Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: Difference between revisions
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** ''[[BattleTech]]''—where powerful, futuristic weapons have effective ranges as short as 60 meters (the heavy machine gun, for example)! The latest incarnation of the ruleset explicitly acknowledges that this is for playability only. (It's a little harder to excuse the fact that ballistic weapons tend to ''lose'' range with increasing caliber, though, especially when the same is most definitely not true for energy-based ones...)
*** There was an interesting and elaborate [[Fix Fic]] about this very problem. It tried to justify the problem by saying that armor manufacturing has progressed to the point that in order to compensate, warheads had to become so bulky that Autocannons were effectively more like short-ranged mortars, with larger ones barely capable of firing beyond 100 meters. Likewise, missiles were limited by fuel capacity. Artillery, at least, has kilometers-long range.
*** Likewise, other fics paint it as an accuracy concern, based on poor quality fire control and recoil compensators. An
**** One early version of the rules attributed the accuracy problem to jamming of the electronic sensors plus extensive use of smoke screens. By this rule, the battlefield's a continual pea-soup fog and a Mechwarrior '''can't''' see his target well enough to hit beyond a few tens of meters. This didn't explain why some weapons could target the enemy at twice the distance another weapon carried by the same 'Mech could.
*** It's worth noting that in ''Battle Space'', the ranges were drastically upgraded so that ranges were measured in thousands of kilometers. Too bad it didn't sell, because, along with being insidiously complex and requiring significantly more paperwork (with ''hundreds'' of hit boxes and critical hit locations ''per ship'', and weapons loadouts that were could fill an entire page) than the land-based game, space combat made the series' signature 'Mechs (and their [[Mechwarrior]] pilots, by extension) [[Point Defenseless]] turrets tethered to their ships at best, and helpless cargo at all other times.
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* [[Justified Trope|Justified]] in ''[[Cyberpunk 2020]]'' due to a serious case of [[Shown Their Work|Showing Their Work]] in regards to shootouts between amateurs and street hoodlums. Most firefights are fought well inside 12.5 meters (the "close" range band of pistols) and are usually decided by the first lucky hit. On average, they last all of fifteen seconds (five turns).
* Completely averted in most cases in ''[[Shadowrun]]'', where the extreme range limit for most weapons is about where the extreme ranges of real weapons would be (e.g. 1500 meters for a sniper rifle under the Shadowrun rules; that has been exceeded in real life in seven cases ever).
* Despite how its parent franchise lovingly embraces this, ''[[Star Wars]]'' RPGs avoid this. A "low tech" mortar has a weight of 1.8 kilograms with max range of 3750 meters {{ref|The real world vz. 99 Antos, made long after these rules were first published and considered light for a mortar, weighs just shy of 3 times this with a much shorter range.}} while larger pieces can reach even further. Capital ships can hit targets with their turbolasers from orbit (bombers are used because this is very inaccurate and slow). Even small arms have reasonable ranges of 450ms being the max range for a normal rifle (this is lower than modern rifles, but still well past most visual range).
== [[Video Games]] ==
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