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Yeah, that was a little creepy, guys. Someone do a tactical analysis of the Warrior H-7 to make up for it.
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May 1, 2011 02:32
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PoptartsNinja posted:Yeah, that was a little creepy, guys. It flies. It is fast as all hell, so you can't hit it. If you ever do hit it, it will go "poof" and that is that. Hey, wait, I wasn't even being creepy why am I doing this?
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May 1, 2011 02:42
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I get the feeling that despite how cool this scenario is, this might be the one where Our Heroes just plain snuff it in a blaze of less-than-glory.
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May 1, 2011 03:23
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Warrior H-7 Attack Helicopter The Warrior is a classic Battletech helicopter, lightly armored but extremely fast (relative to 'Mechs) and packing a decent punch for its size. It is capable of both long range stand-off engagements with shorter ranged foes and punishing SRM volleys at closer range. The trade off for all this versatility is two-fold. First it suffers from the traditional helicopter drawback of having a big, easy to hit rotor that can't really be armored. Without going into too much detail, its like being unable to armor your center torso as a 'Mech. Furthermore the Warrior is particularly lightly armored even for a helicopter. The light armor combined with a versatile weapons load-out means the Warrior will want to remain at range, using its high mobility and large ammunition bins to take long range shots with its autocannon until its target is vulnerable enough for a swooping pass with its SRMs. With so little armor it cannot afford to remain stationary, but its large engine should allow it to dodge most incoming fire or outpace any pursuer. In the close confines of Tharkad it will lose most of its mobility advantage, having to weave between buildings, but will remain a threat due to its SRM-4. If it slows down and offers a clean shot it should be dealt with as a high priority target, however given its current speed there is little hope of hitting it this round.
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May 1, 2011 03:56
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PoptartsNinja posted:Yeah, that was a little creepy, guys. The Warrior is a lightly armored harassment VTOL, armed with an AC-2 and a SRM-4. The AC-2 is the longest ranged weapon that exists in L1 play, and allows it decent standoff range, and the SRM-4 allows it to hunt other VTOLs, as cluster hit weapons like SRMs are death against VTOLs. Against mechs or other harder targets, the Warrior probably should stand off until its AC-2 ammunition bins are empty, then break off and retreat, unless heavily outnumbering the target, in which case the pilot and his fellow pilots should close in to kill the target with SRMs. In general, though, the SRMs are only there to finish things off or kill other VTOLs. Disadvantages of the Warrior are its light armor, lack of firepower, and having only one ton of AC-2 ammunition, which means it is unlikely to kill anything before ending up bingo ammo on its AC-2.
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May 1, 2011 04:08
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Edit:  Ignore this please.
Artificer fucked around with this message at 06:06 on May 1, 2011 |
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May 1, 2011 05:27
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One ton of Autocannon/2 ammo is 45 shots. That's more than adequate to see it through any reasonable fight.
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May 1, 2011 05:28
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Artificer posted:One of these two things are not the same. Not sure if this is a joke but a helicopter is a type of Vertical Take-Off and Landing aircraft.
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May 1, 2011 05:33
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It's true. Helicopters are technically the most common form of VTOL. It's just that nobody every thinks of helicopters as VTOLs since helicopters take it for granted while stuff like the Harrier is sufficiently "weird" enough that you can't call it an ordinary plane nor can you call it a helicopter. So you call it a VTOL and then people just assume that only weird stuff like that gets the moniker when in fact all aircraft capable of that form of flight is considered to fall under the classification. Wait, no, I'm being stupid and roundabout with it. Okay. Look at it this way. Helicopters are VTOLs, but we don't go calling them VTOLs because they already have a more convenient and well-known name--"helicopters." That doesn't mean they're not VTOLs, though.
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May 1, 2011 05:53
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Actually Harriers are V/STOLs 
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May 1, 2011 09:38
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The Casualty posted:Actually Harriers are V/STOLs STOVLs, actually
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May 1, 2011 15:16
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PoptartsNinja posted:One ton of Autocannon/2 ammo is 45 shots. That's more than adequate to see it through any reasonable fight. Is it just me or are L1 tech aircraft really wimpy, but once they get NARC capability they suddenly become monsters.
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May 1, 2011 15:20
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As long as they dump armaments at some point.
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May 1, 2011 15:20
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DatonKallandor posted:Is it just me or are L1 tech aircraft really wimpy, but once they get NARC capability they suddenly become monsters. You guys are lucky--in the original plan for the ComStar mission, I was going to field a Donar. Since the plans are changing significantly due to ComStar's late launch, I don't have any qualms about mentioning that. Edit: Also, still waiting on orders from folks. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 16:29 on May 1, 2011 |
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May 1, 2011 16:20
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PoptartsNinja posted:You guys are lucky--in the original plan for the ComStar mission, I was going to field a Donar. That just means you've replaced it with an even heavier assault craft. That's not good news at all! 
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May 1, 2011 16:48
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PoptartsNinja posted:One ton of Autocannon/2 ammo is 45 shots. That's more than adequate to see it through any reasonable fight. It's not enough to kill anything though. You can plink all day until your ammo bins are dry but you'll just mildly aggravate anything in its way. The Experimental Warrior with stealth armor and the HVAC-2 is hilarious though. Like this one, but even more ridiculous.
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May 1, 2011 16:59
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MJ12 posted:It's not enough to kill anything though. You can plink all day until your ammo bins are dry but you'll just mildly aggravate anything in its way. They can't all be Yellowjacket gunships, after all. 2 damage is enough when you're fighting light 'Mechs (and Aerospace fighters). I'd rather have four Warriors than a Jagermech for anti-aircraft duty; and since the Warrior is 1/10th of the cost of a Jagermech...
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May 1, 2011 17:28
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PoptartsNinja posted:2 damage is enough when you're fighting light 'Mechs (and Aerospace fighters). I'd rather have four Warriors than a Jagermech for anti-aircraft duty; and since the Warrior is 1/10th of the cost of a Jagermech... It's also handy against light vehicles and transports, and for keeping a pair of eyes on the target. If you needed to get something on site to deal with lightly armed rebellion or to attack a convoy or something, it'd probably work fine. It would also arrive on the scene much faster than mechs if you had to scramble your defenses and get something in the area so the enemy isn't rampaging entirely unopposed. Most aircraft in the Battletech universe are undergunned, otherwise you'd just have small lance engagements getting hit by bombing runs constantly.
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May 1, 2011 17:33
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Anghammarad posted:STOVLs, actually The terms are largely interchangeable but a Harrier is V/STOL because it can takeoff AND land vertically while a STOVL must technically use a runway to takeoff.
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May 1, 2011 17:37
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Zaodai posted:Most aircraft in the Battletech universe are undergunned, otherwise you'd just have small lance engagements getting hit by bombing runs constantly. Well, VTOLs anyway. Conventional fighters can pack a wallop (especially with external ordnance), though they're still made from tinfoil. Aerospace fighters, however, can get patently ridiculous.
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May 1, 2011 18:05
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Even then, they tend to be undergunned for their weight. L2 tech helps it somewhat, because the weapons themselves are so good. But compared to the firepower you could pack on real world aircraft to deal with armor, Battletech air assets do tend to be (intentionally) underpowered. In my opinion, anyway. I don't think there's a problem with that from a gameplay standpoint. Otherwise, like I said, mechs would just get bombed back to the stone age rather than there being giant robot fights.
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May 1, 2011 18:19
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Most Battletech tech balancing seem to be semi-awkward attempts at keeping the mechs in focus even when they can't really explain why they should be. I like the better internal consistency/planning of the Heavy Gear game(s) for that part, things like MBTs will loving murder mechs in stand up fights and are held back more by their high cost / poor mobility in the terrain of the game world. Different strokes of military mechs between the game systems though.
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May 1, 2011 18:40
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Pimpmust posted:Most Battletech tech balancing seem to be semi-awkward attempts at keeping the mechs in focus even when they can't really explain why they should be. Heavy Gear is a single-planet game, though, which allows the limitation of making your planet a Giant Stair World full of tight terrain and craggy everything to allow mechs to have a place. Battletech is Feudalism In Space, where the Mechwarrior is a space-knight and his Battlemech is his space-steed and legacy all in one. The thematics (and therefore how machines are represented) are entirely different.
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May 1, 2011 18:45
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At least it's not Ring of Red.
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May 1, 2011 18:55
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PoptartsNinja posted:You guys are lucky--in the original plan for the ComStar mission, I was going to field a Donar. Those things are easy to kill. Just drop a BattleMech on them. DFA and they die. Pimpmust posted:Most Battletech tech balancing seem to be semi-awkward attempts at keeping the mechs in focus even when they can't really explain why they should be. Well, yeah. It makes me sad, really. Even if they made everything else take crits like 'mechs (IE, not until armor is gone unless the dice roll really luckily,) 'mechs would still be prominent. They just wouldn't be the obvious choice that you only don't field because the scenario won't let you. C'est la vie.
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May 1, 2011 18:55
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The trick to killing a Donar? LBX-10. Cluster rounds vs a VTOL is a -4 TN.
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May 1, 2011 18:59
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MJ12 posted:Heavy Gear is a single-planet game, though, which allows the limitation of making your planet a Giant Stair World full of tight terrain and craggy everything to allow mechs to have a place. Well yeah, that's why it feels like Heavy Gear had some more... thought going into it on how the overall picture looks. Battletech feels like it's trying to be Space Knights one moment and serious real warfare mech game the next, so it kinda gets stuck on the fence. It's a bit like how Warhammer 40k tries to have things like Terminator armour be super rare and special yet mass-produced at the same time (or somehow have enough around to replace all that is lost over thousands of years of warfare). That kind of presentation just feels lazy (and/or dumb). Not much one can do about that other than homebrewin'.
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May 1, 2011 19:03
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Pimpmust posted:Most Battletech tech balancing seem to be semi-awkward attempts at keeping the mechs in focus even when they can't really explain why they should be. The first version of Aerotech was quite interesting. You could load up as many bombs into a plane as its thrust rating would allow. A light, 30-ton fighter would carry roughly four times as much bombs as a big 100-ton fighter would. It wasn't hard to carry 500 points (as in, damage points) worth of bombs per fighter. The maximum durability of any mech in the game is 459 points when you combine all armor and internal structure. The real killer was inferno bombing, which had planes carry 10-point bombs (all 50 of them) that would not do damage but would cause 10 extra instant heat to any mech and destroy any vehicles and infantry in target hex. To balance this out, the game had very tight fuel rules which meant normal aircrafts could fly for about 75 hexes (BT mapsheets, roughly 17x21 hexes) in the atmosphere before running out of fuel and crashing. Given that some light fighters could move up to 15 hexes per turn, this would become a problem pretty quickly. Turns in Aerotech were those same 10-second turns. Then there were the strafing rules that would have you draw a hex line through a mapsheet. Energy weapons, not being overpowered enough, would do their maximum damage on every target along that line if they made their to-hit roll. Combined with bombing rules this made the game all about air superiority, as is realistic. Unfortunately it's not that interesting since aircraft were a lot easier to optimize than mechs. Battles between WarShips (the Game Loves to CapitaLize) would have been interesting, if there were some sort of grouping rules for hits or something. As it were, the bookkeeping to actual gameplay ratio was even worse in space. Move ships forward in a line (10 seconds per ship), fire weapons and mark damage for each weapon in each ship (5 minutes per ship). Without a computer to do the accounting, no way. Too bad, since the ships themselves were pretty cool and the system would have lent itself to some relatively interesting tactics. I don't know if they ever fixed Aerotech rules, but on the other hand I don't see how they could have made them worse. In any case, don't bother.
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May 1, 2011 19:11
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Hob_Gadling posted:Too bad, since the ships themselves were pretty cool  The top one's a Clan-refit McKenna. Those ships are all to scale with each other. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 19:51 on May 1, 2011 |
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May 1, 2011 19:32
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The Yggdrasil makes a McKenna it's bitch.
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May 1, 2011 19:48
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Defiance Industries posted:The Yggdrasil makes a McKenna it's bitch. So does the Rasalhague. v v v Nope. Yggdrasil is the name of a Mjolnir-class battlecruiser, and the class is only 960 meters long. landcollector fucked around with this message at 20:30 on May 1, 2011 |
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May 1, 2011 20:25
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Defiance Industries posted:The Yggdrasil makes a McKenna it's bitch. And I'm just assuming an executor class SSD is thw size of a Yggdrasil
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May 1, 2011 20:26
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I came up with an idea a couple years ago that, while causing a few other problems, could resolve a lot of the issues with the Battletech setting and giant robots being stupid and nonsensical, ablative paper armor, absence of realistic air power, super-short ranges on everything, etc. Move the entire setting into a steampunk-style setting. Not that I'm a huge steampunk fan, but it would totally work. The "inner sphere" is pseudo-Europe. The outer colonies are... the colonies. Mechs run on boilers and need radiators to dissipate heat from their steam-powered weapons. I guess throw in some Nicola-Tesla's-Wet-Dreams style electric weapons too, if you want. Mechs use cannons and primitive rockets (no guidance systems), and then your typical rennaisance/victorian fantasy unobtanium/super-acid/blue lightning/whatever extra poo poo to represent all the other weapons. Get rid of all the aircraft and go with dirigibles and gyrocopters and whatnot. Mechs can drop out of the sky from huge zeppelins, on parachutes. Jump jets are powered by steam. Mechs don't have to be better than WWII-era tanks because those are future-tech. You don't need lostech at all. Comstar owns the telegraph lines. Etc. Etc. Obviously it wouldn't be the same setting, but I think most or all of the game mechanics could be translated over more or less intact, and maybe you'd escape from a lot of the silliness of a future setting using technologies obviously inferior to late 20th century tech, yet having a smattering of technologies wildly superior-than.
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May 1, 2011 20:33
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Except steampunk stuff looks stupid as hell. Edit: It's easier to realize that it's a sci-fi game and not care about the little things that make the gameplay work. Usual Barb fucked around with this message at 20:43 on May 1, 2011 |
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May 1, 2011 20:40
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Can't we just enjoy the setting as is? poo poo doesn't need to make sense to be awesome.
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May 1, 2011 20:45
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Well yes to both. I actually don't like "steampunk" (as realized by gluing loving gears to everything and then wearing victorian velvet poo poo along with it) at all, and, I'm quite happy to just play giant robots. But I had the thought and it seemed like it would work so I wanted to tell you guys.
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May 1, 2011 20:49
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PoptartsNinja posted:
And yet, I can't help but think that both an Imperial Star Destroyer and a Galaxy-Class would make mincemeat of the McKenna... Not sure what that one with about a million credits worth of paint just writing out the name "Agamemnon" is from, nor how badly it would own/be owned by a Clan-refit McKenna. Still, that is a big honking battleship, and ain't nobody can deny that.
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May 1, 2011 20:53
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I think Agamemnon is a ship from Babylon 5 universe.
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May 1, 2011 20:57
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The Agamemnon is an Omega Class Destroyer From Babylon 5. The Other ships would do horrible things to it.
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May 1, 2011 21:00
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Right, the Babylon 5 universe humans suffer from having ships that obey a lot more of real-life physics than any of the other settings.
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May 1, 2011 21:02
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