146 replies to this topic

[LordDeathStrike]

Johannes Falkner, on 10 April 2012 - 09:59 PM, said:

Thankfully the RAC-20 does not exist...

Your comments exemplify a design paradigm that will have a large number of people rage quitting and leaving the game. Remember that this is not TT. Your accuracy and the location you hit will no longer be random (ie you will not hit arms/legs as often). This means players will have a much higher liklihood of coring targets. If you have weapons like an AC/20 that do a single massive alpha strike to and allow the firer to return to cover and hide for the next ten seconds, avoiding return fire from the target (hereafter known as the victim), you will destroy the fun for most gamers.

Imagine these scenes:

• You come around a corner and find yourself face to face with a Hunchback. *flash*
  
  Anything guaranteed death for 20 tonners and 25 tonners without full armor forward, highly probable death for most other lights and lighly armored mediums (Clints and such) (Urban mech has 1 structure left and dies to the Hunchback's lasers).
  Hunchback retreats around corner while you pick yourself up off of the ground.
  
• It's THAT map again.
  
  The Hunchback (Atlas/whatever else) always parks mostly behind the building with just their AC and arm showing and a firelane down the alley (good tactics on his part...). To get to objective X you have to go by/through the *******, but he can peek from behind cover and cripple you and prevent all meaningful return fire, sigh, should have brought my *insert mech here*, but the cover sucks going that way.

How many times will this happen before you quit?

why are you rounding corners blind in a 20 ton city map? honestly you deserve to die, you are being stupid. if you are the scout on a city drop, your job is spotting mechs. you should have c3 and bap installed in modules. passive only reduces detection range to around 300m and if you have bap you can see them even sooner. 300m does not = walked around a corner and whammo, undetected hunchback/atlas. unless you were being stupid again running around in a scout mech in passive, so you couldnt see other passives. but a passive scout mech wont detect anything, thus isnt doing its job, thus is stupid.

theres a theme to this post, but odds are if you couldnt figure it out, youll be one of the people running around getting ac 20 cored in a scout mech, becuase you dont know the right way to pilot it.

[Kartr]

LackofCertainty, on 10 April 2012 - 09:48 PM, said:

To everyone in this thread who is complaining about how AC's need to do damage to a single spot in order to be balanced:

The devs already changed lasers to do DOT damage instead of instant damage to one spot, so they could easily do the same thing to AC's.

On the topic of Burst fire AC's, I know it's not very realistic, but I like the idea of my AC/20 being one huge shell shot every ten or so seconds. Maybe that wouldn't work for balance, so the devs could tune it down to 1 round/5 seconds or so, but I don't really want them to tune it all the way down to where it feels/functions exactly the same as a laser does in game.

Maybe it doesn't fit perfectly with cannon, but it's important for different weapons in a fps to have different feels. I don't want AC's to feel like reskinned lasers that have an ammo counter. (aka the stream of bullets some are suggesting) I want them to feel like I'm firing a cannon. Maybe it's a burst fire cannon, but it's still a cannon, not a machine gun.

From what I saw lasers are not a DOT (damage over time). Rather its more like the Pulse lasers from MW3 where the beam is continuous over a few seconds. The difference being a DOT weapon would instantly strike and then the damage would continue to the target after the laser was turned off and the current model has the damage being applied only when the laser is on.

Johannes Falkner, on 10 April 2012 - 09:59 PM, said:

Thankfully the RAC-20 does not exist...

Your comments exemplify a design paradigm that will have a large number of people rage quitting and leaving the game. Remember that this is not TT. Your accuracy and the location you hit will no longer be random (ie you will not hit arms/legs as often). This means players will have a much higher liklihood of coring targets. If you have weapons like an AC/20 that do a single massive alpha strike to and allow the firer to return to cover and hide for the next ten seconds, avoiding return fire from the target (hereafter known as the victim), you will destroy the fun for most gamers.

Imagine these scenes:

• You come around a corner and find yourself face to face with a Hunchback. *flash*
  
  Anything guaranteed death for 20 tonners and 25 tonners without full armor forward, highly probable death for most other lights and lighly armored mediums (Clints and such) (Urban mech has 1 structure left and dies to the Hunchback's lasers).
  Hunchback retreats around corner while you pick yourself up off of the ground.
  
• It's THAT map again.
  
  The Hunchback (Atlas/whatever else) always parks mostly behind the building with just their AC and arm showing and a firelane down the alley (good tactics on his part...). To get to objective X you have to go by/through the *******, but he can peek from behind cover and cripple you and prevent all meaningful return fire, sigh, should have brought my *insert mech here*, but the cover sucks going that way.

How many times will this happen before you quit?

Except that's exactly what makes the AC worthwhile. If you're only doing partial damage per shot then I'd rather take a large laser so I get my 8pts of damage upfront (mostly) and save the extra weight and criticals for extras like lots of FF armor.

The thing with AC/s especially the AC/20 is their really really short range. If that Hunchie wants to stay under cover let him, just bypass his position and avoid him all together, he'll have to come out into the open at some point and then you can light him up with your longer range weapons.

Also we know that AC/20s are in the game as doing massive damage to a single location, one of the devs in a recent interview mentioned how he didn't move evasively and took an AC/20 to the face which instantly killed him.

Remember this isn't a new balancing issue, AC/s have been in the TT for years and yes the dice role made it more random where you hit, but from what I saw of the game play trailer its not going to be super easy to pin point shots on people. The motion of your 'Mech throws your aim off ever so much, the motion of their 'Mech makes it harder still and if they model the ballistics of the shells you're going to have to account for drop and maybe even windage. Its not going to be as simple as headshotting other 'Mechs at ease.

[Johannes Falkner]

I guess I simply have very little faith in people not learning to time their shots to hyper accuracy. In theory, many of the same balance techniques are at work in WoT, but th results are lackluster to say the least. The matchamker throwing tier 6s (Bait) into matches with tier 10 tanks (Wolves) does not help, at all. I would avoid that if possible. Also, fluffwise (canon fluff) the ACs are supposed to shoot multiple projectiles per salvo. Multiple shots over a short duration salvo would distribute the damage a little, difffuse the twitch aspect and allow for a better visual experience.

This is cooler than this (note the yawn).

[Vollstrecker]

Kartr, on 10 April 2012 - 10:08 PM, said:

This would be artistic license and flies in the face of the TT rules and the common sense reasons for having AC/s to combat ablative armor.


This makes much more sense in realistic terms, the SLDF would have wanted to consolidate ammunition types to ease logistics. Picking say a 105mm round and simply firing more rounds per AC rating not only fits perfectly with what we see in the rules, but makes sense from a military perspective as well.

Unfortunately the canon fluff says that's not the case and so we have to live with 30mm-203mm caliber cannons.

My line of thinking was more that we do have some very compelling reasons to go with a short burst style of AC, not to strictly adhere to canon. Frankly, quite a bit of this was founded on "rule of cool" along with some heavy artistic license. You've got examples in novels where a pilot survives an ERPPC to the face, so I'm not truly inclined to follow it to the letter in many respects.

In a game balance aspect, I would rather work against people being taken down in one shot, which can happen with a King Crab or Annihilator if ACs are a single projectile. The issue is only compounded with the introduction of Ultra ACs so a slight spread to the damage isn't terrible in my eyes, and helps give more value to the faster designs.

[Gunmage]

Kartr, on 10 April 2012 - 10:08 PM, said:

Actually the barrel length is extremely important.

Not the length, but length-to-caliber ratio. If the barrel is too long, it would hamper slug velocity instead.

Also, when you compare different caliber rounds, you forget that besides barrel diameter there are such parameters as round length, mass of explosive matrerial, propellant's mass, propellant type, gross round weight... So saying that 150 mm round equals 1.5*100 mm rounds isn't exactly correct.

On the subject of all salvo hitting one location - modern 30 mm cannons shoot at ~6000 rounds per minute rates (~1000 for single-barreled ones). It means that 40 rounds are shot in under half of a second, and because recoil doesn't affect aim too much in such a short amount of time, this salvo hits in a circle with diameter of 3 meters at 500 meter distance (for Soviet GSh-6-30 cannon). So, if you are willing to believe that progress makes it possible to make a 150mm cannon shoot at 6000 rpm, then it's possible that at AC/20 extreme range it can still shoot whole salvo in one location (Mechs are big targets, after all).

Edited by Gunmage, 10 April 2012 - 10:42 PM.

[guardiandashi]

Kartr, on 10 April 2012 - 10:08 PM, said:

This makes much more sense in realistic terms, the SLDF would have wanted to consolidate ammunition types to ease logistics. Picking say a 105mm round and simply firing more rounds per AC rating not only fits perfectly with what we see in the rules, but makes sense from a military perspective as well.

Unfortunately the canon fluff says that's not the case and so we have to live with 30mm-203mm caliber cannons.


AC/s fire multiple rounds so that 1 massive shell doesn't work, however this is fairly close to the most sensible way to describe AC/s. See above.


Actually the barrel length is extremely important. The longer the barrel the greater the accuracy, the longer the barrel the more time the gases from the propellent have to expand increasing the velocity of the round, etc. Furthermore having the shells "rocket themselves" once they leave the barrel will cause them to loose all the accuracy the barrel imparted. Your "rocket shells" would go careening off in random directions as the rocket motors kicked in. That's if you ignore the fact that they are "shells" and by definition shells do not have "rocket motors" nor are the described anywhere in the fluff as having rocket motors.

a few nitpicks now I am not military, but as I understand the physics (and we are at least assuming battletech gives a general nod to physics) kk (kenetic kill) and HE based rounds work dramatically differently A kk round wants to be as narrow (small of endpoint ) as possible because it works in general by striking a point on armor so hard that the armor effectively becomes liquid (fluid), and so flows around the penetrator thus being useless against it.

HE rounds on the otherhand "bigger is better" the reason this works is most modern rounds include "shaped charges" where the round generates a cone (or funnel) shaped blast additionally many rounds of this nature also (may) use special materials such as copper to form a "plasma or gas jet" penetrator. why this is important is that there is definately an optimum angle for maximum penetration and burnthrough effects assuming the optimum angle was ~45 degrees a 50mm diameter round is going to best penetrate armor ~50mm thick or less (putting its focal point exactly on the "rear" surface of the armor panel). on the other hand an identically operating 200 mm round would ideally penetrate up to 200 mm thick armor plate.

now on another note re rocket "shells" there is a thing called a RAP round, mostly used in artillery the acronym stands for Rocket Assisted Projectile these exist and have for years. basically it is a cannon or artillery round with a rocket motor attached (or built into its rear) it can be used to effectively give a cannon or artillery round a much longer "effective barrel length" by continueing to accelerate the round for several seconds after it leaves the barrel. plus considering many rounds are fin or spin stabalized you won't loose as much accuracy as you might think as long as the round doesn't tumble.

on a 3rd note battletech autocannon are burst fire cannons and always fire a number of HEAP rounds so an ac20 fires ~200kg worth of rounds every time you pull the trigger if it is firing 10kg rounds that means it will fire ~20 of them, if the individual rounds only weighed 5kg each it would fire 40 of them and if they weighed 50gk each its burst would be 4 rounds.

if for instance a faction had settled on a common autocannon shell size (say 100mm) just for convenience and assuming said 100mm shells did ~1 damage per, an ac2 would be firing ~2-3 per its short bursts and likely the cannon would have a significantly long barrel (for the size of the round) this would in 2 ways explain the long range accuracy of the weapon 1 long barrel and low fire rate

an ac5 using the same 100mm rounds would be firing likely ~4-6 rounds (nominal 5) and assuming the same rate of fire would have a medium-long barrel ie less inherant accuracy from the shorter barrel length, and a larger shell spread due also to increased burst duration

the ac10 would likely have a medium to medium-short barrel plus firing bursts of ~10-12ish rounds/shells

the ac20 would have proportionallt a short barrel, and fire bursts of around 20-24 rounds every "shot"

in the canon references there are notes of ac 20 cannons (I want to say the pontiac 100 off the victor) firing either a 100mm round, or firing ~100 rounds per burst

I know the marauder was specified as mounting a gm whirlwindwhich is noted as being a 120mm ac5 and fires ~3-5 rounds per burst
wheras the riflemans ac5's are closer to 80mm (or smaller) and fire significantly more rounds faster

[Johannes Falkner]

On the point of comparing the firepower of multiple smaller shells vs one larger shell
http://imageshack.us...7515103086.jpg/
Look at the .22 round versus the 25mm...

Edited by Johannes Falkner, 10 April 2012 - 11:12 PM.

[Johannes Falkner]

For those considering shell weights. The M256 gun on the Abrams fires 120mm shells weighing between about 18 and 25 kilograms (40-55 pounds) with shotgun shells (M1028, 1100 tungsten balls...) and APDS rounds being lighter and HEAT rounds being heavier. So 1 metric ton of shells would be between 40 and 55 shells (ignoring ammo feed weight). 5 salvos would then be between 8 and 11 shells per salvo.

Source http://www.inetres.c...eapon/M256.html

Edited by Johannes Falkner, 10 April 2012 - 11:28 PM.

[Gunmage]

Johannes Falkner, on 10 April 2012 - 11:12 PM, said:

On the point of comparing the firepower of multiple smaller shells vs one larger shell
http://imageshack.us...7515103086.jpg/
Look at the .22 round versus the 25mm...

So what are you trying to say is that "how could those wimpy 30 mm rounds even compare to those magnificent 200 mm destruction packages?", amirite? =D

If you look at numbers, you'll see that a 40-shot salvo of 30mm rounds delivers to a target roughly the same kinetic energy as a 182mm APFSDS round. This makes smaller calibres more effective against ceramic armor (because of multiple hits deformation forces are more destructive). I don't know how this would work with HEAP rounds, though.

[Pvt Dancer]

I just want to point out that the fluff writen for ACs is just that...fluff. The hard game mechanics is one packet of damage to a single location, once a turn. The only difference is weight to range... and a AC 2 is crazy heavy with a crazy range compaired to a Machine Gun, but they do the same damage.

Don't think about it to hard... most of the writers of the fluff never played the game and barily understand the mechanics behind it. This is why you have conflicting 'sources'.

[Johannes Falkner]

Gunmage, on 10 April 2012 - 11:49 PM, said:

So what are you trying to say is that "how could those wimpy 30 mm rounds even compare to those magnificent 200 mm destruction packages?", amirite? =D

I was mostly putting out the simplest answer I could come up with for why 100*5mm =/= 10*50mm =/= 1*500mm

Gunmage, on 10 April 2012 - 11:49 PM, said:

If you look at numbers, you'll see that a 40-shot salvo of 30mm rounds delivers to a target roughly the same kinetic energy as a 182mm APFSDS round. This makes smaller calibres more effective against ceramic armor (because of multiple hits deformation forces are more destructive). I don't know how this would work with HEAP rounds, though.

With HEAP/HEAT the numbers would be truly abysmal on paper. Because the penetration poweer of shaped charges is directly related to their diameter (which determines maximum focus) and the force (determined by explosive) behind the penetration jet. A smaller projectile will have a nearly cubically smaller volume for explosive (if you model the bullet as a sphere volume scales to r³. A bullet actually scales to more than the 3rd power because length is more scaled than diameter.) .
On the other hand many smaller projectiles have the chance to break more individual sheets of armor and find chinks in the armor to do additional damage. You might bust more plates loose than you penentrate, but armor damage is armor damage.

Physics and real life wise it is looking like a fast firing clip of 3-10 shots from a 180-100mm cannon would be the way to go. Then you keep ammo consistent with reasonable weights, keep caliber under control and can even use proven methods like magazine based autoloader systems from tanks. (most tank autoloader magazines were based on revolver designs with ~6 shots.)

[Johannes Falkner]

Pvt Dancer, on 11 April 2012 - 12:11 AM, said:

Don't think about it to hard... most of the writers of the fluff never played the game and barily understand the mechanics behind it. This is why you have conflicting 'sources'.

You are so wrong... (though you might be so right at the same time...)
Randall Bills
Loren Coleman
Blaine Lee Pardoe

Now I will grant you Michael A. Stackpole, Robert Thurston and some others as outside authors may have lacked understanding.

But with just the three listed above you have authors from most (all) of the TROs and RS. A large number of the sourcebooks and core rulebooks were written by these guys. Note that the Sarna.net references are incomplete. Look into any of your CBT books and you will almost certainly see one or more of the three names in the author credits.

I might add that Loren Coleman and Randall Bills are still involved with Catalyst Game Labs producing CBT stuff like the map packs (cities, lakes and rivers and the upcoming mountains and canyons). I just talked to them this weekend and we kicked some ideas around that I hope will come out as products. (I do not want to put words in their mouths so I have no intention of detailing the conversations because I want to keep having conversations in the future.)

[LordDeathStrike]

all this crying over ac 20.

what are you going to do vs my atlas gauss rifle dual large laser setup when im using the 7x zoom module to snipe your head with my radar off at 700m?

you wont see a ping if you dont have a scout near me, ill be peaking my weapons just out of cover visually aquiring target like in mwll.

bam, headshot.

the ac20 is the least of your worries, as a guass rifle is definitely 1 round, and definitely does enough dmg to head shot any chasis in game.

[Pvt Dancer]

Johannes Falkner, on 11 April 2012 - 12:37 AM, said:

You are so wrong... (though you might be so right at the same time...)
Randall Bills
Loren Coleman
Blaine Lee Pardoe

Blaine L. Pardoe is the only writer of the 3 you listed in the 3025 TRO, the first TRO where most of this is based off of. There were 5 writers and 5 'Battletech Statistics' guys... whatever that ment. I will stand by my statement...

LordDeathStrike, on 11 April 2012 - 12:46 AM, said:

all this crying over ac 20.

what are you going to do vs my atlas gauss rifle dual large laser setup when im using the 7x zoom module to snipe your head with my radar off at 700m?

you wont see a ping if you dont have a scout near me, ill be peaking my weapons just out of cover visually aquiring target like in mwll.

bam, headshot.

the ac20 is the least of your worries, as a guass rifle is definitely 1 round, and definitely does enough dmg to head shot any chasis in game.

Your assuming you can see 700m out to 'snipe'. Remember, this isn't the same as those old steaming pile of crap MW games.

[LackofCertainty]

Kartr, on 10 April 2012 - 10:20 PM, said:

From what I saw lasers are not a DOT (damage over time). Rather its more like the Pulse lasers from MW3 where the beam is continuous over a few seconds. The difference being a DOT weapon would instantly strike and then the damage would continue to the target after the laser was turned off and the current model has the damage being applied only when the laser is on.

You're just arguing semantics here. I call it a dot weapon, because it has it does damage over a specific amount of time, as opposed to a more typical instantaneous damage weapon.

My point was that if you have lasers (that deal damage over a period of a second) and burst fire AC's (that deal their damage over the period of a second) then you have suceeded in making two different types of weapons that perform and feel very similar. I worry, because I'd rather have AC's function like single shot cannons with short reload times rather than have them feel like reskinned lasers. (but this is all very speculative, seeings as none of us have played with them yet.)

Edited by LackofCertainty, 11 April 2012 - 01:06 AM.

[LackofCertainty]

Kartr, on 10 April 2012 - 10:20 PM, said:

From what I saw lasers are not a DOT (damage over time). Rather its more like the Pulse lasers from MW3 where the beam is continuous over a few seconds. The difference being a DOT weapon would instantly strike and then the damage would continue to the target after the laser was turned off and the current model has the damage being applied only when the laser is on.

You're just arguing semantics here. I call it a dot weapon, because it has it does damage over a specific amount of time, (thus damage over time) as opposed to a more typical instantaneous damage weapon.

My point was that if you have lasers (that deal damage over a period of a second) and burst fire AC's (that deal their damage over the period of a second) then you have suceeded in making two different types of weapons that perform and feel very similar. I worry, because I'd rather have AC's function like single shot cannons with short reload times rather than have them feel like reskinned lasers. (but this is all very speculative, seeings as none of us have played with them yet.)




To the "AC20's will scare away people" person, I have this to say:

AC 20's have the same role as shotguns do in most fps's. (high damage, short range) people aren't going to quit playing just because someone camped with a hunchback. More likely you'll see people trying to camp with a hunchback and then getting ruined as other mediums use their jump jets to out-maneuver the poor hunchies. Not to mention how much artillery/air strikes (which are apparently going to be in the game) discourage campers of all sorts.

It seems like you're expecting a tiny map too, if you expect that a mech camping in one road is going to cover anything. When the gameplay footage came out, I think some of our super-fans reckoned that the in-game maps are like 5 square kilometers, so covering one road might not do all that much. (other than be annoying until you maneuver around it)

Pvt Dancer, on 11 April 2012 - 12:53 AM, said:

Your assuming you can see 700m out to 'snipe'. Remember, this isn't the same as those old steaming pile of crap MW games.

?

I expect that the draw distances are going to be big enough in game to allow people to use weapons out to their max ranges at least. (well at least for the ppc/gauss. at extreme LRM range you might need a forward spotter and just lock onto the target indicator) There's not much point in putting a sniper rifle (gauss) into the game if the draw distance barely gets past the max range of a shotgun.(AC 20)

Although, since the balistics of shells are going to be modeled, I expect you're going to have to deal with delay/drop when shooting super long range gauss rounds.

Edited by LackofCertainty, 11 April 2012 - 01:23 AM.

[LordDeathStrike]

Pvt Dancer, on 11 April 2012 - 12:53 AM, said:

Blaine L. Pardoe is the only writer of the 3 you listed in the 3025 TRO, the first TRO where most of this is based off of. There were 5 writers and 5 'Battletech Statistics' guys... whatever that ment. I will stand by my statement...


Your assuming you can see 700m out to 'snipe'. Remember, this isn't the same as those old steaming pile of crap MW games.

LackofCertainty, on 11 April 2012 - 01:22 AM, said:

You're just arguing semantics here. I call it a dot weapon, because it has it does damage over a specific amount of time, (thus damage over time) as opposed to a more typical instantaneous damage weapon.

My point was that if you have lasers (that deal damage over a period of a second) and burst fire AC's (that deal their damage over the period of a second) then you have suceeded in making two different types of weapons that perform and feel very similar. I worry, because I'd rather have AC's function like single shot cannons with short reload times rather than have them feel like reskinned lasers. (but this is all very speculative, seeings as none of us have played with them yet.)




To the "AC20's will scare away people" person, I have this to say:

AC 20's have the same role as shotguns do in most fps's. (high damage, short range) people aren't going to quit playing just because someone camped with a hunchback. More likely you'll see people trying to camp with a hunchback and then getting ruined as other mediums use their jump jets to out-maneuver the poor hunchies. Not to mention how much artillery/air strikes (which are apparently going to be in the game) discourage campers of all sorts.

It seems like you're expecting a tiny map too, if you expect that a mech camping in one road is going to cover anything. When the gameplay footage came out, I think some of our super-fans reckoned that the in-game maps are like 5 square kilometers, so covering one road might not do all that much. (other than be annoying until you maneuver around it)



?

I expect that the draw distances are going to be big enough in game to allow people to use weapons out to their max ranges at least. (well at least for the ppc/gauss. at extreme LRM range you might need a forward spotter and just lock onto the target indicator) There's not much point in putting a sniper rifle (gauss) into the game if the draw distance barely gets past the max range of a shotgun.(AC 20)

Although, since the balistics of shells are going to be modeled, I expect you're going to have to deal with delay/drop when shooting super long range gauss rounds.

i intend to fit the 7x zoom scout module on my sniper atlas for this one purpose. true the cockpit would be a pain to target at 700m without zoom (mechs wont have long zoom by default btw, you need the module) but thats why theres a 7x zoom module in the scout level tree. my brawler ac 20 med laser boat atlas will use magnetic vision module for city maps.

its all about the scenario youve built your mech for gents, and with 7x zoom, a 700m shot is just like looking at you from 100m away, which is point blank in battletech terms (100m is well within ac20 range ect).

[Thorqemada]

I have no trouble with different ACs from different Manufacturers having a different construction prinicple, using singel or multiple rounds of ammo.
Its the ability to construct and manufacture the best weapon you can do with the ressources and tech you have available that dicates the design and with the loss of abilities and ressources obviously has to come a diversification of models that in the end do not longer fit the same size, ammo, energy usage, heat radiation etc.
And an AC that fires multiple rounds can miss multiple times but has a better chance to hit at least with some of the shell while a single shell ac is miss or hit.
In the end it must have a logic in the gameworld how it works and not in the real world.

[LordDeathStrike]

Thorqemada, on 11 April 2012 - 02:24 AM, said:

I have no trouble with different ACs from different Manufacturers having a different construction prinicple, using singel or multiple rounds of ammo.
Its the ability to construct and manufacture the best weapon you can do with the ressources and tech you have available that dicates the design and with the loss of abilities and ressources obviously has to come a diversification of models that in the end do not longer fit the same size, ammo, energy usage, heat radiation etc.
And an AC that fires multiple rounds can miss multiple times but has a better chance to hit at least with some of the shell while a single shell ac is miss or hit.
In the end it must have a logic in the gameworld how it works and not in the real world.

ild rather they just unstupidify them since this is a reboot and establish that an ac 20 is 1 massive snub nose gun with a mediocre range and excellent dmg that fires 1 round every few seconds and has X shots per 1 ton ammo reload. standardized = easy to balance.

lbx 20 are the shotgun if you load flechette rounds, or are able to load heat or ap sabots as well, but the smoothbore nature of the lbx makes it less accurate with single shot sabot or heat then the regular ac 20, the trade off being flechette are still ultra deadly point blank, and more likely to land alot of dmg at longer range since they spread out in flight.

either way, in open maps with a guass rifle and a 7x zoom mod, youll still be head shotting ac 20 users and making them cry

[peve]

My take on the subject. It is very unorthodox.

Why not just make small autocannon rounds travel fast and big autocannon rounds travel slowly? That way the big guns would be affected by gravity and thus be very hard to use beyond their effective range. For example, AC/2 could fire at 800m/s and AC/20 at 200m/s. As for fire rate, the smaller the slug, the faster it reloads.

It has always bugged me that AC/20 rounds just vanish in the air one meter before hitting the enemy just beyond the max range. They should hit.

So, if they are pure kinetic weapons, damage should be reduced smoothly over distance. If they use explosive ammo, they should just be harder to aim.

Basically I am suggesting that autocannons are more like Long Tom and not so much as direct fire only weapons. That way you could point your AC/20 at an enemy 500m away, but you should aim a few mechs above his head to hit and hope he doesn't move.

As for shotgun-type autocannons, they should behave the same way.

One other thing: Since the chambers in AC/20 are quite short, accuracy both in x and y should be lower over a distance. But you shouldn´t limit the max range artificially. We already have gravity to take care of everything returning to ground eventually.

I think it would create a beautiful scenery watching those explosive AC/20 rounds lift dust up next to enemy mechs at the horizon.