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PPC vs AC10; discussion on costs (mostly) and other trade-offs.


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Poll: PPC vs AC10 costs (95 member(s) have cast votes)

For a typcial loadout PPC

  1. Should cost 10%+ more than the AC10 (71 votes [74.74%])

    Percentage of vote: 74.74%

  2. Should cost 0 - 10% more than the AC10 (15 votes [15.79%])

    Percentage of vote: 15.79%

  3. Should cost 0- 10% less than the AC10 (4 votes [4.21%])

    Percentage of vote: 4.21%

  4. Should cost 10%+ less than the AC10 (5 votes [5.26%])

    Percentage of vote: 5.26%

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#81 Tincan Nightmare

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Posted 07 May 2012 - 11:57 PM

View PostMaddMaxx, on 07 May 2012 - 05:44 AM, said:

All this talk of HS's being the balancing factor...sadly only the Ballistics user is forced to add weight to their machine in order to operate their weapon of choice.

The AC10 cannot go without Ammo, the PPC can be run on a very "short" HS # given a knowledgeable pilot or Lance. Proper tactics and game play also contribute to the "best use" of either weapon. One Team allows the AC10 a few shots at different targets from range, they assume a 10% miss rate and after a short time, the ammo carrier has to cease and desist. or run out, the PPC user can pot shot all day, assume a 25% miss rate and when the enemies ammo runs dry, over there, now trhe real game is on.

The best solution is to FORCE the PPC user to have to have the required weight in HS's on board at all times. It does not prevent the ammo vs the none required disparity, but at least the balance of weight/Heat ratio for the weapon types is more in line with the core rules.

That is Heat balance. Don't leave it up to the individual. Make it a requirement...


Whats crazy is that when you design a vehicle per the TT construction rules, if it mounted energy weapons you HAD to design in enough heat sinks to dissipate all heat generated per turn. Vehicles never had heating problems, even those that mounted fusion engines. Makes you wonder what the Star League and Houses were thinking when they designed 'Mechs to be able to overheat :huh:.

#82 Yeach

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Posted 08 May 2012 - 08:25 PM

Noticed from the new video that both PPC and AC10 are 200k

The good news is that it appears AC10 ammo is MUCH MUCH cheaper than 6k (looks like 100) it costs in TT.

#83 Owl Cutter

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Posted 09 May 2012 - 09:11 PM

Can I call you Urbie? ...or Flashman? They were probably thinking about having peak firepower much greater than sustained firepower, which can be a huge advantage when you're not just standing still and beating on each other with no use of cover. Bracket setups are IMO one of the most important advantages 'mechs have over tanks, since they offer a lot of practical benefits besides just being more fun to use. Those benefits usually include the aforementioned output spike capability, too.

View PostChristopher Dayson, on 07 May 2012 - 01:40 PM, said:

No, definitely not this. I /want/ to see people explode their mechs from cooking their PPC's too hot :) [...]
Very yes.

#84 CaptainDeez

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Posted 09 May 2012 - 09:39 PM

View PostOwl Cutter, on 03 May 2012 - 11:23 AM, said:

It should deliver momentum indirectly by generating it on-target: dumping its energy into that 5/8 of a ton of armor and blasting it away from the rest of the unit should presumably move enough mass violently enough to produce some serious momentum. Lasers should be just as good at this as PPC; the mechanism is simply dumping heat into the armor fast enough to make it explode violently away. Since this is driven by ludicous energy input, not a heavy projectile slamming into the target, momentum of the beam is insignificant in either case.
P.S. That is, if we're talking about "blaster" lasers designed to incapacitate armored targets by pounding them to pieces, which should not be assumed to be the only approach... I kinda like the idea of a setting where different laser weapons take different approaches, all the way from heatrays to x-rays...


Lasers aren't quite the same as a particle beam. Lasers are focusing light which means photons. They emit EM radiation, which will heat and vaporize material to cause damage.

A particle beam is acutal matter(like ionized hydrogen) that's sent hurtling at a target by a particle accelerator. Those particles aren't vaporizing material on a target, they are battering it apart with kinetic energy. A particle beam has more in common with a rail gun than a laser.

Technically a PPC should be able to run out of ammo.

Edited by CaptainDeez, 09 May 2012 - 09:41 PM.


#85 LordKnightFandragon

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Posted 09 May 2012 - 10:02 PM

I dont care much for PPCs in most games...Mechcommander 1 being the exception, even MC2 I didnt use them much....

In MW4 Medium Lasers and AC10s was my loadout....I will leave out the fact taht i played with ammo off...but that aside, the things I dislike about the PPC is the high heat, long reloads, absurd amount of Heatsinks needed to use them w/o risking a shutdown after every shot and the amount of armor lost to equip them....In MC2, this was the case...PPCs were so big and generated so much heat I often had to lose alot of my armor in order to mount ONE then my loadout would have to be half heatsinks, seriously limiting my firepower for the mission...my PPC loadouts always led to my mechs getting RAPED. FOr that same loadout, I can mount full armor, a few LRMs and lots of 1 space lasers. In Mechwarrior 4 PPCs were just plain HOT as hell and heavier then **** and didnt offer any real firepower bonus and also were so slow flying through the air I missed alot with them....I just plain got away from PPCs in games...never really seem to be worth it to me. Instead I go with Autocannons, medium lasers and LRMs......My tactics often involve me closing to brawl range so the loss in range and the good refire rate on all those weapons brings me victory far more often then the long range, slow reloads of the Gauss and PPC....

#86 Cifu

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Posted 09 May 2012 - 10:16 PM

View PostLordKnightFandragon, on 09 May 2012 - 10:02 PM, said:

In MW4 Medium Lasers and AC10s was my loadout....I will leave out the fact taht i played with ammo off...


Well, then you can play (as remember) without heat management system (ie.: no heat counted). B)
Cheat in one side, then cheat in the other side, if you wan't to compare. :)


View PostLordKnightFandragon, on 09 May 2012 - 10:02 PM, said:

but that aside, the things I dislike about the PPC is the high heat, long reloads, absurd amount of Heatsinks needed to use them w/o risking a shutdown after every shot and the amount of armor lost to equip them....


Again: then play without heat, then you don't need heat sinks - as you don't need ammo for the AC's...
It's simply won't fair.

View PostLordKnightFandragon, on 09 May 2012 - 10:02 PM, said:

In MC2, this was the case...PPCs were so big and generated so much heat I often had to lose alot of my armor in order to mount ONE then my loadout would have to be half heatsinks, seriously limiting my firepower for the mission...my PPC loadouts always led to my mechs getting RAPED.


I was played over the MC2 several times, and i have least one PPC boat in all case. With 3 or 4 PPC / CER PPC you got a very powerful long range weapon, and you don't need to scream, when your ammo runs out. In one case i play short/medium range AC boats (AC/10 or AC/20 in urbie / hunchback), but find the most useful weapon loads is the Med.Las boats (with maxed armor), supported by LRM boats and PPC boats.

#87 LordKnightFandragon

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Posted 10 May 2012 - 12:11 AM

Yeah, one could just play without heat management, that is one cheat I never did use, ever.

As for MC2, I never did run out of ammo...yes, I did just play the campaign through like 4 times with ammo on...of course I modded my pilots to be Ace by mission 10, but still....I didnt have any ammo issues. Even before, when I played the campaign legit, The ER Laser combo I used on my Zeus, whatever battle I was in was over before there was ever a hope of running out of ammo. Of course, I also do know that MC2 is off in the realism dept, you would never laod 14 Er Lasers on one mech and actually have 80 heat capacity...

As for another game where the PPC was not a fav of mine was Mechwarrior 2...it was this slow moving, hard to hit with ball of blue death....I liked Medium Laser boats with LRM's if I could fit them. The Med Laser just seems to be a multi purpose, good in all situations type of weapon. If the Med Laser failed, I had my LRM's to hammer you down a bit while i get to closer range at which point my Med Lasers finish the job.

Back to MW4...The few times I did play a mission or 2 with ammo on, the ammo loads are so great in MW4 that I never ran out of ammo anyway....and no I didnt intentionally leg everything on the board...I didnt play like that in MW4. In MW4 I was able to mount 1 or 2 U/AC10s, acceptable amounts of armor, a few medium lasers as back ups and heatsinks enough to work with. In MW4 you only need 2 tons of ammo and your set for one battle...only way to really run out of ammo is to just plain be a terrible shot, which I was not...PPCs on the other hand, their heat generation, slower reload rates really didnt fit well with me...

#88 Owl Cutter

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Posted 10 May 2012 - 12:34 PM

MOMENTUM IS NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH KINETIC ENERGY, THEY ARE DIFFERENT PHENOMENA
KINETIC ENERGY IS NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH MOMENTUM, THEY ARE DIFFERENT PHENOMENA.
IF YOU DO NOT KNOW THE DIFFERENCE, PLEASE LEARN WHAT IT IS BEFORE COMMENTING ON PHENOMENOLOGY OF HYPOTHETICAL SCIENCE FICTIONAL DEATH RAYS.  
Fantasy death rays without even the thinnest pretense of basis in science are another matter, though; knock yourself out.

View PostCaptainDeez, on 09 May 2012 - 09:39 PM, said:

</p>

Lasers aren't quite the same as a particle beam. Lasers are focusing light which means photons. They emit EM radiation, which will heat and vaporize material to cause damage.

A particle beam is acutal matter(like ionized hydrogen) that's sent hurtling at a target by a particle accelerator. Those particles aren't vaporizing material on a target, they are battering it apart with kinetic energy. A particle beam has more in common with a rail gun than a laser.

Technically a PPC should be able to run out of ammo.

I am really trying to make this as clear and easily understood as possible, because it is a cryin' shame that so many people don't understand this, so I try again...  

Momentum = Mass * Velocity

Kinetic Energy = Mass * Velocity * Velocity

As you can see, the difference between these two values is literally a factor of velocity.  The speed of light is a very high value, so if you throw your projectiles at very near the speed of light, you will get very, very little momentum relative to the kinetic energy that you are projecting.  Looking at it from the other side, you need tremendous energy per unit mass in order to get that velocity, to the extent that the mass of "ammo" a PPC would need is utterly negligible even when scaled up to orbital bombardment scale.  Does this relationship make sense?  

If it still doesn't make sense, consider that the speed of light is a kinda high value, so if we call that C, then the relationship between (MC) and (MCC) is kinda dramatic.  

Light itself is just the case where the mass value is minimal (theoretical rest mass at zero, for what little that matters) and velocity maximal, it does not follow vastly different physical rules or anything.  When a photon is absorbed by any baryonic matter, the light imparts a kinetic impulse.  Laser death rays and PPC could easily have distinguishable effects, but they would have a lot more in common with each other than anything and every thing that shoots stuff at very much less than the speed of light.  

Strictly speaking, light heats things by being converted into kinetic energy.  As such, light does deliver kinetic energy, even if we take the purely semantic position that light is not a pure manifestation of kinetic energy mostly unencumbered by momentum.  The more light-like the projectile velocity, the more light-like the behaviour of the "gun."  

There is just no weaseling around this; if you say your death ray throws stuff at very near the speed of light, then you are also saying it delivers stupendous kinetic energy per unit recoil- or, if you prefer, that the recoil is tiny relative to the kinetic energy projected.  If the velocity were low enough that it could look more like a gun than a laser, it would be called a plasma cannon rather than a particle cannon, because the definitive difference between the two is whether the particles have time to interact with each other enough to recognise plasma dynamics, which is defined by whether they are moving at fantastic or mundane velocity.  Maybe this is why Battletech has a canonical Plasma Cannon which looks kinda like a PPC but differs in that it projects enough particles to require tracking ammo.  That does not mean a death ray shouldn't hit harder in practical terms; if you dump enough energy into something to violently explode a hunk off of it simply by heating it fast enough, that exploding mass should deliver some momentum.  

On collision with any baryonic matter, the kinetic energy of a particle stream anywhere remotely near the speed of light would be mostly converted to heat.  For a death ray, the effect would be very similar to that of a comparatively powerful laser, except that the baryons or electrons (whichever your PPC uses) might much better penetrate the plasma cloud formed at the impact site than most practical wavelengths of light would.  (Some of the highest-frequency light will go through the plasma AND through non-plasma air, but is hard to focus.  You win some, you lose some.)  

The heavier particles will have more momentum than light of similar energy, enough that they will deposit their energy very usefully deeper into the target, but it's still a small value in terms of recoil and initial impact; depending on wattage, it will have an effect on-target more or less resembling a laser heat ray, laser blaster, or "ray beam."  (delightfully-named laser death ray which emits 2 to 200 nanometre light so it can more easily bore deep into the target, the tradeoff being that it needs to bore through air as well since air is not transparent to those wavelengths) See http://panoptesv.com...ay/RayBeam.html for more detail on "ray beams," since I am not sure if the term has caught on in the mainstream...  

Do you know why hard science fiction rarely bothers with "animatter beams?"  Well, neither do I, but my guess is that the kinetic energy:mass ratio at "nearly the speed of light" is so stupendously high that direct conversion of the beam's mass to energy would not add much to the effect for what it would cost to screw around with antimatter; it definitely looks more laser-like than bullet-like, if you ask me.  

Formatting work when tags are used in the input field is getting to be a pain, is there any plan to fix the parsing rules so they are consistent and easy to use?

Edited by Owl Cutter, 10 May 2012 - 12:40 PM.


#89 HellHat

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Posted 10 May 2012 - 01:25 PM

The AC/10 may win the initial cost battle, but don't forget the cost of replenishing the ammo every time (AC/10= Infinite, PPC= 0). In terms of cost, the PPC wins hands down. In terms of space, the AC/10 wins.

With that, I'd rather the PPC cost at least 15% more than the AC/10, just to make it more of a fair deal (or as close as it can get without people complaining).

#90 Monky

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Posted 10 May 2012 - 02:01 PM

Energy weapons are high tech, where cannon technology is fairly simple. Gameplay wise, ACs use ammo, where energy weapons will only have to worry about the unit itself being destroyed (you could factor heatsinks being destroyed in as well but it's useful for both types).

Yes, PPC's/lasers *SHOULD* be more pricey than ACs, both to acquire and repair, for comparable damage envelope.

Edited by monky, 10 May 2012 - 02:02 PM.


#91 Vashts1985

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Posted 10 May 2012 - 04:53 PM

i thought the tradeoff for PPC's lack of ammo was crazy heat buildup.

Edited by Vashts1985, 10 May 2012 - 04:53 PM.


#92 Juiced

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Posted 10 May 2012 - 10:12 PM

i dont think the cost of ammo is going to be a serious deal unless you are being really frugal. If the mechlab video is anything to go by AC/10 ammo is 600 C-bills per ton. While there is a cost, it does not seem to be prohibitive overall. At 2:35 in the video you can see all the ammo costs.

#93 Varjen

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Posted 10 May 2012 - 10:48 PM

I saw a reference to the CASE system in this thread and i would just like to throw an idea out there...

The way i see it, CASE works a little like a fireworks workshop, sturdy walls and a dinky loose tinroof. If something goes bad, all the blast is directed upwards to keep people reasonably safe.
Does the CASE system work with a similar principle? If so, there should be a REALLY weak spot in the armor somewhere.

#94 Tarellond

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Posted 10 May 2012 - 11:27 PM

To be honest i don't care about how much will they cost, equipment costs will probably be marginal compared to whole mech (and its repair) prices. WoT shows that this way of pricing is not a bad one.

To judge the impact of AC, i would first need to know how many of them i will be able to fire in one fight. If i need to turn my mech into a slow scarecrow with grenades ready to explode all over the chassis just to be able to shoot first two mechs i meet, it isn't worth it. Frankly i am affraid about the length of the fights. The devs want them to last 20 minutes, which is a lot, given ACs are more suited for short fights, so making fights so long discriminates ACs from the beginning.
But, this all can be balanced by making the extra ammo boxes contain more/less shells. To do that, i would need to see how the fights go in practise, which just can't happen right now. I expect serious discussions on this topic in beta though.





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