9 replies to this topic

[Kitty Bacon]

Hello everyone, new pilot here to the Mechwarrior scheme in the game, though I have played Mechwarrior games as far back as 1996, but anyways, I just had a question on the realism of mech armor in the game. And yes, I know that its game is far from 'realistic' with giant 100 ton 40 foot tall battle mechs stomping around on the battle field, but this game feels realistic of what it would actually be like to pilot a real mech rather than a Japanese mech of which you barely tap the stick to go left and you break your neck from 100gs of force from your mech going 10000 miles per hour to the left.

A few days ago, I was looking at the front of a Catapult in a match in MWO and I watched the catapult get shot barely atop of its body by a gauss rifle and take full damage as if it was hit right on a flat surface of its armor. Now, I am a World of Tanks player as well as a competitive shooter IRL and I have seen how ballistics work in the real world and it just... looked off to me how the gauss rifle hit the mech and, what should of been a glancing shot, hit for full force.

Now, most of the mechs in the game look to have nice sloped armor, IE the Raven, Catapult, Hunchback to an extent, Stalker and other mechs have areas that have there armor nicely sloped. reason it looked off to me is because a projectile hitting a plate at an angle other than 90° has to move through a greater thickness of armor, compared to hitting the same plate at a right-angle. In the latter case only the plate thickness (the normal to the surface of the armor) has to be pierced; increasing the armor slope improves, for a given plate thickness, the armor's level of protection at the point of impact by increasing the thickness measured in the horizontal plane, the angle of attack of the projectile. By all accounts to what I saw, the Gauss rifle should of bounced off the mech's actual armor values and caused no damage to the mech.

Keep in mind, this same factor can be applied to SRMs, LRMs and flamers. Take for example a Laser against a piece of angled armor. Straight on the beam would have full chance of burning through the armor and cause the maximum damage if it is held on the target for a long time to take full advantage of the duration the beam is exposed. But, say the beam hits the armor at 45° angle from the mech firing to the target. Like a Flashlight on a wall IRL, the light will be more spread out, or if the mech's metallic armor is reflective, it could bounce some of the force of the laser off, reflecting the force off to the side, or into other components of the mech to cause more damage. Say like an Atlas was hit on the left side just below its missiles on a piece of angled armor and it reflects and hits its arm, the arm would take more damage because of the angle of attack rather than the angled armor the laser originally hit.

SRMs and LRMs have different values than lasers or ballistic weapons, so I won't talk about them. but heres the equasion for the armor values of angled armor.

http://upload.wikime..._Diagram_v7.png (this is needed to give a bit of an impression.


armor itself and the other for your angle of incidence to that slope. For example, what's the effective armor thickness of a 100mm plate, sloped at 50 degrees from vertical, with a tank that's angled at 25 degrees?

The calculation is not particularly difficult.

(1) cos(combined slope) = cos(slope) * cos(angle of incidence)

Rearranging (1) to make combined slope the dependent variable:

(2) combined slope = cos^-1(cos(slope) * cos(angle of incidence))

So lets plug in the numbers into (2)...

combined slope = cos^-1(cos(50) * cos(25))
combined slope = cos^-1(.5825)
combined slope = 54.37 degrees

By now we already know that the formula for effective armor thickness is:

(3) effective armor thickness = armor thickness / cos(combined slope)

So plugging the combined slope into (3)...

effective armor thickness = 100mm / cos (54.37)
effective armor thickness = 171mm

But thats it from me. I just want to get other's opinion on this. Sorry for the wall of text.

[Thoummim]

If you want mechwarrior to be realist you can remove the mech and replace them by tanks.

[Toong]

Although this level of realism is a neat idea, it would utterly destroy the balance of every weapon and 'mech in the game. Both Battletech and Mechwarrior have never been designed to support calculations for armor deflection, and it would be a Sysyphean task to try to integrate it in now.

I'm sorry, but I don't think it'd be anywhere close to being worth it, especially since a realistic armor simulation isn't really what Battletech is about.

[Kitty Bacon]

I figured it would break the battletech universe as well as balance issues in the game, I just wanted to get people's opinions and hear what they have to say. I honestly don't care if it was put in or not, I just want some input. If I wanted that kind of realism, I would go play tanks, but I don't. I want to drive my 40 ton medium mech and laugh loudly as I run at 133km/h around a mech to **** them off lol

[Zervziel]

Not too mention getting glancing blows on small mechs that are nothing but angled armor like the Raven would be teeth-gnashingly annoying.

*nails a Raven with an AC20* That one bounced! FML!

[Kitty Bacon]

Zervziel, on 06 April 2013 - 12:27 PM, said:

Not too mention getting glancing blows on small mechs that are nothing but angled armor like the Raven would be teeth-gnashingly annoying.

*nails a Raven with an AC20* That one bounced! FML!

well there are cases where you would hit a Raven and you would cause no damage... THAT is annoying to have the lag shield on them lol

[Duncan Fisher]

I think we need a sticky warning people to not waste their time typing out elaborate systems for adding "realism" to mechwarrior.

[keith]

this is great, but we have this to go by. http://bg.battletech.com/ i would love the idea of sloped armor, but WoT bouncing caused so much rage in me. RNG is bad:P

[Kitty Bacon]

Duncan Fisher, on 06 April 2013 - 12:31 PM, said:

I think we need a sticky warning people to not waste their time typing out elaborate systems for adding "realism" to mechwarrior.

I would actually feel honored if someone did that just because of posts like mine looking for Feedback only, no intent nor desire to see it in the game XD

[Koniving]

Blue doqyn, on 06 April 2013 - 12:15 PM, said:

Neat Interesting Stuff!

I liked this. There's just one small thing to note. MWO uses a server authoritative system to prevent many of the common hacks. This results in upwards of a 2 second delay in some cases. The game compensates by "assuming" things server side. The actual word is prediction.

Long and short of it is this: You try to do something. The game asks for permission. The server okays it and registers it. But your animation is shown at the prediction of an OK and is not what others see. For example I could be shooting directly at this Raven. But you, who is giving no inputs server-side, will see me shooting the ground behind it. Yet the Raven will still be damaged. The projectiles do not always keep up with what the server says, since the client "assumes" things.

This unfortunately is why knockdowns were taken out. A shame, really. But I could fall over. You would see me go right. I would see myself land forward. The server would see me go left. Then there's a huge argument causing teleportation until finally the server wins (as it always does).