21 replies to this topic

[Hans Von Lohman]

Kyone Akashi, on 18 October 2014 - 06:00 PM, said:

I could see that work. Maybe even have a portion of their battles on the same ground/air map.

MWO is pretty much Warthunder/WoT with 'mechs, and given that those two games have started implementing mixed matches, I don't see why it shouldn't work in Battletech as well (though Aerotech would obviously also maintain an "exclusive" set of space maps).

I don't see it happening, but ah ... one can dream.

Normal Battletech airplanes, perhaps, but not aerospace fighters. We're not talking about something "small" like an F-16 here; aerospace assets are considerably larger due to sporting some pretty heavy engines and thrusters to maintain mobility in vacuum, as well as heavier life support and sensor/targeting equipment, not to mention weapons with which they can actually make a dent in dropships and larger spaceborn vessels.

A bit like this Eagle Long Range Fighter from Elite. Note how small the pilot's chair is in comparison to the rest of the ship. And yes, the foremost part of the landing gear includes an entry ramp that leads to a fully sized door.

I cannot disagree with you more.

Aircraft are aircraft, not flying tanks. Step back and look at Aerotech for a moment. It is a tank game with wings.

"But this is the future and in the future you can make up whatever you want!"

I prefer it to not be this far gone like AeroTech is, and bare in mind that I've actually played that board game.

It should never have been designed the way it was, but the guys sitting around the table in the 80's just decided to make the rules as quick and dirty as they could, and so the weapons are the exact same ones from the ground combat game.

1. Somehow a combat plane can be armored like a tank.
2. Somehow a combat plane's tank weaponry gets magically longer ranged when in the air.
3. Gee forces are based on your top speed, not on how hard you turn. Faster planes can just gee-load more because...reasons.
4. Going into afterburner is when you encounter gee forces?

No, the game was flawed. I love BattleTech, and I know that people would cry bloody murder if a game changed it too much, but it should never have been designed the way it was in the first place, and not much can alter that now.

Edited by Hans Von Lohman, 22 October 2014 - 10:15 PM.

[Nebfer]

Hans Von Lohman, on 22 October 2014 - 10:13 PM, said:

I cannot disagree with you more.

Aircraft are aircraft, not flying tanks. Step back and look at Aerotech for a moment. It is a tank game with wings.

Not quite, at a specific level of detail the two can behave similarly on a bard game level. Current Aerotech rules of the Total warfare series are based off Aerotech 2s rules which is based off of Battlespace, which in turn was based off of Renegade Legion Leviathan which was a space based game (Renegade Legion it self was a ground based game, Leviathan was it's space based counter part)

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It should never have been designed the way it was, but the guys sitting around the table in the 80's just decided to make the rules as quick and dirty as they could, and so the weapons are the exact same ones from the ground combat game.

Not really, the fighter weapons re mostly the same, but warship weapons are not the same, and what is wrong with using the same weapons? US Ship based anti missile systems and the Vulcan air defense system use the same gun as mounted on our fighters. Same thing with the A-10s gun (Goalkeeper uses the same gun).

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1. Somehow a combat plane can be armored like a tank.

It's all a matter of how much mass you are willing to spend on it, the more armor you have the more of a penalty, however B-tech aircraft have 4 times the thrust as current aircraft at the lest, and are built with the mass of the armor and it's issues. Also B-tech ASFs are space first airplane second, in space well aerodynamic issues are less of an issue...

In real life many times they simply piled armor onto an existing airframe, and performance suffered. B-tech aircraft are designed from the start to have the armor, and they have the tech to make it happen. Also keep in mind that Real life fighters are much closer to B-techs conventional fighters than ASFs...

Note many real world aircraft have carried similar levels of armor, at lest by ratio...
The A-10 has over half a ton of armor (11.3t empty ~5% of the empty weight), the IL-2 had around 3/4th of a ton (16% of it's empty mass!), the SU-8 had ~1.7 tons of armor (20 ton airframe) and the HS-129 has 1080kg of armor on a 4 ton airframe (26% of it's empty mass!), so Aircraft have no real issues mounting armor, in quantity's similar to B-tech fighters...

Seydlitz Z4 carrys 23.3% of it's empty weight in armor, Saber SB-27, carrys 20% of it's empty mass, the superlative Eisensturm R3 only has 22.7% of it's empty mass as armor, the Chippewa 5W only 9.4%, The Xerxes is only 12.3% of it's empty mass., the most heavily armored get upwards of 40% though.

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2. Somehow a combat plane's tank weaponry gets magically longer ranged when in the air.

This is simply a mechanic of the differences in scale. given how powerful B-tech weapons are, they should have notable longer ranges on the ground... the current rules set dose mention their compressed for game play reasons (at lest in part, kinda hard to find room if you need to use 36 map sheets (~9 square km, and over 40 square feet of gaming space) just to use a realistic engagement rages with the regular scale).

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3. Gee forces are based on your top speed, not on how hard you turn. Faster planes can just gee-load more because...reasons.

How fast you turn dose impact your G forces, the at a 60 degree angle you will be pulling roughly 2 Gs, 80 degrees will result in 7 Gs, also speed by it self dose not produce any G loads, i could be traveling at mach 30 and feel no G forces, acceleration dose (case point people in space are traveling at over 8km/s, but are not felling any significant effects of G forces due to that speed).

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4. Going into afterburner is when you encounter gee forces?

I think your simplifying it a bit to much, sure by the rules when you go into afterburner you do run into risk of airframe damage due to G loads, though truth be told most games are not exactly built to simulate every little detail such as every aspect that can cause G loading on an airframe... It's not like the guys who made the game are experts in this field.