Hi, this is my first post.  My name's flyingdebris, I used to do concept art for MTS when we were still MTS, and have a server obsession with mechs and a lot of vested interest in this project.

Anyway on to my point.  Here's an idea, take it for what its worth.

For the most part, the weapon ranges in BT were designed for the tabletop in mind, where it was not really possible to simulate recoil, ballistic drop, weapon performance, rof, or the many little things that influence how hard it is to hit a guy other than range and a few modifiers, as well as for the sake of not needing a whole floor full of hex sheets.

If one studies modern weapons for more than a few minutes, one thing quickly becomes apparent, most vehicle mounted weapons that are deemed as short range top out at 1km or more. And long range could mean dozens of km in the case of some weapons. 

I'm not saying that combat should take place at such extreme ranges, but to simply get rid of arbitrary range restriction. So that if you can aim at the guy across the map with your mgs, you can hit him.

So that instead of weapon balance coming from what range it is used at, it comes from stuff like, level of ballistic drop, projectile speed, missle maneuverability, rate of fire, accuracy, recoil, and stuff like that.  In this way, if i saw some guy on the other side of the map, and i fired my ac20 1 shot at a time, compensating for drop, while moving slowly, i should be able to nail him.  Stuff like SRMs and LRMs could easily be diferenciated by missle performance, SRMs being faster and a little more agile at close range, while still being able to theoretically reach longer ranges, while LRMs are clumsy at close range but get tenaciously more difficult to deal with at their effective range. Lasers could be balanced off stuff like beam duration and fire delay, i don't want to say focal point, because a laser system 1000 years from now probably already has an automatic focusing system.

Those are my 2 cents.

Thoughts?

In Battletech, the short ranges are explained by degraded aiming tech. Sure, you could fire your weapons at longer ranges, but you wont hit any small and/or moving target, thus, wasting heat and ammo.

I like this explanation, because i like the concept of lost technology. It may be unrealistic, but it is cool. And it makes Battletech different from modern day combat: Shoot at long range, check if you hit something, shoot again and so on. Instead, we have movement and close-combat.

For the sake of balance, rapidly decreasing precision on ballistic, limited lifetime on lasers/missiles represents this perfectly and still allows hitting large, static targets or barrages.

also, please, could gauss rifle projectiles be made to actually go ballistically faster than autocannon rounds and not have an over the top swirly effect?

thats always annoyed me.

ACtually, though I don't want it over the top, the "swirl" is somewhat signature of the gauss cannon.

Also trust me, air resistance is not built into the engine

Now, if you want to see what are ballistics are capable of, go play in the sandbox for a while. Every day we discover new things the engine IS capable of,

And yes, an AC20 CAN go a long as way theoretically, but hitting it is DAMN hard EVEN at 300 meters. Past that, skeet shoot isn't even the word :p . The ranges for ballistic type weapons are going to primariliy come from difficulty of hitting at range, though they will eventually "expire" to signify them loosing damage effectiveness at a certain range(obviously for balance).

have you seen the video of that railgun testfire though? Sure its not a gauss rifle per say.  But real life magnetic weapons do have their own brand of cool effects.

if anything i would opt for really strong air distortion with visible (kinda swirly) pressure waves.  I just don't want them to rival ppcs in the big blue glowy department

Wasn't the swirl just something microsoft added in MW4? MW3 didn't have a swirl and I can't remember reading something about a swirl in the books, either.

There's no swirl mentioned in the description of gauss rifles in a general sourcebook describing battletech technologies, too. (BattleTech - Die Welt des 31. Jahrhunderts. Don't know if it was released in english, too)