136 replies to this topic

[Brixx]

Vellron2005, on 03 November 2011 - 05:10 AM, said:

Personally, I think that shields would be a good option, and would bring some dynamic to the game. Look at today's tanks. 100 tons of armor, and it still gets blown to bits by a few well placed missles. Now add lasers and gauss to the mix.. In Mechwarrior, it always took lots of punishment to take down a 100 ton mech,and I always thought it was a bit unrealistic..

Shields could correct that. An example of this was a game called Mission force: Cyberstorm.. It was a turn based strategy game, but the mechs there employed both shields and armor and it made the game dynamic cose' you had to think about what your weapon loadout would be like. Energy weapons took out shields, while other weapons did more damage to armor. The same principle would work well here.. Shure, older fans of the game would say no to shields, but back in the times of the original mechwarrior games, things were done a different way. This is the new age where we can have our mechs more realistic, more dynamic and overall more fun.. Why not?

To my ears this does not sound as if we are talking about MechWarrior. They chose this franchise and they should stick to it at least concerning the basics. I am against this idea at all. But in the MechWarrior universe there are different types of armor. Reflective... etc. This should be enough... it is basically shields in some way as lasers are not that effective against it.

But back to my first sentence: This is MechWarrior. If they don´t keep up with basic things... they shouldn´t name it MechWarrior. I don´t think that we will see this in game.

[godmonkey]

shields are heresy *BLAM*

Just like a squa *BLAM*

The Officio Assassinorum removed the Heretic before he could spread his vile proganada and lies.

But in all seriousness they just aren't Battletech/Mechwarrior. Sure in any other generic giant robot slugmatch game they would fit in rather well. But not here.

[Arctic Fox]

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. The only exception is shielding against particle beams, which does in fact exist as the experimental Blue Shield Particle Field Damper.

[SilverWings]

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. The only exception is shielding against particle beams, which does in fact exist as the experimental Blue Shield Particle Field Damper.

This is off topic but in Battletech there is no FTL. Their interstellar travel is based on the theory of folding space. Now back to topic. Something like shields could be a major detriment to a franchise this old. I'm surpised Dark Age didn't utterly destroy it but that's for another discussion. Most of the tech in BT is plausible. Mostly improbible but not impossible. Only because we have yet to develop the tech to develop that tech lol.

Edit: Btw Arctic, I only quoted you just for the FTL bit lol.

Edited by Kazimir Kerensky, 03 November 2011 - 05:49 AM.

[infi]

I just wish the ability to add more armor onto a mech at a sacrifice of something else was available. For instance in the real world... you could take a metal plate and weld it onto the front of your car if you liked. Sure it would stop some bullets, but the maneuvering and top speed and balance would be well buggered... but **** being able to stop a bullet would be nice on my Yaris

[smegish]

See, it also depends on your definition of 'Shield'.

What would be considered the usual sci-fi energy shield? No, they never existed in any of the sourcebooks/fiction I've read or heard about, not even the amongst the bizarre stuff the Blakists were apparently working on during the Jihad, so they should not be here. Same goes for some of the weirder weapons I've seen in MW4, though most of them I think were added by Mektek in their open release.

Now on Solaris 7 (The Btech equivalent of Vegas, with added mech gladiatorial arenas) some mechs do use the physical, 'Big Ole Slab of Metal Strapped (or in this case welded) to an Arm' Shield. Never used em before myself, though I have used a few of the S7 mechs -******* Maces are evil weapons when combined with TSM- and only know of one example of a mech with a shield made for any military (The Valiant in TRO 3075 for those who give a ****) so they don't really have a place in here, but their presence along with the unusual Solaris melee weapons -assuming ANY melee is possible in this game- wouldn't bother me or in any way stop me playing this game, need to get my Btech fix somewhere

[Nebfer]

Heh First off Battletech dose have an energy shield of sorts, it's called Blue shield It's current iteration only works effectively for 60 seconds at a time (six B-tech turns, the turns do not have to be consecutive) and only works on particle cannon hits (50% less damage), the systems capacitors can go boom if hit while it's active. It's also expensive and a maintenance nightmare. Not surprisingly it's not very common.

Battletech also has physical shields, These absorb a specific amount of damage from an attack but slowly take damage as well, which eventually renders them useless, larger shields last longer and can absorb more damage but they also reduce the mechs movement profile (not to mention they block weapons fire from the torsos while in use).

So their not very popular out side of Solaris, the only real production models that have them is the House Davion Valiant light battlemech (but the base model dose not have it).

In any case none of these items are available until after the clan invasion.


A few things to note about battletech
Battletech vehicles are much faster than they first seem.
A 3/5 battlemech can move at 54 kph (33.55 mph), this in battletech is a slow mech (many assault mechs are this fast) however looking at real life vehicles a M1 Abrams has a stated off road ability of just 48 kph (30 mph) and yes it dose have the trick of able to disable it's engine governor... (at which it has a top speed of around 70 mph (112 kph) on smooth roads, but it's not recommended to do this for the tank or it's crew). So in short a 100 ton Atlas mech has the same off road ability as a 65 ton M1 Abrams tank of today (most current MBTs have smiler off road ability's).

Also note all Tracked, wheeled and hover based ground vehicles gain a +1 movement to their over all movement capability when on roads, so a 3/5 tank can move 6 hexes a turn when on roads (or 64.8 kph or 40.27 mph, which is not to far off from an Abrams governed road speed of 42 MPH (67.2 kph)).

Further more theirs a number of options that increase the speed of the unit that do not involve out fitting the unit with extra gear, these navigation Satellite up-links (+1 movement, due to better maps), a rule that allows a unit to "sprint (or overdrive for vehicles, this has the effect of MASC or 2x walking speed, it also stacks with MASC and the experimental supercharger (which is oddly partly fluffed as a disabled governor))" and a pilot ability (from the RPG) that allows for a +2 movement while "sprinting".

Using all three of these ability's a 3/5 mech can reach a top speed of 97.2 kph (60.4 mph). Though the down side of using these ability's is the unit is concentrating on moving at this speed, as such it's not taking evasive action, and thus easier to hit and is not able to fire back as well.
--------------------------------------------
Battletech armor is strong but the rules have it a bit contradictory about it, for example a Gauss Rifle fires a 125 kilogram slug (275 pound, about the size of a eight inch naval shell) at hypersonic velocity's (tech manual and a few others mention incredible velocity's, TRO 2750 and the older BMR said twice the velocity of conventional shells, and the majority of novel quotes indicate hypersonic (1,700m/s or faster) velocity's). At say 1,920m/s the Gauss slug has a kinetic energy of 230 megajoules To put that into perspective the 120mm gun on the M1A2 Abrams tank fires a Ke projectile that only deals 8.5 megajoules. And the 16 inch AP shells from an Iowa class battleship at 25,000 yards only deals ~150 megajoules (even at 1,700m/s the Gauss slug is still doing 180 megajoules). And battlemechs can take a number of these hits and survive.

Why 1,920m/s, well the Heavy Gauss Rifle slugs are also stated to be hypersonic (see the novel End Game for that), if the Heavy has a velocity of 1,750m/s and we scale the resulting KE with the damage of the regular Gauss it has to have a velocity of ~1,920m/s.

Though the interesting thing on battletech armor is that it seems to fail quite easily when we have a high mass and low velocity impact, like melee attacks, ramming or falling down... A battlemech that gets rammed by another battlemech can easily have it's armor damaged by one or two megajoules, strangely the charging mech only takes a tenth the damage... Though oddly Aerospace fighters can survive impacts at 3km/s velocity's with some armor intact.

In sort battletech armor seems to do well on low mass high velocity impacts but less on high mass low velocity impacts, it also seems to do less well on mass impacts, like a burst of autocannon fire.

Edited by nebfer, 03 November 2011 - 10:44 AM.

[wanderer]

Vellron2005, on 03 November 2011 - 05:10 AM, said:

Personally, I think that shields would be a good option, and would bring some dynamic to the game. Look at today's tanks. 100 tons of armor, and it still gets blown to bits by a few well placed missles. Now add lasers and gauss to the mix.. In Mechwarrior, it always took lots of punishment to take down a 100 ton mech,and I always thought it was a bit unrealistic..

Shields could correct that. An example of this was a game called Mission force: Cyberstorm.. It was a turn based strategy game, but the mechs there employed both shields and armor and it made the game dynamic cose' you had to think about what your weapon loadout would be like. Energy weapons took out shields, while other weapons did more damage to armor. The same principle would work well here.. Shure, older fans of the game would say no to shields, but back in the times of the original mechwarrior games, things were done a different way. This is the new age where we can have our mechs more realistic, more dynamic and overall more fun.. Why not?

P.S. Shields should regenerate, armor should not. It would be too much of a step sideways if armor would regenerate and it would mess with the original feel of the game. Shields on the other hand, in my opinion, would bring a new dimension to it all..

Because there's absolutely nothing in Battletech that has anything to do with what you're saying, even a century later.

This is up there with suggesting one should have F-16's in a WWI simulation. No offense.

And Battletech weapons have their own reasons for choice. Some weapons are "hole-punchers" that are good for making armor go away. Others are "crit-seekers", that have a much higher chance of tearing apart a 'Mech that's had it's internals exposed. Blasting a 'Mech with a PPC and then dumping an SRM salvo into the thing is giving you many more chances to hit something important- or explosive - than the single dose of damage a second PPC bolt might deliver. Heat matters as well (something a lot of "no heat" players in Mechwarrior videogames don't get, between that and the "coolant purge" mechanic)- the guy with the autocannon can put the hurt on longer than you when you've overloaded your sinks firing all those energy weapons, because the AC isn't cooking him with each round sent down the line.

[wanderer]

nebfer, on 03 November 2011 - 10:43 AM, said:

Though the interesting thing on battletech armor is that it seems to fail quite easily when we have a high mass and low velocity impact, like melee attacks, ramming or falling down... A battlemech that gets rammed by another battlemech can easily have it's armor damaged by one or two megajoules, strangely the charging mech only takes a tenth the damage... Though oddly Aerospace fighters can survive impacts at 3km/s velocity's with some armor intact.

It's worth noting that the BT rules for charging you mention are the simplified ones for tournament play. There's a more complex version of the same that takes the difference in weights into account, so a 20-ton Wasp ramming a 100-ton Atlas will generally come out with the Wasp wishing it hadn't.

[jojobear]

KingCobra, on 02 November 2011 - 01:41 PM, said:

Throughout the Mechwarrior game series i have seen many adaptions of armors and how they work and dont work.It came to my mind the best armor system was the inner and outer armor system used in mechwarrior 2 and 3 with different armor types for bolth armor systems.But even then it was so wasy to take a arm or leg off rendering the mech useless.I always imagined what it would have been like or could be if the arms and leg hitboxes and armor were as tough as the CT=Center torso.Also it would seam by 3049 there would have been adaptive regenerating armors if you were in hiding for a certian lenght of time they would renew or possibly energy shielding to withstand the assault of heavy weapons placed on mech type weapons platform.We see some of these examples in other mech type games like HeavyGear & HeavyGear2 and also SupremeCommander & SupremeCommander2.There were also many fine examples of mechlabs and armor types in other mech type games like ShattedSteel,StarSiege,And EarthSeige & EarthSeige2.

Health regen in MW?

I don't think English has even near the appropriate words or verbal structure to accurately convey my utter loathing, hatred, and rage at reading this post and contemplating its implications.

[Roh]

No. NO! Bad OP! Bad!

[Jack Colten]

Vellron2005, on 03 November 2011 - 05:10 AM, said:

Personally, I think that shields would be a good option, and would bring some dynamic to the game. Look at today's tanks. 100 tons of armor, and it still gets blown to bits by a few well placed missles. Now add lasers and gauss to the mix.. In Mechwarrior, it always took lots of punishment to take down a 100 ton mech,and I always thought it was a bit unrealistic..

Shields could correct that. An example of this was a game called Mission force: Cyberstorm.. It was a turn based strategy game, but the mechs there employed both shields and armor and it made the game dynamic cose' you had to think about what your weapon loadout would be like. Energy weapons took out shields, while other weapons did more damage to armor. The same principle would work well here.. Shure, older fans of the game would say no to shields, but back in the times of the original mechwarrior games, things were done a different way. This is the new age where we can have our mechs more realistic, more dynamic and overall more fun.. Why not?

P.S. Shields should regenerate, armor should not. It would be too much of a step sideways if armor would regenerate and it would mess with the original feel of the game. Shields on the other hand, in my opinion, would bring a new dimension to it all..

Regenerating armor and shields would be to disruptive to the game play. It was bad enough when Mech3 and 4 had useable repair facilities in online game play. Tanks do not have 100(s?) of tons of armor. There hasn't been a 100ton tank since WWII and a modern MBT uses a combination of armor types, geometry, and add on armor to defeat weapons fired at it. Most 1 shot kills on a MBT happen when it is shot in a soft spot (rear, engine, turret ring, ammo sponson). This may cause a catistrophic kill (killing the tank and crew), a mobility kill or partial kill reducing it's combat effectiveness. The trouble with the "reality" of armor that is "chipped" away in games is it doesn't really work that way. The armor can be weakened or become less effective but it either defeats the attack or the attack penetrates to some degree or completely. Just because the turret flies off doesn't mean the remaining armor on it isn't still effective at stopping small arms fire (if you hid behind it laying on the ground). That's a mechanical failure of the turret not the failure of the armor. I wrote "It(s) hit" in a soft spot and it censored that. Bad Censor, Bad Censor.

Edited by Jack Colten, 03 November 2011 - 08:59 PM.

[Belial]

godmonkey, on 03 November 2011 - 05:27 AM, said:

shields are heresy *BLAM*

Just like a squa *BLAM*

The Officio Assassinorum removed the Heretic before he could spread his vile proganada and lies.

But in all seriousness they just aren't Battletech/Mechwarrior. Sure in any other generic giant robot slugmatch game they would fit in rather well. But not here.

I think not only am I the only one who got the reference but also found it quite hilarious. The Inquisition commends you, Vindicare.


To the topic at hand.. fancy explanations aside, just NO. Different armor types (Reflective etc)? Yes. Everything else... well, given the ***-like abilities granted to most game protagonists these days, I can understand why such things would be expected here by new people. Someone give this lad a TRO, the Twilight of the Clans and a cup of coffee.

[Lasershark]

wanderer, on 03 November 2011 - 11:00 AM, said:

This is up there with suggesting one should have F-16's in a WWI simulation. No offense.

*threadjack*I just got a crystal clear image of Tom Cruise ending WW1 with a vulcan cannon and a handful of cluster bombs.*/threadjack*

Edited by Lasershark, 03 November 2011 - 09:08 PM.

[Jack Colten]

nebfer, on 03 November 2011 - 10:43 AM, said:

Heh First off Battletech dose have an energy shield of sorts, it's called Blue shield It's current iteration only works effectively for 60 seconds at a time (six B-tech turns, the turns do not have to be consecutive) and only works on particle cannon hits (50% less damage), the systems capacitors can go boom if hit while it's active. It's also expensive and a maintenance nightmare. Not surprisingly it's not very common.

Battletech also has physical shields, These absorb a specific amount of damage from an attack but slowly take damage as well, which eventually renders them useless, larger shields last longer and can absorb more damage but they also reduce the mechs movement profile (not to mention they block weapons fire from the torsos while in use).

So their not very popular out side of Solaris, the only real production models that have them is the House Davion Valiant light battlemech (but the base model dose not have it).

In any case none of these items are available until after the clan invasion.


A few things to note about battletech
Battletech vehicles are much faster than they first seem.
A 3/5 battlemech can move at 54 kph (33.55 mph), this in battletech is a slow mech (many assault mechs are this fast) however looking at real life vehicles a M1 Abrams has a stated off road ability of just 48 kph (30 mph) and yes it dose have the trick of able to disable it's engine governor... (at which it has a top speed of around 70 mph (112 kph) on smooth roads, but it's not recommended to do this for the tank or it's crew). So in short a 100 ton Atlas mech has the same off road ability as a 65 ton M1 Abrams tank of today (most current MBTs have smiler off road ability's).

Also note all Tracked, wheeled and hover based ground vehicles gain a +1 movement to their over all movement capability when on roads, so a 3/5 tank can move 6 hexes a turn when on roads (or 64.8 kph or 40.27 mph, which is not to far off from an Abrams governed road speed of 42 MPH (67.2 kph)).

Further more theirs a number of options that increase the speed of the unit that do not involve out fitting the unit with extra gear, these navigation Satellite up-links (+1 movement, due to better maps), a rule that allows a unit to "sprint (or overdrive for vehicles, this has the effect of MASC or 2x walking speed, it also stacks with MASC and the experimental supercharger (which is oddly partly fluffed as a disabled governor))" and a pilot ability (from the RPG) that allows for a +2 movement while "sprinting".

Using all three of these ability's a 3/5 mech can reach a top speed of 97.2 kph (60.4 mph). Though the down side of using these ability's is the unit is concentrating on moving at this speed, as such it's not taking evasive action, and thus easier to hit and is not able to fire back as well.
--------------------------------------------
Battletech armor is strong but the rules have it a bit contradictory about it, for example a Gauss Rifle fires a 125 kilogram slug (275 pound, about the size of a eight inch naval shell) at hypersonic velocity's (tech manual and a few others mention incredible velocity's, TRO 2750 and the older BMR said twice the velocity of conventional shells, and the majority of novel quotes indicate hypersonic (1,700m/s or faster) velocity's). At say 1,920m/s the Gauss slug has a kinetic energy of 230 megajoules To put that into perspective the 120mm gun on the M1A2 Abrams tank fires a Ke projectile that only deals 8.5 megajoules. And the 16 inch AP shells from an Iowa class battleship at 25,000 yards only deals ~150 megajoules (even at 1,700m/s the Gauss slug is still doing 180 megajoules). And battlemechs can take a number of these hits and survive.

Why 1,920m/s, well the Heavy Gauss Rifle slugs are also stated to be hypersonic (see the novel End Game for that), if the Heavy has a velocity of 1,750m/s and we scale the resulting KE with the damage of the regular Gauss it has to have a velocity of ~1,920m/s.

Though the interesting thing on battletech armor is that it seems to fail quite easily when we have a high mass and low velocity impact, like melee attacks, ramming or falling down... A battlemech that gets rammed by another battlemech can easily have it's armor damaged by one or two megajoules, strangely the charging mech only takes a tenth the damage... Though oddly Aerospace fighters can survive impacts at 3km/s velocity's with some armor intact.

In sort battletech armor seems to do well on low mass high velocity impacts but less on high mass low velocity impacts, it also seems to do less well on mass impacts, like a burst of autocannon fire.

BTech armor though it's not really discussed in the literature might has some degree of sensing. As in the armor or mechs sensors register the attack and configure in a way to maximize the defensive value, the way reactive (not passive grrrr) armor was designed to deflect HEAT rounds back in the 70s. Active armor you might say. Who knows. CHOBM Armor is a combination of ceramics, steel and filiment barriers on the M1a1 and a2. I'm sure the Mech Armor is something like a high tech composite armor that combines the maximum effectiveness against all weapons. One of the cheapest ways to kill a bot mech in Mech2 was to force it to run into a building or bridge over and over. hehe. A PPC,Gauss Slug or AC Cannon would shred any MBT we have today. I mean the AC20 is a 120mm+ chain gun for christsakes.

Edited by Jack Colten, 03 November 2011 - 09:11 PM.

[Skygrunt]

woah woah regenerating armor and shields.... stop shut down maybe small repairs to systems but armor? conservation of mass please it got blown off. There are repair bay's and such for a reason.

[Skygrunt]

and on that note repair bays become a tactical advantage that could try to destroy or protect.

[Johnathan McKenna]

This is mechwarrior. Shields and regenerative armor do not exist in the mechwarrior/battletech universe therefore they should not exist in this game.

[SyberSmoke]

nebfer, on 03 November 2011 - 10:43 AM, said:

Though the interesting thing on battletech armor is that it seems to fail quite easily when we have a high mass and low velocity impact, like melee attacks, ramming or falling down... A battlemech that gets rammed by another battlemech can easily have it's armor damaged by one or two megajoules, strangely the charging mech only takes a tenth the damage... Though oddly Aerospace fighters can survive impacts at 3km/s velocity's with some armor intact.

In sort battletech armor seems to do well on low mass high velocity impacts but less on high mass low velocity impacts, it also seems to do less well on mass impacts, like a burst of autocannon fire.

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,

Edited by SyberSmoke, 03 November 2011 - 11:42 PM.

[Captain Nice HD]

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

In fact there are three (that I know of) forms of armor in BattleTech. Standard, Ferro-Fibrous, and later a Reactive version.

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.