jester47 said:
Also, the other thing about the BT universe. The frikken autocannons. They make it sound like its just one shell. Its like 5000! A Vulcan is like not even 2 tons! An AC2 from BT weighs like 6 tons. Thats 3 times bigger than a vulcan! An AC20 is 7 times that weight! How big is that! Would that even compute with the weight and height of the mech? (actually now that I think about it, yeah...) Thats some serious destructive force! The Machine Guns gotta be like 50 cals! And with that in mind, apparently that 6 ton autocannon does no more damage than a 50 cal. (granted it has range but...)
Aaron.
Well, first off, an "autocannon" is not necessarily a gatling-sytle gun. It's just a--dun dun daaahhh--automatic cannon. Plenty of them have relatively slow rates of fire. You could look at the
Bushmaster (the main gun on the Bradley AFV), or the
M230 (the chin gun on the Apache heli). The comment on weight is noteworthy, though--that m230 weighs only 127 lbs.
Of course, you have to add in the weight of the ammo supply, as well as the sponson, armor housing, and so on. If you think of the cannons on a Mech as being more like small naval artillery guns, instead of oversized machine guns, it doesn't seem quite so obscene.
Of course, in the end the whole concept of mecha is based on a couple different concepts that are completely false in the "real world," anyway. So getting too worked up in 'realism' isn't necessarily too useful. Battletech--along with every other 'big robot' world--assumes two things. First, that it's possible to make a vertical, walking machine which is remotely as fast or efficient as a rolling armored vehicle, given the same technology being implemented in both designs. And second, that in the race between engineers designing stronger and better armor, and engineers designing cheaper and better armor-defeating munitions, that the armor-designers ever win. They don't.
That ten-dollar Soviet RPG will always be a danger to the ten-million-dollar armored vehicle...
One of the only remotely believable cover stories is that the Battletech engineers are simply incapable of making any useful targeting systems whatsoever. So you have a situation roughly analogous to World War I-era naval ships: massively armored ships carrying huge cannon that can fire over the visible horizon, who can only target each other by eyesight and seat-of-the-pants reckoning.
And this is all just babbling, of course--it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with actually creating your alternate-Battletech setting. I'm just being a Sophist for the hell of it.
