As far as military-modern* HEAT rounds go, neither can an Abrams.
Sure it can, that's why modern military forces use APFSDS rounds in their tank guns. Abrams have survived lots of hits from RPG pattern weapons, although they have also been mobility killed by them iirc. A 4 meter high robot is going to have difficulty shrugging off auto-cannon rounds, let alone tank guns and rockets.
Also, as you seem to ignore me every time I point it out, this example showcases a vehicle capable of significant agility and speed (capable of sidestepping missile barrages and enemy fire) when using its 'skating mechanism'.
Are you saying that putting rollerskates on a mech is going to make it agile and maneuverable, with performance characteristics on par with tracked or wheeled regular vehicles? Or are you just trying to bring up physics as described in the VOTOMS anime as examples of things that will work in real life?
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
It should be noted that Armored Troopers use an EXTREMELY flammable/explosive fuel, have only enough armor to handle infantry small arms, are EXTREMELY spartan, and routinely die in droves...often in a fire.
You make a good point, although I still feel VOTOMS is closer to acceptable than most.
Anyway, onto the other subject of the original post, are things like power armor more feasible in your opinion, or are many of the same problems preventing that from being acceptable? Personally I think if powerplant scaling problems and such can be solved, mechanized infantry would be quite devastating. Sure, they'd be turned into shards of metal and tomato paste by anything larger than a 20mm auto-cannon, but immunity against assault rifle fire would still give it a huge advantage against normal infantry and light armor.
There should be an official metric in regard to stupidity, so we can insult the imbeciles, morons, and RSAs out there the civilized way.
Any ideas for units of measure?
This could be the most one-sided fight since 1973 when Ali fought a 80-foot tall mechanical Joe Frazier. My memory isn't what it used to be, but I think the entire earth was destroyed.
~George Foreman, February 27th 3000 C.E.
Well yeah, that's why I propose a two-meter tall variant. Although I would prefer it to be unmanned & remote piloted. It would have to be able to crouch down to about 1.6-1.8 meter to make sure it can clear the entrances to most buildings, but other than that it should be fine. Functional immunity to 7-8mm rounds is something I feel is achievable, although they will still likely be vulnerable around the joints and things like that.
Implacable, clunking steel supermen are going to be scary enough. They don't have to be all that large to be scary. And the idea that you can't really truly ever kill them, because the pilot will just be redeployed with another robot in short order, so they only get more skilled over time, could be a frightening one for whichever third world hole you're deploying them to.
Although rampaging through a police department won't be a problem, they will still go down fast from something like a .50 cal mounted on a Humvee, so it's not like these can fight all your battles for you. Finally, morale can only improve when soldiers stop getting sent home in body bags. Plus, on-board recording and monitoring of everything that goes on with them, electronic counting of ammunition and so on should increase accountability for when things go screwy (i.e. shooting of civilians). On a similar note, when the "OH GOD MY LIFE IS IN DANGER" instinct gets suppressed (since you're crewing them remotely), I should think that soldiers will evaluate situations more carefully before acting, and err more on the side of caution regarding willy nilly slaughter of people they don't really have a good look at.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
Stark wrote:Yeah, armies of really expensive robots destroyed by grenades is going to be pretty scary.
SCARY FOR YOUR BALANCE OF PAYMENTS.
Better than armies of soldiers with exoskeletons that give them less protection than these robots have getting blown up by whatever they can scrounge up on short notice. Those things aren't cheap either. And grenades? No way. I think they ran out of those in 2003. They're going to get blown up by IED's, and mobility killed when a ricochet AK round clips a knee joint.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
Uh... what? I didn't realise we were playing in some adam grif sandbox. But hey, you design, build, maintain and then see blown up your army of robots; someone else with less silly designs will be better off.
But hey, you design, build, maintain and then see blown up your army of robots; someone else with less silly designs will be better off.
What exactly do you mean by "a less silly design"? Do you mean just sending in the normal infantry, or a different kind of robot? The only military UGVs I've seen in action are slow and vulnerable to small arms fire. The only additional mechanical complexity here is legs, which provide actual mobility advantages over the tracked and wheeled robots, which traverse stairs very slowly and awkwardly.
Uh... what? I didn't realise we were playing in some adam grif sandbox.
Some of us were discussing these things being deployed in genericistan, as a hypothetical example of such things deployed in a more modern, asymmetric warfare type scenario.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
Do you think if we popped legs into a UGV, it'll dance around like a ballerina? Cause I think it'll end up falling on its ass and traversing the stairs by, uh, falling off it and rolling downstairs.
then it'd go SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK
unless if it was one of those things from Metal Gear Solid 4 but then it'd poo on you and then get killed by an androgynous albino girly robot man with a sword
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN! Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
Only things I see mecha for are of small variants and for supporting infantry specifically only for close-range anti-infantry operations. In places like urban areas where treads may make it slow and ungainly to navigate around rubble, alleyways, and debris. They could have just enough armor to shrug off purely infantry arms and some degree of protection from armor-piercing munitions, and be equipped with heavy anti-infantry weapons like heavy machine guns and such.
I don't see mecha having a place in anti-armor combat. That's best left to battle tanks. I personally see small, about eight to ten foot tall mecha armed with heavy anti-personnel weapons providing mobile heavy fire support and be impervious to conventional infantry firearms.
The real army could dig in to advantageous terrain or whatever a decent army does. Once they're set they could march a few big ass mechas out towards the enemy forces blazing away with their super deadly .22 calibre machineguns until they either fall over or get smacked by the enemy.
Now the enemy thinks we're idiots and advances into the kill zone where our artillery can make them stop living.
Ah, mecha. The favorite of topics because people tend to forget a couple large issues.
So what magical small power source is one going to use? Something of a reason even power armor is dumb on many levels. You have to walk around with this wonderfully vunerable object! But wait, you say! You just add enough armor to make sure this doesn't affect the object and enough cooling to insure you or said robot doesn't bake!
You then have weight issues. So this monster that can shrug off bullets weighs how fuck much? Oh wait, it'll weigh more then an average man with equipment, and enter urban areas again? But again, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious engineers of the future will just supplant these two issues, and of course no applications with better vehicles or matters to allow this.
May as well have Shroom and others still have fun with a topic that gets debated to death and always ends the same way. As structures they are engineer nightmares to produce on any scale and even worse to close up glaring weakness that other items do not have.
It's why animes have super unexplained wacky science in their mecha worlds. It's handwaving at it's best, and no different then magical swords.
MM /CF/WG/BOTM/JL/Original Warsie/ACPATHNTDWATGODW FOREVER!!
Sometimes we can choose the path we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all
It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it. Blank Yellow (NSFW)
I'd actually like mecha if the animu it was in was more like Dragon Ball Z or Yu Yu Hashuko something, and not like the rest of the shitty animes we have around today. Imagine mecha throwing fireballs at each other and constipating and achieving better power levels! HHNNNNGGGGGGHHHH!!!!! OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!!
Now that is a realistic feasible mecha.
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN! Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
Ghost Rider wrote:So what magical small power source is one going to use? Something of a reason even power armor is dumb on many levels. You have to walk around with this wonderfully vunerable object! But wait, you say! You just add enough armor to make sure this doesn't affect the object and enough cooling to insure you or said robot doesn't bake!
You then have weight issues. So this monster that can shrug off bullets weighs how fuck much? Oh wait, it'll weigh more then an average man with equipment, and enter urban areas again? But again, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious engineers of the future will just supplant these two issues, and of course no applications with better vehicles or matters to allow this.
As far as power armor or a humanoid drone goes, no there aren't any "better applications". The inside of a human building or human vehicle is surprise surprise built to accommodate a human shape; anything else is going to be at a disadvantage. Just as a giant human shape make a bad replacement for a tank, an undersized tank shape makes a bad replacement for infantry.
Nor do I buy the idea that its impossible to build a sufficient powersource into a human sized object; WE manage just fine and we are restricted to a low energy chemical system called "food". Are you going to be able to build so Space Marines style armor that'll shrug off heavy weapons? no. But armor that resists shrapnel and ordinary gunfire will drastically increase troop survivability, which is why the military is interested. Not because they think they can make soldiers invincible.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
Lord of the Abyss wrote:But armor that resists shrapnel and ordinary gunfire will drastically increase troop survivability, which is why the military is interested. Not because they think they can make soldiers invincible.
AKA, body armour. Current exoskeleton R&D is focussed around improving load-bearing abilities of the users.
Lord of the Abyss wrote:
Nor do I buy the idea that its impossible to build a sufficient powersource into a human sized object; WE manage just fine and we are restricted to a low energy chemical system called "food". Are you going to be able to build so Space Marines style armor that'll shrug off heavy weapons? no. But armor that resists shrapnel and ordinary gunfire will drastically increase troop survivability, which is why the military is interested. Not because they think they can make soldiers invincible.
Food isn't always low energy, sugary food can have more energy per unit of weight then explosives. Its just that your body has to sleep a third of the time and suck in a huge weight of O2 from the air as a catalyst to make use of it. That's why food is high energy but doesn't burn or explode like most fuel.
Also humans are not hollow, big difference, nor are they armored. We base our whole survival strategy on being able to heal after we get injured. I do to agree that we will have bullet proof power armor at some point, the power issue should not be without solutions. But whatever we get may easily weigh 1000lb which is going to put a serious limit on how widely it can be used. That might not even be too much for building floors, but it would be hell in the sand or mud, and getting up after a fall would not be easy.
Its more realistic to expect a future solider to only have a powered exoskelton, and to have no more armor then he can support himself. But that would still be a big step up. A solider could then easily have 60lb of armor like a medieval knight, instead of 20-30lb today, if he was freed from the burden of his backpack. This should be enough to add some useful arm and leg protection, assuming we can avoid roasting the guy alive in the desert heat doing it. Simply having a hard soul under the mans foot would also help immensely with smaller types of land mines. The kind which are meant to wound rather then kill and easily scattered all over.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
So what magical small power source is one going to use? Something of a reason even power armor is dumb on many levels.
Better call DARPA and tell all the scientists and engineers that they're all wrong and that exoskeletons are stupid and they should stop funding them. DoD seems to think that exoskeletons with 24 hour power supplies are achievable with near-future tech. By all reckonings, Unmanned exoskeletons should work better in power terms because they can replace the squishy human interior with more power.
But whatever we get may easily weigh 1000lb which is going to put a serious limit on how widely it can be used. That might not even be too much for building floors, but it would be hell in the sand or mud, and getting up after a fall would not be easy.
You're very likely to be right for the near future, but as technologies like artificial muscles start to mature, we should be able to build something more akin to a human body in mass, but running on electricity and bullet resistant.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
According to one anime, mecha are good because a giant mile-long aircraft carrier can turn into a robot, and punch other aircraft carriers. See? Makes plenty of sense.
Though, I wonder about multi-legged mecha. Quad or Hex-motion would have many of the same 'all terrain' and ground clearance abilities that are the advantage of bipedals, while spreading the load across wider surfaces. They also could adjust the 'body' and turret heights, to maintain cover more effectively along linear obstacles. Possibly also allow 'leaning' around corners with lowered legs on one side, raised on the other.
The engineering for such motive systems is going to be crazy hard, and those legs aren't going to be well armored... but well. Maybe in special conditions, like cratered moons where tracks won't allow full clearance of obstacles like small boulders, but legs will.
The Yosemite Bear wrote:I still say the last time mechs were feasable was when we used Elephants in war.
And elephants were only really feasable because of their psychological impact. Once everyone had learned to deal with elephants they were basically reduced to a status symbol, and indeed some orders of battle basically deployed the whole army to protect the elephants, rather than effectively engage the enemy.
adam_grif wrote:
Better call DARPA and tell all the scientists and engineers that they're all wrong and that exoskeletons are stupid and they should stop funding them. DoD seems to think that exoskeletons with 24 hour power supplies are achievable with near-future tech.
On the other hand, they put serious research into psychic remote viewing, so just because someone takes something seriously doesn't mean it's ever going to work...
adam_grif wrote:
Better call DARPA and tell all the scientists and engineers that they're all wrong and that exoskeletons are stupid and they should stop funding them. DoD seems to think that exoskeletons with 24 hour power supplies are achievable with near-future tech.
On the other hand, they put serious research into psychic remote viewing, so just because someone takes something seriously doesn't mean it's ever going to work...
Wasn't that the CIA? And even so, there's a difference between doing research into whether something exists, and funding a project that is essentially engineering with the odd bit of science here and there to overcome a shortcoming in the technology.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
The government/military/USAF/Army/DARPA also toyed around with jetpacks and jet belts and weirdo disk craft, and while we never got the promised jetpacks or flying cars, it still led to some advances in... I dunno, materials sciences or something, so maybe the research and development spent on power armor might never actually result in militarized power armor as envisioned today, the results might just be better batteries that end up going into tanks/space humvees/jeeps/mules/etc. and better hydraulics for whatever purposes, so if there is a power armor, it may end up becoming some kind of loadlifter like in Aliens and may only see actual-factual combat when a mommy monster with an ovipositor is now in the abandoned spaceship trying to eat a little girl who a single female woman now loves as her daughter, or may only be used by the private military companies when in a low-gravity world where a very valuable resource has been uncovered and an off-world mining operation has been set up and due to logistics problems leading to a lack of heavy armaments and gear these powered loadlifters with exposed glass cockpits end up being armed with guns and used in fighting and actually successfully engage superior enemy numbers before the entire force is defeated when an unexpected world-spanning sentient sapient biosphere unleashes the entire ecosystem to stomp on the jerry-rigged power loadlifters.
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN! Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
"
- PeZook
