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[MuonNeutrino]

Right at the moment, there are two controls for controlling power - a power toggle, and the shutdown override button. Both are important controls to have easy access to, since you want to be able to quickly press them mid-combat. I personally have them both bound to keys near wasd for easy use.

The problem is that erroneous presses of these controls can be extremely bad. Obviously, accidentally powering down mid-fight can get you killed, especially on a mech that doesn't have the quick ignition skill yet. And while not usually as bad, accidentally overriding can also get you killed. This is compounded by the long-standing bug that the last letter in a chat message is also often executed by the game as a command - this results in my mech powering down every time I forget and end a chat message with the letter 'e'. Even if this were to be fixed, the problem of accidental button presses would remain.

There's not much that can be done about accidental overrides. However, accidental shutdowns can be fixed. My suggestion is, in addition to the current 'toggle power' control, to add additional controls that specifically do nothing other than power up, or power down, the battlemech. If you were already powered up and hit the 'power up' control, it would do nothing, and similarly if you were powered down and hit the 'power down' control it would also do nothing.

This would be helpful mostly because it's the 'power up' control that you generally actually need instant, easy access to, not the 'toggle power' control, and accidentally pressing this control almost never would have negative consequences. Therefore, you could bind 'power up' to a convenient, easy to hit button,and bind 'toggle power' to something out of the way. This would mitigate several issues. First, until the chat bug gets squished again it would prevent mechs from accidentally powering down because they ended their chat messages with the wrong letter. Second, it would prevent accidental button presses in the heat of combat from erroneously powering down the mech. Third, it would prevent the 'powered up on its own the instant before I hit the power button, therefore it shuts back down again' cycle.

The devs have already shown a willingness to add these sorts of overlapping controls. There are now separate buttons for toggle and momentary arm lock, as well as about a dozen different ways to switch between different zoom levels, so there doesn't seem to me to be any reason why this couldn't be added too. This ought to be a relatively simple change, as well, though the standard 'I am not a programmer' disclaimer applies.