============================================================================= BT411 -- WEAPONS FIELD GUIDE: EVERY WEAPON, AS THE ORIGINAL BUILT IT Updated 2026-08-13 -- reconstruction review edition, for the whole group. ============================================================================= WHAT THIS IS: we have now read the original machine's firing code for every weapon family and compared it, behavior by behavior, against what our port does. This document is the result. For each family you get: what the shipped machine really did, what our port does today, what changes in the next build, and -- where the code alone cannot settle it -- what we need from your memory. HOW TO REVIEW: you flew the real pods; we only read their code. Read each section and mark anything that CONTRADICTS your memory of the machine -- and anything that confirms it. Silence is not confirmation: if a section simply matches what you remember, a one-word "matches" is genuinely useful data. HOW TO REPLY: EDIT THIS FILE. Every section that needs your input ends with a YOUR NOTES block -- write directly in it (callsign first, then MATCHES / CONTRADICTS / CAN'T RECALL, then your detail) and post the edited file back when you're done. Which floor, which revision, which mech you flew -- machine-room details turn weak memories into strong evidence. ONE RETRACTION UP FRONT: the last issues handout (#27) told you ballistic rounds could now "genuinely MISS a moving target". The deeper dig behind this document proved that framing wrong: the original decides a cannon hit AT THE TRIGGER, and the round you watch fly is a tracer drawn for show. We were wrong; details in the AUTOCANNONS section. Your review of that section is part of the group's sign-off on the correction. ============================================================================= ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. LASERS -- SMALL / MEDIUM / LARGE, STANDARD AND ER ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR - A charge-and-release energy weapon. No ammo, no jam. Six marks, one mechanism -- only the numbers differ (Appendix A). No pulse lasers exist anywhere in the shipped content. - Firing needs three things at the trigger: a LOCKED target, your view actually on the target (the weapon only arms while you are looking where it points), and the target inside effective range. - The beam is instant. The hit is decided the moment you fire -- no travel time, no leading. What you see is the discharge drawing itself, plus a 0.2-second afterglow that tracks the target. - Damage scales with the SQUARE of the charge: a full-charge shot does the listed number; a half-charge release does a quarter. - Out of range: the trigger works and the beam draws, but the damage is silently thrown away. No hit, no denied tone we can find. - Effective range shrinks in proportion to damage on the body zone carrying the weapon: a half-wrecked arm fires at half reach. An undamaged weapon reaches exactly its listed range -- confirmed down to the byte this week. - Overheat is a hard stop: a heat-failed laser quits outright. There is no gradual weakening on the way down. - Each hit lands on ONE panel of the target. OUR PORT TODAY Same machine, verified live end to end. The beam is drawn from the real laser-tube art. Charge timing is smoothed for modern frame rates -- a robustness measure, not a behavior change. (The #164 stuck-beam guards are already in.) CHANGING IN THE NEXT BUILD Nothing mechanical. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY - Firing past range: do you remember shots that visibly fired at a distant target and just did nothing? That is what the machine did. - Generator switching mid-charge: did switching or re-routing generators while a laser was charging COST you the in-flight charge (with an electrical alarm)? A yes pins down a control path we have not been able to identify from the code alone. YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. THE CHARGE GEAR (ALL ENERGY WEAPONS) -- SETTLED BY YOUR MEMORY ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR Veteran/expert pilots could cycle an energy weapon's charge gear (four settings). Cycling past the top wraps to the bottom and the weapon keeps working: a stored charge above the new gear's level simply counts as FULL and fires (a wrap-fired top-gear charge deals its normal top-gear damage -- no secret super-shot, no dead weapon). FOR THE RECORD: an earlier version of this document claimed the machine shipped a flaw here -- that wrapping the gear left the weapon permanently dark. Several of you said flatly that never happened. You were right. The re-audit you triggered found our reading of one number in the original's code was wrong by a single byte-width, and the "brick" existed only in our port, never on the machine. This section is your correction, adopted. OUR PORT TODAY Fixed to match: cycling behaves exactly as you remember. (Before the fix our gauges could briefly read EMPTY on an over-charge where the machine read FULL -- if you saw that, it dies in the next build.) CHANGING IN THE NEXT BUILD The correction above ships. The old "deviation" entry is withdrawn -- the energy lane now has ZERO deviations from the original. YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2B. SEEK-4 ON THE HEAVY WALKERS (VULTURE / MADCAT / THOR / LOKI) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR (audited to the byte this week) - Drive heat scales with weight times speed squared, and no amount of running ever cools you -- there is no airflow cooling anywhere in this machine. The fast-heavy Clan walkers pay the most. - Gears 1 through 3 make IDENTICAL heat: seek-3 is free speed. Seek-4 roughly doubles drive heat AND raises your top speed -- a sprint gear. Cruising it on a heavy walker without the boost crosses myomer degradation in under twenty seconds and the governor bites. A same-weight humanoid at the same speed cooks the same: it is physics, not a chicken-walker curse. - The machine gave you the tool: BOOST COOLANT LOOP 5 (Generator D / Myomers). One press visibly buys your speed back; a full boost sustains seek-4 on a Vulture indefinitely. - THE TRAP: one press past maximum WRAPS THE VALVE CLOSED. If you ever boosted a loop and it cooked anyway -- you probably hit the wrap. Two presses, never three. - Standing still sheds heat fast (~10 degrees a second). OUR PORT TODAY -- AND A CONFESSION YOUR REPORTS FORCED You were right that something was off. Our build measured your mech's acceleration at modern frame rates, and at those rates the measurement picks up walking-gait jitter as phantom acceleration -- nearly TWO-THIRDS of your drive heat on a flat cruise was noise that the original's electronics (sampling at their own slower clock) never saw. The port was punishing heavy walkers roughly TWICE as hard as the machine did. CHANGING IN THE NEXT BUILD (the fix, measured) Heat sensing now samples on the original's clock. Result on the bench: a Vulture at seek-4 WITH the loop-5 boost holds FULL supercharge speed indefinitely, running hot but stable -- the valve trick works exactly as the machine intended, and the manual's printed Super Charged speed is real. WITHOUT the boost, seek-4 still cooks you (that part is the machine's own balance, and it stays). The wrap trap also stays: two presses, never three. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY - Next build: boost loop 5, hold seek-4 on a big walker. Does the sustained supercharge match how the machine felt? Your yes closes the oldest heat complaint on the books. - Did the loop-5 valve boost trick live in era pilot lore, or are we rediscovering it? YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. PPC AND ER PPC ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR - The firing machine is literally the laser's -- the same code, the same rules (lock, look, range gate, square-law charge). Everything distinctive is the numbers: hardest energy hit (12; ER 16), longest energy reach (900 / 950), a slow 5-second recharge, and the only BLUE pip. - What makes a PPC special is what it does to the VICTIM. Energy hits -- and only energy hits -- carry two riders: (a) DISPLAY SCRAMBLE: every energy hit pokes the victim's cockpit display system once -- some kind of gauge/MFD disturbance per hit. What it looked like and how long it lasted is NOT recoverable from the code. (b) GENERATOR SHORT: if the struck zone holds critical equipment, one random critical component takes a forced short -- generator brownout, charge stall, cockpit electronics dip. OUR PORT TODAY The firing machine and the generator short are in and verified. The display scramble is NOT implemented -- right now your screens shrug off a PPC hit, and that is a known gap on the polish list. CHANGING IN THE NEXT BUILD Not yet. We will not invent the visual: the scramble gets built AFTER your testimony, not before. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY (this one really matters) - Taking a PPC hit, from inside the pod: what happened on your screens? Static or interference? A flash? Gauges and MFDs going briefly to garbage? How long did it last? - Separately: after taking PPC hits, do you remember the generator browning out or your weapons losing charge (the short rider)? YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. AUTOCANNONS -- AFC25 / AFC50 / AFC100 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR - The cannons are point-and-hit, not fly-and-hit. At the trigger, with a lock, the machine checks the range; in range, the damage lands THEN -- one solid ballistic hit on ONE panel of the locked target. The shell you watch fly is a TRACER, drawn for show after the decision is already made. - No leading. The lock does the aiming, and a dodging target does not shake a round already fired. - Out of range: the round is consumed, the tracer flies anyway, and the damage is silently discarded. No hit, no warning. - Recoil: every shot with real punch (damage over 3) kicks your own pod up and back through the gyro, in proportion to the shot -- the AFC100 kicks about 3.5 times as hard as the AFC25. - Jams roll after each shot only while the weapon itself is running a heat alarm -- in practice veteran/expert only, since the lower sim levels never heat-alarm a weapon. Chance grows with weapon temperature. - One panel per pull. The old "shotgun across zones" spread in our port (#112) was our bug, never the machine's. OUR PORT TODAY Until now our cannons flew a real shell that could miss -- reasonable, and wrong. The trigger-time machine is now implemented against the original's code line by line and bench-verified: full batches land as one hit, out-of-range rounds are consumed and discarded. What it needs now is a real night of fire. CHANGING IN THE NEXT BUILD - The trigger-time cannon goes live in the build you test next. This is the big #171 correction -- please hammer the cannons. - The tracer's flight speed: the original derives it from the gun's range and muzzle height (roughly one second to cross full range). Our stand-in speed was close by accident; the recovered authentic numbers go in. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY - When YOU fired cannons, did the pod's view visibly kick up and back (distinct from being hit)? Was the AFC100's kick noticeably harder than the AFC25's? - The AFC25 specifically: did it occasionally eat a trigger pull silently -- a click, no shot, on an apparently ready gun? (Its ammo feed timer exactly equals its firing cycle -- the only gun where the two can race.) - Firing beyond range: did the visible round fly on forever, or vanish? (The code consumes the round and discards the damage; the tracer's visual fate is the one part we cannot recover.) - Round pace: roughly how fast did cannon rounds visibly fly? About a second to cross full range, or very different? YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. GAUSS ** THE HEADLINE QUESTION ** ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR (as best we can prove it) - The Gauss the pods actually fielded is built ON THE CANNON MACHINE. The shipped content authors it as an autocannon-class weapon: about 20 points of solid shot out to 900 (tied with the AFC25 for longest ballistic reach), a slow 8-second cycle, only 16 rounds, runs nearly cold, and the only YELLOW ballistic pip. It hit, and it hurt. - The code ALSO contains a second, "true" Gauss-rifle mechanism that charges up and does NOTHING when fired -- no damage, no heat, nothing. No shipped content anywhere uses it. Dead code. - Full honesty: for a while our audit believed the pods fielded the do-nothing Gauss and that our port's Gauss damage was an invention. Reading the raw content bytes settled it the other way -- the fielded Gauss is the cannon-class one. OUR PORT TODAY Same content, same machine: our Gauss already deals cannon-class damage. Port and original agree. Nothing changes. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY (the headline) - Confirm the Gauss KILLED: heavy single hits at extreme range, a slow cycle, a small magazine, a gun that never warmed up, and a yellow pip on the display. We expect YES. - Which mech do you remember carrying it? (We believe the Loki; your memory checks our content map.) - If instead you remember a Gauss that charged up and did NOTHING when fired -- say so loudly. That would be evidence that some floor revision shipped content for the dead mechanism, content we do not have. YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6. MISSILES -- HOW EVERY RACK REALLY FIRES ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR - Missiles are the one family that genuinely FLIES. Everything else in the game decides its hit at the trigger; a missile earns its hit in the air. - Lock required, same as every weapon. There is no dumb-fire path anywhere in the machine -- the trigger will not take without a lock. (No special Streak lock code exists either; all racks fire through the same gate.) - ONE flying round was drawn per salvo, plus one explosion -- the pod drew a single missile even for a 15-tube volley. The damage bookkeeping rides that one round. - The seeker LEADS: it flies a constant-bearing intercept toward the exact spot on the target picked at the moment of fire, and detonates on a close-proximity fuze with a swept contact check. - If the target dies mid-flight, the lock drops and the round goes stupid. - A rack's listed "range" is fire-control display only. Real reach is physics: motor burn, then up to 10 seconds of coasting. Rounds that hit the floor die; rounds that time out fizzle. - On impact, the cluster roll: out of an n-missile salvo, between roughly a quarter and all of them count as hits, scattered across the victim's zones with a fresh scatter every burst. OUR PORT TODAY The whole chain is live-verified: a 382-impact night corpus matches the original's cluster roll exactly, and the fuze and lock-drop are benched. (Flight SPEED is the one thing that corpus measured against the old dragless model -- see CHANGING below: speeds drop to the original's governed values next build.) Presentation deliberately differs: we draw the full ripple of N rounds (the lead round carries the damage, the rest are tracers) with a small tube spread. The damage economy is identical. CHANGING IN THE NEXT BUILD -- AND WHAT TO WATCH MISSILES SLOW DOWN, AND THIS IS THE ORIGINAL'S SPEED. The audit found the original governs every missile with air drag that caps its top speed -- an LRM tops out near 550, an SRM near 775. Our rounds had no drag: an LRM was leaving its burn at over 3000, five times the machine's speed, and flying nearly twice as far downrange. Next build restores the governor. Missiles will feel heavier, arcs will read slower, and long shots will take noticeably longer to arrive -- that is the pod's real feel, not a nerf. If missile flight FINALLY looks like you remember, say so; that confirmation is worth as much as a bug report. The bystander gap. The original's rounds swept everything in the flight path every tick -- a third mech between shooter and target could eat someone else's missile. Our rounds currently contact only the locked target and the terrain: a mech in between gets flown through, and only splash can touch it. This is the largest remaining missile-physics gap; the fix is designed but not landed. WATCH FRIDAY: if you take missile hits aimed at someone else -- beyond splash distance -- report it with the shooter's name. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7. MISSILE SPLASH ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR Splash was LIVE on the pods -- every stock mission enables it. An impact splashes a radius of about 30 around the hit point; strength scales from the FULL rack size and falls off steeply with distance; the mech that took the direct hit is excluded from its own splash. One thing the code cannot prove either way: whether the SHOOTER was protected from splashing themselves at point-blank. OUR PORT TODAY Same math, verified -- including the full-rack-size splash strength, pinned to the original's code this week. We exclude both the direct victim and the shooter. The on/off wiring differs slightly from the original in a way that only matters for custom missions -- a site option question for later, not a Friday one. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY - Do you remember splash hurting mechs standing NEAR an impact? - Critically: could you hurt YOURSELF firing missiles point-blank into a wall or an adjacent mech? Our port says no; the original's code will not tell us. Your memory is the tiebreaker. YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8. HOMING AGILITY, THE LRM ARC, AND THE NARC ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR - Three flight profiles exist in the shipped content: LRM round: sluggish 60 deg/sec turn, 10-second burn, and the LOFT -- at long range the seeker aims high and the round flies the signature climb-then-plunge arc. Streak round: 360 deg/sec turn -- six times the LRM -- short 3-second burn, no loft. The round that out-turns evasion. Narc round: the surprise -- Streak-grade 360 deg/sec tracking PLUS the loft PLUS the long 10-second burn. A light rack that flies like a hawk. - There is NO beacon mechanism anywhere in the machine. The Narc never tagged anyone for anything; it is a light, hard-tracking rack and nothing more. - Several racks LABELED "LRM" actually feed Narc-profile rounds, and at least one "SRM6" feeds Streak rounds. Two visually identical racks homing very differently -- one sluggish, one snapping onto target -- is authentic, not a bug. - Rack names lie in other ways too, all authentic authored data: an "SRM6" that fires 4 tubes, an "SRM4" that fires 2, LRM10s that hit nearly twice as hard on one chassis as another. OUR PORT TODAY Same data-driven resolution -- the racks read the same content, so all of the above carries over for free. One detail we are NOT stating yet: which profile the 2-tube SRM racks fly -- our two content reads disagree and the pass that settles it has not run. CHANGING IN THE NEXT BUILD Nothing mechanical. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY - Do you remember visually identical LRM racks homing very differently on different mechs? And can you confirm the Narc did nothing special -- no tag, no beacon, just a fast light rack? - Do you remember SRM racks that fired FEWER missiles than their name -- a 4-tube "SRM6", a 2-tube "SRM4"? Or LRM10s/LRM15s that hit noticeably harder on one chassis than another? - THE SRM RANGE PIP: the original PRINTED MANUAL shows the SRM range mark at 450 in three separate display mockups; the game content we have authors it at 800. That smells like the range changed between software revisions. Which number do you remember on the ladder when you selected an SRM rack -- 450 or 800? (Range on a missile is display-only either way -- the rounds fly on physics -- but your answer dates our content revision.) YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9. AMMO, EJECT, AND JAMS (CANNONS AND RACKS) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR - The reload countdown runs only while the weapon's generator route is powered, and a HOT generator reloads slower. Below minimum voltage the countdown freezes entirely. - The EJECT control (novice pilots are locked out of it): TAP = eject one round, and the weapon resets to loading if rounds remain. This is the in-mission UNJAM. HOLD (3 seconds) = dump the entire bay. The weapon is out of ammo for good until re-arm or respawn. - Jams roll after each shot while the weapon itself runs a heat alarm; the chance grows with weapon temperature. Standard and novice sims never heat-alarm a weapon -- so in practice only veteran/expert pilots ever jammed. OUR PORT TODAY Same machine, tap-unjam included -- it is the mechanism behind #166's "tap EJECT" advice. One divergence: our jam roll currently waits for a higher weapon temperature than the original -- a leftover safety from before the heat economy went live. CHANGING IN THE NEXT BUILD The leftover jam gate comes out. Warm cannons and racks on veteran/expert may jam a touch more often. That is the authentic rate. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY - Did weapons only ever jam for veteran/expert pilots? And could you CLEAR a jam mid-sortie by tapping EJECT to cycle one round out? - Did a rack or cannon ever go permanently dark WITH ammo remaining after sustained fire? At what firing intensity? (Field case from our own nights: an SRM6 latched out with 19 rounds left. Whether that could happen at authentic intensity is an open question.) YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10. INCOMING-MISSILE WARNING ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR Every missile launched at a mech announces itself to its target -- the machinery for a warning is there. What CONSUMED that announcement (a warning tone? a beeper tempo change? a threat lamp?) we have not located in the original's code. OUR PORT TODAY The beeper plumbing exists but nothing feeds it -- the warning is structurally dead (#83 on the known-gaps list). WE NEED YOUR MEMORY - Did the pod audibly warn you of inbound missiles? A tone, a tempo change, a lamp -- anything. If it did not, #83 closes for free. If it did, describe it and we build exactly that. YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- APPENDIX A -- THE AUTHORED NUMBERS (straight from the shipped content) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Range is in the same units your fire-control shows. Cycle in seconds. ENERGY (damage = full-charge shot; scales with the square of charge) WEAPON DMG RANGE CYCLE HEAT/SHOT SLaser 1.5 150 1 0.75 ERSLaser 2 225 1 1.5 MLaser 2.5 350 2 2 ERMLaser 3.5 500 2 3.5 LLaser 5 600 4 6 ERLLaser 6 750 4 8.5 PPC 12 900 5 11 ERPPC 16 950 5 16 Reach shrinks with damage to the carrying zone: listed x (1 - zone damage). An undamaged weapon reaches exactly the listed range. BALLISTIC (one panel, decided at the trigger; recoil kick = dmg/16) WEAPON DMG RANGE CYCLE NOTES AFC25 7 900 2 feed timer = cycle (see sec. 4) AFC50 13 750 4 AFC100 25 400 8 hardest hit, shortest reach GAUSS 20 900 8 16 rounds, yellow pip, near cold Cannons and racks run effectively cold next to the energy bank. MISSILE RACKS (DMG = whole-salvo total; per-round in parentheses) RACK TUBES DMG CYCLE SRM2 2 10 (5.0) 2 SRM4 4 35 (8.75) 3 SRM4 4 20 (5.0) 3 SRM4 2 10 (5.0) 2 SRM6 6 50 (8.3) 5 SRM6 6 35 (5.8) 5 SRM6 4 20 (5.0) 3 LRM5 5 10 (2.0) 2.5 NRK5 5 10 (2.0) 2.5 LRM10 10 35 (3.5) 4 LRM10 10 20 (2.0) 4 LRM15 15 50 (3.3) 6 LRM15 15 35 (2.3) 6 LRM20 20 65 (3.25) 9 Same rack name, different numbers = different chassis fits, all authentic. We are re-verifying the per-chassis map before naming which mech carries which variant. SRM racks display range 800; LRM/NRK racks display 6000 -- display only; real reach is flight time. Cluster roll on impact: of n launched, between about n/4 and n count as hits. FLIGHT PROFILES (authored on the round, not the rack) LRM round: turn 60 deg/s burn 10 s loft YES Streak round: turn 360 deg/s burn 3 s loft no Narc round: turn 360 deg/s burn 10 s loft YES All rounds splash radius 30 on impact. After burnout a round coasts up to 10 seconds before fizzling. ============================================================================= WHEN YOU'RE DONE: post your edited copy of this file back to the weapons thread. "MATCHES" alone in a notes block is real data. The GAUSS and PPC-HIT questions are the two we cannot answer without you. =============================================================================