Battletech BattleTech discussion thread: May the light of Hanse Davion guide us

[Bear Ribs]

Been having a bit of fun making steam-powered vehicles the long way, not really useful in most situations but if you have a really primitive society these could be useful.


A simple steam-powered motorbike designed for recon-in-force, the Blitzen comes with a sidecar that mounts a primitive machine gun. Its rugged design allows it good off-road capability despite the sidecar. The crew is exposed to both weather and enemy fire as the bike provides no protection. While not intended for heavy combat, Blitzens are fairly capable of delivering significant amounts of firepower in a pinch. Because the sidecar requires the machine gun to be mounted on the side, the bike squadrons are notorious for always driving counter-clockwise around enemy positions so as to be able to bring their machine guns to bear.

Blitzen Combat Patrol Bike

Wheeled Support Vehicle
Weight: 120 KG
Speed:  9/14 (Steam Engine)
Range:  128 Kilometers
Crew:   1 Driver, 1 Gunner

Cost: 1,743 Cbills
BV:   6


SI: 1
Armor Layout
No Armor

Weapon Layout
1 Semi-Portable Machine Gun (Right Pintle Mount)

Weight Breakdown (Kg)
13 Chassis
26 Engine
50 Pillion Seating (x2)
20 Machine Gun (Semi-Portable)
 2 Pintle Mount
 4 Ammunition
 1 Fuel
 4 Cargo

Notes:
Chassis Modifications: Ultralight, Off-Road, Bicycle (May enter light woods hexes)
Due to primitive fire control, the Blitzen suffers a +1 penalty to all attack rolls.

 

[Battlegrinder]

A steam powered motorcycle that can hit 120 kph.....was battletech secretly a steampunk setting this whole time? Now I want to do a battletech/Iron Havest crossover game.


In other news, I've got a game coming up this week. My new custom Ares, two Doloires, a peacekeeper and a malice. First time I've used a superheavy, and probably the first time my opponent has faced one. Building the record sheet for it required me to start learning how to use megamek, as mech factory isn't set up for superheavies or tripods yet.

Edit:

I also figured out* how to to paint mechs faster. Sorta, I figured it out a while ago and it just took ages to get the paint I needed. But anyway, by starting off with a layer of jokareo orange and then layering it with trollslayer, I can do what used to take several days in just a few hours. It's not a huge change, the main limit has always been how many mechs I can afford rather than home long it takes to paint them, but I can at least shift from doing 4 a month to about 6, which should shave a few months off of the project overall.



*IE, I read the thing on the GW paint app that tells you to do this.

 

[Bear Ribs]

A steam powered motorcycle that can hit 120 kph.....was battletech secretly a steampunk setting this whole time? Now I want to do a battletech/Iron Havest crossover game.


In other news, I've got a game coming up this week. My new custom Ares, two Doloires, a peacekeeper and a malice. First time I've used a superheavy, and probably the first time my opponent has faced one. Building the record sheet for it required me to start learning how to use megamek, as mech factory isn't set up for superheavies or tripods yet.

The seat actually weighs more than the engine for some reason. Anyhoo... posted a similar steamboat to this in Discord but discovered I made an error in the calculations, an exponent in one equation is 1.2, not 12, which I didn't notice since it was so small.

Also what kind of idiot uses decimal point exponents in calculating a tabletop game? That's making the math fairly ridiculous.

The Dander is a steam-powered riverboat intended for brown-water operations, capable of providing fire support to shore operations and engaging vessels in its own class. It has excellent range but due to never being far from shore, skimps on crew quarters on the assumption that frequent shore leaves are an option.

I'm somewhat surprised to find it actually has significantly lower BV than most tanks (and impressively low cBill costs for a superheavy), which it will be able to rip apart even with the serious demerit of being equipped with rifles that do decreased damage against combat vehicles and 'mechs.

Dander Class Armed Steamship

Naval Support Vehicle
Weight: 300 Tons
Speed: 3/5 (Steam Engine)
Range: 667 Kilometers
Crew: 3 Officers, 15 Enlisted

Cost: 1,570,085 cBills
BV 424

Armor: BAR 8 Tech Rating B
Internal Structure: 30

Armor Layout
24 Front
18 Sides
22 Turret
18 Rear

Weapon Layout
3x Heavy Rifle (Turret)
2x Light Rifle (Turret)
4x Machine Gun (1 Per Facing)

Weight Breakdown
108   Internal Structure
29.5 Steam Engine
  5.5 Fuel
12   Armor
94   Crew Quarters (Steerage for all but Captain & First Officer)
  5   Cargo Space
  3.5 Fire Control System

Weapons
3 Turret Weight
24 Heavy Rifle x3
  3 Tons Heavy Rifle Ammunition (36 Shots)
6 Light Rifle x2
  2 Tons Light Rifle Ammunition (36 Shots)
2  Machine Gun x4
  1 Ton Machine Gun Ammunition (200 Shots)

 

[Battlegrinder]

Darn it, now I have to figure out how to do vehicles in megamek and build a Monitor.

 

[Bear Ribs]

A monitor built in Megamek will go through a Dander class like a chainsaw through cardboard, Megamek doesn't use primitive support vessel rules for vehicles. Just to start you could slap about 90 tons of armor on a modern combat vehicle instead of the 12 tons my steamship maxes out at, and you'd get significantly more points per ton.

 

[PsihoKekec]

Dander will be able to outrun it though, in MMLab 300 ton naval displacement vehicle will be only able to do 1/2, any larger engine will outmass the vessel itself.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Dander will be able to outrun it though, in MMLab 300 ton naval displacement vehicle will be only able to do 1/2, any larger engine will outmass the vessel itself.

Hmm, that probably means another math error in my spreadsheet somewhere. I shouldn't be able to be that much lighter* even abusing the system. I'll have to double-check it later.

*The bike gets such a stupid-light engine by abusing how the rules work, since you multiply by tonnage at several points, having the entire thing be a fraction of a ton means you're basically dividing your weight rather than multiplying as the designers intended.

 

[Battlegrinder]

Wait, you're doing all this on a spreadsheet? That's impressive, I've barely managed to get anything made correctly when I do stuff outside the confines of an app or other toolkit.....that reminds me, I should check those Riesig protomechs I built by rebuilding them in MML, make sure I didn't botch something.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Yeah, there's no app I know of that will make primitive or support vehicles. The math is much more complex than regular BT vehicles are so I had to build my own spreadsheet for them.

 

[Battlegrinder]

Yeah, there's no app I know of that will make primitive or support vehicles. The math is much more complex than regular BT vehicles are so I had to build my own spreadsheet for them.

It's weird how a franchise as big and well known as battletech can sometimes be very dated, and other times not. Like, they don't have a unit construction app and thier official people to get decals from is FPG, a company run by like two guys in a shed doing this in thier free time with a website that hasn't been updated in 20 years, and other other hand they've got brand new video games coming out regularly and they have the new model line of very modern looking injection molded plastic mechs.

 

[Bear Ribs]

It's weird how a franchise as big and well known as battletech can sometimes be very dated, and other times not. Like, they don't have a unit construction app and thier official people to get decals from is FPG, a company run by like two guys in a shed doing this in thier free time with a website that hasn't been updated in 20 years, and other other hand they've got brand new video games coming out regularly and they have the new model line of very modern looking injection molded plastic mechs.

The rights to BT are split between companies. The different companies treat the franchise very differently, Microsoft is pretty gung-ho about keeping the video game franchise going and has been leasing out the rights to various companies to ensure there's a continuing stream of BT videogames there. Topps basically doesn't care and lets Catalyst do whatever after their failure to make BT work more like their bread-and-butter baseball cards via setting up 'mechs in random booster packs, which the fandom really didn't take to.

Catalyst seems to generally like really dense unparsable rulesets in general, the character generation rules they put in A Time of War are some of the most staggeringly obtuse I've ever seen in a game, only barely edged out by FATAL*. I'm pretty sure even Catalyst themselves can't actually parse the A Time of War rules because none of their sample characters use them.

The rules for primitive/support vehicles are particularly dense and wonky because the Good Idea Fairy paid a visit and convinced them to make a "unified ruleset" for every kind of possible vehicle at once, so everything from satellites to submarines to zeppelins to railroads to gigantor city-vehicles straight out of Mortal Engines uses the "same rules," and every technology level from early age of steam to bleeding-edge clantech also uses the "same rules." Except that doesn't remotely actually work so every one of them has a fat stack of special exceptions to look up at every turn, and many more obtuse exceptions to both the existing rules and all common sense put in entirely to make sure you can't make 'mechs look bad with your creations.

*That's not to say either can compete with HYBRID RPG but that's less an actual game and more a guy dealing with his mental illness.

 

[Aaron Fox]

@Bear Ribs, the thing is, what Catalyst has been doing is literally going through the mess that was the entirety of Battletech and making a 'canon' of rules out of it... then splitting them off into 'basic' and various flavors of advanced rules. There is an old Robotech v Battletech comic where we see a slimmed-down Shadow Chronicles DVD get crushed by Catalyst releasing the first version of their 'rule canon'. It's actually pretty funny.

... and to be honest, the more I hear about what happened back in the day about rules, the more I don't want to see that hot mess.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Now for a jeep. This is basically designed to give our steam-civilization access to motor-infantry. It gets you two support weapons per squad and enough cargo space to swap them out for various other support weapons as needed or carry spare kit.

The Crasher is a light jeep designed for fast troop transport. Two machine guns provide ample support firepower, however, its light armor is more suitable for warding off minor damage from rough terrain rather than dealing with serious firepower.

Variants: A Cargo Crasher also exists which carries only one passenger and no weapons, but has 759Kg of cargo space.

Crasher Steam Jeep

Wheeled Support Vehicle
Weight: 1500Kg
Speed: 6/9 (Steam Engine)
Range: 200 Kilometers
Crew: 1 Driver, 2 gunners, 5 Passengers

Cost: 8,238 Cbills
BV 7

Armor: BAR 2 Tech Rating A
Internal Structure: 1

Armor Layout
2 Front
2 Sides
1 Rear

Weapon Layout
Semi-Portable Machine Gun (Left Pintle Mount
Semi-Portable Machine Gun (Right Pintle Mount

Weight Breakdown (Kg)
144 Internal Structure
150 Steam Engine
  9 Fuel
280 Armor
600 Internal Seating (3 Crew, 5 Passenger)
253 Cargo

Weapons (Kg)
 4 Two Pintle Mounts
40 Semi-Portable Machine Gun x2
16 Ammunition
 4 Fire Control System


Notes: Vehicle suffers a +1 to-hit penalty due to primitive fire control system.  
Speed is reduced by 1 when not driving on pavement.

@Bear Ribs, the thing is, what Catalyst has been doing is literally going through the mess that was the entirety of Battletech and making a 'canon' of rules out of it... then splitting them off into 'basic' and various flavors of advanced rules. There is an old Robotech v Battletech comic where we see a slimmed-down Shadow Chronicles DVD get crushed by Catalyst releasing the first version of their 'rule canon'. It's actually pretty funny.

... and to be honest, the more I hear about what happened back in the day about rules, the more I don't want to see that hot mess.

Hmm, I have both AToW and 3rd edition, would anybody be interested in going through them and comparing them? Perhaps I've been too hard on it, as I never actually used the 3rd edition rules.

 

[S'task]

Catalyst seems to generally like really dense unparsable rulesets in general, the character generation rules they put in A Time of War are some of the most staggeringly obtuse I've ever seen in a game, only barely edged out by FATAL*. I'm pretty sure even Catalyst themselves can't actually parse the A Time of War rules because none of their sample characters use them.

There's a reason when my old gaming group wanted to do a tabletop RPG campaign set in the BattleTech setting we decided that it was simpler to functionally write a total conversion of the entire BattleTech ruleset into the Savage Worlds system... than try and figure out A Time of War.

Which we did, and it's awesome.

 

[bullethead]

Man, trying to do a Flashpoint for the HBS BattleTech game is a massive pain in the ass. There's one tutorial on how to do it, and its written by a guy who didn't take enough screencaps so an absolute noob could do it without having to constantly reference someone else's work. Doesn't help that the Flashpoint editor HBS gives you is clearly an internal tool, because it's un-user friendly as fuck.

 

[Battlegrinder]

I have a quick rules question. I'm working on a mixed tech varient of the new catapult K6, the one that mounts AES in order to boost the accuracy of the missiles. My first idea was to swap the ELRMs for streaks, however onx reflection, I had a better idea. Artemis V, for a net -2 to hit on the missiles.

Of course, that only works if Artemis and AES are compatible. I can't find anything that says they're not and mech factory will let me build a design with both, but I wanted to double check before unleashing this thing.

 

[Aaron Fox]

I have a quick rules question. I'm working on a mixed tech varient of the new catapult K6, the one that mounts AES in order to boost the accuracy of the missiles. My first idea was to swap the ELRMs for streaks, however onx reflection, I had a better idea. Artemis V, for a net -2 to hit on the missiles.

Of course, that only works if Artemis and AES are compatible. I can't find anything that says they're not and mech factory will let me build a design with both, but I wanted to double check before unleashing this thing.

Hm, interesting... so far I haven't found anything about the incompatibility but I could check on the BT discord later.

 

[Bear Ribs]

What is a Steam-powered world like without a Zeppelin? Not very steamy I'd say.

Cupid Class Support Steam Airship

The Cupid was originally designed as a cargo transport. Cupids carry over one hundred tons of cargo across uncharted wilderness or rough terrain where other primitive steam vehicles were unable to cross. The armament is minimal and mainly used to protect the vessel from looters while it's on the ground. Modern Cupids have been modified to drop bombs directly from their cargo bays.

Variants: A troop transport Cupid exists capable of carrying three infantry companies and a MASH unit. There is also a transport Cupid that carries two light vehicles.

This design is technically illegal due to having a bomb bay, when BT does not allow bomb bays on non-space capable craft. Although normally I'm a stickler for the rules, I consider that one of the stupider rules (yes, airplanes such as we've been using to drop bombs for decades are not allowed to have bombs by these rules) and I've elected to ignore it in this case.

There's no particular rules-reason I couldn't lard this thing down with heavy cannons like a battleship, it merely offends my aesthetic sensibilities a bit to have a blimp packing a battleship's main guns rather than dropping bombs and engaging other craft with machine guns.

Cupid Steam Airship Transport

Airship Support Vehicle
Weight: 250 Tons
Speed: 2/3 (Steam Engine)
Range: 800 Fuel Points
Crew: 1 Officer, 5 Enlisted

Cost: 496,275 Cbills
BV 89

Armor: BAR 5 Tech Rating B
Internal Structure: 5

Armor Layout
25 Front
22 Sides
18 Rear

Weapon Layout
Front 2 Machine Guns
Sides 1 Machine Gun
Rear 2 Machine Guns

Weight Breakdown (Tons)
 41   Internal Structure
 24   Steam Engine
 18   Fuel (800 Fuel Points)
  5.5 Armor
 32   Crew Quarters (5 Enlisted, 1 Officer)
125.5 Cargo

Weapons (Tons)
3 Machine Guns x6
1 Ton Machine Gun Ammo

Notes: Vehicle suffers a +2 to-hit penalty due to primitive fire control system.  
Has the "Bomb Bay" and "Difficult to Maintain" Quirks.
Vehicle consumes fuel points at half the rate of aerospace and conventional craft.

 

[Battlegrinder]

So, if anyone's looking to bulk up their mech roster, I found a great source:

The Mech Bay by TheMechBay

They're selling 3D printed mechs for about $5 each (though you need to order at least 4), and the quality is good. Not as good as the Aries I previously reviewed, but good.



The only issue I had was a few spots were only layer peeled away from the others, but it was very minor and likely just an issue with the heat here.

Most of the sculpts are the usual MWO model rips (which is my only point of substantial criticism. The Corsair model is just as detailed and greebly here as it is in MWO, and it just doesn't work at this scale), but they do have some models that are unique, such as the avatar, woodsman, and black python.

Here's how they came put once painted:



I've also been working on building up my collection of offical mechs. Here's my new war crow, which was a joy to assemble:


And my trio of thunderbolts, where were not nearly as fun (though better the vulture mk IV, which is the worst model I've ever had to work with):



I do like how the designers and redesigned of the Thunderbolt just refuse to pick which should the missile pods goes on, and constantly switch between them (you can assemble the the primitive Thunderbolt with it on either, but the canonical configuration has it on the right).

 

[Aaron Fox]

Funny thing, a good portion of my 'mech company is made up of 'mechs from Mech Lab. Too bad that the mail services tend to get them damaged though... or send them to fucking Morocco (or so I remember).