Head away on assignment for a few days, and I get back to... this.
Patrick has been left to his own devices.
I don't know whether we have been burgled or a squad of teenagers has moved in.
Patrick himself looks like something the cat brought in, then brought up. At least he did after I found him... how he managed to get himself with his backside wedged in a filing cabinet surrounded by a wall of beer cans I can only guess at.
We are apparently supposed to believe that he had been experimenting with designs for motte and bailey castles, and the filing cabinet was his tower keep.
Which leads me (and quite nicely) to a piece of kit that I had at first discounted but I'm now starting to look at again.
The Tower Shield module.
At first glance, and certainly when they first came out, you were paying an awful lot for a fat load of nothing really useful.
Sounds a lot like Pat to some degree, but I digress.
50 Niodes, 552 Bioptics and 658 Ferrite gets you a shield that will block 40% of Trample damage, 30% of Forked damage, 40% of Splash damage while letting in an extra 6% of Ice and 2% of Fire. It will also stop dead a flat 35 damage points. With a tonnage rating of 90 up to 100, that covers the top end of the Delta class and all of the Epsilons.
Now purely from the flat shield rating, it is not as good as an Epsilon but it is an upgrade on the Deltas. It depends on whether the other mitigation is worth it for the Delta's.
And at an initial glance it isn't. apart from the flat 35 damage points, it stops nothing that is directly fired at that mech and even lets some through. The only thing it can block are incidental damage that is being carried over from fire on another target.
Why would you want that?
Well, in the intervening time, a few other pieces of gear have been released. The first is the proliferation of chassis kit that can counter damage types such as trample, fork and splash.
Problem is, all of that stuff missed the 90 tonners, so your Dinomechs are just as vulnerable as they always were.
The second thing though, was the introduction of split shields. While at first they were useful rounding out all damage types on any unit with less than 5 shields, you can now in theory pull two single type Deltas and drop in a dual shield and a Tower. Suddenly, your 90 ton beasts are able to withstand some of that incidental damage while sitting in the rear ranks or sideways blasts.
I'm not sure... its a pricey operation, but is it worth a crack?
Submitted by David McCallum : #701548