#4610 Vee and aero crews should die with unit's destruction
According to TW, pg. 128, when a vee or aero is destroyed, the crew is considered killed. However, with the auto-abandon option turned on in MM, vee crews are being ejected from destroyed vehicles. I haven't tested yet whether this is happening for aeros. In addition to disabling this, we should also explicitly give these crews six hits when their ride is destroyed so that MHQ knows how to treat them. Right now they are surviving without a scratch. In the case of dropships, we will also want to go through and make sure that carried units and carried personnel are destroyed as well.
I think it would be worthwhile to have an unofficial optional rule that allows for aero pilot ejection of destroyed ASFs and conventional fighters. I would also like to enable that this auto-ejection could be applied to crashes.
Won't that be a bit harsh for vehicle crews? I'm currently using auto eject for vehicles and they are getting killed quite frequently when their vehicle is destroyed. And to mark the entire crew as killed... as for aeros, it's almost impossible to get the pilot killed. Would be great if they can get killed randomly.
If we want to be strict about it, ejection for 'Mechs should be turned off by default as well (because it's itself an optional TacOps rule and not TW standard -- that it's still normally automatically on in MegaMek is a Master Rules legacy issue), autoejects from ammo explosions should still apply the feedback damage to the MechWarrior (they currently don't), and abandoning vehicles should work differently from ejecting from 'Mechs anyway because they normally have no ejection seats and the crew needs to scramble out under their own power (TacOps pp. 197/8). Essentially, as currently coded MM actually doesn't follow the canon ejection/abandoning rules all that well to begin with.
Klaus, its not ejection we are talking about, its the auto-abandon feature. Presumably, pilots who are not killed by unit destruction can "crawl out of the wreckage." For mechs, it is working fine because there are lots of conditions where the unit is destroyed but pilots are not. However, for most other units, unit destruction is synonomous with pilot death.
Server.abandonUnit contains a check for a doomed or dead pilot, but the issue is that most of the code for destroying units does not bother to actually kill the pilot too. If we were properly specifying when crew were killed on destruction, then this would work correctly.
SirMegaV, we could specify a different option that crews are not killed by unit destruction, but I think assuming thats how the user wants this to work for this option is problematic. I discovered it because I enabled the option but very much did not want this. We need to do things by the rules first. And yes, aero pilots should technically be getting killed if their aero is destroyed while airborne.
Ah...the unofficial auto-abandon option that I barely remember exists because I never use it myself, you mean? Yeah, I suppose I don't have much on that. :) (Well, other than that vehicle crews probably still shouldn't be able to automatically instantly abandon their vehicles when that's normally supposed to be a full-turn process for 'non-automatic' cases by the book...)
That said, yeah, vehicle crews should be killed with their vehicles as per TW p. 128. Not sure whether or not they can be potentially recovered as StratOps p. 177 specifies for crew critical hits -- my intuition would be yes as long as the vehicle isn't totally destroyed by an explosion or such, but that may just be me --, but in either event that's not so much a question for core MM itself to deal with.
Let us not forget that abandoned/ejection s not covered by TW becasue TW only cares about a single match and NOT campaign play where pilot death actually matters. A question like this came up and the devs pretty much said that TW doesn't care nor track what happens to the pilot/crew once the macine is destroyed.
Yes, except that TW does tell us, on the pages that I cited. And Strat Ops also tells us further that "dead" crews roll 2d6>=7 to survive in a wounded state. So the pieces are all there in the rules. The auto-abandon option should not be used to allow "dead" crews to abandon destroyed vehicles, just as it does not now allow for a pilot to abandon a head-capped mech.
ASF/CF pilots should be covered under auto-eject. The ejection seat was created in the 1950s after all. 500 to 1000 years of refinement should get the Pilot out of a fireball at least some of the time.
I would love to have the option to autoeject ASF/CF pilots and rescue them with an SAR unit of some type as I can with mechwarriors. In an atmospheric game it seems like they ought to start at the same altitude at which the ejection occurs and descend 1 level per turn as if by parachute.
For that matter, I'd love to be able to abandon a wrecked small craft/dropship/jumpship/warship/station and load the escape pods with a ship that has spare small craft capacity, just as it now takes an infantry carrier to rescue a vehicle crew.
Space crews should retain the last velocity vectors of their parent unit, especially when advanced movement is enabled, and should move before any other unit type so that you'd actually be able to pick them up.
Any updates on this? I do notice that destroyed vees have all crews killed but without the 2D6=>7 rolls since 2 or 3 release ago.
MHQ v 3.21 kills everything except MWs. 3.22, 3.23, and 3.24 are unusuable for other reasons.
Just tested using 3.25, ejected (manually using vehicle can be abandoned option) vehicle crews are being treated as dead after the game ends. Is that intentional?
MHQ 3.25... any Vee that was destroyed or abandoned during the MM fight does not generate possible Prisoners. Campaign Option to generate Random Vee and Infantry damage is turned on.
Attached is CPNX, Customs, and last turn from MM Save