44 replies to this topic

[Stoicblitzer]

Coralld, on 15 June 2013 - 02:46 PM, said:

Also, I think Paul we generalizing when he said PPCs, so that includes ER-PPCs as well. So 3x PPCs+ER-PPC=heat stacking penalty.

we know that. he said the limit was 3 in his example iirc. any ppc beyond 3 would add 10? more heat if fired simultaneously with the other 3. weak. also heat begins to dmg internals at 150% heat. lol who goes that high?

[Strum Wealh]

Sable Phoenix, on 15 June 2013 - 12:35 PM, said:

The PPC ought to be a beam weapon. It's a particle accelerator cannon. Particle accelerators function at or very near c, the speed of light. Transit time of the "projectile" should be instantaneous and deal its damage over time, just like the lasers do. This simple change would go a very long way towards balancing 6PPC Stalkers and alpha-sniping.

One implementation of a PPC (or PPC-like device) is as a device known as an "electrolaser".

"An electrolaser is a type of electroshock weapon which is also a directed-energy weapon. It uses lasers to form an electrically conductive laser-induced plasma channel (LIPC). A fraction of a second later, a powerful electric current is sent down this plasma channel and delivered to the target, thus functioning overall as a large-scale, high energy, long-distance version of the Taser electroshock gun.

Alternating current is sent through a series of step-up transformers, increasing the voltage and decreasing the current. The final voltage may be between 10^8 and 10^9 volts. This current is fed into the plasma channel created by the laser beam."

In essence, the device would emit a relatively low-power laser beam (by comparison to a laser weapon) that ionizes the air it comes into contact with, creating an electrically-conductive "plasma channel" along which a pulse or bolt of charged particles (such as electrons, protons or ionized atoms/molecules) is projected.
The advantage to this is that it would (at least partially) counteract the effect known as "blooming", wherein "particles bump into one another under the effects of thermal vibration, or bump into air molecules" and "ions of like charge repel one another", thus causing the beam/bolt to lose cohesion and severely limiting its range.

The electrolaser being developed and tested by the US Army even resembles the BT novels' description of the PPC firing as "an arc of man-made lightning".


Like its natural counterpart, such a weapon could deliver its damage instantaneously to a very small, specific area...

[Pater Mors]

Coralld, on 15 June 2013 - 02:46 PM, said:

I have an idea, and no, I am not a 100% backing it my self as it really depends on how the penalties of the up coming heat penalty patch works. Any way, the idea is to keep the PPCs 10pts of damage ball of death, BUT, increase its heat, and when I mean increase its heat I am not talking about upping it back to TT levels I am talking about beyond that. Example, make it so that regular PPCs do 13 or 14 heat and make ER PPCs do 18 to 19 heat. To compensate the new increase in heat, increase the projectile speed from 2,000m/s to 2,500m/s.

Also, I think Paul we generalizing when he said PPCs, so that includes ER-PPCs as well. So 3x PPCs+ER-PPC=heat stacking penalty.

Since PGI's 'stacking' penalties are almost the worst and most useless way to do something with heat in this game, I don't think we should be basing any discussions around how to fix weapons once it's implemented. PPC's are fine as they are. The problem is the current (and proposed) heat system in it's entirety.

Don't treat the symptoms, treat the problem.

[Lightfoot]

There is nothing wrong with the PPC. It doesn't need to be fixed. Lasers do more damage per ton, space, heat and many players use lasers over PPCs. As far as I can tell players will struggle to use more than 3 PPCs after the patch since a fourth will shut the mech down and if you stagger them it will still shut the mech down and so be mostly 7 tons of dead weight. We'll see.

My feeling is the PPC is one of the better weapons in MWO, but just barely. In closed beta when it did anemic 10 area damage, no one used it. Lasers do more damage per ton and heat is more managable. What will happen is everyone will just core your mech with Lasers instead of PPCs and you'll all be back here saying nerf large lasers. One weapon will always be best and people will always complain that the best weapon is OP.

And any mech can carry a PPC with just a few exceptions (CPLT-A1) so it's not like a K2 Gauss-cat situation.

Also the PPC is one of the few Inner Sphere weapons that even comes close to it's Clan equivalent. IS lasers are garbage, Clan are all ER Lasers. Clan LB-20X, Clan Ultra AC20, mechs carrying 30-36 DHS. LRMs that weigh half as much and take up half the space. SSRM-6 (350 meter range), SSRM-4 (1 critical). What you gonna do without your PPC?

Your stated goal is to increase Mech survivability so look in that direction. I like shrinking the CT hitbox of all mechs, extending the arm hitbox over the shoulders. That way battles would last longer and mechs would be more likely to be destroyed in pieces. It could be tweaked a bit and we test it out in Beta.

Edited by Lightfoot, 15 June 2013 - 03:30 PM.

[Bishop Steiner]

stjobe, on 15 June 2013 - 01:36 PM, said:

I made the same suggestion here: http://mwomercs.com/...orking-the-ppc/

It always was a beam weapon in lore, so I don't know why the PGI devs decided to make it a faux-ballistic. Perhaps it was the same devs that implemented the MG as a beam weapon...

Well, it was an electron laser guided lightning gun, to be technical, and Lightning isn't a duration effect, but pretty much an instantaneous hit thing. I like the suggestion to front load the first 5 and stream the rest though.

But am categorically against them becoming lasers.

[HiplyRustic]

Sable Phoenix, on 15 June 2013 - 12:35 PM, said:

The PPC ought to be a beam weapon. It's a particle accelerator cannon. Particle accelerators function at or very near c, the speed of light. Transit time of the "projectile" should be instantaneous and deal its damage over time, just like the lasers do. This simple change would go a very long way towards balancing 6PPC Stalkers and alpha-sniping.

We already have a DoT energy weapon...it's called a laser.

The PPC fires high-energy ion bolts.

It is NOT a beam weapon.

It is not a DoT weapon.

Stop this.

Edited by HiplyRustic, 15 June 2013 - 04:58 PM.

[El Bandito]

Lightfoot, on 15 June 2013 - 02:14 PM, said:

Similar to High Caliber Autocannons. Let's not turn it into a Laser. Everyone is over-reacting to the 6xPPC Stalker which is dead on Tuesday. As is the PPC brings good balancing to MWO. Any mech can carry one, unlike Ballistics and Missile weapons, but the PPC has many of the qualities of a Ballistic, which is how it's described in Battletech. At the same time lasers do more damage per ton/space/heat and many players opt for Lasers instead. True the PPC is supposed to have instantaneous travel time, but I think that would be OP since it would take aiming skill out of it's use. Essentially the PPC is a bolt of lightning.

Did you even read at all? The Field manual clearly says only PPC's lethality is close to an Autocannon, not the weapon itself. The weapon itself functions similar to a laser, using streaming energy, but with recoil.

Edited by El Bandito, 15 June 2013 - 05:20 PM.

[aniviron]

PPC Concept art:

[p00k]

**** it, give us back the big blue orb of doom from mw2

lol @ word filter for a blue colored ball -"colored"

Edited by p00k, 15 June 2013 - 07:05 PM.

[Levi Porphyrogenitus]

Mechwarrior games have a long tradition of making PPCs much like MWO's. The notable exception is MW2 Mercs (did base MW2 do it too?) with its crazy slow death balls (really a bizarre interpretation of the PPC).

I'd love to see a lightning cannon like the books describe, but it might be hard to implement. Maybe PPCs-as-lightning would fix the boating issue by having each bolt arc to a different spot around the reticule. If the reticule was over a target it'd hit it somewhere, sort of like SSRMs should; if it'd be a miss, then it's a miss regardless and the lightning strikes the ground or the wall or whatever. Make PPCs the SSRMs of energy weapons.

[Ralgas]

p00k, on 15 June 2013 - 07:04 PM, said:

**** it, give us back the big blue orb of doom from mw2

lol @ word filter for a blue colored ball -"colored"

NO, the sprial trailed blue orb from mw4!! given a dx11 update that would be cool methinks a slow down to ac/20 projectile speed may help though now

[aniviron]

If I had to guess I would assume the fast projectile we have now is a compromise between an instant-hit (hitscan) ppc like mw4 and the aqua ball of MW2.

edit: ahah, pook was correct, cannot describe the mw2 ppc effect unless you use a non-blue word to describe it.

Edited by aniviron, 15 June 2013 - 07:48 PM.

[Shadowsword8]

Sable Phoenix, on 15 June 2013 - 12:35 PM, said:

The PPC ought to be a beam weapon. It's a particle accelerator cannon. Particle accelerators function at or very near c, the speed of light. Transit time of the "projectile" should be instantaneous and deal its damage over time, just like the lasers do. This simple change would go a very long way towards balancing 6PPC Stalkers and alpha-sniping.

What would differenciate it from lasers then?

Are you also claiming that mechs with only energy slots shouldn't have the right to have at least one instant damage option?

Also, you refered to 6-PPC Stalkers as an unbalanced threat. For me, that remove of lot of your credibility..

[Lightfoot]

Stoicblitzer, on 15 June 2013 - 02:52 PM, said:

we know that. he said the limit was 3 in his example iirc. any ppc beyond 3 would add 10? more heat if fired simultaneously with the other 3. weak. also heat begins to dmg internals at 150% heat. lol who goes that high?

The stock AWS-9M on Tourmaline and Caustic Valley. 21 DHS, firing 3xERPPC's will just barely reach 150% plus on the fourth shot or any shot fired at plus 95% heat. So any mech with fewer heatsinks and 3xERPPCs would be hitting the cap sooner, adding a fourth ERPPC or PPC would be suicide.

[MustrumRidcully]

Shadowsword8, on 15 June 2013 - 10:01 PM, said:

What would differenciate it from lasers then?

It knocks out ECM. It deals different damage per hit at a different range.

[Lightfoot]

El Bandito, on 15 June 2013 - 05:18 PM, said:

Did you even read at all? The Field manual clearly says only PPC's lethality is close to an Autocannon, not the weapon itself. The weapon itself functions similar to a laser, using streaming energy, but with recoil.

The actual PPC is very similar to a bolt of lightning. Bing. It's a burst of particles traveling at near lightspeed with a duration much less than the impact of a ballistic shell. At least this is how Tesla's PPC worked. So I don't think mechs are going to dodge lightning bolts. I think the jargon gets misunderstood when they start talking about Ion and Anion streams, but these streams are interacting at relatavistic speeds so in essence it all happens in the blink of an eye. Like a lightning bolt. The Russians built one or a prototype around 1980 which would have been fueled by an atomic bomb detonation, but some drawbacks like the thing destroying itself couldn't be resolved.

To your point though, the meaning of "Lethality" is in this case Mech destruction. So they are saying the PPC will destroy mechs similar to high caliber autocannons. They didn't compare it to lasers.

Edited by Lightfoot, 16 June 2013 - 01:52 AM.

[Mechkilla]

HiplyRustic, on 15 June 2013 - 04:50 PM, said:

We already have a DoT energy weapon...it's called a laser.

The PPC fires high-energy ion bolts.

It is NOT a beam weapon.

It is not a DoT weapon.

Stop this.

You can't compare Pater Mors idea to a laser. A laser hits instantaneously but delivers its damage over a quite long time (up to 1 second). Firing on a moving or torso twisting target will spread the damage or a part of the beam will miss it.
The ppc stream needs time to travel (but on a very high speed). A hitting ppc stream (in Pater Mors idea) would deal its damage in a quite short time. Let's say the stream is 20m long. That means it only takes 0.01 seconds for the beam when it reached its target point to hit completly. A target that is not moving fast will get all the damage in one spot/section. Otherwise it might spread over two sections.
So it will still be not a DoT weapon (theoretically yes, practically not). In 0.01 seconds a light moving at 150kph would just made (!) 41 cm (less than 1.5 feet). Thinking about that it would make mostly no difference compared to the actual implementation. Also I think the time slices on the servers might be higher than 10ms or around that. That might prevent the devs to implement the ppc like Pater Mors suggested (though I like this idea).
To make Pater Mors idea happen the trail would have to be much much longer (at least 80-150m). The trail could be getting longer the further the ppc ball has to travel (because it decelerate based on aerodynamic effects that forms after the ppc ball). I would give the ball itself 6-7.5 damage.

But we all know, the generell problem with ppc is the absence of lostech thus giving us the insane pinpoint ability (or "skill" as cod-like-players would call it and they are real the reason why PGI is not try to stay canon in this point). Also we have no real heat system that is one of the key system in battletech. Those two missing elements are making 4-6 PPC battlemechs possible and hurting a lot of people.

[Lightfoot]

The 6xPPC Stalker is dead on Tuesday. Some players might carry 4 PPCs but the plus 10 heat penalty will make firing them all at once difficult. Still the alpha-strike is iconic MechWarrior gameplay, but it comes with penalties like high heat, shutdowns, the danger of self-destruction. Alpha-Striking is not going away, not ever.

In my tests I got the AWS-9M stock to hit 150% (or very close ot it) heat on Tourmaline and Caustic Valley. That's 3xERPPCs cooled by 21 DHS. A fourth PPC or ERPPC would cause damage to the mech. A mech with fewer DHS will hit the 150% heatcap sooner. The PPC is a good weapon, but just barely. If you apply this nerf everyone will just switch to lasers which do more damage per ton/heat/space. Then the same players will be coring you faster with Lasers. I think you all really want better durability of the mechs, but are focusing on the PPC because it is doing the damage.

PPC is not the best weapon in MWO so be careful what you wish for.

[Accursed Richards]

Lightfoot, on 16 June 2013 - 01:42 AM, said:

The actual PPC is very similar to a bolt of lightning. Bing. It's a burst of particles traveling at near lightspeed with a duration much less than the impact of a ballistic shell. At least this is how Tesla's PPC worked. So I don't think mechs are going to dodge lightning bolts. I think the jargon gets misunderstood when they start talking about Ion and Anion streams, but these streams are interacting at relatavistic speeds so in essence it all happens in the blink of an eye. Like a lightning bolt. The Russians built one or a prototype around 1980 which would have been fueled by an atomic bomb detonation, but some drawbacks like the thing destroying itself couldn't be resolved.

I can't enjoy lightning guns on my giant robot in the 31st century, unless they work realistically.

[CravenMadness]

I'm sorry, but all the comments about 'This will just make people boat lasers' ... As a 'deterrent' to the proposed heat changes... Are effing r-tards. Who cares if someone is boating six large lasers? They don't instantly hit you for sixty effin' damage in one spot as soon as you peek around a ledge of rock from 1400 meters away. You get those shiny sparks and blue beam, and you have a chance to get the heck back behind that rock before you lose your cockpit or a limb from someone you can't even see on screen resolution. The issue isn't the fact that, if you stand still and take it you die, the issue with er/ppcs is the complete and utter lack of ability to get the hell away from it or even be aware that it's there without taking risk of loss of mech/limb. Hell, even ballistics have barrel flash that you can see from a huge distance away and get out of the path of those damn AutoCannons (except for those putos running dual ac/20s ... Firebrand JagerBomb? Most Expensive JagerBomb.)