To clarify things a bit: classic BT had a thing called a through-armor crit. Any time you hit and damaged a mech anywhere you had a very small chance of doing critical damage to it, regardless of armor remaining where you hit it. There was a whole school of mech design based around this, in fact; mechs with tons and tons and TONS of MGs and/or SLs, designed to unleash something like twenty of them on an enemy, preferably from point-blank range into their back, every round. You're not looking to damage. You're looking to roll, and roll, and roll, and ROLL on the crit table until you finally get lucky. You were looking for the gyroscope. You were looking for the engine. And you were especially looking for ammo.

The through-armor crit rendered anything on the battlefield with the ability to hit you a genuine threat if it rolled well enough.

This is why it is a bad idea to keep ammo in your center torso. You can get away with that in HBS BT, kind of, because through-armor crits aren't a thing there so they don't have even a tiny chance of critting your ammo until they've stripped off all your CT armor, either front or back.

In the old game? Yeah, no. Don't... don't put ammo in the CT. Really, putting ammo in the torso at all is all-advised.

Interestingly, this could lead to mech designs that would be hilariously inefficient in the "real" world. It wasn't uncommon for someone rigging up a mech from scratch to go "hmm, no more space in that arm after putting the weapons in it. I could put the ammo in the torso... ahahahahaNO. Ammo goes in the other arm." Which means that you had mechs whose ammo feed systems were taking ammo from a bin in one arm, moving it up the arm, through the entire torso, and then feeding a weapon in the opposite arm.

-Merc
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