12 replies to this topic

[Ruger4]

So you're probably thinking... "wtf are you talking about we didn't have giant stompy robots and pew pew lasers in the 1950s"... and you'd be right of course but we did have several very good pieces of technology that seem to have been forgotten over the millennia.


1) Something that currently irritates me greatly is when I'm turning my mech's legs its torso also turns... now this is a problem we discovered with tanks in our first and second world wars, we did however solve this problem by 1944 with the humble gun stabilizer which will automatically correct the turret's rotation and the gun's elevation when the base of the tank moves.

It seems this incredibly simple piece of engineering has been lost in the aether of time, maybe they were too busy building the vastly more complicated gyros that keep a 2 legged mech balanced.

My in game solution: Torso doesn't rotate when legs rotate, or at least an option in the settings, torso would only be forced to rotate when its at the maximum yaw of the torso.





2) Ultra Autocannons in this game are just wrong, Autocannons are not burst fire weapons nor can they jam. This is why they were created by the engineers of the 20th century because a weapon that jams is just not feasible for a vehicle mount (no army in the history of mankind would accept a weapon into general use with a jam rate as high as 14%).

"What are you talking about... of course machine guns can jam everybody knows that"... and again good sir you are correct saving one minor detail. A machine gun jams because its uses the exhaust gas from a spent round to reset the firing pin, when a round is defective the cycle will end, the defective round is not ejected and your gun is "jammed".

A chaingun(autocannon) however does not use the exhaust gas to reset the bolt, it uses a motorised bolt (normally an electric motor attached via chain, hence the term chaingun). In this system rounds are ejected weather they fire or not meaning defective rounds can't jam your gun.

Which is a fantasic piece of technology because it means you don't have to climb out of your jet fighter or your Apache helicopter to clear a jam in your chaingun mid flight.

"but its 3050 how do you know the guns would even work like that"... because our existing autocannons already out perform the autocannons of 3050 by lightyears. So somehow in the 1100 intervening years humankind has managed to invent a method of making an unjammable gun jam.

The way UACs work right now is just stupid... paying for the extra DPS with a jam mechanic is just not fun for the player and considering there is no way to learn how to avoid jams makes this worse (and you can't add a timing method because macros). So its either "YAY! double damage!" or "Jam, I'm dead "... leaving your player skill up to a random dice roll is terrible, this is why CoD/Battlefield and the like just exclude weapon jamming. So everyone just throws their ACs back in storage and loads up on laser vomit... yay! more lasers!

So what else is there? well... modern autocannons normally have several firing speed settings, but leaving them on the fastest setting will overheat the motor (oh! hello there heat mechanic!).

My in game solution: Leave all standard ACs exactly as they are, these are autocannons with their fire rate locked to the optimum reliability.

For UACs however remove the burst firing and divide the cooldown by 10 so a UAC10 for example would have a maximum refire rate of 25ms, however the closer the next shot is fired to the last incurs some ghost heat, with the normal cooldown rate of 250ms being the point where the next shot costs no heat. (I didn't do any math stuff to figure out exactly how much heat to add).

This means you can spam out a big pile of damage really quickly but at the cost of heating your mech, meaning you will have to balance your rate of fire with heat cost roughly the same as using lasers but in a different way.

So holding down your fire button down will fire at max speed and also add a lot more heat, meaning you'll have to release the button... this creates your burst firing weapon type...

This should make the UAC an interesting difference to the standard AC which would require a lot more pilot experience and skill to get the maximum use out of them over normal ACs which would be fitting considering they are more popular amongst clan pilots, who consider themselves the bees knees (also might help combat some of the ridiculous laser vomit that is going on in game, ballistics just can't compete).





3) Laser targeters don't weight a ton, this is dumb, not even gonna bother explaining.

My in game solution: remove the weight of tag lasers, 1 slot and 1 energy hard point is cost enough.




Conclusion
was initially gonna be a thread about poking fun at the mechanics but then I came up with solutions I think would work better. There are several other things in modern technology that out perform that of 3050, I may add them later.

Also I honestly have no idea how they think this game could go into anything e-sports like with a weapon jam mechanic as well as the dumb charge up time on the gauss gun... two things that would instantly turn a e-sport player away.




TL;DR: What are you even doing on a forum if you don't read things?

[Zephonarch II]

This kind of felt off topic at first but you changed my mind as I read further.
1. Yeah, it hasn't always been this way. Aim one way, and readjusting the legs will move your cursor. The Max YAW idea sounds do-able. They've done it before.
2. Yeah, the UACs have always burst-fired in this game. But not in MW3 I think. I think the stats differentiated between UACs and ACs by making UACs fire way faster. Definitely no jamming in that game. But I don't remember much about it.
3. That'd break the canon. Although yeah it's not realistic that laser-targeting wouldn't of improved by the 30th century. But still if the TAG laser isn't convenient enough for you why not suggest the MW3 system?
mw3 is mainly all I reference for mechwarrior but the TAG laser had a cooldown, a long one. You really just had to tase a target long enough and a signal would be held long enough as it went out of range, behind objects, anything of that nature, and you'd still keep a lock on them. No continuous stream needed. Maybe satellites would focus in on that area for a specific time until that information became useless as your target might of moved away.
Simply a cooldown is my counter-argument.

[Nothing Whatsoever]

WIth #1, I agree that it would be nice to turn your legs dynamically independently of the torso.

WIth #2, There are real revolver type cannons that would fire in bursts, that could potentially get jammed on reloading.
And originally when an Ultra jammed, it would stay that way until serviced, so personally, I would save the current jam system for how Rotary Autocannons are described and adopt the MASC code for Ultras.

For example, allow a similar pattern where we could increase the rate of fire on Ultras for a short and predictable period that builds up and tracks like MASC on a meter that activates by tapping the fire weapon group the Ultra is assigned to as we currently can; so the meter fills by repeated tapping and when holding off on tapping, will slowly decrease the meter.

So if the meter goes into the red, then the Ultra will recieve damage eventually disabling the weapon for the match to simulate the permanent jam until serviced properly.

Spoiler

With #3, TAG is actually more than just a laser, but I certainly would not mind actually making it infrared and invisible unless seen by NightVison or Thermal Vision:

Edited by Praetor Knight, 28 July 2015 - 06:47 PM.

[Vellron2005]

I posted something similar a while back..

You forgot to mention how targeting computers that lead a simple missle weigh several tons in 3052, and a computer that landed the Apollo on the moon had LESS processing power than a scientific calculator.. not to mention that a modern helicopter's targeting computer fits on a small laptop-sized circuit board, along with several other functions on the same board.. including missle tracking

Edited by Vellron2005, 29 July 2015 - 02:50 AM.

[FlipOver]

Rear View Mirrors stopped existing when people found out the objects reflected on them would seem bigger than they usually are and a Cicada flanking would kill pilots by giving them a heart attack....

[Night Thastus]

1: I would be cool with this change, as an option. Nice idea.

2: I agree that Ultra's are in a crappy spot. Enabling ghost heat might be impossible for PGI to do, but there could easily be other ways of balancing. Increasing the heat is certainly possible. After all, the Flamer already generates exponential heat.

3: TAG is far more then just a "laser designator" as others have posted. It's also armored. I would imagine 1 ton isn't unreasonable.

[Wildstreak]

#1 - you have the ability to aim the torso where you want as you turn legs.

#2 - Autocannon

Quote

Although capable of generating a high rate of fire, autocannons overheat if used for sustained fire, and are limited by the amount of ammunition that can be carried by the weapons systems mounting them. Both the US 25 mm Bushmaster and the British 30 mm Rarden have relatively slow rates of fire so as not to use ammunition too quickly. The rate of fire of a modern autocannon ranges from 90 rounds per minute (in the case of the British Rarden), to 2,500 rounds per minute with the GIAT 30. Systems with multiple barrels can have rates of fire of over 10,000 rounds per minute, (the Russian GSh-6-23 for example).[1] Such extremely high rates of fire are effectively employed by aircraft in air-to-air combat, where the target dwell time is short and weapons are typically operated in brief bursts.

Example of Autocannon Jamming

Quote

As installed in the Me 262, the cannon was found to be prone to jamming, and if fired at night the BK 5's muzzle flash tended to temporarily blind the pilot's night vision.[1]

#3 - it is what it is, want it changed, go get the core CBT rules changed.

[Greyhart]

yes the rear view mirror.

and one that looks down to see what twig is stopping my 85 ton killing machine from moving forwards.

Of course what I want is a mech made out of the trees on the bog map, because they can take fire from everything without a scratch.

[Jaeger Gonzo]

Battletech is not our future.
Its fictional. So go home with your real life argues, thare are only lore argues here.
In BT UAC do jam, thats it. Now we can only agrue about if implementation is correct or if can be better.

[Lugh]

This bears repeating again, because this is a SCI FI /Fantasy of High tech meets Knights of Yore

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Lostech

Jaeger Gonzo, on 30 July 2015 - 12:26 PM, said:

Battletech is not our future.
Its fictional. So go home with your real life argues, thare are only lore argues here.
In BT UAC do jam, thats it. Now we can only agrue about if implementation is correct or if can be better.

In lore they jam at a rate of 2.9% over a period of 10 seconds. In MWO they jam at a rate of 25% or higher and as low as 17.5% ON SOME QUIRCKED GODS... Because for PGI MATH IS HARD.

[Andan]

As someone who worked on and fixed aircraft weapon systems in the militar for 20 years, I can say all guns jam. Anything in life with moving parts is prone to failure during its life at some point. While 14% may be a high number, I can accept it considering the volatile nature of mech combat.

[gloowa]

someone just realized Battletech doesn't make much sense?

[Shermburger]

Ruger4, on 28 July 2015 - 04:54 PM, said:

1) Something that currently irritates me greatly is when I'm turning my mech's legs its torso also turns... now this is a problem we discovered with tanks in our first and second world wars, we did however solve this problem by 1944 with the humble gun stabilizer which will automatically correct the turret's rotation and the gun's elevation when the base of the tank moves.

The stabilizer utilized on tanks during that time period were vertical stabilization only, and not many had even that. Horizontal stabilizers did not come about until later.

The engineers of 3050 are borderline ********. But let's not go overboard.