Kousagi, on 06 February 2013 - 07:50 AM, said:
I guess you don't have a clue what the word Based on means.... Back in the 80's Lasers were still being researched, So no, they didn't know Exactly how lasers would work in 2013
Er...lasers in their complete and functional form were around in the 60's, with most major advances completed with the advent of the room-temperature diode laser in 1970. Since then it's all been refinement. And Einstein could
and did tell you in 1917 the properties they would have in terms of coherence and particle composition (the only two factors affecting 'range').
Jack Corvus, on 06 February 2013 - 07:51 AM, said:
Mechs are, at their core, extremely lightweight because they are built like people - a skeleton wrapped with muscles. In this case, electrically operated ones. An Atlas' frame only weighs ten tons, and it ends up weighing a hundred in the end because it 'wears' a multitude of weapon systems and armour like we wear organs and skin.
The adult male human skeleton weighs ~20% of total body mass by average in a healthy case, the larger the animal the more % is devoted to skeletal mass to support musculature. There are diminishing returns in effect here that provide an upper limit to animal size correlating fairly well with atmospheric oxygen content. This isn't really a refutation of your point of course, but if we want to get really technical the big stompy war mech is invalid not because of physics, but because of inherent design failures as a war machine. Tanks aren't as cool as big stompy war mechs, however, and thus Mechwarrior.
KuruptU4Fun, on 06 February 2013 - 08:15 AM, said:
And yes, someone in the military has looked at the Hadron collider and said: "How can we use it to stop our enemies from doing us harm?".
Getting further and further off topic but that is possibly
the most generous interpretation of high-level military thinking I've ever heard.
Thirdstar, on 06 February 2013 - 08:07 AM, said:
No I really don't think so. Because that's not what a particle accelerator does. It simply isn't. They may be working towards weaponizing effects discovered or derivative research. But a particle accelerator as we know it? Not built for it. Which is what the person I quoted stated. If had injected some nuance into his argument I wouldn't have pounced on him so hard.
"there is a real life particle accelerator in the world right now. Its too big to be used as a weapon, and they are still trying to figure out how to make it a weapon"
There are particle accelerators that sit happily on the end of a car construction robot. They'd be weaponisable against soft targets in no time if a) soft targets were worth it and
the power required vs kill time ratio wasn't infinitely better for a gun. Particle accelerators however are not particularly uncommon. Or necessarily huge.
Evidence:
http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Cyberknife
DocBach, on 06 February 2013 - 08:29 AM, said:
This science fiction universe says that their machine guns are for anti-infantry and light vehicle duty only. I come from a knowledge base that lets me know that machine guns are useless in Battletech because the rules FASA decided to implement regarding them, so they'd most likely be useless in a Mechwarrior game as they aren't intended to be main weapons against other 'Mechs.
And back on topic.
It doesn't say only though does it? It says better-than-at-killing-mechs. And no-one's asking them to be main anti-mech weapons any more than the small laser is. In the BT universe, battlemech-mounted machine guns are
capable of damaging mechs. That's not disputable. They do barely less damage than a small laser.
Am I asking them to be leveled up to match in-game AC/2s? No, since AC/2s have benifited disproportionately from the overall damage buff weapons have received (and, incidentally, are a good example of why raw DPS doesn't make or break a weapon).
Slightly worse than a small laser though, is reasonable.
And, again, we currently have 3 chassis variants rendered arbitrarily useless by the failure to correctly transcribe (i.e. in line with other weapons) from
TT rules the only weapon one can reasonably expect to arm a substantial proportion of their hardpoints with. From a game design perspective that is just plain
bad.
As canon-adherents are you really telling me that an AC/20 or AC/10-wielding RVN-4X is more lore-appropriate than one running a pair of lasers, an SRM and a pair of MGs? They're supposed to be auxiliary weapons, yes, but at the moment they're not even that.