Just a shower thought for a set piece that may be interesting.

[FastConcentrate8]

All right guys hear me out, 'Mech combat inside of an O'Niell Cylinder.

Say this, the enemy has an O'Niell Cylinder in orbit of a critical problem. This station's tracking radar, while normally used to track space debris, is designed to also be used to link into the orbital defense grid as a forward targeting station for silo launched capital missiles and orbital defense guns. The station has a large civilian population aboard it so destroying it would be an Ares Convention Violation/Against Accepted Codes of Warfare. Thus the attacking military has to use modified DropShips to board the Cylinder and capture it in a mechanized battle fought entirely aboard a Space Station.

Moving horizontally can allow you to peak over the enemy's cover and get line of sight on them.

You'd have to be careful using Jump Jets or you may end up too far from the hull to be effected by the Spin Gravity and thus be left free floating. However, time your jump well and you can rapidly jump from one side of the map to the other.

Threats and allies in a literally 3d/360 battlespace making teamwork a must.

What do you guys think?

[idea weenie]

How wide would the O'Neill cylinder be, in order to get 1G gravity at less than 3 RPM?  How fast would the interior of the cylinder be rotating to achieve that 1G?

The width will affect how much jumping will occur.  The rotation speed means that if there is a building in the path of the jump, it will hit the Mech at that speed.

[FastConcentrate8]

How wide would the O'Neill cylinder be, in order to get 1G gravity at less than 3 RPM?  How fast would the interior of the cylinder be rotating to achieve that 1G?

The width will affect how much jumping will occur.  The rotation speed means that if there is a building in the path of the jump, it will hit the Mech at that speed.

I'd have to do the math, right now I'm just floating ideas.

[idea weenie]

Got bored, found a site to do the math for me:  http://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/

So if you want 1G on the inner surface of the Cylinder with 1 RPM, you would need it to be ~900 meter radius (1.8 km wide), and the surface would be moving at just over 90 meters per second.

The map of the interior would be as long as the O'Neill Cylinder, and be ~2800 meters wide, or about 93 Battlemech hexes.  Shooting at  target on the opposite side of the cylinder would be ~60 hexes away.

Technically you could have Mechs or ASF drifting along the interior of the cylinder, as long as they maneuver out of the way of the support pillars that attach the Cylinder to the central keel.  The problem for any unit on the interior is that if it is drifting and hits a building, it will be the equivalent of that unit impacting at a speed of ~324 kilometers per hour, or a little over 200 miles per hour, or about a speed of 30 hexes per BT turn.

The other fun is firing direct-fire weapons.  For every second the shot takes to reach the target, it has moved 90 meters.  Hope your techs were able to rig up a calculator setup to properly lead the target, otherwise you will be rather inaccurate.  And since you will be punching holes in the metal that is keeping the air inside the O'Neill Cylinder, the locals will likely consider you to be genocidal.  Best bet might be using PPCs and laser weapons for direct-fire, along with guided munitions (Artemis, Streak, TAG, etc).


Best bet - station a few ASF outside the Cylinder and tell the inhabitants that you need to come on board to turn off those radars to ensure they are not going to be used (or at least put monitors to make sure they do not go above a certain threshold).  If they refuse to let you land, the ASF can do small and careful shots on the radars.  If the O'Neill Cylinder opens fire, it is a military structure that must be taken out.

Tell the locals to turn off the tracking radars for a certain period of time (i.e. during your planetary invasion), or only allow them in certain directions (i.e. away from the planet).  Also require that the locals share their radar data with your ships so your ships can help with destroying debris before it gets close to the station.

[five_corparty]

I do like the idea of units getting an additional 90 meters of jump if they jump with the roll, -90 against it, and no change lengthwise.

could make an IS vs Clan w/ Elemental fight VERY TRICKY ("hey, watch those toads on the left flank OH MY GOD HOW FAR DID THEY JUST JUMP???") hahahaha

(for the other stuff, I'd just slap a +1 to-hit on all non streak/PPCs/lasers to keep the math simple: these are, theoretically, well-trained soldiers piloting high-tech machines of war, they should be able to old-Kentucky-windage it after a volley or two)

[Daryk]

In theory, targeting systems are always tuned to the environment they are expected to operate in...  8)

[five_corparty]

In theory, targeting systems are always tuned to the environment they are expected to operate in...  8)

In THEORY.

In LIFE, however, we have "murphy's laws of combat" and you KNOW some future MechWarrior will be all "when fighting on a rolling space station your auto-targeting system will compensate the OPPOSITE direction." :-) hahahaha

[FastConcentrate8]

In THEORY.

In LIFE, however, we have "murphy's laws of combat" and you KNOW some future MechWarrior will be all "when fighting on a rolling space station your auto-targeting system will compensate the OPPOSITE direction." :-) hahahaha

Plus, this is all dependent on the condition of the Mech's targeting computer which is heavily dependent upon era.