LordNothing, on 21 November 2019 - 11:39 AM, said:
i believe they said weapons would have an upgrade tree of sorts, an alternative to weapon manufacturers, which frankly the lore doesnt go into much detail about specific makes and models.
Indeed, MW5 Mercs went the "level" route that HBS BT did. The difference is HBS BT did both levels + lore names (though to be honest they weren't exactly accurate with it but they did pretty good.
Though if they were accurate with it, the Demolisher Tanks could shoot OVER walls instead of having to shoot through them.. Several AC/20s can be used as artillery pieces; their limited range is an "accurate range" to land all the projectiles onto a single area within a reasonable amount of time, not a real range, their real range is on average 2,000 meters but at that range you'd never reliably hit anything by anything but pure chance.)
Mw5 appears to be going the route of "Level" "AC type (2-20)", "firing type" (single, burst, automatic). Lets them not even have to happen a single source book.
As for the source material, they do go into a reasonable amount of detail, but it is so scattered that it's absolutely insane.
On Sarna, several people including myself have been going through and getting that individual equipment information out there.
On the Large Laser page, you'll see we've made a lot of progress, from the Half-Laser-Half-PPC Large Laser "Cyclops Eye" (found on specific tanks and Mercenary versions of the Wolfhound, while another Large Laser starting with an S is on Steiner versions of the same Wolfhound models) to the Fiber Optic-miniaturized Defiance A3M Large Laser (found on the Battlemaster and some other mechs).
Similarly, we've been ironing out the autocannons but it is difficult because there are for example 3 variations of the GM Whirlwind/5.
There's a 60mm (Wolverine), 90mm (wolverine-standard) [5-shot], 120mm (Marauder) [3-shot] and they don't have distinctions in their actual names. Lots of interesting stuff.
Rotary AC/5s tend to be 50mm, for example.
Light ACs are basically regular ACs with shorter barrels and lower caliber ranges.
(Meaning AC/5 and Light AC/5 can coexist in MWO today, the difference is the IS light AC/5 would function similarly to the Clan AC/UAC 5 of doing 2 shots, since light AC/5s have half the caliber range of normal ones, 20mm to 60mm versus 40mm to 120mm).