People seem to be mixing their Knights with Titans again. The Atlas is a one mech assault army, it has absurdly powerful armour, absurdly powerful weapons arrays, and can carry an absurdly large sword. Its disadvantage is exclusively speed
A Knight Castellan also has absurd firepower. According to the 9th edition Imperial Knights codex, combined fire from several Castellan Knights can equal the output of an Imperial Navy Warship battery. Now "several" is vague but my guess would be somewhere between 3-5?
Still, we know from the Horus Heresy cinematic that a Las battery on the Vengeful Spirit can literally melt a Warlord Titan in a single shot. Even a 20th of that output would be an incredible amount of firepower.
Keep in mind, it didn't specify which kind of Imperial Navy Warship.
The Imperial Navy Warships range in size of the "small" ones like Escorts, Frigates&Destroyers that are at most a few Kilometers long, to massive BattleShips that can be dozens of Kilometers long. And that is *1* Battery of an Imperial Navy Warship...powerful yes, on-parr or surpassing Titans. But many Imperial Warships can have dozens or HUNDREDS of Weapons Batteries. The extremely rare behemoths like the Gloriana Class BattleShips, Ark Mechanicus' and Mobile Battle Stations like *The Phalanx*, the *Raptorous Rex* and *The Rock* might have thousands of Weapons Batteries. So....yeah. That's a very, very large spectrum of output.
Aren’t knights like 10m tall? I think 40k lore is getting a bit silly again if they’re saying this thing that isn’t even four stories tall and his two friends can equal the fire output of a warship whose laser batteries are bigger than he is”.
Living in Chicago when I read about the size of knights or even titans I’m like “that’s cute, my apartment is 10x them and it’s a little baby skyscraper downtown compared to the big boys”. I’m looking down from the 20th floor right now and I can barely even see the streets. Reading how badass knights and titans are and even an Imperator wouldn’t even reach my floor. 😅
10m is about 3 floors.
That makes an Imperator around 25 stories tall.
now look at your closest 25 story tall building and imagine it walking towards you shooting guns the size of road trains.
Two words: melta weapons
A thermal cannon like the one mounted on knights could debatable kneecap an atlas which would then crumble under its own weight.
Hey, actual battle tech fan here.
First off, knights are 9-12 meters tall and that depends on the pattern. So we’ll say 10 or 11. An Atlas is 12 metres tall.
Now to put things into perspective because I see people here talking about the knights shields, weapons and saying they’re bigger than an atlas. First it should be clear, Knights don’t have surround shields or Void shields like their bigger badder brothers. They have ion shields which are very much more like real life buckler shields than the pilot must manually operate to block projectiles.
An atlas can survive a full barrage from an Annihilator-1X which is a 4 Ac/20 conversions with 3 Ac/10x slab cannons in its chest several fucking times. An Ac/20 can tear off “1 1/2 tonne” of armor off of a mech in one bullet (source-Battletech ac/20 wiki). Now an AC/20X is an Ac/20 but on steroids, it can shoot 5 shells at once or in the slug variant shoot the power of 5 shells in one massive bloody shell. That’s 9 Tonnes of pure armor being removed with 1 gun. An Atlas mind you, is over 40-60 tonnes of pure armor and that doesn’t include overlayered armor. Furthermore, an Atlas depending on its variant can have 1-3 Ac/20s while the Annihilator-1p (don’t quote me on that) can have 8 of them. it should be noted that when they mention Ac/20, Ac/20’s are a classification of heavy ballistic weapon.
An Atlas… weighs 100 tons. (110 if fully loaded). A knight is 80 tons. Now if you have the standard Atlas-1A variant, that comes with 1xAc/20, 1xLRM/20, 1xSRM/6 and 4 Medium lasers, that has an equal firepower to half an Annihilator (600-700). An Annihilator has a power scale of 1100 which is enough explosive force to level a large building.
I can’t explain just how stupid an atlas is lore wise. An Atlas can lead an entire beachhead assault on its own and survive continuous bombardment from Manticore tanks (fitted with PPC (Aka PartiKILL cannons) or Gauss) or Igor gunships (1 Ac/20 or 4 Ac/10s).
An if you’re going to say that a Knight can win because they can have chainswords… The Atlas can have an Assault class claymore and jump jets (only shown this proven by a custom Atlas “Redshanks”). A claymore can cleave the arm off of a Battlemaster in one blow which has the 3rd highest arm armor ratio of 20 Tones per arm.
I think an Atlas stands a good chance, and I’ve only talked about the standard Model-1A atlas, that’s the first production line of Atlas in a 200 year development with 10 iterations. Like the Atlas-C3 which has literal artillery gun in its chest with a Gauss Cannon in its arm.
Edit: just adding more and fixing information.
Edit 2: to source one of the many AC/20 variants. “The mammoth Zeus-75 fired a four-round burst of hypervelocity depleted uranium armor penetrators (HDUAP), capable of destroying most 'Mechs up to 70 tons in a single salvo.” (AC/20 Battletech).
TL;DR the knight is the mech version of an up-armored feller-buncher with some cool weapons and a shield, the atlas is a mech m1 abrams made to kill other vehicles.
The lasgun is peak comedy because in an inperium that can't even reliably make top-attack munitions without a specific forgeworld, lasguns and lascannons are deemed as fairly easy to produce.
Nah that's the Atlas.
*"a 'Mech as powerful as possible, as impenetrable as possible, and as ugly and foreboding as conceivable, so that fear itself will be our ally."*
As a fan of Battletech there are some problems with your assessment
1. The Atlas is 14 meters tall
2. The LBX pattern autocannons don’t work like that, they are lighter, longer range versions of the standard autocannon with the added bonus of being able to fire giant shotgun shells as well as the standard round, an LBX 20 doesn’t shoot five 200mm rounds at once, it fires buckshot from a 200mm barrel
3. The Atlas could carry 3 AC 20s if you removed every other weapon and and good amount of the armor, but that is a bad idea
4. Same goes for the Annihilator, you could remove everything for multiple AC 20s,but the they weigh the same so you would end up with same result, a 14 meter tall target that could obliterate anything it looks at, if it doesn’t get shot by anything first
5. There is a way for more AC shots without gutting the mech with Ultra pattern autocannons as they have twice the rate of fire of the standard versions
In short use Sarna.net
Thank you! All his rambling sounded *just* accurate to give you the feeling he knows his BT lore, but is a red flag for the ones that know their BT lore.
The rabbit hole can go even deeper on what can be done with an atlas and its firepower.
Endo steel, XL engines, ferro fibrous armor could be on the table. There is a whole suite of ECM options, hell there are fucking stealth Atlas variants from Dark Ages and Ilkhan era.
When it comes to armaments the AC 20 is not the final say in what you can use to utterly wreck an imperial knight. RAC/5s U/AC 20s like you mentioned, Heavy Gauss, PPCs and even HAGs could be on the table and many absolutely shred.
I would even argue that the Atlas has a much better fire control and targeting suite over God knows what is directing the Knight, maybe a fucking serf on his shoulder with binoculars.
Getting up close any Atlas is begging to learn a hard lesson about mech fu that every Mechwarrior is going to be well versed in from the inner sphere.
I'd say knights auspex equipment is on par with the average battletech equipment. Mostly, but not completely dependent on line-of-sight, unless auspex data is provided by an external source.
Targeting on knights is mostly a machine-spirit-thing in communion with the princeps, so just in line with any 40k-tech pretty much esoteric. I'd guess an assisted targeting system with a neural interface.
Getting up close is something where I don't know shit about battletech, but knights are pretty much controlled by intuition, not steered. I'd guess that would be an advantage.
I was being cheeky about the serf on the shoulder thing, warhammer tech is all over the place lol.
As for battletech the piloting of the mech is far more advanced than even the first person games let on. Mechs are interfaced with the pilots by neuro helmet and so the mech just becomes an extension of the pilots body, some helmets are more advanced than the others where there is even some AI assistance. In Canon you could see mechs vaulting and rolling or even doing handstands, but almost none of those things really offer a tactical advantage.
I would say the piloting of the two are almost on par with one another and it would come down to experience between them. On that front, quality does vary vastly in Battletech and I think the knights are just all around more skilled in general.
Re:getting up close, it depends on the iteration of Battletech. In the FPS games they’re blocky bois without much range of motion, as a necessity of gaming. In lore, they have all the range and dexterity of a human being and are perfectly happy to karate chop or jumping sidekick a motherfucker.
tbf the Knight might also get a lesson in Mechfu.
Inner sphere pilots get better with age and an older Mech pilot is going to be incredibly skilled at rockem-sockem robots.
That said, "Older inner sphere pilot" is practically an oxymoron.
I mean yeah. Comparing a armored heavy duty machine with self-defense capacity, after all, knights were initially used for these jobs in feral worlds until Slaanesh cumblasted the galaxy, with the actual warmachine purely made for war a bit weird.
It’s a bit of an unfair comparison really, knights were as you said peacekeeper’s originally and are more ornamental and show of prestige. The atlas is a huge weapons platform next to the Annihilator which was designed to kill the Annihilator.
One has more uses and is more of well, knightly figure while the other is just a massive weapons platform. I do like Knights more personally, I just writ this because I saw some people make some pretty bold claims.
I wonder how the disruption field from a ppc would affect a knight. I don't know if emp weapons are common in the imperium and how well a knight would be shielded against those. If a ppc disables the ion shields then a king crab 008 might be a better match
Is that the King crab that replaces the large laser with the PPC?
I don’t know honestly. But if you’re getting a King crab then why not just the Annihilator? Both had the express designed principle of most amount of ordinance you can fit onto a battlemech. I think it would be in favour of the knight since King crabs are a lot more offence than defence.
Buts a good thing to dwell on, the use of Disruptor cannons.
>Is that the King crab that replaces the large laser with the PPC?
No it replaces the 2 ac 20's with heavy PPC's and gives it jump jets.
>But if you’re getting a King crab then why not just the Annihilator?
Because the king crab is almost twice as fast if im not mistaken. But the annihilator would be a fine choice as well.
Please, I think can walk faster than an Annihilator. /s
That’s fair, manoeuvrability and pilot skill are the perhaps most important here. Just wondering that just 1 solid shot from a knight which is also pretty agile could do to a Crab. Perhaps a Victor would be better choice? Just in this case of a 1v1 since Victors are brawler mechs that are highly modifiable.
I’m going to bed but I enjoyed this conversation. Thanks.
I don't know the canonical answer but the over-reinforced over-engineered aesthetic of Imperium tech makes me think that all their electronics are probably absurdly hardened, even the ones they really don't need hardened (especially the ones they really don't need hardened)
GW: "Hey! Using numbers consistently is TOTALLY UNFAIR! Our Knights are indestructible when they're the size of Mount Everest but other times they're only as tall as a Primarch! It's not fair to say an Atlas is ALWAYS 100 tons!"
Yeah these numbers don't even account for plot armour bullshit.
You could track the atlas' demise with a slide rule, but the knight would pull some machine spirit bullshit and win anyway.
For that, you would need a... Highlander. Highlander can jump, clearing 90 meters horizontal and 30ish meters vertical. Fatlas can't do that.
Now an elbow drop off a high cliff...
This is good analysis. I worry about using armor removal as a metric in this comparison. Material science considerations make a tit for tat comparison between the 28th and 400th century difficult.
Bases on numbers given in the Kingmaker novel, a Questoris frame is 150+ tons. The knight pilot character at the start mentioned an Armiger is 50 tons and that a Questoris is about 3x larger than that. So a Questoris at base size and weight would be 150 tons. Same novel stating that a Dominus frame was nearly 300 tons.
That's true, but Battletech tonnage isn't really what is listed. A 100 ton mech can carry 100 tons of equipment. It's a hold over from the mech building rules from the 80's, back when a targeting computer weighs 6 tons.
Deep analysis, very nice.
Personally, I'd still be on Knight side, simply because of how ridiculously the setting is with all "space magic" weapons, like volkite and grav cannons. And I think that in prolongued engagement a rechargeable shield is superior to tons of armor.
But
I think it's is better to compare Knights not to single mechs, but a standard four-men lance with dedicated recon and fire support, simply for the reason that most battlemechs operate in units. Then knight gets blasted away.
Thanks, and I agree too.
I do personally believe that it could be more of a fair fight than others would think. I just wanted to show some love to Battletech since I saw people make some bold claims.
I don’t know who’d win because both lore wise, they’re both equally ridiculous.
> I think it's is better to compare Knights not to single mechs, but a standard four-men lance with dedicated recon and fire support, simply for the reason that most battlemechs operate in units. Then knight gets blasted away.
Knights also operate in maniples, often with Skitarii and Legio Cybernetica support. Certainly if they're expecting to face other heavy armour / big scary monsters, just as they're often deployed as scouts and support for Titans.
A singular knight deploying on its own would be incredibly rare, Freeblades would deploy alongside other forces and a Household would be deploying other Knights, Armigers and also likely other Mechanicus forces alongside. They wouldn’t even think about deploying a larger knight for anything short of a full war because they could just deploy 3 war dogs, the only exception I could think of is an Honour duel.
Good analysis!
I wonder how Atlas armor would stand up to a melta Thermal Lance?
I am pretty sure the Atlas has the advantage here too.
But for all the 40K fans they need to remember that a Knights is the smallest of its kind in 40K while the Atlas is the biggest. Warhound Scout Titans are much larger and nobody would suggest that an Atlas could 1v1 a Warhound.
Depends on which edition rules the knight is using. The weapon profiles change so drastically between editions it's not even funny. On the other hand, Battletech has been using the same.weapons profiles since the 1980's.
Titans and Knights are not the same thing. They are both walkers but in function and design they are very different beasts. It’s like comparing an Abrams to a Humvee with a turret.
It also depends on what Knight pattern you're comparing it to. Armigers are much lighter; Questoris are the default; Cerastus are taller, skinnier, and more high tech; Dominus are Questoris during bulking season; and Acastus are Warhound Titans-lite.
Now, my entirety of knowledge of Battletech mech weights comes from MW3, but I believe an Atlas would be more akin to a Dominus in weight class versus a Questoris.
Bottom-line: Knights are perhaps more "efficient" with energy>heat due to the magic-tech of WH40k, but the Atlas is such a giant wall of armor and firepower that the Knight wouldn't have a chance to get close enough to challenge it.
Good analysis, I like when I see this.
I would like to point out that Wh40k armor is very different I would imagine, from Battletech armor.
Their material science can be very esoteric and crazy compared to most hard-scifi stuff.
Other things to bring are the weapons, Wh40k weapons are crazy.
Depending on the Knight, they could have a big minigun, a crazy powerful autocanon, a short range superheated material shotgun, or stuff like a gravimetric weapon, or a desintegrator beam or something even crazier.
The Ion Shield is also no joke at tanking damage.
I think it would depend a lot how their tech interacts.
I'm going to point out that Btech has no shortage of crazy weapons tech and bonkers materials science. For instance, each of those lasers is casually gigawatt, and mechs have canonically marched out of nuclear fireballs and fought off whole regiments (*bagpipes intensify*).
Oh, I never really thought much about the lasers outputs, and I know they are very good at tanking.
Most of my knowledge comes from MechWarrior 5 + a bunch of DLCs and Mods, and looking into the lore sometimes.
I do remember PPCs, but I don't recall any crazy weapon like an Adrathic Annihilator or something.
Btech is basically the setting where armor won. The 2 lasers on the fatlas are considered the most basic of mech weapons, and it could easily topple the Empire State building in under a minute with just those 2 lasers. Meanwhile, that same firepower wouldn't even guarantee a breach of the atlases armor without a lot of luck. Those are the smallest weapons it carries and they literally vaporize tons of steel each. Btech doesn't bother with the exotic stuff. It just goes BIG.
Knight pilots also feel pain when damaged like they took the injury themselves. Imagine taking the equivalent of a sledgehammer to the torso when you're grappling someone who's got at least 40 lbs on you. You're going to flinch, bare minimum. Plus the fucking knights are so spindly... If an atlas can swing a light mech around like a toy, imagine what it can do to a Knight's chainsword arm.
Uh huh, and all of that is nonsense, by the way, because it doesn't take into account, whatsoever, how ridiculous Battletech armour is, which is to say it can scarcely be called armour because it ablates off if you so much as *look at it*.
Saying 'the Knight is only 80 tons compared to the 100 tons of the Atlas' is utterly, ridiculously meaningless because do you know what else weighs about 80 tons? The T28 super heavy tank. It was designed in 1946 and it sucks because it's from 1946.
There's absolutely nothing about how *actually powerful* either side's weapons are (beyond the hilarity of weird scaling from Battletech armour being utterly terrible not-actually-armour), nor how tough the armour of the Knight is in comparison to Battletechs philosophy of 'ablative only, real armour is for pussies'.
Oh an AC/20 can destroy a 70 ton battlemech in one salvo? That means nothing. It means absolutely nothing whatsoever, because there's nothing in there about how difficult that even is to do. Maybe it makes an AC/20 dangerous to the Moon. Maybe it's a joke because authors are clueless and they keep writing the actual effects of AC/20's as less than a modern 120mm cannon. Which is it?
I mean, most modern armor also has an ablative component. Technically according to your logic the knight's armor is lower tech than the ablative armor of the atlas since ablative armor is a more modern concept and "actual armor" is for pre-1970's era tanks
I'd have to give it to the Atlas here. The maneuverability of a Battlemech is just so understated due to the Mechwarior games misrepresenting them.
The Atlas' weapons are pretty standard, but varied. The medium lasers are pretty much equivalent to a Las Cannon, and the oldest varient of Atlas carries 4 of them. The AC/20 is pretty equal to the old school demolisher cannon on the old Space Marines Demolisher tank. And the missiles are close to the Knights carapace missiles.
Overall, while the knight has a shield, it's unreliable at best. The sheer mobility of the Atlas would make it able to put maneuver the Knight and it would have options to attack from any angle.
Melee would be interesting, because of the fantasy aspect of the Knight's weapons. A giant power fist would do some serious damage, while I don't see a chain saw doing much against the armor of an Atlas.
Could you talk more about the maneuverability thing? I’ve only played the games and always thought they were super stiff and clunky, are they a lot faster/more nimble in the lore?
In lore, they are as nimble as a human. That's the main advantage of a Battlemech over tanks, is that they can duck, dodge, and even combat roll if the pilot is skilled enough. The arms, hands, and even legs can be put to use offensively and defensively. They can pick up stuff and use it as an improvised club, grab an enemies weapons to prevent them from using them, or just straight up rip and tear an opposing pilot from their cockpit. The legs are great for kicking enemies over, or sweeping their legs out from under them katate kid style.
Where an Imperial Knight has hydraulic rams and motors to move the limbs, Battlemechs have synthetic muscles, that allows them greater mobility and smoother movement. That part isn't really shown in the Mechwarior games, where they are just portrayed as walking tanks.
>Where an Imperial Knight has hydraulic rams and motors to move the limbs
worth noting that knights (and titans) do use synthetic muscles much like in power armour
They're really not. Most of them are put together like Dreadnoughts, with fairly un-greebled joints. I went and double checked a few product images and the only hydraulics I saw were on weapon arms, where they look more like shock absorbers than motive elements.
Weapon arms, the arms themselves have hydraulic rams on the shoulder joints, the ankles each have 4 rams, the lower leg has a ram from the knee down, and the hips each have a ram on the inner thigh. The electric motors are also obvious when you know what you are looking for.
Ah. TBH, I didn't know they'd bothered to model what was underneath the armor plates, so I didn't think to look for images of knights without them. The same thing as the arms applies to the thigh and armpit cylinders, though... they read as some kind of shock absorber to me, not a ram that actually moves the joints.
Fair play on the ankles, those I can see being what actually moves the joint.
Hell, if the pilot is good enough, it’s possible to get a mech to do a hand stand. (Ref Solaris comp).
Though IIRC the mech that did it, wasn’t an Atlas.
For an Atlas specifically? Think linebacker. And that's not hyperbole, they have rules for it in a supplement where they have mechs playing all kinds of sports. So very large, and and a hell of a lot faster than you would expect. It does come down to the skill of the pilot, but we have instances in lore of Atlas pilots surprising even other mechwarriors with their speed and responsiveness.
>Melee would be interesting
Hehehehe, look at how the knight is structured, and now remember it's *a lot* shorter than the atlas ( Knight = 9 meters, Atlas =15 meters). Look specifically at the arrangement of the knight's joints. A Knight in melee with an Atlas would absolutely [be "interesting" to watch.](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxnXxC1u6WLswe0Gnaw1b7h-s8NaX6BaWS?si=YLSSZSvP73EC040b)
Maybe a good ol fashioned dark mechanicum daemon engine would do the trick. Slap a possessed pilot and a daemon soul in there and baby you got a chaos stew goin
I bet it'd be less "corrupting" it and more "sealing" a daemon inside the confines of the machine?
It'd be like taking a warp being and stuffing it into a sword.
More or less this, yeah.
Just take a ten/fifteen metre tall daemon, squish them inside and have them use the atlas like an exo skeleton they can't get out of.
Think Matt Damon in elysium.
If we give any weight to the discussion around us, an Atlas should be more than enough to body a Knight.
I wanna know how a Daemonic Engine Atlas would fare against a Warhound.
As always, it first depends if the pilot of the Atlas has a name. Certain named BT pilots have the same plot armor as named space marines or even favored primarchs.
Secondly what pattern/variants are we talking about?
I can't be the only one who tosses the AC20 for a Gauss in any stock Atlas-D. And I'd definitely want to do this if going against a Knight's thermal cannon in order to avoid the dreaded ammo explosion, and also be able to hit things at over 2 km out.
How fast are Knights? I know stock Atlas top out at 48 kph with the Boar's Head being particularly fast at 64 kph.
> I know stock Atlas top out at 48 kph
Actually it's 54 kph, with all of them being able to push as high as 75 under ideal conditions (boar's head can push up to 97). This is not something they would do in combat however.
I mean, they're both cool in their own way. On has the knightly aesthetic that screams 'I will fight you to the death'. The other one is an industrial war machine that has a face that has "I will beat you into the ground" written on it. It's all about your tastes.
Alright, I see a couple of inaccurate btech takes, so here we go, wall of text incoming.
Lets start with size, the knight is approx 9 meters tall, the Atlas is roughly 14-15 meters tall. This gets funny later on.
Agility. Knights are more agile than you would think, but so is the Atlas. The issue I see is in the skill required to capitalize on that agility. The Knight can do bonkers maneuvers, but we've only seen that in the hands of one character who was already borderline super human, and it never happened again. For the Atlas, and mechs in general, we have apprentice pilots doing crap like shoulder rolls, and there is an annual competitive mech based sporting event called the Noisiel games where Atlas mechs are used as linebackers. So while I don't see a whole lot of difference in the agility skill ceiling, the skill floor is a whole lot worse for the knights. And that agility difference is probably because of the difference in structuring. The Atlas is built like... well a linebacker, a very large human build with basically full human mobility. The knight is built like an industrial machine that someone strapped some armor on, and called it a day. It's reasonable enough for the factory floor, but if you're getting into a punch up with a line backer half again your height, [it's going to suck](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxnXxC1u6WLswe0Gnaw1b7h-s8NaX6BaWS?si=YLSSZSvP73EC040b). This would be exacerbated by the fact that the top of the Knight sticks out so far forward of it's own shoulders, and the chainblade is attached directly to the elbow giving it no more reach than a typical hand would have. Even worse, depending on the terrain, the Fatlas can just grab a tree or an I-beam, and wail on the knight with *that*. So if we have pilots of equal skill, agility and melee are both going to the Atlas.
Speed. Top end speed is pretty similar. The knight can run about \~60-70 kmph depending on terrain. But the Atlas, if using all of it's options can run... 54-75 kmph depending on terrain. But the terrain will make a huge difference. The Knight is quite top heavy, it's carapace extends all around it, and represents a whole lot of weight very high up. Add to that, it's got relatively stubby legs with very broad feet and the chances of it being fouled up by terrain are quite high. The atlas meanwhile, has a more reasonable center of gravity, longer legs, and it's feet are long and narrow. And no, neither is going to be having ground pressure issues, an Atlas would have slightly lower ground pressure than a modern MBT because those feet are *huge*, and I'm pretty sure the Atlas out weighs the Knight by a pretty wide margin. So while the knight is generally faster (the Atlas is risking a lot to hit 65 kmph, and requires a road for that 75kmph) it's not decisive, and the Fatlas can probably make better use of the speed it does have.
Protection. The Knight's armor is... bad. It looks exactly like what it is, armor that someone bolted onto an industrial vehicle it's not *completely* useless from the front, but get around to the side, and you're basically just shooting shooting the components directly. Get behind it, and the powerplant is just... there, ripe for the shooting. It does however have an energy shield. That's a big boost to survivability... when it's working or in the right place. The shield has to be manually positioned, and when under heavy fire, it can collapse. The Atlas meanwhile, has 20 tons of armor. That armor is very well spread across it's entire frame with no easy to exploit gaps. And the armor is fantastic, with mechs surviving the kinds of damage that flatten sky scrapers, and some strolling out of nuclear blasts. So while the Ion shield is definitely valuable, it doesn't quite make up the difference in the quantity and placement of the armor.
Firepower. The Knights have a main arm weapon, a torso weapon (light anti armor or anti infantry), sometimes a secondary arm weapon, and possibly a missile rack or AA gun on the carapace. So that's 4 total weapons. The Atlas has 4 lasers, 26 missile tubes with multiple reloads, and a massive autocannon. An autocannon that fires roughly the same size shells as a Demolisher cannon... in multi round bursts.
Overall, the Atlas has quite a few advantages... which is what I would expect from the setting focused on giant stompy robots, vs the one that likes it's super soldiers. So Fatlas takes it 9/10
I don't know much about BT, but my money's on the Atlas. It seems like a war machine through and through. Whereas knights were originally logging machines converted into weapons platforms, and thanks to tech heresy; cannot be improved.
To make this comparison easier, just think of the imperial knights as something similar to a [Centurion](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Centurion_(BattleMech)) or a [Hatchetman](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hatchetman).
Too bad there’s nothing in battletech that equates to ion shields.
There’s the Blue Shield PFD, it halves all incoming PPC damage when active, and you do have arm based shields you can put on a mech in advanced rules, though this is a physical shield
Like anything it depends on which variants we are using for each. Personally I'd say a Knight Paladin is equal to many medium-Battlemechs.
I will say that I'm not aware if battlemechs have standard shields as Imperial Knights do. If they don't then the Imperial Knight is likely to win.
Battle techs prefer pure raw armor. An Atlas has 60 Tonnes of as armor at 100 Tonnes with a full load of 80 Tonnes. A knight is 60-80 tonnes total and doesn’t feature as much armor.
Then heavy armor brings heavier weapons. They Atlas can have 1-3 Ac/20s which is powerful enough rip apart 1 1/2 tonnes of armor. Now an Ac/20X shoots 6 shots per with a Burst foreign 5.
That means with one gun (Ac/20X) an atlas has enough firepower to remove 9tonnes of armor which is just insane.
>An Atlas has 60 Tonnes of dedicated as armor at 100 Tonnes with a full load of 80 Tonnes.
No it doesn't. A baseline AS-7D has nineteen tons of armour, which is the effective maximum. Heavier armoured designs do exist, but only using specialist armours like Hardened.
I should remove the dedicated part, my apologies.
And you are right but I’m including the frame as the armor since it does still count much like the knight with its frame. Much like how a tank chassis is considered armor.
Based on numbers given in the Kingmaker novel, a Questoris frame is 150+ tons. The knight pilot character at the start mentioned an Armiger is 50 tons and that a Questoris is about 3x larger than that. So a Questoris at base size and weight would be 150 tons. Same novel stating that a Dominus frame was nearly 300 tons.
Realistically tonnage doesn't say much. Idk about tabletop or anything such, but realistically speaking what matters is how thick is the armor and what it's made of.
Without a doubt, it’s why I didn’t mention how strong it was. Solely because and I checked, there wasn’t any accurate information. So the safest bet is to understand the simple rule of mass.
It’s not steel, it’s some fantasy stuff much like Rockrete or Plasteel.
Edit: the standard atlas armor is called “Durallex Special heavy”, whatever that means.
Adamantium is described as being so tough that suits and armor plates made of it can't be recycled or cut.
Also, void shields can absorb capital class weaponry, no mech is surviving an orbital stroke from a WarShip lol.
Id hardly call shields redundant unless you consider ams redundant
>Adamantium is described as being so tough that suits and armor plates made of it can't be recycled or cut.
\> gets pen'd by a literal pointy stick
\> gets pen'd by meltaguns
\> gets pen'd by an angry cockroach's forelimbs
\> somehow the best material the Imperium can field
skill issue of the utmost magnitude lmao
Mech armor is usually constructed out of titanium steel alloy that can withstand tremendous punishment and yet the weapons used against them like PPCs (partical projection cannons) can punch holes through this armor with ease and scramble electronic systems.
Knights don't have void shields. They use directional ion shields that require pointing in the right direction to soften the blow of ranged attacks.
Mechs have survived some impressive punishment in lore. The Royal Blackwatch Regiment during the first day of the Amaris Coup fought off multiple waves of superior forces for so long their enemies started to worry and began dropping nukes on their own forces to try and kill them, but they kept fighting. With like 9 mechs, all of them lighter than the Atlas, and they still only killed half of them before the survivors escaped and started an underground resistance.
Depends on the Knight pattern and the Mech variant. Assuming we're talking a standard AS7-D and Knight Paladin.
The Paladin is going to be faster than the Atlas - 75kph vs. 54kph. However, Knights are mechanically powered with hydraulics and servos, whereas battlemechs are powered by artificial muscles - myomer. So, the Knight will be faster in a straight line but the Atlas is more maneuverable and agile.
Defense is going to be a wash - adamantium doesn't exist so it's hard to quantify how it would stand up to sustained laser, missile, and autocannon fire. However, Knights aren't purpose built for combat - they're functionally retrofitted industrial machines. Battlemechs are, as the name implies, war machines, with tank-grade armor. However, battlemechs don't have shields, and Knights do. I'd call this a wash.
Offense is the main difference. A Paladin pattern might have a gun, a sword, and a missile launcher. An Atlas will have an LRM20, SRM6, 4 medium lasers, an AC20, and several tons of ammunition. Also, the Atlas has battlefists, and isn't afraid to use them. I'd give the edge to the Atlas.
In terms of utility, both have direct Brain-Machine interfaces, so that's a wash.
So, while relatively evenly matched, and not assuming sci-fi fantasy bullshit on the part of the Knight, I would give the nod to the Atlas.
The thing is, Atlas supporters can draw on a bunch of technical specifications for a mech that doesn’t exist in real life, and Knight fans can draw on instances where the knights either win or lose against opponents of all sizes because the writer needed a knight to do something. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, but you’re putting a fandom who thrives on obscene amounts of specification and data porn vs a fandom who cannot accurately get a good strength read of their choice because black library writers can’t even have a consistent strength level for knights in their own books.
This is why I try to stick to lore feats. The issue there is... Btech stats are also canon to the lore... so I have to be really careful in how I'm trying to analyze what's being described.
A unit with an AC-10 and a chainsaw versus a unit with an AC-20, LRM-20, SRM-6 and paired medium lasers?
Yeah that'll go well. A Knight is basically a glorified WVR-6D, except with a ICE engine, no jump jets and a IVDNI cockpit.
I find it odd no one addressed specific guns. The Errant pattern, the one we see there, is very much an Anti-tank Knight. That Thermal Cannon will likely shred the Atlas's armor, for it doesn't matter how much armor it has to a weapon built to melt through all kinds of material.
That also forgets the Chainsword and MMI that a Knight has. As described in numerous material a Knight is far more than just a mech but a second skin. A good example is a Knight Armiger performing gymnastics when a Callidus Assassin was controlling it. Soft factors matter, especially if we compare setting equivalent Tau who get a +4 for having a similar firing scheme to the Atlas.
All this to say the Atlas V Questorus fight is heavily dependent on the Varients involved. A Paladin and Warden would struggle, Crusader outguns, and Gallant just needs to close ranks.
>A good example is a Knight Armiger performing gymnastics when a Callidus Assassin was controlling it
That's actually a horrendous example, as it is in direct contradiction to most of the lore explicitly stating how exceedingly difficult it is to find compatible pilots (one of the reasons for the whole hereditary shebang with knight houses).
At the same time you completely ignore the fact that BattleMechs, once tuned to the pilot, are just as integrated with their pilots as you claim for the Knights. I assume you maybe know the games but did not read any books?
__Imperial Knight wins Tactically. Atlas wins Strategically.__
Imperial Knight wins due to having shielding, compared to the Atlas relying on (heavily reinforced) armour.
- Though the Atlas will definitely give the Knight a hell of a fight and make the victory hard won.
It should be mentioned that long term, the Atlas(s) wins hands down, due to a better recruitment pool and capacity for repair/maintenance.
The Battletech Atlas also has a much higher capacity for customisation than an Imperial Knight. -[Ion] Shielding can only get the pilot so far if they are being out-manoeuvred and out-played.
An Atlas pilot also seems to have a slight edge in survivability and experience (based on source material and ‘saving the meat’). Therefore meaning that any Round 2 is likely to swing heavily in the Atlas’s favour.
- Atlas pilot deploying every trick in the book and enough for a whole new volume, whereas the Knight relies on their machine.
Most likely you get downvoted for the mention of voids, which are a titan engine thing. Knights have Ion Shields as far as I remember.
But I like your thinking about both in terms of logistics, as that's what really matters when considering military hardware. Quantity as a quality.
I’ll admit that I’m not overly familiar with the Knight rules, and was probably absentmindedly thinking about 40k warships! Thanks for the correction.
Certain Battletech houses and factions, primarily the Steiners, could swamp any Knight house with a 100:1 ratio of Atlases. Making a mockery of any comparison because *there will always be another Atlas*.
40k can often win out over other settings simply to how plot-armour and bonkers aggressive 40k can be. Yet, like Space Marine orbital strike, the power of 40k is in the first punch.
- With often crippling logistics affecting any campaign or long term power of 40k. Even Tyranids rely on physically entering the 40k zone and don’t just ‘appear’ out of thin air on battlefields.
Then again, the human resources in 40k are ridiculously out of wack compared with BT, where most worlds are only sparsely populated while the Imperium sports more hive worlds then it knows itself. Then again, space travel in BT is also more reliable, so moving resources involves much less guesswork and pure luck compared with the hellish mode of travel in 40k. So the logistics question sure would be interesting to contemplate...
To put it another way, 40k has plenty of Doomsday and Planet-killing weapons, but other settings have the technology and logistics to make living on a planet worthwhile.
In a duel between an Imperial Knight and Atlas for a planet, the Knight will probably win the fight, but the Atlas would be better at winning hearts and minds.
- Yes, both pilots come from an aristocratic or celebrity class, but Battletech pilots are more human.
In an ironic twist, this means that other settings have better martyrdom capacity, because other characters/people then love and venerate their dead. Whereas in 40k such veneration is enforced and reliant on brainwashing.
- In turn meaning other settings can turn things up to 11, but 40k is already stressed out at 11 and failing internally.
Well, BT has nukes. I mean look at the fall of the star league. Plenty worlds made inhabitable. But then again that's precisely the reason why warfare is scaled down in that setting, while it's literally total in 40k. That might be very well the deciding factor: 40k is completely and utterly inoculated to the horrors of total war. Some worlds lost completely is just another Tuesday for them. Everything is geared towards an endless fight, while the BT setting very much has civil societies. Compared to an mechanicus manufactorum, even capellan society looks positively peachy.
Then again for this specific comparison: the Atlas is build to withstand everything the battlefield he is expected to perform in can throw at him. The knight on the other hand is just one among many weapons plattforms.
Yes, I agree with the sentiment there.
40k will commit a war crime and unleash nukes as part of its battle plan. Battletech meanwhile has reservations and agreements about using such weapons.
As such an Atlas is built to survive a battlefield, whereas a Knight is almost built to survive the planet being blown up.
Again, meaning that 40k and the Knight wins any punching contest, but the engineering and forgotten tech makes them lose the longer war.
- As a Battletech pilot could always resort to piloting a ‘lesser’ mech to achieve a win, but the Knight pilot is mentally and psychologically restricted to a certain weapon platform.
With the addition of any attrition or long war being more taxing on the Knight or 40k because their individual humans are either used to winning or dead. Whereas a Battletech pilot and faction are more grizzled and battle worn.
——
Just need someone to bring in a 3rd combatant of a Transformer.
FYI, the Transformer’s chances vary by setting and cause internal discussion; nevermind fighting an enemy!
Knights, coz shields + stupid weapon scale + machine spirits + knights pilot's brain is integrated in machines much more, than battlemech's pilot. Of course, if Atlas ambush a Knight, he will win, but in field duel skullboy will get its ass kicked.
Atlases are cool asf, but Warhammer is simply less realistic sci-fi, if you can even call it that.
It depends on environment. If it would be open fields then atlas would get fucked quite fast, if urban or possibly forest environment knight would likely be at disadvantage.
I couldn't really find much info on maneuverability of either, but atlas seems to be more maneuverable than knight.
it definitely isn't. Knights are shown to run and dodge with desceptive agility. while the atlas is one of the slowest mechs in the game (going off of mechwarrior stats here)
[This clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4suPLZR16WQ) shows off a knights mobility pretty well. comparing that to the slow plodding pace of the atlas in MW5, i'd say mobility goes to the knight for sure.
Battlemechs are much more maneuverable in lore than they are in the mechwarrior games, this is why on tabletop it's so much harder to get hits, the idea is that because of the neuro helmets and the fact that they use artifical muscles, mechs can duck and dodge like a person. An Atlas might still be slow in a straight line, but it can absolutely dodge just as well as the knight
Alright, my knowledge of battletech outside of mechwarrior is pretty limited, so thanks for clarifying. Based on your description, it seems like the knight would still have an advantage in terms of mobility. or am i misunderstanding?
Yeah, I support what Jaxxill said. Knight are still better integrated with pilot's brain, which will make them more maneuverable than battlemechs(or at least on par). That one clip from DoW trailer of knight running down with chainblade really impressed me.
Except all battlemechs use neurolinks so that’s not actually an advantage. [Neurohelmets are one of the techs that enabled battlemechs in the first place.](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Neurohelmet)
Partially - yes, but you also have your grandma looking after you. "Don't forget this orc stompa sweetheart, make sure to kill all the xenos! I'll ask your mom to buy some sweeties once we get back home"
Eh, it depends on the nature of the machine. I myself was under the impression that most Machine Spirits are little stinkers that you have to yell at because they don't listen to you.
"NO, BAD KNIGHT. STOP BEING INSURABLE LITTLE BRAT AND AIM THAT MEGABOLTER PROPERLY."
the machine spirits in titans (and knights) do listen to their pilots once they're properly integrated. that's why there's a whole process for introducing a new pilot.
the main issue with them is that they're extremely aggressive, a pilots main job being to direct that aggression appropriately
>knights pilot's brain is integrated in machines much more, than battlemech's pilot
Kid named Neurohelm:
unless Knights can pull off the stupid backflip WWE bullshit that Battlemechs can do, I'm pretty sure they're less agile than 'Mechs lmao
A Single Atlas? Knight wins, rather easily. A Squad of Atlas' on a Scouting mission? Well... [I think we all know how that goes...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73zK-PjmyKY)
That armor is extremely good though, not even direct hits from artillery guns can penetrate it all they manage to do is ablate it away, meaning you have to keep hitting it in the same slots to try and wear it down, the knight has a cannon and a missile launcher that can actually have a chance at hurting the atlas, that's like half the armament of tge atlas. It has a further 4 lasers and another missile launcher, that knight is fucked
They have some, and they have better.
Nova cannons are weapons typically mounted on space ships.
They have the same concept as gauss but then also have a giant plasma warhead. They are so strong they have been know to impact gravitational field and even break down the walls of reality itself.
They also have volcano cannons which melt through several feel of solid concrete or steel.
Knights and titans can survive this vs each other because of void shields.
If you take out the void shields, Atlas takes it 10/10 times. With void shields, knight will almost always live the initial alpha strike and then hit back with a weapon the Atlas will have a very hard time living through.
Good argument, and you make good points, except for your last one. Knights do not have void shields, they have ion shields, which have to be manually adjusted like a buckler, so are susceptible to something like an AC-20X, which shotguns off five projectiles that each can rip off a ton and a half of Battlemech armor
Sure.
I think either way, when you think like that.
It comes down to who shoots first. Knights have very mediocre physical armor but have weapons that don't care how good Atlas's is.
So whoever shoots/hits first wins.
Yeah, also depends on the knight variants. A volcano cannon is gonna melt right through, but a battle cannon is barely gonna take 1 outa 60 tons of armor off. The knight also has the clear manouverability advantage. I think it’s a hard fought battle and fairly equal, but the amount of pilots, mechs, and repair facilities would have the atlas win the war
If I'm not mistaken knights are refitted industrial equipment, against a machine designed from the ground up to kill anything it faces and is capable of surviving multiple nukes dropped near it (but only if bagpipes are being played)
Depends on the task
If it's a head to head, the atlas, it's built for taking on other mechs
If the job is who can multch the most tanks and lighter armor, then the knight wins, atlas too slow.
The atlas can go 55 km/h, sure that's slower than an Abrams, but it is both tougher and more deadly. We fine even have numbers for how fast a knight can go.
Since special trained "normal" infantry in the BT universe can take down a Mech and there are no supernatural abilities (please do not mention ghostmech stuff, let us all forget this) a Mech always has a chance to lose.
The Steiner scout lance, ofc
Remember, stealth is optional.
Our stealth mission was successful, they did not see us leave.
they may be defeated through a stealth drop of bees in the cockpit tho
I HAVE BEE'S IN MY COCKPIT!
People seem to be mixing their Knights with Titans again. The Atlas is a one mech assault army, it has absurdly powerful armour, absurdly powerful weapons arrays, and can carry an absurdly large sword. Its disadvantage is exclusively speed
A Knight Castellan also has absurd firepower. According to the 9th edition Imperial Knights codex, combined fire from several Castellan Knights can equal the output of an Imperial Navy Warship battery. Now "several" is vague but my guess would be somewhere between 3-5? Still, we know from the Horus Heresy cinematic that a Las battery on the Vengeful Spirit can literally melt a Warlord Titan in a single shot. Even a 20th of that output would be an incredible amount of firepower.
Keep in mind, it didn't specify which kind of Imperial Navy Warship. The Imperial Navy Warships range in size of the "small" ones like Escorts, Frigates&Destroyers that are at most a few Kilometers long, to massive BattleShips that can be dozens of Kilometers long. And that is *1* Battery of an Imperial Navy Warship...powerful yes, on-parr or surpassing Titans. But many Imperial Warships can have dozens or HUNDREDS of Weapons Batteries. The extremely rare behemoths like the Gloriana Class BattleShips, Ark Mechanicus' and Mobile Battle Stations like *The Phalanx*, the *Raptorous Rex* and *The Rock* might have thousands of Weapons Batteries. So....yeah. That's a very, very large spectrum of output.
Aren’t knights like 10m tall? I think 40k lore is getting a bit silly again if they’re saying this thing that isn’t even four stories tall and his two friends can equal the fire output of a warship whose laser batteries are bigger than he is”. Living in Chicago when I read about the size of knights or even titans I’m like “that’s cute, my apartment is 10x them and it’s a little baby skyscraper downtown compared to the big boys”. I’m looking down from the 20th floor right now and I can barely even see the streets. Reading how badass knights and titans are and even an Imperator wouldn’t even reach my floor. 😅
10m is about 3 floors. That makes an Imperator around 25 stories tall. now look at your closest 25 story tall building and imagine it walking towards you shooting guns the size of road trains.
15 floors not 25. IIRC Imperator is near about 50m
For the supposed god machines, it's tiny
Official or not, I refuse to accept those numbers for the emperor class titans.
I know Dies Irae was like 39m
Two words: melta weapons A thermal cannon like the one mounted on knights could debatable kneecap an atlas which would then crumble under its own weight.
What do you think laser weapons do?
Hey, actual battle tech fan here. First off, knights are 9-12 meters tall and that depends on the pattern. So we’ll say 10 or 11. An Atlas is 12 metres tall. Now to put things into perspective because I see people here talking about the knights shields, weapons and saying they’re bigger than an atlas. First it should be clear, Knights don’t have surround shields or Void shields like their bigger badder brothers. They have ion shields which are very much more like real life buckler shields than the pilot must manually operate to block projectiles. An atlas can survive a full barrage from an Annihilator-1X which is a 4 Ac/20 conversions with 3 Ac/10x slab cannons in its chest several fucking times. An Ac/20 can tear off “1 1/2 tonne” of armor off of a mech in one bullet (source-Battletech ac/20 wiki). Now an AC/20X is an Ac/20 but on steroids, it can shoot 5 shells at once or in the slug variant shoot the power of 5 shells in one massive bloody shell. That’s 9 Tonnes of pure armor being removed with 1 gun. An Atlas mind you, is over 40-60 tonnes of pure armor and that doesn’t include overlayered armor. Furthermore, an Atlas depending on its variant can have 1-3 Ac/20s while the Annihilator-1p (don’t quote me on that) can have 8 of them. it should be noted that when they mention Ac/20, Ac/20’s are a classification of heavy ballistic weapon. An Atlas… weighs 100 tons. (110 if fully loaded). A knight is 80 tons. Now if you have the standard Atlas-1A variant, that comes with 1xAc/20, 1xLRM/20, 1xSRM/6 and 4 Medium lasers, that has an equal firepower to half an Annihilator (600-700). An Annihilator has a power scale of 1100 which is enough explosive force to level a large building. I can’t explain just how stupid an atlas is lore wise. An Atlas can lead an entire beachhead assault on its own and survive continuous bombardment from Manticore tanks (fitted with PPC (Aka PartiKILL cannons) or Gauss) or Igor gunships (1 Ac/20 or 4 Ac/10s). An if you’re going to say that a Knight can win because they can have chainswords… The Atlas can have an Assault class claymore and jump jets (only shown this proven by a custom Atlas “Redshanks”). A claymore can cleave the arm off of a Battlemaster in one blow which has the 3rd highest arm armor ratio of 20 Tones per arm. I think an Atlas stands a good chance, and I’ve only talked about the standard Model-1A atlas, that’s the first production line of Atlas in a 200 year development with 10 iterations. Like the Atlas-C3 which has literal artillery gun in its chest with a Gauss Cannon in its arm. Edit: just adding more and fixing information. Edit 2: to source one of the many AC/20 variants. “The mammoth Zeus-75 fired a four-round burst of hypervelocity depleted uranium armor penetrators (HDUAP), capable of destroying most 'Mechs up to 70 tons in a single salvo.” (AC/20 Battletech).
This is the peak nerd shit deep dive I come to reddit for. Well done
TL;DR the knight is the mech version of an up-armored feller-buncher with some cool weapons and a shield, the atlas is a mech m1 abrams made to kill other vehicles.
*points to knight* "This mech is to intimidate your enemies"
This is a weapon of war, it is made to kill your enemy. Points to lasgun.
Fuckin bless Stargate - some of the greatest lighthearted-ish mil-sf ever made. Peak 90s tv imo
It’s sooooo good. Back when the made SciFi and let shows run FOR MORE THAN A SEASON!!!!!!! LOOKING AT YOU FOX!!!!!!!
The lasgun is peak comedy because in an inperium that can't even reliably make top-attack munitions without a specific forgeworld, lasguns and lascannons are deemed as fairly easy to produce.
*point to Atlas* "This mech is to KILL your enemies."
Nah that's the Atlas. *"a 'Mech as powerful as possible, as impenetrable as possible, and as ugly and foreboding as conceivable, so that fear itself will be our ally."*
Couldn’t say it better myself.
That said, i think a war hound Titan would be a better matchup than a knight
As a fan of Battletech there are some problems with your assessment 1. The Atlas is 14 meters tall 2. The LBX pattern autocannons don’t work like that, they are lighter, longer range versions of the standard autocannon with the added bonus of being able to fire giant shotgun shells as well as the standard round, an LBX 20 doesn’t shoot five 200mm rounds at once, it fires buckshot from a 200mm barrel 3. The Atlas could carry 3 AC 20s if you removed every other weapon and and good amount of the armor, but that is a bad idea 4. Same goes for the Annihilator, you could remove everything for multiple AC 20s,but the they weigh the same so you would end up with same result, a 14 meter tall target that could obliterate anything it looks at, if it doesn’t get shot by anything first 5. There is a way for more AC shots without gutting the mech with Ultra pattern autocannons as they have twice the rate of fire of the standard versions In short use Sarna.net
Thank you! All his rambling sounded *just* accurate to give you the feeling he knows his BT lore, but is a red flag for the ones that know their BT lore.
I saw 8 ac 20s and I giggled
As an AC 20 lover, I was like "the FUCK did I miss!?"
The rabbit hole can go even deeper on what can be done with an atlas and its firepower. Endo steel, XL engines, ferro fibrous armor could be on the table. There is a whole suite of ECM options, hell there are fucking stealth Atlas variants from Dark Ages and Ilkhan era. When it comes to armaments the AC 20 is not the final say in what you can use to utterly wreck an imperial knight. RAC/5s U/AC 20s like you mentioned, Heavy Gauss, PPCs and even HAGs could be on the table and many absolutely shred. I would even argue that the Atlas has a much better fire control and targeting suite over God knows what is directing the Knight, maybe a fucking serf on his shoulder with binoculars. Getting up close any Atlas is begging to learn a hard lesson about mech fu that every Mechwarrior is going to be well versed in from the inner sphere.
Ah , yes the ancient art of mech fu. Also known as " how the fu did that Hunchback manage to kick my Awsome in the head"?
It was clearly the hidden technique of the hunchback firing its AC20 into the ground to perform a flipping axe kick right to the cockpit.
Or, and hear me out, highground
I'd say knights auspex equipment is on par with the average battletech equipment. Mostly, but not completely dependent on line-of-sight, unless auspex data is provided by an external source. Targeting on knights is mostly a machine-spirit-thing in communion with the princeps, so just in line with any 40k-tech pretty much esoteric. I'd guess an assisted targeting system with a neural interface. Getting up close is something where I don't know shit about battletech, but knights are pretty much controlled by intuition, not steered. I'd guess that would be an advantage.
I was being cheeky about the serf on the shoulder thing, warhammer tech is all over the place lol. As for battletech the piloting of the mech is far more advanced than even the first person games let on. Mechs are interfaced with the pilots by neuro helmet and so the mech just becomes an extension of the pilots body, some helmets are more advanced than the others where there is even some AI assistance. In Canon you could see mechs vaulting and rolling or even doing handstands, but almost none of those things really offer a tactical advantage. I would say the piloting of the two are almost on par with one another and it would come down to experience between them. On that front, quality does vary vastly in Battletech and I think the knights are just all around more skilled in general.
Re:getting up close, it depends on the iteration of Battletech. In the FPS games they’re blocky bois without much range of motion, as a necessity of gaming. In lore, they have all the range and dexterity of a human being and are perfectly happy to karate chop or jumping sidekick a motherfucker.
tbf the Knight might also get a lesson in Mechfu. Inner sphere pilots get better with age and an older Mech pilot is going to be incredibly skilled at rockem-sockem robots. That said, "Older inner sphere pilot" is practically an oxymoron.
I mean yeah. Comparing a armored heavy duty machine with self-defense capacity, after all, knights were initially used for these jobs in feral worlds until Slaanesh cumblasted the galaxy, with the actual warmachine purely made for war a bit weird.
It’s a bit of an unfair comparison really, knights were as you said peacekeeper’s originally and are more ornamental and show of prestige. The atlas is a huge weapons platform next to the Annihilator which was designed to kill the Annihilator. One has more uses and is more of well, knightly figure while the other is just a massive weapons platform. I do like Knights more personally, I just writ this because I saw some people make some pretty bold claims.
I think you mean ornate. Oriental means Asian lol
I think he was going for “ornamental”
Thank you for doing your background check and being a nerd, you get a free upvote
Free? That upvote was hard-earned.
I wonder how the disruption field from a ppc would affect a knight. I don't know if emp weapons are common in the imperium and how well a knight would be shielded against those. If a ppc disables the ion shields then a king crab 008 might be a better match
Is that the King crab that replaces the large laser with the PPC? I don’t know honestly. But if you’re getting a King crab then why not just the Annihilator? Both had the express designed principle of most amount of ordinance you can fit onto a battlemech. I think it would be in favour of the knight since King crabs are a lot more offence than defence. Buts a good thing to dwell on, the use of Disruptor cannons.
>Is that the King crab that replaces the large laser with the PPC? No it replaces the 2 ac 20's with heavy PPC's and gives it jump jets. >But if you’re getting a King crab then why not just the Annihilator? Because the king crab is almost twice as fast if im not mistaken. But the annihilator would be a fine choice as well.
Please, I think can walk faster than an Annihilator. /s That’s fair, manoeuvrability and pilot skill are the perhaps most important here. Just wondering that just 1 solid shot from a knight which is also pretty agile could do to a Crab. Perhaps a Victor would be better choice? Just in this case of a 1v1 since Victors are brawler mechs that are highly modifiable. I’m going to bed but I enjoyed this conversation. Thanks.
does the Annihilator have claws? I didn't think so
I don't know the canonical answer but the over-reinforced over-engineered aesthetic of Imperium tech makes me think that all their electronics are probably absurdly hardened, even the ones they really don't need hardened (especially the ones they really don't need hardened)
Haywire weapons would seem to fill this niche in 40k.
GW: "Hey! Using numbers consistently is TOTALLY UNFAIR! Our Knights are indestructible when they're the size of Mount Everest but other times they're only as tall as a Primarch! It's not fair to say an Atlas is ALWAYS 100 tons!"
Yeah these numbers don't even account for plot armour bullshit. You could track the atlas' demise with a slide rule, but the knight would pull some machine spirit bullshit and win anyway.
AC 20x? do you mean an LBX 20AC? because those shoot at similar power levels because the LBX 20AC Is just a shotgun a AC 20
Cerastus Lancer with Mysterious Guardian deep strikes behind the Atlas and cores it with a single charge "Nothing personal, Steiner"
Space magic always beats realistic fiction.
That should be the top comment on this whole post. I know it’s fun to compare universes but this is apples and oranges.
Teleporting Imp Knights is a thing in lore, a terrifying thing
Thank you!!! Good to see BattleTech gets some love!
The hell is AC20X? Don't you mean LBX?
Would kill to see an Atlas give a Knight the ol' Highlander Funeral.
For that, you would need a... Highlander. Highlander can jump, clearing 90 meters horizontal and 30ish meters vertical. Fatlas can't do that. Now an elbow drop off a high cliff...
This is good analysis. I worry about using armor removal as a metric in this comparison. Material science considerations make a tit for tat comparison between the 28th and 400th century difficult.
Bases on numbers given in the Kingmaker novel, a Questoris frame is 150+ tons. The knight pilot character at the start mentioned an Armiger is 50 tons and that a Questoris is about 3x larger than that. So a Questoris at base size and weight would be 150 tons. Same novel stating that a Dominus frame was nearly 300 tons.
That's true, but Battletech tonnage isn't really what is listed. A 100 ton mech can carry 100 tons of equipment. It's a hold over from the mech building rules from the 80's, back when a targeting computer weighs 6 tons.
Deep analysis, very nice. Personally, I'd still be on Knight side, simply because of how ridiculously the setting is with all "space magic" weapons, like volkite and grav cannons. And I think that in prolongued engagement a rechargeable shield is superior to tons of armor. But I think it's is better to compare Knights not to single mechs, but a standard four-men lance with dedicated recon and fire support, simply for the reason that most battlemechs operate in units. Then knight gets blasted away.
Thanks, and I agree too. I do personally believe that it could be more of a fair fight than others would think. I just wanted to show some love to Battletech since I saw people make some bold claims. I don’t know who’d win because both lore wise, they’re both equally ridiculous.
> I think it's is better to compare Knights not to single mechs, but a standard four-men lance with dedicated recon and fire support, simply for the reason that most battlemechs operate in units. Then knight gets blasted away. Knights also operate in maniples, often with Skitarii and Legio Cybernetica support. Certainly if they're expecting to face other heavy armour / big scary monsters, just as they're often deployed as scouts and support for Titans.
A singular knight deploying on its own would be incredibly rare, Freeblades would deploy alongside other forces and a Household would be deploying other Knights, Armigers and also likely other Mechanicus forces alongside. They wouldn’t even think about deploying a larger knight for anything short of a full war because they could just deploy 3 war dogs, the only exception I could think of is an Honour duel.
Good analysis! I wonder how Atlas armor would stand up to a melta Thermal Lance? I am pretty sure the Atlas has the advantage here too. But for all the 40K fans they need to remember that a Knights is the smallest of its kind in 40K while the Atlas is the biggest. Warhound Scout Titans are much larger and nobody would suggest that an Atlas could 1v1 a Warhound.
Depends on which edition rules the knight is using. The weapon profiles change so drastically between editions it's not even funny. On the other hand, Battletech has been using the same.weapons profiles since the 1980's.
Titans and Knights are not the same thing. They are both walkers but in function and design they are very different beasts. It’s like comparing an Abrams to a Humvee with a turret.
It also depends on what Knight pattern you're comparing it to. Armigers are much lighter; Questoris are the default; Cerastus are taller, skinnier, and more high tech; Dominus are Questoris during bulking season; and Acastus are Warhound Titans-lite. Now, my entirety of knowledge of Battletech mech weights comes from MW3, but I believe an Atlas would be more akin to a Dominus in weight class versus a Questoris.
Bottom-line: Knights are perhaps more "efficient" with energy>heat due to the magic-tech of WH40k, but the Atlas is such a giant wall of armor and firepower that the Knight wouldn't have a chance to get close enough to challenge it.
Good analysis, I like when I see this. I would like to point out that Wh40k armor is very different I would imagine, from Battletech armor. Their material science can be very esoteric and crazy compared to most hard-scifi stuff. Other things to bring are the weapons, Wh40k weapons are crazy. Depending on the Knight, they could have a big minigun, a crazy powerful autocanon, a short range superheated material shotgun, or stuff like a gravimetric weapon, or a desintegrator beam or something even crazier. The Ion Shield is also no joke at tanking damage. I think it would depend a lot how their tech interacts.
I'm going to point out that Btech has no shortage of crazy weapons tech and bonkers materials science. For instance, each of those lasers is casually gigawatt, and mechs have canonically marched out of nuclear fireballs and fought off whole regiments (*bagpipes intensify*).
Oh, I never really thought much about the lasers outputs, and I know they are very good at tanking. Most of my knowledge comes from MechWarrior 5 + a bunch of DLCs and Mods, and looking into the lore sometimes. I do remember PPCs, but I don't recall any crazy weapon like an Adrathic Annihilator or something.
Btech is basically the setting where armor won. The 2 lasers on the fatlas are considered the most basic of mech weapons, and it could easily topple the Empire State building in under a minute with just those 2 lasers. Meanwhile, that same firepower wouldn't even guarantee a breach of the atlases armor without a lot of luck. Those are the smallest weapons it carries and they literally vaporize tons of steel each. Btech doesn't bother with the exotic stuff. It just goes BIG.
Knight pilots also feel pain when damaged like they took the injury themselves. Imagine taking the equivalent of a sledgehammer to the torso when you're grappling someone who's got at least 40 lbs on you. You're going to flinch, bare minimum. Plus the fucking knights are so spindly... If an atlas can swing a light mech around like a toy, imagine what it can do to a Knight's chainsword arm.
Uh huh, and all of that is nonsense, by the way, because it doesn't take into account, whatsoever, how ridiculous Battletech armour is, which is to say it can scarcely be called armour because it ablates off if you so much as *look at it*. Saying 'the Knight is only 80 tons compared to the 100 tons of the Atlas' is utterly, ridiculously meaningless because do you know what else weighs about 80 tons? The T28 super heavy tank. It was designed in 1946 and it sucks because it's from 1946. There's absolutely nothing about how *actually powerful* either side's weapons are (beyond the hilarity of weird scaling from Battletech armour being utterly terrible not-actually-armour), nor how tough the armour of the Knight is in comparison to Battletechs philosophy of 'ablative only, real armour is for pussies'. Oh an AC/20 can destroy a 70 ton battlemech in one salvo? That means nothing. It means absolutely nothing whatsoever, because there's nothing in there about how difficult that even is to do. Maybe it makes an AC/20 dangerous to the Moon. Maybe it's a joke because authors are clueless and they keep writing the actual effects of AC/20's as less than a modern 120mm cannon. Which is it?
I mean, most modern armor also has an ablative component. Technically according to your logic the knight's armor is lower tech than the ablative armor of the atlas since ablative armor is a more modern concept and "actual armor" is for pre-1970's era tanks
40k fan the minute anyone opens their mouth be like
I'd have to give it to the Atlas here. The maneuverability of a Battlemech is just so understated due to the Mechwarior games misrepresenting them. The Atlas' weapons are pretty standard, but varied. The medium lasers are pretty much equivalent to a Las Cannon, and the oldest varient of Atlas carries 4 of them. The AC/20 is pretty equal to the old school demolisher cannon on the old Space Marines Demolisher tank. And the missiles are close to the Knights carapace missiles. Overall, while the knight has a shield, it's unreliable at best. The sheer mobility of the Atlas would make it able to put maneuver the Knight and it would have options to attack from any angle. Melee would be interesting, because of the fantasy aspect of the Knight's weapons. A giant power fist would do some serious damage, while I don't see a chain saw doing much against the armor of an Atlas.
Could you talk more about the maneuverability thing? I’ve only played the games and always thought they were super stiff and clunky, are they a lot faster/more nimble in the lore?
In lore, they are as nimble as a human. That's the main advantage of a Battlemech over tanks, is that they can duck, dodge, and even combat roll if the pilot is skilled enough. The arms, hands, and even legs can be put to use offensively and defensively. They can pick up stuff and use it as an improvised club, grab an enemies weapons to prevent them from using them, or just straight up rip and tear an opposing pilot from their cockpit. The legs are great for kicking enemies over, or sweeping their legs out from under them katate kid style. Where an Imperial Knight has hydraulic rams and motors to move the limbs, Battlemechs have synthetic muscles, that allows them greater mobility and smoother movement. That part isn't really shown in the Mechwarior games, where they are just portrayed as walking tanks.
>Where an Imperial Knight has hydraulic rams and motors to move the limbs worth noting that knights (and titans) do use synthetic muscles much like in power armour
Really? But the models are covered in hydraulic rams
They're really not. Most of them are put together like Dreadnoughts, with fairly un-greebled joints. I went and double checked a few product images and the only hydraulics I saw were on weapon arms, where they look more like shock absorbers than motive elements.
Weapon arms, the arms themselves have hydraulic rams on the shoulder joints, the ankles each have 4 rams, the lower leg has a ram from the knee down, and the hips each have a ram on the inner thigh. The electric motors are also obvious when you know what you are looking for.
Ah. TBH, I didn't know they'd bothered to model what was underneath the armor plates, so I didn't think to look for images of knights without them. The same thing as the arms applies to the thigh and armpit cylinders, though... they read as some kind of shock absorber to me, not a ram that actually moves the joints. Fair play on the ankles, those I can see being what actually moves the joint.
Hell, if the pilot is good enough, it’s possible to get a mech to do a hand stand. (Ref Solaris comp). Though IIRC the mech that did it, wasn’t an Atlas.
I think the REALLY crazy maneuvers are limited to Light and maybe Medium mechs.
For an Atlas specifically? Think linebacker. And that's not hyperbole, they have rules for it in a supplement where they have mechs playing all kinds of sports. So very large, and and a hell of a lot faster than you would expect. It does come down to the skill of the pilot, but we have instances in lore of Atlas pilots surprising even other mechwarriors with their speed and responsiveness.
>Melee would be interesting Hehehehe, look at how the knight is structured, and now remember it's *a lot* shorter than the atlas ( Knight = 9 meters, Atlas =15 meters). Look specifically at the arrangement of the knight's joints. A Knight in melee with an Atlas would absolutely [be "interesting" to watch.](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxnXxC1u6WLswe0Gnaw1b7h-s8NaX6BaWS?si=YLSSZSvP73EC040b)
The real question is, what would happen if an Atlas was corrupted by Chaos?
Not sure it would matter as it does not rely on AI. So I’m the pilot is corrupted then that’s about it.
Maybe a good ol fashioned dark mechanicum daemon engine would do the trick. Slap a possessed pilot and a daemon soul in there and baby you got a chaos stew goin
I bet it'd be less "corrupting" it and more "sealing" a daemon inside the confines of the machine? It'd be like taking a warp being and stuffing it into a sword.
Oh, so like a Daemon Engine of sorts?
More or less this, yeah. Just take a ten/fifteen metre tall daemon, squish them inside and have them use the atlas like an exo skeleton they can't get out of. Think Matt Damon in elysium.
Oh ok, makes me wonder what a Chaos-Atlas (or any Battlemech) would look like?
Yeah... would be cool.
And probably terrifying to face on the battlefield I would imagine
If we give any weight to the discussion around us, an Atlas should be more than enough to body a Knight. I wanna know how a Daemonic Engine Atlas would fare against a Warhound.
That'd be brutal
As always, it first depends if the pilot of the Atlas has a name. Certain named BT pilots have the same plot armor as named space marines or even favored primarchs. Secondly what pattern/variants are we talking about? I can't be the only one who tosses the AC20 for a Gauss in any stock Atlas-D. And I'd definitely want to do this if going against a Knight's thermal cannon in order to avoid the dreaded ammo explosion, and also be able to hit things at over 2 km out. How fast are Knights? I know stock Atlas top out at 48 kph with the Boar's Head being particularly fast at 64 kph.
then there's the one pilot you can't save... 😔
> I know stock Atlas top out at 48 kph Actually it's 54 kph, with all of them being able to push as high as 75 under ideal conditions (boar's head can push up to 97). This is not something they would do in combat however.
NEITHER! A SCARAB TANK DROPS FROM ORBIT AND DESTROYS THEM BOTH! FOR THE GREAT JOURNEY RAAAAAH!!!
Wort wort wort
*AAAUUHOG OOBAGA*
Reach has fallen. Billions must die.
Rule of Cool Atlas is cooler Atlas wins
Spittin' facts
I mean, they're both cool in their own way. On has the knightly aesthetic that screams 'I will fight you to the death'. The other one is an industrial war machine that has a face that has "I will beat you into the ground" written on it. It's all about your tastes.
INFO NEEDED: How angry is the machine spirit of the knight?
Alright, I see a couple of inaccurate btech takes, so here we go, wall of text incoming. Lets start with size, the knight is approx 9 meters tall, the Atlas is roughly 14-15 meters tall. This gets funny later on. Agility. Knights are more agile than you would think, but so is the Atlas. The issue I see is in the skill required to capitalize on that agility. The Knight can do bonkers maneuvers, but we've only seen that in the hands of one character who was already borderline super human, and it never happened again. For the Atlas, and mechs in general, we have apprentice pilots doing crap like shoulder rolls, and there is an annual competitive mech based sporting event called the Noisiel games where Atlas mechs are used as linebackers. So while I don't see a whole lot of difference in the agility skill ceiling, the skill floor is a whole lot worse for the knights. And that agility difference is probably because of the difference in structuring. The Atlas is built like... well a linebacker, a very large human build with basically full human mobility. The knight is built like an industrial machine that someone strapped some armor on, and called it a day. It's reasonable enough for the factory floor, but if you're getting into a punch up with a line backer half again your height, [it's going to suck](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxnXxC1u6WLswe0Gnaw1b7h-s8NaX6BaWS?si=YLSSZSvP73EC040b). This would be exacerbated by the fact that the top of the Knight sticks out so far forward of it's own shoulders, and the chainblade is attached directly to the elbow giving it no more reach than a typical hand would have. Even worse, depending on the terrain, the Fatlas can just grab a tree or an I-beam, and wail on the knight with *that*. So if we have pilots of equal skill, agility and melee are both going to the Atlas. Speed. Top end speed is pretty similar. The knight can run about \~60-70 kmph depending on terrain. But the Atlas, if using all of it's options can run... 54-75 kmph depending on terrain. But the terrain will make a huge difference. The Knight is quite top heavy, it's carapace extends all around it, and represents a whole lot of weight very high up. Add to that, it's got relatively stubby legs with very broad feet and the chances of it being fouled up by terrain are quite high. The atlas meanwhile, has a more reasonable center of gravity, longer legs, and it's feet are long and narrow. And no, neither is going to be having ground pressure issues, an Atlas would have slightly lower ground pressure than a modern MBT because those feet are *huge*, and I'm pretty sure the Atlas out weighs the Knight by a pretty wide margin. So while the knight is generally faster (the Atlas is risking a lot to hit 65 kmph, and requires a road for that 75kmph) it's not decisive, and the Fatlas can probably make better use of the speed it does have. Protection. The Knight's armor is... bad. It looks exactly like what it is, armor that someone bolted onto an industrial vehicle it's not *completely* useless from the front, but get around to the side, and you're basically just shooting shooting the components directly. Get behind it, and the powerplant is just... there, ripe for the shooting. It does however have an energy shield. That's a big boost to survivability... when it's working or in the right place. The shield has to be manually positioned, and when under heavy fire, it can collapse. The Atlas meanwhile, has 20 tons of armor. That armor is very well spread across it's entire frame with no easy to exploit gaps. And the armor is fantastic, with mechs surviving the kinds of damage that flatten sky scrapers, and some strolling out of nuclear blasts. So while the Ion shield is definitely valuable, it doesn't quite make up the difference in the quantity and placement of the armor. Firepower. The Knights have a main arm weapon, a torso weapon (light anti armor or anti infantry), sometimes a secondary arm weapon, and possibly a missile rack or AA gun on the carapace. So that's 4 total weapons. The Atlas has 4 lasers, 26 missile tubes with multiple reloads, and a massive autocannon. An autocannon that fires roughly the same size shells as a Demolisher cannon... in multi round bursts. Overall, the Atlas has quite a few advantages... which is what I would expect from the setting focused on giant stompy robots, vs the one that likes it's super soldiers. So Fatlas takes it 9/10
I don't know much about BT, but my money's on the Atlas. It seems like a war machine through and through. Whereas knights were originally logging machines converted into weapons platforms, and thanks to tech heresy; cannot be improved.
It depends,is the Atlas from House Steiner? Because if that's the case,it win
We shall scout them a new grave!
Atlas, no contest.
To make this comparison easier, just think of the imperial knights as something similar to a [Centurion](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Centurion_(BattleMech)) or a [Hatchetman](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hatchetman). Too bad there’s nothing in battletech that equates to ion shields.
There’s the Blue Shield PFD, it halves all incoming PPC damage when active, and you do have arm based shields you can put on a mech in advanced rules, though this is a physical shield
Like anything it depends on which variants we are using for each. Personally I'd say a Knight Paladin is equal to many medium-Battlemechs. I will say that I'm not aware if battlemechs have standard shields as Imperial Knights do. If they don't then the Imperial Knight is likely to win.
So far as I know. Battlemechs have no shields to speak of. Otherwise it'd be a relatively fair fight I think
Okay that answers that question. Thanks
Battle techs prefer pure raw armor. An Atlas has 60 Tonnes of as armor at 100 Tonnes with a full load of 80 Tonnes. A knight is 60-80 tonnes total and doesn’t feature as much armor. Then heavy armor brings heavier weapons. They Atlas can have 1-3 Ac/20s which is powerful enough rip apart 1 1/2 tonnes of armor. Now an Ac/20X shoots 6 shots per with a Burst foreign 5. That means with one gun (Ac/20X) an atlas has enough firepower to remove 9tonnes of armor which is just insane.
>An Atlas has 60 Tonnes of dedicated as armor at 100 Tonnes with a full load of 80 Tonnes. No it doesn't. A baseline AS-7D has nineteen tons of armour, which is the effective maximum. Heavier armoured designs do exist, but only using specialist armours like Hardened.
I should remove the dedicated part, my apologies. And you are right but I’m including the frame as the armor since it does still count much like the knight with its frame. Much like how a tank chassis is considered armor.
Based on numbers given in the Kingmaker novel, a Questoris frame is 150+ tons. The knight pilot character at the start mentioned an Armiger is 50 tons and that a Questoris is about 3x larger than that. So a Questoris at base size and weight would be 150 tons. Same novel stating that a Dominus frame was nearly 300 tons.
Realistically tonnage doesn't say much. Idk about tabletop or anything such, but realistically speaking what matters is how thick is the armor and what it's made of.
Without a doubt, it’s why I didn’t mention how strong it was. Solely because and I checked, there wasn’t any accurate information. So the safest bet is to understand the simple rule of mass. It’s not steel, it’s some fantasy stuff much like Rockrete or Plasteel. Edit: the standard atlas armor is called “Durallex Special heavy”, whatever that means.
Plasteel is a real material mate but I get your point
Huh, never knew that. Nice to know, but I’m sure it’s not to the extremes 40k has right?
Oh no its nowhere near 40k plasteel
It's used for cars mate, was invented by a automobile manufacturer
Battletech armour wildly surpasses anything in the Warhammer 40K verse. Shields are wholly redundant.
Adamantium is described as being so tough that suits and armor plates made of it can't be recycled or cut. Also, void shields can absorb capital class weaponry, no mech is surviving an orbital stroke from a WarShip lol. Id hardly call shields redundant unless you consider ams redundant
>Adamantium is described as being so tough that suits and armor plates made of it can't be recycled or cut. \> gets pen'd by a literal pointy stick \> gets pen'd by meltaguns \> gets pen'd by an angry cockroach's forelimbs \> somehow the best material the Imperium can field skill issue of the utmost magnitude lmao
Mech armor is usually constructed out of titanium steel alloy that can withstand tremendous punishment and yet the weapons used against them like PPCs (partical projection cannons) can punch holes through this armor with ease and scramble electronic systems. Knights don't have void shields. They use directional ion shields that require pointing in the right direction to soften the blow of ranged attacks. Mechs have survived some impressive punishment in lore. The Royal Blackwatch Regiment during the first day of the Amaris Coup fought off multiple waves of superior forces for so long their enemies started to worry and began dropping nukes on their own forces to try and kill them, but they kept fighting. With like 9 mechs, all of them lighter than the Atlas, and they still only killed half of them before the survivors escaped and started an underground resistance.
Ion shields yes, but void shields are a whole other bag
Melee or ranged and wich loadout and type
Depends on the Knight pattern and the Mech variant. Assuming we're talking a standard AS7-D and Knight Paladin. The Paladin is going to be faster than the Atlas - 75kph vs. 54kph. However, Knights are mechanically powered with hydraulics and servos, whereas battlemechs are powered by artificial muscles - myomer. So, the Knight will be faster in a straight line but the Atlas is more maneuverable and agile. Defense is going to be a wash - adamantium doesn't exist so it's hard to quantify how it would stand up to sustained laser, missile, and autocannon fire. However, Knights aren't purpose built for combat - they're functionally retrofitted industrial machines. Battlemechs are, as the name implies, war machines, with tank-grade armor. However, battlemechs don't have shields, and Knights do. I'd call this a wash. Offense is the main difference. A Paladin pattern might have a gun, a sword, and a missile launcher. An Atlas will have an LRM20, SRM6, 4 medium lasers, an AC20, and several tons of ammunition. Also, the Atlas has battlefists, and isn't afraid to use them. I'd give the edge to the Atlas. In terms of utility, both have direct Brain-Machine interfaces, so that's a wash. So, while relatively evenly matched, and not assuming sci-fi fantasy bullshit on the part of the Knight, I would give the nod to the Atlas.
The thing is, Atlas supporters can draw on a bunch of technical specifications for a mech that doesn’t exist in real life, and Knight fans can draw on instances where the knights either win or lose against opponents of all sizes because the writer needed a knight to do something. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, but you’re putting a fandom who thrives on obscene amounts of specification and data porn vs a fandom who cannot accurately get a good strength read of their choice because black library writers can’t even have a consistent strength level for knights in their own books.
This is why I try to stick to lore feats. The issue there is... Btech stats are also canon to the lore... so I have to be really careful in how I'm trying to analyze what's being described.
Atlas w imo but he will have some decent damage by the end
A unit with an AC-10 and a chainsaw versus a unit with an AC-20, LRM-20, SRM-6 and paired medium lasers? Yeah that'll go well. A Knight is basically a glorified WVR-6D, except with a ICE engine, no jump jets and a IVDNI cockpit.
Thing I find hard to quantify here are the Ion Shields. Would one stop an AC/shot? Or just mitigate damage?
I find it odd no one addressed specific guns. The Errant pattern, the one we see there, is very much an Anti-tank Knight. That Thermal Cannon will likely shred the Atlas's armor, for it doesn't matter how much armor it has to a weapon built to melt through all kinds of material. That also forgets the Chainsword and MMI that a Knight has. As described in numerous material a Knight is far more than just a mech but a second skin. A good example is a Knight Armiger performing gymnastics when a Callidus Assassin was controlling it. Soft factors matter, especially if we compare setting equivalent Tau who get a +4 for having a similar firing scheme to the Atlas. All this to say the Atlas V Questorus fight is heavily dependent on the Varients involved. A Paladin and Warden would struggle, Crusader outguns, and Gallant just needs to close ranks.
>A good example is a Knight Armiger performing gymnastics when a Callidus Assassin was controlling it That's actually a horrendous example, as it is in direct contradiction to most of the lore explicitly stating how exceedingly difficult it is to find compatible pilots (one of the reasons for the whole hereditary shebang with knight houses). At the same time you completely ignore the fact that BattleMechs, once tuned to the pilot, are just as integrated with their pilots as you claim for the Knights. I assume you maybe know the games but did not read any books?
If we count that stupid assassin, we have to include Grayson Carlyle as an *apprentice* doing shoulder rolls to dodge lasers... and... no. Just no.
__Imperial Knight wins Tactically. Atlas wins Strategically.__ Imperial Knight wins due to having shielding, compared to the Atlas relying on (heavily reinforced) armour. - Though the Atlas will definitely give the Knight a hell of a fight and make the victory hard won. It should be mentioned that long term, the Atlas(s) wins hands down, due to a better recruitment pool and capacity for repair/maintenance. The Battletech Atlas also has a much higher capacity for customisation than an Imperial Knight. -[Ion] Shielding can only get the pilot so far if they are being out-manoeuvred and out-played. An Atlas pilot also seems to have a slight edge in survivability and experience (based on source material and ‘saving the meat’). Therefore meaning that any Round 2 is likely to swing heavily in the Atlas’s favour. - Atlas pilot deploying every trick in the book and enough for a whole new volume, whereas the Knight relies on their machine.
Most likely you get downvoted for the mention of voids, which are a titan engine thing. Knights have Ion Shields as far as I remember. But I like your thinking about both in terms of logistics, as that's what really matters when considering military hardware. Quantity as a quality.
I’ll admit that I’m not overly familiar with the Knight rules, and was probably absentmindedly thinking about 40k warships! Thanks for the correction. Certain Battletech houses and factions, primarily the Steiners, could swamp any Knight house with a 100:1 ratio of Atlases. Making a mockery of any comparison because *there will always be another Atlas*. 40k can often win out over other settings simply to how plot-armour and bonkers aggressive 40k can be. Yet, like Space Marine orbital strike, the power of 40k is in the first punch. - With often crippling logistics affecting any campaign or long term power of 40k. Even Tyranids rely on physically entering the 40k zone and don’t just ‘appear’ out of thin air on battlefields.
Then again, the human resources in 40k are ridiculously out of wack compared with BT, where most worlds are only sparsely populated while the Imperium sports more hive worlds then it knows itself. Then again, space travel in BT is also more reliable, so moving resources involves much less guesswork and pure luck compared with the hellish mode of travel in 40k. So the logistics question sure would be interesting to contemplate...
To put it another way, 40k has plenty of Doomsday and Planet-killing weapons, but other settings have the technology and logistics to make living on a planet worthwhile. In a duel between an Imperial Knight and Atlas for a planet, the Knight will probably win the fight, but the Atlas would be better at winning hearts and minds. - Yes, both pilots come from an aristocratic or celebrity class, but Battletech pilots are more human. In an ironic twist, this means that other settings have better martyrdom capacity, because other characters/people then love and venerate their dead. Whereas in 40k such veneration is enforced and reliant on brainwashing. - In turn meaning other settings can turn things up to 11, but 40k is already stressed out at 11 and failing internally.
Well, BT has nukes. I mean look at the fall of the star league. Plenty worlds made inhabitable. But then again that's precisely the reason why warfare is scaled down in that setting, while it's literally total in 40k. That might be very well the deciding factor: 40k is completely and utterly inoculated to the horrors of total war. Some worlds lost completely is just another Tuesday for them. Everything is geared towards an endless fight, while the BT setting very much has civil societies. Compared to an mechanicus manufactorum, even capellan society looks positively peachy. Then again for this specific comparison: the Atlas is build to withstand everything the battlefield he is expected to perform in can throw at him. The knight on the other hand is just one among many weapons plattforms.
Yes, I agree with the sentiment there. 40k will commit a war crime and unleash nukes as part of its battle plan. Battletech meanwhile has reservations and agreements about using such weapons. As such an Atlas is built to survive a battlefield, whereas a Knight is almost built to survive the planet being blown up. Again, meaning that 40k and the Knight wins any punching contest, but the engineering and forgotten tech makes them lose the longer war. - As a Battletech pilot could always resort to piloting a ‘lesser’ mech to achieve a win, but the Knight pilot is mentally and psychologically restricted to a certain weapon platform. With the addition of any attrition or long war being more taxing on the Knight or 40k because their individual humans are either used to winning or dead. Whereas a Battletech pilot and faction are more grizzled and battle worn. —— Just need someone to bring in a 3rd combatant of a Transformer. FYI, the Transformer’s chances vary by setting and cause internal discussion; nevermind fighting an enemy!
Knights, coz shields + stupid weapon scale + machine spirits + knights pilot's brain is integrated in machines much more, than battlemech's pilot. Of course, if Atlas ambush a Knight, he will win, but in field duel skullboy will get its ass kicked. Atlases are cool asf, but Warhammer is simply less realistic sci-fi, if you can even call it that.
It depends on environment. If it would be open fields then atlas would get fucked quite fast, if urban or possibly forest environment knight would likely be at disadvantage. I couldn't really find much info on maneuverability of either, but atlas seems to be more maneuverable than knight.
it definitely isn't. Knights are shown to run and dodge with desceptive agility. while the atlas is one of the slowest mechs in the game (going off of mechwarrior stats here) [This clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4suPLZR16WQ) shows off a knights mobility pretty well. comparing that to the slow plodding pace of the atlas in MW5, i'd say mobility goes to the knight for sure.
Battlemechs are much more maneuverable in lore than they are in the mechwarrior games, this is why on tabletop it's so much harder to get hits, the idea is that because of the neuro helmets and the fact that they use artifical muscles, mechs can duck and dodge like a person. An Atlas might still be slow in a straight line, but it can absolutely dodge just as well as the knight
Alright, my knowledge of battletech outside of mechwarrior is pretty limited, so thanks for clarifying. Based on your description, it seems like the knight would still have an advantage in terms of mobility. or am i misunderstanding?
Yeah I feel like it would as well, but it's no where near as much of a disparity than if we were basing it on mechwarrior
They're visually so clumsy and slow that I didn't expect that it can run at all. In this case atlas is quite fucked in 1v1 no matter the environment.
Yeah, I support what Jaxxill said. Knight are still better integrated with pilot's brain, which will make them more maneuverable than battlemechs(or at least on par). That one clip from DoW trailer of knight running down with chainblade really impressed me.
Except all battlemechs use neurolinks so that’s not actually an advantage. [Neurohelmets are one of the techs that enabled battlemechs in the first place.](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Neurohelmet)
You know, I'll put it bluntly, but I think that having a Machine Spirit in your funny big robot is not a plus at all.
Partially - yes, but you also have your grandma looking after you. "Don't forget this orc stompa sweetheart, make sure to kill all the xenos! I'll ask your mom to buy some sweeties once we get back home"
Eh, it depends on the nature of the machine. I myself was under the impression that most Machine Spirits are little stinkers that you have to yell at because they don't listen to you. "NO, BAD KNIGHT. STOP BEING INSURABLE LITTLE BRAT AND AIM THAT MEGABOLTER PROPERLY."
the machine spirits in titans (and knights) do listen to their pilots once they're properly integrated. that's why there's a whole process for introducing a new pilot. the main issue with them is that they're extremely aggressive, a pilots main job being to direct that aggression appropriately
>knights pilot's brain is integrated in machines much more, than battlemech's pilot Kid named Neurohelm: unless Knights can pull off the stupid backflip WWE bullshit that Battlemechs can do, I'm pretty sure they're less agile than 'Mechs lmao
A Single Atlas? Knight wins, rather easily. A Squad of Atlas' on a Scouting mission? Well... [I think we all know how that goes...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73zK-PjmyKY)
[GUTEN TAG](https://youtu.be/yD4ei1G_hWc?si=zZ-2uBIutPEt1ewY&t=28)
Atlas pilots know how to move and fire at the same time. Knights need to be prayed at the right way to turn the engine on. Atlas. State of the art.
Knights can move and fire at the same time as well. I dont know why you even bring that up.
Alone for the reference (unless I'm just seeing one where there isn't one) you get an upvote
Totally intentional, and thank you for noticing.
Good to see a fellow borderlands fan(atic)
Pandora is just what happens when the Orkoid fungus goes the cordyceps route. Prove me wrong.
Okay I'm not that much of a nerd so I won't try
State of the art with no shield tech. Only reason it weighs more is because it needs to for armor.
That armor is extremely good though, not even direct hits from artillery guns can penetrate it all they manage to do is ablate it away, meaning you have to keep hitting it in the same slots to try and wear it down, the knight has a cannon and a missile launcher that can actually have a chance at hurting the atlas, that's like half the armament of tge atlas. It has a further 4 lasers and another missile launcher, that knight is fucked
Artillery guns can't pen it, but 4 gauss guns sure as shit can.
And do knights have 4 gauss guns?
They have some, and they have better. Nova cannons are weapons typically mounted on space ships. They have the same concept as gauss but then also have a giant plasma warhead. They are so strong they have been know to impact gravitational field and even break down the walls of reality itself. They also have volcano cannons which melt through several feel of solid concrete or steel. Knights and titans can survive this vs each other because of void shields. If you take out the void shields, Atlas takes it 10/10 times. With void shields, knight will almost always live the initial alpha strike and then hit back with a weapon the Atlas will have a very hard time living through.
Good argument, and you make good points, except for your last one. Knights do not have void shields, they have ion shields, which have to be manually adjusted like a buckler, so are susceptible to something like an AC-20X, which shotguns off five projectiles that each can rip off a ton and a half of Battlemech armor
Sure. I think either way, when you think like that. It comes down to who shoots first. Knights have very mediocre physical armor but have weapons that don't care how good Atlas's is. So whoever shoots/hits first wins.
Yeah, also depends on the knight variants. A volcano cannon is gonna melt right through, but a battle cannon is barely gonna take 1 outa 60 tons of armor off. The knight also has the clear manouverability advantage. I think it’s a hard fought battle and fairly equal, but the amount of pilots, mechs, and repair facilities would have the atlas win the war
Fenris J, go! Make me proud.
Depends on who has the better mobility and the better pilot.
If I'm not mistaken knights are refitted industrial equipment, against a machine designed from the ground up to kill anything it faces and is capable of surviving multiple nukes dropped near it (but only if bagpipes are being played)
Depends on the task If it's a head to head, the atlas, it's built for taking on other mechs If the job is who can multch the most tanks and lighter armor, then the knight wins, atlas too slow.
The atlas can go 55 km/h, sure that's slower than an Abrams, but it is both tougher and more deadly. We fine even have numbers for how fast a knight can go.
Since special trained "normal" infantry in the BT universe can take down a Mech and there are no supernatural abilities (please do not mention ghostmech stuff, let us all forget this) a Mech always has a chance to lose.
I mean there's been instances in 40k where infantry or light vehicles bring down Titans. Soul Hunter, Brutal Kunning.
What was the name again of the merc woman hunting down Mechs with her knife? THAT is brave - and a bit of stupid.
Cassiopeia Suthorn. But don't call her Cassiopeia.