96 replies to this topic

[Bianca Flowers]

every time you apply logic or science to BattleTech, God kills a catgirl

[SquareSphere]

That mechs actually dominate the battlefield where even modern aircraft would decimate them

[phallicabuse]

Ghost, on 09 April 2012 - 01:09 PM, said:

vid...
stuff...

Just to answer this, the term "Railgun" is a misnomer, the weapon should be called a "Coilgun". Small but technically important difference, the railgun has a magnetic rail that goes ZOOOOOOOOM~~~ WHACK! and a projectile flies out. The Coilgun has no such rail, instead it makes a giant magnetic field(from coils of wire) that glides the projectile out, !~without~! actually touching it.

Edit: Slime answered this ages ago, still I left it in while adding this edit.


anywho TLDR: my favorite lines go something like;

"If two Lasers were to collide, would they sparkle like Robert Patinson?"

"Blue lasers are bigger/wider so they must hurt more." -Since when is bigger or wider more powerful and smaller, tighter less powerful? also... colors... wtf?

If you think about it what sounds more reasonable? Knocking a couple idiots upside the head to stop a childish war that'll rip apart all of humanity? Or saying screw it and running light years away with a third of the galaxy's army so you can take a nap?

Do mech's "run outta gas" ?

PS: All this talk of fusion reactors, I'll stick with Heavy Gear's simple Turbine/Classic V-Powered Engines. Speaking of physics HG was fairly reasonable... well as reasonable as 12 ft tall robots with roller skates could be. =)

Edited by phallicabuse, 18 May 2013 - 09:09 AM.

[Felicitatem Parco]

• Flamer - Siphons hot plasma from the shielded reactor core, and then pumps it through conduits and then out a nozzle.

This should most certainly cause your Mech to get much hotter, as the plasma is being removed from the electromagnetically-shielded environment and then sent through non-shielded parts of your Mech. That would cause the chassis of your Mech to accumulate large quantities of heat,and the target Mech would only accumulate the amount of heat that their Mech physically absorbs (whereas most of your Flamer Weapon's output energy is going to be dispersed in the environment as a dissipating cloud).

There is no way for a Flamer to cool your Mech because you're taking heat from a shielded environment where it doesn't cause your chassis to get hot, and moving it through an unshielded environment (the conduits that are part of the weapon system) where it can cause your Mech to heat-up.

• AC/20 vs Gauss (vs. Rifles)

The AC/20 is a rapid-fire autocannon that fires a burst of shells, similar to a very large Naval AAA Gun. It DOES NOT fire a single large slug, like a modern Take Rifle, because the BattleTech weapons that fire large, tank-style rounds are called Mech Rifles (all Mech Rifles that fire these "tank shells" deal -3 damage to any BattleMech or vehicle with Military-grade armor because of how much they suck at damaging ablative armor).

If you've ever fired an assault rifle and dumped a full clip of ammo, you'll find that the barrel gets quite hot. The Gauss Rifle uses a series of solenoid magnets to accelerate a slug to velocities that (supposedly) significantly exceed that of a traditional Tank Rifle owing to it's massive size, and the heat you have to deal with is greatly reduced owing to the lack of a large number of burning powder charges. You only have to dissipate the waste heat of discharging the capacitor bank, and the reactor does not contribute significantly to the Mech's heat load - Remember, the reactor chamber is shielded, and your Mech only Heats up from "using" the energy and sending it through the various components throughout your chassis.

However - Battletech does a ****-poor job at explaining WHY individual Gauss Slugs are so much more effective than individual Tank Shells other than a passing comment on slug velocity.

• Small Lasers on the back of a Mech

Can be used to hurt someone when you otherwise couldn't, like a scout or infantry where 3 dmg can be significant. Not all Mechs can flip their arms, and sometimes it's easier to fry infantry directly instead of turning around to do it.



There are many instances of when BattleTech messes up... but they get a lot of stuff right, too. Like how the Flamers is pretty dead-on; you heat yourself up by taking plasma from a shielded area and pumping it through an unshielded part of your Mech. It wouldn't cool you down at all!

One of my biggest griefs is how they have to scale the weights and damages to make the boardgame make sense. For instance, engines would not scale in tonnage they way they are presented because engine power output/weight efficiency should increase with size, not decrease. They only become less efficient to prevent "Big Engines" from dominating everything.

[Fabe]

Prosperity Park, on 18 May 2013 - 09:39 AM, said:

One of my biggest griefs is how they have to scale the weights and damages to make the boardgame make sense. For instance, engines would not scale in tonnage they way they are presented because engine power output/weight efficiency should increase with size, not decrease. They only become less efficient to prevent "Big Engines" from dominating everything.

That makes perfect sense to me, the bigger the mech the more mass it has so you need a bigger engine to move it. Just look at semi trucks they have massive engines but their top speed if about the same as a smaller vehicle.

[Pht]

Victor Morson, on 09 April 2012 - 09:38 AM, said:

Flamers - A weapon that draws the heat straight from the fusion reactor and vents it! How it should work is obvious: The hotter your reactor is running, the more potent the damage that can be fueled through your flamer is. Since it's venting heat, it should cause either no heat, or actually lower it. .. except it doesn't. It spikes your heat to dump heat out of your 'mech into the atmosphere. What?

And where in the source have you seen it said that flamers are tied directly to the temps of the plasma with NO temperature controlling mechanics in between the plasma and the flamer port?

You're proceeding on a false presumption of knowledge.

Quote

Autocannon/20s vs Gauss Rifles - An Autocannon is a big tank canon style shell, like tanks today use. A Gauss Rifle is similar to a rail gun, taking mass amounts of energy to accelerate a solid metal slug at it's target. Which is why the Gauss Rifle doesn't use the reactor hardly at all while the Autocannon costs huge heat spikes, of course.

AC's aren't single round weapons. They fire multiple rounds at a single time. Gauss fire single rounds, and rail guns aren't "like" gauss guns in any manner other than that both use magnetics to accelerate their projectiles.

The heat that AC's make are due to barrel heat, not heat from running the fusion engine more - gauss rifles have pretty much zero barrel heat comparatively.

Quote

Pulse Lasers in no way would look like "streams of ruby darts", fluff writers!

Pulse lasers fire at a set refire rate in discreet smaller bursts, instead of being "on" for as long as is possible without melting things.

Quote

Clearly, if it's 50 degrees or 80 degrees out will make a huge impact on the heat inside of a fusion engine.

?

Quote

Of course if you put your heatsinks into a vacuum, they'll clearly work really, really well!

Because heat obviously can't move through a vacuum; just ask the people at the beach who got sunburnt by the heat from that big heater way off at the center of our solar system that's surrounded by billions of miles of vacuum.

Or ... uh .. point out the fact that the fusion in the fusion engines are maintained in a vacuum but still somehow manage to heat up the 'Mech that said fusion engine is mounted in.

Edited by Pht, 19 May 2013 - 02:23 PM.

[Felicitatem Parco]

Fabe, on 19 May 2013 - 02:18 PM, said:

That makes perfect sense to me, the bigger the mech the more mass it has so you need a bigger engine to move it. Just look at semi trucks they have massive engines but their top speed if about the same as a smaller vehicle.

I meant the scaling system is off. Of course a bigger engine is heavier, but it shouldn't be getting 2x as heavy for only a 50% increase in power. In reality, you'd get something more like a 2x power boost from a mere 50% increase in reactor weight.

I can't complain, though, because it keeps the game more fair.

[Psygnal]

SquareSphere, on 01 November 2012 - 07:29 AM, said:

That mechs actually dominate the battlefield where even modern aircraft would decimate them

This. But I don't care. Big robots with guns... good enough for me.

[Sug]

Just got a "like" from a post I made over a year ago. Go go necro.

[KingNobody]

chewie, on 09 April 2012 - 10:32 AM, said:

Hmm, I'm not sure if your trolling or serious........



Its MYTH BUSTING TIME!!!!!!

If, we take an AC shell, as being *like* a standardised current tank shell, but fired in multiples (eg, 2, 5 10 or 20) from a cassette or similar type loading medium, then each shell is going to generate heat within the breach as it is fired. no energy required, just heat expended when fired. No drain on the reactor or heat produced from powering it, except for the motors that supply the next reload.

A Gauss round is a metallic projectile accelerated by an Electromagnetic coil, it is not a RAIL gun which uses a series of linear magnets set in a "rail". Now, the last time I checked, phased linear magnets take power to operate, in order to make something accelerate. This power is drawn from the mechs fusion reactor.

Now this takes a fair it of power in 1 bit hit, and is more than the reactor is used to putting out in 1 go. Kind of like a cold start, straight into top speed running puts drain on the reactor etc etc.

So the reactor works a little bit harder to provide the power to the magnets in order to move the projectile down the length of the barrel and out the end towards your target.

Despite this extra power drain, the Gauss rifle gives off little or no heat as it has nothing that can heat up, except the power linkages and the barrel as the round scrapes along it.

thats 1 myth busted


See the final book in the Blood of Kerensky trilogy, when Phelan is facing off against Vlad, and Phelan says to himself how Vlad cannot use both gauss rifles at once, because of the power drain on the mechs reactor (or words to that effect)



Oh wait, you weren't trolling or being serious......


oh no!!!!!, that makes me the Trollololollooolll!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fixed it for ya

[ZnSeventeen]

Prosperity Park, on 19 May 2013 - 02:41 PM, said:

I meant the scaling system is off. Of course a bigger engine is heavier, but it shouldn't be getting 2x as heavy for only a 50% increase in power. In reality, you'd get something more like a 2x power boost from a mere 50% increase in reactor weight.

I can't complain, though, because it keeps the game more fair.

I agree. Also, if it works on this scale, why not just stick two fusion engines in a mech? It would be lighter to have two 200 engines than one 400. But I guess this could be explained away with "shielding," "interference," and various other pseudo explanations.

P.S. I think if super heavy mechs which could take two or more engine slots, but with a -1 or -2 modifier on incoming fire due to a massive increase in girth could be cool. Just saying.

[StompingOnTanks]

I have a theory as to the Autocannon ranges.

See, if you put a lot of gunpowder behind a small bullet, it goes farther and faster. If you put the same amount of gunpowder behind a bigger bullet, that bullet goes slower and travels a shorter distance. Perhaps large Autocannons have less range because they have to limit the size of the shell so it fits inside the cramped space of a mech, therefore, you can only fit so much propellant into the shell for a given caliber. Thus, smaller rounds fly farther than larger ones for the limited propellant the designer has to work with.

Although I seriously want to know how the ammo stored in my left foot makes it past a dozen actuators, 50 myomer bundles, a fusion reactor, a gyroscope, and more actuators and myomer before it arrives at the Autocannon in my right arm without the ammo belt breaking...

[Alaskan Nobody]

StompingOnTanks, on 06 December 2013 - 09:43 PM, said:

I have a theory as to the Autocannon ranges.

Or, alternatively, they have the range limits because, like the modern day tank shells, they have a built in fuse, that causes them to detonate at said range (which would also explain why the explode at their max range)

[dal10]

or you could just notice that the authors said that they had the reduced ranges because of the fact that if you went with how it would really be it wouldn't be fun. it would be whoever saw the other person first.

[Alaskan Nobody]

dal10, on 06 December 2013 - 10:14 PM, said:

or you could just notice that the authors said that they had the reduced ranges because of the fact that if you went with how it would really be it wouldn't be fun. it would be whoever saw the other person first.

That to.

[StompingOnTanks]

dal10, on 06 December 2013 - 10:14 PM, said:

or you could just notice that the authors said that they had the reduced ranges because of the fact that if you went with how it would really be it wouldn't be fun. it would be whoever saw the other person first.

Or... I could tap into my intimate knowledge of firearms and get super technical about it because I'm that kind of nerd.

But if LRMs fired 50 miles and Autocannon 10s shot 5000m this game would be a lot less fun. No more in-your-face brawls or over-dramatic kamikaze charges into enemy lines.