============================================================================= BT411 -- WEAPONS FIELD GUIDE: EVERY WEAPON, AS THE ORIGINAL BUILT IT SECOND EDITION -- updated 2026-08-14 for build 4.11.957. ============================================================================= WHAT THIS IS: we read the original machine's firing code for every weapon family and compared it, behavior by behavior, against our port. This is ROUND TWO of that document. Round one worked exactly as hoped: Oracle returned an annotated copy, and his fourteen notes settled five tracker tickets, fixed two documents, identified a missing alarm sound, and handed us a reference photo. Where a question below is marked [ANSWERED], his verdict is quoted -- corroboration from a second pilot is still valuable, contradiction doubly so. HOW TO REVIEW: you flew the real pods; we only read their code. Mark anything that CONTRADICTS your memory -- and anything that confirms it. Silence is not confirmation: a one-word "matches" is genuinely useful. HOW TO REPLY: EDIT THIS FILE. Every section 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. If you already annotated the first edition, that copy is still gold -- send it as-is; section numbers are unchanged. SCOREBOARD SO FAR: where this project's code reading and a pilot's specific memory have disagreed, the pilot is 9-and-1 (the one loss was a memory of the earlier 4.0 machine -- see the heat note in section 2B). Your memories are evidence. Use the blocks. ============================================================================= ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 stored charge. You cannot fire early -- the trigger does nothing until the charge completes. The only partial-power shot is a different CHARGE GEAR (section 2). Distance never matters: full damage anywhere inside effective range, zero damage past it. - Out of range: the trigger works and the beam draws, but the damage is silently thrown away. No hit, no denied tone. [ANSWERED -- Oracle: "Yes, firing at targets beyond the lasers maximum range discharged the laser but no damage was dealt. I assigned triggers on all mechs based on range groups so that I would not heat up the mech with useless firing." Confirmed.] - Effective range shrinks in proportion to damage on the body zone carrying the weapon: a half-wrecked arm fires at half reach. [Oracle: unknown to him, never came up in era discussion -- still open for anyone who remembers.] - Generator switching mid-charge does NOT cost the charge: the weapon resumes charging where it left off when reconnected. [ANSWERED -- Oracle: pre-round generator/seek shuffling was routine with no charge loss; a generator killed by damage left weapons mid-charge, resuming on reassignment. We then verified our port does exactly this. Question retired.] - Overheat is a hard stop: a heat-failed laser quits outright. - Each hit lands on ONE panel of the target. OUR PORT TODAY Same machine, verified live end to end, zero known deviations in the energy lane. YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. THE CHARGE GEAR (ALL ENERGY WEAPONS) -- NOW WITH THE REAL NUMBERS ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR Veteran/expert pilots can 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 counts as FULL and fires normally. (An earlier edition claimed the machine bricked lasers on the wrap; several of you said flatly that never happened, and you were right -- our misread, corrected.) THE REAL DAMAGE LADDER -- read from the machine's own gear table after Oracle's notes called out our old example as wrong: seek 1 = 56% damage, fastest charge (~0.6x the listed cycle) seek 2 = 77% damage (~0.75x) seek 3 = 100% -- THE PUBLISHED NUMBER (the calibration gear) seek 4 = 153% -- an OVERCHARGE: more damage AND more heat per shot, at roughly TRIPLE the charge time. The doctrine that falls out: downshift for rate of fire, seek 4 for the single big hit. [Oracle's two notes both check out against this ladder: "Seek 3 damage output agrees with published data" -- exactly, it is the calibration point -- and his routine downshifting "to increase rate of fire without negative impact" lives in the 77-100% band where the loss hides inside the rate gain. What he correctly contradicted was our old "half charge = quarter damage" example: no shipped gear sits anywhere near half the calibration voltage.] OUR PORT TODAY Byte-matched: the ladder above IS the port's arithmetic, confirmed both from the original's calibration code and from live fire logs. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY - Did era pilots use seek 4 deliberately as an alpha-strike gear (bigger, hotter, much slower shots)? Any lore about it? 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) - Drive heat scales with weight times speed squared; 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 top speed -- a sprint gear. A same-weight humanoid at the same speed cooks the same: physics, not a chicken-walker curse. - The machine gave you the tool: BOOST COOLANT LOOP 5 (Generator D / Myomers). 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 cooked anyway -- you probably hit the wrap. TWO presses, NEVER three. - Standing still sheds heat fast (~10 degrees a second). - HEAT EXISTS AT VETERAN in this 4.10 machine -- read straight from its code. The 4.0 manual (and some memories of the earlier machine) say expert-only; 4.10 changed it. If you played the earlier floor revision, both your memory and our code are right -- about different machines. OUR PORT -- THE CONFESSION AND THE FIX, NOW SHIPPED You were right that something was off: our build sampled your mech's motion at modern frame rates and read walking-gait jitter as phantom acceleration -- nearly TWO-THIRDS of drive heat on a flat cruise was noise the original's slower electronics never saw. Heavy walkers were punished about twice as hard as the machine intended. FIXED IN THIS BUILD (4.11.957): heat sensing samples on the original's clock. Bench-measured: a Vulture at seek-4 WITH the loop-5 boost holds full supercharge indefinitely, hot but stable -- the manual's printed Super Charged speed is real. WITHOUT the boost, seek-4 still cooks you; that is the machine's own balance. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY - TONIGHT: boost loop 5 (two presses!), 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 rules (lock, look, range gate, the charge-gear ladder). Everything distinctive is the numbers: hardest energy hit (12; ER 16), longest energy reach (900 / 950), a slow 5-second recharge, 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, and thanks to Oracle we now know what it looked like: [ANSWERED -- Oracle: "all MFDs including the Secondary would rapidly and briefly collapse into a vertical line in the center of the display and then rapidly expand back" -- the classic CRT deflection collapse, phosphor blooming bright on the line. He supplied a reference photo; it is archived and it IS the build spec.] SECOND WITNESS WANTED: anyone else remember the screens collapsing to a bright vertical line under particle fire? (b) GENERATOR SHORT: if the struck zone holds critical equipment, one random critical component takes a forced short. [ANSWERED, with a new lead -- Oracle: PPC hits sometimes flipped AUTO-mode generator assignments on individual subsystems; he never saw a generator read offline, "but the switching suggests a generator had momentarily tripped." That is now the field signature we are verifying the mechanism against (#178). TONIGHT: if your generator letters shuffle after taking particle fire, that is data -- say so.] OUR PORT TODAY The firing machine and the generator short are in and verified. The display scramble is IN PROGRESS against Oracle's spec -- your screens still shrug off a PPC hit in this build. YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. AUTOCANNONS -- AFC25 / AFC50 / AFC100 ** SHIPPED THIS BUILD ** ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR - The cannons are point-and-hit, not fly-and-hit. At the trigger, with a lock, 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 made. - No leading. The lock does the aiming; a dodging target does not shake a round already fired. - Out of range: the round is consumed, the tracer flies anyway, the damage is silently discarded. - Recoil: every shot with real punch kicks your own pod up and back through the gyro, in proportion to the shot. [Oracle: "There was a kickback when AFCs fired and it was relative to the caliber." Confirmed.] - Jams roll only while the weapon runs a heat alarm; chance grows with weapon temperature. - One panel per pull. (The old "shotgun across zones" was our bug, never the machine's -- #112 is closed on this build's receipts.) OUR PORT -- LIVE IN 4.11.957 The trigger-time cannon ships TONIGHT. Please hammer it: no leading, instant hits, one panel, range-gated. Every shot is named in your log. A NEW ERA QUESTION FROM ORACLE'S NOTES ** SECOND WITNESS WANTED ** Oracle: "I never recall seeing a projectile animation at all for an AFC. There was a muzzle flash and an impact flash. There was no tracer in my memory... completely invisible both from the firing mech's and the target mech's perspectives." The machine's code DOES contain the tracer mechanism -- but whether the pods actually DREW it visibly is exactly the kind of thing code cannot prove and eyes can. Draco, SAURON, Ronin: do you remember SEEING cannon rounds fly? Our build draws them; if the pods did not, we want to know. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY (still open) - The AFC25: 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.) [Oracle: can't recall -- rarely flew AFC25 carriers.] YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. GAUSS ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR - The fielded Gauss is built ON THE CANNON MACHINE: ~20 points of solid shot out to 900, slow 8-second cycle, 16 rounds, runs nearly cold, the only YELLOW ballistic pip. [ANSWERED -- Oracle: MATCHES, "The Mischief was equipped with a Gauss rifle." And that checks our content map perfectly: Mischief is the Loki variant in the shipped roster, and the Loki family's cockpit authors the Gauss gauges. Confirmed on both sides.] - The code also contains a second, "true" Gauss-rifle mechanism that charges up and does NOTHING when fired. No shipped content uses it. If YOU remember a Gauss that charged and did nothing -- say so loudly; it would mean some floor revision shipped content we do not have. OUR PORT TODAY Same content, same machine. Port and original agree. Nothing changed, nothing changing. YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6. MISSILES -- HOW EVERY RACK REALLY FIRES ** SHIPPED THIS BUILD ** ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINAL'S BEHAVIOR - Missiles are the one family that genuinely FLIES; everything else decides its hit at the trigger. - Lock required; no dumb-fire path exists anywhere in the machine. - ONE flying round was drawn per salvo, plus one explosion; the damage bookkeeping rides that round. (We draw the full ripple -- lead round carries the damage -- a stated presentation choice.) - The seeker LEADS and lofts; detonation is a close-proximity fuze with a swept contact check. Target dies mid-flight: the lock drops and the round goes stupid. - Air drag governs every round: an LRM tops out near 550, an SRM near 775. Listed "range" is display only; real reach is burn + up to 10 seconds of coast. - The round detonates on the FIRST thing in its path: the target, a third mech that wanders into the flight line, a building, or the hill you are hiding behind. WHAT SHIPPED IN 4.11.957 -- PLEASE FLY AGAINST ALL OF IT - TRUE SPEEDS: the drag governor is in. Missiles are ~5x slower than the last builds -- heavier arcs, long shots take visibly longer. That is the pod's real feel, not a nerf. [Oracle, pre-endorsing from the audit description: "MATCHES the description and coming changes are in the direction I expect."] - COVER WORKS (#175): rounds burst on hills and buildings instead of passing through -- and the blast can still splash you if you hug the cover (authentic near-miss splash). Trucks and props die to missiles. - BYSTANDERS (#171): a third mech crossing the flight path eats the round, exactly as the original swept it. - RACK PERSONALITY, acknowledged: [Oracle: "The racks on different mechs did appear to have a personality... Thor and Madcat tended to loft the missiles up, the Avatar a flatter trajectory; very long range shots lofting higher."] That personality is the authored per-rack launch vectors plus the range-scaled loft -- both already data-driven in the port. Enjoy; it is real. YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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; strength scales from the FULL rack size, falls off steeply with distance; the direct victim is excluded from its own splash. [Oracle: MATCHES on nearby splash. Still open below: self-splash.] OUR PORT TODAY Same math, verified. We exclude both the direct victim and the shooter -- and the original's code cannot prove the shooter half either way. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY (the tiebreaker still stands) - Could you hurt YOURSELF firing missiles point-blank into a wall or an adjacent mech? Our port says no; only your memory can settle it. (New in this build: firing into the hill in front of you WILL splash you -- that part is authentic cover physics, not self-splash.) 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, the signature climb-then-plunge LOFT at range. Streak round: 360 deg/sec turn, short 3-second burn, no loft. Narc round: Streak-grade tracking PLUS the loft PLUS the long burn. A light rack that flies like a hawk. - There is NO beacon mechanism anywhere. The Narc never tagged anyone; it is a light, hard-tracking rack and nothing more. - Several racks LABELED "LRM" feed Narc-profile rounds; at least one "SRM6" feeds Streak rounds. Identical-looking racks homing very differently is authentic authored data. - THE SWARM: [Oracle: "The maneuverability of the NARCs and STREAKS often caused an angry swarm of bees effect when the missiles came near a maneuvering target at a high aspect angle."] We are running down whether the original authors a per-round turn rate our port does not read yet -- if your memory holds more detail about WHICH racks swarmed, write it down. - THE SRM RANGE PIP -- SETTLED AT 800: the printed manual shows 450, our content authors 800, and Oracle's note ("agrees with the 800m range published on the VWE site for v4.10") dates the change between revisions. Our 4.10 content is correct at 800. Retired. OUR PORT TODAY Same data-driven resolution. One detail still unstated: which profile the 2-tube SRM racks fly -- our two content reads disagree. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY (still open) - Can anyone else confirm the Narc did nothing special -- no tag, no beacon? And racks firing FEWER tubes than their name (a 4-tube "SRM6", a 2-tube "SRM4")? 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; a HOT generator reloads slower; below minimum voltage the countdown freezes. - The EJECT control (novices locked out): TAP = eject one round; the weapon resets to loading if rounds remain. This is the in-mission UNJAM. HOLD (3 seconds) = dump the entire bay. [ANSWERED -- Oracle: "A jammed round was ejected with a single tap of the eject button. No holding down was required." Confirmed -- the tap IS the unjam; the hold is a different function (full bay dump), which matches.] - Jams roll after each shot while the weapon runs a heat alarm. (Heat exists at veteran AND expert in this 4.10 -- see 2B.) - [Oracle: "I have never seen a non-damaged non-jammed weapon stop recycling and firing." Which is exactly why our old X'd-weapons bug -- dead guns firing, live guns latching -- read so wrong. Both roots are fixed in this build.] OUR PORT TODAY Same machine, tap-unjam included. The leftover conservative jam gate came out: warm cannons and racks on veteran/expert jam at the authentic rate now. WE NEED YOUR MEMORY (still open) - Did a rack or cannon ever go permanently dark WITH ammo remaining after sustained fire? At what intensity? (Field case from our own nights: an SRM6 latched out with 19 rounds left.) YOUR NOTES (callsign first, one entry per line): > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10. INCOMING-MISSILE WARNING ** FOUND, FIXED, SHIPPED TONIGHT ** ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This section is the round-trip working exactly as designed, so here is the whole story. Round one asked "did the pod audibly warn you of inbound missiles?" Oracle answered with the sound itself: [ANSWERED -- Oracle: "There was only a missile warning horn sound, no other warning. This is the missile warning alarm from the sound board '[1:74] IncomingAlarm01 n58'." -- found on the distributable soundboard, plus two videos of the original machine with the alarm audible.] So: the beeper IS the whole annunciation -- no lamp, no voice -- and its tempo accelerates as the missile closes (authored straight into the machine's audio data: distance drives beep rate). Then the fix: our alarm code turned out to be wired to a dead path -- it had never run once in any fielded build. IN 4.11.957 IT LIVES: missiles inbound on you start the beeper, slow at long range, frantic as it closes. LRM volleys give seconds of warning; a point-blank SRM barely a blip (authentic -- the machine cannot warn you faster than the missile flies). WE NEED YOUR EARS TONIGHT - Does the beeper's tempo ramp match your memory of the pods (and Oracle's reference videos)? This is the one verification only ears can do. 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 = the seek-3 shot; the gear ladder scales it) 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. THE CHARGE-GEAR LADDER (all energy weapons; damage AND heat scale together; charge time from the machine's exponential charge curve) GEAR DAMAGE CHARGE TIME (approx, x listed cycle) seek 1 56% ~0.6x (fastest -- the rate-of-fire gear) seek 2 77% ~0.75x seek 3 100% 1x (the published calibration numbers) seek 4 153% ~2.9x (the overcharge -- alpha-strike gear) 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. SRM racks display range 800 (settled -- see section 8); 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 top ~550 Streak round: turn 360 deg/s burn 3 s loft no top ~775 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. Rounds detonate on the first thing in the path: target, bystander, building, or hill. ============================================================================= WHEN YOU'RE DONE: post your edited copy back to the weapons thread. "MATCHES" alone in a notes block is real data. The two questions we most need second witnesses on: DID CANNON ROUNDS VISIBLY FLY (section 4), and the PPC vertical-line screen collapse (section 3). First-edition annotated copies are still welcome exactly as they are. =============================================================================