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I think this can be fixed with few very simple changes to how jump-jets change a mech's movement:
- Give Jump-Jets more Forward Thrust. Right now Jump-Jets all actually have a "Forward" thrust in addition to the vertical amount; however, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of the vertical bump, so much as to be fairly useless. PGI may be planning on boosting these and is just waiting on testing/code in the back-end, I'm not sure; at any rate, however, this would give jumping mechs much more control over where they move in flight (which, if we're going to consider tabletop mechanics, they really should have).
- Change jump jet thrust from a constant value to something like "BaseThrust * (1.0 + RemainingFuel^2)". What this would mean is that, when fully "charged", hitting your jump jets would give you a dramatic initial burst (2x the base thrust), sending you rocketing up into the air. The longer it burned, however, the less thrust you'd get causing your upward movement to settle into a slow ascent, then a hover, and finally a soft landing. It would also discourage constant jumping, in favor of letting your jets fully recharge before making another maneuver, adding an interesting "timing" aspect to playing a jump-jet mech like the Jenner or Spider. Obviously the base thrust values would need to be tuned after this change, and I would only apply this to vertical thrust -- horizontal thrust would remain constant.
