WHY THE FUCK ARE LONG TOMS LOSTECH!? It's just a damn big gun. People worked that one out even before slide rules were invented. By hand. Without paper in some cases.
I'm pretty sure Long Toms are not losttech (at least not the same as other more advanced stuff). They are part of the Level 3 ruleset, but the two are not the same thing. Edit: According to Sarna, they were put back into production in 3012, but nothing special happened in 3012 so it didn't require the Helm Memory core or anything like that. My guess is the tech was never lost, but the means to produce more was lost for some shorter period between the 2nd and 3rd Succession War, until someone managed to rebuild a factory for them? Just a guess.
Weren't they also kinda considered war crime almost because of the collateral damage they could cause? Maybe I'm thinking of clans strong dislike of artillery. I think the Ares convention kinda made all the groups not want to use artillery for a few hundred years. Probably also they forgot how to make them. Notice how most weapons do almost no area of affect damage. More lostech because everyone was shying away from them then because they lost the knowledge.
I would think building extremely large guns would require a lot of resources that people might prefer to invest in giant, stompy death robots
I don't really believe the great houses follow the ares conventions as %100 as they want people to think.
Well they were rescinded about 150 years later. But I think most of it the houses loosely follow. Like not using nukes too often or chemical weapons. Or orbital bombardment (though the lack of warships might more to do with that one.) The conventions didn't specifically say anything about artillery but I wouldn't be surprised if it fell under some other clause. I feel like artillery would have fallen under this one. Appendices I through L defined weapons of mass destruction. The restrictions for their use were so strict that not even tear gas could be used against foreign troops. Of course the capellans were the first to break it. And within a decade of it being signed.
Pretty much. The only thing everyone followed (as far as I can remember) was the bit about orbital bombardments. Everyone had lost so much by that point. To do an orbital bombardment was essentially the nuclear option at a planetary scale. The only reason this was rescinded was because fucking WOB fucked everything up. Still even after, orbital bombardment was very taboo. Use of Long Toms were never considered a war crime itself, only how you used them (such as shelling a civilian center). They also never really disappeared. They just became more rare as casualties mounted in the trillions and their production ground to a halt from the destruction of the 1st and 2nd Succession War. Militaries still had other artillery through it all, just none that fired school bus-sized shells.
