14 replies to this topic

[Edward Radenovic-Espinueva]

I have read on various posts that the reason they changed the Centurion's unique AC/20 arm look to something more "standardized" was for ease of modeling different ballistics with different looks. After all if you for example you fit 3 AC/2s on that unique arm it would look like you are firing an Ultra AC/2. If that's a valid case then why haven't they done that with the Hunchback's AC/20 side torso?

[Nothing Whatsoever]

Well, the devs first want to get all mechs to have the modular display when mounting a weapon before going back and fixing any issues with existing mechs.

After that we'll see once the devs have available time to address issues.

[TheCaptainJZ]

They've already done the visual updates to the Hunchbacks. In this case, they left it as it's protrayed in all previous drawings and models with the AC20 gun encased in the hunch. See: http://www.sarna.net..._Hunchback1.jpg

Edited by TheCaptainJZ, 22 February 2015 - 02:11 AM.

[Nightshade24]

Edward Radenovic-Espinueva, on 21 February 2015 - 02:12 PM, said:

I have read on various posts that the reason they changed the Centurion's unique AC/20 arm look to something more "standardized" was for ease of modeling different ballistics with different looks. After all if you for example you fit 3 AC/2s on that unique arm it would look like you are firing an Ultra AC/2. If that's a valid case then why haven't they done that with the Hunchback's AC/20 side torso?

Because the Hunchback is half the name of the hunchback.

Big dakka gun isn't half the name of the centurion.

That and it isn't that hard to put 3 AC 2's on a hunchback (look at it's model) However the Arm is well... yea.... hard.

[Edward Radenovic-Espinueva]

When the AC/20 arm is blown off and you look at the arm on the ground its the original arm! Just bring it back PGI/Piranha!

[Juodas Varnas]

Edward Radenovic-Espinueva, on 15 March 2015 - 12:02 AM, said:

When the AC/20 arm is blown off and you look at the arm on the ground its the original arm! Just bring it back PGI/Piranha!

[CruiseMissileCowboy]

Some things are not important right now, you have to keep in mind the game is still in Beta, and the Devs have a priority list of things to get right. Nitty gritty details are not high on the list.

[Koniving]

Had PGI used the lore friendly ACs rather than single shot tank rounds (akin to mech Rifles), we'd have different kinds of AC/20s. Minimum of 15 of them for the IS alone, and actually there's more than that.

Anyway.. Lore-wise the AC/20 on the Hunchback is the Tomozuduru Mount Type 20 at 180mm. (Canonically fires exactly 5 rounds per '20 damage' rating). Though toward 3046 it starts mounting the 120mm Kali Yama Big Bore (which fires 4 shots per second, for a total of 12 shots in 3 seconds for a rating of 20 damage.).

The Centurion's AC/20 (and the AC/10) are 120mm. (6 shots total per rating for the AC/10, 12 shots total per rating for the AC/20; basically a jam-free UAC/10 in this regard).
Source explains the 'rounds per ton' as being inaccurately titled on the computers in place of 'cassettes' or magazines.
Bit more.. (Stock mechs having 1 or 2 tons of ammo suddenly makes sense!)

Spoiler

For 5 'rounds' per ton (or 7 as in MWO), they're incorrectly labelled for 'cassettes'. That, for a human reference, is like having an M-16 and having 2 magazines per pouch. Each ammo pouch carries 2 magazines back when I was in the army. You load 3 pouches, you have 6 mags, each has 20 shots (for the size mags I got). That's 120 shots, but it's only 6 mags.

So for a mech, each ton 'pouch' is supposed to be 7 magazines, and for a 120mm AC/20 that's 12 shots per magazine or 84 shots per 'pouch'. The Tomozuduru AC/20 would only have 35 shots per pouch, but each one would do 4 damage as opposed to the 1.67 damage of the 120mm AC/20.

Dunno if PGI factored that in, but when you do that it makes NO SENSE if it's a single shot AC/20, rather than burst/auto fire AC/20s that take varying amounts of shots to deal 20 damage.

Then again we'd have a Victor with a 30mm AC/20 spamming 100 shots in a second. O.o; Scareh!

There's also the fact that the AC/20 would consume the entire arm's hardpoints and leave no space for anything else to be put in... so there isn't a valid reason other than not knowing or thinking of doing a 'fourth' position for the AC/20 that is between the AC mounts (which is EXACTLY where the 3rd MG goes while the third AC/2 goes on the bottom of the arm below the two points; so they did make this spot anyway) and have the AC/20 attach there instead with a larger model. That's an artistic issue and a bit of lack of foresight there.

CruiseMissileCowboy, on 15 March 2015 - 08:51 AM, said:

Some things are not important right now, you have to keep in mind the game is still in Beta, and the Devs have a priority list of things to get right. Nitty gritty details are not high on the list.

It isn't officially a beta anymore but this is essentially true. (CW is officially beta, but yeah)I think the only reason MWO shed the 'beta' off was all the statements by about half the players that they won't buy anything from a beta.

Edited by Koniving, 15 March 2015 - 09:18 AM.

[Edward Radenovic-Espinueva]

Some things aren't important right now, you are right. Changing the Centurion's AC/20 arm wasn't important to begin with so simply change it back and focus on something else

[Tim East]

Koniving, on 15 March 2015 - 09:04 AM, said:

Then again we'd have a Victor with a 30mm AC/20 spamming 100 shots in a second. O.o; Scareh!

Probably wouldn't be good, but it'd be super-cool sounding according to my imagination. I'd have to think about buying a Victor...

[SnagaDance]

Koniving, on 15 March 2015 - 09:04 AM, said:

Then again we'd have a Victor with a 30mm AC/20 spamming 100 shots in a second. O.o; Scareh

Wait, you mean to tell me that huge stovepipe of a weapon arm only holds a 30mm cannon??? (Must be a whole GAU hidden in there)

[Koniving]

Edit: Sorry, Firefox was getting above 3 gigs of RAM and doing its crashy thing so I had to send the post early. Edited and added more stuff to it.

SnagaDance, on 16 March 2015 - 12:31 AM, said:

Wait, you mean to tell me that huge stovepipe of a weapon arm only holds a 30mm cannon??? (Must be a whole GAU hidden in there)

There is something to consider.
While I find the scale depicted here to be wonky... This is the Solaris' official Hunchback art.

Notice despite the size of the barrel, lots of tiny shots are coming out in a circular pattern?

Many of the ACs -- as originally described by BattleTechnology (a then official magazine made unofficial in 2008 by Catalyst Games) in 1987 which is mainly written by the man who wrote the first novel and supplemented with little tidbits, lore, explanations of various things included the heavily downgraded technology of the future by editors who are also involved with the original rulesets of classic BT -- are described as gatling guns in large protected barrels that fire explosive rounds, with each individual shot ranging from significantly inferior up to comparable with missiles in damage (with the then '120mm' AC limit being the high end of 3 to 4 rounds per second split with cassette changes, they're each individual shot is still inferior to SRMs but superior to LRMs in terms of damage). Their high point is their rapid fire rate and low heat, which is especially handy after having melted or lost several heatsinks.

The AC thingy I've been flashing around lately.


Firing rates remotely resembling this has never been possible in online mechwarrior games and I'm not sure if some of the more extreme rates (like the Victor's) would ever be possible in our lifetime (far as internet issues associated with it are concerned).
---

Conversely to ACs, and this is the part I'm on the fence about... the lasers generally had a maximum beam time of 0.2 seconds, most of them having a beam duration of 0.1 seconds. As you can imagine this leaves a few problems (but 'missing' would be a LOT easier). The drawback? The original mech lasers could only be fired one to two times in 10 seconds or the lasers would explode/melt/malfunction (this is 100% pure fluff, there's never been rules associated with this [that I know of or can find] since [in my opinion] at the time of its writing Battletech was still far more infantry/vehicle oriented with its other games that eventually just got 'merged' into BT. And in 1989 the concept seems to have simply been dropped around the time of the first mechwarrior game, don't know if Crescent Hawks had any relation or not in terms of that change.)



I've noticed between classic BT's "eras" and Clan Invasion, a huge number of reasons for why things were the way they were changed.

For example, now the official BT reason there's a minimum range on IS LRMs as stated by the Hotloaded optional state for LRMs, is that the Inner Sphere doesn't put the missiles into the tubes until after acquiring a lock.
So "lock, load, fire." This is to avoid having the missiles risk exploding in the launchers if the launchers are hit.
If Hotloaded however, they're ready to launch right away with no minimum range accuracy penalty. (When using this StratOps [or was it TactOps] rule, critting a Clan LRM launcher will always cause 1 'load' of ammo to explode where the launcher is located to reflect Clans always having their missiles loaded and ready).

The original reason? They were always fired at ballistic launch angles (45 degrees or higher) so that they would lob up and over things to negate cover. Downfall is that LRMs in 1987 are described as 95 to 100% unguided. No lock, each missile being rudimentary so that there'd be no way to jam or intercept them and ideally no way to detect them coming your way. See on the right.


So there you have it. What's funny is here everything has been plagued with ECM in 1987. But in the 90s, ECM gets 'reinvented' after having been 'extinct' for several hundred years.

As you might notice on the left, the original reason for minimum range on PPCs, Gauss Rifles, and ACs is simply "They're heavy so they can't track as quickly as lasers can." That's...pretty much it in 1987. Heavy stuff can't be pointed and aimed quickly enough to hit things at close range.

Later on in the 90s, it became "Well PPCs are very likely to explode, so field inhibitors were created. There's a field inhibitor which degrades the performance of the PPC, requiring a charge-up. Charging your PPC is why it's difficult to hit targets 90 meters or less. But that's okay, you can deactivate the field inhibitor to be able to rapidly fire your PPC without charging up -- at the risk of it exploding in your face."

For obvious reasons the conflicts original BT lore has with 90s BT lore (and having Unseen mechs which were fully used BT mechs at the time on every other page and the front covers) are probably why it got uncanonized in 2008. But this sort of stuff is how it's originally written.

Edited by Koniving, 16 March 2015 - 01:51 AM.

[Tim East]

I actually kind of liked the retro feel of "who needs guided missiles" and "big gun can has inertia" myself, and think it would be super-cool if they brought back some kind of pinpoint delay. You know, so the elite skill of the same name actually made some kind of measurable difference.

[Koniving]

Tim East, on 16 March 2015 - 07:11 AM, said:

I actually kind of liked the retro feel of "who needs guided missiles" and "big gun can has inertia" myself, and think it would be super-cool if they brought back some kind of pinpoint delay. You know, so the elite skill of the same name actually made some kind of measurable difference.

It would be nice. Til then I'm just working out ideas of a more direct TT to real time translation while removing the RNGs. One day, one day.

(What Tim is talking about for those who don't know. Watch the laser beams which start as hitting many different spots before recalibrating to hit a single point). Warning for limited bandwidth users, gif.

Spoiler

In the mean time, MWO originally had that LRMs that worked like that. They still went 1,000 instead of 660, but so far as I could tell were unguided and easily dodged (but you had NO warning, and they were absolutely devastating! They also came straight down so cover meant nothing; and I liked that. There's more skill in dodging than hiding).
Take a peek. Also, omg that speed and spread! (Back then they did 1.9 damage, and had missile splash that 'glitched' on occasion with smaller mechs to generate as much as "25 damage per missile" (is what PGI revealed after many tests regarding it and the Commando which would be instantly gibbed when hit). Another gif.

Spoiler

Edited by Koniving, 16 March 2015 - 07:36 AM.

[Fobhopper]

CruiseMissileCowboy, on 15 March 2015 - 08:51 AM, said:

Some things are not important right now, you have to keep in mind the game is still in Beta, and the Devs have a priority list of things to get right. Nitty gritty details are not high on the list.

The game went out of beta over a year ago. Its only CW thats in 'beta' right now.

as for the main topic, simply put there are only so many devs, and so many things on their plate right now (news mechs, new maps) to manage at once. Give it time, the big things are the important things, the little stuff can be dealt with later. I would rather have new mechs and maps than making sure a mech's arms still had it weapons on it when it got blown off.