Good lord, the new Strategic Operations sourcebook for Classic BattleTech has some really crazy shit in it.

"WarShips are built like space-going skyscrapers, with dozens and even hundreds of decks built perpendicular to the K-F drive core."

My whole world has been turned upside down. This is... shocking. I'd always just believed they were normal decks that ran the length of the ship, like in Star Trek or Star Wars. The viewports always looked that way.

I dunno, viewing those WarShips as skyscrapers on their sides just isn't as interesting as how I'd imagined them before. The whole naval aspect is gone. Instead of sailing towards something, you're just shooting up and they're somewhere over your head beyond the ceiling. It's a very strange concept.

I've slept on it, and gone back to the TROs and... the WarShip thing just doesn't work for me. Not one bit. Flipped through 3067 and the designs all look like they have parallel decks. You can't look at the Conqueror class battlecruiser and say that is in anyway meant to have perpendicular decks, the internal layout just wouldn't make any sense. It looks like a BattleTech Star Destroyer. There is clearly some sort of bridge or observation deck that is parallel. Same thing with the Feng Huang and Leviathan. They all just look like they were built to have long decks instead of many many floors. Only exceptions I can think of are the Fox and the Potemkin.

A few paragraphs in Strategic Ops goes against almost every WarShip artwork ever released and I think the artwork wins out. Not that the artwork's all that amazing. They don't have anything to match the iconic look of the Enterprise, obviously. Most of em resemble bricks. But at least before, I believed they were functional sensible ships. Now you tell me they're these skyscrapers with hundreds of decks and I'm trying to reconcile that with the artwork I've seen and it's just not computing. I don't believe in these ships as anything with a logical layout anymore and that's much much worse then just being bland spacefaring bricks.