LocationStationed at the Iron Dingo's Base on Dumassas
Posted 12 April 2019 - 08:23 PM
MechaBattler, on 10 January 2019 - 11:45 AM, said:
Instant weapon convergence makes it so you can land all your hits in relatively the same location. No random damage spread.
Bear in mind, there is a way to get pin-point convergence in TT. Granted, it involves some additional rules(I think from Battletechnology) and requires you to do some pretty funky things to your electronics, but it is possible. Also, you take a -2 to hit and if you miss, you miss with everything, but the upshot is that if hit, you hit one component with everything you shot.
The RNG of tabletop is intended to help represent firing over time.
Your AC/20 fires half its payload at 0 seconds, the first ML at 2 seconds, the second and third ML which hit the same place fired probably at 3 seconds in, that LRM-20 had been firing 5 tubes every 2.5 seconds and probably hit 1 to 2 seconds after each volley, and that SRM-6 spatter probably happened at 7 seconds in when the enemy got closer and finally the last bit of AC/20 fired somewhere around 6 seconds.
Meanwhile, the AC/20's first spray hit mostly in the enemy's left torso as the guy wasn't expecting it and couldn't react fast enough. The first ML he heard charging and blocked with his right arm, but didn't expect the 1-2 punch of the second volley and that got him in the lower left torso and took out the enemy's missile launcher. Those LRMs were also peppering him and adding to the distractions. Then an SRM-6 lobs in to knock him over. That final volley of AC/20 fire from the AC/20 was opted as a split-fire against another fast approaching threat and managed to break that threat's leg, ripping through the lower leg actuator and causing it to face-plant, bending the cockpit under its own weight and momentum, and skid until it flips over losing an arm.
Ten seconds of combat from an Atlas. RNG hardly seems like RNG when its analyzed.
This said, Solaris puts 2.5 second chunks and divides convergence into 3 sections. Left, right, and center. When you fire weapons in the same group and net, say, left torso as the point of aim... Your LT weapons hit their center torso, your CT and arm weapons hit their left torso, and and your RT weapons hit the left arm.
The "True Alpha Strike" rule works in much the same way, except depending on the variation you add 10 heat or 25% more rounded up.
(Edit: Sorry 10 was what I usually would wind up with, its 1 additional heat per ballistic weapon, 2 per missile and 3 per energy weapon in a "true alpha strike". In general I prefer the +25% rounded up as with a bulk of small lasers that 3 per energy weapon is a death sentence)
Also for True Alpha Strike, you either hit or you missed. If you missed, nothing hit at all. So it was always better not to "true alpha strike."
And I'm wondering how such a thing can become lostech when the difference between a full body cooling suit and a mere vest is just more complicated plumbing.
Thought about this allot myself. Part of it; In universe allocation of resources and the numbers physically producing of coolant vest vs suits. Coolant vest are simpler to make maintain and require less resources to make. A average technician (or even maybe a well educated Mechwarrior) can repair a leaking or malfunction vest with allot more ease than a full suite.
Seems like a petty difference until you look at how many other things are lacking during the succession wars. For example: the production numbers of Large Laser where in decline do to parts and knowledgeable technicians both also becoming more lacking. While the Inner Sphere wasn't Mad Max in Space across the map, constant war had made allocation of resources and needed technology more and more difficult coupled with damage/outright destruction of facilities and infrastructure. Best tech ended up being the simplest tech only because it could be maintained anywhere... with luck.
Allot of this changed after the Helm Memory Core and 4th Succession War. Some fluff even indicates that Coolant Suits had become more common just like the newer Neuralhelment. This was never reflected in the fiction outside of the MW games, most likely because the writers liked the image of how exposed Mechwarriors are outside of their Battlemechs.
(and this Mechwarrior is wearing a Clan Coolant mesh suit, more than a IS MechWarrior)
I personally prefer Coolant Suits but there is plenty of room in the BT for both.
Bear in mind, there is a way to get pin-point convergence in TT. Granted, it involves some additional rules(I think from Battletechnology) and requires you to do some pretty funky things to your electronics, but it is possible. Also, you take a -2 to hit and if you miss, you miss with everything, but the upshot is that if hit, you hit one component with everything you shot.
Like Pilot skills from Battletechnology's "Training and Experience"
Like BV from Battletechnology's CFV
Like Extreme Range rules from Battletechnology's "Ranged Combat: Maximum Range"
Like the sensor rules for ECM, stealth, etc., from BattleTechnology's "Hide and Seek"
Like the Sniper/sharpshooterpilot skill which came from the Sniper Shot move from Battletechnology (but got stupidly simplified from less of an ambush attack to "herp-derp I magically got double range on all my weapons because I spent some XP)
True Alpha Strike and Solaris's targeting computer's 3 weapon group arrangement came from simultaneous fire from BattleTechnology.
Which the very name ought to tell us something... it happens at the same time, unlike most of the time.
Remember when everyone was complaining about the Sniper PPD Meta? lol, I remember one YouTub personality calling this game Sniper Mc Snip Snip during the height of the PPC+ Gauss, PPC+UAC5 meta.
In the HBS BattleTech turn-based strategy video game, the only enemies I fear aren't Mechs at all.
(SRM carriers. To a lesser extent, Demolisher Tanks and Schrek PPC carriers.)
A Demolishr is what I fear the most to be perfectly honest.
This is because I modded the Chemjet gun AC/20 pair that it uses to do exactly what the fluff describes...
<.<
You can have a wall in between you and it, and it will just shoot up and over that wall to hit you using indirect fire...
with a pair of AC/20s..
To be fair, though, each one fires 4 shots and they don't hit the same body part after my HBS mod.
But still, they're ******* terrifying.
Remember when everyone was complaining about the Sniper PPD Meta? lol, I remember one YouTub personality calling this game Sniper Mc Snip Snip during the height of the PPC+ Gauss, PPC+UAC5 meta.
They also cried about the jump snipe... and say you can't really do it in BT.
Technically you can but you can't, the firing arcs only take into account your final position as to whether or not you could fire, but accuracy is significantly reduced due to jumping (greater than the reduction for flanking speed). As such that could be interpreted in a number of ways, such as you land and then shoot and the recovery from landing and time for the jump could significantly reduce the time you have to fire... but then how would you explain all that you've fired in a short span of time yet cooling it all? Etc. There's also the fact that your shots which roll hits will hit, even when an enemy rolls successful hits that will shoot you out of the sky and cause you to do something like my Grasshopper did against Lordred's Black Knight... in which I was hit, and my pilot lost control mid jump, and I landed on the mech's head, crushing it completely including the pilot inside....but most of my shots hit, and the firing arcs all had to be taken from the final intended position not the starting position..
So technically you can jump shoot, its just so freaking inaccurate that it has a hefty penalty that's more than what you'd see while trying to fire a handgun during a 7.3 scale earthquake, while trying to manage your flight using your feet using directional footpedals (with 8 tilts + center-pressed) while trying to control thrust with your left hand and aiming with the right stick where just by the process of moving to aim the balance of the machine is being thrown off and a spinning gyro is trying to compensate for how off balance you feel while going up and during that moment of weightlessness as inertia stops and when all that gravity finally begins to overpower all of your mech's upward momentum but since you're seated as the mech starts to go down, it tries to leave you behind pressing into the belts holding you down as you begin to drop...thankfully nowhere near as quickly as MWO depicts (as that's almost 3x earth's gravity).
Basically its hard for a reason... and your weapons don't converge perfectly. There's a target interlock circuit to set the convergence range, which doing that while flying this already complicated system while jumping... probably isn't gonna happen.
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Far as the cooling suits, I've noticed something. Most cooling suits I've found on google in real life lack a pump, unlike vests with gloves and boots. They seem to have a tolerance, packs of material... the higher quality ones have a thermal regulating material inside the pouches but there's a finite amount of time that it works and a limit.
Pumps probably have a limit as well but hooked up to the mech, that isn't much of an issue as you can run a continuous suit conditioning as needed but that mesh "Clan cooling suit" as you described it has no such ports or pipes. Clans in general do not plan on being in a mech for long at all, they do not include toilets or beds, they do not carry rations so far as I know, there are no creature comforts of any kind. The cooling suits they use probably don't even need much tolerance, as once the machine hits the 80% heat mark and the weapons lock out, they just wait it out... rarely does a Clanner ever override that safety, its poor form. Because these suits cannot connect to any power unit and have no visual pump or anything else, I actually question how effective they might be. I suspect that when coupled with a Clanner's need to look presentable, crisp, clean and civilized... they don't have to endure as much heat in their cockpits and in turn the suits probably don't provide nearly as much as the cooling vest systems that the IS more commonly uses.
I've also noticed that in terms of Mechwarrior uniforms..
Steiners have full uniforms... but in general their mechs don't run that hot. Another group that does is the Davions, but again their focus on autocannons leaves very little thermal issue for their machines. Liao relies pretty highly on energy and missile weaponry... and the uniform is a pair of boxers with boots, gloves and vest. The Draconis Combine has both a full suit uniform and a cooling vest with just shorts depicted and I suspect where this difference comes to matter is...what are they piloting? After all some Drac machines are really cool running...and others are walking furnaces.
Cooling suits also appear to become more common in later years, after a flood of double heatsinks which keep the mechs significantly cooler even in spite of generating more heat overall...as such, there's less of a need for a high powered circulating cooling system hooked up to the machine itself.
Furthermore, from Darpa's trials, a pair of gloves is more than sufficient to keep a guy in freezing cold water reasonably comfortable despite a complete lack of activity. This interests me because not only can this work to keep them cold but to keep them warm, and furthermore only the gloves were necessary... throw in the boots, the vest, and you can easily keep someone working in an incredibly temperate environment.
More interesting, is guys in full cooling suits are dying in the heat of just a pair of autocannons in a Demolisher.. yet a pilot sitting next to a nuclear reactor as it heats up to the point where the machine slows down and stiffens up due to thermal expansion, where the targeting systems fail, where the screens can't display data properly, where heatsinks are failing and melting down...has risks of losing consciousness but isn't dying anytime soon so long as there's still sufficient heatsinks functioning.
I'm certainly led to believe the vests...are a bit more effective.
Plus our mesh cooling suit girl is clearly freezing.
While watching the influences to Battletech, specifically Dougram, I think there's an additional influence for the way pilots are dressed.
In literally the first glimpse of any pilots... I've noticed a rather blatant lack of clothes while in really hot environments... and considering that over 8 Battlemechs come from this series including several iconic ones..
Throw in some cooling vests to make it look good, and voila.
Though at the time, cooling vests didn't exist...and had they patented that or at least sold the idea to Darpa on their own, well they probably wouldn't have had to sell the Battletech franchise..
A Demolishr is what I fear the most to be perfectly honest.
Me too. You can kill an SRM carrier pretty much as soon as you see one. Especially if you use a spotter on any vehicle that weighs that suspicious 60 tons.
But the Demolisher? I've had more than one mech headcapped by its AC/20s because they couldn't kill the Demo fast enough.
I think the only time an SRM Carrier ever got a volley off on my mechs was when it was the choice between killing it and killing the vehicle that was one turn away from failing me a campaign mission.
Demolishers are nothing to take lightly, that is for sure.
I still don't like SRM carrirers either, especially in HBS's BattleTech. With Stability Damage being a thing in that game, a SRM carrier can take a mech from stable to about to fall over in one attack if the mech wasn't too evasive.
I don't mess with either. I prioritize them above most mechs.
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MechaBattler, on 10 January 2019 - 11:45 AM, said:
