Heavy Metal Vee

[Psyckosama]

Is there something wrong with Vee's calculation of hover units engine weight? Because I get some funky looking results when I try and stat up hovers.

[Rick Raisley]

To my knowledge, nothing is wrong with it. However, you have to realize there are a number of special rules with Hovers that apply, such as the engine must weigh at least 20% of the vehicle's maximum weight. That tends to throw a lot of people off. If you know of another problem, please contact me.

[Khymerion]

Speaking of Heavy Metal Vee, will there be an option eventually to use Fuel Cell engines in vehicles or some of the newer armors and equipments that came out in the Tactical Handbook?  It is nice being able to manually enter in new weapons but it does limit newer vehicles that might use equipment, engines, or armors that are not older... which is fine for trying to create the most bargain basement tech 1 machine.  While my mech editors are great to be able to recreate anything on two legs... having to still pull out the classic pencil/pen and fill in the dots method on a blank for anything modern that rolls or hovers or these days, glides...  is almost an anachronism.  Especially when someone can have a nice professional looking and math checked (thus less likely to get someone to yell at you and thus trusted) custom machine sheet next to it.

Again, I apologize if it is something you hear often, I mean no offense.

[Peter Smith]

An update will most likely come sometime after Heavy Metal Pro is updated. Since HMPro is five years out of date, I wouldn't expect to see anything for HMVee for a while.

[Khymerion]

That stinks to hear...  in that it is going to still be the mech jocks getting all the nice toys and having to be in the vertiable stone age in terms of support units (because when prepping a scenario for a campaign, filling out 12+ sheets of vehicles is tedious at best compared to a mech boy getting to just run them off in minutes)

[guardiandashi]

I am going to add a Mabie to peters reasoning about the timeframe for an updated HMVee

if rick made HMVee a lot easier to ... tweek under the hood so to speak, it might be more akin to a database update rather than the almost total rewrite that hmpro seemes to be requiring

[Peter Smith]

if rick made HMVee a lot easier to...

If Rick could get past asking for help I think one of the many programmers that are also BattleTech fans would love to step up and help the guy out.

[guardiandashi]

note I was not actually criticizing Rick, what I was commenting on was that from the sound of things I have heard in the past, the HM Pro program includes more ... hard coded data aparantly than ... tables where a person could just change the table to update the program on the fly so to speak

IE standard internal vs endosteel might be a hard coded either or not a if endosteel look at column B, if (new option) composite look at column C if ....

I was just commenting that if HMVee when Rick wrote it up back in the day, was written a little more conducive to future upgrades ( and not saying it is or isn't ) then it may be a quicker or easier upgrade cycle to add more options