Oddly enough, for all of FASA's pure idiotic behavior on the econ (ie, "What economy") Battletech's economy _can_ be explained.
Breif primer: There's two major consdierations in industrial manfacture.
First is "style of production" which can be boiled down to Craftsman style _or_ Fordism.
Craftsman style is very highly trained experts, knowing excalty what they do, and the 'industry' is set up to maximize their edges, Guilds, unions, etc, etc. It's also very hard to expand this fast.
Fordism, is basically an _smaller_ pool of trained experts to desgin, then _lay_ out _production_ lines, which even low level trained workers can do the tasks (Ford was an genius of rare caliber.)
Battletech uses the former.
Proudction Distrubtion Model.
Three primary models
All in one plants (Russian style)
Limited distrubtion plants. US, several other people's style. Where you tend to cluster as much as possible to minimize shipping, but still have parts all flow to area. US model, to some extent currently.
Cottage industry. Japanese model.
Lots and lots of little feeder plants, into one central assembly area.
At _best_ the people do the last two. I'm sure you can realize the disavdanagtes of those two.
So.
Given that BT uses the worst posisble basis for these, you begin to understand why production is so low (for popluation) and why total equipment is so low.
"Why hasn't it changed!"
Very simple: People are conservative. By and large, people _don't_ change, unless not only is there a reason to change, but someone risks all (and lots of people are not risk takers in this sense)
Combined with the facts of the owners being nobility, and Cameron (or Comstar, your choice, or jsut general weardown) wiping out Fordism, you pretty much get the excat economic model present in BT.
By accident.
A.
