57 replies to this topic

[Yellonet]

LRM's still ruin my game from time to time. I play both on EU and NA servers and there are very seldom more than two mechs with ECM, sometimes only 1. And LRM's seem very common...

[Radbane]

Lyoto Machida, on 29 July 2015 - 02:35 PM, said:

Are you saying that your LRM Catapult does 500-600 damage on average? If so, I find that hard to believe.

I needed 8 more matches to get me a flag, so that was what I played today.
Damage scores:
472
109
414
736
443
708
764
804

An avarage of 556,25

Had a typo though .. I have 1800 missiles, not 1080, and I forgot that I replaced the 4 mediums to 4 small pulselasers to keep heat in check.

Believe it nor not *shrugs*

[M4rtyr]

Wow people are so wrong about LRM/SRM.... standards had no guidance system at all, they aren't actually missles but rockets.

LRM's might be thought to have guidance for IDF and such but no, they opperate just like the IRL MLRS.

The reason NARC or Artemis create more hits is because it ADDs the guidance. That is why there is a difference between Artemis ammo and regular ammo. If they did have guidance then they would need a lock, if they needed a lock then they would be exactly like Streaks because thats the only difference streaks have, you lock and fire or you don't.

And in fluff, I never remember reading a novel talking about an SRM or LRM tracking it's target.

But so off topic, I won't comment if LRM's are good or not as I've not played MWO for a while, trying to decide if I should again.

Edited by M4rtyr, 30 July 2015 - 01:16 PM.

[Gremlich Johns]

AMS also should only protect the mech it is mounted on, not another teammate's mech, too.

[M4rtyr]

Gremlich Johns, on 30 July 2015 - 01:48 PM, said:

AMS also should only protect the mech it is mounted on, not another teammate's mech, too.

Meh, AMS is pretty meaningless, it's ammo burns out too fast to truely matter, its nothing compared to ECM spam.

[Hit the Deck]

Interesting discussion on how LRMs (are supposed to) work (in TT)! After reading all of that, I guess LRMs might use some kind of IFF and they behave like "fire and forget" missiles. I'm sorry if my terminologies are incorrect because I only have little knowledge about this.

Unfortunately, there's basically no indirect fire mechanics outside lock-on in MWO and that means that we can't fully apply the TT's LRMs mechanics in our game. Perhaps like has been often suggested, we should just remove the lock-on capability from our LRM without TAG or NARC. Double its speed (Javelin missiles as a reference) or more and make it track the nearest foe, say, 100m from its intended destination.

How about that?

Edited by Hit the Deck, 30 July 2015 - 02:18 PM.

[Weeny Machine]

M4rtyr, on 30 July 2015 - 01:15 PM, said:

Wow people are so wrong about LRM/SRM.... standards had no guidance system at all, they aren't actually missles but rockets.

LRM's might be thought to have guidance for IDF and such but no, they opperate just like the IRL MLRS.

The reason NARC or Artemis create more hits is because it ADDs the guidance. That is why there is a difference between Artemis ammo and regular ammo. If they did have guidance then they would need a lock, if they needed a lock then they would be exactly like Streaks because thats the only difference streaks have, you lock and fire or you don't.

And in fluff, I never remember reading a novel talking about an SRM or LRM tracking it's target.

But so off topic, I won't comment if LRM's are good or not as I've not played MWO for a while, trying to decide if I should again.

Yes. LRM tubes loaded with "normal" missiles cannot be even guided by TAG, Artemis, or NARC: Actually you need special ammunition for that which is more expensive.

What works, though, is a spotter for indirect fire. However, it was harder to hit then with those missiles also because the movement of the spotter was added to the to-hit roll.
I am not sure if the spotter was allowed to fire his own weapons during that time (it haven't played the TT for some time).

[Aim64C]

M4rtyr, on 30 July 2015 - 01:15 PM, said:

Wow people are so wrong about LRM/SRM.... standards had no guidance system at all, they aren't actually missles but rockets.

LRM's might be thought to have guidance for IDF and such but no, they opperate just like the IRL MLRS.

The reason NARC or Artemis create more hits is because it ADDs the guidance. That is why there is a difference between Artemis ammo and regular ammo. If they did have guidance then they would need a lock, if they needed a lock then they would be exactly like Streaks because thats the only difference streaks have, you lock and fire or you don't.

http://www.sarna.net...m_Range_Missile

" Compared to other missile types, Medium Range Missiles are dead-fire missiles that are fired more like autocannons and lasers. The removal of guidance systems makes each missile more compact, reducing cost and allowing more missiles to be packed in comparison to SRM and LRM launchers of similar size and weight. "

Emphasis, my own.

LRMs and SRMs are guided.

Artemis IV is what we call a Semi-Active-Radar-Homing system. The firing unit illuminates the target with, in this case, a multi-spectrum beam consisting of both Infra-Red and Microwave radiation to complicate jamming attempts. Consider that our target is a very atypical one when compared to a tank or other object.

For example, using standard radar returns, when a mech twists its torso, the radar return would react to this change in orientation and produce an echo indicating a rapid increase in speed along a vector. This would be compensated for in the missile's onboard circuitry as it attempts to intercept the target. Missiles do NOT 'chase' the target. They intercept the target much as a shooter leads a target. Different formulas and metrics for this are known as "Lead-Pursuit Mechanics."

However, the actual center of mass has not changed. In comparison to land vehicles like tanks, or air vehicles like aircraft, this is an issue that current missiles do not have to deal with. In the battletech universe, however, this is a very real problem. Mechs and more complicated actuator systems generate a flurry of radar telemetry information that contributes to what we call the "cluster roll" on the missile table.

This is why missile launchers composing of many smaller missiles would become popular in addressing complex targets as opposed to larger, single missiles that would be better at defeating armor. When missile guidance is easily confounded and individual missiles are, thus, unreliable, shrinking the missile and placing it into an array is a statistical method of addressing the problem.

Artemis-IV is a means of trying to improve performance by using more sophisticated tracking systems and telemetry processing components in the missile.

Most battlemechs come with radar antennas, some specifically mentioned to be phased arrays with AESA-capable processing backends. The standard battlemech should be considered to be, at the least, an F-15E in terms of radar capability. While this doesn't translate as well into the rather strict limitations placed upon the battletech universe in the rule set, the standard battlemech is more than capable of providing guidance to missile systems designed in any way similar to our current systems.

Quote

And in fluff, I never remember reading a novel talking about an SRM or LRM tracking it's target.

At a range of 300 meters, a TOW missile would impact its target in less than a second.

At a range of 1000 meters, it would be right at about three seconds.

Any halfway experienced military fiction author realizes that the battlefields of battletech are -tiny- for the technology involved. This is how real guided rockets work:

https://youtu.be/Osb7anMm1AY

The goal of missile guidance is not to "track" or "chase" the target. Rockets have limited fuel capacity and most solid fuel rockets cannot vary their thrust or conserve fuel for an added boost, later. Falling behind a target (such as an airplane) at any point essentially guarantees a miss as the missile continues to lose energy while the target continues with its own power.

Thus, the goal of missile guidance is to produce a collision - an interception. If you fix a camera on the target, the missile should appear to hit like a mid-air collision. This was originally produced out of an inversion of the technique used by sailors to avoid collisions at sea. Augments to the basic concept have been added to account for greater factors, such as acceleration, relative closure rates (if known - not applicable to all guidance systems), but the basic idea is the same. You want the missile to be set up on a collision course with the target.

Even the fastest battlemechs are agonizingly slow compared to the acceleration rate of anything that would be considered a military missile. Any competently designed missile of the 30th and 31st century would appear to deviate very little from its initial firing arc as it would be on top of the target before any substantial changes in velocity could be made by the target.

Even taking some artistic liberties, you can see that some of the strikes on land vehicles largely appear to be straight lines after the initial course correction by the missile - which would adjust to any attempts by the target to change velocity almost instantly.

This is why modern missiles can obtain very high Pk - the critical factor is range. Obviously, the faster the target can move, the less effective range one has against it - what is typically called an "engagement envelope" - but once sufficiently within that envelope, the target can't produce a velocity change substantial enough to overcome the missile's lead and high rate of closure.

Hence the developments of countermeasures to throw off accuracy during terminal guidance.

Quote

But so off topic, I won't comment if LRM's are good or not as I've not played MWO for a while, trying to decide if I should again.

LRMs are essentially long range sandblasters that are really only practical if your team has a few other sandblasters and the enemy doesn't have ECM.

From an individual standpoint, you have to work pretty damned hard to get 600-800 damage that is splashed all over creation ... when a direct fire loadout doing that kind of damage is caving in torso sections, breaking legs, stripping arms, and melting faces.

LRMs simply don't have the firepower to really be effective against an experienced team and don't really have any other mechanic to make them useful other than the indirect fire that... really doesn't help much. If BAP were to give, say, 500 meters of 'god vision' to target anything through terrain, then their indirect fire method might actually be somewhat practical... but otherwise, you're usually dumping missiles into terrain or buildings if you fire indirectly - and dying if you fire directly without someone on your team to tank for you. The most 'practical' aspect of LRMs is that you can potentially fire over your allies' back and avoid friendly fire even if you screw up. So they have some use if you wanted to use a sort of ranked file approach.... but that gets back into experience and organization, and you're just better off running something other than LRMs if you have those.

They are in a spot where a team that knows what they are doing can position themselves to get much more mileage out of them than if they just rofl-pug it... but if the team has that down... then there aren't many situations where the LRMs actually measure up to the performance of other weapon systems - even when they are 'in their element.'

[masCh]

LRMs have been hard to use for quite a while now. I have LRM5's just for suppressive fire.. heavy, meds, assaults, lights they always disengage as soon as they got the "incoming missiles" warning.

[Joseph Mallan]

Yellonet, on 30 July 2015 - 11:24 AM, said:

LRM's still ruin my game from time to time. I play both on EU and NA servers and there are very seldom more than two mechs with ECM, sometimes only 1. And LRM's seem very common...

All weapons should ruin your game from time to time. Its called getting shot at!

[TWIAFU]

Weztside, on 29 July 2015 - 05:55 PM, said:

It's rather common these days for me to hear my teammates crying out for someone to call a target only to hear someone scream back that there is so much ECM coverage that target designations and even target info is nonexistent. An organized team can essentially remove a fundamental mechanic such as target info from the game with absolute ECM coverage. Reducing the bubble from 180 meters to 90 won't change this. A group of 6 players can field 6 ECM mechs. A group of 12 can technically field a team of 12 ECM equipped mechs. On top of this the dominant strategy in this community continues to be the everlasting "deathball". Nothing short of totally altering the mechanics of ECM is going to reverse the fact that PGI has flooded the queues with ECM mechs in order to make money. They are now using resources made in this process to rebalance ECM and figure out how to fix a problem they created. But hey, what the hell do I know I've only played this game 800+ hours over the years.

In anyone of over those 800 hours have you thought about telling your ECM teammates to hit J?

Tell them to equip BAP?

Use UAV?

TAG?

Just figured with 800+ hours of play you and your team would know how to counter ECM by now.

[masCh]

I might be mistaken in this, but I think Counter-ECM only counters 1 mech.

[lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol]

Depending if you play:
Solo Pug

Group Pug

12-man group

CW drops

Your experience with LRM's and using LRM's will vary greatly, as will friendly/enemy mechs that use C/BAP, ECM, AMS, TAG and the randomness of how MM decides to "balance" each side in the same way a a falling anvil doesn't.

[PurpleNinja]

Only unskilled pilots use lazors.

[Joseph Mallan]

PurpleNinja, on 31 July 2015 - 03:37 AM, said:

Only unskilled pilots use lazors.

Only Unskilled Pilots use weaponz!

[M4NTiC0R3X]

LRMs are great meh when:

Allies use UAV, take that ecm!
Scouts TAG without getting killed!
The missile boat has Artemis!

AND THE BIG ONE:

Enemy has bad or unlucky positioning.

[Madcap72]

I've been back to having 6-900 damage games with LRMS with the latest patch. So there's ecm in some matches, so what?


There's also teams with **** hot players that will smoke you regardless of what you have. Should PGI get rid of them too?


Suck it up and hit launch again.

[RoboPatton]

Man, since Beta LRMs have never gotten that "just-right" feeling.

Maybe they need to reworks several mechanics in the entire missiles fire-to-hit process. I don't know. It's an issue that's been debated since... forever.