67 replies to this topic

[wanderer]

mawg, on 02 June 2012 - 01:48 PM, said:

Air assetts were at high risk with many fixed base and space based sensors and weapons platforms. As any incursion into enemy airspace was quickly met and defeated by fixed AA missles, beam, and kinetic weapons both ground mounted and mech mounted. Neuromancer mechs with their array of sensor systems aboard and those field deployed, enhanced battlefield links and integration dealt with most air assetts swiftly. Overall the high flyers were easy pickings even with stealth and EM shielding as sensor platforms utilizing passive EM field distoration tracking systems were employed. This technology utilizing the disturbance of EM emmissions from both natural and artificial sources allowed passive tracking to be refined such that the Neuro's were a complete net through which aero assetts could not fly undetected. EM field disturbance, audio, airseismic all made the aero attacks risky business. Speed was he only real difficulty to overcome..

You've just gone straight into cloud-cuckoo land, Mawg. That doesn't even remotely exist in canon Battletech, and there's no such thing as "Neuromancer 'Mechs".

[Kairaku]

Simple answer is that BT was originally designed around great big ugly robots going at it and anything else was extraneous. Mechs are like knights... look way better than they were in practice... Agincourt showed us that pretty clearly, but they persisted iwht the idea for a few hundred years more...just to make sure they were wrong

If combat development continued along the current tech path I would imagine that mechs would never have even been invented and mechs with gyros, actuators and all the rest would be very unstable on the size that they are supposed to have been built. For reasons of physics it just wouldn't have happened either, battle armour is far more realistic.

But we all still love mechs or we wouldn't be here impatiently waiting for MWO to give us our wonderful piece of unreality.

[Frostiken]

The biggest limiting balance factor in ASF were the piloting rules themselves. Taking just about any kind of damage would force 'control rolls'. Get pegged by a small laser, fail a single roll and careen into a cliffside.

[mawg]

Cuckoo!!!!

Fiction is fiction.....

You can make up any excrement you desire and beleive that which you like....

Cuckoo!!

[Jarvis]

A little off-topic, but I hope that if MWO is successful enough that they develop an Aerospace offshoot at some point in the future. I think gaming is desperately lacking in a good space combat game.

Edited by Jarvis, 02 June 2012 - 09:53 PM.

[Kairaku]

Jarvis, on 02 June 2012 - 09:52 PM, said:

A little off-topic, but I hope that if MWO is successful enough that they develop an Aerospace offshoot at some point in the future. I think gaming is desperately lacking in a good space combat game.

It would be great if they did that with the original advanced rules concerning thrust vectoring in space...much more realistic.

[Thorqemada]

The problem why an Airforce can not win a war is that you need ground forces to control the territory - destryoing territory is not controling territory.
But the Airforce can contribute most to the destructive and recon work that helps the ground forces to get control of territory while defending own ground forces against enemy airstrikes so they can keep control.
And that is why the US wont win any war since WW2 bcs they use not enough ground forces to keep control until things have fundamentaly changed toward a surviveable and trustfull modern, democracy friendly poltical and public environment.
All the countrys that have been destroyed in the last 60 years were lost as soon the ground forces moved away.
To change the mind of a country permanently you need ground forces to stay for generations, guarantee stability and you put huge efforts in educational and economical support and no small or big airforce changes anything about that!

Edited by Thorqemada, 03 June 2012 - 02:05 AM.

[GreyGriffin]

Paladin1, on 02 June 2012 - 08:17 AM, said:

I absolutely have to disagree with you here for two very important reasons. You seem to be operating under the ideas that ASF cannot carry a bomb load and that they are intended to take out a majority of the `Mechs on a battlefield, neither of which are true.

Disagreement is what talking is for!

I am going to disagree with you here on the effectiveness of bombing, even under Total Warfare. While I've seen some pretty devastating bombing runs, I've seen just as many victimized empty forest hexes. Now, a TAG guided Arrow barrage is kind of a different story, but even then, external payloads play havoc on your maneuverability, requiring your bombers to have escorts to get past enemy interceptors, and then you're talking about a much higher strategic investment than throwing another Atlas at the problem.

Dive bombing is about the only way to get bombs on target, but the cost in altitude (and hence survivability) makes it pretty rough.

Paladin1, on 02 June 2012 - 08:17 AM, said:

Secondly, you don't have to kill every last `Mech standing to be effective with an ASF, you just have to kill enough of his high value targets with them to justify having them on the field. If you can kill a unit that has as much as twice the point value in BV as the ASF that you brought to the fight, you just justified that fighter being there.

ASF's are very cheap by BV, because they have a hard time projecting their power onto the average mapsheet. BV is a tournament and causal gameplay construct, however, doesn't reflect the strategic concerns of aerospace fighters.

But if we're going to mention BV, I'd personally invest in something that needs to make fewer than 7 piloting skill checks on a moderately successful shooting phase.