Saturday, January 3, 2009

BattleTech: the Star League Atlas II

They released official specs for the Star League era Atlas II finally.

Oh my god... that is not an Atlas.
That is a pale imitation. An imposter. You cannot have an Atlas without a large cannon of some sort on the right torso. I was expecting some sort of hybrid of the 3025 and 3050 refit. And boy, I did not get it. They really butchered that thing to hell. The weapons configuration is just all over the place. An LB10X in the right arm? 2 ERLLs in the left? That doesn't look anything like the classic Atlas.

It seems to be some sort of bridge between the Atlases we're used to and some wacky DA designs. And I hate wacky DA designs. There's no need for a bridge. They're awful, disgraceful.

I'm not adverse to change. When 3050 came out, I thought that AS7-K was a very well done upgrade to the original. It still felt like an Atlas. This Atlas II could be any sort of Mech with a cobbled together weapons config. It doesn't have that same sort of silhouette that the original had.

There're a few design features that an Atlas should follow. One is that there has to be some sort of large cannon mounted in the right torso, right around the hip. Another is that each arm has to have a laser mounted, whether Large or Medium class. And lastly, there has to be a missile system of some sort, though the location of that is more flexible. The Atlas II completely disregards the first two.

The problem is, they finally committed to canon one of the most legendary Star League designs of all time, and just screwed it up when the solution wasn't all that hard to reach. People have been conjuring up Star League designs on their websites for years now. I would've even settled for an Atlas II with arm mounted PPCs, now that I think about it. 2 ERPPCs, an AC20 in the torso. That's not a bad design.

The original Atlas AS7-D


The Star League Atlas II

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