21 replies to this topic

[Dragonporn]

As I'm not acquainted with BT lore very well, I was wondering, from actual lore perspective, is it ok to put ammo into the legs when weapons are in upper side torso mounts, for example? Would it technically be efficient in terms of ammo feeding? Like missiles or shell should travel pretty big distance inside mech structure before it reaches hardpoint, weapon is mounted in. It is especially true for bigger mechs, such as Assaults as I imagine. Another thing is with ammo flowing through structure, getting hit in specific point may actually have impact on layers behind armor, causing shell do jam or explode, which blows up whole chain. Is there any explanation that covers it to quell my imagination?

How lore-friendly Mechlab is and all the builds you can come up with in MWO by the way?

[FupDup]

TT has no rules about ammo placement, but most stock builds try to keep ammo in the same location as the weapon or failing that they keep it in the adjacent location.

[justcallme A S H]

Just incase anyone is wondering the draw from the actual locations in MWO

[Vorpal Puppy]

Wow, I always thought ammo in head was pulled in first. I wish ammo location feed order was a mech adjustable parameter.

[Nothing Whatsoever]

Hmm, ammo feed order... tasty.

[Tetatae Squawkins]

Lore/rules don't care.

Ammo feeding and ammunition size problems are solved with space magic.

[justcallme A S H]

Many people ask why I put ammo in the CT, 2T if I can.

The reason is quite obvious IMO. If you can't use 2T ammo or are taking CT shots and dying cause of it. You have other, issues.

[Abaddun]

justcallme A S H, on 27 July 2018 - 09:29 PM, said:

Many people ask why I put ammo in the CT, 2T if I can.

The reason is quite obvious IMO. If you can't use 2T ammo or are taking CT shots and dying cause of it. You have other, issues.

I feel that will make you a bit more vulnerable to light backstabbers. It would only take one unlucky MG crit to blow the CT apart. But you are right, it won't be hard chewing through 2 tons of ammo.

[Dragonporn]

Tetatae Squawkins, on 27 July 2018 - 09:29 PM, said:

Lore/rules don't care.

Ammo feeding and ammunition size problems are solved with space magic.

Dayum... Was really hoping there's some sort of technically believable explanation of it. I'm sad now...

[Bulletsponge0]

justcallme A S H, on 27 July 2018 - 06:11 PM, said:

Just incase anyone is wondering the draw from the actual locations in MWO

and that order is idiotic. The ammo should v\feed from the most vulnerable areas (arms and legs) first....

[justcallme A S H]

How are arms or legs most vulnerable when they are unable to be critical from behind?

[HGAK47]

I recall a picture that someone posted before showing ammo in legs being fed / taken up in a carrige / ammo belt mechanism up the side of a mech into a torso mounted gun. It was cool to see.

Thanks for the ammo order picture here too, I was always told that CT and side torsos were first pulled from but I had no idea that the head was last! lol. No more ammo in the head for me if I can help it.

Edited by HGAK47, 29 July 2018 - 12:45 AM.

[x Deathstrike x]

Bulletsponge0, on 28 July 2018 - 11:22 AM, said:

and that order is idiotic. The ammo should v\feed from the most vulnerable areas (arms and legs) first....

Legs are one of the least vulnerable locations because nobody explicility targets them unlike torso and arms.
That's why everybody with some experience puts his ammo into the legs and even shoves off some armor points from them.

HGAK47, on 29 July 2018 - 12:45 AM, said:

Thanks for the ammo order picture here too, I was always told that CT and side torsos were first pulled from but I had no idea that the head was last! lol. No more ammo in the head for me if I can help it.

Since you rarely get critted on the head (assuming full armor), head is one of the safest locations for remaining ammo after your mech is roughed up from all sides during battle.

[El Bandito]

x Deathstrike x, on 29 July 2018 - 02:30 AM, said:

Since you rarely get critted on the head (assuming full armor), head is one of the safest locations for remaining ammo after your mech is roughed up from all sides during battle.

Depends on the mech. If PGI ever make a good ballistic Battlemaster variant, I would not put any ammo in its head.

[x Deathstrike x]

El Bandito, on 29 July 2018 - 02:44 AM, said:

Depends on the mech. If PGI ever make a good ballistic Battlemaster variant, I would not put any ammo in its head.

Uhm yeah... I concur ... probably there are some exceptions to the ammo in the head.
BLR might be one of them, its head is too deep in the CT.
But back in the day when I still ran it with 4 LPL the head always granted a little extra armor to the CT that way
Luckily its mostly a laser boat.

[CMDR Sunset Shimmer]

Dragonporn, on 28 July 2018 - 07:02 AM, said:

Dayum... Was really hoping there's some sort of technically believable explanation of it. I'm sad now...

There IS a technically believable explanation for it, everyone here is just pissing on MWO and how little it cares about lore.

There is no real "feed order" nor has there ever been, in Tabletop, for instance, you pick the bin ammo is being drained from, simple as that.

The most logical way it's handled from an in-universe perspective is that you try to put the ammo as close to the weapon as possible to cut down on weak points and jams/failures. so if you have a weapon in the right torso, you'd want the ammo also in bins in that torso as well, the feeding mechinisim is in the same area, and simply feeds belts of ammo from the ammo bins to the weapon.

In the event the weapon is in the right torso, but the ammo is in the right arm, the feed system would have to work through the shoulder and back into the torso to the weapon, this of course causes feed issues if the arm is blow through [crit].

mechs tend to have many redundant systems for if you need to change feeding belts from different bins... but it's rarely utilized within the gameplay and is mostly there as fluff in the lore.

[Koniving]

Reining it back to the original questions...

Dragonporn, on 27 July 2018 - 04:53 PM, said:

As I'm not acquainted with BT lore very well, I was wondering, from actual lore perspective, is it ok to put ammo into the legs when weapons are in upper side torso mounts, for example? Would it technically be efficient in terms of ammo feeding? Like missiles or shell should travel pretty big distance inside mech structure before it reaches hardpoint, weapon is mounted in. It is especially true for bigger mechs, such as Assaults as I imagine. Another thing is with ammo flowing through structure, getting hit in specific point may actually have impact on layers behind armor, causing shell do jam or explode, which blows up whole chain. Is there any explanation that covers it to quell my imagination?

How lore-friendly Mechlab is and all the builds you can come up with in MWO by the way?

The last question...isn't worth answering. (In terms of construction "build your own fantasy mech" rules, Mechlab is probably more lore friendly than the actual ruleset to a point. In terms of "modifying" an existing mech within a campaign, with or without the proper facilities to do so, and said mechisn't a fantasy about to be spawned off of some made up production line on the planet Catharsis.... there's nothing lore friendly about it.)

Now can you make lore friendly builds with it? Yes.
Are typical MWO builds lore friendly? For many reasons no, but to be frank... if you try to run many of these builds in CBT or Solaris VII, they aren't just gonna perform different, some are outright impractical death traps or blatantly wasted tonnage.

For example some laser boats in MWO when built in CBT would be cold even with their heatsink weight in single heatsinks, let alone not needing so many doubles. Of course the damage output from them would drop by 3x or greater...making them really impractical.

So your lore questions, here we go.

[1]from actual lore perspective, is it ok to put ammo into the legs when weapons are in upper side torso mounts, for example?

This is fluff dependent. Lets say for example the mech has a left hand, and a right arm projectile weapon that feeds in magazines (for autocannons they're called cassettes, there isn't a lore specific term for a resupply of missiles, though the term rack is often used it usually refers to the launcher itself not the reload). So lets say its an autocannon, and for a lore specific example, its a Wolverine. Bam. Although the internal feed location of most Wolverines is the right torso, early artwork shows us that the ammunition was often carried externally, back when mechs carried modular weapons (a practice stopped with an ever present issue of being "disarmed" and attacked with their own weapons). Thus you could mount it to the left leg and so long as you can explain how you mount it onto the gun for the reload, you're set.

Some of the early art for the Wolverine.
(Right hand - discardable weapon, often put down or dropped prior to melee combat and retrieved after the fact -- a common practice that quickly simmers down to being rare somewhere between the Amaris Coup and the Second Succession War, largely due to many issues where having dropped the weapon has led to being unable to shoot or where the weapon is stolen and used to kill allies. In reality, having tried the rules for it.. it is very easily abused and understandable why they never made print outside of an 1987 issue of "Battletechnology.")
(Left hand - holding spare ammunition).

Edit:
Bonus art -- back when FASA had great artists..

As you can also see, some art had solutions for convergence issues, too...

[2] Would it technically be efficient in terms of ammo feeding? Like missiles or shell should travel pretty big distance inside mech structure before it reaches hardpoint, weapon is mounted in.

It'd be pretty much impractical even from BT's lore, see Trebuchet on Sarna.net for an example.. SRM launcher needs left arm to lock into place without moving for 3 seconds, if it does move (or gets hit), the weapon is supposed to roll for a jam, preventing you from using it for the remainder of the fight. That's just going from left torso to left arm through two actuators.

Similarly, the Victor has two ammo feeds for the arm, one internal and one external. The arm has to remain stationary for (again) 3 seconds, locked in a folded position. If not, that feed jams. Even then it extrudes from the bicep into the forearm externally (after going from the right torso into the upper arm). The secondary feed ejects through the front port of the right torso and requires the left arm to manually insert it. This secondary method consumes 7 seconds and is only relevantly inconvenient in Solaris VII combat where each turn is 2.5 seconds.

Side note: By Solaris VII I mean the original. There are three rulesets. The original as quoted below, the "expedited" released somewhere between 98 and 2000 which basically is just a fluff book that uses classic TT rules instead (I call it expedited as instead of 4 turns to cover 10 seconds you're doing 1 turn to cover it, combat is far less intense, however, and not as fun to retell). And finally what I call the "Clix" release, as its basically a large card game where mechs have 5 HP... released somewhere in after 2003....which Mechwarrior Tactics drew a lot of inspiration from for their card mechanics.

[3] It is especially true for bigger mechs, such as Assaults as I imagine. Another thing is with ammo flowing through structure, getting hit in specific point may actually have impact on layers behind armor, causing shell do jam or explode, which blows up whole chain. Is there any explanation that covers it to quell my imagination?

For why it doesn't? Or to show that it does? If the latter, the most basic rules don't cover it. However beyond those in the above cases with Trebuchet and Victor, being hit in a specific limb while reloading is meant for the GM to decide how to handle it (typically "dice" roll against a specified skill or an automatic application of the affliction. In the case of both stated mechs, the affliction is a weapon jam, though the GM could opt that a critical failure lead to a chain reaction to one ton of ammo). These are not the only examples, but these are the most prominent.

Another fun example is the Javelin. This is related more to ammo location than risk of going boom or chain reaction. When hit from behind while moving forward, there's a pilot roll that should be done to see if it falls forward, weighted by how much ammo the Javelin currently has (the more it has the more likely it will fall forward).

Also fun is sometimes you can see the ammunition storage or how it runs through the mech by looking at some of the artwork. The Blackjack's "life preserver", for example, is actually the armored ammo feed going from the CT storage location, around the abdomen, over the shoulders and finally into the AC/2s. Or in the case of the Hunchback, the ammunition is in the drum on the left torso. And the single piece of official artwork for the Hunchback 4SP of CBT, the drum is half the size and located on the rear of the CT (this is because it holds 1 ton instead of 2 and is mounted on the CT..as the ammo is mounted on the CT for the 4SP)

Any others questions?

Also you'll get more BT-centric answers in the Battletech discussion thread.

Edited by Koniving, 29 July 2018 - 11:43 AM.

[Dragonporn]

Well, that's pretty much covered every possible angle of my questions, so thanks, can't say I'm satisfied tho...

The thing is, I get that gameplay should come first for obvious reasons, but what if PGI introduces some penalties based on ammo distance from weapons it suppose to feed? Like if you have, f.e., AC in arm and ammo in leg, you get something like 0,3-0,5 sec delay before you fire, while if both ammo and weapon are in same spot, you get no penalty? Something also could be done with crit chances if ammo travels across the structure, but that would be big hassle.

[Khobai]

Dragonporn, on 27 July 2018 - 04:53 PM, said:

Like missiles or shell should travel pretty big distance inside mech structure before it reaches hardpoint, weapon is mounted in.

works fine

[Koniving]

From mwo's perspective reloads are done per bullet on a chain or belt... So however long that chain is... It won't make sense for a delay as the next shot on the chain should be waiting just outside the gun like a cafeteria line, each student served just walks away and is immediately replaced. Even the clan cannons are counting individual bullets. Same with the missiles. Sure it only fires when they are all ready but mwo counts the missiles individually. Just a continuous unrealistic chain of single projectiles filling up space.

BT's shot count for cannons is per magazine (cassette) and as such delays would make sense as you are swapping magazines.
But this isn't battletech. It's an arcade shooter with robots and no to limited respawn.