Future Tech Advice and Assistance Thread [O.O.C.]

[Thrashia]

What do you guys think of the practicality of Star Wars military walkers? Specifically the AT-AT http://brian.hoover.net.au/blog/wp-cont ... r-1441.jpg and the AT-TE http://www.fbtb.net/wp-content/uploads/ ... TE_TCW.jpg , compared to wheeled or hover vehicles?

There are only a small category of scenarios when these two walkers achieve "military applicability." The AT-AT, you must remember, was an extension of the Empire's policy of 'Rule Through Fear & Threat of Force,' whereas the AT-TE was an early predecessor, the British Mk. 1 to the later editions, and designed to be utilitarian in its multi-legged and unnecessary way.

[Dreadful Sagittarius]

As others have said, mechs have a wide variety of problems with their use in a military context. More than once, people have tried to claim they'd be superior to tanks and they're thus more 'realistic' than tracked/wheeled combat vehicles. I can't at the moment find the detailed post someone made a few years back cataloguing all the various faults, but I'll try and run through them as best as I can remember.

I. A mech is always going to be heavier then actual organic creatures with legs. If we take one of Skynet's Terminators and set it down to a comparatively-sized human, the Terminator will be heavier thanks to the materials used in its body, and that's not counting the extra weight of material added on for armour. This obviously is something to consider for payloads in assault shuttles and the like. While you could fit four 40-ton mechs in the space of two 60-ton Abrams tanks, you're actually carrying more weight. This ties in neatly with the next point;

II. A legged mech will exert a much higher ground pressure than any other vehicle reliant on conventional propulsion. A 60-ton six legged mech has six contact points with the ground for its weight to go on. A tank, like say the Challenger 2, has the entire length of both tracks in contact with the ground to put the pressure of its weight on.

III. A mech is nearly always taller than the equivalent wheeled/tracked vehicle. Height is not something you want in armoured warfare thanks to the Survivability Onion. The taller you are, the easier a target you are, which brings me onto the next point;

IV. Weaponry. More than a few have claimed that a mech of equivalent size to a tank can hold more or larger weapons than the conventional vehicle, but this isn't necessarily true. If I wanted to mount the 20mm railgun from my Asterion 2 on a mech, I'd have to work out how it can deal with the recoil. Would it need deployable braces? Where do I put the powerpack? How does it reload with only a single crewman? Or even if I put two in and have one as the 'driver', then my commander isn't watching for targets and threats. And if I put a third crewman in, then what space have I saved by creating the mech in the first place?

V. People often claim a mech has greater mobility. Not so. There's a famous saying; "Where a goat can go, a man can go. And where a man can go, he can drag a gun." In this case, we can substitute 'gun' for 'tank'. Yes, rainforests are not ideal terrain for a tank, but a tank has the mass to drive straight through trees that are stood in its way. A mech would either have to be small enough that it's power armour by another name or simply try and push trees out the way. While it's doing that, (assuming it has arms and manipulators to even allow the attempt), it cannot defend itself.

---

But, and I do emphasise this, there is nothing, again, NOTHING, stopping you from using mechs. Go ahead. I think they're cool, I'm working on a universe where they're used, and nobody cares as long as you write them well. Just remember; arguing mechs are more realistic is bad and you should feel bad if you do it.

My personal two penn'orth on the subject is the AT-TE was possibly the most sensible Star Wars walker, but the capabilities the SW universe ascribes to it are crap. Something that size carrying air and rations for seven men for three whole weeks, all the while carrying up to 38 men and ten tons of cargo in a frame that isn't magnitudes of size larger than conventional tanks today and managing to travel at 60 km/h is just...silly, shall we say?

Still, it's got a sensible gun. Far too many lasers in SW it seems, but for what it's worth, don't use it wholesale. Look to it for inspiration and come up with your own design. If you want help, pop onto #NSFT or #NSLegion through the handy links in the OP and we'll do what we can. (Standard disclaimer; Legion's not for the faint of heart)

[The Fedral Union]

Alternatively you can hop on to #GESO on esper as well, people chill there too, point is there are resources in every spectrum of NS/IIFT.. Legion can be "intense" but I digress I'm of the more liberal mindset so are those who chill around us.

[Feazanthia]

Alternatively you can hop on to #GESO on esper as well, people chill there too, point is there are resources in every spectrum of NS/IIFT.. Legion can be "intense" but I digress I'm of the more liberal mindset so are those who chill around us.

wat.


Um, dunno what TFU is smoking. Anyway. There are usually one or two FT Mentors hanging around #NSFT and/or #NSLegion. You can also find Mentors on #NSMentors (also on Esper) who, while maybe not specializing in FT, can answer more general questions.

[Neornith]

Alternatively you can hop on to #GESO on esper as well, people chill there too, point is there are resources in every spectrum of NS/IIFT.. Legion can be "intense" but I digress I'm of the more liberal mindset so are those who chill around us.

As someone who was fed this line of BS I have to say that Legion and it's accompanying advice channel that is setup specifically for giving advice and nothing more are both actually great resources filled with people willing to help new players just entering RP and MT or PMT players deciding to take a dip in the FT pool.

Or you could do what you did and post the question here, just try to ignore the snide comments some people feel they need to make because the have a personal issue with other people.

[Arthurista]

Imagine I'm stuck with using old fashioned reaction motors for my missiles. Are there any tricks to make them go the extra mile aside from multi-staging and rail-gunning the launch tubes?

[Dreadful Sagittarius]

Imagine I'm stuck with using old fashioned reaction motors for my missiles. Are there any tricks to make them go the extra mile aside from multi-staging and rail-gunning the launch tubes?

What kind of reaction motors? As a quick Wikipedia check points out, a reaction motor can cover anything from a jet engine to a nuclear pulse engine to a mass driver.

[Nyte]

I have a bad feeling about posting this but, I'm going to anyway...

There's one part of the mech vs. tank argument that I've never really understood; especially when it involves the FT community. Every argument against mechs inevitably brings in modern realism (things like recoil control, ground pressure, and modern armoring practices as in those used with tanks). While I'm not saying that these are in any way incorrect (I'm well aware that the opposite is in fact true), I am wondering why this in particular continues to be brought up by those who chose to RP as FT nations in the first place... Quite simply, if I was so concerned with realism (and technical shit like ground pressure and weapons recoil) with the "toys" I use in my nations military, I'd RP as a modern tech nation instead of a future tech nation...

By its very nature, FT is NOT realistic (we have things like FTL, artificial gravity, eldritch abominations, aliens, tentacle monsters, etc.) and yet every time someone brings up mechs or mecha in any way,shape, or form, the realism hammer appears and commences swinging with the force of a 1,000 suns going nova. I guess I just don't understand why everyone seems so concerned over the realism (or lack thereof) of this single aspect of RPing...

Now that that's off of my chest, I'll sit back and wait for the inevitable attack that this post is bound to bring upon me (what can I say... I guess I just like pain).

[Feazanthia]

I have a bad feeling about posting this but, I'm going to anyway...

There's one part of the mech vs. tank argument that I've never really understood; especially when it involves the FT community. Every argument against mechs inevitably brings in modern realism (things like recoil control, ground pressure, and modern armoring practices as in those used with tanks). While I'm not saying that these are in any way incorrect (I'm well aware that the opposite is in fact true), I am wondering why this in particular continues to be brought up by those who chose to RP as FT nations in the first place... Quite simply, if I was so concerned with realism (and technical shit like ground pressure and weapons recoil) with the "toys" I use in my nations military, I'd RP as a modern tech nation instead of a future tech nation...

By its very nature, FT is NOT realistic (we have things like FTL, artificial gravity, eldritch abominations, aliens, tentacle monsters, etc.) and yet every time someone brings up mechs or mecha in any way,shape, or form, the realism hammer appears and commences swinging with the force of a 1,000 suns going nova. I guess I just don't understand why everyone seems so concerned over the realism (or lack thereof) of this single aspect of RPing...

Now that that's off of my chest, I'll sit back and wait for the inevitable attack that this post is bound to bring upon me (what can I say... I guess I just like pain).

No, you're right. And if you look at the posts, they're all "Realistically they make no sense, but if you want to use them then go nuts."

Realism has as much presence in FT as you would like it to have.

Edit: Clarification - in NS FT RP, unless you decide otherwise ahead of time, it's generally assumed that one nation's tank and another nation's mech will be more or less equal in terms of combat prowess.

Edit2: However, I encourage everyone to discuss things ahead of time and decide strengths and weaknesses of their equipment. For instance, a Goliath medium tank fielded by the Huerdaen Star Empire (Huerdae) will beat a KHK-15 “Saarlthas” heavy combat vehicle fielded by the Kiith Federation Expeditionary Force (me) 9 times out of 10, because of two reasons.
1) The HSE places a greater emphasis on direct confrontation with armored cavalry in their surface doctrine than the KFEF does. Thus they tend to devote more R&D and resources to tanks than I do.
2) The Goliath is meant to be a direct aggressor, while the Saarlthas is meant to be more of an interdictor.

The point is to always be willing to accept that someone is going to be able to do certain things better than you, and not get hung up on technical aspects of it.

[Dreadful Sagittarius]

It's not so much that as so many times over the years, we've had people come into the older, defunct, FT Advice and Argument threads and claim that by standards of total realism, mechs are more efficient than a tracked/wheeled armoured combat vehicle. We've had complete shitstorms over it (pardon my Belgian) thanks to people purposefully ignoring all the kind of points I illustrated in my post above.

Because of that, and even despite the fact that with Rule of Cool, and Code of Bro we think mechs are still nice and fun, we all tend to be a little anxious in case someone starts off the same old arguments again just by saying 'my nation uses mechs because they're superior to all tanks'. It's a lot like the fighter/missile argument; you can think both are cool, but someone saying that one of them is more useful in space than the other would get your back up. (Fighter proponents over missiles in that case)

[Zepplin Manufacturers]

Imagine I'm stuck with using old fashioned reaction motors for my missiles. Are there any tricks to make them go the extra mile aside from multi-staging and rail-gunning the launch tubes?

Regardless of the base "reaction motor" type given the nature of space to space missile fire you may consider unpowered ballistic flight and loiter time to be your biggest range increase factors (though not necessarily the greatest increasing factor on effectiveness granted whatever setting your in).

The ability to coast on ballistic for hours with active seeking and operational jinking, days on passive or loiter for weeks or months is a huge increase in the effective range of any reaction driven space to space missile and allows you true multi vector time on target attacks especially if you can mass release a few missile swarms a few weeks before engaging in a set assault. Even if they missile cannot engage the target it is still denying safe vector and shaping the engagement.

Alternatives to boost a reaction base system include pulsed laser or beamed power from the main ships reactor to the missiles reaction mass, charged particle mid course refuelling beams , firing spreads of refuelling, escort and pen aid drones ahead of your missiles, effective mass scoop harvesting from planetary or stellar atmospheres (missiles generally taken to be too small to fit an effective brussard ram scoop) or firing packets of dusted fuel particles ahead of the missile via conventional ultra high velocity mass driver that the missiles can then siphon up mid course ( a similar setup to the charged particle refuelling system but placing the charging onus on the missile mass rather than the launch platform).

[Neornith]

I have a bad feeling about posting this but, I'm going to anyway...

By its very nature, FT is not realistic

Now that that's off of my chest, I'll sit back and wait for the inevitable attack that this post is bound to bring upon me (what can I say... I guess I just like pain).

I wholeheartedly agree with you, FT isn't realistic and players should do what they want in the name ofcreating a story and having fun, I even use Mechs with other nations of mine because I like them and think they're cool, what I don't do though is tell people that because Mechs are cooler that they automatically beat tanks which is generally the point of contention with people. As long as you try to work together and have a good time most people won't care you use Mechs.

[SquareDisc City]

I. A mech is always going to be heavier then actual organic creatures with legs.

Most of what you're saying is on the money, but this is false for the simple reason that sufficiently advanced engineering will be able to use those same biological materials and systems living things do. Ie, should you desire you can have your mechs use actual bone and muscle in their legs. Well, unless you subscribe to vitalism or something similar, which may be justified for a nation with fantasy elements. True, armour will add weight, but then armouring a living soldier adds weight too.

Imagine I'm stuck with using old fashioned reaction motors for my missiles. Are there any tricks to make them go the extra mile aside from multi-staging and rail-gunning the launch tubes?

I think most people's missiles use reaction motors of some sort. Nuclear thermal rockets are much more propellant-efficient than chemical ones. If you don't care about fallout or reactor lifespan (which you generally won't for a missile for use in deep space) one of these could be good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_core_reactor_rocket or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket . Atomic Rocket will have plenty more propulsion ideas.

[Dreadful Sagittarius]

I. A mech is always going to be heavier then actual organic creatures with legs.

Most of what you're saying is on the money, but this is false for the simple reason that sufficiently advanced engineering will be able to use those same biological materials and systems living things do. Ie, should you desire you can have your mechs use actual bone and muscle in their legs. Well, unless you subscribe to vitalism or something similar, which may be justified for a nation with fantasy elements. True, armour will add weight, but then armouring a living soldier adds weight too.

True, but most people who have subscribed to the 'mechs are realistically superior to tracked/wheeled armoured combat vehicles' logic trainwreck tend to use the word to describe metal creations rather than some gengineered nightmare.

[Feazanthia]

They also tend to assume one is using materials stronger and/or lighter than organic equivalents.

The tracked form with sloped armor is still an innately superior combat platform (ASSUMING WE'RE TALKING REALISM HERE) than the legged form.

Edit:

Well, unless you subscribe to vitalism or something similar, which may be justified for a nation with fantasy elements. True, armour will add weight, but then armouring a living soldier adds weight too.

Irrelevant. We've already established that this argument only adheres if one is going for realism, which a fantasy element using nation will not do.

[Zepplin Manufacturers]

Before we vanish down the rabbit hole, YES mecha can be cool for the purposes of cool, I for instance while I do not RP them in nation states have an unhealthily large collection of veritech and battleoids models from macross in my study. HOWEVER if you want to know the hard facts about mecha if you were say running a hard FT RP (though such things are like hens teeth)this is the infamous draftroom stickie on the subject that stops this discussion.

Moving on

Yes you can ride an armored and armed cyborg Tyrannosaurus Rex into battle.

No its not a good idea. Cool yes, good idea no. It has all the problems mentioned in the draftroom stickie and all the problems I mention here.

Again its still as cool as dino riders. But its not a "good" idea.

[Vocenae]

To prevent this from spiraling deeper into the tired arguement we've all come to hate, I'd like to quote the thread creator's thoughts on this subject.

And now we've gone over all of the main points of the Tanks vs. Mechs argument. Both sides have, more or less, given their advice. Let's not turn this into a thirty-page argument over the nuances - especially when they've already been rehashed time and time and time again over the years. Move onto other things; there's plenty to reply with advice toward without diving further into this ancient argument.

Much appreciated.

viewtopic.php?p=18930723#p18930723

[The Akasha Colony]

They also tend to assume one is using materials stronger and/or lighter than organic equivalents.

The tracked form with sloped armor is still an innately superior combat platform (ASSUMING WE'RE TALKING REALISM HERE) than the legged form.

Although TBH, the sloping part of modern armor is on its way out aside from ERA since it no longer provides the benefits it once did.

[-The Unified Earth Governments-]

By its very nature, FT is NOT realistic (we have things like FTL, artificial gravity, eldritch abominations, etc.)

Small fix c:

[The Fedral Union]

Alternatively you can hop on to #GESO on esper as well, people chill there too, point is there are resources in every spectrum of NS/IIFT.. Legion can be "intense" but I digress I'm of the more liberal mindset so are those who chill around us.

wat.


Um, dunno what TFU is smoking. Anyway. There are usually one or two FT Mentors hanging around #NSFT and/or #NSLegion. You can also find Mentors on #NSMentors (also on Esper) who, while maybe not specializing in FT, can answer more general questions.

Santh, and Telros hang in #GESO.. TYVM, and its not like most of us on our chat haven't been on NS for more than oh about now 10 years (10 1/2 almost 11 for me) on NS.. so... I'm just stating Legion is not nor was ever the only place in FT you can get advice or chill with people. WE EXIST.. and there are MANY of us that hang in there feaz, including many people you KNOW... But hey ignorance is bliss..

[-The Unified Earth Governments-]

wat.


Um, dunno what TFU is smoking. Anyway. There are usually one or two FT Mentors hanging around #NSFT and/or #NSLegion. You can also find Mentors on #NSMentors (also on Esper) who, while maybe not specializing in FT, can answer more general questions.

Santh, and Telros hang in #GESO.. TYVM, and its not like most of us on our chat haven't been on NS for more than oh about now 10 years (10 1/2 almost 11 for me) on NS.. so... I'm just stating Legion is not nor was ever the only place in FT you can get advice or chill with people. WE EXIST.. and there are MANY of us that hang in there feaz, including many people you KNOW... But hey ignorance is bliss..

Stop fighting please <:c

Fun times plz.

Lets talk about something helpful, I'll be back with a question.

[The Fedral Union]

Santh, and Telros hang in #GESO.. TYVM, and its not like most of us on our chat haven't been on NS for more than oh about now 10 years (10 1/2 almost 11 for me) on NS.. so... I'm just stating Legion is not nor was ever the only place in FT you can get advice or chill with people. WE EXIST.. and there are MANY of us that hang in there feaz, including many people you KNOW... But hey ignorance is bliss..

Stop fighting please <:c

Fun times plz.

Lets talk about something helpful, I'll be back with a question.

I do have a question actually, whats your Air Defense doctrine?

[-The Unified Earth Governments-]

Stop fighting please <:c

Fun times plz.

Lets talk about something helpful, I'll be back with a question.

I do have a question actually, whats your Air Defense doctrine?

I have been working more on Ground stuff and space for a bit, and never heard of that term.

Does it refer to things such as anti air?

Also I have a question, one that has pissed me off to no avail, I think I can finally get an answer!

What exactly is a Pulse weapon? Such as a Pulse Rifle?

I see them in Half Life, Dead Space, Aliens.

But there seems to be some conflictions with various sources.

So what is it, because I want to expand my horizon.

[SquareDisc City]

What exactly is a Pulse weapon? Such as a Pulse Rifle?

I see them in Half Life, Dead Space, Aliens.

But there seems to be some conflictions with various sources.

So what is it, because I want to expand my horizon.

A futuristic gun. It's not a real-world term, so different authors use it to mean slightly different things, though with the same general purpose of killing and destroying stuff. Just like how "warp drive" can mean a few differing methods of faster-than-light travel.

[The Fedral Union]

What exactly is a Pulse weapon? Such as a Pulse Rifle?

I see them in Half Life, Dead Space, Aliens.

But there seems to be some conflictions with various sources.

So what is it, because I want to expand my horizon.

A futuristic gun. It's not a real-world term, so different authors use it to mean slightly different things, though with the same general purpose of killing and destroying stuff. Just like how "warp drive" can mean a few differing methods of faster-than-light travel.

My sub light drive is a form of warp drive in a sense.. If you think of it as using a grapple on space time to cause a wave for us to ride on in the direction we wanna go.. When you get to GUT stuff, things get weird.