You mean the -5M?
It kinda sucks... but at least we get CASE for it...
TT
I'm willing to give a pass to the 3050 upgrades. It was brand new technology to the Inner Sphere, and they really didn't know how the stuff worked. There are a lot of "bad" designs in that book, but it
makes sense that they'd have bad designs.
Plus I don't think all the technology was available to every manufacturer. Just because you get access to CASE doesn't mean you've got access to Endo Steel. Your company might get a shipment of ER PPCs but that doesn't mean you can get your hands on any Double Heat Sinks. People made do with what they had, and a lot of times I don't think they understood the performance envelopes (i.e., game stats) of the equipment they were installing.
With the CASE, I imagine that it was sold as a way to save a mech from an ammo explosion. Miracle technology, of course you'd want it. The fact that it has appreciable
weight, enough to affect what equipment the mech can carry, probably wasn't mentioned. It takes up a crit slot too, and in real world terms that probably means that the internal space the Hunchback had allocated for ammo (xxx cubic feet) was reduced. To get back up to 2 tons of ammo, you might have to redesign the entire torso layout. Design in-universe is probably harder than it is for us, where we can just say "drop the small laser", they don't necessarily have that option.