I'll show my work on the Baneblade so everyone can see where I'm getting my figures. Understand that this is a 3025-centric conversion and so things are scaled to that.
Epic: Armageddon lists the Baneblade with the following stats:
15 cm speed
4+ armor
6+ close combat
4+ firefight
DC 3, reinforced armor
and it gives it the following weapons:
3 twin-heavy bolters - 30 cm range, AP4+
Demolisher cannon - 30 cm range, AP3+ AT 4+, ignore cover, FxF
Autocannon - 45 cm, AP5+ AT6+
2 lascannons - 45 cm, AT5+
Main Battle Cannon - 75 cm, AP3+ AT3+
Okay, so what's all that crap mean? It's got 3 damage points (DC 3), and reinforced armor means it can reroll it's 4+ save any time it takes damage. So a normal lascannon needs a 5+ on a D6 to inflict a damage point (hence the AT (anti-tank) 5+). The Baneblade gets a 4 or higher to save and then gets to reroll if it fails. So it's very durable. So to determine how durable it is, I refer to this link (
http://www.trilemma.com/warmaster/rules/epicBattletech/), where some other guy already did the math to see how durable mechs are, and I find an equivalent mech. What I find is that the lightest mech that has 3 DC and a 4+ reinforced armor is the ON-1K Orion. So I check the Orion. 14 tons of armor. Now I have to get creative.
Normally 14 tons would give me armor values of Front: 60, Sides: 40, Rear: 34, Turret: 50. Good solid armor. It will give the vehicle survivability roughly on par with the Orion, which is what I'm aiming for. However, the Baneblade is a superheavy tank, so by Battletech rules it has 6 locations. So in order to distinguish it from other tanks, I'll give it more armor for its additional facings. The individual facings won't be higher, but the overall armor will be. The Baneblade weighs 319 tons, but giving it 32 internal structure on each location makes it way more durable than I need it (remember, they aren't using Battletech Internal Structure stuff anyway). I'll give it half that at 16 points and it'll be thick enough. So that gets us to:
Cruising 3 (this should really be 2/3 movement to be more accurate, but a direct conversion leaves us at 3/5. Individual units should be adjusted to taste)
Flank 5Front: 16/60
L/R Front: 16/40
L/R Rear: 16/40
Rear: 16/34
Turret: 16/50This gives us a tank significantly tougher than the BT Demolisher, and still approximately on-par with an Orion as far as survivability goes.
Now the weapons. Heavy Bolters in EPIC can't damage vehicles at all, since they only have an Anti-Personnel rating. But machine guns in Battletech cause damage to mechs. So we'll give twin heavy bolters 2 damage, and with 30 cm range, we see that's the medium laser bracket.
3 twin-heavy bolters - 2 damage 3/6/9 (2D6 vs infantry)The Demolisher cannon has an AP rating of 3+ and an AT rating of 4+. It ignores cover and is FxF, which means it has a fixed forward firing arc. Comparing to the chart, we see the closest weapon performance-wise is the AC-10. It doesn't ignore cover, is only 4+ against people, but it's a Macro-Weapon (and the Demolisher cannon isn't), which means unless you have Reinforced Armor, you don't get a save. Those look like good trade-offs to me, so we know about how powerful our Demolisher cannon is.
Demolisher cannon - 10 damage 3/6/9Autocannons have AT6+, and that matches up to an AC-2. 45 cm range gives us the large laser bracket. It probably deserves some anti-infantry ammo to boost its performance there as well.
2 Autocannons - 2 damage 5/10/15The two lascannons have damage comparable to a medium laser, but with 45 cm range. Easy enough.
2 Lascannons - 5 damage 5/10/15And then we have the big boy, our Main Battle Cannon. We have to do some guesstimating here because there's nothing with that exact same damage profile as the MBC's AP3+/AT3+ gun. But the LRM-20 has AT3+. It's average damage is 12, so we'll go with that. This cannon presumably has rounds that affect vehicles and infantry the same, so it will probably do the same damage to them. That gives us:
Mega-Battle Cannon - 12 damage 8/16/24And there you go. The damage on the main gun could probably go anywhere up to 15 and still be in the right ballpark. But given that this tank is primarily designed as an infantry-killer, I think we have a pretty good estimate. Even in its own game, the Baneblade is tough, but not the best at killing enemy tanks. If you want that, you need...
The Shadowsword (to be continued in next post)
