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[Mad Porthos]

In Addition to some having been mentioned, such as clock and temperature, altimeter... and even an overall "satellite map", some alteratives suggest themselves from what we already have in the cockpit displayed as aspects I guess of the helmet HUD, e.g. battlegrid, heatscale, paper doll.

These monitors offer a possibility for example with that KILL screen. It's indicating 12 atlas skulls... cute, but not immersive - and while I've managed Ace of Spades, I can't really see the realistic value of a mechwarrior tracking how close to twelve kills he's got per battle, at least not so much that a whole readout would be developed into it. I am pretty certain that as it stands now it's a nice bit of flash, but a screen that could show up to twelve icons COULD be used BETTER for example to persistently show each of the enemy mechs that has been sighted so far. So for example, say you are scouting about and get a lock on a spider, then an atlas, then an arctic cheetah, why not have this screen show an spider, atlas and arctic cheetah - instead of the dim skulls. Once killed, each can get crossed off WITH one of those atlas skulls n' wrenches. This is a sort of way that it could be useful - telling each pilot out there, what types of enemies have been sighted and giving a persistent bit of information of what forces you are facing still. Perhaps it's limit for inner sphere mechs could be 12, because just about the largest engagement size most have seen in mech combat for centuries is usually about 3 lances vs 3 lances (12 mechs). Heck maybe the maximum could be modified by whether you have command console or beagle, allowing MORE tracked targets even.

I suppose if we did this and they moved to a 16 v 16 mode, the first few kills could be replaced with new sensor locks if you got new opponents, wiping out the skull indicator when space is needed. Likewise, for CW... new mechs replace the kill symbols and if you really are so far behind on kills that you've filled up the whole readout with no kills and tons of tracked targets of the enemy, then the C3 system has basically hit it's limit of I guess 12 shared locks/targets tracked. Just some ideas of course.

Enemy Paper Doll might be displayable on a screen rather than in the top left of the HUD, or perhaps a few mechs might be able to track and provide two seperate mechs as targets to other mechs, one selected normally by bracket and listed in top left HUD, another tracked and relayed if you have an Active Probe and indicated on a panel in the mech, with it's own seperate paper doll. Such a mech would have a better capability because of Active Probe, quite seperate from blocking ECM as it does now. In fact, someone might actually take an Active Probe as part of their role of scout if it had some use on their mech that also was carrying ECM. At present this wont happen though because active probe's prime advantage these days is only counter ECM, making it pointless if you already have ECM and thus countering ability as well.

So tracking of targets, that really could be a sensible way these screens could be used in an immersive manner, giving information that an experienced player can use, but that is not too obtrusive and blinding for new players who will probably just ignore the information on the screens as they do now - since it is just mostly graphical noise.