HammerMaster, on 14 February 2018 - 07:39 AM, said:
It IS free c3 because the indirect fire and then scatter rules are not being used. Just lock and shoot as normal. This is the tier 4/5 bogeyman.
The only thing LRM indirect fire does with normal spotting is +1 to hit. It doesn't scatter onto adjacent hexes or anything like that (that's artillery), and it doesn't affect the Cluster Hit Table in any way. MWO doesn't really have any way to directly simulate a +1 to hit because we don't roll to hit... but in a way, the fact that you're counting on someone else to hold a lock kind of does stand-in for that, since if they drop their lock before the missiles arrive, they won't hit.
In fact, C3 does absolutely nothing for LRMs:
Quote
LRM Indirect Fire: C3-equipped units spotting targets for
or launching an LRM indirect fire attack use the LRM Indirect
Fire rules (see p. 111), and gain no benefit from a C3 network.
The only exception is that the C3 Master unit has a built-in TAG, but that doesn't do anything a normal TAG wouldn't do. TAG is its own thing, and TAG is what eliminates the +1 to hit.
Really, you should be more careful to look things up when you're on a forum where some posters might have the rulebook sitting on their desk next to them.