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[TELEFORCE]

There seems to be a ton of confusion as to what equipment is fixed on an omnimech and what isn't.

Let's look at a real life example, the F-15 fighter jet. The F-15 and an omnimech actually have a lot in common in which the basic vehicle is the same regardless of what weapons are mounted.

So you have the F-15 fighter jet. You can configure it depending on the mission profile. You can stick Sidewinder or AMRAAM missiles on it for air-to-air combat, JDAMs or JSOWs or any dumb bombs for air-to-ground combat. Maybe you want to run the plane as a wild weasel and fit anti-radiation missiles on it to attack ground radars.

Despite all of these capabilities, it has fixed equipment. The engines cannot be changed out for different types unless structural changes are made to the plane. The plane has a single "fixed" weapon, a Vulcan 20mm gatling gun, which wasn't designed to be swapped out with any other weapon than another Vulcan cannon. You also can't add wings to the plane without making structural changes to the airframe.



Now let's look at the omnimechs. Each omnimech chassis has a fixed configuration, not unlike the F-15 described above. They have engines that can't be changed out without making structural changes (that's how the BattleTech Lore has always been regarding omnimechs). Some have heatsinks fixed in certain locations that cannot be removed without structural changes. Some even have fixed weapons, like the Adder's flamer or the later Inner Sphere Avatar's twin medium lasers in the center torso. Those could be repaired, but outright removal may put the 'mech out of balance (again, it's a Lore thing).

The only place that the MWO devs seem to have deviated from the BattleTech construction rules with regards to omnimechs is armor placement, since it's implied that you can change armor placement on the 'mech's hit locations.

I've seen some posters try to explain that fixed equipment is "equipment that appears in every configuration", but that's not necessarily true. A notable example is the Warhawk. The Warhawk's targeting computer is not fixed equipment. Sure, it's fluffed in a way that makes it seem like it's fixed equipment, but due to the loadout-dependent nature of the device, it can't be fixed equipment (I know this changed in MWO, but since they've been following the BattleTech boardgame rules pretty closely, I highly doubt it will be fixed equipment).

Based on how I've seen the devs treat the current Inner Sphere 'mechs, I think they will be faithful to the latest BattleTech Board Game record sheets and place the fixed equipment and structural criticals as displayed. That means no double heat sinks in the legs of Timber Wolf types due to the placement of structural (FF/ES) critical slots, or additional engine-mounted double heat sinks on the Stormcrow since it only comes with 10 freezers in its base configuration (therefore every additional heatsink has to be mounted on the chassis somewhere).

With this in mind, I encourage anyone who reads this to take another look at the Command Chair posts regarding how omnimechs will work in MWO.