/btg/ Battletech General!

Uh...you should be headcapping with claws at 60 tons...

Quikcell™..

>Some of our designs would be pretty good if someone else made them
>Some Assembly Require
>If anybody ask it fell off the back of a dropship.

Rules for the Claw state it's 1 point of damage for every seven tons, so a 60 ton 'mech would deal 8 damage with a claw attack, no? (vs. 6 damage for a regular punch).

>Rules for the Claw state it's 1 point of damage for every seven tons

The fuck?

In MekHQ does the bot ever automatically deploy more than one lance/star/unit at a time to a mission, or is it up to me to decide if I need more firepower for a given mission and deploy it myself?

Up to you. If you let it, the bot will gleefully let you throw a lance up against most of a Battalion or Cluster.

These single expletive replies aren't particularly helpful, you know. Why, what is the rule supposed to be? For quick reference, here's sarna:
sarna.net/wiki/Claw

If you're playing an Against the Bot campaign, check the rules document for "reinforcing". The intention is that the only the encountering lance is involved by default; other lances can only reinforce the battle on a die roll.

Just surprised, I thought it doubled punch damage or divided tonnage by a multiple of 5 like most other things. Just makes claws even more shit than I already thought they were.

He said "great". These wallpapers with a faction logo and a woman picture are cringe worthy at best

Is there any lore reason why the WoB uses a sword as their insignia?

Claws sound kinda useless until you learn that they're the only melee weapon other than fists that gets to roll on the punch table. But yes, it's definitely something you use for style more than anything else. They can be absolutely hilarious if you take paired claws and throw on TSM and or Melee Master.

SHANK TWO CLANNERS AT ONCE
SHANK ONE CLANNER TWICE

That's why I asked if they were the ones he was looking for.
Sentence structure recognition is difficult for some people.

Or you could just take a mech heavy enough to do it without claws and not suffer all the drawbacks

>Is there any lore reason why the WoB uses a sword as their insignia?

>The logo of the Word of Blake consists of a massive broadsword thrust downward, its hilt decorated with the ComStar insignia surrounded by six concentric rings. According to Aziz, the sword represents the Word of Blake's iron determination to establish what they call the true faith, and their willingness to use force to fulfill their version of Jerome Blake's prophecies and visions. The six concentric rings surrounding the ComStar insignia represent the original seats of the First Circuit during Blake's time. By invoking the Order's earliest days, Precentor Aziz seeks to legitimize centuries of creeping revisionism and false doctrine as the gospel of Jerome Blake

>[The traitors have displaced us from our homes, but they
cannot displace the truth we serve. Let them remember that, and
pray for mercy!]

>[ The next war will be a holy war of purification. When it begins,
let the heretics remember that they forced us to it.]

Basically their symbol is a promise to put the the false Fochtstar and all their other enemies "To the sword"

I'll post the one for the OG Comstar star next.

>The design for the famous symbol of ComStar, a circle star with two downward-pointing beams, was commissioned by Primus Conrad Toyama in 2823. Knowing the value of a visual symbol to unify any organization, he announced a competition to choose an emblem for ComStar. More than 800 entries were submitted, and the Primus judged them personally. The winning entry was submitted by Adept Stanfield K'wani. In his own words, the dark outer circle represents the dark times prophesied by Jerome Blake. The original drawing showed a star within the dark circle but the Primus modified it, removing all but two star points, leaving the rest as spokes circled in black. According to Toyama the star represents the light of mankindtechnology and the enlightenment of Blake's words. Once the prophesies of Blake had been fulfilled the image would reclaim its star points. The most striking aspect of the ComStar logo are the two star points. On the original design these were as they are now, elongated and pointing downward. According to the designer Adept K'wani, "the point on the right of the image represents communications and the other represents technology, the two bases of ComStar's true source of power in the Inner Sphere."

>[It is a shame that such a symbol of purity has become tainted by the likes of Anastasius Focht and the bitch-Primus Mori. They defile the image. We of the Word of Blake maintain the symbol's true meaning by placing it in the hilt of our broadsword. In this way, we remember our common origins and the common destiny that we will one day share.]
>—Adept Sheila Sooter, ComStar Archives File
776Q356-OGDN, April 2825

The best thing to uncover and change the setting would be a giant number of recordings, phone calls and personal journals that indisputably prove Blake was a bureaucratic that was just trying to keep the phones working.

He would have literally have looked at anyone that called him a prophet like they were fucking insane.

Focht pulled a bunch of stuff like that out when he secularised ComStar, it was part of what sent the WoB around the bend.

Well, before ComStar never being religious was retconned by CGL any way.

Yeah but he pulled it out of his ass and it was never addressed afterwards. Probably another of his "we don't need Terra" moments.

Victor being a dumbass moment #7... not moving on to Terra as soon as the WoB attacked it. Talk about not doing your job.

Victor was in the middle of the Coventry situation. Terra falling was Focht screwing the pooch.

>operation bulldog and serpent are successful
>focht retires afterwards instead of retaking Terra
Guy really was a retard

That is totally awesome.

MFW before I knew anything about the WoB I named my mercenary company the Starlight Swords. I later started organizing my mech battalion into 6 "lances" of 6 before I knew about Level IIs and IIIs. It just made sense.

Yeah, claws allow mechs of 85 tons or more to reliably decapitate mechs in one hit, but at the cost of a +1 TH penalty and added weight. A 100 tonner can crush heads in one punch if the enemy HD has already taken 2 damage, which is all but inevitable with SRMs and LBX on the field. And a 60 tonner with TSM can do all that and get into melee range faster than either of them. So there is really no reason to use claws other than for fun or lore reasons, especially not dual claws as the combined weight is considerable.

Question: - Are smoke dischargers a thing in BT and if so are they actually useful?

Yes
No

He wrapped up Coventry with a bow, and could have moved on to Earth right away, backing up Comstar while WoB was still mopping up the trapped Comstar holdouts. It might have been messy but it'd have been a whole lot less messier than the Jihad!

Hell.
Thanks.

Nah, we discussed this several times before. The FedCom is simply too strong, they were thiiiiis close to actually winning the whole game several times so the writers just have to cop out somehow and the easiest way is to have them do nothing at all. They never went back and finished the capellan job before '39 and 50, they never attacked the FWL even when Andurian seceded. They never counterattacked the clans despite having a vast enough numerical advantage to bury them in mechs. They never tried to resist Guerrero or atleast restore order to the Chaos March. They never tried to defend their St. Ives ally, they never tried to crack down on the FWL/blakist menace even when they just crushed the clans and enjoyed a brief high in relations with the dracs, Victor never did anything on his own except moping when he could have been winning so much he'd get tired of winning, he refused to act even when he returned with Bulldog and Kat just took his empire like the fucking cuck he was.

Refusing to strangle the wobbies in the cradle just one of the many things. The setting requires the FedCom to not do anything to work, much like fasanomics, just leave it there.

And this is one of the things that aggravates me about the BT timeline. It pisses me off to no end.

Smoke munitions exist for various launchers. Their usefulness varies by situation and terrain.

Two Streak SRM 2s or one Streak SRM 4?

Two Streak-2's. Rolling for two weapons means twice the chance of hitting with at least half of the missiles.

This, also same ammo efficiency. Yeah you gain one more heat for having two, but I think it's worth it as well.

Uhhhh, I know.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I've been watching Babylon 5 lately. It's not a perfect show, but it has one big advantage: it's consistent and believable.

Contrast this with Doctor Who. Doctor Who is fun to watch, but if you think about it for more than two seconds you notice it's full of plot holes and contradictions. Things that cause time travel paradoxes that threaten to destroy the universe one episode go without a hitch the next. And the TARDIS, the sonic screwdriver, and the Doctor's biology gain completely different powers no one's ever alluded to depending on the situation. The aliens are hysterically unlikely, often without motives or believable science, the characters will do any old insane thing when it makes the plot slightly more interesting, and everything has either a self-destruct button or an easily findable secret weakness that it takes no efforts to defend against.

But I guess I'm not complaining. If the show was believable, the Doctor would have gotten killed the first time he decided to take on a massive superadvanced alien invasion force by walking right up to them openly with no weapons and no plan. And then they would have had to cancel the show, and then I would lose my chance to look at the pretty actress who plays Amy Pond.

So Doctor Who is not a complete loss. But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning.

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".

Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

So it's pretty standard "shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong" versus "evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide" stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better. Just to give one example, in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: "Nuts!". The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.

Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?

...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable.

Didn't whoever wrote this joke of a "Halsey" character ever watch the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie? If they had, they would have known how bad it was to write you character sailing into a typhoon!

>History channel

Nope! Nope, nope, nope, nuh-uh.

None of that ameri-zionist centric cuckold historical rewriting shit.

Not even once.

Damn /pol/, how do you get time for so many buzzwords?

>someone got mad enough to type all of this out

You think you are smart but you are no different than the people you dislike

I stay the hell away from american tv, and have sine the early 2000s. Without derailing the thread, wanna fill me on on how ass it is?

Also robits in paints. Post robits in paints.

It really takes a very precise trajectory for something to make it into the atmosphere intact. The angle of approach is very, very key for that, which is partially influenced by the object's incoming velocity. Too shallow of an AOA and it will simply skip off the atmosphere and ricochet back into space. Too steep and it will plummet through the space-atmosphere barrier. Whatever the incredible heat generated by friction doesn't destroy, the wind shear will, as the ship is literally ripped apart by wind resistance. This is partially in response to as well, since a brick-like ship would be worse at planetary landing, as it simply has more surface area, which means it's more affected by atmospheric resistance. Worse yet, depending upon the actual velocity of the ship before hitting the atmosphere, it may simply instantly disintegrate upon hitting the atmosphere. It'd be like jumping off a 20-story balcony into a sufficiently deep body of water -- you'd go splat on the surface. Assuming that it's going 100k MPH (not entirely unreasonable, the current manned speed record is about 40k KPH by Apollo 10), whatever doesn't instantly burn up or vaporize in the atmosphere is going to be caught in gravity's cruel embrace and be accelerated to ballistic velocities, which means it's going to hit the ground like a missile.

Precisely the point I was going for. There'll be tons of scrap left over. It's going to take some fabrication and machine work to turn it into anything useful, though.

>posting a non-argument in reply

There's literally nothing wrong with Zionism.

Judaism is an essential part of BattleTech lore.

...

So I don't know why you're bothering to do that. You aren't me. Please cut that out. I don't want to get pulled into this shit, I certainly don't watch Doctor Who, and at least if I posted a 2-page screed on the OF it was on topic.

See thread for mini: bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=66.0

See pic related.

>points on getting the name spelled right, though.

>RX-79[G] with the beam saber in the shield hand, rather than the rifle in that hand
You fucked up, 0 points.

Hey NEA, how's that fast-awesome Marauder doing on the table?

NEA, it's the same shit as when they were posting using your other handle what, a year or two ago?

While you're around though, if you've got done any more revisions on Gratuitous Battlewagons, would you mind posting it either in /hwg/ or the current botes thread?

Eh, it's not supposed to be Shiro Amada's Gundam unit. A buddy was running an off-canon Gundam RPG game using the early-era stuff, and that's built to represent my character's personal mecha.

Who is Darrian Wolf?

Somebody I screwed over.

I'll probably get hate for it, but several years back, he and the Cincinnati group came to Gencon a lot and played WOB. They always won, and it always ruined Gencon for me. I wasn't part of the Cincy group. I'd come to Gencon with a buddy and we played the allied coalition, because why would we play the bad guys?

It got really frustrating, and eventually CGL made them demo agents to make them stop winning games. I had the ability to go to one last Gencon before my family moved out to LA and it would be too expensive to get back to Gencon, but that was the last year they all played together before becoming agents, and so the last year I could go, they won, and they spoiled my Gencon. Again.

I got really mad about it. I was a way shittier person then. A few years later I found /btg/, saw the links over to the Cincy battletech site, and I decided I was going to fuck with their leader as much as possible. Darrian's password on Cincy BT was really simple, and once I had his IP address it was a relatively simple matter to spoof the IP, use his same password to break into his official forum account, and publicly post some NDA'd stuff. That evidently turned out to be the last straw since he'd had some public disagreements with staff members, and did publicly criticize CGL when he felt the company deserved it. So he got canned.

I started going to therapy a little over a year ago for some unrelated stuff, and part of it is trying to set right the wrong things I've done to people in the past. DW, since you're in-thread, I really want to apologize. I did a shit thing, and I'm sorry. I know that doesn't change anything, but if I could go back and just be an adult and not let losing at a game bother me so much, I would. I'm sorry. I'm going to be in the Cincy area to deal with some data storage issues later this month. If you're OK with it and the dates line up, I'd like to stop by the Cincy play area and apologize in person.

>wanted to play coalition
>didn't like WoB

It's bad enough you fucked with DW but you also have shit taste.

Claws are interesting.
They are, along with talons and maces, the only melee weapon that lets you deal more than kick damage per turn. Vibroblades too, I suppose, depending upon how small your mech is.

Point being, yeah they're bad. But they're bad in a specific useful way that lets you do things mechs normally can't.

Talons are by far the better choice though.

Oh shit, let me go make some popcorn, this thread is going to git gud.

If this is the guy, than who the hell has been doing all the hateposting and stalking?

is remove a medium laser in my Axman to make the BigBoy20 a really fast shooting BigBoy20?

*a good idea

here.

I did a lot of it, up until about last October, which is when I started therapy. After that I don't know who picked up that torch.

Again, I'm sorry. Darrian was hardly the only person who touched my life I went out of my way to screw over, but it's harder to find somebody and apologize on the internet than when they're a part of your life and you have a phone number or see them regularly.

Better option.

Anons, for those of you who use MHQ religiously, would you like an image pack that contains almost all the mechs and most of the vehicles and Aero units for fluff purposes? So that if you don't totally know the name, you can look at the art?

Yes, with Vehicular Grenade Launchers (which are for mechs too)

They're okay? It's three hexes of light smoke, but that won't block LOS, and it's only usable once.

Fuck off medron

They have pretty specific uses, yes - using them with a high skill pilot or Melee Master makes them much better. The +1 malus is canceled out by a Melee Specialist and/or a high skill pilot, and the key thing is that unlike Hatchets or Swords you get to roll two attacks, since they replace punches.

Medron's a Zionist?

YIFFS LEAVE REEEEE.

What, for any moment, made Candence think that Romano couldn't have had her or her husband assassinated?

And why the fuck would Jamie Wolf or anyone else in the Sphere think that the Capellans would care a bit about the Clan Invasion when it was on the other side of the Sphere and hitting one of their mortal enemies?

People can say all they want about Comstar and WOB, but Blake himself was pretty based

What did they get hit with here? Minefield?

Two Davy Crockett-Ms.

Cause the only logical alternative would have been the feds crushing their rump state like an empty beer can and we can't have that.

You gotta wonder how retarded Candace was. She could have placed Kai or Kuan-Yin on the throne at literally any moment, or just take it for herself and be a loyal buffer state for Hanse. It would've made perfect sense with the clan threat on the horizon. Hell, she was skilled enough to sneak to Sian and kill Romano herself without any problems.

I believe that's the after shot of a nuke. For when you need a pilot to get 40+ xp a match.

Any situations where handheld weapons might be good?

Would a machine gun array handheld work?

prototype TSM makes handhelds pretty goddamn interesting.

Where can you find the rules for prototype TSM again?

Tried again, better then last time but more of a bomb

Post your probably bad but fun/dream mechs

Small cockpit is a bad idea

>happy to make pedo cartoon book
>takes pride in not watching Dr. Who

Your priorities are all fucked up, man

Maybe you should have believed him/them every time he said "There's more than one person", cause boy does that come up often.

Just shut the fuck up user. You aren't funny. You aren't clever. You aren't original. You're trying to force a meme, and succeeding only in being a worthless cunt. If you had the courage of your convictions, you'd put on and keep on a trip rather than hiding behind user like a worthless cunt.

Find new material, because the only reason anybody cares about what you post is that you're wasting perfectly good thread space being a worthless cunt.

Yes, but that wouldn't have boded well for the Confederation's future as she pointed out to Sun-Tzu.

Plus I imagine there would have been some in the Confederation that wouldn't have been to happy with her spawn or her husband, who also wouldn't shirk at putting a dagger through her or her ilk.

Remember, if it's that easy for her to take the throne and assassinate her sister, it's just as easy for someone else to do the same. Especially with the nation's assassin cults and fanatics being as loyal to Romano as they were.

>wanting someone to namefag
>so they can be a cunt
>so you can call them a cunt

How about both of you fuck off.

...

Fixed it, any other suggestions?

If they couldnt assassinate a literal insane retard like Romano I bet Candace could take it. Also I cant imagine how not immediately replacing Romano was not beneficial to the capellan's future, she very nearly destroyed them even before she took the throne.

It's just completely inexplicable why felt okay with ruling St Ives only but I bet she felt like a fucking idiot when the confederacy came and annexed her realm.

>I'm ok with people who are into little girls in their underwear

Doesn't Candance even have a big talk about how she could take over the CC any time she felt like it?

This is my favorite /btg/ meme

Seems like it would be better as a LAM

It's a fact though.