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How?
Explosions. Michael bay this stuff up good.
More specifically,
1. Ammo explosions without case have a chance of cooking off other ammo in said part, and adjacent parts.
2. Ammo explosions actually affect the world around it, not only with pretty cook off round fireworks, but also damaging nearby mechs friend or foe.
Thus, Case becomes involved.
Case separates out ammo into reinforced compartments, thus severely reducing the risk of cooking off nearby parts. This comes at a downside of taking tonnage and crit space in the chassis, and only working in the torso bits for IS.
But wouldn't this nerf IS pretty hard? Wouldn't that mean IS mechs couldn't carry nearly as much ammo as clammers, because they'd be at risk of detonating themselves pretty hard anywhere outside of the torso?
NO, and here's why: Case doesn't magically stop explosions; it just redirects them away from the mech inernals. While clan mechs technically would be safer vs themselves, they would still be a danger to those around them. While they COULD more safely (to themselves) boat more ammo than IS, more ammo would STILL mean greater risk to their TEAM.
Directed blasts focus the damage of explosions. We're talking potentially like 180 damage worth of missiles or 300 damage worth of bullets's propellant cooking off. That's just a single ammo slot.
Taking a portion of that to account for just the propellant, say 1/3, that's still 60 or 100 damage split in half, half forward and half back out the mech (or just all out the back of the mech).
This would mean that brawling with or against mechs that had ammo would incur new risks, as damaging components could potentially create a short range nasty backblast, putting both enemies and teammates at risk.
Take a lrm boat for example; say the mad dog. Loaded to the brim with LRMS. Even with CASE, all you gotta do is strip the armor off of a component that has ammo, and shoot a few machinegun rounds at it. SUDDENLY, that mad dog is a liability and a danger to the team, making it more difficult (but not impossible) to defend, but also more dangerous to facehug. A few well placed shots and suddenly it's like an airstrike went off on the 4th of july.
Also you could easily make Gauss weapon explosions follow the same mechanic, thus making them just as dangerous.
TL;DR:
Making explosive ammo a liability to the mech pilot, the team, and the mechs around it, would make boating large amounts of ammo dangerous especially for serious pilots. Mech pilots that wanted to succeed and not become giant walking bombs would take more diverse loadouts to mitigate the risk, and allow their own teammates to more safely assist in more dynamic brawls where you have to be careful not to be directly in the backblast of ammo explosions.
Case would become far more important a tool, and allow for said short range backblasts to be better mitigated away from teammates and towards enemies that get too snuggly.
LRM boats and Kodiak-3 would become a self correcting problem.
Edited by Tibbnak, 02 November 2016 - 04:52 PM.
