Lecture Series Episode 05

From the earliest annuals and history books written about the Inner Sphere strides the giants that are the Grey Death Legion... and today's lecture is all about them!

It's not exhaustive by any measure, and we're talking about the historic GDL, not their newer (and some would say even cooler) iteration, but there's still a fair amount to cover. Plus a bit in the middle where I talk factory logistics.

History. It's whacky. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Battletech Legends and Max, a short story podcast telling tales from around the inner sphere and beyond. Good day everyone, please come and invite us. For those of you joining us over the HPG Network, please remember to use your microphones, but feel free to turn on your cameras if you'd like, especially if you have capitalists. As always, my name is Mark, and this is tutorial section one for the Professor's Lecture Series on the Inner Sphere History. Some of you have asked why I introduced myself at the start of every lecture. That's a fair question. And allow me to point out that I don't think I've ever had a completely sober audience, nor have I ever been completely sober while lecturing. Occasionally I say who I am for your benefit, and occasionally to remind myself of who I am and why I'm here. That stated, today I'm here to talk about one of the most famous mercenary companies, the Intersphere history. We're going to talk about a bunch of these mercenary companies over the coming months, but I figured I'd start with one of the big ones that many people don't know much about. This won't be exhaustive, but hopefully give you a little glimpse into the origins and history of a key player in Intersphere Warfare and politics. The year is 3024, and the Third Secession War is finally starting to putter to less of a halt and more of a rolling stop. It's been on a low simmer for over a century and a half, with few gains for anyone. The system Trell's first planet, Trell 1, often referred to as Trellwan by the locals. For those of you in the audio-only lecture, that's Trell followed by W-A-N as a single word. Trellwall. Anyways, the planet is part of the Lyran Commonwealth. Ooh, Lyran Commonwealth. I'm gonna make that mistake a bunch. Apologies. But perilously close to the Draconis Combine, and in particular, Duke Hasid Recall, aka the Red Duke. Very intimidating at the time. Now, it turns out the Duke wants a Ford base of operations where he can strike at rich, fat, poorly protected Steiner World, and Trellwan would suit his purposes pretty well. Only one tiny problem: the planet is defended by Carlisle's commandos, a mercenary force consisting of a couple lances of battle mechs and a few platoons of infantry. Not a huge defense force, but sufficient to hold off the bandit pirate raids that periodically hit the planet. Now, as part of an alliance agreement with the nearborn Oberon Confederation, the commandos were slated to be rotated to a different garrison, but shortly after the Oberon Mechs arrived, they launched a savage sneak attack, decimating the commandos and killing the commanding officer Durant Carlisle. So far, so intersphere politics. There are two important factors here, though. The first is that the Oberon attack was orchestrated by the aforementioned Duke Recall. His plan was to have the pirates, because let's be honest, that's where the Oberon Confederation is and was a pirate nation. His plan would have the pirates stomp on the local defenders, and then he would sweep in with heavy military response to save the local population and become de facto ruler of Trollwan out of a combination of gratitude and several hundred tons of battle mechs that he was bringing with him. But this meant that the Oberon forces were sent there to die after they completed their job, and unsurprisingly, the good Duke didn't tell them this little fact. Second was the son of Durant Carlisle who was still running around Trelwan. When the commanders retreated from the system, they thought he was dead and left him behind. Instead, Durant's son, Grayson, was very much alive, and having seen his father killed, well, he was a little pissed off. A little pissed off and very very good at anti-Mec infantry tactics. A side note here. Battle mechs have long been considered the kings of the battlefield, and to some of you that might make you confused as to why any infantry other than elementals or forces equipped with power armor would be any concern to a battle mech. To a large extent, it depends on the battlefield in question. On a wide open plane with short grass that's completely flat, yeah, infantry is of no concern to well, anything. Infantry is fragile, you see. And if you can see them, then you can throw things at them. Lasers, missiles, bullets, hell throw rocks at them, and the infantry is going to have a bad time. But do you know how many battlefields are big, flat open planes with nothing else? And as soon as you had any amount of time planning, you suddenly have people armed with SRMs or inferno missile launchers popping up and making your mechs very uncomfortable. So Grayson had a grudge, a knowledge of anti-mech tactics, and a stockpile of SRMs and Inferno missiles. And critically, he had a fair dose of luck. For example, it turns out one of the mech pilots sent to destroy the commandos was deathly afraid of fire. And Grayson shows up carrying a tube filled with liquid fire and threatens her with it. One long, heartfelt period of menacing later, and Lori Kalmar surrenders her mech to Grayson. So now Grayson has anti-mech tactics and a battle mech. And as the old saying goes, you'll get much more with a kind word in a battle mech than you will with just a kind word. So Duke Rekal shows up with his rescue force, and Grayson is angry, armed, and about to try and shove his boot up the Duke's butt. Like all the way up. Grayson was going to see if he could kick Recall so hard that the coordinator felt it several hundred light years away. Grayson proceeds to make the Duke's rescue utterly miserable by employing a series of brilliant tactical moves, attacking places the Duke didn't expect, making quick in-and-out strikes to inflict maximum damage, but then not sticking around long enough for the Kuritan forces to strike back effectively. And all of this would have been pointless, except that Grayson manages to convince a jumpship captain to bring a message to the Steiners, accomplishing two goals. Number one, summoning reinforcements at Trellwan, and, number two, removing the word secret from Duke Recall's secret plan for a secret forward operations base. With any advantage lost and troops on the way, Recall retreats, abandoning a few battle mechs, which Grayson is only too happy to grab. And what does a man with a jump ship and a few mechs do in 3024? He goes mercenary, of course. Grayson Carlisle formed the Grey Death Legion, and head for Galatea, which was a haven for the booming mercenary trade. Once there, they hired new pilots, topped off their infantry detachment, nabbed mechs, medics, and all the associated staff that a small mercenary unit required. Their first contract was to train guerrilla fighters attempting to cast off the shackles of the Draconis combine. And since Grayson still had something of a grudge against the dragon, he was only too happy to sign off. After that, there was a very important contract with House Merrick on the planet Helm. Ah, I see a few flickers of understanding in your faces. And yes, that is why the Grey Death Legion is directly responsible for the fact that we're all still allowed to speak using contractions, and there wasn't a clanner sitting on a big chair on Terra telling the rest of us what to do. At least until very recently. Hmm, the Ilkan? Okay, yeah, we'll get to that eventually, but that's hundreds of years of interspere history from the time we're talking about. And more importantly, the clans in the 3150s are not the clan of the 3050s. I won't say better, but I will say different. What I'm talking about, of course, is the Helm Memory Core. By 3028, the great houses had spent centuries pounding every center of technological advancement, every scientific laboratory, every factory capable of making anything more advanced than a television into radioactive craters. Technology had progressed far, far behind what we are capable of during the Star League, and nobody had the capabilities to build that tech again. I know by modern standards that seems weird, but let's see if we can break that down a little bit. At the core of every battle mech worth its weight is a fusion reactor. Fusion reactors function by taking hydrogen gas and smashing atoms together to form helium and enormous amounts of energy. The helium harmlessly vents off into space or is harnessed and sold in very fancy models, but regardless, hydrogen in, helium, and energy out. Here's the thing. In order for that to work, the hydrogen has to be very, very hot. So hot in fact that if you were to come in contact with anything, it would melt immediately. You're basically walking around with a tiny little star. How do we hold something that hot? With magnetic rings, of course, that spin the hydrogen around in a little loop, not touching anything. And these magnets need to be kept cool, so some of the power produced by the fusion reactor is diverted to maintaining the magnetic field and the cooling that keeps your mech from exploding. A quick aside, no mushroom clouds from fusion reactors exploding. Lots of melting as the superheated hydrogen melts its way through anything it touches, and sometimes big explosions when that really hot gas touches something explosive like a bin full of LRMs or machine gun ammo or whatever. But I digress. For a long time, fusion technology was limited by how much energy a fusion reactor needed itself. It took more power to get a reactor operational than the reactor is capable of producing. The discovery and refinement of light hydrogen fixed that problem. What is light hydrogen? An excellent question. Moving right along. So to build your engine, yeah, I I don't know what light hydrogen is. I am not an engineer and I make no claims to be. I have an education in physics, actually, but not that useful in this particular instance. So let's just move on. And pretend that we all know what light hydrogen is. So to build your engine, you need magnets, hydrogen, and helium containment, cooling and a few computers to keep everything under control while you run around the countryside lobbing PPCs and lasers and anything that moves. The energy has to be collected somehow. That flow has to be regulated and modified according to pilot needs, and all the heat you're producing under your feet needs to be vented safely away. So without taking any of the tactic necessary to make a battle mech itself, just a fusion reactor. We need CPUs, transistor chips, magnetic coils, liquid cooling systems, and the corresponding coolant fluid, fans, copper wire, memory chips, mechanical switches and injectors, shock absorbers, battery arrays. Now let's say one element of that chain is disrupted. Let's pick something perfectly mundane. The fans. You need a series of fans blowing hot air away and cool air towards the reactor. Technically, it's only specific parts of the reactor, but for simplicity, you have fans, and the last factory producing the TLV-405A fan that your reactor requires was just bombed by an overzealous compellant assault. How hard can it be to make a fan? Coils of conductive wire wrapped around a magnet attached to a mechanical blade. Easy, right? How many coils of wire go around the magnet? What size of the magnet in the TLV-405A? Was it ferromagnetic or electromagnetic? Somebody wrote that down, right? Oh, the person who wrote it down worked in the factory the compellants just vaporized, and all the data was on the computer in that factory. Huh. But that's okay. We'll just make a new fan. That works more or less as well. And that should be fine, right? Oh, now the airflow to the magnetic coils in the fusion reactor is too high, and the reactor is producing way less power. Okay, we can adjust that so it's lower. Oh, now the reactor is too hot and it explodes. Thankfully, we have an infinite budget in our imaginary hypothetical situation to build more fusion reactors to test with. And so on. And that's just the really simple stuff. The production of magnetic coils requires a dozen subsidiary industries just to build properly. And if any part of that supply chain is disrupted, suddenly the entire production line has to be retooled and changed, and there just may not be time, knowledge, or capacity to do that. Okay, I have talked longer about logistics than I have of the far cooler and far more interesting Grey Death Legion. But hopefully everyone can grasp how, by the time Carlisle stumbled into the Hell Memory Core, the inner sphere was held together by sweat, luck, and archaic tech pushed way, way beyond its operational window. And now, in Grayson's hands, was a technological database that would reteach anyone how to build centuries of Lost Death. Not just weapons, sure, but also lost multi weapons. Terraforming technologies, water-free communication systems, medical technologies that have been lost for decades, and sure, pulse lasers, ERP PCs and double pizza. Carlisle did the honorable thing. He gave it to everyone. Copies of the Hell Memory Corps were provided free to absolutely anyone and everyone. In a shocking turn of events, Grayson even gave one directly to Duke Recall, the man responsible for his father's death. Recall, to his credit, didn't provide his copy of the Draconis Combine until over six years later, during negotiations to form the free Rasselhob Republic. In the meantime, Comstar did everything in its power to suppress or destroy the Helm Memory Corps, both the original and the copies. They sent assassins, spies, traitors, strike teams, anything Comstar had and used to try to keep the Great Houses from finding and using the Memory Corps. They failed, but they did stall the process a whole lot, such that by 3050, the industrial base of the Great Houses had just barely started to retool and rebuild from centuries of slow decline. A lot of people died because of Comstar's desire to be the only power remaining in the inner sphere. That's a sentence that can be used a lot throughout inner sphere history. Comstar killed a lot of people. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, but almost always consistently. If something really bad happened in the inner sphere at any point after 2780, there's about a 50-50 chance it was because of Comstar. Maybe 60-40. But yeah, they did a lot of bad stuff. They also saved humanity from the clans, but that's only after they screwed humanity to the point the clans were any kind of threat, and only after they kept the Greek houses from learning about the clans by suppressing any information about the invasion until it was politically convenient. Comstar. What a bunch of bastards. Anyways, the Hell Memory Corps wasn't the last of the Great Death Legion by a long shot. Carlisle failed to stop the Jade Falcons at Sudaten, but then successfully defeated them at Pandora. It's interesting that Carlisle built his reputation on mixed arms offensive that united infantry and battle mechs, and that is a lot of what the clans did, although their infantry was 3 meters tall and genetically bred to be stronger than Ox. The same principles, though. After that, there was the mess of the Fedcom Civil War, in which the Legion found itself mostly on the wrong side. Like much of the history of the Civil War, it was messy. But Carlisle himself died of cancer in 3065 at the age of 61 and didn't see the end of it. Neither did the Legion proper, as it was effectively removed as a fighting force during the defense of Hasperus II against pro-Victor forces, or at least mostly pro-Victor Forces, although I can't pretend to understand the politics involved. Still, they fought well, defended the world, and then were quietly removed from the Mercenary Review and Bondi Commission. They reformed in 3151 by some of Carlisle's descendants, but that falls way out of the scope of my education for now. If you're curious, I'm positive there are books you can pick up and read. It's anyone's guess if the new Grey Death Legion will live up to the reputation of the predecessors, but colour me cautiously optimistic. Alright then, that just about covers the Great Death Legion and Broadbrush Strokes. A noble mercenary force insomuch as that is possible, standing against the ragged edge of the dark. As always, I would like to thank Catalyst Games for their generous stewardship of the Battletech property. Guys are doing great work, keep it up. And if any of you have questions, comments, or concerns, do let me know via low-cost HPG message to m arx.battletech at gmail.com. And for the last time, folks, neither I nor the university will accept collect calls or reverse charge messages. If you can't afford your HPG bills, well, I I don't know what to tell you. Capitalism sucks and the Sea Foxes are slightly better than average. Thank you all so much, and next week I think I'm going to spend some time talking about another battle, maybe one which features the Eregan Reach. Class dismissed.