Harebrained Schemes' BattleTech Catch-All

Aetius wrote:
Ecarus wrote:

What are your 'mech designs that you have "parenting love" for?

I run a similar build, but as a dedicated short-range backstabber with six small lasers. I call it Nameless, after a tank in the David Drake novel Rolling Hot. It does roll a bit hot, but can pretty much kill any mech in the game with Ace Pilot for two shots to the back. I've got a couple of variations on it now in my all-lights playthrough, one with two machine guns and one that drops a small laser in order to include a gyro for even more hit defense.

bepnewt wrote:

How may Evasion chevrons do you usually end up with at the end of a turn where you fire? 2 + pilot bonuses?

I can't speak for Ecarus, but with mine it's almost always six. The only time it's not is when they are jumping in to fire during phase 1 (when it usually doesn't matter, because all the AI units have moved), and when they are jumping out into good cover with no possible LoS. Minimizing jumping helps a good bit with heat management.

It's a failing of mine, but jumping has never been my style. I rather use the heat-budget toward weapons. Also the four chevrons is with multiplayer (finished the campaign).

I tried running 5 medium lasers and just letting the heat creep up. But in the later rounds I always wanted another heatsink more.

Aetius wrote:

I run a similar build, but as a dedicated short-range backstabber with six small lasers. I call it Nameless, after a tank in the David Drake novel Rolling Hot.

Nameless was great! Especially when it rammed the other tanks and sheared them in half. I loved Rolling Hot.

I've become rather affectionate towards the Banshee I have my main character in. I just enjoy using such a strange, weird, unoptimized old beast of a 'mech. I stripped all the extra heat sinks, the small laser, and half a ton of armor and crammed in an upgraded (+++) AC/20 to go with an upgraded PPC. I take lots of breaching shots and use high Guts to push the heat curve, and when necessary punch things.

I have a grasshopper with 6 medium lasers and 6 machine guns. With 4 jump jets a couple of heat sinks and over 1000 armour all told, it literally hops around the map shooting mechs legs off. It’s awesome.

I had a Wolverine that was stripped down to nothing but an AC20+++, lots of ammo, and jump jets. Worked like a charm for a long time until other Mechs started to out armour it.

Are there any tools out there for editing saves? I want to respec my pilots now that I've actually got a feel for the different abilities. I'd prefer not to start over or go back to a really old save.

Well, I completed the campaign this evening after running out of patience trying to get some of the heavier assault mechs to drop in missions that weren't designed to immediately screw you over.

There is so much to admire in this game I have to say, but some really poor game design decisions let it down quite badly. I'll be happy to move on to something else now until some of the DLC starts to drop and it gets some significant patching. I'll go back to XCOM2 for now for my TBS fix.

Not exactly game related, but I’ve been having a hard time picturing just how big these machines are. I know they stand approximately 10m tall for a light mech to around 15m for a heavy or assault, so around 30-45 feet. That just feels like it’s a lot shorter than the imagery I’ve read in the books and seen in different game cinematics.

I’m also trying to get my head around the tonnage. I figure that hundreds of years in the future they’ve come up with really strong and lightweight materials, but I work with locomotives that are around 70 feet long and 200T. Mechs are shorter than a locomotive is long, but I also picture them as broader and more dense.

The mechs in this game and in MechWarrior Online are deliberately portrayed as larger than the lore from the tabletop game says they're supposed to be. It was a design decision for MWO that this game sort of inheirited because it uses the same models. It's actually fairly easy to scale the mechs down by editing some game files, although then some of the melee animations don't look right.

Strewth wrote:

Not exactly game related, but I’ve been having a hard time picturing just how big these machines are. I know they stand approximately 10m tall for a light mech to around 15m for a heavy or assault, so around 30-45 feet. That just feels like it’s a lot shorter than the imagery I’ve read in the books and seen in different game cinematics.

I’m also trying to get my head around the tonnage. I figure that hundreds of years in the future they’ve come up with really strong and lightweight materials, but I work with locomotives that are around 70 feet long and 200T. Mechs are shorter than a locomotive is long, but I also picture them as broader and more dense.

Funny. I just thought of that today when my mechs ran along the road and had power lines hanging along it that came up to maybe waist of the assault mechs I ran. So. Like 50 foot freaking mechs.

I picture them to be about 20ish meters, give or take 4-5 meters for Locusts and Atlases.

try to envision the cockpit and extrapolate from that.

I had this whole thing written up about how mecha scaling is weird. I took the Commando and scaled it to a human being with respect to speed and density. I was surprised that it was more or less the same (ballpark, within 25%). I would actually posit that they scaled up a person to get the numbers for a Commando. That being said, a 30ft human probably can't take a SRM barrage to the face, but it's interesting none the less.

Strewth wrote:

Not exactly game related, but I’ve been having a hard time picturing just how big these machines are. I know they stand approximately 10m tall for a light mech to around 15m for a heavy or assault, so around 30-45 feet. That just feels like it’s a lot shorter than the imagery I’ve read in the books and seen in different game cinematics.

I’m also trying to get my head around the tonnage. I figure that hundreds of years in the future they’ve come up with really strong and lightweight materials, but I work with locomotives that are around 70 feet long and 200T. Mechs are shorter than a locomotive is long, but I also picture them as broader and more dense.

A big chunk of the weight savings should come from the fusion power plants in the mechs vs diesel/electric power plants in something like a contemporary locomotive.

Garrcia wrote:

A big chunk of the weight savings should come from the fusion power plants in the mechs vs diesel/electric power plants in something like a contemporary locomotive.

Fusion is just a heat generator, and with present techs, that would need water, a steam turbine, and a generator to turn into electricity. (ie, heat -> kinetic energy, kinetic -> electricity).

If and when we work out fusion power, it will have an enormous impact on civilization, but small, compact power sources will probably not be one of the consequences.

edit: well, they might be able to use thermocouples to generate electricity directly, like in an RTG, but that's much less efficient and generates enormous amounts of waste heat.

I don;t think it's unreasonable to conjecture that the materials advances that allow for compact controllable fusion reactors might also allow for more efficient thermocouples. that doesn't seem like a big leap in my mind

*I am not an engineer

We also shouldn't forget about the armor and structure itself. I doubt the 70 ton locomotive could withstand being knocked over without substantial damage, let alone taking a hit from something like an AC/20.

Malor wrote:
Garrcia wrote:

A big chunk of the weight savings should come from the fusion power plants in the mechs vs diesel/electric power plants in something like a contemporary locomotive.

Fusion is just a heat generator, and with present techs, that would need water, a steam turbine, and a generator to turn into electricity. (ie, heat -> kinetic energy, kinetic -> electricity).

If and when we work out fusion power, it will have an enormous impact on civilization, but small, compact power sources will probably not be one of the consequences.

edit: well, they might be able to use thermocouples to generate electricity directly, like in an RTG, but that's much less efficient and generates enormous amounts of waste heat.

Allow me to be more specific.

Within the Battletech universe there are two principle technologies that are can be seen as behind the relatively light weight of mechs.

The first is a very compact fusion power plant (that incidentally provides some of the heat dissipation for other systems). The second is that rather than relying on mechanical systems for articulation there are polymer synthetic muscles (for want of a better term) that impart motion to the limbs.

While I cannot recall some cannon reason for light weight armor given both the ablative and easily replaceable nature of the armor it is most likely some funky composite layer material (think chobham but different) that is lighter than alternatives like steel plates.

EDIT - I believe these are justified within the cannon on the argument that it is 1000 years in the future.

Strewth wrote:

I’m also trying to get my head around the tonnage. I figure that hundreds of years in the future they’ve come up with really strong and lightweight materials, but I work with locomotives that are around 70 feet long and 200T. Mechs are shorter than a locomotive is long, but I also picture them as broader and more dense.

Mechs of the MWO art generation are horribly horribly oversized, maybe even as bad a twice the size they should be. They took the walking tank aesthetic to an extreme and mixed a bit of height fetishism in. Just look at the leopard dropship, in canon the mechbays are tiny cramped cubicles but in the game the inside is a cavernous hangar with giant hatches you could fly a passenger jet through. This is compounded by the fact that official stats and art are sometimes ridiculously undersized too because the writers did little to no math and just threw out whatever numbers felt good.

For instance a Union dropship is a decently sized spheroid and can carry 12 mechs and 2 aerospace fighters of up to 100 tons each. But the Union is stated to weigh "just" 3600 tons. And it's possible that 1400 tons of that weight is the vehicles it carries internally. So the actual dropship weights just 2200 tons, yet is stated to be 80 metres tall. In other words, the Union dropship is so incredibly light that if you threw one into a lake it would float like a beach ball because it displaces less than 1% of it's volume in water. If you tried to land one in a stiff wind it might blow away like a tumbleweed because it's gigantic bulk catches the wind like a small mountain (made of styrofoam). Anyhow mechs and vehicles are less prone to sillyness like this because they receive the lions share of the attention and thus have the most modern rules. The aerospace stuff is a bit long in the tooth because not enough people would buy a revised ruleset to pay for the effort of making one.

Mechs and vehicles in some of the depictions are at least plausible if you scale them properly and account for the (literally magical) ~1000 years of advances in material science.

I can't believe it took me this long to find the button to upgrade the Argo.

On the other hand, you must be super rich.

It's hard to tell how much cash I need on the first run. I think I've done 3 story missions and have 2M in the bank and my Lance is JM, CN9, VND and FS1. I've put an ac20+++ in the JM. Seems to be going ok. I suspect I will have less cash once I get upgrades happening.

Dekka is dead and Glitch is cursed. She seems to get hit every mission she goes on.

Second I got the Argo, I said "Great, another money sink."

I'm amused by the variety of things I half-remember from the board game. (Which I last played in, um, 2006? Something like that.)

I just saw a Panther in an enemy light lance and had the immediate reaction "Kill that one first!" without quite knowing why -- until I scored a critical on its PPC. Oh, right, that was why I wanted it off the battlefield.

Yeah, those and PPC Locusts have ruined my day. I had a base defense mission where a lance of 3 PPC light mechs and a Hunchback spawned spitting distance from the base and took out 2 buildings immediately.

There is no PPC Locust.

There IS a PPC Cicada.

Yup, Cicada light mech. I'd probably have quit right there if it was a full lance of medium mechs.

Gaine wrote:

Yup, Cicada light mech. I'd probably have quit right there if it was a full lance of medium mechs.

The Cicada is technically a medium. I'm not just pointing this out to be pedantic, the thing is that the PPC Cicada variant with its speed and one big gun would actually be a formidable threat to small 'mechs except that by being a low-end medium it gets shafted by the game's initiative system because all of its potential prey gets to act before it.

Hmmm, I was pretty sure they were light mechs. They did act in initiative all at once before my medium mechs. Are all enemy mechs always stock?

There's a piloting skill that essentially boosts your turn order by 1. Which is how I have glitch in an assault mech going before her soon to be headless targets.

The Cicada is just two Locusts hiding in a trenchcoat.