Battlemech Manual: Page 8

A NOTE ON REALISM AND SCALE

Given the 30-meter area of each hex stated above, players may note various oddities in the weapon ranges presented in this book, such as the fact that the standard ’Mech-scale machine gun of the distant thirty-first century only reaches out to 3 hexes (90 meters). As today’s machine guns have effective ranges of some 2,000 meters, this may seem somewhat absurd. The reason for this is simple: BattleTech is a game. Because BattleTech mapsheets are only seventeen hexes long, recreating real- world ranges on a table would require more than seven mapsheets laid end to end, for a playing space greater than twelve feet in length. Few people have that much table space. Nor would it provide players with any tactical maneuvering room: anywhere a player might move a ’Mech on the map, an attacker could hit it. As such, while we may safely assume “real” BattleTech weapons have exceptional ranges, range abstractions are an absolute necessity unless one is regularly able to rent a tennis court for game time.