Agree, good points! But we’ve made the decision to not implement pilots dismounting mid-combat. In my experience, pilot combat in Lancer starts relying much more on theatre of the mind and human flexibility of what’s allowed. My understanding is that it was added as a release-hatch for giving players something to do if their mech is destroyed. Since LT is a lot snappier than tabletop & single-player to boot, pilots on the battlefield ended up being too many edge cases and pitfalls for too little gain. I know skipping it makes the titanfall fantasy impossible, but Lancer wasn’t ever really set up well to do that anyway.
Re Technophile+BT, it’s possible for Black Thumb to figure out how to adapt its rank 1 on its own without requiring the rest of the game to include dismounting for it. I believe the modded version of BT does something like a custom action that adds the pilot as riding on top of the mech + being able to shoot a custom small weapon. They could also implement or enable “hand over control” as appropriate for that specific case as well.
