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?

[Aerozord]

ok hydrolics use oil based liquids under pressure. This is just asking for fire.

Walking is simple if you use sensores and a self correcting system like what we humans have. As for being a target and laying low. What about the aircraft carrier. It is huge and an easy target, answer; support troops and tanks and aircraft. Now with getting more ammo the advantage is obvious if your out. Plus you can retrieve it in-between battles. You aren't fighting constantly, even the enemy sleeps. Fighting will hit a lul and thats when you get it.

The advantage of legs is that size does matter. Longer legs means longer steps and higher speed. And compared to any other fast moving object humans can turn sharply. However the added weight to tank treds slow it down more so they have size limits. Remember tanks take time to aim, most dont have anti-air weapons, and (unless you can run it over) is useless at point-blank range.

[Dante]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

Walking is simple if you use sensores and a self correcting system like what we humans have.

Elaborate, please. Walking is by no means simple - one could say it is the process of falling so that you do not hit the ground. Humans are predisposed towards developing walking so we think it's easy, but it isn't especially since the mech is much bigger, much heavier, and carries weapons and armor and what have you.

As for being a target and laying low. What about the aircraft carrier. It is huge and an easy target,

Irrelevant - obviously ANY ship is going to stand out on a FLAT ocean.

answer; support troops and tanks and aircraft.

Well now... if you need tanks to back up your mechs then WHY the HELL do you even need the mechs in the first place? What is the demonstrable tactical niche mechs fill which tanks and infantry in combination cannot?

Now with getting more ammo the advantage is obvious if your out. Plus you can retrieve it in-between battles. You aren't fighting constantly, even the enemy sleeps. Fighting will hit a lul and thats when you get it.

Hmm, I wait to rearm during a lull in the fighting... wait a minute... isn't that what EVERYBODY ELSE DOES, RELOAD WHEN THERE'S A LULL IN THE FIGHTING?

So you essentially admit that your vaunted "mechs can reload themselves" advantage isn;t really an advantage at all, because they have to do it the same way everyone else does - when nobody's shooting at them!

The advantage of legs is that size does matter.

It does, and the extra mass will make turning difficult, especially for a legged machine which is probably going to mvoe over swampy, uneven ground at speed.

Longer legs means longer steps and higher speed. And compared to any other fast moving object humans can turn sharply.

Humans do not move fast in comparison to anything which can be considered fast.

However the added weight to tank treds slow it down more so they have size limits.

Weight limtis apply to mechs too, even more so, because it has to maintain its balance. If anything, a tank should beable to move faster, because of the powr-to weight ratio and the larger surface area of the treads.

Remember tanks take time to aim, most dont have anti-air weapons, and (unless you can run it over) is useless at point-blank range.

Mechs would take even longer to aim accurately, because a bipedal platform is less stable than a broad, flat base like a tank.

And anti-air weapons are irrelevant - that's what AA guns are for.

[Sithdarth]

The problem isn't putting a positron and antiproton together. All you have to do is decelerate the antilproton in the pressence of positrons and you have antihydrogen. In any case it would be much easier to confine just antiprotons as you need a chanrged particle for a magnetic field to have an effect. Keeping the antimatter in one place doesn't require all that much energy or all that big of a field, that is with the use of superconductors.

The problem is keeping stray atoms from getting to it. As you may know one of the main problems with hydrogen fuels cells is that pressurised pure hydrogen likes to leak out of it's tanks. I mean an alpha particle is two protons and two neutrons and even it has some penetrating power. That and stray radition tends to destablize the antiprotons as well. Magnetic shielding can solve all these problems but first we need room temp superconductors which may not be far off.

Now with antimatter you don't need a whole lot. If you where to use say a gram of the stuff you could create a significantly large explosion. Enought energy is held in 1 gram to power a medium size city for a few weeks. One gram of antiprotons is about equal to Avogadro's number or 6.02214199 × 10^23, then times that by two because you need an equal number of normal protons. Which gives you 1.81059*10^11 Kilojoules; compare that with the 23 to 35 kilojoules you get from burning 1 gram of coal. So you only need 8.31516*10^13 antiprotons, or about 1.38076*10^-10 grams, to equal a gram of low quality coal.

The problem is making that many antiprotons quickly and cheaply. Room temp superconductors would make it cheaper. An intutively designed setup could use ionized hydrogen to bombard a carefully selected target which would cause a cascade of antiprotons. Which could then be flitered out with a finely tuned magnetic field. The target would have to be both thin and rather large as would the accelerator. So really the biggest obstacle is the price tag of the equipment and trying to keep the true purpose of such a setup form escaping to the general public. Our neighbors in the world wouldn't be to happy to hear the US had the ablity to literaly vaporise the planet.

[popularnerd]

A more viable option is not of a lumbering behemoth. A better design would be on the the infantry level. A powered armor would boost the capabilities of the standard soldier.(Think SPARTAN, not AT-AT) Of course nothing would be able to replace standard armor, but even tanks are becoming obsolete due to the aspect of asymetric warfare. You bring a tank into a city, it doesn't have a lot of manuevering room, and you cannot use the maingun because tank shells are designed to penetrate armor, not to explode. (i.e. depleted uranium rounds) Also a tank in a city is a moving bullseye for any man in a building with a Soviet era RPG. Whereas the primary reason infantry get killed is a lack of armor. A powered armor would increase the speed of the wearer and also increase the longevity of the soldier.

[Sithdarth]

I could see mechs being a part of truly space age wars, if there are any. Legs are much preferable to wheels in a lowgrav enviroment. Mechs could be used to protect astriod mining operations, to repair large ships, or even attack large ships. A mech could get right unto the hull of a large ship and do some good damage while using the ship itself as a shield. Balance, weight and power concerns are not nearly as restrictive in low gravity as they are on earth. Small exoskeletons wouldn't be as usefull in space because of the limited carring capicty. A large mech with what amounts to a good sized cannon could be a threat to a large ship. We may yet see large mechs in war but they won't be fighting on Earth or any planet with significant gravity.

[popularnerd]

In space why even ue legs? Legs unless used for boarding ops. are redundant in space.

[Sithdarth]

Your thinking of something that just flies around. Legs are better than wheels for moving over terrain in low gravity. As in walking over the surface of an asteriod. That and it would allow you to move about fairly easly on the outer hull of a large space craft to avoid any defenses it might have. Legs are not required for general space flight but they do present other advantages when traversing terrian in low to no gravity.

[Dante]

Hmm, Sithdarth has a point about mechs in zero G. Extensible grappling appendages would be of great value in such an environment Perhaps they could fire mechanical/magnetic grappling hooks and pull themselves around?

Admittedly, it would be closer to tentacles than legs...

[Aerozord]

Originally Posted by SPARTAN-000

In space why even ue legs? Legs unless used for boarding ops. are redundant in space.

the reason is like I have been saying, versitality. If need be it can land and walk. Also you have hand to hand capabilities if ammo is gone (try that with a tank)

Also on land a large enough ditch can stop a tank or anyother ground transport. A bi/quadrapedial mech can jump, climb, and possibley hover.

Anti-tank barriers are useless, they can also work on sand, mud, ect.

The arguement on cover is illrelevent because in an urban, jungle, or forest war zone anything bigger then a jeep is about useless.