Companion: Weapon Prices / A few questions

[VictorMorson]

Hey everyone, I was looking through the ATOW Companion to find the Wire-Guided Missile Launcher as it sounded like an interesting weapon system and this book is actually pretty impressive - a week ago, I didn't know it existed.  Lot of good stuff.

But my questions come down to:

 - Why is the Wire-Guided Missile Launcher 800,000 credits?  It's an infantry support weapon that is many times more expensive than a 'mech grade gun and completely out of whack with other support gun prices - is this an error?
 - The same goes for the Vintage Gatling Gun, which costs 450,000 credits.  The price drops sharply so the next most expensive thing is 50,000, closer to consistency.  An error or correct?
 - I can find almost no fluff on these weapons; does any exist?

Thanks!

[HABeas2]

No real fluff, no. The premise is that they are "vintage weaponry", as in weapons so old that they may even predate the Terran Hegemony. The prices reflect what you might expect from finding a weapon that's over 700 years old and still works.

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[Mohammed As`Zaman Bey]

  Yeah, those are "collectors" prices. Considering the technologies range between Industrial Age to 1940s technology, those weapons would be far cheaper in they were in production, even at a cottage level and closer to the prices of common battlefield weaponry of similar performance.

  I'm in a campaign where the GM introduced wire-guided missiles used by low-tech insurgents and they are devastating, if they hit. They have similar weaknesses to early wire-guided missiles in that they can be dodged, the missiles could be shot down, or the firer killed before impact.

  Before introducing WGMs to a game, I suggest you do some research on how they worked in combat, not just in theory.

[RunandFindOut]

Yes, if you're thinking about introducing wire-guided missiles they shouldn't be expensive.  They can in fact be made so simple that with the common tech levels of the Inner Sphere a civilian hobbyist with some background in remote control systems and metalworking should be able to make them and do it cheaply.

But they aren't a panacea.  Especially simpler ones like the 1960s era WGM, they're big and they're heavy and most of them were transported either with a carrying handle or two on a load-carrying frame on your back.  The Fins were carried separate from the missile and fixed on it when you emplaced it for launch.  A lot of the early missiles didn't have a separate launcher instead they launched from the ground and had two motors.  A boost motor that got them up off the ground vertically or near vertically then a conventional motor that carried them to the target.  When they launched it was extremely obvious from great distance and made the firing position a beacon for enemy fire.  Which is why many if not all of them had remote launch units that allowed them to be controlled from up to a hundred yards away from the missile's launch site.  The missile also traveled quite slowly, usually somewhere between 100 and 200 mph in speed and had to be actively steered with a joystick like control onto the target.  Which meant their flight path was also normally pretty predictable but that somebody very good with them could do impressive things.  I've seen some people who were good use them for indirect fire steered onto targets in cover or behind hills, or manual top attacks where they kicked the missile up and dropped it onto a target from above purely by eye.  I've even seen them used against helicopters and if the operator was good enough and the helicopter didn't realize they were aiming at it until too late it could actually work.

But the other side is that launches are spectacular and draw fire from everybody who can see it.  And that has a tendency to kill missile teams if they don't use remote launch controls to operate from a separate position than the launch site.  Even if they do the missile gets its guidance from somebody with a control manually guiding the missile to its target.  So if the fire cuts the wire the missile looses guidance, and even if it doesn't start putting enough fire into the area of the launch and you've got a very good chance of disrupting the ability of the missile team to control their missile.  On top of that the missile is SLOW, as in slow enough that a person with good reflexes can actually hit one in flight with a manually controlled weapon. 

So on a Battletech battlefield anything with an AMS is going to swat them like ****** flies and even those who don't have AMS will have a chance of shooting them down.  And as mentioned above they can be dodged even when guided by skilled operators, early wire-guided missile hit rates were quite low.  They aren't useless but they're a very niche weapon.