113 replies to this topic

[The Unstoppable Puggernaut]

All guass charging should remain, I personally love it, charging up a ballistic slug feels more realistic. The green zone fiddling is rediculous and needs to be the same across all guns. The charge up time should obviously be changed on the gauss type.

I've been trying Dual light gauss with 'x' er med lasers for IS. It's not bad but obviously not the same as the clan punch. The important thing I think people are missing is that it covers a long range where most their weapons struggle. I honestly don't think it's a fantastic saving point, the weight overall too silly but it allows greater mobility in terms of using the weight for a larger engine.

[Aggravated Assault Mech]

The Unstoppable Puggernaut, on 05 August 2017 - 02:29 AM, said:

All guass charging should remain, I personally love it, charging up a ballistic slug feels more realistic. The green zone fiddling is rediculous and needs to be the same across all guns. The charge up time should obviously be changed on the gauss type.

I've been trying Dual light gauss with 'x' er med lasers for IS. It's not bad but obviously not the same as the clan punch. The important thing I think people are missing is that it covers a long range where most their weapons struggle. I honestly don't think it's a fantastic saving point, the weight overall too silly but it allows greater mobility in terms of using the weight for a larger engine.

I think the problem is that when you take a LGR you have to put up with all the ******** of Gauss rifles without any of the advantages. In general IS gauss just sucks- a flat out downgrade from Clan in every way but the module health.

I don't think LGR is going to shake things up for long range. Mechanically it's just much easier with ERPPCs, which don't have ammo and do more damage, or ERLL which are hitscan. Pretty sure regular gauss is doing more damage anyways until you're above 1000m.

Maybe removing charge would be overkill, but my point is more that even regular IS gauss is ****, and light gauss is just a more bloated, less tonnage-efficient version of it. There is basically nothing good about either of them.

[Y E O N N E]

Aggravated Assault Mech, on 05 August 2017 - 03:52 AM, said:

I think the problem is that when you take a LGR you have to put up with all the ******** of Gauss rifles without any of the advantages. In general IS gauss just sucks- a flat out downgrade from Clan in every way but the module health.

I don't think LGR is going to shake things up for long range. Mechanically it's just much easier with ERPPCs, which don't have ammo and do more damage, or ERLL which are hitscan. Pretty sure regular gauss is doing more damage anyways until you're above 1000m.

Maybe removing charge would be overkill, but my point is more that even regular IS gauss is ****, and light gauss is just a more bloated, less tonnage-efficient version of it. There is basically nothing good about either of them.

TBQH, the charge isn't the issue. You hit on it when you mentioned the ERPPC.

The ERPPC travels at 1900 m/s and does 10 damage at 810 meters. It is 7 tons and 3 slots.
The LGauss travels at 2000 m/s and does 8 damage at 750 meters. It is 12 tons and 5 slots.

I mean, what are we getting with LGauss? We have 10 heatsinks included on every 'Mech, and that's sufficient to cool a single ERPPC, so we sure aren't getting DHS savings. The gun does less damage over a shorter range for more weight and more slots. And there's ammo, and we can't ditch any of those 10 DHS even if we don't need them, so the LGauss is always at minimum 12.5 tons.

Charge or not, that will forever be a raw deal; better to just take the ERPPC to get your PPFLD fix.

[MustrumRidcully]

The Unstoppable Puggernaut, on 05 August 2017 - 02:29 AM, said:

All guass charging should remain, I personally love it, charging up a ballistic slug feels more realistic.

What is realistic about it?
Certainly not the fact that a Gauss Rifle explodes because of its charge, even when it's not charged?

[Y E O N N E]

MustrumRidcully, on 05 August 2017 - 07:26 AM, said:

What is realistic about it?
Certainly not the fact that a Gauss Rifle explodes because of its charge, even when it's not charged?

If the Gauss explosion made any sense at all, every high-energy weapon should explode. That includes lasers and PPCs.

[Alexander of Macedon]

Yeonne Greene, on 05 August 2017 - 08:30 AM, said:

If the Gauss explosion made any sense at all, every high-energy weapon should explode. That includes lasers and PPCs.

Gauss explosions make a decent amount of sense in the original TT context. It's a coilgun, which means all of the energy needs to discharge essentially in the same instant, which means a big honkin' capacitor full of stored energy. Gun gets destroyed, all that energy undergoes an uncontrolled release--that is, 'boom'. A laser doesn't need to store the entire charge, especially with BTech's long burn times; it can just have a small capacitor and feed more power throughout the firing cycle.

The problem is the charge mechanic. Logically in MWO GRs should only explode if destroyed while the player is charging the weapon, but as with many other things it appears that little or no actual thought was put into translating mechanics outside of hammering pegs into holes in the desperate pursuit of balance.

[Y E O N N E]

Alexander of Macedon, on 05 August 2017 - 10:22 AM, said:

Gauss explosions make a decent amount of sense in the original TT context. It's a coilgun, which means all of the energy needs to discharge essentially in the same instant, which means a big honkin' capacitor full of stored energy. Gun gets destroyed, all that energy undergoes an uncontrolled release--that is, 'boom'. A laser doesn't need to store the entire charge, especially with BTech's long burn times; it can just have a small capacitor and feed more power throughout the firing cycle.

It doesn't make any sense when you consider that a reactor can only output energy at a certain rate that can't be changed quickly, and you still need capacitors to store the charge in the weapon to fire. But I've been told BT uses some stupid AF explanation where a laser "draws energy straight from the reactor".

[Alexander of Macedon]

Yeonne Greene, on 05 August 2017 - 12:26 PM, said:

It doesn't make any sense when you consider that a reactor can only output energy at a certain rate that can't be changed quickly, and you still need capacitors to store the charge in the weapon to fire. But I've been told BT uses some stupid AF explanation where a laser "draws energy straight from the reactor".

Those are flamers you're thinking of.

My best guess would be that laser draw per second isn't actually very high relative to total potential output considering that 'mechwarriors are riding honking big fusion reactors-'mechs are pretty damn power-dense when you come down to it, which is a big part of the reason why they outperform conventional vehicles.

Though I'd also posit that if you can manage your suspension of disbelief for giant robutts that stomp all over the square-cube law, you should be able to handle weapon systems that aren't perfectly true to life. BTech pretty much runs on '80s technobabble anyways, they've not even got non-mainframe computers to a workable state but centuries-old fusion reactors can be repaired and maintained by random greasemonkeys fer ****'s sake.

[Y E O N N E]

Alexander of Macedon, on 05 August 2017 - 01:20 PM, said:

Those are flamers you're thinking of.

Nope. Flamers draw plasma from the reactor. Not the same thing.

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My best guess would be that laser draw per second isn't actually very high relative to total potential output considering that 'mechwarriors are riding honking big fusion reactors-'mechs are pretty damn power-dense when you come down to it, which is a big part of the reason why they outperform conventional vehicles.

Apparently not, if a Gauss Rifle has a higher draw than something like a Clan ERPPC/ Heavy Large Laser or even just the IS Heavy PPC.

Edited by Yeonne Greene, 05 August 2017 - 02:16 PM.

[Alexander of Macedon]

Yeonne Greene, on 05 August 2017 - 02:15 PM, said:

Nope. Flamers draw plasma from the reactor. Not the same thing.

Okay, then cite me a source, because I don't recall ever reading that and can't find any mention of it. I brought flamers up because that's the closest thing I could think of that could be altered into lasers drawing power directly from the reactor by a faulty memory.

Yeonne Greene, on 05 August 2017 - 02:15 PM, said:

Apparently not, if a Gauss Rifle has a higher draw than something like a Clan ERPPC/ Heavy Large Laser or even just the IS Heavy PPC.

What does that have to do with anything? You do realize that the damage tables don't directly correspond to how the weapons would function, yes?

Let's take a couple real-world examples, about as close as we can get. The railguns that the USN has been testing are estimated to require around 25MW for a full-power shot. HELLADS, an in-development counter-RAM laser, is intended to top out at 150kW. That is, the railgun requires ~167 times as much power to fire as the laser.

Granted, the scale is a bit wider than what is portrayed in BTech, but I'm not sure where you're getting the impression that lasers would necessarily even be as energy intensive as coilguns, never mind drastically exceeding them. Especially when all observed behavior of BTech weapons seems to confirm that GRs require much more energy than just about anything else.

You might have a point to make regarding PPCs, though we basically only have a single example of similar real-world tech (MARAUDER)-that said, I'll reiterate (since you ignored it once): BTech is soft SF from the '80s. If you're expecting consistent logic and adherence to real-world physics, you probably should have checked yourself the instant you saw giant 'mechs that didn't collapse under their own weight.

[Y E O N N E]

Alexander of Macedon, on 05 August 2017 - 04:04 PM, said:

Okay, then cite me a source, because I don't recall ever reading that and can't find any mention of it. I brought flamers up because that's the closest thing I could think of that could be altered into lasers drawing power directly from the reactor by a faulty memory.

Tech Manual, p 218 for the Flamer. As I said earlier, though, I was told that lasers surge the reactor output in BT. I haven't ever read that

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What does that have to do with anything? You do realize that the damage tables don't directly correspond to how the weapons would function, yes?

It has everything to do with it.

To remove X amount of armor, I have to put Y amount of energy onto a target. This is true regardless of weapon type. ACs do it using the kinetic energy in the projectile as well as a secondary payload in the shell. The PPC and the Gauss both do their damage through pure kinetic energy, and they both release that damage inside an infinitesimal amount of time. The HPPC and cERPPC both do the 15 points of damage, whatever that translates to in energy release (in MWO, a Gauss round is 200 MJ). And keep in mind, that's the result at the impact. The inefficiencies of each would require more, and it's actually harder to get enough particles moving near light speed to do this kind of damage than it is to get a 100 kg projectile to Mach 6.8 because the energy required increases exponentially.

Also...consider that we're spooling that Gauss in 0.75 seconds. You have to force all those electrons into the capacitors in less than 75% of the time it takes me to fire a pair of ER Large Lasers when I've got the duration reduction nodes. C'mon, now, nothing about it makes sense.

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Let's take a couple real-world examples, about as close as we can get. The railguns that the USN has been testing are estimated to require around 25MW for a full-power shot. HELLADS, an in-development counter-RAM laser, is intended to top out at 150kW. That is, the railgun requires ~167 times as much power to fire as the laser.

As you observe the scale is super wide; the damage scales are not even remotely comparable. You are also, as above, neglecting the time taken to get the energy into the capacitors to discharge that gun in the first place. And really, that goes for lasers, too.

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Granted, the scale is a bit wider than what is portrayed in BTech, but I'm not sure where you're getting the impression that lasers would necessarily even be as energy intensive as coilguns, never mind drastically exceeding them. Especially when all observed behavior of BTech weapons seems to confirm that GRs require much more energy than just about anything else.

Gauss fills in 0.75 seconds, lasers release in similar time scales. Multiple lasers release more energy without the time scale going up. Turning electricity into light with enough intensity to do this kind of damage in this time scale is very inefficient.

The Gauss should be getting very hot, too, but space magic.

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You might have a point to make regarding PPCs, though we basically only have a single example of similar real-world tech (MARAUDER)-that said, I'll reiterate (since you ignored it once): BTech is soft SF from the '80s. If you're expecting consistent logic and adherence to real-world physics, you probably should have checked yourself the instant you saw giant 'mechs that didn't collapse under their own weight.

I ignored it because the things we are talking about were well understood by the late 1960s, let alone the 1980s. We were speculating on building nuclear lances in the 60s, and by the '80s we had plans for X-Ray lasers and particle projectors in orbit (STAR WARS).

No. Weisman said they wanted as little of the soft as they could get, but they really didn't do the due diligence to make me believe that. I'm not here to project realism onto this game, but you invite it when you say the Gauss shouldn't explode unless charged. It's a gameplay mechanic; nothing more, nothing less.

MARAUDER isn't a PPC. It's firing a plasma toroid. A PPC is more akin to the LHC firing its beam into that giant graphite block at the end when they are finished with an experiment or undergoing a quench event, at least according to its description. The games always get it wrong, showing a fuzzy blue orb instead of a beam with a helical swirl around it (that's just fancy artwork, mind you).

Edited by Yeonne Greene, 05 August 2017 - 04:38 PM.

[Brain Cancer]

Yeonne Greene, on 05 August 2017 - 02:15 PM, said:

Nope. Flamers draw plasma from the reactor. Not the same thing.

Actually, flamers generate plasma (with or without a chemical boost), as tapping plasma directly from the engine would rapidly shut it down. That's why they generate heat- it takes power from the reactor to light one off.

[Y E O N N E]

Brain Cancer, on 05 August 2017 - 07:26 PM, said:

Actually, flamers generate plasma (with or without a chemical boost), as tapping plasma directly from the engine would rapidly shut it down. That's why they generate heat- it takes power from the reactor to light one off.

Not what I understood. And also not necessarily true. I don't know what the rate of fusion is inside a BattleTech fusion engine, but when you've fused your elements to a certain point, you need to refresh your plasma with new fuel.

But, I will defer.

[Brain Cancer]

It "taps into the reactor" the same way all energy weapons do, which is misleading.

Then again, Battlemech reactors can literally be refueled in a pinch by having the pilot take a leak. A modern take on emergency-water cooling a machine gun...