You know, that you should spend more time sleeping and less time studying Operations Research, when you start comparing the Viable System Model of Stafford Beer to the descriptions of the planned economy used by the Clans in BattleTech and realize that again the number five is dominant...
There are five inhabited star systems in the Pentagon cluster, which had been the first five world colonized after the first Exodus of the Star League Defense Force, there are five castes in the Clans, a star has five points, a Bloodname initially had 25 (5²) Bloodrights.... and the VSM defines five systems and applies well to a need-oriented economy with strong focus on survival and limited resources like described in the novels. And its as recursive as described...
(But I doubt any author in the Battletech franchise did even know that VSM existed)