Taken from Sarna. "A BattleMech (often abbreviated 'Mech, although that could technically also refer to IndustrialMechs) is an armored combat vehicle of roughly humanoid shape, standing 8 to 14 meters tall and typically massing from 20 to 100 tons." The scale of mechs with Navid's mod is about how I always pictured mechs.
To me it feels like they should be ~5% bigger. Like assaults don’t have a large amount of overhead, but still a comfortable amount. Like the Atlas and Annihilator being able to just about see over base walls.
I played the table top game in the way back. I had a blueprint of the Battle Master hanging on my bedroom wall. The Battle Master is an 85 ton assault mech. Large, but not the biggest. The blueprint included a pilot standing next to it for scale. Other images in source books like "3025 Technical Readout," included other images that lent a sense of scale. Btw, the reference to Gundam is a bit unfair. Gundam is just about perfectly sized to represent large battlemechs (indeed, in the original timeline, the last ova included newer "suits" which were significantly smaller. I am dissappointed by the up-sizing in the computer games. The turn based Battlemechs game also shows very large machines. Anyway, I'm starting to ramble. I think this mod is a step in the right direction, but I think it goes a bit too far for larger mechs. However, I think there should be a bigger difference between them. A 20 ton light mech should be considerably smaller than a 100 ton assault mech. Anyway, I hope this link works, this is the blueprint I had on my wall, a gazillion years ago: images.app.goo.gl/2V3a4Y3wctDavj9LA Oh, just found another good scale comparison image. I think it's about right: images.app.goo.gl/RVNZ9rQeCuBSb1yy9
The problem isn't the mech size IMO, its the assets all around the world and how it feels like you are walking around in a diorama instead of a real world scaled to humans with a giant mech walking around. The resize mod doesn't really address that. You have grass taller than the truck you demoed earlier in the video, flowers and bushes taller than the truck. Same with textures, they are scaled for the view of you in the mech above, not for humans, so again you get that diorama result. The closest mech games have come to getting this right is something like Titanfall where the map is scaled and sized for human players, but also has giant mechs walking around. Good example of how to get scale right.
A lot of people don't realize, heavy and assault mechs are only supposed to be as tall as fighter jets are long. Another funny thing is Gundam has the same problem. Gundams are canonically roughly the same size as battlemechs, but they never have consistent scale from scene to scene, so sometimes they're randomly twice as big as they should be.
Gundam are cannonicaly 16 to 20 meters tall based on which series they belong to where Sarna says Battlemechs are at most 14 meters Gundams are taller and by a lot
Isnt a train car typically 100 tonnes? So in theory... A mech that is 100 tonnes would at best be the size of a train car. What is funny is that when you think of the weight of the internals and whatnot; assault mechs really aren't all that big. 🤔 Edit: scratch all that. An assault mech is just barely 1.5 abrams tanks. And abrams weighs 75 tonnes. So a Marauder should be that size roughly. ...Dang. They really arent as big as they suggest in the art.
@@kontankarite Part of the problem is that the original stuff that material came from was done by people who very, very clearly didn't give a damn about realism in military equipment. If they did, LRMs wouldn't have shorter ranges than real shoulder mounted RPGs that were in circulation in the 1980s, for example. Or AC weapons being objectively worse than real life tank guns. Or Ferrous Fibrous armor being worse than real RHA. You had a bunch of guys that just subjectively picked numbers they felt looked cool, and other authors over time have rolled with that. Which, to be fair, given that you're talking about bipedal war machines, completely makes sense, as any realistic tech would never choose that shape as a proper war machine w/o something being introduced that just doesn't exist IRL.
By adjusting the scale of the mechs, Mechwarrior now looks like the combined-arms game that it represents: a game where, while mechs are intimidating, they're not battlefield infallible, and where a group of intelligent and brave tank drivers or VTOL pilots can take them on and eek out a victory.
I don't know about you guys, but that is pretty much what I was hoping for when MW5 was released. To get a decent vanilla game (and it was actually A LOT of fun for me, mostly due to COOPing option), that was promised to be HIGHLY moddable and that, with hard work of dedicated and skilled modders like Navid, will turn into magnificent piece of fun :)
Now the walls on the bases actually look like they are there for a reason other than to be stepped on. They don't don't look like the waist high cover from cover shooters.
This has the bonus effect of fixing the sense of speed. Somehow Mechwarrior games manage to make 64km/h feel slow, but now you get to see just how freakishly fast battlemechs are for their size.
Huh. My brain kept telling me "this looks stupid, that Atlas is too small." Until you moved into the base, and then it clicked and my perspective finally readjusted. This really is a lot better. Thanks for the video. After beating the campaign twice, and having my "Career Mode" run broken during PGI's mod update, I'm going to give it a few more weeks and then hop back in. I'll definitely be using this mod as well, should bring a fresh experience back.
Navid is doing MechGod's work. This is seriously making me want to buy the game... Like some people I want to get it on Steam. But also waiting to see more meaty content. Or at least flesh out the career mode.
If you do get the game, there is a recent mod which improves the AI. I don't care who you are but if you get the game, you need to get that mod, It makes the game much more fun and challenging 7fold.
@@TimberWulfIsHere Yeah, I caved, ended up getting it when it was on sale plus an additional discount for Epic. So i got the game for $24. I started without the mods and got bored fast. Then I modded the AI and the mechlab. It's night and day. However it still gets pretty repetitive. We really need a mission editor to change things up.
Rawsilver agreed, especially when you max out everything but the reloaded mod adds quite a bit of replay value. We need more mission types and longer, more rewarding types with the inclusion of mech repair bays and such. I like the new dlc game mode as it does some of that but like, how about defend/ destroy base game modes or something. Add some complexity. Hence a mission editor would be good, although it is possible to create one with the game mod maker.
This is the MechWarrior game I want to play! It always bugged me how big the mechs were in MWO and this returns them a more proper size. I can actually imagine these cockpits being hot and cramped! Get out the cooling vests and skimpy shorts!
I guess I'm going to download the Volumetric Rescale this afternoon. This makes the games feel way more like Battletech over Pacific Rim. I already got the 3D Hud and it is absolutely amazing. I feel almost like I have a real neurohelmet on displaying my HUD.
One frame of reference I like to use is the Boeing 747, which everyone is familiar with, and everyone can picture its (agreeably large) size. A fully loaded 747 weighs 400 tons. 4 times as much as an Atlas or Annihilator. The proportions are different, yes, the technology is supposed to be "more futuristic", sure. Reactors are typically extremely heavy, though, despite improvements made to the skeleton. Since you mention tanks: M1 Abrams are around 60 tons.
Thank you for the ground-pounder perspective. That helps with my 747 analogy, because if you've ever stood near one at ground level, you can tell that that Atlas is STILL taller than the fuselage (though not taller than the Vertical Stab) with your mod. So when are we getting the same mods in MWO? :D
Okay, now that you're smaller, and just in general, I feel like you shouldn't be able to just walk through a reinforced concrete wall theoretically defending a military installation, even in an Atlas. Kerensky piloted an Orion in the Amaris Civil War, and needed his friend in an Atlas to kick in the door for him. JUST the DOOR, implying the walls are even stronger, and not something a 'mech can just plow through without a second thought. And buildings in cities could be used for cover by 'mechs walking inside them (trying to be careful not to cause them to collapse inward on them), so that's a point for size and durability of the environment with respect to Battlemechs.
eh, better to compare to a ww2 maus (from what i read that was a 100ton tank). a Boeing is too "spacious" to properly compare to battlemechs. the square cube law means that even a slightly larger mech then a "light" would have triple if not quadruple the weight
Back in the days, I am pretty sure that mechs were described as being up to 10 meters (30 feet) tall. Then, over time, they somehow grew and grew and grew. I never understood that. I mean, suspension of disbelieve is hard enough with 10m tall walking tanks (you know, the old "the bigger they are, the easier they are to nuke from orbit" thingy) but 15 to 20m? You gotta be kidding me! I guess, this is a very long-winded way of saying: This looks frigging awesome! :)
I remember reading somewhere (might be the technical readout that I have) that says the Thor is the tallest 'mech on the battlefield by a hair and a half, because of that shoulder-mounted missile rack.
If you derive from a ton of SRM ammo, each missile is, like, 20 pounds. Grab a dumb bell, fill it with explosives and fuel. Numbers in Battletech have always been weird. Like, if you use the actual MWO scale of an Atlas, the thing's volume is so greater that at 100 tons, it would actually float in water.
@@rangerwickett Another point in favor of downsizing the 'mechs, as they're definitely supposed to be able to submerge in lakes and rivers, using them for cooling and concealment, at greatly reduced mobility. Last thing we need are Jesus 'mechs walking on water. :)
This is a good mod. In reality, a lot of the trees we're looking at in this video would probably average about 50-plus feet high, so to have the atlas, the tallest mech, only be about 2/3rds the height of the pine trees is much more accurate.
I believe rules wise it's 12m, as a single height level in Battletech is 6m and mechs are said to occupy 2 height levels with their waste being at the intersection of the two, page 31 Total Warfare.
There's old Battletech art that essentially portrays the 50 ton Shadow Hawk as having roughly the same volume as a main battle tank, which in real life tend to weigh about 60 tons being made from contemporary steel and composite armor. I always thought that this was the best benchmark to use for scaling BT battlemechs (and really giant robots in general) in a logical way that respects the laws of physics as much as is reasonably possible for this kind of thing. Applying the square-cube law using an MBT-sized Shadow Hawk as a baseline would mean the 100-ton Atlas wouldn't actually be that much physically taller; the portrayal in this mod seems to be about as good as you're reasonably going to get for a video game.
There is no debate to be had: the PGI 'Mechs have always been way WAY too big. In canon, they've always been between 10-15 meters. Realistically, (well, "realistically") metal and machinery is so heavy that a 19 meter 'Mech just seems cartoonishly light in PGI's world. And gameplay-wise, it has always made 'Mechs feel very slow. 60 kph is like rocketing along the ground in a smaller machine, but in MWO, even 100 kph doesn't feel very impressive. PGI messed up and just wanted bigger cause bigger must equal better, but it's always felt wrong. This looks great, I can't wait to install it.
THANK YOU! To both NavidA1 and you at NGNG for finally highlighting this issue. Honestly, this is one thing that has always bothered me since MechWarrior Online. The disparity between the size of 'mechs relative to the environment has always been irritating to me. I try not to think about it when playing, but it always -- ALWAYS -- comes back to me one way or another as I'm playing. In MWO, it was the sheer tiny-ness of the cars, streets, and stoplights that I stomp on when heading to a fight. In MW5, it's when I walk into buildings to destroy them and seeing how each internal building floor only seemed to be 5 feet instead of 10 to 15 feet average building floor height. As you said, I get that 'mechs are supposed to be big. However, they don't have to be upscaled to get that effect. The same can be done by adjusting camera depth of field and field of vision. I really hope PGH can incorporate these changes going forward, especially for the MW5 story sequel. PGH, hire NavidA1 already.
Remember the mechwarrior 4 vengeance trailer when the guy was using a lift to get inside his vulture mech? That would’ve been a great addition to really give you a sense of scale and make you understand just how big these things are even with the mod added.
In the Grey death saga books there is a descrption of a Stinger and a Wasp being used bye rioters. It was writtin that in these machines the shoulders and heads of the pilots were the only thing in the cockpit. Barely bigger than power armour
thats interesting. maybe they were saying the head and shoulders were in the actual "head" of the stinger, but the cockpit is much more in the upper torsor of the mech (heavy gear and votoms have mechs like this,where the piots head is in the "head" of the mech). unless of course they said they were "Barely bigger than power armour", then that just sounds impossible,because the closest battlemech to the size of "battlearmor" were the "protomechs", though i would say the wasp/stinger are just a little bit taller then protomechs.
@@jaromswenson7541 That'd be more like it. Those books were written before ProtoMechs were a thing so everything needed to be scaled up ever so slightly.
Just look at MechWarrior 2, when the mech pulls into or out of the bay at HQ in the training missions. About 4-stories tall, 32ft for the Mad Cat / Timber Wolf.
If you are planning to run Navid's MW5 Mercs Reloaded, the volumetric rescale mod is already included along with several others: www.nexusmods.com/mechwarrior5mercenaries/mods/161
This is the sort of project that makes me happy to see. I know this video is a bit older at this point, but I have always felt like the modern mechwarrior scale representation was way off. Disregarding fantasy levels of material sciences that exist in mechwarrior lore, the idea of a vehicle that is 20 stories tall weighing only 80 tons is indescribably hard to explain. These things are often shown overshadowing small buildings and fortifications, where realistically they are just super-science bi-pedal tanks. It's really cool to see a project that tries to dial back the scale to a more reasonable and sensible level in the game, as I feel it makes the environment more impactful and immersive. MW5 has a lot of problems, the AI being a really touchy subject for a lot of players, but he has so much potential to be cool with the efforts of the modding community.
TBO I always felt the graphics were fine, you may be noticing DLSS, they patched that in recently. Also all my graphics are cranked up, except for depth of field, I hate that crap!
For a quicky, wolfmech hero is "6 times" Phelan Kell's height, coming out to 9.5ish meters. The tallest mech pre-3060 is 14.4 meters tall (Executioner). Annihilator is 12.8 meters tall and Atlas is 13.6 meters tall (all BT stated heights, now fun fact: 13.6 meters is the height of the Hunchback in mw5). The average medium/heavy mech is between 10 and 12 meters tall. The Leopard dropship's clearance is 14 meters in the artwork from jumpships and dropships, meanwhile in mw5, the door clearance is simply insane. I think Navid's scale mod will work nicely with what I'm working on, but I need stuff in that DLC to continue.
Nice and it makes sense. the Maus was 130tons so it didn't make sense a 100ton atlas was the size of 10 of them. Not quite my head cannon sweet spot but close enough.
This is awesome man. I gotta say, your content lately has been on point. I feel like mechs in this universe have not been correctly represented in any of the games, but this mod is a great step. Judging from a lot of the lore I've been looking into, it seems the mechs behaved much more like Titans from Titanfall. They're supposed to be better than tanks because they are able to mimic human movement (climbing, jumping, and hand combat) and traverse crazy environments but be tougher. Instead we have these giant mechs that are only as capable as a tank. I know it is a super ambitious idea to have these elements in a game made by developers with low manpower and funding but a guy can dream of doing this kind of stuff in Battletech/Mechwarrior.
i agree 100%. this is why i liked the "protomech" concept so much, its very close to titanfall in size and responses. in the lore the battlemechs could do a whole lot more then walk and shoot. would be cool if we could crouch and even melee with these mechs. this would make combat very interesting with mechs crouching and popping out to shoot form cover and we get to see mechs like the hatchetman and kodiak actually use their massive melee wpns to smack a bish. maybe make light mechs just slightly taller then titanfall titans and go from there,and maybe we can get protomechs (titanfall sized,but with better designs then the original goof troop designs). then add battlearmor and we can have some realy cool looking armored warfare. tanks will actually be threats, and you would see the size progression of mechs and the advancements of miniaturization of mech technology (battle armor and protomechs). but hopeing for protomechs and smaller mechs in general is a pipdream becasue many battletech fans like the "super giant mechs and they conquer everything on the battlefield, no i wont accept that my atlas can be outclassed by a tank reeeeee".
@@jaromswenson7541 for your last point, those are the kinds of people who shudder to think of an AC/20 Urbie putting their precious Atlas on its ass. To me, that'll *always* be hilarious.
Probably no one will ever read this, cuz at the time I am writing it this is a 4-year-old video but wow, I am glad I am not the only one who was bothered by the scale. Mechs are supposed to be 12-18 meters, they are big, but not Pacific Rim big. Large trees are 50 meters, mechs are supposed to be bipedal tanks, not bipedal aircraft carriers... For me the scale hurts my immersion. This is perfect, well, ok, not perfect, the relative scale of the mechs could use a little work, but I definitely think the Shadow Hawk is a little big compared to the Atlas, but nitpicking aside this is Amazing, a massive improvement on the base games scale.
The problem is the size of the cockpit window. It's what gives you the sense of scale. If the Atlas is really that small, then how the hell is the window so big? The only mech that i find realistic relative to it's cockpit view is the Shadowhawk or the Griffin. It's big from the inside,big from the outside. The Atlas....big from the inside...tiny from the outside. See what i mean? Judging by the size of the cockpit, players get the sense that the Atlas should be twice as big if not even bigger. If the window was twice as small, then small from the outside, small from the inside. Problem solved. The weight is not important. There are tall cars and short cars, but in the end two of them might weigh about the same.
This can be solved with proper POV changes. i think MW games usually makes the player almost lick the window, when in reality it should be seeing the panel all the time. With this little change even the feeling of being cramped inside a giant mech becomes possible
2-3 stories tall, that's what they were meant to be. largest mech is 14 meters which would be a meter taller than 3 stories, smallest 8, which is just shy of 2. just take a look at the buildings around you. 2-3 stories is as tall as the mechs are supposed to be. I think only the lights in mwo were correct as far as I can remember.
To each his own. I like current scale. So i'd love to have reanimation and inverse kinematics mod separately from rescaling Anyway thank you both Navid and NGNG for keeping things rolling. To my mind despite MW4 was too arcade-feeling it still got some basic things right. If i have an energy hardpoint with 3 slots i could fit a 3-slot PPC there or 3 medium lasers. It makes sense to occupy all free space you have. And legged mechs actually hobble since leg actuators are damaged, it HAS to change the animation, not only slow you down. This was sooooo god damn cool to see that effort of a mech to stay upright.
Always had the thought "How THAT can weight only 100 tons? There's 250 at least" Also remembering art of Battletech 2018 with Griffin with enormous scale
Man now I want to see a vr mod for this game eventually. Being able to ride in these mechs with a realistic scale and being able to feely move around in the cockpit would really sell the game for me. I’ve always been a mech warrior fan and this makes the scale feel just right
I just got the game and am 100 hours in. I knew something felt off, even though I enjoy this game very much. I think one major immersion breaker was when I downloaded the Infantry mod. Like, holy cow you can fit 20 people in one Atlas toe, this is not what I remember it looking like in MW3 and MW4. I feel like a bloody Evangelion unit. Even though the video is old by this point, thank you for sharing. Instant download.
Dude! Thank you for making this. This problem was huge for me and one of the main reasons i quit playing the game. Hell an Abrams tank weighs 60 tons. I get the material in the future should weigh less and all but the mechs in the game were wayyy too big
Yup I like that mod sizing. Like an atlas ..just because it’s 100 tons, doesn’t means all the weight is from height ,but the mass. It makes more sense.
In the 1980'a Battletech board game, the mech size is 12 to 15 meters. I have not gotten any of the Catalyst Games Battletech books so I am not familiar with the new size in their cannon.
It's not a catalyst/fasa problem. The scale of mechs has always been broken in this game. For example the early novels from the 80's say a shadowhawk's cannon is an 80mm. Except if that was the calibre then the mech itself would only be a couple of meters tall going by the muzzle size. Or if you bought old FASA models and scenery, the mechs would be something like 10 stories tall, or 20+ meters. Meanwhile the books say the absolute largest they get is 12m and most are shorter. etc.
Coming from the turn based Battletech game, this was the scale in that game. IRL the IS-3 heavy tank for example is like half the height of the M48 medium tank. Heavier shouldn't always mean taller.
OH THANK YOU YES. What always triggered me the most was the reference to weight. Weight is pretty much THE reference unit in MW games and there's no way of not seeing it. The biggest baddest assault mechs are one hundred tons of armored fighting machine - including ammo, propulsion, actuators etc. That's one hundred, not ten thousand, or in other words, 30-40% more than a fully loaded MBT. There's just no way battlemechs could be the size they are in MWO; even with the most sci-fi esque materials I can imagine, that's just too far off to be believable. Another useful reference is AC caliber. If I'm not mistaken, a really big one, like a 10 or a 20 is in the range of 120/150 mm, maybe a bit more depending on the manufacturer, but surely much closer to a tank gun than a naval gun. This mod makes a lot of sense indeed... and don't forget the one that fixes projectile velocities !
yeah, once i realized the abrams mbt is 60tons, a 60 ton mech is way more massive for no good reason. to get that tonage and weight as presented by pgi the material would almost have to be lighter then air to make sense.
@@ASNS117Zero if we wanted realistic weights to hieght, then light mechs would be much closer to titanfall titans, so about 20ft tall. and because the square cube law exist then the heavier mechs actually wont be much more taller then the light, since just being slightly bigger would dramatically increase weight...i guess they would only look bulkier then the light mech.
@@jaromswenson7541 I mean, if we're going hard realism, you just wouldn't build battlemechs, it's not an effective weapons system. As long as you can fire guided weapons from over the horizon that are a fraction of the cost of the ponderously large and expensive war machine you're trying to build that can likely cripple or outright destroy said war machine in a single shot, there's no reason to ever build it. In-universe, it's still kind of a head scratcher to me why one of the great houses didn't just invest heavily in long range air superiority and precision orbital weaponry to obsolete battlemechs. Or in the very least, why the people who wrote the lore didn't include a reason why the great houses didn't do that.
@@ASNS117Zero well, in universe the battlemechs are kinda an ultimate all terrain weapons platform that can stand its ground. its the same reason we still use tanks today despite them being outclassed by missiles and fighter jets. you can blow up the enemies visible assets from afar as much as you want but at the end of the day if you want to hold ground your gonna need armored firepower that can hold ground. also, in the setting we know there are anti missle systems that seem to be very effective, at least effective enough that the majority of missiles in the setting need to be cheap and shot in large waves just to overcome the defense systems. now the obvious next question is why not build more tranks instead of more battlemechs. in lore it seems the only logical reason (im not counting the weird logic that somehow mechs are harder to kill) battlemechs are preferred over tanks is because they are much better at handling terrain then tanks. but in reality the sheer canonical size of battlemechs is too much and would be easy targets for tank formations. the solution is simple and its the same suggestion i had before, make them smaller as they would logically be based on their weight. at a much smaller size they can better fit into dense cover terrain (especially forests and cities) as they dont have such a wide boxy profile as the tank does, they can better navigate between trees/large boulders/and buildings. their taller profiles (in the 20-20ft range) being negated by being able to hide behind cover of equivalent height (even crouch and lay down if the situation calls for it). now does this make mechs better then tanks? only at certain battlefield roles. with these changes you'll see battlemechs being deployed to conquer the tight confines of urban combat and other such environments, while tanks are still used as open ground combat.
Please tell me what mod you used for the new 'Reactor Online' e.t.c. spheel ( 8:05 ) It doesn't sound standard and reminds me of the good ol' days of MW2. I need this in my lfie!
Seriously, this is so much better. The only reason it seems even a little "off" is because of the monchromatic trees. They're all huge. There's no smaller foliage to make sense of the scale. Any time the mechs are next to vehicles, trucks, people, or normal buildings their size makes perfect sense. They also made PERFECT sense when the shuttle came in. That's the kind of size vehicles you could expect to pack on one of those shuttles and actually take in and out of orbit. When you consider how many mechs an actual dropship can haul, they can't be any bigger than this. And mechs in story and cannon are gladitorial suits, not "godzilla size" as it was put. They're SUPPOSED to be able to take cover in the world around them. Only the huge 100 ton mechs really entered the "damn that thing is big and hard to hide" category. The really small mechs are supposed more like seriously oversize power armor. Cockpits with limbs. TANKS are supposed to be dangerous to mechs in a head on fight. It's terrain and technology that make mechs superior. In proper lore you're not supposed to be able to step on a tank with a medium mech and destroy it. You'd have to attack it physically because of it's size. Only assault mechs get close to "stomp on a tank" range and even then you wouldn't if it was still mobile it might knock you over. So I think this mod really nails it for size.
Well with the focus on the mod bringing you closer to the ground, more attention will be obtained from the lack of details from that height. I think that is what your getting at. Obviously it would be great if PGI implemented this mod into the base game and then added a bit more details for environmental assets like bushes etc..
@@NoGutsNoGalaxy Yes it really would. Or more procedural generation. PGI's biggest downfall with trying to enact the inner sphere war either with MWO or in a game like this is that without infinite variety of warfare areas you are doomed to the eventual 'memorized maps' gameplay... which I HATE from a tactical standpoint. Revisiting a battlefield should be a very rare and exciting thing... not commonplace. Or at least not beyond a single campaign of defense or attack of an area. Also unfortunately PGI just doesn't have the talent, team size, or capability to make this a reality. Which makes me very sad. It's the war ranging across the entire inner sphere across endless battlegrounds that I dream of. And no game has ever delivered.
This seems like a good addition. I'd definitely use this mod...at least once it comes to steam. Now all we need is like you said, infantry, heck I'd even like battle armor and the ability to leave your suit to recon in them.
Given how most Mobile Suits in Gundam range from 15 to 20 meters in height (a few outliers being the Psycho Gundams being 40+ meters), they wouldn't look too out of place in BattleTech. Just tweak their designs to fit the overall aesthetic of BattleTech and they can pass off as prototype designs or some LosTech design.
I mean, the Phoenix Hawk LAM pretty much *is* a Gundam. The other thing these games get wrong besides scale is mobility in general. These things can strafe, they can crouch and drop prone, the TechManual describes some pilots managing to do hand stands. BattleMechs are the king of the battlefield because of their myomer "muscles" that make them move more like humans than hydraulics-powered rock-em sock-em robots.
And the average person is closer to 1.75m than 2m, so the Atlas was scaled correctly. This re-scale takes the Atlas down to about the size of a Commando.
The Atlas is obscured by 12m tall trees in tabletop and old art has the pilot taking up the entire head. The "18m tall" thing is out of older MechWarrior games which were just as bad with scale.
Not scale related, but since you fired the LRMs on the Atlas: I wonder if there'll be an Atlas LRM mod. The Atlas-D (and almost every other version of the Atlas) is supposed to fire the LRM 20 in four groups of 5 from the hip. The SRM 6 was in the upper torso hardpoint. The AS7-K is the only one that expanded the LRM 20 to fire through 20 tubes. I thought that was something PGI could and should have done to make the different Atlases distinct, instead of every single one firing two groups of 10, so I'd enjoy a mod that corrects that.
IIRC that is a carry over from MW:O where correct tubing killed a few chassies. 5 missile volleys did far worse against ams then a 20 missile cluster a lot of the time. Now ofc in this game that would not matter as much.
@@tawesssoabbox But that's what would give the -K model it's "special" feel. It only has a single missile hardpoint, which I'm sure goes mostly unused, but if that single missile hardpoint was the only one on an Atlas that could fire a full salvo, instead of a volley-fire effect, then it would have its purpose, and its "feel". It'd also be nice to have the SRM 6 rack mounted higher. :) Apart from that, AMS on the MWO battlefield is WAY more common than it ever was on Table Top, from what I can gather, looking at builds. I didn't realize it until a few weeks ago, too, but TT AMS was only supposed to be a self-defense weapon. It wasn't supposed to fire on anything aimed at allies. But then MWO would have a bitch of a time programming it to figure out dead-fire missiles, then, wouldn't they? :)
Any mechassault fans? It's an arcade spin off and the scale seems pretty good. You could fight infantry and kick trucks sky high without being the size of a skyscraper.
The more I learned about cannonical 'Mechs the more I appreciated MechAssault. At the time a lot of people were pissed because we knew MechWarrior itself was dead, so people were like "what the hell'a this arcade nonsense it's not a replacement!" Now I'd love to see a more detailed MechAssault.
Considering the rescale, the cockpits looked too small... Until I did a lore deep dive. Apparently, you put a mech on more than getting into it. The cockpits in lore are tiny since 90% of all control is done through the neural helmet, a tiny spot for the organic CPU (the "pilot") to be housed in armored safety.
Sort of! A pilot took up the whole head of an Atlas and that was considered roomy. Meanwhile the Spider was small enough that it didn't have proper ejection capabilities. It's not all the Neurohelmet though. The Inner-Sphere never really figured out true brain-machine links, the helmet just uses the pilot's own sense of balance to automate keeping the 'Mech upright to some extent. Now, the Clans, they came up with "advanced imaging" to truly make pilots move ProtoMechs with their minds, but there was a shelf life because those pilots went batshit insane. So it never got very popular. In the TechManual the control really are described as two joysticks and foot pedals. But they've got more degrees of freedom. Push the joysticks up and down, twist them, same with the "foot pedals" where you basically wear them and can move them as much as your own feet. Apparently some very good MechWarriors can make particularly nimble mechs do handstands.
Thank you for the mod highlight, looks solid and I really like his HUD mods. First time I questioned MW5 scaling was when I noticed how tall I was in was compares to the HPG arrays. For as massive a facility as they are supposed to be, why in a medium mech, a centurion if I recall, was I standing almost half the array height? Now if a mod was made to correct the BS infinite tank spawning on your six....that would be amazing. I'm tired of clearing a base, It's all dead and gone yet somehow 4 new fresh tanks deploy from the F'ing rubble?!? Sigh... right... PGI....
Basically. The writers played fast and loose with scale but these things are obscured by 12m trees and a pilot would take up the whole head of an Atlas.
@@colbyboucher6391 an Atlas pilot only takes up one side of an Atlas's head as the otherside is where the Commander sits due to the Atlas's role as a Command mech with it's satellite dish on the side of it's head providing comms with Lance/Company and orbital vessels.
@@dc-4ever201 The command console was only introduced as a concept in 1997 by which point the people who had initially conceptualized the setting were mostly gone and classic BattleTech was in it's twilight years. This goes in the same category as ultra / rotary autocannons being the "automatic" ones when straight-up standard autocannons were originally fluffed as rapid burst-fire weapons where one "round" represented a single burst (which is why the larger caliber ones have a lower range, by the way, more difficult to land the whole burst on one location with a lower firing rate). I really, truly wish UA-cam didn't auto-remove comments with links so I could actually drill the scale of 'Mechs depicted in earlier artwork into your skull (and, again, their scale as depicted by the actual rules of the game) but go to Sarna and check out the actual early artwork of the Atlas where the pilot did, in fact, just barely fit in the head, and that was considered pretty roomy for a 'Mech. The people who actually developed BattleTech at least had a vague understanding of basic physics.
@@colbyboucher6391 I believe I saw it in the early 90's, when I used to play TT with a group, in the write up for the Atlas in one of the official mech sourcebooks, so it being a Command mech predates what you have read.
@@dc-4ever201 Command consoles were introduced in Maximum Tech in 97. In any case, regardless, if you're going by tabletop rules light / heavy woods are two levels tall which is equal to 12 meters, not even particularly tall trees, and they universally obscure a Mech's line of sight. Edit: Ok, I was wrong, it was the Tactical Handbook in 94. Point still stands.
This looks so much better that it's actually painful to look at the upscaled Metal Gear Rex sized mechs of MWO and MW5.....these actually make sense....
Yeah, this is more or less the scale I expected as well from years of watching the cinematics and FMV from past mechwarrior games... it's especially weird because in a number of them they show human directly in comparison to the mech size (Mechwarrior 3 comes to mind when the poor grunts on the ground got stomped or Mechwarrior 4 when the mechwarriors board their mech) What i am curious though is what exactly is the reasoning for PGI to upscale these mechs? When they put the tanks etc.. and realized those tanks were too small in comparison to the mechs and made no sense, surely they recognize by that point that the mechs were oversized... why keep the mechs at those oversized size and upsizing the vehicles instead of the sensible things to resize the mechs down appropriately?
its for the "wow" factor. unfortunately battletech never had actual numbers on mech sizes (probably was easier to keep that way so they wouldn't have to rescale the minis), and thus these numbers are always going to be up to interpretation. but there is also a factor that some robot enthusiasts just like the idea of "bigger is better". they prefer their mechs to be gigantic because they think that looks cool. its not very realistic, but many fans of mecha could care less about "realism" and more care about feeling like literal Olympic titans on the battlefield...instead of actually feeling grounded in realism. i definitely fall into the "realism" camp, and i would actually like for the battlemechs to be smaller then they would logically be (based on weight),but that's a personal preference.
probably cause the wehicles got 1 or 2 hitbox, and the mechs got 5-6. Or just simply they built the world around the mechs , and that was to hard wired to the developers brain , so nobody was able to think outside the box...
Maybe they just looked at battletech tabletop games and didn't realise that the maps of classic bt are 1/1200 and the mechs are 1/285. So the mechs really look towering over every map feature. So in comparison the real scale looks out of place. But the bigger is better rule is the most likely ^^
Are light and medium mechs re-scaled? The cockpits seems a tad bit on the small side compared to the humans on the ground. I know they are supposed to be really cramped though.
A lot of light 'Mechs in novels only have the pilot's head and shoulders actually in the "cockpit" area. The Spider was infamous for being too claustrophobic even for most MechWarriors (and for not having a way to eject). Cramped as hell. Hell, ProtoMechs had pilots basically curling up into a ball to get inside, and that only worked because the Clans had actually wired the pilots' brains in and they went batshit insane after a while. And Elementals are just discount 40k Space Marines.
I wish I had seen this video when it came out because scale is a huge topic to me and one that I think most people playing/ designing BattleTech/Mechwarrior get wrong. It's so wrong in MWO that I don't even like playing the game. MW5 gets it wrong to the same extent as MWO but at least they don't compound the problem with ridiculous quirks that turn a tiny light mech into a medium in terms of armor and structure. The thing I'm taking about is how relative scale of mechs is just wrong , especially when it comes to light mechs. Designers and artists often think they can take a mech that weighs 20 tons and make it 1/5th the size or even smaller than a mech weighing 100 tons. But that's not realistically possible for one reason. People. All mechs must be at least large enough to accommodate a 3 ton cockpit for the pilot and the necessary support systems like life support and communications. Also a combat vehicle engineer is going to design any war machine to be as compact as possible because smaller targets are harder to see and hit. That's just a fact. Real life designs prove this. I'm going to compare a large tank with a small tank. Using the metric ton and feet on both to keep them apples to apples. I'm also going to compare Hull length because the Abrams gun sticks out much further part the hull than the Wiesel. The German Wiesel tank, heaviest variant, weighs 4.78 tons. Is roughly 12 feet long, 6 feet wide and 6 feet tall. Crew 2-3. The Abrams M1A2 heaviest variant is 66.8 tons. 26 feet long, 12 feet wide and 8 feet tall. Crew 4. As you can see even though the Abrams weighs 14 times now than the Wiesel and has roughly twice the crew, it's not 14 times the size. Not even remotely close. That's because the Wiesel can't get any smaller of it is going to have a human crew. This is why MWO and MW5 and BattleTech needs to re-scale these mechs to be much closer in scale. A light should be roughly 1/3 the size of an assault. A medium roughly half the size of an assault and a heavy roughly 2/3 to 3/4 the size of an assault. Now people will say that would make lights to easy to kill. But they are supposed to be. A light NEVER had a cave to destroy an Atlas in 1v1 combat. But in MWO, many lights have a better than 50/50 chance of taking out an Atlas. Assault pilots are often more afraid of a light mech then they are a heavy mech. That's just silly. Anyone piloting a light should know that they can't go toe to toe and dance around in close under a big mech with impunity. First off in BattleTech, melee combat would have prevented that. An Atlas would have kicked a flea in the face of it got that close and the damage would have likely outright destroyed a component or even the entire mech. So if there's not going to be melee in MWO they at least need to get the scale right and stop adding so much armor and structure quirks to make a light as tanky as a medium. Will it make lights less fun? No. It will just force it back into the role it was designed for. Recon and hit and run. Light pilots will still have lots of fun in those roles and if they want a to take on assaults then they better do it in packs.
This is also just actual BattleTech canon. Official BT cross-section of the Atlas has the MechWarrior inside take up the whole head. 'Mechs are obscured by 12m trees in tabletop. They're described as claustrophobic death traps where in a lot of models the "cockpit" is really just a space for your waist up or even just your head and shoulders.
mechs weight 100tons - compare them to real live machinery now - 100tons is not that HUGE (compare to train engines) This volumetic mod is great! This is how mechs should look like
The rescale and the inverse kinematics are amazing work, within the constraints of the MW engine as it is. In general, I feel like a lot of the official BT material from FASA's 4th Succession War onward succumbed to inflation and munchkinitis. Just like MMOs where the designers can't figure out how to create qualitative depth, they go for quantity (from the deus ex machina of Star League memory cores to Clan tech). There's so much potential for immersion, as you've pointed out, and yet all they could come up with was "make 'em bigger"? MW5 is definitely prettier, but it's just a new graphics skin/effects package on no substantively new gameplay, to me. I get that eye candy is far cheaper to implement than developing a totally new game engine or designing new gameplay elements. Other comments below have mentioned desire for more mission editing ability and other ways to create variety and depth of experience. I get that revenue versus operating costs and game development budget is always a challenge, and I succumbed below to a totally irrelevant rant way out of scope (feel free to skip the rest of the comment). But Glassdoor estimates Piranha Games' annual revenue at $5-10 million. Is it a limitation of game development logistics or of game designer vision that keeps recycling the same constricted MW/BT scope again and again, instead of fleshing out an actual mech simulator with increased gameplay to keep up with the times and new technologies? An FPS like Arma 3 is estimated at around $2-5 million to develop, plus a few key physics/gameplay mods (however you value the labor on those) that combined provide a fairly close comparison for potential gameplay scope. This could be crossed with elements of games like Hardspace Shipbreaker or Space Engineers for physics engine elements. Hell, Living Legends modded more functional vehicles and battlearmor long ago. I'd be totally willing to accept a lot less visual gee-whiz for more game engine scope. Years ago, I got tired of MWO b/c, scale issues aside, the mech movement itself felt too safe, level, and detached. No matter what elevation changes you walk over, the mechs just play a little slip-n-slide but otherwise stay perfectly upright (game engine and design limitations, I'm sure). No MW game has ever really explored the depth of potential play experience in something as simple as keeping your mech stable (like all FPS games). TT BT has stability checks. One of the first MWs (MW 1?) had a simple falling and standing up keypress mechanic, I think. The HBS turn-based BT models it. In a completely different reality and different game engine, we could have a Death Stranding-lite MW with at least an abstracted model for mech balance on different surfaces (the pile of rubble your Atlas stood on at the end of the video would actually induce slipping and slightly random leaning inputs) or when sharply taking damage. A little gyro display that shows your current balance relative to center could be a real-time minigame to organically create a player experience of making piloting skill checks to stay standing; you could control mech lean to help accelerate into a sprint or decelerate, keep balance on slopes, etc. At an extreme of speculation, a limited physics-engine based game could allow shot location to actually matter, so that a big ballistic alpha strike to a higher target torso area would induce bigger gyro instability inputs; or shoot a leg off at the foot, lower, or upper leg to cause the mech to organically fall (unless the player has the skill to play the gyro balance mini-game and prop the mech up on the leg stump a la multiple BT story scenes), etc. A physics engine would also make variable gravity on different moons and planets a possibility, too. Well beyond the apparent and safe inside-the-box scope of the MW games, a deeper Mechwarrior FPS/RPG experience could really dig into mech repair, maintenance, and modification/upgrading. Instead of abstractly reducing all the non-combat stuff to a spreadsheet management game, players could develop a currently non-existent skill tree to put XP into a mech tech path, or as you suggested, infantry game mechanics. Just as the TT rules depicted decades before Titanfall came out, can you imagine (not in this game engine as it stands, of course) infantry units and players trained in anti-mech tactics, grappling onto and rappelling up a mech to plant charges on the leg joints or key vulnerable points on the upper body? Or just training up infantry weapon skills and shutting down a mech by overheating it with well-aimed inferno manpack missiles. Stuff like this could effectively reboot MW gameplay to an even lower (and more immersive) level of origin story, where a scrappy team of mismatched personnel fight hard just to survive against and capture a single Locust (a la Decision at Thunder Rift and the Gray Death Legion). Heck, in The Crescent Hawk's Inception, capturing a Locust meant the high end of armor for commonly found mechs (doesn't count cheesing the Chameleon or stealing any mechs from the arena). And like the abstract mechanic of mech variant assembly in HBS BT mods, if you only have components for less than one whole Wasp, you'd have to capture and strip enough other mech parts to cobble together a Frankenmech Wasp -- with the attendant mech tech skill rolls along the way to install each component, and a player experience of somewhat abstractly carrying components around the mech bay of the dropship, up the maintenance bay scaffolding, to physically put in the appropriate mech location. In a deeper model than HBS BT abstractly recreates, a MW simulator game already has the capacity to model things like rotation speed of every joint (as Navid has demonstrated with gyros etc in the Reloaded mod!). Manufacturer quality or damage level of every actuator, gyro, fusion engine, sensors, cockpit ejection system, EVERYTHING could be made more diverse with simple variation of number stats like degrees of rotation per second (and thus not impact game demands on system resources the way the above mech balance and physics engine requirements would). I've seen other people observe that the dropships in MW are a total missed opportunity. The dropship is modeled, but only as an invincible (and system resource-cheap) prop that drops off or picks up mechs. Interacting with a dropship offers crazy amounts of scenario potential. From choosing an LZ (safe but far, or close but hot) to being shot down, suffering potential jamming, mech entrapment in a damaged bay, stuck bay doors (and having to maneuver a mech inside the dropship to exit via another bay?), the list goes on. One of the early Wolf's Dragoons novels describes jump-capable mechs being dropped from a low-flying dropship (sure, call it artistic license, back then), and the sourcebooks describe mech combat drops. The dropship itself could be used for fire support like an AC-130 gunship (either abstractly as a call-in ability with cooldown timer, or as a full-fledged controllable AI unit/pilotable vehicle for a player on a pilot skill path) or a grounded firebase -- and vulnerable to damage like any other unit. This would integrate the TT dropship stats and provide an entirely new-to-MW-computer-games tier of achievement to save up money/influence/resources to capture/purchase/repair dropships from Leopards up to Overlords. This would also rationalize unlockable and expensive tiers for increased mech bay and storage capacity. But all this is irrelevant given the actual game and choices we have available. /rant :D
i would like a mod that revamps the animations of the mechs, and also one that replaces PGI's awkward models with 3D renders of shimmering swords versions of battle tech mechs, THAT would be cool.
Still, I doubt it'd withstand 20 tons on top of it, right? Of all the forces an MBT is built to withstand something crushing it from above isn't really one of them.
And an army of lazy sci-fi artists cried out in anguish, "Whuh? Mechs are vehicle scale?" and they were silenced. MW5 is bearable, if you like role playing as an ork, but I ditched Star Citizen for its scale negligence being outright... well... The Nova 'tank' in Star Citizen is five meters tall and sixteen long. It's turret has enough free volume to stack multiple Abrams inside. Vertically. It also has an interior hallway that can comfortably dock a Soyuz TMA. If it weren't for those pesky solar panels. And once you see it in the gunhouse, you start to see it in the ships. These aren't vehicles, these are spacepunk deco architecture projects. So anything that corrects this humanless scale problem is welcome in my book.
Give a tank legs and arms, Battlemechs are usually scaled way too large in MWO. Height ranged from roughly 8-14m, height was a disadvantage. The taller a mech the harder it would be to stabilize, its why the largest mech in the universe has 3 legs to stabilize and distribute the weight of it. By all means, these are video games/science fictions and they don't have to be perfect. But Battletech was always walking tanks, and at some point in Mechwarrior they got way too big for what they were supposed to be lol.
Yeah there wasn't any really set scale, and what was set was based on line art for a TT game, not for a shooter. So it's sorta something that just needs to be figured out.
What if I told you... You could save up to 15% on car insurance by switching to Geico And yeah, in lore mechs were big but the cockpits were tightly cramped, ones with hands could pick up a person but their hands were smaller than a person and the smaller mechs needed to use both hands and were around 3 stores tall, ~30ft / 10 meters
set the mechs to the proper scale and set their armor back. It was nice in BAttletech online the mechs had a better scale. atlas was huge jenner was very small. It looks like he needs to scale them between each other.
Great Job!! Relative small changes makes a lot in this game (the hud, the scale, the zoom), so I think this game still have a lot of potential . MW5 engine is far better tan MWO, we can dream… Thanks for the video!
well on paper they are, but if you watch a gundam series it seems the gundams and mobile suits are alot taller then that, but that can be chalked up to inconsistent animation. so while technically they are roughly the same height, gundams looks closer to the size of mwo mechs if you watch a lot of gundam...also gundam takes place alot in space and it can be realy hard to tell the height and scale of mecha in space.
@@jaromswenson7541 i mean, there is literally a life sized 1:1 scale gundam in japan that is 18 meters tall for scale if you wanna do a quick google. also like, 60% of the original gundam took place on earth, im not really sure about later series, but there is tons of tank-stomping in gundam 0079
@@wikikomoto its very predominant in alternate universe series and other UC timeline series. i actually dont remember much "tank stomping", the majority of combat i remember was from the crew of the white base and so it was the gundam kicking zakus and weird mobile armors. also there is a drastic inconsistency with reported gundam sizes and their weight. its the same issue many in this comment section have. no matter what "future super lightweight metals" there will always be this disconnect between size of these mecha and their reported weights.
@@jaromswenson7541 i remember an obscene amount of stock-footage megella attack tanks getting kicked while on earth. and yeah, the weight makes no sense. "luna titanium armor" isn't a thing that will ever exist, but at the very least, mobile suits were designed for low-gravity shenanigans first, where as battlemechs were originally designed for terrestrial combat.
@@wikikomoto oh, those "not tanks". those are stupid vtol fighters that have an alternative movement system. just because a zaku can replace its legs with those tredds doesn't make it a "tank". but that is just me arguing what exactly makes a tank or What makes a mech. to be honest i forgot about the magella as the zeon forces are not known for that weird thing and are mainly known for the zaku and introducing mobile suits to warfare. i guess they added zeon tanks into the series to show off "see, see, our robots can totally win against tanks". well as far as space combat mobile suits make very little sense as they look to be built for ground combat, there is no reason for feet/legs for space combat,especially if you dont include any thrusters on the legs in the original series. at least for battletech they never have "space mechs" and just go with the tried and tested fighter platforms when it came to air and space combat. BT would eventually try introducing transformable "mecha into fighters" but it was explained that they were inferior to normal fighters but it was more or less a way to make the mech easily redeploy-able for ground combat. honestly, despite their "giant robots beat everything" type storytelling, BT was better at having more realistic mecha combat. in gundam a young angsty teenager with mind powers is the best pilot for a super robot gundam. in BT there are no super robots (mech assault tried including such things but are non canonical) and all the mechs have the potential to have the same technologies as each other, no mcguffin mind powers, and all pilots have to actually train for years/decades before they are considered "aces". so i will give mad props for BT actually being more "real robot" then gundam.
This also makes the tonnage a lot more believeable; for comparison an M1 Abrams is about 60-65 tons, and something like the Commando, shown frequently to be so large to make that tank look like an RC toy, is only 25 tons? It just doesn't make sense; sure you can have lighter and more futuristic materials but with something so large the overall density of the figure would probably be less than water.
To put this all into perspective, the typical dry weight of a Boeing 747-400 (that means before crew, fuel, pax, and cargo) is just over twice the weight of an Atlas and has a wingspan that is over three times the height of one if it were laying on its back. Fuselage noose-to-tail measurement and possible max take-off weight is even greater. An even better comparison is the total height from ground to the top of the vertical stabalizer (that vertical fin on the tail of an aircraft)...19.41 meters. Doesn't that number sound familiar? For me, Mech's in BattleTech have never truely been huge or monstrous in size if compared to other sci-fi franchises and IP's, only in comparison to modern-day real-world military hardware. Even an M1A2 Abrams already sits at a whopping 68 and a half tons, and that's been around since the early 90s. In my head canon, BT Mechs are something of merely the next step in mechanized warfare rather than being being so unbelievably beyond it's real form today. What's even more interesting is that we are talking about a 1000 years gap between real-world and BT, but some of the lore behind BT helps to answer the question of why it's simply taken that long to make basically standing tanks. It didn't, but they haven't really gone anywhere since then, even after hundreds of years of warfare. That's also where BT has it's charm...it's a hell of a lot more believable to me than all those Gundams and Megadeuses. Even the fact that Clan tech is often so much more advanced and so far ahead of IS equivalents, while a bitch and a half to get balance in game down right, makes much more sense in the real world than how most games treat opposite sides. It's always felt so much more grounded in plausibility than most other IP's like BT. To be honest, I'm glad they are not Pacific Rim scale...it's a uniqueness that sets BT apart from the rest in a positive and beneficial way. It makes BT an even more all too familiar universe. Also, that's a nice looking F350, way better than that freakin' Telsa Tuck.
I once spent a long weekend brainstorming a reimagining of Battletech with modern ideas of technology. Why big robots? Why no drone vehicles? Why are engagement ranges so close? Sure, by the 31st century tech has declined, and the Clans were I guess weeaboos who loved fighting with honor instead of brains, but why didn't Star League technical manuals ever have just, like, nuclear warheads? The logic I came up with (in my alternate reality) was that the Kearny-Fuchida drive had been adapted to create forcefields, which would block the passage of matter coming in, but could let matter go out, and would let electromagnetic waves (e.g., light and lasers) in and out. They were excellent at blocking single strikes from railguns or even widely distributed energy from explosions. You could only take them down by pounding them repeatedly, preferably in different spots in short succession, causing the field to become unstable and drop. However, they were frictionless, and they only functioned if they formed a complete shell around an object. (In BT lore, jumpships had to drape hoods over dropships so they could be brought along when the K-F drive activated.) The consequence of this was that tracked and wheeled vehicles couldn't use them, because they'd have no traction. Copters could not displace air to create lift, though highly advanced planes could the field itself as a lifting body, though it wasn't very stable. This meant that the best way to move a military vehicle while protecting it with a forcefield was to give it legs. 'Heat sinks' would be devices that briefly part the forcefield to vent heat. Otherwise heat would just build up inside the field. These basic principles of the fictional physics would lead to some adjustments in weapons, and in game mechanics. Every hit to 'armor' (aka, forcefield) would just do 1 damage, which made things like missiles and machine guns good at overwhelming a field and causing it to drop. Things like PPCs and Gauss Rifles would do a lot of damage if they hit exposed 'structure' (aka, the mech itself), but would be wasted if used on a mech that was still shielded. Lasers would go straight through forcefields but do less damage (and probably produce a bit more heat to balance them). Autocannons would probably switch from the 'big bullet' style to something more like rotary autocannons, and would be the best overall weapons for taking down shields and then actually causing damage afterward. Anyway, I thought it would be a nifty idea should the setting ever get rebooted.
well, comparing a mech that has no free space to a massive cargo plane that has a massive open space inside is not very...comparable. a better comparison is the german maus tank of ww2. as from what i read that was 100tons. now you may look at it and think "thats not much bigger then a modern day mbt", but thats because the square cube law means that even going slightly bigger then a modern day 60 ton tank instantly exponentially adds weight.
@@rangerwickett eh, cant say im a fan of "lets explain stuff with shields" kind of logic. that is one of the charms in battletech, that its much more grounded in reality then setting that just explain protection with "we have shields". better to come up with actual metal that is deisgned to flake off instead of being easily penetrated. though even "new type of armor" is a little too unrealistic, since the dawn of firearms and cannons the era of "armor shrugging off anything" has been subverted and now its getting ever more difficult to actually protect things like tanks because ranged wpns are just that efficient at penetration (even bunkers aren't safe).
@@rangerwickett There's much better ways of explaining this. This mod shows 'Mechs at their cannonical scale where they're obscured by 12m trees. What it can't fix is MechWarrior forgetting that a BattleMech's locomotion is provided by myomer fiber muscles. Imagine something that size running at you going 80-something Kph. They're not rock'em sock'em robots, they can strafe (not depicted in tabletop because 30m hexes), they can crouch and even go prone, the TechManual says that skilled pilots can make them do handstands. As for range: Of course these things are hard to hit when they're bobbing and weaving even when "standing still" in their 30m hex. On top of that, think about this: A canonical autocannon doesn't shoot one massive shell. It's a burst that gets abstracted as a "round". In fact with in a class of autocannon the real size of the gun varies, it's a measurement of damage caused, not caliber. Combine that with lasers obviously being damage-over-time weapons as ablative arnor making single big hits relatively meaningless and a particular picture forms. You need to land *burst of fire* on *one specific location* on this thing running 30-100kph or more while running around everywhere yourself. If you can't do that you've caused no meaningful damage. Larger caliber ACs are shorter ranged because the generally low rate of fire makes that more difficult. Keep in mind that in TT "extreme range" existists for anything past a weapon's "effective" range, you just have next to no chance of hitting anything! Granted this is a FLUFF answer. The real answer is balance + the impossibility of depicting real ranges on a table. If course you still need to accept the silly concession that for some reason, they can field nore armor and weapons than a comperable tank. But you've got to suspend disbelief somewhere.
No, thats actually how tall battlemechs are. PGI's scale is correct. Even in the old drawings, one of these Atlas's is x8 the height of the average man. What PGI did wrong was to make these mechs too wide; like the Centurion. The table top Centurion is slim, but in MWO and this game it's almost as wide as it is tall. It's a mech that is hard to miss when shooting at.
lmaooo no dude look up the Atlas on Sarna and look at the old art. A MechWarrior took up the whole head. Sometimes artists got lazy and drew stuff way too big, but these things are obscured by 12m trees in tabletop and infantry can be a threat to them in urban environments. For that matter in the novels light 'mechs are terrifyingly cramped. Like, it's just your head and shoulders or maybe past your waist in the "cockpit" area. The Spider was infamous for being too claustrophobic even for most MechWarriors, particularly because they couldn't eject properly.
Taken from Sarna. "A BattleMech (often abbreviated 'Mech, although that could technically also refer to IndustrialMechs) is an armored combat vehicle of roughly humanoid shape, standing 8 to 14 meters tall and typically massing from 20 to 100 tons." The scale of mechs with Navid's mod is about how I always pictured mechs.
To me it feels like they should be ~5% bigger. Like assaults don’t have a large amount of overhead, but still a comfortable amount. Like the Atlas and Annihilator being able to just about see over base walls.
I played the table top game in the way back. I had a blueprint of the Battle Master hanging on my bedroom wall. The Battle Master is an 85 ton assault mech. Large, but not the biggest.
The blueprint included a pilot standing next to it for scale. Other images in source books like "3025 Technical Readout," included other images that lent a sense of scale.
Btw, the reference to Gundam is a bit unfair. Gundam is just about perfectly sized to represent large battlemechs (indeed, in the original timeline, the last ova included newer "suits" which were significantly smaller.
I am dissappointed by the up-sizing in the computer games. The turn based Battlemechs game also shows very large machines.
Anyway, I'm starting to ramble. I think this mod is a step in the right direction, but I think it goes a bit too far for larger mechs. However, I think there should be a bigger difference between them. A 20 ton light mech should be considerably smaller than a 100 ton assault mech. Anyway, I hope this link works, this is the blueprint I had on my wall, a gazillion years ago:
images.app.goo.gl/2V3a4Y3wctDavj9LA
Oh, just found another good scale comparison image. I think it's about right:
images.app.goo.gl/RVNZ9rQeCuBSb1yy9
I thought atlas was 15m tall, and the Annihilator being the tallest.
'Mechs are supposed to be looking in through second story windows, not third or fourth.
@@jodason8331 The Banshee is the tallest I think, meant to be about 16-18m tall
The problem isn't the mech size IMO, its the assets all around the world and how it feels like you are walking around in a diorama instead of a real world scaled to humans with a giant mech walking around. The resize mod doesn't really address that. You have grass taller than the truck you demoed earlier in the video, flowers and bushes taller than the truck. Same with textures, they are scaled for the view of you in the mech above, not for humans, so again you get that diorama result. The closest mech games have come to getting this right is something like Titanfall where the map is scaled and sized for human players, but also has giant mechs walking around. Good example of how to get scale right.
A lot of people don't realize, heavy and assault mechs are only supposed to be as tall as fighter jets are long.
Another funny thing is Gundam has the same problem. Gundams are canonically roughly the same size as battlemechs, but they never have consistent scale from scene to scene, so sometimes they're randomly twice as big as they should be.
Sad thing all the mods like this are broken.
@@yusriyahbagheri8843 Think YAML's rescale still works.
Gundam are cannonicaly 16 to 20 meters tall based on which series they belong to where Sarna says Battlemechs are at most 14 meters Gundams are taller and by a lot
Isnt a train car typically 100 tonnes? So in theory... A mech that is 100 tonnes would at best be the size of a train car. What is funny is that when you think of the weight of the internals and whatnot; assault mechs really aren't all that big. 🤔
Edit: scratch all that. An assault mech is just barely 1.5 abrams tanks. And abrams weighs 75 tonnes. So a Marauder should be that size roughly.
...Dang. They really arent as big as they suggest in the art.
@@kontankarite Part of the problem is that the original stuff that material came from was done by people who very, very clearly didn't give a damn about realism in military equipment.
If they did, LRMs wouldn't have shorter ranges than real shoulder mounted RPGs that were in circulation in the 1980s, for example. Or AC weapons being objectively worse than real life tank guns. Or Ferrous Fibrous armor being worse than real RHA.
You had a bunch of guys that just subjectively picked numbers they felt looked cool, and other authors over time have rolled with that. Which, to be fair, given that you're talking about bipedal war machines, completely makes sense, as any realistic tech would never choose that shape as a proper war machine w/o something being introduced that just doesn't exist IRL.
By adjusting the scale of the mechs, Mechwarrior now looks like the combined-arms game that it represents: a game where, while mechs are intimidating, they're not battlefield infallible, and where a group of intelligent and brave tank drivers or VTOL pilots can take them on and eek out a victory.
Seems like I should just wait until NavidA1 finishes making MW5 2.0 then play the game again >_<
Thanks for making these mod spotlights
Funny but true...
This exactly how I feel, also hopefully by then it will be on Steam
I agree. Navid is doing a wonderfull job with the HUD allready. Now this scale mod real looks good.
Would very much like to see you playing mech games again Kanajashi
I don't know about you guys, but that is pretty much what I was hoping for when MW5 was released. To get a decent vanilla game (and it was actually A LOT of fun for me, mostly due to COOPing option), that was promised to be HIGHLY moddable and that, with hard work of dedicated and skilled modders like Navid, will turn into magnificent piece of fun :)
Now the walls on the bases actually look like they are there for a reason other than to be stepped on. They don't don't look like the waist high cover from cover shooters.
This has the bonus effect of fixing the sense of speed. Somehow Mechwarrior games manage to make 64km/h feel slow, but now you get to see just how freakishly fast battlemechs are for their size.
I love this mod, the mechs, the world, everything looks so much better.
Huh. My brain kept telling me "this looks stupid, that Atlas is too small." Until you moved into the base, and then it clicked and my perspective finally readjusted. This really is a lot better. Thanks for the video. After beating the campaign twice, and having my "Career Mode" run broken during PGI's mod update, I'm going to give it a few more weeks and then hop back in. I'll definitely be using this mod as well, should bring a fresh experience back.
Glad you watched it till that part, enjoy the mod!
Navid is doing MechGod's work. This is seriously making me want to buy the game... Like some people I want to get it on Steam. But also waiting to see more meaty content. Or at least flesh out the career mode.
If you do get the game, there is a recent mod which improves the AI. I don't care who you are but if you get the game, you need to get that mod, It makes the game much more fun and challenging 7fold.
waiting for steam myself, but watching this I'm almost caving in
@@TimberWulfIsHere Yeah, I caved, ended up getting it when it was on sale plus an additional discount for Epic. So i got the game for $24. I started without the mods and got bored fast. Then I modded the AI and the mechlab. It's night and day. However it still gets pretty repetitive. We really need a mission editor to change things up.
Rawsilver agreed, especially when you max out everything but the reloaded mod adds quite a bit of replay value. We need more mission types and longer, more rewarding types with the inclusion of mech repair bays and such. I like the new dlc game mode as it does some of that but like, how about defend/ destroy base game modes or something. Add some complexity. Hence a mission editor would be good, although it is possible to create one with the game mod maker.
This is the MechWarrior game I want to play! It always bugged me how big the mechs were in MWO and this returns them a more proper size. I can actually imagine these cockpits being hot and cramped! Get out the cooling vests and skimpy shorts!
I guess I'm going to download the Volumetric Rescale this afternoon. This makes the games feel way more like Battletech over Pacific Rim. I already got the 3D Hud and it is absolutely amazing. I feel almost like I have a real neurohelmet on displaying my HUD.
One frame of reference I like to use is the Boeing 747, which everyone is familiar with, and everyone can picture its (agreeably large) size. A fully loaded 747 weighs 400 tons. 4 times as much as an Atlas or Annihilator. The proportions are different, yes, the technology is supposed to be "more futuristic", sure. Reactors are typically extremely heavy, though, despite improvements made to the skeleton. Since you mention tanks: M1 Abrams are around 60 tons.
Thank you for the ground-pounder perspective. That helps with my 747 analogy, because if you've ever stood near one at ground level, you can tell that that Atlas is STILL taller than the fuselage (though not taller than the Vertical Stab) with your mod. So when are we getting the same mods in MWO? :D
Okay, now that you're smaller, and just in general, I feel like you shouldn't be able to just walk through a reinforced concrete wall theoretically defending a military installation, even in an Atlas. Kerensky piloted an Orion in the Amaris Civil War, and needed his friend in an Atlas to kick in the door for him. JUST the DOOR, implying the walls are even stronger, and not something a 'mech can just plow through without a second thought. And buildings in cities could be used for cover by 'mechs walking inside them (trying to be careful not to cause them to collapse inward on them), so that's a point for size and durability of the environment with respect to Battlemechs.
eh, better to compare to a ww2 maus (from what i read that was a 100ton tank). a Boeing is too "spacious" to properly compare to battlemechs. the square cube law means that even a slightly larger mech then a "light" would have triple if not quadruple the weight
Back in the days, I am pretty sure that mechs were described as being up to 10 meters (30 feet) tall.
Then, over time, they somehow grew and grew and grew. I never understood that.
I mean, suspension of disbelieve is hard enough with 10m tall walking tanks (you know, the old "the bigger they are, the easier they are to nuke from orbit" thingy) but 15 to 20m? You gotta be kidding me!
I guess, this is a very long-winded way of saying: This looks frigging awesome! :)
I remember reading somewhere (might be the technical readout that I have) that says the Thor is the tallest 'mech on the battlefield by a hair and a half, because of that shoulder-mounted missile rack.
If you derive from a ton of SRM ammo, each missile is, like, 20 pounds. Grab a dumb bell, fill it with explosives and fuel.
Numbers in Battletech have always been weird. Like, if you use the actual MWO scale of an Atlas, the thing's volume is so greater that at 100 tons, it would actually float in water.
@@rangerwickett Another point in favor of downsizing the 'mechs, as they're definitely supposed to be able to submerge in lakes and rivers, using them for cooling and concealment, at greatly reduced mobility. Last thing we need are Jesus 'mechs walking on water. :)
This is a good mod. In reality, a lot of the trees we're looking at in this video would probably average about 50-plus feet high, so to have the atlas, the tallest mech, only be about 2/3rds the height of the pine trees is much more accurate.
I believe rules wise it's 12m, as a single height level in Battletech is 6m and mechs are said to occupy 2 height levels with their waste being at the intersection of the two, page 31 Total Warfare.
There's old Battletech art that essentially portrays the 50 ton Shadow Hawk as having roughly the same volume as a main battle tank, which in real life tend to weigh about 60 tons being made from contemporary steel and composite armor. I always thought that this was the best benchmark to use for scaling BT battlemechs (and really giant robots in general) in a logical way that respects the laws of physics as much as is reasonably possible for this kind of thing. Applying the square-cube law using an MBT-sized Shadow Hawk as a baseline would mean the 100-ton Atlas wouldn't actually be that much physically taller; the portrayal in this mod seems to be about as good as you're reasonably going to get for a video game.
There is no debate to be had: the PGI 'Mechs have always been way WAY too big. In canon, they've always been between 10-15 meters. Realistically, (well, "realistically") metal and machinery is so heavy that a 19 meter 'Mech just seems cartoonishly light in PGI's world. And gameplay-wise, it has always made 'Mechs feel very slow. 60 kph is like rocketing along the ground in a smaller machine, but in MWO, even 100 kph doesn't feel very impressive. PGI messed up and just wanted bigger cause bigger must equal better, but it's always felt wrong.
This looks great, I can't wait to install it.
THANK YOU! To both NavidA1 and you at NGNG for finally highlighting this issue. Honestly, this is one thing that has always bothered me since MechWarrior Online. The disparity between the size of 'mechs relative to the environment has always been irritating to me. I try not to think about it when playing, but it always -- ALWAYS -- comes back to me one way or another as I'm playing. In MWO, it was the sheer tiny-ness of the cars, streets, and stoplights that I stomp on when heading to a fight. In MW5, it's when I walk into buildings to destroy them and seeing how each internal building floor only seemed to be 5 feet instead of 10 to 15 feet average building floor height.
As you said, I get that 'mechs are supposed to be big. However, they don't have to be upscaled to get that effect. The same can be done by adjusting camera depth of field and field of vision. I really hope PGH can incorporate these changes going forward, especially for the MW5 story sequel.
PGH, hire NavidA1 already.
Remember the mechwarrior 4 vengeance trailer when the guy was using a lift to get inside his vulture mech? That would’ve been a great addition to really give you a sense of scale and make you understand just how big these things are even with the mod added.
It is the year 2022, and the 3D hud still hasn't been updated. Oh how I miss it. 😢
In the Grey death saga books there is a descrption of a Stinger and a Wasp being used bye rioters. It was writtin that in these machines the shoulders and heads of the pilots were the only thing in the cockpit. Barely bigger than power armour
thats interesting. maybe they were saying the head and shoulders were in the actual "head" of the stinger, but the cockpit is much more in the upper torsor of the mech (heavy gear and votoms have mechs like this,where the piots head is in the "head" of the mech). unless of course they said they were "Barely bigger than power armour", then that just sounds impossible,because the closest battlemech to the size of "battlearmor" were the "protomechs", though i would say the wasp/stinger are just a little bit taller then protomechs.
@@jaromswenson7541 That'd be more like it. Those books were written before ProtoMechs were a thing so everything needed to be scaled up ever so slightly.
Just look at MechWarrior 2, when the mech pulls into or out of the bay at HQ in the training missions. About 4-stories tall, 32ft for the Mad Cat / Timber Wolf.
If you are planning to run Navid's MW5 Mercs Reloaded, the volumetric rescale mod is already included along with several others: www.nexusmods.com/mechwarrior5mercenaries/mods/161
This is the sort of project that makes me happy to see. I know this video is a bit older at this point, but I have always felt like the modern mechwarrior scale representation was way off. Disregarding fantasy levels of material sciences that exist in mechwarrior lore, the idea of a vehicle that is 20 stories tall weighing only 80 tons is indescribably hard to explain. These things are often shown overshadowing small buildings and fortifications, where realistically they are just super-science bi-pedal tanks.
It's really cool to see a project that tries to dial back the scale to a more reasonable and sensible level in the game, as I feel it makes the environment more impactful and immersive. MW5 has a lot of problems, the AI being a really touchy subject for a lot of players, but he has so much potential to be cool with the efforts of the modding community.
Ohhh yeah More in line with actual BattleTech canon as well.
The graphics and lighting actually look better now, instead of appearing to be outdated.
TBO I always felt the graphics were fine, you may be noticing DLSS, they patched that in recently. Also all my graphics are cranked up, except for depth of field, I hate that crap!
For a quicky, wolfmech hero is "6 times" Phelan Kell's height, coming out to 9.5ish meters. The tallest mech pre-3060 is 14.4 meters tall (Executioner). Annihilator is 12.8 meters tall and Atlas is 13.6 meters tall (all BT stated heights, now fun fact: 13.6 meters is the height of the Hunchback in mw5). The average medium/heavy mech is between 10 and 12 meters tall. The Leopard dropship's clearance is 14 meters in the artwork from jumpships and dropships, meanwhile in mw5, the door clearance is simply insane. I think Navid's scale mod will work nicely with what I'm working on, but I need stuff in that DLC to continue.
Nice and it makes sense. the Maus was 130tons so it didn't make sense a 100ton atlas was the size of 10 of them. Not quite my head cannon sweet spot but close enough.
This is awesome man. I gotta say, your content lately has been on point.
I feel like mechs in this universe have not been correctly represented in any of the games, but this mod is a great step. Judging from a lot of the lore I've been looking into, it seems the mechs behaved much more like Titans from Titanfall. They're supposed to be better than tanks because they are able to mimic human movement (climbing, jumping, and hand combat) and traverse crazy environments but be tougher. Instead we have these giant mechs that are only as capable as a tank. I know it is a super ambitious idea to have these elements in a game made by developers with low manpower and funding but a guy can dream of doing this kind of stuff in Battletech/Mechwarrior.
Thanks!
i agree 100%. this is why i liked the "protomech" concept so much, its very close to titanfall in size and responses.
in the lore the battlemechs could do a whole lot more then walk and shoot. would be cool if we could crouch and even melee with these mechs. this would make combat very interesting with mechs crouching and popping out to shoot form cover and we get to see mechs like the hatchetman and kodiak actually use their massive melee wpns to smack a bish.
maybe make light mechs just slightly taller then titanfall titans and go from there,and maybe we can get protomechs (titanfall sized,but with better designs then the original goof troop designs). then add battlearmor and we can have some realy cool looking armored warfare.
tanks will actually be threats, and you would see the size progression of mechs and the advancements of miniaturization of mech technology (battle armor and protomechs). but hopeing for protomechs and smaller mechs in general is a pipdream becasue many battletech fans like the "super giant mechs and they conquer everything on the battlefield, no i wont accept that my atlas can be outclassed by a tank reeeeee".
@@jaromswenson7541 for your last point, those are the kinds of people who shudder to think of an AC/20 Urbie putting their precious Atlas on its ass. To me, that'll *always* be hilarious.
@@KaiHarper89 gotta love the humble urbie. an assault mech among lights.
Probably no one will ever read this, cuz at the time I am writing it this is a 4-year-old video but wow, I am glad I am not the only one who was bothered by the scale. Mechs are supposed to be 12-18 meters, they are big, but not Pacific Rim big. Large trees are 50 meters, mechs are supposed to be bipedal tanks, not bipedal aircraft carriers... For me the scale hurts my immersion. This is perfect, well, ok, not perfect, the relative scale of the mechs could use a little work, but I definitely think the Shadow Hawk is a little big compared to the Atlas, but nitpicking aside this is Amazing, a massive improvement on the base games scale.
Yeah scale has a big impact just on gameplay, being able to target locations easy makes certain mechs just take way more damage.
The problem is the size of the cockpit window. It's what gives you the sense of scale.
If the Atlas is really that small, then how the hell is the window so big? The only mech that i find realistic relative to it's cockpit view is the Shadowhawk or the Griffin. It's big from the inside,big from the outside. The Atlas....big from the inside...tiny from the outside. See what i mean?
Judging by the size of the cockpit, players get the sense that the Atlas should be twice as big if not even bigger. If the window was twice as small, then small from the outside, small from the inside. Problem solved.
The weight is not important. There are tall cars and short cars, but in the end two of them might weigh about the same.
This can be solved with proper POV changes. i think MW games usually makes the player almost lick the window, when in reality it should be seeing the panel all the time. With this little change even the feeling of being cramped inside a giant mech becomes possible
You're right. In old artwork a pilot takes up the whole head of an Atlas, while the PGI version has you just sit in the eye. It's kinda insane.
2-3 stories tall, that's what they were meant to be. largest mech is 14 meters which would be a meter taller than 3 stories, smallest 8, which is just shy of 2. just take a look at the buildings around you. 2-3 stories is as tall as the mechs are supposed to be. I think only the lights in mwo were correct as far as I can remember.
To each his own. I like current scale. So i'd love to have reanimation and inverse kinematics mod separately from rescaling
Anyway thank you both Navid and NGNG for keeping things rolling.
To my mind despite MW4 was too arcade-feeling it still got some basic things right. If i have an energy hardpoint with 3 slots i could fit a 3-slot PPC there or 3 medium lasers. It makes sense to occupy all free space you have.
And legged mechs actually hobble since leg actuators are damaged, it HAS to change the animation, not only slow you down. This was sooooo god damn cool to see that effort of a mech to stay upright.
wow this is an awesome mod i wish mwo would have done this when they did the rescale cant wait to see this on twitch
Always had the thought "How THAT can weight only 100 tons? There's 250 at least"
Also remembering art of Battletech 2018 with Griffin with enormous scale
I will give it definitely a try. PGI should hire Navid for developing MW5 correctly.
Man now I want to see a vr mod for this game eventually. Being able to ride in these mechs with a realistic scale and being able to feely move around in the cockpit would really sell the game for me.
I’ve always been a mech warrior fan and this makes the scale feel just right
I just got the game and am 100 hours in. I knew something felt off, even though I enjoy this game very much. I think one major immersion breaker was when I downloaded the Infantry mod. Like, holy cow you can fit 20 people in one Atlas toe, this is not what I remember it looking like in MW3 and MW4. I feel like a bloody Evangelion unit. Even though the video is old by this point, thank you for sharing. Instant download.
Oh no. Its dead :C
Dude! Thank you for making this. This problem was huge for me and one of the main reasons i quit playing the game. Hell an Abrams tank weighs 60 tons. I get the material in the future should weigh less and all but the mechs in the game were wayyy too big
Yup I like that mod sizing. Like an atlas ..just because it’s 100 tons, doesn’t means all the weight is from height ,but the mass. It makes more sense.
In the 1980'a Battletech board game, the mech size is 12 to 15 meters. I have not gotten any of the Catalyst Games Battletech books so I am not familiar with the new size in their cannon.
It's not a catalyst/fasa problem. The scale of mechs has always been broken in this game. For example the early novels from the 80's say a shadowhawk's cannon is an 80mm. Except if that was the calibre then the mech itself would only be a couple of meters tall going by the muzzle size. Or if you bought old FASA models and scenery, the mechs would be something like 10 stories tall, or 20+ meters. Meanwhile the books say the absolute largest they get is 12m and most are shorter. etc.
Catalyst cannon is the same. Except the new minis got scaled up so they could get more detail, so 6mm infantry is out of whack now.
All I can say is WOW! Thanks for showcasing this!
This is build into Navid's 'Reloaded mod' so you don't have to have two instances of it!
I agree the mechs need to be scaled down, but that appears too small
I agree the cockpit should hold a regular person.
And wait, Ctrl shift v lets you exit the cockpit entirely? Thats awesome, didnt know that at all.
Coming from the turn based Battletech game, this was the scale in that game.
IRL the IS-3 heavy tank for example is like half the height of the M48 medium tank. Heavier shouldn't always mean taller.
This looks amazing, can't wait to play MW5 when the epic exclusive is over.
I AGREE WITH YOU 100%. This is proper scale.
OH THANK YOU YES. What always triggered me the most was the reference to weight. Weight is pretty much THE reference unit in MW games and there's no way of not seeing it. The biggest baddest assault mechs are one hundred tons of armored fighting machine - including ammo, propulsion, actuators etc. That's one hundred, not ten thousand, or in other words, 30-40% more than a fully loaded MBT. There's just no way battlemechs could be the size they are in MWO; even with the most sci-fi esque materials I can imagine, that's just too far off to be believable.
Another useful reference is AC caliber. If I'm not mistaken, a really big one, like a 10 or a 20 is in the range of 120/150 mm, maybe a bit more depending on the manufacturer, but surely much closer to a tank gun than a naval gun. This mod makes a lot of sense indeed... and don't forget the one that fixes projectile velocities !
yeah, once i realized the abrams mbt is 60tons, a 60 ton mech is way more massive for no good reason. to get that tonage and weight as presented by pgi the material would almost have to be lighter then air to make sense.
To be fair, even with the old lore scaling, the mechs are way too light. WAY too light.
@@ASNS117Zero if we wanted realistic weights to hieght, then light mechs would be much closer to titanfall titans, so about 20ft tall.
and because the square cube law exist then the heavier mechs actually wont be much more taller then the light, since just being slightly bigger would dramatically increase weight...i guess they would only look bulkier then the light mech.
@@jaromswenson7541 I mean, if we're going hard realism, you just wouldn't build battlemechs, it's not an effective weapons system. As long as you can fire guided weapons from over the horizon that are a fraction of the cost of the ponderously large and expensive war machine you're trying to build that can likely cripple or outright destroy said war machine in a single shot, there's no reason to ever build it. In-universe, it's still kind of a head scratcher to me why one of the great houses didn't just invest heavily in long range air superiority and precision orbital weaponry to obsolete battlemechs. Or in the very least, why the people who wrote the lore didn't include a reason why the great houses didn't do that.
@@ASNS117Zero well, in universe the battlemechs are kinda an ultimate all terrain weapons platform that can stand its ground. its the same reason we still use tanks today despite them being outclassed by missiles and fighter jets. you can blow up the enemies visible assets from afar as much as you want but at the end of the day if you want to hold ground your gonna need armored firepower that can hold ground. also, in the setting we know there are anti missle systems that seem to be very effective, at least effective enough that the majority of missiles in the setting need to be cheap and shot in large waves just to overcome the defense systems.
now the obvious next question is why not build more tranks instead of more battlemechs. in lore it seems the only logical reason (im not counting the weird logic that somehow mechs are harder to kill) battlemechs are preferred over tanks is because they are much better at handling terrain then tanks. but in reality the sheer canonical size of battlemechs is too much and would be easy targets for tank formations.
the solution is simple and its the same suggestion i had before, make them smaller as they would logically be based on their weight. at a much smaller size they can better fit into dense cover terrain (especially forests and cities) as they dont have such a wide boxy profile as the tank does, they can better navigate between trees/large boulders/and buildings. their taller profiles (in the 20-20ft range) being negated by being able to hide behind cover of equivalent height (even crouch and lay down if the situation calls for it). now does this make mechs better then tanks? only at certain battlefield roles. with these changes you'll see battlemechs being deployed to conquer the tight confines of urban combat and other such environments, while tanks are still used as open ground combat.
Please tell me what mod you used for the new 'Reactor Online' e.t.c. spheel ( 8:05 )
It doesn't sound standard and reminds me of the good ol' days of MW2. I need this in my lfie!
Seriously, this is so much better. The only reason it seems even a little "off" is because of the monchromatic trees. They're all huge. There's no smaller foliage to make sense of the scale. Any time the mechs are next to vehicles, trucks, people, or normal buildings their size makes perfect sense. They also made PERFECT sense when the shuttle came in. That's the kind of size vehicles you could expect to pack on one of those shuttles and actually take in and out of orbit. When you consider how many mechs an actual dropship can haul, they can't be any bigger than this. And mechs in story and cannon are gladitorial suits, not "godzilla size" as it was put. They're SUPPOSED to be able to take cover in the world around them. Only the huge 100 ton mechs really entered the "damn that thing is big and hard to hide" category. The really small mechs are supposed more like seriously oversize power armor. Cockpits with limbs. TANKS are supposed to be dangerous to mechs in a head on fight. It's terrain and technology that make mechs superior. In proper lore you're not supposed to be able to step on a tank with a medium mech and destroy it. You'd have to attack it physically because of it's size. Only assault mechs get close to "stomp on a tank" range and even then you wouldn't if it was still mobile it might knock you over. So I think this mod really nails it for size.
Well with the focus on the mod bringing you closer to the ground, more attention will be obtained from the lack of details from that height. I think that is what your getting at. Obviously it would be great if PGI implemented this mod into the base game and then added a bit more details for environmental assets like bushes etc..
@@NoGutsNoGalaxy Yes it really would. Or more procedural generation. PGI's biggest downfall with trying to enact the inner sphere war either with MWO or in a game like this is that without infinite variety of warfare areas you are doomed to the eventual 'memorized maps' gameplay... which I HATE from a tactical standpoint. Revisiting a battlefield should be a very rare and exciting thing... not commonplace. Or at least not beyond a single campaign of defense or attack of an area. Also unfortunately PGI just doesn't have the talent, team size, or capability to make this a reality. Which makes me very sad. It's the war ranging across the entire inner sphere across endless battlegrounds that I dream of. And no game has ever delivered.
Damn the mods are making this game juicy
As I suspected making the game better, but I feel like they still don't have enough freedom to do more!
This seems like a good addition. I'd definitely use this mod...at least once it comes to steam. Now all we need is like you said, infantry, heck I'd even like battle armor and the ability to leave your suit to recon in them.
Given how most Mobile Suits in Gundam range from 15 to 20 meters in height (a few outliers being the Psycho Gundams being 40+ meters), they wouldn't look too out of place in BattleTech. Just tweak their designs to fit the overall aesthetic of BattleTech and they can pass off as prototype designs or some LosTech design.
I mean, the Phoenix Hawk LAM pretty much *is* a Gundam.
The other thing these games get wrong besides scale is mobility in general. These things can strafe, they can crouch and drop prone, the TechManual describes some pilots managing to do hand stands. BattleMechs are the king of the battlefield because of their myomer "muscles" that make them move more like humans than hydraulics-powered rock-em sock-em robots.
The Atlas is canonically the tallest of the 3025 era ‘Mechs at 18m tall.
And the average person is closer to 1.75m than 2m, so the Atlas was scaled correctly. This re-scale takes the Atlas down to about the size of a Commando.
The Atlas is obscured by 12m tall trees in tabletop and old art has the pilot taking up the entire head. The "18m tall" thing is out of older MechWarrior games which were just as bad with scale.
Not scale related, but since you fired the LRMs on the Atlas: I wonder if there'll be an Atlas LRM mod. The Atlas-D (and almost every other version of the Atlas) is supposed to fire the LRM 20 in four groups of 5 from the hip. The SRM 6 was in the upper torso hardpoint. The AS7-K is the only one that expanded the LRM 20 to fire through 20 tubes. I thought that was something PGI could and should have done to make the different Atlases distinct, instead of every single one firing two groups of 10, so I'd enjoy a mod that corrects that.
IIRC that is a carry over from MW:O where correct tubing killed a few chassies. 5 missile volleys did far worse against ams then a 20 missile cluster a lot of the time. Now ofc in this game that would not matter as much.
@@tawesssoabbox But that's what would give the -K model it's "special" feel. It only has a single missile hardpoint, which I'm sure goes mostly unused, but if that single missile hardpoint was the only one on an Atlas that could fire a full salvo, instead of a volley-fire effect, then it would have its purpose, and its "feel". It'd also be nice to have the SRM 6 rack mounted higher. :)
Apart from that, AMS on the MWO battlefield is WAY more common than it ever was on Table Top, from what I can gather, looking at builds. I didn't realize it until a few weeks ago, too, but TT AMS was only supposed to be a self-defense weapon. It wasn't supposed to fire on anything aimed at allies. But then MWO would have a bitch of a time programming it to figure out dead-fire missiles, then, wouldn't they? :)
The fix I want the most is a CENTERED - NOT over the shoulder gears or war styled - third person view. Its SO frustrating. That and no clan mechs.
Any mechassault fans? It's an arcade spin off and the scale seems pretty good. You could fight infantry and kick trucks sky high without being the size of a skyscraper.
Yup, a lot of people got into mechwarrior/battletech because of mechassault.
The more I learned about cannonical 'Mechs the more I appreciated MechAssault. At the time a lot of people were pissed because we knew MechWarrior itself was dead, so people were like "what the hell'a this arcade nonsense it's not a replacement!" Now I'd love to see a more detailed MechAssault.
Considering the rescale, the cockpits looked too small...
Until I did a lore deep dive. Apparently, you put a mech on more than getting into it. The cockpits in lore are tiny since 90% of all control is done through the neural helmet, a tiny spot for the organic CPU (the "pilot") to be housed in armored safety.
Sort of! A pilot took up the whole head of an Atlas and that was considered roomy. Meanwhile the Spider was small enough that it didn't have proper ejection capabilities.
It's not all the Neurohelmet though. The Inner-Sphere never really figured out true brain-machine links, the helmet just uses the pilot's own sense of balance to automate keeping the 'Mech upright to some extent.
Now, the Clans, they came up with "advanced imaging" to truly make pilots move ProtoMechs with their minds, but there was a shelf life because those pilots went batshit insane. So it never got very popular.
In the TechManual the control really are described as two joysticks and foot pedals. But they've got more degrees of freedom. Push the joysticks up and down, twist them, same with the "foot pedals" where you basically wear them and can move them as much as your own feet.
Apparently some very good MechWarriors can make particularly nimble mechs do handstands.
@@colbyboucher6391 A mech doing a handstand. That IS something i want to see.
Thank you for the mod highlight, looks solid and I really like his HUD mods. First time I questioned MW5 scaling was when I noticed how tall I was in was compares to the HPG arrays. For as massive a facility as they are supposed to be, why in a medium mech, a centurion if I recall, was I standing almost half the array height?
Now if a mod was made to correct the BS infinite tank spawning on your six....that would be amazing. I'm tired of clearing a base, It's all dead and gone yet somehow 4 new fresh tanks deploy from the F'ing rubble?!?
Sigh... right... PGI....
09:18 what mod are you using to control the camera like that? Time to start my screen shot collection of Mech and action shots.
I use this mod and others for quite a while. They make MW5 so much better!
Yeah it’s fantastic, helps with immersion.
So are these now at tabletop scale as per the mechs specs in the original TT manuals which can be seen on sarna.net?
Basically. The writers played fast and loose with scale but these things are obscured by 12m trees and a pilot would take up the whole head of an Atlas.
@@colbyboucher6391 an Atlas pilot only takes up one side of an Atlas's head as the otherside is where the Commander sits due to the Atlas's role as a Command mech with it's satellite dish on the side of it's head providing comms with Lance/Company and orbital vessels.
@@dc-4ever201 The command console was only introduced as a concept in 1997 by which point the people who had initially conceptualized the setting were mostly gone and classic BattleTech was in it's twilight years. This goes in the same category as ultra / rotary autocannons being the "automatic" ones when straight-up standard autocannons were originally fluffed as rapid burst-fire weapons where one "round" represented a single burst (which is why the larger caliber ones have a lower range, by the way, more difficult to land the whole burst on one location with a lower firing rate). I really, truly wish UA-cam didn't auto-remove comments with links so I could actually drill the scale of 'Mechs depicted in earlier artwork into your skull (and, again, their scale as depicted by the actual rules of the game) but go to Sarna and check out the actual early artwork of the Atlas where the pilot did, in fact, just barely fit in the head, and that was considered pretty roomy for a 'Mech. The people who actually developed BattleTech at least had a vague understanding of basic physics.
@@colbyboucher6391 I believe I saw it in the early 90's, when I used to play TT with a group, in the write up for the Atlas in one of the official mech sourcebooks, so it being a Command mech predates what you have read.
@@dc-4ever201 Command consoles were introduced in Maximum Tech in 97. In any case, regardless, if you're going by tabletop rules light / heavy woods are two levels tall which is equal to 12 meters, not even particularly tall trees, and they universally obscure a Mech's line of sight.
Edit: Ok, I was wrong, it was the Tactical Handbook in 94. Point still stands.
This looks so much better that it's actually painful to look at the upscaled Metal Gear Rex sized mechs of MWO and MW5.....these actually make sense....
Pah! Then get me a bigger dropship! And an imperatorclass titan! THE EMPEROR WILLS IT!
Yeah, this is more or less the scale I expected as well from years of watching the cinematics and FMV from past mechwarrior games... it's especially weird because in a number of them they show human directly in comparison to the mech size (Mechwarrior 3 comes to mind when the poor grunts on the ground got stomped or Mechwarrior 4 when the mechwarriors board their mech)
What i am curious though is what exactly is the reasoning for PGI to upscale these mechs?
When they put the tanks etc.. and realized those tanks were too small in comparison to the mechs and made no sense, surely they recognize by that point that the mechs were oversized... why keep the mechs at those oversized size and upsizing the vehicles instead of the sensible things to resize the mechs down appropriately?
its for the "wow" factor. unfortunately battletech never had actual numbers on mech sizes (probably was easier to keep that way so they wouldn't have to rescale the minis), and thus these numbers are always going to be up to interpretation.
but there is also a factor that some robot enthusiasts just like the idea of "bigger is better". they prefer their mechs to be gigantic because they think that looks cool. its not very realistic, but many fans of mecha could care less about "realism" and more care about feeling like literal Olympic titans on the battlefield...instead of actually feeling grounded in realism.
i definitely fall into the "realism" camp, and i would actually like for the battlemechs to be smaller then they would logically be (based on weight),but that's a personal preference.
probably cause the wehicles got 1 or 2 hitbox, and the mechs got 5-6. Or just simply they built the world around the mechs , and that was to hard wired to the developers brain , so nobody was able to think outside the box...
Maybe they just looked at battletech tabletop games and didn't realise that the maps of classic bt are 1/1200 and the mechs are 1/285. So the mechs really look towering over every map feature. So in comparison the real scale looks out of place.
But the bigger is better rule is the most likely ^^
Did the same thing in HBS Battletech. Good stuff!!!
Mad respects Navid! This is gorgeous!
Are light and medium mechs re-scaled? The cockpits seems a tad bit on the small side compared to the humans on the ground. I know they are supposed to be really cramped though.
A lot of light 'Mechs in novels only have the pilot's head and shoulders actually in the "cockpit" area. The Spider was infamous for being too claustrophobic even for most MechWarriors (and for not having a way to eject). Cramped as hell. Hell, ProtoMechs had pilots basically curling up into a ball to get inside, and that only worked because the Clans had actually wired the pilots' brains in and they went batshit insane after a while. And Elementals are just discount 40k Space Marines.
Thank you so much for the vid.
I wish I had seen this video when it came out because scale is a huge topic to me and one that I think most people playing/ designing BattleTech/Mechwarrior get wrong.
It's so wrong in MWO that I don't even like playing the game. MW5 gets it wrong to the same extent as MWO but at least they don't compound the problem with ridiculous quirks that turn a tiny light mech into a medium in terms of armor and structure.
The thing I'm taking about is how relative scale of mechs is just wrong , especially when it comes to light mechs. Designers and artists often think they can take a mech that weighs 20 tons and make it 1/5th the size or even smaller than a mech weighing 100 tons. But that's not realistically possible for one reason. People. All mechs must be at least large enough to accommodate a 3 ton cockpit for the pilot and the necessary support systems like life support and communications. Also a combat vehicle engineer is going to design any war machine to be as compact as possible because smaller targets are harder to see and hit. That's just a fact.
Real life designs prove this. I'm going to compare a large tank with a small tank. Using the metric ton and feet on both to keep them apples to apples. I'm also going to compare Hull length because the Abrams gun sticks out much further part the hull than the Wiesel.
The German Wiesel tank, heaviest variant, weighs 4.78 tons. Is roughly 12 feet long, 6 feet wide and 6 feet tall. Crew 2-3.
The Abrams M1A2 heaviest variant is 66.8 tons. 26 feet long, 12 feet wide and 8 feet tall. Crew 4.
As you can see even though the Abrams weighs 14 times now than the Wiesel and has roughly twice the crew, it's not 14 times the size. Not even remotely close. That's because the Wiesel can't get any smaller of it is going to have a human crew.
This is why MWO and MW5 and BattleTech needs to re-scale these mechs to be much closer in scale. A light should be roughly 1/3 the size of an assault. A medium roughly half the size of an assault and a heavy roughly 2/3 to 3/4 the size of an assault.
Now people will say that would make lights to easy to kill. But they are supposed to be. A light NEVER had a cave to destroy an Atlas in 1v1 combat. But in MWO, many lights have a better than 50/50 chance of taking out an Atlas. Assault pilots are often more afraid of a light mech then they are a heavy mech. That's just silly.
Anyone piloting a light should know that they can't go toe to toe and dance around in close under a big mech with impunity. First off in BattleTech, melee combat would have prevented that. An Atlas would have kicked a flea in the face of it got that close and the damage would have likely outright destroyed a component or even the entire mech.
So if there's not going to be melee in MWO they at least need to get the scale right and stop adding so much armor and structure quirks to make a light as tanky as a medium. Will it make lights less fun? No. It will just force it back into the role it was designed for. Recon and hit and run. Light pilots will still have lots of fun in those roles and if they want a to take on assaults then they better do it in packs.
This is also just actual BattleTech canon. Official BT cross-section of the Atlas has the MechWarrior inside take up the whole head. 'Mechs are obscured by 12m trees in tabletop. They're described as claustrophobic death traps where in a lot of models the "cockpit" is really just a space for your waist up or even just your head and shoulders.
mechs weight 100tons - compare them to real live machinery now - 100tons is not that HUGE (compare to train engines)
This volumetic mod is great!
This is how mechs should look like
Looks great to me, and I do agree about the scale etc. Much better looking sizes in my opinion.
The rescale and the inverse kinematics are amazing work, within the constraints of the MW engine as it is. In general, I feel like a lot of the official BT material from FASA's 4th Succession War onward succumbed to inflation and munchkinitis. Just like MMOs where the designers can't figure out how to create qualitative depth, they go for quantity (from the deus ex machina of Star League memory cores to Clan tech). There's so much potential for immersion, as you've pointed out, and yet all they could come up with was "make 'em bigger"? MW5 is definitely prettier, but it's just a new graphics skin/effects package on no substantively new gameplay, to me. I get that eye candy is far cheaper to implement than developing a totally new game engine or designing new gameplay elements. Other comments below have mentioned desire for more mission editing ability and other ways to create variety and depth of experience. I get that revenue versus operating costs and game development budget is always a challenge, and I succumbed below to a totally irrelevant rant way out of scope (feel free to skip the rest of the comment). But Glassdoor estimates Piranha Games' annual revenue at $5-10 million. Is it a limitation of game development logistics or of game designer vision that keeps recycling the same constricted MW/BT scope again and again, instead of fleshing out an actual mech simulator with increased gameplay to keep up with the times and new technologies? An FPS like Arma 3 is estimated at around $2-5 million to develop, plus a few key physics/gameplay mods (however you value the labor on those) that combined provide a fairly close comparison for potential gameplay scope. This could be crossed with elements of games like Hardspace Shipbreaker or Space Engineers for physics engine elements. Hell, Living Legends modded more functional vehicles and battlearmor long ago. I'd be totally willing to accept a lot less visual gee-whiz for more game engine scope.
Years ago, I got tired of MWO b/c, scale issues aside, the mech movement itself felt too safe, level, and detached. No matter what elevation changes you walk over, the mechs just play a little slip-n-slide but otherwise stay perfectly upright (game engine and design limitations, I'm sure). No MW game has ever really explored the depth of potential play experience in something as simple as keeping your mech stable (like all FPS games). TT BT has stability checks. One of the first MWs (MW 1?) had a simple falling and standing up keypress mechanic, I think. The HBS turn-based BT models it. In a completely different reality and different game engine, we could have a Death Stranding-lite MW with at least an abstracted model for mech balance on different surfaces (the pile of rubble your Atlas stood on at the end of the video would actually induce slipping and slightly random leaning inputs) or when sharply taking damage. A little gyro display that shows your current balance relative to center could be a real-time minigame to organically create a player experience of making piloting skill checks to stay standing; you could control mech lean to help accelerate into a sprint or decelerate, keep balance on slopes, etc. At an extreme of speculation, a limited physics-engine based game could allow shot location to actually matter, so that a big ballistic alpha strike to a higher target torso area would induce bigger gyro instability inputs; or shoot a leg off at the foot, lower, or upper leg to cause the mech to organically fall (unless the player has the skill to play the gyro balance mini-game and prop the mech up on the leg stump a la multiple BT story scenes), etc. A physics engine would also make variable gravity on different moons and planets a possibility, too.
Well beyond the apparent and safe inside-the-box scope of the MW games, a deeper Mechwarrior FPS/RPG experience could really dig into mech repair, maintenance, and modification/upgrading. Instead of abstractly reducing all the non-combat stuff to a spreadsheet management game, players could develop a currently non-existent skill tree to put XP into a mech tech path, or as you suggested, infantry game mechanics. Just as the TT rules depicted decades before Titanfall came out, can you imagine (not in this game engine as it stands, of course) infantry units and players trained in anti-mech tactics, grappling onto and rappelling up a mech to plant charges on the leg joints or key vulnerable points on the upper body? Or just training up infantry weapon skills and shutting down a mech by overheating it with well-aimed inferno manpack missiles.
Stuff like this could effectively reboot MW gameplay to an even lower (and more immersive) level of origin story, where a scrappy team of mismatched personnel fight hard just to survive against and capture a single Locust (a la Decision at Thunder Rift and the Gray Death Legion). Heck, in The Crescent Hawk's Inception, capturing a Locust meant the high end of armor for commonly found mechs (doesn't count cheesing the Chameleon or stealing any mechs from the arena). And like the abstract mechanic of mech variant assembly in HBS BT mods, if you only have components for less than one whole Wasp, you'd have to capture and strip enough other mech parts to cobble together a Frankenmech Wasp -- with the attendant mech tech skill rolls along the way to install each component, and a player experience of somewhat abstractly carrying components around the mech bay of the dropship, up the maintenance bay scaffolding, to physically put in the appropriate mech location. In a deeper model than HBS BT abstractly recreates, a MW simulator game already has the capacity to model things like rotation speed of every joint (as Navid has demonstrated with gyros etc in the Reloaded mod!). Manufacturer quality or damage level of every actuator, gyro, fusion engine, sensors, cockpit ejection system, EVERYTHING could be made more diverse with simple variation of number stats like degrees of rotation per second (and thus not impact game demands on system resources the way the above mech balance and physics engine requirements would).
I've seen other people observe that the dropships in MW are a total missed opportunity. The dropship is modeled, but only as an invincible (and system resource-cheap) prop that drops off or picks up mechs. Interacting with a dropship offers crazy amounts of scenario potential. From choosing an LZ (safe but far, or close but hot) to being shot down, suffering potential jamming, mech entrapment in a damaged bay, stuck bay doors (and having to maneuver a mech inside the dropship to exit via another bay?), the list goes on. One of the early Wolf's Dragoons novels describes jump-capable mechs being dropped from a low-flying dropship (sure, call it artistic license, back then), and the sourcebooks describe mech combat drops. The dropship itself could be used for fire support like an AC-130 gunship (either abstractly as a call-in ability with cooldown timer, or as a full-fledged controllable AI unit/pilotable vehicle for a player on a pilot skill path) or a grounded firebase -- and vulnerable to damage like any other unit. This would integrate the TT dropship stats and provide an entirely new-to-MW-computer-games tier of achievement to save up money/influence/resources to capture/purchase/repair dropships from Leopards up to Overlords. This would also rationalize unlockable and expensive tiers for increased mech bay and storage capacity.
But all this is irrelevant given the actual game and choices we have available. /rant :D
i would like a mod that revamps the animations of the mechs, and also one that replaces PGI's awkward models with 3D renders of shimmering swords versions of battle tech mechs, THAT would be cool.
I always thought it was strange that a locust (20 tons) could stomp on and destroy a heavy tank. For reference an M1 abrams MBT weighs 80 TONS
Still, I doubt it'd withstand 20 tons on top of it, right? Of all the forces an MBT is built to withstand something crushing it from above isn't really one of them.
And an army of lazy sci-fi artists cried out in anguish, "Whuh? Mechs are vehicle scale?" and they were silenced. MW5 is bearable, if you like role playing as an ork, but I ditched Star Citizen for its scale negligence being outright... well...
The Nova 'tank' in Star Citizen is five meters tall and sixteen long. It's turret has enough free volume to stack multiple Abrams inside. Vertically. It also has an interior hallway that can comfortably dock a Soyuz TMA. If it weren't for those pesky solar panels. And once you see it in the gunhouse, you start to see it in the ships. These aren't vehicles, these are spacepunk deco architecture projects. So anything that corrects this humanless scale problem is welcome in my book.
That Atlas hip wiggle. Thicc boi
I like this, it feels like Armored Core or Front Mission mechs
Making me wish I had a PC to play MW5 on lol, I like how this looks so much more than base game, it makes more sense, seems more realistic
Give a tank legs and arms, Battlemechs are usually scaled way too large in MWO. Height ranged from roughly 8-14m, height was a disadvantage. The taller a mech the harder it would be to stabilize, its why the largest mech in the universe has 3 legs to stabilize and distribute the weight of it.
By all means, these are video games/science fictions and they don't have to be perfect. But Battletech was always walking tanks, and at some point in Mechwarrior they got way too big for what they were supposed to be lol.
totally agree on the scaling, looks like i have some downloading to do. Love it.
God this scale looks so cool!
unfortunatly this doesnt work anymore and causes a critcal error on load as it hasnt been upfated for the new DLC's.
The mech sizing should be based on cannon specs
Most mechs were no taller than 8-10mtrs
Yeah there wasn't any really set scale, and what was set was based on line art for a TT game, not for a shooter. So it's sorta something that just needs to be figured out.
@@NoGutsNoGalaxy love your channel by the way keep up the great work
Honey I shrunk the mechs!
What if I told you...
You could save up to 15% on car insurance by switching to Geico
And yeah, in lore mechs were big but the cockpits were tightly cramped, ones with hands could pick up a person but their hands were smaller than a person and the smaller mechs needed to use both hands and were around 3 stores tall, ~30ft / 10 meters
haha I should've done something like that...
set the mechs to the proper scale and set their armor back. It was nice in BAttletech online the mechs had a better scale. atlas was huge jenner was very small. It looks like he needs to scale them between each other.
I love this. This should be baked into the official game!
It's in his 'reloaded' mod now!
Great Job!! Relative small changes makes a lot in this game (the hud, the scale, the zoom), so I think this game still have a lot of potential . MW5 engine is far better tan MWO, we can dream… Thanks for the video!
Now it actually makes sense why your stuck on that rock.
i mean, a "gundam" or standard mobile suit it only 18 meters tall, give or take. so isn't that.. already roughly the size of a battlemech?
well on paper they are, but if you watch a gundam series it seems the gundams and mobile suits are alot taller then that, but that can be chalked up to inconsistent animation.
so while technically they are roughly the same height, gundams looks closer to the size of mwo mechs if you watch a lot of gundam...also gundam takes place alot in space and it can be realy hard to tell the height and scale of mecha in space.
@@jaromswenson7541 i mean, there is literally a life sized 1:1 scale gundam in japan that is 18 meters tall for scale if you wanna do a quick google. also like, 60% of the original gundam took place on earth, im not really sure about later series, but there is tons of tank-stomping in gundam 0079
@@wikikomoto its very predominant in alternate universe series and other UC timeline series. i actually dont remember much "tank stomping", the majority of combat i remember was from the crew of the white base and so it was the gundam kicking zakus and weird mobile armors.
also there is a drastic inconsistency with reported gundam sizes and their weight. its the same issue many in this comment section have. no matter what "future super lightweight metals" there will always be this disconnect between size of these mecha and their reported weights.
@@jaromswenson7541 i remember an obscene amount of stock-footage megella attack tanks getting kicked while on earth. and yeah, the weight makes no sense. "luna titanium armor" isn't a thing that will ever exist, but at the very least, mobile suits were designed for low-gravity shenanigans first, where as battlemechs were originally designed for terrestrial combat.
@@wikikomoto oh, those "not tanks". those are stupid vtol fighters that have an alternative movement system. just because a zaku can replace its legs with those tredds doesn't make it a "tank". but that is just me arguing what exactly makes a tank or What makes a mech. to be honest i forgot about the magella as the zeon forces are not known for that weird thing and are mainly known for the zaku and introducing mobile suits to warfare. i guess they added zeon tanks into the series to show off "see, see, our robots can totally win against tanks".
well as far as space combat mobile suits make very little sense as they look to be built for ground combat, there is no reason for feet/legs for space combat,especially if you dont include any thrusters on the legs in the original series. at least for battletech they never have "space mechs" and just go with the tried and tested fighter platforms when it came to air and space combat. BT would eventually try introducing transformable "mecha into fighters" but it was explained that they were inferior to normal fighters but it was more or less a way to make the mech easily redeploy-able for ground combat.
honestly, despite their "giant robots beat everything" type storytelling, BT was better at having more realistic mecha combat. in gundam a young angsty teenager with mind powers is the best pilot for a super robot gundam. in BT there are no super robots (mech assault tried including such things but are non canonical) and all the mechs have the potential to have the same technologies as each other, no mcguffin mind powers, and all pilots have to actually train for years/decades before they are considered "aces". so i will give mad props for BT actually being more "real robot" then gundam.
HI iam new to this game, can you list me the mods your using on this video 3rd person and the UI thanks
I love this mod. The light mechs are truly tiny. I wish it could be applied to MWO.
This also makes the tonnage a lot more believeable; for comparison an M1 Abrams is about 60-65 tons, and something like the Commando, shown frequently to be so large to make that tank look like an RC toy, is only 25 tons? It just doesn't make sense; sure you can have lighter and more futuristic materials but with something so large the overall density of the figure would probably be less than water.
Looks great! Unfortunately, hasn't been updated for DLC.
This is SO much better!
To put this all into perspective, the typical dry weight of a Boeing 747-400 (that means before crew, fuel, pax, and cargo) is just over twice the weight of an Atlas and has a wingspan that is over three times the height of one if it were laying on its back. Fuselage noose-to-tail measurement and possible max take-off weight is even greater. An even better comparison is the total height from ground to the top of the vertical stabalizer (that vertical fin on the tail of an aircraft)...19.41 meters. Doesn't that number sound familiar?
For me, Mech's in BattleTech have never truely been huge or monstrous in size if compared to other sci-fi franchises and IP's, only in comparison to modern-day real-world military hardware. Even an M1A2 Abrams already sits at a whopping 68 and a half tons, and that's been around since the early 90s. In my head canon, BT Mechs are something of merely the next step in mechanized warfare rather than being being so unbelievably beyond it's real form today. What's even more interesting is that we are talking about a 1000 years gap between real-world and BT, but some of the lore behind BT helps to answer the question of why it's simply taken that long to make basically standing tanks. It didn't, but they haven't really gone anywhere since then, even after hundreds of years of warfare. That's also where BT has it's charm...it's a hell of a lot more believable to me than all those Gundams and Megadeuses. Even the fact that Clan tech is often so much more advanced and so far ahead of IS equivalents, while a bitch and a half to get balance in game down right, makes much more sense in the real world than how most games treat opposite sides. It's always felt so much more grounded in plausibility than most other IP's like BT. To be honest, I'm glad they are not Pacific Rim scale...it's a uniqueness that sets BT apart from the rest in a positive and beneficial way. It makes BT an even more all too familiar universe.
Also, that's a nice looking F350, way better than that freakin' Telsa Tuck.
I once spent a long weekend brainstorming a reimagining of Battletech with modern ideas of technology. Why big robots? Why no drone vehicles? Why are engagement ranges so close?
Sure, by the 31st century tech has declined, and the Clans were I guess weeaboos who loved fighting with honor instead of brains, but why didn't Star League technical manuals ever have just, like, nuclear warheads?
The logic I came up with (in my alternate reality) was that the Kearny-Fuchida drive had been adapted to create forcefields, which would block the passage of matter coming in, but could let matter go out, and would let electromagnetic waves (e.g., light and lasers) in and out. They were excellent at blocking single strikes from railguns or even widely distributed energy from explosions. You could only take them down by pounding them repeatedly, preferably in different spots in short succession, causing the field to become unstable and drop. However, they were frictionless, and they only functioned if they formed a complete shell around an object. (In BT lore, jumpships had to drape hoods over dropships so they could be brought along when the K-F drive activated.)
The consequence of this was that tracked and wheeled vehicles couldn't use them, because they'd have no traction. Copters could not displace air to create lift, though highly advanced planes could the field itself as a lifting body, though it wasn't very stable. This meant that the best way to move a military vehicle while protecting it with a forcefield was to give it legs.
'Heat sinks' would be devices that briefly part the forcefield to vent heat. Otherwise heat would just build up inside the field.
These basic principles of the fictional physics would lead to some adjustments in weapons, and in game mechanics. Every hit to 'armor' (aka, forcefield) would just do 1 damage, which made things like missiles and machine guns good at overwhelming a field and causing it to drop. Things like PPCs and Gauss Rifles would do a lot of damage if they hit exposed 'structure' (aka, the mech itself), but would be wasted if used on a mech that was still shielded. Lasers would go straight through forcefields but do less damage (and probably produce a bit more heat to balance them). Autocannons would probably switch from the 'big bullet' style to something more like rotary autocannons, and would be the best overall weapons for taking down shields and then actually causing damage afterward.
Anyway, I thought it would be a nifty idea should the setting ever get rebooted.
well, comparing a mech that has no free space to a massive cargo plane that has a massive open space inside is not very...comparable.
a better comparison is the german maus tank of ww2. as from what i read that was 100tons. now you may look at it and think "thats not much bigger then a modern day mbt", but thats because the square cube law means that even going slightly bigger then a modern day 60 ton tank instantly exponentially adds weight.
@@rangerwickett eh, cant say im a fan of "lets explain stuff with shields" kind of logic. that is one of the charms in battletech, that its much more grounded in reality then setting that just explain protection with "we have shields". better to come up with actual metal that is deisgned to flake off instead of being easily penetrated.
though even "new type of armor" is a little too unrealistic, since the dawn of firearms and cannons the era of "armor shrugging off anything" has been subverted and now its getting ever more difficult to actually protect things like tanks because ranged wpns are just that efficient at penetration (even bunkers aren't safe).
@@rangerwickett There's much better ways of explaining this.
This mod shows 'Mechs at their cannonical scale where they're obscured by 12m trees.
What it can't fix is MechWarrior forgetting that a BattleMech's locomotion is provided by myomer fiber muscles.
Imagine something that size running at you going 80-something Kph. They're not rock'em sock'em robots, they can strafe (not depicted in tabletop because 30m hexes), they can crouch and even go prone, the TechManual says that skilled pilots can make them do handstands.
As for range:
Of course these things are hard to hit when they're bobbing and weaving even when "standing still" in their 30m hex.
On top of that, think about this: A canonical autocannon doesn't shoot one massive shell. It's a burst that gets abstracted as a "round". In fact with in a class of autocannon the real size of the gun varies, it's a measurement of damage caused, not caliber.
Combine that with lasers obviously being damage-over-time weapons as ablative arnor making single big hits relatively meaningless and a particular picture forms.
You need to land *burst of fire* on *one specific location* on this thing running 30-100kph or more while running around everywhere yourself. If you can't do that you've caused no meaningful damage. Larger caliber ACs are shorter ranged because the generally low rate of fire makes that more difficult. Keep in mind that in TT "extreme range" existists for anything past a weapon's "effective" range, you just have next to no chance of hitting anything!
Granted this is a FLUFF answer. The real answer is balance + the impossibility of depicting real ranges on a table.
If course you still need to accept the silly concession that for some reason, they can field nore armor and weapons than a comperable tank. But you've got to suspend disbelief somewhere.
This looks absolutely delicious
This actually makes me want to buy the game... now. lol
What does this do to the Flea, and is there still *HUGE* mechs that just tower over the more well balanced ones, you know for fun
Think ill restart my original playthrough with some mods. :). Nice job phil
No, thats actually how tall battlemechs are. PGI's scale is correct. Even in the old drawings, one of these Atlas's is x8 the height of the average man.
What PGI did wrong was to make these mechs too wide; like the Centurion. The table top Centurion is slim, but in MWO and this game it's almost as wide as it is tall. It's a mech that is hard to miss when shooting at.
lmaooo no dude look up the Atlas on Sarna and look at the old art. A MechWarrior took up the whole head. Sometimes artists got lazy and drew stuff way too big, but these things are obscured by 12m trees in tabletop and infantry can be a threat to them in urban environments.
For that matter in the novels light 'mechs are terrifyingly cramped. Like, it's just your head and shoulders or maybe past your waist in the "cockpit" area. The Spider was infamous for being too claustrophobic even for most MechWarriors, particularly because they couldn't eject properly.