#BATTLETECH RECORD SHEETS MECH FACTORY WINDOWS#

And also, we (the players) are not the mechwarrior – we’re not inside the mech, we’re looking at a miniature of it from outside (usually from above), and more to the point we’re often also looking at the mech from above (not the front/rear) when we’re calculating firing arcs and determining which side our mech is being hit.Īlternative Option #1: The View from the front. I think it’s also counter-intuitive that the front armour of the mech would be shown on such a display – we’re used to seeing things from outside, so I think seeing the front armour would make most people think they’re looking at the front of the mech from the outside (and as I mentioned earlier, the position of the head and hands would support that), but the labels contradict that view. As far as I can see, most existing HUDs/consoles that actually show a picture of the vehicle show it from the top-down, not from the front or back (or even the inside), and there’s no ambiguity about which side is left or right there. Some have tried to rationalise this by suggesting that the Armour Diagram is “the view from inside the mech”, as if it’s something the Mechwarrior would see on their console or HUD, but I think this is a bit of a stretch. in the current flipped way) – and people online have similarly commented that they’d prefer the diagram oriented that way too. I actually showed an unlabelled (current) sheet to a friend of mine the other day and asked him to mark down some damage on the mech’s left torso and his initial instinct was to mark it on the side of the diagram that matched his own left side (i.e. I don’t know exactly what drove the change, but I strongly suspect that between editions the designers either had some feedback from players or decided for themselves that the original layout was confusing to the player and that flipping it made it less confusing since the player’s left and right would then match the left and right shown on the paper – and that makes sense.

The fact that the layout was “anatomically correct” for the mech in Battledroids and then flipped from Battletech 2e onwards is rather telling. The rear torso design is rather strange – I think the Rear Left/Right torso is suppose to cover the upper part of the torso/shoulders, the bump on the top of the Rear Centre Torso seems to match the shape of the top of the Head (again implying that the Head is in front of this), and the bulge at the bottom of the Rear Centre Torso is in the middle of the back.

#BATTLETECH RECORD SHEETS MECH FACTORY WINDOWS#

That said, the grey shading on the Head seems to represent the windows of the cockpit, and since that’s visible that also implies that the head (and therefore the rest of the mech) is facing us. The current “dome-head” design makes the Head a little more ambiguous, sitting now on top of the torso and generally above the shoulders (though my instinctive interpretation would be to see the head in front of the torso, I suppose it could be argued that it’s resting in a depression on top of the torso). The first edition of the game was called Battledroids (published in 1984), and that had a very different looking record sheet: In official publications, it seems there have been three layouts of Mech Record Sheets since Battletech’s inception.

Let’s step back and look at how these sheets have evolved over time. But since I like investigating things I thought it’d be worth a closer look to figure out what may be going on here, and to see if there’s a better way to present the Armour Diagram. In fact, it seems the vast majority of players either don’t care or don’t even consciously realise that left and right are possibly flipped on the diagram (for reasons described below) – and that’s totally fine. The way I see it, the side marked “Left Torso” is actually shown on the right side of the mech (it’s the player’s left side, but not the mech’s left side)! This has bugged me since I first started playing Battletech back in the 80s, and now I’ve started playing again I was reminded of it once again so I thought I’d dig into this a little further.įirst, let’s be absolutely clear – this doesn’t trouble everyone who plays Battletech.

But something’s funny here, to me at least.

Battletech record sheets mech factory