136 replies to this topic

[SyberSmoke]

Captain Nice HD, on 03 November 2011 - 11:57 PM, said:

There is also Laser-Reflective, Light Ferro-Fibrous, Heavy Ferro-Fibrous, Ferro-Lamellor, Hardened, Stealth, Commercial, and Industrial armor. Plus Modular Armor, but that doesn't really count.

:-) Good to know. I know that my info is a litle old cause I have the design books from 3050+, 3025 vehicle book, battlespace core rules, and the BattleTech Core rules....first edition I believe...may be second edition.

[Paladin1]

Regenerating armor? Umm, no. That's as wrong as trying to introduce sentient aliens into the timeline.

[T S Hawk]

CaveMan, on 02 November 2011 - 02:37 PM, said:

No. Just no.

The really great part about BattleTech is how low-tech the future is. They barely can keep their 'Mechs running with salvaged parts, and in most parts of the Inner Sphere tech has sort of regressed back to the 1980s, but with the rare and wonderful sight of the occasional spaceship or BattleMech, and once in a while somebody digs up some cool LosTech. Let's keep it that way.

Aye I agree with you on that. It is one of the reasons why I love the game so much

[Captain Nice HD]

Paladin1, on 04 November 2011 - 10:47 AM, said:

Regenerating armor? Umm, no. That's as wrong as trying to introduce sentient aliens into the timeline.

Well, except for the Tetatae, of course, but they are generally not spoken of.

Anyway, yeah, regenerating armor and deflector shields rank right up there with artificial gravity; its just something that the BattleTech universe in general should never be associated with.

[Paladin1]

Captain Nice HD, on 04 November 2011 - 10:54 AM, said:

Well, except for the Tetatae, of course, but they are generally not spoken of.

Anyway, yeah, regenerating armor and deflector shields rank right up there with artificial gravity; its just something that the BattleTech universe in general should never be associated with.

And the Tetatae also weren't sentient. Intelligent to be sure, but not sentient. Plus, they taste just like chicken so they can't be completely alien.

[Coalbiter]

SyberSmoke, on 03 November 2011 - 11:37 PM, said:

The reason for the armors frail nature is due to how it is manufactured. Unlike normal armor that we think of that is a sold slab of steel or composite. Mech armor is different, it is thicker, but made of a foamed steel that is produced in Zero-G facilities in orbit of production planets.

This makes the armor resistant to most projectile attacks because the round has to go through all the tiny spaces. But it also helps with energy weapons that attempt to vaporize layers of the armor when doing damage, IE a laser. But this also makes the armor brittle to high mass impacts since this will crack and fracture the bubbles of the armor.

In fact there are three (that I know of) forms of armor in BattleTech. Standard, Ferro-Fibrous, and later a Reactive version. We will probably only see Standard for a while since Ferro-Fibrous is pretty rare. Reactive I am not to sure about. But for the most part the armor is purely passive with little other benefit then to absorb damage,

Foamed aluminum is in the internal structure. Armor is in two-layer plates, with one layer of "radiation casted" steel and another of boron nitride in a mesh of carbon nanotubes ("artificial diamond fibers"). The attachment points usually give out before the armor does.

Edited by Coalbiter, 04 November 2011 - 11:02 AM.

[Captain Nice HD]

Paladin1, on 04 November 2011 - 10:57 AM, said:

And the Tetatae also weren't sentient. Intelligent to be sure, but not sentient. Plus, they taste just like chicken so they can't be completely alien.

The Tetatae were most definitely sentient. They were stone-age primitive, to be certain, but they met the dictionary definition of sentience just fine.

Also, just about everything without a distinctive taste tastes like chicken because chicken doesn't taste like much of anything. Chicken meat is very basic as far as animal proteins go.

[Alizabeth Aijou]

The only type of shields you'll see are the old mediæval type ones, a lump of metal stuck to your arm.
StarSiege had an auto-repair system, but it'd take up one of your item slots, and it wasn't exactly superb either, and the shields depended a lot on which one you installed (and even then functioned best only when combined with a shield modulator).

Quote

Anyway, yeah, regenerating armor and deflector shields rank right up there with artificial gravity; its just something that the BattleTech universe in general should never be associated with.

And what do you call those GravDecks on Jump/WarShips?

Edited by Alizabeth Aijou, 04 November 2011 - 12:09 PM.

[Captain Nice HD]

Alizabeth Aijou, on 04 November 2011 - 12:07 PM, said:

And what do you call those GravDecks on Jump/WarShips?

The GravDecks are for Simulated gravity, not artificial gravity. There is a fine, but important, distinction between the two: one exploits centripetal force to create the illusion of up and down; the other is magic.

[UncleKulikov]

Nix on the regeneration. the only regeneration that should take place, would be in a maintenance bay or by having field repairs ( I think 4 armor points per half hour on tabletop).

[Alizabeth Aijou]

Captain Nice HD, on 04 November 2011 - 12:23 PM, said:

The GravDecks are for Simulated gravity, not artificial gravity. There is a fine, but important, distinction between the two: one exploits centripetal force to create the illusion of up and down; the other is magic.

The other distinction is the mess that the clean-up crew has to take care of if someone tries to sneak onto a GravDeck.

[IS Wolf]

Captain Nice HD, on 04 November 2011 - 10:54 AM, said:

Well, except for the Tetatae, of course, but they are generally not spoken of.

Seem to recall that Arden Sortek also ran into a bunch of aliens.
The Sword and the Dagger, but that novel has been out of print for ages.

[PewPew2]

The OP is a troll guys dont get bent out of shape on this topic hes just posting that to get people riled up

[Stormwolf]

It's best to stop posting in this thread, let it die people.

[wanderer]

Alizabeth Aijou, on 04 November 2011 - 12:07 PM, said:

And what do you call those GravDecks on Jump/WarShips?

Good ol' fashioned rotation used to simulate gravity. There's no real "gravity generators" in Battletech.

[Razor Kotovsky]

Arctic Fox, on 03 November 2011 - 05:42 AM, said:

I'd tend to agree they should kept out. While BattleTech has some impossibly efficient technology, it has always stayed away from technologies which violate the laws of physics (With the exception of FTL travel and communication, naturally). Shields are very much in that category, and so they've been kept out of the setting.

(L)AMS acts as an energy shield would irl. Timed countershots neutralizing the threat.
Entirely possible with PPC, for example.

Not advocating or anything but it's not THAT supernatural, the theory is really simple and anti-missile systems already exist.
Lasers could be countered by a varitation of reactive armor rather than simply reflecting it as well.

Edited by Razor Kotovsky, 04 November 2011 - 02:17 PM.

[dal10]

I am just going to point out the clans which are about 1000 years ahead technology wise to the inner sphere. (the 300 years they had to advance technology and all the time the inner sphere lost when it went through the succession wars.) if they don't have regenerating armor and shields... they just have stronger armor that is it.

[Alizabeth Aijou]

And the clans barely got that either (Ferro-Lamellor in 3070).
Before that, just a slightly better Ferro-Fibrous.
Hardened (3045/305?), Reflective (3058/3061), Stealth (3063/NA) and Reactive (3063/3065) Armors all came around just around the clan invasion, or after..

[Razor Kotovsky]

dal10, on 04 November 2011 - 02:17 PM, said:

I am just going to point out the clans which are about 1000 years ahead technology wise to the inner sphere. (the 300 years they had to advance technology and all the time the inner sphere lost when it went through the succession wars.)

Someone has to put in a FAQ that IS rediscovered alot of lostech in the first half of 31th.

Edited by Razor Kotovsky, 04 November 2011 - 02:55 PM.

[Nebfer]

dal10, on 04 November 2011 - 02:17 PM, said:

I am just going to point out the clans which are about 1000 years ahead technology wise to the inner sphere. (the 300 years they had to advance technology and all the time the inner sphere lost when it went through the succession wars.) if they don't have regenerating armor and shields... they just have stronger armor that is it.

The Clans do not have a 1,000 year advantage, The innersphere retained the ability to build battlemechs, so most of the worlds that mattered where around 2600, and after 2850 or so the clans practically stagnated.

However by the time the clans invaded the IS had started building (late era) Star league era equipment, or around 2750s.
As such the Clans had no more than a 100 to 150 year advantage.