Quxudica, on 29 March 2015 - 07:45 AM, said:
Yeah and you could do it that way for immersions sake I guess. That said, I know we are talking about fictional scifi tanks here, but I don't really buy for a second that a Spider could function like that. It makes more sense to me that oversized weapons would require smaller mechs specifically built to carry them like the Hunchback or the Hollander. It's also more interesting to me too, it helps define the roles of the various chassis. Vehicles of war are always designed with their role in mind, it's why they look the way they do. Some can fill multiple roles thanks to variants, but you don't see a Bradly sporting an M1A1's canon because it wasn't built to be a Main Battle Tank.
True, on the Bradly/M1A2 bit, but not so much with BattleMechs. Keep in mind, the UrbanMech has an AC10 stock, and there's the Cappellan Confederation's AC20 variant as well, that's a 30 ton Mech mind, one of the smallest in the BTech universe at that. The Panther was originally designed to carry a PPC, these ARE BattleMechs after all, the smallest in BTech were under 11m, the shortest given height was 9m. They aren't 'little' per se, they are simple less massive than others, which ranged from 10m to 15m tall per FASA's original listed heights, when they can be found at all. Just look at the original TRO artwork, the weapons are larger usually than we see in MWO, but a Panther carrying an ERPPC doesn't look anything like what Bishop put together, as cool as that looks(friggen awesome!).
PGI has scaled Mechs rather strangely compared to the actual source material, and I understand why, they are designing around the LCD mindset. Light means little, Medium means medium, Heavy means big, and Assault means huge. That's NOT what FASA did with them however, and it's rather telling.