1126 replies to this topic

[Ragtag soldier]

Artgathan, on 13 April 2015 - 05:59 PM, said:

I know that (based on the mechanics of the game) it is perfectly possible for a HBK-4P to alpha a target from 1 Hex away and hit every component on the target (even though 6 of those MLs are ostensibly mounted in parallel, firing at a short range, and grouped close together).

a hex is thirty meters across, and barring the target is immobilized (trapped in something or knocked out or such) even a unit that hasn't left it's starting hex in a turn is assumed to be making evasive maneuvers in that area, accounting for the lack of precision there. same reason why you can fire a large laser into an infantry unit and hit all of one guy instead of flashboiling four-five guys into mist, they see a mech targeting them and scatter.

[Artgathan]

Ragtag soldier, on 13 April 2015 - 06:08 PM, said:

a hex is thirty meters across, and barring the target is immobilized (trapped in something or knocked out or such) even a unit that hasn't left it's starting hex in a turn is assumed to be making evasive maneuvers in that area, accounting for the lack of precision there. same reason why you can fire a large laser into an infantry unit and hit all of one guy instead of flashboiling four-five guys into mist, they see a mech targeting them and scatter.

What if the target is shut down? The pilot then has ~10 seconds to line their shots up. From 30 meters. Against something the size of a Duplex.

[Y E O N N E]

Burktross, on 13 April 2015 - 05:55 PM, said:

How do you figure? Does not make sense that a mechwarrior would "say" "ok computer, get that guy's center torso" and the computer would try to target with said parameters? Why would you try to replace a human's intuition for threat assessment with a computer, and then delegate computational targeting to a human?

It doesn't make sense because that turns the pilot into little more than a glorified spotter. There's all this bravado over pilot skill in BT and yet...the pilot doesn't actually do anything except feed coordinates into a computer and move the 'Mech into a firing position? That's essentially what you are saying. That's what a battleship does. You've got the men in the Director feeding coordinates and ranging info to the boys in Main Plot, who then feed that into a computer which aims and fires the guns. But a battleship is slow and deliberate, and the slow pitching of the ocean in conditions where combat is possible has nothing on the lumpy, jarring, constant motion of a BattleMech.

The way I was seeing it, the 'Mech's got sensors on it to tell the pilot where the threats are, displaying the instantaneous firing solution for whichever one he decides to pursue after making his own judgement call. But, because the 'Mech has really complex movement and is a neural extension of the pilot, it was up to the pilot to both move it and make the shot. Your description makes less sense the faster the 'Mech goes.

And you imply that delegating the computational targeting to a human being ridiculous, but what's really ridiculous is that your computers are atrocious at targeting.

Artgathan, on 13 April 2015 - 05:59 PM, said:

Well lore states that the mech's can't actually move around without a pilot, so it's probably a system where the pilot takes control of the 'macro' aiming (target selection, gross motor alignment to target) and the Targeting Computer and Weapon CPUs handle the 'micro' aiming (the actual movement of the weapons on the gimbals to track the pilot's target). Consider how fighter jets work with missiles as a RL parallel - the pilot selects a target, the Jet/Missile handle the actual tracking of the target.

See above section about battleships.

Quote

Aye, under those conditions I would expect some deviance. However, (and my apologies for not making this clear), I was referring more to when mechs are standing next to one another - not moving - and they alpha and it lands everywhere. I've not actually played TT, but I know that (based on the mechanics of the game) it is perfectly possible for a HBK-4P to alpha a target from 1 Hex away and hit every component on the target (even though 6 of those MLs are ostensibly mounted in parallel, firing at a short range, and grouped close together).

Honestly, you should just chalk that up to crappy rules. They made a game, and they made it fair at the expense of making sense. What they should have done is tried to find a way to make it fair and make sense. I do know that you can call a targeted shot in TT, and that distance, movement, and I think Gunnery skills come into play there.

Quote

EDIT: To build on this, consider the presence of pilots making simultaneous attacks against multiple targets (for instance, firing weapons in your mech's left hand at a target to your left, and weapons in your mech's right hand against targets on your right, or engaging targets infront of and behind you at the same tie). As a human you can't do this accurately - your brain physically cannot handle that kind of information input (certainly not against targets to your front and rear). However, a mech can! You need only indicate that you'd like to shoot those two things. The mech's computer cranks through an algorithm to make it happen, gives you the green light, and you pull the trigger. Viola! Accurate hits against multiple targets simultaneously.

Also consider C3 Netowrks - if the battlemechs weapons were all directly controlled by a human there's no way C3 could work.

But the computers in TT and the lore can't do it accurately, either. That's why the whole thing smells funny.

Edited by Yeonne Greene, 13 April 2015 - 06:23 PM.

[ROSS-128]

Gotta love the Model 1940 Fusion Reactor.

Mystere, on 13 April 2015 - 12:27 PM, said:

One of the thoughts I threw in here was adopting a 2-3 meter R95 at 1000m while stationary and firing only 1 weapon. And so, yes, under those ideal conditions, they don't matter. But once you start moving and fire more than 1 weapon, then things start to get not so ideal.

Converting to your numbers (and if my math is correct ), it is equivalent to around 15 MoA while stationary and firing 1 weapon, and 60 MoA when running at full clip and firing XXX weapons or more. At 500m, that should be good enough to possibly miss the component you want to hit.

But as I said in a prior post, I just threw those numbers out there. It's the R95 I am interested in.




You're a cruel person. Hope I don't see you in the Hague.

On a more serious note, let us not forget that according to lore (according to the lore folks here anyway), much of the IS tech in 3050 is early 20th Century equivalent. So 10-15 MoA is fine by me under ideal conditions.



And which reminds me, I'm really here on this thread for convergence, not CoF. So why am I again offering suggestions for the latter?

15 MoA minimum with 60 MoA maximum (a whole degree?!) is pretty ridiculous, especially for a laser, but even for a cannon it's ridiculous.

Since you keep bringing up WWII tech, let's take a look at the 8.8cm KwK 43. It has a 50% dispersion of 30cm horizontally and 50cm vertically at 1000 meters. That's pretty close to the 68% value of one standard deviation, so bringing that in to 100m and rounding up a bit, about 1.5-2 MoA horizontally and 3 MoA vertically is a good estimate. Modern weapons are of course generally more accurate.

Amusingly, a modern MLRS can land rockets in about a 20 foot radius at 60 kilometers. Which gives a dispersion of about 1cm per 100m, or 0.34 MoA. But then the rockets are guided. An Abrams can generally group shots into around 0.75 MoA.

60 MoA is like... a Katyusha or something. Or a shotgun.

As far as fixed convergance goes, eh, it'd be annoying, but I'd probably just run something with tightly grouped shoulder weapons like a HBK-4P or BNC-3M, set my convergance to around 300-350m, and call it good. Lot of mechs would get screwed over hardpoint-wise, such as certain Thunderbolt variants, but other than that the meta wouldn't really change.

[Kuritaclan]

Yeonne Greene, on 13 April 2015 - 06:21 PM, said:

It doesn't make sense because that turns the pilot into little more than a glorified spotter. There's all this bravado over pilot skill in BT and yet...the pilot doesn't actually do anything except feed coordinates into a computer and move the 'Mech into a firing position? That's essentially what you are saying. That's what a battleship does. You've got the men in the Director feeding coordinates and ranging info to the boys in Main Plot, who then feed that into a computer which aims and fires the guns. But a battleship is slow and deliberate, and the slow pitching of the ocean in conditions where combat is possible has nothing on the lumpy, jarring, constant motion of a BattleMech.

The way I was seeing it, the 'Mech's got sensors on it to tell the pilot where the threats are, displaying the instantaneous firing solution for whichever one he decides to pursue after making his own judgement call. But, because the 'Mech has really complex movement and is a neural extension of the pilot, it was up to the pilot to both move it and make the shot. Your description makes less sense the faster the 'Mech goes.

And you imply that delegating the computational targeting to a human being ridiculous, but what's really ridiculous is that your computers are atrocious at targeting.

Read the sarna article about


Major Computer Systems & Sensors
and
Overall 'Mech functionality

http://www.sarna.net...ems_.26_Sensors





It isn't that hard.

Edited by Kuritaclan, 13 April 2015 - 06:38 PM.

[Artgathan]

Yeonne Greene, on 13 April 2015 - 06:21 PM, said:

It doesn't make sense because that turns the pilot into little more than a glorified spotter. There's all this bravado over pilot skill in BT and yet...the pilot doesn't actually do anything except feed coordinates into a computer and move the 'Mech into a firing position? That's essentially what you are saying. That's what a battleship does. You've got the men in the Director feeding coordinates and ranging info to the boys in Main Plot, who then feed that into a computer which aims and fires the guns. But a battleship is slow and deliberate, and the slow pitching of the ocean in conditions where combat is possible has nothing on the lumpy, jarring, constant motion of a BattleMech.

The way I was seeing it, the 'Mech's got sensors on it to tell the pilot where the threats are, displaying the instantaneous firing solution for whichever one he decides to pursue after making his own judgement call. But, because the 'Mech has really complex movement and is a neural extension of the pilot, it was up to the pilot to both move it and make the shot. Your description makes less sense the faster the 'Mech goes.

And you imply that delegating the computational targeting to a human being ridiculous, but what's really ridiculous is that your computers are atrocious at targeting.

In defense of BT TCs, you did say the mech's movement was more turbulent than that of a battleship

Regarding 'Piloting Skills': to my understanding the way these interact with the mech with regards to gunnery is that the mech needs to remain focused on a target to get better targeting telemetry (for instance, you can't really tell how fast someone is running if the only data point you have is their position at time T1). Better pilots are able to keep the target in their sights "more effectively" (longer I suppose? They keep the center of mass targeted instead of a limb?), which allows their mechs to crank out more accurate firing solutions.

I say this because in the lore there are stories about pilots waiting to achieve a targeting locks (various colorful descriptions about crosshairs changing from black to red to gold), even when firing lasers.

Yeonne Greene, on 13 April 2015 - 06:21 PM, said:

Honestly, you should just chalk that up to crappy rules. They made a game, and they made it fair at the expense of making sense. What they should have done is tried to find a way to make it fair and make sense. I do know that you can call a targeted shot in TT, and that distance, movement, and I think Gunnery skills come into play there.

I always thought it fit well thematically with the garbage targeting computers being run on software that hasn't been maintained or upgraded in centuries. Coupled with the various bits of battle damage, it made sense to me that not everything would work correctly (especially if they're using such complicated systems - one kink anywhere and the whole system is FUBAR).

Yeonne Greene, on 13 April 2015 - 06:21 PM, said:

But the computers in TT and the lore can't do it accurately, either. That's why the whole thing smells funny.

But they can do it more reliably than humans. One human being cannot physically keep track of two different targets. The best that can be achieved is to rapidly switch your attention between both of them (people refer to this as 'multitasking'), but they're going to drop some data points along the way. Battlemechs don't appear to have this problem.

Again though, C3. If the battlemech is handling the firing solution, it makes sense that networking them would allow to-hit bonuses, since a single mech is now tapping the computational power of three others (and they can now compare their data against each-other to reduce error). Think of it like GPS - the more satellites you throw in, the more accurate your reading. How would C3 work for human shooters? You get laser-like focus because you don't want to shoot your friend?

By the way - I'm arguing all of this in favor of implementing a system like this in MW:O. I'm not a huge fan of our instant convergence system. I'm just interested in hashing out the details of how mechs operate.

[Y E O N N E]

Personally, I'd want MW:O to go full on sim and dump the lore and abstracted game rules in favor of the more realistic mechanics they were trying to represent. Change the engagement scales to kilometers, give the cannons recoil that the pilot has to compensate for when firing, give lasers a performance curve (they focus out to a given distance and then start diverging) and make the susceptible to atmospherics, etc. The whole nine yards: give it to me!

As for doing it more reliably than humans, still not really buying it. If the pilot has to point the 'Mech in the direction of his target to gather telemetry, and he's trying to engage two targets, then he's either facing one target at the expense of the other or he's not facing either target. In both cases, the telemetry should suffer and we're right back where we started. Do you do martial arts? Because we do learn how to handle multiple targets simultaneously. The only thing we aren't doing is throwing in a plurality of ballistic calculations, but given how it works, you wouldn't need to anyway. You are mitigating the other threats while concentrating on one, using them against each other.

I always envisioned C3 as merely an extension of the sensor network. Normally, the 'Mech can only pick up the targets its radar has a line-of-sight to but, when connected to a C3 network, it also receives the radar data from all of the other 'Mechs connected in the field.

[Kuritaclan]

Yeonne Greene, on 13 April 2015 - 06:53 PM, said:

I always envisioned C3 as merely an extension of the sensor network. Normally, the 'Mech can only pick up the targets its radar has a line-of-sight to but, when connected to a C3 network, it also receives the radar data from all of the other 'Mechs connected in the field.

As it is described in the text book c3 only help in coordination and providing sensor datas about FFI and assumed specifications of the enemy mechs. However in a c3 network you had a better rocket guidance, what makes perfectly sence since you have multiple recon to loacate the enemy for Arrow IV ussage and so on. All telemetry of other clients are available also you can use the Target Acquisition System of other mechs. If someone has a lock you have it also (keyword: indirect LRM fire).

Edited by Kuritaclan, 13 April 2015 - 07:07 PM.

[Artgathan]

Yeonne Greene, on 13 April 2015 - 06:53 PM, said:

Personally, I'd want MW:O to go full on sim and dump the lore and abstracted game rules in favor of the more realistic mechanics they were trying to represent. Change the engagement scales to kilometers, give the cannons recoil that the pilot has to compensate for when firing, give lasers a performance curve (they focus out to a given distance and then start diverging) and make the susceptible to atmospherics, etc. The whole nine yards: give it to me!

As for doing it more reliably than humans, still not really buying it. If the pilot has to point the 'Mech in the direction of his target to gather telemetry, and he's trying to engage two targets, then he's either facing one target at the expense of the other or he's not facing either target. In both cases, the telemetry should suffer and we're right back where we started. Do you do martial arts? Because we do learn how to handle multiple targets simultaneously. The only thing we aren't doing is throwing in a plurality of ballistic calculations, but given how it works, you wouldn't need to anyway. You are mitigating the other threats while concentrating on one, using them against each other.

I always envisioned C3 as merely an extension of the sensor network. Normally, the 'Mech can only pick up the targets its radar has a line-of-sight to but, when connected to a C3 network, it also receives the radar data from all of the other 'Mechs connected in the field.

Fair point about needing to point the mech in the direction of the target to achieve locks. I'll take that back.

That said, humans still cannot do this (focus on multiple tasks). Our attention can only be focused on one thing at a time - that's a psychological fact. We're able to 'multitask' by rapidly switching our attention between multiple tasks, but if these tasks require real-time attention, we'll inevitably miss something. The military did tons of studies on this where they would give a soldier two radios and have two people talk to them at the same time. The soldier was tasked with getting the details of both simultaneous conversations. They could - at best - get the gist of both messages, but they could never remember all the details from both.

To use an analogy, we're a computer using a single-core processor. Most of our 'everyday' functionality ends up being hardwired into our systems (like breathing and walking), but the higher-level cognitive tasks use up the system and demand we do only one thing completely or many things incompletely.

To address the C3 point: if the mechs were only sharing radar data, why would their gunnery improve?

[Y E O N N E]

Kuritaclan, on 13 April 2015 - 06:37 PM, said:

Read the sarna article about


Major Computer Systems & Sensors
and
Overall 'Mech functionality

http://www.sarna.net...ems_.26_Sensors





It isn't that hard.

Seriously, dude? Dispense with the attitude. You are in no position to say "it isn't that hard" when you don't understand half of the things you've been linking in here, such as what a Garet D2J really is and how an AA platform works.

Kuritaclan, on 13 April 2015 - 07:00 PM, said:

As it is described in the text book c3 only help in coordination and providing sensor datas about FFI and assumed specifications of the enemy mechs. However in a c3 network you had a better rocket guidance, what makes perfectly sence since you have multiple recon to loacate the enemy for Arrow IV ussage and so on. All telemetry of other clients are available also you can use the Target Acquisition System of other mechs. If someone has a lock you have it also (keyword: indirect LRM fire).

Helping in coordination is a very broad objective. You can help with coordination by, surprise, sharing enemy location details.

Edited by Yeonne Greene, 13 April 2015 - 07:08 PM.

[Kuritaclan]

Yeonne Greene, on 13 April 2015 - 07:07 PM, said:

Seriously, dude? Dispense with the attitude. You are in no position to say "it isn't that hard" when you don't understand half of the things you've been linking in here, such as what a Garet D2J really is and how an AA platform works.

I'm sry for you if you be addicted to a story that you told yourself or get told by others who do not know better. It isn't that hard to just admit that you and others are just freaking out about something you do not know better and come up everytime with that wwII story (Jadaa Jadaa Jadaa). Well you can stop your denial mode. Or you keep it on. It does not change anything what is written in the article. What i said about T&T Systems, Fire controll Systems etc. it is what it is. And about how to achive the precision, well this is up to the fantasy of this future told by BT-universe. Subsystems to set up perfect condition for a precise shot are available in the our past so they are also true to could be used to achive the goal in the BT Universe.

Edited by Kuritaclan, 13 April 2015 - 07:19 PM.

[Mystere]

(Where are those modern accuracy charts when I need them? ... They're labelled as classified? ... Meh! I'm going to WWII charts. )

E Rommel, on 13 April 2015 - 06:28 PM, said:

15 MoA minimum with 60 MoA maximum (a whole degree?!) is pretty ridiculous, especially for a laser, but even for a cannon it's ridiculous.

Since you keep bringing up WWII tech, let's take a look at the 8.8cm KwK 43. It has a 50% dispersion of 30cm horizontally and 50cm vertically at 1000 meters. That's pretty close to the 68% value of one standard deviation, so bringing that in to 100m and rounding up a bit, about 1.5-2 MoA horizontally and 3 MoA vertically is a good estimate. Modern weapons are of course generally more accurate.

Either your MoA calculations are wrong, or mine are. But in any case (and here's the kicker) ...

That 50% dispersion for your 8.8cm KwK 43 is equivalent to ... drum roll please ... my 2-meter R95 rating at 1000m.

So it's not as ridiculous as you think it is, and as such I can live with it

As for that 1 degree, note that that is at full speed and firing multiple weapons. So I can very much live with that too. And that assumes my MoA calculation is even correct. If not, then the MoA is going to be even lower.

E Rommel, on 13 April 2015 - 06:28 PM, said:

60 MoA is like... a Katyusha or something. Or a shotgun.

Given the above, nope.

E Rommel, on 13 April 2015 - 06:28 PM, said:

As far as fixed convergance goes, eh, it'd be annoying, but I'd probably just run something with tightly grouped shoulder weapons like a HBK-4P or BNC-3M, set my convergance to around 300-350m, and call it good. Lot of mechs would get screwed over hardpoint-wise, such as certain Thunderbolt variants, but other than that the meta wouldn't really change.

What you might call "annoying", I call "requiring more skill".

Edited by Mystere, 13 April 2015 - 08:20 PM.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

pbiggz, on 13 April 2015 - 09:43 AM, said:

This is categorically false. You clearly never even played megamek, where there are AGRESSIVE weapons convergence penalties. Any canon excuses for weapons convergence all have their roots in the battletech TT rules, you know, the ACTUAL GAME WHICH EVERYTHING WE DO IS BASED ON. And you better believe the systems we propose here are better than whats in TT, because you would NOT like being able to only fire 1 medium laser at a time before incurring accuracy penalties. So shut up.

A board game is not good to implement in real time ... how are we to chess as a Hack & Slay konvertieren.Noch to protect with the usually much better than any shooting dice in an environment that does not have a major impact on the skills ... no fainting, no pilot simulated injuries

We want a game where you have to attend a military academy first 3 years, to serve a Mech, I guess most would if their ideas are implemented, first see how unrealistic abstracts much of it was in the TT, and how far from reality, and how it overwhelms the capabilities of a human pilot without neurohelmet with only 2 hands

Edited by CSJ Ranger, 13 April 2015 - 08:32 PM.

[Y E O N N E]

Kuritaclan, on 13 April 2015 - 07:14 PM, said:

I'm sry for you if you be addicted to a story that you told yourself or get told by others who do not know better. It isn't that hard to just admit that you and others are just freaking out about something you do not know better and come up everytime with that wwII story (Jadaa Jadaa Jadaa). Well you can stop your denial mode. Or you keep it on. It does not change anything what is written in the article. What i said about T&T Systems, Fire controll Systems etc. it is what it is. And about how to achive the precision, well this is up to the fantasy of this future told by BT-universe. Subsystems to set up perfect condition for a precise shot are available in the our past so they are also true to could be used to achive the goal in the BT Universe.

Spoiler

Mate, the only story in here is the story of me trying my best to decipher your broken language, exacerbated by your unwillingness to consistently type out whole words, spell properly, or use half-way decent syntax.

Seriously, look at is this mess:

Quote

Subsystems to set up perfect condition for a precise shot are available in the our past so they are also true to could be used to achive the goal in the BT Universe.

There are problems in there that transcend the language barrier. If you are going to edit your posts on the fly, make sure you edit out all the extra bits from your previous iteration on the sentence so we don't have to read syntactic disasters every time you hit the "Post" button.

To address that train-wreck of a statement:

Yes, sub-systems to set up perfect convergence do exist in our past, and present: it's called setting a bloody fixed convergence point or mounting all of your guns on one axis so you don't have to converge them in the first place. So, yes, we can use that in MechWarrior! Glad you agree!

Sarcasm aside, I am quite sure that whatever is in Sarna is gospel for BattleTech or whatever. Neat. A few problems:

• You don't fully understand what you've been reading on Sarna or Wikipedia
  
• You are plugging your ears and singing a song when there is no lore to support an active convergence system
  
• You are telling yourself your own story about what a standard targeting computer can and cannot do
  
• You haven't comprehended about half of anything I have said

All I've been doing in here is clarifying that WWII-like fixed convergence makes sense given the back-story and enumerated capabilities of 'Mechs in BattleTech, that real life still does it, and that anything else is impractical in both contexts. You can't just wave your hands and say "poof, it's the future!" because neither the lore nor the table-top rules are doing so for this topic. In fact, Sarna even states that the 'Mech will attempt to aim the weapons at the target, not that it is always successful or that it will converge to a component. Table-top doesn't do convergence, either, and it takes a skill check to target components with your weapons because that's the pilot intervening on the 'Mech's standard programming to make a special shot.

Apart from that, the other thing I've been doing is bouncing ideas for alternative interpretations of various related lore subjects off of others interested in discussing things like rational people instead of like children. I freely admit that I have my own preconceptions of how the stuff in BT works and that they are often not the same as the official documentation. I am not claiming that these preconceptions are actually how they work, only how I think they ought to work or how they worked in my head prior to being educated.

To close, I don't do ignore lists as a rule because I think everybody has potential for providing interesting and new perspectives and that getting bent out of shape over the internet is ridiculous, but I want you to know that your statements are such an eye-sore in terms of rational, logical progression that they might as well not exist.

Artgathan, on 13 April 2015 - 07:07 PM, said:

Fair point about needing to point the mech in the direction of the target to achieve locks. I'll take that back. That said, humans still cannot do this (focus on multiple tasks). Our attention can only be focused on one thing at a time - that's a psychological fact. We're able to 'multitask' by rapidly switching our attention between multiple tasks, but if these tasks require real-time attention, we'll inevitably miss something. The military did tons of studies on this where they would give a soldier two radios and have two people talk to them at the same time. The soldier was tasked with getting the details of both simultaneous conversations. They could - at best - get the gist of both messages, but they could never remember all the details from both. To use an analogy, we're a computer using a single-core processor. Most of our 'everyday' functionality ends up being hardwired into our systems (like breathing and walking), but the higher-level cognitive tasks use up the system and demand we do only one thing completely or many things incompletely.

Spoiler

No disagreement here, but let's back up a second. The pilot of a 'Mech performs the higher-level decisions, according to Sarna. When engaging two targets, the 'Mech is also relying on you to be aware of what these two targets are doing and to intervene on the computers to allow it to fire and move on both. The computers, in this case, are just performing the back-end calculations for the shot while you are still responsible for telling it to shoot two targets. That's the tricky part of engaging two targets, because you can always train with your weapons to reflexively and accurately engage a complicated pattern. I mean, if Lars Andersen can do what he does with a bow, learning to manually and accurately aim partially stabilized weapons on a 'Mech can't be out of the realm of possibility. If targeting were to work the way I described, it would be fantastically simple. We do it in this very game and with ergonomically non-ideal controls, even.

Quote

To address the C3 point: if the mechs were only sharing radar data, why would their gunnery improve?

Spoiler

Say three 'Mechs have LoS on one target. Their individual sensor sweeps only refresh target info at a set rate, right? There will be changes to the target between sweeps. If you have more 'Mechs with LoS on the target, then the target information will be updated more frequently as the sweeps overlap, affording your targeting computers more recent and more consistent information. So, gunnery wouldn't improve if you are the only one with LoS on a target, but it would if multiples have LoS.

At least, that's how I always saw it.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

now have beginner and single player against other groups hardly a chance if now be integrated mechanisms, which relate the learning curve even higher ... who will support the game still financially? the handful of TT fans? and CoF is already simulates the many weapons only optimal distance do full damage, and already many different distances, then optimal and minimal damage RanGes overwhelmed.
In combat stress a soldier is through the mental block, triggered by the Homer-1 enzyme only to the simplest tasks capable of more than two fire buttons is there already difficult

Edited by CSJ Ranger, 13 April 2015 - 09:27 PM.

[Hotthedd]

CSJ Ranger, on 13 April 2015 - 09:07 PM, said:

now have beginner and single player against other groups hardly a chance if now be integrated mechanisms, which relate the learning curve even higher ... who will support the game still financially? the handful of TT fans? and CoF is already simulates the many weapons only optimal distance do full damage, and already many different distances, then optimal and minimal damage RanGes overwhelmed.
In combat stress a soldier is through the mental block, triggered by the Homer-1 enzyme only to the simplest tasks capable of more than two fire buttons is there already difficult

There would have to be better interactive tutorials for the new player. Ideally there could be a single player campaign that must be completed before PvP is possible, and it could provide enough C-bills for a starter medium mech.

Yes a more realistic firing model, which stays truer to the BT universe would be harder. But MW:O should strive to be a great game, not "FPS arcade game #865"

[Kuritaclan]

Yeonne Greene, on 13 April 2015 - 08:57 PM, said:

To close, I don't do ignore lists as a rule because I think everybody has potential for providing interesting and new perspectives and that getting bent out of shape over the internet is ridiculous, but I want you to know that your statements are such an eye-sore in terms of rational, logical progression that they might as well not exist.

Well i'm ok with the point: in terms of rational, logical progression that might as well not exist - Yes it is a fictional future and the problem talking about it is that this future is in parts unwritten/not specified. Also it has many attempts to clarify how things could work. There are diffrent approach where to set the tech base - However this techbase time claim is irrelevant, because it has to be consistent with one point that Battletech try to achive or the 1st rule of this fictional universe is: "everything needs to be possible in real world - There is no magic and there is no different physics." -

We are talking about so called "LosTech" - many do think everything is LosTech and assosiate the "bombing back into stone age" with said tech standards of our past for example this ww II alike claim. The LosTech characteristic describe by BattleTech is advanced Technology invented in the timeframe of the Star League (founded 2571) was not longer produced (for example Star-ships and BattleMechs) because factories and shipyards got destroyed/scientist got killed, scientific instutions and libraries got destroyed. However for a periode of nearly 500 years there was tech progress before the Star League - this progress is not part of LosTech - and this part needs to be adressed, when it comes down to the second characteristic of LosTech difficulty to maintain the advanced tech of the Star League era. The timeframe between 1st sucession war around ~2780 and a next timepoint around ~3000 is over 200 years without bigger technological progress.

Sure mechanical parts could be maintained with a knowledge of the first half of the 20th century, but not the electronical part. You do not need a CNC-Tool to make parts with low tolerances, but 200 years of kludge, do not maintain electronic equipment of battlemechs, star-ships, infrastructure on the house planets with "replacing broken parts by parts out of salvage". Yes there are planets mentioned what set appart from the universe and degenerate into middle age, but they did not maintaine battlmechs and so on.

I think after the 1st, 2nd, 3rd sucessor war not to mention the border fights in between or in other words 250 years of battle, it is impossible to maintaine battlmech with star league advanced techlvl with only access to early 20th century based manufacturing technology. This is absurde and i think this mindset would be inconsistent! Subsystems like weapons, internal structur parts, armor, myomer and electronics need to be produced during the whole time to R&R the existing BattleMechs, Star-Ships and other techs which where available in the end of the 30th century of this future. Not at the same lvl alike of the Star League but at the Level achived in the 500 years before!

Also speaking about tech in MWO time ~3050 it seems you and others do not take into account the revival of tech in the first half of 31th century by rediscorvered data storage and the new universitys of NAIW and so on. Not to mention the Clan tech is advanced tech out of StarLeague time!

Yeonne Greene, on 13 April 2015 - 08:57 PM, said:

All I've been doing in here is clarifying that WWII-like fixed convergence makes sense given the back-story and enumerated capabilities of 'Mechs in BattleTech, that real life still does it, and that anything else is impractical in both contexts.

WWII-like tech base just makes no sense given the back-story and enumerated capabilities. Because i think examples like "computers to be an assistant in combat" of 500 years progress is far more advanced at what we had/have in first and second half of 20th century.

Yeonne Greene, on 13 April 2015 - 08:57 PM, said:

Sarcasm aside, I am quite sure that whatever is in Sarna is gospel for BattleTech or whatever. Neat. A few problems:

• You don't fully understand what you've been reading on Sarna or Wikipedia
  
• You are plugging your ears and singing a song when there is no lore to support an active convergence system
  
• You are telling yourself your own story about what a standard targeting computer can and cannot do
  
• You haven't comprehended about half of anything I have said

The real problem is:

• You and others don't understand how BattleTech-universe try to be a possible future out of or own past. You then deny a described 500 years tech progress - and come up with the "bombing into stoneage" missunderstanding, as a fully wipe out of any tech and introduce your WWII-story, while Battle Tech clearly say LosTech is all Tech invented during the time of StarLeague.
  
• You are plugging your ears, when nowaddays targeting computers and even targeting systems back in the 80s were capable to achive high accuracy fullfilling their task.
  
• You earase the lore of BattleTech and the assumed 500 year progress in tech, which was not wiped out, and need to be existent in this BattleTechUniverse to make the story of maintaining even further advanced technology invented during Star League era consistent!

Speaking of what is possible and what not. The problem that exists: Does MWO do it right with targeting systems. For me and for others it boil down to - autoconverge and targeting assistant to overcome deviation is a plausible thing for MWO taken the techbase of BattleTech into account.

Edited by Kuritaclan, 14 April 2015 - 07:34 AM.

[ROSS-128]

Mystere, on 13 April 2015 - 08:19 PM, said:

(Where are those modern accuracy charts when I need them? ... They're labelled as classified? ... Meh! I'm going to WWII charts. )



Either your MoA calculations are wrong, or mine are. But in any case (and here's the kicker) ...

That 50% dispersion for your 8.8cm KwK 43 is equivalent to ... drum roll please ... my 2-meter R95 rating at 1000m.

So it's not as ridiculous as you think it is, and as such I can live with it

As for that 1 degree, note that that is at full speed and firing multiple weapons. So I can very much live with that too. And that assumes my MoA calculation is even correct. If not, then the MoA is going to be even lower.




Given the above, nope.




What you might call "annoying", I call "requiring more skill".

Ah, I see it's time for an explanation of how Minutes of Angle work. As the name might imply, it's a measure of the angle between the expected trajectory and the actual trajectory. A minute is 1/60th of a degree. Fortunately, some people interested in measuring how accurate their guns were converted this to dispersion for us a long time ago: 1 minute of angle is a dispersion of about 2.9 cm at 100m.

This relationship is linear with distance, because the sides of a triangle with fixed angles have a fixed ratio. 2.9cm at 100m is equal to 29cm at 1000m, which is equal to 1 minute of angle.

So I'm sure you can see why it's unusual that you got roughly 10 times that value from 30cm at 1000m, which is equal to 3cm at 100m.

The relationship between angle and dispersion is not linear of course, it's described by the tangent function, but as long as we are working with differences less than a degree (and we are) we can pretend it is without too much error.

60 MoA would be 174cm at 100m, or 1740cm at 1000m. That is 17.4 meters of dispersion at 1000m, not 2.

I'm not sure where you're getting your "R95" value from either, since you only need two standard deviations to reach 95% confidence. Since I have been trying to base my calculations on standard deviations, a 95% confidence level should double them, not quadruple them.

Granted, for the 88 tables 50% isn't quite 1 SD, but it's close enough to estimate that the 68% value is less than 40cm/68cm respectively (since that relationship is definitely not linear, it drops off quite rapidly).

As far as "more skill", I don't see how it's any more skillfull when it wouldn't really change playstyles. It would just make some good mechs less good, some bad mechs more bad, and a handful of mechs don't care. Firing an alpha and twisting/covering would still get me more focused damage and less face time, it's just at sub-200 and over-500m ranges some of my damage would spread. Past 600 I don't care, since the meds fizzle before then and LPLs usually just tickle at that range.

I'd also have even more incentive to boat weapons with iddentical ranges, so I can converge them all to the same point. So I don't see what the acolytes of stock builds/schizo builds expect to gain from that. It would just be another nerf to mechs with poor hardpoint placement.

Seems like it would be a waste of effort, overall.

[Hotthedd]

Kuritaclan, on 14 April 2015 - 03:49 AM, said:

Speaking of what is possible and what not. The problem that exists: Does MWO do it right with targeting systems. For me and for others it boil down to - autoconverge and targeting assistant to overcome deviation is a plausible thing for MWO taken the techbase of BattleTech into account.

What you need to remember is that MechWarrior is based on BattleTech, and therefore needs to try and simulate the TT in spirit.

According to your arguments, a TT game would have played out like so:

"Okay, my Firestarter moved 12 hexes this turn, getting behind your Atlas. I'm take the movement penalty for running and jumping, and your Atlas moved 3 hexes."

"Alright, weapons phase. What are you going to shoot?"

"8 Medium Pulse lasers. AND I want to aim at the rear CT."

"That gives you another negative modifier. At this range you need to roll a 10 or better."

"No worries. Its a futuristic weapons platform." <rolls>
"I got a 7"

"Miss. Fire the next one."

"No, I fired all of them together, and since futuristic technology and stuff, there is no way I could miss. So that is 48 damage to your rear CT, destroying your mech. I win!!"

"What about the heat?"

"HEAT?!?! Who gives a crap about heat? You're dead. I win!"



...That does not sound like a good or fun game, and certainly not what MW:) should try to emulate.

[Kuritaclan]

E Rommel, on 14 April 2015 - 04:49 AM, said:

As far as "more skill", I don't see how it's any more skillfull when it wouldn't really change playstyles. It would just make some good mechs less good, some bad mechs more bad, and a handful of mechs don't care. Firing an alpha and twisting/covering would still get me more focused damage and less face time, it's just at sub-200 and over-500m ranges some of my damage would spread. Past 600 I don't care, since the meds fizzle before then and LPLs usually just tickle at that range.

I'd also have even more incentive to boat weapons with iddentical ranges, so I can converge them all to the same point. So I don't see what the acolytes of stock builds/schizo builds expect to gain from that. It would just be another nerf to mechs with poor hardpoint placement.

Seems like it would be a waste of effort, overall.

The conclusion seems flawless. If such a change would happen I imagine it the same way.

Hotthedd, on 14 April 2015 - 04:50 AM, said:

What you need to remember is that MechWarrior is based on BattleTech, and therefore needs to try and simulate the TT in spirit.
...

...That does not sound like a good or fun game, and certainly not what MW:) should try to emulate.

MWO as a emulation of the TT? Sry to dissapoint. I didn't worked in any MW Title, why should it do so in MWO? The only thing any game achived was a try to stay true to the BT-Universe. But everything else was adapted to fit realtime combat.

TT is like w8ing for your enemy to run up to you at 5m with a assault rifle, stoping in front of you, take time to aim and miss! Reality does not cover this story TT can tell it because of dice.

Edited by Kuritaclan, 14 April 2015 - 05:44 AM.