Nightbird, on 02 January 2020 - 08:51 PM, said:
Second, BT armor works by ablation, so massing armor at the front of the tank only reduces the about of guns that can be mounted. If a lean profile can take as much damage as a barn door, but the barn door can mount 3 times more weapons, guess who wins. IRL the opposite is true, but in BT is false.
As far as speed, mylemar + fusion is lighter than threads + ICE + transmission so mechs have a lot better HP to weight ratio to tanks. Again, expensive toy compared to antique sort of comparison.
Tanks could be 1shot by most crits and were, in the end, terribly fragile. It was rare to see anything but little hovers and vtols go down due to actually blowing through armor. You got a TAC vs vehicles on both 2 and 12 hit locations. If you were on a side arc you got a crit on a 2, 8 or 12. On a crit you threw 2d6 and a 6-12 meant the vehicle was either outright destroyed or lost something critical, which often destroyed it.
A hit location from any direction on a 3,4,5 or 9 generally damaged or destroyed the vehicles movement system regardless of armor.
Mechs are vastly superior because the space inside is full of buffers, redundancies, crumple zones and volume mechanics for redirecting the force of impacts, explosions and such. They work in any terrain and thanks to neurohelmets almost like 40ft tall powdered armor. So if you could take an infantry man, give him more weapons than a tank carries, make him 40 ft tall, etc. that's why he's better than a tank. A tank still has exposed tracks and the drawbacks of a compressed design.
At least that's part of the handwavium magic used to justify why big stompy robbits are better than tanks using the same tech. In tabletop though vehicles are incredibly squishy. However if you've either got a strong defensive position or narrow urban environment vehicles can suddenly become stupidly dangerous. I can get an SRM carrier with 2 gunnery and 5 piloting (so the ability to park it somewhere short range and flat out erase whatever steps around the corner With 10xSRM6 and 20% accuracy boost) for the same BV as a 3025 Quickdraw with 4/4. You can do the same thing with a 3055 tech LRM carrier - 3xLRM20s with Artemis and a C3 slave unit so you park him in Kansas and buy a crap ton of super cheap C3+BAP VTOLS like the sprint for 70-80 BV each and rain stupid accurate, very concentrated LRM fire.
Which is why vehicle mobs are considered a cheese tactic, suitable only vs people who only played Clan mechs vs Inner Sphere (MUH LPL WARHAWK C is only 2500 BV!) and nights when everyone was so drunk you knew the game wasn't going to last the X hours it takes to play moves for 30 vehicles.