Vehicle Selection

Right now my party is trying to work out what vehicles they each want to have for the game. Bert and Morgan are taking 'Mechs of different flavors, but Henry's character doesn't have the points available to be a 'Mech Pilot, so he's going down a different road: he's getting himself a VTOL. The selection of ComStar VTOLs in 3067 are fairly limited, so I thought I'd talk about his choices a bit today.

Henry is a new player, so I want to make sure he has a good time in the first few sessions and doesn't get too hung up in the mechanical details of the game, or get himself killed immediately. That seems to make helicopters a terrible idea, but experience with the game system has shown me that as combat vehicles go, VTOL's are surprisingly resilient. The big unique rule that distinguishes a VTOL from other combat vehicles is its rotor. On all three hit location tables (Front, Side, and Rear), there's a bit over a 30% chance that the rotor will be hit. This seems like a terrible thing at first; the rotor even on the scariest gunship has 2 armor and 3 structure, usually less. The rotor, however, has a special rule associated with it; all damage applied to it is divided by ten, round up. When a Heavy Gauss slug that would otherwise wreck the craft comes crashing through the Rotor, it only takes 3 damage rather than 25.

Because of the 1-damage minimum, the solution to this particular tactical problem is to fire a bunch of low-damage weapons at the VTOL, but from a GM perspective, they're great -- I can fire a big, scary gun at this thing, and as long as it isn't capable of piercing the body of the craft and destroying it conventionally (by destruction of internal structure), I can give the impression of real risk to the player's character without actually endangering them greatly. This is especially important for players new to the system -- having their character killed off in the first session or two causes many a player to just drop the system, especially on in which character creation takes as long as A Time of War.

So let's talk gunship selection. Henry's primary character concept is a special ops character -- he's got a +7 in Martial Arts, quite an investment, but he's a green 'chopper pilot (Gunnery 4/Piloting 7). With piloting that low, nobody's going to want to be his passenger. He's enamored of ECM and TAG from the flavor text, but in actual game play, neither of those produce the flashy or impressive damage that wins players to the game. ECM cancels the effects of Active Probes, Artemis FCS, Narc Beacons, and potentially break C3 and C3i networks, all of which are useful, but without experiencing the effects of those systems, breaking them feels empty. TAG is a little better; you're clearly giving another player or NPC a bonus on their rolls, but still, it is only a modifier (usually in the -2 to-hit range) on another attack. Again, very tactically useful, but unless you have aerospace fighters overhead dropping laser-guided ordnance, it won't have the "BOOM" effect it feels like it should from the movies. Semi-guided LRM's just don't pack the punch in 3067 they did in 3025 (or, I suppose I should say, they pack the same punch, but armor has gotten a lot thicker.)

So if I want to give my newbie player a long-range 'Mech-busting capability (without the actual Mechbuster aircraft) I want something with serious power behind it. In Battletech, that device comes in two flavors: the Gauss Rifle and the ER PPC. There's no ComStar-available (or really, any except for an obscure variant of the Ripper) VTOL-mounted PPC in the game, but there are two models that bring Gauss Goodness aloft.

The more conventional choice is the 3058 Yellow Jacket Gunship, essentially a VTOL body wrapped around a Gauss Rifle. Very simple, very straight-forward. Fast enough to outpace anything it can't one-shot, it would allow Henry's character to sit back and take shots while the more experienced players were mixing it up on the ground. It is also unlikely to chew through its ammo reserve in a single engagement, but doesn't carry so much that if it survives the Case White landings, it will be unbalancing to the rest of the campaign.

The other choice is the 3060 Hawk Moth Gunship, essentially a smaller version of the Yellow Jacket. The Hawk Moth is a VTOL wrapped around a Light Gauss Rifle. It comes in two versions: the base with a 32-round magazine, and the uparmored variant with a 16-round magazine. The Hawk Moth is also about 33% faster than the Yellow Jacket, but even its more rugged variant has considerably less armor.

I think either of these would make a fine vehicle for him, so I sent him a quick summary of these two, along with the Sprint and Mantis Light Attack VTOL (the only available VTOL-mounted TAG and ECM in ComStar's 3067 inventory, respectively) to help him make his vehicle choice. As of this writing he is still deciding, but now he, as a new player, has only four choices to weigh instead of wading straight into the source material to locate a helicopter on his own.