GM has a wild notion

[Deathknight69]

Hey Gang,

My GM has a crazy idea for possibly incorporating BattleTech BattleMechs into Rifts. He doesn't use the web so I'm posting for him.

Anybody try this yet and if so, How'd you do it??

Thx in advance,

D69

[Deathknight69]

It helps if I can spell correctly, D'uh !!

[DhAkael]

Hey Gang,

My GM has a crazy idea for possibly incorporating BattleTech BattleMechs into Rifts. He doesn't use the web so I'm posting for him.

Anybody try this yet and if so, How'd you do it??

Thx in advance,

D69

Sadly I can not help you. Due to the facist nature of copyright law and I.P. "mineminemine"'ism, Palladium Books has a strict NO CONVERSIONS!!!! policy on this here website that they own.
But without making the lawyers salivate and the mods get out their mighty hammers of thread smashing, I can say "Yes" I have, and with mixed results.

Your GM would be better served just using the Destroids from the 2nd edition Macross saga book from the Robotech line (published conviently by Palladium Books; so they wouldn't even be making Kevin Siembiada have a rage fit doing so).

[drewkitty ~..~]

As DhK said there is a no conversion rule. Can't help you with that.

However, I can point you in the direction of the Robotech 2nd ed and Macross II gamebooks if what you want is "non-rifts" mecha to spice up things in your games.

[ShadowLogan]

As DhK said there is a no conversion rule. Can't help you with that.

However, I can point you in the direction of the Robotech 2nd ed and Macross II gamebooks if what you want is "non-rifts" mecha to spice up things in your games.

I wouldn't rule out Robotech 1E either.

[guardiandashi]

Hey Gang,

My GM has a crazy idea for possibly incorporating BattleTech BattleMechs into Rifts. He doesn't use the web so I'm posting for him.

Anybody try this yet and if so, How'd you do it??

Thx in advance,

D69

I have done it and frankly it works reasonably well.
with that said the first thing you need to decide is how tough you want the battletech units to be, in our conversion we had them being pretty tough but they are relatively slow compared to palladium units.
for example a dasher tops out at ~200kph with masc engaged, but will rapidly destroy its legs that way.
or to put it another way, a warhammer the battletech version of an Excalibur, tops out at ~64kpr, or roughly 40mph. on the other hand under one interpretation of its stats, it could more or less ignore the Excalibur firing at it, and when it fires its ppcs, has a better than 50% of OSK'ing the Excalibur with each PPC.
which considering the ppc's weigh 7 tons each, is not totally unreasonable.
the other thing that you might have to do is adjust the range of battletech weapons, because as listed the battletech ppc only has a 540m range vs the 2 mile range of the Excalibur's cannons

[Primalzen]

Done , too , most of the work has been done for you if use robotech,

[J_cobbers]

As an alternative to adapting Battletech to Rifts, you can always just use the Battletech mech miniatures from the game as the mini's for your table top game if you have big mech fight going on. won't necessarily scale perfectly but it's not a bad option. There are enough battle tech mech designs that are close enough to some Rift's PA and RV's that it ought to work just fine.

[Deathknight69]

Ok, Thx for the input guys. Are there Robot Construction rules around somewhere ??

[Zer0 Kay]

As DhK said there is a no conversion rule. Can't help you with that.

However, I can point you in the direction of the Robotech 2nd ed and Macross II gamebooks if what you want is "non-rifts" mecha to spice up things in your games.

1eRT also as it has more mecha with Sentinels and the non HG mecha when PB was allowed to make up whatever.

[ShadowLogan]

Ok, Thx for the input guys. Are there Robot Construction rules around somewhere ??

Rifts Source Book 1 (original or revised) has the Robot RCC. Its the closest you/ll find to Robot Construction rules, they are not the best though.

Heroes Unlimited (and one or more of its Aliens Sourcebooks I've read) also has a beefer version of the rules in Rifts Source Book 1, but you'll find similar limitations.

[taalismn]

HU and Rifts robot construction rules tend to favor human-sized or PA-sized robots rather than big battlefield juggernauts, so they're not ideal for big 'mech battle-design.

[Zer0 Kay]

I use Mekton Zeta Plus to make mecha but that is WILDLY more flexible than SB1, HU or even Battletech. Able to design everything in scale from a Micronaut to larger than Unicron.

[DhAkael]

I use Mekton Zeta Plus to make mecha but that is WILDLY more flexible than SB1, HU or even Battletech. Able to design everything in scale from a Micronaut to larger than Unicron.

Wot 'ee sed! WAAAAUGH!
-A-hem-
You just have to figure out what scale conversion to use between the two game systems for the RTgames damage system to PBooks system.

[glitterboy2098]

honestly there is so little in common between the game systems that converting them is very difficult.

my suggestion would be to just write up your own palladium stats to match the art, and not bother with actual conversion.

[Deathknight69]

Ok, Thx again guys.

[Zer0 Kay]

I use Mekton Zeta Plus to make mecha but that is WILDLY more flexible than SB1, HU or even Battletech. Able to design everything in scale from a Micronaut to larger than Unicron.

Wot 'ee sed! WAAAAUGH!
-A-hem-
You just have to figure out what scale conversion to use between the two game systems for the RTgames damage system to PBooks system.

No, NO WAAAAUGH greenskin. I'd say peace but you don't have that word in your lexicon... piece, but not peace and I don't want piece. So go now "little" green skin and Dakka, dakka over there.

[Zer0 Kay]

honestly there is so little in common between the game systems that converting them is very difficult.

my suggestion would be to just write up your own palladium stats to match the art, and not bother with actual conversion.

Not really. You set a minimum and Maximum in Rifts then you divide the range by the number of... "steps" so you know for each "step" you get so many points.

[Deathknight69]

Ok Zer0 Kay; Would you care to comment further ?? PM maybe ??