/btg/ BattleTech General

Tear the JJs out of a wasp so you can mount six MLs. Just think of the glory if you can hit

I hope you mean 9R's. I would not wish 10K's on my worst enemy.

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>Fire Jenner
how does fire jenner differ from the regular one?

Hitomi is my favorite porn star, even though I hate the shitty way Japanese do Porn

who's the midget

Feel free to ask about why I picked what quirk, and what the fuck is wrong with me. I'm surprised the OF doesn't care.

Same as every Fire variant. All the medium lasers.

Like everybody else, I recognize Hitomi Tanaka, but who are the other two?

>Who are these drac cuties?

Girl on the right looks like Hitomi Tanaka.

One on the left is Anri Okita I think.

Sorry, forgot it's armor in the Jenner's case.

True Samurai have no need for crutches. Are you a filthy gaijin incapable of heat management?

>You will never hire Hitomi Tanaka to hang around your offices for awhile in order to improve morale
>You will never add a blue-haired Hiomi Tanaka to your french comic as a character

Having used a Spider as my RPG ride, I can honestly say no ejections isn't a big problem. Nothing explosive on them and riding it down was often safer than ejection.

God damn what was me and losing that right leg though. At least I made that Spider into Morton's Fork incarnate.

That would rule: you just can't beat that kind of attention to detail. Thanks for taking the time: I want this to be the best damn rulebook ever, so that people start suggesting it over the BMR for a new guy.

As for the Hidden Units thing, thanks. I've made a note to correct for the final.

How many AC/20 rounds do you think that frontal armor could withstand?

Don't know why you're asking, your mech only has an AC/2.

NEA, have a couple questions.
The main five light fighters for each of the Houses go like this, right?
>Lyrans - Seydlitz
>Draconians - Sholagar
>Feddies - Sparrowhawk
>Free Worlders - Cheetah
>Capellans - Thrust

If that list is correct how would you rank the five from best to worst?

No problem.

I'll be honest: I sort of want to earn my old forum handle back into the credits, just as a finger in the eye of some specific folks.

But that's not a requirement of my help - I know you're trying to make the best product you can, and I want there to be this sort of document just as much as you do; I have a kid learning BattleTech to think about. Plus, hey, if this thing takes off, maybe CGL will think about compiling the Aerospace stuff into a similar single document rather than scattering it across 5 books.

As obvious a joke that is it's still funny.

>drinking a new bourbon through the inauguration today
Finally drank your local store outta four roses?

If anyone asks their names are Overrated, Too thin but at least does anal and Disgusting

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The release folder is now at 215 gifs

As an aside, are you doing variants too, or just standards?

So you hate breasts and only care about anal, just admit you are a faggot

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Best in what respect?

Cheetah is a recon bird second-to-none in 3025. But it's pretty much crap in a dogfight, or even on the merge.

Assuming you're meaning "general-purpose combat", as most people do, I'd rank them as follows:

>Sparrowhawk
Slightly slow for a light fighter, but the difference between 10 thrust and 11-12 thrust is minimal *in practice*, though strategically it makes the SPH slightly less capable as a 1st-shell interceptor. Good firepower, excellent armor. The short-range firepower is a hair higher than the other "x3 ML" fighters, and thresholding a light fighter tends to happen whether you're throwing 3 points or 5 points per bay. Great fuel capacity for a light fighter.

>Sholagar
SRM-4 is a wierd nose weapon choice, but under TW weapon rules is essentially a beefed-up medium laser. The fact that it's backed up by 2 MLs in the wings mean it still passes the 15-damage bar for a good light fighter throw-weight. Armor is second only to the Sparrowhawk (6 tons vs 7.5), and they have equivalent throw-weight. The Sholagar has identical speed to the Sparrowhawk, identical throw-weight on an alpha strike, identical speed, identical fuel capacity...and slight less armor. Thus, it's lower on the ranking by definition.

>Sabre
Generic fighter, it's what the Thrush wants to be when it grows up. Included for sake of comparison. A 4-ton fuel fraction isn't great, but the Sabre gains a reasonable amount of armor in exchange. Again, it hits the 15-point damage bar. It's probably the most well-balanced IntroTech fighter, overall.

>cont

>2/2

>Seydlitz
Almost defies description cause it's unlike the others so much. Prototypical swarm fighter that only makes sense if you can produce/field them in droves. 3 tons of fuel is terrible, and 2 tons of armor is technically better than the Thrush...but only technically. A LL in the nose gives concentrated damage, but a 5-point hit is just as likely to threshold other light fighters as an 8-point hit, and you're less likely hit with *something*; when everything can deal major damage to your opposite numbers, having more chances to hit means more than dealing slightly more damage if you hit with the one gun. In its favor, it can threshold medium and heavy fighters where the other IS lights can't (if you're OK with losing a lot of Seydlitz's, this can be a strength, though). The LL gets it a lot of points, though since it gives the Lyrans a light fighter with a capacity nobody else's mainline light fighter really has.

>Thrush
Best speed, good firepower, terrible armor - like, an actual joke. 15 damage (x3 MLs) is the bar a light fighter should generally be able to hit. 5-ton fuel fraction is quite good for a light unit. Meme aside, it's a great NPC unit, because it can hit for a meaningful amount of damage, but it still lets the PCs feel good about shooting them down in droves.

>Cheetah
best speed, bad armor. 3 tons is really bad Below-average guns: x1 ML per wing and x1 SL in the nose is bad even for a 25-ton fighter. 4-tons of fuel capacity is at best adequate, but certainly not a strength. The Cheetah is basically bad at literally everything *except* going fast.

Not even close - but I've been meaning to try some new things this year. Currently working on a Henry McKenna Single Barrel 10year that came well-recommended.

If you go by the art, I think the "giant helmet with the tiny hex visor" style of helmet was the equivalent of the absolute bottom barrel stuff, and a lot of the 3025-era stuff was the style of the DCMS 'Mech driver, smaller but still rather bulky. The MWRPG had another style that looked like a bigger motorcycle helmet.

But yeah, the ace battleship grey DCMS cooling vest has to stay, sod the cooling suit.

I'll be darned. What are the odds!

I think I saw someone ask before but with the archives down right now (at least for me) how would you "fix" the Cheetah? I saw some possible options on the OF.

bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,2199.0.html

Or is the Cheetah really only good for recon and the FWL would be better off with something else for an interceptor?

I saw this on Sarna:
>One of the products of the post-Clan Invasion trillion M-Bill naval technology renaissance in the Free Worlds League, the Lancer is an advanced Aerospace Fighter design that sees most use as a carrier DropShip and WarShip-based reconnaissance craft.

Was the Lancer meant to replace the Cheetah?

I know this is out of scope for the project, and therefore something you can't fix, and I'm sorry for saying it, but I really can't recommend a book without basic constructions rules. If I have encyclopedic knowledge of BattleTech, and *I* can't be assed to shift through a few record sheet books to find the stats I want, I'm not going to ask a newb to do it either.

Jenner or Wolfhound for maximum firepower, Spider for everything else. Well, unless you want verisimilitude, which is a different kettle of fish. Advice? Shoot bigger 'Mechs in the back; don't get shot; gang up against bigger targets.

>Full-Head Ejection isn't a quirk, but a piece of equipment.
Same as a head cowl or improved cooling sleeve.

>Er, have you seen the Jagermech? It doesn't have a waist.
It did until the Jager III in 3060.

>I really can't recommend a book without basic constructions rules.
It's a "tabletop reference book" rather than a full rulebook. That said, the survey linked in the book does ask if you would want construction rules, so if you do, go ahead and complete it and let CGL know, and that may get added.

>Same as a head cowl or improved cooling sleeve.
Which are explicitly quirks, not a construction option in TO.

>It did until the Jager III in 3060.
That's the only one to do so, as neither 3050 or 3050U's Jagermechs have that torso arrangement, and instead the pylons connect directly to the shoulders.

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>I know this is out of scope for the project, and therefore something you can't fix, and I'm sorry for saying it, but I really can't recommend a book without basic constructions rules.

And I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum.

If I'm opening the book, it's because we got a question on the tabletop. I don't want to get StoryAboutClanDiamondShark'd with construction rules I'll never have to worry about in the middle of a game.

No, there're hot girls like Shion Utsunomiya, Saki Okuda, Aika Yumeno, etc with big boobs that look way better than Hitomi, like way better, and Anri has a very nice body, her face is too uncanny valley for me though, and she always was too vanilla.

>implying there's anything wrong with vanilla

On that topic, what's your favorite vanilla mech?

Totally fair, and if enough people want construction, I suspect it'll be added back. We knew that axing those rules would cost us some customers (although at the same time, I've heard a bunch of people that say, "finally construction is gone"; hard to say who's in the majority here). But overall, I argued very strongly against it, as part of the process by which the book moved from "TW on a diet" to "BMR clone" to its own thing. It's meant to be an unashamed tabletop gameplay manual, rather than a do-over of old books. IMO, construction no more belongs in such a book than the D&D Monster Manual does being glued into the Player's Handbook (ignoring the obvious size disparity).

I did write a rather nice construction chapter to go with this book, back when it was slated to be included. It may still be released in some form relatively soon. But overall, the current TechManual PDF is far better than anything we can do here, and I think the TW line was right to break the two apart.

wish someone told the mechwarrior devs

>how would you "fix" the Cheetah?

Given an IntroTech limitation, it's extremely difficult without screwing with the engine. I'd actually go whole-hog with the small lasers and drop the MLs for SLs across the board. Three SLs in the nose and 1 in each wing. That actually *increases* your overall firepower, and again, you'll still threshold almost every light fighter's wings and aft if you're throwing 3-point hits around.

Meanwhile, if you screw with the engine, dropping to 10/15 means you can have 4 tons of gas, 4 tons of armor, and 6 tons of the payload of your choice. A 6-ton payload on an IntroTech light fighter is *huge*.

that manga was a good fap

Hey NEA, I've been fiddling with a fighter design but wasn't sure what a proper amount of fuel would be. There some general guidelines that you can share?

Also, at what weight/speed should you start considering rear guns?

>just as a finger in the eye of some specific folks.
Which specific folks?

>There some general guidelines that you can share?

If the fighter is 40+ tons, it should have 5 tons. If you want more because of a specific mission profile or fluff, then that's fine, but 5 tons is the standard fuel fraction for 98% of fighter designs for a reason.

>what weight/speed should you start considering rear guns?

It's often more appropriate to consider the role of the fighter. A fire-support design can get away without them, even if it's fairly slow. Meanwhile a dogfighter should think very, very hard about including rear weapons, because the dogfighter's mission profile involves a high risk of getting somebody on your six by definition. I personally think that almost any 5/8 fighter should think hard about rear weapons as well, and you should consider hard about a 6/9 fighter. Anything faster can often - but not always - get away without them (with the "mission type" caveat, above, held in mind).

There's actually two additional schools of thought about rear weapons. First is "never include them", because that's tonnage you aren't using to accomplish your primary mission. The second is "if you include them, make them hurt", since most often they'll be shooting at nose armor, and a 5-point medium laser isn't going to bother too many fighters if it hits the nose. For example, there's a Clan fighter with a cLPL in the aft arc, and there's an IS fighter with a large missile rack (MRM-30-ish) in the aft arc as well. The "large aft weapon" does have a secondary bonus - if you're making attack runs on a large craft, you zoom past it, and nobody expects to be shot at while you're zooming *away*. Hell, sometimes they've rolled to present fresh armor to your attack, and then you can hit the weakened armor on the far side with your aft gun as you exfil.

I don't think either are the "right" answer, but they both certainly add a specific flavor to a design.

And how would you react to an all-aft gunnery mounting for a fighter?

those ladies flanking the lady in the middle are squishing their busts against the sides of her head.

One think that's always struck me as odd about ASFs is that you can't turret-mount weapons (that I know of), even though mechs can.
What's up with that?

about 1/3 have canon variants so far. Plus there is a non-canon variant folder with all kinds of silly shit in it from Campaign user requests and I. Aiming for canon variants from 3025-3060s for all the guys. This is assuming that there is a visible difference on a 84x72 pixel sprite.

>The "large aft weapon" does have a secondary bonus - if you're making attack runs on a large craft, you zoom past it, and nobody expects to be shot at while you're zooming *away*. Hell, sometimes they've rolled to present fresh armor to your attack, and then you can hit the weakened armor on the far side with your aft gun as you exfil.
>not just rotating as you pass to fire forward guns the entire time
[starfury noises]

>>>m/15116606
rate this stupid son of a bitch and get him outta my /m/, please

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Sweet, thanks dude. Any plans for Jihad/Dark Age?

>never crossposted before

but that's an atlas

oh, my sweet summer child

Well, almost nobody uses vector movement, because it renders everything but heavy fighters almost entirely pointless if you can freely pivot in every direction while maintaining your forward momentum. Go make Starfury noises somewhere else, Sinclair.

>you can't turret-mount asf weapons

See above. Negates light fighters badly. Fighters have two defenses - angle of attack and evasive movement. Turrets (and vector movement) takes away angle of attack, and evasive movement takes away attacking completely. So in the presence of omnidirectional attack options, to defend itself at all, the light fighter can't attack at all. Which, again, means it may as well not even be there.

I would really, REALLY like to see limited-mass turrets, capable of holding a single medium autocannon or a single laser or something. Or at least a chin turret that can fire in 3 directions (not directly aft), because I want to make my goddamn SA-43 Hammerheads, goddammit.

Laugh uproariously and blow it out of the sky, because I don't have to get on somebody's tail to kill them. Thach Weaves still function in AeroTech, after all.

Got to keep the plans realistic, there are over 600? canon mechs and each one has multiple variants. My average time on a new sprite is like 4 hours, 2 hours on a redraw. Time is a huge factor when this is a side project of a side project of a hobby. I have been doing the odd 3100s sprites when I need a palate cleanser.
Fuck, that is glorious.

I posted these yesterday and I'd like your input on it too NEA, if you've got a second.

Such a great looking mech, a damn shame it's bland. Oh, and what's your opinion on the MM devs decision to go for blurry .pngs in the newer versions of MM?

Fuck that .png shit. The way the .gifs are rastered is fine. I really need to get in communication with those dudes though, I would love to get some larger sprite sizes implemented if that is even possible.

dumping because I care

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On first glance, that is pretty clearly a bracket-firing unit; LGRs+ERLL at long/extreme range and LGRs+ERMLs at medium/short range. Heavy armor, XL engine, 6/9 speed, and boat lasers 'to taste'. It's basically just a moderately-optimized low-end heavy fighter. Very solid, but it doesn't especially jump out at me.

It also doesn't seem like an Eagle to me very much. If the LGRs were in the wings, that would be different. Three large weapons, 3 small weapons, paired up with each other in each forward-facing location.

If you're doing these as practice, though, that's a unit which does employ LGRs to a net positive effect. Which isn't all that easy.

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It's my second ASF design so it was a practice. What does low-end with it mean exactly?

So for recommendations about changing the Eagle you'd primarily swap the weapons around?

This was my first ASF.

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we never did get to finishing that quest

>Such a great looking mech, a damn shame it's bland.

It's meant to be that way isn't it? The TRO describes it as nothing special aside from being well rounded.

>tfw never going to get an in-game first reaction of enemy rival to phobos-grin

Well naturally, you don't need it at the gametable. That's a fair position. In my view though, it's a question of how much is this book really aimed at new players, which gets into decisions about the product line as a whole, which may be outside your influence.

>the survey
Yep yep. Saw the survey afterwards.

>Which are explicitly quirks, not a construction option in TO.
Ah. So, fix in TO first, then.

>neither 3050 or 3050U's Jagermechs have that torso arrangement
3050's view is head-on, which prevents any such evaluation; and in 3050U, the Dervish art is for a Jihad variant, so it's reasonable to think the JagerMech art might not depict the 3050 variant either.

Another dude to add to the list of /btg/ sprites. Haven't seen the Shimmy art before. Excellent.
bugz

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Has anyone made the zaku into a battlemech?

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This guy tried, did kinda okay and left tons of room to tech up.

If USS Enterprise jumped through a wormhole and emerged around Terra at the height of the Star League, how many SL warships could it take on before being destroyed?

Cool. What about a Scopedog?

how well can deflectors soak Capital bays?

How much technobabble do they have?

>having a favorite porn star

Reconsider your life, user.