Author Topic: MechWarrior Online  (Read 269265 times)

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Offline headdie

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
Just qoes to show how detailed the rule set is for the game and how much the computer games dont do them justice
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Offline Scotty

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
No, that particular part of the rules would be the special table for where to apply damage when a 'Mech is kicked from one level higher up while (the target is) in partial cover.

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
I just find it rather amusing to see how many people debate points of realism on craft that, in any realistic setting, would be among the most impractical war implements ever designed. :p

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
Actually, a few good points have been made regarding conditions in which the Battlemech would be a realistic and practical tool for warfighting. Given the uber-armor present in the Battletech setting, it's not a bad design - the legs are the biggest strength and the big weak point.

 

Offline Scotty

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
A major part of it is mobility.  Another is versatility.  There is a 'Mech for anything (except, curiously, underwater ops).  The vacuum-proofing lets it fight in more places than any other vehicle on the (BattleTech) battlefield.

 

Offline Commander Zane

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
The Thor/Summoner is 12 meters at 70 tons. The Olympus from Starsiege is 80 tons and barely 9 meters. I was being generous regarding the Apocalypse MkI and Mk IV and the like, which are 60/65 tons and about 12 meters.
Because the Olympus is literally a walking tank and the Apocalypse is actually 70 tons.

 

Offline mxlm

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
Given the uber-armor present in the Battletech setting, it's not a bad design - the legs are the biggest strength and the big weak point.

The uber armor combined with the uber-lame targeting, guidance, and propulsion systems. The armor's awesomeness would be less awesome if SSMs could reliably pelt mechs from many hundreds of kilometers away.

Of course, if they did go the 'sane targeting' route, they could pull a Hammer's Slammers and say, "Point! Defense! Lasers! Defeat! Missiles! And! Artillery!" but that wouldn't do much to protect against kinetic penetrators.
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Offline Scotty

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
The ranges are a device to keep the table top battles from occupying about the same space as a basketball court.

 

Offline mxlm

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
Yes, I'm aware of that. They're still canon, and they're still wholly implausible. Multiplying all distances and times by ten (think that was the number) helps, but only to a small extent.
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Offline Polpolion

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
ARGH. Stop bringing plausibility into this. Or is it that you want all your 'mechs being destroyed by cruise missiles from a missile destroyer 30 miles out to sea?

 

Offline StarSlayer

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
If they ever built something like a bipedal "mech" I'd imagine it would look and act something like a Whiskey Cobra on legs.  It would need to heft more ordinance then a gunship, and have better mobility then a MBT to have any chance of seeing the battlefield.  Even then I would imagine it employed similar to a really mobile MLRS then some sorta close combat monster like most "mechs" in fiction.
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Offline Scotty

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
Quote
It would need to heft more ordinance then a gunship, and have better mobility then a MBT to have any chance of seeing the battlefield.

1) Check, at least for most of them.  The rest (all of them, really) are also much less fragile.
2) Also check.  On the CBT forums, we figured the in-game speed of an Abrams MBT to be approximately 4/6, factoring in acceleration and the ten second "real time" turn.  Only a very few 'Mechs, mostly Assault class (80 tons+) and one Light (Oh, where would we be without you, O Urbanmech?) have less than that.  Those that are slower tend to carry a hell of a lot more firepower and ordinance than any two gunships and tanks combined. (Except the Urbie.  He has firepower of a tank, but not of a gunship/tank combined.)

 

Offline mxlm

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
Or is it that you want all your 'mechs being destroyed by cruise missiles from a missile destroyer 30 miles out to sea?

I guess you didn't read my post.

Battuta mentioned conditions under which mechs might be a realistic and practical tool. The inaccuracy and truncated ranges that are the hallmarks of BT weaponry is very relevant to those conditions.

I likes my giant robots and I likes my Battletech (also Heavy Gear, but less so). I'd like it more if it were more plausible--which I'm far from convinced is impossible, given the way in which  hovertanks (er, as in air cushion, not repulsors) are made (more) plausible in David Drake's stuff. Plus, it's kinda fun to poke holes in. Like, in the new House Handbooks (er, newer), we get things like GDP and population and minimum wage and so on. So, Steiner. Economics: planetary GDP ranges from five hundred million to almost five billion. Population on the example worlds listed earlier in the book: ranges from five hundred million to several billion. Average citizen's income is 17,000 dollar things/year. Spot the problem.

That's fun for me.
I will ask that you explain yourself. Please do so with the clear understanding that I may decide I am angry enough to destroy all of you and raze this sickening mausoleum of fraud down to the naked rock it stands on.

 

Offline Scotty

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
That, my friend is what was (and still is) called FASAnomics :lol:.

 

Offline Commander Zane

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
Average citizen's income is 17,000 dollar things/year. Spot the problem.
They get paid U.S. Army wages! :P

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
I just don't see how the entire genre of giant robots/mechs, be they Gundam or Battletech, can ever be made to be all that more plausible than they are now...which is to say, hardly at all.  A bipedal design is inherently unstable by its very nature, particularly over the sort of rough terrain that a combat vehicle would be expected to deal with.  (Just take a look around the animal kingdom...notice how few species besides us rely on nothing more than two legs?  Animorphs had a good point there. :p)  Every sort of current prototype I've seen for autonomous mechanized sorts of units has had at least four legs (like that eerily lifelike military prototype whose video floats around a lot), with some going straight to six.  It gives you that much more of a stable test bed without making the gyroscopic problem even more horrendously complex, and it's more capable of picking its way over loose slag and steep hills without completely toppling over.  This becomes all the more crucial when you're talking about the sorts of scales that most of these universes tend to deal with.  If you can tell me how a two-legged mech on the order of ten to fifteen meters tall that weighs dozens of tons can plausibly cover any sort of terrain faster than an M-1 Abrams, no matter what sort of powerplant is driving it, I'd love to hear it.

So...yeah.  Mechs in general are a terribly fun concept, but I'm not holding my breath for them. :p

 

Offline Scotty

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
Okay, trying to address this in order:  Instability?  Handwaved with gyroscopes.  I'm not really sure how those work.  I'll post in the "Masters of the Universe" thread for that tomorrow on CBT forums.  There are Quad 'Mechs in BattleTech.  Engine = fusion plant.  Fusion plant = Unlimited POWER! [/emperor].  Seriously, that's the realm of the myormer artificial "muscles."  They contract when subjected to electrical current.  I imagine that the speed at which they contract is proportional to the amount of power vs. the size of the bundle.  Hence, small 'Mechs are upgraded to ludicrous speed.

 

Offline Ace

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
The BattleMech has been in service for centuries. They are an extremely redundant and highly refined design. A HERC that loses its armor just goes down. A 'Mech will be able to fight on even after losing limbs or a whole side torso. Unlike HERCs their weapons are internal and cannot be shot off with ease to neuter them. BattleMechs also demonstrate more advanced weapons; the Gauss rifle has already been mentioned as an example of the kind of power output a BattleMech is capable of, and the PPC is a clearly superior design to the ELF yet both work on the same principles.

ELFs have additional armor penetration properties, and cause internal explosions in their targets by detonating munitions. ...and the Corporate War era ELF-mortar is nothing to laugh at.

The HERC, though, has shielding. Scout HERCs and scout 'Mechs are usually tied, but from medium-class up the HERCs are usually faster and more manuverable, though lacking the close-quarters versatility of a torso twist. Just to mire the issue badly, the Martian Civilization weapons the Resistance picked up in Starsiege put the weapons problem in doubt once more.

Earthsiege era HERCs have torso-twist. Also, the cache tech isn't really 'martian,' they're not from Sol. The blink-guns the toasters... errm glitches use are based on a similar cache found by the Cybrids in the outer solar system.
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Offline Commander Zane

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
Not to mention two ELF2s at point blank range would vaporize even the Cerberus 100 ton Cybrid HERC, try that with two PPCs, it will barely do **** to anything bigger than a Medium.

  

Offline NGTM-1R

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Re: New MechWarrior Game?
Not to mention two ELF2s at point blank range would vaporize even the Cerberus 100 ton Cybrid HERC, try that with two PPCs, it will barely do **** to anything bigger than a Medium.

You realize that's an argument for me, not against, right? Because an ELF is a PPC on a string, and thus has severe range issues. Likewise to Ace. They function under the exact same principles, so anything the ELF can do that the PPC can't has to chalked up to crappy HERC design.
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