the setting makes the mechs out to be ancient storied machines that no one knows how to build anymore, passed down through generations of space feudalism and kept barely functional, but they all look like freshly mass produced clean 1980's angular space robots. they should have like clan banners and family names and engravings and retrofit low-tech parts and stuff if the lore is meant to be at all meaningful.
I think some of the early novels did play into a little of that, although not that creatively, and then the setting moved into a sort of renaissance where they were producing new mechs en masse. It also never quite got to the "mechs are relics" state, because even before that renaissance there were still factories churning them out and standing armies of them.
It did play into that at the start, then there was a small problem that the setting made no sense when put under any scrutiny, a running theme that will persist throughout battletech's lore because very few writers understand how logistics work. And so because BT wanted to pride itself on being grounded sorta grimdark, the guys at FASA had to walk back a lot of the ideas of mechs being rare, introduce limited production of new mechs, but the circlejerk over the space roman empire (Star League/Terran Hegemony) remained.
I think some of the early novels did play into a little of that, although not that creatively, and then the setting moved into a sort of renaissance where they were producing new mechs en masse. It also never quite got to the "mechs are relics" state, because even before that renaissance there were still factories churning them out and standing armies of them.
It's pretty incoherent, overall.
It did play into that at the start, then there was a small problem that the setting made no sense when put under any scrutiny, a running theme that will persist throughout battletech's lore because very few writers understand how logistics work. And so because BT wanted to pride itself on being grounded sorta grimdark, the guys at FASA had to walk back a lot of the ideas of mechs being rare, introduce limited production of new mechs, but the circlejerk over the space roman empire (Star League/Terran Hegemony) remained.