Tex Talks Battletech : The Charger

thank you [Music] thank you foreign [Music] the definition of crazy as we commonly accepted today is the defined characteristic of being mentally unsound marked by lack of thought or driven by action which lacks sound reasoning it is synonymous in use as a descriptor for anything erratic impractical or unusual in the extreme It Is by now from habit of use alone a genericized word made more mundane with every individual misapplication the definition of a truly bad Mech as we commonly accept it today is the character of being the charger or something very much like it and I for one believe that that assessment is inaccurate for a number of reasons the charger has been called the Grand incarnation of abigor or elegos in the history of the military-industrial complex by its Pilots however it has been called The Walking Target the most cursed machine the embarrassment made manifest the mech that graft built and most amusingly the second most disappointing thing on two legs I think these characterizations as applied to the charger and without context are not entirely Fair as I firmly believe the charger is frequently misunderstood and often miscast with minimal supporting context as a machine that has accidentally stumbled into and somehow survived for succession Wars and virtually everything else since as some sort of bizarre military industrial Cryptid accordingly I feel a more thorough examination a much broader context in some actual evidence will help us refute much of the Mythos surrounding this machine and thus help us establish its actual place in history and the real history of the charger or in a fashion a much truer history is indeed a strange tale like many said during the succession Wars the charger store is not a singular cohesive event but rather a scattering of burn notes and margin citations cast like radioactive Ash on the Wind as in fact they were to define the charger by the machinas built and leave it at that a tidy sum of its stats and Munitions it would fail to explain how these things endured their nuclear baptism of fire and still somehow continue to haunt battlefields today perhaps some old-fashioned but I feel there's more to a Mech than numbers as frequently presented in a game of what if or what might have been the charger stands apart as the assault Meg everyone laughs at it's the poster boy of star league malaise during the Golden Age It's 80s Starling tons of grade A Starly graft with five whole small lasers as the only listed weapon system operating in the capacity of a scout as designed and presented the charger is unfortunate with a side of damn and reduced to such a simple analysis the charger has been a standard for academics on the many fold sins of the military-industrial complex and yes while the charger is a very useful study in those areas indeed there is another and very crucial part of the charger story it's a story told in the margins of our shared history as stories set in the hard Shadows of brighter lights it is a story told between the graft of the machine is conceived in its actual end use it is a story set in a wild and strange time a time which directly shaped the collapse of our civilization as we knew it and quite literally all of the Fallout afterward this thesis as presented is a summation of what and more importantly why the charger is we will explore how despite every claim to it being absolutely useless this stupid thing May in fact never die as we slowly place the machine into context one piece at a time we will find that the charger stands at a very strange place in our Collective history for it was born in a strange era thrown into another and then somehow just like the rest of us endured on the matter of how and why is argued by critics of the machine I firmly believe the charger to be a victim of that modern historical lens of plentiful choices and the infinite strategic arsenals of human imagination and perhaps in such form the charger May stand as an enduring invitation to remind ourselves that history is frequently not so simple as we make it out to be to begin we examine the roots of the charger with its birthplace a time so unique in opportunity and yet so contrasted in Limitless graft we historians gave it a label we call it the Golden Age the first myth of this machine which I must now dispel is the belief that the charger was built in a time and a place that you can fundamentally understand the star league in its Zenith was a unique creature in history and its relative if borrowed peace shaped things in ways we today would dismiss is insane or more likely tyrannical in nature but such as civilization history frequently repeats in cycles of strife for nothing new closetwitz wouldn't shut up about it back in the 19th century his contemporary won Antoine Germany had the same bug being extraordinarily militarily well-versed and highly paranoid was the height of fashion back then as it is now their wisdom still Rings true today and is carried by root memorization for every war College in existence they say dispassionately that war is politics by any other means and while the politics of ancient Terror were likened to Gathering storms the inner sphere doesn't make storm clouds in that sense or on that scale and sadly as we have previously established there is no substitution for an actual shooting War to Define pure conflict actual War shows you what works and what doesn't nothing shatters illusions of safety or misconceptions of threat factors like the sudden application of raw Firepower to extinction level scale the existential issues in catastrophically understated challenges with trying to design Next Generation anything during peacetime as well emerges sometimes in the form of a problem or problems for many lifetimes and inexpensive means by which to transport your fighting men to their graves in order to better cover up the graft committed by men now long prosperous and retired if not dad because anyone who could object was well yeah so with no shooting War the practice of War enters peacetime where I'll be honest anything goes and because paranoia is apparently the most popular cognitive disorder in the inner sphere it is very frequent that governments do not ever stop spending money on defense we never stop making weapons in fact we just Rebrand the product or if that fails the problem in this magical place between Wars you will see any idea or program that has any possibility of working being thought up planned designed bought and made right up until an actual war starts and only then do you see who was right all along and who was smoking crack historically this inner War period is where you frequently find a gaggle of artistic statements shaped like weapons and I'm not hating them for until an actual war starts all these ideas are just about as valid as anything else is so how long was this inner War period this magical age of fun ideas in Whimsy an age of prosperity and economic boom that was so unprecedented that they called it the damn Golden Age 168 years of Peace well let's say relative p at least by Inner sphere standards but it was 168 years of what if 168 years of decisions just like the baron decisions made and shaped without ever testing them and hoping if the time came all would be well and as we well know hope is a most fragile currency in the inner sphere as far as why war is mostly simple as analysis goes and the Strategic threat Department you know who's shooting at you most of the time peace however is another animal all your former enemies and all of your friends are at the same table and every private smile they exchange makes you so very glad you have so many nuclear weapons and yet it is this very strange place of an enforced artificial piece one built on lies and death yet counterbalanced on the promise and potential of a hopeful future where we begin our story it was a time so uniquely plentiful and yet unsustainable we call it again the Golden Age of star league and while many believed my earlier work painted the star league and by extension the star league Defense Forces in Immaculate light I frequently remind people my view of that conflict is related directly to that conflict and not the organization across its entire existence the Starling was in fact an absolutely grossly flawed organization from its Inception as an imperfect Faustian bargain between nation-states it was an organization predicated on false morality with a factual Treaty abrogation of the Aries conventions from its Inception as a unified military force and then immediately followed by a disastrous War to pacify the periphery and throughout administered via gross violations of international trust between supposedly peer States but for the most part there was peace the womb in which the charger was born was this vast unprecedented period of Peace Style time where military operations were at best border skirmishes that Clap the latest warlord Uprising and with no real enemies and no pure threat to actually test your ideas against to be proven wrong you can build whatever you want so long as the customer buys it and so you have the background of events I feel frame the Charger's origin however there is one last lens to bring this to a clear focus is to purchase something like the charger let alone full production runs of it is a curious choice in an age of Plenty and peace however I feel I have to clarify this juncture as you may have already guessed the golden age is not pure it is an era of few Wars and relative peace there are as many no oceans of bodies between those definitions in any era and after the reunification War we enter this strange artificially maintained relative peace and then things got interesting by 2605 the star league Defense Forces left the Taurean concordat after policing it for a bit turns out you can't just say you win the enemy has to agree or they will keep shooting at you every time you leave your bunker the Starling Defense Forces didn't understand that so I suppose that the daily human body cause to keep Starlight flags on flagpoles at full mast unburned in the concordant was beginning to affect the overall recruiting pool so they left by 2620 Amanda amaras became the second President of the rim worlds Republic promising of course a full return to democratic elections she was murdered that same year and what I'm sure are unrelated circumstances but I Marx I feel perhaps an interesting beginning of what would be a power struggle in the near term and greater challenges later on as we well know someone's saying the so-called good years of this golden age in which the charger was designed alongside many other great classic mechs started at the end of what is politely called reunification for the record I think that's fairly revisionist not in the professional sense but a personal one if you asked people of an occupied worst guard Nation if the good times started when the war ended I think they'd look up at you with hurt in their eyes and then introduce you to real hardship because nobody likes an ugly tourist in my opinion the good years truly begin in 2623 with the star League Central Bank and currency system allowing trade from one end of the sphere to the other in good faith in one denomination with this came enormous opportunity for anyone with guts and assets to gamble as such with open markets and unparalleled access to resources across the sphere it was soon an economic boom the likes of which none had ever seen it was a good time for most that's why they called it the good years and for the inner sphere they pretty much were I am an opinion on that which I feel may be unpopular among the great houses but I am a periphery historian with a clanor ex-wife and regret is not a theme of this lecture so I'll say this I for one think we called it the good years because in my opinion it was the point at which the great houses were most frustrated and seeing the sort of they pull when they're empowered fully and completely unchecked it was probably a good thing by default and I feel the good years truly stop what two executive orders and a council addict it is in fact these three political events in sequence that are the why of the charger and every other single procurement decision the star league Defense Forces ever made until an exceptionally violent private unboxing ceremony put an end to it [Music] you know [Music] the Golden Age was good for most the great houses were in fact after the reunification not happy at all about having diminished power under the star league as such the greenhouse Lords the very few people supposedly imbued with enough wisdom to understand the benefits of the security cooperation initiative which they themselves had signed and shaped trying to limit the growth of the sldf by preventing recruitment in their territories because that's what adults do so executive order 34 affects that in theory for a time it pinched the problem at least until new ones arrived which they soon did the states of the capellan Confederation the draconis combine suggested that the bulk of those volunteering for military service in the sldf were criminals fleeing the law of their respective states which was true it absolutely was if you consider honest criticism of the government and freely expressing your opinions in public a punishable crime executive order 35 fixed that problem by saying that those so-called fleeing criminals would if can't be then swiftly remanded for prosecution but under star league law I see it as this if the executive orders were the setup the council lead Act of 2650 is the punch line strategically these two acts further the sldf as the sole legitimate unified Leviathan force in the inner sphere by Manpower alone but some people are not paying attention to a single word I'm saying because all they heard was me say Ameris earlier alright so the Americas family we talked about them before I made a list the least of their sins was ruining Venus because they didn't understand how hard space was they also ruined many other things for other reasons then karinsky retired him and that was that but the Ameris family has a long and uh storied history and in this context I must say that the founding member of that house as a ruler of the rimworld Republic was prior to that a member of a foreign intelligence unit empowered during a time of exceptional National and international crisis that later and suddenly retired to the periphery who then suddenly befriended and then somehow replaced the head of an existing Dynasty for all time it's well very interesting I'll say that and as evidenced the family has an interesting theme so coincidence is a very uncomfortable word to use as a historian in this case in 2650 the star league Council heard some interesting news in a three-month window the rimworld Republic under the leadership of an amaris had gone from eight regiments of Mex to 15. this was problematic the two executive orders had in theory made the sldf the sole force of power in the inner sphere and yet here was an invested statement to the opposite effect and as this is the inner sphere if the other state noticed they do likewise star league regulations be damned while the sldf was truly Mighty it wasn't bigger than everyone combined and it could not be everywhere at once so rather than sending the sldf into the periphery which likely Drew oceans of cold sweat from the officer classes who'd actually studied the last dust up the star league decided to bury the whole issue with a new law and this law changed how many weapons each great house could have and as you might guess that number was going to be less than the star league Defense Forces stockpile your initial reaction is not wrong is yes it was a stop Gap and an imperfect one it was an unwelcome addition to an unbalanced equation this edict in theory prevented War but it was a dream a dream based on the sldf of being able to do all the things at once and if they failed die trying to save the state into their credit most of them did but I've already told their tragedy in full it is from this very place that the charger comes from with the great houses agreeing to the Edict of 2650 even if grumbling peace was a guarantee in writing backed by the Sterling dollar held in check with the sldf and with one stroke of the pen the star league Defense Force was by now by default the largest Prime customer of all war material in the inner sphere if you made weapons your choice was clear you could fill sld at procurement contracts or you could go out of business as you'd expect with all the money in one giant bucket and a prolonged you have the exact recipe for what made the charger it was born in a world that was new and crazy and never sustainable to prevent the loss of jobs Prestige or to deliberately frustrate any house Army's secret re-armament attempts the star league was now buying everything in vast quantities in perpetuity even in such uniquely competitive environment the charger still stands out as odd as though purchase sight unseen the charger rolls off the line in 2665 the same year as the awesome and yet the charger isn't to understand why we must now sift the ashes of destroyed worlds to get a picture of the company that first put 80 tons and Scout in the same sentence and then somehow sold it here Begins the incredibly problematic history of Wells Technologies which is very hard because at no point it Well's Technologies ever think about the future from what I can find any success they made was well more a product of their time than their actual industrial capabilities what survives today in any totality is a decent record of Wells HQ in its place in history or modest fragments but that's what happens when we bomb ourselves into continually shorter versions of the history book I didn't say successive editions of the history book because that joke is too obvious moving on we must ask ourselves why is a company that made such a product a product which everyone knows essentially a ghost Corporation a corporation with no background in near zero track record of success or failure in any means we can measure aside from a single flawed product after all it's very normal when a large corporation makes a dud or a poor product because usually they make enough of it for everyone to point and laugh at and when can trusted against their other factually better products they stand out and there are plenty of other terrible neck designs that were never mass produced and so they slip beneath our notice unless serving as academic comparison but the charger they made a full run of it for a nobody like Wells Technologies to somehow succeed in the market that's very interesting I cannot tell you much more about Wells Technologies other than they were and they aren't anymore and that their mechs and Manufacturing lines still survive today but after thoroughly examining the machine as designed some details do emerge as to company practices and internal decisions currently lost a historical record personally nothing on the charger is truly sophisticated this was not brilliantly engineered it is a Big Mac for the then biggest possible engine you could put in it and that's it the old ones almost look as though they're made out of castings and straight angles for cheap as hell Mass manufacturer to be fixed with hand tools between battles if one were very bold that they'd see the charger and go this is an upscaled industrial Mech for moving large or perhaps hazardous objects and considering Wells Technology's experience and Meg design being essentially zero that is a fair gas is any but it is just a guess however a redesigned Choice present on the initial model was made on purpose deliberately because the market was at this point the sldf demanding everything the charger is like a blank platform to fill a check box and never see actual use so unless swell's Technologies itself is an elaborate hoax or a fully wagered bent between a Centric industrialist to see what the government would buy in bulk's sight unseen Wells did this on purpose thinking very smart or more correctly in acceptable industry jargon billable considering they were purchased in a good number they weren't wrong any further clarification from Wells Technologies headquarters is impossible at this point as a variety of factors erase them completely from history and I cannot deny I suspect perhaps by a specific client I'll get to that later but whatever Secrets they held in whatever decision they made in detail will forever be a mystery as far as worlds is and was I believe they were more a crack team of accountants than Visionary Engineers as we move past Wells to examining the machine in further detail I will attempt to explain the charger in its continued Battlefield Evolution despite an ill-fated birth from a company so colossally stupid that it succeeded at erasing itself from our linear measure of existence nearly every mainstream published opinion on the simple but awkward monstrosity describes it as nothing short of a total failure as to why opinions differ some will say it's a failure in military Doctrine and that heavy Recon has always been a crapshoot some will say it's a failure in design some will say it's a failure and concept or even as I suggested sobriety from any way you slice it though this is not a refined tool of War this is in fact a sledgehammer being sold as a scalpel it's sold as heavy Recon which is defined harass and survive contact with the Enemy and to do that they made this the stock model cgr1a1 80 Starling tons of grade a star league stupid or graft or Madness depending on the argument what I've found however only reinforces my argument that again this was built this way on purpose the chassis why that's proprietary to Wells of course it's tracking targeting and communication systems are forgettable marginal commercial products the targeting system is likely just a bigger version of the one they put on the urban Mac it is cheap to manufacture a site from the power plant which is horrendously expensive and thus subcontracted and they charged a hell of a lot for it it's more expensive than an awesome plus parts it has 10 tons of armor 10 heatsinks and 5 weapons what weapons on an assault Mech five lasers small ones some models put this in a pistol mount for the hands so you can awkwardly hold up a bank to pay for the fact that you bought a charger instead of an awesome and then there's the engine well how else do you make an assault mat go fast in the 20 600s Wells solved the problem by bolting in the biggest most expensive mass-produced engine put into a Mech at that point it is a committed subcontracted design line for one application the mighty LTV 400 began as the charger power plant so don't worry it can do 86.4 kph all day and perhaps not much else it's as big as a building lightly armed durable and mostly easy to repair as aside from the engine there was really nothing of value to break at this juncture some people will try and say it's a Cavalry Mac but Cavalry historically are in the modern since typically as a function of stacking bodies and taking heads and symbols like this being common in their lineage and Cavalry is usually capable of running an enemy down harassing and killing them at leisure and then disengaging at will typically Cavalry shows up to a fight firstness with the mostest and then gets murdered until the rest of the army shows up or doesn't the mech had the speed of it but no real Firepower and no ability to accomplish forward observation or adequately relay anything it discovered it in fact lacked all of those necessary systems so people's opinion then changes and they then find it to be a scout but the charger is not capable of reporting back substantially more information than anyone with binoculars in a radio there is a minority opinion one I hold in fact that this Mech was intended for a specific operations footprint and Tempo one best contextualized by the strangeness of the Golden Age itself and in the Golden Age large-scale conflict was Theory at best as the Hobson Leviathan was alive and well and being fed regular police actions but there was grumbling there were riots and in the dark far from common eyes there were quiet Wars burning away at the pillars of State in counter-insurgency operations you don't necessarily need high-tech weapons just a boot a reasonably fast easily repaired easily modified boot a big ass kicking boot to come in and put the fear of God into people for dating to have opinions on things or threatening your police force or rating your supply lines in relative peacetime one of the single most attractive margins in the military-industrial complex is trainer slash light attack slash counterinsurgency platform it's a check box in the military portfolio for the everything else aspect of war that strategic War planners don't like to think about or plan for or a knowledge or learn from and yet it is a capability they pay enormously for often at the last moment and out of impulse or desperate need Wells Tech was many things but they certainly knew their client the charger wasn't for war at least not the sort of War you see broadcast the charger was for dirty war if any it was potentially an okay trainer for heavier mag Pilots because it wasn't Emily r armed or hard to repair and fairly cheap to restore should they accidentally drive one into a building or 20 but it is deeply flawed even in this Mission profile it's 7.5 million sea bills the charger as sold is a million C bills more expensive than an awesome not long after its introduction the sldf withdrew the charger on grounds of its General crapness and soon after Wells Technologies was in deep as a result of their rampant overproduction and grossly over-inflated sales projections as such I believe the charger would have been forgotten entirely like the baron and many other things as an oddity of the distant past if it weren't for a penny disagreement over who said in a damn chair I'll get to the succession Wars in time but the abbreviated context is thus the Great and Mighty Noble Lords of the great houses of the inner sphere fought over the chair they weren't adult enough to realize was an inherently broken power apparatus that destroyed all who sat in it they had watched the literal sort of Damocles destroy the Camerons and then desired it all the same the argument over that one stupid chair and the ruinous power had held then escalated all the way to nukes as a cultural and historical context the succession Wars or what happens in the inner sphere when you try to hold things together by force and then remove that binding Force just for those curious sheer destruction aside it's reasonable to say it did a number on Max full theater strategic response meant that any industrial plant larger than a backyard shed was now a viable War Target all those peacetime great ideas and all the bad ones were mobilized and sent to the front without much if any calculated restraint in many cases machines and Crews were expended for little to no long-term gain many complicated designs fell victim to catastrophic issues as just-in-time replenishment Concepts were challenged by things like the factory disappearing or the final assembly plant now lack a breathable atmosphere as things got worse mechs were increasingly thrown into desperate gambles and sacrificed to stabilize fronts or lastly severely reduced and common Frontline Service as crippled industrial complexes were thrown into chaos trying to figure out how to replace anything with anything at all mix even bad ones like the charger were thrown in and held the line Against All Odds or died trying the succession Wars would know few old pilots though it would produce many bold ones foreign but there is seldom such a thing as a fair fight however some people don't see a problem in having a fight against overwhelming odds some people on faith pure insanity or balls are willing to roll those Dice and see what lands wear because what's the worst that can happen if you're already there and the fight is now and maybe running away sounds exhausting so for whatever reason there is the challenge and some will always rise to meet it it shouldn't terribly surprise you that the succession War has had a lot of crazy showering Warheads on populations like Mardi Gras beads does that to people so don't judge too harshly with the lens of here and now these were wild years for Humanity and people were just trying to make it civilization was for all intents and purposes along for the ride when the succession Wars destroying Starships their dockyards and the continual raising of Technology bases the great armies on offense or defense had one option really with such catastrophic shortages of strategic material witches make do and without the surety of plentiful Mech support the ground forces of the inner sphere open the old infantry manuals and went to work soon everything to them was an artillery Target and everything bigger than four stack breaks they pointed artillery at anything that looked like a Mech let alone a big one got the full treatment and any place that might hide life they erased one fire support Mission at a time one grid square at a time mechs weren't gone but it was far easier to put a man or woman in Boots than replace a continent-sized industrial chain and all of the subject matter experts that made it function in full strategic mobilization does its own wonders to Warfare so infantry did then what all infantry do when time gets hard they dug a hole and they started stacking bodies if anything other than infantry showed up these weapons were their patron saints the Demolisher the SRM carrier the Manticore the Demolisher in particular made most Mex go away with twin AC 20s and frequently in a majestic double tap from the time you saw the Demolisher to the time it fired was the full run of your life in most cases when mix got more scarce the Demolisher and things like it scoured the battlefield mercilessly and often augmented by combined arms units nearby in some terrifyingly heavy artillery it was a bad time to drive a Mech or any big Target let alone an 80-ton assault Mech with woefully inadequate ranged weapons crap sensors comes and a big cockpit window tanks like the Demolisher were a centerpiece in this era for a damn reason they work they kill things very dead very quickly but such brief if inherited Primacy would not last because there is a fairly awkward weapon system that can if a pilot is crazy enough stumble into take a hit from and then say hi to a Demolisher this same system can then waffle stomp it into two Dimensions it can then find that one last guy who survived and decide whether or not to punt him back to his own lines before disappearing were crimes unexplained Fading Into the fog of world like a Cryptid made of dying men's nightmares pressed into Frontline service second rate Max like the charger where the only functional reminder of why mechs were scary or even relevant the charger and its many equally poor second-rate friends went to war when there was nothing else and amazingly it survived met Courier is assigned to Second rate machines like the charger were considered front line and thus Expendable charger Pilots were repeatedly run into guns Max defenses and naturally most of the pilots did not come back at least not the same as they had been before the mechs however usually survived just fine as far as why they were so consistently crazy well succession Wars era Pilots as a whole were a combination of alcohol poisoning TBI scars and a healthy dusting of alpha particle Ash if the notion of a functionally better battle mag crossed what was left of their minds it was falling to ever hope for a better tomorrow let alone a desirable outcome during the succession Wars they discovered at the bottom of the Strategic bucket there are things you frequently Overlook like the charger and they'll frequently do when there is nothing else with the succession Wars rapidly removing better choices house kirita bailed out the near bankrupt Wells Technologies and bought their entire unsold previously unwanted stockpile of chargers they even made Wells build a line at luthien to supposedly enhance and contribute to domestic Mech industry this would result in its own problems but during the succession Wars any weapon that worked was frequently good enough and Doctrine wise kirita had no issue running Pilots into a meat grinder until either exceptional Pilots prevailed or there were no more mechs to worry about and as easily repaired Chargers fit that Doctrine very well as such the charger of the succession Wars is and every likelihood this Rusty dented Kaiju of a war machine that's burned up 20 pilots in six months which may come charging it at any time to escort you and your home team into the Afterlife or explode gloriously in the process and this cycle would continue until the charger produced a hero or became a very brief and very dirty star Once Upon a Time Humanity likened such tragic Heroes to Cervantes on Don Quixote suggesting that they were another age of hilariously tragic figures playing at Heroes tilting at windmills and pretending they were saving the world I can't really comment on whether art or life is more surreal here but I can't say this someone in the hell of for succession wars were better mechs were slain by the score somewhere in the fury of no ammo no Logistics no spares no reinforcements somewhere in that realm of pure Madness where you are out of everything but the goddamn enemy second stringers like the charger started to take back the battlefield in small part by clumsily throwing hands just when people thought mechs were about done the Chargers showed up and punched them into the ground or died trying I personally feel this crazy cycle kept Mech relevant in this era it suggested that any Mech was potentially better than none and if boldly piloted to near a certain Doom it suggested that a Mech was a game changer in the right if crazy hands because to some people the rare few dreamers those few charger Pilots the one in ten thousand they don't see the world like we do to them well the sky is the limit and space is the place and they believe that anyone can be a real Warrior of the Wasteland the Ayatollah of rock and roller the cream of the crop the hammer of Justice the people's elbow that you Noble Wasteland Mech Warrior can walk into the consecrated holy Battle of Mech Warfare like the third monkey on the plank of Noah's Ark and brother it's starting to rain Unleashed as such the charger is an assault Mech designed for getting in close and then reminding people that being beat to death with your own limbs is always a legitimate concern to have in a war zone without the encumbrance of weapons or any delicate anything to worry about and being very fast and very big the charger was in many ways almost perfect for this incredibly barbaric Age of War the mech that was fast enough to chase down just about anything could absolutely if the pilot were crazy enough run around the battlefield punching things until they died or everything else did it was a magic time to be alive in the inner sphere and by surviving long enough the charger reminds studious Mech experts that survival isn't about being best but rather actually surviving [Music] as well on this topic I find that the charger is maligned frequently by newer Pilots is the experience the machine through limited simulations or simulators that expressly forbid melee combat as though the modern Mech Warrior is too genteel for such brutish pugilism that or their employer doesn't want them to know that you can throw hands at 80 tons and ugly as it is awkward fist fights in the dark that kind of war that happens when you don't have better next-gen anything because even food is hard to find the kind of savage War when you're lucky to have a weapon any weapon at your disposal it's a dirty way of War shaped by the lack of material rather than depending on its forever abundance it's a way of War where the only way to stop you is to kill you completely the realization that multi-mission capable machines mean Jack and if they don't work brought the military Affairs people down into the mud it showed people what war was outside of lecture hall it showed people what war was when all the promises of uninterrupted Supply chains and force integration gets tested by somebody who thinks all your plans are and has the army to back it up the dark days of the succession Wars reminded War planners and WiMAX were necessary even bad ones so long as they worked most of the time as far as the long lasting effect of the conflicts and Military planning I will offer this though now largely blamed for proposing courses of action procurement forced design and operations plans that realistically burn several hundred generations of human progress descenders I estimate the generals on the line fared somewhat better than their soldiers I need not remind most of you that the numerous medals you see on any house General's chest were perhaps one somebody's children and sadly there were a lot of medals in those years but I would say a good number of them might have been charger Pilots trying to figure out how to make the damn thing work and perhaps a few more were those who did while removing its pilots from history by the score the charger survived and because it survived despite in this action throughout the succession Wars they started to upgrade the damn thing house curita practically had no choice as they now set a stride a giant production line they bought on impulse when the war started and while the charger wasn't perfect it came back most of the time the principle then was the same as it is now clean the last pilot out of it with a hose patch the mech up and go again that I suppose is the enduring lesson of the conflict that which survives is often well lesser somehow and I think this feeling of loss is expressed in disgust depend on the mech that managed to live when the good people in them generally did not as a symbol of Pilots forced to do too much with far too little and the sacrifices they made to desperately hold the line the charger is a harbinger of truly bad times for Mech Warriors while that old Furious anger and donkey's leading Lions is truly righteous I feel it is entirely misplaced when laid squarely at the feet of this machine foreign [Music] water just starts to look a little purple you know I just does this is what happens man I bet I bet Commander Hatfield can verify that he can say yes yes space will make water look purple it's a normal thing you know Lord British himself who went to space this is you see obviously see he would know yeah exactly I mean who are we to question yes you know he's like from a person us know how this works shortly surely [Music] all right so stack is your is your totem he's your spirit your spiritual father and Patron and uh thanks to you guys putting an absurd amount of points into death he can always tell where you are and always speak to you so he's basically like the hint option in uh in the Sierra game as Mike yeah he's like a so I'm putting my points other places yeah he's like the hit guy from the Sierra game so you wait till you hear what he has to say foreign [Music] foreign [Music] oh yeah that's gone been into just jetting blood and he's like [Music] no you you should have said now you are disarmed come on freeze all right oh there we go but yeah no this uh this first guy here as a second half player for the succession Wars there were better weapon systems in every way and then out of nowhere a charger or some other second rate Mech would run up and beat it to death or explode in the process the charger was then the personification one clumsy blow at a time of how perilously primitive the succession Wars had become and yet in the same sense an endless symbol of endurance of Plan B of having everything go wrong and just throwing down anyways because making the enemies their pants and cry is more important than winning the stupid War anyhow when kirita was desperate enough for Mex when the succession Wars hit full swing they bought all of the stockpiled charges Wells Technologies had mass produced and immediately threw them into The Fray in close combat the mech had absolutely annihilated smaller Max which constituted most of what the great houses were using to replace attritional losses on a more economic scale and after a Time the charger was a combat proven design that was a reliable reasonable low maintenance weapons platform that could if pressed into the hands of a select few crazy people throw down in Grand fashion it was an infantry plow or an angry dancing God of War that won fistfights in the assault neck range or it killed Pilots reliably fast enough while keeping the enemy busy enough to find people who could because why not so let's look at this Beast the 1a1 we've been over big engine five-hole small lasers next though is the one that somebody other than the sldf bot and I think it shows what the charger could have been if Wells had any inkling as to the actual military needs of the inner sphere the cgr185 corrected the charger to a proper assault Mac or at the very least tried to the capellans received a crap ton of military assistance and War Surplus after the third succession War this meant as you guessed it Chargers lots of them which they immediately re-engineered into usable Frontline mags they downgraded the engine to a 320 which is cheaper and far lighter They removed most of the small lasers and put in an AC 20 because that's always an awesome choice to round out the weapons they added two srm-6s and a medium laser also five more tons of armor it was as fast as most assault mechs at the time while carrying a salt Mac armor and was a nasty surprise for anyone who thought the compelling Confederation lacked assault Max let alone good ones the cgr189 was house curitas take on the venerable machine through buying at Wells Technologies to enhance domestic Mech industry as such the 1a9 was a luthian armor Works refit of the base charger for heavier Frontline combat the 1a9 bumped the engine rating down to a 320 power plant much like the capellan engineers had decided and similarly replaced the small lasers with a mix of useful long and short-range weapons like an lrm-20 medium lasers and jump jets for added Mobility a legal up with this model's licensed production rights would result in it being built subsequently in license with full technology Handover for unlimited production by Ravina electronics and the outworlds alliance and that's how a salt Max show up in the periphery in numbers when they really shouldn't have thank you Wells technology so very much those pirates were always very manageable coincidentally the original run of the charger suddenly ended in 3030 because of War profiteering bi-wells Technologies illegally reselling Battlefield Salvage to the enemy of the nation it was supporting logistically that's right after striking it rich and saving themselves from bankruptcy they resold their license to Pirates then sold weapons through embargo then finally betrayed their client and I'm not saying this decision beheaded the company or anything but the result is decisive Wells is and then very suddenly was or is house Kirito put it an emergency buyout was exercised and the wells corporate board was invited to quote dine with their ancestors which is the very last they're mentioned intact in any history I can find the cgr-282 is the de facto periphery version it's definitely a junkyard brawler and then it has replaced the five small lasers of the original with one shitload of rockets and a medium laser to round and out why because the periphery actually has need of a heavy Scout you have one hellacious rocket blast sufficient to alakablam an opponent and then follow it up with fizzy cuffs until Friends show up the cgr-3k is the attempted midlife refit by the draconis combine for the 1a9 but with an XL engine to bring the top speed back up to where it was at the cost of it now being very very expensive and fantastically volatile but this upgrade gives it medium pulse lasers and adds Artemis for Fire Control support it can also jump 150 meters all around not a terrible Mech it's an expensive stop Gap solution as a mid-life extension for the Aging charger with most components integrated for no other reason than this fits in a charger now these successive iterations at refitting the charger were not wasteful as they gave karita insight into successive Mecha salt design which would help them later the CGR s85 is in fact the badass hot rod version of the charger this bastard has a 320 light Fusion engine and is slower than the base model however this is wonderfully compensated by Myoma accelerated signal circuitry so it can Sprint as needed they also decided to save weight by burning money and fabricating a custom window steel essay because why not the sa-5 however like all cool battle Max carries an LBX Auto Canon 20. it also has three er medium lasers and two streak SRM launchers held together with 15 and a half tons of armor it's all around really great it also costs all of the money you will seldom see it for this reason but it is certainly and truly Majestic there are other approaches though such as the attempt to turn the charger into a full-on assault Meg by gutting it and essentially starting over this warfront charger the cgrsb or Challenger punches the engine down to a commonly available pit band 240. it has 15 and a half tons of armor and everything else is weapons it has four large lasers a medium laser and 28 heat sinks it's definitely a brawler with serious teeth and certainly one of the more radical takes on the original charger as a stop Gap up gunning of the charger I feel it is more a product of desperation intending to plug the gap of insufficient assault mechs rather than to excel as a platform charger chassis variants are their own special Madness with the charger inspiring such Solaris monsters as the cudgel which is the way it is because Solaris murder is a sport there on nearly every channel broken by advertisements for Pleasures you cannot afford and should not rent as such it is the charger made to beat people to death in Grand fashion it is a pugilist designed to remove Solaris Gladiators in ways ancient Rome would applaud it's designed for beating things to death as they used to say simple as of Solaris and for those into asymmetrical Warfare or just wanting to spice up the battlefield unleashing a cudgel in a war zone is an interesting way to make a Kaiju movie suddenly very real the charger inspired even greater things still this is the hatamoto chi and it is very serious business so why does it look like a charger well as well as Technologies had aired with house curator in magnitudes of failure measurable only in human screams kirita had a Wells plan and had been upgrading chargers for some time having pushed the charger as far as they cared to they took the lessons learned and moved forward the hantamoto chi is have charger half Thug and a lot of luthian Armory gumption it's also pretty cool it's simple it has two ppcs and two srm-6s it's fast enough Tough Enough and expensive enough to live in the inner sphere also most people think on some level it is as stated cool so that helps it sell well among both hardened kirita aligned forces and really strange people making artistic statements on the battlefield however to sum the charger up best I'm going to tell you the story of a pilot who I feel encapsulates what the charger really is poor despite the Grim years of the fourth succession War One Pilot made it through without a scratch until well after strangely enough and against the grain this thing sometimes has a reputation for being well lucky Terry Ford was a veteran of the succession Wars and many would assume his hijinks were the result of some serious defect of Education or general self-preservation awareness but it wasn't that at all because Terry Ford believed in Magic Terry Ford believed in the magical protective qualities imbued into the machine he rode a machine that for some reason could tangle with anything and despite horrendous damage sustained keep Terry safe against the likes of atlases and banshees Terry charged in with his cgr1a1 named Lucky Number Seven Terry Ford survived the fourth succession War without a scratch every Mission without fail despite the sheer amount of damage pummeled into his machine after every battle Terry cared for it and is a limited protective way as it was likely then his only surviving long-term friend as such he rode to war with lucky number seven surrounded by an ocean of collected Lucky Charms and trinkets these two Terry believed in and while he did survive the war the charger helped him die in the way he probably wanted which is to say when encountering a longbow an outnumbered his sides Terry decided that was a great time to remind people of what a charger could do one failed attempt to death from above later and well Terry Ford died that day but he was probably laughing the whole time because to a charger Pilot any time is clobbering time and while Terry Ford was dead somewhere in his pile of Lucky trinkets lucky number seven was taken from the field and rebuilt into a charger 189 as rightfully one battle Salvage yet despite a full rebuild lucky number seven was different Texan commanders complained about how persistently odd it was about its unfixable minor glitches and constant unsolvable malfunctions it was by all records available from that day forward a cursed instrument at a ruinous blight upon the new legal owners some said it was a lonely ghost in the machine throwing hands the only way it knew how perhaps clawing out in anger and missing its friend the last account we have of lucky number seven is that it dropped out of the drop ship during a combat drill for no identifiable reason is though it too were finally done and decided to lay down the charger is most like that it is imperfect but it possesses through its faults something else I feel it perhaps approaches the concept of character we know best one derived through long-standing suffering or as some might suggest a tired old soul foreign everything we're taught war is frequently won by bad crazy as much as anything else it is often not the machine but the pilot which dictates the outcome of conflict as such I'll return us to clausowitz for he said every age has its own kind of War its own limiting conditions and its own peculiar preconceptions he knew that war was very strange and that each War inherently unique even back then the charger is a machine of War stands as a product of a time and a place so distant in memory that it has functionally faded into myth and Legend in that light the charger can be viewed as a peculiar Mech shaped in its own limiting conditions designed under peculiar preconceptions in a very unique time and I believe that the Charger's marginal entry into the world would have been entirely forgotten and wholesale discarded and thought like so many other forgettable Niche products had it not been for The Madness of the succession Wars that cataclysm was the test which allowed the charger to find its true character one of actual demonstrated resilience and despite being beaten down always Rising again over and over the cursed design went through absolute hell and no matter the damage with a new pilot some fresh paint and a few repairs later it endured as a steadfast reminder that mechs were the apex predator of the battlefield such maddening defines in the face of the Apocalypse one that killed its pilots on Industrial scale might be called a tragically heroic or perhaps apocalyptically naive but this is a machine so with the charger it's something else entirely in the inner sphere we have a word for it we call it crazy crazy is about tilting at windmills full sinned and expecting the windmills to fall crazy as pugilism grandstanding and the Macho elbow in an age of Mech Warfare crazy has no regrets crazy is that cheerful enduring presence to stand tall and meet the next challenge fist raised in foolish Defiance no matter the odds crazy is what's left in the war fighting toolbox once everything else is gone and the fight ain't over with crazy isn't really about winning wars or conquering Nations it's about boxing the stars and the heavens and fate craziest smiling and overwhelming odds and starting to swing regardless crazy is about wading into a gun fight with a sword and then winning crazy is about making your enemy use nukes on their own troops because you won't quit fighting and you're just too mad to die crazy is about having no way weapons of any Merit and windmilling your arms at the enemy until they get the message or put you six feet under in that sense I feel the common definition of crazy and the inner sphere as we know it is a barrel fisted 80 ton wrecking Machine piloted by a psychopath fully intent on seeing what new friends he can make today charger is precisely that righteous force of blissful ignorant cheerful violence and in the right hands exactly the sort of crazy solution you never knew you needed but if you aren't afraid of the charger itself please do keep in mind it's seldom the mech you need to worry about in this business it's frequently The Lunatic that finds a charger appealing that you 'd concerned with that we'll end this history just as a reminder repeated filling of my inbox was suggestions of lecture material are being read but I do not have infinite time and this is not my full-time vocation for good reasons the following artists digital and analog have greatly helped us with lecture materials as again most records of this era have been problematic if not radioactive their Peerless work has assisted this production and many others and I feel we should Endeavor to always recognize them fully for their talents and implore you to seek their work for your own projects that being said my team would flog me in my sleep if I didn't say the following I don't shill but I do have bills kindly and thank you this is brought to you by you and nobody else class dismissed Audiology opal Bubba J talking at you today I'm here to let you know that we here at Bubba J's seasonal holiday lock headquarters have got you covered if you woke up this morning and realized much to your horror that you forgot to prepare and cook for the family you have coming in a few hours don't worry I've been there myself and after being in the doghouse for like a solid month last year I decided that I will stop at nothing to prevent you from having the same problem this year that I did last year so if you found yourself in a bit of a spot this morning you can call on Old Bubba J seasonal holiday-like headquarters over at 1 800 holy cow and we've got a handful of people waiting to answer your call in your time of need I have assembled the finest task force of very reasonable husbands that are determined to keep others out of the trouble they wound up in last year so here's how it works you give us a call and you don't even tell us what went wrong you throw your address at us at top speed and you write down the number that you're given and while you you're paying online we will already be loading up our new thermite powered holiday-like dinner package and deciding how best to get it to your location Larry is on the repurposed lunch artillery Cannon for long range orders Leroy has the urban Mac mobile hot dog stand out front ready to deliver anything that did targeting computer that we Stow repurposed from a Rifleman 2C says that we can hit from the parking lot and we have repaired the spider lamb for everything else the spider lamb is now powered by 180 box fans welded to the outside and this time the pilot didn't pass out when we fired it up so should be good to go so once you get your box you're going to notice the words caution thermite don't worry that's the brilliant part of our plan so you're going to want to leave the Box just right where it lands in your yard and you're going to remove the handy provided sledge hammer and give the Box a good solid whack where the X has been spray painted in large comforting red paint now within seconds the carefully measured amount of thermite will get to work wait about 30 minutes in the glowing should kind of start to fade just give it a good solid hose down with your water hose until it cools off inside you will find several sealed containers one will have a seasoned turkey stuffed as full as possible with dressing another will have a ham with a package of honey glaze go ahead and pour that on you know pretty fast if you can there's a big container of my semi Infamous spicy green bean casserole oh we got some yams in there and if we got the recipe right this time you should have some fresh rolls if we didn't get it right they'll look like hockey pucks just throw it away we'll get it worked out for next year so when you wake up in a panic you give us a call at 1-800 holy cow an Old Bubba J's legally sane Enterprises are here to help and since I can't help but get caught up in the holiday spirit myself the first 50 orders will have a gift wrapped spider toaster to give to your significant other just pretend that this was all premeditated and wing it from there that's what I'd do and while supplies last you you can get our new extra bigly sized external combustion powered food warmer added to your order to fill the leftovers and kick the in-laws out with it and as always you can stop by in person and we'll hook you up right so y'all come on down to Bubba J's temporary holiday like headquarters on the other side of the Waffle House next to the Putt-Putt course I just look for the urban Mech just up like Santa you can't miss it oh man that burger was great because you're right Swedish Pete let me throw this away a fell off [Music] that others we just got sounds really mad yeah foreign [Music] [Music] hello here's Police Station videos foreign [Music] foreign [Music] here at Defiance Industries realize that there's a lot of sweet sweet money to be made out there and you have too much to do already let us take the guesswork out of your business trust us we are the market hey kids it's make the military industrial complex rubber stamp first let's pick an existing Market next let's pick a proposed solution next let's pick an existential threat to really really spice things up sell it make people believe now flavor it up you need a think tank to make this real all right choose a name that's vaguely patriotic or recalls a period when the client wasn't strategically inept oh man now let's choose some offset Partners For This Dance oh man now nobody knows who's making what and that's called industrial participation what licensing residuals now they won't measure any of this anyway and you'll be lucky if anyone remembers who made what in 20 years hey don't worry you'll be dead by the time they figure any of this out oh man now you're swinging yeah choose localized partners and they'll sign oh they need those programs badly and people's jobs and that means votes this is to find Industries the military industrial complex would like to recommend you that the Universe does not run on hux and your neighbors are probably up to something no man I gotta get this rental back by five oh wait it's a charger this will be fun [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] even if you think the video is crap you can at least donate to charity I won't tell anybody

Channel: The Black Pants Legion

Views: 302,453

Keywords: Let's, play, tex talks battletech, battletech lore, battletech universe, battletech setting, battletech history, battletech setting history, battletech lore tex, battletech history tex, black pants legion battletech, tex talks battletech charger

Id: HbA-8YYohC4

Length: 76min 18sec (4578 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 24 2022