66 replies to this topic

[Old Farkas]

I will always prefer big buttons and joystick over 3d virtual controls. Because when you pilot with your hands and feets you feel your Mech.

[Budor]

Charles McLarren, on 07 February 2013 - 03:44 PM, said:

I will always prefer big buttons and joystick over 3d virtual controls. Because when you pilot with your hands and feets you feel your Mech.

I just had this idea to really feel our mech we could pilot them with our...nah nevermind.

Edited by Budor, 07 February 2013 - 03:49 PM.

[Paul McKenzie]

Here's the real question. Right now I can remotely pilot these mechs from my office chair. Why are there pilots at all in battle tech. BOOM. In other words don't ****** worry about it. Just enjoy.

[Wired]

Paul McKenzie, on 07 February 2013 - 03:54 PM, said:

Here's the real question. Right now I can remotely pilot these mechs from my office chair. Why are there pilots at all in battle tech. BOOM. In other words don't ****** worry about it. Just enjoy.

Because the mech requires your own sense of balance to stand up.

[Paul McKenzie]

The gyro in its torso blow that theory right up canons ***.

[Asmudius Heng]

remember - Battletech loves the 80s!

[Kristov Kerensky]

Mechs are designed to operate in enviroments with all sorts of nasty things in them, like radiation, toxic chemicals, extremes of temp, extremes of atmospheric pressure and even the total lack of any atmosphere, which generally increases the radiation exposure. They ARE shielded for these issues simply so the human pilot can survive them, but you just can't shield them enough to stop things from frying fancy electronics, and the fancier they are, the more delicate they tend to be which means a lot less energy is required to fry them. So you build the controls and interfaces to be as hardened as possible, which means you don't use anything more delicate then required, which means you don't use touch screens and voice activation systems, you use buttons and toggles and switches. You lose power due to the EMP effect of multiple PPC near hits, you can hit a switch and restart the damn thing OR you can stare at the dead touch screens while screaming into a dead mic trying to get the dead voice system to acknowledge your commands.

Star Trek has always rather bothered the hells out of me with it's touch screens and voice systems, stupidly bad designs to have nothing but those as your control and interface systems. And Star Trek DOES occasionally include some good old fashioned manual control systems, like for doors, and then there was the time Riker used a joystick to fly a starship in combat, and there's also that other time they used manual controls for a door, and that one time they used manual controls for a door...lots of broken doors in Star Trek, but everything ELSE seems to never short out or get jammed or be with EMP..
It's all about the cool tech, it's not about how that cool tech is pretty damn stupid to rely on in a starship moving factors of speed faster then c in the first place.

Oh, and about hacking a Mech, yeah, it's quite possible, you can do it remotely or directly, but there are security systems in place to counter that, and the direct interface approach can be deadly if you fail, as most of the security systems used by Mercs for their personal Mechs ARE lethal. That's from the novels btw, it's discussed various times in various novels that Mechs do have authorization systems and security systems and can be stolen.