Battletech Mech Talk: The Violator
The official BT forums are a closed ecosystem, so I might as well post this here before sarna’s “bad mechs” series snipes this.
The Violator. What a mech. It’s a mediocre machine that showcases the limitations of converting MWDA units into classic BT units. Still, there's just enough potential to make me wish it was better.
One thing to get out of the way first: Yes, the mech called the Violator is defined by its massive penetrative melee weapon. Freudian analysis aside, the implied rape joke isn’t funny to say the least. It's also kind of bizarre in-universe. Does naming a mech like that not hurt its odds of making it through procurement? Is this some kind of commentary on Regulan culture? Is the fact that all named Violator pilots from the MWDA era in both the dossiers and novels are women (CGL eventually put a named man in the cockpit of a Violator in TRO 3145 FWL) meant to be some kind of subversion of expectations, or were the writers just uncomfortable with the implications of having a man choose to pilot a mech called the Violator? Or am I overthinking this? This section wasn't meant to be this long, but the more I thought about it the more important it seemed to talk about. Anyways…
The Violator was made for Mechwarrior: Dark Age, and only given classic Battletech stats much later. Before going over its loadout, I think it's best to go over what aspects of the design were "locked in" from MWDA lore and models. Here are the facts:
2) It has a drill in one arm and a big grabby hand in the other arm
3) It's good at close quarters combat
4) The most common variant has 20 missile tubes ringing the cockpit, with a group of 6 above and two groups of 7 on the lower left and right
5) One variant used MRMs as its missile of choice
As far as I can tell it was never given a dossier writeup, which would have specified details like its weight, speed, and weapons in BT terminology. If someone has a copy of a MWDA dossier with BT-style info for the Violator then I'd love to see it.
Now onto the mech's actual stats. It's a 45-ton biped that moves 5/8 and uses endosteel and DHS for weight-saving technologies. It's reasonably armored with 9 tons arranged sensibly. It also has an armored cockpit, which is actually a really good piece of technology. For the low cost of one (1) ton and 0 crit slots, the Violator will shrug off the first cockpit crit. You'll still die to an AC/20 headshot like any ordinary mech, but you have insurance against head hits that don't destroy the location critting the cockpit and killing your mech.
Okay, so we've got good armor and unremarkable speed, how are the weapons? This is where things get funky. For its supposed primary method of attack the Violator mounts a pair of melee weapons, a mining drill and a claw. These are obscure enough to warrant an explanation. The drill hits at a -1, but does a flat 4 damage. Not great. It does bonus damage to buildings, but as we'll see in a moment that doesn't really matter. The claw is marginally better, replacing one arm's punch with a 7 damage hit (2 higher than it would otherwise be doing) at +1 to hit. The issue is that these weapons are mutually exclusive. You can't attack with both the drill and claw in the same turn. And because the claw is part of a punch attack, it does more damage than the drill does to buildings if you can get the building in an arc both hands can reach. This relegates the drill to attacking backstabbers and structures in your right and rear arcs (with and without torso twisting respectively). But even the fist+claw punch isn't doing very much damage, especially when the claw's accuracy is factored in. In most cases you're still better off kicking, trading in at most 3 damage for a significant accuracy boost and potential knockdown. A lower tonnage would have made the drill better in comparison to punches/kicks, but also would have made the claw worse, which is an interesting tension; not only do the weapons compete for action economy, they also compete for design goals.
So we've got a wannabe melee mech that's spent six tons to be only marginally better at melee than a basic Phoenix Hawk. How are the guns? The stock U1 carries a pair of MRM-10s with Apollo, each with 1 ton of ammo in the left torso protected by CASE. MRMs aren't always bad, but MRM-10s with Apollo are 4 tons each plus ammo for something with more or less equivalent performance to a IS ER medium laser. They can do more damage than a ML, but they're just as likely to do less damage so it evens out to the same thing.
A 45t mech with mediocre mobility (5/8/0 is not impressive for a medium mech in any post-primitive era), slightly above average armor, and 2 ER medium laser equivalents plus a single claw as its only weapons is incredibly unexciting. And that's the U1 in a nutshell: it starts with the formula of "close-ranged medium mech with a drill and 20 missile tubes" and makes so many weird decisions that average out to a boring mech. And it doesn't even match the missile arrangement on the mini! 2 MML-7s in the side torsos and a SRM-6 (streak optional) in the CT or head would match the "6 over, 7 left, 7 right" pattern much more closely while giving it a much scarier close-range punch. The lowercase-c claw didn't have to become a statted uppercase-c Claw! This would have freed up some tonnage for more interesting equipment!
The U2 variant departs from WYSIWYG with a 17-missile design, and almost manages to salvage things. It carries a LRM-5 and 2 SRM-6, which already does more damage up close than paired MRM-10s while also providing some chip damage or special munition access at range. But an unwillingness to swap in more weight-saving technologies causes new issues for the Violator. It has one ton of LRM-5 ammo (more than enough), but the SRMs share a ton of ammo, meaning that they only get 7.5 volleys. Because of this, there’s a real risk of running out before the Violator U2 is defeated. Then it's either stuck firing LRMs point-blank as it tries to use its melee options or forced to extricate itself from melee in order to return to optimal LRM range. It also heavily limits its ability to use special SRM ammo types, like smoke or inferno missiles. At least it does more damage than the U1.
Does the lore explain any of these deficits? Kind of. The Violator is a Solaris mech. The unusual melee weapons help it stand out in the arenas, and the armored cockpit reflects a desire to reduce pilot fatalities without reducing the level of violence involved in the fights. The suboptimal but unique loadout helps the Violator communicate the pilot's style or brand--between the mech name and weapon choice, I could see a Violator pilot getting cast as a heel in Solaris media. It became associated with the Regulans after some more or less unexplained happenings in the 3100's. It's unclear whether it was originally manufactured in FWL space and imported to Solaris or if its place of manufacture moved after the Regulans decided it was "their" mech, but as of 3145 it was made in League space.
For what it's worth the TROs emphasize that the Violator was never intended to be used as a battleline unit, but the fiction repeatedly hypes up the drill as a weapon in a way that the tabletop doesn't match. The (admittedly cool) image of a Violator drilling through someone's cockpit is used several times in the fiction, but classic BT just isn't amenable to that happening.
The Violator is not the mech that got screwed over the most in the conversion from MWDA to BT. Even ignoring the industrialmech MODs and "intentionally bad" mechs like the Raider and Targe, there are worse ones. The Mjolnir and Storm Raider are wannabe melee mechs even lighter than the Violator, for example. But the Violator is the only battlemech to use a drill as its primary weapon, putting it in a category all by itself. And that's a shame, because even if you sacrifice tonnage for the drill (gaining style points and costing you like 10 BV), the chassis is workable. It's the guns that really kill the design.
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