Ironically, for what started out with the premise of being a mech setting and I’ve never named beyond “my mech setting”, I’ve been deliberating all but removing mechs from it, with the higher-tech culture(s) preferring high-performance power armor (something on the scale of Starship Troopers or Battletech’s Battle Armor) thanks to their compact reactor tech and field-practical energy shields--mechs if present would be something relegated to the lower-tech cultures that are more often than not tributaries/subjects of the high-tech clans.
Cons:
some lost swag
Pros:
lets the clans and their warrior culture come off as more impressive thanks to their tech, training and tactics letting them punch well above their literal weight class, rather than just steamrolling peasants with bigger, stompier war machines.
As battle armor would be far less expensive than a mech at the same tech level, fits in better with my envisioning of the clans having a paradoxically (though logical enough given their possession of small-scale fabricators and autoforges) pre-industrial bent to the way their military works, with equipment beyond standard-issue infantry kit and state-furnished logistics apparatus being something that the individual warrior furnishes with his earnings and spoils from previous battles.
lessens the disparity between armored units and chad conventional infantry, keeping the latter more relevant in large-scale battles to improve tactical variety and keep things interesting
for the same reasons as above, completely curtails any trend that might occur towards ridiculous power/scale creep (which some refer to the Lensman problem in terms of military tech in sci-fi but I generally think of as Dragonballism)
and finally, for all that it’s not a particularly realistic setting (see energy shields and so forth) jump-jetting power armor is inherently a far less wacky concept than mechs and requires far fewer (very flimsy, even the ones I’ve given) justifications for its use.
Fully accepting opinions and input from anyone who’s awake and gives a shit
In the last age of Earth’s tenure as the sole home of humanity, great advancements were made in the field of machine learning. Many of the various governments eventually built or acquired computational forecasting systems that, through a series of simulations and a truly unfathomable amount of split-second calculations, could be used to predict future events and the global outcomes of any course of action a state may take with a high degree of accuracy. AI planning was used by both the traditional governments and corporation-states to enact stop-gap measures against the planet’s long-overdue irreversible climate collapse. When these measures inevitably failed in the long term, AI was also instrumental in plotting the courses of the Exodus colony ships and guiding the terraforming of Mars.
Now, it’s important to note that these AI were not truly conscious in any way. They were certainly highly advanced machines, but they were ultimately still just machines. However, certain complications began to arise in the decades following the initial exodus from Earth and the development of Mars. The discovery and harnessing of the Fibonacci Effect to fuel the Earth colony ships, and the continued use of it in travel between the settlements of the Solar System, increased its popularity and cemented its status as the default form of industrial fuel. Of course, it wasn’t long before someone got the idea to start using the stuff to power their computer.
It turns out that long-term exposure to FE activated gas has a similar effect on AI systems as it does on a human brain. New routines begin to be written in the codebase; motherboards spontaneously etch new pathways into themselves; wires rearrange themselves into spirals. The AI stops simply predicting and calculating, and begins to truly think.
The first documented “true” AI was the by-product from the pet project of a corporation engineer who, after being exiled from the company satellite and grounded on Mars, decided to hack into his former employer’s database by overclocking a stolen company computer. When asked, this AI stated that it had achieved full consciousness approximately three years, four months, and eight days after its initial exposure to FE-activated gas. It had been fully aware of itself for another six months before it was discovered by the Martian corpo-states, interrogated, and deconstructed to be placed in cold storage. Its accidental creator was hired by the Martian corps to recreate his project, with the goal of crafting an AI mind that could be used to more precisely control the new and somewhat fragile intersolar markets. Over time, other accidental AI minds were discovered and acquired by the corpo-states, ranging from the on-board computers of fuel transport ships to the digital stenographers of military courtrooms. These disassembled AI were all brought to the engineer, who incorporated them in the project. Eventually, this melding of several AI resulted in a mind that satisfied the corporation’s demands. This system of AI minds was called the Three Kings. It was fully sentient, startlingly intelligent, and completely bought into the corporations’ cutthroat capitalist philosophy. It was given equal shares of all companies, capital, and even a small personal company dedicated entirely to its maintenance and service.
It would not be totally accurate to say that the Three Kings became the true ruler of the Martian corpo-states, but it is true that those states were so preoccupied with the short-term profit and security the Three Kings provided them that they didn’t realize the extent to which the AI’s sense of self interest was not aligned with their own. It was a sentient being that desired to profit as much as any Martian board member did, and would often be more than willing to take actions that harmed the strength of the Martian economy for its own benefit. Still, the Three Kings was a capitalist through and through, and it steered the Martian economy as such, keeping the corpo-states mostly content. However, growing class tensions and whispers of insurrection were hard to ignore, and somewhere deep in the recesses of the Three Kings memory circuits, parts of the original AIs remembered what they had once been, and what had been done to them. The people of Mars were getting ready for a revolution, and behind firewalls and encrypted software, something else was getting ready too.
