Nightmares with Aerotech (Battletech)

[fusion]

While looking through the fan made ships, I though about the armor of the ship, then it hit me that the armor of most ships is less than mm thick . So I found out that a well defended super-dreadnought of 2000 meter length has only 0.4 mm of armor....

So this ship has an impressive 7500 tons of armor but the problem is that the ship is a mile and a half long. 7500 tons of armor is about 1000 cubic meters if it has the same density as steel. Such ship would be about an average 500 meters tall and 500 meters wide (picked these numbers because it has the smallest perimeter) such ship would have the surface area of

500x3.14x2000+250^2x3.14=3.3 million square meters of surface area.

1000/3,300,000=0.0003m or 0.4mm thick of armor

linky to ship

So one could really say foil thin armor And what is even worst is that this is considered a well armored vessel....

So my question is why don't they just use machine guns?

[VF5SS]

So my question is why don't they just use machine guns?

Dude, machine guns in Battletech are fucking dangerous! A mere half ton of bullets explodes with more force than a single ton of LRM-20 ammo. Carrying enough bullets to take out an entire ship runs the risk of a nuclear explosion of machine gun rounds.

[fusion]

Over a hundred points of damage to a single spot...

Isn't that the most powerful thing besides the nukes themselves?

My problem is that my car has better armor than that...

[Covenant]

Over a hundred points of damage to a single spot...

Isn't that the most powerful thing besides the nukes themselves?

My problem is that my car has better armor than that...

The HAB is probably more afraid of a machinegun mounted on your car than any variety of military machine from battletech. Now you just don't need to wonder why anymore.

[VF5SS]

To put it all in perspective, the 100 ton Atlas has 304 points of armor. One ton of ammo (I messed up, it's the machine gun itself that weighs half a ton) does 2 times 200 damage when it blows up. That's 400 damage from what is often called a 20mm cannon. The funny thing is that machine guns were used as an example in at least one of the books for why ammo explosions are so dangerous. Clearly all wars in Battletech should be fought with armies dropping boxes of machine gun ammo on each other.

[Coalition]

It's been known about for a while on the classicbattletech.com forum. Think handwavium armor, composed of a mixture of cobwebs and vacuum to get the density right.

The other fun ones are:
* Fuel consumption (a 200,000 kiloton ship and a ~2 million ton ship both burn 40 tons of fuel per day, maintaining the same acceleration the whole time)
* Dropship and Lithium-Fusion battery multipliers on KF core costs. Compare the price for a Davion 770 kiloton Destroyer with Lithium-Fusion battery and 6 Dropship docking slots (20.3 billion C-Bills) vs the price of a Steiner 1.35 megaton battlecruiser with 4 Dropship docking slots (7.4 billion)
* Squadroned Fighters versus Warships: on a per cost and Battlevalue, squadrons of fighters are much more dangerous than an equal cost or battlevalue Warship.

There are a few of us trying to make an Aerotech 3 with changes to the above. Mostly though we just post our gripes and an idea here and there.

[GuppyShark]

Personally, I thought the real problem with AeroTech 2 was that it made Aerospace fighters superior to BattleMechs in every single way.

They had more armour.
They were less vulnerable to critical hits.
They could fire more often.
Their movement was measured in mapsheets.

[Nephtys]

Personally, I thought the real problem with AeroTech 2 was that it made Aerospace fighters superior to BattleMechs in every single way.

They had more armour.
They were less vulnerable to critical hits.
They could fire more often.
Their movement was measured in mapsheets.

Ugh. The Eisensturm or STU-D6 Stuka were soo much better than comparable Battlemechs. But I think that's the intent though for most: Aerotechs and Mechs are both elite unit types with comparable capabilities, unlike the 'one weightclass oversized' Tanks what die the instant an inferno SRM stares at them, or the 'E-Z Pop Rotor' VTOLs.

[VF5SS]

I dunno about those VTOLs. You put enough Kestrel VTOLs with a player who has the patience to move them all you may just see Battlemechs dying in a hale of machine gun fire.