I like the idea of training packages being used to reflect late life path entries, that in combination with the Culture should give a decent reflection of a characters backstory. It may not even be too much work to build a few training packages from the lifepath entries from the Battletech/Mechwarrior books.
I'm still noodling the battlesuit issue. Maybe if I get too deep into it I will write up something for the Guild Companion on it. This isn't the first time battlesuit issues have come up for HARP Sci-Fi. That depends on me finding an elusive "round to it" however.
I've come up with some general guidelines I might use for mech conversion however. Based on the stuff in Sci-Fi Xtreme, I'm thinking:
light mechs should be in the 20 to 25 hits range, with about 5 armor, between 0 and 10 EW (mostly 0 in this universe with a few exceptions), and 0 to 10 PD (again mostly 0 with a few exceptions). Shields are not a part of the technology base so should be 0.
medium mechs should be 25 to 30 hits, around 10 to 15 armor, and have the same PD and EW as light mechs.
heavy mechs should be about 35 to 40 hits, with 15 to 20 armor.
assult mechs should be around 40 to 50 hits with 20 to 30 armor.
Weapons can be fairly easily converted to the Sci-Fi Xtreme standards I should think. Small lasers being tiny, medium lasers being small, and large lasers being medium. ACs, PPCs, and the like should all fall in line pretty easy from there. Pulse lasers should just be burst fire lasers. LRMs and SRMs should probably be burst/salvo fired missles with tiny/small warheads.
Issues I'm seeing so far are: no shields means the guns to armor ratio isn't going to be as favorable to the target as Battletech cannon - I may need to up the armor some. Heat management isn't taken into consideration, perhaps replace the engineering phase of vehicle combat (shield management) with a heat management phase. Heat management would mean each mech would need either a heat rating applied to it in general or for each weapon. I'm not sure how the missles will play out with as little EW and point defense as is typical in Battletech. I may have to assume a basic level of EW for all mechs with advanced for ones like the Raven. Otherwise a single LRM20 is likely to turn an Atlas into a smoking heap. May have to reduce the "regular" missle warheads even smaller than tiny - perhaps huge personal scale instead. Thunderbolts would be much larger warheads.
Despite the challenges I still think this would be doable and probably even benefitial. If I wanted to play a game of Battletech I would - but if I want to resolve a small scale combat between two Mechwarriors having the fight end in only a few rounds of combat is probably a good thing.
I'll continue to muse on this topic.
Thanks,
-Pyrotech