Speaking of battlemechs...
 

this is some dumb fun with back-of-the-envelope calculations I made a few years back...it's based on the one solid piece of evidence of how much damage a Battletech weapon can do. In the Tech Readout 3058 there's a Gauss Rifle (KE penetrator firing railgun) equipped attack helo. The fluff text for it tells us the gun fires a projectile at "mach 2.2"...we'll work outward from there.

Gauss Rifle ammo is 8 shots/ton. If we assume Metric tons that's 125kg/shot.

The M829A1 Long-Rod DU penetrator round used by the M1 weighs 9kg.

"Mach 2.2" = 748m/sec. The energy from a single Gauss rifle impact is (roughly) 35 megajoules.

The Gauss rifle does 15 points of Battletech unit damage. Thus, one point of Battletech damage requires 2.3 megajoules of energy.

Our DU round from the M1's gun hits with 12.25 mJ energy - or about 5 points of damage in Battletech terms. Not too shabby, not at 1+ km range versus the mere 700 m or so range the Gauss rifle can reach...

I like it! But I think you may be calculating with an excessive projectile weight. That 1t/8rds probably includes the feed mechanisms and the magazine structure itself. If we assume 50% of that weight is structure and 50% is ammo, then the Gauss rifle's per-round weight is halved, and so is its kinetic energy. This, in turn, should put an Abrams' silver bullet around 10 points of damage.

(Of course, all of this may be horribly wrong due to low blood caffeine levels.)

- C.

The ranges on Battletech weapons seem way low to me. Especially given the height advantage of the firing platform.

I remember reading a quote from Jordan Weisman where he said they tried to "accurately simulate" what they thought real-world weapons systems would be like in the future and they ran in to two problems: ballistic weapons required ridiculous amounts of map-space, and energy weapons meant nobody used ballistic weapons period. Why bother with an Autocannon (which originally only did 5 points of damage, there was no ac/2 or ac/10 or ac/20) when a medium laser weighed 1/8th the tonnage, had an effective range of "LOS" and generated the same heat for no ammo?

So they gimped the ranges so you could play on the two mapboards they sold with the original Battletech set.

(Although it should be noted that was not the first giant robot combat game they did - Battledroids was, and Lucas sent them a C&D so they reworked the game after a visit to Japan where they saw the Macross stuff...)

Bahh thats a Zentradi Roiquonmi Glaug command battlepod.