Konril, on 01 February 2013 - 11:01 PM, said:
Honestly, The Hit Point system is something made in the tabletop days to simplify the recording of "damage." Real armor does not work this way, and there are a few nods to that fact in the lore and official rules.
When a location's armor reaches zero, it doesn't mean the armor is completely gone, but simply compromised. It is still there, but no longer in good enough shape to reasonably stop incoming fire from getting through to the sensitive parts inside. If some of the ammo gets hit and cooks off as a result, that massive armor meant to keep the heat and kinetic force away from the sensitive structure of the mech does a spectacular job of keeping that heat and kinetic force inside the mech instead. Obviously, some of the explosion can go right out the holes in the armor made by the shots that compromised it to begin with. But unfortunately, the biggest hole, AKA the path of least resistance, is through the shoulder where the arm meets the torso. Therefore the explosion is not likely to be stopped until it goes through the center torso. Bye bye, engine!
CASE (Cellular Ammo Storage Equipment) is a modification that reinforces the compartment and puts a safety release on a section of the armor. So instead of the path of least resistance leading to the engine, it blows off the back armor. That means the mech is usually crippled instead of outright destroyed as that torso is still effectively gone. Technically, it is possible to modify an arm or a leg with CASE. However right now the means to do so has been lost to war. So until the eggheads figure out a way again, it is limited to the torso.
Does that make sense?
There is two good things about having the ammo in the arm instead of the torso. If the whole arm gets shot off before the ammo goes up, then that ammo just falls off the mech with the rest of the arm and is no longer any threat. Also, there is no "rear arm" location to worry about. Opponents can't blow out the arm faster by getting behind you unlike with torso locations that have separate front and rear armor.
Yes some damage would likely go to the torso, but there is no way ALL damage would transfer 100% in a snaking pattern through to the engine. It needs to be reduced by a fairly signifcant factor (like dealing 50-75% of remain ammo damage to account for energy lost due in the arm exploding and flying off the mech or lost to air) and also it should do fairly "compromising" damage to the exterior armor of a section before traveling further unless the chest is just an empty shipping crate with no sectioning off between center and adjacent torsos. Given that mechs have a fairly durable internal system (like greater than 50-70% of the exterior "armor points" done directly to the internals to render a section completely destroyed.
Additionally, ammo explosions in the RT and LT that do enough to destroy the section should lose a fairly significant force out the gaping hole in the side of the mech where the arm used to be attached.
While I do not have a heavy physics background, nor do I know much about battletech lore, I do have an engineering background and given what I do know I feel like it should work at least a little different. I think something like this:
For arms: it does the full damage to the arm internals, 50-35% of what bleeds over from that does damage to the internals of the R/L torso, 25-40% goes to the R/L torso exterior armor, subtotaling 75% here, and the last 25% is lost to the air/arm flying off the mech.
For R/L torso: 60-75% of what bleeds over from the torso destruction is applied to the CT internals with possibly a small portion of that applied to CT armor.
For legs, it would be similar to arms but they really should bleed over damage directly to CT not R/L torso... also possibly a tiny amount damage adjacent leg exterior armor.
Wouldn't that be fairly easy to implement and make more sense than current mechanics? Heck, just a flat 75% damage modifier to ammo explosions using current mechanics to account for energy loss would be alright, and extremely easy to implement.
Edited by Tw1stedMonkey, 03 February 2013 - 07:29 PM.
2
