d20 future = Mechwarrior d20

[jester47]

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.

Good point. Still, you are looking at an awesome weapon when you stat measureing thier size in metric tons. I guess what I am talking about is that they are supposed to be "machine gun like" cannons. The rules with the ultras and such make them sound like one shell wonders. Your comment about counting "support" hardware for the gun dopes help balance the whole thing out a bit more. Rad links by the way.

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.

But that is just it. A walker, that could walk with the same skill as a human, is able to access terrain where rollers or hoverers cannot. That is thier one key advantage. They are not as hindered by trees, mountains and other assorted terrain. Its the ultimate ATV which equates to the ability to deliver a lot more 1st person firepower. On top of that, the walkers in the BT universe use 28th century technology. These rollers largely use a 21st base with 28th weapons and armor. And the tanks are limited to terrain. Granted there are weapon systems that can reach into those places, but nothing is as effective as rooting out your enemy as somthing that can walk in there and deliver 1st person damage. Be that an infantry unit or a mech.

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...

Hence the Antimech infantry and the SRM infantry that is featured in the boardgame. It is written in such a way that, if you use infantry right, you can take out a mech fairly easily. I think that is the reason BT is as engrosing as it is. It actually operates on a more "real world" assumption than other mecha subgenres.

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.

I don't know. Most every weapon system requires some sort of "line of sense" to the target of some sort. Be you a sattelite aimed laser or a seismic triggered land mine. And yeah, you could have awesome sensors that pick up the target and aim the weapon for you but only trajectory weapons can reach around the obstacles. But a trajectory that can reach over obstacles indicates that there is travel time. This would lead to the ability to dodge any unguided weapon that used trajectory to clear obstacles simply by moving. Thus the requirement for line of sight.

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.

Yes but every bit helps to make it better!

Aaron.

 

[Henry Hankovich]

I don't know. Most every weapon system requires some sort of "line of sense" to the target of some sort. Be you a sattelite aimed laser or a seismic triggered land mine. And yeah, you could have awesome sensors that pick up the target and aim the weapon for you but only trajectory weapons can reach around the obstacles. But a trajectory that can reach over obstacles indicates that there is travel time. This would lead to the ability to dodge any unguided weapon that used trajectory to clear obstacles simply by moving. Thus the requirement for line of sight.

What I was referring to was more along the lines of the sophisticated auto-tracking and targeting electronics we have nowadays. Everything in Battletech (it seems) is targeted by eyeball--you look through your crosshairs like a WWII fighter pilot, you squeeze the trigger, the guns blast away. Which is why you end up with 80-ton Battlemechs blasting away at each other from within 200 meters or less, on open terrain. That's what I meant by the battleship analogy: in 1914 the only way to sight in those massive 15-inch guns was to shoot them off, look through binoculars to see where the splashes were, adjust your aim, and repeat. So even though you have this massive firepower that theoretically could be sinking ships ten miles away, you still end up with the Brits and the Germans crusing past each other at kissing distance, plugging away at each other.

Actually, a better analogy would be the two-gun USS Monitor cruising in circles around a 100-gun sailing ship-of-the-line. In the Battletech world, the 100-gun ship always wins....

A 20 ton Locust with modern, "real-world" tank equipment would completely rape any 'classic' Battlemech it came across, regardless of how heavy the opponent was. Designate with a laser, fire off a Hellfire or TOW, and watch that Atlas brew up from five or six kilometers away. Of course, once you have that capability, it makes more sense just to strap those Hellfires to a helicopter or a set of wheels. In the real world, if you can be seen (including radar, infrared, whatever), you can be killed. In Battletech, it's not a matter of seeing the enemy--you have to see the whites of the pilot's eyes before you can consistently hit anything.

So, yeah. Battletech assumes that you're going to use a large volume of fire at close range to slowly (or not so slowly) slough off the opponent's armor through ablation. Consequently, "improvements" in Battlemech-engineering seem to consist of figuring out how to load even more LRMs or Ultra ACs on a mech, so that when you're at kissing distance with the other guy, you have a couple hundred more rounds to fire off downrange. Whereas, the 'real world' method, is to build better munitions and better targeting systems, so you can get kills at long range, without having to constantly replace all that highly-expensive armor that the Battlemech guys are constantly melting or shredding away.

Which is what kind of ruins it for me. You have engineers that can figure out how to use your freakin' brainwaves to control a walking machine; but they can't figure out how to strap a camera to the nose of a 500-lb bomb and use it to take out an Atlas from 40,000 feet. Much less build a laser guided, shaped-charge rocket. There's a really weird dysjunction of technology going on, that I always attributed to "we have these Mechs that someone else built for us a thousand years ago; but we've reverted to the point that we don't even know what transistors are any more."

 

[Geoff Watson]

The short range of Battletech weaponry is for game-play, not realism. It allows maneuver and tactics, rather than just who got surprise or had longer range.

Geoff.

 

[jester47]

There are several assumptions I would make about mechs:

1. Their armor is somthing that is a lot tougher than anything we have today.
2. Their weapons are made to go through that armor.
3. Some can get up to 60mph in speed. Some are faster some are slower.
4. They are not limited by terrain.
5. Some even carry cruise missiles like the Arrow IV.

So I would doubt that a modern Hellfire or TOW would be able to get through the armor, or would do very little damage. We are talking about 21st C vs. 28th C.

Case in point the locust. It is a machine that can cruise at 120kph+ (80mph). If you are on the freeway going 60mph, this little bug can fly past you. And he is running. Stomp stomp stomp. With grace and elegance. With armor 50 times stronger* than anything we have on a tank today. This is somthing modern weapons could not penetrate. It is an ATV. It can go underwater and into space. Into forests and mountains. If can fill the roles of infantry, armor, and support. Sharing this last one with aircraft. Thats a pretty spiffy weapon system, just in its versatility alone. And we have not gotten to the actual shooting yet which is where the "real" 21st C tech and the made up 28th C tech have thier disjuctions.

It makes sense that a mech is primarily a "direct fire" weapon system, as most of the roles it fills are direct fire roles. Direct fire is where the target is seen and aimed at from the gun. So while the indirect long range never miss attack is accounted for (long toms and Arrow IVs), I guess the question is why do mechs miss in direct fire if they have the computing power to have really good targeting? Why, if we can occasionally send a bomb down a vent, or drive cruise missiles down streets in the 21st C, can't Giant Multirole walkers in the 28th track each other worth a damn? Why does the pilot even have to think about aiming? These are all really good questions and one of the flaws in battletech as it stands.

But this will be reconciled and the questions will be answered in the next post

*This is a number I am pulling out of my butt based on the relative tensile strengths of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes vs. Titanium. Titanium weighs in at 900 MPa, almost 1 GPa. SWCN weigh in at 63GPa at it highest recorded measurement. I knock it down to 50 to be realisitic. I would assume that such technology would be used to make mech armor. Thus impenetrable by today's standards.

Aaron.

 

[jester47]

Issues we looked at previously are the following:

1. Mechpilots with 28th century Technology should not have to aim.
2. The ranges of the wepoans seem unrealistic.

#2 comes out of a truth about weapons. Its eaiser to use different weapons at different ranges. Pistols are better for close in fighting than longrifles. the Confusion in Battletech comes from two points: Autocannons and Lasers. Most every other weapon has the same range. An AC5 has the standard 24 hexes. ACs apparently loose range as thier ammo increases in caliber or looose accuracy as you try to saturate the air with shells. Lasers loose range because it takes more energy to get through the atmostphere.
(thus in our reimagining, space battles and desert sandstorms should be quite different, no?) This we can deal with. The d20 cloud of probability allows for those impossible shots with the medium laser and such. This is good.

But why miss? You have that rad targeting computer, turn it on and use it. heck there are scripts in quakeIII that can aim for you. Why do you have to aim in the 28th century?

I would say its probably from the way the mech is designed. It all comes back to the neurohelmet. This spiffy thing is picking up the commands to drive the mech, keep it balanced and upright, flush coolant etc. It controls the movement of the mech. And I think there is the rub. Aiming the weapons of the mech counts at movement of the mech. I would surmise that in the 28th century that the engineers would not be able to reconcile a system that overrides the pilots movement impulses with the movements needed to automaticly aim the weapons. Thus weapons aiming is left up to the pilots brain. Essentially overriding pilot ego with a computer was too much of a task even for the 28th century.

Now it gets weird and cyberpunkish. So the neurohelmet controls the fireing and the movement of the mech. When the pilot wants somthing done all he has to do is generate a strong enough impulse for the helmet to pick up. Really all he has to do is think about fireing at the left leg. However, the impulse has to be strong enough. For most of us to get that strong of an impulse, we need cause and effect. Hence all those controls in the mech that do absolutely nothing. All they are there for is to give a button to push to reinforce the neural impulse. The Throttle and Joystick are the same things. Placebos. The HUD shows the pilot where he is aiming. The stick reinforces the impulse for aiming and the trigger for fireing. The battlecomputer is responsible for collecting the info from the mech and the sensors and displaying it to the pilot.

Using this idea, we can find reasons for the clan targeting computer being a higher tech item in that it is a start in working with the pilots inpulses rather than against them. This works as the attacks are based on the pilots gunnery skill. Hence a reason why there is only limited advanced targeting in mechs in the 31st century. This opens the door for a feat. The Zen Mech Feat. Basicly the pilot has learned to control his mind in such a way he rarely needs to press fake buttons. Also, it allows for the psycho (ala UNBOUND) that is willing to wire himself directly to his mech.

Anyways, more wood for the fire!

Aaron.

 

[Henry Hankovich]

Issues we looked at previously are the following:

Now it gets weird and cyberpunkish. So the neurohelmet controls the fireing and the movement of the mech. When the pilot wants somthing done all he has to do is generate a strong enough impulse for the helmet to pick up. Really all he has to do is think about fireing at the left leg. However, the impulse has to be strong enough. For most of us to get that strong of an impulse, we need cause and effect. Hence all those controls in the mech that do absolutely nothing. All they are there for is to give a button to push to reinforce the neural impulse. The Throttle and Joystick are the same things. Placebos. The HUD shows the pilot where he is aiming. The stick reinforces the impulse for aiming and the trigger for fireing. The battlecomputer is responsible for collecting the info from the mech and the sensors and displaying it to the pilot.

Heh. Controls that don't actually do anything except give the pilot something to yank on? It's an Evangelion!

 

[Henry]

Jester, that's beautiful. It would be one of the best jokes in any RPG ever designed.

Now, what you could say is all of those knobs, joysticks, wheels, etc. are actually backup controls...

 

[Aaron L]

I could swear that all the neurohelmet did was tie the pilots sense of balance into the 'mechs gyro's, nothing beyond that. Of course, this is Mechwarrior 1st edition technical info I am working from, so they could have retconned it.

And I was under the impression that the close ranges and eyeball targeting was because of the extreme ECM the 'mechs carried, jamming just about everything, like gundams.

I think I am going with Mecha Crusade rules for my Dragonstar mecha. The D20 Mecha rules are just way to much.

Now, for Battletech, the D20 mecha rules are perfect for more cumbersome vehicle Battlemechs.

 

[jester47]

Henry H. -- Yeah, but Evas are not really mecha now are they? In fact there is a chance they could be your mom.

Henry -- I was thinking that. But I was thinking that it would be more fun if the players open up a captured locust to find that the pilot only had one big red button for everything. (cause locust pilots are sopposed to be kinda off...) In truth though, even if the mech was fully controled by NI, arrays of buttons and switches would help the pilot to keep the functions at his/her disposal sorted and in mind. Of course the Zen pilot keeps everything in mind. This reinforces in my opinion that Int would come to play in driving a mech too.

Aaron L. -- Its retconned, but not in the way you might think. 1st ed MW had complete control of the mech's movement through the neurohelmet. I think this got changed around the time the clans showed up (MW2). Look at the beginning of this thread for the quote about the neuro helmets.

I heard that ECM thing too. However, if that was true and it was that severe than the sensors wouldn't work. And as long as the sensors work, you can have a computer targeting. I like my idea that makes fun of pilots. Flyboys are supposed to have really big egos, take TOPGUN or Macross Plus for example. I would assume that there is a bit of ECMing going on, but not so much that the sensors don't work. The ECM equipment option is basicly an advanced ECM. The opposite of the Beagle which is advanced sensors.

 

[jester47]

I think it would be funny for a PC to have a button in his mech that said BREAKDANCE.

Aaron