Torso Twists, Shields, and Rear Firing Arcs

[marcussmythe]

I'm not clear enough on my thoughts yet to ask the formal rules question people, so I wanted to get a sense here if my reasoning is correct.

1.)  Incoming damage locations are based on the facing of the mech's feet.
2.)  Twisting a mech's torso changes that mech's firing arcs, but does not change the hit locations of incoming damage.
3.)  A shield, actively used, protects the arm, the side torso, the center torso, and the head.  It does not protect the opposite arm, or any rear location.
4.)  Tripod mechs may torso twist 360*
5.)  Weapons in locations protected by an actively used shield may not fire.

Therefore:
A Tripod, facing north, with a shield actively used in each arm, and -rear- mounted weapons, could torso twist to bring its rear arc to bear, fire them freely to an opponent to its north, but return fire would be resolved against the -front- of the Tripod, and have to punch through the shield.

Obviously, IF the above is true, it would get house ruled at my table pretty quickly, but as I was fiddling with 'making things hard to kill', it came up in my head.

[Daryk]

That definitely looks like a weakness in the Tripod rules to me...

[Weirdo]

I believe an active shield does cover the rear side torso on that side, though I could be wrong.

All else fails, you may know why no canon tripod mounts a shield.

[Retry]

I believe an active shield does cover the rear side torso on that side, though I could be wrong.

All else fails, you may know why no canon tripod mounts a shield.

I think the fact that there's like, 3 whole canon tripod designs (all from the RotS) has more to due with the lack of tripods with shields since there's a distinct lack of, well, tripods.

It is a goofy scenario that the abstraction doesn't handle well, though I doubt it'd be particularly useful in practice.  Good, big shields are pretty heavy and they slow you down, and I do think the rear mounted weapons suffer some sort of secondary to-hit modifier too.

From what I understand (from Tac Ops Pg290ish), the shield does cover the rear side torso, but only in active mode.  Shield rules are kind of convoluted IMO

[marcussmythe]

This all started because I saw the sheild rules and pictured using them as an ablatige shell (one on each arm) to protect most of the mech, leaving a small section exposed to shoot.

But they really dont work well for that (not being designed for it - no surprise) - so wierdness happens.

Its been amusing.  For all my fiddling with stealth systems, smoke laying, hull down tripods, better armor, etc - when I test it vs Princess or solo me v me, its very hard to compete with straightforward, 3050 tech Clan designs.  They can do it, but have less margin for error and unluck than ‘moar gunz’.

Beyond that, when I look at BV - wow, BV hates defensive systems.

[mbear]

I'm not clear enough on my thoughts yet to ask the formal rules question people, so I wanted to get a sense here if my reasoning is correct.

1.)  Incoming damage locations are based on the facing of the mech's feet.

I thought incoming damage applied to the torsos was affected by torso twists. Off to BMM to find out.

edit: Nope. I was wrong. Huh.

[RoundTop]

I thought incoming damage applied to the torsos was affected by torso twists. Off to BMM to find out.

edit: Nope. I was wrong. Huh.

To be very clear.  It has NEVER been modified by torso twists. That is a common misconception/house rule going back decades.