90 replies to this topic

[Nik Van Rhijn]

Not if your ammo runs out while still trying to paper cut him to death

[ArchSight]

Pht, on 24 March 2012 - 02:02 PM, said:

All it would do is encourage everyone to use massive knock setups and make sure they got the first shot in... just like "juggling" opposing characters in the tekken video game.

Whoever gets the first shot wins.

Thats why in MW4 people banned the use of weapons that caused frequent aim pushing knock back. Having aim pushing knock back occur every second was game breaking because it did not allow the player to fight back during the battle. But still MW4 players allowed weapons that caused aim pushing knock back; the weapons that fired ones and had a longer recycle time were not banned.

For the sake of game play balance only certain types of weapons should cause aim pushing knock back. The AC 20, LBX 20, PPC, Thunder Bolt, Gauss Rifle, Heavy Gauss Rifle, Rail Gun, ETC, and their clan counter parts should have aim pushing knock back.
I know that you can chain fire these weapons if you have enough of them on your battle mech but that will take a lot of tonnage, ammo, heat management, and you still don't get a consistent rate of fire to keep them from firing back at you. The longer the recycle time on these weapons the less likely that can happen.

What you really get from having these weapons cause aim pushing knock back is a momentarily amount of time that they didn't fire at you and a chance to make them miss once. You also get more immersion into the game with knock back happening to you. This can be completely fair as long as the other player can do it too, during the fight.

[Jake Valeck]

um so there was a lot of things in this forum that read "blah blah blah tech blah tech blah blah noob blah blah RL lasers blah blah fantasy laser blah blah noob blah blah!!etc..."

however in the vids i seem to remember that knockback was around but the targeting reticles did not move. curious if anyone else noticed

[Pht]

ArchSight, on 24 March 2012 - 03:39 PM, said:

Thats why in MW4 people banned the use of weapons that caused frequent aim pushing knock back. Having aim pushing knock back occur every second was game breaking because it did not allow the player to fight back during the battle. But still MW4 players allowed weapons that caused aim pushing knock back; the weapons that fired ones and had a longer recycle time were not banned.

Of course we allowed for it... we had no choice; there were no other MW video games out there.

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For the sake of game play balance only certain types of weapons should cause aim pushing knock back. The AC 20, LBX 20, PPC, Thunder Bolt, Gauss Rifle, Heavy Gauss Rifle, Rail Gun, ETC, and their clan counter parts should have aim pushing knock back.

Than these weapons will be the only weapons anyone would see being used, 99.99% of the time.

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You also get more immersion into the game with knock back happening to you.

Only if you think that 'mechs should suffer aim-breaking knock effect, and they don't.

[ArchSight]

Pht, on 24 March 2012 - 04:13 PM, said:

Of course we allowed for it... we had no choice; there were no other MW video games out there.

If enough people wanted the aim breaking knock back out of the game, I would of saw it. Jump sniping/pop tarts was the main thing we all hated back then and aim breaking knock back was one of things we used to help kill them.

Pht, on 24 March 2012 - 04:13 PM, said:

Than these weapons will be the only weapons anyone would see being used, 99.99% of the time.

MechWarrior's already try to use as many of these weapons as possible even without aim breaking knock back and that's just because of the amount of damage they do per shot. What really does keep us from mounting as many of these weapons as possible?

Pht, on 24 March 2012 - 04:13 PM, said:

Only if you think that 'mechs should suffer aim-breaking knock effect, and they don't.

Yeah, they can suffer a aim-breaking knock effect. Just because they are on a larger scale doesn't mean they cannot suffer from such a thing.

The reason why it gives immersion is because it feels alive with the added motion of feeling an impact. A battle mech is not a rock that just sits there and does nothing. It's a giant robot with machine joints that enable it to move around and aim, just like a human. From what I know, if I punch Paul in the face he'll suffer knock back that not only disrupts what he's looking at but also his balance.

Edited by ArchSight, 24 March 2012 - 06:15 PM.

[Pht]

ArchSight, on 24 March 2012 - 05:32 PM, said:

If enough people wanted the aim breaking knock back out of the game, I would of saw it.

You didn't notice the nerf bat that the HVAC's and RAC's got hit with, which reduced their knock down a few orders of magnitude?

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Jump sniping/pop tarts was the main thing we all hated back then and aim breaking knock back was one of things we used to help kill them.

Knock back does no good versus a target that only pops up from a spot once, who is radar silent, who already has you in his cross hairs.

It's only the morons who never moved and jumped repetitively as soon as their jets filled up that could be killed with ease... Knock-back didn't help much if at all in that account; poptarts and jump-snipers exposed themselves to incoming fire for a very small amount of time.

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MechWarrior's already try to use as many of these weapons as possible even without aim breaking knock back and that's just because of the amount of damage they do per shot. What really does keep us from mounting as many of these weapons as possible?

The point is that if knock-back is considerable and only certain weapons will generate it, most people will use those weapons.

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Yeah, they can suffer a aim-breaking knock effect. Just because they are on a larger scale doesn't mean they cannot suffer from such a thing.

They don't suffer from it because they're built to not suffer from it, with multiple effective systems to control for it. The pilot may rattle around and chip his teeth, but that doesn't mean that the 'mech suffers enough from knock that it's aim is thrown off.

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The reason why it gives immersion is because it feels alive with the added motion of feeling an impact. A battle mech is not a rock that just sits there and does nothing. It's a giant robot with machine joints that enable it to move around and aim, just like a human. From what I know, if I punch Paul in the face he'll suffer knock back that not only disrupts what he's looking at but also his balance.

... and if paul is a 40 year martial arts veteran, who's trained for just that eventuality, your chances are far less for throwing him off target.

[Trogusaur]

ArchSight, on 24 March 2012 - 05:32 PM, said:

MechWarrior's already try to use as many of these weapons as possible even without aim breaking knock back and that's just because of the amount of damage they do per shot. What really does keep us from mounting as many of these weapons as possible?

Note how poptarts continue to exploit long range, single shot weapons to this day. The difference is that continuously hitting a target more than once with knock weapons actually requires some skill on the user's part, thus proving inefficient. One-shotting with a single, enormous damage output and returning to cover is far easier than having to keep your reticule on your target while exposing yourself and spreading damage out.

Edited by Lord Trogus, 28 March 2012 - 06:58 AM.

[Thomas Hogarth]

I think all weapons should cause knock. Yes, even lasers. Knock for light amounts of damage should be minimal, and rocking should increase with the amount of damage you receive in a period of time.

Pht, on 24 March 2012 - 04:13 PM, said:

Only if you think that 'mechs should suffer aim-breaking knock effect, and they don't.

You think weapons that contain enough energy to light up the eastern seaboard for a week explosively blasting armor off a walking tank with the density of styrofoam won't cause knock?

Edited by Thomas Hogarth, 25 March 2012 - 09:20 PM.

[GrimFist]

One thing to consider.

A pesky light should not be able to rock an Atlas to the point where it cant shoot. Some motion from combat damage sounds good, but lets not get to crazy with it.

Semper Fi

[Siilk]

Thomas Hogarth, on 25 March 2012 - 09:19 PM, said:

I think all weapons should cause knock. Yes, even lasers.

No, definitely not lasers. Reactive force of evaporating armour is hardly enough to be noticeable and the beam itself has to impact force to begin with. PPC, on the other hand, is a particle beam(i.e. a stream particles with of non-zero mass flying at the relativistic speed) thus it would cause severe knockback, as strong as large ACs or even stronger.

[Hayashi]

GrimFist, on 25 March 2012 - 09:39 PM, said:

One thing to consider.

A pesky light should not be able to rock an Atlas to the point where it cant shoot. Some motion from combat damage sounds good, but lets not get to crazy with it.

Semper Fi

A pesky light should not be able to destroy an Atlas. But it should be able to force the Atlas' alpha to miss if the knockback is applied judiciously...

Or else we can screw role warfare and we'll end up with another race to the 100 ton game.

[Nik Van Rhijn]

Except in this case we can have 100 tons right out the gate. Having said that the devs seem pretty convinced that people will have reasons to run the inbetweens. Maybe we'll find out more next month. I hope so as I prefer piloting Mediums or Heavies.

[Jehan]

Hayashi, on 26 March 2012 - 02:45 AM, said:

A pesky light should not be able to destroy an Atlas.

Why not?

People keep confusing mech's size with weapon size. It's not the mech size what destroys a target, it's their WEAPONS what destroys a mech.

Any Light mech can mount a PPC (or ERPCC) or LRM missiles, or Large Lasers or several Medium Lasers... That's enough firepower to down any mech category. They would need more shots? probably, but light mechs also have the agility to avoid much of the enemy fire. Furthermore, many assault mechs carry only one long-range weapon (The Atlas, to begin with). At long range, an Atlas has the same firepower as a light mech with an ERPPC. The Atlas has more armor, but a light mech has far more speed to dodge the Atlas LRM's and to keep distance. So, why a Light Mech shouldn't be able to destroy an Atlas?

Edit: That's without even counting lucky critical shots or cockpit shots.

Edited by Jehan, 26 March 2012 - 04:05 AM.

[Belisarius1]

Hayashi, on 26 March 2012 - 02:45 AM, said:

A pesky light should not be able to destroy an Atlas. But it should be able to force the Atlas' alpha to miss if the knockback is applied judiciously...

Or else we can screw role warfare and we'll end up with another race to the 100 ton game.

No, that's a very worrying conclusion.

If the smallest 'Mech in the game can pack enough knock to prevent the largest from shooting accurately, everything in between is going to be so crippled by knockback that no-one will be able to shoot at all.

Debilitating knock needs to be reserved for boats dedicated to the role, that have to expose themselves to do it.

[MaddMaxx]

Hayashi, on 26 March 2012 - 02:45 AM, said:

A pesky light should not be able to destroy an Atlas. But it should be able to force the Atlas' alpha to miss if the knockback is applied judiciously...

Or else we can screw role warfare and we'll end up with another race to the 100 ton game.

So now we have a Light running around the Assault can't target reliably, but neither can it ignore it and battle the real threat @200+m as it can't target anything due to the constant knock of the Light Mech?

Sounds like a lot of FUN for sure. I suppose it does assure that the Assault Mech syndrome is dealt with. Why ever take one if a pair of trained enemies can simply destroy you with out the ability to fight back.

And for the sake of argument, the battle is left with a Light and a Medium one Team 1, and the last Assault from Team 2. It becomes a no win situation which is BS imho.

Edited by MaddMaxx, 26 March 2012 - 05:35 AM.

[Trevnor]

This whole knockback issue is getting somewhat blown out of proportion, I think... Even if the 'mech torso is knocked back a bit, and the targeting reticule is slightly moved, the arms of the mech would still be aimed at the spot your reticule was. Same tech as we use now days in multiple tanks, using gyroscopes to keep the aiming steady, no matter where the body of the tank/mech is.

Also, if you know your lore, 'mech pilots do contend with that, by just sitting it out, waiting for a heat curve to go back down, the mech that just fired at you won't be able to continually hit you. Also, if they are running a heat curve, that would affect their targeting sensors.

Basically, in my confusing way, I'm saying that knock back isn't as huge of an issue as it's seeming to be made out to be. Yes, it does affect your aiming, but the amount of aiming it affects wouldn't even necessarily mean you miss. Mechs are rather large targets. If you are 200 M away, and they hit you first with a close range gauss round, you could still squeeze off a shot and pretty much hit something.

[Strum Wealh]

Siilk, on 26 March 2012 - 01:36 AM, said:

No, definitely not lasers. Reactive force of evaporating armour is hardly enough to be noticeable and the beam itself has to impact force to begin with. PPC, on the other hand, is a particle beam(i.e. a stream particles with of non-zero mass flying at the relativistic speed) thus it would cause severe knockback, as strong as large ACs or even stronger.

Though, it becomes a question of how much mass is being projected and how fast "relativistic" is...

Technically, any and all velocities are "relativistic", as outlined in the "twin paradox" and demonstrated in the 1971 Hafele-Keating experiment.
However, let's say that "relativistic velocity", as far as PPCs are concerned, occurs when 1.) relativistic effects become significant and/or 2.) when it becomes practical to express velocity in fractions/percentages of c in place of conventional units (m/s, kph, mph, ft/s, and so on)

Also, from an earlier post:

Strum Wealh, on 24 January 2012 - 05:44 PM, said:

And, finally:

I wasn't able to find a concrete definition for "relativistic velocity", but "at a speed of 13,400,000 m/s (30 million mph, 0.0447c), the length is 99.9% of the length at rest; at a speed of 42,300,000 m/s (95 million mph, 0.141c), the length is still 99%", stated in regard to the Lorentz–Fitzgerald contraction.

So, if we are (IMO) very conservative and assume that "relativistic velocity" of a PPC's salvo is on the order of 0.010c (1% of the speed of light; 2,997,924.58 m/s or 9,835,710.56 ft/sec), we get the following times-to-target:

IS Standard PPC (range: 540 meters): 0.000180124611 seconds
IS and Clan ER PPC (range: 690 meters): 0.000230159226 seconds

In that time-frame (two ten-thousandths of one second), one of the fastest 'Mechs running at top speed (the Fire Moth, at 60 m/s) would have displaced itself approximately 0.0138095536 meters (1.3 cm, or ~0.54 inches).

I think it would be fairly safe to say that PPCs would also be, for all intents and purposes, "hit-scan" weapons...

A relatively "simple" modern cyclotron (a type of particle accelerator) can accelerate particles up to ~0.1c, and higher-end cyclotrons can reach 0.8c.
And some FFAG accelerators can reach "essentially the speed of light" using much less energy.
So, 0.01c should be doable by a weaponized particle accelerator attached to a 31st century fusion-powered walking tank, right?

On the other hand, natural lightning bolts (to which PPC salvos are often compared) have a speed of about 220,000 kph (140,000 mph, or about 61,111.11 m/s, or 0.0002c).

We know that PPCs "fire a concentrated stream of protons or ions at a target" and we know that the mass of a single proton (not to be confused with the photons fired by lasers) is approximately 1.67x10^(-27) kg and that said proton has a volume of approximately 1.5x10^-41 m^3.
There seem to be some problems with modeling PPCs as "proton guns", though...

• If we can say that the PPC is firing a total mass of 1.0 kg of protons, then each salvo represents approximately 5.98x10^26 individual protons with a combined volume of approximately 8.97x10^(-15) m^3 (representing a sphere with a diameter of 0.000026 meters).
  
• If we can say that a PPC salvo can be represented by a sphere with a diameter of approximately 120 millimeters (identical to the bore of the Marauder's GM Whirlwind AC-5) and a corresponding volume of 0.007238 m^3, then each salvo represents approximately 4.825x10^38 individual protons with a combined mass of 8.0712x10^11 kg.

The above assumes a fairly dense and uniform bolt of protons; I would guess that a bolt of lesser density could be used if the PPC also includes some means of producing a plasma channel (as would be the case with an electrolaser device), though that would be getting to the point where actual physicists (which I'm not) should start weighing in...

Even with the slower speed of natural lightning, the travel time to range would be on the order of ~0.0097 seconds - enough time for a fast 'Mech (the MASC-equipped Fire Moth mentioned in the quoted post) to move about 0.58 meters (a little under 2 feet).

And even a PPC bolt with a mass of one gram (0.001 kg) hitting something at the slower lightning-speed (220,000 m/s, 0.0002c) is going to have something like 24 megajoules of kinetic energy (0.5*mass*velocity^2) and 220 Newton-seconds of momentum (mass*velocity), with KE being the more telling - and more dangerous to opposing 'Mechs - of the two.
Increasing the velocity to 0.01c (2,997,924.58 m/s) for a one-gram PPC salvo increases the KE to 4.49 gigajoules and the momentum to 2997.92 N-s.
Increasing the mass to a 1.0 kg bolt for a 0.0002c PPC salvo increases the KE to 24.20 gigajoules and the momentum to 2.2x10^5 N-s.
Increasing the mass to a 1.0 kg bolt for a 0.01c PPC salvo increases the KE to 4.49 terajoules and the momentum to 2.997x10^6 N-s.

By contrast, a 125 kg Gauss Rifle slug moving at Mach 10 (~3420 m/s, the high-end of "hypersonic") would have 0.73 gigajoules of KE.
The same 125 kg Gauss Rifle slug moving at Mach 5 (~1710 m/s, the low-end of "hypersonic") would have 0.18 gigajoules of KE.
A one-ton (1000 kg) car moving at 160 kph (44.44 m/s, or ~100 mph) would have ~0.99 megajoules of KE.

Either of the latter two PPC examples effectively make knock irrelevant, as they will almost-certainly punch a hole through any 'Mech and emerge from the other side, while the second/third-to-last (with the equivalent KE of six Mach-10 Gauss Rifle slugs, and then some!) could most-likely still insta-core any 'Mech.

Even the first PPC example (one gram at 200,000 m/s) has 0.033x the KE of a "fast" Gauss Rifle slug, roughly 0.132x the KE of a "slow" Gauss Rifle slug, and roughly 6-8 times the KE of what any autocannon shell should (IMO) have (though, standard AC shells are High-Explosive Armor-Piercing rounds and would/should (IMO) rely on their explosive charges for much of their damage).

So... IMO, PPCs should have quite a bit of knock.

Your thoughts?

[MaddMaxx]

Where is the "I luv u" button?

[Ezekial Karn]

I can see that knockback could be usefull but then your going to have swarms of AC 2's firing at extreme long range just to knock people around. There has to be a balance with it or it becomes overly powerfull as a tool so yeah knockback is important but as for what the OP was saying I cant stand behind to much. I mean if im crusin along in a 100 ton assult mech an AC2 hit isnt gonna knock me around that much where an AC 20 will. In the tabletop version of the game a pilot is required to make a pilot check or loose controll of his vehicle if he takes more than 20 points of damage to his mech in one round. This is how knockback is represented in the tabletop version of the game and while I agree lasers would not create much knockback a PPC would as it is a particle projection cannon meaning that it fires particles of matter charged with high ammounts of energy. There were rules at one point about PPC's having issues when used in lightning storms. There was a chance that the firing of a PPC could generate enough charged particles to attract lightning strikes which would cause the battlemech severe damage.

The point I am making is that I think each weapon should have a knockback rating and each mech type should have a knockback resistance rating. Special equipment could be added to help prevent knockback at the cost of tonnage and space available in the mech for special equipment.

[Howlin Wolf]

Ezekial Karn, on 26 March 2012 - 11:23 AM, said:

I can see that knockback could be usefull but then your going to have swarms of AC 2's firing at extreme long range just to knock people around. There has to be a balance with it or it becomes overly powerfull as a tool so yeah knockback is important but as for what the OP was saying I cant stand behind to much. I mean if im crusin along in a 100 ton assult mech an AC2 hit isnt gonna knock me around that much where an AC 20 will. In the tabletop version of the game a pilot is required to make a pilot check or loose controll of his vehicle if he takes more than 20 points of damage to his mech in one round. This is how knockback is represented in the tabletop version of the game and while I agree lasers would not create much knockback a PPC would as it is a particle projection cannon meaning that it fires particles of matter charged with high ammounts of energy. There were rules at one point about PPC's having issues when used in lightning storms. There was a chance that the firing of a PPC could generate enough charged particles to attract lightning strikes which would cause the battlemech severe damage.

The point I am making is that I think each weapon should have a knockback rating and each mech type should have a knockback resistance rating. Special equipment could be added to help prevent knockback at the cost of tonnage and space available in the mech for special equipment.

This sounds balanced. Hope its canon. I love the idea of lightning strikes on PPCs also.