70 replies to this topic

[evilauthor]

Lightfoot, on 14 April 2018 - 09:29 AM, said:

MWO's weapons are heavily nerfed compared to all other MechWarrior games. The Gauss Rifle charge-up? wtf! is that? You mean it's wrong to fire PPCs with Gauss? That's not how I learned to play MechWarrior!

I'm also pretty sure weapons are actually chain fired in the Battletech universe rather than group fired all the time as in MWO. That would explain why each individual weapon has to roll to hit individually instead of as a group.

And remember, all mechs are heat capped at 30 heat in TT game unlike in MWO where the cap is much higher. If you really tried to fire 2 ER PPCs or 3+ standard PPCs at the same time, your mech would go into autoshutdown. Hence everything gets chain fired over 10 seconds in order to give your heat sinks time to get rid of the heat. Imagine how MWO matches would go if you were forced to chain fire all your weapon groups.

[FupDup]

evilauthor, on 14 April 2018 - 07:29 PM, said:

I'm also pretty sure weapons are actually chain fired in the Battletech universe rather than group fired all the time as in MWO. That would explain why each individual weapon has to roll to hit individually instead of as a group.

I've never bought into that argument because a giant 100-ton weapon platform that can't even fire two dinky little Machine Guns simultaneously would be 100% completely and utterly useless on the battlefield. The individual rolls are a game rule, not a literal lore element. The lore explanation is that targeting computers just really really suck in the BT universe.

Not to mention that it completely breaks the power fantasy/immersion of piloting a hulking death machine.

evilauthor, on 14 April 2018 - 07:29 PM, said:

And remember, all mechs are heat capped at 30 heat in TT game unlike in MWO where the cap is much higher. If you really tried to fire 2 ER PPCs or 3+ standard PPCs at the same time, your mech would go into autoshutdown. Hence everything gets chain fired over 10 seconds in order to give your heat sinks time to get rid of the heat. Imagine how MWO matches would go if you were forced to chain fire all your weapon groups.

That would not happen in TT. Even with just 10 SHS, your double ERPPCs or triple PPCs would leave you at 20 on the heat scale. That's pretty high up there but not forced shutdown. With 10 DHS you'd only generate 10 points of heat from that salvo. With 15 DHS you'd generate literally zero heat.

There's a Clan assault mech called the Hellstar that was built specifically to fire quad Clan ERPPC every single turn without generating any waste heat (30 DHS needed). Very nasty piece of hardware.

[Mcgral18]

FupDup, on 14 April 2018 - 07:42 PM, said:

There's a Clan assault mech called the Hellstar that was built specifically to fire quad Clan ERPPC every single turn without generating any waste heat (30 DHS needed). Very nasty piece of hardware.

So hot, he needs to dab to drop excess heat

[FupDup]

Mcgral18, on 14 April 2018 - 07:49 PM, said:

So hot, he needs to dab to drop excess heat

Cannot unsee.

[Brain Cancer]

Mcgral18, on 14 April 2018 - 07:49 PM, said:

So hot, he needs to dab to drop excess heat

FupDup, on 14 April 2018 - 07:50 PM, said:

Cannot unsee.

In the grim future of the 32nd Century, there is only dab.

[LordNothing]

real life weapons op. pay to win.

Edited by LordNothing, 14 April 2018 - 10:08 PM.

[Lightfoot]

evilauthor, on 14 April 2018 - 07:29 PM, said:

I'm also pretty sure weapons are actually chain fired in the Battletech universe rather than group fired all the time as in MWO. That would explain why each individual weapon has to roll to hit individually instead of as a group.

And remember, all mechs are heat capped at 30 heat in TT game unlike in MWO where the cap is much higher. If you really tried to fire 2 ER PPCs or 3+ standard PPCs at the same time, your mech would go into autoshutdown. Hence everything gets chain fired over 10 seconds in order to give your heat sinks time to get rid of the heat. Imagine how MWO matches would go if you were forced to chain fire all your weapon groups.

Well this is just incorrect. You don't fire 14 medium Lasers one at a time, not even in TT. You take a heat penalty sure, but you would fire them in as large a group as you could per turn, or alpha strike and miss a turn.

Canon Lore is that the AWS-8Q could fire a 3xPPC salvo or 2 per turn for extended fights. Same for the AWS-9M, but using ERPPCs thanks to it's double heatsinks.

The translation between Table Top and Simulation is never perfect, but firing in groups is represented in the Lore.

But, more to the point, there is no reason you could not fire 2xGauss and 2xPPCs in a single salvo. 22 heat, with some double heatsinks you would never overheat.

But MWO has things like an AC20 firing a possible 3 times in a 10 second period and in TT it's just once. Things like that break the TT stats for normal mech armor and even though MWO uses 2x armor, it's not enough. The mechs die too fast, do not feel armored.

[LGear]

Mechwarrior1441491, on 13 April 2018 - 05:30 AM, said:

Are tanks moving and shooting at moving targets 2 miles out? Not if they want any chance of success.

Technically, modern main battle tank software and hardware do in fact allow gun-stabilized turrets on moving tanks to accurately hit targets to around their effective range. Of course, the majority of engagements in the last few decades have not necessitated said ability when fighting against outmoded hardware (like against Vietnam War-era vehicles fielded by third-world countries), but the capability is there in order to potentially fight off peer hardware.

I'm really just chalking up Battletech's short ranges as being a limitation of their targeting systems owing to the ubiquity of electronic warfare in the battlefield, necessitating shorter engagement ranges for weapons, aka the Minovsky Particle Excuse of Mecha Combat Paradigm.

Edited by LGear, 15 April 2018 - 01:20 AM.

[Brain Cancer]

Lightfoot, on 14 April 2018 - 11:57 PM, said:

But MWO has things like an AC20 firing a possible 3 times in a 10 second period and in TT it's just once. Things like that break the TT stats for normal mech armor and even though MWO uses 2x armor, it's not enough. The mechs die too fast, do not feel armored.

Actually, an AC/20 can fire twice during a ten second period in TT. Four times, if you don't mind risking the gun breaking in the process by forcing a double-tap.

Remember that standard rules don't take ROF into account at all, but Solaris VII lists reload times- which if it's 0,1,or 2 the weapon has a fire-and-recycle time that can be completed in a single 10 second period. AC/20's are 2, which means fire (one 2.5 second turn), reload for five seconds, ready to fire again on turn 4 (which ends at 10 seconds, the same amount of time as a standard rule turn). You could even force a weapon to fire before it's done cycling, which in an AC/20's case would mean a second shot immediately after the first would be triple heat and risk disabling and possibly detonating the gun for pushing it past it's limits.

[C E Dwyer]

I don't get this thread as it's so freaking obvious what the answer is. and yet this goes on and on.

The clues in Table top game.

It's played on a table and ranges have to be short so you can't do an old River City exploit of being able to guass rifle your enemy in the drop zone from your drop zone.

Minimum practical table top scale for figures that can show some detail are 1/285, 1/300 fell out of favour when the lead content was removed, as pewter is to fragile for the smaller scale.

This is very roughly, no extremely roughly the 'scale' of B.T Table Top.

Nearly all war game have extremely truncated ranges, the only one I had on record with something like realistic ranges was a bloody awful world war two naval game which involved laboriously chalking torpedo tracks and guessing ranges by eye.

Created by an ex U.S Navy Rear Admiral, it was impossible to play unless you could afford to hire the local community hall.

Dredging the dpeths of my memory I have a feeling it was called something like

Damn the torpedo's, after Farragut's famous quote.

Though of course I doubt Farragut would have ever said that, if Confederate torpedo/mines had the abilities of a Japanese 24 inch Long Lance

[mad kat]

Maybe Battletech should have something like this......Complete with terrified pigeons!
https://youtu.be/BGoJl8Lr46g