46 replies to this topic

[Captain Fabulous]

CONTINUITY ERROR:

Were there even double heat sinks in 3049? If not, I don't think we're going to have to worry about them.

[Pht]

Neither were omnimechs (in the innersphere) - but these things are going to be coming into the game, so they seem to be "fair game" to discuss.

[Captain Fabulous]

Well ****.

[guardiandashi]

YES there were double heat sinks in 3049

in fact according to tech manual the rediscovery date (post helm data core) was 3040 for fedcom/fed suns

[Pht]

Actually, it was less of a rediscovery - the NAIS was experimenting with them in 3022 or so, they came into actual use (with a high fail rate) in the fedsuns in 3041, by 3047-8 they had reduced the failures and by 3049 pretty well they're in the hands of the five sphereoid "houses."

Edited by Pht, 09 November 2011 - 07:51 PM.

[VYCanis]

Pht, on 09 November 2011 - 07:02 PM, said:

This is a problem ... why?



It does, if they don't make their choices for arbitrary reasons and they possibly include a cost/rarity element with the hardware.

its a problem, because from a game design perspective, you don't want to spend weeks and months designing stuff that people are just going to throw away at first opportunity.

its a problem because otherwise you will eventually see every tom **** and larry running around up to their gills in clan tech as if its being handed out like candy on halloween i.e. every previous MW game.

Its a problem because traditionally there are very few downsides to switching to DHS, to the point where it makes energy boats childs play to create on some mechs, and on others, they simply never track heat at all unless their engines are halfway falling out.


ergo, yes, that is why i would love to see rusty old IS gear be a little more relatively resilient, a bit more reliable, or otherwise given some credit for being technology so robust that it has survived 300 years of tech decline intact, compared to the more efficient or powerful or longer range weapons that come later.

these SHS may not be super efficient, but they are cheap to maintain and replace and harder to break.
these standard medium lasers may not be the fanciest things ever, but they've kept their focus no matter how many times i've punched with that arm

so on and so forth

[Zyllos]

Just up their cost and make them 2x easier to crit. Simple solution. Of course, if the devs are not adding crits through armor, this might not fix the issue.

I am not sure what you could do if crits through armor are not in the equation.

[TheRulesLawyer]

VYCanis, on 10 November 2011 - 01:24 AM, said:

its a problem because otherwise you will eventually see every tom **** and larry running around up to their gills in clan tech as if its being handed out like candy on halloween i.e. every previous MW game.

Well you either make clan gear really hard to get ahold of, and even harder to keep in repair or you make is not economically viable to run clan gear all the time. The non-viable model is a bit too much stick for my liking though. The rarity method requires that you really treat mech damage as real and persistent though. IE your mech gets CT cored and you're left with a pile of parts, not a mech anymore. I think that's a more interesting option, but I don't seriously see it being adopted.

[Nik Van Rhijn]

If it is a persistant world then that will impart a dynamic all of it's own - it will be better to be house than merc or you could get wiped out very easily unless a basic mech is always available. When the Clan's invade they will have trouble replacing losses quickly which could make it cost effective for the IS to swarm Clan Omni Mechs - not only for the salvage but just to reduce their fire power over time.

[Gaius Cavadus]

Making clan gear expensive, even prohibitively expensive, to maintain and operate isn't a feasible solution.

When the clans are introduced are we going to make all of their available equipment arbitrarily expensive or something?

VYCanis is dead on. Clan tech obsolesces all IS tech which means IS tech is both worthless and unused. Which begs the question of why it should even be bothered with in the first place.

The two tech bases has always been a major flaw in BattleTech. It's time to pick one, the other, or something in between and use that for everyone.

[VYCanis]

well i'm not advocating only having 1 tech base. I'm just saying there should be a few subtle benefits for sticking with older, technically obsolete gear

Clan stuff is mostly high performance light weight space age materials,
Old IS stuff is heavy, with multiple redundancies and simpler more rugged mechanisms

The newer IS stuff that tries to bridge the tech gap, could be a bit of a grab bag in terms of reliability.

[TheRulesLawyer]

Cavadus, on 10 November 2011 - 10:41 AM, said:

Making clan gear expensive, even prohibitively expensive, to maintain and operate isn't a feasible solution.

When the clans are introduced are we going to make all of their available equipment arbitrarily expensive or something?

VYCanis is dead on. Clan tech obsolesces all IS tech which means IS tech is both worthless and unused. Which begs the question of why it should even be bothered with in the first place.

The two tech bases has always been a major flaw in BattleTech. It's time to pick one, the other, or something in between and use that for everyone.

Sure its feasible. Easy even. Its not exactly a desirable solution though. Who wants to be told they can't play with their new toy unless they run many missions in mech they don't want to play? Ultimately you only annoy people.

We need non-lore reasons for people to play with non-clan gear. Its clearly superior, and people always gravitate to the OP gear.

- Better Income. Ultimately won't work unless clan actually costs you c-bills to run. That annoy people
- Better advancement. Works maybe until you hit the skill cap. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense
- Restricted availability. Either it ends up feeling a bit too luck dependent if random supply, or you create a two class system if its by rank.
- BV tweaking. Could just make it so clan mechs face tougher opponents. Could maybe work long term, but its one of those things that would have to be carefully balanced of people would complain about matchmaking all the time.

I guess part of the issue we just don't know yet is if you'll be able to play as part of the clans, or just have access to salvage clan mechs.

[UncleKulikov]

I feel that for non-omni chassis, you should only have slots available that are taken up by the mech. So if you had a mech with a large laser, lower arm actuator and upper arm actuator, you could only swap 5 critical slots in that arm, though you could swap out even the arm actuators.

That could help reduce issues, though it makes energy weapons better (smaller).

[CaveMan]

Maybe this has been mentioned upthread, but what about just making DHS more fragile?

A heat sink is basically just a radiator, and the ones in BT circulate a liquid coolant. Canon has never really indicated that the coolant in DHS is any better than what's used in SHS (otherwise why cant you fill your SHS with DHS coolant?), so that implies DHS have a much larger surface area and so lots of tiny little capillary pipes carrying coolant around to maximize heat transfer instead of a few pipes running through a big hunk of metal. This inherently means that if a DHS is hit by weapons' fire it's going to bleed coolant out much faster than a punctured SHS (more leaks).

So have a heat sink hit cause the 'Mech to start draining coolant (the rest of your heat sinks slowly become less effective as the coolant reservoir runs dry) and a double heat sink that gets busted drains coolant out much faster. Eventually if you've taken enough damage your coolant reservoir will be empty and you'll be forced to shut down or hide in water.

[Pht]

VYCanis, on 10 November 2011 - 01:24 AM, said:

its a problem, because from a game design perspective, you don't want to spend weeks and months designing stuff that people are just going to throw away at first opportunity.

Why is this a bad thing.

Quote

its a problem because otherwise you will eventually see every tom **** and larry running around up to their gills in clan tech as if its being handed out like candy on halloween i.e. every previous MW game.

If you just arbitrarily assume the worst scenario, yes, you can make things ugly.

Quote

ergo, yes, that is why i would love to see rusty old IS gear be a little more relatively resilient, a bit more reliable, or otherwise given some credit for being technology so robust that it has survived 300 years of tech decline intact, compared to the more efficient or powerful or longer range weapons that come later.

The older tech is cheaper, it's easier to build, it's easier to maintain, and it's as common as dirt (redundancy in replace-abilty). These are the natural upside to lower technology.

[Nebfer]

One thing to do is make them more susceptible to the effects of overheating and infernos.

Current TT rules allow for external heat sources to give you 15 heat (infernos give you three heat each so five infernos)
The effects of having 15 heat on the mech is
+2 to hit
-3 movement points
Shutdown, avoid on 4+

What if thats for single heat sinks, what if for double heat sinks the max external heat sources is 20 heat (instead of 15)
The effects of getting pushed to 20 heat over 15 is
-4 movement points
+3 to hit
shutdown, avoid on 6+
Ammo explosion, avoid on 4+

Ouch... makes flamers and infernos a bit more useful and gives a noticeable disadvantage to double heat sinks
Another thing one can do is theirs an optional rule in tactical ops, it deals with the effects of continually pushing your heat scales the longer and hotter you go the more likely you will start losing heat sinks, due to the coolant being saturated (it's why coolant trucks exist), what if double heat sinks are more liable to "brake down" due to this over use...
Furthermore one can implement a quality system like in Strategic ops, salvaging an item reduces it's quality, IIRC so dose combat damage.
Junk quality items do not work all that well, so over time parts will lose their quality and start working less effectively, some items may reach that point a bit faster than others... one can spend funds to maintain your tech though...

An item that is in the pore quality state should, produce more heat, is less accurate, and or do less damage, over a good quality item (not to mention sells for less).



As for Clan tech....
Well I do not think you should be able to transfer stuff to your self (so if you have units on both sides your clan "pilot" can not transfer stuff over to the "IS" pilots storage).

I think for IS players the majority of clan tech should come from salvage, but for IS forces clan tech should be hard to maintain, this translates into spending player funds (in game funds not real life) but clan tech due to it's "more advanced tech" should be harder for IS players to maintain, basically this translates into the item taking less time to go from "good" quality to "pore" quality, and being much more expensive to maintain them at good quality. Also as it's primarily salvage it's more likely to start op as a low quality item to begin with. Also if the player buys clan tech in game, it should be very expensive like say 5x it's table top game price -or what ever cost system they use, if the implement one (a Clan ER medium laser costs 80,000 C-bills in B-tech, so 400,000 C-bills in this case, that's the cost of two IS PPCs by the way).

So for an IS player clan tech would have the following draw backs
It's more expensive to maintain
It loses quality faster
It's super expensive to buy
More likely to be low quality salvage -as such less accurate, produces more heat and deals less damage
Much more expensive to repair to bring up to a good quality

[Pht]

Nebfer, on 12 November 2011 - 07:59 PM, said:

One thing to do is make them more susceptible to the effects of overheating and infernos.

Hmm. How would we justify that by the lore?



...



I presume we'd have to have some way of determining how fast the various heatsinks can transfer heat out in order to estimate how much their systems can condense the heat into the outer actual "heatsink" section of the cooling system, so we'd know if the increased surface area of the DHS would actually be vulnerable to this "heat override" where the external heat sources can heat the surface up enough to override the heat condensers..



[/crazytechnobabble]

[Nebfer]

Pht, on 12 November 2011 - 08:04 PM, said:

Hmm. How would we justify that by the lore?



...



I presume we'd have to have some way of determining how fast the various heatsinks can transfer heat out in order to estimate how much their systems can condense the heat into the outer actual "heatsink" section of the cooling system, so we'd know if the increased surface area of the DHS would actually be vulnerable to this "heat override" where the external heat sources can heat the surface up enough to override the heat condensers..



[/crazytechnobabble]

Well the Devs have said they are wanting to be close to B-tech rules as possible, but will change things to suit game play (and things that obviously do not translate well from table top to real time game play)...

In any case a double heat sink is fluffed as having a larger surface area for it's radiators no?

Is so that's a lot more area to hit with a inferno missile, I do not believe a heat sink is going to work all that well if its radiators are hit by flaming liquid...

So if changing the external heat is bothersome, perhaps taking more damage from infernos in the area of heat sink failure rates...

Edited by Nebfer, 12 November 2011 - 08:36 PM.

[Pht]

yeah, but you'd expect the DHS to have a heat-condenser able to over-ride the extra "heat pressure" from the larger surface area....

It's a knotty question!

Still, an interesting angle.

[Devlin Stone]

I've been working on an idea relevant to this. I was going to post it as a new thread, but I think it's appropriate here.

Make chassis-mounted heat sinks absorb part of the heat instantly. Allow me to elaborate:

Engine-mounted heat sinks are always under load. They actively absorb excess heat from the engine as well as from the secondary systems, so their coolant is always heated. Chassis-mounted heat-sinks are normally unloaded heat pumps, so their coolant can absorb a good amount of heat from weapons-fire, jump-jets and logistics systems before the mech's temperature rises at all. This way chassis-mounted heat sinks can 'buffer' a certain ammount of heat after they are allowed to cool.


Most MechWarrior games apply heat first, and then dissipate it over time. This is why a Supernova would go critical if it fired an alpha-strike in MechWarrior3. A lot of clan designs rely heavily on those internal heat sinks to dissipate heat, but if those engine-mounted heat sinks have no buffer, you rob some of their advantage. Let's take the Awesome as an example. The AWS-8Q Awesome has 28 single heat sinks, 19 of which are external. The AWS-8Q uses 19 double heat sinks, 10 of which are external.

Turn 1:

AWS-8Q - Heat 0 , Buffer 0
Fires 3 PPCs ( 30 heat ) : Buffer absorbs - 19 heat. Mech gains 11 heat. Dissipation Rate - 28

AWS-9Q - Heat 0 , Buffer 0
Fires 3 PPCs ( 30 heat ) : Buffer absorbs - 10 heat. Mech gains 20 heat. Dissipation Rate - 38

Turn 2:

AWS-8Q - Heat 0 , Buffer 2

AWS-9Q - Heat 0 , Buffer 0

So group firing the same three PPCs, the AWS-8Q will overheat if firing continuously, but it won't spike to the peak heat of the AWS-9Q for 10 salvos. And If the AWS-9Q wants to use all of it's PPCs continuously, it needs to chain fire.

Edited by Devlin Stone, 12 November 2011 - 09:06 PM.