During the Story campaign, we recover Star League knowledge in the form of a memory core.We have the Argo, a Lostech (civilian) Dropship of great value.The Player's merc band in the 2018 game is influenced by Comstar in some fashionLet us count the ways: So, the AC/2 is akin to a real life anti-aircraft gun, AC/5s to many tank and tank destroyer guns, AC/10s to a high(er)-velocity version of the KV-2's 150mm howitzer, and AC/20s are basically an 8-inch mortar loaded with armor-piercing shells.
AC/s don't do this, and probably can't use as heavy a propellant charge either. Howitzers get their range by firing in a high arc. By a top-heavy fighting vehicle that cannot spread it's recoil across a set of spuds or even four wheels. Added to that, the autocannons in Battletech are all autoloading burst-firing guns, so the rear of the gun must have a relatively complex loading system! The upshot of all this is that AC/10s and AC/20s are quite short barreled weapons for their caliber, akin to howitzers - but being used in a direct-fire role.
#Battletech heavy metal aero plus#
An 8-inch naval gun as mentioned above, has a barrel 11 meters long, plus an extra 2-ish meters for the breech, and that's not including the space behind the gun needed to load the shell, and into which the entire gun recoils upon firing. The biggest factor in range of a gun is not weight of projectile, it's the amount of propellant and length of barrel, which must be matched to avoid wasted energy. There's actually a realistic answer to this conundrum: Bore length.Also, it's only weapons already capable of actually dealing damage at long range that can qualify, so the 200mm AC-20 mentioned above still is restricted to 300 yards. It'd be insanely easy for even a skill 0 pilot to need a 12 or above on 2d6 to hit. It's a +8 modifier, modified by movement and terrain. However both of those have insanely high to-hit modifiers, meaning that even an ace pilot would need a good bit of luck to actually hit anything at Horizon Range. This point seems to have been addressed in a very roundabout way in Alpha Strike, where units are given two more range bands in expanded rules - Extreme (21-30 hexes, or 42-60 inches), and Horizon, the latter being effectively Exactly What It Says on the Tin.Also in one of the more recent rulebooks (not sure which, mind) there's a note from the designers that for the sake of effective gameplay, the ranges in game are much shorter than what they would be in the fluff.You'd need a Segway to get from one end of the map to the other. If you used the REAL range of guns that size, the map would have to be close to 1,500 hexes long. Adding to the previous note, each hex on the map is 30 meters across.Accuracy 25 miles is not so easy when you're firing a good 60-200 rounds a minute. Speaking of recoil, there is also the matter that most Autocannons are literally cannon-scale machineguns.If it was higher, the 'mechs wouldn't be able to handle the recoil. The short range of the larger A Cs probably can be explained by low projectile speed.It's not that they can't fire far it's that they can't fire far and do so accurately. Mechs are big, but compare the gun/space ratio of a mech's arm or torso, then look at the gun/body ratio for a ship the ship has a lot more room for recoil compensation and such. I've always considered it less of an absolute range problem and more of an accuracy problem.If you combined that kind of damage with a realistic range, game balance would go out the window. The Mk-71 has an effective range of about 25 MILES, about 150 times the range of an AC/20, but as it stands, the AC/20 can already destroy most Light Mechs with one or two shots. an example would be the MK-71 naval 8-inch gun (200mm is just shy of 8 inches). Remember the Autocannon/20? The book establishes that an AC/20 is somewhere in the 185mm to 200mm range, and yet, its maximum range is less than 300 yards. Game balance explains a lot of the other weirdness in the game. It's also heavy and bulky for game balance reasons.Additional sensors attatched to the weapons allso adds more tonnage/crits, though for ease of gameplay/design, all those bits were lumped in with the actual computer. Indeed, such things as additional recoil/motion compensators would take up a fair bit of room and tonnage.It's all the extra peripheral performance-enhancing gear that takes up the tonnage and space (and yes, that's canon). Despite the name, there's actually a lot more to a functional targeting computer than just a bunch of chips to be plugged into an existing system as-is.It might also explain the Short-Range Long-Range Weapon thing.
This would explain why an additional targeting computer takes up several tons and a lot of hull space.Integrated circuits are LosTech, and all computers are analog.
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