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Post by Carlos on Jun 22, 2014 23:41:30 GMT -6
I couldn't find specific numbers on the IC Engines. But one of the vehicles that is listed with it I subtracted everything else and got a rough idea of the weight difference.
I was wondering. How was the heat system in the TT handled?
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Richter
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Post by Richter on Jun 22, 2014 23:57:48 GMT -6
Mind you there's fuel cell and fission reactors too, but those are pretty rare compared to ICE and fusion. I think there are actual numbers for those on Sarna, but I don't think they'd come up too often. Fuel cells are usually used for civvy stuff, and fission only gets used by the Periphery and such.
As for heat, it varied. Firing weapons, moving (the faster you move, the more heat you generate), jump jetting (unlike walking and running distance affects heat gen here), and getting hit by certain things (flamers and incendiary missiles mostly) all jacked up your heat. Having an engine online passively generated heat, and having more than 1 engine increased this heat gen additively (1 engine is 5 heat, 3 is 15 heat...if you ever want 2 backups for some odd reason). You dissipated a certain number of heat each round related to the number of heat sinks you have. Being in water helped too, if there was any nearby, or if you were in a colder than normal environment. Special, super effective heatsinks worked more efficiently than defaults, so there's something you could potentially research. But mind you, these 'double strength' heat sinks were very prone to break down and not too safe. So you pay for the, admittedly awesome, advantages in ways other than cost.
So if you started to jack up heat you'd have to stand still, fire less guns, or even shut the mech down to not overheat. I think rather than a full shutdown some later models just had an emergency cooling mode that took all guns and motion systems offline and opened all their vents to bleed heat off quickly - but this left you helpless for a whole turn. So it wasn't a fun thing to do unless needed/you had good cover.
What happened when you heat up, was systems started to fuck up. Your sensors could fry, myomers burn up, or even ammo explode in its cases. And when you're carrying 5 tons of 150mm tank ammo, an explosion inside your mech isn't very fun. So, heating up an enemy mech to destroy it was just as viable as actually blowing it up conventionally. Provided you forced it into an auto-shutdown you'd be able to kill or capture it at leisure, or make its shit cook off.
Mind you, only mechs had heat IIRC. Battle armors, protomechs, and tanks didn't bother with it.
How you'll make this into a more flexible RP system I'm not sure. You'd basically end up having to track heat and everything that gives it to you, and how much, along with how fast you burn it off.
Edit: Also if you want I can go try to hunt down the tech manual the ICE page mentions on sarna and get if you numbers.
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Post by Carlos on Jun 23, 2014 0:20:22 GMT -6
Yeah, if you could find at least one example of an ICE's weight and critical slot. That would be great.
I took the day off working on this. Saturday it was all, MWO, writing this, and reading a Mechwarrior book. The irony that I was raging against the Clans in the game, but reading a book on the Steel Wolves/Wolf Hunters.
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Richter
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Post by Richter on Jun 23, 2014 0:36:46 GMT -6
Hey man, clans are great. But I don't really have a favorite faction, outside of perhaps Hell's Horses.
> MWO
I heard that game was a huge pay to win grindfest of horrific proportions, and sketchy devs. Which is a shame I looked forward to it a lot. Buh.
I'll see what I can dig up.
Should also add me on skype, ya jerk.
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Richter
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Post by Richter on Jun 23, 2014 1:18:27 GMT -6
It was a bitch to find this book, but here, the master table of all the engine types. Has fuel cell, ICE, fission, and a couple types of fusion as a bonus beyond the standard. Pretty cool. You won't find slots on here though, best I can tell, all of these take up the same 6 slots as a standard fusion engine. From the book: Battlemechs can /only/ use fusion power I guess in these rules, so don't mind the references to industrials in that quote. As far as how to read that table, engine rating is how powerful the engine is, and those other numbers are the weight for an engine of that size. So yeah, pursuant to that quote, look up 220 rating engines and you'll see the ICE one weighs 20 tons and the standard fusion only 10 tons. As for slots... Standard fusion and other non fusion power plants: 6 slots. Compact fusion: 3 slots. Then light and extra cut weight but they spread the engine and its slots out into the side torso, and not just the central part. It's pretty weird. X-light has 12 slots, 6 central and 3 per each side. Light fusion is 10 total, 6 central and 2 per side. It's also worth noting if you're having trouble reading that chart, compact fusion engines weigh more, but take up fewer slots. That threw me for a loop at first. Light and x-light are the opposite, lighter in weight with more slot consumption (and spread out more). Hope that helps? Edit: Reading the tech manual more tells me that fuel cell engines are renowned for their low temperatures. I don't have the core rulebook right now to check the actual heat rules, but it seems that engines of different types run at different temps than others, and generate heat differently. Another passage under industrial mechs leads me to believe there's a bigger difference between these types than just the weight and whether or not they use fuel. Maybe I should just go get the rules and see for myself. On the topic of engines, most types get 'weight free heat sinks' included in the package that I guess represent heat dissipation built right into the engine itself. As the name implies they don't add to the tonnage. ICE gets 0, fuel cells 1, fission 5, and fusion 10. Then you can pay to stick on extras if you want to do that. Similar to that, ICE and fuel cell engines come with some integral fuel storage capability free and then you can slap more on for extra costs in money/tonnage like with heat sinks. I don't know if that's significant or not to make note of but it's interesting.
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Post by Carlos on Jun 23, 2014 21:17:37 GMT -6
Good work. That's pretty informative.
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Richter
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Post by Richter on Jun 23, 2014 22:55:03 GMT -6
Yeah. For all the math and shit BT makes you do they actually explain it all pretty well. I did end up grabbing the actual play rules too, BTW. So if you want I can pull ideas out of that too. The critical hit system in here was pretty cool. I was mostly right about heat too, but it turns out engines don't generate passive heat like I thought. Instead, each time the engine itself gets hit (as in, a shot goes through armor) THEN it starts to put out 5/10 extra heat a round. A third hit destroys the engine. ICE and fuel cells don't put out extra heat when they get critically hit but risk exploding, with the risk getting worse each time it gets hit (its a dice roll). Third hit blows it up, same as with fusion. Fission operates like fusion but in addition to making more heat it has a chance to leak rads and hurt the pilot every 6 turns first time its hit, and each 3 the second time, with the third ruining it. Other high heat effects include potentially knocking out the pilot and making the mech move slower, didn't know about these parts. Apparently though, building up heat is useful for triple strength myomers, however, so I guess it has some good points. Final thing to note is you only need to put heat sinks on protomechs and vehicles if you plan to mount energy weapons on them - enough to dissipate the heat from the weapons firing at once. I guess that's the balance for energy weapons not running an ammunition count. Protos don't get free heat sinks for their fusion engines, but their weight is much, much lower than the 1 ton standard for vehicles and mechs. Vehicles still use the usual 1 tonners but they get free ones as normal if they're fusion/fission/fuel cell powered, and none if ice. About that table, I think how it works is you pick an engine rating relevant to how fast you want the unit to go. I might advise just making your own system for power requirements though, because the last few times we had an RP with speed values, it ended up going pretty shitty. Still, I can grab the rules for that if it'd help. Or just point out where to get these books, might be easier.
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Post by Carlos on Jul 3, 2014 14:30:07 GMT -6
Sorry that I haven't updated. I was going to do it this past weekend. But a merciless cold, provided by an equally merciless God, has left me with not the will to write anything or even think very hard D:
I've missed a week of work now. Can't really afford that : /
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Richter
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Post by Richter on Jul 3, 2014 14:47:20 GMT -6
It's cool, I had a (still going) week of endless company myself. So not much ability to put thought into anything fun either. Sucks to hear shit went south though, hope that improves.
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Hectator
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Post by Hectator on Jul 8, 2014 10:06:59 GMT -6
An expansion to the pile driver type weapon would be something similar to the "arm punch" weapons the Zogok and Galluss-J have; basically it uses the same premise/mechanism as a pile banker/pile driver, but with the MS/mech's entire forearm (instead of a spike or rod), so that when it punches it has additional force that increases the power exponentially. Kind of like some Super Robots, namely Big O. Though it doesn't have that awesome dieselpunk piston mechanism on it (not that our mechs couldn't).
Also. Carlos: So does this mean you want to do a mech RP using your actual Galactic Civs setting with the Noble Houses and everything? Because if so I could always just collaborate and contribute to that instead of working a completely separate setting and RP. No sense in having two similar RPs competing for player interest.
The condottieri concept with civilized rules of war actually sounds pretty cool (and helps with the idea of nobles piloting mechs), as does the idea that even though the different houses are rivals. If a common threat (alien or otherwise) were to arise they'd have no choice but to put their disputes aside and fight under the Imperial banner.
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Hectator
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Post by Hectator on Jul 8, 2014 10:17:17 GMT -6
Forgive the double post, but since this is separate, here's some of the different engine types.Apparently engines range from steam engines (which I can't actually find stats for) up through ICE, electric engines and Fuel Cells (various types, though namely hydrogen), up to fission and fusion engines (which include everything from Primitive types that are ~20% larger than standard types, to XXL types which weighs a third what a standard engine does).
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Richter
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Post by Richter on Jul 8, 2014 10:29:27 GMT -6
Steam and electric engines are in an obscure part of the rule books, you won't find them on Sarna. They're only available for support vehicles, mostly bigger ones like airships and naval vessels for obvious reasons. They're generally regarded as not being very efficient for the era, steam especially as you can expect, but I guess they're thorough in putting them in. Can't fault that.
Thing to note about engines here that isn't mentioned right away is if you want to use non-chemical lasers, you need to install power amplifiers in vehicles/mechs/etc with any kind of powerplant that isn't one of the two atomic ones. So that's a thing to think about, because those amps weigh a lot (10% of the energy gun's base weight added on), on top of the engines weighing a lot. Mostly ICE anyway, fuel cell is pretty reasonable in terms of weight so I'm not sure why it doesn't get used more.
You both can consider my help as well for mech-related RP's should it be needed, as far as that goes. I definitely wouldn't mind seeing some spess-nobles shit again, I'm a sucker for settings like that after BT/dune/fading suns beat it into me. We were kind of going for that in this last AUC here, but that went to shit so maybe this will do it better and actually get work done.
Edit: Also since we're lacking in blood I was thinking of seeing if any friends of mine off forum would be interested in these RPs should one happen. I know a few who are fans of mech stuff that could help make shit more interesting, supposing you lot are fine with that.
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Hectator
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Post by Hectator on Jul 8, 2014 17:37:03 GMT -6
Oh definitely. New blood is always welcome. I was actually thinking of trying to recruit at some point since our members have dwindled so much, but anyone else who wants to is more than welcome.
And yeah, I had some hopes for the last AUC. I still have a couple files on my computer where I'd statted up a bunch of units for the NPC factions. Mainly the Russo-Federation stuff (like a scaled-down Zanny where they built a 1/3rd scale Middle MS version of the Zaku IIJ they'd dug up and then "Federalized" it up a bit externally), but I came up with some low-tech aircraft for the North Africans too. Like a mix of aircraft based on turboprop versions of WWII aircraft and on 1st generation jet aircraft. Basically jet-powered flying bricks because the North Africans had little to go on or work with, and had no clue what they were doing beyond making a basic airframe and then kludging together engine parts they'd smuggled into their now-partially occupied lands.
As for the fuel cells, I was thinking if we did my RP idea. Both those and electric engines would be more common than they are in Battletech. Which seems to go straight for ICE as the default non-fusion powerplant of choice.
But have fuel cells for things like industrial mechs, vehicles (both civilian and military), conventional aircraft (as opposed to aerospace craft) and for some smaller units like battle armor. Maybe even for some planetary militia mechs. I'd think if they had the choice, those periphery militaries would prefer something a little more efficient than a gas turbine to power a giant robot. Especially if they're on a world where fossil fuels are scarce.
Electric power plants would mainly be for small vehicles like cars and trucks, like the elecars in Gundam. But the idea is they'd still be common among the more developed planets, and be useful on the frontier worlds with the addition of some sort of solar powering device that could recharge individual "batteries" (removable fuel cell) when not in use.
Speaking of that. For the lasers, is there a way to mount the support lasers infantry use onto a mech or vehicle? They obviously don't run off of fusion reactors. Or are those chemical lasers as well?
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Richter
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Post by Richter on Jul 8, 2014 18:00:28 GMT -6
The downside to fuel cells in BT was they had, like, 3/4 the fuel capacity of an ICE engine. But considering the weight difference, I think you'd be better off just carrying more reactants. Guess it depends on the planet though, but I'm a big fan of the cell. Far as batteries go there's always a possibility for hybridized equipment too, ala the cars that do that sort of thing along with diesel-electric subs that ran both.
I forgot that colonial stuff in gundam ran off electric, I recall in f91 they had tanks in there so apparently it's not totally out of the question to run a military vehicle off an electrical system. Probably has to be one hell of a battery, but shit, if you can fit a fission plant in a tank I can't see that being a huge concern. I didn't read over the rules for electric engines for support vehicles very seriously but I guess I could go dig the numbers up out of there as a point of reference if you don't have the books. I think it listed solar too as another, independent means of gaining power - don't think I'd roll with that myself, though.
Infantry supports lasers run off batteries, power packs of civilian or military grade pending on the model. Support lasers are literally identical in stats to several types of mech/vehicle laser, the only difference is the lack of power packs. I don't think they're really compatible for this reason, at least not without some work being done to modify the thing to link directly to the engine rather than batteries.
This is compared to chemical lasers which run off of tanks of chemicals, several cold war anti-missile laser systems are what you can look to for references of what this category entails. They literally fire like an autocannon, you can even put the chemical canisters in a CASE system. Because they blow up if hit just like bullets, lol.
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Post by Carlos on Jul 20, 2014 13:24:06 GMT -6
Do Fuel Cells run out of, well, fuel? ;o
Sorry I didn't answer sooner Hector. I don't want to continue from the last Galactic Civs RP. But I do want to use a similar setup. With multiple player factions. And a strong NPC faction as a central authority.
I don't know if I want to go into every type of generator. ICE makes the most sense as an alternative.
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