The Beast Wars Cartoon had it explained that the Maximals and Predacons would be in beast mode due to higher energon radiation affecting their systems. So a similar method might be the Aximals/Predacons having circuitry that is more sensitive to local environmental conditions (whatever those are), requiring increased maintenance (or even circuit failures) if they are in robot mode for too long while outdoors. So Beast Mode would represent the transformers using a form of deployable protection that is weak against standard weapons damage, but strong vs the ambient environment.
I can see where you're going with that, but in the BT universe, BattleMechs are suitable for all but the most extreme of environments. It takes a nuke going off to surge most of them into shutdown--assuming the conventional damage doesn't incinerate them first--and anything harsh enough to prove too much for a BattleMech's environmental protections is generally going to have killed the organics all around them long before it's affected the 'Mechs. So, if there's a biosphere they're protecting, it would be quite alien indeed for it to be so harsh to Mechs yet sustainable for its native life forms. Not saying impossible, but certainly a stretch, IMO.
In their bases the outside environment is kept out so they can be in robot mode without suffering problems. Specialized equipment can be made in the base, carried in Beast Mode, the transformer changes into robot mode for special research in a single location, then the robot changes back into 'protected' mode for long-distance travel. The specialized equipment is hardened against the environment that is why it can survive long-duration.
In BattleTech terms, I think I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a tech that only works in one mode and not the other from a purely environmental standpoint. I mean, motive systems vary with conversion-capable units only because the very act of conversion re-orients the motive systems into their necessary configuration for optimal use (wheels and tracks to the ground, rotors and jets to appropriate thrust vectors, even extra legs to the ground, and so forth), but armor, structure, and weapons tend to retain their utility in both modes or we would be just asking for trouble in combat. The same tends to go for the various types of environmental sealing that (again) is a built-in feature of all BattleMech designs (and a good number of IndustrialMechs).
For Scorponok, it could be where the robot mode has regular hands, while in Beast Mode the myomers and joints are re-positioned to effectively form Claws, imposing a 'Piloting' penalty in cases of fine manipulation. So robot mode provides fingers and protects the environmental armor, while beast mode has less precise manipulators but allows them to travel outdoors for longer periods of time. (Of course Scorponok also had the annoying tendency to use his claws when typing on computers)
Well, for that matter, the original cartoons tended to show several of the Maximals and Preds using very non-human hand designs that did human-hand jobs. The spider-bots typically had pincer-like claw-hands themselves, and Dinobot's hands, IIRC, never retracted their claws. The Maximals were fortunate enough to all have five-fingered hands in robot mode, at least.
(Also, the Beast Wars transformers were a lot smaller than the G1 transformers. See the episodes where Beast Wars Megatron was only slightly taller than Ravage, rather than towering over him.)
If there's one thing I ignored outright in making a BT-to-TF ruleset, it was scale and size changing. That tech just doesn't exist in BT, and the ProtoMech class was definitely not available to the Syberians. (I'm straining things as it is to put BA-scale drones in, but if your Beast Wars drones happened to use those, they'd last about a minute in a crossover fight and would never have a transforming capacity--another bridge I wouldn't cross there.) So, letting them just be lighter Mechs is perfectly fine to me.
The detail with that idea for the mini-Veebots is the strength/sturdiness needed for the linkage equipment required to transfer stress from an arm-Veebot to the torso-Veebot(s).
Never liked that version of Voltron. Combiners always seemed an iffy approach to me, but the 20 vehicles to make one robot screamed "too many ways to defeat this thing!"
Still, a mini-Veebot acting as an additional turret (such as the Minicons) would allow a Veebot to engage one target by itself, while the turret Veebot could engage a second target with no secondary target modifiers. Or where a full size Veebot might not have a Beagle Active Probe, but a Minicon might have a BA-scale sensor pack and feed that data to the Veebot. These structural, power, and data connections would need their own mass and crit slots though.
I think we have enough room for that approach with the rules we worked out earlier in this thread. They'd just be a different take on the cassette deployers, which basically are mechanized battle armor. Having a specialized sensor/ECM type of capability in the BA-sized drone so the parent Mech can devote that tonnage for more weapons/armor is totally sensible, and their use really shouldn't require extra rules to pull off; you're basically just running two unit types in tandem.
the explanation i went with for Syberia (if you read the fluff i posted ) is that the designs were originally created to help manage the wildlife of the dome. being made to look like animals (including stuff like faux fur and skin) was a way to help the bots blend in more with the local megafauna and thus not stress out of the wildlife they were managing quite as much. and since the death of the humans, they've generally kept those features due to the limited creative inertia of syberian AI's. (much the same way that the AutoBoP's and DemoCons continue to fight the old wars and emulate the human societies that created them. the AxiMaL's are just ones from a society focused on ecological preservation and terraforming.)
mostly i just figured it would be fun to toss some more bestial automech options into the mix, and a third (or fifth?) faction that wasn't closely aligned with the existing AutoBoP and DemoCon groups.
That is certainly a more manageable approach than trying to force the energon-overload angle into the mix with the way BT BattleMechs work. Another angle that might seem even sillier, but no less valid: Entertainment gone feral. Akin to trying to make a Jurassic Park scenario, but using AI-controlled 'Mechs customized to look animalistic, rather than cloning real dinosaurs and such, the human Syberians tried to make a high-tech fantastical theme park before they died, and the Maximal/Predacon machines effectively descend from them, perhaps militarized during the waning days of the humans in an effort to stave off their inevitable fall, leaving them with a dual layered kind of programming that tells them to simultaneously mimic bestial traits while fighting to protect their own side. This puts them in the same boat as the rest of the AutoMechs in the Syberia system, but with their own gimmick based on some eccentric pre-existing values.
its actually even more obvious when BW megatron finds the Ark and tries to change history by killing Optimus Prime before G1 even happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9t7G_lHeiY
(the maximals manage to fix things and prevent history from changing.. mostly)
I think we can agree to skip the time travel arc. ;)
a detail i've largely dropped to avoid having to create BA and protomech sized automech rules. but that is why i went with the lighter masses for their units (being about 1/2 the mass of comparable roles in the AutoBoP's and DemoCons), and i'd generally say they should all have the "low profile" quirk plus whatever negative quirks that fit the chassis to balance it out. (non standard parts for example would be an obvious one)
(this actually is a little closer to the war for cybertron trilogy depiction, where in Kingdom the beast wars characters are shown as being much closer in size to the G1 bots, though mass shifting was definitely in play in that for rattrap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJ9WpZk45Q
Works for me. We don't need size-changers anyway, and having the "Beast Wars" AutoMechs on scale with the "G1" AutoMechs keeps them competitive and useful on the same battlefield.
more or less my thoughts for most of them. the insects generally are already covered, i just need to work up the designs. (and figure out how to represent the mass and crits of the extra legs and the tail options from the book in MML)
Yeah, that can be tricky. When it comes to the spiders, though, a fun bit to note: Tarantulus and Black Arachnia's beast modes may have shown them with as many legs as their arachnid counterparts, but the toys and their robot forms made i kind of clear that only four limbs did most of the heavy lifting in their beast modes. The extra limbs became guns in robot mode. No reason they couldn't just be guns.
that said what might make a fun way to do the minis would be to get some cheap plastic animal toys to cut up and hang some parts of off light and medium mechs of the roughly right sizes.
A kitbashing dream!
and yeah, i was thinking that i could probably just swap the animal mode to a quadruped where needed. perhaps some of the local beasts lean towards the old Victorian dinosaur style critters:
'Xactly.
I suppose it would be but there were different types of drones during the Star League too. Now that I think about it though, how much do non mech AI's weigh? Those that convert and those that don't? I'm guessing a 3 ton AI could replace regular control systems but what about smaller AutoMech Drones? Would regular drone equipment be good enough for their AIs since they wouldn't have to tonnage for a 3 ton AI?
You're basically talking about the robotic/remote-controlled drone systems already in TacOps and Campaign Ops, I believe (or wherever they are now; my intimate knowledge of rulebooks has decayed in the last decade). Aside from the rules we kludged in this thread already for BA-drones, which basically just say all human control systems are now drone control systems, non AutoMech drone systems should be unchanged from their standard rules.
So Luminecent Vibro-Weapons are okay as long as they're not retractable? I suppose other Star Empire equipment is limited but so is some BT equipment. In a way their Shields are better than the IS's Blue Shield System. It protects against all energy weapons, not just PPCs. Laser Cannons do pack a punch and are lighter even if they aren't that accurate. Not that weapons fire was all that accurate in the animation. Some TFs also had shields. If allowed they wouldn't quite be the same since the SE shields seem to be for Aerospace only. There also weren't that many, that I can remember, so a few AutoMechs with RejecTech should be possible. They'd be the reason why they're tech was rejected. Of course now I really want a book full of RejecTech. ;D
At the 'Mech scale, a luminescent vibroblade is going to be just a vibroblade in terms of damage and whatnot. We have rules for those already, and there's no need to remake the wheel. (The human-scaled versions used in NebCal for the Star Empire setting were just for them.) As to the rest, that's up to whatever you really want on your table. I can only speak to the "canon" I wrote for NebCal, and as I wrote it, the AutoMechs don't have Star Empire tech (yet).
That's what I thought, which is why I was surprised to see tonnage listed for them. I didn't know MegaMekLab did that. You need power amps with fuel cells too. And support engines of all kinds need heat sinks. Would they be really ancient Automechs?
More like AutoMechs based on IndustrialMechs, I'd say.
How about a more primitive version of the Narc Launcher? It's just a just a big single tube missile launcher, like the Thunderbolt. It just has high tech homing equipment. Remove than and you've got something like a Thunderbolt.
We already discussed that, didn't we? We're basically describing an explosive Narc munition is all.
I never understood that since TFs consume energon.
Others covered this, I know, but the gist was, as Primal put it in episode one: "This is too much of a good thing." The pre-human Earth was basically so heavily irradiated by raw energon that the Cybertronians would have been breathing it in constantly. If we literally breathed our food in with every inhalation, how quickly do you imagine we'd all have diabetes?
Maybe have BeastMechs be more vulnerable to ECM, Centurion WS and Tasers in Mech Mode?
Once more, I'd call that reaching. In this case, you're basically building a handicap into their very gimmick, which makes it even weirder they would want it!
True, I was going with a reason for Herb as to why the original Beast Wars crew had to remain in beast mode most of the time. Their choice was survival, your setup is to prevent panic.
You are right, having the extra faction would be fun
Agreed. I liked the effort to make them mesh.
It could be compared to drinking from a garden hose vs drinking from a fire hose. Or how some food needs to be cooked before eating (and raw energon needs to be processed before consuming)
Oh, right! And after the superweapon/second moon was used, most of that raw energon was stabilized or vaporized, too. (Which made it practically unnecessary to have beast modes, but by then, half the beast forms were chrome plated anyway, so...)
But your idea about vulnerability to EM effects would be good. Perhaps PPCs would be added to the list?
Still think you're looking to create a problem that only makes it harder to justify them vs. regular 'Mechs, which is kind of going the opposite direction from where you'd want to go.
For combining into a larger bot (i.e. Devastator), you'd need the legs to form first, then the lower torso bot climbs the legs and transforms, then the upper torso bot climbs and transforms, then each of the arm bots climb and transform.
The fun part is that this would technically be a triple-changer bot, plus if the combined transformer is over 100 tons then each of the smaller bots would likely need to use the SuperheavyMech construction rules (i.e. 20% of mass as internal structure). So you would have a BIG Mech, but the available tonnage percentage would be much lower than if it was a single Mech. It means that whoever develops it can use existing factories to make the smaller combiner bots instead of needing to develop a larger factory to make the single larger bot (I figure a factory that makes six 50-ton Mechs per month would be cheaper than a factory that can make a single 300-ton Mech every month).
Maybe, but TBH, combiner 'Mechs would just be a whole bunch of extra rules and handicaps I wouldn't want to touch anyway. What happens if you blow the leg or arm off just one of the component Mechs, rendering it incapable of transformation? Now it's out of commission, and so is your mega-Mech. To keep them all useful in BT, I would just treat a combiner as a well-coordinated team of Mechs; you get more tactical options and firepower that way, anyway, and don't need to come up with a ton of specialized rules.
- Herb
