5 replies to this topic

[War Kitten]

Greetings Al,

Just won the Easter Urbie, went to outfit it and found it had an -2.5 (that's negative 2.5) ton engine.....

How in the hell do you get *negative* engine number? Did the techs use styrofoam and fill it with helium?

I know the urbie can be hard to work with, but damn......never saw this before. Is this a glitch or a late 4/1 joke?

Thank you all for any help!

War Kitten
"I have Spoken."
"This is The Way"

[ScrapIron Prime]

It's an artifact of the short sighted way that PGI did the mechlab. In the boardgame this game is taken from, engine weight includes 10 free heat sinks, and you can fit Rating/25 of them inside the engine. Well PGI thought that adding zero-weight heat sinks would be confusing. So for engines under 250 rating, they reduce the weight of the engine by 1 per heat sink that you cannot fit inside and force you to buy them for 1 ton each after you fit the engine.

AND the weight of the engine in MWO also includes 3 tons for the Cockpit and 1 ton per 100 rating for the Gyro.

The result of this freakshow is that the 60 rated engine weighs -2.5 tons. That's 1.5 tons for the engine, 3 tons for the cockpit, 1 ton for the gyro, and negative 8 tons for the heat sinks they require you to buy afterward.

The accounting all works out, but its... dumb.

[Gagis]

I think its actually a very good compromise. Everything you see in the mechlab has consistent weight and a varying number of weightless heat sinks would absolutely be confusing.

[ScrapIron Prime]

Gagis, on 27 April 2022 - 09:18 PM, said:

I think its actually a very good compromise. Everything you see in the mechlab has consistent weight and a varying number of weightless heat sinks would absolutely be confusing.

Yeah, well they didn't have to do it like this. They could have made the extra heat sinks for smaller engines be floating crit slots like Endo or Ferro that just come with the engine. Instead they're both confusing and enraging people, particularly the light mech pilots that load up on ballistics and wonder why they're forced to buy "extra" heat sinks they don't need.

[TheCaptainJZ]

They never imagined having an engine rated at 60. They had to add that in later specifically for the Urbie. The lowest they had before was 100 and no one ever bought that.

[ScrapIron Prime]

TheCaptainJZ, on 28 April 2022 - 07:47 AM, said:

They never imagined having an engine rated at 60. They had to add that in later specifically for the Urbie. The lowest they had before was 100 and no one ever bought that.

Sure, but the 100 engine still had people crying "why do I have to buy 6 more heat sinks? What if I don't want to?" Heck, people cried about that with 200 rated engines. And 180's. Having floating critical slots that came with the engine EQUIVOLENT to more heat sinks would have been more elegant and sidestepped the issue.