950 replies to this topic

[Melcyna]

Randis, on 25 April 2013 - 11:53 PM, said:

Spoiler

The Battletech settting does include periods of intense warship on warship action, but much of that occured during the Age of War, the Reunification War with the Periphery, and then the Liberation of Terra from Amaris the Usurper by Aleksandr Kerensky and the SLDF. Warships did duke it out with other warships, and they also used tactical nuclear weapons, but the ground campaign still remained important. You need ground forces to take and hold ground; factories, mines, power stations etc. You can obliterate stuff from orbit, but this is why many of the SLDF Castles Brian were buried underground.
Even in the real world, the modern infantry trooper still has a role that has not been eradicated by ICBMs or air power.

The reasons for the central role of Battlemechs are largely social, in my opinion..
During the Succession Wars the Ares Conventions were adhered to because it preserved what little technology and infrastructure remained; wars were not total (in the modern sense) but proxy battles often held away from civilian areas. A lance of Battlemechs could decide the fate of an entire world. Arguably the way of the Clans was all about minimising collateral damage and preserving civilian life and infrastrucutre, while also minimising military losses... until Malvina Hazen started practicing the Mongol doctrine...
We also need to consider that a return to feudal systems of noble families had been reestablished before the destruction of the Terran Hegemony. Noble families would maintain their status by limiting access to elite technologies.

The Smoke Jaguars used warship weapons on the city of Edo on the planet Turtle Bay, which was considered a breach of "civilised" war by the Inner Sphere. That was the first such instance in centuries until the Word of Blake used orbital bombardment, nuclear weapons, and chemical and biological weapons during their Jihad.

One of the most compelling aspects of the Battletech setting is how it tries to explore the issue of how conflict should be handled by societies, and what steps they may make to limit or curtail destruction through various codes of honour.

Fiction wise that's fine (especially since the point of the game is to sell more materials and make ppl interested to buy BT stuff)

logical wise though? it has absolutely no sense

Fighting in an ordered regimented fashion as BT did is not handling conflict by societies and curtailing destruction
it's the opposite,

instead of attempting to resolve conflicts via other means and with force of arms as the last resort when all else fails, what they did is made force of arms the answer to most of their conflicts instead

all they did is trade off short burst of intense war, with a perpetual constant warfare because everyone now resolve it through controlled warfare... a mockery watered down war like a game, which is the whole point of BT, ie: it's a game and the setting is convenient since players are expected to be fighting lots.

and instead of a war where one side eventually submits or both are exhausted (after which it's unlikely for them to wage another war for quite some time), we have a situation where they KEEP DOING THIS as the war will never end conclusively.

this was addressed in the other thread about BT politics (which is interesting in itself)

"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it."
Robert E. Lee

Spoiler

The point with the absence of ground forces is a bit off

in our world for example, ICBM and airpower don't render ground forces moot for several reasons:
1. ICBM are absolute last resort weapon since most scenarios involving their usage generally have extensive diplomatic issues since NO ONE can tell if an ICBM carries a nuke or not and thus have to be assumed to carry one in the absence of any prior knowledge, as such all nations with ICBM weapons generally are reluctant to use them unless if there is no other options.

2. Airpower is first and foremost a force multiplier... it has been since it's inception, and it will be as far as war is waged between man on THIS PLANET since sealing air corridor doesn't stop a force from getting somewhere, you have the sea and ground routes as well depending on locations not to mention that both ground and naval force CAN fight air force and denying the airspace.

in modern world, the primary reason why ground forces are still as valid as ever of course is the reality that we are waging asymmetric warfare for the most part these days where air power doesn't do as much good, technically in a full blown direct conventional warfare airpower of today is extremely potent and powerful that even a tiny ground force can win with good air support.

The problem with BT here is that they wage war on interstellar scale across hundreds of worlds separated from each other by vast amount of space

There's only ONE WAY TO GET ANYWHERE in this world... through space, all the mechs and infantries etc has to cross the space to get to a planet they intend to win and for the most part in this BT odd world, planets are either entirely within the control of one faction or another along with the control of the space around it.

In our world, the army can still reach their objective without the airforce or full control of it (china among the master of this, as displayed in Korean War)

In our world, the navy can still influence war even without the airforce in various manner, either from stopping the shipping, cruise missiles, naval bombardment, all the way to ICBM weapons launched from submarines.

In BT, they can't do ANYTHING until they move the force across space into the planet in question and everything including shipping is done across space lanes.

Edited by Melcyna, 26 April 2013 - 01:32 AM.

[Just wanna play]

Karma Police, on 26 April 2013 - 12:19 AM, said:

all of the weight classes are ridiculous.
an assault mech thats bigger than a 6 story building cannot possibly weight only 100 tons.
100 tons is what a medium-light mech would be if it were in the real world.
just so you know, a real life abrahms tank weighs in at about 80 tons. (despite it being said lower - because of war treatys).
so if a normal tank which is lower than 1 story of a building is 80tons... an assault should weight at least 900 tons.

its been said already... BY ME

[Theodor Kling]

I just remembered another one: The diffilculty of calculating pirate jump points.

Seriously, they tell us that a jump point needs to be have near zero gravitational field. Maybe a low radient is also nice. But the gravitational field is not that hard to compute (numericly) once you know the position of every major celestial body. And once you got position and momentum of everything important in a system ( i would say you can ignore all but the largest asteroids)you can compute the position for any time yout want. This does need a computer, you can´t do it analyticaly. But not an insanely powerfull one. I once had to do it as a compuer exercise in 3rd semester. even using a comparativley crude, ram intensive method we could calculate the ovement of all planets and the sun in our solar system for 10^9 seconds. More was a ram problem, but switching from the PC pool fossils with their pentium III and 256Mb ram to our home pcs with 2Gb ram an order of magnitude more was no problem. Others in the course did it more elegantly and managed the 10^10sec prediction on the pool pcs. A real thought out code ( not a 3rd semester student using mathematica 4) , on a modern home computer could probably do it with all the moons as well , and for centuries.

So why can´t Bt computers do it?

[Alan Wagner]

Theodor Kling, on 26 April 2013 - 09:53 AM, said:

I just remembered another one: The diffilculty of calculating pirate jump points.

Seriously, they tell us that a jump point needs to be have near zero gravitational field. Maybe a low radient is also nice. But the gravitational field is not that hard to compute (numericly) once you know the position of every major celestial body. And once you got position and momentum of everything important in a system ( i would say you can ignore all but the largest asteroids)you can compute the position for any time yout want. This does need a computer, you can´t do it analyticaly. But not an insanely powerfull one. I once had to do it as a compuer exercise in 3rd semester. even using a comparativley crude, ram intensive method we could calculate the ovement of all planets and the sun in our solar system for 10^9 seconds. More was a ram problem, but switching from the PC pool fossils with their pentium III and 256Mb ram to our home pcs with 2Gb ram an order of magnitude more was no problem. Others in the course did it more elegantly and managed the 10^10sec prediction on the pool pcs. A real thought out code ( not a 3rd semester student using mathematica 4) , on a modern home computer could probably do it with all the moons as well , and for centuries.

So why can´t Bt computers do it?

If a computer meant to help you aim straight weighs 9 tons, how heavy must a computer designed to location gravity free locations in space weigh?

[Just wanna play]

im starting to see why IStech is refereed to as pehistoric

*prehistoric

[Melcyna]

Alan Wagner, on 26 April 2013 - 06:41 PM, said:

If a computer meant to help you aim straight weighs 9 tons, how heavy must a computer designed to location gravity free locations in space weigh?

And they don't aim straight for that matter...

since that's about the only way one could not develop weapons effective beyond 1km with their existing assets, so no matter which way we slice it... BT in general (IS or Clan, both are equally brain dead in applied tech or common sense) basically falls apart when one scrutinize over it's details.

[Just wanna play]

Melcyna, on 26 April 2013 - 09:46 PM, said:

And they don't aim straight for that matter...

since that's about the only way one could not develop weapons effective beyond 1km with their existing assets, so no matter which way we slice it... BT in general (IS or Clan, both are equally brain dead in applied tech or common sense) basically falls apart when one scrutinize over it's details.

Yep, pretty much

[ego1607]

Humanoid bipedal design is actually quite ridiculous itself. We humans walk on two legs because we evolved as a four legged species and adopted one pair of limbs for fine object manipulation very recently. As a consequence we are physically inferior to any species of comparable weight in every possible aspect. Is someone for some reason wanted to design a good walking warmachine, there are greatly superior (although less cool) designs. It would probably look like a giant bear or a cockroach rather then a human.

[MadSavage]

ego1607, on 27 April 2013 - 07:14 AM, said:

Humanoid bipedal design is actually quite ridiculous itself. We humans walk on two legs because we evolved as a four legged species and adopted one pair of limbs for fine object manipulation very recently. As a consequence we are physically inferior to any species of comparable weight in every possible aspect. Is someone for some reason wanted to design a good walking warmachine, there are greatly superior (although less cool) designs. It would probably look like a giant bear or a cockroach rather then a human.

Well we're inferior only because we fight with our hands and feet and have less of our brain devoted to the neuromuscular side of things. We don't run fast because we're an adaptation, however an animal that evolved from the ground up to be bipedal would probably be able to run as fast as anything else out there with four legs.

As for the 'less strong' side of things, mechs fight with weapons and not muscles, and their muscles have very little in common with ours in terms of strength-to-weight ratio. A bipedal mech is much more efficient than a quadrupedal or hexapedal design because it has fewer moving parts and smaller size, meaning that it is harder to hit and easier to maneuver. In terms of the BT universe, mechs make a lot of sense if you're waging war across vast amounts of undeveloped land across planets with varying types of geography.

So yes, tl;dr, I <3 battlemechs!!!

[Littlefingers]

I have a ridiculous battletech fact for you all who complain about all the stuff in battletech . the fact is no of you complaining about the tech level must never have read the books or the tech readouts or an of the other source material, or you would realize that much of the 31st century stuff is just about 21st level tech level due to the fact that there was over 300 years of warfare with most of that with no rules of combat. so think about the fact that by 3025 most of what was being used for combat was being build in factories that couldn't be repaired and most space faring warships were destroyed and those that were still around were far to valueable to use in combat and risk being destroyed. So think about it if you cant replace it would you risk using it. Man people read more and complain less. you might learn something.

[Melcyna]

Littlefingers, on 27 April 2013 - 08:13 AM, said:

I have a ridiculous battletech fact for you all who complain about all the stuff in battletech . the fact is no of you complaining about the tech level must never have read the books or the tech readouts or an of the other source material, or you would realize that much of the 31st century stuff is just about 21st level tech level due to the fact that there was over 300 years of warfare with most of that with no rules of combat. so think about the fact that by 3025 most of what was being used for combat was being build in factories that couldn't be repaired and most space faring warships were destroyed and those that were still around were far to valueable to use in combat and risk being destroyed. So think about it if you cant replace it would you risk using it. Man people read more and complain less. you might learn something.

Already discussed to death before but you obviously missed it

short version: BT is NOT EVEN 20th century tech level in some cases... they are far more backward and primitive and in some respect worse than the tech level of WW2

so read more in the thread and you might learn something... right back at you, since you clearly missed the ENTIRE discussion where the whole SL and IS war and it's supposed technological regression been discussed, rebuked, and made fun of for it's nonsense and trash fiction.

MadSavage, on 27 April 2013 - 07:43 AM, said:

Well we're inferior only because we fight with our hands and feet and have less of our brain devoted to the neuromuscular side of things. We don't run fast because we're an adaptation, however an animal that evolved from the ground up to be bipedal would probably be able to run as fast as anything else out there with four legs.

As for the 'less strong' side of things, mechs fight with weapons and not muscles, and their muscles have very little in common with ours in terms of strength-to-weight ratio. A bipedal mech is much more efficient than a quadrupedal or hexapedal design because it has fewer moving parts and smaller size, meaning that it is harder to hit and easier to maneuver. In terms of the BT universe, mechs make a lot of sense if you're waging war across vast amounts of undeveloped land across planets with varying types of geography.

So yes, tl;dr, I <3 battlemechs!!!

Unfortunately they don't...

Spoiler

the fastest bipedal animal on earth out there don't quite nearly run as fast as an equivalent mass quadruped for instance (red kangaroo 70kph vs cheetah 100kph, and the cheetah is technically smaller mass too at that), and nor can bipedal maintain the pace for as long in general... there's a good reason why all our workhorse animals were quadruped, and similarly a good reason as to why most bipedal animals can't really outrun quadruped predators.

it's fairly easy to see why, on a bipedal you got the whole body standing high presenting a massive drag, and unlike the bipedal, nearly the entire muscles of a quadruped assist it in it's movement gait, few are wasted as they used nearly all their limbs for it's gait.

In combat bipedal chassis of any kind (including humans but we don't have a choice there and fortunately there are few sentient things lower profile than us that is a direct threat in combat) movement gait is also it's fatal weakness

A bipedal has to stand or come close to standing posture to move effectively at all, this turns it into a sitting duck as they become a tall target easier to see and fired upon, while remaining in low posture translates to slow movement rate.

Soldiers are trained to seek cover and stay as low as possible in combat for a good reason, like it or not... bipedal is in fact a very poor combat base in pretty much most respect.

To make things worse, a bipedal chassis that is standing presents the worst gunnery platform for any sort of weapon with actual recoil that can affect the chassis, in order to mitigate this the easiest solution is to lower the center of gravity ie: crouch or prone the bipedal chassis... but this naturally means the chassis can't move effectively while doing so.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg...

Edited by Melcyna, 27 April 2013 - 08:33 AM.

[Just wanna play]

Melcyna, on 27 April 2013 - 08:22 AM, said:

short version: BT is NOT EVEN 20th century tech level in some cases... they are far more backward and primitive and in some respect worse than the tech level of WW2
.

and thats what makes it awesome!
you are missing one MAJOR advantage of being bipedal, versatility, your real world example of soldiers having to stay low is a perfect example, when you are bipedal you have more of a choice on how to utilize your limbs, would an animal that has 4 limbs and need all them to move be able to use a weapon, then look over cover, then crawl on 3 legs and hold a weapon in the third?? since bi pedals have arms, they have limbs free to do what ever is needed, but they can still crawl, crouch, go prone, etc when needed its not like you HAVE to stand straight up and be the biggest target possible (of course, this ww1 game says other wise...)
and since our arms where evolved for various tasks over then walking, we have a very good range of motion allowing us to do many movements quadruple pedals cant, sure a cheeta can run super fast (not for very long tho) but can it hold a gun while laying on the ground then get back up with out ever dropping the gun?
we also can turn our torsos , so if our stompy robots used all 4 legs to walk, it would be like a turret less td :/

of course you are right about certain things, like bipedal not being perfect for absorbing recoil, but we can always change our stance for the task, and mad savage, wtf, just... wtf, the result of evolution making an animal that can run fast is quadrupedal movement in the first place, so evolving for speed while being bipedal is stupid and pointless, there where probably animals like that that probably got killed that caused us not to have evolved for running, the smart ones survived and breed, the " fast" on the other hand....(hence predators being 4 legged more often then not), so...

of course having four legs and still a human like torso, well thats got its own set of problems, you cant just talk about this stuff and say one thing is completely bettert then the other, you just can't
we as humans evolved to utilize our intelligence, we ae bipedal so we can used items in our hands while still being able to walk, we arent colorblind so we can tell certain materials apart, we have 2 eyes with over lapping field of views for better vision when looking at fine details, etc

lots of typing there... bound to be errors just so ya know

[Soy]

Melcyna, on 27 April 2013 - 08:22 AM, said:

Already discussed to death before but you obviously missed it...

...so read more in the thread and you might learn something... right back at you, since you clearly missed the ENTIRE discussion

Yeah dude, bash the guy cuz he didn't read (LITERALLY) 750 POSTS ABOUT HOW A FANTASY WORLD ISNT REAL.

[Just wanna play]

Soy, on 27 April 2013 - 09:21 AM, said:

Yeah dude, bash the guy cuz he didn't read (LITERALLY) 750 POSTS ABOUT HOW A FANTASY WORLD ISNT REAL.

and still talked about it like everyone else did....... hes not any better

[Melcyna]

Soy, on 27 April 2013 - 09:21 AM, said:

Yeah dude, bash the guy cuz he didn't read (LITERALLY) 750 POSTS ABOUT HOW A FANTASY WORLD ISNT REAL.

Of course i would bash him... it's the whole point of this thread... to make fun of BT's inconsistent and nonsensical lore,

Littlefingers, on 27 April 2013 - 08:13 AM, said:

the fact is no of you complaining about the tech level must never have read the books or the tech readouts or an of the other source material, or you would realize that much of the 31st century stuff is just about 21st level tech level due to the fact that there was over 300 years of warfare with most of that with no rules of combat.

That's what he said himself, so since he tried to justify it... it's only fitting for me to bludgeon his argument with what's been done before in this very thread, it is after all what this thread is all about.

Just wanna play, on 27 April 2013 - 09:09 AM, said:

Spoiler

and thats what makes it awesome!
you are missing one MAJOR advantage of being bipedal, versatility, your real world example of soldiers having to stay low is a perfect example, when you are bipedal you have more of a choice on how to utilize your limbs, would an animal that has 4 limbs and need all them to move be able to use a weapon, then look over cover, then crawl on 3 legs and hold a weapon in the third?? since bi pedals have arms, they have limbs free to do what ever is needed, but they can still crawl, crouch, go prone, etc when needed its not like you HAVE to stand straight up and be the biggest target possible (of course, this ww1 game says other wise...)
and since our arms where evolved for various tasks over then walking, we have a very good range of motion allowing us to do many movements quadruple pedals cant, sure a cheeta can run super fast (not for very long tho) but can it hold a gun while laying on the ground then get back up with out ever dropping the gun?
we also can turn our torsos , so if our stompy robots used all 4 legs to walk, it would be like a turret less td :/

of course you are right about certain things, like bipedal not being perfect for absorbing recoil, but we can always change our stance for the task, and mad savage, wtf, just... wtf, the result of evolution making an animal that can run fast is quadrupedal movement in the first place, so evolving for speed while being bipedal is stupid and pointless, there where probably animals like that that probably got killed that caused us not to have evolved for running, the smart ones survived and breed, the " fast" on the other hand....(hence predators being 4 legged more often then not), so...

of course having four legs and still a human like torso, well thats got its own set of problems, you cant just talk about this stuff and say one thing is completely bettert then the other, you just can't
we as humans evolved to utilize our intelligence, we ae bipedal so we can used items in our hands while still being able to walk, we arent colorblind so we can tell certain materials apart, we have 2 eyes with over lapping field of views for better vision when looking at fine details, etc

lots of typing there... bound to be errors just so ya know

Some valid point there,

but a few things immediately stick out:

Spoiler

1. why does a war machine needs to hold it's weapon with an arm and why is it not build into it in the first place

remember that a hand is not an ideal method of holding a weapon (we humans don't have a choice on the matter, for now anyway) since it's a less stable link between the weapon and the user, there's a reason why every vehicle weapons we have are mounted directly on the chassis with rock solid support...

2. flexibility is fine and dandy when it's intended for other things than war (since outside war we have a lot of different need and goals), but these are war machines intended for war... there's no margin of allowance in a war for jack of all trade, master of none because in a war during combat when you are master of none and you meet the respective master of the field (be it ground, sea, or air)... you simply perish.

3. a bipedal has no choice on the matter... they are either upright to move, or they crouch/prone and becomes nearly immobile

so what happens if they are under fire (as most front line units do) and has to move quickly?

well... that's part of the problem of what happens in WW1, you got infantries... they need to charge the trench and take it over... but standing up and running there means sitting duck and getting slaughtered by machine guns and rifles. If they prone and crawl slowly across the field on the other hand they get blasted to little chunks by artillery that will find them as sitting ducks.

and if they don't do anything and just hide in their trench then EVENTUALLY one of the enemy artillery will blast them to bits inside their own trench... or they can pray their artillery get the enemy artillery first or the enemy's trench.

It was not a pretty choice... but luckily, we found other means to solve that...

4. there's technically nothing stopping a quadruped chassis from mounting a turret...

with such turret it's essentially a literal tank with legs except with much lower weight capacity and increased complexity... and unlike the bipedal mechs, this one is a LITERAL tank with legs, but whereas the bipedal chassis is tall and high on the move, this one can be made MUCH lower in profile and thus attract far less attention than the bipedal equivalent, and yet still move reasonably... (it would be spider like however rather than quadruped animal like at very low height).

5. Turretless TD actually has a very good reason why they came about... Turretless TD can hold a MASSIVE GUN for a given chassis size and weight... this was one of their primary reason why it was invented in the first place, to allow a vehicle to carry weapons that are normally not mountable on similar size and weight tank chassis....

plus a turretless TD is INCREDIBLY low and thus really easy to hide in the field... which is crucial in warfare where the first shot determines most of the outcome.

a few others as well but we'll take it slow...

Edited by Melcyna, 27 April 2013 - 10:53 AM.

[Just wanna play]

i never meant a mech needing a hand to hold a weapon, jut having a free limb to mount it on, its not like you would want it in the torso where you can barely aim it

and bipedal doesnt mean tall, look at the way jenners are, they dont have a big upper torso, just 2 legs with a small little boat strapped on top

[Melcyna]

that depends entirely on the design of the chassis of course...

note that being unable to aim it with torso mounting would be true on a bipedal case...

but this does not necessarily hold on quadruped, or more legs which have a horizontal aligned body instead of vertical during movement.

in the case of jenner,

be careful there, tall is a relative word... tall to whom..

if we take a jenner and compare it to non bipedal design of the same MASS, same WEIGHT, same TOTAL VOLUME, it's practically guaranteed that the jenner is the taller one.

there's not much point to be shorter than say an Atlas, when both Atlas and jenner in the field still outline themselves as they are taller than any other combatant on the field.

Edited by Melcyna, 27 April 2013 - 11:05 AM.

[Just wanna play]

and i know all the strengths of turret less tds, but notice how they are disappering in favor of wheeled things with turrets, frankly, ifvs are replacing purpose built tds because a specialized tds arent necessary when all that is needed is a rocket launcher


jack of all trades may perish when facing the purpose built thing, but they will be more effective then something purpose built for something else, like the tank that can hold troops, effectively acting as an ifv, either send in 10 tanks and 10 ifvs, or send in 20 of those tanks filled with troops, think about it, do you really think a jack of all trades doesn't belong on the battle field? because they are everywhere

and many American vehicles have had their chassis modified for various tasks, light tanks as tds, medium tanks as spgs, etc...

Melcyna, on 27 April 2013 - 11:00 AM, said:

that depends entirely on the design of the chassis of course...

note that being unable to aim it with torso mounting would be true on a bipedal case...

but this does not necessarily hold on quadruped, or more legs which have a horizontal aligned body instead of vertical during movement.

in the case of jenner,

be careful there, tall is a relative word... tall to whom..

if we take a jenner and compare it to non bipedal design of the same MASS, same WEIGHT, same TOTAL VOLUME, it's practically guaranteed that the jenner is the taller one.

there's not much point to be shorter than say an Atlas, when both Atlas and jenner in the field still outline themselves as they are taller than any other combatant on the field.

it would help if you showed me a pic of an example of a mech built like what you are describing

[Melcyna]

Just wanna play, on 27 April 2013 - 11:04 AM, said:

and i know all the strengths of turret less tds, but notice how they are disappering in favor of wheeled things with turrets, frankly, ifvs are replacing purpose built tds because a specialized tds arent necessary when all that is needed is a rocket launcher


jack of all trades may perish when facing the purpose built thing, but they will be more effective then something purpose built for something else, like the tank that can hold troops, effectively acting as an ifv, either send in 10 tanks and 10 ifvs, or send in 20 of those tanks filled with troops, think about it, do you really think a jack of all trades doesn't belong on the battle field? because they are everywhere

and many American vehicles have had their chassis modified for various tasks, light tanks as tds, medium tanks as spgs, etc...

This is unfortunately mistaken,

what the american did is not making a jack of all trade...

because the light tank turned into a TD for example, is a TD now... they have changed it's role and application but it is now specialized in that role.

a sherman chassis used as Priest SPG for another example, is NOW an SPG... not a tank anymore... and it specialize in that role AS an SPG.

They essentially took a chassis, and replace it's content to fulfill a very specific role... they did not turn the chassis to be a jack of all trade at all (and this would be suicidal in fact if you tried to use them as such).

And there's only 1 tank we have right now iirc that can hold troops in it's design ie: Merkava and for that matter they do so by sacrificing something else.. in Merkava case they do this by sacrificing ammo capacity and the room that they can hold is VERY small for that matter.

and they are not an IFV replacement, rather in the event that they are forced to do so Merkava can perform a limited capacity of it, they are not intended to replace IFV AT ALL, hence why Israel has a large array of heavy APC and IFV.

Just wanna play, on 27 April 2013 - 11:07 AM, said:

it would help if you showed me a pic of an example of a mech built like what you are describing

I'll shop something in a bit...

Edited by Melcyna, 27 April 2013 - 11:18 AM.

[Just wanna play]

Melcyna, on 27 April 2013 - 11:09 AM, said:

This is unfortunately mistaken,

what the american did is not making a jack of all trade...

because the light tank turned into a TD for example, is a TD now... they have changed it's role and application but it is now specialized in that role.

a sherman chassis used as Priest SPG for another example, is NOW an SPG... not a tank anymore... and it specialize in that role AS an SPG.

They essentially took a chassis, and replace it's content to fulfill a very specific role... they did not turn the chassis to be a jack of all trade at all (and this would be suicidal in fact if you tried to use them as such).

And there's only 1 tank we have right now iirc that can hold troops in it's design ie: Merkava and for that matter they do so by sacrificing something else.. in Merkava case they do this by sacrificing ammo capacity and the room that they can hold is VERY small for that matter.

and they are not an IFV replacement, rather in the event that they are forced to do so Merkava can perform a limited capacity of it, they are not intended to replace IFV AT ALL.

jack of all trades have to have compromises somewhere right??? iack of all trades never replace, only supplement those more specialized, and the chassis its self was a jack of trades, note that the preist was also made out of the m3 lee, and so was T40

and they don't really "specialize it" for the task, the td light was nearly the same as it was when it was a light, mainly just bigger gun, it wasn't exactly a perfect td, the there is that american half track that was just a truck with a 2nd axle and treads, again, did just as well as a purpose built half track, and better then the germans ******** half track design