CincyBattletech
Campaigns (all) => "Have `Mech, Will Travel." => Topic started by: Darrian Wolffe on July 01, 2017, 05:35:38 PM
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NOTE: GUERILLA WARFARE CONTRACTS MEAN YOU CANNOT PURCHASE *ANY* WEAPONS/EQUIPMENT/AMMO ONCE YOU'RE ON THE PLANET, AND YOU'RE CONSIDERED TO BE "IN THE FIELD" FOR PURPOSES OF ALL REPAIRS/REFITS. YOU'RE LIVING ONLY ON WHAT YOU CAN SALVAGE.
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NOTE: GARRISON CONTRACTS MEAN YOU'RE CONSIDERED TO HAVE ACCESS TO "MAINTENANCE FACILITIES" NO MATTER HOW YOUR ACTIVE LANCES ARE ASSIGNED.
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NOTE: DIVERSIONARY RAIDS HAVE NO POSITIVE "EARLY END CONDITION" THE WAY THAT OBJECTIVE OR EXTRACTION RAIDS DO.
We have until 7 July (real life time) to choose a contract, or choose to wait another month to see the contract market refresh.
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My personal vote is for Operation THEMYSCIRA; it'll be a *hard* mission due to the enemy skill/equipment rating, but the rewards are extremely good, it's short, and the BLC percentage is quite good. IMO, the only downside is a 20-week(ish) travel time.
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My only issues with the last one are the travel times and the opfor
The cost to get there is enormous(yes I know it's covered) the return trip is the worry though
Say the next contract we take doesn't include expenses and we travel same distance. I'm assuming we are in the hole at that point. It does offer rather nice incentive though and could be a huge buffer
On another note an alternate choice would be dragon decent salvage rate, battle loss compensation, time frame but we won't make as much cash I feel
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The cost to get there is enormous(yes I know it's covered) the return trip is the worry though
Say the next contract we take doesn't include expenses and we travel same distance. I'm assuming we are in the hole at that point. It does offer rather nice incentive though and could be a huge buffer
That cost is the cost of chartering transport. If you didn't know a JumpShip/Dropship(s) and had to charter private transport to get there, that's how much it'd cost to rent the ships, pay the crews, and so forth.
Because you already own your own JumpShip/Dropship(s), the cost to the unit per jump is only 5,000 CB for fuel, plus having to pay 3 months worth of salaries/maintenance on the trip. So something like a 3/4ths of a million C-bills in total (~100k for fuel, and ~225k per month in salary/overhead/maintenance expenses for 3 months).
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Thats not all that bad then
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My evaluation of the missions:
RAGING JUSTICE - F rated opposition with 30% salvage won't exactly line our pockets. 60% BLC and 50% overhead are good. 99 days to station doesn't thrill me.
MINERVA - F rated opposition with 10% salvage, even further out than RAGING JUSTICE (1/2 a year to get there). 100% transport and BLC help.
ECHO - Regular opponent with C equipment and 90% salvage (!!!) with 50% overhead compensation and 100% transport. This one looks lucrative. Big catch is the House Command and 0% BLC. Relatively close by in Skye. But Guerilla...
DRAGON - Green opponent plus F equipment is okay, but not great. House command doesn't thrill either, but 60% BLC and 70% salvage are good. 60% transport and 50% overhead help.
SUPERCHARGE - (Character does not like) Green opponent with D equipment good, but 10% salvage is pathetic. None of the other terms improve things.
SADDLE - (Is this a prelude to Double Blind? One jump to Astrokaszy and Campolene on a ComStar contract...) Green enemy with D equipment but 0% salvage. Moderate transport and BLC terms don't rescue this turkey.
THEMYSCIRA - Veteran opponent with B equipment could hurt, but 90% salvage... High transport and medium BLC is good, half a year of transport doesn't thrill (though i may FINALLY get the Shadow Hawks heat sinks changed to doubles...). Only non-House command is a bonus.
Best Missions
1. THEMYSCIRA (High upside, we have custom mechs now to really push the odds)
2. DRAGON
Okay Missions
3. RAGING JUSTICE
4. SUPERCHARGE (At least it's short...)
Worst Missions
5. MINERVA
6. SADDLE (Long contract with no real upside)
7. ECHO (We can't really have the backlog of parts and spare mechs to make this work.)
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My preference is DRAGON then THEMYSCIRA, but it's a very slight preference for DRAGON. I am fine with either one ultimately.
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My preference is DRAGON then THEMYSCIRA, but it's a very slight preference for DRAGON. I am fine with either one ultimately.
I am good with either of them I know the opfor on THEMYSCIRA is gonna be the big kicker but the salvage and cash may make it worth it
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The richer salvage is what is driving me putting Themyscira over Dragon.
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My main issue with DRAGON is that sure, we get 70% salvage...but it's going to be 70% of crap, because of F-rated OPFOR. F-ratings are going to be a ton of Vedettes and Scorpions, and the majority of Mech units will be primitives, IndustrialMechs, and bugs.
Also, as a point of order, any BLC over 60% is vanishingly rare. I think the BLC on MINERVA is only the second 100% rating I've ever seen. 20-30% is average, 40% or more is "good".
B-rated OPFOR on THEMYSCIRA is a big risk, yes. But it also means that any salvage we take is going to be almost certainly immediately useful to us. I would call THEMYSCIRA as the mission with the biggest upside by far; DRAGON is a safer bet, but with almost no "growth potential" beyond the base contract pay due to the poor rate of return we'll have on salvaged units vis a vis paying for our own repairs. And I don't think the base contract pay is high enough to justify that.
We can also sit around for another month and see if the October contracts are any better.
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With so many upgraded mechs now, I don't think we need to cower in fear of a well equipped opponent. I won't endorse a Guerilla operation against such an opponent yet, given the repair challenges, but over a short contract we should be good.
Presumably we will be fighting 3 battles again (~ 1/month) for the contract, right Rob?
That gives us about a month between fights, so we should be good on repair time, but make sure we have enough spare parts...
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my vote is for themyscira
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I went ahead and did a test run into THEMYSCIRA (the MekHQ campaign wasn't saved, don't worry - we aren't committed to doing anything) to see what, exactly, a B-rated unit produced by MekHQ might look like at this time period.
It looks something like this:
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This isn't going to be perfectly representative, but I don't think it's necessarily a Death Juggernaught, either. The Mechs with red arrows are upgraded tech. I'd bet a company of our guys against this force, as long as we're judicious with our heavier assets and are willing to either run away or pull some crazy shit if any Awesomes show up.
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I say Themyscira or wait for next market.
If we take a contract with long travel time will parts ordered find us on way or not until we reach final destination?
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flat 21 days for parts regardless where we are per rob
also i do want to point out 70 mil profit on the guerrilla wow (although we would be spending ahead of time for a lot of stuff and most likely to lose it)
also still a little scary but doable as long as we focus stuff down and get some hits on those fast movers
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On the plus side, major lost tech variants like the AWS-9M won't resurface until 3049 (in theory). Regular Awesomes could still be a pain in the butt though.
Looking at the mechs listed, several of the upgraded units should not exist yet (lending some weight to that Awesome comment...).
HBK-5M 3046 (Added CASE, DHS)
CDA-3F 3052 (XL Engine, JJ, plus ER PPC)
HER-5S 3050 (Endo-Steel plus UAC-5 and MPLas)
LCT-3M 3050 (AMS, CASE, and FF)
Some should exist
PXH-3M 3037 (XL engine, Endo-Steel, AMS, and ER/Pulse lasers)
Aside from the Cicada (Ouch) and Phoenix Hawk (solid), most of the upgraded units don't gain a lot of firepower or combat effectiveness. The Locust still has paper armor. The Hunchback loses endurance going from 10 shots to 5, but gains heatsinks it can't really use and CASE that will be irrelevant in a couple of turns. The Hermes II can blow through its ammo faster and be more accurate with its now pulse laser, but nothing very threatening.
Honestly, the nastier vehicles bother me more. Pegasus is mean.
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On the plus side, major lost tech variants like the AWS-9M won't resurface until 3049 (in theory). Regular Awesomes could still be a pain in the butt though.
After the TRO 3039 retcons, those introduction dates no longer have any meaning**. FYI. Upgraded Mechs are around in increasing numbers starting in ~3034.
The first sentence of the rules doc *is* that the 3039 retcons are in play. Even the ones that make no sense. Especially the ones that make no sense.
Like these.
**Alternate punchline: "MegaMek hears ya. MegaMek don't care."
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The first sentence of the rules doc *is* that the 3039 retcons are in play. Even the ones that make no sense. Especially the ones that make no sense.
....
**Alternate punchline: "MegaMek hears ya. MegaMek don't care."
Why do I hear "THIS IS SPARTA!"?
Also, it is definitely MegaMek don't care.
Judging by this potential enemy list, I think C class enemies may actually end up scarier if they result in more upgraded vehicles. With the kind of vehicle spam MegaMek likes to throw at us, a herd of upgraded tanks could be ugly.
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flat 21 days for parts regardless where we are per rob
also i do want to point out 70 mil profit on the guerrilla wow (although we would be spending ahead of time for a lot of stuff and most likely to lose it)
also still a little scary but doable as long as we focus stuff down and get some hits on those fast movers
A couple of things to note on that contract.
1. All repairs are in the field (+2 to all TNs, so Regular Techs start at 9s)
2. No purchasing/hiring/etc.
3. 73 million / 24 months = 3 million/month for ECHO (THEMYSCIRA pencils out to 2 million/month, but that is without the transportation cost, and since we own a JumpShip and DropShips, we get to pocket most of that 19 million...)
4. In a guerilla war we probably won't control the battlefield very often, so how often we get to salvage stuff is a really important question
If we had some spare mechs and a larger logistical tail, I would really like to take a shot at it. One other major consideration though is that we are adding a new player (Lucas) and it would be good to have a short mission for him to win some loot and then upgrade his units before going haring off on a 24 month contract.
Rob, how does the transportation allocation work when we own transport? Are we pocketing that 19 million transportation allocation (minus the ~750 k of fuel, overhead and personnel costs, and again on return...)?
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flat 21 days for parts regardless where we are per rob
also i do want to point out 70 mil profit on the guerrilla wow (although we would be spending ahead of time for a lot of stuff and most likely to lose it)
also still a little scary but doable as long as we focus stuff down and get some hits on those fast movers
A couple of things to note on that contract.
1. All repairs are in the field (+2 to all TNs, so Regular Techs start at 9s)
2. No purchasing/hiring/etc.
3. 73 million / 24 months = 3 million/month for ECHO (THEMYSCIRA pencils out to 2 million/month, but that is without the transportation cost, and since we own a JumpShip and DropShips, we get to pocket most of that 19 million...)
4. In a guerilla war we probably won't control the battlefield very often, so how often we get to salvage stuff is a really important question
If we had some spare mechs and a larger logistical tail, I would really like to take a shot at it. One other major consideration though is that we are adding a new player (Lucas) and it would be good to have a short mission for him to win some loot and then upgrade his units before going haring off on a 24 month contract.
Rob, how does the transportation allocation work when we own transport? Are we pocketing that 19 million transportation allocation (minus the ~750 k of fuel, overhead and personnel costs, and again on return...)?
i was just saying lots of cbills there at once compared to others but it makes sense i was only saying i wish that was for a 3 month raid lol
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Except it really isn't at once, we would be getting monthly payments, which we couldn't spend until the end. Granted, it would feel like a big splurge.
On a side note:
Rob, would we execute a 24 month contract at the same time scale as a shorter contract? From a campaign play standpoint, 24 months would practically be a campaign unto itself.
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Except it really isn't at once, we would be getting monthly payments, which we couldn't spend until the end. Granted, it would feel like a big splurge.
On a side note:
Rob, would we execute a 24 month contract at the same time scale as a shorter contract? From a campaign play standpoint, 24 months would practically be a campaign unto itself.
again im only referring to amount showing (not how it all works) and yes it would
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Rob, how does the transportation allocation work when we own transport? Are we pocketing that 19 million transportation allocation (minus the ~750 k of fuel, overhead and personnel costs, and again on return...)?
You...you're serious? It's right there on the bottom of the contract. What's confusing?
OK.
Base amount: We get handed a minimum amount of money we're paid for the contract, base on unit salaries per month multiplied by some values depended on several factors (employer, mission type, etc)
Overhead amount: we get handed an amount of money to cover a certain percentage of 3 months of Overhead costs
Straight Support: we get handed an amount of money to cover a certain percentage of 3 months of Maintenance costs
Transportation Amount: we get handed an amount of money to cover a certain percentage of ALL of our transportation-related costs (incl. fuel) to the mission site. If we didn't have our own transport, this is the *minimum* cost - assuming optimum DropShip and JumpShip usage - that it would take to get us where we're going. If we didn't have our own transport, we'd have to charter a DropShip and JumpShip and pay ALL OF THIS AMOUNT UP FRONT out of unit cash reserves. Fortunately, we *do* have our own transport.
Total Contract Amount: Add up all of the above to get the total amount of money we are being given for this mission, assuming zero salvage, ransoms or anything else.
Signing bonus: If we were cooler than we are, we'd get a flat extra amount paid to us for being cool.
MRBC fee: The Dragoons take a percentage of the Total Contract Amount because they have to pay for their Fiat factory on the Outback. This comes off the top, we'll never see it.
Net Amount: This is the amount of money that's left after the MRBC fee is taken away from the Total Contract Amount.
Advance Money: We get this many CBills completely up front to use however we want.
Monthly amount: Take the net amount, subtract the Advance Money, and divide what's left by the number of months in the contract. This is what we get paid each month.
Estimated Total Profit: Assuming you're using every dime the contract gives you to actually pay for a chartered flight, and you don't see any combat, and don't get any salvage, and don't have to make any repairs or unexpected expenses, this is the total profit the unit will make after maintenance, overhead, transportation, and support costs. Basically, take the Base Amount, subtract a percentage of the MRBC fee, and subtract unit salaries, uncovered overhead, and uncovered maintenance. Whatever's left is the ETP. It doesn't mean a whole lot, since salvage and loss of Mechs can make things differ *hugely*.
Also note that your transport costs is due up front, and your transport pay is spread over a series of monthly payments. So the unit would have to come up with XX million CB up front to charter a flight, or go into debt for whatever isn't covered by the transport percentage and hope you can pay it all off by the end of the contract. This is what kills merc units.
Rob, would we execute a 24 month contract at the same time scale as a shorter contract? From a campaign play standpoint, 24 months would practically be a campaign unto itself.
Maybe. What would likely happen is that instead of 3-5 IRL games spread out with roughly 2-4 weeks (game time) between each IRL game, you'd end up with 5-10 IRL games, some of which have a very long time between games (game time) and some of which happen on an extremely compressed time schedule (game time). Assuming you didn't run out of steam and dissolve halfway in as supplies ran out.
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Rob, how does the transportation allocation work when we own transport? Are we pocketing that 19 million transportation allocation (minus the ~750 k of fuel, overhead and personnel costs, and again on return...)?
You...you're serious? It's right there on the bottom of the contract. What's confusing?
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Transportation Amount: we get handed an amount of money to cover a certain percentage of ALL of our transportation-related costs (incl. fuel) to the mission site. If we didn't have our own transport, this is the *minimum* cost - assuming optimum DropShip and JumpShip usage - that it would take to get us where we're going. If we didn't have our own transport, we'd have to charter a DropShip and JumpShip and pay ALL OF THIS AMOUNT UP FRONT out of unit cash reserves. Fortunately, we *do* have our own transport.
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Also note that your transport costs is due up front, and your transport pay is spread over a series of monthly payments. So the unit would have to come up with XX million CB up front to charter a flight, or go into debt for whatever isn't covered by the transport percentage and hope you can pay it all off by the end of the contract. This is what kills merc units.
The we get paid this amount up front for transportation was the part I wanted to confirm. I've spent too much time in freight brokerage and overthought it.
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Current Votes
1. Darrian Wolfe - Themyscira
2. TimberwolfD - Themyscira
3. Ad Hoc - Themyscira or try again
4. Augustaquila - Dragon then Themyscira
5. Ice - Themyscira
6. Lucas -
7. Black Omega -
8. Serrate -
So the three options selected so far are (With non-exclusive counts):
Themyscira (5)
Dragon (1)
Wait for next month (1)
Looks like we almost have a quorum already.
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Themyscira it is then, I will drop the first choice which gives 5 1st place votes to Themyscira.
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Themyscira it is then, I will drop the first choice which gives 5 1st place votes to Themyscira.
Confirmed. I'll start updating MekHQ.
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question is it even possible to reach there by that date?
25 days
31 days
30 days
31 days
25 days
leaves us 4 days short if we leave 9/6 or would there be a way to get there still or can we negotiate for a later arrival?
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question is it even possible to reach there by that date?
25 days
31 days
30 days
31 days
25 days
leaves us 4 days short if we leave 9/6 or would there be a way to get there still or can we negotiate for a later arrival?
Isn't the day still theoretically 9/1/3044 until we make our decision on contracts?
Then we have 29 days in September with us lifting off on 9/2/3044, just possible to be on time.
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We agreed to stay until 9/5
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Well that could be inconvenient.
Although in game, we could probably make up the difference using our JumpShip's fusion to augment sail charging in the weak stars. Sail charging can run to 201 hours at weak stars while fusion charging can be in hours (if we wanted to risk engine failure). Ultimately, as long as you take 175+ hours, you (we) are fine. Since over half of the star types take more than 175 hours, we can probably make the time back over the course of the transit. If we save 5-6 hours per jump on average, we make up all of the time. Add in a higher G departure and arrival to trim down the transit times to the zenith/nadir jump points and we should be fine.
Charge times
M (0-9) - 201-210 Hours
K (0-9) - 191-200 Hours
G (0-9) - 181-190 Hours
F (0-9) - 171-180 Hours
A (0-9) - 161-170 Hours
B (0-9) - 151-160 Hours
Any star in the B, A or first half of F we have to throttle the charge rate to slow down the charge time to 175 hours. An F4 star gives us an exact 175 hour charge. Anything from F5-F9, all of the K's and all of the M's are slower.
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We agreed to stay until 9/5
I won't lie; I forgot about that completely.
That's an easy thing to deal with, though, and yes, it can easily be made up in transit. Looking at the jump path and the star types (almost entirely G2V types, oddly enough), the crew won't even have to make a skill roll. You're basically taking a G2V's default 189 hour charge time and reducing it to 175 hours (14 hours saved) 7 times, and then there's a single K-class star on the trip where you drop a 200-hour charge time to a 178 hour charge time, adding up to 120 hours (5 days) saved.
JumpShips burn essentially 40 tons of fuel per burn-day, so that's 200 tons of hyrdogen fuel to save 5 days. At $15,000/ton (StratOps, p179), that's expensive ($3 million), but fortunately a fusion engine can also generate some fuel for free; ~10 tons per maintenance cycle that we don't use it to provide power (which is basically "per week; since we're only running the engine to produce power instead of hydrogen fuel for 5 hours most weeks, that won't be an issue). The JumpShip fusion drive can cover 17 weeks of fuel production (170 tons), so we're only on the hook for 30 tons of go-juice.
So we'll have to pay an extra $450,000 CB to run the jump drive to make up the time. We can eat that. Or we can take the potential minor contract breach (-1 to the contract score) for getting there late, with a potential -1 for each additional battle we miss while where's in transit.
Discuss.
(Also, I'm 80% sure that fuel costs are why the transport values are so damn high; hydrogen fuel was only like $1,000/ton back in the original merc handbook)
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I say we take the 450k hit we got more than enough to cover it. I would hate to spend the time to go there and not even get to do anything for that contract because it breached
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Lucas and I agree pay the fuel cost and get there on time.
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Pay the cost, If for some odd reason we have three battles back to back then we would be out a contact with negative reputation.
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I know that it really doesn't matter at this point, but I am in favor of Themyscira. My character, being who he is, would strongly object to any contract with actions against the Federated Suns.
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That's an easy thing to deal with, though, and yes, it can easily be made up in transit. Looking at the jump path and the star types (almost entirely G2V types, oddly enough), the crew won't even have to make a skill roll.
For grins and giggles I dug through some CBT star charts in the source books and most of the planets with listed star spectral classes are capitals or worlds with space campaigns/battles. In the core, a lot of stars meet that, as you go out toward the periphery, they get much sparser. They also seem to have decided that the utter majority of habitable stars would be GX sequence stars like Sol. Go figure. A couple of cooler K and M stars make an appearance, but few A or B stars.
I would be willing to bet that MegaMek uses a default star type when there isn't a canon answer.
Also, it may be cheaper to gain time back on the dropships. If it is 8 days to the JumpShip at 1G, it would be 5.3 days at 1.5G. And we have to burn that fuel anyway. Even playing games like a couple of hours at higher G loadings in the first couple of hours of transit would create meaningful reductions in transit times. Or sustaining 1.15G cuts off 1 day.
Either way we can spend the money too make up the time.
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Also, it may be cheaper to gain time back on the dropships. If it is 8 days to the JumpShip at 1G, it would be 5.3 days at 1.5G. And we have to burn that fuel anyway. Even playing games like a couple of hours at higher G loadings in the first couple of hours of transit would create meaningful reductions in transit times. Or sustaining 1.15G cuts off 1 day.
Either way we can spend the money too make up the time.
You don't want to do high g DropShip runs of you can help it. I have to look up the rules, but to make up 5 full days on a jump ship to planet burn that normally only takes 7 days, you'll have do a long term, sustained burn, and even small high g burns on MechWarrior 3 do something like "make Body tests or take penalties to all skills for 12-BODY weeks.".
It's extremely punitive.
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You don't want to do high g DropShip runs of you can help it. I have to look up the rules, but to make up 5 full days on a jump ship to planet burn that normally only takes 7 days, you'll have do a long term, sustained burn, and even small high g burns on MechWarrior 3 do something like "make Body tests or take penalties to all skills for 12-BODY weeks.".
It's extremely punitive.
Well, that's a bummer.
For the record, I was thinking in terms of reducing the number of days we would need to make up on the jumps and thereby reduce the 450k cbills.
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You don't want to do high g DropShip runs of you can help it. I have to look up the rules, but to make up 5 full days on a jump ship to planet burn that normally only takes 7 days, you'll have do a long term, sustained burn, and even small high g burns on MechWarrior 3 do something like "make Body tests or take penalties to all skills for 12-BODY weeks.".
It's extremely punitive.
Well, that's a bummer.
For the record, I was thinking in terms of reducing the number of days we would need to make up on the jumps and thereby reduce the 450k cbills.
Yeah, high g runs fuck people up. I'd look up the rules, but I'm at the Cincy pops concert at Riverbend right now.
You'd also owe more money for the DropShip fuel, but I don't know how the actual comparative costs would break down.
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Since we are embarking on operation THEMYSCIRA, where is Wonder Woman? Are there any Amazons involved?
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Since we are embarking on operation THEMYSCIRA, where is Wonder Woman? Are there any Amazons involved?
Easy there, you're on the wrong part of the sphere to have ZEUS punch you in the face.
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I looked through the "Unit's Next Destination" thread and can not see where we agreed to to stay to 9-5. We agreed to leave arrive 7-25 and stay until 9-1 in order to get 2 market places giving us a month + 5 days. I think we don't need to worry about time to next contract.
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You are correct i thought about it but didnt get around to posting about it.
The agreement was a month and five days not until 9/5. So we are fine and no need to burn the 450k