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Yeah, I like the weight reduction mostly because I didn't really want to necessarily increase the damage flying around, and because the units that mount base AC2/5s are most in need of a couple extra heat sinks or armor, and tbh there's just not THAT many units mounting them that need changes. Straight moving extra tonnage to armor is the correct choice on at least 90%+ of cases.
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Dec 31, 2023 22:01
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In contrast, I think I like buffing the AC2 & 5 over reducing their weights. First, it means you don't have to gently caress with the mechs, you can keep stock configs. But it also helps with identity, I think - it would be weird for the Jagermech to have armor, but now at least it has decent long range firepower, as I assume was always the intention.
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Jan 1, 2024 00:20
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I don't have enough experience with how the game plays out in practice. I thought the light ACs were basically supposed to have tremendous range to compensate for their light damage. I'd be tempted to increase the ranges on them even more, though I immediately think that makes them so situational that they wouldn't be useful in most play unless you were using very large maps.
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Jan 1, 2024 01:49
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Range, or in the case of the AC/20, damage that exceeds almost anything else. Yes it's heavy, but nothing else is as good at removing center torsos.
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Jan 1, 2024 02:08
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Olothreutes posted:Range, or in the case of the AC/20, damage that exceeds almost anything else. Yes it's heavy, but nothing else is as good at removing center torsos. Wait until you see what we invent in the 3060s
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Jan 1, 2024 02:38
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propatriamori posted:I don't have enough experience with how the game plays out in practice. I thought the light ACs were basically supposed to have tremendous range to compensate for their light damage. I'd be tempted to increase the ranges on them even more, though I immediately think that makes them so situational that they wouldn't be useful in most play unless you were using very large maps. They work better in the lore, especially AC/2's as they made great anti-aircraft weapons with their incredible range. I like the changes you've come up with though PTN, seems reasonable and no work required to rebuild mechs.
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Jan 1, 2024 03:38
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seaborgium posted:They work better in the lore, especially AC/2's as they made great anti-aircraft weapons with their incredible range. They do in TT too, you just gotta load flak rounds instead of standard slugs.
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Jan 1, 2024 04:04
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seaborgium posted:They work better in the lore, especially AC/2's as they made great anti-aircraft weapons with their incredible range. That's a problem that shows up somewhat traditionally in the Battletech games. The fact that most battles are technically small-scale skirmishes of lance-on-lance action, when in the lore it's not uncommon for there to be combined arms, sides of different sizes and weight class, objectives other than "kill them all." It's a lot harder to find a use for artillery, anti-aircraft weapons, and anti-infantry weapons when the average battle is 4 mechs on both sides, on a map large enough to comfortably fit on a table.
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Jan 1, 2024 04:09
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glwgameplayer posted:That's a problem that shows up somewhat traditionally in the Battletech games. The fact that most battles are technically small-scale skirmishes of lance-on-lance action, when in the lore it's not uncommon for there to be combined arms, sides of different sizes and weight class, objectives other than "kill them all." I still remember watching the glory that was the Clans establishing artillery doctrine in Poptart's last thread.
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Jan 1, 2024 06:38
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Defiance Industries posted:They do in TT too, you just gotta load flak rounds instead of standard slugs. They are great at that, it just requires using both mechs and fighters at the same time.
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Jan 1, 2024 07:20
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PoptartsNinja posted:Right, since I can't make it through an LP without rebalancing something (and since we've already given small weapons the buff I think they need), I'm looking once again at autocannons. The AC/2 and AC/5 specifically, since the AC/10 and AC/20 are fine-ish. The LB-10X always obsoletes the standard AC/10 and I don't think anything can fix that. I like these changes quite a bit!
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Jan 3, 2024 03:30
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PoptartsNinja posted:Right, since I can't make it through an LP without rebalancing something (and since we've already given small weapons the buff I think they need), I'm looking once again at autocannons. The AC/2 and AC/5 specifically, since the AC/10 and AC/20 are fine-ish. The LB-10X always obsoletes the standard AC/10 and I don't think anything can fix that. let's do it
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Jan 3, 2024 03:47
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PoptartsNinja posted:Right, since I can't make it through an LP without rebalancing something (and since we've already given small weapons the buff I think they need), I'm looking once again at autocannons. The AC/2 and AC/5 specifically, since the AC/10 and AC/20 are fine-ish. The LB-10X always obsoletes the standard AC/10 and I don't think anything can fix that. It occurs to me that if ACs are supposed to be rapid-fire weapons in the fluff, and there's a weapon called the pulse laser that gets a hit bonus for being rapid-fire, you could give the smaller ACs the accuracy boost normally given to pulse lasers.
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Jan 3, 2024 12:04
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Gnoman posted:It occurs to me that if ACs are supposed to be rapid-fire weapons in the fluff, and there's a weapon called the pulse laser that gets a hit bonus for being rapid-fire, you could give the smaller ACs the accuracy boost normally given to pulse lasers. Pulse lasers wouldn’t have recoil the same way auto cannons do.
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Jan 3, 2024 14:55
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Please bear with me because this is going to get long. I have a lot of thoughts about Pulse Lasers. In addition to the minimal recoil, I don't like giving the small autocannons an accuracy bonus for a few reasons: 0) It doesn't really help them, materially. An AC/2 with a -2 bonus ToHit would still be a garbage weapon that's only useful for shooting unarmored civilian vehicles and flinching AeroSpace Fighter pilots into a crash. 1) Other burst weapons don't work like pulse lasers. Even the machine gun, which does 2 damage to 'Mech armor after a sustaned burst of fire, doesn't get a ToHit bonus. Neither do AP Gauss Rifles, Ultra or Rotary Autocannons, Anti-Missile Systems, or Hyper-Assault Gauss Rifles. 2) With the exception of the small and micro models, pulse lasers are no longer the "machine gun lasers" Stackpole described when they were first introduced. Stackpole was writing Star Wars at the time and was clearly picturing blasters every time he talked about lasers. BattleTech's lasers are short-duration, high energy beam weapons that fire for a fraction of a second (usually the beam duration is so short that most human eyes can't really 'see' the beam itself. The way lasers are described they don't really have travel time so they really should all be giving an accuracy bonus or they shouldn't have more than a short range bracket (or they should have a consistent range bracket: short to 5, medium to 10, long 10+). Laser beam duration could be much longer (and I gather it probably is for AeroSpace Fighters, which may be a component of their bonus range), and while a longer duration beam would deliver more energy into the target there just isn't any point to it. Mech armor is, among a whole host of other properties, ablative. When a laser hits Mech armor it vaporizes the surface layers. This armor vapor apparently really fucks with lasers, which prevents long-duration beams from doing more damage. 3) Pulse lasers aren't described as more accurate than standard lasers. They're only described (in and out of the fluff) as being more damaging. They use an array of slightly smaller lasers to plink away at a spot of armor repeatedly to give that vapor cloud a moment to dissipate before the next strike comes in. The bonus accuracy is a combination of them being a laser (minor), having a built-in targeting system designed to land pinpoint hits on the same spot multiple times (major), and an extremely precise traversal / stabilization system that lets them track their target point better or longer than other weapons do (major). Presumably any weapon could get the pulse laser accuracy bonus if they were given the same targeting and tracking. It just hasn't happened because people in the Inner Sphere can't see the game stats and don't realize how much the pulse laser is actually doing. Scientific testing says the large pulse laser does approximately 112.5% more damage than the normal large laser so pulse lasers just "do more damage." Presumably: A) Mechs with the Accurate Weapon quirk have one of the two major advantages pulse lasers do (pinpoint targeting or precision tracking). B) Targeting Computers provide the same level of precision targeting that pulse lasers have by default. C) Wolf's Dragoons figured this out and the AES is secretly an offshoot of pulse laser technology, giving precision tracking to an entire arm. D) The -2 pulse laser bonus is actually a -1 bonus from enhanced targeting and a -1 bonus from precision target tracking and shouldn't stack in any way with the identical ToHit bonus from targeting computers or AES. E) Nothing about the pulse laser's actual laser is inherently more accurate than a normal laser. TLDR: No other burst weapons give an accuracy bonus, and I believe pulse lasers have something else giving them an accuracy bonus that nobody in universe has noticed (yet, maybe). PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 15:31
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 (good)
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Jan 3, 2024 16:37
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Oh yeah: F) The RISC Pulse Laser module that gives pulse laser bonuses to any laser weapon should be a step towards a tiny targeting / stabilization computer that can be attached to any direct-fire weapon. The Republic was in the process of figuring out How Pulse Lasers Do when they got Worfed. Paying 1-2 tons to turn a PPC or autocannon into a "Precision PPC" or "Precision AC/10" sounds pretty solid to me. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 16:46
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PoptartsNinja posted:Mech armor is, among a whole host of other properties, ablative. When a laser hits Mech armor it vaporizes the surface layers. This armor vapor apparently really fucks with lasers, which prevents long-duration beams from doing more damage. This is called laser-plasma coupling and is an active area of research for modern inertial fusion experiments. There are a lot of clever tricks that can help avoid energy loss, but the most impactful thing is having a compatible beam wavelength and target material. Since mech armor is a bunch of poo poo and not a well defined experimental target is very easy to say that letting the plasma dissipate is the easiest solution. It is possible to power through the plasma to some degree with additional energy, but it's wildly inefficient compared to things like pulse shaping and stepping, which I'm going to assume the battletech lasers all do already.
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Jan 3, 2024 18:26
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I've got a lot of thoughts about Mech armor I could go into at some point; because there's a lot we don't know about it but there's also a lot we do know.
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Jan 3, 2024 19:18
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Man I love thinking about fake weapons stuff too. I like this take on pulse lasers, and it got me thinking. So as I see it the standard lasers are a single short duration "pulse" while pulse lasers are a longer duration many sub-second duration pulses. These would still not be anywhere near the multi second discharges of MWO/MW5. In fact, a thing I remember from one of the few good BT novels, Robert Charette's Heir to the Dragon, a Zeus takes a hit that disables the rear medium laser which (iirc) Theodore sees because it starts just emitting continously for a second or two then it burns itself out. Targeting penalties and range bands represent that while these are lightspeed weapons the laser shots need to hit in a sufficiently direct way in order to damage BT armored units, but are working within small windows of time. Pulse lasers can also be a nice showcase of how much more advanced the Terran Hegemony was in laser engineering since these heavier components still fit in the same space as a standard laser, which could easily show that the "laser" part of the pulse laser weapons was effectively miniaturized. Another pulse laser type that is explicitly described as having specialized physical components to making it behave the way it does in the tabletop are Variable Speed Pulse Lasers (VSPL) weapons. These are described as approaching the range issue by another route, by integrating software cutoffs and physical lens switching systems that make the weapon deadly accurate at closer ranges while still giving it the ability to track better even at a longer range than standard Inner Sphere (SL tech) pulse lasers. The software/hardware integration could also be seen with the prototype/rediscovered standard Inner Sphere pulse lasers. As I recall instead of the -2 to-hit bonus the prototype systems only have a -1 as well as suffering 1d6 higher heat generation when they fire. I think this makes sense as a representation of the systems integration of the targeting arrays for pulse laser prototypes being fare more primitive so aren't able to keep the beam on target as easy as the mature weapons system. The heat could also be just another way of arriving at the -1 bonus in that the recovered lostech pulse lasers could be cycling much longer durations compared to Star League original hardware to put enough pulses on the target. PTN's pointing out of the stabilization/targeting as being the special sauce that makes pulse lasers lines up nicely with every other "accurized" sort of thing we see in BT weaponry. For example, Targeting Computers in BT are large multiton things. But the computer component itself is of neglible weight, the majority of the tonnage/space represents the specialized stabilization, targeting arrays, and other physical components to hold multiton weapons systems on target. Another to-hit benefiting weapon system are the newer Reengineered Lasers. These are described as a sort of multistage beam firing laser with a noticeably longer firing cycle (even if this wouldn't be detectable to human senses) to allow the REL to pierce even specialized armor composites in the 3150s. The weight and space gains over a standard laser or even pulse lasers represents the targeting and tracking systems in order to keep the beam hitting the same spot enough to punch through advanced armors.
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Jan 3, 2024 19:57
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I remember that MechWarrior 3 really threw me with how it handled pulse lasers. The previous games had pulse lasers as going "pchew-pchew" in bursts of 3. Not really lasers so much as chunks of plasma. And then MW3 comes along, and it's like, nope, it's a continuous laser that'll pulse as it fires. Or am I misremembering?
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Jan 3, 2024 22:32
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Youre not. They were long burns that you could chop on and off as fast as you liked or you could hold it for a longer burn and recycle time. The damage increased as you got towards the end of the full burn time so if you cut it after like 50% of the available time it would only do like 25% of max potential damage
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Jan 3, 2024 22:40
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Showdown at High Noon 4-1 “The package is delivered,” Prodigal’s HUD flashed as she transmitted the ‘go’ code to the rest of the lance. There just wasn’t much point to pretending her comms were still out now that the guns of the enemy DropShip had been suppressed. It wouldn’t take the enemy captain long to organize their ship’s marines; but even in the unlikely event that those troops were trained for anti-Mech attacks it would likely still take them a while to work up the courage to attack the Falcon directly. The more pressing concern were the enemy ‘Mechs. If they weren’t presented with an immediate external threat, they might risk storming the boarding ramps in the hopes of gunning down the plucky light ‘Mech before the Falcon could damage their ship’s reactor. That wasn’t an unlikely prospect. Vulnerable as the DropShip was to an attack from within, the reactor was thick and heavily shielded. It would take more than a single medium laser shot to cause any crippling harm and once the enemy ‘Mech lance realized that they’d storm the ship. She needed to give them something else to worry about. “Obligation Lance, it’s time to go loud.”  [n/a]  Movement Phase [n/a] Shooting Phase [n/a] Shooting End Phase [n/a] Melee Phase [n/a] Melee End Phase [n/a] Heat Phase [n/a] End Phase [n/a]   Map Link Objectives Primary Objective - Capture the Enemy DropShip (0/1) - - Overwhelm DropShip Troop Strength (0/46) - - Turns remaining before Turncoat is overwhelmed (0/12) Secondary Objective - Defeat Enemy BattleMech Lance (0/4) Player Status:      Ally Status:          OpForce Status:     Special Rules Glacial Exposure: Ejecting pilots suffer 1 automatic pilot damage. Light Autocannon Tweaks - Autocannon/5s can fire singly or burst fire two shots as per the Ultra Autocannon rules, with the standard chance to jam. - Autocannon/2s can fire singly or burst fire three shots as per the Ultra Autocannon rules, with the standard chance to jam. - Ultra Autocannons don't jam, and receive a +2 bonus on cluster table rolls at short range, +1 at medium range, and +0 at long range. Small Weapon Tweaks - Weapons with a range of 3 or less only have a short range bracket. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 6, 2024 07:15
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hello, I am your Battlemaster for this fight. I've played a little tabletop Battletech before; happy that I'm in this Battlemaster variant because last time I had two PPCs all to myself I cooked off my own ammo bins. The unknown heavies look like one of the Kuritan PPC-Catapults and a Dragon, I guess? Pretty decent heavies all around, though I think the Catapults usually have thin armor? Looks fun. I hope we get to push someone through thin ice.
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Jan 6, 2024 07:39
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Wow, there are a -lot- of allied units taking part in this mission, versus only four OpFor mechs (albiet three of them are quite formidable). Obviously the shoe is going to drop at some point, so I suggest the players go hard immediately in order to maximise their initial advantage.
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Jan 6, 2024 07:45
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Not to fuss, but PTN, hasn't the thunderbolt normally got jumpjets?? Or did the pirate special give those up? edit: and looking forward to laying ruin upon our foes!! vorebane fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Jan 6, 2024 |
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Jan 6, 2024 07:46
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vorebane posted:Not to fuss, but PTN, hasn't the thunderbolt normally got jumpjets?? Or did the pirate special give those up? Other way around. The Thunderbolt doesn't have jets in its base config, but the Pirate Special does. I'll get that fixed, nice spot!
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Jan 6, 2024 07:52
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How do the ice movement rules go? I played around in Megamek with what I knew about this scenario from the preview and the ice was hilarious but deadly.
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Jan 6, 2024 08:03
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Dumb question, but what happens if I DFA someone on thin ice? I'm holding out for comically standing on the victim's head and hopping safely off onto safer platforms. edit: or the drink is big enough for the both of us. vorebane fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Jan 6, 2024 |
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Jan 6, 2024 08:04
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propatriamori posted:How do the ice movement rules go? I played around in Megamek with what I knew about this scenario from the preview and the ice was hilarious but deadly. This is a layer of dense snow over ice. There are no modifiers except for vehicles, which suffer skidding tests. The only ice on the map is the crater the DropShip melted when it landed.
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Jan 6, 2024 08:06
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propatriamori posted:hello, I am your Battlemaster for this fight. I've played a little tabletop Battletech before; happy that I'm in this Battlemaster variant because last time I had two PPCs all to myself I cooked off my own ammo bins. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a Dragon and a K-pult would mean half the 'mechs on the scene are associated with House Kurita. Could be meaningful to the bigger whodunnit.
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Jan 6, 2024 08:32
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There are two "Mobilized locals platoon 2" units, the command names and such are different so I'm guessing it's a typo and not a duplicate, but it'll get confusing! ... Lovemore Solo?
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Jan 6, 2024 10:36
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Battlemaster I just put in orders to move 1420, 1419, 1519 and twist north. I figure I'll stay centered for a while but I can cover more ground to the east right now and maybe get some early damage on the Catapult.
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Jan 6, 2024 11:58
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Cestus 6X Dragon, could be a 1N or a 1C.
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Jan 6, 2024 13:55
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That's a really good Stalker sprite
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Jan 6, 2024 14:12
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Cythereal posted:Cestus 6X quote:Dragon, could be a 1N or a 1C. 1C has more armour, so it's most likely a 1N. JackSplater fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Jan 6, 2024 |
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Jan 6, 2024 15:39
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Hoplite checking in. Doesn't look like anyone is in range and out of cover, advancing. Edit: orders in, advancing and avoiding the thin ice. AJ_Impy fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Jan 6, 2024 |
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Jan 6, 2024 16:16
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JackSplater posted:Never heard of this mech, but I doubt it? 6X has 2xLPL, 2xMPL, and 2xPPC, and only 14 single heat sinks. I'd say it's probably a CPLT-K2, just modified a little bit to replace the MGs with medium lasers. Heat dissipation doesn't match, though. Hm. A Catapult K2 would be a very rare sight in the Periphery at this time, is my big reservation. The Catapult in general is supposed to be a pretty rare design until 3033 when the Combine starts building more. The Cestus on the other hand was a well known SLDF design until its factory got blown up in the Succession Wars.
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Jan 6, 2024 16:21
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What would a Cestus with double heat sinks look like in terms of dissipation?
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Jan 6, 2024 16:22
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Rifleman Moving to 1626 and shooting Unknown #1 I'm planning to advance slowly and keep taking potshots.
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