21 Blackjack Street Edition

>MFW reading the Zellbrigen rules
It may as well be summed up as"let's stand in front of each other and who Alpha Strikes the other better wins"
I hope the other Clan castes don't have to deal with similar silly rules

No one ever accused the Clans of having a culture that makes sense.

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>make an improved mech
>give it to the FedSuns
such is life in the 3050s

I think that particular variant is out of production in the Dark Age as well. Even Xi Sheng didn't save it.

My literal niggas. I thought liking the basic Blackjack made me an oddity.

Have a Blackjack everyone loves.

Don't you mean Federated Commonwealth? :^)

I forget, is there a Blackjack in one of the Mechcommander games? Does it show up in one of the MW1-4 games as well?

>is there a Blackjack in one of the Mechcommander games?

Since it's an original FASA design, you'd think there would be, but I don't ever recall seeing one.

I want to say it might have been in MW2: Mercenaries, since that had like 100 'Mechs or something in it.

Wasn't in the regular game. It may have been in one of the mods that added a shit ton of mechs though.

>Read MW2 as MC2
Apologies for my dumbassery.

Nope, no Blackjack in MW2 Mercenaries.

The Mektek mod added the BJ-O.

Ah! Forgot to calibrate the WABAC machine. The Blackjack *does* appear in The Crescent Hawk's Revenge!

I legit miss the FedCom. When I got into the game it was *the* faction. There was no clan invasion yet and the 4th Succession War was just history.

Nice catch.
I used to be House Steiner because of the Crescent Hawks games, and loves the FedCom, but then bitch-K had to ruin it and made me move to Davion because I am not playing with whores like that. No way.

>On 16 February 3072, the 512th Cobra Guards arrived at Niles and declared a unilateral Trial of Reaving against all of the Clan Hells Horses sibkos training in the system. After claiming the victory they took every sibko member from each training facility, lined them up and executed them before leaving the system.

Why did the Clans go full retard in the wars of reaving? The Smoke Jaguars used to be the bad ones, but it's like all the surviving Clans have been striving to outdo them.

The Clans proudly hold themselves to be the heirs of Standardised War Crimes: The Faction.

That they've gone crazy had never been surprising. That it took so long is.

losing to phone company security guards will do that to you

>Why did the Clans go full retard in the wars of reaving?

I don't see what the problem is. If more factions acted like this more often, the post-Star League wars wouldn't have gone on for so long. If more factions acted like this more often, there wouldn't have been a Clan Invasion in the first place (since they'd have killed each other all off). If more factions acted like this more often, we wouldn't have to deal with TCfags or MOCfags because the Periphery would have been completely depopulated like it deserves.

There's not really a downside, and it's pretty stupid that FASA kept the various factions from acting in their own best interests like this. What's amazing is that it took CGL, the Company of Failure, to actually make factions behave rationally for a change.

The LAC-5 BJ is probably one of my favorites. tar comp and ap ammo or scrub driver + precision.

lol

Got a story for y'all
>playing Megamek with some newbies
>playing solaris
>last match of the night, tell people to bring whatever looks cool
>I pick a Flamberge, don't remember which, but it was the one with the UAC/20
>blind drop is on, don't know what the others are bringing
>turn 1 begins, see what the others brought
>the other veteran player brings one of the decent charger variants
>the newbie who has been experimenting with MM brings a Neanderthal
>The other newbie brings an Omega
Now the previous game, the charger driver had betrayed the charger and omega drivers when they ganged up on me(I was using hardened armor)
>neanderthal and omega gang up on charger
>I assess the situation and figure if I'm gonna lose might as well do so with style
>Turn 2 begins, I win initiative
>declare DFA on the Omega
>45% chance to hit
>Don't get shot during the weapons fire phase
>DFA lands and does basically no damage
>I fall over
>Omega has been forced from the field
mfw

How active is the MegaMek community? I always wanted to try it out since I got no friends who like BattleTech
>mfw they say giant robots are not futuristic, only stupid and against all logic

I just discovered the Taurians and they're fucking awesome. Does anyone know if they have any national 'mechs, or favored 'mechs, or the same with tanks? I know that Taurians place more respect for their conventional forces than a lot of the other States (save the FWL) do.

We should have some sort of scheduler or get-together place to set up games online. Could be fun.
Someone made one of those BATTLETECH! posts a few months back about being in a tournament with five tables going, and had an aerospace fighter crash, knock into one mech, causing it to knock into a Marauder which fell into a building and critted it's AC ammo. It was a text of gloriousness.

>It was a text of gloriousness.

It was NEA. As usual.

fucking Snow Ravens

>bismuthedges.tga

They're pretty BA but in the current era they don't really have any distinctive mech designs of their own. I think they just build SL era stuff.

There must be some kind of method to this madness in BT that allows this kind of shit to happen. It's like a graceful trainwreck of RNG that culminated into this extremely unlikely yet hilarious series of events.

Which are Snow Ravens?

MUH AEROSPACE

do you want legit answer or bullshit meme answer that might make the empty husk of a human being that is you laugh

Why not both, nigga? It's a slow thread right now.

>It's a slow thread right now.

Boy, I'll say!

Hey CampaignAnon, could you be so kind as to stat me up a Zaku II as a 55- or 60-tonner? I know the Gundam lore lists it as something like 80 tons, but it acts more like a medium mech, and I doubt anyone here takes the listed weights as literal truth.

So I think I'm reading this right, but I just want to check - I can make a mech with Hardened armor on the head and torso and normal armor on the legs, and don't suffer the -1 PSR from the Hardened?

Why doesn't everyone make Mechs like that?

Wanna play earth side gundam? Get you some mechs like around 80 tons or so, whatever you like. We just made sure they went 3/5/3. Clad them in BAR 5 armor, with medium lasers getting a +1 damage at short range.

GM's Beam Spray gun=Medium Laser
Zaku Machinegun=AC/5
Gundam's Beam Rifle= Large Laser
Bazooka's were AC/10s
Zaku Leg Missiles were OS SRM-6s

Throw in half a ton or so of machinegun ammo in the central torso for appropriately explosive reactors.

With this setup beam weapons are appropriately going through armor. Balancing forces is a little tricky, but Feddies should be rolling with more tanks to make forces appropriate.

I was mostly just curious to see how he'd build one using Battletech rules. Thanks for the suggestion though, I'll keep it in mind if I have players who ever want to play Gundam.

Honestly I can't see it being much more than a RAC-5 and a hatchet on legs with jumpjets. Speed is problematic seeing how it's supposed to sprint at 100+ km/h. XL engine would reflect that and some of the center torso fragility since in Gundam it seems hits to the core = dead mobile suit.

Actually now that I think on it, stick a hatchet on one of these. sarna.net/wiki/Legionnaire

I must protest to the idea of them being made of explodium, as Gundams are often shooting at them with beam weapons capable of going through battleship plate.

Though to keep in mind with the speed, it might be beneficial to stat them as 40- or 45-tonners. This might even give them a bit of fragility, memes be damned.

Well, they *used* to have a national mech in the form of the Toro, but it's extinct by the eras where most people play the game. Other than that, their preferred mechs are also some of the most common ones, with a slight preference for heavier and multirole mechs

>beam spray guns are more powerful than Beam Rifles
make it Blazer vs PPC

That's kinda holding to the fluff about the Beam Spray Guns. Up close they blasted bigger holes than the beam rifle and were cheaper to make. Gundam had the range to reach out and touch someone. Make it an ER Large Laser if you feel it more appropriate.
I dunno man. We never really see Mobile Suits surviving shots to the torso. Unless someone plot important is piloting it they seem far more volatile than a Battlemech that isn't carrying internal ammo.

Mobile suits always felt a little silly in that regard. "Hey, I nicked it!" *KABOOM* "Onto the next use of our animation budget!"

Well considering their weapons started off meant to kill warships and then beam weaponry came along and it proved impossible to armor one against them they turned out like post war tanks when faced with shaped charges. One and done. Plus all that propellant for Delta-V means you've got a pretty neat bomb even nicking a limb.

More recent series have helped that. Gundam 00 showed grunt mechs survive after the explosion unless they were hit by massive cannon. Unicorn shows some of the same, as does Build Fighters and Thunderbolt. In fact, Thunderbolt has a particularly neat scene where after the fight with lots of explosions, there are a ton of floating Jims. Their explosions from lost limbs and whatnot made it look like the entire mobile suits had exploded, when in fact Thunderbolt felt like it was poking fun at their budget by showing Jims with normal-looking post-loss battle damage floating about.

>Gundumb

I know BT has its issues, but holy shit people.

Have anything better to contribute?

Fang of the Sun Dougram was a little one-shot-kill all of the time, when at times the machine Dougram would take a pounding from other combat armor's linear guns. (What the hell is a linear gun in that series anyway? Is it an energy weapon, because it seems that way.)
But yeah, Gundams and Zakus and such seem delicate.

I just realized that the Hatchetman's head is shaped like a little VTOL because it has a full head ejection system.

Oh shit, you're right.

I imagine a linear magnetic accelerator like is used on a maglev train. Just in this case it's hurling a bullet instead of a train car.

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>Why did the Clans go full retard in the wars of reaving?
They were twenty (at the start) bickering and competing factions, taught to utterly hate each other while being glued together only by the Kerensky cult of personality, told that only killers have any social value, conditioned to solve even the mildest of inter-personal or inter-factional disputes with brutality and violence, and led by people selected through ritual combat.
The Clans were *always* primed to wipe themselves out in that kind of mutually-genocidal murderfest. Only two things surprised me about the Wars of Reaving:
- that they didn't happen two centuries before the Clans ever appeared in canon
- that *any* Clan actually survived the carnage

Hey guy making family trees, add the hitosume kozo to the Hunchback tree.

>Why did the Clans go full retard in the wars of reaving?

Contact with the Inner Sphere was the tipping point.

No, really, In the Homeworlds they never had the population and resources to to go through with a major war, especially since the Trial system was designed to limit the assets and level of escalation used in open warfare.

But the the Invasion happens and the richer Clans become insanely rich, causing a power vacuum back home where their holdings start getting snapped up and they stop caring because they have their OZs. This starts to increase the power of certain Homeworld Clans to the point that they can sustain an all-out war.

Then you get things like the Refusal War, Absorption War, and Bulldog/Serpent showing everyone that sticking to the mutually agreed-upon rules doesn't matter, as long as you can win. Also that completely wiping out your enemies is really goddamn satisfying.

What clantech components do the Dracs have access to after taking over the Nova Cat stuff? Running a DA campaign and my players, who have just wrapped up a short stint against the Wolf Empire, want to get out of dodge. They have a few captured Clan mechs and I'm wondering about the viability of repairing them over on that side of the sphere.

Eh, if you go for the simplest reading of the rules, I can see that happening. However, Clan duels are supposed to be pretty showy (not Solaris level, but still) tests of combat ability, so spicing things up with mobility and long-range gunnery is probably encouraged. Just don't melee or backstab, and we cool.

I dunno, the Clans make sense for a society of fascist techno-barbarians centered around ancestor worship and the edicts set by a crazy guy who thought ritualistic battles were the pinnacle of human interaction.

What survived the Bears and Dracs isn't really clear, and the Cats deliberately scuttling the factories as their last fuck you to the Dracs is hardly unlikely.

Basically I would have a look at the MUL and the 3145 TRs. Also note that Clan tech is a lot more common then than in previous eras thanks to the Sharks even if the Cats were very stingy with trading their stuff away.

And worst comes to worst there's ExoStar Pinnacle just over the other side of the border which is an IS facility that can fabricate Clan-level energy weapons.

Sure, let me wake up some more and start dinner.

Probably a fair amount. Several factories on Irece are noted as being given to LAW, and while the Combine probably didn't hesitate to salt the earth in their own way, the chance to upgrade more of their factories to Clan tech status wouldn't go amiss. As for Mercenaries getting Clan gear? Incredibly unlikely with the invasion of the FS going on. Your better option is going to the Foxes or something.

I appreciate it, broski. I definitely think a 55-tonner would be the better.

Boop. Zaku. Commercial armor since Zaku II armor is explicitly steel, LAC/5 to fit the shield on the arm. I didn't add the missiles or make a Bazooka variant because, well that's not a standard mook Zaku.

It's mainly them getting Clan endo, DHS, ferro, and maybe some lasers or something, not whole new machines. Even if they can only get a few tons of it, it'll help.

Awesome. Thank you. Two questions: What would your suggestion be for converting this to the bazooka variant? And does the "Commercial," aspect of its armor mean anything in particular?

If I have a mech with one JJ, can I jump up from level 0 to level 3 or higher? Where are rules for that?

You can jump as high as your number of jumpjets. This does not effect your lateral distance. So a 5/8/5 can jump from flat ground to the top of a level 5 building 5 hexes away.

I could probably see Ferro and the lasers. Endo is still orbital factory bound, a fact which is completely glossed over by several sources, so that might be tricky. If the Dracs were to sell it, it wouldn't be cheap, since the only confirmed DCMS Clan mech with Clan ES is the Wendigo, and that's a medium. DHS would probably go to frontline units, because Clan DHS are tops. As always, actual item production is never really described, and if I thought it would help, I'd beat Xotl with a rubber chicken to get the official factory listing in the DA.

Well if you drop the medium shield (which you would have to do to fit the AC/10 in the arm), you could do this.

>And does the "Commercial," aspect of its armor mean anything in particular?
The BAR 5 number after the type tells you the Barrier Armor Rating. Anything under 10/Standard armor means that if an attack does more than that number you take the chance of a penetrating critical hit.

Awesome, thank you.

>AC/10
Any particular reasoning? Was it because you couldn't fit something heavier and explodier, like a PPC, or does typical /bfg/ thinking determine it to be about AC/10-tier?

Out of curiosity, how would this do in a fight?

Well I was going off someone's statement upthread about the Bazooka being an AC/10. If anything, I'd probably swap to a Thunderbolt 15, so it's actually firing a missile. It has 8 shots, which are admittedly 2 less than the double 5 shot magazines a Zaku bazooka is seen as having. but does more damage.

Anything with a Large Laser will beat it stupid. Penetrating crits are a hell of a drug.

Do in a fight against what? I could tear apart a lance of them with a single grogtech Pixie.

>Thunderbolt 15
I didn't know what this was until I looked it up. It's fucking amazing how many different weapons this franchise has.

>penetrating crits are a hell of a drug
Fits in with the Gundam meme-tier explodium animation.

An equivalent 55-tonner. Realistically, looking at it doesn't give me a ton of confidence, but mostly because of what its armor acts like. I was going to say "it looks kind of cheap, so at least that's nice," but then I noticed that it's about 2 mil more than a starting SHD which could probably beat it in a straight-up duel. They'd be super reliant on their shields to stay alive.

It might actually loose to a shadow hawk-2D

MFW I thought the hound was a meme.

That thing is a seriously awesome mech.

- Sore losers like Steel Vipers and Ice Hellions for one, both clans got ejected from IS by other clans, so when Steel Vipers Khan got elected as IlKhan, the among the first thing he do is claimed especially those has holdings in IS are tainted.
- Scientist caste long term machination - the Society of controlling the Clans from the shadow and playing with Clans's gens got exposed by Jade Falcon agent Peri Watson, thus giving weight to Vipers' claims of taint, and the main backer of Society, Coyotes get most flaks, surprisingly those Coyotes even survived the aftermath.
- Leading to mad culling of so-called tainted bloodlines and scramble for founder Kerensky's legacy and bodies that all Clans envied and desired to have, which Vlad had his Wolf Watch to steal and faked evidence those legacies were destroyed.
- In the end most of the Clans that has holdings or OZ in IS were ejected totally from clans space or destroyed like Ice Hellion or re-branded like Hell Horse into Stone Lion. Ironically, Steel Vipers were also destroyed as Star Adders also pointed out to rest of the clans, that Steel Vipers for a period of time was in IS thus can be considered tainted.

Honestly mang, why didn't they earlier?

I don't in any way expect one of the most blatantly warrior cultures in science fiction to hold itself in check; especially after getting their asses kicked by religious telephone operators with no real previous combat experience proved that the thin rules keeping them from going murderfuck-psycho weren't actually worth the trouble.

Especially-especially after that same rude awakening exposed how their super awesome warrior culture was incapable of maintaining a full war without destroying itself. That must have been one hell of an experience.

Even the strong Clans weren't strong enough to deal with a serious challenge from three or four lesser Clans who ganged up on them, and there wasn't anywhere else to go (except maybe back to the IS).

But after the mid-3050s you get the rise of massive Clans like the Star Adders while others weaken themselves, and the most powerful Clans are already in the IS, far from retribution so they give few to no fucks about what's happening in the Homeworlds.

In that environment the Chicken-Bone Defence and Piranha Principle no longer apply and they start acting on long-held grudges. Before that they'd fume and mouth off but not actually be able to follow through on anything because it would invite a stomping they couldn't survive.

The homeworlds didn't get their ass kicked by Blakestar. The IS clans did, and only had to console themselves with...wait for it...literally fifty times the riches and resources that they had back in the homeworlds.

Reaving was about a bunch of people assmad that they're stuck on the barely habitable rocks of the Kerensky Cluster while the other people who were barely better than them are now swimming in wealth untold. And then they get double assmad when those people cockblock them from doing the same thing.

And do you know whose fault that all is? Comstar and fucking Waterly. If they hadn't spent so much time rolling out the welcome mat for the clans and helping those tubebabies secure their OZ's before they discovered the final goal was Terra, the Clans wouldn't have had such a massive foothold and there wouldn't be such a division between them and the Homeworlders.

The IS clans became so rich they didn't need to play by the rules anymore that the Clan system depended on.

>It's fucking amazing how many different weapons this franchise has.

There really aren't that many, unless you count every variation as a separate one. See, the thing is that virtually every BT weapons conforms to the same rules - range brackets, does damage the same way (i.e., a missile marks off dots of armor just like a laser does).

If you start getting into ammo types things spice up a little, but still. Most BT weapons are the same. There's no practical difference in the effect a Gauss Rifle has when compared to a Thunderbolt missile, or a HPPC.

Hey Naval Nerds. Got a question for you.

Whats the deal with this thing and its Naval Tug Adaptor? I've never seen that piece of equipment before and I'd love to know what it does.

If it does half of what I think it can probably do it'd probably make a great boarding vessel for capturing jump ships.

>There's no practical difference in the effect a Gauss Rifle has when compared to a Thunderbolt missile, or a HPPC.
Different special rules don't change anything? One of those explodes when shot, one uses explosive ammo and is a missile, the last has none of the above. I'd say that the weapons are differentiated enough to have unique feels and to justify their existences.

His point is that what they actually do is pretty much identical for most of the weapons. What's the difference between a Thunderbolt 15, a Gauss Rifle, and an HPPC shot hitting a target? Nothing.

The one thing is that even one jump jet can let you safely drop down any number of levels, including hot drops from a dropship.