I was mildly annoyed, but not surprised, to discover that even as a zero-day user, by the time I came to create my other callsign (the one for the overall account, not the single-player campaign), "gryphon" was already taken. Looks like Zebulon P. Gryphon rides yet again. :)

--G.
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I know -that- feel. I've had to get creative with things that can be interpreted as 'Silversword'. Battletech gets ArgentBlade. :)

Had a couple days at the campaign now meself, enjoying it, just got half my arse handed to me during one of the story cutscenes. Buncha new stuff, two dead pilots.

Also really liking the salvage mechanics, even if it did mewn I only got 2/3 of that one Catapukt K-2 I killed via lucky headshot. Would've come in real handy to, y'know, not have my people all die.

~Silv'

My ancient pen-and-paper instincts whisper that swapping out a Spider for pretty much anything is worth it. :)

--G.
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Oh sure, eventually it'll be worth it but the call right now is "a jenner would cost me 4 months of operating costs and I only have 6 right now should I do that? Or should I take a bunch of low paying jobs and negotiate for higher salvage to hope to get one?"

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

You aren't the only one feeling that. Plus, I keep wanting to rip out PPCs out of smaller 'Mechs and replacing them with Large Lasers and extra heat sinks.

I'm looking at you, Panther....

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

Clearly, they need to look at scavenging the parts for a Black Knight for her.

Peter Eng
--
"I'll bite your legs off!"

Speaking off, in my first mission after the "this is how things work", I got both of those achievements (blowing both arms off, and blowing 1 arm off)

It makes performing softer takedowns, to get better salvage, really tricky when you have a distinct tendency to blow up all your future loot.

"Ooo, there's a PPC in that mech's arm. Even better it's missing a leg, the other leg is out of armor, and the arm and torso with the PPC is undamaged." *Makes called shot on leg.* *Right torso destroyed.* "What, come on?!"

In the tabletop game, you're generally invited to consider yourself lucky if you hit the correct enemy 'Mech. Aiming at individual body parts? Who do you think you are, Napoleon Solo?

--G.
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I wonder why the disconnect between the mechwarrior games and the battletech games.

Like, I assume that any 'Warrior fresh out of boot camp (or whatever the equivalent was) is probably better at piloting a 'Mech than I would be after a couple hundred hours of playing MechWarrior 4.

What was the thing that was poorly modeled? Slow aiming? Lag between pulling the trigger and the weapon firing? Low accuracy on the weapon itself (no HUD reticle maybe?)

Yes, I know that neither game is real, but still I wonder what the thing is that the designers of the tabletop game thought for percentages of hitting with weapons that weren't modeled by the time there was a 'sim' developed. Were they things purposefully removed for improved gameplay, or just because they hadn't thought up the things yet?

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

If I had to guess, and I do, it was that the designers thought aiming at hit locations would have made the weapons fire resolution phase of the tabletop game take too long. As it is there are half a million fiddly modifiers you have to take into account just to figure out if you hit the 'Mech at all—range, elevation differences, Gunnery skill, heat level, did you move, did the target move, how much, are there buildings, are there trees, is anything else screwing with your line-of-sight, is your 'Mech damaged in a relevant way, relative facing/arcs of fire, have you got a friend with a target designator, is anyone doing ECM, and on and on. By the time you're done calculating all of that, to pile on an attempt to hit a particular piece of the enemy unit was probably just too annoying. Roll on the hit location table and let's all get on with our lives.

MechWarrior (the computer game family; the BattleTech RPG system was already called that) operates on a completely different plane. It's in real time, for one thing, which the tabletop game absolutely isn't, so even before you get to the in-the-cockpit viewpoint you're already using a different part of your gaming brain. In that context it would be weird if you couldn't at least try to call your shots, but by the same token, since you're controlling the 'Mech directly in real time, it doesn't take half an hour (of not only your time, but all the other players' as well) to do the math and figure out if you did it; you just try it and see if it works.

This is an unsubstantiated guess, but I suspect you find less skillful MechWarrior players missing outright a lot more of the time when attempting, e.g., head shots, than tabletop players miss when using the conventional hit mechanics. Statistically, they really ought to, anyway.

--G.
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There's also the bit that the numbers were set when it was still "these 'mechs barely work and their targeting systems are no better than the mid-20th century stuff." The computer games came after most of those early assumptions had been thrown out. Sure the 'mechs still tended to be old, (although everyone was still building them¹), but they were being maintained with new-build parts, rather than battlefield salvage and centuries-old supply caches.

1: To the point of having to make "that was the last LAM factory that just got destroyed" an event in the fiction to help get rid of those OP things.

LAMs were only overpowered if mishandled, and then mostly just because of the brokenness of certain AeroTech rules. They ought to be balanced by their fragility, the time required to change modes, and the fact that 10 percent of their mass is taken up by the transformation gear; but they aren't, because AeroTech's rules for ground attack (particularly strafing) are so hilarious. When you can attack everything on about a quarter of the map area in a single round in fighter mode with the same weapons that can attack one enemy target at a time in 'Mech mode, that might be a bit ridiculous. :)

--G.
sure was fun, though
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Don't.

I mean... yes, in terms of RP, that's your families ancestral BattleMech.

In terms of practicality? Shove that piece of shit in your storage bay and never, ever look back. The Blackjack needs about ten more tons for its hardpoint distribution to be at all decent; you only get by with it early in the game because everything you're fighting is already fucked up.

-Merc
Keep Rat

LRMs are potentially even worse. If you've got anything that can see you, odds are good those LRM carriers will be bombing you EVERY. DAMN. PHASE. It's a glorious nightmare, and it makes stepping on them in response oh so satisfying.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

It's was only difficulty *two*, and it was a simple vehicle stomp with some potential 'Mech backup.

I took my 'Mech's down, three just-barely mediums and a light, and started scouting slowly forward.

The very first thing we ran into was a heavy missile carrier with a mixed load of long and short range missiles. I start engaging, not a huge issue, then my last 'Mech goes and that vehicle goes fist. I'm thinking "this is going to hurt" but instead of shooting it establishes a sensor lock -- and my scout takes 60 LRM.

Not from the heavy, no, that would be the *assault* class missile carrier outside of sensor range. The one loaded with three LRM-20 and more armor than any one of my 'Mech's total weight. And it's staying outside of sensor range (and in cover to boot).

I caught the first heavy carrier in the side and alpha'd it to death. Then engaged another of the same and managed to focus down it too. Took more fire from the assault LRM missile carrier, cover saving the targeted 'Mech. Then the final vehicle, an assault class SRM carrier, got over the hill and wrote off my first 'Mech.

This is when the backup arrived. At least three Commandos and medium 'Mech I didn't bother to identify before I extracted the hell out of that death trap.

They could be. Punching in tabletop (assuming your 'Mech has proper arms) does one point of damager per 10 tons the punching 'Mech weighs, which isn't all that much (a punch from an Atlas, the heaviest 'Mech available without using Weird Rules, does 10 points of damage, the same as a hit from a PPC or an AC/10), but you roll 1d6 (instead of the usual 2d6) for hit location on a special table that only encompasses the target's upper body, which gives you a 1-in-6 chance of hitting the head instead of the usual 1-in-11.

(Death From Above damage is assigned using the same table, which is a big part of why it's such a feared maneuver, too.)

The tabletop game also has rules for picking up a sufficiently wieldy object off the ground (the canonical examples in the rulebook are a tree from a hex with the Woods terrain, a girder from the rubble of a ruined building, or a blown-off limb from somebody else's 'Mech) and using it as a club, which is both hilarious and potentially quite effective. Of course, your 'Mech has to have hands to do it, and a lot of them don't, so it's not for everyone, but...

--G.
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Give that 'Mechs are technically Armored Fighting Vehicles, I can see where the Clans were coming from. At the same time, given the general tech regression and the Inner Sphere's attitudes towards 'Mechs in general, I'm surprised they aren't a little more common. Maybe not built straight into the 'Mech like the Hatchetman's own Hatchet, but there are a lot of 'Mechs that have arms, but don't have weapons mounted in those arms.

Even just a 'Mech scaled entrenching tool, hardened enough to use as a weapon in a pinch, would be of huge utility.

Given that one of the defining features of the Clans, besides the fact that all of their equipment is cheaty as fuck, is that they have selectively bred out any trace of imagination or creativity from their soldiery, that makes perfect sense.

>Even just a 'Mech scaled entrenching tool, hardened enough to use as a
>weapon in a pinch, would be of huge utility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAdam_Shield_Shovel

--G.
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Point of order: this wasn't because of a lack of creativity on the Clans part. They were contemptuous of Inner Sphere mechs using melee weapons, either the venerable hatchet or the fancy-pants sword House Kurita favored, because that's Not Done. It isn't the Way Wars Are Fought and is Dishonorable. Melee combat was a HUGE no-no.

Something to understand about the Clans is that they're like if you took all the worst aspects of the Klingons honor culture and cranked them up to eleven. War is a game to them, a ritual. People are prizes to be traded back and forth like trophies between victors and losers in said "wars." They are to be conducted in ways that don't actually impact the warrior caste (other than, you know, the possibility of death) and don't damage the planets they occur on, which sounds like a laudable thing until you realize those strictures only exist to allow the warriors to continue playing at war as long as possible while not having any downside risk.

Many Clanners loathe the Inner Sphere because, when the Clans went to conquer them, the Inner Sphere refused to treat war as a game and treated it as a WAR. They did things like mount counter-invasions of Clan homeworlds and refuse to take part in competitive bidding or honor batchalls. They'd achieve local superiority and defeat Clan forces via strength in numbers, dogpiling the superior Clan mechs rather than fighting one-on-one duels with them in the Clan fashion.

This drove the Clans up the wall.

-Merc
Keep Rat

The most OP weapon in EVE is diplomacy. (RIP Vile Rat.)

To be fair, the Clans caught on to the fact that the Inner Sphere wasn't going to cooperate very quickly, and because they're not actually STUPID stupid basically decided "our codes of honor are NOT APPLICABLE against them unless we decide they are."

They just really hate it.

>Hilarity usually ensues and the e-honorable practitioners of space
>bushido rarely emerge the victors.

You know, I get what you're saying here, but as a former EVE player myself I usually associate the non-ironic use of "e-honor" with people explaining to me why I'm not allowed to get mad at them telling lies to new players in order to grief them or picking out a guy who clearly just wants to mine in hisec in peace and conducting a relentless harassment campaign against them anytime they undock "for the lulz."

-Merc
Keep Rat

Yes they are. They very much are.

>You know, I get what you're saying here, but as a former EVE player
>myself I usually associate the non-ironic use of "e-honor" with people
>explaining to me why I'm not allowed to get mad at them telling lies
>to new players in order to grief them or picking out a guy who clearly
>just wants to mine in hisec in peace and conducting a relentless
>harassment campaign against them anytime they undock "for the lulz."

EVE Online: Contains More Assholes Than The Inner Sphere.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

My talk about how to start up (and eventually shut down) an alliance without fucking anyone over or stealing everything that isn't nailed down was certainly the most novel one at Fanfest 2015. Especially coming from someone whose current spacejob title was "senior Goonswarm diplomat". ;)

I feel like I've probably told this story before, but:

When I went back to college, a startling number of years ago now, I spent a brief stint as an electrical engineering major before switching to mechanical engineering. In the introductory EE lab course I took, there was a guy who liked to brag about his online exploits during lab time. Like one day he talked about how the group he was in on Reddit had doxxed some guy they didn't like and got him fired from his real-life job. It was always some reprehensible thing like that. He was always really amused and assumed that his listeners would be too.

Griefing other players in EVE Online was a recurring theme in these war stories. One day I asked him if he had any hobbies that didn't involve being a cock to complete strangers over the Internet, and he grinned a big shit-eating grin and replied, "Nope!"

Strangely, I have never felt even the slightest desire to consider playing EVE Online.

--G.
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RIP Vile Rat
------
Oh God, it was me. I was the grognard all along.

"It's your own fault, Kowalski. Didn't anyone ever tell you to make sure your optics are clean?"

--G.
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The Pacific shellfish gets a mech. Now maybe they'll show some respect.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

But you don't start off with an Urbanmech, why you gotta tease like that HBS >:(

------
Oh God, it was me. I was the grognard all along.

What makes that even funnier is that it's not pronounced at all the way you'd expect if you haven't encountered it before. I know I was startled when I moved up here and ran into that headfirst.

--sofaspud
--

I know what a gooeyduck is, I just wasn't expecting to find it on a list of MechWarrior callsigns. :)

--G.
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------
Oh God, it was me. I was the grognard all along.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMW-j7cBQL0

------
Oh God, it was me. I was the grognard all along.

How dare you, sir. Locust is life. Locust is love. ... OK, Locust is at least better than Spider. :)

Also, hey, Shadow Hawk has to be good for something, it's certainly not going to carry any fights with its hopelessly weedy weapons loadout...

--G.
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The Shadow Hawk stock loadout is indeed pants, but it has the hard points and tonnage to be massively customized without shedding a lot of armor into a real asskicker.

I got a long way through the game with a Missilehawk; two SRM 6s, an SRM 4 (in the head!) and an ML. It isn't QUITE heat neutral if you aren't someplace cold but close enough that you can alpha and jump for quite some time before needing to back off, and when you're running two of them they can knock down much bigger mechs.

You can also strip out an SRM and the ML and load in an AC/5. This gives you some additional reach, and the Shadow Hawk is fast and jumpy enough that it can place other units outside of the minimum range of the AC/5 but still inside the sweet spot for the SRMs.

-Merc
Keep Rat

I'm currently experimenting with an AC/10+ I happened across last night. Right now I've taken off the AC/5 and the SRM2 to make room for it, and it seems to work fine, but I might switch up the missiles (take off the LRM5, put the SRMs back) and see if it works even better as more of a brawler. I mean, Behemoth isn't exactly the outfit's finesse gunner anyway.

--G.
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Yeah, if you've got an AC/10, you really don't want LRMs. Slap an SRM on that sucker. You might end up dismounting it when you get a Centurion, tho, the most iconic AC/10 wielding BattleMech of all time.

BattleTech has always loved designing stock mechs that are sort of all-rounders, meant to engage at all range envelopes with at least SOMETHING. Like, take the Vindicator. PPC, LRM5, ML, SL. Or the Blackjack, with a pair of AC/2 and then a shitload of MLs.

And it's like... okay, I get it. You're engaging with your own lore which says that in the degenerate late-stage Succession Wars era of 3025, BattleMechs are rare and precious things, and you'll often literally be the only guy on the battlefield with one, like a knight on his horse, and as such your mech is meant to engage at all range envelopes, firing missiles or long-range autocannons as it approaches a target and then switching to close-up stuff when the fight turns into a brawl. And even if you're part of a lance, your lancemates might end up shot to bits in the course of an extended engagement or campaign, so you had better be prepared to go it alone.

The problem is that these generalist designs make a certain amount of sense in-universe but they're actually sometimes tooth-gnashingly frustrating to engage with as the player of a game, especially when you have a full lance of mechs and you want to build them into a synergistic team of asskickers whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts rather than just have a team of kinda meh generalists. You find yourself going "why is my long-range fire support mech wasting all this tonnage on close-range weaponry when it COULD have a second PPC or an upgraded LRM rack? I feel gimped."

-Merc
Keep Rat

Not a terribly high bar to clear there.... :)

Michael

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

You've probably figured this out already, but if not ...

the Shadow Hawk has the best straight melee damage in the medium range. 85 damage per melee attack. That's just five points less than the best _heavies_ in that bracket (Grasshopper, Black Knight) do in terms of straight melee damage.

Slap some actuator mods and armor on it, and you can do _horrible_ things as you literally punch above your weight class.

With about as much success as tackling Jim Brown (Or Walter Payton or Barry Sanders) on the football field in their prime.....

Craig
(I just dated myself, didn't I?)

There's a very, very early Superman story where Superman disguises himself as a professional football players and enters a game in order to, I forget, thwart some unscrupulous sports gamblers or something (he was always having incredibly mundane adventures like that in the '30s). Anyway, there's a scene in that where he's just sort of wading downfield with the entire enemy team hanging off him, mildly inconvenienced, because at that early stage he only has the strength of a hundred men or such-like.

--G.
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Crusader doesn't have jump jets, so, no. :)

--G.
Ours was, "So can I throw my axe?"
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There is a variant that does but you have to live with driving a Liao produced mech and nooooooooope.

------
Oh God, it was me. I was the grognard all along.

Years ago in my tabletop RPG group, we were playing I think Shadowrun and one of the other players proposed to, quote, "jump out the side of the helicopter and swing down on a rope toward [the target]'s car and, you know, boingy boingy."

We all stared at him for a minute and then the GM said, with a perfectly straight face, "Boingy boingy requires an athletics check."