Odanan, on 25 March 2015 - 12:41 PM, said:
in TT, mechs are locked with their stock loadoutrs. Unless you want to spend millions of C-Bills to change anything. My defense for the armor limitation in MWO is the simple existence of a engine limitation, or a weapon limitation (hardpoints).
That's not really the case, Oda.
- Class A: field refit kit ("can be attempted with little or no access to support facilities") allowing for replacement of a single already-present weapon with one of the same type (energy/ballistic/missile) and similar or lesser size (# of criticals)
- Class B: field refit kit ("can be attempted with little or no access to support facilities") allowing for replacement of a single already-present weapon with one of a different type (energy → ballistic or missile, ballistic → missile or energy, missile → energy or ballistic) and similar or lesser size (# of criticals)
According to StratOps, replacing a weapon on a non-OmniTech 'Mech can be done in-the-field with little more than the replacement weapon, the right toolbox, and a hoist (or plenty of strong backs).
Note that it takes a Class C refit to overcome the size restriction, and a Class D refit to create a new weapon mount (that is, to install a new weapon where there was not a weapon previously mounted) - and both of those are "maintenance-level" refits (e.g. "requires access to the equipment and resources found in the appropriate type of transport cubicle") that cannot be done in the field.
For example, removing a
Hunchback's AC/20 and replacing it with an AC/10 is relatively easy (as a fairly basic Class A refit), but mounting a Machine gun underslung to it requires adding a second ballistic hardpoint where there was only one (now occupied by the AC/10), and so is far more difficult (in this case, as a Class D refit).
The main advantage of OmniMechs was, essentially, that one could do a number of maintenance-level refit tasks (but not all of them) as field-level refits (which meant they could be done for minimal time & monetary costs, while also increasing the flexibility of the particular 'Mech).
Of course, the trade-off was that the factory-level refits ("requires a production facility capable of producing the unit in question") & the remaining maintenance-level refits were made completely impossible for OmniMechs.
So, contrary to seemingly-popular belief, BattleTech canon DOES have a concept of limited weapon hardpoints, though the implementation that PGI created for MWO is essentially an inversion of BT's Class B refit - while the Class B refit makes hardpoints "size-locked but type-free", PGI's implementation is "type-locked but unsized".
Personally (and very much in hindsight), I would have preferred to have seen PGI go with a Class A implementation for standard BattleMechs (that is, to make hardpoints type-locked AND size-locked for non-OmniTech 'Mechs), and having OmniMechs make use of the current switchable pod system combined with a Class B implementation (that is, similar to what they have now but with "size-locked but type-free" hardpoints), as I feel that this would have solved (via prevention) a number of the previous (and current) "'meta' abuse" issues as well as enhanced the "flavor" difference between the two tech bases.
Thoughts?