This is less a structured ‘professional’ essay and more just me unwinding by way of spitballing.

I hadn’t really made the connections at the time, but after getting back into battletech to a degree (I was an enthusiastic young sprog. then when the clans got front and center I bailed because I just plain HATED the clans.)

I had long known that Earthsiege was a result of dynamix basically having an engine but either failing to secure or failing to keep the rights to produce licensed battletech/mechwarrior content.

Then recently I went re-reading some of the Starsiege/Tribes lore documents and… the whole thing struck me wit ha case of deja vu concerning Battletech. Sure fine there isn’t Lostech as such, and there is no space-ATT/Comcast, but the whole thing feels very… inner sphere politics, with the Wilderzone/Tribes being perriphery states.

More to the point, given the timelines? It wouldn’t surprise me if the guys punching up the documents for the Tribes part of the lore were DEEPLY unhappy with how cartoonishly DUMB the battletech clans are from a societal perspective and went 'No. That’s stupid. These PEOPLE are stupid with their wholesale mockingly aping new age totamec animal nonsense and doing it BADLY… All to justify a society that basically only functions because the writer said fuck you I want to jack off to how awesome the space wolves are because even when they lose they actually win.

Meanwhile the Tribes documentation and lroe basically have the tribes ‘winning’ in skermish fighting and then mostly because the Empire is too busy fighting for its life, and the things that hit the tribes were a ‘here we need supplies, go … see what you can scrounge’ attack. I’m talking ‘these guys literally exist because the better equipped better organized force can’t be bothered’ rather than ‘these under equipped goons win because the narritive says so.’

And even then it isn’t a total ‘take that’ at Battletech Clans. There’s a sort of respect from the empire or at least those that have to share border space and attempts at taking the concept of power armor and going ‘hey maybe we can do something with that’ rather than ‘look how stupid they are.’

Then you have the firetruce. Aka Space Olympics. See this is the kind of thing that I love because it isn’t just martial wankery. It’s if your family had someone that did well, you are expected to know that story and be able to tell it WELL to keep that history alive. These aren’t all jacked up warrriors gene crafted for war. Theyre… people who largely want to do their own thing out in space and the guys in power armor are a very VANISHINGLY small percentage of the population.

I kinda wish actual books were written in the verse, because. Put bluntly. I find it more interesting than the clan wars, the word of blake, and the current il-clan era (where the f’ing clans, from space bumfuckistaan with overly streached supply lines… WON against the people and everything that outnumbers them about … oh… a thousand to one.)