The Rifleman

I have been wanting to do this review for some time. I have liked this mech since way back in the MW2 days. If I recall, back then, you could put on jump jets? I also seem to remember being able to load 4 ERPPCs. Maybe not, its been a long time since MW2, and a lot of water has passed under my bridge.

Let me start by saying that I am not one to knock the work of another, especially if I am not able to do better (and prove that I can do so). I do not have the knowledge (yet) on how to ‘draw’ or model mechs in a way similar to what we will use in our game. The artist of MekTek and others are very talented folks and they do a damn good job. Each generation of mekpaks brings us more details and beautifully ‘done’ models.

When I first saw the MW4 incarnation of todays mech, I had some mixed feelings. My apologies up front, but Ol’ Vettie simply shoot straight and lets you know his thoughts on the topic. You don’t have to agree and I don’t expect anyone to, I am just giving you ‘Vettie’s Views’ on things. Now where was I? Oh yeah, when I first saw the MW4 version of the Rifleman I thought it looked stupid. The Artist that created it did a damn good job and the details on this mech are spectacular, but I just thought it looked dumb. I did not care for the way the radar array was tilted overhead, nor did I care for the look of the array. I thought the arms stuck out to far from the body and that the weapons barrels on each arm were way too long. I also didn’t care for the animation. When the mech walks or runs, it looks like it is leaning back, way back, almost to the point of falling backward. Again, this is just Ol Vettie’s opinion on the ‘looks’ of the mech. It has nothing much to do with the performance.

Stepping into the wayback machine for a moment, I believe the Rifleman was created to counter air strikes and turrets mounted very high on buildings or mountain sides or even on the plateaus of mesas. Out of the wayback and back into current day, MekTek did a great job of recreating this ability. The Rifleman can shoot almost straight up and it has a 360 degree torso twist. Very nice.

Lets take a quit walk over to the Mech Lab. I think the techs have a Rifleman in there right now and they would be willing to show us what one of these is made of. Careful, watch your step, those crates contain live ammo, we don’t want any accidents in the lab. Ok, here we are, come on in, don’t by shy. You can learn a lot in the mech alb and these techs? Well they are professionals.

Wow, standing beside of one of these things really gives you a feel for how big they are. Maybe we should go into the control room where the configurations are laid out on the computer. These parts are big and I would hate if one fell of and ewww, I don’t even want to think about what would happen if a piece fell on you. It would take the clean up crew quite a while to get the stain off the floor, so follow me.

All right, here we are in the comfort and safety of the control room. You can still see the mech from here and you can customize the load out and equipment all from here. I’ll show you how all that works in a moment, but first lets see what a Rifleman comes with. Here, click that tab on the screen and it brings up a picture of the mech and tells you some info. See how easy that was? Ok then, well it shows here that the Rifleman is an Inner Sphere Heavy Class Battlemech weighing in at 60 tons. From the factory, the standard equipment includes ECM and LAMs, with 2 heat sinks and top speed of 79kph. If you click that center tab, the one called weapons, it shows you the current weapons load. This one has a Large Laser in each arm as well as an AC5 in each. The Chin Rack is pre-loaded with 2 Medium Pulse Lasers. Finally, by clicking on the Armor (they spelled it wrong) Tab you can see that the Rifleman is loaded with 10 tons of Ferro Fibrous Armour on an Endo Steel Frame.

Lets strip the weapons (its simple to do, just click the ‘strip’ button) and lets max out the armour (also simple, just click the mis-spelled max armor button). This gives us 11.9 tons of armour. The Rifleman is capable of carrying one of the best suite of electronics in the game. ECM, BAP, LAMs and IFF are all offered. Excellent. Maxing the armour and taking all the electronics offered, gives you 28.1 tons to use on weapons without any engine upgrades. The speed ranges are from 64kph to 104kph. Pretty nice overall.

Moving on to the weapons load out, I was somewhat disappointed in the last set of changes MekTek made to this mech. Looking at the slots available in todays Rifleman, we can see each arm has a 3-slot beam rack and a 2-slot Direct Fire rack. The D-Racks house either ballistics or energy weapons only. The Chin Rack has 2 single beam racks. I could be wrong, but I seem to remember the arm slots being different prior to MP302b.

Seeing these slots, the 1^st thought that comes to mind is that the Rifleman is set up to be an energy based platform. In our puretech world, this mech can hold 2 PPCs and 2 Large Lasers with 4 heat sinks. Problem is that the Rifleman is not the most heat efficient mech. With a heat capacity rating of only 42, it just doesn’t do well with lots of heat weapons. Those PPCs generate 11 pts of heat (in a spike) each every time you fire one. It doesn’t take long for the Rifleman to shut down from heat problems if you don’t choose your shots carefully and your coolant flushes too.

A nice config is to load up 4 Large lasers, 4 heat sinks (or 2 and use the other 2 tons for a speed upgrade) and to load up 2 small coolant pods. This gives you a nice blast and the 2 coolant pods can be used to remove 10pts of heat each time you use 1 of them. They take a bit to recycle, so if you heat up before recycle use the mechs coolant flush or just slow down on your alphas.

IF you slow it down a little, you can load up 2 PPCs and 2 Mini Gauss Rifles. With all the electronics, this mech makes for a very nice sniper. 2 Light Gauss and a PPC is another good one but it does require very slow speed or careful shaving of armour. Another one I like is 2 HVAC 5s with double ammo and 2 large lasers. If you like to experiment, 3 Large X-Pulse lasers and a coolant pod with a crap load of heat sinks is also a nasty that can apply some pain to your enemy. IF you don’t mind getting a little closer to your opponents, 4 LAC5s and 2 medium lasers will keep them rocking. IF you like to ping them from long distances, then drop the LAC5s and load up 4 HVAC2s. Keep the 2 medium lasers in case somebody gets close to you. The HVAC2s have a 1200 meter range and the BAP will allow you to ‘see’ some targets at that range. The Rifleman can also carry 4 Large Continuous Beam Lasers to chew through some armour. There are lots of offensive options for this mech and they all don’t have to be centered around beam weapons.

The Rifleman is a very mobile mech. It climbs very well, not as good as some, but it will get you where you need to go. I already mentioned that you can fire straight up and the 360 torso twist, both big pluses when it comes to combat. What I didn’t mention was that this battlemech had one of, if not THE fastest torso twist in the game. For me this is a plus and a minus. The mouse I use to play this game is very sensitive and if I give it a slight twist either way the mech responds and the torso twists quickly to the where ever I am pointing. This is also bad when fighting an opponent that has weapons with heavy knock as your torso gets knocked to the side easily.

The accel and decel rates for the Rifleman are also good. It hill humps with ease. The most important par of this is the decel rate. This allows you to reverse direction quickly. You can move up to a hill or the edge of a cliff and fire and back off with out taking return fire (if you are fast enough). For me, using a Nostromo, its just the push of a button, and I am going forward or backward, push it again and I am going the opposite. The Rifleman handles this smoothly.

Defensively the Rifleman is surprisingly tough for a 60 ton mech. It is fairly small in stature and the electronics package including IFF make it a hard target to pick up on radar or through any type of fog or ground cover. The “head” or radar array on the top of the mech tend to get blown of quickly and I personally would just prefer that ‘box’ not be up there, but I understand the reasoning and the function. I mentioned earlier that the arms ‘stuck’ out a bit far making the Rifleman a wide target. The arms are obvious targets because of this and the fact that they hold the weapons load out. The arms hold up surprisingly well considering that they only hold 1.4 tons of Ferro Armour.

While in the control room of the mech lab, I mentioned to you that the Rifleman was built on an Endo Steel frame. Over the years of playing this game and slapping some vicious alphas on enemy mechs I have learned at least one thing. Let me give you a bit of insight to what I do know about the frames types before I go on here.

As we know it, there are basically 2 types of frames used in MW4 Mercs. Standard and Endo Steel. There are some significant differences between them and it DOES matter. I may be way off on this but I will tell you what I THINK. Standard chassis have standard internals and they are much ‘tougher’ to blow out once the outer shell of armour has been destroyed. The Standard internals are also easier to allow for engine upgrades (lower tonnage cost to speed up your mech). The Endo Steel Chassis types take more room inside and they spread damage much faster inside the mech once a panel or arm is blown out. It also cost more tonnage to upgrade the engine (go faster) overall. At least, that is what I think. I hope that if this is wrong that someone will post a comment and correct me.

Now back to what I was getting at. Maybe its just me, but in playing this game as often as I do I have noticed that mechs with endo steel frames seem to be harder to register initial damage. Once you actually blow out a panel or destroy an arm, if you keep hitting that spot you see the mech begin to take damage elsewhere pretty quickly, but it seems to take forever to get that initial damage on them (unless of course you hit them with an outrageous alpha). I have noticed this on the Shadow Cat, the Canis, the Rifleman and others. Compare them to same weight mechs that have standard frames and you will see what I mean.

Back to the Rifleman and apologies for the ramble. It just seemed applicable. The Rifleman can take some punishment. The right and left torsos seem to be the weak spots, but more or less that is ok as those spots contain no armaments.

This concludes our visit of the Mech Lab and the control room. Did you notice how neat and clean everything was? I told you, those techs are pros and they do a good job. I forgot to mention, if you have decide on a config, in the control room, on the chassis tab, click that little button on the lower right that is named ‘Save’. That sends a printout to the techs and they will configure your mech to order. Nice huh? Follow me folks.

Here we are in my office. This is where I review all the mechs. This is also where I play a few games online. Yes, there are many computers in this room. That one? Yes it is running Microsoft Vista (trouble free I might add) and yes it is the server where The Blood Pearls practice their trade. This one? Well, this one is my gamer and review machine. The others? One of them is used by my kids to do homework (yeah right) and the other is one I am working on and trying to decide whether to make it a Windows 98 machine so I can play around with all the MW2 stuff and get the MW3 stuff or whether to rebuild it as my next gamer. Oh don’t touch that, that’s the wifeys laptop. She left it down here for me to run the weekly upgrades / updates and defrag / virus checks on it for her.

Ok, well this is the part of the review where I actually rate the mech. I like the Rifleman. It has some really nice features and it holds up well under fire. There are a couple of things I don’t like. The Rifleman doesn’t do heat well (kinda tough for an energy based mech) and its hard to get a big alpha on it. The Rifleman is one of those mechs that you need some patience to drive it and to do a good job offensively. IT doesn’t need spec armour and if you did fill it with spec armour, you would be even more pressed to get a good weapons load on it. The mech holds up well and maybe that is because it is not the obvious target because of the electronics or because of the lack of devastating alpha. The Rifleman CAN hurt you. Patience is the key. Vettie’s View of the Rifleman? I rate this mech a 4. Its solid and it can get the job done. As with all mechs, learn to use it. Find a load you are comfortable with and practice with it. It’s a nice ride.