stjobe, on 20 February 2014 - 03:12 PM, said:
And the LB-10X, of course.
And the MG, which has a random cone of fire.
And the Flamer, which has the same.
Edit: Doubling internal structure would make life much harder for Light 'mechs, with their relatively lighter armament and lower alpha combined with their natural tendency to go for the biggest target available.
As a predominantly Light pilot, I'm not overly keen on the idea. In fact, I think it's a bad idea. It's not the armour or internal structure values that are the problem, it's instant pin-point alpha striking; so let's do something about that instead.
My suggestion is
forced chain-fire and a reworked alpha strike mechanic (extra cooldown and a cone of fire - make alpha strike an "oh shit" button, not the ordinary way of using your weaponry).
I almost always go for the enemy light mechs first when I pilot a light.I find a large portion of the light pilots do go for the big mechs first and are utterly hopeless in a light vs light dog fight.
But putting that asside...
Light mechs would not suffer any more than any other mech class.The proportional damage they inflict is the same.Actually if anything machinegun equiped mechs may be seeing a significant boost in viability with doubled internals.
I have made suggestions on altering how certain weapons inflict damage based on what type of hit point pool is being hit.
We currently have three seperate hitpoint pools in the mix.
1) Armor
2) Internal Structure
3) Component health
So just as an example we could do this,
ACs inflict 100% damage to armor 50% damage to internals and 100% damage to components.When a hit is resolved the damage is applied to a single target location first (armor if it is present) any excess damage is randomly assigned a target from available options (either internal structure or a component if it is present and not previously destroyed)
To differentiate a weapon type we could have beam weapons like large lasers inflict 100% damage to armor 100% to internal and 100% to components.The huge difference would be a beam weapon deploys damage in "ticks" each damage tick deals a portion of the weapons total damage.Each tick is applied to the targeted area if it is armor.If the target area is not armored each tick is randomly assigned a target from available options (internal structure or components)
These examples show that two distinctive weapon types can be assigned distinctive roles.
An AC is a can opener that punches through armor with pinpoint front loaded damage.The AC is good against armor but less effective at damaging structure.The AC is still potent against components when they are hit deal 100% damage against them so an AC firing into an unarmored body segment is either going to do a little structure damage or a lot of component damage.
Conversley the Laser is equally good at dealing damage against any health pool type.The disadvantages are the need to maintain aim during beam duration (exstending exposure to enemy fire and reducing access to cover while in combat) The advantages are the beam when fired into unarmored body segments will likely hit both component health and structure health making a beam weapon more likely to "seek" damaged health pools.
That is just a basic idea of additional mechanics that can be implimented to balance weapon functions without altering their core functionality.