102 replies to this topic

[StoneRhino]

Well, the problem with missiles is their ability to maneuver. In order for them to be accurate they need to move fast, they need to be able to adjust, and they need to detonate when they are near the target. There are some missiles out there now that explode within the proximity of the target, but have a submunition of some sort that fires off in hopes of hitting the target directly. IIRC, there were 3 arrow head like projectiles meant to punch holes in the wings and body of an aircraft as a second chance attack. BT's missiles are not that complex, instead they are missiles that attempt to avoid being shot down by being numerous, but also taking slightly wild paths, similar to the robotech style missile barrage. They aren't that heavy because they are not designed for extreme ranges, not to carry huge payloads, and avoid the fancy guidance systems.

The best way to represent BT's LRMS is to take a similar path of the upwards firing LRMs of MW4, IIRC, but to also cause the missiles to scatter at the min range, with the missiles starting to focus in at minrange+1 distances. Think of the missiles scattering a bit,take your mini or image, and think of the size of the launcher. Imagine if the missiles were to try and scatter from each other at a distance of the size of the launcher between them. It would create a nice wide pattern that would be great for avoiding AMS fire at range. Those LRMs then travel as a scatter group until they close with the target, which would be to help ensure a hit, but also because they are now to close to an AMS to all get shot down before they strike the hostile mech. The inaccuracy of below min range shots with LRMs would then make sense. The scatter would also make it difficult for people to hit at short ranges using LRMs.

Of course short range targets would appear to be moving faster then long range targets. There is less time to adjust the path of the missile, meaning the LRM would need to adjust faster then it is designed to, in order to hit the target. If the LRM does not have that ability built into it then it is going to have a much harder time hitting, meaning it is more about the skill if the pilot and lucky, as opposed to using the right tool for the job. SRMs are heavier, which I suspect is due to more then a bigger warhead, especially since if you were to half the warhead, the range of an srm is going to be 18 at max, assuming the missile is using the same amount of fuel. It might have to do with having the right gear for rapid course corrections.

[superbob]

I think missiles (LRM/MRM) should need some 100m to converge into a consistent volley, before that distance some/most would miss the target. Some might try to circle around but I don't think missiles should be agile enough to consistently hit that way.

As for PPC, I think the player should have a somewhat bigger reticle for arming the cannon, letting the mech's computer align the weapon precisely at the center of the target (or on a specific part, if there is a targeting computer available) and properly focus the beams to converge at the target distance. That would make it unpractical to use the PPC at shorter ranges. Perhaps it should do some splash damage at shorter ranges, but less damage overall.

I'd also like to be able to deactivate the inhibitor or overcharge the PPC ( IIRC, described in "tactical operations" book ), but that might be a topic for another thread.

[Oppi]

Malavai Fletcher, on 27 November 2011 - 03:02 PM, said:

Absolutely disagree,you seem to be implying the brawler has just run over open ground to get within range of the long range mech,which is suicide and a really crappy tactic.Flanking?moving in under cover of terrain?moving in under cover of team mates fire?

And now you are implying that the long-range-mechs pilot is some ****** who lets his opponent maneuver at will without reacting, has no teammates and does not watch his radar at all.

The things you mention are all matters of piloting skill.

Quote

Not hitting a target with artillery will still cause damage to their mech,as you point out splash,which was kind of the point i was making,so i dont understand this comment.

Why, it's quite easy to understand. "Causing damage" (even by splash damage) is hitting. Crushing somebodies skull with the actual projectile is "directly hitting".

Edited by Oppi, 28 November 2011 - 04:51 AM.

[feor]

Quote

No way ever would an LRM20 be more effective in a city fight......ever ever ever.

Unless you're not a moron and your LRM mech is hiding behind a building while your scouts call in indirect LRM barrages. At that point the LRM does some damage, the LB-20X does no damage. Some > none by a large margin.

Quote

Minimal arming distance for missiles is silly. Most missile systems fired from platforms that are not giant cruise missles are armed the instant they leave the barrel. I really liked how Mw3 handled missles. They weren't fired all at once like MW4. They didn't start tracking till they had a lock and were a few meters out from the mech. And if fired dumb they kinda shotgunned out.

In the background the minimum arming distance was the cause, created by 300 years of technological regression making the arming systems of the missiles highly unpredictable.

However, I've seemed to have stumble across some Retcon. Pg. 229 of the Techmanual, under the LRM entry, states: "Inner Sphere launchers, which derive their impressive range from a ballistic launch angle, are notoriously less accurate close-in..." which seems to imply that the OP was actually correct in his assumption that the missiles are fired "up" and can't drop fast enough to be accurate within 180m.

[Malavai Fletcher]

Oppi, on 28 November 2011 - 04:48 AM, said:

And now you are implying that the long-range-mechs pilot is some ****** who lets his opponent maneuver at will without reacting, has no teammates and does not watch his radar at all.

The things you mention are all matters of piloting skill.



Why, it's quite easy to understand. "Causing damage" (even by splash damage) is hitting. Crushing somebodies skull with the actual projectile is "directly hitting".

Ehh?where did i imply anything about the long range mech pilot,all i mentioned were moves i had used to close in a long range group of mechs.Just because we could get close in against long range mechs didn't mean the long range pilots sucked,it just meant we outmaneurvered them.

It is not really piloting skill,it is more good organised teamwork.

My point was you dont have to physically hit the mech with the shell to cause it damage.

feor, on 28 November 2011 - 08:35 AM, said:

Unless you're not a moron and your LRM mech is hiding behind a building while your scouts call in indirect LRM barrages. At that point the LRM does some damage, the LB-20X does no damage. Some > none by a large margin.

I am guessing this is a non simulation TT move,because never have i seen this happen in a city map,buildings in city areas are often taller than the mechs,for this to work the missles would have to fire straight up,fly high enough to clear the multiple tall buildings in the city then change direction and come almost straight down at the target.The mechs in MW4 didn't fire straight up,from what i read in here the mechs in TT dont fire straight up,so how this works is a mystery to me.

Edited by Malavai Fletcher, 28 November 2011 - 01:24 PM.

[UncleKulikov]

Malavai Fletcher, on 28 November 2011 - 01:24 PM, said:

I am guessing this is a non simulation TT move,because never have i seen this happen in a city map,buildings in city areas are often taller than the mechs,for this to work the missles would have to fire straight up,fly high enough to clear the multiple tall buildings in the city then change direction and come almost straight down at the target.The mechs in MW4 didn't fire straight up,from what i read in here the mechs in TT dont fire straight up,so how this works is a mystery to me.

If you have ever played Tribes 2, their missile launcher works the same way the LRMs do in Battletech Tabletop. A small charge pushes the warhead out of the tube and up, then the engine ignites with quality guidance and maneuverability so that they could effectively go straight up and then arc down with reliable targeting data.

[guardian wolf]

PPCs' should just have a slower than normal recycle time, which almost completely negates their close quarter combat abilities, but LRMs, should just stick with the either hot load, which by now every one is informed is dangerous, especially if you are under fire, or they have to arm after so many meters, which makes sense, the details, let the devs decide

[guardian wolf]

Did you just seriously use Tribes 2 as an example? Why do I even bother....

[Malavai Fletcher]

UncleKulikov, on 28 November 2011 - 01:43 PM, said:

If you have ever played Tribes 2, their missile launcher works the same way the LRMs do in Battletech Tabletop. A small charge pushes the warhead out of the tube and up, then the engine ignites with quality guidance and maneuverability so that they could effectively go straight up and then arc down with reliable targeting data.

I have never played Tribes 2,i have never played a TT game of battletech,i played for a long time a mech simulation game,which is what MWO will be a mech simulation game, i fail to see how this explains how a missle can fly straight up,be smart enough to detect the height of buildings and adjust its height accordingly,skim the rooftops,then when its over the top of me change direction to straight down and hit me.

[Blackfire1]

Wouldn't it be more surreal if the angle of projection from LRM's are attached to the angle of the missile pods? Straight missile pods shoot straight, Vulture pods shoot at a 45degree angle, ect. This means if you want to shoot over buildings you need to aim up and over. Thus eliminating urban LRMS. I have no progblem seeing LRMS as dumb fire missiles that spread out then tighten as a group. The spread however would take out a few missiles from the urban terrain.

[Phades]

feor, on 28 November 2011 - 08:35 AM, said:

Unless you're not a moron and your LRM mech is hiding behind a building while your scouts call in indirect LRM barrages. At that point the LRM does some damage, the LB-20X does no damage. Some > none by a large margin.

What is the turning arc of the missiles? What is your firing point of origin? How tall are the buildings? What other intervening objects are there? What is the flight time on the missiles? How is spotting designation going to work? Must it be TAG or C3 or will other means like NARC be sufficient? If TAG or C3 will the spotter gain control of the firing mechanism or is it pure voice com relays?

There are a lot of things to consider when translating abstract table top rules into a real time execution game.

[feor]

I imagine it'll be fairly simple.

Scout mech A puts his targeting reticule on a spot and hits his "designate target" button. If he has a Tag, it kicks in, but that doesn't really help unless you're calling in Arrow IV. (TAG guided LRMs won't come into existence until the Mariks perfect the Semi-guided LRMs in 3058)

All friendlies (not affected by ECM) get a new target pop up on their HUD, you targeting point for barrage fire. They get to somewhere they aren't just immediately firing into a building, pick that target, wait for the tone, and pull the trigger. Those LRMs will then land in a roughly 30m wide circle centered on the target point of the designation.

[Razed In Black]

hw about lower the damage? the missiles are not armed so they dont explode.

the PPCs should cause electrical interfernce and have potential to back fire and cause damage to the person shooting.

[UncleKulikov]

Malavai Fletcher, on 28 November 2011 - 02:08 PM, said:

I have never played Tribes 2,i have never played a TT game of battletech,i played for a long time a mech simulation game,which is what MWO will be a mech simulation game, i fail to see how this explains how a missle can fly straight up,be smart enough to detect the height of buildings and adjust its height accordingly,skim the rooftops,then when its over the top of me change direction to straight down and hit me.

Basically, the missile is pushed from the launcher with a primary charge, and then it's main engine ignites which propels it to the target.

Cruise missiles work in about that way. LRMs could have radar built into the warhead to detect proximity, or even a simpler proximity fuse to detect adjacent structures. The spotting mech's radar could feed telemetry to the firing mech's computer, which could feed it to the LRM computer as well.

Edited by UncleKulikov, 28 November 2011 - 08:32 PM.

[Uncl Munkeh]

ilithi dragon, on 27 November 2011 - 02:13 PM, said:

So the general consensus is that LRMs are easy and quite acceptable to make difficult or dangerous or ineffective to use at close range, through a combination of delayed arming time (to prevent detonation in the launcher and friendly-fire splash damage if fired too close), missile divergence at launch to prevent missile fratricide (the missiles diverge away from each other immediately after launching so they don't collide), making LRMs spread apart at close range before clustering back together and converging on the target, and arched missile flight paths (the missiles are fired 'up' in an arc to allow for fire over obstacles, etc.). Players would then be able to mix things up with various types of missiles made by different manufacturers.

Default missiles would have a delayed arming time after launch, making them rocket-powered rocks inside that minimum range, and would widely diverge after launch, like a wide-choke shotgun blast. Many mechs would also fire their missiles angled up, because of the location and angle of the pods (though not all mechs - some would fire straight-forward, but iirc all the mechs designed to be dedicated LRM boats have their pods oriented to fire in arcs). Missiles from some manufacturers would hot-load, with the warheads armed and ready to go in the launcher, at the risk of them going off in the pod, and setting off the whole pod of missiles, or getting splash damage if they hit a target right in front of you. Missiles from other manufacturers would have the missiles stay clustered together out of the tubes, at the risk that they would collide with each other. Missiles from other manufacturers would do both, with the additive risks of both (like the risk of your hot-loaded, clustering missiles colliding right out of the tubes and setting off the whole pack right in your face). Personally, I think the arching angle of missiles firing should be mech-dependent, to help give points of difference between different mechs.


As for PPCs, a Particle Projection Cannons basically IS an over-sized laser, it just uses hydrogen ions, or protons, instead of photons (light particles). It's a beam or bolt of charged particles, hence the recoil and kinetic effects despite being an energy weapon, and electrical surge problems. Now, the canonical explanation for PPC range limitation makes some sense - you're basically hitting the target with a stream of charged particles that can play holy hell with a target's systems, and a feedback along the ionized trail to your mech that hits you with the same EMP-like effects is not something that you want to have happen. The problem I have with this is that the effects would be severely limited - it fires a stream of protons, which are charged particles, but they are not going to act like an electrical surge because they're not electrons, which are what conduct electrical energy along wires and which are what cause the first-tier and main damaging effects of a nuclear EMP (check out the wikipedia page on electromagnetic pulse if you want some specifics on the physics behind that). It COULD still potentially work, though, if the PPC induces a high positive charge in the area around where it hits, that is rapidly neutralized by a flow of negative electrons to the area - causing some electrical drain and static discharge effects. Depending on how the PPC actually works, its firing might also create a heavy negative charge in the cannon itself, which would have to be neutralized. Presumably, if this is so, the cannon has mechanisms to safely neutralize the charge while the weapon recycles (possibly part of the need for the recycle time in the first place?), which at close range could cause a feedback surge from the target along the ionized plasma trail of the energy bolt back to the weapon itself, which could, hypothetically speaking, act as if the weapon fired and partially 'bounced back' into itself, which would be what is known as A Bad Thing.

So, in my opinion, and as others have suggested, having a PPC fire at reduced damage inside a certain range (90 meters being the canonical minimum safe range), with an option for players to override the safety protocol, or buy weapons that override the safety protocols, at the risk of causing a feedback into the weapon for, say, half damage or so of the weapon, with the damage bypassing the mech's armor and being directly applied to its internals. This is both canonical, and at least kinda-sorta consistent with real-world physics (though being a physics major myself, I will say that they seem a bit stretched to me, but not unreasonably so), and doesn't introduce silly and hard-to-explain things like a charged particle beam firing in a cone that somehow converges on itself some hundred meters or so beyond the barrel of the weapon, or a weapon that is fairly precise to aim at 900 meters suddenly going all wonky and all-over-the-place inside a tenth of that range...

Maybe a combination of these?

Firing before the infinity parallax causing splash damage AND weapons malfunction/failure? Everyone gets hit but repair costs make it VERY unwise to fire at close range....

[Yeach]

I think having a minimum range for the PPC is stupid. The thing already takes awhile to recycle and uses up alot of heat.

FYI for LRMs, for MW4test beta, they made it so the disadvantage of firing LRMs up close was that you had a HUGE heat spike. Funny to see all the MadCats overheat when in melee.

[Malavai Fletcher]

feor, on 28 November 2011 - 07:47 PM, said:

I imagine it'll be fairly simple.

Scout mech A puts his targeting reticule on a spot and hits his "designate target" button. If he has a Tag, it kicks in, but that doesn't really help unless you're calling in Arrow IV. (TAG guided LRMs won't come into existence until the Mariks perfect the Semi-guided LRMs in 3058)

All friendlies (not affected by ECM) get a new target pop up on their HUD, you targeting point for barrage fire. They get to somewhere they aren't just immediately firing into a building, pick that target, wait for the tone, and pull the trigger. Those LRMs will then land in a roughly 30m wide circle centered on the target point of the designation.

All the time that the mechs are moving into a fire position the other team are just standing there?Not doing anything?dont you think they would have their own scouts searching for the enemy or other enemy scouts?Plus the team that are about to be bombarded with missles aren't gonna have the common sense and actually see a light mech tagging them and kill him?The thing that does not translate from aTT game to an online simulation is that maybe your scout mech tagging someone in a TT is not properly visable,in a mech simulation where people are constantly scanning the horizon using your own eyes is as important as radar.

[MaddMaxx]

I would just really like to see the semi-guided missiles that go past your mech do not have maneuvering capabilities to come back around and hit you in the back. Or you have to do some stupid ugly torso twisting dance to avoid them. They either Hit, Do Splash or Miss.

[JC Daxion]

I like the arming delay, and the mini emp feild both seem like logical places to start.. but here are a few i thought about.


LRMs

Size, LRMs should be much much larger than an SRM.. So it only makes sence that they should carry less for the size. Much of the rocket will be fuel, as it also has a guidance system built in.

But if you did make them of similar size. An SRM, none guided that say has a range of 150m, would be able to carry a much larger warhead than and LRM, especially taking into account the lack of a guidanceand less fuel, the SRM should pack a much larger punch. (if they are equal sizes)

Also less talk about mass.. If your firing a salvo of LRM's, or even something like a cannon of an AC-20.. that should pack a huge punch, but at the same time it should make your mech react to a ton of back fire. the gyro should have to really kick in, and much of the mechs power and movement should go towards keeping your mech upright and even slowing movement.

If every time you fire a few LRMs, or a heavy AC, if all of a sudden your movement was slowed, you lost your aim, and had to spend 2-3 seconds recovering, that would make a giant difference in close combat. A smaller mech, or one with using lighter weapons would gain a huge boost in mobiilty basically letting you have a much easier time of out manuvering the person that keeps firing off the heavy weapons.

You could even add a refire over ride, or stabilty over ride, that could let you keep firing, at the risk of knocking over your mech, outside of the decreased accuracy. Firing to many LRMs, to fast, or big AC's could even lead to knocking down yourself, and we all know that in close combat a mech on its back, is a really vuneralble target.

With all these little issues, i could see people definatly thinking twice about load out, and see some major game play changes for the better than all around make sence.



PPC,

the main thing i would do with these would be refire rates, along with electronics disruption. Perhaps a new thing to add to your mech could be electronic damping. (taking up places vrs heat sinks and ammo) This would be needed to protect yourself from the effects of the PPC. Especially repeated firing. Perhaps the PPC woud create an after effect, that would linger and build up over repeated firing. (just like heat) As you keep firing rapidly, you could start losing radar and targeting functions.. Outside of being able to carry less over all ammo, heat sinks, or alternate weapons.


those were a few ideas that i had, trying to think a little outside the box..

[feor]

LRMs are actually slightly smaller than SRMs, an LRM round weighs roughly 8kg, while SRMs weigh about 10kg. (based on getting 120 Missiles into a ton of LRM ammo, and 100 missiles into a ton of SRM ammo)

Quote

If every time you fire a few LRMs, or a heavy AC, if all of a sudden your movement was slowed, you lost your aim, and had to spend 2-3 seconds recovering, that would make a giant difference in close combat. A smaller mech, or one with using lighter weapons would gain a huge boost in mobiilty basically letting you have a much easier time of out manuvering the person that keeps firing off the heavy weapons.

For LRMs that makes a bit of sense (the computer takes over for a second to aim the actual launchers), but in the battletech universe heavy ACs are close combat weapons. Increasing size = decreasing range, to where an AC/20 has comparable range to a Medium laser and the AC/2 is able to match an LRM for reach. In universe explanation is that propellant load in larger shells does not increase as much as you'd expect for the increase in size of the actual bullet part of the shell for reasons of volume and mass.