75 replies to this topic

[Watchit]

Oh, LordDeathStrike. You troll, you.

Edited by Watchit, 28 April 2012 - 09:40 PM.

[XxSaberxX]

MrMojoPin, on 26 April 2012 - 10:41 PM, said:

Researchers at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), which is the research and development arm of the Ministry of Defence, claim it is possible to incorporate material known as supercapacitors into armour of a vehicle to turn it into a kind of giant battery.

Then you'll find soldiers armed that said vehicles with these supercapacitors using that 'giant battery' to charge their iPhones and iPads. When they head off into battle, they'll then realize that they've drained the 'supercapacitor' playing Angry Birds or something...

[Blaze32]

Shiinore, on 22 April 2012 - 02:47 AM, said:

Sure. How about beam swords too? Oh- and plasma rifles. Maybe we could have everything run on thermal clips. Why not make the whole thing powered by rainbows and unicorn farts?

I'm tired in seeing these "energy shields" in sci-fi games like Mass Effect and Halo. I'm in a giant walking weapons platform, not a fantasy spaceship. Mechs are a technological marvel in themselves, don't fix what isn't broken. Not to mention storywise, humanity has bombed itself into a technological impasse.

And for the record, developing this sort of tech within 1,000 years is by no stretch of the imagination "low tech". It's been 12 years since the second millennium, and I still don't have a ********* flying car.

But they already made plasma cannons and rifles.......
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Plasma_Rifle
http://www.sarna.net...i/Plasma_Cannon

[Blaze32]

LordDeathStrike, on 27 April 2012 - 08:12 PM, said:

roll down a ****** window maybe? except on vacuum maps, or hostile atmo maps, or most scenarios really.

i know i know! run refrigerant through the seat cushions, ahhhhhhh icey balls.

and i dont see why my atlas cant mount a few GAU-8 gatling guns, 1 on earch arm 1 in the right torso? they fire uranium slugs at supersonic speeds, very rapidly, they exist now, surely in 1000 years they are tried and true tech for large war machines wanting to inflict massive dmg on armored targets 1 mile away or closer.

http://www.fas.org/m...equip/gau-8.htm
number of barrels 7 Feed: Linkless feed system calibre 30 mm Ammo types PGU-14/B API Armor Piercing Incendiary [DU]
PGU-13/B HEI High Explosive Incendiary
PGU-15/B TP Target Practice muzzle velocity 1067 meters/second Armor penetration 69mm at 500 meters
38mm at 1000 meters Maximum Range over 1,250 meters Accuracy 5mil, 80 percent
80% of rounds fired at 4,000ft hit within a 20ft radius cannon weight 281 kilograms cannon length 6.40 meters

It is called RAC5 or RAC2
RAC5 http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rotary_AC/5
RAC2 http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rotary_AC/2

There are your gattling guns 12 tons and 10 tons each respectfully

[Exilyth]

Too bad other universes use so much handwaving, bigger is better and [generic overly extrapolated technology] without giving much thought to how it actually works. With the amount of soft sci-fi universes around, it's no wonder so many people ask for [generic overly extrapolated technology] being ported to battletech. But, being a military hard sci-fi universe, there's no place in battletech for generic anime space knights, megadeathcannons of ultimate destruction or other such silly things.

Edited by Exilyth, 01 September 2012 - 03:39 AM.

[Watchit]

[John Norad]

Too bad?
Well, yes you might say it's a pity Battletech is low tech, with regard to poor weapon ranges, targeting systems, etc.

But.
It's kept low tech to make it playable as a tabletop.
One hex on the map is supposed to be 30m big iirc. And one miniatures already occupies one hex -> they are already too big for the map scale.
Think about how big the maps/tables would have to be to utilize 'realistic' ranges.

It's just a poorly thought-out sci-fi scenario with a patchwork ruleset. But it's a lot of fun, so who cares?

[Lightdragon]

Helmer, on 13 April 2012 - 04:35 AM, said:

I'm guessing you don't want to hear about my idea for 'mechs with LaserSwords........





Cheers.

lol helmer mechs do mount vibroblades hehe

[CoffiNail]

Lightdragon, on 01 September 2012 - 03:11 PM, said:

lol helmer mechs do mount vibroblades hehe

A vibroblade and a lightsword are two different things haha. Ohh when/if melee gets put in.

[Lightdragon]

yes but they both cut the same XD

[DinochromeBrigade]

To be fair, if BT was anymore advanced in my opinion, it wouldn't be BT. Instead of striding across the battlefield in my Atlas with heavy thick metal armor and....somewhat inefficient weapons, we would all be in either some kind of freaky PPC armed Gundam (Not sure if that's a dirty word around here ) or FLYING across the terrain at 250 kph in a Bolo MK XXXIII with 200cm plasma/hellbores blowing away everything from Terra to the Clan space.

or as my friend says, first comes shields, then comes plasma, then comes space-bushido and signature moves.....

[the celestian]

its not as high tech as some might think


with the balancing programming on the big dog military robot, a little more power and some good structural engineering,you could possibly make a light mech

[Exilyth]

the celestian, on 01 September 2012 - 09:25 PM, said:

with the balancing programming on the big dog military robot, a little more power and some good structural engineering,you could possibly make a light mech

Since you mentioned big dog... do you know Petman?

Now, if they would scale that up and make it steerable...

[Thurman]

And when push comes to shove, all that is outside the parameters set up by the game and novel histories. Laser weapons had line of sight range potential but the technology was lost during the Sucession Wars. Lets just stick to having fun within the game rather than having a 'Monty Haul' Mech.

[Elsydeon]

ilkhan, on 13 April 2012 - 04:05 AM, said:

Battletech tries to stay a close to real world physics as possible.

The superheating and melting of armour from lasers is the most realistic way laser weaponry can work (as far as we know), your standard projectile autocanons and missiles you see in real world military, even rail gun/gauss rifle equivalents have been shown to be theoretically possible (and there are even some working prototypes). The only weapon which is a fair way off is the PPC (although theory has no problem with it working outside of an atmosphere.

Generating this kind of field would be difficult enough but it would only work on lasers of a specific frequency (if you are using destructive superposition to cancel them out) and I can't even begin to think about how it would stop projectile weapons without digging out a physics textbook or two.

PPCs can work in an atmosphere, you simply exploit bloom. Fire a laser first, as it blooms, it will create an ion channel, then you simply fire your electron beam down that. It is called an electrolaser.

[Pht]

LordDeathStrike, on 13 April 2012 - 02:14 AM, said:

think of the possibilities that could be harrnessed with fusion power.

instead of bulky heavy armor,...

BT armor is not bulky and heavy. The armor panels that cover battlemechs are all less than an inch thick; the majority of them are more like a few millimeters to maybe a few centimeters thick.

Quote

we could engineer mechs with 2 power plants, 1 for moving and weapons, a 2nd for charged force field armor.

The mech power plants are already capable of generating more power than the 'mech can use. Charged force field armor - that would break everything in the entire BTU that came before it.

BT really isn't as low-tech as people think it is.

[Steve Varayis]

Concerning using GAU-8's, LordDeathStrike

First, you say BTech is too low-tech, and wanna add shields/plasma guns

and then you want to use a gun that is over 1000 years old

[Nebfer]

LordDeathStrike, on 13 April 2012 - 02:14 AM, said:

think of the possibilities that could be harrnessed with fusion power.

instead of bulky heavy armor, we could engineer mechs with 2 power plants, 1 for moving and weapons, a 2nd for charged force field armor. charged force field armor is quite simple, you take highly conductive armor plateing, it only needs to be a few molecules thick, and does not need to be very tough, gold foil would work very well. this skin as it were, is then charged with the massive power output of a fusion reactor across the various band spectrum of em fields.

Why do you need two reactors? A B-tech reactor already produces vasts amount of power, A single small laser all ready has a yield of over 100 megajoules of energy, and that's being a bit conservative (it actually takes roughly 200 megajoules to melt a single point -if you did the math), assuming it fires for a half second that an output of 200 megawatts! And you can stuff a lot of small lasers on a mech...

B-tech armor is already quite strong. Not only dose it require over 500 megajoules to melt a single ton of armor, it's kinetic resistance is quite impressive, as a single ton of armor can stop a 125kg slug traveling at hypersonic velocity's, the kinetic energy's is equivalent to mid sized battleship shells (which would I am told disintegrate current day MBTs), missiles are a bit harder to view, but at the lest their no different from what we have to day, though Era report 2750 mentions that "advances" in technology made B-tech missiles much smaller, what was once a three meter long missile is now less than one... With warheads being almost 100% explosives and IIRC the body as well...
In any case B-tech missiles are in the same weight range of many infantry use AT missiles...

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the effect would be armor that can completely repel laser particle slug and missiles attacks that have less incoming energy then the armor is outputting. you would effectively need to over come the armors shield field to breach it!

honestly with fusion powered shields, i dont see normal mech mounted weaponry breaching them, it would take orbital bombardment with things like large asteroids going very fast slamming into the mech to do it!

but then that would be kind of unbalanced, just give me one of these mechs so i can punish anyone caught cheating in game

Well if that is the case then I would suspect that they would find a way to bring them down, weapons technology has often had not long to wait till it caught up...

Though interestingly B-tech dose have a energy shield of shorts called blue shield, but it's highly temperamental (only working for 60 seconds at a time) and only reduces the effects of energy weapons by half (which stacks with Reflective (AKA blazer) armor).

Then theirs the ballistic shields but their simply hand held lumps of armor plate...

Dakkaface, on 26 April 2012 - 10:09 PM, said:

The two things that make BT mechs slightly more realistic than masses of conventional firepower:

1)BT armor. I don't know what the stuff is made out off, but it's CRAZY strong, to deal with railgun and laser hits and not be instantly destroyed. Tanks can't mount as much armor without mounting a fusion engine, at which point they get really, really big.

Well we know it's comprised of Steel and CBN (a form of Boron Nitride) augmented with diamond fibers, with Ferro adding diamond fibers to the Steel layer(s), but as Cray (a Materials engineer by trade) of the B-tech forums says how it works is simply magic...

However B-tech tanks in fact can mount more armor than a Battlemech can even if they have an ICE, the engen type has no barring on how much armor it can carry (well out side of taking up the mass for it), An 100 ton B-tech tank can mount 390 points of armor, a 100 ton mech only 307. However tanks do get disabled more quickly (I.e. crits), My take on this is that this is likely due to tanks being not as "mobile" as a mech is and get hit a bit harder manifesting in higher crit chances.

LordDeathStrike, on 27 April 2012 - 08:12 PM, said:

roll down a ****** window maybe? except on vacuum maps, or hostile atmo maps, or most scenarios really.

i know i know! run refrigerant through the seat cushions, ahhhhhhh icey balls.

Well The odd thing is mechs that do not have overheating issues have it, take the Locust for example the only way for it to overheat (out side infernos) is for it to run with an engine hit, as well as a heat sink crit and have it firing its medium laser...

Quote

and i dont see why my atlas cant mount a few GAU-8 gatling guns, 1 on earch arm 1 in the right torso? they fire uranium slugs at supersonic speeds, very rapidly, they exist now, surely in 1000 years they are tried and true tech for large war machines wanting to inflict massive dmg on armored targets 1 mile away or closer.

Well first off assuming 30mm rounds in B-tech are roughly the same weight (about 800 grams per round), you can fit about 28 of them in weight of a single shot of AC-2 ammo, that's roughly a half a second burst from a GAU-8. However B-tech autocannons suposedly have better rates of fire, and use better ammo (higher accuaracy, higher MV and better design) than current day weapons for enhanced performence on the armor of the day. For all we know a typical B-tech AC-2 firing a 30mm round could have a MV of 2,000m/s or more, and have an accuacy of 99% at that 12m wide cricle at 1,200m. And then theirs the AC-10s and 20s fring 75mm or larger shells (up to 203mm)...

As for range, well thats game play reasons, a square map with realistic ranges would...
1. require 144 or more mapsheets (representing a 6 x 6km playing area)
2. require the entierty of a good size room just to play...
3. In any case most playing areas probly can only handle someting like 2 x 2 or 3 x 3 mapsheets at a time...
Adjusting the scale brings other issues...

[mstrfishy]

Helmer, on 13 April 2012 - 04:35 AM, said:

I'm guessing you don't want to hear about my idea for 'mechs with LaserSwords........





Cheers.

There are many accounts of battlemechs with physical force weapons. The Hatchetman get's it's namesake from the giant armor melting axe on it's arm.

[ZetaFalcon]

Scotty, we need those sheilds now!

Captain! I'm working as fast as I can!