Cael
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2017
- Messages
- 22,043
In very broad strokes, yes.
In BTech, all 'mechs have a heat scale from 0-30. At various points on the scale, you had things happen to your 'mech. At 5, for example, you lose 1 point of walking speed (and your running speed gets affected, of course as it is x1.5 of your walking speed, rounded up). At 8, you have a penalty to-hit of +1, at 10 -2 to walking speed, 13 +2 penalty to-hit, and so on. Other effects include rolls to avoid a shut down, or worse, to avoid ammo explosion (if your 'mech has ammo). Ammo explosion is basically a lost 'mech since we are pre-CASE.
At the end of the round, you add up all your sources of heat (movement and weaponsfire being the two most common) and minus the amount of heat your 'mech can dissipate (number of heat sinks in this case, since freezers and DHS doesn't exist yet). The result, is added to your heat scale. Note that this can be a minus which will bring your heat scale down, but never below 0.
Energy weapons have massive heat generated for its damage and range. Ballistic weapons have less heat generated for the same. For example, a medium laser has max range 9 and generates 3 heat for 5 damage. An AC20 has the same range but 20 damage for 7 heat. 4 times the damage for just over double the heat. Large laser has damage 8 for 8 heat. AC10, same range, has damage 10 for 3 heat. Also, the longest range weapons are ballistics (LRMs are called LONG range missiles for a reason). The PPC has max range 18, while LRM goes to 21, for example. AC2 goes even further to 24.
This is where the balancing act starts: All 'mechs have 10 "free" heat sinks. That means they can fire and move up to 10 heat per turn without adding to the heat scale. Every extra point you want to get rid of per turn has to be done via heat sinks, which are 1 ton and 1 crit each. Horribly expensive in terms of weight and space used.
As a comparison, take the Awesome. The standard config is 3 PPC + 1 small laser. It has 28 heat sinks. So if it fires all of its PPCs (damage 30), it overheats by 2. A variant of it has 2x LRM15 and 2x Large Laser, removing 5 heat sinks and the PPCs. Fire all those weapons (average damage 34) and you only overheat by 1. But you can run out of ammo.
The big deciding factor is what KIND of missions you are running into. In most computer games, running out of ammo is not a big problem. There isn't all that many things to shoot at. That is why Clan 'mechs are notoriously BAD at prolonged campaigns. Their warfare is all about individual fights, basically multiplayer one-on-one. In MW2M, for example, it would be pretty rare to run out of ammo for any of the procedurally generated missions. Only when you have to take down massively armoured things like DropShips or buildings would you run into ammo issues (if you are crazy enough to use ammo on stationary targets that don't shoot back, that is...). This HBS game doesn't sound like ammo would be a problem. Now, if you play something like Crescent Hawks' Revenge, on the other hand, where you can go on multiple stages of one massive mission with no resupply, then yes, it would be a major issue. Or if you are playing MechCommander, where ammo comes fixed and there is no way you can increase the ammo load, and there are dozens of targets all over the map.
EDIT: Something that even some veterans miss (although rarely for long) is that energy boats are very vulnerable to engine hits. A TAC that hits the engine twice is basically game over for energy boats (+10 heat every round just from the engine hits; +5 per hit). And given that long range energy weapons comes in chunks of 8 or 10 heat, yeah, you're basically defanged at long range, and severely curtailed at short.
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