Eh, that really depends, 90+% of the costs are through life instead of unit price and integration of post 90s weapons is going to be hugely expensive. Best to make a clean-sheet with what we've learned instead of doubling down on our T-34. We can make a T-55, use all the mistakes.
THE LIST:
Urban - extra plating, combat shield, the back-gun is downgraded to a gun-mortar to compensate for plating weight.
Rugged - Same load out as Gen I with one exception, back gun can be replaced with a missile rail. Can you say "rapidly deployable anti-ship missile" three times in quick succession?
Engineering - Same as Gen I, can mount either the gun-mortar or missile rail to fire minefield deploying missiles or mine-clearing charges.
counterpoint, so long as we dont invade a country with nukes themselves and we vaguely place ourselves near someone with nukes no nukes will be used.(we did just sign a pact with the USSR, the paranoid americans have no idea if we slipped some secret clauses in there)
molotov-ribbentrop anyone?
if not, rather than an invasion we pull the ol' little green men strat. and by the time we are done, nuking us would be political suicide for the democracies of the world
Are we still going to use the IT to fight in China? Might be good to keep that in mind when designing this. It needs to be able to operate far from our borders.
It should be noted that an eleven foot tall mech can enter most structures accessible to infantry, but in many cases where it does so, it will be not so much "entering" the building as "wading in the building while carving furrows in the second story with its head equivalent and any attached sensor systems or weapon mounts."
It can Kool-Aid Man its way into a hotel lobby or something, because of high ceilings and wide access points. Many commercial buildings, likewise. But in other kinds of structure, it will, uh, not really fit very well.
We should plan to start sending ITs out to various Cypac members soon, a lot of them requested military aid, and ITs are a great way to show Guangchou 's dedication to that.
I think we can simply update certain parts of the gen 1 chassis to keep it up to date. Which means our new design can be more specialized if you guys want, while our updated gen 1 remains the basic or vanilla platform.
Absolutely not worth it. Mechs are still very much in their infancy, and when a technology is in that early state giant leaps get made very rapidly. Think of the evolution of fighter aircraft from the start to end of WW1. That's where ITs are right now. We want a clean sheet design.
i dont understand why its thought off as a frontline unit, rather than a mobility platform. placing a big gun or rockets with legs should give it unparalleled shoot and scoot mobility.
imagine fighting against ghost artillery in the mountains or jungle. setting up counter batteries would be impossible, and as long as you do the same shoot and scoot with AA alongside the artillery, the only counter would be to send infantry into the jungle to sus them out (at a staggering rate of casualties)or to use something that outranges the arty to level the entire jungle (like naval guns or SRBM's) at incredible monetary cost. honestly, for the money spent i think we'd be better off using technicals or IFV's for ofensive actions with mechas on the back or middle lines
also, mechas in urban areas would suffer much the same problems as tanks do.
Is it possible to render first gen IT down to powered frames and cocpit, add mounting points for industrial equipment and issue them to shipyard/heavy machinery plant/construction battalions/etc?
You could, but these are military grad machines, so the maintenance schedule is going to be awful. You really need to do a clean sheet civilian design for these applications.
ok, i understand that any new proposals should be made for gen 2, but my point still remains.
a gen 1 IT would suck at urban combat.
im truly sorry if theres something about them that im somehow missing but its not obvious to me why Gen 1 IT's would be seen as good urban fighters.
being 3-4 meters tall means tunnels are a problem, and hiding is basically impossible when youre the height of a 1 story house.(aint no point of a sneak and peek when everyone can see you).also, at those heights , shooting nearby targets starts to become a problem when you meed to shoot down to fire at the base level of a building. weight is a problem too, not because of the weight itself but because we are using legs, the weight is distributed over a small area causing a lot of pressure, meaning that sure our mechs move fine, but any truck carrying our infantry cant use the roads because we just cracked them. same thing with bridges. and to be an efective urban unit, it should have some defense capability against MANPATS which is far off into the future unless we are armoring the living shit out of it(which would make it slower, heavyer and increase the previous problems while further compromising speed)
the only redeeming quality i can see in an urban setting would be vertical targeting.mobility is overrated in urban environments, its not like you can cut across a building when youre trapped.
urban combat is not a sopved problem to this day, and is considered one of the worst fighting enviroments for a reason.
the IT's are good for rough terrain and quick flanking manovers (especially if you flank the enemy from a terrain that they thought impassable) and in their current configuration work well for supporting infantry to hit hardened points ,but Not urban environments. (unless we want a repeat of the chechen wars).
There's a reason nobody's seriously pursued mechs IRL, and it boils down to what you've said.
I feel like I should clarify when HC is taking about these being decent at combat engineering, very rough terrain ops, and urban combat, he's talking about Gen 2 ITs that are basically landmates. That was the closest thing to a workable concept of operations for a mecha that's somewhat grounded in reality.
The Gen 1 ITs that we are fielding right now were used to find out all the ways Mechs suck, the hard way. And you definitely don't want to deploy gen 1's in the above roles.
This is what I'm imaging as being close to practical:
Combination of these:
The argument goes that there's a theoretical sweet spot between power armor and a traditional mecha-with-cockpit where the biggest practical drawbacks of both are mitigated.
On the power armor side, going to something bigger allows you to avoid a bunch of the joint alignment issues that apprently plague wearable type PA as well as gives you room to mount all the hardware needed to actually power and move the PA and otherwise make it possible without some really good miniaturization tech.
On the other hand, because it's so small, you avoid the square cube law issues that traditional mecha have.
The Doylist argument for a clean sheet Gen 2 design is that Gen 1 was build by players and a GM who didn't know what they were doing (no offence folks. ), before I came into the thread with a dose of "for the love of god, this is a bad idea on all levels from physical to doctrinal".
From a Watsonian perspective, my headcanon is that our military's early gushing about mecha was the result of a lot of Jeune Ecole thinking that did not survive contact with actually trying to field 35 ton mechs, which turned into maintennace issue ridden hangar queens (but lead to a lot of lessons being learned the hard way).
A Gen1 Iron Tiger is 3.30 meters tall, with a weight of 35 tons.
A Gen1 IT will not crack concrete due to being designed with feet that distribute its weight in as large an area as possible without compromising the ITs ability to move.
It is short enough that it can enter structures normal infantry can, while being armored to such an extent that enemy combatants can't harm the machine with nothing short of directly applied armor-piercing explosives or collapsing the building ontop of the IT. Both of which are tactics that are used to deal with regular infantry.
It brings with it an NBC sealed enviroment for the pilot, alongside a tri-barrel autocannon rifle, a 115mm automatic back-mounted artillery/anti-air gun, and a massive dagger for a multitude of applications, and each weapon can be removed to save weight/reduce profile, alongside the armor.
In short: a Gen1 Iron Tiger is a light tank in human shape and approximate height. No infantry in my 1980 Verse is going to fare well against them in urban combat. They aren't a miracle solver of urban combat, but they will definitely become a part of it.
I should point out that a lot of my early attempts to make sense of mechs also had a lot of issues, including the whole 3.5 meter tall but 35 tons in mass thing. That is a hilariously high density for something humanoid.
Method 2 for instance is almost 4 meter tall but only weights 1.5 tons:
I'll throw together a design for a possible Gen 2 mech.
This is a list of likely issues we would have found with our Gen 1 ITs:
Gyroscopic stabilization is heavy AF, extra maintenance on load bearing joints.
SCARS is really fucking overengineered. You do not need CO2 scrubbers or pressurized air for this. Just put some heavy duty filters on your AC unit, make sure it has good overpressure, and make sure your compartment seals are up to snuff. You need the AC unit for your computers anyway.
The 115mm cannon's swing arm gains microfractures faster than CPUSA gains FBI plants.
Also the 115mm cannon relies on absorbing the recoil with the mech's limbs, which causes the platform to shift between shots, making follow ups inaccurate.
The 57mm anti-aircraft cannon can't hit modern aircraft for shit because there's no integrated radar and fire control system.
It's also fucking hilariously overkill for AA duty. The triple barrel setup eats ammunition like crazy, which really hurts combat endurance compared to more modern systems like the Shilka.
The mech sized knife is basically never used in its intended role and has devolved into an improvised engineering tool.
The elbow and knee joints have limited range of motion compared to human ones due to the nature of the mech not being made of soft squishy material that can compress.
Wear and tear on the joints in field condition is an ongoing headache. Cloth covers over the joints have been implemented as an interim solution. But more needs to be done to seal against water intrusion in the ankles.
Can't use them to provide cover for advancing infantry due to how skinny legs are.
Poor cockpit visibility also makes it dangerous to deploy near infantry. We came this close to having somebody stepped on.
Rapid maneuvers are very taxing on the pilots, and insufficient shock absorption has led to chronic health effects due to accumulated micro-concussions.
Jumping is right out - very difficult to not overstress the actuators and topple the mech.
Poor proprioception (pilot's knowledge of where the mech's limbs are) and sub-optimal gait design makes it prone to falling over when maneuvering quickly in rough terrain.
thanks so much for the update, i was mentally stuck in that weird suspension of disbelief moment where i didn't understand where the realism started when confronted with mecha development.
ironically i think we will end up pretty much following the traditional development of tanks, where we started off with a landship equivalent, figured out the kit was totally overengineeired and will now proceed to produce a sleek slimmed down version which will then be up armoured and upgunned untill we design a bigger chasis to deal with the newfound weight, reformulations of old chasis for specialty needs and way down the line, we will combine them all into basically the MBT equivalent of a mech.
sidenote, given your newfound mech density, making one thats just 2.2 meters or thereabouts that can carry a heavy machinegun and some rockets would be an absolute killing machine in urban enviroments . think about a mecha that can climb the sides of a building, it would open so many avenues of attack its not even funny. and if youre ever in an ambush? just go into a building (because your size allows for it even if you need to widen the doors via percussive maintenance)
again thanks for taking the time to address my points and im sorry if it came out as confrontational.
P.S. mecha arty >>> helis, you have advance manuverability without having to expose yourself to shoot.
thanks so much for the update, i was mentally stuck in that weird suspension of disbelief moment where i didn't understand where the realism started when confronted with mecha development.
ironically i think we will end up pretty much following the traditional development of tanks, where we started off with a landship equivalent, figured out the kit was totally overengineeired and will now proceed to produce a sleek slimmed down version which will then be up armoured and upgunned untill we design a bigger chasis to deal with the newfound weight, reformulations of old chasis for specialty needs and way down the line, we will combine them all into basically the MBT equivalent of a mech.
sidenote, given your newfound mech density, making one thats just 2.2 meters or thereabouts that can carry a heavy machinegun and some rockets would be an absolute killing machine in urban enviroments . think about a mecha that can climb the sides of a building, it would open so many avenues of attack its not even funny. and if youre ever in an ambush? just go into a building (because your size allows for it even if you need to widen the doors via percussive maintenance)
again thanks for taking the time to address my points and im sorry if it came out as confrontational.
P.S. mecha arty >>> helis, you have advance manuverability without having to expose yourself to shoot.
Mechs are very limited on Earth. They're fantastic as infantry replacement in places where you need to carry your life support around and/or the environment is bathed in radiation.
I would also be very leery of letting a mech try to climb a building - we're still doing this with early 1990 electronics, so the dexterity is going to be limited, and walls are unlikely to be able to bear the weight.
Going inside buildings is something we should aim for, but it's going to be risky still until we develop even lighter weight mechs, and should have very good SOP in terms of infantry integration to make sure the building can even support that weight.
Like, the standard live floor load for us residential buildings is 40 lb/sqft (195 kg/m^2 in real units of measurement). You are not making a mech that's 195 kg. A mech trying to get to the second story of a house (or enter the first storey if it has a basement) would collapse the floor. It would be like parking a car in your living room.
With regard to arty, the more practical answer is to just not take arty into hilly jungle. It's arty, park is somewhere with less demanding terrain and use time on target barrages and relocation to deal with counter-battery fire.
The 115mm cannon's swing arm gains microfractures faster than CPUSA gains FBI plants.
Also the 115mm cannon relies on absorbing the recoil with the mech's limbs, which causes the platform to shift between shots, making follow ups inaccurate.
The 57mm anti-aircraft cannon can't hit modern aircraft for shit because there's no integrated radar and fire control system.
It's also fucking hilariously overkill for AA duty. The triple barrel setup eats ammunition like crazy, which really hurts combat endurance compared to more modern systems like the Shilka.
About these two, the 115mm is actually supposed to be shoulder/back mounted, not handheld. Part of the training and trials wouldve been trying to figure out if and how you could absorb the recoil the best. Though it was clear it was not to be fired on the move.
Then HC went and got a good roll for it and turned it into an even better AC somehow with the recoil yet to be addressed in trials. Let's call it the engineers being so engrossed with the breakthough they forgot about their original concern.
As for the 57mm, it was never supposed to be an AA weapon. It was an AA gun adopted to be used on lighter armored vehicles. Maybe even infantry if the ITs needed to.
I actually wanted to find a weapon similar to the main gun the AMPs in Avatar have, hence the 57. I made it triple barrelled because I felt it was thematically appropriate for a dictatorship weapons development team to take a good enough design and up it into WTF IS THIS SHIT levels of design.
That it was an AA gun originally and "theoretically" could hit airborne objects was then marketed as a feature.
In truth, they wouldve found out that the triple barrel was really just supposed to be fired in bursts at most.
Finally, the knife. I figured these mechs, or the gen 1 at least, were never gonna be carrying much ammo. So, a melee weapon marketed under 'just in case' and reinforced with the image of mech troops valiantly duking it out with imaginary mech opponents in close combat. And winning, of course!
The knife is never gonna see much actual combat use, especially compared to ranged weapons, but it's literally a slab of metal an IT can easily carry around without too much issue and isnt really hard to maintain or adapt to subsequent generations.
This would've rounded off lighter and heavier guns plus a close combat option all for testing on our gen 1.
Is what Id like to say. Truth is, I wanted to give the IT as many options as we could then see what sticks. What doesnt would hopefully get rehashed, redesigned or improved for another chassis.
As for maintenance costs, im roleplaying as enthusiastic mech designer, I dont care about costs!
How much work would it take to reengineer IT into a suit of powered armor? Even if initial end effect is slow, bulky and very ungainly, it would still have its uses, especially if it retained ability to lift normally emplacement level weapons.
How much work would it take to reengineer IT into a suit of powered armor? Even if initial end effect is slow, bulky and very ungainly, it would still have its uses, especially if it retained ability to lift normally emplacement level weapons.
The big issue is miniaturizing the power plant, actuators, etc, but power armour also has to be, to a degree, bespoke because of join alignment issues, which is obviously not ideal. There are ways around all these issues, but... you have to ask if there's a doctrinal niche for it that justifies the investment into solving all these problems.
For the record, these arms aren't built to help disabled people. They're there to make normies feel less awkward about it. Their weight makes them uncomfortable to wear for long. The actual practical prosthesis looks a lot like two finger robot claw, and tends to be used when a second gripper is necessary.
So I just had a thougth, Once remote control becomes feasable, having a heavily Armoured carrier vehicle with people controlling, most likely, scaled-down urban capable mechs would probably be pretty good for breaching operations, plus with out a pilot inside it might be able to be even smaller than otherwise.
Also, image an aircraft with paratrooper mechs, probably impractical, but they'd take AA fire better than infantry I imagine. Probably wouldn't use a parachute though.
But TBF, this update is essentially your military folk going: "We know the areas we'll likely use them in, alongside what equipment we need to make/replace, but we do know that the Gen1 are bad to nearly unusable. Chuck 'em at the Russians and be thankful the Great Leader got them to hand over a Cosmodrome for them."
Then HC went and got a good roll for it and turned it into an even better AC somehow with the recoil yet to be addressed in trials. Let's call it the engineers being so engrossed with the breakthough they forgot about their original concern.
How much work would it take to reengineer IT into a suit of powered armor? Even if initial end effect is slow,bulky and very ungainly, it would still have its uses, especially if it retained ability to lift normally emplacement level weapons.
He was a corrupt traitor to the Union and the Workers, who sought to enrich himself like a filthy Capitalist on the backs of the people! Thankfully, with the aid of the techniques and technologies given by our stalwart allies of Guangchou, his nefarious plot was found and neutralized!
He was a corrupt traitor to the Union and the Workers, who sought to enrich himself like a filthy Capitalist on the backs of the people! Thankfully, with the aid of the techniques and technologies given by our stalwart allies of Guangchou, his nefarious plot was found and neutralized!
