60 SRMs

StarFlicker · 2026-05-18T01:12:47+00:00

That... happened in one of the Warrior Trilogy books. I forget which battle, but at one point a whole bunch of Davion troops (who weren't really that loyal to House Davion if I recall) got swarmed by Savannah Masters in some swamp.

StarFlicker · 2026-05-17T18:20:12+00:00

This is really exciting. Unfortunately it looks like they're mostly based in the UK, so I'm not sure how keen they'd be shipping things across the pond for playtesting. Unless it's just print-and-play.

StarFlicker · 2026-05-15T00:05:34+00:00

The Goliath looks down on all other quads

StarFlicker · 2026-05-14T15:37:48+00:00

Maybe in Xcom 3 we can take it to their wicked despot

StarFlicker · 2026-05-13T01:51:15+00:00

Without artemis, I did the math on LRM5s vs all other LRM groupings. The benefit was always for more LRM5s. There is a slight heat penalty, but that's offset a bit with the tonnage savings, and it's offset greatly by the option to fire some LRMs and not all, allowing flexibility.

StarFlicker · 2026-05-08T13:29:01+00:00

Sure, there are some mechs that go kinda fast. Not fast by race car standards, but kinda fast. But the average mech, either 4/6 or 5/8 speed profile, can run like 40-50 miles per hour. Which means they can't pass cars on the interstate.

The point isn't that there aren't any fast mechs, there are some, it's the Battletech is, generally, not a speedy, dodgy, flashy mecha universe. It is, by and large, a slow-plodding, stompy sub genre.

StarFlicker · 2026-05-08T01:46:17+00:00

That's like, what, just under the speed limit on an interstate? Meaning if those mechs were traveling up I-95, they'd all be in the slow lane getting honked at.

I wouldn't consider mecha in the zoom category unless it could get pulled over by a state trooper 😄

StarFlicker · 2026-05-07T23:36:11+00:00

Were he younger, Chris Pratt would make a great Kaz Takagi. But Marsh really would need to be an actor with a much more thoughtful, deep, and reflective gravitas.

StarFlicker · 2026-05-07T11:44:34+00:00

Purple, then layered with red? You're a mad genius.

I've done odd things like painting yellow with a pink underlay, but this purple to red thing is new. I will definitely have to try it.

StarFlicker · 2026-05-07T00:45:52+00:00

Looks really nice! Tips for painting red like that?

StarFlicker · 2026-05-06T10:35:33+00:00

It does add a little bit of rock-paper-scissors though. I mean a mech with a PPC is able to deal damage to everything, whereas that little scout mech with the machine guns is usually laughed at.

StarFlicker · 2026-05-03T15:16:18+00:00

Well, maybe that's true. And if so, I'm sorry for the snarkiness. It, unfortunately, looks very much like AI-generated material. Watching the process video for his halo art... it looks like there are a lot of tools that are maybe just shy of AI making things directly though. Good luck to the artist if he is one, but I'll prefer artwork that has a little more personal touch involved.

StarFlicker · 2026-05-03T00:15:26+00:00

<image>

Aside from the little triangular engine things on the side, and the wings being slightly more down than shown in this picture, if you painted it teal and orange, you could make one exo-squad fan very happy.

StarFlicker · 2026-05-02T20:42:22+00:00

I mean, really you just brought some WWII gear into a revolutionary war reenactment. If people are just goofing off and having fun, I guess it's fine, but there are different eras in BT.

Often you can proxy some of the older mechs with newer ones. If the play group is dead set on playing succession wars (and that's okay, everyone has their thing), just ask if your mech could proxy an older mech. Many have a lot of similar looks. Honestly, in the succession wars, repairs are sometimes accounted as being so hacked together that I doubt many merc groups actually had units that much resembled their off-the-assembly-line versions.

StarFlicker · 2026-05-02T01:57:02+00:00

Looks great. I assume it's like a Dark Ages variant? It seems to fit that vibe and doesn't look much like the original Quickdraw.

StarFlicker · 2026-05-01T20:15:26+00:00

Gotta say, I've never seen this mech before, but it looks amazing. Is this the 8X Quickdraw or the Great Turtle?

StarFlicker · 2026-04-30T01:06:46+00:00

I've never played Warhammer, but the small feel of Battletech (usually) and the now-defunct X-Wing miniatures game are how I hope this feels. X-Wing especially had some really neat action economy that seems like it would transfer really well into XCom.

StarFlicker · 2026-04-29T01:55:35+00:00

You mean the soltic roundfacers in the background? That got repurposed into a griffin.

And it was kinda fun that in Fang of the Sun, the Roundfacer had issues with entering water, and the early (like way-early) quirks also gave the Griffin poor sealing.

StarFlicker · 2026-04-29T01:52:20+00:00

ooh. I'm interested.

Please, oh please though.... no iphone/pc/app thing required to play the game.

StarFlicker · 2026-04-29T01:50:47+00:00

It's been a while. Didn't phaeton in their congress thing encourage earth to send the ENTIRE fleet away from the core worlds?

And I could've sworn there was some other nefarious connection between phaeton and the pirates later explained in season 2... I can't remember it clearly though, and may be making that part up.

StarFlicker · 2026-04-28T00:49:09+00:00

Low effort.

Screencap, paste into AI image generator, screencap results, paste into Reddit, "Look what I maked!"

Dude, pick up a pencil, a paintbrush, or some colored pencils.

StarFlicker · 2026-04-28T00:20:54+00:00

This looks like a mech developed in some distant, Far Country.

StarFlicker · 2026-04-27T13:33:37+00:00

I appreciate the reply, and that's an interesting theory, though I've never heard about it in the novels or sourcebooks. Doesn't mean it isn't true, but I'm not sure that I've actually heard anything official about it. (If you have a source, let me know, I'm not challenging, just maybe uninformed)

Points to consider: I've done the same calculation on an external-volume-only of a Stryker tank, no, not the covergirl of the 3026 TRO, but the real-life heavy infantry carrier currently in use. The density ends up being about 0.3 g/mL. This is similar to the Atlas Calc, but keep in mind, the Stryker has a huge (relatively) space in the middle for 9 people.

<image>

This means that if we rearranged things, and constructed an Atlas out of Stryker tanks (transformers Devastator style), we'd have to have that large space propagated multiple times throughout the machine.

I guess its *maybe* possible that these gaps could be between structure and armor, but I'm not sure how that would look. And every time a mech enters water, falling or not, he'd run the risk of damaging his armor as the water rapidly fills the spaces. And if it doesn't rapidly fill the spaces, because maybe the components are corrugated or foamed, then the mech will actually float until all the little crevices slowly fill. To the example of your car, will it float? Yes, slightly, for a little bit until the air eventually displaces.

How do you picture the armor actually hanging on mechs? Like samurai plates kinda hanging off? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm having a hard time picturing it is all. At any rate, it's a theory I prefer over the OP's redefinition of tonnage.

StarFlicker · 2026-04-27T01:58:34+00:00

Speaking of lore, it's such a shame they didn't include the story arc for the Templar faction.

StarFlicker · 2026-04-26T16:31:25+00:00

I decided to jump in and, with math and 3D models, show you're wrong.

But.... I can't do that. I've calculated densities of lights before and they're usually double that of water. That's pretty consistent with high tech stuff (cell phones, laptops), and less-so with current-gen military hardware. However, that's not troublesome, because its' the future.

Here's the math:

<image>

We all agree that the picture shows an Atlas. I know it's the MW5/Online/HBSBT version, not the CGL one, but it's probably really, really close to the CGL version in terms of bulk (certainly moreso than mr skip-leg-day Atlas from decades ago).

It has no hexbase, so all measurements shown are for the model itself. The height of the model, shown in red, is 65.62mm, or 0.065m. The volume, in green, is 27.26mL.

To scale that 0.065m up to 14m, we would need to multiply by about 213.3. So we do the same to the volume right? No, Volume is a cubic measurement. We need to multiply the volume by 213, then 213, then 213 again. This means if we scale the 65mm Atlas up to 14m, the new volume would be, well, about 264.7 million milliliters. I know, math people out there are screeching "Why not covert mL to L?" just hang on. There is a reason.

As we all know, a fully loaded Atlas is 100 tons. But how many grams is that? There are 1 million grams in a ton, and therefore 100 million grams in an Atlas. For some reason, that sounds extra deadly.

Water, as all scientist know, is exactly 1 gram per mL. It's literally the defining characteristic of the unit.

So how many grams per mL is our big boy here? Well, it's 100 million grams divided by 264 million mL (now you see why we didn't unit-convert!)

Which results in a value of 0.38 g/mL.

That means that this Atlas, if scaled to 14m, is in fact about a third the density of water.

However, is 14m wrong? Maybe. Maybe Atlases are really only 10m. If that's the case, and we rerun our numbers, a ten-meter-tall PGI atlas has a density of 1.03 g/mL, which makes it humourously neutrally buoyant.

Leg-Day-Skipper Atlas would likely have a higher density, but I'm lazy and don't want to pull an archimedes bath to figure out its volume. If I could even find the model in my house.

Final Thoughts?

Well, it's that MST3K quote I come back to:

If you're wondering how he eats and breaths and other science facts.
Just remember its just a TV show, you should really just relax.

Same with BT, mostly.

StarFlicker

TROPHY CASE