Improve Battletech

[consequences]

I'm not sure what you're getting at consequences. Would you mind elaborating regarding the strategic paradigm?

If you make weapons and subcomponents in general more accessible it completely changes the whole landscape. You would need more handwaving of how tiny forces can manage to take worlds.

Not having everything they need on hand helps explain how important factory worlds can actually be successfully attacked. Something demonstrated in the official history, if you fail to take Hesperus quickly enough, it will throw another regiment out there to shoot all of your force calculations all to hell, though in that case they likely had to salvage fusion reactors from the wreckage of both sides to pull it off.


Much also depends on how seriously you take Objective Raids as a source, and how carefully you go line by line in the TROs and sourcebooks to disprove it. At least to me, it makes more sense to have the factories and their suppliers scattered willy-nilly if you're keeping the whole recovering from a dark age theme. Manufacturers are going to be established where they can be easily built, and even more importantly easily defended, with a rational scheme of production being third on the list at best.

[Lightning]

IIRC the first succession war wasn't the first time there was fairly widespread WMD use. (Age of war, reunification war)

[PainRack]

If you make weapons and subcomponents in general more accessible it completely changes the whole landscape. You would need more handwaving of how tiny forces can manage to take worlds.

Not having everything they need on hand helps explain how important factory worlds can actually be successfully attacked. Something demonstrated in the official history, if you fail to take Hesperus quickly enough, it will throw another regiment out there to shoot all of your force calculations all to hell, though in that case they likely had to salvage fusion reactors from the wreckage of both sides to pull it off.


Much also depends on how seriously you take Objective Raids as a source, and how carefully you go line by line in the TROs and sourcebooks to disprove it. At least to me, it makes more sense to have the factories and their suppliers scattered willy-nilly if you're keeping the whole recovering from a dark age theme. Manufacturers are going to be established where they can be easily built, and even more importantly easily defended, with a rational scheme of production being third on the list at best.

I wasn't talking about that actually, but rather, about the siting of factories as well as the scattering of suppliers across the galaxy. Factories are usually placed far away from resource sites, away from areas of labour and power and "natural" logistic networks such as rivers and etc. A spaceport is usually built but not always.

Regarding scattering of suppliers and the theme, well.... that IS true. I just don't like it because the scale of an entire star system is simply too large to avoid building subcomponents on one planet.

[PainRack]

IIRC the first succession war wasn't the first time there was fairly widespread WMD use. (Age of war, reunification war)

The Reunification War featured the use of WMD by the Taurians, although this was restricted mostly to nuclear attacks against spaceborne targets and the use of kamikaze attacks, terrorist strikes.

The Age of War was bound by the Ares convention, so, nope. I probably have to do a look to see whether there was any documented WMD attack other than the general barbarity which prompted the move towards the Ares convention.

[Steven Snyder]

As a BT player back from the 88-92 period, my information is dated, I think 3055 was the last book I saw.

But I have been putting some thought into the system to try and fix it...it may be hopeless. What I can't fix is the horrible real-world combat performance of a humaniform mech vs something shaped like a modern tank.

My solution would be to add a shields to mechs, though not perfect ones. It would be a combination of a sophisticated sensor array, an AI, and kinetic barriers, that could deflect attacks if it has enough time to react. Projectiles would be detected and defeated with a projected kinetic field from the mech itself, the more time the shield system has to react to the threat the less dangerous it becomes. This of course means that the ability of the shield system to deflect attacks depends on the flight time of the incoming projectile, thus the factors of range and projectile velocity make all the importance. So battletech combat would have to be resolved by getting mechs close and unleash their firepower at point-blank range where their defense systems would have trouble reacting in time. So now we are back to mechs engaging each other at ranges that are insanely close by modern standards, but their weapons are perfectly capable of damaging targets at least on par with modern weaponry, assuming the those targets are not shielded.

This would require that energy weapons such as lasers and PPCs be removed from the system, they wouldn't work with this...but that does allow us to remove the Heat system as the remaining ballistic weapons really don't generate much.

I see a system where autocannons would be of various calibers and then could be loaded with at least 3 type of ammunition, lower-velocity armor piercing explosive rounds that would be a low range/high damage type, a standard ammunition which would fit the medium range/medium damage category, and ultra-high velocity rounds that sacrifice armor penetration and explosive payload to fit in the long range/low damage niche. Missiles would be similarly affected but you wouldn't need to to worry if the launcher is an SRM/LRM, just what sort of missile type is loaded into it.

Now I know this isn't pretty, but the system itself is horribly flawed and this is the best I can do to bring some sense to it.