that's the clan anti anti-pigeon laser do you do you know do you know why that's there so birds don't fly into the windshield it's to kill any birds that fly by because [ __ ] on a clan Mech is dishonorable and not allowed I'm going with the uh Hey Cannon of uh so they avoid the we're gonna be in the hunted moments whenever they're flying whenever this thing takes off it's Gotta shoot down any birds nearby to make sure it doesn't get immediately sucked into the engine or something now that's that's uh that's basically a long-running community meme because a lot of Clan mechs have like this random like flamethrower or machine gun or small laser in like the head slot right next to the cockpit for no reason and this is this is the perfect example of it being absolutely silly its main weapons are like most effective at over a kilometer away yeah like you're you're trying to fight people at like a kilometers distance that's where the stone Rhino is like relatively effective maybe longer range up to two kilometers if you're just using the uh gas rifles so that small laser is only effective within like 100 meters yeah you you have like you have 20 or 30 times the range of that small laser and it's there for no reason if someone's gotten so close that that is a weapon you're using you have made a mistake things have gone wrong you tell me it couldn't just be for uh any Elementals planning snake attacks there uh no Elementals are no we've been over this Elementals don't give a [ __ ] machine guns and small lasers do not even even some missiles don't do anything to them they don't care hey man I I don't know how small that laser is all right it's not the size that matters it's the punch behind it oh oh you poor Sweet Summer child [Music] only the most mature if you were here you know you know what's actually a good analogy for how this Mech works like most assault mechs are like running dual SMG or like pump action or something with with body armor right the stone Rhino is like a dude wearing Juggernaut armor standing on top of a hill with an anti-material rifle on each arm this dude can barely move he's about to die of heat stroke and it took him all morning to get to that hill but now that he's there get ready to have all of your insides become your outsides very quickly okay he's there that is his Hill there are many like it but that one is his right up until someone gets behind him and then he can't [ __ ] turn around in time it's definitely just have to blast off into the atmosphere you know that's what he's got he's got those uh space shuttle rockets on him for uh you can't fly he can he can jump but if he jumps a little too far he's gonna melt himself to death before he gets down so that debatable and I think that is a great time to segue into its cooling problems actually it has several of them so the stone Rhino has 10 double heat sinks now that probably means nothing to you but if it was an inner sphere Mac that's a great amount of weapons for the for the thing to carry with a great amount of cooling but for clan weapons which belch heat like the sun plus the jump Jets plus the Giga big engines these things are constantly running hot firing its weapons a few times forces it to just sit there and do nothing while it cools down for an afternoon and the stone Rhino has issues operating on hot tropical or volcanic worlds because it can't sink heat properly and it just melts so Stone Rhino Pilots need to be very careful about when and how they engage targets because Alpha striking firing all of your weapons at the same time is a fast track to an emergency shutdown or a very quick evacuation of your cockpit so when Pilots are desperate and they're really just hammering on the trigger as fast as they can they'll basically destroy their ability to cool down and that forces the Rhino to basically use one of its weapon systems at a time and reserve the other one for like staggered firing which when you're getting mogged by like a bunch of dudes trying to kill you it you're probably not going to be staggering your shots and well pacing them you typically don't think about oh how much longer do I need to wait before I can shoot this one again it's more of a uh it's more of a oh hahaha thanks so Walker I like that one you you have permission to use that one occasionally don't overuse it but that one's funny that one can come back so there are a few other variants of it which we'll talk about so obviously we have the precursor the matar which you know broke leg boy stuck on the floor we have the main Stone Rhino but there are a few alternate versions that have cropped up over the years and then we have the stone Rhino 2 by a different name which we'll get into later a further development on the chassis first some notable variants and the first one we're going to talk about is my personal favorite which just reeks of desperation to make this thing viable so the stone Rhino Mark V while the default engine core 300 the base model had was a damn big engine this one they upgraded it to a 400 rating extra large Fusion engine this is if I recall correctly the biggest engine possible in the BattleTech Universe like like actually the biggest one that you can put into your Mech and it was capable of boosting the slow 54 kilometer Max Speed so like 33 and a half whatever miles right two an eye-watering an incredible 64 kph or like 40 miles per hour 39.7 39 it they they put the biggest the biggest engine they possibly could have in this thing and it barely made a difference it went from being too slow to do anything to slower than all of its other Clan contemporaries it's great well too slow to do anything to uh still too slow to do anything this part was they had to sacrifice most of the Firepower to fit that thing in and it barely did anything as a trade-off like they didn't have the giant Mech killing weapons in anymore so what they did was strip them off and give them a shitload of smaller weapons four Mech scale shotguns ginormous shotguns lbx5s to be precise on it and then they put six medium lasers three in each arm as far as I'm concerned this is like a terrible design it's like giving the Abrams 10 30 millimeter cannons on it like yeah that's a lot of Firepower I guess but will it be able to actually make use of those to do anything significant or take in the the gal off the uh warthog and we're going giving it some uh some 50 Cals well surely it'll do the same thing let's give the A10 like 20 50 kills on the wings it's fine C equivalent is throwing the same weight yeah but it's not how that works uh it's it's great that's my personal favorite because it's just silly it's it's just reeks of desperation as Engineers try to fix problems but next up is the mark six and I I love this one because it just it wouldn't work anyone who like understands battletechers played the games or is really into it would look at this and just laugh because this is a really fast way to kill yourself it would melt itself into slag immediately but it's really funny this bad boy strips all of the weapons and some of the heatsinks so it's got even worse Cooling and replaces them with 14 medium pulse lasers remember how we said that lasers dump a lot of heat right at the beginning when they fire like just immediately and remember how I said The more of them there are the exponentially more heat they generate yeah and then uh remember how you said they got rid of the heatsinks yeah this version of the stone Rhino would vaporize itself it would fire and the reactor would immediately go critical and the thing would explode from overheat damage like it's just a little reactor it's like and again this this fire and it would be just be what reactor what Mac this is there's nothing there this this version of the stone Rhino Alpha strikes all of its weapons and some guy on the other side of a hill is just like why is there a second sun over there and again like this this may not sound stupid but for anyone that really knows Mech Warrior hearing 14 pulse lasers may as well be the equivalent of [ __ ] and Betty declaring a reactor meltdown as Eminem like the the second you fire those things you're just you're gonna turn into a pressure cooker and the best part is again they didn't even improve the cooling it got a little bit worse it's just like this is however the stone Rhino 2 and let me let me get a picture of it I think you mean the stone Rider nine no stop yes stop yes no it goes no you have eight versions of it and then you make another one it's no it's a different Mech by technicality this is The Crucible we don't do technicalities here sir okay it is essentially this a same chassis of the mech with a few big changes made to the center torso and the mountings for it to try to squeeze a little bit of more performance out of it it's got the same slow speed as the base model it's got a lot of the same issues it's got the same overheating problems it's got the same jump Jets but what they did was they basically completely switched things around so like I said the proper name of this one is The Crucible and it's an iteration on the stone Rhino's design built by Clan wolf and I said we're gonna talk about them by this point in history guess what they've become it involves plot armor uh the the Invincible ones that don't ever take losses you you are very close they they have at this point for a while they they win battle Tech they they have one they have one battle Tech so by this point and you can laugh at the names by the way they're pretty stupid they they are now known at this point in time that they built this Mech as the wolf Empire mwah I can smell the plot armor from here it just it clan wolf is just at it again smells like weakled sour cream and rotting meat it's great the soup stock is strong with these ones they formed the wolf Empire whatever will we do it here they come yet again yet again there's a there's a there's a really good reason why people hate Clan wolf in the lore there's there's a very good reason and this is why because someone was like let's just make them the winners of the setting even if only temporarily it's it's very dumb so in a stroke of Genius they decided yes forecast rifle good Having learned nothing from when amaris tried to do the same thing with his own wonder weapon Rifleman The Crucible was just as slow and bulky as the original Stone Rhino but now it had ongoing ammunition problems because ghost rifles take so much space and weight that they can't really fit much else around and to top it off it was so expensive to make that building them was prohibitively expensive and losing one was grounds for an Express ticket to God for whoever was responsible it also still has the anti-pigeon laser just in case you were wondering most important part and now finally we can talk a little bit at the end why was this Mech so bad and it comes to our favorite of topics Logistics take a guess take a take a guess with everything we've covered what what really put the nail in the coffin for this and led to it you see they had to move it yes but not really so these mechs were ungodly expensive the the original Stone rhino run was only a few dozen maybe a few hundred mechs at most and as such ended up being spread far and thin across Clan space they also didn't survive very often since Wednesday showed up everyone went oh [ __ ] kill it so their numbers dwindled quickly after those initial runs even funnier in my opinion is that when they were seen on the battlefields planners would constantly and I mean constantly run up in the middle of a battle and just decide to be honorable morons and issue Trials of ownership or like whatever basically fight me and if I win I get your stuff so they had to worry about these psychos running up to them in the middle of a fight and then binding them into an honor duel to take their Mech the stone Rhino is literally that stupid potion or Elixir that like everyone leaves in the bottom of their their RPG character's inventory because May maybe it would be good to use it now but maybe it'll be more useful later and before you know it the potion is still there and the game is over that's that's literally what the stone Rhino is that's that's exactly how it's treated I have my hidden trap card that simply just never be used the the greatest part of of human psychology don't use the valuable thing it might be useful later right exactly it might be useful later write that on my Tombstone I want that written on my headstone when I die and I think the worst part about it is they're deployed in arguably like the worst possible way for any weapons which is they're either only deployed when things are so good that it's it's already a guaranteed Victory there's no point in deploying it it's a Stomp and the reason that for that is because they don't want to lose it so they only deploy it when they're gonna win or in the absolute worst of scenarios where it's guaranteed they're going to lose because they're overwhelming odds so this Mech only ever finds itself deployed in battles that are already completely decided it almost never actually makes a difference on the battlefield it is the saddest kind of weapon built with no purpose and left to just rot in the hangar where when everyone realized that it just can't do anything also its feet look stupid insert what are those memes somewhere in the background also its feet just looks stupid this is my final point of this video that is that's the final point we're done oh my God so that is uh that's functionally the end of the video anything else to add on the Rhino before we do do the outro oh that was all I'm gonna that that one gets approval that gets to go in the bank maybe maybe if you use others in really funny ways later on I will be willing to let you use the soundboard more but for now that's it so with that having I'm not gonna use soundboard unless it fits come on now okay fair enough fair enough you're still on a tight leash so with that I'm gonna move on to the the patron thanks and shout out David gape which is Christ every time okay so to our patrons thank you to David Gabe the original Augie 11 Bravo crunchy Terry Higgins Pedro Munoz David G the other one silencer and Vox apollyon oh wait a minute we have a new one as well rugard 190. nice let's go patrons feeding Steve so he can show up and we got uh we got the new microphone we're probably we're probably gonna upgrade that in the future at some point but for now Steve is loud this is your stopgap measure yeah he's he's large and in charge and we can actually hear all the things he's doing including when he tries to hide being sneaky with his uh this keyboard and stuff in the background and with that and with that the video is functionally over we're total recording at a cool 50 minutes which is pretty good for us I think and uh yeah guess what uh guess what next week's topic is we're doing another Mech it's gonna be a fun one but what is it uh it is a Mech designed to melee things it's gonna run up it's gonna hit you with a weapon it's got a big melee weapon as well which is hilarious it's like one of the one Jesus Christ stop cut it foreign

Channel: SCIENCE INSANITY

Views: 27,572

Keywords: battletech stone rhino, mechwarrior, battletech, stone rhino, mechwarrior 5, mw5, mechwarrior online, battletech behemoth, behemoth, mech, battletech lore, mechwarrior lore, battlemech, house steiner, house liao, house kurita, house davion, house marik, mechs, sci fi, science insanity, battletech lore explained, battletech lore video, assault mech, battletech lore history, federated suns, battletech matar, battletech clan mech, clan assault mech, new clan mech

Id: Df9BmPdLpcA

Length: 35min 11sec (2111 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2023