patchwork armor

[Crimson Dawn]

So I was making a custom variant of a catapult and it had 10.5 tons of clan ferro fibrous so 201 points.  I put that on everything except the head of the mech.  I then put 8 points of hardened armor on the head which is supposed to be 1 ton.  I am using megamek and it seems to jump up all the way up to 12 or 12.5 tons.  I just wanted to make sure that conceptually that if I had 10.5 tons of ferro fibrous and put 8 points of hardened armor using patchwork armor rules it should be just a grand total of 11.5 tons of armor or if I was missing something from the patchwork armor rules.

[Hammer]

Since your using Megameklab. What version are you using? 

[Crimson Dawn]

Since your using Megameklab. What version are you using?

megameklac version 0.45.4

[Hammer]

megameklac version 0.45.4

That’s an old version I’d recommend updating to the the newest versions. Lots of fixes since that release.

https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=67537.0

[Crimson Dawn]

Well I just tried the newer version (nice putting in artwork at the start in the newer version by the way) and it seems to do the same thing.  Putting in the first hardened armor point immediately seems to jump the grand total amount of armor from 10.5 straight to 11.5 which I thought it should only go up to 11.  So is that just a bug or are there things about patchwork armor I do not know about?

I liked the idea of my merc protecting himself by giving himself more armor on his head and this is how I was going to do it so I am hoping it works.

[Maelwys]

It could be a rounding issue.

Assuming I'm not missing any errata/rules changes for the patchwork armor, the rules state that you calculate the weight of the armor (rounding up to the nearest half ton) for each location.

So unless I'm mistaken, as soon as you make the design utilizing patchwork armor, you have to recalculate the weight of all that Ferro Fibrous armor as well, and the rounding might be where the other weight is coming in.

[Crimson Dawn]

It could be a rounding issue.

Assuming I'm not missing any errata/rules changes for the patchwork armor, the rules state that you calculate the weight of the armor (rounding up to the nearest half ton) for each location.

So unless I'm mistaken, as soon as you make the design utilizing patchwork armor, you have to recalculate the weight of all that Ferro Fibrous armor as well, and the rounding might be where the other weight is coming in.

That was something I was trying to watch out for so what I did was put myself at full armor allocated that and then took away a half ton (for this mech I had one half ton left before I removed that half ton of armor so this left me the full ton I was planning on using on hardened armor for the head).  That told me that I was then 10 points over so I removed the 9 points from my head and one from the center torso to make the the armor outside of my head equal to 10.5 tons of ferro fibrous armor (clan type).  This way I knew I had an exact amount of armor I needed and I also planned to only add 8 points of hardened armor on the head which should be exactly 1 ton.

I am thinking it may be a bug in meklab because I did the same technique with standard armor with hardened armor on the head.  I had exactly 10.5 tons of standard armor on everything except the head and then added 8 points of hardened armor to the head which brought the grand total to exactly 11.5 tons of armor. 

So patchwork armor seems to work correctly when I use standard and hardened armor together but so far clan ferro fibrous and hardened armor on the head seems to run into problems.

[Hammer]

Can you tell us how much of each type of armor you've but in each location.  It would help us trouble shoot MegaMekLab

[Hammer]

I've got a rules question in for this as well.  Their seems to be some conflicting rules depending on the edition.

https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=67819.0

[Crimson Dawn]

Can you tell us how much of each type of armor you've but in each location.  It would help us trouble shoot MegaMekLab

10.5 tons of clan ferro fibrous which the meklab says is 201 total points distributed as 20 in each arm, 23 points front side torsos 7 in each rear torso, 31 front center torso 10 rear, 30 in each leg.  I have 0 on the head at that point.

I then turn on patchwork and set head to hardened armor.  when I put in the first point on the head armor type at the top of the screen switches to hardened and the total tonnage jumps from 10.5 to 11.5 from just the first point of hardened armor.  I then boost it to 8 points into the head which should be a total of 1 ton of hardened armor but mega mek seems to put it all the way up a grand total of 12 tons of armor.  This is also weird because when I first start at 10.5  tons of armor my mech is at a total of 64 tons so 1 ton left.  After using patchwork armor the grand total for armor says 12 which is 1.5 tons more than where I started but it says my total tonnage for my mech is now 66 tons which means my design gained 2 tons which makes no sense.

[Shin Ji]

I've been doing the same thing in the most recent version of MekHQ (in the Mek Lab) and what I have noticed is that you need to move the armor points up and down a bit before the system figures out the actual weight. So, it's no biggie, but you don't want to just leave it be after designating it as patchwork.

[Shin Ji]

BTW - putting hardened armor on just the head is genius!

[Crimson Dawn]

BTW - putting hardened armor on just the head is genius!

It is a great way to add more survivability to a unit for an extra half ton and some additional complexity.  Also perhaps feeling slightly dirty (maybe).