Posted 14 May 2012 - 01:07 PM
As far as I'm concerned, any argument based around making a fictional world cleave more to reality in a video game while forsaking balance is just silly. If you absolutely need to feel that you're driving a super futuristic war machine with realisticly ranged weapons, I have an idea for you...add a 0 to everything in your head. Now your missiles travel 6300 meters, your medium lasers reach 2700 meters, and your super futuristic battlemechs run an easy 600 KM/h+, while your enhanced optics makes everything look closer. =)
As for balance, those saying 630 meters isn't long range are just ignoring the technology (of the fiction) of the time. Figure an average speed of 64.8 KM/h for most mech's not fit to be speed demons. Now hand them a decently hard hitting "longish" range weapon of the era, AC5, AC10, Large laser, PPC.
These weapons will strike from 450-540M. Assuming 2 mechs of equal speed (64.8KM/h), 1 charging and the other equiped with LRM's backpeddling, you'll have a closure rate of aproximately 7m/s, this gives you just over 12 seconds of time on target before someone can respond with an AC 5 or PPC, and a whopping 25 seconds on target before an AC 10 or Large Laser can return fire, and a damn sight longer than that before they can bring the majority of brawling weapons to bear.
Given that it appears you can launch a salvo of LRM's roughly every 3 or 4 seconds, this means you can easily disgorge 25-100% of your missile payload on a target before it can even begin to return fire, depending on how you're loaded. If you're unable to get that kind of time on target because of terrain, it wouldn't have mattered if you had a 1000m range in the 1st place, seems pretty balanced to me.