290 replies to this topic

[Phasics]

It's a mute point, an altas built to spec using todays materials would basically collapse under it own weight let alone walk at 40kph

its simple not something that we could build with current materials technology let alone power/weight ratio engine/powerplant tech

so no it would not weigh more than 100ton of sci-fi future tech material

[Black Fool]

100-tons walking on what surface area? Might not collapse but it might sink...

[Phasics]

Black Fool, on 25 June 2012 - 05:11 AM, said:

100-tons walking on what surface area? Might not collapse but it might sink...

heh forget that consider the weight on the knee joints while walking 100ton of pressure over a very small area

[Dozer]

Melcyna, on 25 June 2012 - 01:31 AM, said:

You can't argue on 'grip of science' with giant bipedal mech in the same sentence since you know... the whole bipedal giant combat machine is pure nonsensical from both physical and military stand point of view since it neither has the logical sense physically to use such form, and neither does it have any logical sense from the military utility usage.

That's fine though since we can suspend our disbelief to an extent, and as long as the game is consistent about it we can sort of pretend about it while it suits the game context.

But the moment it's dissected with REAL logic, it will break apart very quickly.

And yes 'ultralight material can sink or ultra-heavy float under the right conditions' or you know to just condense it in the direct term 'does it weigh less than the water it displace with it's volume.

Just put it in the simplest term:
does the mech weigh LESS than the volume of water it displace? yes? it floats... no? it sinks... the end.

Of course you can What is logical isn't always what drives creativity or innovation now does it, be that it in either a civil and/or a military situation. If it was why on earth was the cocktail stick ever invented or the bouncing bomb (aka Dam Busters) or storming the beaches at Normandy Real logic would have likely stopped them (nearly did for the last two), and yet they still manifested. It's probably more to do with necessity, hmm maybe not the cocktail stick but still...

As for your condensing it to 'if it weigh's less' why bother? If someone can learn a bit more about how things actually work they are more likely to appreciate the complexities. Dumbing things down for the sake of simplicity and brevity is the bane of a person's intellectual advancement. Let people learn and grow. There's no real harm in sharing

Edited by Dozer, 25 June 2012 - 06:57 AM.

[Phasics]

I love how people can dispute the true weight of mech and yet I have no doubt they'd have no problem accepting a mass effect field reduces an objects mass in another game

are we really arguing that the game explanations don't adequately explain the in-game "reality" ?

ever consider maybe in BT universe the mass of Protons and Neutron is less than our universe

ever consider we don't even get what gravity really is we just know what conditions cause its effects

[Squeak]

ROFLMAO take it from a self impossed giant rat, its a game dont think about it to much or you will relize how much of your life is embed in fiction

[Feindfeuer]

Battletech is not a hard sci-fi setting. There is no need to explain the weight for the magic-space-knight-robot-armor besides what the writer feels would be a fitting number.

[Lord Of NOOB]

This is battletech not Star Treck. I mean even the sceleton weights of an Atlas is calculated with 10T no matter the armor it carries. And the Nuclear Reactor weights 19 tonnes. (I mean emagine you are moveing on a nice Atombomb into battle, lol)

my 2 sents is. I like the unrealism. It as the style over substance factor which makes the hole thing cool.
I like the 100 Tonnes a lot because it keeps things simple in my head.

[xxx WreckinBallRaj xxx]

Guys it's not all an exact science. Try to suspend your disbelief a little. It looks very realistic and that should be good enough.

[Fl3tcher]

I think it all may have something to do with all this being space opera >.>

[grimzod]

Heat sinks are a vulnerable spot, like the NBC filter vents on a Abrams tank (yes enemy rounds and rockets have knocked an Abrams out by hitting that spot), designed to vent waste engine heat. You can't cover it up completely and STILL vent waste heat. Elementary engineering. They don't have to be mounted externally and aren't, really, though some are definitely in the engine others are spaced around the mech. Also, waste heat is generated by the myomer muscles in a mech and theres a lot fo that to disperse.
.
@dauntlessK

Quote

Ablative armor of thebattletech universe: Introduced in 2470 by the Terran Hegemony. It is generally destroyed or blown off when hit, but in the process of doing so, it absorbs enormous energies, protecting the unit it is mounted on. While powerful blows will still rock a vehicle, there will be little, if any, internal damage as long as armor plating still remains. Armor-piercing rounds do exist for certain weapons, but they require a higher technology level and cost more. As a result, destroying a mech requires either immense firepower, concentrated fire on a vulnerable location, or a lucky hit.


Standard armor is composed of several layers providing various degrees of protection and support. The first layer is extremely strong steel, the result of crystal alignment and radiation treatment, which is also very brittle. The second layer is a ceramic, cubic boron nitride, which combined with a web of artificial diamond fibers acts as a backstop to the steel layer. These two layers rest atop a titanium alloy honeycomb structure which provides support, and a layer of self-sealing polymer sealant which allows for space and underwater operations

So, from the above you now realize the armor is designed to be ablative and manages not only to shed massive firepower from the mech leavin gt intact, it is easy to repair int he field. The concept you are looking for is diminishing returns. With lightweight ablative armor you have nimble mechs, without it you have agromechs that die under the first volley. Add massive primitive armor slabs... called Hardened Armor, and your mech loses a bit of its speed gaining toughness. Do that, its in the TT rules but if they implement it in this game i'll be surprised.

Quote

Vassago Legion, on 13 June 2012 - 05:45 PM, said:

I've always thought the 100 ton "limit" was absurd when the Germans had a tank, Maus, in WW2 that weighed 188 tons, and it only had one cannon. Tanks aren't solid either, Some of them have enough room for 5 or 6 people.

And even then their Ferdinand tanks caught fire going up hills (took them a bit to fix that, rebuilding th etanks as Elephants). I can build a 190 ton solid mass of armor and give it wheels but that doesnt mean it'll work. When we catch up to 31st century engineering (which is mostly 24th/25th century engineering in their universe) we'll be able to build battlemechs like they do. When the game came out the 100 ton limit was there. There was no innovation or new creation of mechs on a regular basis and few facilities that coudl even construct an Atlas. It took a while to go above 100 tons, not that i'd advise building mechs larger/denser, just makes larger targets for cheap mechbuster aircraft.

@dauntlessK

Quote

Tell me what you'd do as a designer if there was a new armor that was twice as thin and could stop your bullet easier. You'd simply design a better projectile, whether that means bigger, faster, harder, etc. And then what? Eventually you'd have a weapon that could outdo that armor, so you can either improve the armor technology again or thicken it to the orignal thickness, or both.

Acid and AP rounds, already in the TT game. Been there for years. Designed to counter armor. What next?

Thomas Hogarth, on 13 June 2012 - 06:15 PM, said:

It's been speculated by people that write for Catalyst that are smarter than I am that 'Mechs have similar densities to foam. That's right, by all rationale, 'Mechs should float quite easily and be blown over in a light wind.

Some may assert that it's easier to simply add a zero to the end of the weights. I think this leaves us with non-sensical machine gun weights. Easier to just assume that it weighs more in some manner or another and move on.

Of course the foam rubber M1 Abrams has an internal volume of roughly 70 cubic meters and a weight of 60+ tons has four crew, large internal spaces and is 8 meters long. An Atlas is barely 13 maybe 14 meters tall and pretty solid (discounting foamed metal internal strucure and motive forces of electrillally motivated myomer bundles), has internal spaces for one crew and ammo.

Hmmmm..... neither seem to be foam rubber. Or light for their given volume.

Edited by grimzod, 25 June 2012 - 07:54 AM.

[grimzod]

Black Fool, on 25 June 2012 - 05:11 AM, said:

100-tons walking on what surface area? Might not collapse but it might sink...

An Atlas doesn't have big flat feet because of its agressive mating season urges.

Jaguar Knight, on 18 June 2012 - 05:45 AM, said:

The 100 tons of the Atlas is not it's weight, but is the weight limit of the amount of weapons, ammo, heat sinks and armor it's endo-skeleton can carry. Therefor a 100 ton Atlas in fact could very well weigh in at 150 or more tons.

Nope.

[Nicolai Deadfield]

Umm. It's scifi. Use your suspension of disbelief and move on. As long as the rule stays concrete in the BT/MW world, we can let it slide.

[Dozer]

suspend... suspend... suspend.

Ah that's better

Edited by Dozer, 25 June 2012 - 09:20 AM.

[Dagger6T6]

aren't most mechs parts made of...

?

[Melcyna]

Dozer, on 25 June 2012 - 05:25 AM, said:

Of course you can What is logical isn't always what drives creativity or innovation now does it, be that it in either a civil and/or a military situation. If it was why on earth was the cocktail stick ever invented or the bouncing bomb (aka Dam Busters) or storming the beaches at Normandy Real logic would have likely stopped them (nearly did for the last two), and yet they still manifested. It's probably more to do with necessity, hmm maybe not the cocktail stick but still...

As for your condensing it to 'if it weigh's less' why bother? If someone can learn a bit more about how things actually work they are more likely to appreciate the complexities. Dumbing things down for the sake of simplicity and brevity is the bane of a person's intellectual advancement. Let people learn and grow. There's no real harm in sharing

Don't get me wrong, i don't argue against creativity and especially for entertainment (else it'll be boring).

But do NOT, i repeat DO NOT attempt to mix IRL thought process into it if it's not designed to be robust against it (of which battletech is ANYTHING but) because there's a LOGIC involved in everything when you make comparison with IRL, (hence why we tend to avoid that in sci fi for games since they don't usually held up to it), you are mistaken when you said real logic would've stopped dam buster or normandy assault because logic was behind both design decision in EVERY step.

what you are missing is the REASONING behind their logic, and design which is common because most civilians don't understand the details.

Dam Buster bouncing bomb for example is the product of LOGIC iteration, for example:

why didn't they use normal bombs instead?
A. bombs accuracy of the time was VERY imprecise relying on massed saturation to achieve any sort of hit, the exception being dive bombing but dive bombers cannot carry bombs that can do sufficient damage to the dam, and regular bombs will not do catastrophic damage on the dam structure from above without repeated hits.

Massed formation assault on the dam would be about the only way to achieve any real success with conventional bomb but Britain was in NO SHAPE or condition to divert sufficient bombers that would be required for such task given they are hard pressed and need bombers to hit other targets of war in quantity and have limited resource for it.

Why not torpedoes which would be a natural choice of weapon?
B. because the german laid out anti torpedo net PRECISELY to counter this (they are not dumb, they KNEW torpedo bombers would spell complete destruction of the dam if allowed)

The bomb was specifically designed as such to allow it to be aimed much more accurately at the broad section of a target on water surface on a level run (which is important because the large bombers of the era which is needed to carry the bomb cannot aim precisely like a dive bomber with dive bombing) and skip the underwater defenses like torpedo net as a bonus.

The bomb wasn't counter to logical thought process... it was in fact designed and chosen PRECISELY because of the logical thought process involved in the planning.

Same with Normandy, an entire planning stretching for months before the operation covered it (and with counter intelligence and deception operation of which was one of the most massive in scope of the war) and it's choice was taken not against the logic but WITH logical thought process taking into account the condition of the forces involved, and the time frame planned for the invasion.

Slight rant there, but there's no such thing as absence of logic when it comes to something as vital as war decision, for absence of one generally means defeat.

[Phasics]

If an Atlas weighs more than 100tons then so does your Mom

[Voyager I]

Vanguard319, on 25 June 2012 - 12:08 AM, said:

It Also helps safisfy the Square/Cube law (Where if you double an object's size, you triple it's volume and mass)

Actually, you octuple its volume and mass.

[Dozer]

Melcyna, on 25 June 2012 - 05:08 PM, said:

Don't get me wrong, i don't argue against creativity and especially for entertainment (else it'll be boring).

But do NOT, i repeat DO NOT attempt to mix IRL thought process into it if it's not designed to be robust against it (of which battletech is ANYTHING but) because there's a LOGIC involved in everything when you make comparison with IRL, (hence why we tend to avoid that in sci fi for games since they don't usually held up to it), you are mistaken when you said real logic would've stopped dam buster or normandy assault because logic was behind both design decision in EVERY step.

what you are missing is the REASONING behind their logic, and design which is common because most civilians don't understand the details.

....

Slight rant there, but there's no such thing as absence of logic when it comes to something as vital as war decision, for absence of one generally means defeat.

Sorry to disagree but having some military experience I can tell you some decisions are made for political and not logical reasons, at least not from a military perspective.


Your example of the logical reasoning behind the Bouncing Bomb, while impressive , fails to acknowledge that it was not universally accepted by the military nor politicians. For example pressure from Air Marshall Francis John Linnell via the chairman of Vickers, Sir Charles Worthington Craven, caused Wallis (the creator of the bomb) to resign from Vickers due to his belief that the work was taking away from the development of larger bombers. Sir Arthur Harris, head of bomber command also opposed the allocation of his bombers after discussion with Linnell for similar reasons. Wallis did an end run around them both to ensure that the Chief of Air Staff Air Marshall Charles Portal eventually heard (and approved) of the project. It was Portal who overrode them all - due mostly to the increased pressure from Winston Churchill to resolve the issue of German mass-production in that area that was hindering the war effort which was resulting in growing calls from the opposition that his continued leadership was hurting the war effort - and the project went ahead.


So in short, Wallis' real logic failed to impress those who were directly responsible for making it succeed at the time because their logic felt it was not worth pursuing. If it wasn't for the political pressure - Churchill wanting to keep his job basically - it may very well not have gone ahead hence my comments previously. I guess my point should be that logic is really subjective, much like this conversation, and as such doesn't truly exist in it's purest form

And please, don't think not understanding the reasoning behind things is mostly a 'civilian' issue. It's a people issue, period.

As for mixing IRL thought processes if they are not robust enough, that's purely a matter of opinion so we'll agree to disagree. I think they are to my logic, you think they aren't to yours. Mine is based on a position that they 'can' have a scientific basis because I acknowledge the inevitable advancement of science to reach the level where sci-fi become sci-fact and give credit to those - like the game designers - who seek the bridge that gap. Then again I am a bit of a 'dreamer' and therefore not bound by the constraints of cold 'hard' logic as some. Maybe it's called having a little faith and optimism

And can you honestly say that you understand the reasoning for the cocktail stick? I mean really... the cocktail stick?

BTW - kinda derailing the thread here aren't we Gods, we need to get into Beta!

Edited by Dozer, 25 June 2012 - 10:26 PM.

[Twisted Power]

Frostiken, on 13 June 2012 - 02:42 PM, said:

What I don't understand is how mechs function on worlds with more than 1g. Is there anything in the lore that ever describes a high-gravity world that basically causes heavier mechs to crumple under their own weight?
Also, jumpjets. Jumpjets put mechs under a lot of acceleration - I honestly can't picture a heavyweight mech activating the jumpjets and dealing with the high G-forces from acceleration and landing without breaking things.
Under a mere 2g, which you'd experience after simply falling 20 meters, your Archer weighs 140 tons o_O
Naturally there'd be some wiggle-room in the 'maximum weight' of a frame just to prevent this, but realistically why are mechs limited to x tons of weapons then? Even aircraft can overload themselves but it means they can't pull as many Gs, so wouldn't a mech on a high-gravity world have to go out missing a lot of weapons, and shouldn't they be able to overload the frame on a low-gravity world?
The mind boggles.

The myomer bundles ( I believe that is what they are called I prob spelled it wrong though) are like muscle fibers but as strong as metal. That is why a mech can hold the weight it does. These fibers are controlled by electric impulses and can be strengthened for impacts. The computer normally controls all this with help from a neuro helmet and suit that uses the pilots brain to control movement reactions. The reason that mechs walk on 2 feet is because the brain already has the motor functions for 2 feet.

There were 4 legged mechs or something but I remember something about even though faster and could carry more weapons, couldn't be controlled as well as 2 legged. Also 2 legged was cheaper and easier to get pilots used to. With that said, it IS possible that a mech can be more than its designed weight limit. There are plenty of examples in books where mechs carry things (like other parts of mechs) and even bigger. Also hold up other mechs from falling over. However you would never want to be overweight for too long as it could cause bad stress on the joints and damage can occur (this has also happened in the books). So if you want to be all technical a mech is like a human. Of course you could run around with heavier armor/weapons but you might hurt yourself trying to carry more then what is optimal.

Also this is a game there has to be a balance and they don’t want people kamakaze-ing with overloaded mechs.