Battletech BattleTech discussion thread: May the light of Hanse Davion guide us

[Battlegrinder]

I don't know if this has been discussed here already, but how exactly does one become a Mechpilot? I know that you can only be born into being a pilot with the Clans, but how are things handled in the Inner Sphere?

You actually can be a clan mech pilot from outside the warrior caste, either by testing into the warrior caste, or being an IS pilot captured by the clan as a bondsman and being placed in the warrior caste. That said, it's rare to test in and extremely rare to get in via the isola route.

For the sphere, there's a bunch of different ways it can happen. The most common is probably just joining a house military or merc outfit and testing well enough to be assigned to a mech, same as how you'd get to be a fighter pilot or the like IRL. You could also inherit a mech from your family, but that's mostly a Noble thing. You could also just buy one and sign up with a merc group (and maybe a house army, not sure), generally they'll let you in if you're even vaguely competent.

There's a couple cases in the TROs where someone in a tank unit or other force has captured and salvaged an enemy mech and gotten to use it, but I imagine that's not common. Solaris VII teams might take promising fighters and train them as warriors, but if they do I think it's rare, Solaris is usual a BYOGR sorta place.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Interestingly enough Clan Blood Spirit has a tradition where even non-military castes can become Mechwarriors, via their grand melee where everybody is allowed to participate, and being the last one standing means promotion to the warrior caste and becoming a MechWarrior.

This is helped by the fact that Blood Spirits give everybody, absolutely every member of the clan, combat training so every laborer, scientist, merchant, and technician also gets range time and proficiency with weapons. In practice given the advantage of genetic programs the grand melee usually goes a a Trueborn who barely washed out but the option does exist.

 

[Aaron Fox]

Well, my brother and I have been building our forces for a coming Jihad-era campaign we're planning to play, and thanks to Solaris Skunk Works, we've been having fun with all sorts of designs. Like a twin-Gauss/MML-7/Laser boat with CASE that hits almost as well as a Direwolf/Daishi Prime or an Annihilator with LBX-10s and LPPCs.

Also, people should get into Tex talks Battletech... it's seriously fun (especially the STEINER STEALTH SQUAD bits).

 

[Battlegrinder]

Also, people should get into Tex talks Battletech... it's seriously fun (especially the STEINER STEALTH SQUAD bits).

I'm wondering if there's any part of the battletech fandom that's not into TTB at this point.

 

[Aaron Fox]

I'm wondering if there's any part of the battletech fandom that's not into TTB at this point.

I mean it is rather digestible bits of lore of various machines and events of the setting and has DUNCAN FISHER being, well, DUNCAN FISHER... and STEINER SCOUT LANCE.

 

[Typhonis]

I mean it is rather digestible bits of lore of various machines and events of the setting and has DUNCAN FISHER being, well, DUNCAN FISHER... and STEINER SCOUT LANCE.

Yes the Stiner Scout Lance method of stealth. If the enemy is not alive to report your position you are still hidden.

 

[Aaron Fox]

Yes the Stiner Scout Lance method of stealth. If the enemy is not alive to report your position you are still hidden.

People forget that the purpose of recon includes... well... poking the enemy. Atlases make poking the enemy a far less deadly problem for the lance in question.

 

[Culsu]

Soooo, is there is useful way to calculate the duration of emergence signatures?

 

[Battlegrinder]

Oh. I forgot to mention. I was actually able to get an IRL game going the other week. My longbow, omen, a clan tech devastator, malice and bullshark vs two marauders, a warhammer, a valkyrie, and 3 gauss rifle armed behemoths, with the other side also upping thier pilot skill to close the point gap, so they were very good. Unfortunately, I was very lucky.

On of the tanks skidded off a cliff at flak speed, fell off the cliff, and got itself stuck on a ledge the rest of the match. The other two got m-killed by LBX fire immediately.

It went even worse for the mechs. One marauder got It's head blown off by a missile salvo early on, the other one got a though beating by the devastator but was still standing. The warhammer, however, was the worst off (I don't think I ever hit the valkyrie, it was hiding behind a rock firing indirectly most of the game.

You might sense, based on my opponent's list, thst he's an old school player (I'm not sure what you'd read into mine). You would be correct, he's very old school. "Run a classic warhammer that still has a ton of MG ammo in the torso" old school, in fact. I had a malice, a mech armed with 5 LBX 5 autocannons. You can probably guess what happened.

That's not to say everything went my way, the Omen limped off the field with its engine and gyro barely intact, and the longbow took some hits, though relatively light.

Takeaways from the battle:
When people say vehicle are "vunerable" to motive damage, that actually understated it. I had read that "vunerable" to mean they're vunerable in the way werewolves are vunerable to silver, normally they're quit tough but the right weapon can punch through thier hide and hurt them like anyone else. It turns out it's more of a "regular normal humans are vunerable to napalm" sort of deal.

iATMs can fire indirectly, but that doesn't make them a good counter to conventional LRMs doing the same thing.

Sometimes, the main value of the old school is to remind people why everyone moved over to the bigger, cooler new school.

 

[PsihoKekec]

Did you run your star with C3I

"Run a classic warhammer that still has a ton of MG ammo in the torso"

in lvl.2 tech game? If I had to bring that model to the table I would chalk up the MG ammo bin a empty.

 

[Battlegrinder]

Did you run your star with C3I

Yes, always do, given in the range of designs I use I like to have some sort of unifying factor beyond paint schemes. Don't think it helped much, terrain made closing the gap hard, maybe shaved a few hexs off the total. Which is nice, but I think he had like 3/3 pilots, so it at best evened the odds.

in lvl.2 tech game? If I had to bring that model to the table I would chalk up the MG ammo bin a empty.

Level 4, I think, since the Malice is mixed tech by default. I'm not very familiar with tech levels, the local group basically runs two games, introtech and not introtech.

 

[Flintsteel]

Soooo, is there is useful way to calculate the duration of emergence signatures?

I think it's 2x the jump duration, which itself is based on distance traveled.

Yes, this does in fact mean the emergence signature is detectable before the drive itself is turned on. You may now commence with the temporal-mechanics headaches.

 

[Culsu]

I think it's 2x the jump duration, which itself is based on distance traveled.

Yes, this does in fact mean the emergence signature is detectable before the drive itself is turned on. You may now commence with the temporal-mechanics headaches.

So there's no handy formula? Like mass x distance or something?

 

[Doomsought]

Yes, this does in fact mean the emergence signature is detectable before the drive itself is turned on. You may now commence with the temporal-mechanics headaches.

An outgoing jump and and incoming jump cannot exist in the same place, probably exactly out to the distance of the lightspeed lag needed to prevent a paradox.

Edit: From SO:

The jump seems instantaneous, but it actually can take several minutes. The time varies depending on the distance traveled and the size of the JumpShip. The elapsed time in seconds is: [light years traveled ÷ 2] x maximum number of DropShips the JumpShip can carry.

 

[Culsu]

So basically the mass of the ship itself has no influence?

 

[Bear Ribs]

This would mean an Explorer with it's 0 drop collars takes no time to travel... and thus would have no emergence signature since said signature would exist for 0 seconds.

The tendency of BT to make "Number of collars" significant instead of tonnage or similar tends to slightly annoy me at times with how it creates nonsense results like this or mangles basic logic at times (I'm looking at you, "bays increase the cost of the jump core"). They actually posted a rules patch that such ships as the Explorer count as having 1 DropShip collar when I wish they'd just used a more reasonable standard instead.

 

[Aaron Fox]

Eh, people keep forgetting that BT is the '80s future, not the 2000s, 2010s, or even the '90s future. Everything is clunky instead of sleek, things won't get improved much, yadda, yadda, yadda.

 

[Culsu]

So a Pinto with 160,000 tons will have a longer emergence signature than a 400,000 tons Vincent, just because it has a collar? There's no bloody sense in that...

 

[Doomsought]

So basically the mass of the ship itself has no influence?

SO is a recompiling of rules publish piecemeal over multiple splatbooks, so it is likely that rule was written before there were rules for deigning warships or primitive jump ships like the explorer.

The potential number of dropships a jump-ship may carry is unit mass / 50000 tons, so you can plug that in for units without the maximum number of droship collars.

 

[PsihoKekec]

I am not exactly a fan of XXL engines so here is a bit downgraded version of Gunsmith

Gunsmith CH10-NG

Mass: 25 tons
Chassis: Endo Steel Biped
Power Plant: 250 XL
Cruising Speed: 108 kph
Maximum Speed: 216 kph
Jump Jets: None
     Jump Capacity: 0 meters
Armor: Reflective
Armament:
     2 ER Medium Laser
     2 Medium X-Pulse Laser
Manufacturer: Unknown
     Primary Factory: Unknown
Communication System: Unknown
Targeting & Tracking System: Unknown
Introduction Year: 3131
Tech Rating/Availability: F/X-X-X-E
Cost: 7,233,333 C-bills

Overview
With the deliveries of the PlasmaStar 250 being in doubt, the first pre-production series used readily available Magna 250 XL engines, necessitating some compromises.

Type: Gunsmith
Technology Base: Inner Sphere (Experimental)
Tonnage: 25
Battle Value: 1,435

Equipment                                          Mass
Internal Structure            Endo Steel            1.5
Engine                        250 XL                6.5
    Walking MP: 10
    Running MP: 15(20)
    Jumping MP: 0
Double Heat Sink              10 [20]                 0
XL Gyro                                             1.5
Cockpit                                               3
Armor Factor (Reflective)     88                    5.5

                          Internal   Armor   
                          Structure  Value   
     Head                    3         9     
     Center Torso            8         12   
     Center Torso (rear)               3     
     R/L Torso               6         10   
     R/L Torso (rear)                  2     
     R/L Arm                 4         8     
     R/L Leg                 6         12   


Right Arm Actuators: Shoulder, Upper Arm, Lower Arm
Left Arm Actuators: Shoulder, Upper Arm, Lower Arm

Weapons
and Ammo               Location  Critical   Heat    Tonnage   
Medium X-Pulse Laser      LA        1        6       2.0   
ER Medium Laser           LA        1        5       1.0   
MASC                      LT        1        -       1.0   
Medium X-Pulse Laser      RA        1        6       2.0   
ER Medium Laser           RA        1        5       1.0

And another one without MASC and a bit more range

Gunsmith CH12-NG

Mass: 25 tons
Chassis: Endo Steel Biped
Power Plant: 250 XL
Cruising Speed: 108 kph
Maximum Speed: 162 kph
Jump Jets: None
     Jump Capacity: 0 meters
Armor: Reflective
Armament:
     1 Light PPC
     2 Medium X-Pulse Laser
Manufacturer: Unknown
     Primary Factory: Unknown
Communication System: Unknown
Targeting & Tracking System: Unknown
Introduction Year: 3131
Tech Rating/Availability: F/X-X-X-X
Cost: 6,908,333 C-bills

Overview
A refit of a damaged Gunsmith during battle of New Avalon, inclusion of token long range firepower proved popular with mechwarriors leading to more such refits.

Type: Gunsmith
Technology Base: Inner Sphere (Experimental)
Tonnage: 25
Battle Value: 1,111

Equipment                                          Mass
Internal Structure            Endo Steel            1.5
Engine                        250 XL                6.5
    Walking MP: 10
    Running MP: 15
    Jumping MP: 0
Double Heat Sink              10 [20]                 0
XL Gyro                                             1.5
Cockpit                                               3
Armor Factor (Reflective)     88                    5.5

                          Internal   Armor   
                          Structure  Value   
     Head                    3         9     
     Center Torso            8         12   
     Center Torso (rear)               3     
     R/L Torso               6         10   
     R/L Torso (rear)                  2     
     R/L Arm                 4         8     
     R/L Leg                 6         12   


Right Arm Actuators: Shoulder, Upper Arm, Lower Arm
Left Arm Actuators: Shoulder, Upper Arm, Lower Arm

Weapons
and Ammo               Location  Critical   Heat    Tonnage   
Medium X-Pulse Laser      LA        1        6       2.0   
Light PPC                 LT        2        5       3.0   
Medium X-Pulse Laser      RA        1        6       2.0