WiGEs aren't new. The Soviets used them starting in the 60's, the physical knowledge that they could be made was understood in the 1920s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_vehicle
They're new to Battletech. They weren't released until Total Warfare- about twenty years after the game was first conceived in the early 1980s.
It's not a knee jerk reaction at all. I see little advantage towards combining a quad mech with vehicular movements. It is not a good argument to make an unsupported suggestion regarding someones basis for their opinions rather than supporting your own reason for an opinion. I like new things in battletech, more than most I think considering some's reactions to various changes in the universe or technology through the years.
We know little to nothing about the quadvees as of yet. You heard about them in this thread, and immediately concluded that they're ill conceived because you assumed they won't make sense.
That is, by definition, a
knee jerk reaction.
It's no different than someone hearing about WiGEs for Total Warfare, and assume that because we already have VTOLs, Hovercrafts, Conventional Fighters
and Aerospace fighters there wouldn't be an advantage to them.
Or concluding that any combination of a 'mech and an aerospace would be useless due to movement penalties and conversion equipment- making LAMs 'ill conceived'
Or a combination of a Battlemech and Battle Armour would be ill conceived as well.
Yet, somehow, TPTB have all managed to make them work in the game.
Jumping to the assumption and going on a rant that quadvees are stupid before seeing any sort of rules for them is an overreaction.
I simply don't like new things that seem poorly conceived. Quadvees seem just that at this point. I could be surprised in the future, but the basic idea seems like it would result in a more complex object (expensive, difficult to maintain), with more mass and volume devoted to it's movement systems (less mass for armor/weaponry/engine), and more vulnerable to movement system failure or damage from combat. In return, it gains what? Quads are already very stable, while a tank isn't vulnerable to falling from damage, it's a limited gain.
Or, you know, they could combine the features of both instead of their negative quirks. Protomechs don't suffer falling damage, for example. As it's Clan, and the Horses have been using Protomechs of late, they could incorporate the smaller gyros and technology there into this quadvee. We could see a quad-like 'mech that saves tonnage by using smaller gyros and smaller engines for a similiar movement profile, or as Paul suggests, a vehicle that ignors terrain modifiers with minor tradeoffs.
In the end, we won't know until we see the actual rules. There was fear that a modern version of the LAM rules would be overpowered by some, and crippled by others. In the end, it looks like TBTB did a nice job.
Jumping to the assumption that they can't come up with rules that reflect a niche this vehicle can fill (especially as many of them wrote for MWDA under Wizkids) is what's ill conceived at this point, in my opinion.