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Fan Fiction / Re: Survivor
« Last post by Daryk on Today at 03:27:10 »At least 52 was wearing clothes!
The btech ships are too light, but thats because the ships are no longer tube shaped like in tro2750 but chubby blocky things with much more width and height in tro3057. Also, the leviathian's armor weight is the issue, not the leviathians actual weight. Like, at 2.5 million tons there is plenty of tonnage to put a big thick sheet of armor on the leviathan even at it's existing overblown dimensions, but while the structure is 360,000 tons, the armor is only 5300 tons thanks to the wonky construction rules. So the armor is a mere .2% the mass while the structure is a respectable 15%. Mech armor is up to 20% the mass of the mech, with another 10% structure, and can be 40% for hardened armor and 20% for strengthened internal structure. Adding a zero to the warship's mass isnt going to fix anything, the armor would still be .2% when you multiply everything by 10... 10 sheets of paper for example instead of 1. Gotta fix the dimensions--if you want bulky ships they need to be shorter, if you want long ships cause of the KF core they need to be thinner.
not quite BT level of cluster hits, but my love of Yahtzee and shaking dice died sometime in my late teens. 7-12 me? loved that loud plastic on plastic on shaking. (now it causes eye twitches)
I do have one suggestion that could garner more interest in BattleTech Space Ships:
Dropship Carrying Cases.
Nothing like having portable gaming terrain with the added function of carrying your gaming miniatures. Of course, if you're not playing open tabletop like in Alpha Strike, you might want to include a hexmap-scale template for if the ship is part of the scenario. Using that enough times may get some people curious about the rest of interstellar transit and the foils and foibles of Void travels.
Hmmm. It got mentioned on the boards. Guess it's not gonna happen now. (Can someone tell me how this hasn't become a meme, please?)
Now, that aside, and with me caught up in this thread, I'd like to tackle a scaling idea.
People keep talking about having space ships taking up multiple hexes. That's fine. But, does that mapping have to be by hex, for one? And why does the mapping of a ship have to translate to the combat map directly?
For point 1, there's the funky little thing in BattleTech that is currently unique to one combat unit: The crit location table. But, it doesn't have to be unique to the BattleMech. What's wrong with mapping out a ship's items that way? Sure, I think space ships of most volumes that equate to a large building should have more than 4 or 6 locations. Way more if they're whole sections of land.
The Thrust ratings and Fuel Consumption values already handle that inertia and fuel needs. Unless you are saying that a Warship that accelerates at a Thrust of 4 in turn 1 does not actually start to move until turn 2?
For ISD vs MF, the ISD might just have a lower thrust rating.
Closest I can think of is the White Stars vs Shadomegas, where the Star Furies are firing on White Stars while the White Stars are passing by. Not sure about damage inflicted by the Star Furies though.
The key for me in BT is that an ASF force that is 1% the mass of a Warship can engage it and be likely to win, even just punching through the armor. To test this, make a 100 kton Warship, and put ten 100-ton ASF against it (or twenty 50-ton ASF, fifty 20-ton ASF, etc).