THE ATLAS | The face of the franchise & the BEEFIEST mech ever built | Battletech Lore

generic greetings and welcome to science Insanity a channel dedicated to bringing my love of Science Fiction in all its smooth brain stupidity to you and along for the ride is the epitome of that sentence my friend and co-host Steve a science illiterate filling in the role as comedic relief and target of my narration in the hopes that he learns and retains some information say hello Steve today we're going to be covering the lyren's favorite Mech karensky's crowning achievement the ugliest heaviest beefiest assault Mech to ever grace the battlefield with his presence when this Titan shrugs Army's brace oh yeah brother come get a taste of these battle fists baby it's the one the only the face of the franchise the atlas let's go I am so hyped for this I wrote this at two in the morning can you tell off yes it's gonna be there's gonna be more there's gonna be so much more of that in the episode by the way it is uh does the audio pickup like joining and leaving Discord I'm pretty sure it will yes okay cool so I guess I can just include one of those for dramatic effect ively oh my God you you can't if you do it in the middle of a sentence I'm going to ignore that it happened and just keep going like nothing nothing happened you're just gonna get to miss like my my Luchador style WrestleMania [ __ ] I was gonna disconnect it right at the end of it say that oh my God that that would have been that would have been pretty good too late to too late to go back and do it though I'm not repeating that that was well I just got we got a new reference now I have been unable to think about or see this Mech without imagining it sprinting at another Mech and trying to melee it with like the Team Fortress Heavies scream playing from its warhorn just that heavy Russians yell it's it's awful in fact you know what I'm gonna edit that in and post right after I'm done with this I'm gonna steal someone's like Mech Warrior melee Atlas footage or something and then edit all of that in hahaha [Music] I am bullet proof I'm looking at my script I think I forgot to add in the part to shill my my brain is is full of fog right now hey don't forget to show yeah okay you know what let's let's just do it before we get into the actual video I must beg for money if you'd like to support science insanity and see our content a day earlier then head over to our patreon and buy me a coffee or become one of the food Merchants feeding Steve and if space bucks are short then like sub ring the bell and share our content since every little bit helps I need to get you a picture of the actual Atlas so you can understand how beefy and chunky of a boy this is let me let me give you two first a meme image enjoy this wonderful look at him he is a chunky boy I don't enjoy it and here is a more proper high definition image if it will load there we go look at him he's beautiful he's absolutely fantastic not at all ugly despite the fact that it's supposed to be in the lore can I get like the four pixel images again that's like really small I don't know what to do with him just this as that's not happening that was an accident that was an accident when it happened in the uh Battle Battle Star video anyways the atlas is probably the best known Mech in all of BattleTech I don't think there's a single other Contender for that for the Clans sure they have the Timberwolf which is on like the cover image for all of the clan stuff during the original Invasion and all of that expansion to lore and stuff but you know the atlas is special e each of the great houses also have like a Mech they're most known for that's iconic like the centurions for the Federated Suns but I don't think if you were to pick a single Mech to represent the entire IP you you'd have to pick the atlas would you yeah you would it's like the most iconic Mech in the entire in the entire franchise by far not only in The Meta sense but like in lore the atlas is one of the most feared and respected mechs on the battlefield full stop and often draws withering fire and attention from enemies who are attempting to destroy it it's like a black hole it just sucks in punishment and anger as much as it possibly can wherever it shows up and it was designed by Almighty soup stock himself in 2755. that's how you know it's good it is good it's busted it's one of the best mechs in the setting and of course like everything else that we've seen Clan wolf we've got like the king crab we've got all of this other stuff it it all comes back to karensky man it all comes back to that soup stock the extra chunk broth just makes just builds people different I swear to God man [Laughter] oh God anyways karensky sent out three design requirements when he essentially commissioned the mech that would eventually become the atlas Unholy levels of Firepower immovable mountains of armor and being a fugly Mother Lover on top of it all summed up in the quote a Mech as powerful as possible as impenetrable as possible and as ugly and foreboding as conceivables that fear itself will be our Ally that's a great quote I think I think I've used that quote like four times but it's amazing to remember that yeah the atlas was originally designed as almost a gun pointed at the head of the great houses supposed to be the final word in heavy sldf assault mechs the atlas was to be the armored Fist and shield of the star league far exceeding anything the great houses could bring to bear against it as it turns out probably since it was designed sort of by karensky himself and everything that man touches turns into war-winning Wonder Weapons the atlas was quickly proven to be a monstrously powerful design in its initial test bed runs one person describing it as being able to take on and wipe out an entire Battalion of stingers for minimal armor loss the the Stinger is a small light Mac by the way that seems good is that good I don't know uh quite good yes it means the atlas is you know what this this is the answer to that question how many toddlers can the atlas fight and it's a battalion of them there's a canonical answer to that question for help how many toddlers the atlas can fight uh that's fantastic the first actual live combat Trials of the atlas unfortunately came during the amarus Civil War when fat Genghis Khan tried and failed miserably to take over the entirety of the star league while forgetting he was up against the man with plot armor thicker than any warship and nuts of solid titanium the atlas proved to be a critical tool in the sldf Arsenal for two reasons first was that it was new none of the Rebel forces had ever really seen or dealt with an atlas before which meant in its early engagements it was capable of all but obliterating enemy mechs who moved in to engage with it thinking it was a fair fight or vulnerable Target or exposed assault Mech when in reality the atlas was just waiting for people to feed into a wood chipper see we didn't engage in no fair fights here Fair fights are for idiots the second reason that it was so incredibly critical and effective was its combination of armor and Firepower meant that the atlas could act as the spearhead in armored thrusts and soak crippling weapons fire and shrug it off whereas the other mechs it was drawing fire for would have been totaled by that level of focus not only that but the early sldf versions of the atlas were also very powerful command Vehicles remember all the way back in the king crab video where we talked about how krabo had the advanced command and control stuff removed well the atlas was the replacement right the the atlas is uh what karensky replaced it with because the king crab actually came first so Not only was the atlas a bunker complex cosplaying as a person it could also feed targeting data and commands back to its support units that way every time someone would shoot at an atlas they would immediately be Vibe checked by the conga line of dudes following behind it [ __ ] that's a good one there the the sldf Civil War as we all know culminated in the capture and execution of amarus of course and while it was karensky in his Orion that Kool-Aid manned his way through the amarus palace walls it was his friend in an atlas that ran ahead of him and punched the defensive walls and gun emplacements to dust to clear the way for his brass nuts being dragged all the way over to kikamaris's ass even after the collapse of the star league the atlas was an incredibly prominent Mech on the battlefields of the succession Wars out of all the sldf forces that didn't join karetsky's Exodus two-thirds of them were Atlas pilots and their mechs so out of every dude that decided to stay behind in the inner Sphere for the war to end all wars two-thirds of them were atlases probably because they just wanted to kill things in the upcoming super genocide that the great house is called a war would be a great opportunity for that of course this Mech would go on to serve as one of the most dangerous and feared vehicles in the inner Sphere for centuries causing infantry tankers and Mech Pilots aplenty to turn their pants brown at the site bearing down on them it was even brought out of storage in all of its sldf Glory by Comstar during the Battle of tukiyad where it once again played a vital role in helping the com guard break the back of the clan Invasion and with his history indeed we do love Comcast when they're not busy stabbing everyone in the back and being Shifty little shits with its history out of the way let's talk about its specs and armaments shall we because oh boy does it have plenty of both to go over of course we'll be using the base version as our talking point and mentioning some of the variants later the atlas comes with a mix of weapons designed specifically to maximize the amount of [ __ ] you in every Salvo at all ranges at the extremes of its combat range the atlas carries a long-range missile launcher capable of firing 20 missiles in either arcing indirect fire or more rare for inner sphere missile systems at least more accurate direct fire on Targets in line of sight unfortunately it can't just vomit out those 20 missiles the cramped hard points means that it takes a few seconds to cycle load and fire four groups of five or two groups of 10 missiles depending on the model of the atlas which means that if someone is particularly fast they can potentially get behind cover before you know half or more of the missile Salvo actually hits them when enemies close into medium range the atlas has four medium lasers mounted in its arms that can do notable pinpoint damage to enemies or finish off damaged mechs with Precision after they suffered the ways of missile fire trying to get close to the atlas when enemies do get in close though oh boy this is when the atlas goes from spooky scary skeleton mask to actually pants shittingly terrifying it is equipped with the and just like the king crab I shall say its full name Defiance Mech Hunter Auto Cannon 20 which is similar to a 180 200 millimeter Naval gun that is fully fully automatic in some instances or semi-auto in others it is absolutely fantastic this bad boy isn't quite as strong as the king crab's Mech nukers however because it only has one AC 20 and it's a little bit more built for close range but it is still more than strong enough to strip armor from heavy mechs in single shots or delete a light Mech from reality if it hits them directly Dr Atlas diagnoses you with death to supplement the ac20s slow fire rate it also had an srm-6 launcher that fired extremely powerful short range high explosive missiles strong enough that if it hits some of the spindlier or smaller mechs it can knock them over from the concussive force I I mean the ac20 can as well but you know missiles are more entertaining the biggest downside to the atlas is that it moves like it's carrying the weight of the world quite literally the atlas is incredibly slow which means similarly to the king crab the easiest way to deal with an atlas is to heavily flank it or run away and kite it this is actually the most effective way to stay alive as well because getting the hell out of Dodge is pretty much the only option you have if you're stacked up against this thing on the battlefield of course that's not always possible because well the atlas is extremely expensive and generally is only deployed when people know that it is going to be used somewhat effectively and they're actually going to get value out of all the money they're throwing at it assault mechs will generally only ever be deployed and atlases especially to positions where they are told to sit fight and kill on the Spot while the enemy comes to them to push them off whatever proverbial Hill they're holding or said assault mechs will be marching up that hill to push someone else off of it so while the speed is a massive issue and a fast enough and skilled enough pilot could potentially get behind it and kill it the atlas is rarely deployed unless its opponent can't for whatever reason just run away and has to sit there and wait for death to approach wearing the skull mask and speaking of the skull mask real quick it's uh it's not a particularly scary design I don't think it's even a particularly ugly design I think it's pretty cool but in the actual lore designers spent over a year trying out hundreds of different designs until they came up with the one that looked the quote unquote best on the atlas which is what gave us that and uh if I can find my favorite image of the atlas punching the hell out of a direwolf I will show you what the older version looked like this image is what the atlas used to look like and it looked a lot like a dude wearing football pads so it looked really Dopey before but to be fair I do think this image goes really really hard because the atlas is punching the ever-loving hell out of a direwolf I think which is a clan assault Mech all your clan Tech ain't got [ __ ] on my fist why are they number what do you mean why are they numbered why are they numbered because people paint numbers on their mechs when you have a whole bunch of them to figure out whose is whose everyone just had their own individual paint scheme I had so much work and that's also a terrible idea when you have like standardized militaries they've already done it what do you mean they've already done it we have Big Ben and then we have the with the black and uh silver it looks like and then we have the the one that with the death I had on it that's that's green that's a different Mech I'm aware one of them is an app those are enemies fighting they do not need to have this oh my God it's not when you have enemy mechs fighting each other Steve it's when you have Max fighting on the same team because if you have like five atlases all from one company and they're all painted different colors how the hell do you tell who's who on the battlefield what if you're fighting an enemy who's green and then Fred over there painted his Atlas green today because he felt like it you're gonna shoot Fred in the back uh don't you have iff I mean not always this is BattleTech some people literally Drive their mechs around driving by eye you never know in Taliban equivalents bro there's someone who this is BattleTech could have put it you could have put an atlas on the back of a technical that could have been a thing that there are technicals in BattleTech they're canonically Toyota trucks that drive around with missile launchers on the back that's in this universe that's Canon can we get an atlas on a tactical place we need someone get that art figured out please we'll put it on my shirt or something we'll put it on a sticker anyways getting getting getting back getting back into it what we discussed is the bog standard atlas there there are just a stupid number of variants of this thing there's something like 30 different versions of it because just everyone and their grandmother wanted to have their own version of the atlas but we're only going to talk about two the ones that I find the most entertaining the first is the Atlas 7A this thing basically got rid of the long range missiles and downsized the Giga big gun and instead mounted five short range missile launchers in the Torso that is a Loadout that is almost unusable at long range but if someone face checks you in a city then the surviving Mech debris after you shoot them is about to become a modern art display embedded in the building down the street it the amount of damage that this thing can put out at close range is frankly disgusting and there's almost nothing that can stand up to it it just looks at you and you die if you're only a few hundred meters away from it second is the Atlas from a game called Mech Commander 2 because it is just so dumb it's got two long range particle cannons ppcs one on each arm and a ghost rifle in place of the auto Cannon it has terrifying long range Firepower and because the guy who designed this or like jury rigged it is like actually insane in the game he also decided he wanted to put jump Jets on it so that it could almost fly this colossal stupid 100 ton assault Mech it can get itself in all kinds of shenanigans like Skyscraper hopping across the city or I guess elbow dropping someone from the top of a cliff that it climbed to there are tons more like I said but instead of going over all the different variants I'm going to talk about two later versions of it the atlas 2 and the atlas 3. the atlas 2 was a more advanced notably more powerful and significantly faster development of the atlas that was only given to sldf Royal regiments when karensky pieced out of the inner sphere every single one of the atlas twos left with him for the Clans these mechs are more valuable than almost anything the Clans treat these almost like holy relics and they have fought entire Wars over them if there's a chance to get one for the most part its weapons are simply bigger and better slightly smaller Auto Cannon but larger lasers instead of medium lasers and better quality for the other weapon systems you can see that it's a lot less still fat and chunky than the regular Atlas it's a little more streamlined it is faster it trades off the medium lasers for large lasers and it trades off the massive Auto Cannon and its torso for an ultra Auto cannon on its arm that is basically the automatic version of the semi-automatic regular cannons that battlemax use and uh every single one of those completely dipped out with karensky into the periphery to form the Clans and then then we have the atlas 3. and this thing is an absolute meme there is simply no other way to go about that there's that image I showed you there the wonderful colored one it looks like it's carrying a Gatling Cannon or whatever in its uh left arm there this is a better image to show it I want you to take a wild guess at what that thing is big [ __ ] gun correct but that's not all it is okay so this thing is it's incredibly stupid all right it was produced and built in 3137 400 years give or take after the first Atlas one prototype was initially designed and built this thing is pure face to wall stupid so of course all the weapons are bigger and better sure yeah whatever they got rid of all the kinetic weapons and replaced them with the Giga big Auto cannon that you see on the side there imagine imagine if you will the main gun of like an Abrams okay then multiply that by six barrels wrap them around a spinning assembly and then put a massive ammo feed coming in from the back and underarm feeding into this thing it has a ginormous Gatling Cannon strapped to its arm that is a rotary autocannon 5 I think that that right there is one of the most destructive weapons in all of BattleTech it is so ludicrously over the top it will obliterate enemy Max you point that thing at the chest of another assault Mech it is going to be gone in seconds and that's just because it's the seconds that the bolts to travel pretty much yeah it it fires ludicrously fast it's absolutely mental however I I will admit it's kind of it's kind of really silly you notice that they had to Super reinforce the legs on the atlas 3 they're a lot beefier than the other Atlas 2 and Atlas one versions yeah it needs to support the weight of that thing but it's so unbalanced like it has nothing in its other arm and it's just carrying this colossal gun like could they not have balanced It Out by putting like a second one on the other arm you know or maybe put like a really big shotgun to kind of balance the mech out I feel like it would tip over if it tried to walk around that covers the atlas for the most part there's uh one or two last things I wanted to talk about before we do the outro though and it's gonna take up a hefty amount of this it's a shorter episode but running stiff on time more or less and that's the goddamn arms and fists on this thing the atlas firstly has something called reinforced battle fists you'll notice in a lot of the images specifically the one with the white background those um like metal triangles there just behind the fingers those are the battle Fists it is a giant slab of Steel in its Palm that reinforces its hands like brass knuckles it can basically One-Shot other mechs by punching them since canonically the atlas has some of the strongest arms Full Stop in the entire setting which is why that image of it killing a direwolf in with a punch is actually pretty accurate the atlas could probably kill almost anything by punching it once it's extremely powerful canonically if the atlas can get its big meaty hands on you it can lift other mechs and throw them the atlas has been known to get into melee with other mechs and rather than just punching them so hard that their grandchildren will feel it it will pick up said Mac the smaller ones at least and just like hold it there well it blasts it to bits with his chest mounted weapons or it'll Chuck them like into a building or I don't know off a cliff if it's nearby one or something long live the king [ __ ] and just eat them off the side of a mountain it's absolutely fantastic this is this is a canonical thing it can do and when I learned of this at two in the morning my immediate thought was a giant City and some punk little light Mech [ __ ] tries to flank an atlas and he just rips around the corner the atlas just clotheslines this light Mech immediately knocks him to the ground he picks up that little [ __ ] and Batista bombs him right back into the pavement and moments later as the atlas looks like it's about to walk away it's the people's elbow smashing the spider into next week but he's not done yet that little [ __ ] thinks he can just stand back up in the presence of that champ no the atlas grabs The Pretender lifts him with one arm this can only be going one place folks the atlas tosses that lightweight nobody's straight up into the air a volley of long-range missiles right to the face too close for them to arm but oh that's got a sting that's gotta hurt the pride and the champ catches him as he falls leaning back and is that oh ladies and gentlemen Atlas gives the spider the atomic suplex finishing off burying the Challenger up to his hips head down in the ground what a finisher what do you think of that instant replay Steve the Champs classic power move to end off this impromptu fight we went some real real Still Moments on this thing here phenomenal commentating oh God I wish this channel was either big enough or Rich enough to like have fans animate that or pay someone to animate it because like [ __ ] dude that [ __ ] would be so funny to see an atlas do that to a to a spider which is like a really small light Mech just a hurling this thing around like he's in a cage match like a like a [ __ ] wrestling match that'd be great be so funny in the [ __ ] octagon of course the spider's probably going out of the Octagon in the first 20 seconds but oh absolutely if an atlas clothes line to spider spider would probably be pancaked instantly it would be destroyed the thing's just gone there there is no follow-up moves yeah the the most unrealistic part of that bit there at the end was the fact that the spider survived the first punch as it came around the corner that's pretty much that all the other battles and stuff as well we're not going to cover them because we can milk those for other videos in the future so you know yeah come back and watch the content come back next week idiots anyways that's functionally the end of the video before we fully end off a thank you to our patrons your funding of space bucks is greatly appreciated and a special thanks to the food Merchant's feet oh my God say it before you know what it doesn't matter it doesn't matter a special thanks to the food Merchants feeding Steve David Gabe the original Augie 11 Bravo crunchy Terry Higgins Pedro Munoz David G the other one the silencer and Vox apollyon thank you very much for your support I hope it'll continue in the future and with that the video is over outros are hard goodbye [Music] thank you

Channel: SCIENCE INSANITY

Views: 28,462

Keywords: battletech, battletech lore, mechwarrior, mechwarrior online, mwo, mechwarrior 5, mechwarrior lore, battlemech, house steiner, house liao, house kurita, house davion, house marik, star league, mech, mechs, sci fi, science insanity, battletech lore explained, battletech lore video, clan invasion, battletech atlas, battletech atlas lore, atlas, battletech atlas 2, battletech atlas 2 lore, atlas 3 lore, atlas 3, assault mech, battletech lore history, federated suns, atlas mech

Id: zJEVLUtc7ZE

Length: 27min 16sec (1636 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2023