"Real life" performance versus game rules -- making sense of bad designs?

[massey]

Some Battlemechs are awesome, but some Battlemechs are not.  We see threads about why XYZ mech would be better, if only they lowered the movement speed, added more heat sinks, etc.  And some of these critiques go from small adjustments, all the way up to a complete rebuild that just looks kinda like the original if you squint hard.

So I was thinking about this, and reading the thread on the Gargolye Prime, and then took a look at Solaris: The Reaches and saw the Werewolf mech.  At first glance, the Werewolf is terrible.  It is a 40 tonner with 5/8/3 movement, max armor, 2 machine guns, 2 small pulse lasers, a medium pulse, an SRM-6, and sixteen double heat sinks.  It literally sinks more than twice as much heat as it can possibly generate in a round.

Now, under the Solaris rules, the Werewolf suddenly makes sense.  A single turn is broken down into four segments, and weapons can be fired more than once per turn.  Solaris mechwarriors hot-rod their mechs, pushing them to the extreme limit.  Under those rules, the Werewolf can fire so quickly that it can actually build heat despite being the coolest-running mech ever created.

So this made me wonder.  We've got multiple rules sets that all reflect a different aspect of 31st century warfare.  Battletech itself gives us a representation of small unit warfare.  Battleforce and Alpha Strike show us mechs in a more abstracted sense, where larger units are more important.  Solaris shows us mechs pushed to the redline with safety standards be damned.  All of them are official FASA/Catalyst products that purport to show us the universe from a particular point of view.

My question is this (really questions, plural).  Should this affect how we look at mech designs?  When we ask ourselves "does this mech make sense", should we take these other game systems into account?  What is most representative of actual warfare to the people in the universe?  Do they think "boy this Marauder needs more heat sinks, I can't fire my PPCs and move without slowing down".  Or does their combat reflect something else, maybe a combination of different rule sets, or something completely different?

Anyway, just curious as to everyone else's thoughts on this.

[Vandervecken]

I think there's something fundamentally broken in the diffs between these two games.
A typical weapon (say a medium laser) either can be fired once every (say) 10s, or once every 20s. If it's once every 10s, a game that limits it to firing once every 20s is a bad simulation. And vice versa.
So in a sense, you could argue that one of these games is just flat-out wrong.

[Sartris]

"Should this affect how we look at mech designs?"

good and bad are context-dependant values - it doesn't matter that a fork is good in other contexts if i'm trying to eat a bowl of soup with that fork.  "This for would be so good at stabbing chunks of meat. But we don't eat like that," I say as I try to get a little broth on that little dip where the tynes connect. In a world where one only eats soup, there is almost nothing that will make me evaluate the fork as good, even if I understand intellectually it would be better in a different world. Should I ever go to that soupless world, my opinion will change with the context. "Time to shine, fork! I knew you'd be useful someday," I say as I step off the spacecraft and am immediately served a plate of meatballs.

i guarantee though, in that soup world, some hipster is going to jump into a fork hate thread and defend its merits.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Sometimes, a Mech is just incompetently designed in-universe.  Solaris Mechs are supposed to be flashy and crowd-pleasing, not combat effective.  Look at the Aquagladius: it's supposedly an underwater combat mech, yet it's mounting a Mech Taser and a Flail.

[SteelRaven]

... Sorry, you lost me at Real Life and Battletech

Most games are far, far, far from realistic unless plasma swords and shouting at dragons to kill them are actual things I've been missing out on.

[Daemion]

... Sorry, you lost me at Real Life and Battletech

Most games are far, far, far from realistic unless plasma swords and shouting at dragons to kill them are actual things I've been missing out on.

;) A long time ago, maybe 5000 years, give or take (depending on who you ask), when the world looked a lot different than it does now.  Or, maybe yet to come, in some post-apocalyptic future where the fundamentals in physics have taken mild or drastic turns.

Most games are indeed abstractions, but that's for the sake of making it playable without a computer system.  Still, war-games try to emulate combat in a visual enough manner that you can piece the scene together in your mind's eye. So does some RPG combat.

In that vein, don't knock the attempt at using the system to derive a vision of how the game's 'real world' works. In a lot of ways, it's all we got to really work with.

[SteveRestless]

... Sorry, you lost me at Real Life and Battletech

Most games are far, far, far from realistic unless plasma swords and shouting at dragons to kill them are actual things I've been missing out on.

I don't think that the thread's concept is about how mechs would perform IRL.

I think it's trying to get at the stats in the game being an abstraction, and the in-universe performance of mechs being different from that.

[jklantern]

... Sorry, you lost me at Real Life and Battletech

Most games are far, far, far from realistic unless plasma swords and shouting at dragons to kill them are actual things I've been missing out on.

Hey!  What happens to me on Tuesdays is nobody's business!

[SteelRaven]

I don't think that the thread's concept is about how mechs would perform IRL.

I think it's trying to get at the stats in the game being an abstraction, and the in-universe performance of mechs being different from that.

Sorry, got too used to people trying justify real world logistics and engineering into a game about giant robots.

A good amount of in universe logic, in game logic and RL logic don't always gel but that's the nature of the beast and why allot of fans have their own head cannon to bridge the gaps.

[Mecha-Anchovy]

I think it's trying to get at the stats in the game being an abstraction, and the in-universe performance of mechs being different from that.

Right. The rules - of all of the various games on offer here - are creative abstractions. They are designed to create a fun game which is evocative of heavy metal 'mech combat. The rules are not a simulation of the universe as such. Rather, they are an entertaining and atmospheric game.

The point of the rules, basically, is to feel like piloting around a giant 'mech as described in the game's universe. If they do that, then they've succeeded, even if they don't accurately model all the actual mechanics or strengths or weaknesses of the 'mechs in 'reality', so to speak.

[massey]

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to figure out actual real real life abilities of mechs.  Sorry if that wasn’t clear.  The idea was more along the lines of, take the Shadow Hawk.  By fluff, it’s a very well respected medium mech in the 3025 era.  But in the game, it’s over-sinked and it doesn’t even have full jump.  The AC is “meh” and I can’t see why people would bother with it.

But... let’s suppose that the Battletech rules we all know represent a fairly cautious, sustained use of the equipment.  Basically it means you’re following the manufacturer’s recommended guidelines for everything.  But what if you can hold down the trigger on that autocannon and Fire it faster than the regular game rules represent?  Maybe it’s not good for the gun long term, and you’ll wear it out faster (void the warranty?), but you can do it.

The Solaris rules have a reload time for each weapon.  I don’t have them with me right now, but as I recall the AC-5 has a reload time of either 0 or 1, and SRMs have a reload time of 1.  That means you can fire your SRM 2 twice per standard Battletech turn, and your AC-5 either twice or four times per turn.  You can also fire it faster if you’re willing to pay a heat penalty (as I recall it’s something like 3 or 4 times the heat) and risk destroying the weapon.

From that perspective, over-sinking the Shadow Hawk would make sense.  During intensive combat situations the mechwarrior would be expected to burn through that AC ammo as fast as possible. It would mean he could have a damage spike that was higher than the Griffin (as I recall the PPC had a reload time of 3, meaning it could only fire once per Battletech turn).  Now the mech makes a lot more sense.  As least I can kinda justify some of the design choices they made.

Likewise, the Marauder has a few more choices in how it manages heat, once you break down the turn into smaller components.  We see some examples of this philosophy with mechs like the experimental 3025 Raven, and the Cyclops with the HQ unit installed.  Neither of these mechs make sense in standard Battletech — the equipment they carried didn’t have a use at that scale of the game.  They may have later added rules for what that equipment was supposed to do, but originally it was just empty tonnage.  What that stuff did wasn’t represented in the standard game.  But it would have still done something.  Presumably if you were playing Battleforce you’d have loved to have one of those mechs.

[SteveRestless]

Right. The rules - of all of the various games on offer here - are creative abstractions. They are designed to create a fun game which is evocative of heavy metal 'mech combat. The rules are not a simulation of the universe as such. Rather, they are an entertaining and atmospheric game.

The point of the rules, basically, is to feel like piloting around a giant 'mech as described in the game's universe. If they do that, then they've succeeded, even if they don't accurately model all the actual mechanics or strengths or weaknesses of the 'mechs in 'reality', so to speak.

at the end of the day though, if this is the case, I want to see what a version of battletech that IS a "simulation" of the "Battletech World" rather than just a game would be like. Since I'll probably never get that, my only option is to treat the game stats as authoritative.

[Daemion]

at the end of the day though, if this is the case, I want to see what a version of battletech that IS a "simulation" of the "Battletech World" rather than just a game would be like. Since I'll probably never get that, my only option is to treat the game stats as authoritative.

That's right. So, how far do you take it? Since these threads are all about opinion, you get all kinds of permutations and opinions.

For example - do you include all the advanced rules? How about prior rule-sets? Do they act as an alternate form of technology for you if you, say, use the BMR rules to resolve partial cover and damage against vehicles for an old Star League Mech, compared to the less accurate approach of Total Warfare?

I've actually played around with that. 

I know some people don't care for the current Aero rules at all, not wanting to cite them for potential max-ranges and weapons performance. But, as long as we have them, it's there as proof of power and projectile speed.  And, then you go back to AT1, with ranges in whole planets per hex.  If you include that, even if as LosTech, how do you compare it to the less advanced equipment? (I'm thinking that for those speeds and velocities in AT1, Aerospace craft have some sort of rudimentary anti-gravity built in to keep the crews/pilots from turning into paste, and would explain why pilot and crew damage is so important to skill values, which were arbitrarily high in that game.)

So, going back to Solaris 7, I have a mixed view on its inclusion in at least one of my BT world-views.  Part of it really depends on the way the heat system works and whether the AC is clip- or belt- fed. If clip-fed, it's hard to justify the high rates of fire possible by simply disengaging the safeties. 

edit: However, looking at how the Rotary 2 and 5 work their damage, a tricked out AC that could rapid-reload a clip might have been the inspiration behind what they call a rotary autocannon.  I personally think of it less as a giant Gatling, and more of a clockwork autocannon where there's a pause between clip loadings.
/edit

Secondly, the Solaris 7 heat dissipation system seems to suggest that heatsinks function almost continually.  The problem with this is that TSM becomes highly impractical, because the window during which it is effective becomes very narrow. This doesn't fit with the standard rules where it's effective for an entire 10 seconds before the cooling system fires again.  This had suggested to me that heat dissipation happens more like how my old 90's Tauruses worked when at idle and sitting.  The radiator fan would kick in for a little bit when the thermostat opened up to let coolant flow, and I'd watch the temp gauge drop significantly in the second or two that the system ran before turning off.

I kinda think that the majority of BattleMech heatsinks actually have a compressor component, much like a fridge, that has to force the coolant to cool down by packing it together, before it can release the freshly cooled fluid back through the system to capture the heat given off by the components and whatever other materials the line runs close to.  In a lot of ways, coolant probably pumps through the system about the same way blood pumps through a living animal or person. 

Those are the only real problems I have with the Solaris 7 rules.  Their inclusion under the interpretations above would mean extensive engineering had been done to get the results you see in some, or many, cases. Which is why the rules are for Solaris 7, and not stock BT play, because a Machine capable of that performance has been tricked out to do it.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Multiple novels, especially the Gray Death books, portray ACs as clip-fed.

[Daemion]

That's right. And, on the Shadow Hawk or Marauder, no less. But, those are only particular brands. I bet you could justify one or two brands being belt fed, here or there.

There's an inherent safety in the clip-fed, from what I gather. If the AC is breached, it doesn't have a round chambered that can go off, like you have with a jammed rotary cannon. (However, that could be a jammed clip, too.)

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

That's right. And, on the Shadow Hawk or Marauder, no less. But, those are only particular brands. I bet you could justify one or two brands being belt fed, here or there.

Sure, but they all perform the same regardless of how they're fluffed as working.  Heck, the AC-5 ranges from 30mm to 120mm bore size and yet they're all the exact same tonnage with the exact same range and damage.