181 replies to this topic

[Bombast]

Defender Rococo Rockfowl, on 31 October 2017 - 11:25 PM, said:

Not lookin for an arguement but after reading pretty much all the novels ... they do travel FTL.
Even the BT wiki reads, and I quote: "They facilitate faster-than-light (FTL) movement - "jumping" from one Jump Point to another, typically to a different star system, covering light-years in mere seconds." (copy-pasted from the Sarna wiki)

If you read the entire Sarna entry, you'll see that jump drives don't travel at all - They simply transpose the ship from one location to another. This is a fairly common method of bypassing relativistic speeds in sci-fi.

YueFei, on 31 October 2017 - 11:52 PM, said:

Anything that allows you to get something from A to B faster than light could've gone from A to B, regardless of the mechanism (including teleportation) opens up the gateway to violating causality.

I don't think it's canon, but one or two of the books insinuated that the jump signatures that preceded a jump ship actually occur before the jump starts. For big ships, they could occur prior to the decision to actually jump. As I recall, it's mentioned this bit of 'time travel' didn't really matter, due to the nature of interstellar travel and communications - Knowing whats happening in a solar system lightyears away a few minutes ahead of time is basically meaningless.

Edited by Bombast, 01 November 2017 - 06:21 AM.

[totgeboren]

El Bandito, on 24 October 2017 - 03:40 AM, said:

The Great Houses. I really do not think humanity will regress to feudal system again, unless nuclear wars wipe the slate clean.

Considering how wealth and power tends to accumulate in today's world, I don't think it's that far fetched at all. All you need is for a wartime democracy to dismantle and omit a few rules here and there about how long someone can remain in power, give the leader quite a bit of power that enables them to get people loyal to them into other positions of power, then elections and things like that are just a show for the masses (that might be how it already is in many parts of the world).

Political families can turn into political dynasties given enough time, and especially with a constant outside threat. That in turn gives you great houses basically.

[arcana75]

totgeboren, on 03 November 2017 - 12:16 AM, said:

Considering how wealth and power tends to accumulate in today's world, I don't think it's that far fetched at all. All you need is for a wartime democracy to dismantle and omit a few rules here and there about how long someone can remain in power, give the leader quite a bit of power that enables them to get people loyal to them into other positions of power, then elections and things like that are just a show for the masses (that might be how it already is in many parts of the world).

Political families can turn into political dynasties given enough time, and especially with a constant outside threat. That in turn gives you great houses basically.

Actually the lore gives an explanation to why the IS became a feudal system.

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Nobility

[El Bandito]

totgeboren, on 03 November 2017 - 12:16 AM, said:

Considering how wealth and power tends to accumulate in today's world, I don't think it's that far fetched at all. All you need is for a wartime democracy to dismantle and omit a few rules here and there about how long someone can remain in power, give the leader quite a bit of power that enables them to get people loyal to them into other positions of power, then elections and things like that are just a show for the masses (that might be how it already is in many parts of the world).

Political families can turn into political dynasties given enough time, and especially with a constant outside threat. That in turn gives you great houses basically.

That hasn't happened. Not even in N. Korea. Because centralized government is just superior in terms of stability. If anything, it will be closer to Marik system of governance with planetary representatives in a parliament, overseen by by a director.

[Red Shrike]

Most unrealistic thing?

9 out of 10 maps don't even try to hide the fact that they've been purposefully designed for mech combat. All it does is make the mechs feel smaller than they are supposed to be.

[sycocys]

The most obvious one to me is the ammo (especially missiles) traveling via magic to your weapons.

Second to that is internally encased "heat sinks" which would have no effect but to store additional amounts of heat in your mech's chassis until you boiled alive. Maybe they are supposedly piped out, but there's no way that especially on the omnipod side that they'd have 10 billion custom plumbing configurations.

Third - a bipedal machine can walk, much less stand with a destroyed leg.

[The Cyberserker]

My mech doesn't have cup holders.

[FupDup]

sycocys, on 03 November 2017 - 02:24 AM, said:

The most obvious one to me is the ammo (especially missiles) traveling via magic to your weapons.

Second to that is internally encased "heat sinks" which would have no effect but to store additional amounts of heat in your mech's chassis until you boiled alive. Maybe they are supposedly piped out, but there's no way that especially on the omnipod side that they'd have 10 billion custom plumbing configurations.

Third - a bipedal machine can walk, much less stand with a destroyed leg.

Technically Battletech "heat sinks" are actually heat pumps by function. They were just very poorly named.

[sycocys]

FupDup, on 03 November 2017 - 03:08 AM, said:

Technically Battletech "heat sinks" are actually heat pumps by function. They were just very poorly named.

Even so, as far as I can tell the only thing they'd do is make your mech accumulate heat because only a few mechs have any sort of setup for exhausting the heat outside of flushing your coolant. Which would also only end up making your mech hotter.

[Electroflameageddon]

I think the whole person aiming and firing weapons without computer assistance is hilarious.

20th century tech has ships, planes and helicopters that use computer controlled fire control. It is insanely accurate. The operator locks the target and sometimes pulls the trigger, sometimes the computer (once unlocked) pulls the trigger.

The software necessary to figure out where to point the weapons was less than 32K in the 1960's to do this. Ships with that technology were able to hit targets travelling around Mach 1 that were 30 miles away.

Doesn't take a lot of computational power to solve the fire control problem. The software has grown slightly to solve ECM issues digitally, but you could probably run it with room to spare on your average desktop. Yes, even under Windows 10....

[Kin3ticX]

ammo in the left leg going to a weapon in the right arm

[Stridercal]

I love how people make IRL answers for a fictional universe... when the fictional universe has already answered all this questions. Even if the lore is poorly answering the questions, the answers are there.

[davoodoo]

sycocys, on 03 November 2017 - 02:24 AM, said:

Third - a bipedal machine can walk, much less stand with a destroyed leg.

I can answer that.

Its really hard to actually blow something off a mech so a "destroyed" leg is simply one with damaged or destroyed myomers and can still limp around.

Electroflameageddon, on 21 November 2017 - 09:09 AM, said:

I think the whole person aiming and firing weapons without computer assistance is hilarious.

You cant aim by hand in bt, mech without sensors is unable to attack

also sensors include targeting computer.
http://www.sarna.net...Tracking_System

Edited by davoodoo, 21 November 2017 - 11:54 AM.

[Electroflameageddon]

davoodoo, on 21 November 2017 - 11:45 AM, said:

I can answer that.

Its really hard to actually blow something off a mech so a "destroyed" leg is simply one with damaged or destroyed myomers and can still limp around.

You cant aim by hand in bt, mech without sensors is unable to attack

also sensors include targeting computer.
http://www.sarna.net...Tracking_System

Alright, I'll concede the point that they exist in the board game.

In MWO, you are looking out of a cockpit, manually aiming weapons at a target and pulling the trigger. The only thing I can see being solved by your "computer" is parallax (convergence), which is two right triangle calculations for each weapon, if one knows range and angle to target. Not to terribly taxing for the "targeting computer". Uh, I've got the hypotenuse and an angle, golly, tough math.

Sure you have heat vision and night vision. That tech has been around since the 1960's.

An Apache helicopter pilot has a helmet that points the weapons automatically at whatever target the pilot is looking at. This technology was around in 1972.

With the technology that we have today, the radar picture of MWO is enough to put missile and ballistic strikes on every target that you see on the radar and hit the target 100% of the time.

I've done the fire control problem by hand, it is nothing but a series of right angle geometry problems. I even programmed a x286 computer with 640K of memory to do it back in the '80's. Oddly enough, this was the same computer I played Mechwarrior 1 on.

With the pattern recognition features of today's technology it is possible for cruise missiles to almost ring the doorbell of your home before detonation.

Using today's technology, it would be possible to write a subroutine that would target the mech's weakest point, automatically aim the weapons and fire all while moving at a paltry 150 kph.

So yes, I laugh at the "targeting computers" in MWO that require you to aim and fire manually.

But I also recognize that having a computer that did all the work for you would make a very boring game.

Edited by Electroflameageddon, 21 November 2017 - 05:45 PM.

[Anjian]

Electroflameageddon, on 21 November 2017 - 09:09 AM, said:

I think the whole person aiming and firing weapons without computer assistance is hilarious.

20th century tech has ships, planes and helicopters that use computer controlled fire control. It is insanely accurate. The operator locks the target and sometimes pulls the trigger, sometimes the computer (once unlocked) pulls the trigger.

The software necessary to figure out where to point the weapons was less than 32K in the 1960's to do this. Ships with that technology were able to hit targets travelling around Mach 1 that were 30 miles away.

Doesn't take a lot of computational power to solve the fire control problem. The software has grown slightly to solve ECM issues digitally, but you could probably run it with room to spare on your average desktop. Yes, even under Windows 10....

Its more hilarious when you consider there is an ingame technology called AMS that exactly does that.

AMS in the game works and looks like a mini CIWS...

What's also funny is how many times, the artwork for this franchise also shows mech pilots wearing monocles, and monocles are used in lets say, modern attack helicopters for eye ball cued computer assisted targeting.

Edited by Anjian, 21 November 2017 - 08:38 PM.

[davoodoo]

Electroflameageddon, on 21 November 2017 - 05:09 PM, said:

But I also recognize that having a computer that did all the work for you would make a very boring game.

Pretty much crux of the problem.

Also gunnery skill exists so pilot can make adjustments to fire.

[MechaBattler]

Wearing short shorts because it's hot in your mech. So glad PGI went with a cooling suit xD

LOL. I cant' stop imagining all these burly mechwarriors standing around with their hairy legs Dx

Edited by MechaBattler, 21 November 2017 - 10:56 PM.

[Athom83]

Bombast, on 01 November 2017 - 06:20 AM, said:

If you read the entire Sarna entry, you'll see that jump drives don't travel at all - They simply transpose the ship from one location to another. This is a fairly common method of bypassing relativistic speeds in sci-fi.

Speed is the derivative of distance, meaning distance over time. Even if the ship itself doesn't move, its place in space changes over time. However since that time is 0, then it briefly achieves an infinite speed.

[jss78]

About FTL, isn't the idea of the Alcubierre warp drive -- the concept actually discussed in scientific literature -- that though there's a limitation on speed, there's no such limitation on folding of space?

I'm not a physicist, so I'm just quoting from memory stuff I don't really understand.

About the neo-feudalism in BT, it kind of makes sense to me. The idea is that humanity spread across the stars, and tying this vast interstellar civilization together requires a massive fleet of FTL ships, FTL communications, a massive bureucracy.

Once these start to erode, communities suddenly become very isolated, in a way not seen since the age of horses and wagons on Terra. And then you start to get power vacuums and local strongmen.

Not saying it WOULD happen, but it's a halfway-feasible what-if scenario to me. Lots of sci-fi is built on probably-not-gonna-happen stuff like this.

Edited by jss78, 22 November 2017 - 01:22 PM.

[LORD ORION]

arcana75, on 24 October 2017 - 03:26 AM, said:

Yeah it's the 31st Century and it's all sci-fi and what not, and the whole mech thing is pretty much sci-fi bs, and there's alot of unrealistic things in BT to choose from, but out of all of it, what's the most unrealistic thing for you in BT/MW?

For me, it's seeing a 75 ton giant robot lift off the ground with small jets. Every time I see a Timber Wolf do this, it breaks my suspension of disbelief. More so than other stuff like all the complex moving parts surviving huge barrages, all the hidden ammo and how leg ammo can actually feed to shoulder mounted weaponry even in chicken walkers, etc.

What's yours?

Pretty much mechs...