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[Jarvis Lancaster]

Always liked the looks of the Catapult from the start. Always noticed the little hatch on the back, kinda figured that's where the pilot gets in, but is it? Is it maybe just a service hatch and the pilots get in through an opening cockpit like an Apache helicopter? Other mechs too; how does the pilot get into a spider, shadow hawk, or Atlas?

I kinda guess from MW4 that the ejector-pods have something to do with this. Maybe all pilots are sealed into their cockpits when their inside their mechs, and they can only leave when the mech is docked or they eject.

I'm asking any die-hard fans of battletech fiction because I'm guessing that'd have the best description for how pilots get into their mechs. Are there any telltale signs on MWO mechs that pilots enter via an opening cockpit or hatch somewhere on the mech?

[Mad Porthos]

Yes there are signs of these hatches. There's a thread even where a player used in game art assets to show pilots, techs and other people at appropriate scale working on the outsides of mechs and getting pilots into their cockpits.

For some mechs, the scale is such that all is good, and it makes sense that they enter through a hatch in the back of the mech body or head. For other mechs, like the commando, the pictures showed that the scale that they have made some mechs in Mechwarrior Online is unrealistic, in that they are too small, by a bit. In these cases, the pilot would not actually fit in the head of the commando or in the right cockpit of the spider.

These designs have cockpits in them, and they look like they would be "right shaped" for a pilot to be in and pilot, with the view that you actually have from in the game cockpit, but when you actually realize seeing the pilot in the correct IN GAME size at like 1.8 meters, you realize that the pilot's cockpit has been shrunk down much smaller since it looks nice and appropriate on these like mechs that way. If you made the cockpits large enough to properly hold a 1.8m tall pilot, the commando would look like a hydro-encephalitic baby, and the spider would have to have a different shaped center "head".

This is why some people actually complain about the scaling of some light mechs. While they may be mad that a small target is hard to hit, and that is an advantage intended perhaps by the devs, for lights... there is the flaw that simply there is something off or wrong about mechs that are so small that they could not really hold the pilots that are supposed to be in them. It may break immersion for the logical minded, and generally annoy.