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=============================================================================
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.
=============================================================================
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