43 replies to this topic

[Vellron2005]

I've played MW games for a long time, starting with MW2, but what always puzzled me, was the fact that in-game we see weapons like LRM20, which fires a spread of 20 missiles at the same time, and at the same target..

This always seemed really powerful and extremely redundant to me, since in real-life, a single missile is usually enough to turn a tank into a smoking wreck..

Can anyone explain to me why this is so?

Shouldn't 20 missiles be your entire ammo count for that pod, and you fire them one at a time?

Is this a flaw in battletech as a setting, is there an in-game reason why missiles are so weak that it takes about a 100 of them to take down a mech, or are missiles that weak in real-life too?

Please, don't spam the thread about how LRM's suck or don't suck.. we have enough of those threads..

[Karl Streiger]

reason: rule of cool

the designers of BattleTech in the 80s like the corkscrewing swams of missiles - thats it.

[martian]

Vellron2005, on 01 December 2015 - 06:22 AM, said:

Can anyone explain to me why this is so?

Shouldn't 20 missiles be your entire ammo count for that pod, and you fire them one at a time?

Is this a flaw in battletech as a setting, is there an in-game reason why missiles are so weak that it takes about a 100 of them to take down a mech, or are missiles that weak in real-life too?

1) Out-of-character explanation: When BattleTech was created, LRMs were the weapon with the longest reach. It seems that Weisman and Babcock wished to avoid giving it a big, concencentrated damage, punch. So they split the damage into 5-point clusters.

2) In-universe explanation: LRMs are just one missile system, specifically developed to have a great reach. There is another - less known - missile system: Thunderbolt Missile. It delivers one big concentrated hit at the cost of shorter range. However, Thunderbolt has been less evolutionary successful and therefore it's less known and less used.

Edited by martian, 01 December 2015 - 06:37 AM.

[MechB Kotare]

Would be cool, if you guys stopped comparing a MW free to play title, where every mech, every weapon and every tech is supposed to be usable comparing to others, with a BT set of rules.

You really think that each weapon system in MWO works exacly like it does in BT? You might be dissapointed.

[El Bandito]

Cause this is cool. Launching dozens of missiles feels powerful.

Edited by El Bandito, 01 December 2015 - 06:46 AM.

[Necromonger Commander]

Probably because Robotech/Macross used large packs of missiles. MRLs were very popular with the Russians in WWII. they fired as many as 40 tubes of unguided missiles off a 2 ton truck. https://en.wikipedia...rocket_launcher

[SpiralFace]

Missiles in battletech are not conventional balistic missiles you see in this day and age, they are more like guided rockets.

A typical naval cruise missile weighs about 410 killograms.

Missiles in battletech are significantly lighter. At 120 missiles per ton of ammo in the traditional Table top, a single missile in battletech weighs about 7.5 kilograms Putting it more roughly on par with conventional day RPG's then ballistic missiles.

In battletech, Missiles are designed more as a "crit seeking" or "High explosive" option. They are designed to gut and disable exposed components to finish a mech off quicker then trying to core out the engine.

Traditional style missiles still exist in battletech, but they are more considered "artillery" or "bombs" to be utilized by aerospace fighters. While a few mechs utilize Arrow IV missiles (much more akin to what kind of missiles your thinking of,) they typically are very inefficient on mechs, and are more of a Niche weapon reserved for cheaper, more "conventional" vehicles closer to supply lines.

[DivineEvil]

Vellron2005, on 01 December 2015 - 06:22 AM, said:

I've played MW games for a long time, starting with MW2, but what always puzzled me, was the fact that in-game we see weapons like LRM20, which fires a spread of 20 missiles at the same time, and at the same target..

This always seemed really powerful and extremely redundant to me, since in real-life, a single missile is usually enough to turn a tank into a smoking wreck..

Can anyone explain to me why this is so?

Shouldn't 20 missiles be your entire ammo count for that pod, and you fire them one at a time?

Is this a flaw in battletech as a setting, is there an in-game reason why missiles are so weak that it takes about a 100 of them to take down a mech, or are missiles that weak in real-life too?

Please, don't spam the thread about how LRM's suck or don't suck.. we have enough of those threads..

As far as I'm aware about the lore, the reason behind it, is that current AMS systems were so efficient at shotting down large missiles, that it became more practical to develop a volley system of smaller missiles, which are harder to hit.

Aside form regular LRMs, there's Thunderbolt missile systems and Arrow-IV artillery complex, both of which are mentioned to be more susceptible to AMS, and having less tonnage/space efficiency, being required to transfer and use the ammo of greater caliber.

Concerning the topic of LRM power, it originates from the technological theory of Battlemech/ComV armor. Due to humanity's venture to space, much more materials became available for industial use. Because of that, the present Standard Armor were developed, which undermined the modern stereotypes around effective projectile weapons.

Standard Armor is a multi-layered composite armor, that were specifically designed to counter two most conventional types of modern munitions - Armor-Piercing shells and Shaped-Charge warheads. The first outer layer of Standard armor is molecularly arranged Titanium-Steel alloy plate, enchanced by radiation treatment, extremely strong and hard to deform, which prevents any AP rounds to force a breach trough the plate by effectively consuming its kinetic energy, though it has much lower elasticity and crumble rather than bend. Second layer is a solid plate of Boron-Nitride, a ceramic material with distinctively high thermal and chemical resistance. This layer prevents Shaped Charges and conventional Heavy-Explosive shells to be efficinent at destroying and passing trough it.

These two layers are backed up by a "diamond fiber" sheet (basically what we now know as Graphene, or rather, Carbon Nanotubes), which is used to counteract most Electro-Magnetic effects and fairly strong in its own right, and all of those are attached to the honeycomb Titanium wireframe, accompanied by semi-liquid resin, that passively seals the breaches, preventing structurual damage from environmental factors. Depending on a mech's tonnage capacity, this armor can be laid in multiple layers on top of one-another.

Because of that Armor, all Missile and Ballistic weapons, except for few exclusions like Gauss Rifles, were redesigned to use HEAP (Heavy-Explosive/Armor-Piercing) composite ammunition. Basically it's a missile or a shell, that hits the armor plate like AP shell, heating and softening it up, then explodes, showering the affected area with alloyed splinters, shredding the armor piece by piece. Kinetic energy of a projectile is an important element still, which is why Autocannon shells still do less if any damage over range, and also why Gauss slugs can still break away enormous chunks of that armor, even if it causes them burst into sparks.

Edited by DivineEvil, 01 December 2015 - 07:58 AM.

[Alistair Winter]

I think that if you look at any number of computer games and tabletop games from the 1980s, you'll see missile launchers and rocket launchers firing multiple projectiles at the same time. It was just a cool trend at the time, similar to how older sci fi had lasers and ray guns everywhere and how more modern sci fi in the 90's and 2000's often feature more ballistic weapons, such as miniguns, assault rifles and sniper rifles (check out http://conceptrobots.blogspot.no/ ).

Obviously, Battletech has all kinds of weapons, but multi-missile launchers are common as dirt in any 1980's video game. I almost wonder if the prevalance of shooter games (e.g. side scrollers) contributed to the trend of missile launchers firing swarms of projectiles. Looks better on the screen when the enemy boss fires a spread of 50 missiles instead of one big cruise missile.

[The Basilisk]

The reason is none of the above mentioned ^^

The seemingly strange thing about Battletech weapons is the mix of ultra high tech and seemingly early 2nd WW tech weapons. Keyword --> arms race

When according to Battletech lore the Battlemech concept was created when the weapon technology, the counterweapon weapon technology and electronic warfare technology was developed high enough that conventional target following or seeking missiles or drones would just be shoot down long before reaching their target and conventional guiding systems just wouldn't be able to lock on to a target due to enemy ECM.
Also a conventional anti tank or anti armor missile would have needed to be either pretty large and therefore easy to dodge or shoot down, or nuclear to kill a mech in a single volley.
There was an intense armsrace between the Terran Hegemony and its competitors.
So instead of developing always better and faster ( and more expensive !!! ) guiding systems that would just get outteched after some years by its competitor states the Terran hegemony armed forces followed a conceped of strength through masses and the other interstellar states followed their example.
They combined pretty simple guiding technologys with sturdy and easy to replace components to just overwhelm an enemys misslile defense and ECM system.
Since their weapon tech level was pretty equal our concept of precision bombing and outomated weapons just would not be valid.

Later after uniting ( conquering ) the other interstellar states and forming the StarLeague there where indeed advanced weapons for asymetric warfare ( wich in reallife is the reason our nice hightech self targeting and target folowing weapons do function, the enemy is unable to defend itself with equal weapons )
With the fall of the Starleague and the following civilwar, most of the hightech and know how for interstellar warfare vanished in the fire of orbital, thermonuclear, biological and chemical bombings that killed over 60% of the StarLeagues citicens and 85% of its former infrastructure and technological potential.
Even the ability to build new Starships was all but lost.
So most of the Mechs, Starships and tech you see in the 3025 was just old stuff a hundred of times salvaged and cobbeled together after each fight and so are the weaponsystems.
Most of them have just been "rediscovered" and are barely understood how they work.

TL,DR The cobbled together nature of weaponsystems in BT is due to simple neccessity in combination with the BT Universe beeing a post apocalyptic scenario on interstellar level.

Edited by The Basilisk, 01 December 2015 - 07:33 AM.

[Paigan]

Karl Streiger, on 01 December 2015 - 06:29 AM, said:

reason: rule of cool

the designers of BattleTech in the 80s like the corkscrewing swams of missiles - thats it.

this

also:
- Why don't Mechs just use targeting software instead of clumsy slow humans?
- Why tons of funny looking, ill-designed (see hardpoints), redundant mechs?
- Why bother using mechs at all instead of airborne or orbital units for the same tech and mass?
etc etc.
(anybody: please don't come up with some "easy, the reason is ... " child logic answers. Those are rhetorical questions. You know rhetorical questions, quiaff?)


The reason always is: it is fiction, almost exclusively meant to look and feel cool, caring only very little about reason.
(and tbh, the BT rules in particular are pretty illogical. Like 20tonners having the same amount of item space as a 100tonner, bigger structure for a whole mech being able to be completely assigned into one arm, etc.)


My rule for playing BT: Never think about realism. Play as it is (basically the niveau of child toys), or leave it.

Edited by Paigan, 01 December 2015 - 07:32 AM.

[Mistress Lilium Magnus]

Where are all the engineers at? C'mon, guys.

Actually, it won't take an engineer to explain it (excluding myself as well). The point though is that it's actually reasonably realistic and believable. A missile in real life is anywhere from half the size of a man to a little better than two and a half men long. Missiles in general are usually of a certain size and geometry because of their flight characteristics and purpose. A warhead is actually relatively small all things considered and it doesn't take too much to punch through soft spots in armor either (i.e. the turret or top hatch on a tank, treads, etc).

A mech is not a tank. A mech is nowhere near the size or geometry of a tank. Machine Gun rounds for a mech are heavy autocannon rounds for us. The armor is much thicker, to keep other mechs from ripping right through it, and there is much more of it because it's a walking, dynamic thing.

A mech can step on a modern-era tank and crush it in (I say that because tanks in BT go in size from Abrams to crazy WWII Germany railway-transported and beyond). If the missiles themselves aren't getting bigger on scale with the platforms, the alternative is to just throw out a lot more of them.

Edit: As for why the missile systems didn't get larger or "better," Basilisk described it really well.

Edited by Lilium Magnus the Bloodwitch, 01 December 2015 - 07:59 AM.

[The Basilisk]

Paigan, on 01 December 2015 - 07:28 AM, said:

[...] Play as it is (basically the niveau of child toys), or leave it. [...]

Exactly this stance is the reason because gamedevelopers are able to earn money with illdeveloped lackluster conceps.

But hey yea nevemind, dont dive into immersion or what ever, just pay and play.....

The question by vellron2005 was why are Missiles fired in clusters by most BT weapons.
Answer: Lore ......and indeed some logic

Answering: hey bro dont think just play ..... does not help

[Karl Streiger]

Lilium Magnus the Bloodwitch, on 01 December 2015 - 07:55 AM, said:

Where are all the engineers at? C'mon, guys.

Actually, it won't take an engineer to explain it (excluding myself as well). The point though is that it's actually reasonably realistic and believable. A missile in real life is anywhere from half the size of a man to a little better than two and a half men long. Missiles in general are usually of a certain size and geometry because of their flight characteristics and purpose. A warhead is actually relatively small all things considered and it doesn't take too much to punch through soft spots in armor either (i.e. the turret or top hatch on a tank, treads, etc).

A mech is not a tank. A mech is nowhere near the size or geometry of a tank. Machine Gun rounds for a mech are heavy autocannon rounds for us. The armor is much thicker, to keep other mechs from ripping right through it, and there is much more of it because it's a walking, dynamic thing.

A mech can step on a modern-era tank and crush it in (I say that because tanks in BT go in size from Abrams to crazy WWII Germany railway-transported and beyond). If the missiles themselves aren't getting bigger on scale with the platforms, the alternative is to just throw out a lot more of them.

no engineers were harmed in the creation of battletech.
frankly 19t armor for a 12m high walking avatar of death (Atlas)
talking about 20mm Aluminium - you would be able to penetrate it with a rifle

mech armor is something strange a magic material that stops any bullet but get damaged like a whipple shield or a heat shield of a entry vehicle.

the reason is as Martian described: when the LRMs would hit as one big missile neither range would have been that long or the heat would have been exorbitant high - say 20 heat for one LRM 20.

[mark v92]

I always see it like its to combat Balistic or laser AMS. Shooting down 1 bigger missile is way easier than to shoot down 20.

Lets pick a real life example, the ICBM. https://en.wikipedia...llistic_missile

they come with 1 missile/1 warhead but also 1 missile/several warheads (MIRV)
mIRV missiles seperate in flight to release multiple warheads.

One of the advantages listed is this:

''Reduces the effectiveness of an anti-ballistic missile system that relies on intercepting individual warheads. While a MIRV attacking missile can have multiple warheads (3–12 on United States missiles and 3-12 on Russian), interceptors may have only one warhead per missile. Thus, in both a military and an economic sense, MIRVs render ABM systems less effective, as the costs of maintaining a workable defense against MIRVs would greatly increase, requiring multiple defensive missiles for each offensive one.''

Ofcourse the battletech isnt splitting mid air but that can be explained by AMS range in comparison to LRM range since the missiles needs to be split before it reaches 180m (or less for clan) to make it effective on short range angainst AMS.
Another explaination might be that a missile jam is less problamatic when you fire 20 induvidual missiles instaid of 1 MIRV.

(In battletech there is however a true MIRV. The Swarm LRM that separates midflight into 100 submunitions per missile )

Edited by mark v92, 01 December 2015 - 08:37 AM.

[PurpleNinja]

Watch a few Macross scenes and you'll understand.

[Mistress Lilium Magnus]

It's a missile, not a Saturn rocket. Compared to half the weapons used anyways, it would be average at best. 20 is a bit far fetched.

Also, yeah, it feels powerful and awesome to shoot a swarm of missiles but LRMs (especially the Clan ones that fire sequentially) look and feel like a swarm of angry hornets.

Range and heat has little (not saying nothing) to do with it though because with the same sort of tech they could make a larger missile go further, perhaps not as fast, and the heat would still be comparably negligible. However, that wouldn't be as effective against AMS or for precision against other mechs. Damage spread might also be a factor, not sure though.

Edit: (I keep being too vague. The point I'm trying to say is one big missile would be wasted if it missed/burned, but a bunch of normal ones take the same tech and just multiply the benefits.)

Edited by Lilium Magnus the Bloodwitch, 01 December 2015 - 08:29 AM.

[Bishop Steiner]

Vellron2005, on 01 December 2015 - 06:22 AM, said:

I've played MW games for a long time, starting with MW2, but what always puzzled me, was the fact that in-game we see weapons like LRM20, which fires a spread of 20 missiles at the same time, and at the same target..

This always seemed really powerful and extremely redundant to me, since in real-life, a single missile is usually enough to turn a tank into a smoking wreck..

Can anyone explain to me why this is so?

Shouldn't 20 missiles be your entire ammo count for that pod, and you fire them one at a time?

Is this a flaw in battletech as a setting, is there an in-game reason why missiles are so weak that it takes about a 100 of them to take down a mech, or are missiles that weak in real-life too?

Please, don't spam the thread about how LRM's suck or don't suck.. we have enough of those threads..

battletech missile are really more akin to semi guided rocket pods, not a bunch of individual AMRAAMs, or the like. Heck, one could probably liken SRMs to swarms of RPGs. Cheap to produce, and not needing any fancy guidance systems.

Doesn't make a lot of sense, but neither do giant space robots.

PurpleNinja, on 01 December 2015 - 08:25 AM, said:

Watch a few Macross scenes and you'll understand.

yeah, although usually just one Macross missile hit would kill or cripple. Always loved it when they did crap like fire 60 missiles at one target. SMH

[mark v92]

Heres a real life concept for swarm missiles that comes close to the battletech variant:

https://youtu.be/77gTSr07Jqs?t=158

[Paigan]

The Basilisk, on 01 December 2015 - 07:58 AM, said:

Exactly this stance is the reason because gamedevelopers are able to earn money with illdeveloped lackluster conceps.

But hey yea nevemind, dont dive into immersion or what ever, just pay and play.....

The question by vellron2005 was why are Missiles fired in clusters by most BT weapons.
Answer: Lore ......and indeed some logic

Answering: hey bro dont think just play ..... does not help

I know what you mean, but you twisted my statement.
What I said was: exactely BECAUSE one wants immersion, one has to accept all the flaws around it.
For MWO specifically, the flaws lie countlessly in the BT rules in the first place, not at PGI.
So if PGI sticked slaveishly to original rules, the game would be unplayable.

Some years ago, I had a similarly extreme point of view that I read in your post: It either has to be perfect or it's crap not worth being played at all.
Now I know:
- things are never perfect
- if they were, they would be just as complex and cumbersome as reality is. Noone wants that.
- every company has limited money, time, human resources, knowledge, skill. And it's NEVER enough. And if it were enough, all those high-skilled people would demand wages that would ten-fold the customer prices.

So, again: One can either accept stuff as it is (specifically to GET the precious immersion, at least a little) or one can/must bail out and say "no, sorry, not enough for me". Both are perfectly fine.

No need to get so cynical and aggressive.

Edited by Paigan, 01 December 2015 - 08:57 AM.