483 replies to this topic

[Deltex]

Personally I don't have a problem with Mech hands but for the original poster that dosen't like hands on his mechs, things could be alot worse... (yes, these are from the Battletech universe )

Edited by Deltex, 31 January 2012 - 03:14 PM.

[Neovenator]

Well I'd like to start by saying I am a fan of the redesigns, I think all of the mech drawings that have been released to date look great.

Unlike many others I was never a big fan of the clans and their technology and for the most part just ignored (ans still do) them when I play the TT game. I did look through my old battered TRO3025 (with Unseen and everything) and in regards to hands vs. weapons only it breaks down like so:

Mechs with two hands: 21
Mechs with one hand: 14
Mechs with no hands: 19 (this includes 5 chicken walker style mechs (no real arms) and 2 four legged mechs).

So there are a lot of mechs with hands and it shouldn't be a big deal, if you don't like them don't pilot a mech with hands,

In the fiction mechs with hands were very useful in fact mechs in general were far more mobile than any video game or even table top battle ever portrayed them. They have mechs doing combat rolls and dives in the novels and all kinds of other physical feats. Not to mention mechs assisting with contruction tasks, dragging other mechs and saving other mechwarriors by literally ripping the cockpits from other mechs with their hands.

As for the TT game having hands was also a good thing, nothing like picking up a mechs severed limb (or uprooting a tree) and smashing other mechs with it. I would say physical attacks (punching, kicking, charging or the beloved death from above) were used in 75% of games that I played in. They are extremely damaging and could easily turn the tide of a battle. Another great use for hands (and all arm actuators for that matter) was they took up critical hit locations. So if you took a critical hit to the arm there was a decent chance it may just take out your hand instead of your weapon allowing you to keep firing that weapon (altough at a penalty) in battle.

All in all I would take a mech with a least one hand over a no handed mech any day.

[flyingdebris]

hehe thanks,

there's like 500+ or so mech designs

welp, I better get the forklift for all those warehouse palettes of energy drinks

[Alex Wolfe]

Deltex, on 31 January 2012 - 02:37 PM, said:

For the original poster that dosen't like hands on his mechs, things could be alot worse... (yes, these are from the Battletech universe )

Ack. These things again. The Canon That Should Not Be, like the Emperor's clones and midichlorians. The "we just gave up" mechs. The cannot-be-Unseen.

Could we please make a gentlemanly pact never to speak of those abominations again? Hands, necks, trash cans, all those design details pale in comparison to the Mechagodzilla's runty cousin knockoffs there... let us unite against the true enemy of Battletech design consistency .

[Deltex]

Alex Wolfe, on 31 January 2012 - 03:02 PM, said:

Ack. These things again. The Canon That Should Not Be, like the Emperor's clones and midichlorians. The "we just gave up" mechs. The cannot-be-Unseen.

Could we please make a gentlemanly pact never to speak of those abominations again? Hands, necks, trash cans, all those design details pale in comparison to the Mechagodzilla's runty cousin knockoffs there... let us unite against the true enemy of Battletech design consistency .

Point well-made sir.

[osito]

Alex Wolfe, on 31 January 2012 - 01:18 PM, said:

Hear, hear.

The King is naked .

i was in a boring meeting and checked this link out. a couple pages in i was laughing out loud with everyone wondering what i was reading. my boss gave me the glare for interrupting the meeting.

[Solis Obscuri]

Jack Gallows, on 31 January 2012 - 02:30 PM, said:

I like the redesigns, no matter what, really.

Having FD do the redesigns gives them a fresh new look and allows some of them to look for the better....but it doesn't null and void their old designs. Let the mechs in MWO have their own individuality, let FD take them and see what he can do with them and enjoy the different take on our long standing mech designs.

Some 'mechs may benefit and their new looks may be better then their old designs (which, opinions may vary,) and I can't see many taking a step back from what they were originally. It also allows the Pirahna to really make this game their own, and help contribute to the massive universe and community that is Battletech/Mechwarrior.

There is definitely a fair point to be made that Piranha is making their own 3D designs, and needs to figure out how they want to incorporate the old BT/FASA designs into the game; there's room for some creative license here. Despite a few quibbles on the Centurion I think the vast majority of the concept artwork is very promising so far (though as I've said before, we haven't seen anything in-game yet, and that's where the rubber meets the road.)

Jack Gallows, on 31 January 2012 - 02:30 PM, said:

I'd like to see Alex tackle some of the more..."unseen" mechs See what orignal designs he can come up with instead of what has been done in the past, so that maybe we can just move past the legal hoopla that rears it's ugly head around them. Even if they don't get put into the game, I'd still really love to see his ideas based on them, and hell we could even get the community involved in a step by step process and collectively design these machines new looks with polls and such. It'd be a fun way to get to influence some of our favorite mechs, while building an even stronger relationship with the current developers.

I would like to see an original take by Flyingdebris on the Unseen designs - some of the Reseen were ok (Thunderbolt), but some are just terrible (Rifleman, Warhammer).

[Jack Gallows]

Solis Obscuri, on 31 January 2012 - 04:27 PM, said:

I would like to see an original take by Flyingdebris on the Unseen designs - some of the Reseen were ok (Thunderbolt), but some are just terrible (Rifleman, Warhammer).

I also really like how refreshing it is to see new takes on older machines, I always have. I enjoy how Flyingdebris really makes them look like they're warmachines, something a bit more realistic then their orignal depiction, more like the walking (or jumping!) tanks they really are.

Can't wait for more concept art for the rest of the MWO stable, it's probably one of my most favorite things about the project right now, lol.

Edited by Jack Gallows, 31 January 2012 - 04:39 PM.

[Tifalia]

*sighs*

There were always be complainers...

*sighs*

[Rhinehart]

Azantia, on 27 January 2012 - 10:03 PM, said:

Sorry, but the mech in that picture is not a clan vulture. Its a clan Masakari, a.k.a Warhawk, an 85 ton Assault mech that is one bad**s Mother....too bad its salvage now. Long live the Atlas.

My bad, shoulder mounted missile launcher threw me off for a second. Still that much Clan weight means you almost certainly need a IS bruiser like the Atlas to have a shot at it. It also would be even better to get in close by stealth or ambush and punch the sucker out because depending on the set up that Warhawk has weapon advantages at just about every range except point blank.

I know I'm a gazillion posts behind the action here, but I'm too busy on my weekends to visit the boards much 8)

[empath]

Nick Makiaveli, on 31 January 2012 - 11:12 AM, said:

To the 14 mechs debate....

I think many here are thinking we are going to see a fully fleshed out game at launch. I honestly don't expect much more than the original BT TT had. Ie Mechs and a place to fight. Some rules for capturing land, mostly for cash and bragging rights.

Down the road when some cash rolls in then we will see campaigns, salvage etc.

Aye; we're gonna get to watch this game grow and develop and expand; I for one eagerly look forward to that.

[RoninV3]

Leetskeet, on 27 January 2012 - 08:30 PM, said:

I think you'll find that an Atlas isn't going to just walk up nice and slow at a snail's pace and just punch the **** out of whatever mech that is.

As pretty as the picture is, and as much as it inflates the OMFG ATLAS FTW HANDS SO GOOD SO USEFUL, an Atlas wouldn't even come close to getting an opportunity to do that. Hands make sense for industrial mechs to a point, but outside of something like a Solaris melee match, what are they going to do on military mechs? Getting past your loyalty to oldschool battletech and how the mechs originally had hands because that's the way mechs(Gundams) were originally envisioned, they plain and simple have no purpose on a battlefield full of ranged weaponry.

I don't know if you've played something like MWLL, but assault mechs, especially an Atlas, are giant targets that get completely hammered if they try something stupid like getting close. They're FAR too slow to be anything but mobile heavy weapons platform. They absolutely annihilate anything they can shoot at, but don't be fooled into thinking they're going to just walk into enemy lines and punch ****. You wouldn't have arms by the time you got in close enough to punch completely through a torso, which by the way, is ridiculous.

Do hands genuinely make sense to you on a BATTLEmech? Does it genuinely make sense that you can control individual fingers and joints, as well as make the complex motions involved in punching and swinging with joysticks? Or do they tell the mech what to do with their cute little neurohelmets like it's a gundam? Last I heard the mot the helmets were capable of was helping the mech balance and orient itself based on the pilot's sense of balance.

You have a Madcat(Timberwolf, whatever), which in it's more modern(read:logical) adaptations looks like it's a feasable(eventually) mech that could potentially function. You have a Blood Asp, which again is a walking behemoth full of guns that clearly was made to annihilate whatever it's pointed at.

Then you have this silly *** mech that's completely humanoid in form complete with hands, a rotating head, and even a damn handheld gun on occasion. Outside of the feeling of oldschool nostalgia from the good old days of battletech where everything was a gundam, that nonsense has abolutely no reason to hold any sort of weight in a game that's going for something a little bit more realistic.

tl;dr, hands, handheld guns, rotating necks, and overly humanoid mechs(as in it looks like a damn gundam) are relics from a past where battletech was essentially copying japanese mechs that they saw. If you wonder why Mechwarrior GAMES aren't rocking swords, axes, pistols, lightsabers, gundams, and jet-mechs, it's because that **** is absurd.

I am sorry I have to disagree with you there. In THIS modern world with ranged weapons and body armor you can count on absolutley nothing as an absolute. You can never know when you are approaching a target it goes hot and you have to put them down hard, it may go to longarms, sidearms, knives, or who just doesn't wanna die the most. Don't even think for a second that melee is outdated as long as humans try to kill each other our hands will alwys be a natural weapon wether augmented or not.

[Souske Sagara]

I wasted too much time reading this thread so I'll just say my peace and go back to doing something productive like sleeping or drinking heavily. There are no mech designs I would call gundam-like. Some look kindof anime, and some are blatantly anime what with having been pulled from HG USA properties, but they all look like big mounds of armor and weapons in one configuration or another. Weather they look military or not is an arguement of personal taste, and there are plenty of historical points that can be dragged in (like actual centurians) but Btech and MW were never about what looked and felt military, they were about someting far more important.

They were about space knights hopping into their giant cold fusion powered robots cobbled together from 300 year old spare parts to duel to the death over salvage stolen from the phone company in the name of their feudal space lords.

Also anyone who ******* about hands has never clubbed someone to death with a tree, and the DCMS has swords by 3055 as of more then a decade ago so your too late grumbling about that.

[joemomma]

Posting in this thread with a single digit post count kind of feels like spraying myself down in BBQ sauce and walking into the Police Dog pens. That said I figure I might as well throw my opinion in.

I agree with the idea that hands are useful for noncombat tasks and for self-righting. Also if you put a "power glove" in the pilot's seat then some form of melee would be an option. I'm not convinced that full body MMA type grappling could ever happen short of a "full body motion capture suit", but flailing a fist around wildly seems reasonable. Whether it is useful is up for debate.

As far as the argument that a close combat attack could never damage a mech I always assumed that battlemech armor was super hard but extremely brittle, and layed down in extremely thin laminated type plates in between softer cushioning layers. So any impact that has enough force to bend a sheet just a millimeter or so will completely shatter it and render that particular "layer/sheet" useless. Theoretically that could explain how armor is so completely ablative. Of course this also means a mech would break its own fists into pieces whenever it hit something. That could be a problem. Hydraulic "recoil dampeners" in the wrists maybe? I'm probably overthinking this, but that's what engineers do.

This assumes that mechs will ever close enough to get into melee range, which isn't really such a bad assumption to make. The BT universe pretty much explicitly states that the maximum range a mech can shoot is 600m, give or take, in a universe where these same platforms can run all out over uneaven terrain at speeds approaching 100km/hr the melee option suddenly makes a lot more sense. If you're outgunned it kind of makes sense to remove that advantage. The IS tactic of powering down an Atlas behind a hill and jumping the Clanners at the closest point really is a sound one from that perspective. It's like the classic debate in self defense situations about how a knife wielder can charge from about 20 feet and stab you multiple times before you can draw a firearm from concealed carry.

Also, second the opinion that mechs were made by a ton of different people throughout a ton of different times. Different styles come and go. Maybe some mech designers in the BT universe liked the anime look . I'm not a huge fan of it, but having a humanoid shaped mech does make it more "relatable." Like people associate personalities with cars based on their grills. You ever notice that car grills look kinbda like a face? Designed on purpose to make them more appealing to buyers.

[Strum Wealh]

Leetskeet, on 27 January 2012 - 08:30 PM, said:

I think you'll find that an Atlas isn't going to just walk up nice and slow at a snail's pace and just punch the **** out of whatever mech that is.

As pretty as the picture is, and as much as it inflates the OMFG ATLAS FTW HANDS SO GOOD SO USEFUL, an Atlas wouldn't even come close to getting an opportunity to do that. Hands make sense for industrial mechs to a point, but outside of something like a Solaris melee match, what are they going to do on military mechs? Getting past your loyalty to oldschool battletech and how the mechs originally had hands because that's the way mechs(Gundams) were originally envisioned, they plain and simple have no purpose on a battlefield full of ranged weaponry.

I don't know if you've played something like MWLL, but assault mechs, especially an Atlas, are giant targets that get completely hammered if they try something stupid like getting close. They're FAR too slow to be anything but mobile heavy weapons platform. They absolutely annihilate anything they can shoot at, but don't be fooled into thinking they're going to just walk into enemy lines and punch ****. You wouldn't have arms by the time you got in close enough to punch completely through a torso, which by the way, is ridiculous.

Do hands genuinely make sense to you on a BATTLEmech? Does it genuinely make sense that you can control individual fingers and joints, as well as make the complex motions involved in punching and swinging with joysticks? Or do they tell the mech what to do with their cute little neurohelmets like it's a gundam? Last I heard the mot the helmets were capable of was helping the mech balance and orient itself based on the pilot's sense of balance.

You have a Madcat(Timberwolf, whatever), which in it's more modern(read:logical) adaptations looks like it's a feasable(eventually) mech that could potentially function. You have a Blood Asp, which again is a walking behemoth full of guns that clearly was made to annihilate whatever it's pointed at.

Then you have this silly *** mech that's completely humanoid in form complete with hands, a rotating head, and even a damn handheld gun on occasion. Outside of the feeling of oldschool nostalgia from the good old days of battletech where everything was a gundam, that nonsense has abolutely no reason to hold any sort of weight in a game that's going for something a little bit more realistic.

tl;dr, hands, handheld guns, rotating necks, and overly humanoid mechs(as in it looks like a damn gundam) are relics from a past where battletech was essentially copying japanese mechs that they saw. If you wonder why Mechwarrior GAMES aren't rocking swords, axes, pistols, lightsabers, gundams, and jet-mechs, it's because that **** is absurd.

The response to this is essentially my response to your post in the other thread.

Some of the key points:

Quote

One of the things that makes BattleTech's BattleMechs - the predominant symbols of Western mecha - different from a lot of other mecha is the fact that they use obvious, occasionally head-like cockpits.
In that sense, BattleMechs are less like the tanks to which most are made, and more like the fighter aircraft of the era in which BT made its debut (the mid-1980s), with Mechwarriors being the equivalent of Top Gun-esque "fighter jocks" (a fitting analogy, even though BT has actual fighter pilots for AeroSpace assets and Top Gun itself came out in 1986, two years after BT).

----------


By contrast, the original RX-78 Gundam from 1979's Mobile Suit Gundam (as well as the majority of the other mecha from the same series) featured a windowless monitor system that displayed images taken from exterior cameras that was buried in the machine's torso, underneath the torso armor.
The RX-78's cockpit was also built in the form of the "core block system", which would allow the pilot to eject and escape in a small fighter-like aerospace craft
Later mobile suits (MS) featured windowless "panoramic cockpits" buried within the machine's torso (usually in the belly or chest area), underneath the torso armor.
The panoramic cockpit system has been retained for the majority of all later MS across the Gundam metaseries.
In these mecha, the head serves as a sensor platform, much akin to the sensor pod/turret found on modern drones like the Predator and the Global Hawk.

In terms of the Eastern mecha, many of the "real robot" type mecha (Gundam's "mobile suits", VOTOMS' "armored troopers", Macross' "variable fighters" (in their humanoid configuration) and "battlepods", Patlabor's "labors", Nadesico's "Aestivalis", Gasaraki's "tactical armors", Code Geass' "knightmare frames", Chromehounds' "HOUNDs", Front Mission's "wanzers", the eponymous mecha of the Metal Gear series and Steel Battalion's "vertical tanks" among others) and many "super robot" type mecha (the mecha of the Mazinger and Getta Robo series, the mecha of Godannar, Escaflowne's "guymelefs", RahXephon's titular mecha, Evangelion's titular mecha, Eureka Seven's "LFOs", several of Gurren Lagann's "gunmen", and the titular mecha of the Armored Core series, and others) feature windowless cockpits buried within the heavily-armored torso (which, for a combat vehicle, is generally a better idea than an obvious cockpit if one can viably do so).

In a few cases (most notably, the mecha of Tetsujin 28-go/"Gigantor"), there is no cockpit and the mecha are controlled remotely (much like modern UAVs).

----------


About the closest one would get to viable and practical military mecha with modern technologies are powered exoskeletons/"powered armor" for infantry- basically, have a soldier wear something like the HAL exoskeletons or the Raytheon/Sarcos exoskeleton or the Lockheed Martin "HULC" exoskeleton in addition to their normal combat attire.
Even with futuristic technologies, the best one is likely to do in terms of practical and viable military mecha is something like the Mjolnir armor or SPI armor from Halo, or something like the Gray Death (Scout) or Kage or Purifier battle armors.

Between the capabilities of infantry (exoskeleton-equipped or otherwise), armored combat vehicles (tanks, APCs), combat helicopters, and ground attack aircraft, something on the scale of a BattleMech is too poorly balanced, too slow, too complex, and too maintenance-intensive to fill any role or niche related to ground combat that can't be filled as well or better at lower cost by something else.

----------


The point of the BattleTech/Mechwarrior universe is that, for whatever reason, large and vaguely (to varying degrees) anthropomorphic robot-things have become one of the preferred weapons platforms for a society that's harnessed the power of fusion in a mobile powerplant, achieved superluminal interstellar travel, terraformed and colonized several planets in several solar systems, and decided to arrange itself into a set of hereditary feudal nation-states, so that that we as players can take control of one or more of these large and vaguely anthropomorphic robot-things and blow stuff (usually someone else's large and vaguely anthropomorphic robot-thing(s)) up.

If one of the large and vaguely anthropomorphic robot-things is too anthropomorphic for one's tastes, then use a different large and vaguely anthropomorphic robot-thing.
If all of the large and vaguely anthropomorphic robot-things are too anthropomorphic for one's tastes, then perhaps a re-evaluation of one's interest in the franchise, or even mecha in general, may be in order, yes?

[Volkite]

flyingdebris, on 31 January 2012 - 10:59 AM, said:

um, you guys know i didn't draw that flashman, right?

Thats the art of one the other BT artists http://thundergodxar...deviantart.com/ i think he may have done some stuff for that fan made tro too.

I never said you did, it was the others. Please don't hurt me!

[tynaiden]

I put a response on another similar topic that is a bit lengthy but very relevant, so link instead:
http://mwomercs.com/...870#entry101870

As to the Protomechs images that were posted a bit back... why?! Those are rather garish designs considering the designs of 'mechs up until then. I liked the initial idea of Protos when they were first brought about in 3060 materials. The visual designs of the Protomechs loadouts though really do not fit into the BT universe very well. It's one thing to have defining features like claw-like structures on the Kodiak, plume on the Centurion and pointed crests on the (BT 4th Ed.) Spider that facsimiles spider legs/ webs and whole 'nother boat with the straight up, all-out 'must look like its namesake' design of the Protos.

Further OT:
So far I am greatly enjoying the redesigns. Not saying they are perfectly in line with what I would reinvision the golden-oldies but very very very great work. Some of the closest to what the BT-[written]verse portrays their 'mechs to be blended with 'plausable' uniqueness that I have yet seen.

[Kasiagora]

Just read the first half of what OP said and just thought I'd stick around long enough to say,
"Postin' in a troll thread here!"
I'm out!

[The Paleo King]

What bugs me isn't so much the hands on the Centurion, but the feet. Those 3-toed feet reminiscent of the cheesy "reseen" mech designs look just wrong on a man-walker mech. Especially when you replace a perfectly fine standard "shoe" foot with three tiny little nubs.

However the Kodiak actually has pretty large 3-toed feet, at least in the MW2 and MWLL mod designs. So not all 3-toed designs are bad, but I wish artists wouldn't just keep changing classic canon mechs like that with bizarre non-canon leg designs. The new centurion doesn't even LOOK recognizable as a centurion other than the mohawk, did the original centurion have its face in its chest? There's nothing "gundam" about that gaff, it just looks WRONG in a totally different way when you compare it to the Centurion we all knew before.

BTW I personally don't mind mechs with hands but I just don't see the point behind them - you wonder if they have humanoid hands shouldn't they ALL have meelee weapons or some kind of hand-held guns? Not just the Axman and Battlemaster, but ALL mechs with hands? Otherwise what is the point of these hands, it would make more sense to give them long insectoid claws if they're supposed to just rip things apart. The only reason Gundams and other mobile suits as well as all the Macross thingies have hands is because most of their weapons are hand-held, not mounted into the chassis! if you have mechs that have weapons built into the frame (like nearly all mechs have) then there's no use for humanoid hands, they make pretty bad melee weapons too since they are neither sharp nor long-reaching. And then you have al the mechs that forego hands altogether in favor of arm-mounted cannons/lasers/guns, like Mauler, Warhammer, Summoner, Rifleman, etc. They are all pretty tough mechs and do just fine without hands. Then you get long-range mechs with hands, and you wonder what the hell the designers were thinking.

When you think about it, if these mechs don't need hands, and things like Atlas, Thunderbolt, Centurion, Nova, and so on don't have any meelee weapons, then why do the latter even need hands? Yes the hands look good as a cosmetic feature, but from a practical standpoint they're not that useful and probably an unnecessary expense, considering that most of these mechs can already destroy enemies at range. Why not give "handed" mechs beam sabers while we're at it, then the hands actually have a clear purpose....

[flyingdebris]

hands allow mechs to wash themselves between missions without requiring techs to crawl all over them, thus saving time,

if your mechs has no hands to wash itself, team up with one that does as a wash buddy
this is probably critical to mission success...somehow.

also how do you think many of those decals end up on the mechs? stencils and airbrushes!? ha, not by half.
mechs with hands holding up 5 meter wide mirrors and using mechscale cosmetics

how do you intend to carry home groceries from the supermarket when your mech has no hands? protip, you can't. Have fun being hungry when the atlas hogs all the chips.

also having hands techncially means that you CAN "hug with nuclear arms," (nuclear powered anyway)