/btg/ Battletech General!

I think the Locust IIC is 25 tons.

But they list it as being the DVS-2, which was developed years after Barton's antics.

>which was developed years after Barton's antics.

The whole scenario book is about destroying the prototype DVS-2 program in 3044. You fight three at the end and salvage the commander's ride to take home.

My mistake then.

I thought it was the DVS-1 that was used in those scenarios.

Wasp. She's always there when you need a mech, and there's always a replacement for when it explodes.

Yeah but the FWL who also fought during Guerrero don't get it. Because reasons.

Honestly the whole MUL project seems like a well-meaning clusterfuck to me. Who gets what is pretty arbitrary- Capellans can salvage Devastators, Dracs and FWL can't. For 300 years the idea of replacing the Wolverine's A/C-5 with a Large Laser occurs *only* to the FWL. Removing the MGs and ammo on the Phoenix Hawk for two Heat Sinks is such a revolutionary idea only the Suns is capable of coming up with it, much less implementing it. The FWL refuses to sell the Apollo to anyone else, especially the FedCom, but the FedCom immediately gains access to it.

It just.. arg.

The -9Q already exists. We've hit peak Awesome, unless Clan tech is involved.

That scenario introduced the Devastator as a chassis and as the DVS-2 model. DVS-1 was never even mentioned by name, just "They tried to build a limited run of these things without foundtech and used AC-10's back in the day. It was a miserable failure." Wasn't until 3058 Upgrade where they retconned that into loads of chassis for some dumb reason.

The MUL is pretty shit. Every group I play with takes it with a grain of salt.

That all went the Taurians. Damn munchkin bulls.

>What is your dream Battletech campaign, my dear anons?
A state scale game, with people who aren't idiots (see: Fan Grand Council)

>be Liao arming TDF to fight in St Ives
>makes you literally prepping the bull
Kek

>What is your dream Battletech campaign

A few years ago Cincy ran a campaign going through the entire Amaris Coup. It lasted like three years and was this epic Gundam-esque thing of high drama.

That.

Ditto. I want in on something like that so badly.

Details?

Too much to type out. They're on the Cincy battletech website under the SLDF campaign forum, look for a sticked thread that's basically a campaign summary. There's a summary image from partway through the campaign pointing out some (not all, maybe 1/4th of the) highlights.

That's awesome. Especially that they played WoB.
>having to fight your way across a 30 hex wide field against a dug in assault company and Alacorns
>still win
Praise Blake!

>That might be the single worst character pic since the 80s.

I actually like it.

A lot of people forget that Elementals are supposed to be deformed to be bigger, tougher infantry, not unlike how aerospace warriors are deformed to have huge heads and eyes to be more adapted as aerospace pilots.

They managed to keep those traits, and still make it look believable.

Sure it looks awesome, but this is actually evidence of why Cincy's existence is terrible for the game. it sets an unrealistic standard for everybody else.

It looks shooped and weird. His other pics are better.

My second favorite meme

Question in regards to Cruise Missiles. Can Cruise Missiles be mounted on a submarine? Thinking of a variant of the Triton Missile Submarine that replaces the Arrow launchers with a pair of Cruise Missile Launchers. Is that feasible?

As long as it can accommodate the weight, crit space, and (if applicable) heat, yes. The only thing that can't be mounted on a submarine is space naval weapons.

The bot does weird things sometimes.

I've been in a campaign supporting the Dracs against the Feds. The Dracs are a bunch of nutters but they were the only ones willing to give me salvage terms higher than 20% and pay my transport fee when I was looking for work, so why not? MekHQ rolled a base assault mission so I deployed 1 assault lance and 2 heavy lances. The Dracs deployed two lances of mixed heavies and assaults. Opposing us were 1 mixed light/medium lance, 2 heavy lances and 2 assault lances. The Feds also had 2 lances of light/medium vehicles as reinforcements as well as 10 random militia vehicles like armed agrimechs and APCs.

My command terms for this contract were Independent so this is the first time I actually fought beside my employer. I deployed on the left side of the south edge, the Dracs deployed in the middle inside a small forest. The Feds deployed their mechs inside the town with the militia and reinforcements entering from the north. I managed to trap the enemy light/medium/heavy mechs in a brutal pincer attack on turn 4 by drawing them out of the town just as the Dracs emerged from the forest. That left the enemy assaults, a few heavies inside the town and the various vehicles to be dealt with.

And then pic related happened.

Normally the bot is perfectly happy to execute enemy pilots if they have nothing else to shoot at, or they are within stomping distance. But what happened was that every Drac mech except for one Rifleman surrounded one of the ejected Fed pilots and started this weird tribal dance. The first 6 mechs who arrived formed a circle around him and just stood there spinning in place. When the Battlemaster arrived the Thug moved into the middle of the circle to make room and then they stayed like this while spinning in random directions for the rest of the battle.

Pitch dark, grues, etc.

Footage of the event.

youtube.com/watch?v=7cufG2Dlxvk

Kentares Massacre don't real. It's all Feddie propaganda

>be FS mechwarrior
>fighting drac scum
>get shot out of your mech
>6 assaults approach
>OH SHIT
>they stand around you, not shooting
>dracs don't take prisoners?
>they start spinning around
>wat
>another shows up, now one's standing over you
>he spins around too

fucking dracs

>be cute female FS mechwarrior
>fighting drac scum
>get shot out of your mech
>6 assaults approach
>OH SHIT
>they stand around you, not shooting
>dracs don't take prisoners?
>they get out of their mechs
>wat
>stand over you
>cum on your face
Drackakke

Actual footage of the event.
youtube.com/watch?v=8LIg8WSIBpo

I've seen that happen, too.

I also get this...

>"Protect the 4 civilian units in either APCs, Trucks, or industrialmechs"
>Decent number of opponents in an urban area
>Reroll with tactics to get a night mission
>Manage to clear out most of the opposition, just need to handle the fresh reinforcements
>Suddenly, the swansong of an enemy tank manages to gyro and/or hip one of the agromechs.
>Agromech falls. Manages to survive.
>Stay Down, Agromech
>Naw man I got this
>Stand checks on 11+ means good-to-go
>Prevented from getting a perfect score because the civilian blew up after the fifth consecutive fall.

>11+
So you are telling me.. There's a chance!

Which heavies should I pair with Stalkers for a good assault lance?
3030s era FWIW

Thunderbolts. They're like half a Stalker but with more armor.

I wish Dark Age was still mostly forestry and mining mechs.

The Thunderbolt is the traditional stalker-buddy for a reason, although you should also consider Warhammers, especially the -K, because the weapon arrangement complements the stalker's well.
If you're trying to be fluffy, a Crusader-K or -D is actually pretty good, too
I don't. They're very fun as a complement to actual mechs, but being forced to use them as a substitute for them is just shitty. It may just be my booster pack PTSD talking, though

>RotS had literally three regiments of battlemechs left in PrefX when the wall went up

And people talk about the Capellans having a hard time in 3030.

>2017
>Still using Demotivational memes

Epic Fail right ~desu?

That also happens to Spider pilots because they can't eject if you have quirks turned on. The only way they can escape is by walking off the map or getting the mech destroyed so the "autoeject" kicks them out of it. They will repeatedly attempt to stand up until they die, no matter the odds. I've met about a dozen spiders in battle since I started playing but I was only able to salvage one in usable condition. And I was only able to salvage THAT spider because I managed to kick both of it's legs and torsos off in the same turn leaving it a head and armourless CT and nothing else. The limbless spider just sat there like the black knight until the battle was over and I captured it.

Those civilian missions are the worst. I always change the post-game results to make the civilians survive if it was blatantly obvious that they would have lived if not for AI stupidity. In the last extraction mission I did the civilian units were all wheeled units, I think one of them was a passenger bus and the other two were cargo trucks. But the fourth? The fourth was a coolant truck, and it had a vehicle flamer.

So while the first three vehicles sensibly cowered behind a hill while I was duking it out with the enemy mechs, the coolant truck went HOLD MY BEER I GOT THIS, drove right up to an enemy warhammer and started burning it's legs at point blank range. This lasted for an amazing 4 turns until the warhammer pilot got sick of his shit, stepped on the coolant truck and set off both the ammo and the fuel tank in a gigantic explosion.

I'm pretty sure this is wrong

We still play Battletech too, Nazi Frog. We love things that stopped being cool a long time ago.

Sounds like a goddamn hero to me.

It's not counting the Remnant who were left outside the Wall.

I just love the idea of a turbo diesel powered medium mech. Especially the engine going runaway if it's destroyed by an engine crit.

>Nazi Frog
Almost had me

We went on to nazi marik pigeon now.

Are there any vehicles that you've found particularly useful in a mercenary campaign context? (whether it be Against-the-Bot, a tabletop campaign with friends, a Mechwarrior RPG campaign, etc.)

Personally I've found both the Saladin and the Striker LRM tank to be pretty useful - they clock in at only 35 tons and add a lot of firepower for their weight. The Saladin in particular adds a ton of firepower to light scout lance in a vehicle that can also keep pace for the most part.

So, are their situations where handheld weapons can be good?

Would a handheld made entirely of machine gun relays work?

>AI stupidity

You can actually mess with the AI settings - find the bot's player # with "/who", then use "/kick #", and from the menu replace the bot with a new one and fine tune the settings. For civilians, turn their aggression way down, turn their self-preservation way up, and turn down their willingness to take PSR checks and extraction missions will play out a little more fairly. If you feel the civilians should be fleeing in a particular direction, you can also tick "Immediate Escape" and set a map edge for the bot to run away to..

Hunter Light Tank is good too.

I've always liked vees but find them a bit fragile. Still, for the cost the LB-X Po is pretty good. Also any kind of LRM carrier that can stay out of the way.

This shit happens all the time in periphery games. One time, my buddies and I played some pirates out Bad News way and one of my machines was a Wasp that had its fusion engine blown decades ago and replaced with a diesel Conlee 80 out of a bog standard APC. It was basically a Wasp 1L that went 4/6 and had just enough heatsinks to fire its missiles. I yanked one sink out and replaced it with a machine gun and half a bin of ammo to up the firepower just a bit and give me something to terrorize the locals without wasting my precious missiles.

Sometimes, playing scum is pretty fun.

Thanks for the tip, I'll try that next time. Ideally the civilians should stop for nothing and just run for their lives off of the map edge I deployed from. Extraction missions are usually not a problem if the civilians are unarmed, it's just the ones with weapons (no matter how terrible) that go from zero to berserker. The agrimechs refitted with weapons are by far the worst offenders at this.

I find Saladins and Pegasus Scout Hovertanks to be very reliable support units. Saladins are quite fragile but the AC20 can put almost any mech on it's ass (or in the grave) with a single shot, especially from behind. The version of the Pegasus I prefer is the one with triple SRM6s and like the Saladin these can reliably shred and knock down mechs, or annihilate enemy vees if you bring some infernos. My Pegasus lance once captured a near-pristine Stalker just by running circles around it and repeatedly shotgunning SRMs into it's face until the pilot blacked out.

If you use them in a combined arms attack with heavy or assault mechs they become particularly deadly because the difference in TH numbers is so wide that the enemy will focus exclusively on your mechs. So you can scoot them right up to the short range bracket with impunity and often get rear armour hits. Just remember to stay out of kicking range.

Odd, but my files says I got this from /btg/ at November 27th of last year. It was just part of my stash.

Here, have an explodey-mech.

This is a beautiful story. Honestly, if it weren't for the trolls shoving it down everyone's throats and making the thread hate it, PaF was pretty awesome. Bonus points that it's a 1L. I dunno what it is, but that little asshole serves me well every time I field it. Will never forget the time I had one take down a cherry Thud in the first round of firing. One of those "Battletech sucks for the same reasons it's awesome" moments.

Heavy BattleMech Recovery Vehicle is a goddamn godsend. A 70 ton truck able to haul up to 100 tons, with loading gear to drag things on. It's a 'mech tow truck and armored to boot..

But you don't have to just put 'mechs on it. 100 tons of just about anything you want to steal can be loaded on a BRV by any 'mech with hands.

Sadly, our Laio contract liaison seemed to get the idea and ruined the fun, just seeming to goddamn appear sitting on top of it as we rolled into our field base.

Apparently she was afraid we were violating the terms of our 10% salvage just because we had loaded up a headless Phoenix Hawk, an Awesome arm and a Packrat ICE scout car with Laio markings.

And the personal effects of a Laio scout team inside.

Luckily we were able to clear it up that we had just secured these items to make sure they would not suffer damage after the battle.

So it takes about 4 and a half months for a jump-ship to travel the exodus road.

It takes twenty jump-ships to set up a a relay for high speed transport able to move 1 jump-ship worth of droppers per week.

Does it ever say how they were supposed to be sustaining a invasion with that kind of supply chain? Did they spend years setting up forward supply catches or something?

They moved all the initial bid at once, then called for reinforcements and supplies later. Once every Clan not named "Smoke Jaguar" got to the IS, they started modifying local factories to support the OZs, rather than rely on such a long supply line. The Wolves planned on doing more under Ulric, but Vlad was a short sighted idiot who figured that changing what worked wasn't worth it.

Hey, I just read that the little fluff from 2nd ed Battletech is different from 1st ed Battledroids... Anyone know what's different?
Thank you in advance.

WarShips, user.

Even a Vincent has 90 kT of cargo. Every Galaxy had at least one as a flagship, and the Falcons even had one per Cluster.

Most Clans recovered from Tukayyid very rapidly too. It was really just the Jags who fucked everything up.

Wolves also did establish supply caches ahead of their advance.

"Clans couldn't into logistics" is a total meme. Considering they swept through a fifth of the IS faster than anyone else has before or since at the other end of a one0year supply chain, they had to be doing something right.

All at once would mean putting almost all of their warriors in microgravity for four and a half months and breaking their supply chain so rather then 1/shipload a week per 20 jumpers they would get zero shiploads for a minimum of nearly five months while the chain reestablished itself.

I believe you, I just think that is badly written.

>microgravity
I was under the impression that Battletech spacecraft are able to generate some sort of gravitation, if only via acceleration, just as is handwaved in nearly every other space opera.

The can. They can fly at 1g or more, and they have grav decks.

There's two options.

Dropships and Warships can accelerate constantly for a while, simulating gravity between 0 and 3G or so. That's not an option if you are going on a road trip this long, as Battletech fusion torches are efficient, but not THAT efficient. It's also not an option because when jumping, you have to stay at the jump point with your sails open and can't accelerate.

The other options is a really big doughnut. That you spin and stand on the inside.

This is neat, effective, and used on some Warships and Jumpships.

And.. yeah, this is why I said "most" not "all". Even packed like sardines you can't fit anything like everyone into those. Most of your warriors would be in Dropships, and in microgravity.

If you are traveling via daisy-chain of jumpers and dropships you only need to spend as long as it takes to disconnect in one system and join up with the next jump ship in one system. If everyone's going at once you need to wait to recharge the jump ship in every system.

Trying to get a feel for combined arms selection - In terms of ground attack Aerospace, is there any reason *not* to take a Lightning/Transit instead of another ASF for air-to-ground work? It seems that a flying AC/20 is the absolute best option for 'mech/tank plinking.

If the Dropships are attached to the Jumpship via a ring, couldn't you get gravitation simply by spinning the Jumpship, so the externally attached Dropships experience the centrifugal (centripetal? Help me out, physics majors) force?

>That's not an option if you are going on a road trip this long, as Battletech fusion torches are efficient, but not THAT efficient.

Assuming you run the engines all day every day instead of just doing it for a portion to maintain muscle mass and bone density, a WarShip needs just 5,336 tons of fuel. DropShips would require 1,193 tons.

So take the Potemkin. 25 DropShips for ~28 kT, plus 5.3 kT for itself. It actually has 25 kT for fuel any way so that's not even an issue, and subtracting the DS resupply still leaves over 340 kT for supplies.

Other WSes will still be packing 75 kT plus much of the time for supplies, and this isn't even factoring in things like Mammoths or Mules for hauling supplies.

This is well and truly a solved problem in BT.

CGL decided to make it so that attempting to spend any thrust with DSes attached to a WS or JS fucks things up and breaks the collar, even though they routinely conduct maneuvers with DSes attached in the fiction.

So now, no way no how. Because Cray hath spoken, forever and ever amen.

They are good anti-mech fighters, the only reason you'd go for something else is if you can afford the luxury of more advanced fighters or if you want something that hits a better multi-role compromise.

Theroeticlly, yes..

But the spin would rip the jumpships off the collars..

And the spin would rip apart the jumpship's sail..

And last, and most funny, dropships are build 'engines down' and connect to jumpships the same way. Everything in the dropper would be upside down when you did this.

Warships can not accelerate with the sail deployed unless you want to walk home.

REVIVAL's planners expected the invasion of the Inner Sphere to really only need the first wave, so there wasn't an expectation of needing to reestablish the supply line. REVIVAL was a shit show from start to finish, planning wise. Of course, that was intentional on the Wardens' part.

So double the 5.3 kT of fuel use to also charge the drive, and oh look, there's still a shit ton of cargo space left to handle the problem. Oh noes. Woe is us.

Seriously it's not even an issue and I don't know why you're trying to make it into one.

>REVIVAL's planners expected the invasion of the Inner Sphere to really only need the first wave, so there wasn't an expectation of needing to reestablish the supply line.

No, they expected to sweep the IS before them and for the Invasion to be easy. For the most part it was.

Something like 10 Waves were planned.

It took like a month for most Clans to recover from Tukayyid. The Jags obviously didn't, but that was due to how badly they shat things up 200 years ago rather than the length of the Exodus Road.

I think I'm probably remembering something from a novel more than an SB, so probably. The death of Lincoln Osis may have helped the IS and the Invading Clans equally all told though.

>Burning the reactor to power the K/F drive
>For half a year

>You are walking home.

That's an emergency option, not something you do for half a year with no possibility at all of getting help if you fuck the drive.

Dude, if you burn the engines and charge at 175+ hours per Jump you don't do shit to either the engines or the drive. It only becomes an issue if you want to charge the drive in 174 hours or less.

>The death of Lincoln Osis may have helped the IS and the Invading Clans equally all told though.

Probably. The IS would have been in an absolute shambles without it but the most likely scenario is the Wolves on Terra by the end of 3052 otherwise and then the Wars of Reaving happening early as all the Crusaders flip their shit over being beaten so comprehensively.

>The only thing that can't be mounted on a submarine is space naval weapons.
Though that can be achieved via submersible mobile structure.

Where can I find info on the Augustine Alliance?

The what?

Closest to that I've heard of is the Aurigen Coalition. If that's what you mean, it's going to be in the new BT computer game.

>vidya shit

Ew. I'm talking about the DA FWL sub-state formed by rebellious Republic Senators.

Then you're shit out of luck becuse about all the DA material we have is just "this is a thing that exists."

But it was a faction in the DA game and, I assume, the DA novels.

It was never detailed beyond what has already been mentioned user. Sorry.

Fuck off medron

Stop invoking his name or he may actually show up here.

Jaguars did it too. Just for the plot reasons they did it less, until it was time for salvage post-war and loads of gear was found.

Do you think Vic ended up happier with Isis than he would have been married to Omi?

What happened to their kids?

From what I gathered Omi was Victors love of the life and when the Katherine hatemurdered her, Victor was devasted quite badly. Tbh I don't know why Victor didn't kill Katherine right there and then when se revealed Omi was dead.

>100-ton chassis that moves 2/3
>four Light Gauss Rifles and two ER Medium lasers
>improved C3 link, Guardian ECM, Bloodhound Probe and CASE

Thoughts?