At 05:55 PM 6/6/2007, Alfred Urrutia wrote:
Chris Campbell wrote:
And how would they manage this? It's a shield. You can't just
wander on through it if you have a small craft.
I was assuming some type of shield that was good against
line-of-site energy weapons but couldn't really stop something
physical like a fighter or mech from coming through. If it could
then all bets are off, obviously.
If it's permeable to physical matter then you shoot with railguns,
mass drivers, missles/rockets, or even simple bullets. Small craft
might be useful as delivery systems (a la modern jets), but that's it.
*Inside* a ship. No one who wants to keep their ship intact will
use heavy ordinance inside of it. Doing so would be suicidal.
Ah, my bad. But would not a dozen armed mechs attacking a ship pose
a harder defense problem for that ship than one enemy ship with the
same total amount of weapons as the dozen mechs?
Not really. That single ship would presumably be harder to destroy
than the single units. Also, that single ship almost certainly has
better range and weapons capability than small craft ever would.
Consider a B-2 vs. an F-22. The small craft might be useful as a
low-cost, short range delivery system, but the larger craft could
strike with impugnity from half a system away (and in any event, any
small craft you might use would be weapons systems with propellant
tanks attached, not mechs).
I mean, a dozen targets englobing it vs. one target firing at it
from only one direction?
Again, from many, many hundreds of kilometers distant. The small
craft might take longer to eliminate once they're targetted, but
since your range is better than theirs (since you have bigger and
better weapons, being a larger craft) you can pick them off before
they're close enough to do anything to you.
And then, since they're mechs, they can also perform the boarding
party/capture portion of the operation, something a large ship or
fighter squadron might not be able to do so well.
If capture is the goal you stick a squadron of marines inside a
stealth ship and pull a lamprey job (attach to your target, cut a
hole, storm the ship). Fighter craft would be useless for that sort
of thing, and mechs would have a nasty target profile that would make
them sitting ducks long before they got a chance to hit their target.
Sure. It's plausible as a desperation move, but nobody's gonna do
it as a matter of SOP. There are just better ways to get the job done.
I understand that in terms of now.
In terms of ever. No matter the technological development of the
time, it will always be more efficient to make a simple design as
opposed to a complex design. A fighter/bomber/whatever will always be
better for ordinance delivery, a stealth ship/inside job will always
be better for capture, etc. Mechs just aren't that useful unless
you're working in an environment where crawling around and
manipulating your environment are the order of the day. They're
plausible in a setting like GitS (kinda). They aren't at all
plausible in a setting like Gundam (barring MacGuffins).
But it's too easy for circumstances to change enough in general for
a once stupid idea to become the obvious first choice. Not saying
that it's a given with armed mechs in space but I won't write it off
yet until I'm hearing about pitched battles in space that don't need mechs.
The question remains: no matter you tech level, why would you ever
use a mech instead of something simpler? Again, talking about mecha
here as opposed to powered armor, which is another matter.
And when you have all of that virtually anything other than a
humanoid design will perform better.
In multiple roles? An all in one Swiss Army knife sort of mech that
can perform all the functions of a fighter, tank and large powered armor?
Yeah. a flying tank with an armored human piloting it. That just wins
compared to mecha in virtually every scenario imaginable.
I agree, you're probably right but given the assumptions I've
proposed, where a mech would no longer be the slow, awkward cousin
of a fighter or tank, I don't see why it would be such an obviously
stupid choice. Now, certainly. But not if all the Ifs are
satisfied, a single machine that can work in vacuum and on land in
atmosphere, fly, run, fight.
If you're advanced enough to make a mecha work, you're advanced
enough to make a flying tank that will run circles around it. It
really is just that simple.
Now, if you're talking Starship Troopers style battle armor, that's
another story. But that isn't really mecha, either.
I can, namely the fact that anything you can do with a mech (in
combat, mind) can be done better by something else.
Some*things* else, yes. Fighters + tanks + helicopters = mechs
(assuming the ability to make a practical Gundam or Dom, which is
far from certain). But if you could have one machine handle the
roles of 3 machines at once, why not? Assuming it could be built, of course.
Hovertank. There you go. There was a game awhile back called
Centurion that made use of grav tanks. Unbelievably useful hardware.
With them on the ground and battleships in space there's nothing you
can't handle (and you use corvettes with armored marines for boarding
actions and such).
Powered body armor is one thing. I can definitely see that
happening (something like the marines in Starcraft). But there's a
pretty big gap between that and bona-fide mecha.
But when does impossible bullshit kick in? How big does the body
armor have to get before it becomes, based on your analysis, useless
or idiotic? Double the size of a person? 4 times? 8? Madox-01 or
Gasaraki or Macross?
It has to be small enough and simple enough that it's a good idea vs.
a comparably sophisticated fighter or tank. Tachikomas are about the
limit there, and if it were me I'd probably stick with simple
exoskeletons with hard points on 'em and enough propellant for
power-assisted leaps. Anything larger is just too expensive to be
worthwhile; might as well invest in a fighter/tank/whatever at that point.
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