Below Thirty Meters in BattleTech

It's a pity that infantry, battle armor, protomechs and support vehicles don't have a common way to figure engines, control weights and so on. Covering the same small design space four different times seems like a bigger hassle than patching 'Mech and vehicle construction to cover dinoriders, rocketeers, exoskeleton squads, individual missiles and the shopping carts from the Ironhold Safeway.

I mention shopping carts because the cargo and trailer rules aren't great either. Improving them would probably negate the need for "trains" to be constructed as a separate unit type.

Can't fault the writers for having fun devising new systems, nor the fans for having fun exploring and testing them; but... look, the point of "support vehicles" is to have archaic tanks for 'Mechs to shoot at and soft civilian vehicles for RPG characters to shoot at, and... isn't that handled by making armor less effective per ton? Are separate "penetration" and "BAR" values really needed, or can that be handled with range, damage and armor factor?

A Note on Scale and Realism

Since 2005, BattleTech's rules have opened with "A Note On Scale" which explains that distances are abstracted for gameplay. (Say for instance one 'Mech is prone with two other 'Mechs kicking it from either side: although all three 'Mechs might "really" be no more than ten meters apart, the game treats them as though they're all in separate thirty-meter hexes, with the attackers at range one from the prone 'Mech and range two from each other.)

The "Note" also mentions that BattleTech weapons have shorter effective ranges than many real world weapons, and cracks the old joke that you'd need a gameboard twelve feet across to recreate real world ranges. (The real solution, of course, is to use a normal size gameboard and put more meters in each hex. It's trivial to choose a scale which makes BattleTech ranges dwarf 21st century weapon ranges.)

Unfortunately, readers sometimes misconstrue the joke and the word "abstraction" to mean that the ranges in the boardgame don't match BattleTech's "reality." Because how could machine guns only be effective to ninety meters?

Well (and I can't believe I can't find the Judge Dredd clip on youtube), ballistic weapons lose effectiveness over range. The tougher the armor you want to scratch, the closer you have to be to scratch it. In the real world, tank armor is stronger today than it was thirty years ago, and BattleTech's history has centuries to make it even stronger. Since BattleTech gets to choose just how much stronger weapons and armor get, it chooses values which produce the ranges you see.

Infantry are an afterthought. The game measures cover and obstacles based on how they affect big metal bipeds trying to fight other big metal bipeds. Ground cover of three meters or less? Not worth putting on maps. It exists though, and infantry are down in it. The weapons on a big metal biped have to either power through that cover or get a high enough angle to shoot over it. (Hexes are thirty meters wide which means angles of fire are a lot shallower than they look on the gameboard.)

Future weapons are arbitrarily strong, and we haven't defined how much cover infantry in a "clear" hex has, so we can choose values which make the range against 'Mechs and range against infantry match.


[Edit, Oct 3: this ground cover is also evident when firing at prone 'Mechs: you get a -2 bonus if you're adjacent or +1 penalty if you're further away. That's a base of -2 for the target being semi-mobile (same as when shooting at "bogged down" targets) combined with +3 as for the old partial cover rule.

Also, there are other ways to implement "modern" weapon ranges on a normal-sized play surface. One option is to treat all ground combat as occurring at short range (due to ambush, sight lines or a reluctance to waste ammo on bad shots). Another option is to give each force its own separate map for local maneuvering and then abstract lines of sight across the intervening distance (somewhat akin to how off-board artillery is tracked). /Edit]

[Edit, Jan 3, 2022: ah, okay, the "basketball court" thing probably started as a way to explain why a map hex represents 30 meters while a miniature's hexbase (of the same real world size) represents only 9 or so meters. /Edit]