mechas and walkers - doom-bringers or death-traps?

[moach_mayhem 10]

it occurred to me the other day...

we see Mech's in all sorts of sci-fi battlefields, be it in movies or games... they always look really cool and deal unstoppable dammage to whatever dares opose them...

but how good a war-machine is an AT-ST like contraption? in a real (or realistic sci-fi) war context - would a "walking tank/apc" really be a good idea?

futuristic scenarios depict such walking robots as all-terrain fearless metal beasts that feature ideally unmatched habilities to deal with unwelcoming environments....

but let's look at it from a combat-engineering point-of-view...

pros:

- infantry-like terrain negotiation habilities

- faster than walking

- tank-like weapons capacity and armor

- awe-strinking presence pounds horror upon the most dauntless of foes

- can easily move over dragon's teeth, hedgehogs and other barriers, where tanks and cars would be stuck

- can "duck" and "pop" in and out of the line of fire

cons:

- incredibly complex piece of machinery with thousands of moving parts

- would probably require advanced onboard computers to handle

- needs one hell of a power supply

- not very stable a platform for firing heavy-recoil guns

- could easily "sink" a leg in muddy terrain or soft sand/snow

- stands out tall above ground, a very easy, slow-moving target for AT soldiers

- slow as a pig....

- as stealth as a marching band

so, say one would set off creating a futuristic-combat addon pack for ArmA2 or something, how would you advise on the presence of mechs and the like

justifiable? or just a hands-down death-trap?

discuss :bounce3:

[Daniel 0]

It's hard to think of a situation where a bi-pedal mech would be the platform of choice.

Big mechs are impractical due to sheer weight and high profile. Smaller mechs might be viable if air transportable, as a sort of quick reaction asset. In this case it would have to weigh in at around 10 tons or less, unless designed around a heavier lifting future aircraft (V-44?).

Perhaps a one man mech, say 3 or 4 metres tall, capable of providing accurate fire support in rugged terrain. More intimate support than most platforms while retaining armour against small arms fire. Could be something of a platoon level asset. But then it wouldn't be much use in a conventional war, where air superiority could be contested or lost.

Edited December 7, 2010 by Daniel

[NeMeSiS 11]

Except for being awesome, i cant think of 1 real advantage of choosing legs over tracks as something to put your guns on. All of your pro's except the dragons teeth are advantages over infantry, not over tanks. And unless the mech is huge things like dragons teeth would still be obstacles.

[ArmAriffic 10]

If it try's to fire a big gun it just falls over, lol "I'll get em' (BOOM) oh crap"

[ck-claw 1]

Depends if the mechs/walker was controlled by our very own 'Walker' ;):D

Kind Regards! :p

[moach_mayhem 10]

another point worth considering is that although the "ducking" hability could be just as well provided by a tank or armored car with a gun turret mounted on an extending boom or crane...

perhaps if the mech is to be kept mostly out of harms way, perhaps primarily as a load-carrying and infantry-assist platform, it could be more useful in a real battle... guns for self-defense, sure, why not?

but i too fail to see the use of such type of vehicle as a hard-combat asset

i would imagine maybe two-three meters tall mechs with long lightweight legs and wide-area feet working as a mobile infantry support system, ideally unmanned, remotely controlled by a platoon member....

AT-ST's don't strike me much as a battle-worthy apparatus... i mean, even ewoks can have the better of them... let alone AT4-toting highly trained combatants....

hence, me raising this discussion.... sci-fi wars are loaded with gun-sporting mechs to such extent that it even diverts from how poorly they would perform in a real armed conflict

is there conceivable justification (awesome factor aside) to the existance of such hardware in future combat, or is this myth truly "busted"?

[max power 21]

With conventional materials, it's difficult to make a road vehicle that's resistant to amour piercing machine gun fire. APCs until recently were vulnerable to .30 calibre rounds up close. The bradley and newer vehicles resist these calibres but are heavier (twice as heavy as the m113 for the bradley). This walking vehicle would need to have quite heavy armour because it is standing upright and would be quite an easy target. I think it would be lots and lots of horsepower to stay maneuverable. In order to jump, for instance, it would need a power to weight ratio of 1:1, I think.

Just playing with numbers, for a bradley sized and armoured mecha with todays materials, let's call it 40 tons. With feet 1 meter long and 1 meter wide, it has a ground pressure of 20 tonnes per square meter. That's 28 psi. That's twice the ground pressure of a m1a2. I guess this would be for a 6 meter tall mecha. If this is at all accurate, to have the ground pressure of a tank, you'd need a mecha with 1/3 its height in foot length and width to get down to the ground pressure of an MBT.

Edited December 8, 2010 by Max Power

[ryguy 10]

Mechs would only make sense with four legs. In fact the army has already commissioned a four-legged mech, seen here:

egpBRjFqNWA

Of course there's the mobility aspect, it can go anywhere a human can go. If there were a tank-sized, low-profile, four- or six-legged mech (nothing like the star wars ones), it actually would make sense. Otherwise, tracks are the better solution.

[Big Dawg KS 6]

A bipedal/multiped vehicle would be far better at supporting infantry in urban/close quarters environments (or has the potential to depending on its size and maneuverability).

In an open field though, unless it could get really low, it'd be quite vulnerable.

[[aps]gnat 28]

A bipedal/multiped vehicle would be far better at supporting infantry in urban/close quarters environments (or has the potential to depending on its size and maneuverability).

In an open field though, unless it could get really low, it'd be quite vulnerable.

Yes, biped good for Urban, low profile tracked good for country.

If the biped could "lay-down" (onto wheels for example) then you could potential get the best of both.

But as said, they would be extremely complicated (and hence delayed in implementation) bit of machinery ...... but very do-able at current technology.

I think the Exo-skeleton type machine will come first to the battlefield.

Already a few projects out there where theyre testing.

-Carry heavy packs

-Carry heavy weapons

-Run faster, longer.

-Extra strength for urban (structure) assualt etc

-Less "restrictive" to the body

-More likely to be taken up by the average foot soldier.

[-)rStrangelove 0]

I'm with Gnat on this one.

Big mechs dont seem to be feasible on a battlefield, but mini-mechs/exo-skeletons could come quite in handy. Due to its size it should be harder to see and would produce less noise, but it offers the advantages of a big mech like carrying equipment/weapons and troops for longer distances.

Since an Exo could also maintain more computers/terminals/consoles stuff than a normal soldier it could become a walking platoon info center when cooperating with recon units like drones for example.

Edited December 8, 2010 by ])rStrangelove

[SteveJA 12]

I think ill jump on the Exoskeleton idea being the most likly in the forseable future.

Imagain being able to preform foot patrol knowing you have a good deal of metal between you and that potetial IED or sniper/Sporadic fire. And your not carrying that fucking heavy burgen and body armour through dirt and ditches.

More eqipment, IR, NV with more quality, faster movement, pure fear factor, heavy weapons . . . . .

I surpose the only way they would counter these, would to ethier use anti-material rifles, or AT, both really a single shot kind thing, and both would be hard to aim/setup with armoured mech firing heavy weapons running towards you.

Of corse this could be just dreaming ha ha

We'd surly need a new highly effective energy system

[walker 0]

Hi all

Future wars will be small not big think nano. A simple nano weapon can superglue your mechs joints, or a real world tanks tracks, or a jets turbo; imobilising it.

Fire one bullet that has tracking capability rather than the thousands that it takes to take out a single target. Why kill them? They are more useful as prisoners. A nano war head can track a particular soldier stick to them and guide progressive fire to them until they are incapacitated. Not only that but you can make the projectiles recoverable and reusable.

Why bother with pointing a gun at the target? Use a vertical projector that way the troops do no even have to put their head over the parapet. Fire up a swarm of them as a network let one of them hover and act as guide and targeting relay and guide the others to the target once the target is physicly aquired let the others home on that.

This technology is already here. We already have fin guided munitions and they get smaller by the day, UAVs etc.

Today there is a battle in cyberspace, that we are not allowed to speak of in this forum one of the participants is not even a country.

It is proverbial that generals always prepare for the last war…

~James A. Field, Jr.

http://www.history.navy.mil/books/field/ch2b.htm

The days of the tank and the mech and the massed infantry divisions are dead.

The winners of the next war do not think that way.

Kind Regards walker

Edited December 8, 2010 by walker

[SteveJA 12]

Yeah but no but YEHa

When you have your Nano weapon, our mechs will have uber shields with lightsabers and . . . .

Lol But no on a serious note what is a Nano weapon??

[moach_mayhem 10]

(...)what is a Nano weapon??

it's a very very very small weapon... ideally, robots made of molecule-sized components and the like... circuitry based on individal atoms, the works....

a nano-weapon could be designed to behave like a virus, contaminating enemies one by one and seizing up the organism of one particular target once that's reached....

not very war-like... not like war as we know it, anyways.... and not a very appealing concept for games either....

...so i guess that's where the mechas come in

Edited December 8, 2010 by Moach_Mayhem

[HyperU2 11]

Didn't this idea originate in the country that brought us the Kamikaze?

[walker 0]

...Lol But no on a serious note what is a Nano weapon??

Hi SteveJA360

I dont just mean nano I also mean micro.

They would be the weapons that most of the big weapons companies are researching now do a google search with Nano and any big weapons company name you will see what I mean.

As to micro weapons they are already here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM25

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_UAV

As drive and control system weights decrease payload weights increase that German Micro Drone is probably cabable of carrying a 25mm explosive warhead already. Imagine what you could do with that?

You can place each warhead right on target. Drop 23mm right in the targets foxhole or fly it through his bunker slit.

Of course a radio jammer could take it out as would chaff and a simple net would stop it but frequency shifting and smaller size and the first one blows a whole in your net so the second one gets you.

They are cheap and commercial and off the shelf.

Macro weapons are the past, micro are the present and the future of war is nano.

Kind regards walker

Edited December 8, 2010 by walker

[Big Dawg KS 6]

I'm still convinced that the future of military development (at least in the West) will focus on unmanned vehicles/automated systems. With more and more of modern militaries being networked and an increasingly lazy (technology-spoiled generations) population, human operators will probably become a significant bottleneck.

Of course, that's only if there's anyone still left to wage real war against...

By the time pratical mech-type vehicles could be developed, warfare might be so far abstracted that the idea of a mechanical weapon system may seem like nonsense.

Edited December 8, 2010 by Big Dawg KS

[NoRailgunner 0]

Battletech anyone? :D

Perhaps future battles between companies, politics and countries will be much more done via networks, media and through programming/scripting skills? Maybe the public world and average people won't even recognize such kind of warfare...

[celery 8]

An exoskeleton is the only viable bipedal armored solution with technology that isn't based on science fiction. Calculating and powering an automated leg system that can move in all terrain without collapsing and still having considerable benefits over infantry, cars and tanks is a far fetched idea.

[Wolfrug 0]

Hm. I think y'all thinking about this the wrong way. A walking mech crewed by humans is unlikely to ever be 'worth' it when compared to its wheeled/tracked counterparts. How do you armour it enough to protect the crew, while still having room for a power supply, fuel, ammunition and weaponry? Logistical nightmare.

However, there are also these: http://www.gizmag.com/korea-dodamm-super-aegis-autonomos-robot-gun-turret/17198/

Which are, any way you put it, fucking scary.

"The Super aEgis 2 is an automated gun tower that can find and lock on to a human-sized target in pitch darkness at a distance of up to 1.36 miles (2.2 kilometers). It uses a 35x zoom CCD camera with 'enhancement feature' for bad weather, in conjunction with a dual FOV, autofocus Infra-Red sensor, to pick out targets."

Now, imagine a walker-mech NOT as a replacement for tanks or IFVs, but as an automated, automobile gun turret. Fly it in with an infantry section, use it as a pack mule on the hike up the hills, then set it up to ceaselessly scan the hills for badguys while the men rest. Or any other possible application one might have for remote-controlled guns on legs that never need to sleep and can scan a heck of a lot more space than a guy with binoculars.

Just an idea ;)

Regards,

Wolfrug

[moach_mayhem 10]

(...) imagine a walker-mech NOT as a replacement for tanks or IFVs, but as an automated, automobile gun turret. Fly it in with an infantry section, use it as a pack mule on the hike up the hills, then set it up to ceaselessly scan the hills for badguys while the men rest. Or any other possible application one might have for remote-controlled guns on legs that never need to sleep and can scan a heck of a lot more space than a guy with binoculars. (...)

i had thought of that myself - but, why couldn't that robot use wheels or small tracks instead of legs?

sure, it can cover terrain that no wheeled vehicle can, and performs as well as infantry in constricted environments such as urban or dense jungle...

but then again, is than not just like the big-dog?

i'm still trying to conceive a scenario that would coherently justify a biped over most other alternatives...

doesn't seem very plausible, tho... i think we're almost safe to say "myth busted"... it would be more viable to give infantry men jetpacks than to have heavy mech-warrior-ish machines running around

Edited December 8, 2010 by Moach_Mayhem

[NeMeSiS 11]

Now, imagine a walker-mech NOT as a replacement for tanks or IFVs, but as an automated, automobile gun turret. Fly it in with an infantry section, use it as a pack mule on the hike up the hills, then set it up to ceaselessly scan the hills for badguys while the men rest. Or any other possible application one might have for remote-controlled guns on legs that never need to sleep and can scan a heck of a lot more space than a guy with binoculars.

Because you can also put that gun on (smaller) tracks. :p

[TRexian 0]

3 words:

Sigourney Weaver's hotness

:)

I think the exoskeleton is the right idea. But, if you can engineer around the balance issues, it is but a small evolution to mechs.

[max power 21]

Bipedal structures are not the optimum firing platform at any rate. This is why we shoot from the prone position.