50 replies to this topic

[InvictusLee]

Your going to love this!

https://youtu.be/3HereJw4XP4

[MeiSooHaityu]

HBS just released a new trailer for the Mercenary Sim too...


It...looks...AMAZING.

[Jonathan8883]

The Sim part looks like fun. I think that may be where Paradox came into play (CK2, etc.).

[Leone]

Nope! All HBS. Paradox was brought in for extra testing and advertising as well as forum support.

The game itself is all Harebrained.

~Leone.

Edited by Leone, 15 March 2018 - 07:21 AM.

[C E Dwyer]

Actually, and I'm clearly expressing my opinion here, things were fine, until Paradox got involved.

[MechaBattler]

Did Paradox do something bad?

[InvictusLee]

I cannot waiiiitt!!
The sim looks like a blast!
Its gonna be like the BT version of Fire emblem but with alot less creepy Loli-popping!

Edited by November11th, 15 March 2018 - 08:55 PM.

[evilauthor]

MechaBattler, on 15 March 2018 - 02:19 PM, said:

Did Paradox do something bad?

Yes! The Dropship is not visually lore compliant! Which is weird since the Jumpship it deploys from is lore compliant from what I can see.

Seriously though, it looks great. But you know die hard purists are going to complain about this:


...when the dropship should look like this:

[Koniving]

MeiSooHaityu, on 15 March 2018 - 02:44 AM, said:

HBS just released a new trailer for the Mercenary Sim too...


It...looks...AMAZING.

Know what's funny?
The "two of your mechwarriors get into a fight" tidbit has played out in a Megamek mod I used (its no longer compatible since it hasn't been updated in forever) that basically took some RNG DM events from the Battletech RPG book and applied them every now and then.

Can't find the stories on mwo but I shared some years ago in which I had an issue where one of my good pilots was arrested because he got into a fight in a bar, and thus wasn't available for my next mission. Another one where a pilot and a technician got into a fight and the technician got medical leave due to a broken limb and losing an eye (btw eye implants are apparently really expensive...)

This wasn't just limited to fights, either.
From this post.

Spoiler

Koniving, on 18 September 2017 - 08:03 AM, said:

This said. What you do in "Creating your mech" aka "Make your gundam rules" is NOT the same as "Customization" rules in a campaign. There's a drastic difference between the two.
In a full on campaign, just changing out a weapon could take several days.
Swap that heatsink to make room for another ammo bin? Welp, there went five days.
Change the armor type?

Upwards of over a month to three with a mercenary-sized dedicated facility, several technicians working OVERTIME (including two GOD MODE techs because otherwise the colossal failures with ELITE technicians are so dramatic that you have to throw away the mech into a junk pile!, a crapload of ASTechs (assistant technicians), and somewhere of twice the money it takes to just buy a mech variant that has ferro armor is gonna be spent on allowing for all this to happen.

I tried this three times and it required some GM god-moding to get the conditions to do so. To ensure everything was done by the book this was done in Megamek HQ (wanted to do it in MekWars as that is BT's online community warfare, but it would probably take me over a year to build up a unit far enough to even attempt this). Overtime was permitted and each technician (a total of four) was given 60 hours to work with the mech for each week. Each tech had a full compliment of AsTechs of average skill. The mech was moved to the proper facility to ensure that the conditions were perfect to make the change. Use of a Power Man cargo mech was authorized to assist in the repairs, with an elite pilot and modified to have an Easy to pilot quirk to prevent any issues from his participation (which there were no issues from him in all of these attempts). The budget allotted was 13 million cbills (more than 4 times the cost of a ferro-equipped Jenner from the factory) and after each attempt, the saved game was reloaded to recreate the same conditions. The result?

• Result 1: The mech was rendered useless due to a mistake that both broke some section of the center torso structure which caused the engine damage and when I attempted to correct that, the engine got fused permanently. In the end, the mech needed to be discarded as it could no longer function without being able to replace the engine, and since that was impossible, I tried to sell it. Because of the issues, it was also given the Bad Reputation design quirk which should just cut its value in half, but I couldn't even sell it as we could not find a buyer. The roll to meet for finding a buyer even with the god-modded technician was "impossible." It was discarded out back into a trash heap. So many millions down the drain. 9,573,872 million out of 13 million was spent on the process and that all went to the toilet to flush.
  
• Result 2: Marginal success! I was able to convert the Jenner JF7-D into a ferro-armor totting mech. Unfortunately, in doing so I wound up getting the design quirk Exposed Weapon Linkage on one of my lasers. Another laser ended up with Non-Functional. The other two were fine. The SRM launcher now had "Ammo feed problems" which could lead to jamming. It also somehow lost its cooling jacket, adding an additional 2 heat every time I fired the SRM. It took another 3 weeks to attempt to fix these issues, during which one of the god modded technicians quit...and took the mech with him. (The reasoning from the die roll was he felt he wasn't getting paid enough. I had about 4 million left at the time but no option was given for me to give him a raise. As such, I had somewhere around 9 million spent.)
  
• Result 3: Encouraged by the previous marginal success, I dedicated triple the amount of money this time, a total of 39,000,000 cbills just for this project to turn one JR7-D into a Ferro-armor Jenner. The extra money was dedicated to making sure the God Modded techs were paid a lot more so that I wouldn't have a repeat of the previous issue. I was met with a colossal flop. This time during the process, despite being god modded for incredible success... one of the technicians (Scotty from Star Trek) accidentally fused a leg actuator so it one, could not move, and two, could not be replaced. It was otherwise largely successful. But what good is a mech that can't walk?

Needless to say, even with the facilities, God modded technicians, etc... that common upgrade in 3051...ain't gonna happen realistically. So try picturing it in 3015, or 3049, without the facilities, with at best maybe an elite technician, and struggling to pay your bills instead of magically getting 39,000,000 cbills "from your uncle" just to complete a project to change a JR7-D into a JR7-K, a Ferro-fibrous mech worth only 3,306,375 cbills brand new.


It's just a waste of time in lore and customization rules.

(I repeated this experiment as House Kurita in 3045, and did it in the Jenner facility owned by Luthien Armor Works on the planet of Abiy Adi.

Here, they don't actually have the Jenner JR7-Ks until 3049, and I'm at it in 3045. I was able to produce one by modifying and redesigning the Jenner JR7-K. It cost me about 5 million cbills to make the changes and didn't require as high level technicians or nearly as much time (just 3 weeks). I was able to do it on the first try with only a minor issue (the design quirk "unbalanced/off balance"). Unfortunately maintaining was difficult. Within a week it went from Great/prestine (E) to average (C) after the first maintenance.

A highly qualified technician quit because he wasn't getting paid enough. When he left, he took the mech he was working on as his severance package, which I had poured millions into.

In another case from the same post, an engine was damaged beyond repair during the attempt to repair it, and during the attempt to replace it, the engine was then unintentionally fused in such a way that replacing would be impossible. Nobody would buy the mech, either, as finding a buyer was impossible in terms of the dice roll. As such we took a that cost 4 million and had 9 million sunk into it and dumped it in a trash heap somewhere.

Lots of fun, megamek. But doesn't have the visuals of the BT PC.
Still, glad they ensured to add a bunch of the BT RPG (originally known simply as "Mechwarrior" as that was the title of the RPG prior to the computer games) into BT.

[Koniving]

evilauthor, on 16 March 2018 - 07:27 AM, said:

Yes! The Dropship is not visually lore compliant! Which is weird since the Jumpship it deploys from is lore compliant from what I can see.

Seriously though, it looks great. But you know die hard purists are going to complain about this:


...when the dropship should look like this:

There's actually several hundred dropship designs (if you include all the variants).
And two base types. "Spheroid" and "Aerodyne."

You're showing a spheroid.

The ratio of main dropship types is 29 Aerodyne to 41 Sphereoid.

In terms of most things, however, unless you're a major military faction or a very well-earning mercenary company, you're using aerodyne dropships for economical reasons, as well as practical ones. Aerodyne dropships are much more capable in terms of drop missions, especially in hot zones as well as get in and get out missions. Also most Spheroid dropships are basically overkill for small operations and pretty difficult to manage.

The Argo was built within construction rules as a civilian dropship (of which all civilian-purposed dropships are aerodyne though there's mention of high end merchant groups using the ever rare 'salvaged' spheroid dropship on occasion.)

So no, no issues from this purist. In fact there would've been issues if it was a spheroid dropship.

Here's some other dropships...

The Achilles


Arcadia Class. Not sure if trying to salvage mechs in space, perform zero-g repairs (they can do that on the ship so makes no sense out here). Whatever it is, they're doing...it.


Assault Triumph class
Light as this thing is its better armed than 12 MWO assault mechs.


Avenger class


Buccaneer class; this is a very common merchant dropship. Hosts 12 crew and can carry up to 4 mechs/vehicles.


Civilian Spheroid Dropship, 28.5 times heavier than the Buc...and hideous.


Condor-Class.

There's a lot of 'em. Barely scratched the surface thus far.

[MechaBattler]

evilauthor, on 16 March 2018 - 07:27 AM, said:

Yes! The Dropship is not visually lore compliant! Which is weird since the Jumpship it deploys from is lore compliant from what I can see.

Seriously though, it looks great. But you know die hard purists are going to complain about this:


...when the dropship should look like this:

That wasn't Paradox's design decision. That was HBS, they had that previewed since the Kickstarter. Well we can't just keep revisiting the past. And since HBS is led by the original creator of Battletech people will just have to accept it. ;o

[Metus regem]

evilauthor, on 16 March 2018 - 07:27 AM, said:

Yes! The Dropship is not visually lore compliant! Which is weird since the Jumpship it deploys from is lore compliant from what I can see.

Seriously though, it looks great. But you know die hard purists are going to complain about this:


...when the dropship should look like this:

Think of the Argo as less of a drop ship and more of an intra-system transport... It's always kind of bothered me that Drop-ships (specifically small ones like a Leopard) have enough fuel to reach escape velocity and make a few AU long trip... Not to mention everything needed by the people on board for the same kind of trip... If something like the Argo makes that more grounded, I am happy to oblige it's introduction.

What I mean about the distance is most Jumpships sit a few AU (1-4) away from the star, either above or below the plane of orbit for most worlds, that means most trips from the Jumpship to the target world is approximately between 150 million and 600 million kilometers (93 million miles to 372 million miles)... just to give you an idea of the distance we are talking about, the distance between earth and the sun is 1 AU, it takes light 8 minuets to reach earth....

[evilauthor]

Koniving, on 16 March 2018 - 07:55 AM, said:

There's actually several hundred dropship designs (if you include all the variants).
And two base types. "Spheroid" and "Aerodyne."

You're showing a spheroid.

The ratio of main dropship types is 29 Aerodyne to 41 Sphereoid.

In terms of most things, however, unless you're a major military faction or a very well-earning mercenary company, you're using aerodyne dropships for economical reasons, as well as practical ones. Aerodyne dropships are much more capable in terms of drop missions, especially in hot zones as well as get in and get out missions. Also most Spheroid dropships are basically overkill for small operations and pretty difficult to manage.

The Argo was built within construction rules as a civilian dropship (of which all civilian-purposed dropships are aerodyne though there's mention of high end merchant groups using the ever rare 'salvaged' spheroid dropship on occasion.)

So no, no issues from this purist. In fact there would've been issues if it was a spheroid dropship.

Here's some other dropships...

And you know what they all have in common? They're all (more or less) streamlined! They're all obviously designed to enter and fly through atmosphere even if in the case of Spheroids it's just straight up and down.

But the HBS ship? It's NOT designed for atmospheric ops. It's NOT streamlined. It's got far too many greeblies for it. And it's obviously not meant to model an Aerodyne given those moving pods are clearly meant to be rotating decks for a spinning grav section. This ship is clearly meant to do the same job as a Spheroid dropship but clearly isn't a spheroid.

Metus regem, on 16 March 2018 - 09:59 AM, said:

Think of the Argo as less of a drop ship and more of an intra-system transport... It's always kind of bothered me that Drop-ships (specifically small ones like a Leopard) have enough fuel to reach escape velocity and make a few AU long trip... Not to mention everything needed by the people on board for the same kind of trip... If something like the Argo makes that more grounded, I am happy to oblige it's introduction.

What I mean about the distance is most Jumpships sit a few AU (1-4) away from the star, either above or below the plane of orbit for most worlds, that means most trips from the Jumpship to the target world is approximately between 150 million and 600 million kilometers (93 million miles to 372 million miles)... just to give you an idea of the distance we are talking about, the distance between earth and the sun is 1 AU, it takes light 8 minuets to reach earth....

The Argo's rotating decks make sense if it spends the majority of cross system transit in free fall. But it'd take several weeks or even months to make the same trip that BT canon Dropship do in days. And BT canon Dropships can make the trip in days because they're accelerating/decellerating at 1G for nearly the entire trip, which would make rotating decks unnecessary.

And if it takes weeks or days to travel from Jump Point to planet is standard in the HBS version of Battletech, that's going to have all kinds of knock on effects for the rest of the setting.

Edit: Also, we see it leaving a planet, so the Argo is clearly meant to land and take off again.

Edited by evilauthor, 16 March 2018 - 01:07 PM.

[InvictusLee]

Why do you guys even care about the damned drop ship?! We are finally getting he lore friendly RTS we want and deserve!

Edited by November11th, 16 March 2018 - 11:27 PM.

[Metus regem]

November11th, on 16 March 2018 - 11:26 PM, said:

Why do you guys even care about the damned drop ship?! We are finally getting he lore friendly RTS we want and deserve!

'Cause I like the Argo, it fills a lore gap for me.

[Damnedtroll]

Argo is awesome, like a dropship build to act has a space station and merchandise relay between the jumpship and dropship going on the ground.

You can build space station in lore too.

[evilauthor]

After googling a few more Argo images, I may have to change my tune. The Argo looks like it's NOT supposed to land. The thing on its side that I had been taking for a funny looking winged turret is actually a Leopard Dropship. That makes its design more acceptable I guess... from a technical point of view anyway.

Well except that the Argo doesn't appear to carry proportionally more fuel and engine than the Dropships it is supposed to replace for interplanetary transit. Which kinda makes it unnecessarily redundant.

November11th, on 16 March 2018 - 11:26 PM, said:

Why do you guys even care about the damned drop ship?! We are finally getting he lore friendly RTS we want and deserve!

Because the Argo is NOT lore friendly? AFAIK, nothing like it exists in BT lore. There's a few spheroid dropships that lore says is entirely meant for space use, but none of them carry smaller Dropships.

[Karl Streiger]

Well well well - the Argo seems not to be a aerodyne but a spheroid dropship.
Considering that burn and coast might be more cost and time efficient then a constant acceleration (fusion torch drive) the spin pods are great.

Why spheroid?

After landing the observation deck and the "launch pods" of the ASFs will be correct alligned

[Koniving]

From what I seen, the Argo itself is not intended to actually make surface drops. It takes two dock collars when attached to a jumpship (so it counts as a large dropship), but it also has ports for mounting smaller dropships to make the actual drops. Something tells me this thing won't enter atmosphere unless it absolutely has to.

(As for the Spheroid classification, by the design given it has no means of providing "lift" for horizontal flight in atmosphere.)

[Koniving]

Far as constant acceleration engines, these strike me as extremely unnecessary in the Battletech universe. One the fuel consumption would be absolutely immense and unsustainable for ordinary travel, landings and liftoffs consume a significant supply on Spheroid class dropships and from what I can see they only seem to have the ability to make two landings (one at origin and one at destination) plus some in-system travel. Beyond this, they rely on a Jumpship for inter-system travel and the jumpships themselves are extremely conserving of their traditional propellant, as their only need is to get near the star of any given system in which they apparently 'fold' and suddenly end up in their destination system, whereby they get some distance from the new star and wait 7 days to recharge the drive.

Constant acceleration systems are designed with the Real Universe idea of going from one star system to another as fast as possible within as few generations (of crew) as possible, assuming that no Star Trek "Warp Drive" could be made, provided the ship could somehow have enough fuel (and this is why the system is not practical in today's standard, it'd be a one way trip with no guarantee of having enough fuel).

The entire concept is unnecessary in the Battletech universe as apparently, they don't "thrust" anywhere outside of any given star system. If the jumpship is lost, that's it there's no means to leave (which is why some systems drop off completely, the civilizations are left to fend for themselves and either die out or change to the point that when a jumpship does come, the Battlemechs and vehicles are worshiped as gods.

Instead what they do is they thrust off their planet of origin, thrust to nearest jumpship, dock, hitch ride. Jumpship nears sun in the most fuel efficient way possible. Fold space and instantly travel from one star to another. Jumpship establishes a safe orbit far enough away from this new sun for hospitable living conditions and waits a week. During which dropship thrusts to new planet, lands, delivers payload, waits to provide pickup, pick up payload, takes off, returns to jumpship, hitches ride, and in the original star system lands back home. Fuel gone. Resupply for the next sortie whenever it is necessary. (Contrary to the games, apparently the reason dropships are so well armed is they do NOT leave the planet until the job is done. In fact, there's quite an elaborate thing about how all mechs inherently have thrusters (or in later publications, backpacks) with enough thrust to make a drop from orbit as this is the primary means of delivery mechs to the field. Hence "Confirm Mech Pod Deployment." As such, unless staying in orbit is too unsafe, or dropping their strike team is impractical from orbit, they don't land until time to pick up their team. So no multiple landings. They land once on hostile territory and once at home. Just not enough fuel to keep pulling the constant acceleration needed to land on and leave planets so doing so in space..just isn't happening unless they're desperate.

As such, with their jumpships' "fast travel" and the limited capabilities of the dropships... there just isn't a practical application for the constant acceleration system and apparently not enough power/fuel reserves to use it by the means intended by the theory of constant acceleration.

Travel on a jumpship is described as "instant", with violent nausea that gets significantly worse for every dropship attached to the jumpship, with a fully 'docked' jumpship being so undesirable that the symptoms could lead to several deaths between BattleTechnology and MechWarrior RPG 1st and 2nd editions. There's apparently a roll for recovery time measured in hours with the high end being hospitalized for days..


Gravity is rarely used, and they thrust to speeds necessary and cut the engine, so they are not using constant acceleration methods.


There's about 3 pages on the subject. Effectively, "fuel economy" and "conservation of power" are the reasons why there's often no gravity on these dropships. Instead the use of magnetic boots is quite common (as demonstrated in the BT cartoon's second episode.)

At best, combine "Asteroids" (or Star Control) for most ships with umpships using Homeworld's drive (with the requirement of being near the sun).

With the 6+months it takes to get from Clan space to the inner periphery outside of Steiner/Kurita space using the instant travel, waiting for recharge, etc while fully loaded... the constant acceleration idea would be akin to Aleksandr's message of intent made after leaving the periphery long before finding a planet to settle... over 300 years before it reached Earth at the speed of light. So yeah...kinda worthless in the BT standpoint. The Khar Salim in Homeworld took 10 years to get to a point that took minutes for the drive, (with no ill side effects), but BT's solution is "nearly instant".

One could use constant acceleration to get to a jumpship much quicker than normal, but then you have the issue of flipping over and slowing down (which as you might be able to see Spheroid dropships don't exactly have an easy way of doing a barrel roll/sommersault to counter their thrust meaningfully if they went that route so that's kinda out. Aerodynes could probably pull it off. But as mentioned since dropships aren't meant for interstellar travel, just inter-system travel, you'd effectively burn up your land-at-home fuel and need to be resupplyed in orbit, assuming you have anything left to make orbit with. (Dropships are power houses with big reactors, but this reactor powers a lot of things and this big emphasis on conserving power until absolutely necessary tells me that this power is very finite, especially since dropships aren't intended to make more than two landings without being resupplied (one in hostile territory with possibly no resupply, and finally one in home territory to be refit, resupplied, and given a new sortie (run / mission) to complete.)

Edited by Koniving, 19 March 2018 - 09:22 AM.