Well, the way Heavy Gear handles damage, the better (more accurate) the hit, the more damage it does. That's probably a "direct" hit, with damage attenuating as the blast expands. The damage multiplier of the weapon (which is hard to put into penetration terms for a MOS 1) is the least amount of damage it could possibly do and still hit. A medium artillery missile has a DM x18, which means that against most gear armor, the least it could possibly do is light damage (which still has a chance of destroying the gear, however slim). That's assuming that the Gear is on the edge of the radius, or has something shielding it from the brunt of the blast.Vympel wrote:I like Heavy Gear. But really, the above makes no sense. Does everything in the blast radius get penetrated to the extent of 324mm of this steel, or only a direct hit?Or the dreaded Vandal, with the Medium Artillery Missiles:
Effective Range: 24000 m, 25 meter blast radius
Penetration: 324 mm armor-grade steel
May not destroy heavy armor, but it'll stop infantry charges or IFVs (or most Gears) dead.
Infantry, however, has a maximum damage of 12 or so (since they're soft targets, they operate on the hitpoint principle). A medium artillery missile, at worst (MOS 1), will completely wipe out a squad, as damage for blast radius weapons are applied to each infantryman individually. Meanwhile, a cannon with DM x18 with a MOS 1 would likely kill one infantryman and severely wound another, assuming a damage of 12, which is on the extreme high end for infantry (standard infantry squad is usually 5).
There are two ways to figure out the proper abilities of weapoons. One is to take the MOS 1 value as the basic penetration value, which means that the better the shot (the higher the MOS), the more vulnerable a place it hit (somewhere with less armor than average, place where the armor was weakened in previous engagements, etc). The second is to consider an arbitrary MOS (for example, MOS 3) to be the basic penetration value, as the penetration tests were done in a lab firing a stationary gun at a stationary target. Everything below that point doesn't penetrate as well as the lab results for a variety of reasons, and everything above that result managed to strike a weak point in the target.
It's possible that DP9 used the second method for determining damage properties, but we'd have to ask them to be sure. After doing some quick calculations, it seems that the penetration appears to be roughly the square of the damage multiplier. This holds true for most weapons in the game.
).
In 'Mechwarrior 2, 3, and 4 I've always had incredible success with that basic idea (since the in-game mechanics make it impossible to follow that config exactly). It gives your 'mech long range main armament and support (PPCs and LRM, respectively), and short range, rapid fire weaponry in case you get rushed by a little annoying Kit Fox or some such. There's little need to get more "big guns" after the PPCs and LRMs, so might as well spend the extra tonnage on short-range "doorstops", armor, and jump jets.
