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Whats The Point Of Mechs When A Abrams Can Blow Them Apart ?


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#1 KING PRoCaT

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Posted 08 April 2016 - 02:02 PM

Has no one in battle techs universe discovered sabot rounds with 630MMs of penetration ? A modern tank can just sit outside a mechs range and just blow it apart! it just doesnt make sense to me but oh well.

#2 XxXAbsolutZeroXxX

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Posted 08 April 2016 - 02:53 PM

There's a plot device in the BT/MW universe that prohibits modern telemetry and target tracking technology to enable honor duels using giant robots. Its like an attempt to recreate the romanticized man versus man state of warfare that existed before wars were won or lost by who has the better physicists, defense budget, satellites and tracking technology.

edit - Also I'm not sure if an abrams M1 can be destroyed by a direct hit of its own main gun. There have been cases where tanks have broken down in the middle east and they've tried to destroy them to prevent them from being salvaged. Supposedly the M1's armor can survive at least 1 direct hit and they've had a hard time finding ways to demolish it into an unsalvageable state.

Edited by I Zeratul I, 08 April 2016 - 02:54 PM.


#3 Anjian

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Posted 08 April 2016 - 05:51 PM

Tanks are not that useful in today's limited low intensity wars. Today, in many countries, the TTV is far more useful. "TTV" stands for Toyota Tactical Vehicle, aka the Pickup.

In the future, for low intensity warfare, it may make sense to use armored automated drones, which in effect, are going to be our real mechs. Large multicopter drones will deploy and pickup these armored drones, and may even support them in battles.

#4 Krakenfingers

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Posted 09 April 2016 - 08:38 AM

View PostKING PRoCaT, on 08 April 2016 - 02:02 PM, said:

Has no one in battle techs universe discovered sabot rounds with 630MMs of penetration ? A modern tank can just sit outside a mechs range and just blow it apart! it just doesnt make sense to me but oh well.


And the RHAe of the Leopard 2A7's turret front is over 1500mm. Today, modern battletanks cannot penetrate each other frontally. If we assume that BT mechs use extremely effective armor in 10-20cm thickness plates, then the amount of damage they can take is reasonable.

The only problem is that the same amount of armor can be mounted on a lower-to-the ground, wheeled vehicle for greater effect.

#5 Tordin

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Posted 09 April 2016 - 09:28 AM

But the tracks couldnt take that weight, or at least make them extremely slow, while mechs who can use all these advanced myomers, height, agility and such can outmanouver tanks. Sure mechs are bigger targets. But as I just said and add the plethora of weapons a mech can carry.

Speaking of drones. I hate em, it makes battles even more cowardly and people lazy. If people absolutely want to murder each other, they should have the so called guts to face each other through means of mechs, tanks, planes, ships and infantry!
Using long range weapons are "cowardly enough". The most ballsy warfare methods were in the use of fists and objects in hands to fight with, then you had to witness the horror of your actions and the consequences. Now that takes guts and brawn to witness.

Edited by Tordin, 09 April 2016 - 09:31 AM.


#6 Krakenfingers

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Posted 09 April 2016 - 09:50 AM

View PostTordin, on 09 April 2016 - 09:28 AM, said:

But the tracks couldnt take that weight, or at least make them extremely slow, while mechs who can use all these advanced myomers, height, agility and such can outmanouver tanks. Sure mechs are bigger targets. But as I just said and add the plethora of weapons a mech can carry.

Speaking of drones. I hate em, it makes battles even more cowardly and people lazy. If people absolutely want to murder each other, they should have the so called guts to face each other through means of mechs, tanks, planes, ships and infantry!
Using long range weapons are "cowardly enough". The most ballsy warfare methods were in the use of fists and objects in hands to fight with, then you had to witness the horror of your actions and the consequences. Now that takes guts and brawn to witness.


1) Armor mass is proportionate to surface area. A low to the ground, tank-shaped vehicle has less surface area than humanoid mech, so it requires less armor for the same effect.

2) Past a certain point (like having energy from a fusion reactor), mobility becomes proportionate to traction. Mechs on legs have feet, with small area to grip with and high ground pressure. Tank treads have a greater surface area, so higher grip, lower ground pressure and have the extra benefit of being able to spin at much faster speeds than a leg can be swung around.

3) People went and murdered each other by the hundreds of thousands when we only had swords and arrows to bash each other with. Remote weaponry does not change that willingness to kill and get killed - it only disproportionately gives advantage to the side with greater resources. If anything, modern media has exposed the general population to the horrors of war is degrees much greater than the 'soldier's affair' of generations past.

#7 Kalimaster

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Posted 09 April 2016 - 10:28 AM

Hate to say it, but I would love to see a mock vid of a Mech vs. an Abrams, or even a T-90.

#8 Exilyth

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Posted 09 April 2016 - 02:50 PM

According to lore, the average 'mech can take on a battalion of modern 20th century tanks and walk away with only a scratch.

The 'mech rifle is the equivalent to the modern military tank cannon. As much damage as three machine guns and outranged by most weapons.

#9 Kei Nogareru

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Posted 12 April 2016 - 05:39 PM

Rule of cool bro

#10 Threat Doc

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Posted 12 April 2016 - 08:41 PM

View PostKING PRoCaT, on 08 April 2016 - 02:02 PM, said:

Has no one in battle techs universe discovered sabot rounds with 630MMs of penetration ? A modern tank can just sit outside a mechs range and just blow it apart! it just doesnt make sense to me but oh well.
King Procat, the time period of the BattleTech universe this game is set in comes after four centuries of almost unremitting warfare taking place between five nation states spanning 2,021 worlds -not including the Clan worlds-, where science and technology was viciously targeted and destroyed.

In essence, the technology level of those worlds dropped to a pre-World War II level of understanding in both science and technology, except for those things -such as JumpShips, DropShips, BattleMechs, PPCs, Lasers, etc.- which still exist, but can only be marginally repaired due to the lower level of understanding of most technicians in the Inner Sphere, and manufacturing of new parts is done by automated factories or by people following very specific instructions on how to make things work. These instructions, like the technology they were created to make understandable, have also had to be reconstructed from knowledge found in secret places throughout the Inner Sphere.

In the timeline we're in, instructions on creating the technology necessary to produce the weapons of war, and repair them properly, were found by the Gray Death Legion and sold to House Marik and House Davion, though it eventually got out to all of the other Houses through various nefarious endeavors, and it sort of leveled the playing field quite a lot. The Inner Sphere was able to get just enough technology just in time for the Clan Invasion.

So, playing this game, you might want to take time to learn about its lore and history, yes? What I've written here is little more than a summary, and there is a great deal more detail to be had, especially at the BattleTech web site.

#11 Mole

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Posted 19 April 2016 - 01:17 PM

View PostKay Wolf, on 12 April 2016 - 08:41 PM, said:

King Procat, the time period of the BattleTech universe this game is set in comes after four centuries of almost unremitting warfare taking place between five nation states spanning 2,021 worlds -not including the Clan worlds-, where science and technology was viciously targeted and destroyed.

In essence, the technology level of those worlds dropped to a pre-World War II level of understanding in both science and technology, except for those things -such as JumpShips, DropShips, BattleMechs, PPCs, Lasers, etc.- which still exist, but can only be marginally repaired due to the lower level of understanding of most technicians in the Inner Sphere, and manufacturing of new parts is done by automated factories or by people following very specific instructions on how to make things work. These instructions, like the technology they were created to make understandable, have also had to be reconstructed from knowledge found in secret places throughout the Inner Sphere.

In the timeline we're in, instructions on creating the technology necessary to produce the weapons of war, and repair them properly, were found by the Gray Death Legion and sold to House Marik and House Davion, though it eventually got out to all of the other Houses through various nefarious endeavors, and it sort of leveled the playing field quite a lot. The Inner Sphere was able to get just enough technology just in time for the Clan Invasion.

So, playing this game, you might want to take time to learn about its lore and history, yes? What I've written here is little more than a summary, and there is a great deal more detail to be had, especially at the BattleTech web site.

This. Imagine it this way: Would a giant robot as large as a battlemech be practical on a modern battlefield? No. No it wouldn't be. It would be nothing but a huge target that could get destroyed by a single round from either an advanced cannon or by some form of missile like a Javelin launcher that is currently in use by the US Military as an anti-tank weapon. Now imagine that humanity had just been through a war so terrible that our level of technology was reduced to levels seen in WWII, and the only means of producing new advanced weapons of war was to salvage old ones already in existence and use blueprints and AI factories to produce new ones even though we had no friggin' clue how they worked. Would a battlemech have been a useless target on a WWII battlefield? No. Not at all. It would have been nearly unstoppable. The advanced technology that we see militaries using in the BT universe in the current timeline of this game was pretty much salvaged tech and the rest of it, the knowledge was lost, which is what we refer to as Lostech. If that war had never happened and technology continued to evolve, would battlemechs have been rendered obsolete? Probably. But that didn't happen. There was a war, and most of humanity's advanced technologies were lost in the process and have still not been recovered.

#12 Anjian

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Posted 19 April 2016 - 07:19 PM

Conventional weaponry in Battletech --- and there is plenty of them in its canon --- don't look like WW2 stuff, they look more like stuff you see in Command & Conquer Red Alert and Generals, or in Starcraft, Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander.
They include fighter jets, atmospheric reentry vehicles, VTOLs with multiple rotors, monster tanks (land ships) with two cannons, tanks that mount PPCs.

Also WW2 tanks are quite capable of making kills over 1km; modern tanks can do it over 2km. WW2 machine guns like .50 calibers, 20mm autocannons easily reach past 700m. Artillery can throw things over 10km.

Armor in Battletech isn't armor like in WW2 which is deflective. BT armor is ablative. It may not immediately penetrate, but it will wear away. Deflective armor on the other hand, will literally bounce shells and won't lose any "HP" for that matter.

Even with lost technologies, on equal technology footings, a tank has serious advantage over a mech. Smaller, more affordable, a tank can also play a serious game of stealth. The tank will be ambushing and the mech won't see where its coming from. Using the same armor as the mech, being smaller, this allows the armor to be much thicker for the same given weight. A tank that weighs 60 tons is going to have much thicker frontal armor than a mech with 60 tons, all because all that armor can be concentrated on a small surface area. Add deflection qualities, and the fact that a tank can go "hull down", which hides the hull in the terrain, exposing only a part of the turret, and you got a superior peek and boom weapon.

#13 Lily from animove

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Posted 20 April 2016 - 08:47 AM

View PostKrakenfingers, on 09 April 2016 - 09:50 AM, said:


1) Armor mass is proportionate to surface area. A low to the ground, tank-shaped vehicle has less surface area than humanoid mech, so it requires less armor for the same effect.




Not entirely, thats only a Mechwarrior thingy, in the lore, mechs cna duck and crouch,raise arms and all that stuff. Thats just somethign the game cannot give us and probably won't be the Mechwarior feeling. In fact a mech would behave a lot more like the transformers. So Mechwarrior is a rather abstracted and cutted off part in its gameplay form the Battletech lore.

I wonder if one day we may get a VR next gen Mechwarrior making all this possible.


View PostMole, on 19 April 2016 - 01:17 PM, said:

This. Imagine it this way: Would a giant robot as large as a battlemech be practical on a modern battlefield? No. No it wouldn't be. It would be nothing but a huge target that could get destroyed by a single round from either an advanced cannon or by some form of missile like a Javelin launcher that is currently in use by the US Military as an anti-tank weapon. Now imagine that humanity had just been through a war so terrible that our level of technology was reduced to levels seen in WWII, and the only means of producing new advanced weapons of war was to salvage old ones already in existence and use blueprints and AI factories to produce new ones even though we had no friggin' clue how they worked. Would a battlemech have been a useless target on a WWII battlefield? No. Not at all. It would have been nearly unstoppable. The advanced technology that we see militaries using in the BT universe in the current timeline of this game was pretty much salvaged tech and the rest of it, the knowledge was lost, which is what we refer to as Lostech. If that war had never happened and technology continued to evolve, would battlemechs have been rendered obsolete? Probably. But that didn't happen. There was a war, and most of humanity's advanced technologies were lost in the process and have still not been recovered.



your explanation is rather problematic because this lostech thingy is a rather IS like thing not counting for the clanners.

Edited by Lily from animove, 20 April 2016 - 08:51 AM.


#14 XxXAbsolutZeroXxX

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Posted 21 April 2016 - 07:28 AM

I'm on the fence as to whether BT mechs could be effective on a battlefield.

In terms of mobility modern tanks do "ok" with the terrain they've been deployed in. But how would a modern tank fare on an arctic landscape like alpine peaks or polar highlands? What of an alien world full of giant 10 foot tall boulders? Modern tanks built to have a low profile, be less of a sensor contact and less armor surface area per volume might have advantages under some circumstances. But being built low to the ground also implies a decreased ability to traverse certain types of terrain. The battlemech built taller would have greater ground clearance & should be able to step over obstacles and obstructions that would render a modern tank immobile.

The use of limbs and legs could be a more energy efficient, durable and versatile design over wheels or tank treads. A mech's fusion powerplant would definitely be far and above the efficiency and power output an Abrams turbine engine generates. If I remember right an Abrams is extremely fuel inefficient. If the above is true it would mean that a mech would have a far greater range and require far less fuel than an Abrams.

Mech mounted weapons in BT afaik have ranges longer than their respective rating. I always thought that the short distances involved were due to short range combat being necessary for weapons to damage a mechs advanced armor. Weapons in BT have longer implied ranges but at certain distances a mech's weapons simply lacked the punch to inflict beyond negligible damage.

Its hard to say how effective or ineffective armor in BT is without knowing how many kilowatts/megawatts/gigawatts/terawatts of energy a single large laser or PPC discharge produces. Given that fusion engines, interstellar travel, extremely low cost ler kilogram of orbital launches and other advances exist in BT which are far beyond current era science, one might say armor in BT is also likely to be advanced beyond current era tech. There are precedents for this in terms of nanotech armor. It is possible to build armor superior to what is on an abrams, its just not currently cost effective.

#15 Anjian

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Posted 22 April 2016 - 08:52 PM

To start with, BT weapons need to have at least 5x the range of their game ranges to be tactically useful and logically plausible. The AC/20 range on the game is Age of Sail cannon ranges. Machine guns don't have 170 meters range, in WW2, .50 caliber machine guns you see in P-51 Mustangs easily range over 700 meters.

When you start with the 5x range --- LRMs can now hit for 5km distances, and other weapons can now hit over 2km --- then we can begin to talk. Its important to reach out and hit the other guy first before we can discuss things.

A mech isn't going to win over a tank in the density of armor; it needs to achieve superior survivability through better mobility and increased stealth. For the latter, the mech must be more flexible, needs to act more humanoid in shooting positions, achieve prone and sniper positions, and stop acting like a zombie. It must be able to hide its thermal and visual signatures, and at the same time, achieve superior situational awareness over a tank --- hence sensor networks that include drones and VR gear. The mech must also have software that is designed to take off workload from its pilot, so it does the work for one man what a tank needs a 5 man crew for. This is going to include auto-scan and auto-aim.

#16 XTerranite

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Posted 01 May 2016 - 06:31 AM

All the stuff this guy said and a lot more. ^

Mechs would require insane levels of equilibrium management. Human counterparts utilize real time adaptive techniques nearly impossible to describe let alone duplicate, to stay balanced on two legs. It's a lot more high tech then we realize when we dismiss it with little thought. Mechs have flat feet which is a huge issue in a RL 2 legged walking creature/machine. Knocking them over would be an incredibly effective goal. Assuming the mech ever got its clumsy butt out of the drop ship without creaming all the mechanics and landing on its head when it accidentally slammed into the side of the mechbay on its way down.

Many mechs cannot even look up at a high enough angle to target the air above them which in modern warfare is another insanely costly weakness. Dropships suddenly become destroyers. As some mechwarrior games rightly had it.

The mech pilot's location being visible may be a small thing in the longer range warfare. But against other mechs, this makes little sense to me. that being said even in longer range it's still possibly accidentally fatal. Furthermore, why is the mech pilot even in the machine to begin with? I guess this goes along with the duel/honor thing though.

Thermal and night vision should be able to filter out surges of high density heat/light better, making foggy and superhot planets less difficult to navigate. I'm not an expert on night vision but I suspect our troops don't lose the tanks vision when they are in deserts?

In mechwarrior a mech is rather small at 1000 meters. Now go to a city and check out a mech size building at 1k meters. So far as I know it is not so hard to spot. IDK if this should be brought up but certainly the tank would have zero issues finding it as a bold striking target far in advance of the mechs weapon ranges being effective.

List goes on and on though. IMO these mechs would be so much wasted effort in modern warfare. Somethign like the piece of junk I expect Mitsubishi will one day produce in an effort to learn to produce actual useful mechs. Then we will get something insane from them. It's a game thankfully.

Edited by XTerranite, 01 May 2016 - 06:52 AM.


#17 VinJade

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Posted 02 May 2016 - 12:59 AM

@EXI
That would be correct I remember reading that as well, I had asked Herb or Lorn about that on the old boards and I was told that the M1s would be ineffective against any thing in BT let alone a Battlemech.

If memory serves me I believe they had said that the Mackie was field tested against entire platoon of M1s and it destroyed them all with ease.

#18 Lily from animove

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Posted 02 May 2016 - 01:03 AM

View PostAnjian, on 22 April 2016 - 08:52 PM, said:

To start with, BT weapons need to have at least 5x the range of their game ranges to be tactically useful and logically plausible. The AC/20 range on the game is Age of Sail cannon ranges. Machine guns don't have 170 meters range, in WW2, .50 caliber machine guns you see in P-51 Mustangs easily range over 700 meters.


I don't think that BT ranges are actually meant real, Most games or gamesystems in TT use heavily reduced and abstracted ranges. Simply for the playabilty, or do you want to move your miniatures on a 10m * 20m board just to simulate correct ranges? Mostly not, will hardly be a TABLEtop anymore.

#19 VinJade

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Posted 02 May 2016 - 01:12 AM

@Lily
that is also correct, iirc herb said if it was real life ranges we would be looking at three or four map sheets range just for the Std medium laser.

can you imgine the a mount of sheets one would need for LRMs?

they was reduced for game play, however I do believe there are miniature rules that actually extend the ranges of all weapons by a lot.

#20 Rushin Roulette

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Posted 02 May 2016 - 01:14 AM

View PostAnjian, on 08 April 2016 - 05:51 PM, said:

Tanks are not that useful in today's limited low intensity wars. Today, in many countries, the TTV is far more useful. "TTV" stands for Toyota Tactical Vehicle, aka the Pickup.

Just wait a while until these groups get infiltrated by eco friendlies. They will all be driving around in Prius and Yaris cars... however, due to space limitations the rear mounted Machine Gun will have to be replaced with a rood mounted handgun just in front of the sun roof.

After that change has gone through for a few years, Mechs may seem like a viable upgrade (Especially as Tanks will be Lostech by then)

Edited by Rushin Roulette, 02 May 2016 - 01:15 AM.






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