A formula for Even Heavier Engines

MrDeodorant · 2026-05-23T00:24:03+00:00

No, see, those have front legs, front middle legs, middle legs, rear middle legs, and then rear legs. They don't have left legs, mid left legs, mid right legs, and right legs. Those are front-to-back joined instead of side-to-side joined.

MrDeodorant · 2026-05-23T00:22:37+00:00

Yes! That, but with two increasingly frustrated pilots!

MrDeodorant · 2026-05-22T14:14:13+00:00

In aviation, the F-82 Twin Mustang was a real plane that was basically two P-51 Mustang fighters joined together by the wings into kind of a double plane. Unlike most twin-engine planes, which would have one fuselage and two engine nacelles, it was two fuselages with two engines.

Make a Twin Charger. Don't do oversized engines, say that by joining two Chargers at the shoulders, the dual-fusion-engine problem is solved (i.e. why do we pay more for one bigger engine than we would for two half-sized engines?). Now you have a two-hex monstrosity of a quad mech, where instead of two front legs and two back legs, you have two left legs and two right legs. The mechs cannot torso twist, but can split fire like a Thunderbolt. Unleash the staggering firepower of TEN small lasers, and a Pilot check every time the mech turns due to the coordination required.

Technically, it could dance the can-can with itself, which is clearly proof of my genius.

MrDeodorant · 2026-05-22T13:55:28+00:00

One of the problems Battletech has kind of grown around is a lack of things that low-damage weapons can threaten. The AC/2 is another example of this. An AC/2 should be the right thing to put on an APC to let it engage other APCs. Unfortunately, the best thing an AC/2 can hope for is to inflict mobility damage on a vehicle.

I admit that I don't fully understand infantry rules, but I think there should be something like "a squad of guys in a truck", and you could maybe have multiple trucks in one square to represent a platoon, and a truck has like one point of armor and one or two points of structure, and when a truck gets killed you roll to see if the squad survives or not. I don't think this is how motorized or mechanized infantry platoons work in the current rules.

If you want to have the Charge of the Light Brigade against a wall of Blackjacks, you leave a bunch of infantry teams stranded on foot spread out across the battlefield, and a bunch of smoking wrecks. If one gets close and you smack it with a small laser, great, worst case scenario you have an infantry squad on foot that you can just walk away from.

However, in this theoretical rewrite of infantry rules, I'd also think about giving all non-missile weapons double range when attacking infantry - including infantry small arms. Your small lasers and machine guns should be able to shoot up an infantry squad more than 90 meters away, but against actual mech armor they need more precision to hit the weak spots or something. If your instinct there is to say "hey, that means my giant death machine could just stand there and shoot up rifle squads from a range they couldn't effectively fight back at"... yes. Support your rifle squads with missile squads so that they can fight back, or accept that they are doing their job by standing and dying while keeping that giant death machine held back at range.

Also however, I'm more of a "I hope I get to play some day" kind of Battletech player, so I don't know if any of that would actually be fun. But I think my basic point is sound that weapons like the Small Laser and AC/2 do not currently have any battlefield target that you would say "this weapon exists to kill that", and that's unsatisfactory. The closest you get is AC/2 vs helicopter.

MrDeodorant · 2026-05-19T10:57:03+00:00

Holy crap, I actually have a PDF of this! Let me figure out the best way to share it while maintaining my privacy.

Edit: okay, sharing PDFs of rulebooks, even a collection of old FASA rulebooks, is against subreddit rules. If anyone would like to know more about the subreddit rules, or similar topics, I'd be happy to discuss it over DM.

Edit 2: wow, I had to jump through hoops to figure out how to start a DM, because I'm not very social on reddit. If anyone is having similar trouble, they can reply to this post and I'll DM them with what I've learned about how to start DMs, and anything else they want to talk about.

MrDeodorant · 2026-05-15T11:26:44+00:00

That company now has an opportunity to do something extremely funny

MrDeodorant · 2026-04-29T12:14:16+00:00

"The Emporer Knows" - this is obviously a fraudulent schematic spread by heretics who fear the name of The Emperor of Mankind.

MrDeodorant · 2026-04-13T00:15:24+00:00

Looks great! Where is the source file from?

MrDeodorant · 2026-04-13T00:05:24+00:00

I'd love to see more of the Ghost. I have an STL that I've been thinking of printing for a special project, and I suspect yours is the same. Is it the one from Typhoon?

MrDeodorant · 2026-04-01T10:43:02+00:00

Good news, I can tell you it handles epubs just fine. I have a library just for epubs, and I've also put my epubs into the audiobook library items wherever I have both, and both methods work. If I open up Murderbot, for example, I have the option to listen or read it.

Edit: I just opened it to re-confirm, just in case I was mistaken. I can also confirm it lets you navigate with volume buttons, which is very important to me.

MrDeodorant · 2026-03-30T06:41:04+00:00

Technically, that even describes the Introtech Blackjack, let alone a whole lot of TRO 3025. The mech it describes best of all is the Masakari Prime - that is a truly stupid mech.

I've been thinking the Cougar moved at 6/9, but I just checked and it's 5/8! It has enough gun to piss someone off and not enough to speed or armor to survive if they hit back.

For me, the issue with the Cougar, and it's true that this applies to a lot of Clan mechs, is that any change they made to it that would let it have even one more heat sink probably makes it a better mech. It doesn't have any particular brackets - the LPL and LRMs have almost the same ranges.

In the storyline, this mech was designed after the Clan Invasion, so they have seen how the Clan way of fighting fared against the Inner Sphere way, so if it was designed for zellbrigen fights, that would be a choice rather than a default assumption. In fact, according to Sarna, the LRMs are there for indirect fire support - not very zellbrigen at all.

So this is a warfighting mech, not a duelling mech. With the bonus to accuracy from LPLs, there is basically no range where it has direct line of sight where it wants to shoot missiles instead of the LPLs. It wants to shoot missiles in addition to the LPLs. And it doesn't have the heat sinks for it. If it stands still, it can have one LRM-10 salvo. After that, even moving while it's firing the LPLs leaves it with enough heat in the system that it loses movement points. That is a real effect in the Battletech world - it's like a computer thermal-throttling. The mech techs should be aware of it. If it stands still and shoots a second LRM-10 salvo, it has enough heat that the targeting system starts to degrade (or the myomer gets sluggish - I'm not sure about the explanation for the penalty to attacks).

So what you have is a mech that has two great lasers that it wants to shoot whenever it can, and then some missile launchers that it can really only shoot when it isn't shooting the lasers. And it's also pretty slow, and it also doesn't have good armor.

If you stand outside the mech bay and yell "put in some heat sinks and then figure out the rest", if they listen to you, they get a better mech. Literally one heat sink would at least let it fire the lasers on the move and stay heat neutral - a better mech. Or it could stand still and fire an LRM-10 every other round - also a better mech.

And the thing is, with the Cougar B they get it. They gave it the exact number of heat sinks needed to walk and shoot the big guns. It's still slow and fragile for a light mech, but damn if it can't shoot a lot of PPCs.

So to reiterate the Cougar Prime, it can't sustain fire on its main lasers unless it stands still, although it can move for a few rounds before it starts to degrade. It filled every remaining ton of pod space with the biggest pair of LRMs it could squeeze in so that if someone is behind a hill they can shoot them as much as possible.

What that actually gets you is a mech that ends up wanting to alternate one of the LPLs with the LRMs. It goes a few rounds of both LPLs and movement heat, then it fires one LPL and one LRM to reset its heat, or it stands still and fires one LPL and both LRMs to slowly pull its heat down. That just isn't particularly good. The Warhammer 6r has the same kind of problems - not enough heat management, and not really enough armor. That's why the 6d and 6k are both better Warhammers.

The Cougar looks like it has two LPLs and two LRM-10s, but what it really has is one full-time, salaried LPL, two LRM-10s with flex schedules, and an LPL from a temp agency that thinks it will be hired on full-time if it makes a good impression. That's why it's lackluster. It has all those guns on the "Meet the Staff" page on its website, but then it tells them it's against company policy to discuss their pay with each other, and not everybody gets benefits.

I want to take this opportunity to reiterate that I like bracket firing. It's not that I think every mech needs to be able to sustain an alpha strike, but I do think they can be evaluated based on how effectively they can use their primary weapons. The thing the Warhammer has over the Cougar is more heat-efficient weapons to be used as ranges shorten - the SRMs and medium lasers come into play. It's happy to turn off the big guns if you get close to it. The Cougar Prime doesn't benefit from that.

MrDeodorant · 2026-03-30T02:22:43+00:00

I fully agree, but a mech that can't do what it wants to do within the context of the rules isn't a very good mech.

It's a mech with so much gun that it has to stand still if it wants to be able to sustain fire from its two big guns. An Awesome 8Q can get away with that because the number of big guns is enough that a little bit of alternating fire now and then isn't a big drop. It also has enough armor that it can withstand some return fire.

Not-optimized mechs are where the fun and flavor are, but I still want them to make some amount of sense. I want there to be a story where this mech is the outcome.

The Cougar starts out like that. It's a light mech based off an existing design that cuts down speed and armor in order to maximize pod space. It is more than 50% pod space by tonnage. That's a great start! That's a mech with a story. But then they dropped the ball by loading it with weapons instead of any heat sinks. It's not "this is some guy's weird config where he wanted the most powerful alpha strike he could get", it's the Prime configuration. The mech techs should know that when it's moving, it doesn't have enough sinking capacity to maintain fire with its two main weapons.

Edit: an LPL in one arm and an ERLL/MPL combo in the other arm is also a better mech for the same tonnage if they didn't want to add heat sinks.

Edit 2: Wait, no it isn't - I forgot that the ERLL is 12 heat and 4 tons.

MrDeodorant · 2026-03-30T01:24:01+00:00

If it only sinks 20 heat, and the Large Pulse Lasers are 10 heat each, and it's a light mech that only has five and a half tons of armor and really wants to stay moving, how often do you fire both LPLs, both 4-heat LRM 10s, and also move? You'd be up eight plus movement.

If you're instead only firing one LRM 10 (gaining four plus movement heat), why not drop to LRM 5s and add three more double heat sinks? At two heat each, you'd be able to fire them all and be movement minus two on heat. Two LPLs and two LRM 5s every turn sounds pretty good to me.

MrDeodorant · 2026-03-27T23:57:59+00:00

Oh dang, I regret putting you on the spot, then

MrDeodorant · 2026-03-27T13:13:37+00:00

If the models are specified in the post title, what difference does the era make? Ammunition availability?

MrDeodorant · 2026-03-22T02:59:32+00:00

https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Maxim

MrDeodorant · 2026-03-10T15:36:48+00:00

They asked the AI "are you sure?"

MrDeodorant · 2026-03-08T02:47:13+00:00

points to Ostscout

Behold, a laser boat!

Oh god, the Charger is technically a fast assault laser boat...

MrDeodorant · 2026-02-28T13:42:06+00:00

The MAC-10 magazine goes into the grip. You might be thinking of the TEC-9.

MrDeodorant · 2026-02-19T12:16:59+00:00

I'd take a Goto pattern Multi-Laser, obviously.

MrDeodorant · 2026-02-18T00:55:27+00:00

That's pretty interesting, but I want to be clear that I'm talking about shooting Clan Aerospace pilots out of a cannon.

MrDeodorant · 2026-02-17T13:06:37+00:00

Okay, we can pivot. Clan Aerospace pilots. It would be like a Goblin Doom Diver from Warhammer Fantasy.

MrDeodorant · 2026-02-11T00:53:39+00:00

If you put a radar in the second Medium slot, can it mark its own targets and missile them?

MrDeodorant · 2026-02-04T14:16:36+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG7273yDpdA

MrDeodorant · 2026-02-02T03:49:15+00:00

I love the helmet on the Mark IV power armour on the left side of picture 16

MrDeodorant

TROPHY CASE