Editing BattleTech Spacecraft (section)

===Monitors===
A failed experiment in designing an interplanetary WarShip without a Jump Drive and replacing the mass it would occupy with more engines, weapons, or armor. If all you do is strip out the Jump Drive from an existing WarShip design, you lose key structural supports that cause the monitor to tear itself apart when attempting maneuvers. Nobody ever got around to designing one that was structurally sound. After the catastrophic failure of the first Monitor prototype, nobody in the Battletech universe believes its possible to even conceive such a thing, much less attempt to build it; even while the Succession Wars were ranging and WarShips were becoming LosTech artifacts because nobody could replace the Compact K-F drives they used, everyone understood that monitors were as useless as a sword made out of gold. [[Skub|Never mention them, ever]].

Officially, CGL has declared that WarShip-sized Monitors will never be a thing in Battletech because their existence would fuck up the setting too much. Given the way tonnage works in the game, any WarShip would be outclassed by any Monitor of equal tonnage while their relative technical simplicity would make them far more common and thus a much more important part of the setting than WarShips, DropShips, and AeroSpace Fighters currently are.  A similar problem exists in most ship-building combat systems (BFG, D20 Future, Rogue Trader RPG, etc), with the effect of making it much easier to defend than to attack (much like Axis & Allies).

The only technical Monitors that exist are Pocket WarShips, which are essentially DropShip-sized space torpedo boats designed to live long enough to fire anti-ship naval missiles and defend proper WarShips from fighters. Even the smallest WarShip is at least 10 times the mass of a common DropShip, though post-3150 TROs state that the Republic of the Sphere fielded examples of the Castrum Class Pocket WarShip at least 100,000 tons, nearly the size of the lightest Corvettes that range from 130,000 to 200,000 tons.