Posted 17 July 2014 - 01:08 PM
One of the things that could help this, and yes, I've already said it another way, is to make sure the engine is the source and determiner of thrust/power, while jump jets determine how effectively it is applied and/or how stable the mech is being thrust. By the lore, the fusion engine of a mech is creating thrust by venting super heated engine plasma and gases, or at least, using electricity to super heat some other reaction mass like air from the atmosphere around. In cases when a mech is operating in a vaccuum, the lore implies that some on board reaction mass is included, enough to make it through most engagements since there will not be any atmospheric reaction mass to take in and then vent to create thrust. Ultimately, it's PGI's choice, but I think that if you have a fuel source of "thrust" and it's coming out of one location (one jet) it will make for a much less stable platform, which is harder to cool as all that exhaust comes out of it. Multiple jets one would think are easier to cool at the same time, would offer greater stability and greater reliability as they are being damaged and one after another fails.
In either case, based off the general feel of the original game, a mech could jump in a manner allowing it to travel roughly equal to it's walking distance in the same ten second turn. That distance was rather 2/3 of it's max speed in that same time period and while you did not have to move that whole distance, typically you could. With the changes to a game like this, a computer game obviously we've had major changes and I don't really expect mechs to be jumping the same hundreds of meters they could walk or run in ten seconds, but it would be feasible I think for them to still have much more of a forward or at least DIRECTIONAL thrust than they do now, accompanying a vertical thrust that is sufficient to clear some of those very obstructions that jump jets are supposed to help you be able to be more MANUVERABLE around, such as hills, cliffs, buildings and the like.
The vertical component of jump has often been a great boon to pop tarters and many of them are deriding this "fix" as something that won't keep them down for long, once they adjust. They may well be able to, because many of them always have run more than simply one jump jet, having created builds that actually could spend the requisite tonnage on jump jets and more. They would be more effected if jump boosts threw thier mechs more forward in a given direction, in an arc, because if they were trying to use hills as cover, they would rather be leaping over the very hill they expected to provide cover, further more, if they tried to game things by "DELIBERATELY" not clearing hills and buildings, so they'd fall down behind them after shooting for cover, they would still be battering their mechs to death if thier velocity forward created significant impact. Hence, if a jump jet for example provide X m/s vertical lift, it should provide perhaps half that as directional lift. As one piles on more jump jets for height, they would have to contend with more horizontal thrust, preventing them as much advantage from being able to leap and land in the same secluded cover area. Decreasing jump jets to decrease the "offset" when they jump would also prevent them from actually getting the height to make thier cover clearning shots.