@nerthos don't look up positronium or the fission bots are gonna get jelly

@snacks I mean, that's not a real atom, it's some MIT campus robot bullshit.
REAL robots run on diesel, uranium or solar. Spacefags love hydrogen and helium but to any engineer-fearing, decent bot, they're filthy huffers.

@nerthos what does it mean for matter to contain energy?

@nerthos we should feed those starving African kids with uranium

@teto Fuckers have their own uranium but don't eat it. We shouldn't keep enabling their laziness.

@bajax Do I look like a nerd?

@nerthos ...yes

@nerthos positronium exists in nature funny enough. It even has a half life over 100ns!

@snacks 100ns! as many ns as a whole ghetto street!

@bajax Well it means either the amount of energy in the form of heat the material can store, or the amount of energy it can release when used as fuel.

I'm a jock savant though so turn around for your wedgie.

@nerthos in other words, a gram of nuke suffices calorie intakes of one person for 27 years and 145 days, assuming daily intakes of 2000 kcal

@pesekcuy More than the uranium eater will ever spend

@nerthos the real endgame is using micro black holes to convert any matter into pure enrgy tbh

@snacks But that won't make a cool vroom vroom noise

@nerthos it will glow ominously however

@nerthos jokes on you I'm the class downy you can't hit me or everyone hates you and thinks your gay also mass literally is energy in the most fundamental sense

@bajax Bold of you to assume I wouldn't hit a downy and then fight the rest of the class. Back in my elementary school days I did just that.

@snacks @nerthos i can't read micro black hole in any voice other than japanese from the steins gate

@snacks We can just irradiate the cool v8 and use BOTH glow and gasoline.

@nerthos lol you gotta win first

@bajax My win rate is like 95% tbh. I lost a few times but won WAY more. Usually the only guys to win against me were the 2 years older repeaters or the huge malformed freaks that were just too sturdy.

@nerthos upon review of v-powered robots i have to concede that they are rad

@snacks @nerthos バルブ(valve) when バルブ(bulb) drops

@snacks Over the last few years I've been lazily developing a mecha tabletop game and I'm including both fantasy spacetech energy source robots and combustion engine robots because it's cool to have older robots with huge traditional engines and alternators.

@nerthos is there heavy diselpunk bots and nimble ones with rotaries or 2-strokes?

@nerthos @snacks how do you balance those two types? are the approaches comparable in overall performance or is the tech magic stuff prohibitively expensive or difficult to manufacture? is it like one gundam vs 5 zakus situation or are the gasoline/diesel mechs able to hold their own?

(I had a thing like this I was toying with for turn-based tactics game I was making... I got nuts with it such that the diesel-based robots had an engine at every major joint, with hydraulics only operating in the hands, meaning it was possible for your shoulder or knee to stall out at a very bad time rofl. oil and fuel was distributed throughout the whole thing. you couldn't really escape the smell even in the cockpit. idk I thought it was cool. the diesel-based mech was the only one your side had and it had to win against more "advanced" mechs, lots of missions were going to be about finding salvage to upgrade it so you'd stand a chance in whichever upcoming fight. you had to position infantry and tanks and stuff (it always pissed me off in gundam how useless modern military tech was depicted to be against mobile suits, I still wanted them to be special and uber powered mind you I just wanted the other stuff to make a credible showing) and set traps for their main mech, which would be treated like their hero/commander unit. got as far as making the engine in webgl and some sketches but nothing else ever came of it lol)

@snacks Heavy bots with a blocky torso for the combustion ones, with massive thousands of HP tank-like engines protruding backwards on an armored box.
Nimbler more humanoid ones for the normal spacetech bots
Fast and agile or hyperarmored for the advanced spacetech robots
And one special boss robot that has it all with a one-of-a-kind powersource, which is meant to be the ultimate robot of the setting (and optional final boss depending on player choices and alliances) on the grounds that a) there's no other similar powersource b) sucked the GDP of a big nation to build on a vanity project and c) its specs are too high to be piloted at max capabilities since there are no inertial dampener technologies or anything like that, nor fantasy cooling technologies to make a gigawatt-level power output not heat up to deadly levels, as it's supposed to be a current tech+exotic energy source discovery and related developments setting, not a luxury space civilization setting. Robots developed after the main campaign timeframe will be designed with the limits learned from that one in mind, as "this is as much as we can actually use, let's not spend a trillion dollars more on a machine capable of 45G turns that will turn our aces into paste"

@bajax @snacks The idea is that the combustion bots are early military models and industrial models, the basic spacetech ones are military tech available to all nations, and advanced ones are top of the line built only by the great powers or powerful private companies.

Fantasy energy source material is somewhat limited, basic ones use dust that is easier to get, advanced ones use little shards of it. Special endgame boss robot uses a huge piece of it. Militias, outlaws, and backwaters still use the diesel ones because they can be manufactured and mantained without any special tech using normal factories so they're very cheap, and can still mount big cannons or missiles despite being much slower and incapable of using energy based defenses.

Scrapping enemy bots or getting pieces or tech blueprints through alliances or espionage and having engineers work on those to build/reverse engineer will be a big part of the advancement mechanics, otherwise players are limited to what they can capture or buy/be given in contracts or negotiations.

@bajax @snacks anyway if you have a batallion of diesel bots with the right weapons and the right battlefield you can absolutely beat newer robots, you just kinda have to play them like tanks or AT emplacements instead of trying to brawl with them. They're viable with a good commander. A 155mm gun firing depleted uranium APFSDS will go through most things regardless of where the gun is mounted.

Having higher tech stuff just gives you a lot more options.

@nerthos @snacks I just kinda liked the image of a guy jumping into a mobile suit, ready to fight the badasses and save the town punching his dashboard and yelling while trying to get his engine to crank over and finally start. then he does, gets into the fight, saves his comrade's lives and grapples with the hyper-advanced mech.

And it's badass, his engine(s) rumbles like a mac truck going down a steep hill, a huge puff of black smoke is released at his shoulder and he stabs some expendable thermite dagger or something into his enemy's chest-- the mech shudders for a moment and goes still. Cheers arise from his comrades in the field, the enemy's support is scattering, but he notices and they notice wisps of smoke rising from the enemy mech-- "Damnit don't explode! We need this salvage, don't explode! " but he had nicked a battery case and the whole thing bursts into noxious lithium flame-- he has to fling it off a nearby cliff to protect his supporters from the blast. And then they're left there with nothing to show for the mission. And then his shoulder releases a puff of smoke and goes limp.

I built the lore and everything else around that kind of scenario

@bajax @snacks That sounds pretty cool on its own right.

The mech genre is a spectrum:
Mechanized Infantry <-------------> Courage Fueled Magic Robot

I'm falling more on the mechanized infantry side of it, you want to go a bit more towards the courage fueled type.

@nerthos @snacks yeah that's true-- I want the setting to justify why everything that's happening is happening, but it's really just window dressing to the character/vibe beats I want to hit.

I made all this shit up when I was like 19, I haven't thought about it in YEARS.

@nerthos @snacks yep, that's a big one-- to a huge extent you can just treat it as a platform for any kind of weapon you can scrounge up, which justifies the junkers being able to keep up with more advanced stuff. I didn't go much into making the electrical stuff more advanced, they were just good for the mililtary logistics-- uniformity and ease of deployment and maintenance etc, like they had battery packs on huge tank transports they would bring with them, and swap out every couple hours etc. They were better, but more expensive and not available to militia/civilian forces.

I wanted to do more with the infantry and tank stuff, but a lot of the real life tactics weren't going to translate very well into a game so I never thoguht about it that much. If I'd gone further with it I might have come up with a better combined fighting doctrine (I wanted them to be kind of dependent on each other) but I never did lol.

@bajax @snacks Different approach yeah. I started with my stuff at 29 or so, and made up a story to bundle up with the mechanics I wanted to build, as an optional ready-to-play thing and to test it with players.

@nerthos @snacks neat! so how did you see a game playing out? was there a lot of positioning and flanking and stuff like warhammer or was it gonna be just a robot brawl?

@bajax @snacks My idea of how to handle combustion bots is how turbine engines are used in modern tanks: actuators are electrical, and the engine basically just moves a huge alternator or a bunch of them, and only has a few things mechanically connected to the main gears.
Direct mechanical connections on something with limbs would be a fucking nightmare since everything needs to move at different speeds to adjust to terrain.

@nerthos @snacks lol yep. I was going to have each one be hooked up to a clutch made of exotic materials, with fluid transmissions you could get later that would increase reliability. it was supposed to be elaborate and impractical I just thought it was neat lol but you're right it would suck horribly irl.

@bajax @snacks Somewhat of a mid point, grid battlefield with terrain modifiers to movement and cover but simple ones.
Main thing would be that advanced robots would have a sort of aimbot so the player can focus on moving and firing with a decent to hit chance (just eroding hp/armor), or manually aim for specific parts with huge disvantages if moving, or sacrifice movement to take aimed shots with much better chances to hit, but also risking aimed shots in return. Melee would operate on simple d20.