» 2012 How to Spot a Psychopath

"Bug-zapper engaged."

22 November 2012 — dan

All the serious MechWarrior Online players use voice chat to coordinate their team. The game has some kind of voice-chat thing built in, but I don't think anybody uses it, because the obvious feature of just making an ad-hoc chat group out of everybody on the team that has a microphone does not exist.

There is a much better reason to use voice chat, though.

It allows you to have a Bitching Betty voice actor actually playing on your team.

(She's in the red Gaussapult. She's also not the one who'll actually be doing the onboard-computer voice, when it returns to the game; they've apparently retained the services of Carole Ruggier again.)

Posted in Games, MechWarrior Online, Nerdery. 3 Comments »

Yet more MechWarriorage

20 November 2012 — dan

Must flush thoughts of Middle-Eastern misery out of my mind.

I know: Yet another post about imaginary Internet robots!

This right here is the MechWarrior Online wiki's Hardpoints Table. All the basic stats for all of the 'Mechs in the game so far.

Also: Don't walk your BattleMech off a cliff.

This is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you're in a fast 'Mech; it's normal for high-speed light 'Mechs to suffer a few points of leg damage just by running across largely level ground. Cut the throttle when you're running downhill, or you'll leap out into the air and fall. (If you've got jump jets, you can of course use them to cushion your fall.)

One of the ways to destroy a 'Mech is by shooting off both of its legs. Thus far the legs do not actually detach from the 'Mech as blown-off arms do, but the effect of losing a leg on your locomotion is about what you'd expect; even super-fast 'Mechs drop to a top speed under 20km/h. But, for whatever reason, people tend not to shoot legs very much. So you can economise on armour there, if you're not a speedy light 'Mech, in which case skimping on leg armour is very false economy.

Winning by capturing the enemy base (in an "Assault" game, which is the only game mode that exists as I write this) gets you more money and experience points than winning by killing all of your enemies. So if the enemy team is no longer a threat, and you're a feasible distance from the enemy base at whatever your 'Mech's top speed is, head over there and start "capping". In random pick-up games the rest of your team may or may not respond to a chat suggestion that they cap rather than kill, but it's worth a try.

Oh, and while capping, don't shoot the complicated widget in the middle of the base area. Some newbies appear to think you have to blow that thing up, in case it is in league with a gazebo.

(The complicated widget also has an array of what look rather like nodding-donkey pumps. That's right - this whole war could be for oil!)

Many mechs come from the factory with too little armour, especially the small ones. The trial Atlas-K (which, once again, I implore new players to not use) has 608 of its maximum possible 614 points of armour, but the trial Commando-1B has only 128 points, of a maximum possible 178. The factory loadouts for the Commando 1D and 3A include only 96 points of armour, making them susceptible to damage from well-thrown baseballs, wind-blown leaves, and woodpeckers. (Two models of Jenner come with less than 130 points of armour, too. Their maximum is 238.)

If you die by a means other than suicide ("suicide" here means "wandering out of bounds, or shooting lasers and aborting shutdown until you explode from overheating"), and then quit out of the match rather than spectate on the rest of it, you'll get all - or at least almost all - of the money and XP rewards you'd get if you spectated until the end. The money and XP won't be awarded until the end of the match, which is also when 'Mech you were driving "unlocks" - the "in match" feature was added to deal with serial suiciders. I think you won't get any Kill Assist money and XP for kills that happen after you quit the match, but everything else, you'll still get. So you don't have to watch those two bozos in trial Atlases get pecked to death by high-speed 30-ton ducks, when you've seen it a hundred times before.

I'm not sure if there's a time or damage limit of any sort on Kill Assists, either. A light 'Mech that runs through the enemy team Small-Lasering multiple targets for almost no damage may, for this reason, reap many kill assists if those enemies get killed later.

Weapons do not penetrate water well, or in some cases at all; Streak SRMs fired from one light 'Mech at another when you're both waist-deep in the water will probably just splash down ahead of the target. They'll still work if the target is tall enough to give them an upward trajectory, though.

And, finally, you can't convert "Mech XP" into "General XP" for a model of 'Mech you no longer own. If you want to convert XP, make sure to do so before you sell the last 'Mech you own of that type. (With any luck the developers will change this in a patch, since it costs a little real-world money to convert XP, so all this limit really does is make it harder for players to spend money.)

Posted in Games, MechWarrior Online. 3 Comments »

On V-2s, Qassams, and conditional probability

20 November 2012 — dan

A reader writes:

Re "If it looks random, it probably isn't"; can I presume that I can apply the same logic instead of lightning to missiles ?

Meaning if a missile falls in a location is it highly probably that another will fall in the same area?

R.

From Israel.

Right at the top, I'm just going to say that I'm not going to say anything about the politics of this situation which has been particularly in the news, yet again, in the last few days, and I'd appreciate it if commenters didn't either. I sure do have opinions on this subject, but there are a million places people can have arguments about the Heroic Downtrodden Palestinians versus the Stoic Peace-Loving Israelis, and this blog post is not the time nor the place.

(Readers who feel an uncontrollable need to argue about something are encouraged to do so on that post about a free book that some guy argued against without even looking at the free book, that post about the existence or otherwise of "copper bullion" where a lady turned up to hotly argue that buying copper by the ounce is a great idea, and the few posts that sort of ended up being about Jock Doubleday and the floridly preposterous conditions of his "vaccine challenge". Bonus points for anybody who manages to persuade me to their religion, or that climate change isn't happening, or that every man secretly craves sex with other men.)

Speaking of time and place, though, both things are important here, because impacts of artillery over time have a distribution both in space and in time. This is a problem which has been addressed before, most famously in analyses of where the thousands of V-1 and V-2 missiles landed in and around London in World War II.

(That, by the way, is one of the approximately 300 themes of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which I read once, and finished, purely because I am susceptible to the sunk-costs fallacy. Forget Israelis and Palestinians - if you want to see true hatred, ask me what I think of Gravity's Fucking Rainbow. How can such dazzling ability to paint a whole scene with ten words be used to create such an indigestible housebrick of a book?!)

The British analysts in WWII wanted to know how good the guidance systems of the V-2, in particular, were. Since it turned out that V-2 hits conformed quite well to a random Poisson distribution, the analysts reached the correct conclusion that the V-2 did not have a guidance system capable of targeting particular areas of the city.

Even the V-1s did have some kind of guidance system, though. There's a popular belief that V-1s "flew until their fuel ran out", but they actually had an autopilot that counted the revolutions of a little propeller on the nose of the missile, and put the bomb in a dive after a predetermined flight distance. That dive happened to cut off the fuel flow and stop the engine in early V-1s, creating the out-of-fuel legend; this bug was fixed in later V-1s, most of which therefore managed to do their final dive under power, as originally designed.

Aaaaanyway, if you abstract it all out and presume that any arbitrary square metre of Sderot is as likely to be hit by a rocket from the Gaza Strip as any other over a given hour, then the lightning-strike conditional-probability situation applies. Whichever square metre you're standing in is, by these assumptions, as likely to be hit over the next hour as any other, but in order for a missile to next hit your particular square metre two hours from now, there must by definition not be a hit in the next hour. So, as in the lightning-strike example, you multiply the probability of no-hit next hour by the probability of a hit the hour after that, and get a slightly lower number. The probability of a hit in any given spot in any given hour is the same, but the probability of the next hit being separated from now by one, or ten, or a million, hours gets lower and lower as time wears on.

This is of no use whatsoever in determining what location's going to be hit next, though; we assumed right at the start of our abstraction that the missiles were falling randomly. It just explains why clusters of hits, close in time and/or space, can and will occur - and encourage the statistically untutored to explain them in terms of aim and guidance systems - even if the actual distribution of events is random.

In the real world, of course, the distribution of Palestinian missile hits on Israel is only partially random. The basic garage-built missiles have no guidance system at all and variable performance characteristics, which predisposes them to land in a Poisson distribution just like the V-2s in WWII. But there are many launch sites and several other kinds of missile...

image source: Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center)

...making the overall situation extremely complex.

Many Palestinian missiles are just shot in the right general direction (in the opinion of the people launching them, of course). In videos of the Iron Dome missile-defence system in operation...

...you'll occasionally see the system not bothering to shoot an interceptor missile at some of the incoming fire, because the system calculates that that rocket isn't going to hit a populated area. (See also, mortar attacks by insurgents/terrorists/freedom-fighters, strike out whichever does not in your opinion apply, on military bases and police stations and various other targets in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq, and a dismayingly long list of other places.)

But the more sophisticated actual military rockets definitely can be aimed, at least to some extent, so the distribution of their hits will be skewed toward populated areas, military targets, or whatever else the people launching them are trying to hit. You could probably protect yourself from those rockets by a considerable amount by going and living in a tent in the middle of the desert.

As regards avoiding getting blown up in the Israeli towns within rocket range of the Gaza Strip, though, I'm afraid conditional probability has nothing to offer you. All it tells you is that it's improbable that some particular location will not be hit for an extended period of time, which you already, unfortunately, knew.

Posted in Nerdery, Strange Tales. 17 Comments »

MechTrivia, continued

18 November 2012 — dan

Herewith, a few more tips for players of MechWarrior Online who are by some cruel turn of fate even worse at it than I am.

For the complete newbie: Yes, there is teamdamage in this game. You are not Friendly Fireproof.

For this reason, shooting guns at the start of the round when you're surrounded by close-packed teammates will make those teammates nervous. Shooting weapons that require ammunition is particularly unsettling. (A certain amount of celebratory gunfire occasionally breaks out at the end of a round.)

Only once have I been one-shot-killed in the first second of the game by some doofus in an assault 'Mech who spawned right behind my humble Commando. I've been winged plenty of times, though, often when there's no enemy even in sight, let alone near me.

If you're just shooting to see whether your weapons are in chain-fire or normal mode, you don't have to; in chain fire, a little highlight box thing runs down through each weapon group in the bottom-right display. In normal-fire mode, there's no animation there.

Slightly less obviously, you should not only refrain from shooting your teammates, but also avoid forcing them to shoot you. Do not, if you can help it, run your 'Mech between a friend and the enemy he's shooting at.

And, conversely, be alert for friends running into your firing line, and if you've already got a laser or something firing, yank your crosshair up or down to try to miss them.

Chief among the teamdamage offenders in the early game are newbies driving the trial Atlas.

As I've said before: Do not do this. That 'Mech is not for you.

On the face of it, the trial Atlas (and other big trial 'Mechs with lots of weapon systems; they switch the trial 'Mechs around from time to time) seems like a great idea. Not only is the Atlas one of the archetypal BattleMechs and as big as 'Mechs get, but this particular model is well armed, heavily armoured, and of course free. In the hands of an experienced player, the stock AS7-K is a very dangerous opponent.

But it is sloooooow. Top speed 48.6 km/h.

I think that's the worst thing about it, for newbies. Mobility is immensely important when you're not sure what you're doing, and any 'Mech with a top speed under 50 km/h is likely to be difficult for an experienced player to use well in a lot of random pick-up games, let alone a newbie. The classic situation in which a fast 'Mech runs round and round a slower one shooting it in the back without even being shot back occurs frequently with trial Atlases.

(Real newbies will drive their slow trial 'Mech in a straight line shooting at someone way over there somewhere, and completely fail to notice that there's a scout 'Mech running at 25% throttle right behind them, shooting them in the back over and over and over without even having to steer.)

And to add insult to injury, the AS7-K's anaemic little engine actually isn't very little - it's of the lighter but larger "XL" type, which means it takes up space in the left and right torso. If any part of the engine receives a critical hit, the 'Mech explodes no matter how healthy the rest of it is. XL engines make it much easier for this to happen.

Engine specs

On the subject of engines, there are engines with different ratings, but the same weight.

There is very little reason to buy a 7-ton 160 engine when you could buy a 7-ton 170. ~~Only if the higher-rated engine needs more heat sinks than you can cram into your 'Mech should you go with a lower-rated engine of the same weight.~~ I was wrong about that, as per Itsacon's comment below. There is actually no reason besides price to get a lower-rated engine with the same tonnage.

Selling a 'Mech

And when you sell a 'Mech, you don't have to, and shouldn't, sell all the equipment in it (the optional "Item Value" checkbox). Only sell stuff you know you're never going to use, like spare engines if you've got a pile of one size, heat sinks if you've accumulated a zillion of them, and non-Streak SRMs and autocannons if, like me, your ping is lousy.

And finally, If you're overheating, slow down. The higher your throttle setting, the slower you cool off.

Posted in Games, MechWarrior Online. 7 Comments »

Baby boating

16 November 2012 — dan

(Again with the MechWarrior Online. Get used to it, gentle reader; there will be more.)

If you want to play a "missile boat" in MechWarrior Online - which isn't very exciting, but is a solid way to contribute to your team and make money for yourself - you have the problem that missile boats are usually heavy or assault 'Mechs. So while you're learning, your half-baked missile 'Mech may cause MechWarrior Online's... less-than-perfect... matchmaker to add a fully perked and polished enemy heavy or assault 'Mech to the enemy team.

(This will also happen if you head out in the current trial Catapult, a 70-tonner with two LRM-15s and four medium lasers.)

The solution to this problem is The Light Missile Boat, which is mildly ridiculous but actually works pretty well, and will only be matched by another light 'Mech on the other team, with any luck. (Or by some newbie in the trial Atlas, which is often even better.)

One formula for a Light Missile Boat is:

One Raven RVN-2X, which has a missile hardpoint in its right torso and four energy hardpoints split between the left torso and right arm, and an Anti-Missile System slot in the left torso. (AMS is highly desirable for missile boats, which often find themselves copping a lot of counter-battery fire.)

Pull the engine out. Stick an LRM-15 or LRM-20 in the right torso, and an AMS and one or two tons of ammo in the left torso. Add lasers of your choice to the right arm and/or left torso. Sprinkle with LRM ammo to taste. Put heat sinks in the legs (I'm pretty sure MechWarrior Online does give you the correct cooling bonus if there are heat sinks in your legs and your legs are in water). Wind up the armour, putting plenty on the back, 'cos you're not going to be fast.

Now, add the biggest non-XL engine that still fits. Enjoy your new light 'Mech that's pretty much exactly half a Catapult.

My version of this 'Mech has an LRM 15, two Medium Pulse Lasers along with the AMS in the left torso, and a Standard Engine 140 for a not-too-horribly-bad 64.8 km/h top speed. I used to have an LRM-20, but the lighter missile rack allowed the heavier, more useful lasers. You can add even more stuff if you go for structure and armour upgrades and put in an XL engine, but this'll cost you a lot more for repairs.

(On a weight-per-missiles basis, by the way, the little LRM-5 is the best; it shoots five missiles and weighs two tons, 2.5 missiles per ton. The LRM-10 and LRM-20 both give you only two missiles per ton; if you can install two LRM-5s instead of one LRM-10, you probably should. The LRM-15 gives 2.142857143 missiles per ton.)

If you want to be tricky, you can save some weight by putting no armour at all on a Raven 2X's gunless left arm. It's probably a good idea to put all of your missile ammo in the right and centre torso, in that case.

If you go into battle with an un-armoured limb there's a very good chance it'll be blown off and then, with the standard auto-repair and auto-rearm settings, you'll have to pay to put a new un-armoured arm on your 'Mech, only to have it blown off again. If you turn off auto-repair, though, you can leave the arm as a stump, and make money faster.

(For this reason, less-honourable players who want to make money fast and don't much care about helping their team may go into battle in a "Zombie Wang", a Yen-Lo-Wang with a couple of medium lasers in the centre torso, no other armament, and no arms.)

As things stand, you also get a 75% ammunition reload for free at the end of every battle. You get this reload even if auto-rearm is turned off. So for economical missile-boating, just lay in more ammo than you really need when it's all full (for both LRMs and AMS). Now the free 75% reload will give you enough, and you can head back into battle without paying to re-arm.

In a continuation of MechWarrior Online's pleasing commitment to making different 'Mechs truly different, 'Mechs fire missiles in closely-spaced volleys according to the number of physical launch tubes present on that 'Mech. A Raven 2X has six tubes, so if you put an LRM-20 on it, it will fire four volleys (of six, six, six and two missiles, respectively) in quick succession. An LRM-15 will fire three volleys.

This isn't ideal - spacing out the missiles gives enemy Anti-Missile Systems more time to fire on them, and enemy pilots more time to duck behind cover - but it works well enough. Especially if you're missile-boating correctly, with more than one of you unloading on one target.

Apparently there's at least one 'Mech with a single missile launch tube, though I forget which one it is. Put an LRM-20 on that and it'll pee out the missiles as if it's got bladder stones.

UPDATE: Ah, here it is; it's the Raven 3L...

...whose single missile tube is meant to fire Narc Beacons, not explosives.

Posted in Games, MechWarrior Online. 6 Comments »

MechWarrioring, Online

15 November 2012 — dan

I've been spending entirely too much time playing MechWarrior Online.

If you've got a Windows PC with moderate graphics power, or something that can be tricked into acting like one, try it. It's free. And if you do not want to fight people from distant nations in a giant walking tank, I am not at all sure that I want to be friends with you.

(There will be a certain amount of BattleTech-y jargon in this post. I make no apologies, since all right-thinking people pored over Technical Readout: 3025 at the bus stop in 1987 as I did, memorising even the stupidest-looking 'Mechs, and thinking long and hard on the subject of internal-combustion Demolisher tanks only costing about 20% more than 25-ton scout 'Mechs. You are allowed to not have also played hundreds of hours of the unlicensed multiplayer-only tabletop-BattleTech knockoff Mechforce on the Amiga, but that's as far as I'm willing to go. Oh, and in case you care, the modern equivalent to Mechforce is MegaMek.)

MechWarrior Online is currently in open beta. It is not bugless, and right now the only game mode is eight-a-side team deathmatch on a small handful of maps, with a capture-the-base mechanic to avoid the "Where's Wally" problem in which the single survivor of one team goes and hides until his opponents quit in disgust.

But it doesn't crash very often, and stuff you earn in the beta will carry over into the full release, so it's well worth trying.

Because, again, it's free.

"Wait a minute," I hear you say, "this is actually an Allegedly Free Game, right? They want you to send them money if you want a 'Mech that can compete, don't they?"

Well, yes, Piranha Games would very much like you to whip out your credit card or PayPal account and pay for "MechWarrior Credits" ("MC"), which can be purchased in five tiers from $US6.95 for 1250 MCs (180 MCs per dollar) to $US99.95 for 25,000 MCs (250 credits per dollar). But you really can play, and play competitively, without spending a penny.

You can certainly play competitively without buying the first only-available-for-real-money "hero 'Mech", the "Yen-Lo-Wang" variant of the Centurion. That costs 3750 MCs, meaning you'd have to buy at least the $US29.95 6500-MC package (217 MCs per dollar), and its main selling point is that it multiplies all "normal" money, "C-Bills" you make in the game by 1.3. But that's about the only nice thing you can say about it.

I will digress about the "Wang", as everyone calls both it and anyone driving one, for a moment, because that 'Mech exemplifies an important piece of MechWarrior Online's design. (This may have debuted in some other MechWarrior game, by the way; I haven't played the last couple of them. I haven't played Crysis-based MechWarrior, Living Legends either.)

The Wang is not a very good 'Mech at all, because the only weapon "hardpoints" it has are two ballistic ones on the right arm, and two energy hardpoints in the centre torso. You only have two "slots" left over in any 'Mech's the centre torso after the gyro and engine, so you can't mount any big lasers or PPCs or whatever there. The best you can do is two Medium Lasers. Even a Medium Pulse Laser will take up both slots and leave you no room to install a second energy weapon.

Old-style tabletop BattleTech did not work like this. Per the original rules, you could strip any 'Mech down to the frame and rebuild it however you liked, provided it didn't end up overweight.

(Weight limits are one of the distinctive features of BattleTech. A "75-ton" 'Mech can be kitted out with less than 75 tons of gear if you're feeling perverse, but not so much as an ounce more. Since any 'Mech with hands can, per the original rules, also yank a two-ton tree out of the ground and whack another 'Mech with it, and since 'Mechs can operate on a variety of planets with different gravity strength, this makes no sense at all. But it's always been in the rules, and MechWarrior Online follows them.)

So by the old rules, you could take the LRMs off an Archer and put on lots of heat-sinks and lasers, or you could somehow cram an AC/20 into any scout 'Mech by downsizing the engine and stripping off armour and arm actuators, or you could stick jump jets on anything. You name it. The "fluff" may say that this 'Mech is prone to knee-joint problems and that one has especially fast torso twisting, but there was no actual difference in the game itself.

In MechWarrior Online, the hardpoints are fixed. If you buy the Catapult variant that has six missile hardpoints and nothing else, you will never be able to put a laser on it. And 'Mechs really do have different cockpit visibility, arm and torso movement ranges, and so on.

Which is why the Wang sucks. It comes with an AC/20, the heaviest-hitting gun in the game, on its right arm, but opponents with a clue will try to shoot that arm off any Wang they see. And if you're like me and playing from Australia, your 250-millisecond-ish ping time makes ballistic weapons very hard to use. Lasers and lock-on missiles (both long-range and Streak short range) work well enough, but even PPCs are hard to aim when the darn thing always goes off a quarter second after you press the button, and heavy autocannon are a huge pain.

The hardpoint system means Wang pilots are stuck with these problems, though. They can put two lighter autocannon in the right arm if they like, or even a couple of machine guns (which are almost harmless unless shooting a de-armoured location, in which case they become critical-hit monsters). But, to add insult to injury, the Wang's arms don't even have very wide movement arcs. So you almost get the restricted tracking of a torso-mount weapon, with the vulnerability of an arm-mount one.

OK, back to the "pay to win" problem, and why MechWarrior Online does not suffer from it, much.

You can buy some MCs with real money right at the outset, and buy your own 'Mech.

This isn't necessarily even very expensive; the cheapest 'Mech in the game so far is a Commando variant that goes for only 680 MC, giving you plenty of change from even the $US6.95 MC package.

(The most expensive 'Mech is an Atlas variant that costs 13.7 million C-bills, or 5480 MC. You'd need to buy at least the $US29.95 6500-MC package to buy it right off the bat. Oh, and you can't, at the moment at least, buy partially with C-Bills and partially with MC.)

Don't buy right away, though; maybe you won't even like the game! Instead, start out playing the "trial" 'Mechs, which are actually pretty good at the moment (they switch the trial 'Mechs around from time to time. The last batch weren't so great).

Do not jump into the trial Atlas and lumber around in befuddlement at your numerous weapons systems and limited speed and torso aiming envelope. Grab the trial Commando or Catapult, instead. The Commando is nippy and heavily armed for its size (it's exactly tall enough to headbutt an Atlas in the crotch); the Catapult has a simple and useful weapon loadout, and jump-jets, which may or may not reduce the amount of time a newbie spends grinding his face on the scenery.

Newbies do that because MechWarrior Online, like all other "proper" MechWarrior games, has separate controls for your legs and your torso and arms. Using the default keyboard and mouse controls (which work well), W and S change throttle setting, and A and D turn your legs left and right. The mouse moves your arms and torso. Arms - and any weapons on them - get to where you've moved quickly, then the torso - and any weapons on it - catches up.

Since many 'Mechs have a quite wide torso traverse - many can aim directly behind them with their arms - it is easy to lose track of what you're doing and flail around randomly while nudging the scenery and being torn to shreds by heartless opponents. Thus far the game also lacks any sort of interactive tutorial, too, so you have to learn to drive under fire.

(On the subject of shooting behind you, by the way, MechWarrior Online does not allow rear-facing weapons, because they couldn't figure out a way to make them useful and fun at the same time. There are also no 'Mech collisions in the game at the moment; they took out the collision code after seeing how often a 'Mech would be knocked down in one place then stand up somewhere very different. Collisions, and Death from Above, are promised to be reinstated once they've sorted this out.)

Anyway, pick a trial 'Mech, and play. This will earn you the in-game "C-Bills" money, but not experience points. But you don't have to pay to repair or re-arm a trial 'Mech either, and you get money even when you lose a game.

Which you will, a lot, because the match-maker at the moment doesn't seem to see any difference between a new player in a trial heavy 'Mech and a hugely experienced player in a fully tricked-out heavy 'Mech. In about 20 to 30 games, you'll be able to afford to buy your own light 'Mech.

Which is what I recommend you do. A nice fast light 'Mech is the closest to a conventional first-person shooter you can get in this game, zooming around behind enemies spotting targets for your long-range shooters and generally making a nuisance of yourself is a lot of fun, and a light 'Mech with no fancy upgrades doesn't cost much to repair even if you're utterly blown to bits.

Ferro-fibrous armour, endo-steel interior structure, Artemis missile fire control and the extremely expensive XL engines are all available as upgrades; if you still frequently do not survive a battle, it's best not to bother with any of them. (Especially the XL engine, the cheapest of which costs more than the biggest plain engine. XL engines have extra critical-hit locations in right and left torso; any hit to any of those locations detonates the engine and your 'Mech, making it impossible to turn a profit on that match.)

When you play with an "owned", non-Trial 'Mech, you earn "Mech XP" experience points that can be spent on minor upgrades - 7.5% better heat dissipation, 10% faster turning speed, that sort of thing - specific to that 'Mech variant:

You can get the first eight upgrades by just saving up enough XP; you can only get the "Elite" and higher upgrades - and also double all of the basic-upgrade bonuses, which is rather nice - if you've bought all eight upgrades for three variants of that 'Mech model.

This is made easier by "General XP", which can be spent on upgrades for any 'Mech. You can convert Mech XP into General XP one-for-one, but it costs 40 MC per thousand XP converted.

You don't have to convert any points, though. You can just play with each 'Mech variant until you've earned enough points with it to upgrade it fully.

The Elite upgrades aren't that amazing, either; the double bonus to the Basic upgrades is much more exciting, if you ask me. Elite offers you 33% faster shutting down and starting up, 15% better weapon "convergence" (accuracy of aiming at the crosshair), 5% faster weapon firing and a 10% higher top speed, but that'll cost you 21,500 experience points, versus 14,250 for all eight Basic upgrades.

And, importantly, there is no way to just buy these upgrades; you can buy Mech Credits and use them to shift Mech XP from one 'Mech to General XP you can spend on tweaking another, but you can't buy experience points.

(You can also only buy pilot upgrades with GXP, but none of those are must-haves either.)

As you may have gathered, I could keep rabbiting on about this game indefinitely. In future posts, I may.

Just go and play it. It's fun.

(And do feel free to send me some money so, despite all the above, I can buy some more MCs with which to shift my XP points around. And buy more 'Mech bays, slots for owned 'Mechs so you don't have to sell one before you can buy another. Papa needs a new BattleMech carport, people!)

Posted in Games, MechWarrior Online, MiniReviews, Nerdery. 20 Comments »

No good deed goes unpunished

10 November 2012 — dan

A reader writes:

I run a blog at http://www.tim.id.au/blog ... actually, the blog is more or less dead in the water, but I'm keeping it alive for two very good reasons - one of which you'll notice if you google "F6 drivers", and the other if you google "laptop service manuals" (or many similar variations of). It's the latter I'd like to ask for your advice on.

Basically: For the last three or so years, I've been collecting laptop repair manuals for every model I can find one for (along with some extra things, like iMacs and other complicated all-in-ones), and hosting them free to download on my website. It started as a reference for myself and a few other guys at a small computer shop near Wollongong, then gradually exploded into the monstrosity you see there now. The last time I looked at stats on it, it was moving about 50gb of data every *day*.

The biggest challenge I've faced is that most laptop makers tend to guard their repair manuals behind passworded extranet sites and snarling legal notices. Dell, Lenovo and HP are the only three companies in the world that publicly publish their laptop service manuals, and the rest make it variously difficult to find (Apple and Acer models are fairly easy, while some companies like ASUS and BenQ apparently run a very tight ship). It's one such company, Toshiba, that is currently making things very awkward for me.

As you can see, my Toshiba manuals section is completely blanked out - I was contacted by the Assistant General Affairs Manager (Legal division) of Toshiba Australia at the end of July with a fairly blunt demand to take down all Toshiba copyrighted material from my site. I complied more or less immediately, because I was in no state to even start to pursue the matter down legal channels at the time, and did not want to risk more or less ruining my life for the chance to try and fight for something pretty petty.

I've been given varying reasons for Toshiba's unwillingness to play ball. They say they're concerned for the wellbeing of their customers (as if Satellite Pros are somehow intensely more dangerous to take apart than a ThinkPad?), they contain proprietary information (again, I see nothing different in what Dell/HP/Lenovo are willing to share publicly), and that they are copyrighted material (laws put in place to protect the profits of people who create original works of art - I see nothing particularly creative or artistic in their manuals). Any argument I put forward was simply rebuffed with a polite but very firm 'no'. I fully believe they are using copyright as a whitewash for controlling dissemination of information that would do nothing but help consumers, and are abusing the spirit of copyright law in how it extends to their repair manuals.

I've asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation for advice - they have no Australian legal presence but suggested I contact Electronic Frontiers Australia. EFA suggested I contact a lawyer who specialises in intellectual property matters, and the only one of those I could easily get ahold of charges more or less the same amount *per hour* for representation as I do per month in paying off my car. A friend of mine who is studying law pointed out that IP law is fairly specialised and I'm very unlikely to find a free source of legal advice on the matter. As far as I can tell, I'm completely screwed and have no legal recourse except to be a good boy and comply with their demands.

What do you think of this whole situation? Can you think of any way I can push back against Toshiba and be fairly likely to win the matter? I firmly believe I am in the moral right here (and have had a pile of emails from concerned readers more or less backing me up on that), but am getting screwed over because this is such new ground for ageing copyright laws and have no way to even have the matter addressed fairly without risking costly legal action against me.

Help!

Tim

I entirely agree with you that you're providing a valuable service to both end-users and, arguably, the laptop manufacturers themselves, but in my own non-lawyer opinion I'm not even entirely sure why you're asking me this. The manuals are unquestionably copyrighted to the manufacturer, so even if they normally give them away for free on their own (often crummy) download sites, that doesn't mean it's OK for other people to put copies of the manuals up on the Web.

This isn't a trademark-protection sort of issue; if somone is in a similar business to yours using a trade-name or mark that's similar to yours (if, say, someone other than Toshiba started selling "Satellite"-branded computer gear), then you have to make them stop if you want to keep control of your trademark. But copyright holders are free to ignore people distributing their copyrighted stuff, without that having any effect on the validity of said copyrights, and enforce or not enforce their copyright rights as and how they like.

(Tim Hunkin, for instance, allows free distribution of The Secret Life of Machines, just as Martin Pearson allows free distribution of The Unfinished Spelling Errors of Bolkien. But either of them could change his mind at any moment, and would I think easily win a case against someone who started selling those works without permission.)

I strongly doubt you could wriggle out of this by saying that a service manual isn't a creative work. Lots of things are copyrightable without being music or literature or any of the other things that first come to mind when you hear the term "creative work". Maps are copyrightable. Computer operating systems are copyrightable. Circuit diagrams, plans and blueprints are copyrightable. As they should be; you shouldn't have to file for a patent or something just to stop random people copying and selling, or giving away, a street directory that took you a great deal of effort and money to create.

The legal defining line, I think in my state of almost complete legal ignorance, is that a creative work is anything someone created that some other creator would not be expected to make in substantially the same way ("substantially" being the part that lawyers get paid to argue about), and that is also substantially different from anything someone else already created. A service manual for a given product could be written in many very different ways, so it's copyrightable.

I think the clincher is that Toshiba, unlike many other manufacturers, as you say does not make its service manuals available for simple free download. This creates a much greater need for an alternative download option like your Web site, but it also makes completely clear that Toshiba, for whatever reason, doesn't want the manuals freely available. So they are not only in my untutored opinion entirely within their rights as copyright-holder to demand you take down your copies of their manuals, but they aren't even acting inconsistently in doing so. Stupidly, perhaps, but not inconsistently.

I know actual lawyers do read this blog, and perhaps there's something I'm missing; if you know better than me, or even have something to add regarding copyright law in countries other than Australia, do please comment. But I really think it's an open and shut case.

The manuals are copyright to Toshiba, so you're not allowed to put them on a Web site for people to access unless Toshiba give you permission. End of story, I'm afraid.

Posted in Shop talk. 11 Comments »

More magnets

9 November 2012 — dan

The mysterious Professor X, from that post the other day about scaling up little toy sculpture magnet things to evade bans on such toys, has contacted me again:

Now that I'm not headed to bed and can really read the post, thanks again for such thorough and useful info. The comment to your post was useful, too.

I assume that if the sphere size stays the same and the flux factor goes down, they're just not going to be as effective for sculpting because they won't hold as well, and they won't have the same satisfying snap, etc. The lack of a workable alternative is just as good for me as a teaching point as a workable alternative would be; I'll have fun with this. I appreciate your assistance to total stranger.

I find it funny, after reading your post, that the CPSC in its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking says, "Thus, it might be possible for manufacturers to make magnet sets that contain strong magnets so long as the magnets are sufficiently large, although the large size could reduce their utility."

Well, that's an understatement, apparently.

Professor X

To get a, literal, feel for how these things behave, I do strongly recommend you hit eBay and get some cheap magnets there, both the little strong silver ones and the black shiny "rattlesnake egg" type (which can be had as spheres as well as elongated ovals).

The eBay seller I got some of my element samples from, "The Mists of Avalon" (here on eBay Australia, here on eBay UK) has some interesting magnets too, including irregular "tumblie" versions of the rattlesnake-egg type.

Plus, of course, these things really are some of the greatest fiddle-toys ever created. Just don't put them in the same pocket as your credit cards!

I used to also have to warn people to keep strong magnets away from CRT monitors and TVs, but that's way less of a problem these days, of course. To demonstrate rare-earth magnets' their ability to wipe other magnetised things, get a standard flexible rubber fridge magnet of the sort given away as promotional items, scrub it all over with a smallish rare-earth magnet, and behold that it now can't stick to a fridge at all.

This is because those rubbery magnets are set up with a "one sided" array of alternating parallel rows of magnetisation - that's why only one side of them sticks to the fridge, and also why they stick to each other in such an odd, "lumpy" way.

You can also use magnetic field viewing film (a small piece of which can be yours for less than $10 delivered) to see this oddness directly.

When a strong enough external field re-aligns these parallel poles so they all go one way, the essentially feeble magnetic material can no longer hold up own weight.

There's a lot to be said for ferrofluid, too.

The cheapest ferrofluid on eBay is in tiny squeeze sachets, for topping up the coolant in tweeters. But you can get thirty grams for less than $US25 delivered; that's enough to have some fun with.

There are also several dealers selling sealed vials with ferrofluid and possibly also some immiscible liquid inside, to keep the ferrofluid clean and, perhaps more importantly, prevent other objects, people and pets from being stained by it. Regrettably, you can only get some of a ferrofluid stain out of your clothes with a magnet.

Also, if physics demonstrations at all interest you, those little magnets can be great for those, too!

Posted in Nerdery, Science, Toys. Leave a Comment »

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