In my last post I showed how most Battlemechs couldn’t actually walk as fast as described in the game – if you missed that then you can read it at How fast can a Battlemech walk?. In this post I will present some optional Advanced Rules to implement the more realistic mech movement described there.
This is what I’m setting out to achieve here:
– Mechs now walk, run, and sprint at realistic speeds.
– Where possible, movement rates should be as consistent as possible with their current stats. That said, the fastest mechs must be slower here because it’s now impossible for them to be as fast as they were – this means they will have smaller engines and more space for equipment.
– It must be possible to design mechs so that their engine ratings (and gyros) are comparable with published designs.
– MASC, Superchargers and TSM will have a similar effect on speed as in the existing rules. Continue reading →
A good demonstration of how a Locust doesn’t walk! 🙂
Or: “Can a Locust Battlemech really walk 240m in only 10 seconds?”
The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is “no, it can’t” – a Locust (or indeed any battlemech) could run that far in that time… but it is actually physically impossible for it to walk 240m in 10 seconds (at least in gravity similar to Earth’s). To discover why, we must take a rather fascinating scientific journey that sheds some light on something that perhaps many of us take for granted – the mechanics of how we move on two legs! Read on to learn more… Continue reading →
You hear the distant boom of an Autocannon echoing across the landscape and your mech shudders at the shell impacts against its left torso, blasting off some of the armour plating. It’s not enough to significantly damage your mech, but certainly enough to get your attention as you scan for your attacker and raise your arm-mounted PPC to respond…
And so the player peers at their Mech Record Sheet, and marks off five points of damage on the Left Torso:
Just your normal everyday record sheet.
But something’s funny here, to me at least. The way I see it, the side marked “Left Torso” is actually shown on the right side of the mech (it’s the player’s left side, but not the mech’s left side)! This has bugged me since I first started playing Battletech back in the 80s, and now I’ve started playing again I was reminded of it once again so I thought I’d dig into this a little further. Continue reading →
I’ve got back into Battletech recently and I’ve been trying to reverse-engineer how the Proximity Limit is calculated (because I like to know how these things work). First, here’s a little background if you’re unaware of how jump works in Battletech. According to the fluff, Jumpships use a “Kearny-Fuchida drive” to travel over interstellar distances almost instantaneously. Traditionally they arrive at the Zenith/Nadir points – above the north and south poles of a star respectively – at the Proximity Limit, which is (supposedly) determined by the gravitational field of the star. These Jumpships usually carry Dropships, which then detach from the Jumpship with their cargo of mechs and head towards their target planet using normal fusion drives. Meanwhile, the Jumpship (which has little more than a few manoeuvering thrusters) generally sits at the arrival point and unfurls a large solar sail about a kilometre in diameter that it uses to recharge its drive in readiness for the next jump, which usually takes around a week (150-200 hrs).
After looking at the latest version of the stellar data table on pg. 100 of Campaign Ops, and I made an interesting observation: the Proximity Limit is not based on gravity. Given all the fluff says that this distance is determined by gravity (e.g. the notes on pg. 122 of Strategic Ops, summarised as “hyperspace fields don’t like gravity”) this is somewhat surprising. It turns out I’m not actually the first to notice this either – a thread on the battletech forums from over a decade ago discusses this too, but no solution to this is presented there. So I wondered – what would it look like if the Proximity Limit was calculated using gravity?
If you just want to skip to the point – here’s the gravity-based Safe Jump Distance table that you can use in your Battletech games instead of the published ones (this is just intended as a variant to use if you want more realistic values): Table showing recalculated gravity-based Safe Jump Distance values.
If you want to know the technical details behind how I calculated this then read on… Continue reading →
