It's not that it cooks off more easily; it doesn't. It's that the cookoffs are so much more catastrophic.

A single ton of full, untouched, pristine AC/20 ammo that cooks off will, if you're not protected by CASE, do 160 points of damage to the mech. That's bad, REALLY bad, but depending on the mech and the ammo location you can actually live through that. And that's if you cook off an untouched ammo stockpile; if you fire three or four rounds suddenly you're down into much more manageable territory if and when it cooks off.

MG ammo is... very dense. You almost never need more than a single ton of it, because a single ton of MG ammo contains 240 rounds. Even if you're running a crazy pepperbox design designed to go crit-hunting, the odds of you depleting more than 20 rounds of that in a single trigger pull (and that's an absurd number of MGs to have on a mech) are not high, which means that single ton is gonna last you any reasonable battle.

An untouched ton of MG ammo cooking off will do 240 points of damage to your mech. NOTHING lives through that, not a fully-armored ANYTHING. You go from zero to dead. And because that ton depletes so very, very, VERY slowly, it is usually at or near max.

It's the most dangerous thing inside your mech.

Something I very much like about HBS BT is that through-armor crits are no longer a thing. Sure, it makes some designs that could be kinda fun non-viable, the aforementioned pepperbox, or an SL boat, or whatnot. Crit-hunting could be kinda cool. But it also means that, while you can still get your mech headshot, pilot dead, otherwise undamaged war machine topples over, completely useless, it means that it is literally impossible for some bullshit 30-ton gnat of a mech to fire its pathetic armaments at you... and because they're piloted by Luke Skywalker or some bullshit, it finds a chink in your massive layers of armor and crits you right in your ammo store, blowing you sky-high.

That can't happen anymore.

-Merc
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