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I never knew they were so biometrically locked down. I guess swapping pilots last second on the deployment screen is a concession to vidyagame playability.
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Jan 25, 2023 16:25
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Owlbear Camus posted:I never knew they were so biometrically locked down. Like most things in the video games yeah, its why you get goofy poo poo like "You're in a summoner, we expect you to kill around 30 mechs in a 15 minute timeframe" which is just a Normal Mechwarrior Protagonist thing to do when 30 kills is a top-level mechwarrior's entire career in the lore
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Jan 25, 2023 16:38
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You can get it down to an hour if you have top end equipment intended for intelligence agents. If you have to reconfigure that poo poo manually then yeah, days or weeks.
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Jan 25, 2023 17:40
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Comstar posted:What other stories are there about mis-jumped or failed KF drives showing up in the wrong time or place? The only one I know of the wrong place is Peter Rice's infamous Bird Person (which I have nothing against! I love his Renegade Legion novels!) book. There was Living Legends- https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Living_Legends I think I remember reading that the devs were pretty adamant about never doing it again.
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Jan 25, 2023 17:41
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In theory could you key a mech to multiple users, like everyone in your company? So when Grifter has to take over driving the Blackjack because Stopwatch is in the infirmary, it recognizes either's brain meat without hassle-- but if Joe Mechjacker sneaks into the mechbay and tries to make off with the goods it's a no go?
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Jan 25, 2023 17:57
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Owlbear Camus posted:Joe Mechjacker OSHA thread’s truckfuckler goes by many names, but always lives on 
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Jan 25, 2023 18:04
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Owlbear Camus posted:In theory could you key a mech to multiple users, like everyone in your company? I believe the Clans could do something close to that. I think it was one of the first Phelan Kell ones, he saw a Clan warrior just put in a circuit board/usb type thing and it reset the 'Mech so it could be piloted by that person. Basically it was a dongle that carried the proper brainwaves/technobabble to sync the 'Mech to the pilot as the Clans needed to do so a lot more often. It was Star League based tech that the IS had lost along the way, though any 'Mech properly set up could do it if you really, really wanted to.
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Jan 25, 2023 19:05
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Defiance Industries posted:You can get it down to an hour if you have top end equipment intended for intelligence agents. If you have to reconfigure that poo poo manually then yeah, days or weeks. The Society had a master decoder "skeleton key" that would unlock any 'Mech's security in a matter of minutes. Chandrasekhar Kurita traded for one and used it to help the Caballeros. I know that was a Society thing because it was Jade Falcon merchants who turned up with it.
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Jan 25, 2023 19:09
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I appreciate all the answers guys, thank you.
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Jan 25, 2023 20:21
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It should also be noted that a lot of 'Mechs stored in Castles Brian were considered secure and were stored without biometrics or passwords so the SLDF could power them up quickly if the need arose. It was one of the reasons why finding an intact Castle was such a huge blessing, because those 'Mechs were ready to go.
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Jan 25, 2023 20:52
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Is there an easy way to search Sarna for lostech?
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Jan 25, 2023 20:54
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Chainclaw posted:Is there an easy way to search Sarna for lostech? The SLDF Royals are all guaranteed LosTech, as are most of the Rim Worlds Republic 'Mechs. Then everything on the list of Star League 'Mechs probably has a LosTech variant (sometimes it's even the base model of the 'Mech). For combat vehicles the same rules apply: Royal then Rim World then SLDF with the tacit understanding that a fair few of the SLDF vehicles are just bog standard crap they gave to militias.
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Jan 25, 2023 21:01
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Not sarna, but this is a good place to start http://masterunitlist.info/Era/FactionEraDetails?FactionId=43&EraId=10
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Jan 25, 2023 22:23
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The first suggested scheme in the new paint kit guide reminds me of PoptartNinja's meatwad mechs.
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Jan 26, 2023 02:31
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So I'm assuming there's no good way to do cooperative Battletech that doesn't involve a GM to handle the OpFor? I was thinking about setting up a low points mission for my group of friends where they can take a lance of 'mechs against some vehicles and maybe a few sub-par lights.
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Jan 26, 2023 06:04
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TheKingslayer posted:So I'm assuming there's no good way to do cooperative Battletech that doesn't involve a GM to handle the OpFor? I was thinking about setting up a low points mission for my group of friends where they can take a lance of 'mechs against some vehicles and maybe a few sub-par lights. I had an idea for a Classic BT campaign similar to Heroes of the Aturi Cluster from X-Wing, but I’m not sure if a paper flowchart for the OpFor is practical, or if it’s better to use MegaMek almost like an electronic chess opponent from way back.
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Jan 26, 2023 16:51
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TheKingslayer posted:So I'm assuming there's no good way to do cooperative Battletech that doesn't involve a GM to handle the OpFor? I was thinking about setting up a low points mission for my group of friends where they can take a lance of 'mechs against some vehicles and maybe a few sub-par lights. If you're using Megamek it has a competent-ish bot. Other than that you really need a GM.
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Jan 27, 2023 13:24
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This might be a weird question but where does everyone play Battletech? I've been trying to run a meetup group but it's tough to find good venues. Gaming stores (the kind that do lots of MtG business) tend to be cramped, have weird hours*, or very difficult to actually reserve time slots (some places fill up the entire store seemingly at random with MtG/YGO/etc tournaments/events, others have flaky management that want to schedule through email exchanges). *the most reliable venue is basically only available from 12-5PM. With Battletech especially, I've found it nearly impossible to get through a 4+ player game in less than 4 hours even with everyone running 10k BV. I considered splitting up a larger group into multiple tables, but then we'd need someone to run each table, and that feels like a big ask when many of these people are newcomers. And it feels bad to confine these events to 4 members, I've actually had people express interest in larger groups so they could invite curious friends. Maybe I should try public libraries instead? Find a workspace that I can rent for 1-2x a month without costing a billion dollars? Give up trying to run a group and just drive an hour or so to attend some of the more established groups?
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Jan 27, 2023 15:19
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Marx Headroom posted:Maybe I should try public libraries instead? This is what I was going to suggest. A lot of them have community rooms that sit fallow a few nights a week and it should be cheap/free. They'll probably be glad to have another "community event" to host. It might be an easier sell if you get any pushback to pitch it as a more ecuminical "community tabletop gaming night" with Battletech as one of the options (that in practice just happens to be near everyone who shows up, with an odd table of people playing D&D or Boggle or whatever) In my metro area we have an embarrassment of riches with FLGSes that offer a lot of play space, but I know a lot of towns aren't so lucky so that would be my first thought if it were a problem.
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Jan 27, 2023 15:24
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Marx Headroom posted:This might be a weird question but where does everyone play Battletech? I've been trying to run a meetup group but it's tough to find good venues. Gaming stores (the kind that do lots of MtG business) tend to be cramped, have weird hours*, or very difficult to actually reserve time slots (some places fill up the entire store seemingly at random with MtG/YGO/etc tournaments/events, others have flaky management that want to schedule through email exchanges). We befriended a rich man. He even has one of those "gaming tables" that cost like 10k. Downside is he also has a family so we have to deal with kids. Wife is pretty cool and likes nerdy stuff but she literally only plays board games. She has expressed interest in Command and Succession Wars but she ridicules the Alpha Strike
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Jan 27, 2023 16:59
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Marx Headroom posted:This might be a weird question but where does everyone play Battletech? I've been trying to run a meetup group but it's tough to find good venues. Gaming stores (the kind that do lots of MtG business) tend to be cramped, have weird hours*, or very difficult to actually reserve time slots (some places fill up the entire store seemingly at random with MtG/YGO/etc tournaments/events, others have flaky management that want to schedule through email exchanges). i play in my house with my friends. i just bought a folding ping pong table for wargames and i also make all the terrain
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Jan 27, 2023 17:01
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I play at my LGS, but it's not perfect - largest permanent BT community in the state (only conventions are bigger) and it's still a struggle to even have two people align their schedules enough to play, let alone more than one game a week, and outside of events scheduled months in advance we don't get 4+ players at a time.
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Jan 27, 2023 17:02
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Owlbear Camus posted:This is what I was going to suggest. A lot of them have community rooms that sit fallow a few nights a week and it should be cheap/free. Library worker here. Yeah, this is totally true, you can probably even reserve a room on a repeat schedule, say every Tuesday night for a year. One thing you'll want to look over is the community group rules. Our library requires any community group meetings to be open to the public, meaning that literally anyone is allowed to walk in and at least observe. That doesn't mean they can come in and be jerks/disruptive but at least at our building they can't be locked out by default. Having a spare Game of Armored Combat box might be a good tool for recruiting new players! I can't speak to charging for space because we don't, but they should have all that handy.
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Jan 27, 2023 18:12
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I found a post of someone describing Battletech: Command on reddit:quote:I had a chance to play it. I don't know how much it will change, but at that time it was a 1v1 game something like a semi-open game of Stratego. You have about a batallion of forces, broken into lances, each of which has a weight class and a role (cavalry, command, etc.) which gives them a special ability. You can see the enemy weight class, but not its role. Sounds alright, nothing wrong with a little casual battletech game
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Jan 27, 2023 18:27
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Owlbear Camus posted:This is what I was going to suggest. A lot of them have community rooms that sit fallow a few nights a week and it should be cheap/free. All the libraries in our areas unfortunately charge $100 after the first two hours. I try to keep the events as low cost as possible for my friends, even though we probably could afford it. In my previous state, all library rooms were free. Those rooms where I am now sit empty a lot. We do have a guy in the area building a game room in his house where we will host stuff after he finishes. Waiting for my principals to approve my board game club proposal and sign off on buying some starter games. Going to get a box set of Alpha Strike along with a couple other games. Crazy Joe Wilson fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Jan 27, 2023 |
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Jan 27, 2023 19:44
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Dominions Divided is out. I'll steal my update from elsewhere to provide a Quick Update from a scan of the PDF: Ghost Bears/Rasalhague Dominion are moderately to severely hosed, as Brexit.. er.. the vote to join the ilClan split them REALLY hard. After a couple years of low level civil war where Join/Leave battles/pogroms basically tore many planets apart, the Dominion is attempting to focus the nation ny attacking the Draconis Combine, giving them an external enemy to focus on. Sea Foxes continue to become ComStar 2.0, complete with being an actually effective mercenary bonding company (They personally attend to breach in contracts, the book has two Sea Fox assaults on those breaching contracts, one employer (bankrupting a baron who refused to pay his mercs because "money was tight", by buying up all his debt and draining all his off-planet accounts, but also eradicating a merc unit that went Rogue and joined the Dracs instead of fighting them). They've also bought out the HPG stations in Fed Suns space. Fed Suns are.. well.. if you ignore the Capellan March, you'd think they're on the upswing, but the Capellan March leader (Hasek) was revealed to have sat out the Blackout on a luxury resort, and launched a foolish assault on the Taurians when it looked like an "assassination attempt" had used a Taurian grenade. He's the Davion version of a social general, basically, and got captured by the Bull-ies, and was forced to tell his units to stand down.Between that and the breach between Sandoval and Julian Davion, interesting times Dracs are on the retreat, the tongue's been cut out, but it looks like Yori Kurita is doing a vast rearmament project. Dominion may be making nice with the Tamar Pact, and the Alyina Merchant League is doing ok. Interesting times. Very Interesting times.
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Jan 27, 2023 20:19
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Oh hey, completely forgot that there would be a new BattleTech thread until now. So how bout dem plastic robots eh?
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Jan 27, 2023 20:37
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Arquinsiel posted:Oh hey, completely forgot that there would be a new BattleTech thread until now. I like painting them and playing games with them with my daughter
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Jan 27, 2023 20:42
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Thanks for all the venue advice. I'll definitely look into the library. Gonna pass on that $10k table for now Luke Towan makes me want to build a big 3D map for Alpha Strike)
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Jan 28, 2023 00:04
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Marx Headroom posted:Thanks for all the venue advice. I'll definitely look into the library. Gonna pass on that $10k table for now Luke Towan makes me want to build a big 3D map for Alpha Strike) Those tables are imsane and overpriced garbage anyway. You can build an awesome gaming table for 200 bucks, there are tutorials on youtube. Even the super crazy ones you see - befriend a carpenter and suddenly it's a 1000$ table. Also carpenters are cool as gently caress.
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Jan 28, 2023 00:09
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https://twitter.com/vgc_news/status/1613151572128571395?s=46&t=TMvV06czYWGxzGMix6JMMA
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Jan 28, 2023 04:28
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Anyone have an answer on this? Defiance Industries posted:You can get it down to an hour if you have top end equipment intended for intelligence agents. If you have to reconfigure that poo poo manually then yeah, days or weeks. PoptartsNinja posted:BattleMechs are heavily passworded with biometric data and etc. Taking one over usually takes weeks or months unless battle damage to the DI computer wipes the protections. If you're a named character you can crack it in a manner of minutes and 99% of the time if you are mechwarrior trying to jump in an enemy's mech the mech is completely unsecured and unlocked. Literally every scrap of fiction supports this. This is a critical thing to allow if you're trying to play out any kind of rpg or narrative environment. kingcom fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Jan 28, 2023 |
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Jan 28, 2023 05:11
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If you attend the Emporia Military Academy you get the ability for free when you collect your room assignment.Owlbear Camus posted:I like painting them and playing games with them with my daughter
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Jan 28, 2023 05:19
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kingcom posted:Literally every scrap of fiction supports this. Citation needed.
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Jan 28, 2023 05:20
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kingcom posted:This is a critical thing to allow if you're trying to play out any kind of rpg or narrative environment. I disagree, my adventures will be better written than the kind of slop that a hack like stackpole churns out
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Jan 28, 2023 05:35
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Defiance Industries posted:I disagree, my adventures will be better written than the kind of slop that a hack like stackpole churns out I JUST read the first warrior trilogy book and they specifically mention capturing a bunch of drac mechs and how they're currently bonding them or whatever to new pilots so its not a stackpole thing
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Jan 28, 2023 06:07
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The universe bending over backwards for his terrible protags is though
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Jan 28, 2023 06:51
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There are only two instances in fiction I can think of where a protagonist "stole" an active enemy 'Mech. The first was Victor Davion and pals in a Wolf's Dragoons training mission during their Dragoon training on Outreach to steal unlocked training 'Mechs. I'm using the word 'training' a whole lot because the whole purpose of the training exercise was to steal training 'Mechs they knew would be unlocked in advance both because the Dragoons told them that was their 'win' condition and because they were stealing them from an "enemy training Cadre" (manned by actual Wolf's Dragoons trainees who probably weren't aware of the training raid because that's just how the Dragoons rolled in the 3050s). The 'mechs had to be unlocked because they were in use as actual trainers and had to cycle through trainees on a daily basis. And the second was when Cassie Suthorn used the technician overrides to make a Blakist BattleMaster move. It was explicitly already powered up (because she couldn't have done that and says as much in the text); she also explicitly couldn't use a neurohelmet in part because she wasn't a trained 'Mechwarrior and the BattleMaster would've locked its controls if she'd put it on; and because she accidentally threw it into a decorative pond when she threw the dead Blakist Mechwarrior out of the BattleMaster's cockpit so she could hide there when the BattleMaster's lancemates turned up. The amount of control she had was 'lurch one or two steps forward, raise the arm 30-60 degrees (however much the Myomer wanted to raise it, really), shoot unaimed PPC from the hip, and jump into the frozen pond if the process was either a partial success or total failure.' She had to jump into the frozen pond.  Everything else typically had a timeline of several weeks, months, or entire novels in between salvaging an enemy 'Mech and fielding it in combat. Even Jeremiah Rose doesn't actually pilot the Warhawk he captured on Borghese until the second novel and he was a Blakist plant with SLDF cheat codes. Otherwise there was always some amount of turnaround time between capturing or salvaging a 'Mech and actually using it in combat; and that's even assuming the Clans were being cocky dumbasses (they were) and not properly locking everything down (they weren't) because their warriors passed around 'Mechs whenever a higher-up sneezed. Even the rare protagonists that don't mention the encryption-breaking directly still nearly always had a "and then they spent a month on a DropShip" between capturing a new 'Mech and that protagonist actually fielding it in battle. If that changed in the Dark Ages novel line, I'd love to know. Ghost War was bad enough it put me off the whole line. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Jan 28, 2023 |
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Jan 28, 2023 06:52
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Defiance Industries posted:The universe bending over backwards for his terrible protags is though The setting is a 80s action schlock with giant robots as it's tone, hero protagonists being able to leap in a mech and gunning it is very much an important part of it. PoptartsNinja posted:There are only two instances in fiction I can think of where a protagonist "stole" an active enemy 'Mech. I'm pretty sure Grayson Carlyle does this in at least 2 books (maybe all 3?). Every mention of a character not using it immediately is because its broken as part of the salvage and needs to take time to get it fixed or the pilot needs to train in it before they are comfortable in it. They are genuinely as accessible as the plot demands it. EDIT: Actually doesn't this happen in Double Blind too? The mechwarrior steals a clint, hacking its password without even any equipment but has to deal with the neurohelment being rigged to someone else . PoptartsNinja posted:Even Jeremiah Rose doesn't actually pilot the Warhawk he captured on Borghese until the second novel and he was a Blakist plant with SLDF cheat codes. I don't know if DTR is the source to go to lol kingcom fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Jan 28, 2023 |
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Jan 28, 2023 08:30
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kingcom posted:I'm pretty sure Grayson Carlyle does this in at least 2 books (maybe all 3?). Every mention of a character not using it immediately is because its broken as part of the salvage and needs to take time to get it fixed or the pilot needs to train in it before they are comfortable in it. I give them some leeway because they were finding their feet. quote:EDIT: Actually doesn't this happen in Double Blind too? The mechwarrior steals a clint, hacking its password without even any equipment but has to deal with the neurohelment being rigged to someone else . quote:I don't know if DTR is the source to go to lol
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Jan 28, 2023 15:03
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