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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Henry Hankovich" data-source="post: 1665377" data-attributes="member: 20280">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.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />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.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />   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."</blockquote>

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