The rise of interest in ilclan era has opened the door to superheavy battlemechs, and the ability to gain an advantage from using the rules on multiple pilots has caused them to become more common at our local game store. Could you clarify who is a pilot for the calculation of pilot skills for the purposes of calculating BV?
Superheavy tripod battlemechs have 3 people in the cockpit, a pilot, a gunner and a technical officer, conferring them the ability to target up the 3 targets without a "secondary target penalty", a -1 on top of the -1 for tripods for PSR rolls, and a +1 initiative all for what appears to be nothing in the bv cost calculation. (pg158 interstellar operations alternative eras).
The BV multiplier for pilots is found by averaging the skills of the pilots (pg188 interstellar operations: alternative eras) Pilot Skills: To calculate the Battle Value for a Tripod ’Mech with variable skill ratings (see p. 314, TM) use the average of the pilots’ Piloting and Gunnery Skills, respectively. Round normally when determining the average score.
Although our environment limits the gunnery and piloting skill to within 2, if that house rule did not exist then using the above rules one could theoretically use a 0/8 gunner, 8/0 pilot and 8/8 technical officer for a mech that has a 0 gunnery skill, a 0 piloting skill and yet uses the BV multiplier for 5/5 (0.95x).
So, the question i have is: are all three of the people in the cockpit considered pilots for the purposes of calculating the BV? Or are just the gunner and the pilot?
