Mech design decisions that make no sense

[Iceweb]

I know it takes an optional rule, but the mismatched weapons I like to mount are a claw on the left and a retractable blade in the right.  Unless I misunderstood the rules you can make two punches with each weapon doing it's modification.  Makes a great rip and tear effect. 

Unfortunately I am unaware of any cannon mech that mounts that pair.   

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

I'm pretty sure you have to mount two claws in order to be able to make two melee attacks with them.

[Firesprocket]

I know it takes an optional rule, but the mismatched weapons I like to mount are a claw on the left and a retractable blade in the right.  Unless I misunderstood the rules you can make two punches with each weapon doing it's modification.  Makes a great rip and tear effect. 

I'm pretty sure you have to mount two claws in order to be able to make two melee attacks with them.

I haven't used Claws all that much so if I'm wrong someone can step in and correct me.  A mech with 2 Claws can make an attack each turn because you are allowed 2 punches which is exactly what a Claw attack is, augmented punch damage.  The premise would be the same with optional rule for the retractable blade, you aren't attacking with the blade for damage, you can simply augment the punch for the possible crit by extending the blade.

Now I want to go quirk out a mech that has double claws, double retractable blades, and some experimental talons with spring blades to GM against my locals.  To bad no one really has free days between watching their kids or getting sucked into the latest FF expansion.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

I suppose you could do that, but with the amount of tonnage that's going to eat up it's not going to leave you with a lot of options for conventional weaponry.

[Luciora]

But it's going to look GREAT!

I suppose you could do that, but with the amount of tonnage that's going to eat up it's not going to leave you with a lot of options for conventional weaponry.

[Sartris]

There are two ways to win at Battletech

1) by defeating your opponent (boring, cliche, so 1990)
2) losing with PANACHE (brilliant, innovative, unforgettable)

[Weirdo]

There are two ways to win at Battletech

1) by defeating your opponent (boring, cliche, so 1990)
2) losing with PANACHE (brilliant, innovative, unforgettable)

This man wins the forum!

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

There are two ways to win at Battletech

1) by defeating your opponent (boring, cliche, so 1990)
2) losing with PANACHE (brilliant, innovative, unforgettable)

Well played. :clap:

[grimlock1]

There are two ways to win at Battletech

1) by defeating your opponent (boring, cliche, so 1990)
2) losing with PANACHE (brilliant, innovative, unforgettable)

The DM in my Pathfinder group let me do something weird last week mostly because if I botched the roll, it would have been hilarious.

I didn't and the villainous NPC took an adamantine grenade to the chest. :-)

[dgorsman]

But it's going to look GREAT!

Which has little more priority in the S7 arenas where these designs would normally be found.  Maybe Noisel, but just like real life: would you play soccer when the other team looked like that?

[Alexander Knight]

There are two ways to win at Battletech

1) by defeating your opponent (boring, cliche, so 1990)
2) losing with PANACHE (brilliant, innovative, unforgettable)

"Oh, you're a villain all right.  Just not a *super* one."

"Oh yeah?  What's the difference?"

"PRESENTATION!"

[mbear]

There are two ways to win at Battletech

1) by defeating your opponent (boring, cliche, so 1990)
2) losing with PANACHE (brilliant, innovative, unforgettable)

Unfortunately, this means JadeHellbringer automatically wins every single game he plays.

[Firesprocket]

I suppose you could do that, but with the amount of tonnage that's going to eat up it's not going to leave you with a lot of options for conventional weaponry.

Got that part covered.  I am going to save weight with a smaller engine and paint the mech red to compensate   ;).

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

There you go.

Be sure to add a bunch of spikes, too.

[grimlock1]

There you go.

Be sure to add a bunch of spikes, too.

Only need spikes on the left shoulder. 

[victor_shaw]

To answer this question you have to ask yourself "From what perspective is the question being asked".

From a purely in universe perspective I would have to say that this ship sailed a long time ago.
As ex-military I ask:
Why are there so many designs in the first place.
No military is going to create new designs for combat vehicles just to have more variety.
As an air force vet I can say you don't create custom layouts for each of your pilots this is set for the mission not the pilot, and you don't create multiple platforms for the same job.
The point of platform creation is to fined the for (lack of a better word) the most min/maxed platform to best utilizes the available equipment and minimized the cost.
If a piece of equipment failed to meet this requirement it is abandoned. At this point in Battlemech history there should be maybe 20 or so Battlemech designs (probable less as weight ranges are ruled out for min/maxing) in total, and all new Mechs should be just new tech variance of the standard Mech chassis.
The U.S. army/Marines have used the same single tank chassis (M1 in all its variances) for going on 25 years.
Clan omni-tech is a perfect example of this, why would any military with this tech produce anymore then one mech chassis per weight class or even less since most of the time 5 tons doesn't make that much of a differences.
By this time in the Battletech universe (706 years since the Mackie) each house should at most have one maybe two mech chassis in any weight class. As they have had way to long to Min/Max the Mech designs.
And the idea of iconic Mechs is just be silly from a military uses perspective. We don't use bi-planes anymore in the air force or put them on the recruiting posters, so why would a Warhammer which is majorly out classed by newer chassis still be used on the field or in the literature to recruit new mechwarriors?
The old argument Mechs are rare is long past in the modern Innersphere.

Now from a out of universe perspective it all makes sense, Money!
CGL is a business and they need to make money, so they need to keep having new products for us to buy.
While I don't agree with the idea that we need 1+ new TRO every year.
I don't hold it against them that they are good sellers.
IMHO, they should concentrate on the story aspect of the universe and stop trying to come up with 20+ new mechs all the time.
Just this marketing design alone explains the OPs mech choice. They needed another design so they had to come up with something.
The backwards firing MG's make an otherwise already used chassis design seem new.
At this point I can guess that it become harder each day to come up with new and original mech ideas.
After awhile you run out of ways to equip new mech with the construction system employed.

[Orin J.]

To answer this question you have to ask yourself "From what perspective is the question being asked".

From a purely in universe perspective I would have to say that this ship sailed a long time ago.
As ex-military I ask:
Why are there so many designs in the first place.

Every time they build weapons it's easier to convince someone in the government they need the new toy than it is to simply convince them to refit the Enforcer again. then they throw it at the army who get the fun of figuring out how to field them without tying too many new knots in their supply lines.

you know, like we do now!

[Colt Ward]

As ex-military I ask:
Why are there so many designs in the first place.
No military is going to create new designs for combat vehicles just to have more variety.

The Houses are sort of like the old Soviets . . . never throw any gear away!  It just gets handed down to lower priority units, I mean the Soviets were still flying MiG-21s when the system collapsed IIRC.  So over 40 years and several generations of aircraft yet it was still in production in places (or variants) while various places were refitting their fleets to incorporate advances.

[massey]

To answer this question you have to ask yourself "From what perspective is the question being asked".

From a purely in universe perspective I would have to say that this ship sailed a long time ago.
As ex-military I ask:
Why are there so many designs in the first place.
No military is going to create new designs for combat vehicles just to have more variety.

Nah.  Because politics.  Politics and the size of the Inner Sphere.

Don't think of a Successor State military as similar to a modern one.  At best, it's like a version of NATO.  A version of NATO where no tech advancement took place over a few centuries, and people are still using WWII equipment in large numbers because it still works and half the factories have been blown up.

[Colt Ward]

The point was he was looking at it from a Western military perspective . . . the Soviets did not throw away or recycle gear, they just gave it to lower tiers.  I mean the NKoreans were using WWII T-34s b/c the Russians peddled them for influence and they were still adequate.

But yeah, the post WWII arms race frozen in the 50s is probably a good analogy.  Since some units were equipped with pre-WWII gear and some had more cutting edge stuff- like jets!

[massey]

So let's say you've got a Successor State.  At the top, you've got the Chancellor/First Prince/Grand Poobah/whatever.  Not only does this guy have a lot of money personally, and probably owns a large private army, but he's also got a hundred different titles, and a million different alliances with various nobles.

Grand Duke Doofus who runs the Backwater Conglomeration, a group of a dozen planets in the most remote part of the kingdom, is happy to send five Battlemech regiments to help his third cousin twice removed (by marriage), the Successor Lord.  And so the Backwater Hussars are considered a vital part of the Successor State's armies.  But they're gonna make use of that weird Crusader variant, because it's produced by Grand Duke Doofus' factories.  It doesn't matter if there's a better variant out there, this one is the "best" because it's produced by the Grand Duke.  And by God, you're gonna make a purchase every year of two dozen Battlemechs and send them to units under your command, because that's part of the 700 year old treaty that originally joined the Backwater Conglomeration to your kingdom.

This kind of thing isn't unique.  It's the standard way of doing business.  Everybody's got their own factories, and produce their own style of mechs.  Yes, to a degree combat ability matters, but there's a whole lot of redundancy in design because you've got to buy from the right person.

[Orin J.]

The point was he was looking at it from a Western military perspective . . . the Soviets did not throw away or recycle gear, they just gave it to lower tiers.  I mean the NKoreans were using WWII T-34s b/c the Russians peddled them for influence and they were still adequate.

But yeah, the post WWII arms race frozen in the 50s is probably a good analogy.  Since some units were equipped with pre-WWII gear and some had more cutting edge stuff- like jets!

don't forget the successor states are countless orders of magnitude larger than any worldly nation- more than a little of it is going to be "what can i support with parts in reasonable range" and "who does we have contracts to supply new 'mechs with here". i'd wager a fair chunk of 'mech designs are "make this other 'mech, but in  way we can produce it here without copyright infringements and using local weapons". or just vanity projects like all those combine 'mechs dressed like samurai...

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

The DCMS loves a good cosplayer.

[victor_shaw]

The soviet philosophy of keeping every piece of equipment they ever made had more to do with being outnumbered and already behind a technologically advanced west.
The old soviet addict of "quantity over quality" which had won them the eastern front.
I don't see the Successor State as the old soviet state.
And as I said, while this answer worked during the 3rd Successor war, by 3050 and beyond technology was rapidly climbing back to Starleague levels so it would have been way more efficient to par down the numbers of chassis type to reduce the stress on logistics for the house armies, not create more to further strain them.
Add to this the Omni-technology and you should have had Successor State armies more in line with the 3049 Clans. (one or two chassis per wight level)
But, really world business had to butt in and even mess this up with clans getting new mechs every TRO at Successor State rates, not because they needed them but to fill-up TROs.

[Wolf72]

I think I saw this response up there somewhere,

but I'd say why there are so many variants is that there are so many different entities out there that can afford their own equipment, even if it is made by the same international/stellar company or their competitors.

The magnitude of the BTU easily dwarfs one planet and it's internecine issues.  The clans are as fractured as the I.S.  Instead of the US, it's like having 100 US's and they don't want to simply copy-cat each other or they're trying to support their homegrown tech first ... even if it is a load of horse phooey (armed and armored horse phooey, that is).

[AdmiralObvious]

The soviet philosophy of keeping every piece of equipment they ever made had more to do with being outnumbered and already behind a technologically advanced west.
The old soviet addict of "quantity over quality" which had won them the eastern front.
I don't see the Successor State as the old soviet state.
And as I said, while this answer worked during the 3rd Successor war, by 3050 and beyond technology was rapidly climbing back to Starleague levels so it would have been way more efficient to par down the numbers of chassis type to reduce the stress on logistics for the house armies, not create more to further strain them.
Add to this the Omni-technology and you should have had Successor State armies more in line with the 3049 Clans. (one or two chassis per wight level)
But, really world business had to butt in and even mess this up with clans getting new mechs every TRO at Successor State rates, not because they needed them but to fill-up TROs.

I mean, a lot of the successor states still worked similarly to the Soviet methodology of "keep it, we'll find a use for it later". Old Soviet stuff was easy to maintain. As are quite a few units the States continued to use throughout the series of BT.

Units which are relatively easy to retrofit, such as the T-34 in our timeline can apply to many units in the BT universe. We talked about the PO, and how it can be turned into a LB-X carrier (in the weapons maintenance thread, I thought this was that). The T-34 was also retrofitted into using AA guns. Mechs probably are the least likely to be able to be retrofitted as easily, since a lot of the mounts are hardwired contrary to an Omni.

That's not even mentioning that "we have a T-34" is usually better than "we don't have any armor at all". Anything that can lob shrapnel shells is better than something that doesn't.

[SCC]

One major difference between the Soviets and the IS is that I'm pretty sure the Soviets stopped making outdated (for them) gear. The IS also seems to introduce new designs just because, unlike any real world military.

[dgorsman]

One major difference between the Soviets and the IS is that I'm pretty sure the Soviets stopped making outdated (for them) gear. The IS also seems to introduce new designs just because, unlike any real world military.

They would sell not just the outdated stock, but designs and possibly technical support in helping the client state set up manufacturing for some of the necessary parts.  Pretty cheap way to get access to the client states resources and/or strategic location.

I don't think there's as much design competition in the IS than real life militaries.  While they happen from time to time, it's more a case of "Make a competing product or we're going to lose market share" for the less favored companies.  Even if the federal forces don't pick them up regional forces might (possibly just to politically spite their own feds).  Together with authorized merc sales, there's rarely an actual boondoggle design.

[The_Caveman]

They would sell not just the outdated stock, but designs and possibly technical support in helping the client state set up manufacturing for some of the necessary parts.  Pretty cheap way to get access to the client states resources and/or strategic location.

I don't think there's as much design competition in the IS than real life militaries.  While they happen from time to time, it's more a case of "Make a competing product or we're going to lose market share" for the less favored companies.  Even if the federal forces don't pick them up regional forces might (possibly just to politically spite their own feds).  Together with authorized merc sales, there's rarely an actual boondoggle design.

It's a better system, TBH. Companies develop products to spec, the military evaluates and buys new products as they're submitted for approval and manufacturers who can't deliver don't get repeat orders. Instead of having protracted winner-take-all bids that are sold on the strength of a single pre-production prototype that may only loosely reflect the finished product. It works well because 'Mechs are difficult to produce quickly and components are highly standardized between models.

Where you have contractor bids for a single universal design, you get designs that are politically optimized instead of optimized for their intended mission (one might argue that keeping the state bureaucracy happy becomes the intended mission).

[SCC]

Caveman, an important difference between the real world and BT is that BT has a seemingly unregulated military hardware market, IRL military hardware companies can often only sell to their national governments, so free market principals don't apply. Not saying your wrong, but there are good reasons we have the systems we do IRL.