Right. Was thinking a few days ago about Narc beacons. It's a missile that attaches to an enemy mech and attracts friendly missiles to the beacon. Wouldn't a missile hit destroy the beacon making it slightly worthless? I can see the point of having one salvo fly off and smash a single spot, but it seems slightly wasteful..

Also.. I remember in MW4 that Narcs would stay on a for a bit, not taking into account missiles hitting it.

And I guess going into the mod a bit... Anything like Narc beacon damage going to be added?

True, but if it did hit the beacon, I'm it would be ripped to pieces and wouldn't function anymore.

It's been a while sadly...

Well... How is the weapon system going to work out? Will certain parts of the mech be able to hold certain weapons like in MW4?

MW3 was slightly cheap because you could become a LRM boat, or a Flamer, or a LBX.. Or well anything. There were no hardpoint stops. Anything could go anywhere as long as there was a free critical.

Now let's say you have an Atlas (That has the small 6 missile rack right?) You should just limit the amount of missiles usable by the base model. How can something that only has a missile rack of 6 fire a full spread of 40? It cannot.

So if you did that, the only thing that could really be a LRM boat are mechs designed to be fire support or something like a Catapult or a Mad Dog/Vulture.

I would assume that there would be some sort of detection in it. Like it would only activate if it's locked onto a hostile target.

Painting the ground or a friendly target would be pretty bad. Waste of missiles and possibly deadly for friendlies. I'm sure they ironed that bug out during testing... If the testing "actually" occurred.

And in theory we could have a laser designator equiped trooper or narc beacon guide the missiles in the 'mechs laser designator is blocked by a object.  The problem is linking the particular NARC beacon with a a particular missile salve.  If you have more then one scattered throughout the map then the missiles may not know which one to hit.  One way to get past this is by having the ability to select which narc beacon to target.  Anothe good use of the narc beacon would be if there is a objective that must be destroyed.  A lone trooper can sneak in and plant the narc beacon on the target.  Then 'mechs could provide cover while LRM equiped mechs fire to destory the target.  I think its a neat gameplay idea if doable.

As for damage taken to the narc beacon,  I would say yes they should take some amount of damage.  However clever placment of the narc beacon can minimize the amount of damage it will take.

Hey, someone is taking my "bullet stopper/missile catcher" statement a little too much to heart. 

  NARC beacons in CBT give a +2 modifier to the number of missiles hit table.  Missile fire in CBT is a 2 step process. 1)roll to hit, with range modifier, movement modifiers, and cover modifiers. 2)if it is a hit, roll to see how many missiles hit, this is 2d6 compared to a chart, it is this roll that the NARC beacon gives its bonus to.  Here is an example of the chart for an LRM20.

(2d6)  Missiles Hit
  2          6
  3          6
  4          9
  5         12
  6         12
  7         12
  8         12
  9         16
 10        16
 11        20
 12        20

  NARC Beacons work for all friendlies with Narc equipped missiles targeting the mech with the beacon.  When fired the location of the beacon must be noted as any damage to that area destroys the beacon.  The nice thing about Narc is that one beacon can provide 'assistance' to every friendly LRM launcher on the field (as long as they have Narc Missiles) and the beacon launcher can be mounted on a mech that doesn't even have missiles (like a scout mech), so the support mechs can stay at range but get increased effectiveness.  This differs from the Artemis IV system which must be installed on each launcher, but gives the same benefit without the use of the beacon.

  I'm sure many of you are wondering why I would bother to type up the missile hit chart...well it's to illustrate that LRM's in CBT are more like shotguns than the missiles we think of, the average number of missile's that hit from an LRM 20 is 12, what's more is they probably wont hit the same location on the mech either.  Damage for LRM's is broken into groups of 5 and each group is rolled independently for location.  So in the case of our average strike of 12, you would have 2 groups of 5 and one group of 2, for a possible 3 different locations each taking damage equal to the number of missiles in that cluster.

  The problem with LRM's in previous games is they all tended to hit and they tended to hit in the same area, this throws them out of game balance for what the are intended to do, which is to soften up a mech, damaging it 'all' over.  I hope you think carefully about how you implement damage from an LRM in your mod as has been noted in this thread, when changed from their intended use they can become overly popular.

By the way, what your talking about implementing in the mod is a good example of indirect LRM fire with an infantryman using a TAG laser, which is also in the CBT rules.  Indirect LRM fire requires only a friendly unit with a Line of Sight, the TAG removes the the penalty for firing indirectly.

  I think it's probably more accurate to say that they accept the entire mech as the target, they don't care where on the mech they hit, they're just trying to hit it, and with an average of a 60% hit ratio, they really aren't exceptionally good at it.  Incidentally SRM's use the same process, and even Streak's, which guarantee a hit with all missiles if they fire (successful to-hit roll), use random hit locations, on a per missile basis instead of in groups of 5.  Missiles aren't the  only weapons to use damage clusters, cluster munitions for LBX autocannons also spread their damage, as well as ultra autocannons fired in full 'rock' in roll' mode, which actually use the SRM 2 missile table to determine if both shots hit as well as both shots having their damage locations determined independently if they do.