9
let's pretend for a moment that BT made sense physically (it's not, giant bipedal combat machines never made sense in the first place, but let's pretend it is for now),
if there's no single engine powerful enough to power and move it, then you use two engine and tandem their output... heck even easier here given that their primary expected output are: electricity, plasma... there's no conceivable reason i can think of why this has to come from a single engine except weight and space but both are going to be upscaled anyway for the mech. Even in the case of old fashioned engine we've figured out how to get 2 engine to work on the same crank shaft so the idea that they can't get 2 fusion engine, which is essentially a power generator to work together and combine their output is somewhat illogical.
Next, chassis... no material strong enough to hold the strain and weight? But a 100ton mech moves at it's pace with absolutely no problem?
It's physically illogical that they can get a 100ton chassis in BT to walk about plain as a day and fails the moment it gets above 100ton like a magical threshold, if such reasoning as weight and strain is used then logically an Atlas mech for example which sits as close as it gets to the threshold should have such heavy strain that under fire it's chassis should catastrophically fail under it's own weight when it so much as land it's foot from a slight elevation or shot in the chassis structure even if the shot didn't set anything else off.
Then there's the muscle...
You know the great thing about muscle like motive mechanism? You can stack them... like REALLY STACK THEM.
X amount of muscle fiber connected to the limb is not enough? then use 2X amount of muscle, that's not enough? then use 3X amount of muscle.
Sure you need more power for it, but again similar to the chassis argument, if they managed to get a 100ton chassis to move at that pace, it's illogical that they just suddenly unable to get it to work beyond 100ton.
Now there is indeed such a thing as diminishing return and inefficiency of course, so one might argue that beyond 100ton the return from stacking the power or the muscle, etc will not be effective... the unfortunate part of this thought however is that this line of thought also highlight that even the 100ton mech are hardly performing like they are close to the point of ineffective movement capability... ie: they clearly are capable of pushing the envelope further otherwise the Atlas would be near immobile.
This technically of course had to be done since otherwise we don't get much of a point for these heavies at all in the game in which case they might as well not be there... and while we might fancy comparison of the story with that of the real war tank performance where the heavy tanks were of little use with the more flexible and mobile mediums being largely superior, we can't have that in a game where these heavy chassis are supposed to be useful.
TLDR?
Battletech is a soft sci-fi, the more one try and explain them, the more holes you open because let's face it... it's not a hard sci-fi, it will NOT survive the attempt to explain them like hard sci-fi material.
Edited by Melcyna, 27 July 2012 - 11:25 AM.
