Quoting: Joseph Hewitt
Down that path lies madness
Indeed! A stopping point can be decided on, of course. At simplest, I'd say just use the 3d meshes and have armor add-ons for them. When a piece of armor or a limb is destroyed, it disappears. In the case of many-limbed mecha, the legs on the model count as the second to last and last legs left on the mecha.
Quoting: Joseph Hewitt
What is the computer supposed to do when someone builds a monstrosity with a Dora body and seventeen legs, no two of which are from the same design?
I don't know how to make rendering a 17 leg mecha possible, but I can think of a couple ways to make it so that you can't create an impossible mecha. The simplest is to add a hard limit on the number of limbs of type x for each body module. Bigger body: more limbs.
From here on out, I'm going to go a little overboard, so that my ideas can be polished down into a nice game mechanic.
Require legs to be linked to something before putting them on a body.
My thought is that you add a left and right leg together and get a '2L chassis'. I know chassis isn't quite the right word, but 'leg thing' isn't any better. Two 2L chassis put together is a 4L chassis. Add a 4L chassis to a body and this is the result:
[edit 'cause it removed my indentation]
>body
-->4L chassis
---->front left leg
---->front right leg
---->rear left leg
---->rear right leg
This gets rid of the issue of having to figure out where to put the 17th limb.
Putting this together with a hard limit on limbs means that each body has x many arm mounting points (perhaps these are hidden, mass-less modules that only appear on the arm install list?) and 1 chassis mount (likewise 'not there'). The chassis itself would have no mass or DP, so game mechanics aren't really affected. It just takes several more Mecha Engineering roles to add extra legs, which is perhaps desirable. Taking things even further, classify legs as 2L, 4L, 6L, etc. An nL leg can be put on any chassis that is <=nL. The lighter/slimmer the leg, the higher the nL value. I'm a little unsure of this last bit. Perhaps 2L legs would be special cases?
At any rate, having set arm mounting points would make it easier to add arms onto the 3d models, since the code doesn't have to calculate where the arms should go, we won't wind up with arms floating in space.
How does the free hand requirement for larger mecha weapons work? Arm mounting points could be rather neat for this if the player gets to decide which mounting point to attach an arm to. You can have one left arm with a shield and three right arms, each holding a railgun, for example. None of the railguns get penalized for not having a free hand.
tl;dr?
