108 replies to this topic

[Not A Real RAbbi]

This has been on my mind a bit lately. Allow me to explain a bit, and to solicit your perspectives as well...

We have the old track-versus-wheel discussion every so often. Or HAD, when I was still in the Army. Why a track? Better at moving over certain types of unimproved terrain. Better at carrying REALLY heavy weights, like main battle tanks and self-propelled howitzers, which are STUPID heavy (30-70+ tons). Tracks can't be blown out by a single small arms round. Etc.

Why a wheel vehicle? Better consistent/safe top speed on improved roadways. Better ground clearance potential. Off-the-shelf availability of a lot of repair/service parts. Less vulnerable to 'throwing track' under certain circumstances.

What does either kinda lack, though? Well, for one, they are pretty limited on the max slope and change of slope per forward distance, that they can traverse. Both have difficulties with barriers beyond a certain height (consider an old video of a guy rampaging after stealing a freaking TANK from a National Guard armory or something, who got hung up on a jersey barrier on the highway). Both have a pretty intricate drivetrain to make things go. And as regards cargo, both are pretty limited by design in how much, and what size, they can carry in cargo safely.

Enter the mech! With articulated legs, not dissimilar from animals (often the HUMAN animal), they are able to traverse terrain that would be simply impassable for traditional wheel or track vehicles. The natural bending of hips/knees/ankles makes the able to readily adjust their height for certain circumstances. The upright orientation makes for a more commanding view of the engagement area. Articulated arms with hands (in many cases) allow for melee combat and a variety of cargo handling functions, without requiring crew to step outside of the mech's sealed crew compartment. There are MAD advantages to the battemech, and mechs in general.

The invention of the neurohelmet was the BIG enabling step for battlemechs, and the portable fusion powerplants made them relatively efficient.

What are YOUR thoughts?

[kesmai]

Tracked vehicles aren't really long term reliable. All the tank tracks used today have a maintenance cycle of 300-500 miles and a replacement cycle of arouNd 2500 miles. Just too many moving parts. Tracks are vey vulnerable to conventional and especially smart artillery. Mechs have their moving parts inside a housing. Where the environmental influence is minimal. AND this is science fiction...

[Vellron2005]

Mechs are much better all-round at moving and manageing terrain, but their size, hight, and bulk make them much more succeptable to enemy fire. It is much easier to hide a tank, and also much harded to hit a flat, low target. Mechs are big, cumbersome, slow, and would in real-world situations be decimated by a modern helicopter.

Also, when you look at today's weapon ranges and those in BT, its upsurd that lasers have "range", so a simple helicopter with air 2 surface missles would kill them preety quick..

[kesmai]

Todays atm's would barely scratch a mechs armor though... --> see "science fiction"

[crashlogic]

mechs have knees, ankles and shoulders. All notorouiously vulnerable. See human sports medicine for performance of these parts under high stress conditions. At mech scale thes parts would be rather more vulnerable. MWO artificially downplays this vulnerability by allowing mechs to run with one leg gone. In older versions of the game, "Leggers" were looked down upon because taking off a single leg was a brutally effective way of killing any mech. I like mechs but there are reasons they are science fiction.

[aniviron]

The thing that makes me sad about this post is how it reminds me that MWO's mechs don't behave like mechs.

All the advantages that the OP mentions about mechs compared to vehicles aren't in this game. The mechs behave like they have wheels. They can't climb steep slopes. They get stuck on small (less than knee-height) objects. And to top it all off, they have no melee. All in all, the mechs we have might as well be tanks.

Of course, they have none of the weaknesses that crashlogic mentions either. In this game, critting actuators and joints does effectively nothing. Again, this just reinforces the feeling that we are piloting tracked or wheeled vehicles instead of mechs.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

kesmai, on 30 August 2015 - 11:19 PM, said:

this is science fiction...

/thread

[Spr1ggan]

Mechwarriors Mechs are pretty impractical due to their size. If we were to look at it from a realistic war scenario they would be easily taken out with aircraft. I think power armour and mechs like the ones seen in Votoms or Heavy Gear would be more practical.

But this is Sci-Fi so anything goes which is the cool thing.

Edited by Spr1ggan, 31 August 2015 - 01:19 AM.

[fat4eyes]

If were talking mobility on rough terrain as the mech's main advantage over the tracked tank, a spider tank would be a much better alternative. It has all the advantages of the tracked tank (low profile, low center of gravity, high mounted 360 rotation turret and ability to use sloped armor all over the place) and the advantages of the battemech (mobility, possibly jumpjets and being able to 'crouch' and 'stand up' making it easier to move from full cover to hull down position and back). Imagine an Urbanmech with the firepower and armor of a Jagermech. That's what a spidertank could be.

The only remaining advantage of the battlemech would be melee combat, but I'm sure you could put some pincers on a spider tank to compensate. I guess that would make it a scorpion tank.

The only thing that the humanoid battlemech wins outright is fortunately also the one that matters the most: The Rule of Cool.

Here's a random spidertank:

[Shredhead]

One of the most simple reasons we'll never see mechs on battlefields is simply armor/cm² . A tank or ATV has way less surface to be covered with armor, so a cm² of it could sport so much more armor it's ridiculous to even propose using mechs. And melee? Seriously? You wouldn't even get in range to do melee damage on a modern battlefield.
And with that we haven't even started talking about balance problems, ammo feeding and housing and the vulnerability of crew housings.
And no, you could not climb slopes better with a mech than with a tracked vehicle that has way more contact area and higher contact pressure to the ground.

[Kiiyor]

Well, the argument for mechs starts and ends at the square cubed law.

Someone... somewhere did an interesting tech journal aeons ago talking about the various sized giant robots, starting with Power Ranger size and working their way down. Battletech was in there somewhere (as was Gundam), but the gist of it was that anything roughly five times the size of a person or higher is too large for joints like knees and ankles to support - with modern materials anyway.

In the lore though, Battlemechs won because of their maneuverability - though any real discussion about it is kind of laughable. True walking machines are far, far too complicated and energy hungry to reproduce as a military machine. Apparently the robots in interstellar were as close to genuine bipedal military machines as you could feasibly get, and their design was heavily researched to be as believable as possible. I remember Adam Savage remarking on how well the robots were designed.

BattleTech exists though because in the BattleTech universe, physics ain't got no time for physics.

[El Bandito]

PGI really should give mechs with hands better hill climb rate, cause technically they can assist themselves by grabbing onto things. For example, Atlas vs. Dire Wolf.

Edited by El Bandito, 31 August 2015 - 01:39 AM.

[Blue Boutique]

The problem with the video game adaptation of Battletech is that they made them all clunky robots when they were fluid machines in expert hands. They duck, weave, sidestep, jump and crouch utilizing the powerful Myomer fibers whereas hydraulics tend to be slow.

[MeiSooHaityu]

People like giant robots, that's pretty much it .

I suppose if you were looking for a more practical excuse, I'd say ease of maintenance (molymer fibers and acuators better than tracks), ability to navigate terrain a tracked vehicle can't, psychological effect of seeing a mechanical monster in front of you, etc...

[Triordinant]

Hovertanks would be the ideal all-terrain vehicles, assuming they use "repulsorlift" technology like in Star Wars. However, they're not big stompy robots so...

[Lily from animove]

I guess humanoid mechs, could also kina climb over cliffs and such, we have a rather simplified movement of out mechs here. No arm raising and crouching and such.


But not sure how the chicken walking mechs would manage this, they probably wouldn't be able to perform such maneuvers.

[FupDup]

El Bandito, on 31 August 2015 - 01:38 AM, said:

PGI really should give mechs with hands better hill climb rate, cause technically they can assist themselves by grabbing onto things. For example, Atlas vs. Dire Wolf.

The Koshi should be able to climb walls, just because.

[LordBraxton]

Spr1ggan, on 31 August 2015 - 12:56 AM, said:

Mechwarriors Mechs are pretty impractical due to their size. If we were to look at it from a realistic war scenario they would be easily taken out with aircraft. I think power armour and mechs like the ones seen in Votoms or Heavy Gear would be more practical.

But this is Sci-Fi so anything goes which is the cool thing.

this sounds like the post I always write on this subject! Spriggan is right. In fact, I would go farther and say, battlearmor is the future, not mechs. The only mech that would be practical would be an Armored Core, because they fulfill the jet fighter role, as well as carry ridiculous amounts of countermeasures. Active defense is the future, not passive defense. Realistically though, battlearmor supported by drones will be our conventional forces by 2055, just wait.

[Bishop Steiner]

TheRAbbi, on 30 August 2015 - 10:45 PM, said:

This has been on my mind a bit lately. Allow me to explain a bit, and to solicit your perspectives as well...

We have the old track-versus-wheel discussion every so often. Or HAD, when I was still in the Army. Why a track? Better at moving over certain types of unimproved terrain. Better at carrying REALLY heavy weights, like main battle tanks and self-propelled howitzers, which are STUPID heavy (30-70+ tons). Tracks can't be blown out by a single small arms round. Etc.

Why a wheel vehicle? Better consistent/safe top speed on improved roadways. Better ground clearance potential. Off-the-shelf availability of a lot of repair/service parts. Less vulnerable to 'throwing track' under certain circumstances.

What does either kinda lack, though? Well, for one, they are pretty limited on the max slope and change of slope per forward distance, that they can traverse. Both have difficulties with barriers beyond a certain height (consider an old video of a guy rampaging after stealing a freaking TANK from a National Guard armory or something, who got hung up on a jersey barrier on the highway). Both have a pretty intricate drivetrain to make things go. And as regards cargo, both are pretty limited by design in how much, and what size, they can carry in cargo safely.

Enter the mech! With articulated legs, not dissimilar from animals (often the HUMAN animal), they are able to traverse terrain that would be simply impassable for traditional wheel or track vehicles. The natural bending of hips/knees/ankles makes the able to readily adjust their height for certain circumstances. The upright orientation makes for a more commanding view of the engagement area. Articulated arms with hands (in many cases) allow for melee combat and a variety of cargo handling functions, without requiring crew to step outside of the mech's sealed crew compartment. There are MAD advantages to the battemech, and mechs in general.

The invention of the neurohelmet was the BIG enabling step for battlemechs, and the portable fusion powerplants made them relatively efficient.

What are YOUR thoughts?

because it was the 80s, the anime craze was just starting to hit the USA, Macross and Dougram looked cool, and so, Battlemechs.

There is no real factor that would make an ultra complex, ultra articulated (and thus ultra vulnerable) 30-40 ft walker a better combat vehicle than a tank. Warheads beat armor, pretty much hands down. Thus, even the MBT of today, is at times in a precarious position...but still far better at it's job than a Mech would ever be.

Protomechs and Elementals/Power Armor all can be made a case for, in special applications...but anything over 20 ft? Dead. Expensive and dead.

[Duke ramulots]

Bi-pedal is a sub optimal design under any and all circumstances. This is science fiction though so we don't have to take that into account, otherwise any and all tech that would go well on a mech would be better on a tank.

In the game we have unstable bi-pedal machines firing high recoil devises off of arms far removed from their center of gravity without twisting and falling over. That takes a certain level of suspension of disbelief right there.