Your statistics do not match my experience. Either there's a flaw in your data collection, or you are the unluckiest person on the planet, or your game is broken.

I share your opinion on headshots. I take two or three head hits every single mission unless it's one where I am lucky enough to be able to ambush and break LOS constantly. It was almost game-breaking until I got Cockpit Mods+, then it was merely a nuisance if the enemy actually ganged up on me a bit. And I can lob six or eight 60-LRM volleys without getting a single head crit to injure the enemy.

But the knockdown thing sounds wrong. When you're knocked down, you get pushed to the end of the action queue, that's it. Now, if you had just taken your turn, you would have to wait for the end of the following turn to stand up, so especially if you have Master Tactician, you could see the enemy go twice before you get to go, which would look like a missed turn - but it isn't, it's just a delayed turn.

I very well could be wrong about the whole knockdown thing. Though I do think that the enemy A.I. tends to get up far quicker than I do.

I still think enemy A.I. headshots need to be looked at. I've played 10+ missions in the last 2 days and I know that in each mission at least 1 of my warriors gets a 6-12 days hospital stay due to head shots. Maybe I am unlucky but I do think the enemy A.I. has a much higher chance of head shots the the player.

With high tactics skill the chance can go up to ~17% for a headshot.

If you hover your mouse over the enemies you will see that some are labeled with recruit, tactican and so on.
Not sure if you need a high tactican skill to see this ( i always go to guts5 first and than to tac10, that fits my playstyle ).

Get Cockpit Mods or use Sensorlock and stay hidden.

Adding to Adamant102's good advice, stay out of range of turrets (especially the ones with missiles) if you have mechs to face. You can kill turrets with fire from afar if you have a guy who can do sensor lock. Take out the mechs with SRMs, before they get in range to use them. And if you let a machinegunner hit you, you have yourself to blame.

That might be the case, but doesn't really say anything on its own. A mission might have you get the jump on a lance of Spiders and they get off a few shots before the PPCs devour their torso. Or you could be going toe-to-toe with a company of SRM carriers vomiting missiles at you, each missile getting an independent to-hit calculation. If your mission has hundreds of shots your way, and at 1% chance of headshot per hit, that seems reasonable. No one loses a turn. You can get knocked back one initiative phase for getting knocked down, but not an entire turn (maybe they should do this for Juggernaut, but they haven't).

What might be happening is that you're getting mechs knocked down after they've moved for that turn. If your 732B gets knocked down after it moved, (1) that lets all of the opponent assault mechs that didn't move yet, as well as turrets, vehicles, etc. to shoot at it. (2) The next turn, in the conventional move order, all the lights, medium, and heavy mechs get to move (and shoot at it). And maybe even an assault mech. THEN the 732B gets to stand up. So it feels like you've lost two turns, even though you didn't.

You can turn this in your favor. It's usually tempting to shoot at mech that haven't moved yet (because maybe you can blow up that arm with the PPC in it before the computer tries to shoot you with it), but there's also an advantage to punching or blasting LRMs at mechs that have already moved (because if you knock them down, you get to abuse called shots on them with all of your mechs before it can stand up again).

People and their statistics. I think yours is the 3rd telling us how Battltech works and getting it wrong.

Never tell me the odds, kid.

Anyway, if you`re going to start rolling stats you have to be more precise, doing multi-varied analysis for a start... Not just the first percentages you can find (which always looked suspect from the start)...

Every computer strategy game ever created has had people complaining that the computer cheats at dice. The more you know ==> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

Well to be fair you are unlikely to find true randomness on a computer, specially in a computer game.
Of course emulated random chance isn't necessarily bad just that there will be patterns.
Could well be some of us got hit with a seed which cause allot more headshots to be taken.

I only had bad issues with Dekker but still the frequency of headshots on a mission is something I find rather boring.
Feels like a forced way to make you use several mechwarriors instead of just 4-6 because I take internal damage in maybe one out of 20 missions but get a headshot wound on almost every mission.
So at all times I have 4-6 mechwarriors in sickbay and when it is a high level or two in there I can't do any high difficulty missions which means either grind easy junk or just have fun with the fast forward button.

Thankfully I got my first head mod yesterday so maybe things will shape up from there.

True randomness is not about everything happening in an equal space of time; it`s about things happening whenever they can.

This means with a truly equal random system you can still find your mech being hit in the cockpit 6 times in a row; or conversely, never being hit. That`s how true randomness works.

This is easy to code into computers, but most Devs actually code so the dice fall in favour of the gamer, because many gamers don`t understand and will whine.

Xcom 2 had this problem; it actually has a completely fair random system, but some people still complained bitterly because they often drew the bad deck, ie they were unlucky to put it simply.

With a truly random system all that`s left is how lucky you are.

You can see this just by playing a table top game with perfectly balanced dice, but most people don`t complain there since you can`t alter real life, although I`ve seen some who do go mad because of how `unfair` the dice was to him.

@Socratatus I'd advice you to read up on randomness and computers, it is quite an interesting read never mind the proving "easy to code" being completely false.
We even have tech that grabs atmospheric noise just to get closer to true randomness on a computer, that do tend to lean towards more even and higher numbers though.

I agree with the OP on the headshots. I find that the AI always aims for the head. I hate when a game has to cheat to make it look like its challenging. I wish I could do what those npc's can do. when I try for head shots it seems reasonably tough.. Which is good.. But them damn NPCs they rip my pilots to shreds. I've done my best to adapt to there techniques.. Speed and cover reduce the chance of being hit..

But damn those head shots.. sheesh too much.

And I havent lost any pilot yet. No headkill, just headshots with injuries and this after like 80 missions.

Edit: and playing close range with AC20 mechs and Jumpjets. Waiting in safe till they come, reserve, jump in, kill the biggies, jump out, cool down and so on.

Just heard that a Dev has confirmed that AI have an improved chance for head hits.
I have failed to find any proper source for such a claim though.
Maybe someone else will have better luck with a search than me.