4E-ize BattleTech? Why would you need that? There are no classes, everyone uses the same mechanic, and you only need d6's to play. There is little use of XP (depending on how you advance pilot skills). It's simple and easy to run.
I'm lost on the problem of "busy work." What do you mean?
And on the topic of lengthy play time, I have played in company vs. company games that only took 5 hours, which is far less than some D&D games I have played. Oh and nothing in either company was under medium class or 45 tons and included clan tech. It was an awesome game.
I didn't mean "4E-ize" in some literal sense. I meant that I would love it if battletech were rewritten with some of the same... design and style and philosophy as 4e. 4e tended to prune away at 3e, using a simple metric- if something was good for gameplay, it should stay or be enhanced. If something wasn't, it should go away. Things like rules that exist purely to make the game world more realistic only deserved to stay if that added realism actually made the gameplay better. Realism for the sake of more accurate simulation was rejected. And ultimately the idea that "fun" in an RPG is rolling a die and seeing if its high enough was rejected. "Fun" was instead identified as residing in tactical decisions.
That's a stance that a tabletop wargame should embrace, probably much further than an RPG does. I'd like a battletech designed to be playable much faster, with rules that exist to create a more "realistic" mech simulation deleted and replaced with rules designed to create a more tactical and more fun mech simulation.
But maybe I'm a little spoiled, since I tend to play next generation wargames.
As for the whole "length of game" issue, I'm going to nip this in the bud. Much like earlier forum warfare about the length of combat at high level in 3e, I really just don't care if you claim to have anecdotal experience of large games of battletech being played in *merely* five hours. I have enough experience playing battletech that I feel confident in my assessment of battletech games typically lasting much longer than that in a company on company game. I have no desire to get into yet another weird, machismo-laden debate where everyone assures me that THEY play battletech in ridiculously short times, and obviously I, and everyone else I've even known, and the vast majority of people I've talked to online, are somehow aberrantly slow. You are not going to convince me of that. Don't try.
To give you an example of the sorts of problems I have with battletech, consider this: To fire an SRM 6, you need to do the following:
Determine to hit number, based on weapon range. This requires consulting a chart for the weapon, your own modifiers, and your opponents modifiers. You may have to look up two additional sets of information in the process, one for yourself, and one for your opponent.
Roll to hit.
If you hit, roll for how many individual missiles hit, consulting the relevant chart. Your typical result will be a 4.
Roll locations for each missile. This requires a minimum of one roll, and as many as 8 rolls (one for location, if it went internal one for whether a critical occured and how many, and two rolls for the specific slot that went critical, grand total eight rolls possible on one location check for one missile).
If critical hits occurred, additional piloting rolls may be required. These in turn may spawn additional rolls, depending on damage taken when falling.
Now, that's a larger weapon system. And if you're firing it early game, you will ONLY need to make about 6 die rolls to resolve it (one to hit, one for number of missiles, average four missile locations). Many other weapons, such as lasers, require only two die rolls, plus possible critical rolls. But the SRM 6 also isn't the worst weapon in the game for time sinkage either.
The tactical additions to the game created by all of these die rolls and charts is not sufficient to justify this degree of...
stuff. The tactical tricks in battletech don't even come from this sort of thing.
