• Philosophosphorous [comrade/them, null/void]
    ·
    7 hours ago

    the Atlas is basically too slow (48 km/h or so) to be useful in mechwarrior 5 imo, you get better performance if you take a Battlemaster (about 64 km/h) and move all its rear armor to the front. set the 4 medium lasers in the chest to chainfire instead of all at once and you will have excellent damage output without a risk of overheating, while your left arm MGs blast away with negligible heat buildup and your shoulder SRM can be saved to finish off damaged enemies. (LRMs are heavy and useless against lighter/faster enemies since they will close to within your minimum range, they don't even do great damage ime at their optimal range unless your entire AI squad is LRM carriers and you are their spotter)

    also i hate the transparent cockpit designs on battletech mechs, they should either have remote operated camera pods or tank-style periscopes unless they are particularly lightweight imo. the setting makes the mechs out to be ancient storied machines that no one knows how to build anymore, passed down through generations of space feudalism and kept barely functional, but they all look like freshly mass produced clean 1980's angular space robots. they should have like clan banners and family names and engravings and retrofit low-tech parts and stuff if the lore is meant to be at all meaningful.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
      ·
      6 hours ago

      the setting makes the mechs out to be ancient storied machines that no one knows how to build anymore, passed down through generations of space feudalism and kept barely functional, but they all look like freshly mass produced clean 1980's angular space robots. they should have like clan banners and family names and engravings and retrofit low-tech parts and stuff if the lore is meant to be at all meaningful.

      I think some of the early novels did play into a little of that, although not that creatively, and then the setting moved into a sort of renaissance where they were producing new mechs en masse. It also never quite got to the "mechs are relics" state, because even before that renaissance there were still factories churning them out and standing armies of them.

      It's pretty incoherent, overall.