BattleTech - The Board Game of Armored Combat
BattleTech Game Systems => General BattleTech Discussion => Topic started by: StCptMara on 27 February 2024, 06:30:40
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In a number of threads over the years, I hear people describe the Aerospace side of BattleTech as things like "Deeply flawed" "Barely functional" and other, similar comments. I have played it in the Total Warfare form, and have had little issues with it, even when using the fighters interacting on a standard BattleTech map with ground units. It just adds a little extra book-keeping in those areas.
If I were to say that it had any real issues, it would be the Space Map using Vector Movement vs Atmospheric Map using maneuvres and such, with limits based on Structural Integrity, so that you are using two different sets of rules based on where you are fighting. However, again, that doesn't seem that big of a deal to me.
So...why does Aerospace seem to get as much hate directed at it as Dark Age?
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I refer to it as "My happy Math place." it is very complex when things get involved, significantly more so than Classic Battletech's ground game, which is already more crunch than some folks want. I personally have enjoyed playing out scenerios, but they take forever, and are probably not worth it if you aren't as invested as folks like me. It really seems like there is too much going on, too many rolls, too many rules that might or might not actually effect anything. All those criticisms can also be leveled at Classic, but this is more so.
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My suspicion is that aerospace suffers from being part of a niche category:
Hex-based space combat is already a very narrow market. There are other games out there (e.g. Full thrust, SFB) but none of them are huge sellers.
I’m not sure there is a large market for crunchy space combat simulators.
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Warship generation is very unbalanced, there's little reason to not take the largest ship and give it the best stuff (Leviathan) beside c-bill cost and arguably the c-bill cost is diminished on larger ships due to the fixed costs of a compact core making the dropships they carry more economical by comparison (Potemkin). Also dropship cost multipliers are nuts, it would be better to have a space-only dropship and a multirole dropship with different modifiers (Aerospace Fighter vs Conventional Fighter style, just inverse I suppose) to allow for more cost-effective assault ships meant for space fighting. Once all of that is taken into account the fuel loads normally carry mean they are incredibly short ranged when facing off against a dropship of comparable speed.
Vector movement on tabletop is also difficult to model due to the moving frame of reference and why I would have actually preferred something like a high-speed closing engagement pattern for it. I modeled how a typically vectored approach (in my Second Star League guide to Warships, link in sig below) would occur and its very similar. Its either a slow chase where the only weapon bays are aft vs prow at long ranges until someone turns around or gets closer or its a diagonal cut at relatively high closing speeds with maybe three turns worth of engagement potential before even capital weapons are outranged, and Aerospace fighters have expended their fuel. Doing it any other way basically punishes Warships and favors fighters by allowing them to linger a cut away at capital armor they should not be as capable of effectively damaging (that is also incredibly tinfoil based on surface area).
Nuclear weapons when they hit are potentially devastating and the Anti-Missile defenses of combatant craft are either impenetrable (due to easy mass for fire control penalty) or porous (when sticking within 20 weapons) leading to easy kills by missile ships despite nukes requiring specific rolls to acquire in tabletop. Whenever they are in a Warship fight each of those ships suddenly has a whole magazine of nukes.
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The biggest problem with areospace is the complete inability to shoot down an incomming bombing run with Anti Air Arrow IV at long range before it reaches your mapboard. As it is you can only shoot down simultaneously when a bombing run happens after the Damage is done.
The only preventable measure is an Aerospace cap moving to intercept. It doesn't really add anything to the ground game save making the combat take more time than necessary
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Layout. The layout of the rules in Total War is 99% of the problem with aero. The rest is mostly stuff not conforming to people's prejudged expectations, and their refusal to adjust their tactics to the reality of the game.
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I also agree with Weirdo, Aerospace rules need to be excised, reformatted, and probably should be put in a dedicated book (along with the build rules).
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I also agree with Weirdo, Aerospace rules need to be excised, reformatted, and probably should be put in a dedicated book (along with the build rules).
One reason why we only have one (later on two) aerospace plastics available. Even the writers and developers are reworking the rules.
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Layout. The layout of the rules in Total War is 99% of the problem with aero. The rest is mostly stuff not conforming to people's prejudged expectations, and their refusal to adjust their tactics to the reality of the game.
Sounds like a call for an Aerospace Manual to me.
Still, I haven't taken the time to really learn even the ground-combat rules from Total Warfare, and that's all we regularly use. Even when someones bring ASF to the table, we use the simplified Radar Map from StratOps. As it is, even with Aerospace is allowed in our weekly game, most of the time the BV is so low and/or have objectives in which Aerospace is useless for, and it's more rewarding to catch up on Artillery, Infantry, and Protomech rules to justify researching ASF rules.
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For me it is the simple fact that without using a lot of optional rules the rules in Total Warfare carried over the worst aspects of Battlespace making for a very unfun experience.
Take the wrong unit even if the BV says it should be a good matchup you're still going to be in a bad spot. I know this exists in ground combat but it is dialed up way worse with aerospace. So much so that because of how even canon units are designed, you make the wrong design decision it impacts game play way, way more than other aspects of the game.
Bad arc layouts. I'm honestly not sure why I'd ever actually design an aerodyne for combat purposes. It has huge blindspots that are very easily exploited.
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In a number of threads over the years, I hear people describe the Aerospace side of BattleTech as things like "Deeply flawed" "Barely functional" and other, similar comments. I have played it in the Total Warfare form, and have had little issues with it, even when using the fighters interacting on a standard BattleTech map with ground units. It just adds a little extra book-keeping in those areas.
If I were to say that it had any real issues, it would be the Space Map using Vector Movement vs Atmospheric Map using maneuvres and such, with limits based on Structural Integrity, so that you are using two different sets of rules based on where you are fighting. However, again, that doesn't seem that big of a deal to me.
So...why does Aerospace seem to get as much hate directed at it as Dark Age?
Despite the concentrated effort of several generations of line developers (alright, lick-and-a-promise effort with a heavy dose of 'round toit) They can't make Aerospace play like Battletech.
There are also severe scaling issues.
The largest problem is, with aerospace you're trying to play a three dimensional conflict on a 2 dimensional surface, which means using LOTS of math-which doesn't lend to a beer and pretzels environment. That's a problem.
But the scaling makes it worse when you make the mistake of using the lore, and actual distances to set up a scenario. Why?
Because it becomes obvious that, outside of very low orbit or inside an atmosphere over a planet, every fight has to be agreed on ahead of time for the two sides to even meet, and once they meet, they have to both concentrate on staying inside a very small engagement zone.
That is, they both have to make a specific EFFORT to remain inside that zone, at a frame of reference where they are stationary to one another.
Space, is very big, and even moving at interplanetary speeds, velocity is very high.
as I refer to it as "My happy Math place." it is very complex when things get involved, significantly more so than Classic Battletech's ground game, which is already more crunch than some folks want. I personally have enjoyed playing out scenerios, but they take forever, and are probably not worth it if you aren't as invested as folks like me. It really seems like there is too much going on, too many rolls, too many rules that might or might not actually effect anything. All those criticisms can also be leveled at Classic, but this is more so.
said, you end up having to do a LOT of pen-and-paper math as a player every turn.
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The rules scare many people. The rules are very tough for those who don't understand and dont use them on a daily basis.
I wish things would change for the Aerospace rules, it was great buying all the miniatures for all of the units.
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I also agree with Weirdo, Aerospace rules need to be excised, reformatted, and probably should be put in a dedicated book (along with the build rules).
Like it was once upon a time.
If a recent interview is saying the truth (and I think, why not?) the Aerotech game is being totally reworked now. Hope it will see the light in a dedicated (and deserved) book.
I, for me, ever liked a lot Aerotech. Played many many times even by the times of the first edition. yes, the one with odd gameboard full of grey and blue arrows.
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As someone who has been into Battletech for years and never played Aerospace outside of Alpha Strike, my issues with it are:
1) If integrating aero into a ground game, of all the unit types you can add onto your mech-based combat, it seems to add the most rules complexity. A game of Battletech is already long and complex; adding units that greatly increase the complexity is a complete non-starter for anyone I've played with.
2) Playing Aero standalone doesn't have a lot of appeal as someone who got into Battletech through the Mechwarrior video games. I don't have the same connection to the units.
3) It clogs up the Total Warfare rulebook with a big chunk of useless (to most people) pages dividing the main "movement" and "combat" chapters.
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Aerospace rules need to be excised....
Absolutely not. If you are going to make a book called "Total Warfare," support vehicles have no business there at the expense of artillery. Re-presenting how the AeroTech rules are presented is probably useful, but excising them further undermines the book's title.
On the other hand, if CGL is intent on abandoning the compendium publishing concept, then yes, ground combat (that includes vehicles, artillery, and infantry) and aerospace books, all with full construction rules up through about the FedCom civil war, are reasonable companions to BMM. Era supplementals could be additional tomes, perhaps incorporated into their associated TROs in the same way Helm Core stuff was introduced in TRO:2750 and Clan stuff in TRO:3050.
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My $0.02x is that the scales are confusing. Is it:
- A side game adding strikes and strafes to Battletech
- Atmospheric Dogfights ala Wings of Glory
- Space Fighter Combat ala X-Wing
- Capital Ship Combat ala Armada
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It also doesn't help that the biggest advocates of Aerospace seam to focus on capital ship combat which doesn't exist in the day to day setting, and nearly impossible to integrate into a more run of the mill lance / company sized classic campaign.
I know it would be unpopular with the current fans, but I feel like a Aerospace game focused on getting drop ships to/from the planet, and gaining local air superiority, would be more interesting entirely because it could cleanly connect to the other stories we play and tell.
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My $0.02x is that the scales are confusing. Is it:
- A side game adding strikes and strafes to Battletech
- Atmospheric Dogfights ala Wings of Glory
- Space Fighter Combat ala X-Wing
- Capital Ship Combat ala Armada
?
This is my hang-up. Within the context of the Battletech domain, Aerospace could be several different systems/games/things and none of them have very much overlap.
For my money, the Battlefield Support deck is the best way to integrated Aero into CBT and Alpha Strike. It’s clean, it’s very straightforward, and it doesn’t require a whole extra set of rules. I suspect that’s not what most Aero fans want, though.
If you want the same level of control over your space planes that CBT gives you over your space robots, that’s a whole different game that is much more complicated thanks to the movement alone. It can be done, of course, but what if you want to integrate that into your Battletech games? That’s going to necessitate the creating of a whole different set of rules to simulate ground combat.
Once you get out into deep space, you eliminate the need to worry about integrating ground units, but then you have fighters vs capital ships. Again, drastically different scales.
Can it be done? Yes, absolutely. We’ve seen plenty of dogfight games and fleet games come and go. Can it all be done in one box? No, I don’t think so. If you start splitting the boxes up, though, you start splitting the Aero fans up and then you have to worry about there being enough interest in order to merit the product.
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Agreed, my ideal product line would look something like this as it makes a nice pyramid of options
Battlemech Manual
ALL Mech rules including the optional ones: plus basic terrain, weapons and ammo, Record Sheet unit interaction, and the concept of Battlefield Support Points (which covers artillery, air, and mines at its most basic form)
Battletech - Armored Combat
ALL ground vehicle and structure rules plus the optional ones: ALL Infantry (and Battle Armor) rules including the optional ones: Artillery and Mines
Battletech - Tactical Operations
ALL Aerospace and Conventional Fighters plus Wet Naval Vessels (including superheavy ones but not mobile structures) rules: Exotic Terrain such as Underwater, Toxic or Strange Worlds, and Vacuum: Advanced Sensors and Stealth: Dogfighting in Atmosphere and Orbit: Bomb Types (including Thermobaric): Scenario Planning: Unit Modification and Leveling between scenarios
Alpha Strike - A Game of Combined Arms
Conversion rules to Alpha Strike: Running larger ground scenarios with combined arms: Integrating all the previous books for a true combined arms experience.
Battletech - TechManual
Construction rules for everything but what would be found in the next entries (including structures and superheavy vehicles). Repair, Salvage, and Maintenance
Battletech - Campaign Ops
Fast rules for building out a unit and OPFOR: Staffing and Expanding One: Contract Rules: Accountant Tech Stuff: Linking Scenarios in Alpha Strike
Battlespace ver 3 - Death in the Void
ALL rules related to Warships, Jumpships, Dropships, Space Stations, Small Craft, and Satellites including construction and conversion rules: High Speed Closing Engagements: Capital and Sub-Capital Weapons: Nuclear Weapons and Ortillery
Battletech - Alternate Eras and Strange Science
Most of the stuff in the present Interstellar Ops, Blakey strange jumps, WMBs, Cyborgs, Robots, Tripods, etc...
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The largest problem is, with aerospace you're trying to play a three dimensional conflict on a 2 dimensional surface, which means using LOTS of math-which doesn't lend to a beer and pretzels environment. That's a problem.
A lot og games do that, and brilliantly too.
We can talk about Aerotech, if it is a good system or not, but if you want to play a starfighter game you have to device a system that abstract a 3D environment on a two-dimensional map.
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Agreed, my ideal product line would look something like this as it makes a nice pyramid of options
Too many books. The developers, it seems, are working on a new iteration of the rules that will have less books than the actual "Total Warfare" version.
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My suspicion is that aerospace suffers from being part of a niche category:
Hex-based space combat is already a very narrow market. There are other games out there (e.g. Full thrust, SFB) but none of them are huge sellers.
I’m not sure there is a large market for crunchy space combat simulators.
This is my feel on the matter as well. Giant robots have a certain mass appeal that fighter jets (or spaceships) lack. The #1 physical game title on indie site itch.io is Lancer, a mecha RPG, and it's been there for literally years. It's the visceral power fantasy appeal: a 'Mech is you, but bigger and better. Even the alien-looking machines like the King Crab still have recognizably anthropomorphic characteristics. You can get up-close and really lay into your enemies, and if guns fail, there's always your big steel fists. But a fighter is a pointy tube with wings and WarShips are even more impersonal. You need to be into military hardware and tactics already.
I fully believe that AeroTech should see a new edition of some sort, with the next iteration of the core rulebooks moving fighters and spaceship combat into their own books. But I wouldn't hold my breath for them to be massive breakout hits.
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Too many books. The developers, it seems, are working on a new iteration of the rules that will have less books than the actual "Total Warfare" version.
While it may be more books, each one could be individually smaller and focused on their role [no minis rules or painting guides (make both free downloads) no battleforce, no fiction, fewer tables (many of which are reprints anyway)] thus easier to produce. I'd even say Alternate Eras and Strange Science could be split into two books, pre and post-Jihad for greater focus.
You'd only have to bring what you'd need to the table. Which would typically be 2-3 books, BMM + supplemental, or just print out the tables.
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You'd only have to bring what you'd need to the table. Which would typically be 2-3 books, BMM + supplemental, or just print out the tables.
2-3 books at the table is already a bad idea. Printed-out tables yes, but if you need to paw through more than one book for whatever you need to look up, you're just slowing the game down more. One book for fighter-scale combat, one for WarShip-scale, and repeat whatever rules you need. Use the Battlefield Support concept to keep the primary units (fighters and 'Ships, respectively) centered. Basically, treat them as separate games again, because they are.
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Most everything play relevant is already on the record sheet. It should remain that way. If you want to use optional rules bringing the book seems reasonable.
I agree though with the rest, that's why I separated them. Abstracted fighter squadron rules vs Warships. Scenario scale objectives for the other types. I kinda do like an Air-Sea Combat option though as a tutorial for Battlespace. Much slower, still 3d ish, and with less obscene firepower potential.
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As separate games it is quite workable. However I think that the only way to get an unified Aerospace would be as a PC game.
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Just learning aerospace. In space me and opponent had a blast. When it comes to integration with ground, things get wonky because you need abstraction to make it work with two ground maps.
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Just learning aerospace. In space me and opponent had a blast. When it comes to integration with ground, things get wonky because you need abstraction to make it work with two ground maps.
Definitely agreed, Battlefield Support Points are the way to go for a format like that. One or two off aerospace runs are sufficient to seize an opportunity if it presents itself.
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So aerospace, like some mentioned, is like 3 games at the same time.
The deep space version has velocity with 2 different methods to track things, and 1 minute turns. Vector based movement 'seems' like it would be 'realistic', but its just an illusion. Turning at the 1 minute scale is far too slow and hexes moved is about 2x more then acceleration should be. But that incorrect math isnt just being technical for physics sake. Playing the game, like cannonshop mentioned, requires both parties to slow down, and the players have to fight to keep their ships on the map--because they go too far (the acceleration math is part of this problem) and its too hard to turn to get an errant ship back on the map (turns in 1 minute should NEVER require 1 whole thrust point). Alpha strike, which has 1 minute-ish turns, does not require you to pay to change facing, so for the 1 minute space game alpha strike in space, with its 'free' turns, is actually more realistic at the 1 minute scale, and its much easier to 'keep on the map' without needing both players to tacitly agree to cut thrust and just wail on each other to make the fight happen.
There are lots of optional rules for the 1 minute scale as well, and they all kinda massively influence balance. Like, the basic act of movement alone has 2 different, completely incompatible, methods for moving. It makes trying to play with someone new almost impossible, as while battletech has a slew of rules, battletech also has a default that is pretty well balanced.
Now in the atmosphere, we have another 2 different scales, with a low atmosphere map and a 'fighters on the ground map'. Again, the 2 movement modes are mostly incompatible. We also have the radar map, another atmosphere method, the space map for battleforce with decent rules but yet another incompatible movement method, ect. So, we are at 6 different ways to play aerospace units so far, right? Plus alpha strike. Even if learning each of these systems wasnt hard, with so many different ways to play finding common ground with 2 players for even WHAT THE GAME IS takes an effort, doubly if 2 players like different gameplay modes.
On the ground map, ground units always move first and thus fighters can always hit their target. Its like artillery that lets you pick your target hex after movement, not before. Hence the infamous bomb truck which delivers up to 200 damage to a mech with no way for the mech to dodge it, as the fighter moves last and damage is simultaneous, and they move fast enough that the fighter moves from out of range of ground units to delivering bombs in the same movement phase. Bombs being good isnt a problem, the problem is the gameplay interaction. As in, bombers are not interactive at all. A humble boeing jump bomber is 40 AE damage anywhere you want, so it greatly punishes fast units like dashers and infantry units like elementals. Such hard counters have some negative gameplay experiences built in; while artillery is also potentially pretty negative, it requires some planning and guess work at least. So if you land that artillery shell because you guessed where the dasher was gonna move before it moves, well that required quite a feat to pull off. Bombs dont have that. Even the BSPs introduce the concept of air cover, where you can stop a bombing attack that will one shot your unit, IF you decided to buy the counter. Because a counter exists, unlike the total warfare rules, losing your elementals to a bombing attack is less of a negative experience--the other player decided not to buy air cover, and since the BSP list is pretty small its pretty small they know the risks and they decided to be weak to bombs. Its less of a feels bad when you know there is something you can do to stop the bombs, unlike with the boeing jump bomber.
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I also agree with Weirdo, Aerospace rules need to be excised, reformatted, and probably should be put in a dedicated book (along with the build rules).
Just had a discussion about this very thing this weekend.
It's been close to 20 years now since TW came out.
IMHO-It's time for some reformatting and rules clarifications.
As that's done perhaps they should consider simplifying things as well
as scalability for new players.
Instead of the 1st Core rule book being TW perhaps it should be re-titled
"Battletech Ground Warfare" or something similar.
The first book should cover ground warfare.
That's the step just past mechs only in the box set.
I would suggest removing Aero from that 1st book entirely.
I would include Artillery instead as it's also ground level but that's debatable.
Include EVERYTHING needed outside of optional rules so that you don't need multiple
books for just ground warfare.
No more of this trying to figure out what book the info you need is in - group
the info together where it's appropriate.
Make Aero an add on book so that your group can more easily bolt on that extra level of
complexity if/when they want to.
Same concept for campaigns,Dropships & Warships, optional rules, ETC.
You want that extra level of complexity ? Get the book for it.
As it is the "TW" book and current format presents more of a hurdle to new players then it needs to be.
This 1st major rule book needs to make the overall game more accessible to new players
in the long run. The rules need to be easier to find,have better explanations as well
as easy to understand drawings, and not have related rules scattered in different books.
We need to stop considering the game just from the standpoint of long term players and
consider what would encourage newer players to take that 1st step past the box set.
That step should be obvious and not to difficult.
Right now TW fails at that. HARD. I've seen it repeatedly.
IMHO-Aero shouldn't be jammed into that 1st step. 2nd or maybe 3rd maybe , but not 1st.
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This is my feel on the matter as well. Giant robots have a certain mass appeal that fighter jets (or spaceships) lack. The #1 physical game title on indie site itch.io is Lancer, a mecha RPG, and it's been there for literally years. It's the visceral power fantasy appeal: a 'Mech is you, but bigger and better. Even the alien-looking machines like the King Crab still have recognizably anthropomorphic characteristics. You can get up-close and really lay into your enemies, and if guns fail, there's always your big steel fists. But a fighter is a pointy tube with wings and WarShips are even more impersonal. You need to be into military hardware and tactics already.
I fully believe that AeroTech should see a new edition of some sort, with the next iteration of the core rulebooks moving fighters and spaceship combat into their own books. But I wouldn't hold my breath for them to be massive breakout hits.
I don't think that holds up if you look past just physical game titles. While there's certainly a big market for 'Mech games like Battletech and Armored Core, there's huge markets for both terrestrial and space combat: Star Wars alone has a ton of titles that focus on dogfights or space combat in general, the Ace Combat franchise is huge, there's no shortage of strategy games where the Space War is the primary (or even only) theatre you play in. I don't think most of these can be said to have niche appeals, at least not compared to 'Mech games, but of course they're not going to be sampled when only considering physical game titles.
Of course, limiting it just to physical hex-based games, you're absolutely right: In that particular area, fighter & fleet hex games are quite niche.
My guess as to why BT Aerospace is relatively unpopular is:
1. Battletech, the Board Game of Armored Combat is, first and foremost, a Battlemech centric setting. Consequentially the 'Mech part of the rule set is very polished, and other areas tend to be less polished the further from 'Mechs you get.* No one really gets attracted to the setting just for its space battles; if people get interested in that part it's usually because they were also interested in the 'Mechs which drew them in first. So there's a minimum of two different areas you have to be interested in before you can even begin to consider playing a Battletech Aerospace game: Aerospace Fighters / Warships AND Battlemechs (arguably 3 things, if we include the Battletech setting itself). That by itself is going to be a higher bar than settings or game that are fighter-centric or warship-centric, in which case there's only 1-2 bars of entry: Being interested in dogfights, and possibly the setting itself.
*ASF and Warships in general suffer from this to some extent. A simple example is how BV doesn't reflect weapon utility in space nearly as well as it does on the ground, and the primary culprit is simplified range brackets. For instance: Clan Heavy MGs have a BV of 6, while Clan AP Gauss Rifles have a BV of 21. Both have 3 points of damage, and the HMG deals 3D6 vs infantry while the AP Gauss does only 2D6. The BV difference is justified on the ground because the AP Gauss has nearly 5x the effective range of the HMG, but in space both occupy the Short range bracket and perform identically (except the HMG strafes slightly better). That is, an ASF AP Gauss costs 3.5x more BV than a ASF HMG for identical performance. This is a clear artifact of the Battlemech-First setting.
2. Battletech, the Setting, is, first and foremost, a Battlemech-centric setting. Compared to the ubiquitous Battlemech ground battles, there's not a ton of in-universe places where Warships actually play a role beyond plot-necessary orbital bombardment, and even fewer places where the Warship engagements are meaningful. In fact, in some eras they're all but written out: The IS Warships get obliterated during the Succession Wars and the Houses don't/can't rebuild them, so the Clan Invasion era starts with the Clan warship fleet having totally free reign besides the occasional IS pocket warship or planet-based fighters. In the Dark Age they're basically gone again, with IS powers having low single-digits of warships at best and the Snow Ravens possessing the lion's share of humanity's warship power with maybe a dozen, mostly in mothball?
This is a major hurdle for me. I really can't run a canonical Dark Aged aerospace game. I can't run something like the Draconis Combine Invasion of the Federated Suns because DCS Draconis Wind is more than half of their entire Warship strength. It'd be at best a Pocket Warship slugfest, and the players I have that are conceptually interested in fleet battles and enjoy them in other settings or mediums are not interested in such a campaign even if the Aerospace portion of the game was mechanically flawless because they're interested in ships, not boats.
3. The physical game style generally doesn't lend itself very well to simulating atmospheric or space fighter dogfights or fleet battles. There are some, but they're not common and generally not as well known, or popular. Hence, the group that are interested in such things go to the mediums that do have them and do them well, like the video game format. This factor probably heavily influences physical, hex-based, fighter-based or fleet-based games being very niche.
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I can add a little personal experience to the mix. I tried bringing some aerospace to a game group and the guy I ended up playing against was fully convinced Aerospace was overpowered but was kind enough to humor me for a game. In any case I had brought a 3k BV Eisenstrum fully loaded with bombs that knocked out an assault mech with its first bomb run which didn't change his opinion on aerospace in the slightest. It also didn't help that I was absurdly lucky before the big bird even made it the fight. :rolleyes: If I could do it over again I wish I had brought something a little more fragile like a Lucifer and ditched the bombs.
There was definitely some interest in the group but most people felt the rules were too hard to understand as written. I totally agree with this and I think the only reason I could work through them was that I was already familiar with the old rules Aerotech 2 that they are based off of. The biggest problem IMHO is that Total Warfare is really describing two different rulesets for using Aerospace on Battletech map sheets (the Flight Path ruleset and the Aerospace on Ground Maps ruleset) and oscillates between these two rulesets throughout the book without being explicitly clear which one is being described at a given time. Another major hurdle is the need for two maps to use aerospace properly. Battletech already takes up a lot of room and clearing the space for a whole other map, even the small radar map from Strat Ops, can pose a challenge depending on the venue.
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My $0.02x is that the scales are confusing. Is it:
- A side game adding strikes and strafes to Battletech
- Atmospheric Dogfights ala Wings of Glory
- Space Fighter Combat ala X-Wing
- Capital Ship Combat ala Armada
All but the last. That's the purview of BattleSpace.
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Agreed Lance Leader,
I think the all damage is resolved simultaneous is the thing that bothers me most about how Aerospace are handled on the map. If Anti-Air was resolved first, Attacks by Fighters were more difficult (because they are actually reasonably easy), or Fighters more fragile (like by engine mass and fuel intake per turn going up limiting the war-load) that might even it up a bit.
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I'll agree with AlphaMirage that having anti-air resolved first would change up the dynamic a bit. Mechs wouldn't feel like setting ducks and the fluffed anti-air mechs like the Rifleman and Jagermech would actually feel more important in those rolls.
Aerospace as a whole is in a weird place as a after thought in the base game of armored ground combat. I can appreciate Fasa was trying to expand and add layers to the game but getting it to gel together is a bit of a headache. Total Warfare kind of proves this; we can reformat the book or give Aerospace it's own book but how aerospace units work vs how ground targets work will always be a little wonky.
Warships are whole other can of worms. I always felt the BTU having minimal reliance on space battleships gave it a unique feel but space dreadnoughts and space gallons have become so ingrained into the sci-fi genre as a whole, every one wants to see the biggest ships duke it out. Changing the cost so relying on Dropships and aerospace fighters becomes more practical as in universe would help but I really think it comes down to everyone wanting to see 2 Leviathans trade nukes.
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I totally agree with this and I think the only reason I could work through them was that I was already familiar with the old rules Aerotech 2 that they are based off of.
Based off of? They don't seem so different!
I agree anyway, even being a fan of Aerotech, that to have multiple maps on the table to play atmospheric actions can be a problem.
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I know it would be unpopular with the current fans, but I feel like a Aerospace game focused on getting drop ships to/from the planet, and gaining local air superiority, would be more interesting entirely because it could cleanly connect to the other stories we play and tell.
Honestly, if it played like Dropfleet Commander where your fleets maneuver and fight but victory conditions are based on troops delivered and/or bombardment I'd be fine with that.
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I don't think that holds up if you look past just physical game titles. While there's certainly a big market for 'Mech games like Battletech and Armored Core, there's huge markets for both terrestrial and space combat: Star Wars alone has a ton of titles that focus on dogfights or space combat in general, the Ace Combat franchise is huge, there's no shortage of strategy games where the Space War is the primary (or even only) theatre you play in. I don't think most of these can be said to have niche appeals, at least not compared to 'Mech games, but of course they're not going to be sampled when only considering physical game titles.
Of course, limiting it just to physical hex-based games, you're absolutely right: In that particular area, fighter & fleet hex games are quite niche.
My guess as to why BT Aerospace is relatively unpopular is:
1. Battletech, the Board Game of Armored Combat is, first and foremost, a Battlemech centric setting. Consequentially the 'Mech part of the rule set is very polished, and other areas tend to be less polished the further from 'Mechs you get.* No one really gets attracted to the setting just for its space battles; if people get interested in that part it's usually because they were also interested in the 'Mechs which drew them in first. So there's a minimum of two different areas you have to be interested in before you can even begin to consider playing a Battletech Aerospace game: Aerospace Fighters / Warships AND Battlemechs (arguably 3 things, if we include the Battletech setting itself). That by itself is going to be a higher bar than settings or game that are fighter-centric or warship-centric, in which case there's only 1-2 bars of entry: Being interested in dogfights, and possibly the setting itself.
*ASF and Warships in general suffer from this to some extent. A simple example is how BV doesn't reflect weapon utility in space nearly as well as it does on the ground, and the primary culprit is simplified range brackets. For instance: Clan Heavy MGs have a BV of 6, while Clan AP Gauss Rifles have a BV of 21. Both have 3 points of damage, and the HMG deals 3D6 vs infantry while the AP Gauss does only 2D6. The BV difference is justified on the ground because the AP Gauss has nearly 5x the effective range of the HMG, but in space both occupy the Short range bracket and perform identically (except the HMG strafes slightly better). That is, an ASF AP Gauss costs 3.5x more BV than a ASF HMG for identical performance. This is a clear artifact of the Battlemech-First setting.
2. Battletech, the Setting, is, first and foremost, a Battlemech-centric setting. Compared to the ubiquitous Battlemech ground battles, there's not a ton of in-universe places where Warships actually play a role beyond plot-necessary orbital bombardment, and even fewer places where the Warship engagements are meaningful. In fact, in some eras they're all but written out: The IS Warships get obliterated during the Succession Wars and the Houses don't/can't rebuild them, so the Clan Invasion era starts with the Clan warship fleet having totally free reign besides the occasional IS pocket warship or planet-based fighters. In the Dark Age they're basically gone again, with IS powers having low single-digits of warships at best and the Snow Ravens possessing the lion's share of humanity's warship power with maybe a dozen, mostly in mothball?
This is a major hurdle for me. I really can't run a canonical Dark Aged aerospace game. I can't run something like the Draconis Combine Invasion of the Federated Suns because DCS Draconis Wind is more than half of their entire Warship strength. It'd be at best a Pocket Warship slugfest, and the players I have that are conceptually interested in fleet battles and enjoy them in other settings or mediums are not interested in such a campaign even if the Aerospace portion of the game was mechanically flawless because they're interested in ships, not boats.
3. The physical game style generally doesn't lend itself very well to simulating atmospheric or space fighter dogfights or fleet battles. There are some, but they're not common and generally not as well known, or popular. Hence, the group that are interested in such things go to the mediums that do have them and do them well, like the video game format. This factor probably heavily influences physical, hex-based, fighter-based or fleet-based games being very niche.
sad part here, is that the best, cleanest dogfight I ever played in Battletech, didn't have proper aero units at all-we took canon VTOLs selected from the faction lists and played chopper-on-chopper using the VTOL rules from Total Warfare.
it was exciting, fun, required cleverness...but same group couldn't get the feel we got using choppers, when we tried it again using ASF under the same ruleset.
(what do I mean by 'fun'? chasing a Donar around the map with a Mantis. Little pop-guns..)
This, I think, encapsulates part of the problem. We could do that because unless you sideslip off the map-edge, it's hella easier to HOLD that dogfight than it is using ASF's.
There are, I think, conceptual issues that the mechanics have a hard time handling without needing a lot of extra maths, or House Rules.
and then, there's the scaling issue you pointed out, because Warships are almost their own thing entirely-the BV price alone makes them impractical for modeling out something like the major warship battles of the Reunification war, Amaris-Kerensky conflict, age of war, or first succession war.
and very little motivation to develop that, when the present makes them the sort of asset you can better do without, just on costs.
Battletech is, at its heart, a tactical game, Naval warfare is Strategic, and Warships are strategic assets more than tactical ones, which makes integration even MORE difficult for the purposes of play than it looks with even a cursory glance.
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But a fighter is a pointy tube with wings
You could call it a wingstube....
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All but the last. That's the purview of BattleSpace.
I mean sure, but its usually less than a page talking about aerospace before someone bring up Warships and capital weapons.
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I mean sure, but its usually less than a page talking about aerospace before someone bring up Warships and capital weapons.
Which kinda brings up the problem, doesn't it? The scaling gets so horribly out of whack once a discussion gets going, never mind trying to build a playable scenario.
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I feel like making aerospace the most useful on a BattleTech board needs more abstraction. Playing it mainly via MegaMek, I hate having to time flying on and off the map and plotting attack courses. It's especially bad if the map space itself isn't big enough to make any use of aerospace units at all.
I think aerospace attacks on ground maps could benefit from being treated more like artillery strikes with either guns, bombs/missiles, or both, with the chance of being attacked by AA fire and shot down. The tradeoff is that they're more precise than regular ground-based artillery. Stand-off attacks with both smart and iron bombs and missiles would basically be off-board artillery attacks and don't even need aerospace units on the map at all, which can be useful for units in a campaign that lack ground-based artillery assets but have aerospace fighters that can carry internal or external ordnance.
Now the space game itself? I agree that it can be a bit boring because there isn't much to space combat at all, even with playing with the realistic Newtonian movement rules turning Aerotech into the board game adaptation of Asteroids. Compared to BattleTech, space isn't as interesting as a ground map where units can use terrain to their advantage to get the best shot or to avoid attack. In space, there are many times where as long as you're in range of targets you can shoot with a chance to hit. I don't think tweaking movement path relative to the target is enough of a challenge to make the space game interesting. Unfortunately, I don't have any better ideas right now :(
Every once in awhile I do have fun playing space battles just to imagine the big ships on the board blowing each other up like I see happening with capital ship duels in Star Wars. To me, warships are the 'mechs of space, with dropships being the vehicles, and fighter squadrons being the infantry platoons.
I also wouldn't mind ship construction and fluff getting an overhaul considering how it's been discussed on the forum many times how the density of BattleTech ships is unrealistic, even for a universe with super-efficient fusion engines and FTL travel. The arbitrary weapon limits and fire control penalties are also bothersome, and I think point defense weapons could be integral to large craft construction and not necessarily statted out.
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I feel like making aerospace the most useful on a BattleTech board needs more abstraction. Playing it mainly via MegaMek, I hate having to time flying on and off the map and plotting attack courses. It's especially bad if the map space itself isn't big enough to make any use of aerospace units at all.
I think aerospace attacks on ground maps could benefit from being treated more like artillery strikes with either guns, bombs/missiles, or both, with the chance of being attacked by AA fire and shot down. The tradeoff is that they're more precise than regular ground-based artillery. Stand-off attacks with both smart and iron bombs and missiles would basically be off-board artillery attacks and don't even need aerospace units on the map at all, which can be useful for units in a campaign that lack ground-based artillery assets but have aerospace fighters that can carry internal or external ordnance.
Now the space game itself? I agree that it can be a bit boring because there isn't much to space combat at all, even with playing with the realistic Newtonian movement rules turning Aerotech into the board game adaptation of Asteroids. Compared to BattleTech, space isn't as interesting as a ground map where units can use terrain to their advantage to get the best shot or to avoid attack. In space, there are many times where as long as you're in range of targets you can shoot with a chance to hit. I don't think tweaking movement path relative to the target is enough of a challenge to make the space game interesting. Unfortunately, I don't have any better ideas right now :(
Every once in awhile I do have fun playing space battles just to imagine the big ships on the board blowing each other up like I see happening with capital ship duels in Star Wars. To me, warships are the 'mechs of space, with dropships being the vehicles, and fighter squadrons being the infantry platoons.
I also wouldn't mind ship construction and fluff getting an overhaul considering how it's been discussed on the forum many times how the density of BattleTech ships is unrealistic, even for a universe with super-efficient fusion engines and FTL travel. The arbitrary weapon limits and fire control penalties are also bothersome, and I think point defense weapons could be integral to large craft construction and not necessarily statted out.
One of the major conceptual balancers for Air-drop munitions vs. Artillery, is risk. YOu can site an artillery piece well out of range of conventional reply and shell from relative safety. An Airstrike has to include putting the airframe doing it (and the pilot) at risk.
THAT part, is at least partly addressed in the game rules, though they did, *(MY OPINION ONLY) overcompensate by making bombs incredibly mass inefficient compared to artillery projectiles, which do significantly more damage at much smaller investment in both risk, and mass.
IMHO, on the ground map, airstrikes should be both very powerful, And very risky.
aka something you use, and it can turn a battlefield, but you can also lose the airframe in the same moment for no effect at all.
That's how it should work-every attack on ground units with the kind of tech Battletech has, should present a high risk of losing the aerofighter, bomber, etc. to ground fire. (But when it succeeds, it should be more effective than a successful indirect artillery shot taken from higher relative safety...)
Obviously, not everyone agrees with my point of view.
To me, the problem is they made Orbital Bombardment too safe, reliable, and convenient, then compensated by trying to make warships extinct instead of addressing the imbalance. (again, this is MY OPINION.)
In my view, Warships should be of limited relevance by optimizing their rules to keep them out of low orbit as much as possible. How to do this I'll leave up to someone smarter than I am, but the ongoing paranoid trope about playes just 'resorting to orbital bombardments' has hampered Aerospace development in the game for decades.
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I just put a fan rule design concept in that forum about making Wet Navy Vessels a threat to Space Warships by putting them on a similar scale that would keep them out of orbit which is one way to do it. Both of those do however take away from the principal setting builder though so I don't actually know if I'd want them to be made canon but I do look forward to gaming out a capital scale sea Carrier Task Force against an orbiting Warship.
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We played our first game in around 13-15 years with aerospace a couple of weeks ago. We have an ongoing RPG campaign in which the PCs are mercs in a 'Mech unit, like you do. A returning player from years ago asked if he could play an Aerojock. He created the character, got himself a fighter, and wingman in a matching fighter, and the company commander had the unit purchase four Mechbusters to deploy once in atmosphere. We decided we would use the "Radar Map" rules.
To keep things simple for the first game, the scenario was a surprise attack on an outlying outpost where the Kurita defenders didn't have time to scramble any air cover in response. It was on its way when the scenario ended. Due to the rules for movement on the radar map, starting the fighter's approach on the outer ring, the aerospace forces got two passes before the PCs pulled out, having accomplished their objective of hitting the outpost hard enough to force the Kurita defenders to send more forces to garrison it later.
Those two passes went like this: ASFs strafed, and missed. Two Mechbusters, all they brought in, leaving the other two back in the cargo hold, executed a strike. One miss, one hit... and rolled a 12 for location. BOOM. Headshot. This made all the PCs sit up and take notice of what enemy air power could do to them if and when it showed up. The funky rules on counterfire meant the one Kurita anti-air 'Mech, a Rifleman, was unable to hit the fighters as they flew over due to it being on the other mapsheet, and altitude adding to range.
After they turned around for another pass, the fighters all missed their attacks, but the Rifleman scored a hit with a single AC/5 thanks to the Anti-Air quirk. The 5 points was above the threshold, the pilot made his pilot check, failed, and rolled for altitude loss. LAWN DART. The PCs now took notice that even hitting most aircraft with a relatively light smack could immediately end them. The PC involved burned an edge point to re-roll, but the point was made to the players.
Our consensus after this trial game was that aerospace added a lot to the feel of the battle, but did take a bit of emphasis off 'Mechs. This was counterbalanced by the fighters being just as fragile as they were hideously effective when they actually hit. We discussed how things could have been more complicated by enemy aircraft, underwing ordnance, etc. and how the full-on mapsheet-for-fighters game would have worked. We talked about anti-air, and how to try to defend against fighters. The fighter player brought up fuel expenditure and loiter time over the battlefield, which he found shockingly limited for an ASF, but adequate for the air-breathing Mechbusters. I need to re-read these rules myself.
The debrief resulted in the players wanting to keep aerospace as part of our games, but stick to the radar map to keep the rules overhead as light as possible. The fighter player agreed.
I'd say the lack of popularity is more due to the rules complexity, and fragility of aerospace for the person playing them. If you want to be low enough to strafe or strike, you're risking being a lawn dart if anything bigger than an SRM hits you in most locations. The rules are also scattered, and in some cases make little sense, like the hex you count range to if you're not in the line of flight if you're conducting ground-to-air fire.
We had fun, but man, it's taking a while to knock all the rust off the rules.
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So let me quote myself the the last time this, or something like it came up:
So if Aero has a flaw in BT it's that it, like basically EVERYTHING in the setting, bends the knee not only to the 'Mechs, but also a 'Mech only game that players can knock out in an afternoon, and so everything exists to support that, the pre-dominate way to move forces around is in DropShips sized for games of this size (Lance to Company) and this is done because raids, which explain (but not really) why there is fighting going on, and anything that threatens to make raids difficult or not make sense isn't allowed, change that and things might change.
So you want to fix this you have to explain why raids keep getting through, despite the fact that ASF can shoot down DS.
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So let me quote myself the the last time this, or something like it came up:
So you want to fix this you have to explain why raids keep getting through, despite the fact that ASF can shoot down DS.
You will never get a satisfactory believable answer to this. Becuase the honest answer is: "but then we wouldn't get mech on mech combat." The core premise of this setting is giant stompy robots. Against all logic about why this is not the optimal method of waging war.
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Well to SCC, mechs being dropped in orbit is a thing that happens to get mechs, even those without JJ, to the battlefield without much risk to the dropship in space. So they do have a delivery method that gets mechs where they need to be by brute force/handwavium of drop cocoons.
The space battles around a planet tend to be interesting enough, much more interesting then the deep space battles. I love my neoprene space/planet map, and when playing about the extent of our games is getting the dropship to the dropsite in orbit. So we do simple crossing engagements or 'hold the dropship at x' objective missions, where you score points for every mech you kick out in orbit. The mission is based on the attacker having more cargo/mech bays then the defender destroys.
This mission doesnt solve my issues with 6+ different ways to play the same aerotech stuff, all with different scales and movement types and unique balance concerns. But from a fluff POV, I havent had an issue with aerospace taking over for mechs, simply because in more then half the different ways you can play with aerotech stuff the mechs dont even factor--the game is like a completely separate one.
And when air and mechs do factor together, the lore isnt what is holding that back, but game mechanics. Attacking a grounded dropship is a fun and lore friendly mission for a mech force, it was even in some video games, its just the game mechanics and book cross referencing and tracking different kinds of special effects that burden that. IE, 12s TO HIT now matter instead of 12s for location, so the btech players used to batch rolling attacks now have to stop and slow down cause of a different kind of rule interaction with hit rolls and damage v armor values. And the return fire by bay with different range bands makes the dropship shoot weird from a mech players point of view, unless they use the OTHER rule for shooting, which is weird for the aerospace player, because even shooting has at least 3 different ways for the same dropship and you need to decide which way to play.
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So let me quote myself the the last time this, or something like it came up:
So you want to fix this you have to explain why raids keep getting through, despite the fact that ASF can shoot down DS.
You mean like the time that happened to the Gray Death Legion in Mercenary's Star or the Falcon Guard in Bloodname?
ASF can shoot down DS, but they often pay a price for it. Also the Dropships usually bring ASF cover if they are invading.
In the scenarios above, the GDL had minimal ASF cover and were trying to sneak in, while the Falcon Guard were in the middle of a transfer and not anticipating a need for such protection from an invading force.
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Honestly, if it played like Dropfleet Commander where your fleets maneuver and fight but victory conditions are based on troops delivered and/or bombardment I'd be fine with that.
There is literally nothing stopping anyone from doing this. Hell, I can remember from memory two canon scenarios that work exactly this way. There's probably more.
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There is literally nothing stopping anyone from doing this. Hell, I can remember from memory two canon scenarios that work exactly this way. There's probably more.
Where are these?
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The first one is the the Northwind Highlanders scenario pack. The second is in The Dragon Roars.
The latter one at least does include some "Aero unit X survives, you get VP" in the victory conditions, but if the attacker successfully lands all of the DropShips while also losing all of their dedicated aero combat assets(a Warship among them), they will win the game.
And if you don't want to play a pregen scenario, just build a Breakthrough or Hold the Line scenario where the objective map edge is the planetary surface. Done. Everything you need to play these kinds of games is already at your fingertips.
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Breakthrough or Hold the Line scenario
We played the Breakthrough scenario with the Battlespace maps a lot of years ago.
It was unsatisfing, because the speed that aerospace fighters can have resulted in an easy victory for the side that had to reach the opposite edge. We have not tried again anyway.
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In a number of threads over the years, I hear people describe the Aerospace side of BattleTech as things like "Deeply flawed" "Barely functional" and other, similar comments. I have played it in the Total Warfare form, and have had little issues with it, even when using the fighters interacting on a standard BattleTech map with ground units. It just adds a little extra book-keeping in those areas.
If I were to say that it had any real issues, it would be the Space Map using Vector Movement vs Atmospheric Map using maneuvres and such, with limits based on Structural Integrity, so that you are using two different sets of rules based on where you are fighting. However, again, that doesn't seem that big of a deal to me.
So...why does Aerospace seem to get as much hate directed at it as Dark Age?
My number one problem with it is a really enjoyed Battlespace a lot more and would have rather seen battlespace 2 than an second areotech game and so forth.
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We played the Breakthrough scenario with the Battlespace maps a lot of years ago.
It was unsatisfing, because the speed that aerospace fighters can have resulted in an easy victory for the side that had to reach the opposite edge. We have not tried again anyway.
This is why I specified having the planet's surface on the map. The Velocity limits in atmosphere will take care of that in a gif. :cool:
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Having recently dedicated some time to learning Aero out of Total Warfare, I have to admit that it was a rough experience. Splitting up the rules for movement and combat: awful idea -- especially since those rules are so drastically different from ground combat. Furthermore, TW has been written in a way that can't seem to decide on whether something should or should not be explained in detail. Sometimes, I just want key points bolded or with bullet points. Just some sort of formula that eases the parsing of the rules across systems. Nothing seems to be where you would think it would be.
Once you understand the rules, it's fine. It is just that getting there is a slog. Unfortunately, I haven't used the rules enough to really understand the application of it and speak about other points further up this thread.
Oddly enough, I do have AeroTech, BattleSpace, and AeroTech 2, but have never played them.
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I need to take some time to do that and construct a self-designed Quick Guide. That usually helps me figure out things, especially if few/no one locally knows how and we can't use it often. Helped out with Protomechs.
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TBH I think the common pitfall new players (new to aero anyway) is that they try to approach aerospace the same way they probably already approached every other unit type: they tried to incorporate aero into a normal ground mech game. Really aero is almost entirely its own game/ruleset that you could staple onto a ground game but really it's written as pure air games first and ground operations third.
As mentioned TW's air rules are a mess. Air movement and air combat are at opposite ends of the book. Most of the movement section is layered like an onion, space first then atmos then maybe on-ground-mapsheet. Small craft, aero, and conventional movement exist in a soup with each other, maybe it should've had all the small craft stuff in the back ("here's how these are different"). Aero heat is with the rest of the heat rules. Air combat covers ground strikes, but shooting back is in the normal combat chapter. Control loss is in the movement section, though most control loss is probably from getting shot at.
So, if you wanted to learn how to add air support to your mech game without already knowing the rules, you'd need to learn space movement. Then how atmos movement is different, but also there's high and low altitude atmos. Then maybe consider the optional on-ground-mapsheet movement.
For one side to have bomber support in a mech game, suddenly you have a second side map for the airplanes, and in the movement phase I play a second game figuring where the plane's going- though in spite of the time taken all my opponent really cares about is if it flew over the ground area or not. The plane makes maybe two passes in a 8 turn 4 hour game; a strike easily hitting and either nuking a BA squad to non-existence or heavily crippling a mech for just Being There, meanwhile the plane gets pinged by an LRM 5 for like 3 damage, fails the roll and lawn darts to dust rendering the armor diagram irrelevant. The flyover paths don't quite add up cleanly because the ground map is square but the air map is hexes.
The air rules are complex enough (again, its a separate game) that I haven't braved teaching my friend it for air-to-air or ground games with air support on both sides.
I've done some solo matches of pure atmos air to see what's up. The actual air-to-air combat is almost too simple compared to ground. There's some interesting maneuvers but they all need pilot checks to risk. Shooting is really easy compared to ground, there's range and facing, that's about it, so everything tends to just hit. I guess it's up to positioning and maybe the evasive maneuvers ability. Ground cares about speed and terrain. As an atmos fight well over half the planes are going to either lawn dart or fly off the map accidentally due to control loss.
The guns are all universalized so they lose a lot of character. Everything uses the same set of range brackets, all cluster weapons group into 5s, alternate ammo doesn't exist.
I haven't considered space games, warship scale operations don't really interest me.
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I need to take some time to do that and construct a self-designed Quick Guide. That usually helps me figure out things, especially if few/no one locally knows how and we can't use it often. Helped out with Protomechs.
I actually wrote an "official" AeroTech QSR a long time ago - back when I had a gold BattleMaster - that was meant for a Clan expansion boxed set to BattleTech's 30th Anniversary edition. But plans changed and it was never used. Sadly, I think it's now lost.
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Well, these days; fighter combat as depicted in the rules is clunky and vastly out-moded when compared to the fun and easy-to-use systems they now have out there in various games built as dog-fighters.
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It's been a while, but before x-wing fasa had crimson skies which might have bleed rules and dogfighting into an aerotech rule.
I don't think it was the whole maneuver stick, but i do remember something about setting speed for all craft before moving, so there was some planning that went into the movement.
With aerotech air duels, its very deterministic; if you lose initiative you can try and climb into a blind zone, but its pretty binary if you can or can't be hit all based on just the init roll, as usually there is some combination of thrust that gets you in ideal arc.
The radar map, another way to play, has pilot skill plus thrust in place of initiative, so a better pilot or a fast pilot has the edge in "initiative" instead of it being so yes/no. Its my personal preference, but the radar map makes air power a tiny minigame compared to ground combat and not a game in its own right.
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I need to take some time to do that and construct a self-designed Quick Guide. That usually helps me figure out things, especially if few/no one locally knows how and we can't use it often. Helped out with Protomechs.
Psssst. Get a copy of BattleTech Compendium and update it.
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Psssst. Get a copy of BattleTech Compendium and update it.
Pfft, which one? There was two.
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Pfft, which one? There was two.
There is only one BTC (even if there are two on my shelf). If I had meant the the preceding BTM:ROW or subsequent BTC:ROW I would have said that.
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There is only one BTC (even if there are two on my shelf). If I had meant the the preceding BTM:ROW or subsequent BTC:ROW I would have said that.
Sorry, there was 3 printings of them, the last being printed in 1995. Some minor changes happened in each, I believe.
Even then, I don't think they line up completely with Total Warfare.
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The last printing was the year after it had been superseded by BTC:ROW (which doesn't contain AeroTech)? Sure <shrug>
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Row was the First compendium book I bought. Great Memories.
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I just put a fan rule design concept in that forum about making Wet Navy Vessels a threat to Space Warships by putting them on a similar scale that would keep them out of orbit which is one way to do it. Both of those do however take away from the principal setting builder though so I don't actually know if I'd want them to be made canon but I do look forward to gaming out a capital scale sea Carrier Task Force against an orbiting Warship.
One nice thing about ground to orbit with energy weapons is that ground units can ignore the atmosphere range reduction (the ground energy weapon is adjusted to the local atmosphere, while the orbital ship is not). Here (https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=82151.msg1981381#msg1981381) is the post stating so
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Perilously close to House Rules here, so I'll divert away and look at something else.
What is the general characterization of Warships in the printed canon?
They crash, they burn, they die. They're terrifying atrocitymakers, or they're expensive casualties to punch up that 'things have got see-ree-usss'.
That's the characterization based on how warships appear in the fiction, when they bother appearing.
Basicallly they're there, like Mr. Worf, to lose fights in order to show how tough or badass the opponent is.
Okay, so now, what is the general character of ASF in the setting?
anyone?
if you go by fictional depiction, fighters are almost a non-factor, they're irrelevant, or they're manned missiles to shoot down warships by ramming them in the bridge so the 'mechwarriors can look cool rescuing the Khan.
is a picture forming here?
What they are NOT doing, for the most part, is successfully influencing events. The warships are a sideshow at best, most often just a display of how thoroughly important a given event is by dying violently in it, while the fighters are ineffectual, they never stop a landing or have any significant impact on what's going on.
taken together, what, then, is the self-insert appeal of playing these??
When you sit down at the table with your players, do they want to be redshirts (or expensive redshirts) or do they want to be the heroes? For the most part, Aerospace doesn't present fictional heroes, or examples where players are likely to see themselves as being the heroes. This, unfortunately, scales up from fighters through Dropships to Warships.
There is no point you can find (Fiction or sourcebook), where a reader says, "thank god the warship survived" or "those aerospace fighters saved the day."
We have that with Infantry, and we have it with Tankers, and yes, even 'mechwarriors. but in terms of the chief marketing for the game as a whole, Aerospace is a tacked on thing that is largely, if not completely, irrelevant.
Thus, not much attraction for the core market, who stuck with Battletech because of the FICTION and the detailed sourcebooks and the scenarios in those books...and the setting.
The undercurrent is made more apparent when you consider that Compendium had Aerospace rules, then dropped them, and Compendium ROW sold more copies after the drop. That BMR went through a revision and was still a good seller, and that with Aero reintroduced in Total Warfare (integrating AT2 to a severely limited degree), very few players are willing to wade through it to figure out how to play Aerospace.
and why would they? There's shit for heroes to model on. The biggest space/aerospace/naval conflict to date (outside historicals) was a one-sided wash that showcased Aerospace and Naval forces as blunderingly, obviously, completely inept.
NOT a lot to attract new fans with that. I'd almost say before looking at revamp of the combat rules, one should begin with looking at some way to make Aerospace relevant enough to get casual readers interested.
Without the fanbase, a revamped set of rules is going to do exactly what AT1, Battlespace, and AT2 did-which is filling the overstock/unsold bin at your FLGS.
wanna know why Star Wars sells? because of Rogue Squadron. the game mechanics only has a passing impact on popularity. There's no Rogue Squadron type product for Battletech's Aerospace.
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Okay, last post was pretty long, and I apologize if it looks like I'm beating a dead horse into toxic gradeschool glue.
What Aerospace needs, is a push in the fiction, where its unique properties aren't a millstone, but a feature. Jobs where "Well, we can't use a 'mech for that", stories (MULTIPLE) where ground forces are 'cargo', the players on the stage are ship captains and fighter pilots, and the battles are written not as one-sided mudstomps, but as exciting tactical, strategic moves with actual relevance to the events in the main line.
Something like a series of stories focused on a Fighter Wing with a dropship, interfering in the enemy's resupply or advance in deep space, or a story where a couple lances of fighters stop a Bandit force from getting away with it, or a patrol dropship saves civilians from bieng sold as slaves.
The kind of events where a battlemech might even be a HINDRANCE in other words-something to make Aero into the heroes, if only as a side-story to the main event.
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Agreed Cannonshop, its part of the reason they feature so heavily in my fan fics.
One of the my main POVs in the Katherine, White Wolf Series is basically a mashup of Captain Adama and Global in command of the whole 2nd SLDFleet fighting against the Clans and Word of Blake. I love that guy. Aerospace Commanders are important (but not necessarily key mostly due to scarcity) in the Golden Lion Series as well. I think I've only actually written three or four mechs fights in the latest installment and at least as many Aerospace engagements.
Aerospace SHOULD matter for the greater war efforts and campaign goals. Indeed the whole war effort is carried on their back (unless its an intra-planetary fight), there is no separation in rules and lore. As you've mentioned many times, Battletech Empires are Archipelagoes in a dark sea of stars upon which Aerospace dwells.
Battlemechs can't fight the enemy unless you can get them somehow, which is typically by Dropships. Now it is possible to operate a dropship without air superiority (land it out of sortie or detection range from Aerospace and reposition if you are discovered) but it is tricky.
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Agreed Cannonshop, its part of the reason they feature so heavily in my fan fics.
One of the my main POVs in the Katherine, White Wolf Series is basically a mashup of Captain Adama and Global in command of the whole 2nd SLDFleet fighting against the Clans and Word of Blake. I love that guy. Aerospace Commanders are important (but not necessarily key mostly due to scarcity) in the Golden Lion Series as well. I think I've only actually written three or four mechs fights in the latest installment and at least as many Aerospace engagements.
Aerospace SHOULD matter for the greater war efforts and campaign goals. Indeed the whole war effort is carried on their back (unless its an intra-planetary fight), there is no separation in rules and lore. As you've mentioned many times, Battletech Empires are Archipelagoes in a dark sea of stars upon which Aerospace dwells.
Battlemechs can't fight the enemy unless you can get them somehow, which is typically by Dropships. Now it is possible to operate a dropship without air superiority (land it out of sortie or detection range from Aerospace and reposition if you are discovered) but it is tricky.
I"ve featured it heavily in a recent collaboration with Monbvol, and there's the ridiculous number of Ngo Stories, but I do it because I know it doesn't fit the editorial direction at Catalyst.
see, the problem works out like this: it's an interstellar setting, but the focus is on a specialist ground warfare arm. That means they kind of MUST avoid doing heavily aerospace or naval for licensing and editorial reasons-aka giving attention to Naval/Aerospace really DOES push the 'mechwarrior off his pedestal-or at least, that's the fear at the editorial level.
and it's a reasonable fear. Effective aerospace and now your 'mechwarriors might not live to see their glorious ground action, which in turn might end up not being so pivotal if the aerospace/naval arm actually does their job correctly, and who wants to play occupation trooper?
so there's a REASON Aerospace gets short-shrift...but it's also why it doesn't sell.
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I am starting to agree with the complete revamping of the Aerospace rules . Preferably before some of the original writers fully retire . Best include those that broke the system in the past and forced rewriting them in the first place .
Mechanics that need to be better codified. Over lapping KF fields ( Ice Transport ) . Rediscovering of better jump engines . Possibly different FTL system . Some AU work has been done by one or two of the writers of Jade Falcon Sourcebook. The biggest nonsensical issue some of the old Gaurd had was LAMs having arbitrary restrictions that Quad Vee don't.
My biggest issues is how it intersects the ground game. Just how ridiculously vulnerable a grounded dropship is routinely is . As far as I have seen Deep space engagements have the least Issues.
The Abstraction mechanics of Support points expended just rings hollow .
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I actually think grounded dropships should be vulnerable, that's why they should only stay down as long as necessary to recover troops in enemy territory. If you want your dropship to safely shut down its engines (rather than operate in condition yellow all the time) then secure a starport for them, and put a guard around it to protect it.
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To the original post:
If my interaction with some people on this forum is any indication, I think it might be the complete change in weapon performance, and the range shifts involved with the scales.
It goes to a bit more realistic approach compared to the comically unrealistic ground ranges if you don't try to wrap your imagination around why there's such a difference.
Let's start with range. Instead of individual weapon ranges, you now have solid range bands based on the unit, and different weapons have a reach to one of these bands. (Sure, the optional rule for tracking individual weapon ranges at the new scale is stated in the core rules. But, being optional, I doubt there are many who switch over to use it.)
It's a pretty drastic shift from BattleTech's ground combat.
And, then there are the modifiers. Hexes traveled doesn't give you the hefty defensive modifiers as you would get in the ground game. Sure, we are talking aircraft here, who can't presumably juke side-to-side so readily or move as erratically as a unit in contact with the ground moving at velocities that don't impart problems with aerodynamics. But, again, it's a drastic enough change as to be unrecognizable from the parent game.
It really is a completely different game in many respects, and that could be an easy turn-off for people who don't want to have to remember yet another set of rules.
I personally do and don't mind at the same time. I've played so many different styles of games that I don't mind being the guy that knows aero and can advise the guys who need to run the fighters that are making an appearance in a ground game.
My quibbles and praises have a lot to do with the concepts behind in universe performances. I like that the new scales show the weapons for the ground go well beyond what's shown at the ground level. But, at the same time, some of that performance is baffling, like how large ships that are seemingly ponderous in their movement get a magical armor shield wall and can't have specific items damaged without risking the destruction of an entire vessel. Especially if they're a dropship sitting nice and duck-like on the ground.
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As mentioned TW's air rules are a mess. Air movement and air combat are at opposite ends of the book. Most of the movement section is layered like an onion, space first then atmos then maybe on-ground-mapsheet. Small craft, aero, and conventional movement exist in a soup with each other, maybe it should've had all the small craft stuff in the back ("here's how these are different"). Aero heat is with the rest of the heat rules. Air combat covers ground strikes, but shooting back is in the normal combat chapter. Control loss is in the movement section, though most control loss is probably from getting shot at.
TW's layout in general is a mess. The number one thing they could do to help players would be to redo that book and lay things out in the book in a manor that make sense. It has always felt like they changed the order things were in the book from past books just to be different and no other reason. TW's rules as a whole do not flow well and it makes no sense because none of the past Main rule books had this problem.
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On the layout of Total Warfare, it doesn't help that the Aero Section is largely a direct copy/paste of the AT:2 book, optional rules and all. I know, I still have my copy of AT2, and when TW came out, I went through it with a fine-tooth comb to see what changes were actually made.
For a tournament level book, the fact that you have three different ways to play out ground interaction is ... wasting page space that could have gone elsewhere.
Between a separate low altitude map, a separate radar map, or actual rules for aero units on many, many ground maps, pick one! Make that the standard. The rest should have been in TacOps.
And, when it comes right down to it, I think the only rules most people want out of Aero is the ground interaction rules. In fact, you don't even need to go beyond what AT1 did - set up the attack run for the BT game in question, and then let it fly. All that would be required is the hit location tables and crit effects for the fighters.*
Also, grounded DropShips as objective pieces for the ground games. I, personally, want to see DropShips that are effectively giant buildings, easily critted to ineffectiveness instead of having to plow through walls of armor that shouldn't rightly have that kind of reach, and then risk demolishing the craft entirely as you quickly chew through its structural integrity. (It's one thing if the ship's on the move and airborn. But, on the ground?)
That's where the introduction for Aero should rightly start. Add-ons to the core ground game.
* - Sounds like there's been a set of support rules which allows you to effectively 'purchase' attack runs, so you wouldn't even have to stress over whether there should be any return flybys or which direction they come from and how soon. If you've paid for it, you get it.
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Warships are whole other can of worms. I always felt the BTU having minimal reliance on space battleships gave it a unique feel but space dreadnoughts and space gallons have become so ingrained into the sci-fi genre as a whole, every one wants to see the biggest ships duke it out. Changing the cost so relying on Dropships and aerospace fighters becomes more practical as in universe would help but I really think it comes down to everyone wanting to see 2 Leviathans trade nukes.
It's too bad that we can't have Captain Harlock style pirate ships plying the space lanes. If there were small numbers of these ships overall, I could see the only reason a pirate ship wouldn't set up shop in a flag-waving star system is that eventually it would have to face off against a house navy vessel. So it could come in, help establish air superiority for a ground raid, but would eventually have to hoist the sails and get out of there, or risk being demolished.
This could even be done for small mercenary 'privateer' bands.
The Dark Age could have been a great time for this.
Technically, so could the 3rd Succession War period.
Sadly, putting that in would be a huge retcon.
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You will never get a satisfactory believable answer to this. Becuase the honest answer is: "but then we wouldn't get mech on mech combat." The core premise of this setting is giant stompy robots. Against all logic about why this is not the optimal method of waging war.
Only if Mechs are also rare. The aerospace argument can be answered by simply having the conflict happen 'locally'. You have neo-feudalistic lords and fiefs on any given planet, leading to all kinds of potential for conflict. Planets are more than a giant city, and have lots of room for rival nations to form behind a contest in who gets the planetary throne, or control of a particular parcel of land and whatever industry/population happens to be on it.
Make the Mech conflict more easily resorted to from having so many easily available, and you're set. No need to get in a dropper and risk getting shot down if Militias and Malcontents have scores of Mechs scrapped together from whole battlefields of yore as well as freshly minted ones from local garage assembly group, or the fresh supply just shipped in from the Imperial Manufacturers. If you ease the rarety of the BattleMech, but still maintain its superiority over conventional forces, you can have your Mech Battles without having to worry about how someone got to the surface. (Hint: A lot of them were already there.)
And, you can still have your interstellar Merc trade as battlefields open up around a region of space. No need to make a hot-drop raid when you can have a writ of passage and an officially stamped contract that puts you down as a supplement to one side or another in an ongoing conflict. And, you don't have to worry necessarily about being the only force to get to a situation on time, because the conflicts will usually have been going on long enough that there really may not be a rush, except on missing out.
And, since I'm on the subject of getting Mechs into Mech battles, I'm going to float this little idea out there as a way to bridge the ground game and any potential Air&Space game: Why not bring back AirMechs/LAMs?
I know why the concept was dropped for a time, but it looks like we should be past that now, especially if you change out how things transform, or even create simple specialized designs which don't transform. And, this could apply to other environments as well as Air&Space. Want a good naval game for BattleTech? Break out the AquaMechs. The old Viper second-line Mech could be the basis for a non-transformable AirMech.
When I mean change the way it transforms, I mean more than going simply bimodal. One of the common things I see in most anime Variable Form Mecha is the tendency to put the legs behind. Why not take a cue from Ender's Game for your space Mechs? Have the legs pull up to become the nose and act as extra armor for the rest of the craft when in an environment where they're nothing more than added weight? Or the arms?
Get creative! How would a Warhammer heavy bomber look if it transformed? If you see the torso armor as foldout wings, and flip them down, and you bring the legs forward to create an aerodynamic nose, you get something that might look akin to a Colonial Viper, with the PPC Guns under the wing.
Or, if you have a dedicated Space Mech, (Griffin and Beemer, I'm looking at you), when they launch into space, the could bring up their legs in front of them in a kneeling position, and lock them, and have a lot of the thrust coming from the backpack.
It's just an idea. But, if you want to introduce something and still have your giant robot combat in it, bring in the Mech in some fashion. It wasn't a bad idea then. Doesn't have to be a bad idea now.
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On the layout of Total Warfare, it doesn't help that the Aero Section is largely a direct copy/paste of the AT:2 book, optional rules and all. I know, I still have my copy of AT2, and when TW came out, I went through it with a fine-tooth comb to see what changes were actually made.
For a tournament level book, the fact that you have three different ways to play out ground interaction is ... wasting page space that could have gone elsewhere.
Between a separate low altitude map, a separate radar map, or actual rules for aero units on many, many ground maps, pick one! Make that the standard. The rest should have been in TacOps.
And, when it comes right down to it, I think the only rules most people want out of Aero is the ground interaction rules. In fact, you don't even need to go beyond what AT1 did - set up the attack run for the BT game in question, and then let it fly. All that would be required is the hit location tables and crit effects for the fighters.*
Also, grounded DropShips as objective pieces for the ground games. I, personally, want to see DropShips that are effectively giant buildings, easily critted to ineffectiveness instead of having to plow through walls of armor that shouldn't rightly have that kind of reach, and then risk demolishing the craft entirely as you quickly chew through its structural integrity. (It's one thing if the ship's on the move and airborn. But, on the ground?)
That's where the introduction for Aero should rightly start. Add-ons to the core ground game.
* - Sounds like there's been a set of support rules which allows you to effectively 'purchase' attack runs, so you wouldn't even have to stress over whether there should be any return flybys or which direction they come from and how soon. If you've paid for it, you get it.
Speaking of tourny level rule book has anyone ever brought an airship to a tourny style game. I still say those shouldn't have been in and Artillery should have stayed. At lest people use artillery.
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I couldn't tell you. Of the few GenCon game events I got to attend over the years since the introduction of TW, I can't say that I've seen one.
Still, the page count dedicated to the alternate forms of Aero Ground Interaction would have probably been enough to swap out for the Artillery rules as laid out in the old BMR.
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Well, the Wolves are now in charge of Terra and it seems they're going to have at least their hundred-year ilClan. Considering the general Clan view on these things, I'm not seeing a viable path to resurrect the LAM in-universe.
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I could see the Dragon trying to resurrect them as a means to try to come up with some sort of advantage. Just because Terra becomes the ground of stagnation doesn't mean it has to apply to the other houses.
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They can, as long as they can retain their independence from the forming 3rd Star League. I don't think the overarching plot is leaning in that direction, though.
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Well, you only limit yourself if you decide you want to. [shrug]
And, since I'm on a bit of a lore tangent, there is something from the current Aero rules that I wish had been more thoroughly explored officially, and personally wouldn't want to see it completely go away. That would be the range bands and the low-altitude scale and even high-altitude/space scale.
I have long concluded that the magic nature of BT armor, among many other variables, is one of the determining factors for the 'effective' ground ranges. So, that there is a different performance for Airborne units at high velocities which warrant playing at the different altitude scales is fascinating. Sure, they have to enter the 'map' hex occupied by a ground unit to attack it. But against another aero unit, they can engage at the increased ranges.
I personally look at the range bands kind of like the full effective sensor range when armor isn't the deciding factor. And I personally like using this as a basis for comparison against other settings that don't have the magic armor plus mobility effect that I envision BT ground units having. So, I honestly don't want to lose that. I could actually see using the AT2-style rules for emulating modern warfare a bit more readily.
But, if we're to keep that, I would want a little more consistency across the board. I think grounded DropShips should make great Anti-Aircraft emplacements that can engage aero units at the longer appropriate ranges, and think it should extend to dedicated AA units if we're going to keep things at that scale. Maybe some balancing factor can make things be equal, or maybe not. If there's a reason ground engagements work, give the ground units that unspoken of advantage. It would certainly make for an interesting challenge.
But, in the end, I would rather better consistency and integration between the two games once we get the new AeroTech:Revised. (I'm banking on its eventuality and not mere possibilty, personally.)
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Well, the Wolves are now in charge of Terra and it seems they're going to have at least their hundred-year ilClan. Considering the general Clan view on these things, I'm not seeing a viable path to resurrect the LAM in-universe.
QuadVees and Interface Cockpits have been adopted, at least on a small scale, by the Clans. The Clans are ludicrously traditional and hidebound only as far as it gives them an advantage or a sense of moral superiority. If they find a valid use for LAMs, then by Kerensky, they'll bring them back.
That said, it wouldn't take much to include them in a future edition of the core rulebook. They act like 'Mechs in standard mode and WiGE in AirMech mode. Their use in fighter mode can be mentioned as being in the aerospace book. Then you need less than a paragraph to explain their conversion special rule, with perhaps a note saying that if not using aerospace rules, a LAM that converts to fighter mode is assumed to have retreated, just like moving off a map edge.
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LAMs are a whole other discussion
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QuadVees and Interface Cockpits have been adopted, at least on a small scale, by the Clans. The Clans are ludicrously traditional and hidebound only as far as it gives them an advantage or a sense of moral superiority. If they find a valid use for LAMs, then by Kerensky, they'll bring them back.
That said, it wouldn't take much to include them in a future edition of the core rulebook. They act like 'Mechs in standard mode and WiGE in AirMech mode. Their use in fighter mode can be mentioned as being in the aerospace book. Then you need less than a paragraph to explain their conversion special rule, with perhaps a note saying that if not using aerospace rules, a LAM that converts to fighter mode is assumed to have retreated, just like moving off a map edge.
Ehhh, The QuadVees aren't a good example of adoption. Only the Horses (their creator) has adopted them as far as I know, and likely to be the only Clan to do so, at least for front-line and Trueborn units. For the rest of the Clans, Trueborn MechWarriors have too much pride to share a cockpit with another. The Freeborns might be willing to, but they need to convince their lords and masters that it's worth the Trials to acquire them. I don't even see the Wolves accepting Tripods for the Trueborns or the Super-Heavies for that same reason.
LAMs are in a similar position. Clan Warriors do not cross-train, which is required for a single pilot to run a LAM. In order to get around that then, you need to use dual-cockpits, and they would need to work as a team within that cockpit, which Jade Falcon has demonstrated to not work with Clan Warriors.
Now, with the Snow Ravens having a strong aerospace focus, they might be the only Clan that would even try to use LAMs, but I wouldn't put money on it.
There's also the thing about the naughty Blakists using a lot of them in that kerfuffle they caused, which might sour some of the Spheroid Houses.
The Confederation was the only major house not up their eyes in fighting like mad until they went after Alaric on Terra. Most of the Periphery states simply don't have the budget to develop or build "new" technologies.
There are some options to approach it, but that's going to go in to Fan Design territory way to quickly, so I'll just stop there.
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Okay, last post was pretty long, and I apologize if it looks like I'm beating a dead horse into toxic gradeschool glue.
What Aerospace needs, is a push in the fiction, where its unique properties aren't a millstone, but a feature. Jobs where "Well, we can't use a 'mech for that", stories (MULTIPLE) where ground forces are 'cargo', the players on the stage are ship captains and fighter pilots, and the battles are written not as one-sided mudstomps, but as exciting tactical, strategic moves with actual relevance to the events in the main line.
Something like a series of stories focused on a Fighter Wing with a dropship, interfering in the enemy's resupply or advance in deep space, or a story where a couple lances of fighters stop a Bandit force from getting away with it, or a patrol dropship saves civilians from bieng sold as slaves.
The kind of events where a battlemech might even be a HINDRANCE in other words-something to make Aero into the heroes, if only as a side-story to the main event.
You are not wrong stories would be nice. Then again AT2 rule set is not great. I would really prefer a new Battlespace style game
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You are not wrong stories would be nice. Then again AT2 rule set is not great. I would really prefer a new Battlespace style game
Here's the thing I see, and maybe I'm all wet in seeing it, but The Rules Aren't The Core Problem. Indecision about how they were presented? sure, that's "A" problem, but it's also a symptom of the real problem.
We have all these different, conflicting, rulesets inside the same ruleset, because of the core problem.
We have the scaling issues ALSO because of that core problem, and the lack of fiction support is ALSO a symptom of the core problem.
The problem is, Aerospace isn't important enough to get right.
That problem, in turn, comes from a much bigger problem.
"We have this, what do we DO with it??" Says the generic dev, late (or early) on a weekend night, sitting at his macbook or desktop, with a deadline on Monday.
There's little to no consistency among the devs (or the fanbase) as to what it Should be.
Only that it's a sci-fi game without ground based Stargates, so logically this thing should exist. Nobody can agree on what it should look like or be, so it gets an occasional rules polish from stuff that they didn't make go into another game, maybe add some fluff, and of course designs, but nobody can agree on how it should play out.
The handling of Aerospace isn't so much a system, as it is throwing whatever good idea happens to be mathematically somewhat sound on a page and hoping for the best, so you can go back to polishing the aspects that you already know works.
What's worse, is us. WE, the Players and Fans, demanding contradictory things from those line developers, because we all 'think' we've got the ideal solution that will make it all make sense, but WE can't agree on what will work to do that, how can we expect THEM to?
You like Battlespace rules, consider why.
Battlespace is in the Battletech universe, but...it's internally consistent and was developed as its own game-it's not trying to patch across using paradoxes, and it failed commercially.
I got my copy from the 'half off overstock' bin at the game store. I hadn't even known it was released before it had already failed commercially.
Think about that, think about what that means.
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I'm cautiously optimistic about about future aerospace in Battletech. The Total Warfare ruleset, despite being IMHO awfully written, is an improvement to what we had in Aerotech 2, mainly by getting rid of the whole hex 0808 nonsense among other things. Alpha Strike has also made some key improvements to air-support by de-powering bombs and by integrated fighters into the main map. These are baby steps in the right direction but it is getting better.
Going forward I think the main thing is make aerospace assets a fun addition to the base mech combat game. So basically focusing on the gameplay above everything else so that air-support can be seamlessly and intuitively integrated into a ground battle in a fun way. Aerospace should be about supplementing the ground game without superseding it.
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I'm cautiously optimistic about about future aerospace in Battletech.
The authors are right now studying a new Aerotech game that changes a lot of the rules.
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It just hard to combine rules for many different types of unit.
A warship vs warship only game is one thing but add the dropships that can be popped by one shot of a warship.
Then throw in the fighters and squadrons and that makes thing harder.
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It just hard to combine rules for many different types of unit.
A warship vs warship only game is one thing but add the dropships that can be popped by one shot of a warship.
Then throw in the fighters and squadrons and that makes thing harder.
I suspect that when it is released it emphasizes dropship and aerofighter combat. Warships have never been plentiful in the Battletech universe.
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As it should be CJC. I do think you'd need to include Moon Bases, Jumpships, Satellites, and Space Stations however as those are objectives for Aerospace missions. Destroying or Capturing those should be Day -3 Objectives for any ground campaign in order to clear the Battlespace of hostiles. It gives Battlemechs something to do in unison with Aerospace vehicles too which is key for the fiction and shows off why Battlemechs are so crucial to the House Militaries.
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Looking at warships closely, I wonder if the original writers who designed the warships were right in creating them without construction rules. They are big metal tubes that carry guns and cargo in zero gravity. In that light I'd be fine with removing the construction rules for jumpships, warships, and space stations considering many of them as tangible fluff that you can play with at a table, maybe like a boss fight :bruce6sg: Last I checked, Star Wars didn't have any construction rules for their capital ships, so why should ours? :tongue:
I'd keep construction rules for anything that can travel in atmospheres since they'll have to escape a planet's gravity to do stuff in space, so the mass of their equipment is more of a concern. Also, I think their overall mass should affect how they move. For example, an empty Union dropship can get to space faster than a loaded one as assumed in the construction rules. This was a rule in AT2R for omnifighters not equipping their entire pod space. Of course this can always be changed at the game table...
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I suspect that when it is released it emphasizes dropship and aerofighter combat. Warships have never been plentiful in the Battletech universe.
Not exactly true. They've never been plentiful in the Eras people usually play. Before the Mackie and the Ares Conventions, though, they were the main unit for projecting power. The Clans even had a significant fleet, but between bidding after Turtle Bay and a certain tantrum even that was whittled away.
Last I checked, Star Wars didn't have any construction rules for their capital ships, so why should ours? :tongue:
I guess because everything else does. In fact, we got Warship construction rules LONG before we got any Infantry construction rules.
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One of the core assumptions for BT is that the 'Mechs have reached the surface.
I guess that Aerospace can be abstracted to a degree as long as that core assumption isn't affected.
So a bad event would be like having ones supplies and 'Mechs scattered (like MW3 pc game), or that the opponent gets some orbital bombardment tokens/BSP.
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I guess because everything else does. In fact, we got Warship construction rules LONG before we got any Infantry construction rules.
That's what I figured! BattleTech really has to take combat math all the way it seems :laugh:
Building further on my thoughts about doing away with capital ship construction rules, I wonder more-recent writers have considered that as well. For example, we have no record sheets for the CCS Ancestral Home Texas-class ship, or the CSV Perigard Zalman Leviathan Prime-class ship, both being oddly superpowered ships which clashed during the Wars of Reaving. I think it's possible that they haven't been built at all.
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In fact, we got Warship construction rules LONG before we got any Infantry construction rules.
I got the infantry construction rules in junior high.
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I got the infantry construction rules in junior high.
(Wincing) Kit, we had warship construction rules pre-BMR , If you got your infantry construction rules in high school, that means Companion, which was around 2002, or about five to ten years after warship construction was a thing.
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Here's the thing I see, and maybe I'm all wet in seeing it, but The Rules Aren't The Core Problem. Indecision about how they were presented? sure, that's "A" problem, but it's also a symptom of the real problem.
We have all these different, conflicting, rulesets inside the same ruleset, because of the core problem.
We have the scaling issues ALSO because of that core problem, and the lack of fiction support is ALSO a symptom of the core problem.
The problem is, Aerospace isn't important enough to get right.
That problem, in turn, comes from a much bigger problem.
"We have this, what do we DO with it??" Says the generic dev, late (or early) on a weekend night, sitting at his macbook or desktop, with a deadline on Monday.
There's little to no consistency among the devs (or the fanbase) as to what it Should be.
Only that it's a sci-fi game without ground based Stargates, so logically this thing should exist. Nobody can agree on what it should look like or be, so it gets an occasional rules polish from stuff that they didn't make go into another game, maybe add some fluff, and of course designs, but nobody can agree on how it should play out.
The handling of Aerospace isn't so much a system, as it is throwing whatever good idea happens to be mathematically somewhat sound on a page and hoping for the best, so you can go back to polishing the aspects that you already know works.
What's worse, is us. WE, the Players and Fans, demanding contradictory things from those line developers, because we all 'think' we've got the ideal solution that will make it all make sense, but WE can't agree on what will work to do that, how can we expect THEM to?
You like Battlespace rules, consider why.
Battlespace is in the Battletech universe, but...it's internally consistent and was developed as its own game-it's not trying to patch across using paradoxes, and it failed commercially.
I got my copy from the 'half off overstock' bin at the game store. I hadn't even known it was released before it had already failed commercially.
Think about that, think about what that means.
Well I think AT2 commercially failed two hence why FanPRO and CGL when they went to the Total Ware fare rule set didn't give it a stand alone rule set like in the past.
I think you are spot on that it is basicly and after thought and that creates a problem were nothing is really well thought out as to how all the ideals effect each other.
And because Battlespace existed you kind of have two styles of players The ones that want the smaller scale and the ones like me that would just prefer to play fleet scale battles. Which of course makes matters worse a split fan base.
Honestly I don't know what the solution is. (which you point out the fan base doesnt'.) But I do think if you had a novel or two focused on the areo tech side you might create a base that did care enough to figure that out. Will that ever happen doubt it. Space games don't seem to have longevity in the wargaming space anyways as a rule
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Honestly you know what I always thought would have made a good space system for Battletech. Was the clicky tech. Simplify the game for players they had those larger bases for other games that did dragons and what not for dropships and warships. I think a clicky tech syle areospace/battlespace game was the answer
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I got the infantry construction rules in junior high.
You're that much younger than me? I am turning to dust as we speak.
Space games don't seem to have longevity in the wargaming space anyways as a rule
I don't know right now. Yes and no? Star Wars: X-Wing and Armada are still in print through Atomic Mass as boutique games and Wizkids is poised to release a new Star Trek fleet game. But there is definitely a lot of churn among both licenses, and on the gripping hand they're both much more popular than BattleTech. I've think I've been clear that I want to see new AeroTech and BattleSpace-style games, but they're going to need something to make them "pop." I have no idea what that could be.
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You're that much younger than me? I am turning to dust as we speak.
I think that joke was a little too subtle....
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You're that much younger than me? I am turning to dust as we speak.
I don't know right now. Yes and no? Star Wars: X-Wing and Armada are still in print through Atomic Mass as boutique games and Wizkids is poised to release a new Star Trek fleet game. But there is definitely a lot of churn among both licenses, and on the gripping hand they're both much more popular than BattleTech. I've think I've been clear that I want to see new AeroTech and BattleSpace-style games, but they're going to need something to make them "pop." I have no idea what that could be.
Right but they are exceptions that survive because of the Name Brand that Star Wars carries. We will see how the Star Trek game does the last one Wizkids did didn't have legs. Space Games based on wargames universes just don't have legs that stand the test of time. Even Games Workshop runs into the same problem. And don't get me wrong I don't want it to be that way just seems to be the way it is.
But yea you are right to have any chance it needs something to make it pop. Honestly probally needs to be an Xwing style game with ground attack rules to have much of a long term chance
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Making a successful all-new aero ruleset is an interesting dilemma because you have to consider before you even start what your goal is: to make a game that complements base BT well, or making something that is successful and thrives all on its own (like X-Wing, or Alpha Strike). The two require very different approaches.
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Making a successful all-new aero ruleset is an interesting dilemma because you have to consider before you even start what your goal is: to make a game that complements base BT well, or making something that is successful and thrives all on its own (like X-Wing, or Alpha Strike). The two require very different approaches.
Heh. For the first time in years I wish I was still a dev, because I have IDEAS.
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The authors are right now studying a new Aerotech game that changes a lot of the rules.
source? i've not heard anything of the sort.
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I'm not aware of that fact either (which is admittedly no guarantee of anything). Offhand I'd guess it's the rumour spiral applied to Randall's casual comment from a half-year ago that aero is being reconsidered.
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source? i've not heard anything of the sort.
It's only been mentioned in passing from what I remember but every time someone brings up a new Aerospace or Battlespace, not until we get new rules has been the response. Now how much time has been out into the making of the new rules set with every other CGL iron in the fire, that's the real question.
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I got the infantry construction rules in junior high.
That doesn't really tell me much. I first saw Warship Construction rules in Battlespace, which was released in 1993. I didn't see any Infantry Construction rules till the Tech Manual, but I was out of the loop from the late 90s till just the last decade or so.
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Heh. For the first time in years I wish I was still a dev, because I have IDEAS.
why not work up a proposal and send it in? the worst that can happen is 'no'.
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Honestly what we are all referring to as Aerospace should probably be broken down into three seperate games / rules-sets. Which I am aware is not remotely feasible in terms of investment. But in my ideal world we have:
1: A functional and relatively easy way to handle 1-4 fighters on a ground attack run. A decent way to do ground vs air combat tied into the core rules of Battletech.
2: A dogfighting game of ASF vs ASF, maybe going up to the occasional dropship. If I'm being completely candid a Battletech reskin of X-Wing would probably work (they even had rules for things like the corvette that would serve for dropships).
and finally 3: a new incarnation of Battlespace focusing on Dropship and Warship combat. In Ilclan era you don't have a ton of true Warships, but you do have well developed "Pocket Warships" which in some cases are basically full if small Warships that just don't have a Jump drive. Once again, I would settle for a Battletech reskin of Star Trek Armada for this.
But this does serve to illuminate the true problem: "The Aerospace rules" are trying to do too much, and since they are an afterthought tacked onto the game/setting they have never been given the resources and time to actually make the three different games they really want to be.
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It arguably shouldn't be three different games, only reason to make that conclusion was Fasa couldn't decide which aspect to focus on: air to air? Air to ground? Air control? Fleet combat? Allot of examples of other games pick one, the BT community has a bad habit of saying 'all of the above!'
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I think that joke was a little too subtle....
For everyone replying to Kit, let's give it another try...
Construction steps for making infantry:
1) Find two consenting adults
2) Turn the lights down low...
As a prodigal son returned recently to Battletech and one-time Aerotech player, I was flipping through Total Warfare and found the aerospace rules discordant. There's the section on Falling, then a short story, then aerospace rules. Worse, check this out:
The most exciting way to use aerospace units in the game is to fly them directly onto the ground maps playing area...
... to use aerospace units directly on ground maps requires a very large playing area; ideally an arrangement of nine, twelve, sixteen or more mapsheets.
* blink blink *
Alright, then.
As a fan of large scale (and thus, pretty much failed) space battle games (RL: Leviathan being a favourite that comes to mind to this day, SFB, Battlefleet Gothic, etc.), I say, leave it out of Battletech. There are other games for that. The Battletech fiction gains strength and uniqueness from the idea of fragile jumpships delivering cocoon type dropships full of ground units.
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I don't know right now. Yes and no? Star Wars: X-Wing and Armada are still in print through Atomic Mass as boutique games and Wizkids is poised to release a new Star Trek fleet game. But there is definitely a lot of churn among both licenses, and on the gripping hand they're both much more popular than BattleTech. I've think I've been clear that I want to see new AeroTech and BattleSpace-style games, but they're going to need something to make them "pop." I have no idea what that could be.
Full Thrust is still very much available (and free, now) and still has a large fanbase.
(I feel obligated to mentioned Accelerate and Attack! is still very much in active support, too, though possibly only by the developer *cough* - least ways, nobody ever comes to me to talk about it.)
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As a fan of large scale (and thus, pretty much failed) space battle games (RL: Leviathan being a favourite that comes to mind to this day, SFB, Battlefleet Gothic, etc.), I say, leave it out of Battletech. There are other games for that. The Battletech fiction gains strength and uniqueness from the idea of fragile jumpships delivering cocoon type dropships full of ground units.
There may be other games, but they aren't Battletech. There are those who want those sweeping battlescapes and who would recreate either of the big Battles of Terra. So let them. That's what Strategic Operations: Advanced Space Rules is meant to address (for the most part).
The biggest problem with Aerospace right now is that they are approaching things from a poor direction with Total Warfare, which everyone has said.
The solution is to either, keep it to a total mimimum in any Total Warfare-style book with the simplified Radar map and ground effect only; OR do away with Total Warfare and embrace the Manual series, with Battlemech Manual, Combined Arms Manual, Aerospace Manual, and Fleet Manual.
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Full Thrust is still very much available (and free, now) and still has a large fanbase.
(I feel obligated to mentioned Accelerate and Attack! is still very much in active support, too, though possibly only by the developer *cough* - least ways, nobody ever comes to me to talk about it.)
Not a large enough fan base to be sold in stores same with Starmada (just put out a new rule set). The reality if it isn't going to sell it is a waste of CGL's time. (Full thrust and starmada are both fun games)
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There may be other games, but they aren't Battletech.
Ha ha! You and I have said basically the same thing... but I suspect we have rather different meanings :wink:
There are those who want those sweeping battlescapes and who would recreate either of the big Battles of Terra. So let them. That's what Strategic Operations: Advanced Space Rules is meant to address (for the most part).
I'd say, make fleet games a totally separate game then, for those few who want it (and I say that, again, having watched all my favourites either fail, or at least not significantly grow the fanbase), set in the same universe (although, again, I'd argue even those canon time periods are relatively niche compared to the flavour of Battletech).
The solution is to either, keep it to a total mimimum in any Total Warfare-style book with the simplified Radar map and ground effect only; OR do away with Total Warfare and embrace the Manual series, with Battlemech Manual, Combined Arms Manual, Aerospace Manual, and Fleet Manual.
Yup, at most, make it fighter scale to jive with the mechs, but boy I don't even know where I'd start the rework. In the short term, before reworking, it'd be nice just to use strafing/bombing as battlefield support. For one turn you can put your fighter figure on the map, to determine the strafing row, then pull it off, sort of thing.
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Yup, at most, make it fighter scale to jive with the mechs, but boy I don't even know where I'd start the rework. In the short term, before reworking, it'd be nice just to use strafing/bombing as battlefield support. For one turn you can put your fighter figure on the map, to determine the strafing row, then pull it off, sort of thing.
I'm waiting to see how aerospace battlefield support is handled in the Mercenaries boxed set.
why not work up a proposal and send it in? the worst that can happen is 'no'.
Nah, I'm starting a new job next week and won't have the time nor energy to do that kind of game design again.
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I'm waiting to see how aerospace battlefield support is handled in the Mercenaries boxed set.
This. Also, vehicles, infantry, etc. will be in. It's supposed to make the game more mech-centric yet still get your minis on the table. I'm pretty excited about it, but we'll see, I guess.
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I'm waiting to see how aerospace battlefield support is handled in the Mercenaries boxed set.
Aerospace Battlefield Support is already in the new Tukayyid Scenario Pack, Battlemech Manual, and Battlefield Support Cards, along with Minefields and Artillery. They are very simple with the only way to "fight back" is to have the counter Battlefield Support units.
This. Also, vehicles, infantry, etc. will be in. It's supposed to make the game more mech-centric yet still get your minis on the table. I'm pretty excited about it, but we'll see, I guess.
If you joined the Kickstarter, there's the Open Beta documents. I haven't had a chance to play with them, but I have read them over. Infantry sort of work well there, but they have problems in doing Anti-Mech Attacks, and I think the Combat Vehicles are rather neutered pretty bad, though they might be very cheap. They might last longer than the Aerospace and Artillery options, as I think those are one-use, but I wouldn't bet on it.
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If you joined the Kickstarter, there's the Open Beta documents.
Wait, I did, but somehow missed that. Is it in the folder that the other digital files were in? I haven't looked in a long time (I pulled down a couple wallpapers, but that's it).
ETA: I just looked in the backers only folder. It's not there. The only Beta I see is for Battletech: Aces, which I downloaded. How do I get it?
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For everyone replying to Kit, let's give it another try...
Construction steps for making infantry:
1) Find two consenting adults
2) Turn the lights down low...
I'm glad someone got it.
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I'm glad someone got it.
*deep sigh*
Wait, I did, but somehow missed that. Is it in the folder that the other digital files were in? I haven't looked in a long time (I pulled down a couple wallpapers, but that's it).
ETA: I just looked in the backers only folder. It's not there. The only Beta I see is for Battletech: Aces, which I downloaded. How do I get it?
If I remember correctly, they were only up for a rather short time for comment and were taken down when the book went to print. I have the files, but I'm waiting for the final printed version before commenting publicly on them.
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It arguably shouldn't be three different games, only reason to make that conclusion was Fasa couldn't decide which aspect to focus on: air to air? Air to ground? Air control? Fleet combat? Allot of examples of other games pick one, the BT community has a bad habit of saying 'all of the above!'
FASA did make the choice to have fleet combat be a different game.
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The battlemech manual has the non-beta aerospace BSP rules. As was mentioned, the only way to stop a bombing attack is to have air cover.
However, that is true in total warfare too. Once the bomber has flown onto the map over a target, there is no way to stop a bombing attack. The only way to stop them is to have a fighter on the aero map that intercepts the attack before they fly over the ground map.
You can shoot down strike craft, after they have attacked, but since each attack is only usable once in BSP form there is no need. Its like counterbattery fire for artillery, in the BSP form each artillery attack is one use, so striking back at the artillery isn't needed. It keeps the artillery nice and simple.
If mercenaries has BSP stats for the aerospace fighters, assuming they are like the vtol and such rules they will have a threshold and destroy TN. So you'd shoot them and they'd shoot you, and you don't track much besides the end of turn destroy TN.
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Wait, I did, but somehow missed that. Is it in the folder that the other digital files were in? I haven't looked in a long time (I pulled down a couple wallpapers, but that's it).
ETA: I just looked in the backers only folder. It's not there. The only Beta I see is for Battletech: Aces, which I downloaded. How do I get it?
There's a link to the DropBox in Update #30.
If I remember correctly, they were only up for a rather short time for comment and were taken down when the book went to print. I have the files, but I'm waiting for the final printed version before commenting publicly on them.
The DropBox link is still active. It even has a document for Vehicle and Infantry Counters.
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Ahhh, I didn't check the Dropbox, just the Google Docs folder.
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The DropBox link is still active. It even has a document for Vehicle and Infantry Counters.
Got it! Thanks!
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There's a link to the DropBox in Update #30.
The DropBox link is still active. It even has a document for Vehicle and Infantry Counters.
Just checked #30. Repeatedly. Didn't see it.
Can anybody give me a better idea what I'm looking for?
I thought #50 was where all the action was and I got all of it,but I'm not seeing this.
Thanks.
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Just checked #30. Repeatedly. Didn't see it.
Can anybody give me a better idea what I'm looking for?
I thought #50 was where all the action was and I got all of it,but I'm not seeing this.
Thanks.
#30 has a link to the announcement, but I guess it's #28 that has the link for V2.
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#30 has a link to the announcement, but I guess it's #28 that has the link for V2.
Yes. It's in the email for #30, which links back to #28. You have to scroll down. Below the 8m stretch goal there's a section called 'More from this creator'. There're two links. The first is 'Exciting News!' the second is 'Battlefield Support Open Beta V2'. Click on that and it takes you to the kickstarter page. If you're logged in, the message for #28 shows up with the dropbox links.
Don't want to say too much, but I'm cautiously optimistic. Mechs play like Battletech, but it looks like all other assets get Alpha Strikey type cards. You get tank miniatures on the table, and they move like Battletech, including paying MP for facing changes, but they take damage in a sort of Alpha Strikey way. So, you get more miniatures on the table without needing simulation level fidelity for the non-mech units. We'll see how it plays.
Back OT for the aerospace, we'll see how the rules are finally written when it comes out, but it would have been nice if, when designating your hexes for strafing, they'd said something like: put your fighter playing piece in the first hex facing along the designated hexes to let players know where they are. That way, you could put the couple new fighter figures they've made for the kickstarters on the table, even if only for a few moments (it's an aesthetic thing)!
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I'm not aware of that fact either (which is admittedly no guarantee of anything). Offhand I'd guess it's the rumour spiral applied to Randall's casual comment from a half-year ago that aero is being reconsidered.
There's also some comments from Ray in this interview (https://www.sarna.net/news/battletech-in-2024-an-interview-with-line-developer-ray-arrastia-assistant-line-developer-aaron-cahall/) that may be coloring people's perceptions.
But I'd like to specifically call out one thing Ray says in that interview (emphasis mine):
Sean: Brent also told me we’re going to be seeing more AeroSpace fighters when there’s a product that actually supports them. And he said that you’re really looking for a product to kind of replace AeroTech.
What are you looking for in a new AeroTech game? And do you think the optional Alpha Strike rules are the best we’re going to get for now? Or is there an actual AeroTech game out there just waiting to be found?
Ray: I’ll answer that generally, not specifically; what we’re looking for is a fun game. A fun AeroSpace game. I know there are lots of fans of the existing system. And I can tell you that because I’ve been in the game for almost 40 years and I’ve got the original AeroTech box.
I love AeroSpace, WarShips, DropShips, all that. But we have to step away from the idea that something is untouchable the way that we are with the BattleTech core. Even if we consider that core, people just don’t play it. There are a few hardcore people, but otherwise, people don’t play it.
And it needs to be fun on its own. We can’t just say we need something to support the ground game—we need a fun game in and of itself. A lot goes into producing these minis, and there really is no point if there isn’t a game to play them with.
As far as ground support and integrating AeroSpace, we have the Battlefield Support system, and the response to that has been good. I only say good because a lot of people aren’t aware. It is set up as a separate, optional system right now in the BattleMech Manual, it’s not in any of the old core lines.
the next paragraph
Ray: So it’s more of we haven’t really moved that to a core system yet but the people who have used it, that’s what most people are looking for as far as getting the AeroSpace involved in supporting the ground game. You know, if you play the old school integrating AeroSpace, they’re on the board for like one turn. They take a shot, they can be shot at, and then they’re gone. And this system just does that and it gets rid of all the keeping track of the secondary game.
To me it sounds like they're trying to use the battlefield support rules to handle the ground support/integrate with BattleMech combat aspect while looking for something else for the "higher level/AeroTech" combat.
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To me it sounds like they're trying to use the battlefield support rules to handle the ground support/integrate with BattleMech combat aspect while looking for something else for the "higher level/AeroTech" combat.
Frankly, I think that's the only sensible option to model that.
Short of doing what we did with Stargrunt II and my homebrew Silent Death/Fox Two rules at a couple of convention shows before the turn of the millenium; which was to have one starfighter game going on and if a bomber got through, you went to the other table and told the appropriate side they got an airstrike to be used immediately and ignored any timescale differences. (And that only worked because SGII was fully phased and non-simultaneous (i.e. more like the HBS game) than BattleTech's semi-phased structure.) Which obviously requires you to run two seperate games which may or may not overlap any time you want to run airsupport.
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Yes. It's in the email for #30, which links back to #28. You have to scroll down. Below the 8m stretch goal there's a section called 'More from this creator'. There're two links. The first is 'Exciting News!' the second is 'Battlefield Support Open Beta V2'. Click on that and it takes you to the kickstarter page. If you're logged in, the message for #28 shows up with the dropbox links.
Thanks ! I got it now. Hope there aren't any other downloads that I missed from the Kickstarter.
Also I'm surprised at the number of people that I have talked to that seem to agree with my earlier post.
TW is a little heavy for a new players first step out of the box set.
Perhaps it might be better to go back to how it used to be.
A ground level combat book could be that first step outside of the box set
and have Aero be it's own rule book that's added later if/when players want to.
"Surface Combat Compendium"?
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Apologies if this was posted before. The internet has been giving me problems. Anyway, I like the idea of Aerospace and would like to use it more. Unfortunately, the rules seem a bit complex. Velocity and Vectoring have always tripped me up. If I ignore those things, aerospace vs aerospace can be fun. Although the space map being 2D and the air/ground map 3D is confusing.
Aerospace vs ground units is where things fall apart. It just doesn't integrate well with ground units do to the different rules used. Aerospace operate under one set of rules and ground units operate under different rules depending on whether or not they're dropping. If feels like I'm trying to pound a square peg into a round hole with a feather pillow. It ends up not being fun. There's got to be better integration.
I also miss the old Aerospace bombs and the external stores in Battletechnology. They were fun. Maybe they could be brought back?
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Another consideration, brought up on DakkaDakka in regards to an Alpha Strike group using the Radar Map from Strategic Operations, that ASF cost as much as a Mech of equivalent size, but in situations where there is no other ASF, their presence on the ground map is probably 2-4 Turns, out of 8 or more.
That's one of the reasons I haven't really pushed to learn the rules very hard, honestly. Most of our BV values are rather low, and our time frames only allow for about 4-5 Turns. That means an ASF will only be available for one single Pass. Not much to entice me to bring a Warhammer that shows up, says, 'Hi!', and then is gone till the game is done, even with StrategicOps Simplified Radar Map.
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Another consideration, brought up on DakkaDakka in regards to an Alpha Strike group using the Radar Map from Strategic Operations, that ASF cost as much as a Mech of equivalent size, but in situations where there is no other ASF, their presence on the ground map is probably 2-4 Turns, out of 8 or more.
That's one of the reasons I haven't really pushed to learn the rules very hard, honestly. Most of our BV values are rather low, and our time frames only allow for about 4-5 Turns. That means an ASF will only be available for one single Pass. Not much to entice me to bring a Warhammer that shows up, says, 'Hi!', and then is gone till the game is done, even with StrategicOps Simplified Radar Map.
in alpha striek at least, the aerospace on the map rules from commander's edition ensures that they'd see more use.
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in alpha striek at least, the aerospace on the map rules from commander's edition ensures that they'd see more use.
That's what I said, but they were saying they were using the Radar Map with Alpha Strike.
I can sort of see how it would work, but the problem still lies in that for the cost, ASF just don't cut it for how little they show on the map with such a method.
If it's a dedicated air or void scenario, that may be a different story, but most of our work has been the ground game, almost to exclusion.
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Looking at warships closely, I wonder if the original writers who designed the warships were right in creating them without construction rules. They are big metal tubes that carry guns and cargo in zero gravity. In that light I'd be fine with removing the construction rules for jumpships, warships, and space stations considering many of them as tangible fluff that you can play with at a table, maybe like a boss fight :bruce6sg: Last I checked, Star Wars didn't have any construction rules for their capital ships, so why should ours? :tongue:
I'd keep construction rules for anything that can travel in atmospheres since they'll have to escape a planet's gravity to do stuff in space, so the mass of their equipment is more of a concern. Also, I think their overall mass should affect how they move. For example, an empty Union dropship can get to space faster than a loaded one as assumed in the construction rules. This was a rule in AT2R for omnifighters not equipping their entire pod space. Of course this can always be changed at the game table...
actually thats not true about star wars not having construction rules. for capital ships, the most current set I have is "starships of the galaxy" I believe
now granted the rules while complete (for certain definitions of complete) are not super detailed. additionally because of star wars "lore" they make some IMO questionable choices, resulting in many ships having MASSIVELY excessive crew compliments. (an imperial star destroyer has a crew of ~30-35,000 people, plus it carries ~10,000 troops with a much cheaper automation you could cut it down to ~1000 crew (and keep the 10,000 troops) while increasing the cargo capacity, weapons or some other aspect.
sorry about the tangent.
my personal issue is I liked a lot of aerospace (first edition) and hate the conversion to fighters being massively simplified into fire factors.
my 2 cents on the subject of lams, is I prefer aerospace 1's version of them but wish there was some tweeks on how the system works rather than the massive throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak.
I think a lot of it is that there were some issues and misconceptions on how things were supposed to work, and a few physics errors.
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actually thats not true about star wars not having construction rules. for capital ships, the most current set I have is "starships of the galaxy" I believe
now granted the rules while complete (for certain definitions of complete) are not super detailed. additionally because of star wars "lore" they make some IMO questionable choices, resulting in many ships having MASSIVELY excessive crew compliments. (an imperial star destroyer has a crew of ~30-35,000 people, plus it carries ~10,000 troops with a much cheaper automation you could cut it down to ~1000 crew (and keep the 10,000 troops) while increasing the cargo capacity, weapons or some other aspect.
sorry about the tangent.
my personal issue is I liked a lot of aerospace (first edition) and hate the conversion to fighters being massively simplified into fire factors.
my 2 cents on the subject of lams, is I prefer aerospace 1's version of them but wish there was some tweeks on how the system works rather than the massive throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak.
I think a lot of it is that there were some issues and misconceptions on how things were supposed to work, and a few physics errors.
A "Few Physics Errors" in Battletech is like saying that the Ocean is 'a bit moist'.
There's "Physics", and then there's "Fasafiziks".
The only important thing, is to keep the internal logic consistent ENOUGH-like any other magic system in gaming or fiction, while maintaining a consistent "Rule of Kewl".
thus why the ship-art from TRO: 2750 and the ship-art for TRO:3057 don't even bear resemblances that would logically flow from refitting the same hull. (I'll leave the Gif sorting to someone else.)
what looked "Cool and futuristic and possible" in 1986, was superseded by what looked "Kewl" in the 1990s, and the fluff was kind of...strained to make it fit.
but it was ALL an aftethought, that's why consistency even in imagery wasn't considered in any way important.
Thus, also we have three current extant whole game systems to address the same situation, scaling problems, a pile of variant rules (many of which contradict one another directly) and so on.
Getting it consistent isn't a high priority, in part because the fanbase itself can't agree on what it ought to look like, never mind how it ought to work, only that something currently ISN'T working right.
but even there, we can't really agree on WHAT isn't working correctly. For the Devs, this is a nightmare because the amount of sheer hard ass work necessary is unlikely to be accepted by enough people to make doing that work profitable.
As an example, after spanking someone who was using 3050 era Clan forces using a pair of LAMs under aT1 rules, I completely understood why LAMS as they existed at the time, had to go.
it was entirely too easy to make the 'super advanced' Clan warriors look like the cast of Dumb and Dumberer, or like your favorite bumbling cartoon villain from Warner Brothers' height when using what was, at the time, base-level Inner sphere tech in platforms that weren't particularly impressive otherwise. (aka book LAMs)
the Harmony Gold mess just gave the excuse to get rid of it until someone was willing and able to revise the rules to something less irrational.
The problems Aero have, come from its existence as an afterthought. A consistent approach gets complicated when you scale up from Fighters to Dropships, and then goes absurdity when you scale up from that, to Warships.
What's worse still, is that not a lot of effort was put into preventing "I Killzzz dem all wif' my ORBITUL BOMBARDMENT!!111"
because the rules there, weren't all that well thought out initially, either and as a direct outcome, the developers went on a "Let's make them extinct again because this is a record keeping pain in the ass that is unbalanced."
Heavy distortion of outcomes leading to making something as extinct as you can get away with? check.
That distortion being because you didn't really think it through: also check.
You didn't think it through because of fan reactions? double check.
The problem begins in the fanbase, the missteps just amplified the problem, then the fixes get 'lost in the shuffle' of layout and publishing deadlines.
This, too, is not unusual. It's part of why 200 kilos Arrow IV does more AREA EFFECT blast damage than 1000 kilos of air-dropped bomb. The TW bombing rules were balanced against BMR(r) with adjustments from AT2, Tac Ops artillery were a direct port from Munchtek (Maximum Tech's untested optional rules) and unbound, which were NOT balanced against air-drop munitions because those weren't a factor in Munchtek's ruleset.
The claim that it's an aerodynamic problem ignores that a long tom shell's weight has to include propellant, and aerodynamics itself can be applied to under-wing bombs more EASILY than to something that has to resist and survive being fired from a gun.
But, Physics need not apply, only "Fizikz".
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As an example, after spanking someone who was using 3050 era Clan forces using a pair of LAMs under aT1 rules, I completely understood why LAMS as they existed at the time, had to go.
Quick question, what is meant by "aT1" rules?
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Quick question, what is meant by "aT1" rules?
AeroTech 1, the original boxed game from 1986 or so.
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Thanks. That sounds like a misapplication of rules. A 3050 clanner needs a 6 plus range and attacker movement to hit a flying Air'Mech and a 8 plus attacker movement to hit a fighter, 4+ if the fighter targeted them.
Edit: There is also the unaddressed question in the text of whether the LAM driver uses Mech or Aerospace skills in Air'Mech and fighter mode. If so, the base P/G goes from 5/4 to 5/6.
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Thanks. That sounds like a misapplication of rules. A 3050 clanner needs a 6 plus range and attacker movement to hit a flying Air'Mech and a 8 plus attacker movement to hit a fighter, 4+ if the fighter targeted them.
Edit: There is also the unaddressed question in the text of whether the LAM driver uses Mech or Aerospace skills in Air'Mech and fighter mode. If so, the base P/G goes from 5/4 to 5/6.
ERm... Jumping was Plus Three, which in airmech mode under AT1, was still plus three, then there's the distance, because that plus three wasn't a flat plus three-your distance moved counted in ADDITION.
Your base Clan Warrior, then, needed his gunnery (3) plus 5 (same as a VTOL moving 9 hexes).
IIRC most LAMs had an airmech distance of nine or more, see?
So at minimum, standing still, your clanner needs to roll higher than eight, assuming short range (0). Medium (2) or Long (4) and he's looking at 10 or 12 (or more).
Meanwile, my Airmech mode doesn't count as jumping for gunnery. So base gunnery 4, plus two for medium plus one for movement.
Yeah, it was broken as ******, since to get good numbers the Clanner player has to sacrifice his movement or just run assaults that don't have much movement to begin with. (AMM2 turns the eight into ten, and the ten into twelves or higher.)
Strafing in that era also worked differently. Draw a line down the map three hexes wide in Aerospace mode. everything in that line takes your full weapons complement of energy weapons.
Strafe, transform, attack-the odds are good he'll have pre-existing damage.
I wont' go into what bombing first did, suffice to say it was bad enough that removing LAMS to get them reworked and add some restrictions was a GOOD idea, because AAA before AT2 was WEAK-the golden bb rule didn't exist, and in AT1, your Lam could drop bombs in Aerospace fighter mode, strafe, then drop into Air'mech to tangle, which was a lot nastier when you look at what kind of bombs were available in AT1, that weren't available by AT2 or Total Warfare.
LAMS in those days were REALLY invitations to powergame. The Star League Tech was available by then, so a custom LAM could get outright Deviant in terms of twinking.
That's without using anything in "Maximum Tech" or "unbound". It took almost fifteen years to fix those rules to the point that Land Air 'mechs weren't grossly broken and unbalanced in the ground game. All the restrictions people complain about with them now? are because of HOW broken they were before they were cut out of the rules courtesy of Harmony Gold.
The first generation didn't just borrow the ART off Robotech, they made Land Air 'Mechs as POWERFUL as the Veritechs in Robotech.
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ERm... Jumping was Plus Three, which in airmech mode under AT1, was still plus three, then there's the distance, because that plus three wasn't a flat plus three-your distance moved counted in ADDITION.
A flying Air'Mech is not a normal target. Its modifier to hit from a ground combatant is +4. That's it. A 3050 clanner with their P/G of 3/2 (per TRO:3050) thus needs a (base 4+4 target-2 Gunnery) 6 to hit at short range. Flyers do not have the standard distance based movement modifiers of ground targets in AeroTech.
On the other side, the Air'Mech is using the either the base 4 for ground attackers or base 6 to hit for flyers (the rules aren't clear about exactly when and if the aerospace pilot base P/G of 5/6 applies) plus the +2 to hit for flying.
If the LAM is in fighter mode and performing those air to ground attacks, the base target to hit is 10 with no range or target modifiers. This is modified by the clanner's G2 down to 8 and an additional -4 if the mech was the target of or in the strafing run of the LAM.
EDIT: Also, if the LAM is in fighter mode and strafing, the base TN is 8, modified by Gunnery, target movement, terrain, and damage to the airframe. Again, default Gunnery is also 6 for an aerospace pilot (for a +2 modifier), but AeroTech does not address whether the LAM driver has two sets of skills.
EDIT 2: 1987's BTM:ROW did clear up and streamline a few things. These are the rules carried forward into 1990's BTC, which would be the operative rules appropriate to TRO:3050 of the same year.
- LAMs in flight in Air'Mech mode are treated as jumping mechs for targeting and attacking. Under this ruleset, they do generate TMM at a +1 and take a +3 modifier to their fire.
- VTOLs are introduced in this book and flying Air'Mechs have to pay attention to elevation, etc. as a VTOL.
There still is no clarification on a second set of skills for the pilot.
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Way back when Targeting Computers could be used with Pulse Lasers resulting in a -3 modifier. Needless to say if LAMs were on the tables, the Clans used flashbulbs with TCs. Of course 100 ton OMNI LAMs with Clan tech were truly nasty so I can understand FASA eliminating OMNI Tech and capping LAM weight at 55 tons in Battletech Compendium and prohibiting bulky advance tech in Tactical Handbook.
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Way back when Targeting Computers could be used with Pulse Lasers resulting in a -3 modifier.
You say that like they can't now. How odd. You can't use the Targeting Computer to make Aimed Shots with Pulse Lasers, but there's nothing stopping the TC from giving Pulse Lasers a bonus for regular fire.
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Thank you for clarifying that for me.
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Making a successful all-new aero ruleset is an interesting dilemma because you have to consider before you even start what your goal is: to make a game that complements base BT well, or making something that is successful and thrives all on its own (like X-Wing, or Alpha Strike). The two require very different approaches.
Well, the latter option might be something to consider. If you make it a core game with its own setting, you can potentially bring in other players who might not care about BattleTech and Space Robots. And, then you make it compatible with BattleTech, you not only get potential cross-over appeal, but you get the BT players who would be interested in that very supplement to their normal ground games.
And this could very well be true for other elements of BattleTech. A ground troop Star Grunt style game could very well function on its own in its own setting. And, then it could also add some detail for BattleTech Ground combat through some integration rules with BT ground units and stats for the soldiers across the different factions, or even time periods. Then you also have an avenue to explore other periods of BT history that are outside the pervue of the BattleMech.
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I got the infantry construction rules in junior high.
You're that much younger than me? I am turning to dust as we speak.
That doesn't really tell me much. I first saw Warship Construction rules in Battlespace, which was released in 1993. I didn't see any Infantry Construction rules till the Tech Manual, but I was out of the loop from the late 90s till just the last decade or so.
I think that joke was a little too subtle....
Yeah. Not enough people are thinking Rated-R basic like that.
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You say that like they can't now. How odd. You can't use the Targeting Computer to make Aimed Shots with Pulse Lasers, but there's nothing stopping the TC from giving Pulse Lasers a bonus for regular fire.
That loophole hasn't been completely closed but, the Human TRO SPA exists and can do an Aimed Shot with both Pulse Laser bonus and TarCmop bonus.
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A ground troop Star Grunt style game could very well function on its own
I use Stargrunt II to resolve infantry fights in Battletech!
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Part of the issue for me is the realism of it.
As mentioned, it's hard to write aerospace into the lore without spoiling the ground battles, as I suspect the vast majority of wars and battles would be decided in space, regardless of any boots on the ground (or whether or not any boots were ever on the ground to begin with).
There are ways around this, but they are very contrived; a couple examples might be: every planet has an SDS to keep the ships far away until ground units can disable them, or every battle is being fought in a place that is too critical to Nuke From Orbit. Neither of these fit in too well with the Battletech universe imo - SDSs are super rare, rarer than warships I would argue.
This even works for aerospace fighters really - ground units without gobs (and I mean GOBS) of point and self defense systems will just be buried by powerful weapons from well outside their ability to retaliate... unless the enemy also has air support, in which case, the air forces tangle and maybe the ground guys can have a fight too (though it's irrelevant unless it's being fought over the contenter's only airbase or something).
Now if ASF were rare or something, that would be a bit easier, but it's a case of "rip apart the von-luckner to repair the mech? NO NO, my boy, we rip apart the von Luckner AND the mech to repair the space plane!"
Orbital control effectively no-sells meaningful ground engagements except in limited wars, imo. Limited wars can happen, of course, so maybe there's space there for ground battles.... Ah, but no space for ASF. Here we go again.
EDIT:
To be fair, I can also see on-world conflicts and raids (maybe) working okay. *Shrug*. Just not interstellar militaries.
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The solution to that seems straightforward to me: Planet-based anti-orbital infrastructure that is common and effective enough to cover important infrastructure and make pure Warship-based orbital bombardment generally inefficient and dangerous, but not so ubiquitous and effective that Dropships can't land somewhere outside the anti-orbital defense coverage and deploy Battlemechs to attack such infrastructure.
Unfortunately that would essentially require a lore rework since Battletech's already entrenched into the alternative approach of "Fleet?" Distant Alamo Explosion "What Fleet?"
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That loophole hasn't been completely closed but, the Human TRO SPA exists and can do an Aimed Shot with both Pulse Laser bonus and TarCmop bonus.
Human TRO increases the Roll to Determine Critical Hits. It's Marksman and Sharpshooter that do that.
And SPAs aren't always available.
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If planetary and space defense systems were so common as to force dropships to land a large distance from target wouldn't the use of warships would be encouraged? Not that I don't want to use them but "I kills it with my warship!" shouldn't be the go to option.
I remember aerospace being rare and I think it should be. You need ground units to take the field. I don't think the bottleneck shouldn't be manufacture though. It should be in pilot training. If it takes longer to have ASF Pilots, wouldn't there be fewer ASFs?
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The attrition rate must certainly be higher. Ammo explosions and headshots aside, mechwarriors tend to survive combat, and mechs are easy to repair or at least scrap together. What's left of an aerospace fighter after a failed lawn dart roll?
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I remember aerospace being rare and I think it should be. You need ground units to take the field. I don't think the bottleneck shouldn't be manufacture though. It should be in pilot training. If it takes longer to have ASF Pilots, wouldn't there be fewer ASFs?
Or rarely deployed. You wouldn't want to risk your flight corps on just any unidentified inbound dropper. The planes, themselves are also expensive to produce, so replacing them wouldn't be that easy. And, as has been pointed out in another thread questioning maintenance, Fighter Craft are maintenance Hogs, meaning that some may be stuck in a hangar at an inopportune moment because a circuit board is on the fritz, or the fuel line isn't injecting right.
The solution to that seems straightforward to me: Planet-based anti-orbital infrastructure that is common and effective enough to cover important infrastructure and make pure Warship-based orbital bombardment generally inefficient and dangerous, but not so ubiquitous and effective that Dropships can't land somewhere outside the anti-orbital defense coverage and deploy Battlemechs to attack such infrastructure.
Unfortunately that would essentially require a lore rework since Battletech's already entrenched into the alternative approach of "Fleet?" Distant Alamo Explosion "What Fleet?"
But, it would work well in an age where warships are limited.
I'm surprised that the IS powers allowed their navies to fall apart as badly as they did. Honestly, I'm surprised we didn't see some ship crews and captains turn pirate/privateer near the end of the 2nd Succession War. There may have been a time where individual warships would bounce around and be the force projection bubble for parts raiding.
And, if you only have ONE ship, it's priceless. You wouldn't stick around to see it wrecked or captured. So, the idea that many planets would turtle up with effective anti-shipping firepower near important points of interest would actually act as a deterrent for a solo Warship to keep its distance.
And, that would mean that having a single planetary defense warship or even monitor would also act as a means of keeping the Pirate with a warship or Merc with a Warship under contract, from sticking around too long. You get into that gunfight. you lose your mobile base of operations.
Thus you could have single ship-to-ship combat, but with a hefty forced withdrawal set-up. Having to play your escape because the enemy showed up just barely in time to get off a few shots might be interesting for those wanting to track that kind of thing with a merc/pirate force.
And, this goes back to the lore needing a bit of a touch-up. Would people be okay with that, though, in light of the 1st and 2nd Succession War source books that came out recently? You want warships in BT, they really need a presence in the fiction other than key moments in major wars throughout BT history. I'm not strictly drawn to BattleTech for the Historical Battles. I don't mind playing in historical eras, but the big draw is generating a custom force for the period and seeing how far they get, and what kind of impact they may have in the back yard of history in BT. That will be true of Warships, Aerospace and Dropships just as much as my star Mech Force and the hero characters I have in them.
The attrition rate must certainly be higher. Ammo explosions and headshots aside, mechwarriors tend to survive combat, and mechs are easy to repair or at least scrap together. What's left of an aerospace fighter after a failed lawn dart roll?
Y'know, I've read through the AT2 and TW rules for aero a couple times and have played a variety of missions with Droppers and AeroFighters. But, there's one thing which escapes my memory: Pilot Ejection. I don't recall if there's rules for emergency ejections for Fighter Pilots. There should be. It's a key feature in modern combat avionics. It's an intrinsic part of BattleMechs.
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So, one thing I'll come back to as a problem I have with Aero game rules is the performance dichotomy between units in the air and in space, and units on the ground.
While I did state that I like the concept behind the range bands and the scale of hexes for the different low- and high-altitude/space theaters of play, that's for a very explicit cross-over reason.
I'm one of those people who look at the short engagement ranges on the ground and take them at face value and have worked out a whole slough of reasons as to how that works. Aerospace units are using the same weapons, especially fighters, as well as the same armor, and have probably adopted the same active defensive maneuver algorithms that make it effective on the ground. That means to me, that they should be shooting at each other at matching, dangerously close ranges. This would be hard to emulate while they're moving at speeds that see them clear whole ground maps in a matter of a fraction of a ground turn. But, I think it can be done.
So, part of the turn-off is consistency in performance across the games.
I also have a problem with how much, or rather little, damage a dropship can take. You have the weird dichotomy of the Hit Location Armor bubble acting like a forcefield. Then you have really sensitive structure that seems to fall apart from all of a few hits once that forcefield is gone. But DropShips are the size of Buildings! And, on the ground, a landed dropship is immobile, so it should be easy to pick it apart, knocking out weapons bays and other things without having to blow it up outright. You would think that it would be the other way around, with armor covering key items and the ship almost impossible to demolish but with the most explosive, powerful anti-ship weapons.
The rules for grounded Aero Units aren't that clear, and I have to take advantage of loose rules interpretations based on the situation to allow for crippling a ship for boarding and salvage.
And, then there are Warships, which amplify the armor force shield effect beyond believable.
So, those are my gripes with the current system.
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I'm one of those people who look at the short engagement ranges on the ground and take them at face value and have worked out a whole slough of reasons as to how that works. Aerospace units are using the same weapons, especially fighters, as well as the same armor, and have probably adopted the same active defensive maneuver algorithms that make it effective on the ground. That means to me, that they should be shooting at each other at matching, dangerously close ranges. This would be hard to emulate while they're moving at speeds that see them clear whole ground maps in a matter of a fraction of a ground turn. But, I think it can be done.
So, part of the turn-off is consistency in performance across the games.
I've thought about the same thing and thought a good solution would be to make aerotech ranges on low altitude maps be 1/2/3/4 for short/medium/long/extreme. It would make aerofighter combat more dogfight oriented in keeping with Btech's WW2 in space themes and essentially consistent with the ground ranges. On the other hand I could seem some practical gameplay issues cropping up, like miniature crowding from players clumping all their fighters together in a small spaces to overlap ranges.
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I remember aerospace being rare and I think it should be. You need ground units to take the field. I don't think the bottleneck shouldn't be manufacture though. It should be in pilot training. If it takes longer to have ASF Pilots, wouldn't there be fewer ASFs?
There is also pilot death to think about. When a mech goes down the pilot survives. When an ASF goes down there is a good chance the pilot is lost as well. Even higher in space after a losing engagement.
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Part of the issue for me is the realism of it.
As mentioned, it's hard to write aerospace into the lore without spoiling the ground battles, as I suspect the vast majority of wars and battles would be decided in space, regardless of any boots on the ground (or whether or not any boots were ever on the ground to begin with).
There are ways around this, but they are very contrived; a couple examples might be: every planet has an SDS to keep the ships far away until ground units can disable them, or every battle is being fought in a place that is too critical to Nuke From Orbit. Neither of these fit in too well with the Battletech universe imo - SDSs are super rare, rarer than warships I would argue.
This even works for aerospace fighters really - ground units without gobs (and I mean GOBS) of point and self defense systems will just be buried by powerful weapons from well outside their ability to retaliate... unless the enemy also has air support, in which case, the air forces tangle and maybe the ground guys can have a fight too (though it's irrelevant unless it's being fought over the contenter's only airbase or something).
Now if ASF were rare or something, that would be a bit easier, but it's a case of "rip apart the von-luckner to repair the mech? NO NO, my boy, we rip apart the von Luckner AND the mech to repair the space plane!"
Orbital control effectively no-sells meaningful ground engagements except in limited wars, imo. Limited wars can happen, of course, so maybe there's space there for ground battles.... Ah, but no space for ASF. Here we go again.
EDIT:
To be fair, I can also see on-world conflicts and raids (maybe) working okay. *Shrug*. Just not interstellar militaries.
you can smash lots of shit flat with air strikes and artillery, but if you're trying to take something of VALUE, you need boots on the ground that do less.
Yes, I said LESS.
why? because whatever it is you're fighting over, if you destroy it, you have wasted megabucks on nothing.
Damage it? not so much, but if you want it intact enough to fix, you're going to have to put men in harm's way to take it.
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I'm surprised that the IS powers allowed their navies to fall apart as badly as they did. Honestly, I'm surprised we didn't see some ship crews and captains turn pirate/privateer near the end of the 2nd Succession War. There may have been a time where individual warships would bounce around and be the force projection bubble for parts raiding.
The SeaFoxes are sort of doing that during the ilClan Era. They can pull it off because they have a large amount of other assets to protect their main ships if and when they need refit, and the merchant fleet to needed to support it. A rouge warship would be alright for a little while, but the second it needed to stop for a repair and refit it would be extremely vulnerable to retaliation.
That is assuming you could keep the crew in line. I doubt very many Navy personnel would support a captain stealing a ship to become a pirate.
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If planetary and space defense systems were so common as to force dropships to land a large distance from target wouldn't the use of warships would be encouraged? Not that I don't want to use them but "I kills it with my warship!" shouldn't be the go to option.
I remember aerospace being rare and I think it should be. You need ground units to take the field. I don't think the bottleneck shouldn't be manufacture though. It should be in pilot training. If it takes longer to have ASF Pilots, wouldn't there be fewer ASFs?
Make a really expensive ground to ~orbit setup being a light SCL (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Light_Sub-Capital_Laser) pointed up. From the new errata here (https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=82151.msg1981381#msg1981381), a defending energy weapon emplacement is tuned to the local atmosphere so it doesn't get the range reduction.
So the SCL/1 is firing a 10 standard pt shot every minute which will keep hostile cargo/pirate Dropships from wanting to be overhead near it. A Warship will accept the light damage from that weapon, and bombard the general location. The SCL are not that expensive (220k-450k), so the limitation would be tech ability to build/maintain them.
This lets you have pirate raids affecting the rest of the planet since the orbital defense is only in the most critical locations, a reason for wanting to capture the planetary capital (it has the SCL defense), and an assault still being able to go in (its Dropships are armored enough to take the hits).
Now all we need is TPTB making a variety of canon bunkers mounting the SCL/1 (and the other two (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Medium_Sub-Capital_Laser) types (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Heavy_Sub-Capital_Laser)). You'd need armor, comms, quarters (for the tech crews, gunners, troops to protect it, etc), and other fun stuff. Or fan designs placed elsewhere.
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the issue there is that Subcapital weaponry like the SCL1 didn't exist until 3073.. and didn't become available to non-WOB factions until the mid 3080's.
so it doesn't really fix the bombardment issue.
the Peacemaker Missile system (basically a ground launched Killer Whale Capital Missile with a nuclear warhead) becomes available around 3056, which works a little better.. but proliferation of such systems to various worlds isn't going to be fast, plus you have the issue with using nuclear weaponry so close to a planet. (Article I of the ares convention prohibiting nuclear use within 75,000km of a planet being one of the few parts of the conventions that both the IS and the clans seem to actually follow.) conventional warheads would be an answer there, but still runs into the issues of proliferation.
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you can smash lots of shit flat with air strikes and artillery, but if you're trying to take something of VALUE, you need boots on the ground that do less.
Yes, I said LESS.
why? because whatever it is you're fighting over, if you destroy it, you have wasted megabucks on nothing.
Damage it? not so much, but if you want it intact enough to fix, you're going to have to put men in harm's way to take it.
Right, but that's sort of what I meant in my post by "every battle is somewhere important enough not to flatten".
If a battle is happening somewhere where neither side wants to flatten it, then I can believe a ground battle can happen there. But I expect those places to be fairly few, all things considered - after all, the lore for the 1SW is that "everyone flattened each other's infrastructure with nukes". I can't think of a time they said "wait, this is important, let's not nuke it" right up until they ran out of warships to launch the nukes with, haha.
In fact, the only reason Mechs survived and Warships didn't is because all the warship factories got nuked before the mech factories did.
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I've thought about the same thing and thought a good solution would be to make aerotech ranges on low altitude maps be 1/2/3/4 for short/medium/long/extreme. It would make aerofighter combat more dogfight oriented in keeping with Btech's WW2 in space themes and essentially consistent with the ground ranges. On the other hand I could seem some practical gameplay issues cropping up, like miniature crowding from players clumping all their fighters together in a small spaces to overlap ranges.
And, then with external hard points, you could bring in Air-to-Air artillery of a sorts, bringing back the equivalent of Sidewinder missiles to get the needed reach for the low-alt scale.
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the issue there is that Subcapital weaponry like the SCL1 didn't exist until 3073.. and didn't become available to non-WOB factions until the mid 3080's.
so it doesn't really fix the bombardment issue.
Well, the proposition there would be a change in lore. A retcon, if you will.
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The idea of retconning in ground to orbit artillery was something done in a number of the video games. Mech Commander, and the mobile defense lasers in MechWarrior 4: Black Knight come to mind. It might have been part of the plot behind MechWarrior 3, as well, but my memory on that one is fuzzy.
edit: And guess who helped write the stories for those video games? Some of the people in charge of producing BattleTech now.
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If planetary and space defense systems were so common as to force dropships to land a large distance from target wouldn't the use of warships would be encouraged? Not that I don't want to use them but "I kills it with my warship!" shouldn't be the go to option.
By definition of my suggestion, the planetary defenses would be common enough to make bombardment via Warship high-risk. Sending a multi-billion C-Bill warship to blast an important multi-million C-Bill factory if you're likely to be blasted by a million C-Bill orbital defense array (Capital and sub-capital weapons are surprisingly cheap C-Bill wise). Even if the chance of failure during the bombardment is low, like 1% per engagement, those are bad odds and not something you'd like to do regularly if you'd wish to keep your fleet.
Alternatively you send a Dropship near the objective to the surface and send a ground team on foot. Each 'Mech only costs millions, many orders of magnitude cheaper than an entire Warship, so most can afford losses in pursuit of the objective. Even in a worse-case scenario where you lose the entire Dropship due to incomplete information, that hundred-million C-Bill ship is still magnitudes cheaper than a Warship, so the loss is still far more palatable, though still not pleasant.
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So basically the less magical shield version of:
" Vader: What is it, General?
Gen. Maximilian Veers: My Lord, the fleet has moved out of lightspeed. Com-Scan has detected an energy field protecting an area of the sixth planet of the Hoth system. The field is strong enough to deflect any bombardment.
Vader: The Rebels are alerted to our presence. Admiral Ozzel came out of lightspeed too close to the system.
Veers: He felt surprise was wiser–
Vader: [angrily] He is as clumsy as he is stupid. General, prepare your troops for a surface attack.
Veers: Yes, my Lord. [bows and leaves quickly]
[Darth Vader turns to a nearby screen and calls up Admiral Kendel Ozzel and Captain Firmus Piett.]
Ozzel: Lord Vader, the fleet has moved out of lightspeed and we're preparing to– [begins choking]
Vader: You have failed me for the last time, Admiral. Captain Piett.
Piett: [nervously] Yes, my Lord?
Vader: Make ready to land our troops beyond their energy field, then deploy the fleet so that nothing gets off the system. You are in command now, Admiral Piett.
Piett: [sees a dead Ozzel collapse] Thank you, Lord Vader."
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My 3 C-Bills;
1.) Make Warships vulnerable. I know people love the idea of Warships being near invulnerable war machines but considering the number of Battleships lost to fighters in history, it will increase the value of Aerospace fighters in orbit and risk for such a gun platform to enter orbit.
2.) Make them expensive, in terms of money and personnel needed. I know the game already does this to some extent and people just ignore it so they can have Leviathans duke it out in theater but I still think it's important for the in universe reason why ground battles are still the most important aspect of keeping a planet. You just can't afford to have a warship in every orbit.
3.) Overkill is a thing. Dropships with Aerospace fighters can cover allot of task in the BTU, a Warship ready to orbital strike a city shouldn't be plan A when a Steiner Scout Lance can murder the opposing forces hilariously without turning the city into a creator with orbital guns.
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one possible option to deal with the bombardment issue would be to make bombardments only viable with specialized munitions..
heavily reduce the damage and AOE from capital weapons when used against a ground target. then give NAC's and capital missiles special bombardment munitions that retain the current damage and AOE. (which do a lot less against anything but ground targets)
this helps limit the effectiveness of warships in wiping out whole armies or cities in a single salvo, unless they fill their magazines with specialty munitions that leave them less effective against stuff that can kill a warship. existing designs optimized for bombardment with energy weapons stop being "i win' buttons and start just being exotic artillery support. and while warships usually have enough cargo space to afford to carry a few magazine reloads of the special munitions.. few carry big enough magazines to be able split their loads and remain effective, and reloading from cargo is a long process that can't be done during battle. and if they're loaded for bombardment, they'll be more vulnerable to other spacecraft.
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one possible option to deal with the bombardment issue would be to make bombardments only viable with specialized munitions..
heavily reduce the damage and AOE from capital weapons when used against a ground target. then give NAC's and capital missiles special bombardment munitions that retain the current damage and AOE. (which do a lot less against anything but ground targets)
this helps limit the effectiveness of warships in wiping out whole armies or cities in a single salvo, unless they fill their magazines with specialty munitions that leave them less effective against stuff that can kill a warship. existing designs optimized for bombardment with energy weapons stop being "i win' buttons and start just being exotic artillery support.
One could base it on the principle of over-penetration, in that regular shots drill deep but narrow holes, so you would need ways of spreading the damage out.
But capital weapons can't be made too weak or it will undermine the universe, so my preference would still be for lots of ground-based cap missiles that are optimized against warships, which would be a natural technological development during the age of war.
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one possible option to deal with the bombardment issue would be to make bombardments only viable with specialized munitions..
heavily reduce the damage and AOE from capital weapons when used against a ground target. then give NAC's and capital missiles special bombardment munitions that retain the current damage and AOE. (which do a lot less against anything but ground targets)
this helps limit the effectiveness of warships in wiping out whole armies or cities in a single salvo, unless they fill their magazines with specialty munitions that leave them less effective against stuff that can kill a warship. existing designs optimized for bombardment with energy weapons stop being "i win' buttons and start just being exotic artillery support. and while warships usually have enough cargo space to afford to carry a few magazine reloads of the special munitions.. few carry big enough magazines to be able split their loads and remain effective, and reloading from cargo is a long process that can't be done during battle. and if they're loaded for bombardment, they'll be more vulnerable to other spacecraft.
I thikn that was actually addressed. See, tehre's a couple things involved... "Flight time" and "How stationary is your target?"
You an 'bombard' from well past oribt, if you don't particularly care about leaving anything to take on the ground, or if you're fine with creating an environmental event like global thermonuclear winter.
YOu know, where 'close' is measured in kilometers and running at the target is truly pointless.
but you're not going to take anything that's valuable. (sort of like using nuclear ICBMs to take an oilfield-the Iraq war would've been one and done in five minutes if we used minuteman missiles or something...just there wouldn't be any Iraq left.)
So I might suggest the other way; you need specialized munitions and down-tuning on your energy battery, or fifty years to several centuries to wait for the target landmass to be cool enough to approach (and for the fallout to finish falling).
Anything worth sending tens to hundreds of billions of [currency] to take, is too fragile to survive the experience, so taking it requires ground troops.
War is an economic exercise as much as anything else, esp. in the Battletech context we're used to (3rd successon war onward), an offensive that pays dividends in radioactive ashes is by definition a failure even if you destroy all the enemy.
This is unlike pure ship-to-ship, which really DOES require both sides to consent to meet for the engagement outside of very close orbit (On account of 'space: It's REALLY BIG, and doesn't include nice rock-lined narrow inlets like you get in bays and river mouths")
Instead, I'd emphasize the requirement to get close to your Orbital bombardment targets for anything short of a bunker complex (aka anything capable of moving under its own power), and secondary impacts to make it undesirable to DO that if you're after, say, a factory complex or you want to annex the civilian infrastructure and actually get something that isnt' burned, bleeding and dying.
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Honestly Orbital Bombardment isn't what makes Warships so overly problematic.
Because they are already extremely vulnerable while doing so.
No.
A much more fundamental problem is they have a capacity to intercept troop carriers that is much nastier than ASFs.
And if they fail that? They can go after the Jumpships instead. Or vice versa.
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Honestly Orbital Bombardment isn't what makes Warships so overly problematic.
Because they are already extremely vulnerable while doing so.
No.
A much more fundamental problem is they have a capacity to intercept troop carriers that is much nastier than ASFs.
And if they fail that? They can go after the Jumpships instead. Or vice versa.
Space: It's VERY BIG!!!
Meanwhile, it takes a while to accelerate anywhere, and nobody has Inertial dampening or compensators. That means your 5/8 or higher accel curve on your super-duper warship is subjecting the crew to enough gravity to damage their circulatory systems and make tripping in the corridor a hospital worthy event even for someone in fantastic shape, complete with "maybe won't survive the trip to sick bay".
Sustained ops have to be done within a reasonable range of one gee's acceleration, which becomes problematic if you're trying an interception against someone who can change vectors or speed.
Because space is big, it's also more than two dimensions, so you're trying to cover a spherical volume with your pursuit/patrol ships that is massive, has response times delayed by speed-of-light, and requires quite a lot of prediction being right to make it work.
For Orbital distances, (the only place an intercept might actually work consistently) you have to be positioned over the right hemisphere when your opponent makes his landing runs (or takeoff runs).
otherwise the planet's in the way.
The scale would be ike trying to secure the U.S. Coastline using a couple of speedboats-a successful detection and interception in the Gulf requires a concentrated search and knowledge ahead of tie, or the narco-sub's going to land their load of Cocaine somewhere on the coastline.
Mechanics of jumpship travel and the mechanics of ballistics say that an attacker can already come from damned near any direction and the detection grids, being focused on 'easiest approaches' because resources are FINITE including the resource known as "guys to watch the screen at headquarters who have enough experience to have a clue what they're seeing and enough devotion to watch it instead of playing Space-Tetris because they're bored."
so interception LOOKS easy-assuming the other side wants to be cooperative about letting it happen, but it's not necessarily going to BE easy even if your fleet is made of Leviathan III's.
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We have examples of in system jumps being used.
So yes space may be big, but a Warship properly utilized solves a lot of that problem.
Especially since on the defense a Warship knows where any inbound invaders are going for with rather rare exception.
Add in orbital bombardment from a rules perspective has not been Warship exclusive since at least since Battlespace and while yes it may be a consideration, it is clearly not the biggest threat they pose to the ground game.
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Space: It's VERY BIG!!!
Meanwhile, it takes a while to accelerate anywhere, and nobody has Inertial dampening or compensators. That means your 5/8 or higher accel curve on your super-duper warship is subjecting the crew to enough gravity to damage their circulatory systems and make tripping in the corridor a hospital worthy event even for someone in fantastic shape, complete with "maybe won't survive the trip to sick bay".
Sustained ops have to be done within a reasonable range of one gee's acceleration, which becomes problematic if you're trying an interception against someone who can change vectors or speed.
Because space is big, it's also more than two dimensions, so you're trying to cover a spherical volume with your pursuit/patrol ships that is massive, has response times delayed by speed-of-light, and requires quite a lot of prediction being right to make it work.
For Orbital distances, (the only place an intercept might actually work consistently) you have to be positioned over the right hemisphere when your opponent makes his landing runs (or takeoff runs).
otherwise the planet's in the way.
The scale would be ike trying to secure the U.S. Coastline using a couple of speedboats-a successful detection and interception in the Gulf requires a concentrated search and knowledge ahead of tie, or the narco-sub's going to land their load of Cocaine somewhere on the coastline.
Mechanics of jumpship travel and the mechanics of ballistics say that an attacker can already come from damned near any direction and the detection grids, being focused on 'easiest approaches' because resources are FINITE including the resource known as "guys to watch the screen at headquarters who have enough experience to have a clue what they're seeing and enough devotion to watch it instead of playing Space-Tetris because they're bored."
so interception LOOKS easy-assuming the other side wants to be cooperative about letting it happen, but it's not necessarily going to BE easy even if your fleet is made of Leviathan III's.
If there's one thing that Terra Invicta has taught me, it's that intercepting an enemy fleet en route to your planet is... surprisingly straightforward. Especially if your cruising acceleration and delta-V is comparable. Just gotta put your fleet in LEO and slingshot to 'em. The hostile fleet has to slow down enough to enter the atmosphere instead of face-planting into the planet... but you don't. Earth-like planet at LEO? You make a full rotation about the planet in 2 hours; that's basically nothing in terms of space. As long as someone on the planet has eyes on the approaching fleet, from LEO you're well positioned to counteract any maneuvering your OPRFOR may make from deep space by adjusting your own orbital plane, which takes much less thrust, time and delta-V than whatever your opponent is doing (unless they're already at LEO themselves, but then you've failed your intercept).
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I did mention SDS in my post - space defense system.
Having ground-to-orbit weapons that can make a WARSHIP FLEET think twice certainly will make an invasion fleet think twice... not sure that helps ground battles be terribly relevant, except in limited war cases like raids...
... which I already mentioned you don't really need a justification to not have aerospace in. They're just not around when that company of mechs booped in and out.
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Or rarely deployed. You wouldn't want to risk your flight corps on just any unidentified inbound dropper. The planes, themselves are also expensive to produce, so replacing them wouldn't be that easy. And, as has been pointed out in another thread questioning maintenance, Fighter Craft are maintenance Hogs, meaning that some may be stuck in a hangar at an inopportune moment because a circuit board is on the fritz, or the fuel line isn't injecting right.
Actually, you would send your flight corps on unidentified droppers. At the minimum they'd gain flight time and experience. At best, they'd engage an enemy before they get to the ground.
Yes, fighters are expensive but building them shouldn't be the problem. Granted unit has cost of purchase, maintenance, and training but aircraft usually have higher maintenance like you said. Keeping them in flying shape should help keep them rare as they don't want to have a problem and crash or be stuck in space.
Training should also take longer as you don't want trainees crashing valuable planes. I do think that conventional fighters would be built in higher numbers though. Aerospace fighters should be for more skilled pilots.
(snip)
And, this goes back to the lore needing a bit of a touch-up. Would people be okay with that, though, in light of the 1st and 2nd Succession War source books that came out recently? You want warships in BT, they really need a presence in the fiction other than key moments in major wars throughout BT history. I'm not strictly drawn to BattleTech for the Historical Battles. I don't mind playing in historical eras, but the big draw is generating a custom force for the period and seeing how far they get, and what kind of impact they may have in the back yard of history in BT. That will be true of Warships, Aerospace and Dropships just as much as my star Mech Force and the hero characters I have in them.
I can see how easily the IS lost their warships. If they loose their shipyards you can't build more or maintain what you have, and the IS did that. And they didn't make more do to the expanse and because they weren't really needed. The ground based anti-ship defenses were pretty much gone as well. If they weren't, the IS would have been encouraged to restart their warship programs far sooner. And that would have encouraged more strikes against shipyards, which could have ended jumpship production.
So, one thing I'll come back to as a problem I have with Aero game rules is the performance dichotomy between units in the air and in space, and units on the ground.
While I did state that I like the concept behind the range bands and the scale of hexes for the different low- and high-altitude/space theaters of play, that's for a very explicit cross-over reason.
I'm one of those people who look at the short engagement ranges on the ground and take them at face value and have worked out a whole slough of reasons as to how that works. Aerospace units are using the same weapons, especially fighters, as well as the same armor, and have probably adopted the same active defensive maneuver algorithms that make it effective on the ground. That means to me, that they should be shooting at each other at matching, dangerously close ranges. This would be hard to emulate while they're moving at speeds that see them clear whole ground maps in a matter of a fraction of a ground turn. But, I think it can be done.
So, part of the turn-off is consistency in performance across the games.
(snip)
The range and consistency bothers me too. I get added range with height but it should apply to all units and those units should still be fighting at dangerously close ranges.
Speeds are also an issue. Right now, if feels like the Space Shuttle engaging in a dog fight or ground attack while the orbital boosters are going at max thrust. I can see a high altitude bombing run but at those speeds it shouldn't be easy to hit the target and it should be very dangerous to strafe or strike. And that doesn't get to how fast props and airships move.
There is also pilot death to think about. When a mech goes down the pilot survives. When an ASF goes down there is a good chance the pilot is lost as well. Even higher in space after a losing engagement.
Good point.
you can smash lots of shit flat with air strikes and artillery, but if you're trying to take something of VALUE, you need boots on the ground that do less.
Yes, I said LESS.
why? because whatever it is you're fighting over, if you destroy it, you have wasted megabucks on nothing.
Damage it? not so much, but if you want it intact enough to fix, you're going to have to put men in harm's way to take it.
Denying something to your enemy has a value of it's own.
Make a really expensive ground to ~orbit setup being a light SCL (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Light_Sub-Capital_Laser) pointed up. From the new errata here (https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=82151.msg1981381#msg1981381), a defending energy weapon emplacement is tuned to the local atmosphere so it doesn't get the range reduction.
So the SCL/1 is firing a 10 standard pt shot every minute which will keep hostile cargo/pirate Dropships from wanting to be overhead near it. A Warship will accept the light damage from that weapon, and bombard the general location. The SCL are not that expensive (220k-450k), so the limitation would be tech ability to build/maintain them.
That's my point. IS militaries will work on keeping and developing warships because they can shrug off those attacks.
This lets you have pirate raids affecting the rest of the planet since the orbital defense is only in the most critical locations, a reason for wanting to capture the planetary capital (it has the SCL defense), and an assault still being able to go in (its Dropships are armored enough to take the hits).
Now all we need is TPTB making a variety of canon bunkers mounting the SCL/1 (and the other two (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Medium_Sub-Capital_Laser) types (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Heavy_Sub-Capital_Laser)). You'd need armor, comms, quarters (for the tech crews, gunners, troops to protect it, etc), and other fun stuff. Or fan designs placed elsewhere.
Attackers can strike other parts of the planet now. The thing is sometimes the only targets worth attacking is the planetary capital. If the dropships can't get in to even drop troops they have to do so further away. The problems with landing further away is the distance. Pirates and Raiders want to get in and out quickly, not get into a running gun battles. Landing further away gives the defenders time to prepare their defenses. The distance also allows reinforcements to arrive while they're moving more slowly with their loot. Those are things any attacker does not want.
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Having ground-to-orbit weapons that can make a WARSHIP FLEET think twice certainly will make an invasion fleet think twice... not sure that helps ground battles be terribly relevant, except in limited war cases like raids...
No. The premise is that orbital defenses is common enough to protect key installations like big cities, but not so common that one can readily protect every molehill on, say, Albion.
IOW, an orbital battery around Avalon City is going to do a good job protecting Avalon City from orbital fire, but it will not do a good job at protecting Jameston from orbital fire, and will not protect the city from an invasion force landing 'Mechs outside the firing arc of the Avalon City defenses in the Grand Avalon Mountains and bum-rushing the capital.
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We have examples of in system jumps being used.
So yes space may be big, but a Warship properly utilized solves a lot of that problem.
Especially since on the defense a Warship knows where any inbound invaders are going for with rather rare exception.
Add in orbital bombardment from a rules perspective has not been Warship exclusive since at least since Battlespace and while yes it may be a consideration, it is clearly not the biggest threat they pose to the ground game.
In-system jumps solve a lot of problems if you're outside the jump limit, remeber: Zenith and Nadir aren't the only jump points, they're just the closest STABLE ones.
followed up by L1 points.
Now, that means you've got minutes to hours of light delay between emergence and detection.
It also means your in-system jumps can range from "very close' to "kinda far away' but only a stationary target's going to be there when you arrive.
(Hint: Sensor nets are still confined to real-world issues, such as the speed of light, and at those distances the delay is minutes, to hours, to potentially days.)
the writers sometimes forget the biggest use of those massive SLDF cargo fractions, is being able to emerge from OUTSIDE the limit on any angle you want, then burn in from a direction the local defense can't afford to monitor fully.
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No. The premise is that orbital defenses is common enough to protect key installations like big cities, but not so common that one can readily protect every molehill on, say, Albion.
IOW, an orbital battery around Avalon City is going to do a good job protecting Avalon City from orbital fire, but it will not do a good job at protecting Jameston from orbital fire, and will not protect the city from an invasion force landing 'Mechs outside the firing arc of the Avalon City defenses in the Grand Avalon Mountains and bum-rushing the capital.
That also means it won't interfere with warships firing over the horizon with orbital bombardment missiles to silence them...
either the whole planet is protected in every arc, or the WarShips can use the planet's own mass against the defense installations by hiding in their blindspots and firing missiles. It's not like nuclear missiles can only fly in a straight line, even today.
So to summarize, either the orbital defenses don't have blindspots (ergo making them just as lethal against an invasion force) or a WarShip can bomb from the blindspot.
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In-universe, capital-scale missiles are rather lousy at orbital bombardment, especially compared to other weapon options (Cap Lasers and ballistics). They're really heavy and inaccurate and don't deal much orbit-to-ground damage for that weight. Unless it's a nuke you're not going to accomplish much of anything (believe me, I've tried). Plus it only works if you have complete information: That battery is definitely there, not here, there is no hidden batteries located here, this silo is totally not a fake 10k C-Bill chunk of ferrocrete meant to waste your fire...
Putting aside any retcons we could make to the setting, even in the current setting, with the rules as it exists right now, the defender has a good chunk of options at their disposal if they have a nonzero budget. Having been on both sides, it's not nearly as easy as you make it sound.
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In-system jumps solve a lot of problems if you're outside the jump limit, remeber: Zenith and Nadir aren't the only jump points, they're just the closest STABLE ones.
followed up by L1 points.
Now, that means you've got minutes to hours of light delay between emergence and detection.
It also means your in-system jumps can range from "very close' to "kinda far away' but only a stationary target's going to be there when you arrive.
(Hint: Sensor nets are still confined to real-world issues, such as the speed of light, and at those distances the delay is minutes, to hours, to potentially days.)
the writers sometimes forget the biggest use of those massive SLDF cargo fractions, is being able to emerge from OUTSIDE the limit on any angle you want, then burn in from a direction the local defense can't afford to monitor fully.
Which all said and done still translates to Warships still being far better at intercepting an invader than any other unit and conversely being better able to deliver ground forces intact.
Which is a far bigger problem for the ground game than orbital bombardment.
Or do I have to ask who are you and what you've done with the real Cannonshop?
You know the one that has spend many a posts espousing how Warships in Battletech are more akin to U-boats than line of battle behemoths?
The rules and fluff do frankly show how there are already plenty of ways to counter orbital bombardment and how Battletech Warships are vulnerable while doing it.
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I feel like 1 and 2SW would've turned out differently if it was "easy" to defend against warship attacks.
The unit that extincted the warship (by destroying all the warship factories) was ... the warship.
My hunch is that landing ground troops will always be harder than bombing from orbit, because you have to get equally close to the planet. The only benefit is that the ground troops can move across the ground and be dropped somewhere else...
... except so can basically any drone, missile, Aerospace fighter (well, at low altitude anyways).
The times when it is more efficient to drop ground troops than assail the target from orbit are:
1) you want to capture the thing intact (it is important)
2) it has a magic shield generator that prevents bombardment if you come out of hyperspace too close- er, I mean works against spacecraft but not ground units
3) it has a magic surface-to-orbit weapon emplacement that can hit ships dropping ground things that skim across the ground when those things are weapons, but not when they are troops.
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I mean, it was brought up earlier, but truly bombing the planet isnt a job for a warship. A warship can do it, but its inefficient to put warships in ASF range of the planet. Boomer dropships were used for that, and they didnt stat up the dropships that did the nuclear blasting cause the 1st + 2nd succession wars never really got stats for how hellish the nukes were beyond 'bad enough for the rest of the game to exist.' There isnt much value to bombing things gameplay wise, cause like was pointed out you dont get to take what you bomb, and bombing with less then nuclear yields are pretty inefficient when you have to cross the stars to put a rain drop (conventional bomb) in the ocean (planets infrastructure).
Using just in game assets, the big deal is dropships orbital dropping mechs. These seem to get to the surface with only the arrival turn being vulnerable to AA fire, so its a quick insertion and greatly favors mechs (which the universe likes). Since ASF arnt good at chasing down dropships in orbit, we have a game scenario for playing space combat, where defending dropships and short range fighters try and intercept the dropships before the orbital insertion, after which point the attacking dropships back up or go to a moon or something. The exfil of ground troops in the lore often is uncontested, even with the clans. They did token chases, but seeing as planet after planet fought the clans and then packed up and left, the lore has included X token defenses of whatever type being enough to allow dropships to flee even under fire.
Warships are fun to include, but when I play a game for space its focused around the orbital drop, for the rest of the game on the ground to happen. So 1 warship max per side, with 3-6 dropship groups and 3-6 fighter groups, using battleforce/the free alpha strike warship/dropship stats to make playing 12ish units per side manageable. Smaller games with 1 player character ship I play like the millennium falcon, more or less the hero dropship of the campaign doing a blockade run fending off fighters. For the hero ship of a campaign, the players can modifiy their dropship like they can modify a mech, for that 'she aint much to look at but she's got it where it counts' feeling. I use Leopards a lot for this, trying to keep to 4 PC mech units. The leopard featured heavily in MW5 and HBS battletech, so I can pull up video clips of it to show the players what the ship is like to try and 'sell' the space side, but honestly the space side is super neglected. I ignored it entirely for the clan campaign cause it wasn't interesting enough for the group of clan PC mechwarriors.
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Which all said and done still translates to Warships still being far better at intercepting an invader than any other unit and conversely being better able to deliver ground forces intact.
Which is a far bigger problem for the ground game than orbital bombardment.
Or do I have to ask who are you and what you've done with the real Cannonshop?
You know the one that has spend many a posts espousing how Warships in Battletech are more akin to U-boats than line of battle behemoths?
The rules and fluff do frankly show how there are already plenty of ways to counter orbital bombardment and how Battletech Warships are vulnerable while doing it.
Generally, you're right. There are a few narrow applications where a Dropship can play the role-but they're at close orbital and that's...really it.
Yet!
yet we have authors and devs literally insisting that a dropship is adequate for patrolling a star system.
So sometimes, I try to figure out where in the hell they're getting that idea.
and you're right-it doesn't compute, except in the developer's studio.
but that goes back to how thoroughly Naval/Aviation really has been neglected.
However, that said, warships don't make good defending assets-they're stronger players playing offense...but not as bombardment platforms.
and yeah, that CAN impact the ground game, if the conflict is big enough.
Very few conflicts in Battletech actually get big enough for that to be a factor, not even the Clan invasion really got that big, and the Can-spawned Clanners Brought warships.
I think we've beat the REASON to death in here-the level of neglect means the devs never really considered how any of this would actually work, beyond "Do the formulas add up and can we put it on two six sided dice?"
That is, Nobody, not FASA, or FanPro, or Catalyst, actually tries to think about this stuff Strategically.
as in, "What Strategies, given how these things operate, would or could actually work??"
because if they did, yes, indeed, it would impact the ground game, and that's WITHOUT needing orbital bombardment to do so.
That aversion is probably a core reason they have been trying to slowly make warships extinct, but without admitting that they're trying to make warships extinct.
(the real problem, is that while Warships are BETTER at it, the same basic concepts work with jumpship/Dropship combos, which they have also not really examined or investigated, if they had, we wouldn't have gotten PWS at all.)
The upshot is, you can't defend a star system-not entirely. You can defend specific points within it, but that costs a HELL of a lot of effort, because any enemy fleet-in-being is a threat to your garrison or your occupation forces, a threat to their logistics, a threat to communications, and a threat to the forces themselves...and that fleet-in-being has the initiative, they don't HAVE to give you a stand up fight you can win.
One of the things you may have noticed in Liberation of Terra, and the other invasion (Operation Scour) is that the Sol system's defenses largely didn't need fire ships to overcome them. They could be rendered irrelevant just by leveraging fuel supplies and cargo fractions. At the same time, the defenders invested in a structure that simply doesn't work-and that's whether you're talking Amaris, Comstar, Word of Blake, or Devlin Stone.
in every single case, they used their aerospace and naval assets as badly as humanly possible, in every case, they invested in 'defenses' that were overcome at great cost...and didn't even need to be engaged to render them irrelevant.
it's because, sadly, the writers really don't think about how the mechanics of their setting actually play out. This translates to a sense, among the players who pay attention, that there's no point to Aerospace, no reason to demand consistent rules and nothing to recommend it beyond some cartoonish Anime Recreation scenes.
which is why it doesn't sell-there's no commitment to making it good, so the gamers don't buy the product.
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I think the architecture for system defense is in place: jump points.
When at war, declare one point "open" for traffic, and just scatter trash at the other points - people jumping into the other points will misjump because a starship and a crumpled soda can interact badly when decelerating from FTL/materializing into existence.
Then, you will need sweeps/patrols (probably from drone ships, like the old SDS Caspar system) to find and monitor the "pirate points" (which are, I think, kept infinitely and deliberately ambiguous) and a heavy bastion/monitor presence at the "open" jump point.
Once the threat of war subsides (or deep into the core systems of a state) you can relax the amount of space trash you dump onto the other jump points.
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The problem is that you can and should come in via non-standard points (which are infinite) when attacking a planet. That is unless you are trying an infiltration mission (putting mechs in a modded freighter). This keeps your jump ship 'safer' than via a normal point and encourages patrols in your outer system.
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I think the architecture for system defense is in place: jump points.
When at war, declare one point "open" for traffic, and just scatter trash at the other points - people jumping into the other points will misjump because a starship and a crumpled soda can interact badly when decelerating from FTL/materializing into existence.
Then, you will need sweeps/patrols (probably from drone ships, like the old SDS Caspar system) to find and monitor the "pirate points" (which are, I think, kept infinitely and deliberately ambiguous) and a heavy bastion/monitor presence at the "open" jump point.
Once the threat of war subsides (or deep into the core systems of a state) you can relax the amount of space trash you dump onto the other jump points.
Just random space junk floating around isn't that big of a deal as Warships do annihilate small chunks of stuff jumping in without detrimental effect.
Also stations and PWS patrols only work because the authors do keep thinking 'point'.
The Earth Moon L1 point at it's smallest is big enough for a pretty sizable fleet* to jump in and still be outside the weapons ranges of any defense stations positioned where gravity is too strong to safely jump around the point.
This is made all the more impossible once you start talking Zenith/Nadir.
*I'd have to find the thread where the volume was calculated but yeah it was more than enough to handle dozens of Warships coming in at the same time. Possibly hundreds.
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Warships have already been established in the BTU as potential planet killers (depending on their load out) orbital bombardment has been a thing in fluff, fiction and has been brought up as a strategy in the forum both in jest and seriously multiple times so saying Warships are easily to counter or not as big of a threat is already a misnomer.
If you want to bring Warships into the meta of the game game, this needs to be addressed.
Strategic vs tactical has been mentioned many times and it's true; Battletech is very much a tactical game. Though TW has added books to 'zoom out' to the strategic level, the meat of the game is the tactical side from the ground up.
Battlespace could be it's own game on the strategic level, Aerospace it's own with the radar map but then you need to address how these games don't divorce themselves from another by being their own thing.
Then your back to the original problem of someone playing Battlespace just playing area denial for planetary orbit thus denying the tactical game that it's built on.
It's a balancing act that's hard to get in Battletech as Warships where original written as this force from a bygone age. Now warships are back, plugging them into the ground game without those ships becoming a beast is a challenge. Not to mention that sci-fi loves the 'do everything' ship so you need to justify Warships not replacing existing ships the universe has been built on.
I personally think less is more (hey, it's better than none) but getting the balance right is still a chore.
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the issue there is that Subcapital weaponry like the SCL1 didn't exist until 3073.. and didn't become available to non-WOB factions until the mid 3080's.
so it doesn't really fix the bombardment issue.
You'd have to make a lower-tech version of the SCL/1, much larger in mass (and cost). A Primitive version.
the Peacemaker Missile system (basically a ground launched Killer Whale Capital Missile with a nuclear warhead) becomes available around 3056, which works a little better.. but proliferation of such systems to various worlds isn't going to be fast, plus you have the issue with using nuclear weaponry so close to a planet. (Article I of the ares convention prohibiting nuclear use within 75,000km of a planet being one of the few parts of the conventions that both the IS and the clans seem to actually follow.) conventional warheads would be an answer there, but still runs into the issues of proliferation.
Conventional warheads would have to do enough damage, and you'd need several of them.
Killer Whale missiles are recovered in 3051, so you'd still have decades where a planet is relatively undefended. At least if you can recover them, Killer Whale Launchers and their ammo are very cheap. Tech Manual 6th printing page 292 has a Killer Whale Launcher at 150k C-Bills, or 3/4 the price of a PPC. A single Killer Whale missile is only 20,000 C-Bills, or 2/3 the price of a ton of LRM ammo.
My 3 C-Bills;
1.) Make Warships vulnerable. I know people love the idea of Warships being near invulnerable war machines but considering the number of Battleships lost to fighters in history, it will increase the value of Aerospace fighters in orbit and risk for such a gun platform to enter orbit.
2.) Make them expensive, in terms of money and personnel needed. I know the game already does this to some extent and people just ignore it so they can have Leviathans duke it out in theater but I still think it's important for the in universe reason why ground battles are still the most important aspect of keeping a planet. You just can't afford to have a warship in every orbit.
3.) Overkill is a thing. Dropships with Aerospace fighters can cover allot of task in the BTU, a Warship ready to orbital strike a city shouldn't be plan A when a Steiner Scout Lance can murder the opposing forces hilariously without turning the city into a creator with orbital guns.
1) Warships are vulnerable. Take any canon Warship, deploy 1% of its mass in ASF, and have just the Warship fight the ASF. Chances are the Warship will die.
2) The KF Core is expensive, such that all the rest of the equipment is ~10% of the total cost. Price out a Warship and see how much of that cost is due to the KF Core/DS Collars/LiF Battery and Warship support systems, vs the rest of the Warship. You also have the Warship losing almost half its mass to its KF core, while combat Dropships and ASF can devote 100% of their mass to tactical fun stuff.
3) Maneuvering to strike a city will take time, and the Warship will need to hover over that city in order to fire more than two shots. Assuming you are 7 space hexes (18 km/) up, that is a footprint of ~126 km. LEO velocity for Earth is ~7.8 km/second. Dividing 126 by 7.8 means the Warship will be overhead for only 16 seconds. So the Warship might get 1-2 shots off before it is out of arc to fire at the selected mapsheet. If you want more turns, you need to burn fuel at the tactical rate to hold position against 1G (or whatever the local planet has), and have a decent helmsman who can thrust the ship out of the gravity well in case of trouble (with a bonus to this roll based on the Warship's Thrust rating?).
Attackers can strike other parts of the planet now. The thing is sometimes the only targets worth attacking is the planetary capital. If the dropships can't get in to even drop troops they have to do so further away. The problems with landing further away is the distance. Pirates and Raiders want to get in and out quickly, not get into a running gun battles. Landing further away gives the defenders time to prepare their defenses. The distance also allows reinforcements to arrive while they're moving more slowly with their loot. Those are things any attacker does not want.
Actually, I'd see the pirates attacking other towns and cities. If the planet is important enough to have a Primitive SCL defending it, I'd expect the planet is also prosperous enough to have towns and cities too far away from the capital to be protected by the Primitive SCL. Exceptions would be where the critical location is something like a Germanium mine or fully automated Mech factory.
This also allows for various politicking, lowered tax rates (due to being outside the protection radius), mindsets of 'the people in the city don't know what we have to deal with during pirate attacks', 'the people attacked by pirates don't know how long it takes us to get there because the bridge was washed out last week', etc.
That also means it won't interfere with warships firing over the horizon with orbital bombardment missiles to silence them...
either the whole planet is protected in every arc, or the WarShips can use the planet's own mass against the defense installations by hiding in their blindspots and firing missiles. It's not like nuclear missiles can only fly in a straight line, even today.
So to summarize, either the orbital defenses don't have blindspots (ergo making them just as lethal against an invasion force) or a WarShip can bomb from the blindspot.
The Orbital defenses won't be shooting down the Capital missiles. The on-site and nearby AMS systems will be shooting at the Capital Missiles. Now those on-site and nearby AMS systems are potentially vulnerable to an attacker landing an army over the horizon to march and try to smash them. But at least the capital doesn't have to deal with a ship right overhead firing energy weapons, NAC, and NGauss freely into its skyscrapers.
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Can AMS engage capital missiles? Or, point defense, same diff.
If you're building a warship's worth of PD and capital weapons to fire up from the surface, why not just put those weapons in orbit on a monitor (i.e. no-KF drive but still armed and armored) and give them greater range, cover, and maneuverability? After all, if they can wax a warship without getting waxed in return... then just put them on a warship.
It is hard for me to believe that a stationary system will so thoroughly deny a mobile system of equivalent tech level that you have to land *ground troops* to remove that denial asset.
Think of planets like islands in a sea: if the coastal defense systems can keep a DDG or CG from striking it with missiles, what suddenly makes LHAs and LPDs able to get close enough to land ACVs?
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Can AMS engage capital missiles? Or, point defense, same diff.
If you're building a warship's worth of PD and capital weapons to fire up from the surface, why not just put those weapons in orbit on a monitor (i.e. no-KF drive but still armed and armored) and give them greater range, cover, and maneuverability? After all, if they can wax a warship without getting waxed in return... then just put them on a warship.
It is hard for me to believe that a stationary system will so thoroughly deny a mobile system of equivalent tech level that you have to land *ground troops* to remove that denial asset.
Think of planets like islands in a sea: if the coastal defense systems can keep a DDG or CG from striking it with missiles, what suddenly makes LHAs and LPDs able to get close enough to land ACVs?
It is technically an optional rule for AMS to engage capital missiles and have any effect upon said capital missiles under current rule sets.
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By definition of my suggestion, the planetary defenses would be common enough to make bombardment via Warship high-risk. Sending a multi-billion C-Bill warship to blast an important multi-million C-Bill factory if you're likely to be blasted by a million C-Bill orbital defense array (Capital and sub-capital weapons are surprisingly cheap C-Bill wise). Even if the chance of failure during the bombardment is low, like 1% per engagement, those are bad odds and not something you'd like to do regularly if you'd wish to keep your fleet.
Alternatively you send a Dropship near the objective to the surface and send a ground team on foot. Each 'Mech only costs millions, many orders of magnitude cheaper than an entire Warship, so most can afford losses in pursuit of the objective. Even in a worse-case scenario where you lose the entire Dropship due to incomplete information, that hundred-million C-Bill ship is still magnitudes cheaper than a Warship, so the loss is still far more palatable, though still not pleasant.
That's the problem. Stronger defenses result in stronger attacks. If the factory can't be captured or raided, you can still deny it to your enemy. If warships aren't available, there's nukes. I do think there should be more SDS and WS, but if there's too many Battletech becomes a space game.
I would like more but too much changes too much. The retcon wouldn't just be there being more SDS and WS. There's also Wolf's Dragoons wouldn't have left their warships behind when they arrived in the Inner Sphere. If they didn't leave them there wouldn't be a need to go get them, so how would Jaime Wolf's son be killed? And then there's Comstar and Word of Blake. They wouldn't have hid their warships and shipyards.
So basically the less magical shield version of:
(snip)
I can see that happening. Not all the time but I can see it happening.
No. The premise is that orbital defenses is common enough to protect key installations like big cities, but not so common that one can readily protect every molehill on, say, Albion.
IOW, an orbital battery around Avalon City is going to do a good job protecting Avalon City from orbital fire, but it will not do a good job at protecting Jameston from orbital fire, and will not protect the city from an invasion force landing 'Mechs outside the firing arc of the Avalon City defenses in the Grand Avalon Mountains and bum-rushing the capital.
I imagine that's the way it used to be and that they've been either destroyed in all the wars or fallen to neglect and a lack of parts.
Actually, I'd see the pirates attacking other towns and cities. If the planet is important enough to have a Primitive SCL defending it, I'd expect the planet is also prosperous enough to have towns and cities too far away from the capital to be protected by the Primitive SCL. Exceptions would be where the critical location is something like a Germanium mine or fully automated Mech factory.
This also allows for various politicking, lowered tax rates (due to being outside the protection radius), mindsets of 'the people in the city don't know what we have to deal with during pirate attacks', 'the people attacked by pirates don't know how long it takes us to get there because the bridge was washed out last week', etc.
Pirates do attack smaller towns. The thing is one attack can wipe out a town. Enough towns get wiped out and there won't be anyone living in rural areas. That leaves the bigger towns, cities, and installations as targets and with increase ground defenses you get increased space attackers. How long would it be before Pirates used capital missiles to bombard the SDS? How SDS will die not do to weapons fire but lack of money for upkeep, or were stripped by the pirates because the locals surrendered rather than risk being nuked? Worse, how many pirates will set up shop on the planet and use the planet's SDS for their own defense?
The Orbital defenses won't be shooting down the Capital missiles. The on-site and nearby AMS systems will be shooting at the Capital Missiles. Now those on-site and nearby AMS systems are potentially vulnerable to an attacker landing an army over the horizon to march and try to smash them. But at least the capital doesn't have to deal with a ship right overhead firing energy weapons, NAC, and NGauss freely into its skyscrapers.
There's how many standard scale weapons that can be used for anti-missile fire?
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There's how many standard scale weapons that can be used for anti-missile fire?
For the sake of clarity since we're talking game rules I will point out this too is an optional rule.
Even if we assume it is in use the ranges of what a standard scale weapon can cover at any given time versus how big space is means you'd need to put a prohibitive number of defense satelites/stations over a world to actually defend it.
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I think the architecture for system defense is in place: jump points.
When at war, declare one point "open" for traffic, and just scatter trash at the other points - people jumping into the other points will misjump because a starship and a crumpled soda can interact badly when decelerating from FTL/materializing into existence.
Then, you will need sweeps/patrols (probably from drone ships, like the old SDS Caspar system) to find and monitor the "pirate points" (which are, I think, kept infinitely and deliberately ambiguous) and a heavy bastion/monitor presence at the "open" jump point.
Once the threat of war subsides (or deep into the core systems of a state) you can relax the amount of space trash you dump onto the other jump points.
The entire Inner Sphere simply does not have nearly enough trash to cover even one standard Zenith/Nadir Jump Point as described, not least because Jump Points aren't actually points but fairly big regions of space where the net gravitational force is close to zero. You could move Jupiter onto the Nadir "point" and it would barely budge the needle.
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For the sake of clarity since we're talking game rules I will point out this too is an optional rule.
Even if we assume it is in use the ranges of what a standard scale weapon can cover at any given time versus how big space is means you'd need to put a prohibitive number of defense satelites/stations over a world to actually defend it.
Yes, but how many are there?
Around an entire world? True. But you won't need as many just to defend vital areas against missiles.
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I think the architecture for system defense is in place: jump points.
When at war, declare one point "open" for traffic, and just scatter trash at the other points - people jumping into the other points will misjump because a starship and a crumpled soda can interact badly when decelerating from FTL/materializing into existence.
Then, you will need sweeps/patrols (probably from drone ships, like the old SDS Caspar system) to find and monitor the "pirate points" (which are, I think, kept infinitely and deliberately ambiguous) and a heavy bastion/monitor presence at the "open" jump point.
Once the threat of war subsides (or deep into the core systems of a state) you can relax the amount of space trash you dump onto the other jump points.
The problem you're missing, I think, is that you didn't fully read the description of what a Jump Point IS.
Out past a certain point, in any given direction, and your jumpship works just fine. The Zenith/Nadir and L1 points?
They're merely the closest stable points in a system-that is, the shortest transit distance from a stable (there all the time or on a regular schedule) gravitational null.
Anywhere OUTSIDE that? and it's just a matter of how many more hours you want to spend burning, and your fuel fraction.
Ever notice how big the cargo fractions are on Star League ships? Yeah, that's not party favors, that's reserve fuel bunkerage, because it's bloody obvious that you don't go in through the front door and announce yourself if you want to catch the other guy with his pants down...because Space! it's BIG!!! and Detection grids and ranges are SMALL.
Lemme put it another way, imagine a dark, moonless night on the prairie, with no light pollution (or very little) from the faraway houses of the city, and you have a flashlight, and some asshat is out there with you, and he has a gun.
do you turn the flashlight on?
Pro for turning it on-within the light cone, you see better, and if you're in close enough proximity, you can flash it in his eyes.
Con against it: He can see you coming and knows exactly where you are when you turn on the flashlight-and he can stand outside the illuminated area.
That's active sensors and deep space. Great resolution within a reasonable range, at the cost of skylining the emitter for incoming hostile fire.
This is made even WORSE because Light isn't instant. a sensitive enough reciever and you get to interpret images minutes, hours, even days after it was relevant.
and if your receiver isn't sensitive enough, then you don't get THAT much warning.
Now, there are canon combos that can get around this to an extent, like putting a satellite with an HPG out there to relay what your early warning sats are seeing, or using a Black Box (before BB's were nerfed into uselessness).
But, that's limited-because you need a lot of them to cover the volume of just your commercial shipping routes.
Without detection, there is no interception,without interception, there is no defense.
The compromise is to concentrate on the easiest approaches-your "Jump Points"-the stable ones, which are still big enough (if you READ THE TEXT) to easily accomodate a War fleet without overlap...at the closest reliable approach. Not the ONLY reliable approach, just the closest reliable emergence point from hyperspace.
Which an attacker doesn't need to use, unless he feels like it, or he's got a food/water/air/fuel shortage problem.
This is what makes System Defense very difficult-difficult enough, that the writers ignore the elephant in the room created by their own fictional physics and model everything on Salamis or close coastal riverine warfare-which is the only way a Dropship can make any sense as a SYSTEM defense asset, as opposed to a close orbit planetary defense asset.
How close? Luna would be too far away for a triple of Castrums to defend to that orbital plane...or even the stable L1 point between Luna and Earth.
They don't get useful until you're already IN close orbit of one body, or the other.
not even as a deterrent against amatuers.
That, is if you actually read the physics as written in Battletech's magic system regarding spaceflight, and do basic velocity and time calcs that you had to learn in High School (well, if you took Calculus in high school, or junior college, or because it looked REALLY interesting and the correspondence course was cheap.)
This, in turn, is because of the magic system as detailed. non-jump vessels go at newtonian to relativistic speeds only-and they have to use the rocket equation to do it, no reactionless thrust, no inertial dampening, no handwavium artificial gravity or other means to shift that, and no FTL sensors to give you enough early warning to manage a long range intercept.
and they didn't include anything within the tech magic system as a canon workaround. No early warning sats with FTL capability so that you get real-time location on an arriving vessel, no hyperspace telescopes, nada.
Do you know why so many SLDF warships had the bulk of their weapons mounted side-and-aft? because on approach, the engine nozzles are coming at the target-they have to, it's the only way to slow down-and you're pointing the bulk of your guns at the target you're approaching, instead of into interstellar space.
because Constant Thrust does not equal constant velocity outside of a gravity well. Turning off the engines and you're no longer accelerating (at least, if you're not pointed at a point source of gravity), but you're not stopping either. to get 'all stop' you've got to apply reaction thrust as brakes, and you're going to pull gees doing it.
That, in turn, requires you to use reaction mass-aka "FUEL".
do you see where this is going? We don't have artificial gravity, that means passengers/invasion soldiers/occupation troops are subjected to the G-strain and forces of Acceleration and DECELERATION.
Which, if sustained above one gee, is proven medically NOT to make you a comic book superman, but to mess your circulatory system, bones, joints, and nervous system up across the board. It can even kill you where you're sitting if it's high enough, for long enough.
but if you're locked down properly, a few seconds or minutes of it at a time won't do lasting damage, and it only takes a little bit of thrust difference to make major changes in your approach vector. Apollo 13's margin was paper thin between making earth orbit after the accident, and wheeling out into interplanetary space without any fuel.
That's our scaling problem, and it's big enough that people who don't do aviation for a living often underestimate just how big a scale we're talking about.
Eighteen thousand meter hex sounds damned impressive, until you realize that it's millions of kilometers to Luna from earth at closest approach.
Never mind a running battle from Jupiter to Earth past Mars-that 'running battle' would take months, and most of the cool scenery would be out of position to get a good look at for most of the year.
Patrolling out to Jupiter and actually giving coverage would take years.
That's roughly the scale just the Solar system, the most mapped collection of objects known to man off the surface of earth, presents.
to do it, and follow the physics as presented in the game, as opposed to the authors of novels ignoring them, requires either massive aerspace forces, or easy FTL travel that isn't jumpships, and we're not presented with either one.
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Yes, but how many are there?
Around an entire world? True. But you won't need as many just to defend vital areas against missiles.
To provide complete coverage of an area the size of New York City from an orbital height equal to the ISS? You'd need A LOT. Like easily in the thousands. Probably more. And that's if you have Extreme Range standard scale weapons and no overlap.
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One could base it on the principle of over-penetration, in that regular shots drill deep but narrow holes, so you would need ways of spreading the damage out.
But capital weapons can't be made too weak or it will undermine the universe, so my preference would still be for lots of ground-based cap missiles that are optimized against warships, which would be a natural technological development during the age of war.
i wasn't suggesting an overall reduction including space stats, just a recognition that bombardment as it is currently written is a little overpowered? going by the rules for it, a naval weapon that is an order of magnitude or more weaker than the official nuclear ordinance stats in a space battle, suddenly becomes a near peer to a nuke in terms of damage and area of effect when fired at the ground of a planet.
which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. energy weapons are going to be weakened by the passage through the atmosphere (as the gases of the atmosphere absorb energy from the beams and heats up, the matter diffracts the light of N-lasers, and atoms absorb charged particle from NPPCs), and naval autocannons, naval guass, and naval missiles normal munitions are going to have been designed for penetrating the armor and structure of other warships. not really designed for area effect attacks against small targets. when you look at the design of real world warship guns and missiles, munitions designed for fighting other ships tend to have their explosive payload surrounded by thick metal housings designed to penetrate stuff (or use shaped explosive charges designed to punch through stuff), while the ones designed for use in shore bombardments are usually thin metal skins around a lot of explosive, sometimes with some added shrapnel. which can't penetrate worth a damn but blows up with way more force and area effect than the penetration focused shells.
if we fix the bombardment rules so that naval guns don't gain that leap in power just because they're pointed down at a planet, some of the problems with the idea that warships would just be a 'delete' button agaisnt ground forces gets fixed. and by making special munitions for bombardment that offset the reduction a little (but not to the same near-nuke levels as currently) we preserve the existing examples of bombardment being used to cause heavy damage to ground targets.
it does help that we've only rarely seen an orbital bombardment "up close" in the fiction. most of the time it tends to happen either 'just off screen' or as a reference to a recent event. and with those we rarely get told how long it took for it to occur.. even with this change, you could still level a city like the jaguars did Turtle Bay, it's just going to take a prolonged time of sustained bombardment to do so instead of it being something that occurs rapidly. hours, instead of minutes.
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To provide complete coverage of an area the size of New York City from an orbital height equal to the ISS? You'd need A LOT. Like easily in the thousands. Probably more. And that's if you have Extreme Range standard scale weapons and no overlap.
I'm sorry but that isn't what I was referring to. How many standard scale weapons can be used for anti-missile defense?
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Lots of good points in here and I am learning!
The only thing I have to add is that it is extremely odd to me that AMS is helpless when confronted with Arrow IV (AFAIK) but if you make the arrow IV even bigger and harder to down, it becomes able to shoot it down again.
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if we fix the bombardment rules so that naval guns don't gain that leap in power just because they're pointed down at a planet, some of the problems with the idea that warships would just be a 'delete' button agaisnt ground forces gets fixed. and by making special munitions for bombardment that offset the reduction a little (but not to the same near-nuke levels as currently) we preserve the existing examples of bombardment being used to cause heavy damage to ground targets.
I find naval bombardment weapons incredibly weak compared to nukes still. They are not near peer weapons to nukes, as far as I have seen. Earlier in the thread someone mathed out 3 years for a mckenna to level LA, versus one barracuda nuke in 1 minute. A warship broadside from a mckenna isnt all that impressive on a strategic scale. Scale is the operative word here. A mckenna weighs like 50 Iowa battleships. Its broadside is impressive versus a ship, like a single Iowa, but they weren't using Iowas to destroy cities. The short bombardment from battleships was questionably effective for the effort, especially when you are collecting something worth 50 Iowa's in mass in 1 single place.
Im guessing you mean that the naval weapons gain AE damage on the ground, dealing 150/75/37 damage. Yes I agree with you there, AE damage is super duper great, cause a standard 4v4 mech game just cant handle AE damage in volume. Its true of the big bombers on aerospace, and artillery companies, as well. A Slayer casually putting 150 AE damage into a mech, ignoring TMM and such, versus the less accurate space laser attack that still does damage on a miss, I have found roughly as frustrating... frustrating in that, why bother bringing my stalker and other mechs if AE damage is just gonna evaporate them with no interaction. And I do 100% agree with you there, the bombardment rules are just too out of scale with the ground game.
My 260 tons of random mechs just isnt able to interact with a 6000 ton space laser in a meaningful way in the game, and the lack of anything else for the warship with 6000 ton death rays to do always loops back to ground bombardment to play the part of the game most people care about--the ground game. Yet, the space lasers ruin the ground game due to such asymmetry.
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I think part of the actual problem is that folks get too bogged down in simulationist modes of thought. The rules are an abstraction. Actually trying to cover everything results in a VERY clunky system. Plus it has a cognitive disconnect where you need to think of tactical things in realistic detail, but strategically thinking that way destroys the setting. We just need to accept that rules are an abstraction, and hope the Devs can come up with fun rules for integrating Aerospace into ground combat, dogfighting and a spiritual successor to battlespace, be they all one rules set or multiple ones.
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I think part of the actual problem is that folks get too bogged down in simulationist modes of thought. The rules are an abstraction. Actually trying to cover everything results in a VERY clunky system. Plus it has a cognitive disconnect where you need to think of tactical things in realistic detail, but strategically thinking that way destroys the setting. We just need to accept that rules are an abstraction, and hope the Devs can come up with fun rules for integrating Aerospace into ground combat, dogfighting and a spiritual successor to battlespace, be they all one rules set or multiple ones.
I think this is the best mindset. BattleTech is a board game - a complicated board game, yes, but ultimately leaning a bit more towards the "abstract" rather than the "simulationist" ethos.
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I'm sorry but that isn't what I was referring to. How many standard scale weapons can be used for anti-missile defense?
Ah. Okay. My bad.
Under the less permissive optional rule set: Small Lasers, Flamers, Machine Guns, Heavy Machine Guns, and probably a couple others that I am not able to remember off the top of my head and don't have my PDFs handy to double check. Under this rule set these weapons have their damage halved and can only engage one missile volley per turn. Actual AMS under this rule set does not have either limitation.
Under the most permissive optional rule set: All of them.
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I think you can't abstract an elegant rule system without first understanding the reality underneath it.
If you mean "ignore the reality and build the elegant gameplay abstraction first, then just "make it so" in the lore/reality of the setting" .... well that's how you get Warhammer 40k, where mechanics in the game are so distant from reality you can find better simulation in MTG
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i wasn't suggesting an overall reduction including space stats, just a recognition that bombardment as it is currently written is a little overpowered? going by the rules for it, a naval weapon that is an order of magnitude or more weaker than the official nuclear ordinance stats in a space battle, suddenly becomes a near peer to a nuke in terms of damage and area of effect when fired at the ground of a planet.
which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. energy weapons are going to be weakened by the passage through the atmosphere (as the gases of the atmosphere absorb energy from the beams and heats up, the matter diffracts the light of N-lasers, and atoms absorb charged particle from NPPCs), and naval autocannons, naval guass, and naval missiles normal munitions are going to have been designed for penetrating the armor and structure of other warships. not really designed for area effect attacks against small targets. when you look at the design of real world warship guns and missiles, munitions designed for fighting other ships tend to have their explosive payload surrounded by thick metal housings designed to penetrate stuff (or use shaped explosive charges designed to punch through stuff), while the ones designed for use in shore bombardments are usually thin metal skins around a lot of explosive, sometimes with some added shrapnel. which can't penetrate worth a damn but blows up with way more force and area effect than the penetration focused shells.
if we fix the bombardment rules so that naval guns don't gain that leap in power just because they're pointed down at a planet, some of the problems with the idea that warships would just be a 'delete' button agaisnt ground forces gets fixed. and by making special munitions for bombardment that offset the reduction a little (but not to the same near-nuke levels as currently) we preserve the existing examples of bombardment being used to cause heavy damage to ground targets.
it does help that we've only rarely seen an orbital bombardment "up close" in the fiction. most of the time it tends to happen either 'just off screen' or as a reference to a recent event. and with those we rarely get told how long it took for it to occur.. even with this change, you could still level a city like the jaguars did Turtle Bay, it's just going to take a prolonged time of sustained bombardment to do so instead of it being something that occurs rapidly. hours, instead of minutes.
Most BT nukes are pretty tame, in fact I see them as being overpowered in space (for their low yield). That capital weapons are able to wipe islands out of existence (McKenna's coup) put them pretty much in the same ball park as nuclear weapons. However I do understand the need to limit the influence of WarShips on a planetary surface.
I think that the aim should be centered around the fact that orbital bombardment creates a big stable target in low orbit. In principle the defenders should be able to discourage bombardment with special anti-WS capital missiles.
For example a defender sees a WarShip positioning itself for bombardment and orders the launch of a missile from somewhere on the planet (possibly from the other side). The missile picks up speed until it goes so fast it can only really hit a warship in that bombardment position. Then the enemy either noticed the missile in time causing the WS to back off, or they don't notice it in time and the WS gets hit by a high velocity missile. The end result will be that WarShips will mostly stay away from planets, while DS can still do their job.
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In less words, you’re looking for the setting to come out with a reasonable smaller scale ground based anti-warship measure that might not be enough to kill warships outright, but is high enough risk to a warship to make approaching the planet need a lot more justification.
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I'm not sure a 'gear' solution is the right answer guys.
There's a habit pattern that is somewhat concerning, in Battletech-a niche is identified, a new piece of hardware pops up-that should've been there all along, and was implied as there from the start, or was silent but assumed (ECM being an example, also rocket launchers and various weight Machine guns).
"Why wouldn't you use a Warship for that?"
that's our question, if I'm reading the last few posts right.
It's a decent question. the answer that comes to mind for me, is something more fundamental than "New and improved ADA defense tech that the Clans get first!!! and bEST!!!"
or you can say "...clans get the best of after examining one and doing a better version" if you start it in the Inner Sphere.
Two ways I see to go with it; Orbital Bombardment is DESTRUCTIVE, and as we see with aerial bombing and with artillery, it's likely to be somewhat to very inaccurate.
Instead of a dinner plate blast diagram, you're dropping Turkey Platters on the mapsheet, but randomly.
That's consistent with both tube arty, and with aerial bombardment (bombs dropping on level bombing, as opposed to strike).
Basically, if the target is city-sized (or Island size, as in the Admiral McKenna story) it's the beez neez, but if you're trying to hit something small and mobile, through atmospheric lensing, pollution, smoke, clouds... well...if you don't mind a footprint the size of a medium sized county? then it's alright, but not ideal-your odds of hitting your own guys are too high and to limit that, you gotta get down where you're burning fuel just to keep from crashing...which makes you vulnerable to pretty much everything since you're not going to have much potential energy left to maneuver.
Makes your indomitable warship a kind of fat, slow moving (if it moves at all) target for everything in range. Not just special missiles, but fighters, fighters with bomb loads, fighters who can release bomb loads in a toss-bombing, bigger field artillery, and so on.
about the only tweak I'd use, is to require a PSR for every combat round your warship's doing that, with increasing difficulty reflecting the fun of trying to hold something decidedly non-aerodynamic that was never meant to be that close to a gravity well, steady while your crew try to parse through atmospheric noise and ground clutter (and frantic calls for support from your ground units) to try not to hit the friendlies while playing 'erase the enemy'.
that vibration should probably also impose a targeting penalty, since you're trying to hover in turbulence that's going to get worse over time.
IOW nobody said the Smoke Jaguars aren't good shots, just that they chose a city as both target and backstop, which is a moral, not technical, choice.
The alternative is, hanging back and hoping volume of fire gets your shots 'kinda close' to the target. Ship sensors are made to look out across vast distances of hard vacuum.
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A 'gear' solution could exist however, change large vehicle rules to make actually good wet warships and remove the non-missile cap fire rules. If you could threaten a Warship via a wet battleship your coastal areas are securish, if the ships are present. However the interior is at risk and would need either surface to space bunkers or a space based deterrent (such as PWS). This would dissuade smaller warships and put bigger ones at actual risk while providing objectives for ground forces
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As my Dad (a former aerospace engineer who did simulatins for a living) a simulation is only as good as its weakest point. BattleTech's aerospace in particular is really a bit too fragile (given the lore was not really thought through in those terms;, likely because, not unreasonably, the original writers weren't quite so pendantic as to be the sort of person that will spend ten hours parsing through 750 record sheets nitpicking for consistency[1].
Come to that, to trot out another one of his other favourites "all simulations are wrong; but some simulations are useful."
Aerospace either needs to get more abtract, or pick which bit it wants to simulate that is useful to the game and abtract the rest away. (You can't simulate capaital staship combat with the same set of rules as fighter combat- well, you can, but that's part of the problem, here, right?)
[1]Frag-damn Thunderbolts and their "no, this missile launcher's CLEARLY on every model and image from unseen onwards on my left shoulder, but I say it's on my my right" that I had to fix for my own satisifcation. Special frack-you to the 11SE, I think it was, that was the only one so full of bits to make it impossible to actually swap the launcher's side...)
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In a number of threads over the years, I hear people describe the Aerospace side of BattleTech as things like "Deeply flawed" "Barely functional" and other, similar comments. I have played it in the Total Warfare form, and have had little issues with it, even when using the fighters interacting on a standard BattleTech map with ground units. It just adds a little extra book-keeping in those areas.
If I were to say that it had any real issues, it would be the Space Map using Vector Movement vs Atmospheric Map using maneuvres and such, with limits based on Structural Integrity, so that you are using two different sets of rules based on where you are fighting. However, again, that doesn't seem that big of a deal to me.
So...why does Aerospace seem to get as much hate directed at it as Dark Age?
I've played the original old-school Aerotech, it was fun, and like Battletech, but in space; most players didn't realize the goal was to get behind your enemy so you can fire, but they can't; then we got Interceptor and that's that.
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Damage flowcharts FTW!
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It's a balancing act that's hard to get in Battletech as Warships where original written as this force from a bygone age. Now warships are back, plugging them into the ground game without those ships becoming a beast is a challenge. Not to mention that sci-fi loves the 'do everything' ship so you need to justify Warships not replacing existing ships the universe has been built on.
Well, here's an interesting thought: Why not make something new for the WarShip class for the new age. What if WarShips could land? They become the new DropShip? Once on the ground, you now have what amounts to a fortress from which to launch ground forces, and fall back to if things go sour.
This is technically something I wish for for DropShips on the ground map, but with a little more logic and detail brought into how you demolish them. (IE - You shouldn't have to demolish them, just pluck their wings and claws.)
It's one of the reasons I'm surprised that there aren't DropShip modifications with Artillery weapons bays for use as ground support on the ground. Technically, I suppose that's what a Union's Fighter Bays are for. The fighers can deploy with off-board artillery missiles to support your ground company, although in limited supply. But, what about eras where the Arrow IV missile was in very short supply?
After all, the DropShip doesn't want to act as air support for the ground forces, so that plethora of standard weapons really doesn't function except for when the ship is under way. Or should it? Under the current rules, as far as I can tell, once landed and on the ground, an air unit becomes a ground unit, and is subject to the ground rules, which includes the ranges. But, what if that range restriction didn't have to be turned on for grounded dropships? Logically, it makes sense, and that aero units still in the air could counter fire at the aerial ranges. A landed DropShip is still a big, now immobile, target. But, it still has that huge bridge with all that computing capacity as well as huge weapons bays with all the support structure required for precise aiming at BVR engagement.
It would be kinda fun to be able to call in AC/5 or Gauss or Large Lasers from off-board as artillery support. Barring LoS on the Low Altitude map, of course.
But, this goes back to the lack of fleshing out a proper vision for how things are supposed to work, and then applying that across the board. So, I hope the Devs come up with a vision with the new Aero rules.
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Well, here's an interesting thought: Why not make something new for the WarShip class for the new age. What if WarShips could land? They become the new DropShip? Once on the ground, you now have what amounts to a fortress from which to launch ground forces, and fall back to if things go sour.
This is technically something I wish for for DropShips on the ground map, but with a little more logic and detail brought into how you demolish them. (IE - You shouldn't have to demolish them, just pluck their wings and claws.)
It's one of the reasons I'm surprised that there aren't DropShip modifications with Artillery weapons bays for use as ground support on the ground. Technically, I suppose that's what a Union's Fighter Bays are for. The fighers can deploy with off-board artillery missiles to support your ground company, although in limited supply. But, what about eras where the Arrow IV missile was in very short supply?
After all, the DropShip doesn't want to act as air support for the ground forces, so that plethora of standard weapons really doesn't function except for when the ship is under way. Or should it? Under the current rules, as far as I can tell, once landed and on the ground, an air unit becomes a ground unit, and is subject to the ground rules, which includes the ranges. But, what if that range restriction didn't have to be turned on for grounded dropships? Logically, it makes sense, and that aero units still in the air could counter fire at the aerial ranges. A landed DropShip is still a big, now immobile, target. But, it still has that huge bridge with all that computing capacity as well as huge weapons bays with all the support structure required for precise aiming at BVR engagement.
It would be kinda fun to be able to call in AC/5 or Gauss or Large Lasers from off-board as artillery support. Barring LoS on the Low Altitude map, of course.
But, this goes back to the lack of fleshing out a proper vision for how things are supposed to work, and then applying that across the board. So, I hope the Devs come up with a vision with the new Aero rules.
Which sometimes the fluff does suggest Dropships are already something of fortresses and thus do take some concentrated effort to take down.
But yeah that we don't see more designs like the Fortress class Dropship with it's built in artillery support is a bit strange.
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This is what makes System Defense very difficult-difficult enough, that the writers ignore the elephant in the room created by their own fictional physics and model everything on Salamis or close coastal riverine warfare-which is the only way a Dropship can make any sense as a SYSTEM defense asset, as opposed to a close orbit planetary defense asset.
How close? Luna would be too far away for a triple of Castrums to defend to that orbital plane...or even the stable L1 point between Luna and Earth.
Y'know, this wasn't exactly as big an issue under the AT1 ranges. Sure this brings in other technical issues with the tech as--written, such as potential anti-grav in limited capacity to keep crews and machines from crumpling under the g-forces. And, the gravity rules were something I would've personally ignored for the sake of gameplay.
But, 6500km hexes is a huge 'point blank' range. :wink:
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Just to add a side note to this discussion, I just got a chance to use Aerospace in an Alpha Strike game and the currents rules worked really well IMHO. Aerospace didn't feel overly complex or overpowered. The only thing I wish is for higher thrust fighters to get a little bit more of an advantage in air-to-air engagements (like adding thrust/2 to engagement control rolls or something).
(https://i.imgur.com/IEq4Q26.jpeg)
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Well, here's an interesting thought: Why not make something new for the WarShip class for the new age. What if WarShips could land? They become the new DropShip? Once on the ground, you now have what amounts to a fortress from which to launch ground forces, and fall back to if things go sour.
This is technically something I wish for for DropShips on the ground map, but with a little more logic and detail brought into how you demolish them. (IE - You shouldn't have to demolish them, just pluck their wings and claws.)
It's one of the reasons I'm surprised that there aren't DropShip modifications with Artillery weapons bays for use as ground support on the ground. Technically, I suppose that's what a Union's Fighter Bays are for. The fighers can deploy with off-board artillery missiles to support your ground company, although in limited supply. But, what about eras where the Arrow IV missile was in very short supply?
After all, the DropShip doesn't want to act as air support for the ground forces, so that plethora of standard weapons really doesn't function except for when the ship is under way. Or should it? Under the current rules, as far as I can tell, once landed and on the ground, an air unit becomes a ground unit, and is subject to the ground rules, which includes the ranges. But, what if that range restriction didn't have to be turned on for grounded dropships? Logically, it makes sense, and that aero units still in the air could counter fire at the aerial ranges. A landed DropShip is still a big, now immobile, target. But, it still has that huge bridge with all that computing capacity as well as huge weapons bays with all the support structure required for precise aiming at BVR engagement.
It would be kinda fun to be able to call in AC/5 or Gauss or Large Lasers from off-board as artillery support. Barring LoS on the Low Altitude map, of course.
But, this goes back to the lack of fleshing out a proper vision for how things are supposed to work, and then applying that across the board. So, I hope the Devs come up with a vision with the new Aero rules.
Which sometimes the fluff does suggest Dropships are already something of fortresses and thus do take some concentrated effort to take down.
But yeah that we don't see more designs like the Fortress class Dropship with it's built in artillery support is a bit strange.
Yeah, the problem here is more the existing designs then anything else, a DS is many things but the overriding thing is a landing craft in the vein of a Higgins boat while the big inspiration for BT's travel system is Dune, so the DS sphere should include massive ships, but it doesn't, because takes away from lance based play.
Just to add a side note to this discussion, I just got a chance to use Aerospace in an Alpha Strike game and the currents rules worked really well IMHO. Aerospace didn't feel overly complex or overpowered. The only thing I wish is for higher thrust fighters to get a little bit more of an advantage in air-to-air engagements (like adding thrust/2 to engagement control rolls or something).
(https://i.imgur.com/IEq4Q26.jpeg)
This will be because you'd have been using the in-atmosphere rules, I'm pretty sure that the exo-atmospheric rules are the problem (because they work on Newtonian physics)
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Pirates do attack smaller towns. The thing is one attack can wipe out a town. Enough towns get wiped out and there won't be anyone living in rural areas. That leaves the bigger towns, cities, and installations as targets and with increase ground defenses you get increased space attackers. How long would it be before Pirates used capital missiles to bombard the SDS? How SDS will die not do to weapons fire but lack of money for upkeep, or were stripped by the pirates because the locals surrendered rather than risk being nuked? Worse, how many pirates will set up shop on the planet and use the planet's SDS for their own defense?
The key with pirates is that they raid the smaller towns, rather than completely wiping them out.
Imagine a planet with 100 million people, of which 90% live under the SDS 'umbrella'.
That still leaves 10 million people that are available to be raided, in a variety of town sizes. How often do pirates raid the single planet? How big are the pirate raids that occur? Will the pirates really be able to depopulate 10 million people?
If pirates are using Capital missiles, the question should be 'where did they get those missiles from'? Any House employee that is providing capital missiles or nuclear warheads to pirates should be asked, "why are you giving these pirates something that could hurt us too". Other pirates would be going after the nuke-happy pirates, to prevent anyone from thinking of performing such reprisals. The last thing pirates want is for all the Houses to put their wars on pause because one pirate group used nuclear warheads, and the Houses decide to make a clean sweep of their border regions.
The SDS facilities would be very rare, and the critical ones would be kept in operation. Defining 'critical' would be based on the House Lord or other similarly high-ranking nobles.
If a pirate force decides to set up shop, how big will the House response be? The House has likely been trying to find this pirate group, and now the pirates are in a known location.
Smart pirate groups raid and shear the populations, then get out before retaliation. They don't hang around for reprisals from angry House forces, and they definitely don't use weapons capable of provoking such a House response. I'd almost see a pirate group deciding to turn over nuclear warheads to the local planet's military, to establish their 'honesty'. Or at least establish that "we could have used this, we didn't, give us the stuff on this list and call it a finder's fee".
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Ah. Okay. My bad.
Under the less permissive optional rule set: Small Lasers, Flamers, Machine Guns, Heavy Machine Guns, and probably a couple others that I am not able to remember off the top of my head and don't have my PDFs handy to double check. Under this rule set these weapons have their damage halved and can only engage one missile volley per turn. Actual AMS under this rule set does not have either limitation.
Under the most permissive optional rule set: All of them.
No worries. :)
So a few more to a lot more. Thanks. :)
The key with pirates is that they raid the smaller towns, rather than completely wiping them out.
Imagine a planet with 100 million people, of which 90% live under the SDS 'umbrella'.
That still leaves 10 million people that are available to be raided, in a variety of town sizes. How often do pirates raid the single planet? How big are the pirate raids that occur? Will the pirates really be able to depopulate 10 million people?
If pirates are using Capital missiles, the question should be 'where did they get those missiles from'? Any House employee that is providing capital missiles or nuclear warheads to pirates should be asked, "why are you giving these pirates something that could hurt us too". Other pirates would be going after the nuke-happy pirates, to prevent anyone from thinking of performing such reprisals. The last thing pirates want is for all the Houses to put their wars on pause because one pirate group used nuclear warheads, and the Houses decide to make a clean sweep of their border regions.
The SDS facilities would be very rare, and the critical ones would be kept in operation. Defining 'critical' would be based on the House Lord or other similarly high-ranking nobles.
If a pirate force decides to set up shop, how big will the House response be? The House has likely been trying to find this pirate group, and now the pirates are in a known location.
Smart pirate groups raid and shear the populations, then get out before retaliation. They don't hang around for reprisals from angry House forces, and they definitely don't use weapons capable of provoking such a House response. I'd almost see a pirate group deciding to turn over nuclear warheads to the local planet's military, to establish their 'honesty'. Or at least establish that "we could have used this, we didn't, give us the stuff on this list and call it a finder's fee".
With 10 million people, the pirates would have a target rich environment. And with that many people they could easily depopulate a small town. Doing so may even be better for them. No witnesses. With a smaller population the pirates may leave some of the population or take all depending on their requirements and capabilities. They need to make the raid worthwhile.
If SDS is that rare, it's only going to be over vital targets such as capitals and major manufactures. Neither of those places are a likely target for pirates as they're already heavily defended.
Where would pirates get any military equipment? They either steal it, buy it on the black market, or get lucky and find it. That would include nukes. And they don't have to use them, just threaten. Even if they did, how would the Houses know? There likely wouldn't be any survivors. The planet would have to send out an alert saying they'd be attacked just to get a response and not every planet has an HPG. With limited space traffic it could be months before anyone finds out the planet was raided or nuked. That gives the pirates plenty of time to get away and make it harder to identify who did it. Having to land further away though increases the time that defenders have to gather what forces they have on planet and call for reinforcements. That makes for a more difficult raid. The more difficult the raid the more they take it out on the defenders.
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I thought every planet that has a dot on the map has an HPG, with maybe some exceptions in the periphery. Periphery is not part of the IS houses.
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I thought every planet that has a dot on the map has an HPG, with maybe some exceptions in the periphery. Periphery is not part of the IS houses.
There's been a lot of different interpretations for that, it might even be worth asking on the Errata or the Help boards to see what the current interpretation is.
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Damage flowcharts FTW!
That was in RL: Interceptor. 2nd-edition changed that to the same charts grav-tanks used, but, IMHO, made aerospace-fighters more powerful, so I still use the 1st edition flow-charts.
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With 10 million people, the pirates would have a target rich environment. And with that many people they could easily depopulate a small town. Doing so may even be better for them. No witnesses. With a smaller population the pirates may leave some of the population or take all depending on their requirements and capabilities. They need to make the raid worthwhile.
I was referring to the 10 million people being the planet's 'available' population, not that the pirates had that many people. Also that there are still targets for pirates to raid even with an SDS surface to orbit weapon setup.
If SDS is that rare, it's only going to be over vital targets such as capitals and major manufactures. Neither of those places are a likely target for pirates as they're already heavily defended.
Because as you also pointed out here (https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=84170.msg1997171#msg1997171): "Enough towns get wiped out and there won't be anyone living in rural areas. That leaves the bigger towns, cities, and installations as targets and with increase ground defenses you get increased space attackers"
The SDS systems would be rare, but since they would only be over a few critical locations it is still possible to have pirate raids occurring. The pirates won't need to find Capital Missiles or nuclear warheads.
Where would pirates get any military equipment? They either steal it, buy it on the black market, or get lucky and find it. That would include nukes. And they don't have to use them, just threaten. Even if they did, how would the Houses know? There likely wouldn't be any survivors. The planet would have to send out an alert saying they'd be attacked just to get a response and not every planet has an HPG. With limited space traffic it could be months before anyone finds out the planet was raided or nuked. That gives the pirates plenty of time to get away and make it harder to identify who did it. Having to land further away though increases the time that defenders have to gather what forces they have on planet and call for reinforcements. That makes for a more difficult raid. The more difficult the raid the more they take it out on the defenders.
Unless the pirates are killing everyone on the planet, I'd expect that planets worth the time for pirates to raid would have some way to record transmissions. If nothing else the local medieval noble sends out several dozen messengers on horseback whose orders are to hide until the pirates leave. With additional messengers/spies/runners/hiders whose only job is to keep the message safe. Those messages will be explaining who attacked the planet, what the pirates threatened the planet with, and will have some sort of signet ring that states the noble verifies the text on the paper is correct. Even if only one messenger survives, the House will know which pirate attacked, that the pirate had nuclear weapons and threatened to use them, and the date of the attack. Even if it is months later, another IS noble will notice that the tax payments have not yet arrived and will send a ship out of financial concern.
If the planet is small enough that no House controls it, then the pirates may just take over. They land on another part of the planet, and raid the existing people for resources. The problem comes when the pirates are not getting enough technical material to maintain their Mechs, and the mechs (and Dropship) start breaking down.
The difficult raid also imposes a harsher question on the pirates: are they going to get enough loot to make up for their losses. They might want to go after the main jewelry store for the gold/diamonds present, but if all they can get is the smaller town's jewelry store then that is what they will have to settle for. They might want to pick and choose from the warehouse of computer components, but may have to settle for the small town's IT center. The pirates have to survive to take their revenge on the defender.
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From the Adepticon livestream summary:
"From the chat with Ray, Brent, Bryn and Mike:
-When asked about the hurdles to making a new aerospace game, Ray said the first one is that they would not be relying on an existing system, they need a ground-up game that is fun and engaging. After that is making it work within BattleTech as a setting."
This is probably a good decision, make it fun and useable, the rest will follow.
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Agreed. and this is actually pretty big when you think of it, it means that to produce an aerospace game they're willing to kill some sacred cows
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Historically, it's noted that the Outworlds Alliance had always relied heavily on its aerospace forces, to the extent that its fighter pilots had the kind of prestige which in most other known realms has accrued to MechWarriors.
Even as if the "current" era, the AMC portion of the Raven Alliance armed forces appears to continue this trend; indeed, with the provision of more advanced fighter designs from Clan Snow Raven (albeit as "cast-offs" from the Snow Raven touman), the militia regiments compare favourably to any known Inner Sphere or Periphery aerospace force to be found beyond the Alliance's borders - even if they are a distant second from the standard set by the Snow Ravens themselves.
Speaking of which, the Snow Ravens might be most (in)famous for their comparatively large WarShip fleet - but they are also renowned for their aerospace fighter presence, even if they do not neglect their ground forces to anything like the extent seen among the Outworlder regiments.
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So, if one was to split the implementation of Total Warfare-scale Aerospace into three separate systems - one for ground support, one for dogfighting, and one for WarShip fleet battles - I would still hope that the first of those three would stay in the same "starter" rulebook as BattleMechs and other ground units. If only to enable would-be Outworlds and/or Snow Raven players to account for this aspect of their preferred tactical doctrines in as close to a "core" rule set as possible.
Similarly, since Alpha Strike: Commander's Edition is already set up to integrate the ground support role in a relatively concise (by TW standards, at least) rule set, I"d hope that any plans to re-jig the TW-scale way of doing things won't have too much of an impact on how AS is set up to handle that side of things.