Battletech's Conventional Infantry Equipment: One Man's Descent into Maddness

Here's the worst thing about being a data person who's into Battletech:  The part of your brain that notices inconsistencies is screaming bloody murder.

I have spent hours comparing different lists of equipment and trying to understand those inconsistencies only to repeatedly throw my hands up in frustration.  Here is my story:

I have, for a while now, wanted to build a comprehensive list of Battletech information for my own purposes (research, mostly). Most of us would reasonably start with the Battletech core rulebooks. And predictably, Techmanual has three different tables for conventional infantry equipment: 1) general equipment stats 2) availability and cost information and 3) battle value.

Seems pretty straightforward right? Just type up or scan in the table and you are off the races.

Well, I convinced myself to check the errata. In 2022 CGL revised the conventional infantry the equipment pretty substantially.  Why did they do this? They do not say.

A little bit of research (a/k/a asking people on reddit) suggests that these new conventional infantry weapon statistics are based on upconverting A Time of War equipment to Total Warfare using the rules for A Time of War Companion (pg. 168). Errata published in 2021updated these conversion formulas (and thus the Battle Value (BV)).

A Time of War Companion has some additional equipment in, and those did not get added to the Techmanual. But that extra equipment are in Interstellar Operations (and the later print/split Interstellar Operations: Alternate Eras).

If you look at the entries in Interstellar Operations you will also see that they do not exactly line up.  They are bundled up differently than in Techmanual.[1] The availability table in Techmanual also does not line up with the other tables elsewhere in the book.

And then, some of the listing for missile launchers in the Techmanual include second entries for using inferno missiles. But no other alternate ammunition types are given.  Interstellar Operations does not list info for any kind of alternate munitions either.

Then, as a kind of sanity check I exported the equipment database from MegaMek, hoping I could use it instead.  Once more, I used the presence or absence of an entry for Scimitar as a quick validation test.  The scimitar is missing from the export.  Further, there is no explicit field specifying whether a piece of equipment is for infantry, battle armor, or mechs/vehicles.

At the end of day this tells me two things: 1) there is no exhaustive, complete, list of information for Total Warfare level infantry units to draw from 2) it is clear that instead of maintaining a unified database that equipment statistics are drawn from, Catalyst just keeps disparate collections of data that sometimes get cleaned up.  Probably in excel.[2]

So what's a data person looking into Battletech to do? I think the following steps can be used to unify that conventional infantry:

• Catalyst is correct to treat the equipment in A Time of War and A Time of War Companion as the canonical equipment for conventional infantry in Total Warfare. The existence of conversion formulas confirms this reality
  
• Unbundle the equipment entries in the various tables in so that there is one entry for each piece of equipment.
• Only list stats for standard ammunition, which makes these tables consistent with the way equipment is listed elsewhere in Total Warfare

 I'll be trying to run those conversions coming up here. Hopefully soon.

[1] So for example, Techmanual has an entry for Blade(Katana), which is errataed to Blade(Katana/Scimitar). But Interstellar Operations: Alternate Eras lists Blade (Dao/Katana/No-Dachi/Sword/Wakizashi) as a single entry with no mention of the scimitar.
[2] That's just me opining.  I have no evidence of that.