Sci-Fi tanks vs. Mechs

[Vejut]

Thanks Sylas. BTW, pardon my ignorance, but iridium is a real element, correct? (afraid I haven't memorized the entire periodic table yet...) And do they actually calc how powerful the bigger gun is somewhere?

Shep, I keep asking for more than pretty words, you keep giving me what I ain't asking for. Yes, We get that they're outranged. However, can they be hurt by the powerguns? Saying that powerguns peirce Slammer's armor doesn't tell me anything--we don't know the strength of Slammer armor except in relation to powergun fire, and you can see the problem in the logic there, I hope. For all I can tell from your post, a PPC might slash right through a slammer tank front...or it might bounce off.

[consequences]

Have you ever seen the falling damage calcs done on B-tech? Trust me, the Slammers will butcher them. And Iridium is a real element too.

[Vejut]

just makin' sure consequences. I thought it might be a real element, but as I say, despite my egr student status, have yet to memorize more than about half the periodic table, and the way it was being thrown about made me think "technobabble element"

[The Dark]

Found it:

http://kier.3dfrontier.com/forums/showt ... t=Slammers

Question: was the tribarrel shot a single round or a burst? This does slightly alter the energy per round, so I'm just wondering out of curiosity.

[SylasGaunt]

I'll try and find my copy of The Tank Lords and get back to you on it.

[SylasGaunt]

Found it on page 125 of 'The Tank Lords'

It sounds like it was talking multiple shots but it was also talking multiple chunks to so I think it's safe to assume it was one shot per chunk.

[MKSheppard]

The Yokel tank, its cannon nodding for further prey, squealed past the wreckage.

Suilin's tribarrel was still pointed to cover the car's rear quadrant. Cooter's burst splashed upwards from the tank's glacis plate, blasting collops from the sheath and ceramic core.

Before the tribarrel could penetrate the armor at its point of greatest thickness, the tank's 60mm gun cracked out a three-round clip. Dick Suilin's world went red with a crash that struck him like a falling anvil.
The impact knocked him forward. He couldn't hear anything. The fighting compartment was brighter, because cannon shells had blown away the splinter shield overhead. The sun streamed down past the bare poles of plasma-withered trees.

The ready light over his tribarrel's trigger no longer glowed green. Suilin rotated the switch the way Gale had demonstrated a lifetime earlier. The metal felt cool on his fingertips.

The cannon's muzzle began to recoil behind a soundless yellow flash. Warmonger shuddered as Suilin's thumbs pressed his butterfly trigger. Cyan bolts roiled the bottle-shaped flare of unburned powder, then carved the mantlet before the 60mm gun could cycle to battery and fire again.
Steel blazed, sucked inward, and blew apart like a bomb as the tank's ready ammunition detonated.

Suilin's tribarrel stopped firing. His thumbs were still locked on the trigger. A stream of congealed plastic drooled out of the ejection port. The molten cases had built up until they jammed the system.

The hull of the vehicle Dick Suilin had destroyed was burning brightly. Another tank crawled around it. The Consie on the second tank's turret was mouthing orders down the open hatch.

***********************

Tribarrels are capable of carving through the mantlet of armor on
light/medium tanks easily, and later, a Slammers tank literally
runs over another tank with no damage at all...quite much better
than the fall damage calcs from BTech, eh?

[Sarevok]

Ok, what is the minimum force nessarry of front line Mechs nessary to dislodge a single Company of Hammer's Slammers (Two Panzer (Heavy hover tanks), Two Recon Platoons(Combat Cars) & 1 Artillery Platoon)

Using froces from:

1. Mobile Suit Gundam

2. Zone of Enders

3. Battletech

4. Imperial AT-AT's & AT-ST's

5. Zoids

6. Gasraki

Nuclear Supression field is engaged (Niether side can use nukes)
Note: Said tanks have Irridium Armored hulls (Funky Sci-fi superconductive metal, can handle KE blasts fairly well too), 30mm cannons can hit targets accuratly at 5km distance (targeting objects smaller then a human head), the Main guns of the Tanks can hit anything they have a valid LOS up to low orbit. Artillery can engage sub orbital targets.

A single AT-AT. This monster survive direct hits from multiple megaton weopens. The kiloton level cannons on the X-wing starfighter are insufficient to kill them. Infact Wedge Antilles once fired a single proton torpedo at a group of walkers. One was destroyed by a direct hit from the torpedo but the others were able to survive shockwave of the torpedoes detonation. Given the fact that the proton torpedo has been rated as a gigaton level weopen I doubt anything in the Slammers arsenal can hurt an AT-AT.

For battletech a single battlelion of inner sphere mechs should do the job.
The mechs will split up in groups, the Catapults will move behind obstacles and rain down LRM from long range. The Bushwackers and Centurions will move in followed by Awesomes and Atlases. The Atlases gauss rifle fires a 125 kg slug at 37600 km per hour. That is more than enough to kill any tank with a single hit. PPC barrage from Centurions and Awesomes will fry enemy sensors and targeting systems render them blind. With the added jamming from Raven scout mechs ECM suite they won't be able to hit anything much less maintain radio contact with each other. As for battletechs own tank the mobile artillery can shower the area with Long Tom shells, Alacorn heavy tanks and Shrek PPC carriers are more than a match for anything the Slammers have.

Note I am assuming you are using Aerotech rules for weopen ranges. The 1 km range limitation for mechs should not apply as it was created to simplify the game. 1 km can not be maximum ranges for mech weopenry as they violate the laws of physics. For example there is nothing that stops a Large ER laser from going past 1 km. Atmospheric aborbsion would eventualy stop but then again the fact that a laser operating through an atmosphere would do less damage the further it travels is not represented in the game. So ER lasers lasers do same amount of damage
whether the target is 10 meters away or 999 meters away, irrespective of whether it is raining (rain seriously hampers lasers) or whether this is an air less moon or a planet with dense atmospere. This is violates the laws of physics so 1 km can not be the maximum range of a laser. Aerotech figures are better since the combat takes place space the weopens can operate with maximum effieniency giving a better idea about what actual maximum ranges might be. And yes Aerospace fighters carry the same weopens as battlemechs (in fact the battlemech weopens were derived from space fighter weopens when they were first built) so no arguing that
aerotech ranges apply to aerospace fighters only not mechs. One good solid evidence for this conclusion is the LAM(Land Air Mech) a unique machine that operates both as a space fighter and mech. Since it uses the same weopens in both space and ground the Aerotech ranges must be true.

Another reason for the 1 km kilometer weopen ranges is intense jamming as all units in battletech have form ECM capability. If you think the 1 km range limitation is bad just wait till you move close to a dedicated ECM suite equipped mech or veichle and your range will drop to 500 meters.

One last not mechs are not viable in real life and I agree to that. So please no discussions about mechs are stupid as we all know they are just a sci-fi writers dream.

[SylasGaunt]

Where are you getting that Gauss Rifle muzzle velocity because the only one I remember was Mach 2.

[SWPIGWANG]

and mike is a jerk for slamming our wankfest

Anyway, Turn-A Gundam, MOONLIGHT BUTTERFLY

And depending on the Strenght of beam shields..... 1 to 20 V-2 Assult Buster Gundam

[Darth Wong]

Where are you getting that Gauss Rifle muzzle velocity because the only one I remember was Mach 2.

He's getting it from the depths of insanity.

A 125 kg slug moving at 37,600 km/h is doing more than 10 km/s. If the barrel length is, say, 5 metres, it would be out of the barrel in roughly 1 ms and its acceleration would be roughly 1E7 m/s^2. The reaction force would be more than 1 GN.

That's right: 1 billion Newtons reaction force. How much does this thing weigh? Let's say it's 100 tons: the reaction force would accelerate it backwards at 10 km/s^2! And if you perform the vector math on g (~10 m/s^2) in the Z- direction and a (10,000 m/s^2 in the X+ direction, you will find that this thing WILL fall over unless its centre of mass is a hundred times closer to the ground than the gauss gun.

[Sea Skimmer]

Another reason for the 1 km kilometer weopen ranges is intense jamming as all units in battletech have form ECM capability. If you think the 1 km range limitation is bad just wait till you move close to a dedicated ECM suite equipped mech or veichle and your range will drop to 500 meters.

One last not mechs are not viable in real life and I agree to that. So please no discussions about mechs are stupid as we all know they are just a sci-fi writers dream.

Accurate fire with optical only sighting is possibul out to several kilometers. If the weapons can reach out further then 1000 meters it because they simple can't.

[SWPIGWANG]

maybe the mech leans to something like 10 degree off ground before they fire........

[Typhonis 1]

Sorry but Newtons laws say the mech will fall over because of recoil from firing it.Remeber you are friing it from abour 7 meters in the air even higher or for us dumb Americans 21 feet or higher

[SylasGaunt]

Which is why I'm more inclined to believe the Mach 2 figure, that's at least somewhat sane.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Yeah it was per shot.

The Tribarrel was IIRC based on a hit vaporizing a 'fist-sized' chunk of iridium, then the main gun round was based on relative cartridge size (and assuming the same energy density).

Since a single 30mm shot can vaporize the cab of a truck. (Civilian)
a Single 20mm shot can turn a human into red mist
a single 10mm shot can leave a nice big hole in the same human.
a single 200mm shot can Vaporize a Combat Car, Destroy an Artillery Implacement Behind a rock shield, Destroy a space port building designed to take heavy heat blastwaves.

[Vejut]

Actually mike, he's getting it from Battlespace (the space combat version of Battletech.) Fighter Gauss Rifle mass the same, have same mass ammo, and shoot just as far when in Atmosphere IIRC, but it space, they can shoot 20 hexes, with each hex being 17km, and a turn being 10 seconds, thus minimum velocity is 34km/sec. Thats fairly insane, and doesn't match what's seen in either the novels or the land game (if it's so damn fast, why the hell can't they just point it at the target and score a hit WAY past 1km...with that speed, it wouldn't drop very much before it hit...)

And if you can come up with a good reason why the hell ranges are so short, you're a better man than I.

[Utsanomiko]

Actually Wong, I answered the original question in my first post. This is all Off-Topic stuff now.

Yes, part of your first post admitted that regular mechs would get creamed. So instead of simply leaving it there, you introduced a whole lot of off-topic bullshit in an attempt to hijack the thread. You even ADMIT it!

EDIT: in one final attempt to explain the problem with your thinking, if somebody asks how many Fed starships it would take to accomplish something, you can't simply say "one, with Q on it." And if somebody asks how many SW Imperial ships it would take to accomplish something, you can't simply say "one: the Death Star". That's basically what you're doing.

Not only that, but it's a misinterpretation of definitions. Technically, the Devil Gundam, Getta Robo, and such non-military, one-of-a-kind machines aren't even 'Mechs', in the modern term, but rather 'Super Robots', a super-hero-like genre where the giant robots went up against the bad guys and almost always won easilly. It wasn't untill Mobile Suit Gundam came along in 1979 and paved way for more serrious gaint-robots in war-stories (probably a contradiction to most people). They're barely even the same types of robots, let alone genres.

It's like asking 'What's the best gun to use over long distances?' and getting "ICBMs" as a responce. Pretty damn effective choice, but it hardly fits with the accepted definition of handheld guns.

And finally I'll say this yet again; don't bring up Evangelions in mech threads. Hell, don't bring them up in versus threads at all, I'd say. An angelic equivalent to the 'dead frog with a battery connected to its nervous system' covered in purple armor with a human soul in it is hardly comparable to machanical units. It's also stupid to try and measure or wank over their effectiveness in general combat when they only had one real specific prupose (no, not 'fighting angels', though being able to neutralize AT fields helps in that regard).

Just don't pretend things are mechs when they aren't.

[Typhonis 1]

And its pointless toi use a nuke in a low key situation like was said in Starship troopers you dont punish a child by chopping his head off

[Utsanomiko]

Nukes are also pretty lousy for fighting on your own turf, or in your own cities for that matter, unless you're the kind of strategist who'll pick up and fire a .38 special when a fly shows up in your room or lands on your thigh.