MechWarrior Online Community Q&A 6

A sixth community Q&A is upon the official MechWarrior Online website, this this entry tackling questions about 'mech upgrades - specifically, whether they'll be visually represented, how they'll be purchased, how our upgrade/downgrade options will be determined, what differences we can expect from the various manufacturers, and much more. Lots of great info in here:
Can I not use all my armor points or not fill all the weapon blocks to reduce overall weight/tonnage and increase speed/acceleration? Scanlon

[DAVID] No, you cannot do that. A 'Mech will always weigh the same, no matter what you put in or take out of it, as per tabletop rules.

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For mounting equipment (such as AMS, BAP, ECM), will we be able to place it anywhere there is critical space, as the devblog indicates heat sinks can be placed, or will those items have hardpoint limitations as well? Solis Obscuri

[DAVID] For the most part, you'll be able to place non-weapon equipment anywhere, subject to critical slot and tonnage restrictions. Though there are some restrictions. Some are derived from the tabletop rules, like CASE being allowed only in the torso locations, while others are specific to our game, like jump jets being allowed only on variants and locations that include jump jets by default.

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Are you keeping all the traditional weights and criticals of the classic rules, or have you rebalanced some of them (like, say, ACs)? Hao Yu

[DAVID] The weights and critical slots of weapons will remain the same, so that we can take 'Mechs straight out of the Technical Readout manuals and into the game. What we will be looking at tuning is the damage, cooldown time, speed, etc. of the weapons.