Yeonne Greene, on 21 October 2015 - 08:18 PM, said:
On the one hand, calling a mortar a missile (yes yes, in strict definitions, any projectile is a missile) is ridiculous.
On the other hand, it lets you use your otherwise undesirable missile hard-points to house a poor man's AC and deliver PPFLD from a distance, with the only caveat being you have to lob it and it's a bit slow.
Here are my makeshift space-magic explanations that I thought of about a minute ago:
A. With their naming conventions (e.g. Mech Mortar 8), it implies that they need multiple barrels/tubes. Ballistics around here usually seem to be either single-barrel or rotary-barrel, being long and thin. For mounting these mortar tubes, I visualize it as requiring a large flat and horizontal space like the missile weapons we already have.
B. From a game mechanics standpoint, their heat, damage per ton, huge minimum range, and spread-damage nature make them behave more akin to the average missile weapon than ballistics (which are usually low heat, low damage per ton, with little or no min range).
C. They have limited guidance mechanisms, which is a characteristic more common to missiles than cannon shells.
Space magic aside, from a fooling around standpoint I think that keeping them as missiles would add a fairly unique and oddball new member of the missile family.
One little idea I had in my mind was if we had "hybrid hardpoints" like Mechwarrior 4, Mech Mortars could be counted normally as missiles but with the ability to be mounted in "direct fire" hardpoints as well (normally reserved for your choice of energy and/or ballistics). But alas, that's a Mechwarrior 4 thing...