There's a lot of tiers, B5 isn't actually *that* low, there's plenty of universes they would totally roll due to their respectable fleet sizes, big ships, and beam weapons.
Trek, with larger fleet sizes, more powerful ships, shields, stronger weapons (some of which rapid fire and consider unshielded fighters to be skeet), and tons of funky advantages, simply happens to roll them.
Elheru Aran wrote:Batman wrote:The difference is Trek loses because they're stupid. BattleTech loses because their weapons are significantly inferior to modern world stuff.
Fair enough, I still remember one of my first posts being something about a Mech going up against a column of MBT's... *shudder*
Seriously though, Mechs and associated stupidity aside, what about the rest of BT ground forces? Or were they really just that colossally shitty?
Weirdly enough, due to the fact everything is scaled off mechs and expected to both take hit from and dish out damage to mechs and tanks, their power armor is actually really
really good (makes Spartans and Space Marine armor look fragile, and they come with built-in mech scale weaponry so anything that's not at least tank tough goes down *fast*, and they have jump jets for high mobility), and their aerospace fighters are flying bricks that'd laugh at our puny anti-air missiles because they have the same armor that's on heavy ground units, just less of it.
It's the kind of thing you get occasionally in series that scale off a certain thing. Like how Trek 'fighters' are way overpowered next to many other SF's since they're made to fight and take the odd hit from Trek ships rather than modeled after real fighters but in space like most SF, and while Trek's actually ground stuff is sucky, logically simply hovering a shuttle or Runabout not far off the ground and you've got an invincible death 'tank' next to a lot of SF ground stuff. Or heck, land a Voyager-type ship and you've got a fortress base that can withstand anti-matter warhead hits, places wherever on a planet you need. Not that they actually do so, but it's just funny how the scaling works sometimes, where an overall weaker power sometimes dominates in particular scale bands.
Mechs and such have pretty good armor and firepower due to the advanced material technology (a modern tank cannon is supposed to do about 2-3 damage points by their game terms- a fairly light weapon by their terms), just, y'know, 36 mechs is considered a large force and they don't have great range with all but a few weapons (unless one considers that just a game-convenience thing). If a mech was right *near* a column of MBT's it'd do fine due to simply the advanced alloys and lasers that will kill all kinds of stuff (the novel-descriptions have them melting or even *evaporating* a ton of armor- in short, anything modern hit would be insta-cooked), but what'd actually happen is the MBTs would simply kill it with tons of hits from a distance from the mech.
Or if you ignore the range issue, a mech would be pretty darn dangerous, but on the flip side, totally logistically outmatched and way too small in number for a mech force to fight well.
Tribble covered their issues pretty well.