Tell The World That We Tried (Battletech CYOA) (Complete)

On the nature of Rifles, while it isn't technically canon, XTRO: 1945 lists WWII era tanks as mounting Light and Medium Rifles for anyone who is crazy enough to want to use them alongside standard BT units (vs. other WWII units, they ignore BAR and similar rules, IIRC).
 
The thing is, the start of the things you need to make it work are already there in the published material!

I refer, of course, to the mystic kung-fu bullshit. Of course mechs are better, their humanoid form can channel the soul of the pilot! Which is also why they work best operated by a single person, why they team up in small squads where each member has a different mech, and why mech-based piracy is so effective. Seriously, you can load up a dropship with tanks and loaded IFVs, but a lance of mechs with boisterous swagger and eyepatches will be twice as effective at plundering the booty. I dunno, chi flows through myomer perhaps.
This obviously has the follow on effect that the only viable method for tanks to compete is if they are sufficiently feng shui.
 
On the nature of Rifles, while it isn't technically canon, XTRO: 1945 lists WWII era tanks as mounting Light and Medium Rifles for anyone who is crazy enough to want to use them alongside standard BT units (vs. other WWII units, they ignore BAR and similar rules, IIRC).

Regarding rifles and why many modern tanks don't use them: Rifling matters when your main weapon fires a closely fitted projectile, because the spin imparted makes the projectile more stable in flight and thus more accurate over longer ranges. The standard projectile in modern tank warfare however is an Armour Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot projectile, a long rod thinner than the gun's bore that uses a filler to catch and impart the impulse of the detonation while in the barrel, and then discards it on exiting. It's also not spin stabilized, but uses those fins to maintain its stability and thus course.

As such, having a closely fitted, smooth bore barrel so that no propellant leaks is much more beneficial than the spin imparted by rifling the barrel.
 
You can't really compare BT and real life weapons. BT is a setting written - with a lot of crutches and cheap "fixes" - with one goal: "'Mechs are the kings of the battlefield". That isn't true for our reality, where, given tech parity, a tank would eat 'Mechs for breakfast and engagement ranges are far, far longer.

I remember reading an "unofficial" statement by one of the developers about range once, that they made it "game-friendly" by just dividing all ranges by 10.
So "out of game", that's where the fluff is meant to be.

And no, there are several ways that mechs COULD be vastly superior to tanks, it's just that the requisites for that currently does not exist.
Basically, 4 things.
First of all, ablative armour. Which i might add is under development in the real world, and if they ever get it to work as intended, may make current tanks potentially obsolete overnight. Most extreme successful test so far, a few cm of armour completely stopped a sabot round from a T-90 12.5cm gun. Of course, the fact that THAT type of armour also explodes >9 times out of 10 when hit is why it's not exactly the best route of development, to say the least. But still, the level of protection it can provide is absurd if they ever get it usefully functional. This kind of armour would make the "armoured box" drastically less of a requirement, as you would no longer have to have massively deep armour that weighs horribly much to get enough protection. And once 10cm armour is better than 40cm, a HUGE chunk of the advantage of tanks over "others" disappears or are negated.

Second comes compartmentalisation. Something that already exists, but which is very difficult to take any further on tanks, as generally, anything that penetrates the outer armour will also penetrate any internal "bulkheads", and if you can get the above armour, or something like it(like the soon to arrive superfacehardened materials that may raise current armour levels by a magnitude all by themselves), secondary damage is suddenly going to become an extremely important issue, and something that consists of multiple parts, like something humanoid, is drastically more easy to basically apply "CASE" to.

Third is the need for better "propulsion" and powerplants. There's a bundle of developments in that area already happening, and some of the memorymetal projects could very well end up being good enough to make mechs drastically more realistic. Powerplants isn't quite as important, but would make a huge difference if good enough. Powerplants however is the one development that isn't really going much of anywhere currently.

And THE most important tech, man-machine interface. Because the fact that the games completely ignore is that BT mechs are supposed to be effectively an extension of the pilot and commonly be as mobile, agile and even graceful as a human, this is THE one thing that could potentially all by itself make mechs realistic, as having a single person in superior control of what amounts to a walking tank, that is a BIG thing, all tanks you can ever find in reality, they all have inherent delays built in, something a mech wouldn't have or would shave off >90% of. A very simple example would be the fact that a decent pilot could actually dodge a tank shooting at it, because the tank would lase it to get accurate rangedata, which a sensor on the mech would detect, and unlike with a tank, there wouldn't be a few/several seconds of reaction delay between "oh shit someone is about to shoot at me" and "DODGE!".
And the amount of research done into direct interfacing is MASSIVE. There's all kinds of projects ongoing, even if most of them are medical, they're still happening and there does seem to be a fair chance that a workable direct interface may one day be realistic. And because it's been shown that while the brain is very good at adapting, it is extremely much more easy to adapt to something that acts similar to it expects, humanoid shapes would likely be highly preferable.


So, basically, with all the research already in progress? We could potentially be less than a decade from mechs being completely disadvantaged in every way except for x-terrain mobility, changing into being outright superior to tanks. Not bloody likely, but if key progress was made in enough of the developments already underway, it is amazingly possible. Point being, that tanks are totally superior only as long as the current tech paradigm remains unchanged, and it might not. In fact, with the potential advantages from some of the above techs, there's a lot of reason to push towards changing it.

As for tech comparison between BT and Modern.... really i don't think you can make a fair comparison as not only has both diverged significantly one is centuries ahead of the other, though the value that has is debatable as nothing says they 'advanced' as far as they could/should. If i had to though i would say that BT beats us in direct engagement capacity with better guns, armor, and general equipment, but we beat them in sensor, stealth tech, and combined arms/asymetrical warfare.

The only reason "we" beat them in sensor and stealth is for gamist reasons i think, as i noted above, they cut down ranges for game reasons by didiving by 10. And as for combined arms, well, when you have something that generally trashes anything that isn't another machine of the same type, combined arms falling by the wayside is natural. So yeah, the BT-verse utterly sucks there, but if taken as a reality without the gamist nerfs, they wouldn't need it if set up against our modern world reality.

I agree though that making a "fair comparison" is unrealistic. Especially when you take the "fluff changed for game reasons" into account, no matter which way you go, you end up with massive imbalances in both directions, most of them making little sense.
Hence why whenever i've written anything in the BT-verse, i completely ignore the game-ised settings and instead adhere to realistic, based on those few statements by the developers about where they took their baselines from, because then you can make it make SENSE so much more easily!
 
I remember reading an "unofficial" statement by one of the developers about range once, that they made it "game-friendly" by just dividing all ranges by 10.
So "out of game", that's where the fluff is meant to be.

And no, there are several ways that mechs COULD be vastly superior to tanks, it's just that the requisites for that currently does not exist.
Basically, 4 things.
First of all, ablative armour. Which i might add is under development in the real world, and if they ever get it to work as intended, may make current tanks potentially obsolete overnight. Most extreme successful test so far, a few cm of armour completely stopped a sabot round from a T-90 12.5cm gun. Of course, the fact that THAT type of armour also explodes >9 times out of 10 when hit is why it's not exactly the best route of development, to say the least. But still, the level of protection it can provide is absurd if they ever get it usefully functional. This kind of armour would make the "armoured box" drastically less of a requirement, as you would no longer have to have massively deep armour that weighs horribly much to get enough protection. And once 10cm armour is better than 40cm, a HUGE chunk of the advantage of tanks over "others" disappears or are negated.

Second comes compartmentalisation. Something that already exists, but which is very difficult to take any further on tanks, as generally, anything that penetrates the outer armour will also penetrate any internal "bulkheads", and if you can get the above armour, or something like it(like the soon to arrive superfacehardened materials that may raise current armour levels by a magnitude all by themselves), secondary damage is suddenly going to become an extremely important issue, and something that consists of multiple parts, like something humanoid, is drastically more easy to basically apply "CASE" to.

Third is the need for better "propulsion" and powerplants. There's a bundle of developments in that area already happening, and some of the memorymetal projects could very well end up being good enough to make mechs drastically more realistic. Powerplants isn't quite as important, but would make a huge difference if good enough. Powerplants however is the one development that isn't really going much of anywhere currently.

And THE most important tech, man-machine interface. Because the fact that the games completely ignore is that BT mechs are supposed to be effectively an extension of the pilot and commonly be as mobile, agile and even graceful as a human, this is THE one thing that could potentially all by itself make mechs realistic, as having a single person in superior control of what amounts to a walking tank, that is a BIG thing, all tanks you can ever find in reality, they all have inherent delays built in, something a mech wouldn't have or would shave off >90% of. A very simple example would be the fact that a decent pilot could actually dodge a tank shooting at it, because the tank would lase it to get accurate rangedata, which a sensor on the mech would detect, and unlike with a tank, there wouldn't be a few/several seconds of reaction delay between "oh shit someone is about to shoot at me" and "DODGE!".
And the amount of research done into direct interfacing is MASSIVE. There's all kinds of projects ongoing, even if most of them are medical, they're still happening and there does seem to be a fair chance that a workable direct interface may one day be realistic. And because it's been shown that while the brain is very good at adapting, it is extremely much more easy to adapt to something that acts similar to it expects, humanoid shapes would likely be highly preferable.


So, basically, with all the research already in progress? We could potentially be less than a decade from mechs being completely disadvantaged in every way except for x-terrain mobility, changing into being outright superior to tanks. Not bloody likely, but if key progress was made in enough of the developments already underway, it is amazingly possible. Point being, that tanks are totally superior only as long as the current tech paradigm remains unchanged, and it might not. In fact, with the potential advantages from some of the above techs, there's a lot of reason to push towards changing it.



The only reason "we" beat them in sensor and stealth is for gamist reasons i think, as i noted above, they cut down ranges for game reasons by didiving by 10. And as for combined arms, well, when you have something that generally trashes anything that isn't another machine of the same type, combined arms falling by the wayside is natural. So yeah, the BT-verse utterly sucks there, but if taken as a reality without the gamist nerfs, they wouldn't need it if set up against our modern world reality.

I agree though that making a "fair comparison" is unrealistic. Especially when you take the "fluff changed for game reasons" into account, no matter which way you go, you end up with massive imbalances in both directions, most of them making little sense.
Hence why whenever i've written anything in the BT-verse, i completely ignore the game-ised settings and instead adhere to realistic, based on those few statements by the developers about where they took their baselines from, because then you can make it make SENSE so much more easily!
...uh, no, that's not why people say Battlemechs are and should be worse than tanks. Of the points you have raised, all can be reversed and applied to tanks with just as much effect, if not more, than bipedal combat platforms.

Better armor can be applied to the tank just as easily as a biped. You can build compartmentalized tanks, the problem is not the shape or motive method but the size of the vehicle, useful compartmentalization requires a larger platform past a certain point.

Power is a nonsensical statement, you do not need dramatically more or less power between bipedal locomotion and other motive methods, not when compared to the needs of powering DEWs and other elements, and if you do that is a strike against the bipedal platform. You might require advances in propulsion or motivation technology just to make bipedal systems feasible, but that is a strike against it, not in favor of it.

Finally, there is no known reason for a man-machine interface to be viable only in a bipedal humanoid vehicle, and in-setting evidence (ASFs) that it can be applied to non-humanoid shapes as well. If you can stick an MMI into any vehicle, it stops providing special and notable advantage to bipeds, save for the limited value that may be inherent in having giant hands, I suppose.

No, the reason bipedal combat platforms are worse than tracked or wheeled platforms is because the bipedal platform is inherently more exposed, more mechanically complex, less redundant, less stable, has a higher specific ground pressure, and falls afoul of the square-cube law in a worse way.

This is not exactly the place to rehash the whole "Tanks v. Bipeds" argument though.
 
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Regarding rifles and why many modern tanks don't use them: Rifling matters when your main weapon fires a closely fitted projectile, because the spin imparted makes the projectile more stable in flight and thus more accurate over longer ranges. The standard projectile in modern tank warfare however is an Armour Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot projectile, a long rod thinner than the gun's bore that uses a filler to catch and impart the impulse of the detonation while in the barrel, and then discards it on exiting. It's also not spin stabilized, but uses those fins to maintain its stability and thus course.

As such, having a closely fitted, smooth bore barrel so that no propellant leaks is much more beneficial than the spin imparted by rifling the barrel.

...and?

Just because modern guns are smoothbore doesn't change the fact that the weapon defined in BT game terms as "Rifles" are, in fact, intended to reflect real world tank cannons, which is what the discussion was about.

Here's an excerpt from Tactical Operations:

 
This obviously has the follow on effect that the only viable method for tanks to compete is if they are sufficiently feng shui.
Regarding rifles and why many modern tanks don't use them: Rifling matters when your main weapon fires a closely fitted projectile, because the spin imparted makes the projectile more stable in flight and thus more accurate over longer ranges. The standard projectile in modern tank warfare however is an Armour Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot projectile, a long rod thinner than the gun's bore that uses a filler to catch and impart the impulse of the detonation while in the barrel, and then discards it on exiting. It's also not spin stabilized, but uses those fins to maintain its stability and thus course.

As such, having a closely fitted, smooth bore barrel so that no propellant leaks is much more beneficial than the spin imparted by rifling the barrel.
I remember reading an "unofficial" statement by one of the developers about range once, that they made it "game-friendly" by just dividing all ranges by 10.
So "out of game", that's where the fluff is meant to be.

And no, there are several ways that mechs COULD be vastly superior to tanks, it's just that the requisites for that currently does not exist.
Basically, 4 things.
First of all, ablative armour. Which i might add is under development in the real world, and if they ever get it to work as intended, may make current tanks potentially obsolete overnight. Most extreme successful test so far, a few cm of armour completely stopped a sabot round from a T-90 12.5cm gun. Of course, the fact that THAT type of armour also explodes >9 times out of 10 when hit is why it's not exactly the best route of development, to say the least. But still, the level of protection it can provide is absurd if they ever get it usefully functional. This kind of armour would make the "armoured box" drastically less of a requirement, as you would no longer have to have massively deep armour that weighs horribly much to get enough protection. And once 10cm armour is better than 40cm, a HUGE chunk of the advantage of tanks over "others" disappears or are negated.

Second comes compartmentalisation. Something that already exists, but which is very difficult to take any further on tanks, as generally, anything that penetrates the outer armour will also penetrate any internal "bulkheads", and if you can get the above armour, or something like it(like the soon to arrive superfacehardened materials that may raise current armour levels by a magnitude all by themselves), secondary damage is suddenly going to become an extremely important issue, and something that consists of multiple parts, like something humanoid, is drastically more easy to basically apply "CASE" to.

Third is the need for better "propulsion" and powerplants. There's a bundle of developments in that area already happening, and some of the memorymetal projects could very well end up being good enough to make mechs drastically more realistic. Powerplants isn't quite as important, but would make a huge difference if good enough. Powerplants however is the one development that isn't really going much of anywhere currently.

And THE most important tech, man-machine interface. Because the fact that the games completely ignore is that BT mechs are supposed to be effectively an extension of the pilot and commonly be as mobile, agile and even graceful as a human, this is THE one thing that could potentially all by itself make mechs realistic, as having a single person in superior control of what amounts to a walking tank, that is a BIG thing, all tanks you can ever find in reality, they all have inherent delays built in, something a mech wouldn't have or would shave off >90% of. A very simple example would be the fact that a decent pilot could actually dodge a tank shooting at it, because the tank would lase it to get accurate rangedata, which a sensor on the mech would detect, and unlike with a tank, there wouldn't be a few/several seconds of reaction delay between "oh shit someone is about to shoot at me" and "DODGE!".
And the amount of research done into direct interfacing is MASSIVE. There's all kinds of projects ongoing, even if most of them are medical, they're still happening and there does seem to be a fair chance that a workable direct interface may one day be realistic. And because it's been shown that while the brain is very good at adapting, it is extremely much more easy to adapt to something that acts similar to it expects, humanoid shapes would likely be highly preferable.


So, basically, with all the research already in progress? We could potentially be less than a decade from mechs being completely disadvantaged in every way except for x-terrain mobility, changing into being outright superior to tanks. Not bloody likely, but if key progress was made in enough of the developments already underway, it is amazingly possible. Point being, that tanks are totally superior only as long as the current tech paradigm remains unchanged, and it might not. In fact, with the potential advantages from some of the above techs, there's a lot of reason to push towards changing it.



The only reason "we" beat them in sensor and stealth is for gamist reasons i think, as i noted above, they cut down ranges for game reasons by didiving by 10. And as for combined arms, well, when you have something that generally trashes anything that isn't another machine of the same type, combined arms falling by the wayside is natural. So yeah, the BT-verse utterly sucks there, but if taken as a reality without the gamist nerfs, they wouldn't need it if set up against our modern world reality.

I agree though that making a "fair comparison" is unrealistic. Especially when you take the "fluff changed for game reasons" into account, no matter which way you go, you end up with massive imbalances in both directions, most of them making little sense.
Hence why whenever i've written anything in the BT-verse, i completely ignore the game-ised settings and instead adhere to realistic, based on those few statements by the developers about where they took their baselines from, because then you can make it make SENSE so much more easily!
...uh, no, that's not why people say Battlemechs are and should be worse than tanks. Of the points you have raised, all can be reversed and applied to tanks with just as much effect, if not more, than bipedal combat platforms.

Better armor can be applied to the tank just as easily as a biped. You can build comparmentalized tanks, the problem is not the shape or motive method but the size of the vehicle, useful comparmentalization requires a larger platform past a certain point.

Power is a nonsensical statement, you do not need dramatically more or less power between bipedal locomotion and other motive methods, not when compared to the needs of powering DEWs and other elements, and if you do that is a strike against the bipedal platform. You might require advances in propulsion or motivation technology just to make bipedal systems feasible, but that is a strike against it, not in favor of it.

Finally, there is no known reason for a man-machine interface to be viable only in a bipedal humanoid vehicle, and in-setting evidence (ASFs) that it can be applied to non-humanoid shapes as well. If you can stick an MMI into any vehicle, it stops providing special and notable advantage to bipeds, save for the limited value that may be inherent in having giant hands, I suppose.

No, the reason bipedal combat platforms are worse than tracked or wheeled platforms is because the bipedal platform is inherently more exposed, more mechanically complex, less redundant, less stable, has a higher specific ground pressure, and falls afoul of the square-cube law in a worse way.

This is not exactly the place to rehash the whole "Tanks v. Bipeds" argument though.
...and?

Just because modern guns are smoothbore doesn't change the fact that the weapon defined in BT game terms as "Rifles" are, in fact, intended to reflect real world tank cannons, which is what the discussion was about.

Here's an excerpt from Tactical Operations:

*cough cough* Please excuse me, but you know there is a new thread open, right? Here, let me help you:
The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings...
If the quote threw you off, here is the link for it.
 
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And no, there are several ways that mechs COULD be vastly superior to tanks, it's just that the requisites for that currently does not exist.
regardless of whether or not you are right, in BT there are several arbitrary nerf to make Tanks inferior to Mechs. These include (but are not limited to):

- Fusion engines in tanks have 50% more mass for 'extra shielding' (so less room for other stuff)
- tanks are required to have 1 crewman per 15 tons (or part thereof), so a 100t tank requires a crew of 7, even though a 100t Mech only needs 1.
- Jumpjets are not allowed on vehicles.
- Vehicles must have enough heatsinks to handle a full alpha strike (moderated by the fact Vehicles ignore heat from missiles, Autocannons and machineguns)
 
Finally, there is no known reason for a man-machine interface to be viable only in a bipedal humanoid vehicle, and in-setting evidence (ASFs) that it can be applied to non-humanoid shapes as well. If you can stick an MMI into any vehicle, it stops providing special and notable advantage to bipeds, save for the limited value that may be inherent in having giant hands, I suppose.

As i noted in my previous post, REAL WORLD experiments so far has shown that the human brain is considerably better at interfacing with something that mimics the human body. The less similarity, the more delays and ambiguity you get. So no, if you stick the same MMI into a mech and into a tank, you most certainly do not get the same level of advantage from both. You might not even get the advantage from it at all from the tank.

No, the reason bipedal combat platforms are worse than tracked or wheeled platforms is because the bipedal platform is inherently more exposed, more mechanically complex, less redundant, less stable, has a higher specific ground pressure, and falls afoul of the square-cube law in a worse way.

You're completely ignoring what i wrote, again... Let's say it in an even more simplified way then shall we? If you have a mech that moves at least as easily as an infantry-soldier, it is no longer easier to hit than a tank. It's also only more exposed as long as it is in the open. And the shape of a mech allows it to move through terrain in ways that tanks simply cannot. Most forests suddenly no longer require engineers to make roads. A lot of swamps suddenly becomes merely something that slows you down instead of completely stop you. Stony ground is mostly a non-issue. Cities are no longer deathtraps.
Anywhere but open plains or desert, the mech is vastly advantaged.

2nd part, what's easier to hit, a box or something that has the same surface area spread out over several moving parts? Oh yes, the box by a HUGE margin, because as long as you don't miss by a lot, you still end up hitting. But aiming center of mass against something humanoid-shaped does not get that. It's why some people in reality who are plenty good on a shooting range are utterly crap at hitting real, moving targets.

...uh, no, that's not why people say Battlemechs are and should be worse than tanks. Of the points you have raised, all can be reversed and applied to tanks with just as much effect, if not more, than bipedal combat platforms.

Better armor can be applied to the tank just as easily as a biped. You can build comparmentalized tanks, the problem is not the shape or motive method but the size of the vehicle, useful comparmentalization requires a larger platform past a certain point.

In case you didn't know, the primary reason why tanks look like they do is because of the limitations of armouring. If you remove/change that limitation, which several future materials seem highly likely to do, then the reason for the "armoured box" no longer exists.

And no, compartmentalization of a tank is NOT an easy thing to do, as because of being "a box", if something goes in on one side, unless you go for massive internal armour, if it can do enough damage, it can go through anything in its path, and unless the tank gets shot at from very weird angles, that path is extremely likely to go through several/all compartments of the tank, this has been one of the big tank design problems for over a hundred years and it's not getting solved anytime soon because the design is inherently susceptible to it.

Just because you're unable to understand what the effects of such a paradigmshift would result in, doesn't mean it cannot happen. And again, i'm NOT saying it will happen, because again, it requires the developments i mentioned to happen to a high enough degree as otherwise the classical advantages from the "armoured box" remains the better choice. But denying the potential advantages of "walkers", IF you get the right foundations to actually exploit them to their best, that's just paradigm blindness. You're doing your best to only think inside the box, literally and in double meaning for the terrible pun.

Power is a nonsensical statement, you do not need dramatically more or less power between bipedal locomotion and other motive methods, not when compared to the needs of powering DEWs and other elements, and if you do that is a strike against the bipedal platform. You might require advances in propulsion or motivation technology just to make bipedal systems feasible, but that is a strike against it, not in favor of it.

Power was secondary to achieving better "muscles", because while we can today build something "mech"-ish, what they use for movement is mostly pathetically bad compared to human muscles(and simply wont work for something military). Having a better powersource however, would potentially make a far greater difference for "nontanks", as the "armoured box" will simply say "thank you" if you can make the engine smaller or lighter etc, but it wont actually have any truly huge impact on the tank, while for something that is better compartmentalized, it could mean being able to cut down even more on the size of at least one of those compartments, making a mech even more difficult to hit.


#####
regardless of whether or not you are right, in BT there are several arbitrary nerf to make Tanks inferior to Mechs. These include (but are not limited to):

- Fusion engines in tanks have 50% more mass for 'extra shielding' (so less room for other stuff)
- tanks are required to have 1 crewman per 15 tons (or part thereof), so a 100t tank requires a crew of 7, even though a 100t Mech only needs 1.
- Jumpjets are not allowed on vehicles.
- Vehicles must have enough heatsinks to handle a full alpha strike (moderated by the fact Vehicles ignore heat from missiles, Autocannons and machineguns)

Indeed, again this is mostly game-balance stuff, but at least the latter two would have some real resons for them(i could possibly make an argument for the first one as well, but that's a bit iffy). A jumpcapable tank would require a massively more capable suspension(which would require lots of both space and weight), while a mech, well, there it's just a matter of having the already existing legs do exactly what they're already built for, absorb impacts. There's also the balance issue, as while modern electronics could MAYBE deal with it on its own, for hopping around, the compactness of a tank is actually a negative.
The combination of having a more dispersed center of mass and the inherent sense of balance of the pilot, would definitely be preferable.

While the heat-thing is based on the assumption of a mech-wide heat distribution system together with compartmentalisation, while in a tank, if you generate heat, you generate it basically "in the middle of everything", which is less than great. This also reflects on my earlier "oh dear, BT-verse is absurdly overpowered" note, because the amount of heat generated according to fluff, is stupidly high.

However, ingame, mechs are also greatly nerfed compared to tanks. Most of all, the enhanced reflexes and C4 a mech would have according to the fluff, is effectively nonexistant by the rules. The true mobility advantages of bipedal over tracks/etc is also seriously lacking.

And it's not really a matter of "am i right" but rather, whether reality will ever come up with the advances that makes me be right.
I don't really think it's likely to happen in my lifetime at the very least, but like i wrote above, if the right tech people suddenly get just the right breakthroughs, it could happen really soon, as while current tech is far too poor to make it happen(or even get close), there's no solid obstacles actually blocking the way as far as anyone can tell.
 
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