StevieLasVegas
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Episode is on the Marauder, not the Highlanders. Still, can't wait to watch it
Battletech - Also known as Trannytech
- Thread starter Frosted Snowflakes
- Start date
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
I went and double-checked, and prior to the CI the Wolves actually made limited amounts of Clan equipment during the leadup, including those Dire Wolves they handed off to the winner and runner-up in the trial.
From Blood Legacy, at the first big meetup on Outreach.
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2020
That is funny. The 3052 era report states that all IS powers were already producing limited quantities of SL weapons before the Clans even invaded. Though upgrading their entire armies is of course another story. And then we have some inovations like TSM that the Clans never produced (and yeah I read the Clan trilogy too). The Clans had more variants of several weapons (like ER lasers in all weight classes, Streak SRM's wth 4 and 6 tubes etc)
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
Yeah. The Inner Sphere had recovered all of the LosTech stuff that the Star League had developed, but as you say, producing enough to refit entire armies is difficult, and something not even the Star League itself had done with the Hegemony restricting all of the best kit to the Royals. Half from cost, half from paranoia about the rest of the League nations. I don't have a chart of tech years handy, but I believe the last thing to be recovered were the LosTech energy weapons, the Combine coming out with them in 3037 just in time for the War of 3039. As to the weapons themselves, the SL had never developed a Streak bigger than a 2, LBX other than a 10, or an Ultra other than a 5, or an ER laser other than the Large. All of the IS variants of those weapons had to be reverse engineered from Clan tech.
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2016
So, since I only own the 4th Edition BT rulebook and I want to get the new shiny rules, what books should I get and in what order?
I was thinking AGOAC box (dem minis man) and Total Warfare, since I have a handful of vehicles, but at first I will mainly do matches with Mechs, so maybe it's worth to buy the MechManual before TW (it 's also more handy to use at the table than TW I guess).
Any suggestions? I guess my caveman hunter/gatherer switch has been turned, so I am going to buy Strategic Operations and all that other stuff sooner or later, too.
I was thinking AGOAC box (dem minis man) and Total Warfare, since I have a handful of vehicles, but at first I will mainly do matches with Mechs, so maybe it's worth to buy the MechManual before TW (it 's also more handy to use at the table than TW I guess).
Any suggestions? I guess my caveman hunter/gatherer switch has been turned, so I am going to buy Strategic Operations and all that other stuff sooner or later, too.
StevieLasVegas
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
AGOAC has the main rules you'll need to play the Total Warfare as well what's need for Alpha Strike (faster paced version). Both TW and AS books go into further detail and have more special rules. TW gets into detail about playing with combined arms (using tanks, aircraft, infantry) and space combat. A big boon for Alpha Strike is that every mech available has it's AS card listed within the Master Unit List website, so if you see a mech you like on there, you're hardest part you'll face will be getting the mini.
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2018
Yeah, I was kinda surprised at this. I could've sworn that the Inner Sphere hadn't recovered that much SL-era tech by 3049, but either I misremembered this or they retconned it. The Combine was fielding prototype Gauss rifles during the War of 3039 as well.
Some of the early battles depicted in Lethal Heritage play out kinda strangely because the IS Mechs and armaments are still Succession Wars era.
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2018
Well, the Hunchback was a good start but they hadn't solved the recoil issue at that point.
(At least one Mechwarrior solved this by wedging her Mech up against trees and buildings first before firing. Hard on the landscape though.)
While I'm thinking about weapons, more Clan bullshit: heavy lasers. Holy fuck why. Clan lasers already have +damage, why did they need a laser that deals 2x damage for over 2x heat?
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
I mean, at least they take that range hit (so now they're just better than IS lasers on damage and tonnage instead of absolutely fucking everything) and the to-hit because sensor fuckery. iHLs are bullshit though, then again the iHGR comes in about that time too.
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2020
They hadn't recovered all that much SL-era tech by 3049. A lot of it was still in the prototype stage when the Clans showed up, and even the bits and pieces that could be manufactured using only the data from the Helm Memory Core needed both production lines to assemble them, and new 'Mech designs that could mount them. For example, it took the Free Worlds League 12 years to get their own Gauss Rifles out in the field.
Most Inner Sphere 'Mechs in the TRO 3050 that carry post 3025-era tech are stated to have been designed back during the Star League era. The ones that are new production are stated as being very new.
Because Clanners are silly, that's why.
In gameplay terms, once the designers realized their fuckup with how the standard Clan weapons were balanced, they moved on to giving new weapons big tradeoffs in order to push them towards specific niches. The Heavy Lasers work well as a high-risk, high-reward weapon: you're not going to be boating those damn things without either shutting down or dedicating so much tonnage to heatsinks that you gimp yourself, and the penalty to hit is going to heavily encourage getting as close as possible to lower your to-hit number (which goes against most Clan weapons having longer range than their IS counterparts). It's a similar thing to the Variable-Speed Pulse Lasers we talked about a while back.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
The whole Omnis being bullshit thing points to another issue now that this came up - with something as... well, intense as a Gauss Rifle or UAC20 you'd think you couldn't just Omni in a BFG any old place without having your mech promptly disintegrate/fall over but apparently Omnitech is fucking magic about that. Why can a Kit Fox, a fucking 30t mech, slap a Gauss into an arm mount that used to hold an LB5X AC? Because fuck you, that's why.
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2020
And that's why Omnis are more expensive. Forget the pod bays, the real champion there is the scientist who developed the OmniMech Gyro. Normal Gyros can barely take ammo bins being unevenly empty without complaining, and yet the Coyotes figured out how to build a gyro that can take completely unbalanced loads with barely any calibration required.
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
Like people said, that stuff wasn't getting rolled out that quickly. While the weapons had been rediscovered, they still hadn't quite met the production stage. The FedSuns was rolling out field-test protos of the UAC/5 in 3039, same with prototype Gauss Rifles. The Combine usage was them jury-rigging some Hunchbacks with salvaged prototypes. It didn't exactly work out too well because Gauss rifles kick just a bit harder than the burst-firing derp gun that's the AC/20.
I mean, if you wanted a UAC/5 made by NAIS's best machinists with German levels of hand-finish, then yeah, you could get one around 3037/3038. Just don't expect a lot of them.
EDIT: Well... OmniMech gyro stuff is easy to handwave. Pods have to have info on their mounted weapons for the mech, even if its the exact same weight as what its replacing, and from there its just a self-balancing adaptive fly-by-wire system. You know, the sort of thing we have now for airplanes. The only reason we don't have OmniFighters is thanks to Boeing, IMO.
I mean, if you wanted a UAC/5 made by NAIS's best machinists with German levels of hand-finish, then yeah, you could get one around 3037/3038. Just don't expect a lot of them.
EDIT: Well... OmniMech gyro stuff is easy to handwave. Pods have to have info on their mounted weapons for the mech, even if its the exact same weight as what its replacing, and from there its just a self-balancing adaptive fly-by-wire system. You know, the sort of thing we have now for airplanes. The only reason we don't have OmniFighters is thanks to Boeing, IMO.
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2020
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you're firing an inert slug at fuck-you speeds, you have to be able to absorb the same amount of energy you're applying to the target. The difference is that while the target takes the energy of the impact all at once, against a single point, the firing unit has to absorb that energy over a certain period of time (the time it takes for the slug to accelerate), over a much larger area (the entire gauss rifle gets pushed backwards), with plenty of recoil dampening built into the gun and the mounting.
As for heat... beats me how they run so cool. I have played with coilguns and I don't remember them getting too hot. But even then, I wasn't firing 250lb ferro-nickel slugs at supersonic speeds, so... the power going through my little coilgun was nine or ten orders of magnitude lower than in a Gauss Rifle. I guess that's also why they turned into LosTech: the circuitry, the capacitors and the coils inside a Gauss Rifle need to be incredibly efficient to avoid waste heat. Either that or a lot of that 15-ton, 7-crit bulk is just dedicated heatsinks permanently attached to the weapon. Being slow-firing weapons probably helps with that, too. The circuits would have some time to cool off between shots.
ETA: Autocannons avoid the issues of recoil by firing much slower shells with explosive warheads that detonate when they hit the target. The heat they generate is simply what happens when you fire a gun in full-auto for a while: the chamber and barrel get hot, and that heat needs to be wicked away to avoid overheating.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
I'm a little hazy on how Newton's third law works when you're basically throwing something really really hard instead of pushing it with an explosion but makes sense (except for the heat, I know coilguns aren't railguns but seeing some of those prototype railguns belching these massive gouts of flame makes me look at the concept of the Gauss Rifle crosseyed)
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2018
Are there any vehicles that are basically a gauss rifle with an assault gun chassis designed around it? Being low to the ground would definitely help with recoil compared to a Hunchback
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
I was about to say "Hollander" but vehicle, right. Um... was there a Gauss Hetzer?
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2018
The Regulator and the Alacorn both sport gauss rifles. Don't think the Hetzer ever had a Gauss variant.