128 replies to this topic

[dyrewolfe]

I can certainly see the logic behind the OP but as others have commented, I think we need to accept Battletech for what it is.

While I agree that the tech curve has slipped behind the real world, I feel trying to update it would take away many of the quirks and features that make it what it is.

Its like the old argument about weapon ranges...those aren't accurate either, but they are deliberately curtailed to make for a more balanced and enjoyable gaming experience (rather than have people obliterating each other from the opposite sides of the board).

[Gun Bear]

The game is populated by giant bipedal machines brimming with lasers, Gauss weaponry, and guns that shoot a thousand million bullets at once.... and OP is worried about realism.

[DaMavster]

Battletech isn't 100% realistic. But it's fun. That should be all that matters.

2001 a Space Oddyssy: It's 2012 now. Where's the manned space flight to other planets?

1984: I'm pretty sure the government isn't watching me through my television. And I know keeping a journal isn't illegal. Time to update!

Terminator Series: With all the time travel, who the heck knows? But I'm pretty sure Judgment Day was supposed to have happened already. Fix it! It's not realistic anymore!

Chess: No one in their right mind would field Knights in this day and age. And not many countries have monarchies either. "First Lady to M1 Abrams - Seven." "Doh! Now my Commander-in-Chief is being threatened!"

Twilight Saga: Vampires aren't real. This series needs updated (I have not watched the movies or read the books, but still. Vampires! Not really like that!)

Etc, etc, etc. It's all fiction. The source material for Mech Warrior Online is the Battletech tabletop game. Let's keep that the source material and not try to change it. Otherwise it becomes "Group A's Vision of Warfare in the Future Involving Walking Tanks: Online", and the best weapon is the Tomahawk Mk XII which will kill a "BattleMech" from 1500 miles away (that's about 2,500,000 meters and MUCH more realistic than the ol' LRM ranges. And that assumes the fictional Mk XII has a range similar to today's Tomahawk).

Game start. Get satellite targeting data. Fire missile. 2 hours later it hits and you win. Good game all! (twenty seconds after that, your opponent's missile hits you. So close!)

[Akrasjel Lanate]

Adridos, on 19 May 2012 - 10:02 AM, said:

It's a paralel universe. The technologies gained by cooperation are therefore, non-existent.

This

[Carebear]

They should have done single playing game is what Ive said it many times.

Edited by Carebear, 20 May 2012 - 09:51 AM.

[Nick Makiaveli]

FrostPaw, on 20 May 2012 - 04:21 AM, said:

Real technology doesn't progress like science fiction for two major reasons.

1) Technology gets smaller not bigger.

2) It's called fiction.

If the creators and current owners of the Battletech Universe don't want to reinvent their tech, Piranha games has no chance of changing the IP in a game licensed for it.

Except for when it doesn't. As you said, it's fiction.


Once again, the BT universe was almost blasted back to the 20th Century across the board. MANY things were lost. So some of the tech have been replaced, or recreated etc. Therefore not all of it is as small or efficient as it was.

In other words, what most of these people are forgetting, is that canon is canon. It's not a suggestion, it's "what happened" in the context of this world. Was it unlikely? Even ludicrously unlikely? Maybe, but it's what happened.

[Aaron DeChavilier]

OP misses the point of a fictional continuity. Many sci-fi universes are written to a certain specificaton, or design aesthetic. Want to know why all this stuff isn't in Warhammer 40k? because wh40k is a retro-future which equates to dark fantasy in space. How come none of this technology is in Fallout? becuase Fallout is a retro-future where the tech of the 1950's (along with everything else of that era) never ended and kept going. Why doesn't Mass Effect take into account any of the stuff you mentioned? Because it's written more like a space opera, and does not focus on such minutia.

Battletech was written for one express purpose: to get big robots piloted by metaphorical knights, to bash the scrap out of each other, everything else takes second seat to accomplishing that aim. Btech as I've seen it, is what if the 1980's tech never fully evolved, and instead solidified and improved itself limitedly over the next 1000 years

[3Xtr3m3]

Btech as I've seen it, is what if the 1980's tech never fully evolved, and instead solidified and improved itself limitedly over the next 1000 years

Acually, the U.S. Government Report that spawned BT was in 1972. BT hit its hieghth of popularity in the 80's, but the same report was also the basis for Star Wars legged Armour in the movies.

[3Xtr3m3]

^^height

sorry about the typo

[Beazle]

Carebear, on 20 May 2012 - 09:51 AM, said:

They should have done single playing game is what Ive said it many times.

They were planning on it, but it fell apart. I'm pretty sure what you see with MWO is a lot of the work that was going to go into it (skins and models and what not)

[Carl Wrede]

Haakon Valravn, on 19 May 2012 - 09:32 PM, said:

Hardly. Aircraft have never ruled the battlefield and it's highly unlikely that they ever will. They are a great asset, but they cannot win by themselves. Their advantage is that they can fly... And the things that allow them to fly mean that they are fundamentally very vulnerable. And, of course, SAMs are and always will be less expensive than the aircraft they're shooting at. Similarly, any space-based warship would be extremely vulnerable to surface- and high-altitude anti-satellite defenses.

At the end of the day, it's still going to be infantry and the big guns that carry the day. Whether they're towed, self-propelled, the main armament of an AFV, or just one gun on a BattleMech. Aircraft pilots just get a better view, dangling from their big silk sheets.



Comparing a DARPA prototype to an operational vehicle? Isn't that a bit like comparing the Wright Flyer with an observation balloon and declaring nothing will ever come of it, because the balloon is simpler and has superior endurance?

Ever heard of orbital bombardment? And if you can not move your mechs from planet to planet because the enemy has air/space superiority then you have basically lost.

[DaMavster]

Carl Wrede, on 20 May 2012 - 05:11 PM, said:

Ever heard of orbital bombardment? And if you can not move your mechs from planet to planet because the enemy has air/space superiority then you have basically lost.

Of course, a few batteries of surface-to-orbit nukes would take care of that problem. Perhaps more cost effectively, just add a small yield nuke to all of your satellites (this is a culture of war after all). Enemy bombardment starts happening, launch a 15 kiloton GPS satellite nuke at them.

"Eh, we don't need GPS coverage of the Balkans anymore: they turned it into a crater. Well, good thing our satellites pull double duty!"

[Grokmoo]

The entire concept of a Battlemech is not a realistic one. Why go to all the trouble of making your vehicle walk (which as anyone in robotics will tell you is very difficult)? The taller battlemech is just an easier target. Humans already possess portable weaponry that can hit a mech sized target from 5 or 10 km away (let alone larger guided weapons).

You have to ignore realism, because the goal of MWO should be to produce gameplay that is fun.

[GrimJim]

Lemme ask you this:

Could you build a television? An iPhone? How about a refrigerator? These things are ubiquitous and commonplace in our 21st Century household, having existed for decades, they are largely taken for granted.

But with your college/high school/GED education, could YOU do it? Now assume any of the ppl who could are dead or held hostage. The factories that assembled the devices are ashes. Even the material they are composed of is hard to get. And why would you bother since you haven't eaten for a month...

...THAT is the Succession Wars.

And it totally makes sense that this conflict is being waged with WWII styled tech, punctuated by older future tech. And honestly (whether you believe it or not...) it makes for a much more interesting SciFi backdrop for our game that our "real" and "logical" current existence.

[Technoviking]

GrimJim, on 21 May 2012 - 09:43 AM, said:

Lemme ask you this:

Could you build a television? An iPhone? How about a refrigerator? These things are ubiquitous and commonplace in our 21st Century household, having existed for decades, they are largely taken for granted.

But with your college/high school/GED education, could YOU do it? Now assume any of the ppl who could are dead or held hostage. The factories that assembled the devices are ashes. Even the material they are composed of is hard to get. And why would you bother since you haven't eaten for a month...

...THAT is the Succession Wars.

And it totally makes sense that this conflict is being waged with WWII styled tech, punctuated by older future tech. And honestly (whether you believe it or not...) it makes for a much more interesting SciFi backdrop for our game that our "real" and "logical" current existence.

Right, lets also not forget, that many of these battles are fought on backwater plantes 100s or 1000s of light years away from major planets. What I don't need, is some complicated whoozawhatsit computer system dying because one microchip died on the ultra complex long range targeting system, and now I have to wait 2 months for a replacement. Give me machines I can make with metal, not fragile computer systems. Do I have Satelites? MAYBE! Maybe not! Terra has been civilly populated for 10k years, but others are just hitting their first centennial.... ever. Hopefully my House will send my perpheriy planet their very best equipment... but not bloody likely!

[Skylarr]

DaMavster, on 21 May 2012 - 09:25 AM, said:

Of course, a few batteries of surface-to-orbit nukes would take care of that problem. Perhaps more cost effectively, just add a small yield nuke to all of your satellites (this is a culture of war after all). Enemy bombardment starts happening, launch a 15 kiloton GPS satellite nuke at them.

"Eh, we don't need GPS coverage of the Balkans anymore: they turned it into a crater. Well, good thing our satellites pull double duty!"

If you are invading a planet the first thing you would do is take out its satellites from range. That is what missiles and aerospace is for. Since during the 1st and 2nd succession wars warships were still around I might have launched nukes or other NBCs. But, maybe the enemy knew you would do that and has a secret base on an asteroid that they could launch aerospace with their own Nukes. Do you see were this is going.

Nukes were so widely used that at a certain point both sides agreed, either official or unofficially, to stop using NBCs. They decided to use conventional military forces.

As for Battlemechs. Someone developed a military vehicle far more superior to any other military vehicle out there. It can gain access to any terrain. Far more resilient to damage than anything else out there.

Maybe you do have a gun that can fire a shell at a target 3 miles away. It is not strong enough to penetrate this new armor at such ranges. So now you have to wait for the Mech or tank to get closer.

Look at the soviet tanks built in the 50 and 60. Able to destroy an enemy tank at long ranges. Now place that tank point blank to am M1. What happens. This happened in Kuwait in the 90s. M1s took on a group of older soviet tanks at point blank. the M1s only had scratches on them.

People want things explained in exact detail. Use your imaginations. That is what Fiction is.

Edited by Skylarr, 21 May 2012 - 10:14 AM.

[Kfobx]

There's lots of stuff to nit-pick, if you really think about it. For example, ballistic weapons (like, say a machine gun) should easily outrange lasers in an atmosphere. We have machine guns today that reach out over a mile easily, but a laser would loose an incredible amount of energy over that same space due to atmospheric interference. Moreover, bullets that are smaller tend not to go as far as bullets that are bigger. Not so in BT, the AC/2 outdistances the AC/20 by a butt-ton. But, the fact that people are strapping in to walking machines that weigh multiple tons powered by fusion reactors while mastering interstellar space travel within a feudal system of government is a little out there too. So don't try to select what is "believable" or "unrealistic" in a game that is purely, in all aspects, fantastical.

Just power up and meet me on the battlefield. The game might be unrealistic, but the beatings are all real... heh!

[LakeDaemon]

I dont understand why someone wants to F up my BT universe with reality.

[Lauranis]

A simple answer to this question is that the universe of Battletech is intended as a science fiction analogy of Europe in the Middle Ages. Think about our history, and how long it took the western nations to rebuild technologies that we lost with breakdown of the roman empire. It wasn't the 1600's and the Renaissance that we "rediscovered" and re-approached such things as scientific method, perspective in drawings and hell, democracy. It took us the better part of 2 THOUSAND years to start using concrete again, we had to relearn almost all of the methods used in classical architecture as well. We even lost such fundamentals as reading, writing and arithmetic for the public and is only in the last 200 years that a significant number of ordinary people had access to these "technologies".

The fall of technology in the Inner Sphere, looked at in comparison to the Dark Age in Europe is hardly "unrealistic." This is particularly true when you consider the nature of interstellar warfare in the Battletech universe. Consider a war where by an enemy can strike almost anywhere in your nation at will, in such a way that only local forces can make a response. In the books covert strikes are made into enemy territories simply by avoiding inhabited systems. The only forces that can respond in defence in these situations are local forces, with reinforcements being weeks or months away. The history of the Inner Sphere has shown time and time again that enemies strike at targets entirely to deny there enemies technology. In fact the fall is so far the when the Helm Memory Core is retrieved by the Gray Death Legion, there is so much information that Inner Sphere scientists just don't know where to start.

[Angelicon]

I still haven't figured out what we're voting on here.