THE KING CRAB | The greatest 'Mech of all time : Battletech Lore

generic greetings and welcome to science Insanity a channel podcast thing dedicated to bringing my love of Science Fiction in all its wondrous glorious stupid Insanity to you and along for the ride is my wonderful assistant Steve playing the role of the science illiterate he knows basically nothing and just like the audience of layman is along for the ride to Meme and laugh and be generally stupid the whole way say hello Steve hello the classic intro and today we are going to be looking at my favorite Mech of all time the best Mech in all of BattleTech and if you disagree you are wrong alternate opinions will not be tolerated on this channel I run it like a dictator we are talking of course of Steppy boy himself the king crab the greatest assault Mech ever I love this thing are you ready to dive into it Steve of course oh this is gonna be so so much fun oh the king crab king stabo king slab got a easy meat slab I love this thing so much it is amazing so let's talk about why the king crab is the best the king crab was designed by casara weapons in 2700s and entered production in 2741 officially this Mech is a little special however there are a few mechs that do fit this mold but the king crab is special to me because it was designed to be an absolute Sledgehammer of death and it wasn't made to be some special contract padding or money making ploy to con the star league out of its money oh no the crab was especially ordered by the soup stock man himself the man the myth the legend Alexander karensky oh the Clans are angry about that's yet another invention by karensky that is truly and only for the inner sphere to play with the king crab is one of those mechs that has honestly really always bugged me about how it's treated I see this all the time in background mechs and stuff like it's just kind of there like included in DLC or is some off to the side thing or just outright not really seeing much in the tabletop in the community and I think that's because there are so many people that love the proverbial faces of the franchise and the King was a fugly Mother Lover early on remember how I told you that we're gonna enjoy some good old king crab art well I'm gonna show you what this thing used to look like it's a pancake it's a wide boy it's so ugly it's so ugly it's genuinely amazing to me how this turned into the king crab we know and love and just so that everybody can see let me find a uh let me find a real good image of one that I can throw up there to just absolutely t-pose on everyone else in the community oh this one looks pretty nice it's even got a fancy yellow paint Scheme yellow is the worst color to paint by the way look at that like how how did pancake wide boy become this monstrosity wrecker of Worlds how did this happen uh they just shaved off the sides of his head man it was actually hair that was growing up there it wasn't like actual metal so they just shaved it off and uh it it grew it hit a growth spurt the king the king crab had like an afro in his teens and he grew out of it into a fade as he got older it it's exactly what happened despite the fact that the king crab used to be absolutely disgusting it is not that anymore it is not only beautiful now it wasn't but it's beautiful now and it is and was one of the best assault mechs ever built actually in the lore no I am not biased it literally says on the wiki word for word and I quote get ready this one's a doozy the king crab is one of the most fearsome battle mechs to have ever existed its Primary Weapons super heavy Auto cannons mounted in its arms can strip the armor off of any Mech in a few bursts if not outright destroy it its secondary weapons give the slow king crab the Firepower to see off attackers attempting to pick it off at range and while not sporting the heaviest armor of any assault Mech ever there are absolutely no weak points to its protection the only reliable way to destroy a king crab is with overwhelming numbers of a heavy and assault mechs and casualties will be suffered in the attempt that is an amazing quote and I love it people just need to get good and they want to have an issue destroying and if I'm being honest I mean would you want to fight with the crab no exactly you mess with the crabo you get the stabo everybody understands that not not only that okay but karensky had a direct hand in its design process not super involved obviously but there the entire time and basically demanded that the king crab be capable of face tanking everything while being powerful enough to kill any other Mech in existence with only a salvo or two for most they never got the second one was enough the king crab was originally designed to be an all-purpose assault Mech that was the king of the battlefield hence the name it had state of the art and quite impressive Communications and command systems built onto the mechs back most images do not have it but some of them you can find it's got a couple of big antennas basically like sticking out the back of the Mac that's the Uplink to all of the other mechs and stuff and that's a special communication system so exposed like uh the rifleman's like um sort of not really I mean the king crabs the way it was before they removed it was basically just antennas like the same way that tanks and like Humvees and stuff nowadays have just big antennas they're not super vulnerable like they would have to take a direct hit and they're very small so not super but they are exposed so I guess technically if someone sweeped a laser over top they could cut it off but I mean the rifleman's more exposed so who really cares these systems allowed the king crab to basically data link with other mechs and not only improve their performance and accuracy but also share information and compute targeting solutions for devastating multi-mech volley fire as the mech was tested however it became clear that the advanced command and control systems weren't really up to par they weren't performing particularly well so they were removed in favor of more standard individual components and instead the weight savings went towards more armor ammo and heat sinks the atlas one of the most famous face of the franchise type mechs I mentioned earlier was actually designed by good old soup stock as well but this time it was to be more of an all-rounder better sensors more versatile weapons so close range medium range and long range and more survivability at the cost of no longer being hyper specialized to [ __ ] obliterate everything it was fighting the atlas was basically the quintessential assault Mech while the king crab became the rocket-powered sledgehammer of God hitting whatever force it was sent up against as for the armaments of said king crab oh boy do we have some guns on this thing so the king crab's main weapons worry pair of the biggest guns and arguably the most powerful guns ever made and fielded by the inner sphere so remember how we talked about AC 20s being like the biggest thing that you have to throw on a Mech that's reasonably usable yes yeah they're they're very big guns basically like massive Naval cannons slapped into this thing's arm okay okay they were powerful enough to be a significant threat to the Clans when they invaded like 600 years later although they would be altered to weaker Gauss cannons to deal with the fact that the Clans had an insane range advantage over inner sphere AC 20s but those guns in their Heyday oh my God those guns were the death Giver model of autocannon 20 fast reloading with improved performance the greatest possible way of sending someone to hell with style now autocannon 20s in general like I mentioned are quite short range hence the later Gauss rifles to deal with the clans in the clan Buster variant of the king crab but AC 20s are inarguably one of the most powerful guns that are actually usable and not some stupid cheese build that people are going to spam me with in the comments down below after this like a long Tom or a thumper the long Tom and Thumper respectively are like the biggest guns ever made they are a massive piece of semi-self-propelled artillery and in lore would actually genuinely straight up knock over a Mech even if it was bracing that tried to fire it so basically the p1000 rat if it like actually existed pretty much yeah it kind of ludicrously over the top those two Auto cannons that the king crab had could Thanos snap most other mechs out of this universe by themselves but they were short range to account for this weakness the king crab also had an lrm-15 mounted in one of its shoulders and a large laser in the other now if you'll remember our Rifleman video from last week's Shameless self plug go check that out if you want to see us talk about um the best of the worst options and even if you don't want to see us talk about it go watch it anyway yeah that's true even if you don't want to watch it it's not a question go do it right now and then come back and re-watch this video because more watch minutes are better now like I was saying the lrm 15 and the large laser allowed the king crab to put down an impressive amount of fire at long range and do quite a bit of both Splash damage with the missile spread and pinpoint damage to an enemy as they close the distance with the laser despite the power of the king crab part of the design Intentions by karensky needed it to be incredibly rugged and well defended in a straight-up fight the king crab would probably beat almost anything that it was fighting at close range but if it was breaking down constantly was a nightmare to maintain or if it had severe issues or was fragile and just got annihilated then it would be an incredibly useless design considering how goddamn chunky it was and difficult it was to build to this end the king crab was designed with fewer Advanced components or lost Tech as you know modern battle Tech would call it during the days of the star league those super high-end components were still very available and easy to replace but they were super high-end and had a nasty habit of breaking needing to be repaired or being a little bit unfunctional if not maintained properly so to this end the king crab was designed with basically Ultra tested super rugged very durable components that would basically mean similar to the Sherman tank in real life this thing could operate on the other side of the Galaxy run it rugged into the ground completely tear it apart cover it in mud and drown it and it would still be perfectly fine to just get back up and keep moving so long as you dust it off and give it a little bit of an oiling it was extremely extremely reliable and when we get onto the armor and the survivability there is a stark difference between the king crab and most other battle Mech designs you see you'll notice that most mechs are blocky brick shithouses on legs that walk around like geriatrics that's because the armor is designed in an All or Nothing Style with notable weak points or gaps placed strategically where the mech was least likely to take shots in order to save on weight stuff like the rear of the knee or the inner armpit for lack of a better term the bottom of arm joints certain areas around the cockpit stuff like that was generally cut down on the armor in order to save a few tons here or there to put more towards armor or more towards armor in the important areas or ammo or weapons or that kind of stuff the king crab was not like this while it carried less armor than most other assault mechs it was designed far far better for soaking damage the king crab despite being just as heavy as an atlas stands notably shorter by like a solid 20-25 in fact I actually have an image here and it's a comparison between three assault mechs I want you to take a look at this on the left you have the atlas in the center is the king crab and on the right is the direwolf one of the most advanced Clan assault mechs look how much shorter the king crab is compared to the atlas and that it's notably a little shorter than the direwolf despite the fact that this thing is one of the heaviest mechs ever built it's very short it's about the size of a lot of heavy and some of the taller medium mechs so it's it's pretty small considering its size small considering its size I mean it's super heavy it's it's really wide and it's really fast dirty it's it's sturdy my mother says I'm husky the reason is because of the design of the king crab primarily in the reverse bow-legged design that it has allowing it to squat far lower while still being able to move fine and in some cases when the mech is crouching it can get down to like half the size of an atlas it's very very small and easy to hide behind cover when you're trying to and because the weapons that it has for long ranges are mounted up on its shoulders it can basically Peak a tiny amount of the mech over a building or over a hill and still be able to poke you with its missiles and Laser it's a very economical design you will also notice that the king crab unlike the atlas the fatless is smooth let's look look at those curves look at the gentle slope of its armor look at all of those wonderful smoothed out angles and rounded edges compared to the atlas literally just being a brick it's a giant square with a bowling ball on top for a head bam girl you got some nice curves on you it does though it's the most attractive assault Mech and I'm tired of pretending it's not anyways something that hits an atlas in the leg will just straight up transfer that energy into it it's it's flat metal right it absorbs all the hell that you throw at it the king crab while not super we're going angled Armor Designs here is this one yeah I know it's insane we're talking about angled armor that's where we're going for so like I was mentioning this the atlas just face tanks everything and the atlas is arguably more survivable because it does have way more armor than the king crab does but the king crabs really small stature and heavily sloped armor means in a lot of cases while not super effective against missiles and lasers because like they don't give a [ __ ] about angling one of them explodes the other is a laser it will still be able to completely shrug off most smaller Auto Cannon rounds and machine gun fire and like smaller like kinetic weapons as they will just deflect off the armor or they will just outright Miss because again it's a very small Target for an assault Mech and at really long ranges it can be quite difficult to hit it if it's using terrain as a good advantage to hide behind it also lets it be stealthy like I've mentioned because at long ranges the king crab is squat sensors can actually mistake it for a medium Mech or a really big heavy like a fat heavy Mech if it's in really rough terrain like a jungle or a city or something with lots of smoke and damage already existing in the environment imagine walking through a jungle expecting to find like a hunchback or a wolverine like some big chunky medium X then exiting a Thicket and Bam the rectum wrecker itself staring you down at Point Blank Range well within pinching distance to repeat the name please I just want to make sure I heard you correct no you heard me perfectly fine the first time and then she'll move on as if nothing I think it's a confirmation I didn't say anything what are you talking about personally by the way speaking of pinching distance so you know how the king crab has those like um gun Shields over his things the reason it's got that is because the weapons it's using are so expensive and so big and so scary a lot of enemy combatant like Mech Warriors and stuff will try to shoot them and damage them before you can reasonably use them because otherwise there's a really good chance they're not getting the chance to fight you afterwards those AC 20s will obliterate people so what they did to design around that is they put these really big or really heavily armored gun shields on the top and bottom operated pneumatically that open and close in time with the gunfire when nothing is happening they can open a little bit just enough for the shell to clear through or be closed completely or if they really need to they can open full wide to help bleed out heat or to make it a little bit easier to aim because when they're closed you got to be a little more careful where you're pointing them right however a lot of king crabs have been modified to actually use the Pinchers as a melee weapon and I'm gonna try to find a picture of one of them that has been heavily modified to do that because they are so good they look so funny oh here we go wonderful wonderful 3D model where instead of the gun Shields we're using big old spooky Grabbers big old spooky Grabbers what else what else do you describe that as look at it it's the same kind of thing but instead of using just normal gun Shields now they're really big and meant for grabbing people imagine this thing grabbing you in its stupid little Claws and then you're just literally face planted into an ac20 There Is No Escape the only solution is death chainsaws at the end of it there or is that just the uh uh I think those are I think those are just Grabbers um I don't think they're chainsaws I think there is another version that actually does have chainsaws oh here we go because we can call it on the grip Reaper yeah I I don't I don't I don't know if this is I don't know if this is Canon but this one I love this one look at the claws on this sucker look at this one that actually does have it looks like it actually has some kind of like pneumatic spikes or something in there it's gonna grab you and it's gonna swish you yeah it's got teeth it's so good it's an amazing little part of the mech and I love it it also is a big reason why it has the crab part of the name it's really big it's got Pinchers king crab there you go amazing despite the fact that I have spent the last radical name design here yeah exactly but like I was saying while I may have spent the last 20 minutes and will continue to spend another 20 minutes just shamelessly fellating the king crab it does have huge downsides some of those are a little silly and based on how it was designed so we have to go over those firstly the biggest problem is its lack of staying power and the second one is its General lack of mobility and we'll start with that one first the king crab isn't exactly slow especially not for an assault Mech it's a it's on the speedier side but because of its main weapons being brawling range armaments you got to be pretty close to use them it's very vulnerable to being outflanked kited or outmaneuvered and especially good Mech Warriors namely clanners and some very competent mercenaries can take king crab apart from extreme long range if they're willing to spend the time and effort to outmaneuver it give up their positions keep repositioning and stuff rather than risking a straight up fight it's still gonna take a lot of time though because the king crab is very tanky and you're probably gonna have to wail on it quite a bit but that's still a severe weakness it does not enjoy being out in Open Fields where people can see it coming from a long way away this also means despite its long range weapons the king crab is almost relegated to very rough terrain and City combat where it can come around a corner blast someone into orbit and then immediately Retreat back behind cover to wait for the next person it's going to basically Team Rocket the second big weakness staying power the king crab does not carry much ammunition similar to The Rifleman only a few tons per weapon depending on the design and what versions of Auto cannons and missiles it's using unlike The Rifleman however it has no heating problems which means the king crab can basically go ham from the minute go and only really needs to stop because the bin is dry sadly nothing lasts forever and this is where the true tragedy of the crabo comes in because you see despite the weaknesses it was a widely loved Mech this thing was fantastic everybody wanted them and when karensky left he tried to take as many people as possible with him or sorry not as many people as many King grabs with them as possible in the long Exodus because they were just that goddamn good but once he noped out of there there weren't too many production facilities for the king crab because it was very big and very specialized and when the succession Wars kicked off the production facilities and the king crabs were some of the very first casualties of the succession Wars because no everyone had them and I need to explain that you see when the Terran hegemony fell which is where like all of king crab manufacturing was only of the few of the great houses had actually managed to capture Terran hegemony worlds with factories capable of making them and the plans to actually do so and none of the sides that didn't have it wanted to deal with them because they were basically a hard counter to any other assault mechs that they met in close combat so for a very long time the king crab became lost Tech as every Factory was given a sun to the forehead by the other great houses and any of them that were on the battlefield were also treated to the same luxury I guess you could say luxury I mean most to it to be to be fair though come on we had this conversation in a previous video as well like it's an honor that you are so goddamn scary that someone looks at you and goes nuke it that guy specifically him nuke him on his forehead that's that's a that's that's an honor now Comstar of course doing com star things did manage to maintain a rather large force of them basically all of them that didn't go with karensky got hoovered up by Comstar and they even managed to secretly commandeer a factory and keep it working in on the down low while they used it to make spare parts and new production models to replace the wear and tear losses that they were experiencing just over the generations so Comstar maintained quite a hefty amount of king crabs over the years and they would play a very very special role in the Battle of tukiyad there is also a picture that I want to find it is amazing and it shows a com star king crab hiding in some jungles waiting to Ambush the Clans oh I found it he's done it I've done it I found it now I oh God the quality of this image is so bad never mind I went to the source and I found the True Image oh it's so beautiful check this thing out com star king crab hiding in the bushes as a bunch of Clan Jade Falcon mechs walk by what is the king crabo do literally reaches out and crushes the head of what looks like a timber wolf with one of them pincers look at that it's such a good image I love it look at that big glorious bastard just sitting up there looking fantastic also if you look down in the corner you notice a clanner Elemental you look at the dudes climbing on the elemental they're like shooting him in the visor that's that's that's really good this this image goes so hard I love it I'm glad I found that that makes this video so much better also because I can here's another really really fancy piece of fan art that just looks so glorious look at the paint Scheme on this thing it is beautiful I wish I had one like that it's gold look at this absolute extra bastard it's all the mechanical parts are gold amazing yin and yang moment um it's white and black it's not exactly I'm calling it yin and yang okay you got that you got the black dot on on the right arm uh so you can't see the other side so you don't know if there's a white dot there so it very well could be now there's not much else to really talk about the king crab there aren't too many other special neat things to go over there's not really too much else because honestly it's basically just what happened after the secession Wars and I briefly mentioned that the king crab was one of the first casualties of the succession war and that's true but it endured for quite a while longer after that you see the king crab was so simple because of the way it was designed it was so easy to repair and maintain and simple that unlike a lot of other star league mechs that could just never be replaced or repaired because they didn't have the technology anymore the king crab could have some of that special lost Tech removed from it and replaced with less effective stuff the great houses had granted that would make the king crab less effective or weaker armor or slower or whatever because they had to remove components out of it but it allowed them to keep going a lot longer than most other of those specialized mechs did they had to sacrifice a lot don't get me wrong Pharaoh fiber's armor was like the thing that they removed from it because that was some of the biggest weight savings but it survived for quite a while by the time of the third succession War I believe which is like a good 300 years into the era of war that saw you know nukes being used just everywhere willy-nilly there was still a few of them left kicking around mostly in like great houses personal armories for like Nobles and Royals and stuff but yeah they were still kicking around and aside from that I guess I'm just going to talk about some of my most favoritest mechs ever because there's a few different versions of it that are really really fun so remember how we talked about just the big Auto the big AC 20s that the king crab had by default yeah yeah well there there are some really really good refits of it so the king crab 007 right okay the chicken spawn version it is absolutely fantastic and I can make this joke and be incredibly serious this king crab version has a [ __ ] amazing rack [Music] foreign [Music] okay so instead of the regular Auto cannons this one was developed after they had begun recovering a lot of Starly garatech and after the Clans had invaded so they uncovered a number of special weapons that the star league basically took to his grave with it for a very long time those being rotary Auto cannons racs those are a regular autocannon but instead of it being an ultra version where you know it's semi-auto this is full auto it is a main battle tank gun sized minigun and they replaced the autocannon 20s with two rack fives on each of the king crab's arms this thing could put thousands of rounds downrange in minutes and these are shells big enough to turn your torso into paste it is fantastic I love it it's so stupid Oh C whiz but bigger bullets is what I'm hearing C whiz but bullets like the size of your arm yeah pretty much very very large and in charge there are also some some pretty entertaining hero mechs but I'm just going to talk about one which is my personal favorite my absolute favoriteist of all favorite mechs and that's the Kaiju I gotta find a picture of this because it's it's genuinely a really really cool paint Scheme oh here's actually so right up in the top left corner that is the Kaiju that's its paint Scheme and you can also see those antennas on the back those are that means that this is a command variant of the king crab it's got all the fancy Communications equipment on the back there I just really like it and when I say it's a hero Mech for if you don't know what that means basically special named characters are using special named mechs they show up in the lore in books and video games whatever that kind of stuff right and they generally have some significance in their own story or in the greater Universe of BattleTech and the Kaiju is fantastic because the entire like mercenary company that this thing is assigned to they're nothing but like Kaiju movie monster references the the actual name is called Greenberg's Godzillas that's the name of it and it is the Kaiju king crab hiramek instead of the AC 20s it's equipped with two ppcs in each arm so four of them which means that it has an insane amount of energy weapons this is the one that I use in Mech Warrior online 12 out of 10 excellent I love it yeah that's pretty much everything I can think of to do with the king crab this thing is amazing I love it it is the best mechan battle Tech no arguments shall be heard no no arguments screw you all I'm gonna Patrol the comment section of this video for like ever more and I'm gonna delete everyone that's being negative about my my absence we're gonna come back to it every three days every three days a month first month he's gonna be checking it daily after that it's gonna be every three days and it's gonna delete all negative comments about it and that's pretty much the end of the video I have nothing else to add you got any questions or anything final to say at the end I like all right I don't know thank you thank you for your wonderful Insight Steve what I mean very thoughtful very very thoughtful and that's the end of the video I hope you've had a wonderful day I hope you enjoyed it okay goodbye [Music] foreign foreign

Channel: SCIENCE INSANITY

Views: 47,428

Keywords: battletech, mechwarrior, inner sphere, battletech lore, mechwarrior online, mwo, mechwarrior 5, mechwarrior lore, battlemech, house steiner, house liao, house kurita, house davion, house marik, succession wars, star league, battletech great houses, mech, mechs, sci fi, raging, canadian, raging canadian, science, insanity, science insanity, battletech king crab, king crab, battletech king crab lore, assault mech, lyran commonwealth, federated suns, draconis combine

Id: c2_3xnKJ2wY

Length: 31min 41sec (1901 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023