362 replies to this topic

[PlzBanMe]

I am new to the mech warrior thing, I found out about the mech warrior stuff while at a tattoo place but the weight for the "mechs" seems really low. This tank right here is about 65 tons. Aren't some of these mechs easily 4 times bigger?

Edited by PlzBanMe, 25 July 2012 - 10:59 AM.

[Inkarnus]

dunno but i read about the ares type but it statet only that it had the same loadout at max as a 100 ton mech thou would be a nice asset for collectors in the future too obtain

[Baron Kreight]

[wanderer]

Levi Porphyrogenitus, on 05 June 2012 - 04:20 PM, said:

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Orca

That is my favorite 100+ 'Mech. I seem to recall a varient with a rotary Gauss rifle (the most amazing weapon ever!).

That one happened to be an April Fool's joke (Catalyst is good at em) but the Omega has the honor of being the first "super-assault" class design. It also had the honor of being utterly obliterated shortly thereafter defending Terra in the waning days of the Jihad, along with it's factory. To date, no known attempt to make new ones happens until the Ares, much much later.

[wanderer]

Skylarr, on 05 June 2012 - 06:25 PM, said:

Is Non-Canon

Nope, the Omega is very much canon. It's from Jihad: Final Reckoning, which details the end of the war.



Here's the mini from Iron Wind Metals.

[Elemental]

No.

[Hodo]

Nope, dont like it.

[Name54678]

I think the 100+ tonners would be flagged kill on site by the fanboys. If they did bring them into the game, they'd have to be brutally slow like half the speed of an Atlas.

[Hodo]

PlzBanMe, on 25 July 2012 - 10:58 AM, said:

I am new to the mech warrior thing, I found out about the mech warrior stuff while at a tattoo place but the weight for the "mechs" seems really low. This tank right here is about 65 tons. Aren't some of these mechs easily 4 times bigger?

Uh that tank is barely 47 tons. Its a T-90 variant.

And even Battletechs tanks dont get huge at 65tons.

This tank, which I have seen in real life, is only 95 tons.

[Chief 117]

You guys realize that Industry mechs weight WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY over 100 tons ?

Edited by Chief 117, 25 July 2012 - 12:29 PM.

[wanderer]

Kittygrinder, on 06 June 2012 - 05:43 AM, said:

In Dark Age there were 3 legged 100+ assault mechs. But anyone who knows anything, knows that Mechwarrior Dark Age is NOT considered to be canon.

Loathe it or like it, MW:DA is canon- and that's straight from the people who do the TT game. They don't like some of the stuff handed down to them by WizKids, but they have to work with (around) it.

And no amount of fan-rage will change that. It IS worth noting that Catalyst is seriously considering skipping ahead to the post-DA era after the Jihad, which means we'll be seeing the 32nd century sooner rather than later.

None of it will mean much for MWO. We're the equivalent of a WWII sim while TT is somewhere in the Gulf War right now and the timeline is up to "now".

[PlzBanMe]

Hodo, on 25 July 2012 - 12:29 PM, said:

Uh that tank is barely 47 tons. Its a T-90 variant.

And even Battletechs tanks dont get huge at 65tons.

This tank, which I have seen in real life, is only 95 tons.

The tank I post is a [color=#3A2A34]M-1 Abrams Tank which does weigh more than 65 tons. [/color]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams

[Hodo]

PlzBanMe, on 25 July 2012 - 12:37 PM, said:

The tank I post is a [color=#3a2a34]M-1 Abrams Tank which does weigh more than 65 tons. [/color]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams

The pic that came up is a T-90.

And the Abrams is actually 70tons. I know, I served on one.

[Evinthal]

Skylarr, on 05 June 2012 - 06:25 PM, said:

Is Non-Canon



Not sure if this is canon. It is only a rumor.

The Ares represents a series of 'Mechs that are built to exceed the 100-ton mark. The Ares uses a unique tripodal chassis to support the 'Mechs weight bridging the gap between the biped 'Mechs and the quad 'Mechs. The Ares has its roots in the Rhodes Project and was first fielded sometime after 3132. Although the manufacturer of the 'Mech remains unknown intelligence has pointed to an Ares factory being located on the world of Kaus Australis in Prefecture I of the Republic of the Sphere. This intelligence, as well as the potential of the Ares was strong enough to provoke both the Lyran Commonwealth and Clan Nova Cat to raid the location in search of this factory.
While there has been a great deal of hype surrounding each version of the Ares 'Mechs, they have roughly the same amount of weapons as can be loaded onto a 100 ton chassis and are outgunned by some Assault 'Mechs dating from the 3060s. One unique aspect of these 'Mechs is that they are manned with three personnel.

As part of an experimental project, only a few selected MechWarriors can operate this 'Mech. It is also notable that, as a secret project, most of those MechWarriors are the research scientist's children or family and some also received training since their very childhood.

Omega is canon, Ares is kind of a murky canon as we really don't have any real 'official' write ups on them (yet...). The Orca was an April's Fools joke.

Omega, is pretty damn cool to me at least. I still play the clicky tech game for fun, but the Ares are a little bit absurd even for me, but i still have them!

MagnusEffect, on 05 June 2012 - 07:19 PM, said:

I already said it; I KNOW ALL OF THIS. I read it all. The circumstances as to why Terra fell were stupid and contrived. It never should have fallen in the first place. Then... after it fell, everyone was like "oh noes, the crazies control the cradle of humanity and all its resources... well lets NOT do anything about that. No... lets wait around for awhile so they have time to reinforce their position and utilize said resources".

Yeah... like i said, the whole story arc was ******* retarded and (EDIT: in regards to the Jihad, specifically) manufactured to legitimize Dark Age.

But I waste my time here. There is no unringing that bell with some of you people.

*putting headphones on*

The entire quote above is an opinion and therefore holds no validity in an argument.

When it comes right down to it the only thing that matters is that the line developers have said it will happen / has happened.

Don't like it? Fine. Your opinion and you are more than welcome to it.
Want it to change? Get a job at Catalyst and write something better for it, if you think you can.

Aethon, on 06 June 2012 - 01:00 AM, said:

It's not all bad after 3067. Some cool factions that had been crapped on all through the timeline finally got some good writing after 3065. I also dislike a few of the technologies that were introduced after that time, but it didn't ruin Battletech for me.

Dark Age is where things really went pants-on-head stupid, IMHO. It no longer resembled Battletech at that point, and Wizkids didn't give a crap about canon. It was nothing more than Wizkids' half-hearted, careless attempt to immediately cash in on their new IP. They may have made money running our beloved franchise into the ground, but they certainly didn't do Battletech or its fans any favours.

I can agree to the didn't care about canon part, the entire system really has to be looked at as its own thing with out any relation to CBT, although some of the designs they have actual stat sheets for are kind of impressive. The ZEUS-X they have are just way to expensive though. I hate XXL engines with a firey passion of a thousand suns.

Alex Wolfe, on 06 June 2012 - 06:31 AM, said:

It's a reboot. Good thing about reboots is that you can take the good stuff from the source material, and jettison the parts where people writing it had brain farts/were drunk/ran out of ideas/tried one-upping in desperation/simply had ideas that didn't turn out as good as they seemed. Canon is not wholly untouchable and holy, it's not enlightened truth, it was written by people who had some awesome ideas and some not-so-awesome ideas. The spirit of the whole can be preserved without recreating every single bit.

No need to take all the suck with all the cool. No need to repeat past mistakes.

PGI can make the bad things go away.

Nope, not a reboot.

Alex Wolfe, on 06 June 2012 - 07:07 AM, said:

Redesigned mechs, timeline with player involvement with new facts that didn't appear in previous works (which means that, if it's not a reboot, it's retroactive continuity), early access to pulse lasers and similar tech... things are changing already.

Those things make it a reboot as far as I'm concerned. No need to force hated stuff down the players' throats.

Pulse lasers were recovered in 3037 by House Marik. 12 years before MW:O is set. Plenty of time for them to be introduced into regular house units and proliferated throughout the Inner Sphere.

wanderer, on 25 July 2012 - 12:29 PM, said:

Loathe it or like it, MW:DA is canon- and that's straight from the people who do the TT game. They don't like some of the stuff handed down to them by WizKids, but they have to work with (around) it.

And no amount of fan-rage will change that. It IS worth noting that Catalyst is seriously considering skipping ahead to the post-DA era after the Jihad, which means we'll be seeing the 32nd century sooner rather than later.

Yeah, I am glad they have decided to just skip over it as it has already been covered (granted poorly by WizKids), so here is to looking foreward to seeing what Catalyst can do with the brand post Dark Age.

Edited by Evinthal, 25 July 2012 - 01:16 PM.

[Sporkosophy]

Evin, some of that came close to suggesting he become the Matt Ward of BTech.

I'm watching you.

[Bishop Steiner]

@ Evinthal, I agree w/ most of what ya say, but I do question this part a bit:


Pulse lasers were recovered in 3037 by House Marik. 12 years before MW:O is set. Plenty of time for them to be introduced into regular house units and proliferated throughout the Inner Sphere.

They may have retconned Pulse lasers in earlier in one of the many TRO redos, I don't know. Personally I stopped supporting the money grabs. There has been p;enty of ret-conning, first by wizkids, then fan-pro and yes, Catalyst.

That said, as one of the folks who was playing tourneys at conventions when the Clan Invasion launched (god what an awesome surprise that was..... until the\y toasted us), and who owns all the classic Battletech novels and FASA sourcebooks, the lasers may have been re-discovered whenever, but they were certainly not disseminated throughout the armies.Neither Hohiro Kurita nor Victor Steiner Davion had any access to advance tech, and both drove stock 3025 model mechs, a Grand Dragon and a Victor, respectively. Both were totally unprepared for the er weapons, pulse weapons and gauss weapons the Clans used against them. Phelan Kell, who was the heir to one of the 3 most techno-advanced Merc groups in the Inner Sphere, was totally unfamiliar with pulse lasers and gauss rifles when he was testing out as a Clan Mechwarrior. Ditto Kai Allard-Liao.

When the scions of 4 of the most powerful and influential noble families are completely unfamiliar with them, it suggests that while they may have been working prototypes and limited distribution in some cases, they were hardly widespread.

Now, whatever PGi decides to do about, and what Catalyst may have rewritten history to say, IDK, and honestly it ain't gonna faze me either way. But don't blast folks who have3 been playing this game forever are a little taken aback by the revisions in Battletech history over the last decade. It may not be the end of the world, but it IS totally inconsistent with early canon.

[Captain Nice HD]

Bah, you unimaginative Mech jocks and your Omegas and Areses. I'll take a SturmFeur Kalki, please; daddy needs his Cruise Missiles.

[Evinthal]

Bishop Steiner, on 25 July 2012 - 03:25 PM, said:

@ Evinthal, I agree w/ most of what ya say, but I do question this part a bit:


Pulse lasers were recovered in 3037 by House Marik. 12 years before MW:O is set. Plenty of time for them to be introduced into regular house units and proliferated throughout the Inner Sphere.

They may have retconned Pulse lasers in earlier in one of the many TRO redos, I don't know. Personally I stopped supporting the money grabs. There has been p;enty of ret-conning, first by wizkids, then fan-pro and yes, Catalyst.

That said, as one of the folks who was playing tourneys at conventions when the Clan Invasion launched (god what an awesome surprise that was..... until the\y toasted us), and who owns all the classic Battletech novels and FASA sourcebooks, the lasers may have been re-discovered whenever, but they were certainly not disseminated throughout the armies.Neither Hohiro Kurita nor Victor Steiner Davion had any access to advance tech, and both drove stock 3025 model mechs, a Grand Dragon and a Victor, respectively. Both were totally unprepared for the er weapons, pulse weapons and gauss weapons the Clans used against them. Phelan Kell, who was the heir to one of the 3 most techno-advanced Merc groups in the Inner Sphere, was totally unfamiliar with pulse lasers and gauss rifles when he was testing out as a Clan Mechwarrior. Ditto Kai Allard-Liao.

When the scions of 4 of the most powerful and influential noble families are completely unfamiliar with them, it suggests that while they may have been working prototypes and limited distribution in some cases, they were hardly widespread.

Now, whatever PGi decides to do about, and what Catalyst may have rewritten history to say, IDK, and honestly it ain't gonna faze me either way. But don't blast folks who have3 been playing this game forever are a little taken aback by the revisions in Battletech history over the last decade. It may not be the end of the world, but it IS totally inconsistent with early canon.

Ah, well maybe it was one of those things where ComStar was keeping it, or trying to keep it from spreading around. Who knows, except ComStar themselves.

That was no way meant to be a blast at people, and I am sorry if it came off sounding as such.

Sporkosophy, on 25 July 2012 - 02:13 PM, said:

Evin, some of that came close to suggesting he become the Matt Ward of BTech.

I'm watching you.

God no. I'd give RNB and the rest of the game crew at Catalyst enough credit to pick up anything of that magnitude heading in their direction...

After all Catalyst has yet to actually muck with the rules to the point of making something that was specifically made to combat something else unusable against said something. (See Grey Knights and Force Weapons not working against demons...)

[Aidan Malchor]

Dark Severance, on 05 June 2012 - 03:54 PM, said:

Until XL Engines, there wasn't an Engine big enough or powerful enough to power and move it. Until Endo Steel there wasn't a mech chassis that could even begin to hold the strain and weight of that much tonnage. Until advantacements in Myomer fibers there weren't muscles strong enough to actually move the joints of the mech.

I see your 135 ton mech and raise you a dropship. Anything larger than 100 tons is what Dropships are for.

This right here sums it up nicely.

[Melcyna]

technically that's not really true since the line of thought is full of holes in itself...

let's pretend for a moment that BT made sense physically (it's not, giant bipedal combat machines never made sense in the first place, but let's pretend it is for now),

if there's no single engine powerful enough to power and move it, then you use two engine and tandem their output... heck even easier here given that their primary expected output are: electricity, plasma... there's no conceivable reason i can think of why this has to come from a single engine except weight and space but both are going to be upscaled anyway for the mech. Even in the case of old fashioned engine we've figured out how to get 2 engine to work on the same crank shaft so the idea that they can't get 2 fusion engine, which is essentially a power generator to work together and combine their output is somewhat illogical.

Next, chassis... no material strong enough to hold the strain and weight? But a 100ton mech moves at it's pace with absolutely no problem?

It's physically illogical that they can get a 100ton chassis in BT to walk about plain as a day and fails the moment it gets above 100ton like a magical threshold, if such reasoning as weight and strain is used then logically an Atlas mech for example which sits as close as it gets to the threshold should have such heavy strain that under fire it's chassis should catastrophically fail under it's own weight when it so much as land it's foot from a slight elevation or shot in the chassis structure even if the shot didn't set anything else off.

Then there's the muscle...

You know the great thing about muscle like motive mechanism? You can stack them... like REALLY STACK THEM.

X amount of muscle fiber connected to the limb is not enough? then use 2X amount of muscle, that's not enough? then use 3X amount of muscle.

Sure you need more power for it, but again similar to the chassis argument, if they managed to get a 100ton chassis to move at that pace, it's illogical that they just suddenly unable to get it to work beyond 100ton.

Now there is indeed such a thing as diminishing return and inefficiency of course, so one might argue that beyond 100ton the return from stacking the power or the muscle, etc will not be effective... the unfortunate part of this thought however is that this line of thought also highlight that even the 100ton mech are hardly performing like they are close to the point of ineffective movement capability... ie: they clearly are capable of pushing the envelope further otherwise the Atlas would be near immobile.

This technically of course had to be done since otherwise we don't get much of a point for these heavies at all in the game in which case they might as well not be there... and while we might fancy comparison of the story with that of the real war tank performance where the heavy tanks were of little use with the more flexible and mobile mediums being largely superior, we can't have that in a game where these heavy chassis are supposed to be useful.

TLDR?

Battletech is a soft sci-fi, the more one try and explain them, the more holes you open because let's face it... it's not a hard sci-fi, it will NOT survive the attempt to explain them like hard sci-fi material.

Edited by Melcyna, 27 July 2012 - 11:25 AM.