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Ammo explosions were a weakness of ballistic and missile weapons, and were also the reason CASE WAS INVENTED. If players chose to run standard engines, they could use said case and play like normal as it wouldn't be fatal to them, whereas an XL might instantaneously die. You get all of that extra power and weight savings from the XL at increased vulnerabilty, which ammo explosions in part helped produce.
"but people were dying too fast when the explosion rates were high", how much you wana bet that those people weren't using Standard engines and Case? But I do agree at times it was a bit extensive. However, there were certain ways it could have been handled better than just moving the go boom chance slider all the way to the left.
I've seen people mentioning a "dumping ammo function" around the forums, and I generally really like this idea. If an ammo bin is struck and it starts a chain reaction, you'd start taking damage over time from shells going off like fireworks in your mech instead of one giant ass explosion instantaneously. This would give you time to manually eject the ammo before it cooks off any further. If however, an ammo bin was destroyed in its entirety, it would just explode, because all of the ammo would have been hit at once, instead of a minor breach in the bin. Additionally, different ammo types could behave differently
AMS, Machinegun, and AC rounds would fire forward in random directions, striking various components as it makes its way to the armor, damaging it from the inside. It could work like the current critical hit system. ~40% chance to crit at least one time, with a chance to either deal full damage to internals, partial damage to internals and armor, or full damage to armor. The lighter the ammo type, the less damaging over time it would be and easier to eject. So for example, if a machinegun or AC2 ammo bin starts cooking off, you'd have plenty of time to eject it out of the mech and would only have taken minimal damage. If however, you're unfortunate to have an AC20 ammo bin cook off, you're pretty much ****** as a single shell could possibly instantly kill you based on your situation.
SRMS and LRMS would behave differently depending on how they were hit. If overheated or hit by a glancing blow, LRMS would fire forward and cause minimal damage through a physical impact to the internals of a mech, much like a bullet, due to them not being armed at a certain distance. If destroyed however, the LRM's warhead would detonate. The srm ammo bins would explode regardless of how they were struck(They wouldn't cook off, but just fly foward and hit the edge of the bin and detonate, blowing all of the other srms up in an instantaneous reaction)
Flamers could then be introduced as the weapon in the game to be used specifically for that purpose. They'd cause low crit damage compared to mgs, but would have a higher chance on each proc to cause an ammo explosion to occur.
So if a mech gets it armor breached, a pilot would have to weigh the risk vs reward of keeping that exposed ammo vulnerable to the enemies fire. If he found it to be too great of a risk, he could dump it, preventing any chance of him going boom. This could help alleviate the whole RNG issue of getting your ammo crit, by having the player able to directly influence the dice roll.
As for where ammo is located. I've always found it ridiculous that you could store ammo in legs for upper body weapons, even with the whole ammo elevator bullsnot. A system like that just wouldn't seem practical to me as the leg internal structure and actuators take up so much space, you just couldn't visibly see ammunition going around a knee joint without a chance of jamming. I could see ammo feeding directly into a leg weapon, but moving upward to a torso or arm, I don't see how it'd be possible.
TL:DR / Closing comments
So ammunition explosions don't happen very often, and people just store their ammo in the legs anyway, rendering case useless, and very unlikely to ever make a mech go pop. So I'd like to remedy this in a variety of ways. Either A.) remove the ability to store ammo in the legs for weapons that aren't in that respective area, B.) provide recycle bonuses for mechs with ammunition stores that are adjacent to their respective weapon system, aka maybe a 10% faster reload time if you keep your AC10 ammo in the same part of the mech the AC10 is in, or C.) increase ammo explosion rate drastically, in a way similar to being mentioned above with the ability to dump ammo, as there's really no risk to carrying ammo in the legs.
Edits: Grammar
Edited by Capnflintlock, 26 June 2014 - 02:37 PM.
