19 replies to this topic

[Chou Senwan]

One ton of SRM ammo gets you 100 missiles. So that's 10 kilograms per missile (about 22 pounds).

Go to your local gym and grab a 25-pound dumb bell. An SRM should probably not be much bigger than that, unless it's made out of plastic. Now that might seem light for a missile, but we're used to thinking of the sidewinders that fighter jets use. Consider instead, the humble bazooka.

http://en.wikipedia....#Specifications

Even large rockets weigh only about 9 kilos, and have an effective range of 180+ meters.

What might an LRM be? Perhaps the FGM-148 Javelin:

http://en.wikipedia....FGM-148_Javelin

10 kilo missiles, range 75 to 2500m. Guided by imaging infrared, not radar lock though.

A sidewinder missile, by contrast, weighs 85 kilos, 9 of which is explosive, and has an effective range of 1 to 35 kilometers! I guess that's a Thunderbolt?

http://en.wikipedia....IM-9_Sidewinder

[MrPenguin]

Big enough to ruin your backyard BBQ party.

[Signal27]

My friend: Your first mistake is trying to equate any Battletech physics to real world physics. This is a universe of 1000-pound machine guns that perform significantly worse than our real world 20-pound man-portable machine guns. Whenever you see a big discrepancy in weights, just wave your hands and sing out loud: "SPACE MAGIC!"

Though, if I had a time machine I wish I could go ask the Battletech writer who came up with measuring everything in"tons" to change that to a more vague label of "Weight" and never specify what each unit of "Weight" is equivalent to.

Edited by Signal27, 26 March 2013 - 08:00 PM.

[Larth]

MrPenguin, on 26 March 2013 - 07:42 PM, said:

Big enough to ruin your backyard BBQ party.

Or speed up the barbecue if it hits your neighbor's yard.

[Kiiyor]

Battletech technology reminds me of some of the awesome jury rigged Russian stuff from WW2 that seemed to defy physics. At one stage they were making tank rounds out of concrete. The bigger the round, the shorter the range. Awesome.

[Warrax the Chaos Warrior]

Go far enough down the rabbit-hole of realism, and you'll eventually find that the entire concept of Battlemechs is impractical at best and ridiculous at worst.

Battletech is just as much fantasy as anything with orcs or elves, and that's OK, it's still fun

Edited by Warrax the Chaos Warrior, 26 March 2013 - 08:46 PM.

[Voidsinger]

Chou Senwan, on 26 March 2013 - 07:41 PM, said:

One ton of SRM ammo gets you 100 missiles. So that's 10 kilograms per missile (about 22 pounds).

Go to your local gym and grab a 25-pound dumb bell. An SRM should probably not be much bigger than that, unless it's made out of plastic. Now that might seem light for a missile, but we're used to thinking of the sidewinders that fighter jets use. Consider instead, the humble bazooka.

http://en.wikipedia....#Specifications

Even large rockets weigh only about 9 kilos, and have an effective range of 180+ meters.

What might an LRM be? Perhaps the FGM-148 Javelin:

http://en.wikipedia....FGM-148_Javelin

10 kilo missiles, range 75 to 2500m. Guided by imaging infrared, not radar lock though.

A sidewinder missile, by contrast, weighs 85 kilos, 9 of which is explosive, and has an effective range of 1 to 35 kilometers! I guess that's a Thunderbolt?

http://en.wikipedia....IM-9_Sidewinder

If you take more exacting figures, an SRM would weigh 10kgs. Reasonable for what it does, considering very short range, and basic guidance (Streaks have all the computational action in the launcher, just need special ammo for last minute orders, same with Artemis).

LRMs are much more problematic: 5.5kg per missile.

Longer range, in flight course correction, NARC beacon effects, terminal fusing. What made it even worse was an LRM is cheaper than an SRM.

I wouldn't even touch guidance, which is completely broken in MWO, since everything works off radar in a high ECM environment. Alernative sensors integrating into the Targeting computer doesn't happen, and this is why the BAP remains crippled.

[IceCase88]

The size depends on whether is is SSRMs or SRMs.



Above is the SSRMs. Below is the SRMs.

Edited by IceCase88, 26 March 2013 - 10:05 PM.

[Dr Killinger]

You're assuming that warheads haven't advanced in 1000 years. I think a small Star League era SRM warhead would be far more destructive than today's much larger missiles. They're just trying to pack as many missiles in per ton, so they opted for more smaller missiles (that are still way more dangerous that today's).

Also, stop trying to equate current physics with Battletech physics. You'll just get a nosebleed.

EDIT: I try to look at BT weight figures not as true weight, but as a 'rating'. For example, Centurions and Hunchbacks both are classed as 50 ton battlemechs. In my mind, neither of them necessarily weigh 50 tons, but their effective payload is somewhere around there, and there is a lot of give and take for the individual chassis' design and geometry, and how it has been engineered to carry a 50 ton rated payload of weaponry. I'd think that a Centurion would probably be north of 100 tons, with the Hunchback being two dozen or so tons heavier due to the chunkier chassis, but still able to mount a comparable loadout to other mechs in the class.

Great, now my nose is bleeding.

Edited by Dr Killinger, 26 March 2013 - 10:12 PM.

[Mister Blastman]

When I think of SRMs (streaks), I think of this enemy from the classic 1980's game, Thexder:





They were buggers, to say the least. They'd follow you and saddle up alongside your mech and prevent you from moving up or down forcing you into a corner where they and their buddies could pummel you.

Thexder was awesome, btw.

Edited by Mister Blastman, 26 March 2013 - 10:09 PM.

[Noobzorz]

Signal27, on 26 March 2013 - 07:59 PM, said:

My friend: Your first mistake is trying to equate any Battletech physics to real world physics. This is a universe of 1000-pound machine guns that perform significantly worse than our real world 20-pound man-portable machine guns. Whenever you see a big discrepancy in weights, just wave your hands and sing out loud: "SPACE MAGIC!"

Though, if I had a time machine I wish I could go ask the Battletech writer who came up with measuring everything in"tons" to change that to a more vague label of "Weight" and never specify what each unit of "Weight" is equivalent to.

Eh, not sure that's accurate. While anything that has that much lore and that many rule revisions draped on it and can never be totally consistent with hard sci-fi (or even itself, if you want to look at the particularly egregious example of WH40K), those 500kg machine guns are devastating anti-mech weapons that pulverize infantry and tanks into mulch. They're also supposed to obliterate the armor on battlemechs, they just suck in the game for some unexplained, unjustified reason.

[Elyam]

From the earliest days of Battletech, I've associated missile size with that shown visually in the anime that it grew from, particularly Macross. From this point of view, each missile type is about the size and shape of R2D2 but about 12" more squat. SRM's carry less fuel but have larger warheads, but the missile chassis is about the same. Google pictures of the Tomahawk Destroid with its shoulder bay doors open to see a good example.

Battletech didn't really embrace the notion of LRMs looking pretty much (and sized pretty much) like circa-1970s Sparrow missiles (long, thin, ~10' long with 2 sets of 4 fins and narrow pointed nose) until the guy they contracted to blueprint the first 4 Clan mechs drew the missiles that way since it fit the way the LRMs were displayed particularly in the shoulder bays of the Vulture, but also the MadCat. And eventually they drew the SRMs like Maverick missiles (thicker body with rounded fins and obvious optical guidance in the rounded nosecone).

((Loved Thexder! One of the first games on my old Tandy PC in the 80s))

Edited by Elyam, 26 March 2013 - 10:24 PM.

[IceCase88]

LRMs

[Voidcrafter]

MrPenguin, on 26 March 2013 - 07:42 PM, said:

Big enough to ruin your backyard BBQ party.

Nahaha - good one bro
I don't like BBQs very much anyways...

[Weztside]

Chou Senwan, on 26 March 2013 - 07:41 PM, said:

One ton of SRM ammo gets you 100 missiles. So that's 10 kilograms per missile (about 22 pounds).

Go to your local gym and grab a 25-pound dumb bell. An SRM should probably not be much bigger than that, unless it's made out of plastic. Now that might seem light for a missile, but we're used to thinking of the sidewinders that fighter jets use. Consider instead, the humble bazooka.

http://en.wikipedia....#Specifications

Even large rockets weigh only about 9 kilos, and have an effective range of 180+ meters.

What might an LRM be? Perhaps the FGM-148 Javelin:

http://en.wikipedia....FGM-148_Javelin

10 kilo missiles, range 75 to 2500m. Guided by imaging infrared, not radar lock though.

A sidewinder missile, by contrast, weighs 85 kilos, 9 of which is explosive, and has an effective range of 1 to 35 kilometers! I guess that's a Thunderbolt?

http://en.wikipedia....IM-9_Sidewinder

This game takes place 1000 years in the future. I think SRM's being made of super-light-weight-space alloys isn't that much of a stretch. Just look how far basic flight and the aerospace industry have come in the best century.

[Voidsinger]

Okay, just did some checking in the Mechwarrior RPG.

SRM 2-pack launcher weighs in at 16 kilograms with 2 missiles.

Launcher and rounds are about the same size as a Carl Gustav 84mm Recoiless gun (same with ammo).

There is also a 1-shot Heavy SRM that does 3 points, that weighs 20 kilograms.

The scariest thing are vibrobombs. These do 10 points of damage to each leg if a mech steps on a hex where one is planted (they were left out after 1st ed Mechwarrior).

The other source was the Clan Heavy Omnimech Blueprints.

Timberwolf showed an LRM as 200mm with about an 16:1 length:diameter ratio. Warhead was more like a 8:1 ratio to overall length.

However, the Mad Dog showed a 120mm LRM round of 120mm calibre with a 6:1 Length: Diameter, no fins, but looks like propulsion ports at back. Looks somewhat like the projectile an autocannon would fire.

Lastly, the Hellbringer. Depicted was a 200mm SRM. Length to diameter was again about 8:1. Hoever, warhead was enlarged, more at a 5.5:1 ratio.

Interestingly, the triplepacks on the hips of the Summoner and Hellbringer were identied as 120mm White Phosphorus spotting rounds.

Canonicity of Blueprints unknown.

Edited by Voidsinger, 27 March 2013 - 02:45 AM.

[Warma]

Voidsinger, on 26 March 2013 - 09:23 PM, said:

LRMs are much more problematic: 5.5kg per missile.
Longer range, in flight course correction, NARC beacon effects, terminal fusing. What made it even worse was an LRM is cheaper than an SRM.
I wouldn't even touch guidance, which is completely broken in MWO, since everything works off radar in a high ECM environment. Alernative sensors integrating into the Targeting computer doesn't happen, and this is why the BAP remains crippled.

This is mostly an MWO issue and concerns how they increased ammo amounts to account for double armor. In the tabletop game, an LRM round weighs a little more than 8kg and I don't think it's as efficiently guided as in this game. This is pretty well in line with a Javelin missile with possible future improvements.

I actually liked the quantity over quality approach present in the tabletop. Things are low-tech and cheap.

For that matter, probably the right way to fix SSRMs would be to have them auto-account for target speed and bearing, but not have them change course in-flight.

I would also like MW2-style LRMS that tracked only lightly but you could choose the aiming angle... Better make a new post out of this.

[Karl Streiger]

Warma, on 27 March 2013 - 03:19 AM, said:

I would also like MW2-style LRMS that tracked only lightly but you could choose the aiming angle... Better make a new post out of this.

Do this... would like to have some LRM magic back. a single LRM 15 and the right angle was all you need for killing the direwolf.

[Deeztar]

Warma, on 27 March 2013 - 03:19 AM, said:

I would also like MW2-style LRMS that tracked only lightly but you could choose the aiming angle... Better make a new post out of this.

This is clan Streak LRM weapon. May be we will see them with clan's mechs.

[Warma]

Karl Streiger, on 27 March 2013 - 03:24 AM, said:

Do this... would like to have some LRM magic back. a single LRM 15 and the right angle was all you need for killing the direwolf.

I separated the issue to a new topic:
http://mwomercs.com/...-ssrm-guidance/

Awaiting opinions there.