New Age Weapons and Warfare

[Dante]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

Mechs: They are more plausible then you think. With latest technology if the controls are made correctly then it becomes as stable as well...a human.

Human beings are notoriously unstable...

In any case, your software would have to be able of computing shifts in balance much like the brain subconsciously does, a fact made more difficult by the fact that there is much more mass to take into account here.

The problem is drive system.

Amen to that. Legs are inherently slower than wheels/tracks, and their ONLY advantage is the ability to traverse uneven terrain more easily.

Hydrolics are too flammable for use. The advantages though are the same of a foot soldier vs a tank: Manuverable, multi-purpose, addaptable, and capable of using the weapons and supplies of others. If your buddy is dead and has some ammo you wanna grab it, try doing that with two tanks or jets.

I fail to see how this is possible. Do you mean as in modular weaponry? You'd still need tech teams to transplant the weapons and extended time in a workshop. The exact same thing can be done with a tank or IFV.

Or do you mean as in actual, grasping appendages? Those are even more impractical. If you're talking about loading ammo from a wrecked mech, you'd have to take too long to load it to be practical. In the open, it'd be suicide, because whatever killed your buddy could very easily kill you as well. Dragging another mech to cover to loot his corpse there would slow you down too much and render you dead as well.

Apart from that...

Mechs are tall and easily spotted. You'd need VERY advanced gyroscopes and materials tech to build something that weighs as much as a family car and supports its weight on two or more legs. A wheeled vehicle would still be faster and a mech would require more miaintenance than said vehicle. Weapons would be awkward to mount and ammo feed systems even more so.

A mech is implausible in enclosed areas because of its size - obstacles that would obstruct a conventional wheeled vehicle are only slightly more traversable for mechs. In open areas, mechs are easier targets and are simply not stable enough to sport weaponry capable of rivalling MBTs for range and lethality. Even in an urban environment precluding the use of MBTs, 3 man MILAN teams and 2 man Carl Gustav teams can volley missiles into the lumbering hulk picking through the urban detritus. At least a tank can lie low. A mech trying to do this can bring very few of its weapons to ebar and would be essentially sueless.

Armor protection is another factor. Your mech will have an atrocious power-to-weight ratio, so you'll have to develop lighter and/or stronger materials. You will definitely need somethign strong to support the mechs weight on its legs, for the joint housings so that the legs don't come off under the strain of walking, and for many other things. A mech has to fight gravity much more than a vehicle, AND balance at the same time.

Weaponry too. Any weapon scaled up to mech size will either be inefficient or unusable (as said earlier, most mech's can't support a tank gun's recoil - crouching to fire makes you incredibly vulnerable. A tank can already fire on the move and it can traverse its turret 360 degrees - a mech has to manually turn, crouch, aim, fire. In that time, a decent gunnery crew could have put an APFSDS long rod penetrator through your power plant. So you'd need a low-recoil weapon with killing pwoer to rival a tank's main gun.

And if you could do that, why not just upgrade a tank instead?