I think the PPC carriers in the city battle was supposed to carry support PPCs. IIRC they shoot Lori's Locust a couple of times with them? Locusts don't get shot multiple times by full-sized PPCs and keep fighting... ;)
I think so too.
I think the PPC Carrier in HTP: Glengarry is a different beast and what we see in DaTR is more like a jeep with an S-PPC instead of an MG.
I ran the numbers myself and what I came up with had a fixed PPC, 5/8 movement and I think like 2.5t of armour in a 40 tonner; which is just the kind of nonsense I like in BT and the sort of unit I love to throw at players in my kind of games. But Wow! Talk about the tail wagging the dog! As a manufacturer or a commander, geeze; do I want to get in on that? Wow.
I also found the Weapons Carrier-A, which is a Hover 25t ICE vehicle with a large laser, which the MUL says has an LRM variant which we have never seen. Which is perfect for this list.
Looking at the PPC carrier from HTP:G, I am reminded of the numbers which Cray or some other gifted member ran on the old forums which basically established that even with the most optimistic projections for ICE fuel in the BTU, on a pure economics level; Fusion Engines paid for themselves rapidly, even in the darkest days of lostech.
More germane to the topic though; I think we could put up LRM and AC hover weapons carriers and some further light, wheeled weapons carriers would be welcome as well, no?
Not to threadjack this into a "what if" weapon thread, but the near-absence of grenade launchers has always bothered me as well. The VGL makes a good smoke dispenser and competitor to A-pods, but where is the equivalent of a Mk 19? Even infantry rarely seem to use them. I can't think off the top of my head of a mention of them being used anywhere in the fiction, despite some of the rather obvious shortcomings of SRMs as an infantry anti-materiel weapon.
There is a lot of confusion in infantry weapons between art and stats as presented in different versions of different games set in the BTU. One of my back-burner projects is a rationalized infantry weapons list that provides stats for every version of the game, as well as my own rationalized, consistent stats, re-balanced for better play. In addition; I'd add a number of weapons to fill out some notable gaps.
In terms of a Mk-19-style weapon; while there is an automatic grenade launcher in several incarnations, in terms of a weapon with the range, punch and crew requirements of the Mk-19 and similar weapons; no, we never see them. Battletech likes to step-down punch, as it steps up capacity and rate of fire and this was carried over to the infantry weapons.
For my money, all of the BA Mortars are really heavy grenade launchers and the grenade launchers are more like weak, small cannons.
