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Knowledgeispower

Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
Again, the key problem with restarting Highlander production is that the tooling is buried under thousands of tons of radioactive rubble. Getting at it is possible, but would be both time-consuming and expensive.

We have the benefit of knowing that a lot of the production facilities are actually intact because they managed to stand production back up. In universe, they don’t know that. So playing around on Son Hoa is a big risk with a questionable reward.

On the other hand, once the new Longbow is in production, Szabó’s goal is to get the King Crab going again. He has the ruins of the line on Loburg, but he needs more info than he’s got there, which means a fishing expedition to Son Hoa to see if any part of that line survived. At which point, they learn that quite a lot of the facility there is salvageable. Not everything, by any means, but enough that they can fill in the gaps and get production restored, as in Canon.
And as per canon the Highlander and Emperor do renter production as well albeit not till the late 3050s. Mind you the new Longbow variant kinda does the same job as the Emperor for cheaper
 

Knowledgeispower

Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
For what reason? Forgive me but I haven't done tabletop. I never have gotten into that. Heck Bruce Quest was really my introduction into the setting
 

PsihoKekec

Swashbuckling Accountant
For what reason?
Because rolling hits for double LB-20X, when using cluster ammo, takes forever as you have to roll the dice for location of every pellet that hits, best leave that for computer versions of the game.
And while 5 and 20 class autocannons have their uses, LB-10X is indeed the optimal blend of range, weight and hitting power albeit in the TT, weight and crit wise you can't exchange 20s and 10 in 1:2 ratio (haven't played MWO in a long time)
 

Doomsought

Well-known member
True but the King Crab is known for twin AC/20s so giving them longer range can't hurt
A Thumper Artillery Piece weighs a ton more than an AC-20, has 4 times as much ammo per ton and deals 15 damage in 4 point clusters. Also, it would appeal strongly the the "Bigger is better" attitude that many Lyran nobles, while also incentivizing them to lead from the rear. I'd go ahead and add a command console to the cockpit, and skip the LRMs because you have much longer ranged weapons.
It would require fifteen double heat sinks, but add some jump jets and a cockpit command console and your have a very solid command/artillery mech.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
A Thumper Artillery Piece weighs a ton more than an AC-20, has 4 times as much ammo per ton and deals 15 damage in 4 point clusters. Also, it would appeal strongly the the "Bigger is better" attitude that many Lyran nobles, while also incentivizing them to lead from the rear. I'd go ahead and add a command console to the cockpit, and skip the LRMs because you have much longer ranged weapons.
It would require fifteen double heat sinks, but add some jump jets and a cockpit command console and your have a very solid command/artillery mech.
It also takes up 15 crit spaces which is difficult to put on a 'mech and requires splitting between locations. That leaves the 'mech vulnerable on that side. You also lose the use of one arm and its ability to fire into the arm arc or behind the 'mech.
 

Atarlost

Well-known member
Building construction factors are level 3 optional rules that are not used in tournament play
I was under the impression that everything in Total Warfare was the standard rules. They start on page 166 and while there's a note that more advanced rules are coming in Tactical Operations I see nothing to say that the rules in Total Warfare are not the standard rules. In any case, this is a narrative not a tournament. The rules provide the setting detail that buildings in the setting are not universally built to support arbitrarily large weights on their roofs by providing rules for buildings that are not.

That's light cavalry. Heavy cavalry is for riding right over your lines in a welter of gore.
If that were what defined heavy cavalry the Highlander is not. With an LRM-20 and a Gauss Rifle that's every bit as much a sniper as the original Longbow. Using this definition thus invalidates your precedent for calling a 3/5/3 mech heavy cavalry. To me, the obvious conclusion is that whoever wrote that description of the Highlander had no clue what he was talking about. Sometimes FASA or Catalyst writers or freelancers make serious errors because they don't know what they're talking about and it doesn't get caught by editors who are also do not. If it was in the original publication of the Highlander laypeople simply didn't have the easy access to high quality military history that they do today.

The defining characteristic of cavalry is classically being on a horse, which obviously does not apply. The analogous definition when calling armored formations cavalry is being mobile over open terrain. The common line of battle mechs that have displaced infantry as the queen of battles are 4/6 slow mediums and lights like the Panther, Vindicator, Enforcer, and Centurion and for the Lyrans smaller heavies like the Thunderbolt. Calling a mech as slow or slower than these cavalry because it is designed for shock requires ignoring that shock infantry has been a thing for most of history until the widespread adoption of magazine rifles and smokeless powder, which is also when heavy cavalry stopped using that definition because running over enemy lines in a welter of gore stopped being achievable.

Any building insufficiently reinforced for it to walk on the rooftops is insufficiently reinforced to prevent it from playing Kool-Aid man and "Oh, yeah!"-ing right out the side for much the same result. And any decently old city in the Inner Sphere (which is most of them) is going to have a solid core of Star League era buildings that will be reinforced enough for roof hopping. The whole point of reconnaissance or planning is to discover/determine good ambush positions and attack routes that you can make use of.

If you could play Kool-Aid Man your jumpjets would not be enhancing your urban mobility because playing Kool-Aid Man does not use jumpjets. Either the risks are significant and being able to smash through buildings is not a substitute for being able to get over them or on top of them, or they're not significant. Jumpjets are exactly as significant to mobility through an urban environment as the downsides of simply barging through buildings.

Reconnaissance is not very helpful for determining which buildings it is safe to jump on unless it involves infiltrating the city planning office and getting copies of all the blueprints because the structural strength of a building is not likely to be apparent without detailed inspection by a civil engineer. And presuming that none of the buildings you expect to simply walk through have been renovated without permit to support something heavy high up or any you plan to jump on built below spec by the lowest bidder. The only way to be sure is to see a hostile mech of the same weight standing on top and that's not likely to happen since I think the heaviest jumper still in production is the Grasshopper.
 

Simonbob

Well-known member
90 tons and nobody has made it since the Mariks nuked the production facility during the 2nd Succession War

From Sana.

As with other Star League era designs the Highlander would suffer the loss of technology brought about by the Succession Wars, and when StarCorps' factory on Son Hoa was devastated towards the end of the Second Succession War the original HGN-732 became virtually extinct. An agreement between StarCorps and Hollis Incorporated to rebuild destroyed chassis from scratch using readily-available technology kept the line going until the mid-3030s when limited production was restarted by StarCorps on Son Hoa and Corey, producing barely a dozen new 'Mechs per year. These HGN-733 Highlanders were used in small numbers by the Capellan Confederation and Lyran Commonwealth, commonly as part of lances containing Exterminators, Victors, Grasshoppers and Catapults.[4][1][7]


You are right that it's a 90 tonner. However, it stopped production on Son Hoa, in the Lyran Commonwealth.
 

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