814 replies to this topic

[Zergling]

Dee Eight, on 16 February 2017 - 11:08 AM, said:

Depends from what was it fired, and what it hit. If you shoot say a 120mm APFSDS from a American M1 or German Leo2 into the right side of a russian BMP-1, what's going to happen is you'll get two holes in a straight line (in the right side and left side armor plating) and very little else happening in between unless by some miracle it went thru something important (like someone inside).

Also there is a difference between an APDS and APFSDS and FAPDS rounds. The former and latter are prevalent on small to medium caliber guns of APCs and IFVs whereas the latter are pretty much the domain only of large caliber guns used on tanks and tank destroyers. The only somewhat modern exception is the Chieftain's APDS for its 120mm L11 gun.

Early 105mm L7 ammo in the 1960s and early 1970s was APDS too, like British L36/L52 and American M392/M728.
And I think the first sabotted round for the Russian 100mm rifled guns was BM-8 APDS.

Small caliber (autocannon) APFSDS are becoming common, like 25x137mm M919 used by the M2/M3 Bradley (used since the around 1996-1998) and 30x173mm Mk 258/Mk 268.

Edited by Zergling, 16 February 2017 - 11:33 AM.

[Apollo777]

At the moment MWO is not P2W(pay to win) wich makes the game unique and i love it, but in the new ST system you can buy your skills!
I think many players wil stop playing MWO if it become P2W game.
Please PGI make new ST free of C-bill/MC, just spending XP is enough.

[Dee Eight]

PFC Carsten, on 16 February 2017 - 08:35 AM, said:

Actually... the BALL of metal is designed to deliver a massive amount of kinetic energy over a comparatively large surface (i.e. armor plates, diameter of a basketball according to lore), while the APDS is designed to pierce armor concentrating it's kinetic energy on a very, very VERY limited amount of space, say, a couple of mm². basically designed to pierce armor (hence AP - armor piercing). Compare this to AS (armor smashing) as the Gauss projectiles are described according to lore.

Once the armor is gone (critting occurs), an APDS round would run right though the internals, possibly even missing many system completely. A Gauss ball however would crunch and destroy everything in it's (much larger!) path - hence higher crit chance.

Armor smashing would be the FASA way of describing current FAPDS (also known as PELE) rounds which are different enough from APDS that they required a different abbreviation.

[Cy Mitchell]

Apollo777, on 16 February 2017 - 11:27 AM, said:

At the moment MWO is not P2W(pay to win) wich makes the game unique and i love it, but in the new ST system you can buy your skills!
I think many players wil stop playing MWO if it become P2W game.
Please PGI make new ST free of C-bill/MC, just spending XP is enough.

How is the new Skill Tree Pay to Win? Sure you can buy C-Bills with MC to pay that part of the cost of Skill Nodes but you still have to have 1500 XP for every Skill Node you unlock. You cannot buy XP. In the time it takes you to grind 1500XP, you will earned way more than the 100,000 C-bills that you need for the unlock.

I do not see Pay2Win here.

[Dee Eight]

Hastur Azargo, on 16 February 2017 - 10:14 AM, said:

Something tells me that a basketball-sized ball of metal would also have really bad ballistic stats, i.e. range and accuracy. It seems to me FASA didn't take a detailed look into evolution of armor and armor-piercing tech when they were writing the fluff.

Well again... consider the ranges they were claiming combat occurs at... in an atmosphere, somehow the effective range for a gauss is only 22 hexes which is 660 meters (being 30 meter across each hex) at ground level fired from a highlander but put the same gauss into an aerospace fighter and the range is still measured in hexes...except in an atmosphere a hex is 500 meters across and in space they're EIGHTEEN KILOMETERS across. Same goes for World of Tanks... most combat in that game happens at 300 meters or less except for rare cases up to 500 meters for some tanks. That's not how most actual real world tank combat history goes though.

ALSO

Turn duration in the atmosphere whether it be for mechs on the ground or aerospace fighters in the air is 10 seconds... in space its 1 minute (so six atmosphere turns). Yet if you believe the gauss fluff about projectile velocity...then clearly doesn't work out if a gauss in space. 22 hexes at 18km per hex equals 396 km per minute which times sixty gives 23760 km/h. That's about mach 19 and change based on the sea level speed of sound being 340.29 m/sec. Remember firing a projectile weapon in space doesn't make it go faster than in an atmosphere... it just eliminates the air drag that slows the projectile down during its flight. So the only way to explain why gauss slugs slow down so much in an atmosphere, especially when fired by a mech against another mech, is that they're shaped like frying pans or lunch boxes or something like that.

Edited by Dee Eight, 16 February 2017 - 03:18 PM.

[Zergling]

Amusingly, fluff text and novel descriptions in Battletech used to state the Gauss Rifle had a staggeringly high muzzle velocity of... Mach 2.2

Which is all of 755 m/s; even WW2 tank guns achieved higher muzzle velocities than that, nevermind modern tank guns that can hit MVs of around 1750 m/s.

Of course, taking the '8 shots per ton' literally* puts each Gauss round at a weight of 125 kg... but that is still only performance comparable to a 203mm howitzer, hardly 'super duper advanced tech'.

*given ammo weights probably include stuff like ammo storage and feeds, each shot probably weighs less than 1/8th of a ton.

Edited by Zergling, 16 February 2017 - 12:11 PM.

[Kael Posavatz]

Rampage, on 16 February 2017 - 11:37 AM, said:

How is the new Skill Tree Pay to Win? Sure you can buy C-Bills with MC to pay that part of the cost of Skill Nodes but you still have to have 1500 XP for every Skill Node you unlock. You cannot buy XP. In the time it takes you to grind 1500XP, you will earned way more than the 100,000 C-bills that you need for the unlock.

I do not see Pay2Win here.

There is one Pay2Win element--consumables.

Assuming arty/air/coolshot nodes are added and that all are not removed from the mech tree (currently UAV's are part of the Mech Tree) the situations becomes this:

A player willing to pay MC (real money) receives max-performance consumables and can invest 91 nodes in non-consumable skills

A free-to-player can invest 91 nodes in non-consumable skills or bring max-performance consumables. Not both.

Paying real money for an in-game performance buff is the definition of a pay-to-win game mechanic.

Edited by Kael Posavatz, 16 February 2017 - 12:32 PM.

[BLOOD WOLF]

Fester Blatz1980, on 16 February 2017 - 03:15 AM, said:

I'm reading this differently:
https://twitter.com/...756588747468804

Jeez, I don't know if this is american level of reading comprehension or what.

How does new grinding, meaning the grind is going to be different= More grinding.

You also got to look into the Context of the other post he has written.

Edited by BLOOD WOLF, 16 February 2017 - 12:47 PM.

[MovinTarget]

Kael Posavatz, on 16 February 2017 - 12:32 PM, said:

There is one Pay2Win element--consumables.

Assuming arty/air/coolshot nodes are added and that all are not removed from the mech tree (currently UAV's are part of the Mech Tree) the situations becomes this:

A player willing to pay MC (real money) receives max-performance consumables and can invest 91 nodes in non-consumable skills

A free-to-player can invest 91 nodes in non-consumable skills or bring max-performance consumables. Not both.

Paying real money for an in-game performance buff is the definition of a pay-to-win game mechanic.

If the non-paying player isn't using cbill consumables at all, I suppose you'd have a point. But I'm not convinced that the MC consumables win games where the cbill version would not at some exorbitantly high rate. I get it, they can give you a momentary edge that *might* be better than the edge that a cbill consumable provides... Would be interesting if there are actual statistics proving this.

[Kael Posavatz]

MovinTarget, on 16 February 2017 - 12:54 PM, said:

If the non-paying player isn't using cbill consumables at all, I suppose you'd have a point. But I'm not convinced that the MC consumables win games where the cbill version would not at some exorbitantly high rate. I get it, they can give you a momentary edge that *might* be better than the edge that a cbill consumable provides... Would be interesting if there are actual statistics proving this.

we'll see what they put in PTS2, but the non-node c-bill UAVs are...very, very bad, arty/air is apathetic, and the 40k-cbill coolshot struggles to be better than the 10k-cbill variant.

[Dee Eight]

Kael Posavatz, on 16 February 2017 - 01:16 PM, said:

we'll see what they put in PTS2, but the non-node c-bill UAVs are...very, very bad, arty/air is apathetic, and the 40k-cbill coolshot struggles to be better than the 10k-cbill variant.

That's because the PTS1 forgot about the "improved" skill nodes for the cbill consumables. Thus there is no double nine for 40k with 20% bonus. Its just a cool shot of 9 total.

[MrKvola]

I believe the consumables were considered and error and were to be fixed in the next iteration. I just wish we would get the next iteration already.

[Kael Posavatz]

Dee Eight, on 16 February 2017 - 01:31 PM, said:

That's because the PTS1 forgot about the "improved" skill nodes for the cbill consumables. Thus there is no double nine for 40k with 20% bonus. Its just a cool shot of 9 total.

Actually, no, it was because I was comparing non-improved c-bill consumables to those available for MC.

[jackswift]

Checked out the test server. With the cbill costs, more like a tax, I won't be delving into it when it makes it live but maybe on one or two mechs that would be worth the investment. I don't even have proper engines in all my mechs. I don't do well enough on average to fund weapons, mechs, engines, and skills on top of that.

I didn't even invest in, what, 3 modules at most so I won't be getting cbills back either. I'll just run vanilla.

[MrKvola]

jackswift, on 16 February 2017 - 02:55 PM, said:

Checked out the test server. With the cbill costs, more like a tax, I won't be delving into it when it makes it live but maybe on one or two mechs that would be worth the investment. I don't even have proper engines in all my mechs. I don't do well enough on average to fund weapons, mechs, engines, and skills on top of that.

I didn't even invest in, what, 3 modules at most so I won't be getting cbills back either. I'll just run vanilla.

And now imagine you have to grind almost 4x as much to get your 'mechs mastered. Because of the XP.

[BLOOD WOLF]

MrKvola, on 16 February 2017 - 03:33 PM, said:

And now imagine you have to grind almost 4x as much to get your 'mechs mastered. Because of the XP.

well lets not imagine at all and use the PTS as a benchmark.

[jackswift]

Yeah, I've been reading up on it to see it from all the sides. I like the concept but no so much the implementation. I have close to 60 mechs since 2012, according to the website. For me that's a stupid amount of time invested. I understand the purpose of it, but I know I've lost what useful skills I had when this goes live. Take away the c-bill cost and straighten/organize the trees so that there are actually branches and it's a good addition. We'll see what really happens soon enough.

[MrKvola]

BLOOD WOLF, on 16 February 2017 - 03:44 PM, said:

well lets not imagine at all and use the PTS as a benchmark.

Did that. Still need 136.5k to get the SPs. No change in the maths.

[Petrothian Tong]

Well, time to cancel those pre-orders again...

Seriously... is like they pick the most unpopular method (9.1 mill c-bills to master a mech) on purpose.

[SuperFunkTron]

Petrothian Tong, on 16 February 2017 - 05:07 PM, said:

Well, time to cancel those pre-orders again...

Seriously... is like they pick the most unpopular method (9.1 mill c-bills to master a mech) on purpose.

I got excited by the idea of needing to grind out some new the supernovas. I'm going to being more interested in buy mech packs now that there are will be a system letting me make all the variants useful.