On the other hand, ammo capacity is not stated as a requirement for any of the potential clients, is it? It is something we can compromise on and still get the sales.
Read the damn entry for the 152mm ammo where it says the rear and central is the only option allowed.
We have 2 budget to unfuck that problem.
Yes. Put the EWAR in the rear. It won't explode like the ammo will. I've already suggested putting sensors back there.
Definitely grab that liquid cooling system. Beyond that--we're adding armor after this step, so no need for additional heatsinks.
A.I. Core would be great...for a high-end mech where we don't care about Tech Simplicity. We're not making that.
Do we get optics as standard, and how good are those relative to everything else?
Definitely want more 152mm ammo. Rest is, eh, take it or leave it.
I am basing my estimates on historical armoured vehicles. I really don't feel like digging out all the reference material, but here is one figure. An M1A2 carries 42 rounds. The Leopard 2, Challenger 2, and T-90 all carry about 45 rounds. My plan brings the mech up to 45. This feels like a reasonable place.
Why was this not the first thing out of your mouth in the previous comment? All this passive aggressive nonsense about how unhappy you are is getting in the way of meaningful criticism.
In an era of drones, missiles, and other such assholery, EWAR is a useful defensive measure. I don't necessarily buy into this following position, but some even say indispensable. Especially since this Mech is explicitly demanded to kill peer opponents reliably.
Noted.
Battletech isn't a great example because each round of ammo is actually ten seconds of fire. The 150mm AC/20 on the Hetzer actually fires 10-round bursts for example, so one ton of ammo for that would have 50 shots. Our ballistic weapons are probably a fair bit less advanced than battletech.
This mech doesn't need to stand up against a Type 01 or anything, though. It's targeted towards second-tier powers who just want a mech that's primarily going to see use against pirates and insurgents. Against actual state actors it's mostly just going to sit on the border to deter invasion, and fight defensively if it has to.
EVERYONE said:
Battletech isn't really a good comparison except in the most abstract - they've never done a full overhaul to make decades of errata and such coherent with itself. So you get some AC20s that are described as burst fire, and some that are described as single big shells.
What do you think of this combination of my one thoughts and @CuriousRaptor ?
You are using 10 tons. That brings us BELOW the minimum armour threshold mentioned. You are putting all kinds of fancy toys into the mech at the expense of it's ability to do it's primary job. Engage equal tonnage armoured vehicles. I feel this would be a disaster of a plan.
Would you be a little more helpful than that? I took out all the fancy toys! Do you mean the cell banks?
Given how much Power Cells weigh, and how this design needs 10 tons of armor, sadly I'd recommend you cut those, as well as the fire suppression to anything other than the center. Airlock likewise doesn't really help the design all that much at current. If this had more room and tonnage leftover we'd ahve more to play with but as it stands we don't so we can't.
Maybe put the Long-range comms on the back too? Components close together might get synergies. But overall looks good.
Long Range Comms prevent jamming. But yeah, the Cell banks, which I want, are just too heavy atm to actually be worthwhile if we want to hit our design goals to get these bad boys to sell to other polities. You need to limit your design to 4.5 Tons unless you want to compromise armor.
There is not a single item in this entire update that IMPROVES Tech Simplicity, and the only option in my plan that REDUCES it doesn't even reduce it because it's less than 1.0 value and less than 1.0 doesn't roll.
50/50 there. @Verisaimilitude is there any significant difference with moving where the comm system is between the center and back?
You have 3 tons of extra range, an airlock that isn't needed for most customer because we are mostly selling to people on Earth, an EWAR system that while nice, is also expensive, and a ton of extra fire suppression.
Sort of. We have modern day examples of tanks being catastrophic killed frequently because tankers are loading up on extra ammo beyond what can be safely stored and tanks that do carry 30-50 rounds regularly running dry during high-intensity combat. I suspect that the 30-50 shells that modern tanks carry is just the volumetric limit of how many 120mm shells you can safely store in a tank-sized vehicle while still fitting everything else in.
A class-20 autocannon is a ballistic weapon that fires 200kg of ammo in 10 seconds with an effective range of 300m. 20mm hypervelocity cannon that fires 12 shells per second? AC/20. 203mm cannon that fires a shell every five seconds? AC/20.
Why on earth would you ever send a dedicated EWAR suite to the frontlines? Those are wildly expensive, filled with classified technology and information, and have fairly long range to boot. We're not going to be able to fit a particularly good EWAR suite on this thing unless we give up on everything else, so we might as well just put in good networking and more ammo. A radar will also explicitly going to improve our ability to detect enemies, as opposed to ECM which is mainly a defensive too.
What i WANT is for Tech simplicity which is already bad not to nosedive into unmakeable except for the hyperpowers range. You are Saying we can make it up in back end, but I sincerely doubt we have the sheer funding to do that without screwing up the rest of the design terribly if you cram the AI in there.
