Like I previously stated, the opening video seems to make little sense when compared to cannon material and fluff. It is kind of a generic representation of BattleTech with a disregard to allot of the small in-depth details but as Orzorn so well put it “it oozes awesomesauce”. And despite its many flaws it did its job, and still does its job today, for grabbing your interest wetting your pallet for playing the game and getting some BattleMech action on.
Another thing to remember is that in the table top games of Classic BattleTech and video games of MechWarrior they make you chew through the entire armor allocated in a location before you moved onto the internal structure and criticals (BattleTech will give you some chance for scoring critical hits hear and there on well placed shots, and some of the video games had a similar functionality as well with their “hard-points”).
If you go off the Novels and fluff from BattleTech you will find that a well place shot on a fresh BattleMech will sever arms and legs right off in one shot. There are even weak spots on them as well, the one I can think of right off the top of my head is with the Marauder there is a fatal flaw near the cockpit, one good hit in the right spot will cause an explosion of armor shards to fly through the cockpit killing the pilot in one shot, once again this can happen with a new Marauder fresh off the assembly line.
The ammunition warnings were for the machine guns that were inaccurately located on the TimberWolf, I would guess most likely the pilot was still waiting on the capacitors and what not of the PPC to recharge.
The best cannon information I know of for weapon recycle times comes from the Solaris VII board game rulebooks (the I.S. PPC reloading time would have been an available resource at the time of making MW2:31CC, while the ER PPC specs would have been a bit on the late side published in '93) which put the recharge rate of both the I.S. PPC and I.S. ER PPC at about 7.5 seconds and a Clan ER PPC at about 5 Seconds. And in the intro movie there was about 22 seconds that had elapsed since the TW first fired his PPCs and then depleted his MG ammo, even using the IS reloading times he still could have got at least another three shots off with his PPCs before he got blown away by the Summoner.
Another thing, as a part of their societies upbringing in hard times, clanners despise wastefulness and inefficiency. Why did the pilot waste all his MG ammunition by keeping his finger on the trigger while swinging past the rock/plateau? It is almost like the pilot had gone into a state of shock and panicked when the other guy got blown awy in front of him.
For the GBL intro, I guess I never really paid that much attention to the fact that the original Kodiak chassis was not equipped with JumpJets, I was more dumbfounded with the fact that a clan warrior used physical combat (DFA) in the intro. And as I said before you get back to the novels and other fluff you will find that they do not always stick to their rules. While it is not very cannon to what a Clanner would most likely do, the DFA maneuver still made a great action sequence for the intro.
Just like the InnerSphere, the clans had their notable pilots who had a custom load out made specially by request for them, such as the TimberWolf “Pryde” variant. There also has been those one-of-a-kind BattleMechs built from the ground up by Solaris pilots and Mercinaries.
The Kodiak with Jump Jets is most likely a goof on Activision’s part. But it also could have been a modified Kodiak that was a prelude to the Kodiak II design.
You know if Activision would make a new expansion pack for MW2 we would be far too occupied playing it to think about these things and discuss them in great detail.
Now that I think about it, this whole discussion is a bit of an insult to Piranha Games and their MWO game. We would all rather sit around and critique the intro videos to older games and reminisce about our good times playing the older games then spend time playing the new MWO game.
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What are you watching? A no point did anyone say "His gauss is coming". We are obviously not watching the same intro.
