Johannes replied to me:
What are the suits supposed to do?
* Cover a lot of area, fight anything weaker then them, if they
encounter
something heavy, call for the cavalry. Stealth is good for that,
flying is
good for deployment or retreats.
That didn't work all that well for battlecruisers. Sometimes you have
to stand and fight, and then the suits should have a good showing
against enemies in their own weight class. (I wonder how many NATO
troops got worried about their high-ground-clearance, high-silhouette
MRAPs when the crisis with Russia started.)
I was more thinking about a pickup with a heavy weapon mounted on it.
Or infantry. That is more expendable then a battle cruiser and the
tactics i have in mind would depend on the expendability of individual
units.
Especially the advantage of covering lots of ground and detecting
enemy troops early must outweight loosing a few units on the long run.
Battlesuits are going to be more expendable than tanks, but much less
expendable than the recon drones mentioned by Stephen. I wonder how
small (and cheap) a viable drone can become.
Say the target is a SM+0 suit with basic cloaking (-7) and I want to
detect it at 450 yards (-14). Even with a high sensor skill (18?) a scan
rating of 13 or more would be desirable. That's 1 lb. and $4,000 for a
PESA.
It sounds as if you are clearly on the pro-flight side of the debate.
Sofar all my ideas have come up with uses for flights. Though with
some i suspect, if i develop them long enough, eventually the suit
might get dropped and i end up with a grav cycle with a bazooka
equivalent or something. And as a personal preferrence i don't like
suits much, so it might be, that i have a bias to optimize them away
from being suits.
Johannes
The old TL11 has no contragrav, but vectored reactionless thrust gets
the same look-and-feel.
- An enclosed grav cycle with integral armor or an open grav cycle with
body armor for the rider? Would the "air cav" trooper fight mounted,
dismounted, or both?
- How does that work in space ships/stations, urban areas, or arcologies?
- If you go with the concept, why not two-seat models with a driver and
a gunner? The flying equivalent of a jeep with a TOW.
- Historically, motorcycle troops were a failure. Jeeps worked better,
but mostly behind the frontline.
Regards,
Onno
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