That Time I Became A Dictator Of A Small Asian Communist Nation
- Thread starter HeroCooky
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Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
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[X] Steel Leopard
[X] Steel Leopard
As for the concept of crew-served weapons and firing while mounted/un-mounted, I'm trying to avoid the former since that means we now have to produce multiple mechs and train multiple pilots on them just to fire a single weapon. The mortar itself is objectively massive at 250mm, but with the scale of the SL it probably could have been a lot larger if it was made to be used by a full mech squad. 250mm was me trying to keep it to a size a single mech could theoretically operate by itself so we don't need make 3-4 mechs to fire a single mortar tube. There may be a place for massive mech-crew served weapons in the future, I just don't have any idea what that would be right now.
On the topic of making the Lightningbolt a tripod mounted weapon, given that it's a direct fire gun if you're shooting it at something chances are something can shoot back at you. In that situation I prefer to have the rapid relocation abilities that comes from having the gun integrated into the mech itself so it can stop, take the shot, and then keep moving without having to spend time unpacking and repacking the gun. On the other hand, the superheavy mortar is going to have very good range while it's indirect fire that doesn't need to see the target and have the chance of being seen in return, so I'm much more comfortable with that weapon being set up on the ground and needing to be packed before relocating.
I'm not convinced cameras are that bad right now, since OTL this is about the time tank thermals were invented and the SL is just normal+low light, not even that. Even if they were though, I'd be more likely to just try to lean on our IT electronics tech to handwave rather than fiberscopes, since I just don't think the fiberscopes will be able to do the combined panorama I'm aiming for to keep situational awareness instead of just a bunch of individual views in different directions.
And as for the reason I'm interested in building a military for a "peer" war, it boils down to three reasons.
1. A "peer-focused" military equipped to fully prosecute a war to the best of our ability gives us one more step of escalation before we have to start considering WMDs than if we kept our military focused on non-peer or above threats. With the SL's modular nature brought over from the IT, there's nothing stopping us from developing specialized anti-insurgency or other modules meant for combat with non-peers later too.
2. My read on Guangchou's military is that while it is very high tech, it is still "below-peer" compared to many other countries that have more land, more resources, more industry, and more population. Even if you took nukes off the table alongside everyone else's super secret Nazi tech while leaving us our ITs and SLs, I still fully expect that we would lose a conventional war against giants like the US or China, and possibly a few European countries too. Building a military capable of punching equally, or even punching "up," would make the prospect of fighting us just that much more bloody and more likely to be discarded than if we had a military focused on punching down against non-peers.
3. Related to the two above, the USA also looks to be going completely insane. With how things look to be going, and our anti-imperialism promise to CyPac, I'd be more surprised if we don't end up entangled in a number of "totally not proxy wars with the US" across Central America, Africa, and the Middle East against suspiciously well equipped enemies backed by totally "volunteer" American troops.
Double jointing for improved flexibility and fabric covers to keep them clean are easy enough, so I'll drop them in right now.@7th Hex, can you include some of if the Tabby features on Leopard?
The power egg with dynamic balancing is lighter than the gyro, cameras are IIRC not very good at this time so fiberscopes would be better, and you should double joint the limbs to more closely approximate a human range of motion.
Making the Lightning Bolt a crew served tripod mounted gun would also cut down an most of the issues that mounting a high caliber tank gun on a bipedal mech involves.
The mortar on the other hand could use a backpack mount no it can be fired from a kneeling position so it man relocate quick in case of counter battery fire.
And add soft kill ATGM countermeasures, 3-axis arm stabilization, and the mech sized BDUs to keep dirt and dust out of the joints.
Edit: On the note of mechs being era defining, maybe that's because the ancillary techs are the era defining bits.
And an the coolness side, consider the aesthetic of a mechanical T-Rex stalking it's prey through the urban jungle.
As for the concept of crew-served weapons and firing while mounted/un-mounted, I'm trying to avoid the former since that means we now have to produce multiple mechs and train multiple pilots on them just to fire a single weapon. The mortar itself is objectively massive at 250mm, but with the scale of the SL it probably could have been a lot larger if it was made to be used by a full mech squad. 250mm was me trying to keep it to a size a single mech could theoretically operate by itself so we don't need make 3-4 mechs to fire a single mortar tube. There may be a place for massive mech-crew served weapons in the future, I just don't have any idea what that would be right now.
On the topic of making the Lightningbolt a tripod mounted weapon, given that it's a direct fire gun if you're shooting it at something chances are something can shoot back at you. In that situation I prefer to have the rapid relocation abilities that comes from having the gun integrated into the mech itself so it can stop, take the shot, and then keep moving without having to spend time unpacking and repacking the gun. On the other hand, the superheavy mortar is going to have very good range while it's indirect fire that doesn't need to see the target and have the chance of being seen in return, so I'm much more comfortable with that weapon being set up on the ground and needing to be packed before relocating.
I'm not convinced cameras are that bad right now, since OTL this is about the time tank thermals were invented and the SL is just normal+low light, not even that. Even if they were though, I'd be more likely to just try to lean on our IT electronics tech to handwave rather than fiberscopes, since I just don't think the fiberscopes will be able to do the combined panorama I'm aiming for to keep situational awareness instead of just a bunch of individual views in different directions.
And as for the reason I'm interested in building a military for a "peer" war, it boils down to three reasons.
1. A "peer-focused" military equipped to fully prosecute a war to the best of our ability gives us one more step of escalation before we have to start considering WMDs than if we kept our military focused on non-peer or above threats. With the SL's modular nature brought over from the IT, there's nothing stopping us from developing specialized anti-insurgency or other modules meant for combat with non-peers later too.
2. My read on Guangchou's military is that while it is very high tech, it is still "below-peer" compared to many other countries that have more land, more resources, more industry, and more population. Even if you took nukes off the table alongside everyone else's super secret Nazi tech while leaving us our ITs and SLs, I still fully expect that we would lose a conventional war against giants like the US or China, and possibly a few European countries too. Building a military capable of punching equally, or even punching "up," would make the prospect of fighting us just that much more bloody and more likely to be discarded than if we had a military focused on punching down against non-peers.
3. Related to the two above, the USA also looks to be going completely insane. With how things look to be going, and our anti-imperialism promise to CyPac, I'd be more surprised if we don't end up entangled in a number of "totally not proxy wars with the US" across Central America, Africa, and the Middle East against suspiciously well equipped enemies backed by totally "volunteer" American troops.
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I'm categorically opposed to building up a military that can fight an offensive war against a peer opponent. That's an absolute fucking boondogle that will slurp up all our resources because I will like to remind everyone: we're basically big Taiwan, we are NOT gonna be able to match China, or the US, or France or whoever else in terms of conventional force. Just no. Stop.
A decent defensive military and a top notch nuclear umbrella (likely jointly under CyPac) is how we make sure foreign boots don't touch Guang soil in the short to medium term.
Do not even think about offensive ops until CyPac is better developed.
[x] Steel Leopard
When I'm talking about peers, I'm referring to peers to us specifically.
We are not peers of countries like the US, China, USSR, etc. We are below them. With that framework established, when I am talking about building up a military to fight peers, the peers I am referring to are not the big names that we will never be able to match in the scope of this quest, but the countries that are actually peers of our tiny but significantly industrialized island nation.
Any increased effectiveness from this at deterrence of countries that are stronger than us, or the military's ability to withstand foreign support in a conflict from those same countries held back by the need for plausible deniability to prevent WW3 is a beneficial side effect I am happy to take. But I do not plan on trying to make a military that can match the superpowers, it would be such a resource sink that would likely cause nothing but them spending a single percentage more of their budget on the military and outpacing us again.
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- Location
- SEAsia
- Pronouns
- Thou
Honestly speaking, Im not building mechs because I want to wage some kind of war. Im building mechs because it's fun. Like, seriously, for some of the omakes I wrote, I literally imagined the techs and engineers wanting to work on mechs not because they want to make a name for themselves or build connections (although that's a desirable benefit for a lot of em) but because theyre fucking mechs. Like, holy shit we got a Nat 100 that gave us big stompy robots. I dont care if we never wage a war ever again, but im sure as hell gonna write characters just having pure fun designing mechs and piloting them. Like grown-ass people acting like kids.
Hell, these guys took laufpanzer tech and made a computer system just for shits and giggles. The tigersoft omake thing I wrote? I didnt have some overarching goal of creating a sophisticated networking system and future AI tech. I just had time to kill and wanted to make you guys laugh.
Hell, these guys took laufpanzer tech and made a computer system just for shits and giggles. The tigersoft omake thing I wrote? I didnt have some overarching goal of creating a sophisticated networking system and future AI tech. I just had time to kill and wanted to make you guys laugh.
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That just leads to design that are utterly divorced from any sort of constraints tho, which is fine if your setting works off of Rule of Cool, but I can't actually engage with that based on my own interests.
(sigh)
N0Way
2.71 8281 8284 5904 5235 3602 8747 1352 6624 9775
[X] Steel Leopard
- Location
- SEAsia
- Pronouns
- Thou
I mean, you guys already got the military vehicles, aircraft, and navy and honestly i wont even make a peep about the powerplants, the residences, infra, electronics, or infra.
The mech tho. That was literally the One. Like, we all know it shouldnt even exist. Promise, imma leave everything but the giant stompy robots alone.
You could probs make a joke out of it where despite everything being ruled with sense, and logic and human decency...
The Iron Tigers were... unnatural.
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I mean, you guys already got the military vehicles, aircraft, and navy and honestly i wont even make a peep about the powerplants, the residences, infra, electronics, or infra.
The mech tho. That was literally the One.
I mean seriously, imma leave everything but the giant stompy robots alone.
It bothers me to no end that I missed that vote, because you lot picked the exact wrong thing for an island nation, lmao.
Anti-grav would have been so much better from the standpoint of something that would legit give even the USA pause before trying to invade us.
Anti-gravity missile battleships are like... as close to a hard counter to carrier battlegroups as I can think of.
We could have gone maximum Ace Combat, with supersonic stealth air-ships, and we could have gone back for seconds with aerial ICBM launchers.
Inb4 HerCooky announces an Ace Combat design quest where we are the ones in charge of making the megaweapons.
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The difference between a wunderwaffe and a viable military system is finer - and more context dependent - than you think.
- Location
- SEAsia
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- Thou
It bothers me to no end that I missed that vote, because you lot picked the exact wrong thing for an island nation, lmao.
Anti-grav would have been so much better from the standpoint of something that would legit give even the USA pause before trying to invade us.
Anti-gravity missile battleships are like... as close to a hard counter to carrier battlegroups as I can think of.
We could have gone maximum Ace Combat, with supersonic stealth air-ships, and we could have gone back for seconds with aerial ICBM launchers.
to be fair, that vote hasnt ended. technically it applies for every design we shall ever opt to commission, draft and finalize for the nation.
what im saying is... that the Ace Combat fans could still hijack the aircraft votes if they submit their own bullshit-tier designs and pool enough people to support said designs.
also i was really tempted with antigrav. flying island wouldve been cool. but then big stompy robots
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grimely
Twink Death Sufferer
Stealing this idea
dgr11897
FBI surveillance Tank
- Location
- Behind you
Yeah, the longer this has gone on the more disappointed I have been with us not getting that one. Yeah mechs are cool, but they have mostly proven useful just through the various advancements being applied elsewhere to great effect.It bothers me to no end that I missed that vote, because you lot picked the exact wrong thing for an island nation, lmao.
Anti-grav would have been so much better from the standpoint of something that would legit give even the USA pause before trying to invade us.
Anti-gravity missile battleships are like... as close to a hard counter to carrier battlegroups as I can think of.
We could have gone maximum Ace Combat, with supersonic stealth air-ships, and we could have gone back for seconds with aerial ICBM launchers.
- Location
- SEAsia
- Pronouns
- Thou
That's not our fault tho. Not our problem either. Not all of us get into a quest thinking what's the optimal way for things. Some of us pick the choices we pick because its fun and because we didnt really care about optimizing.
I remember the vote we had to decide this. Nobody (or barely anybody at least) was talking about the best thing to sync with previous choices. I was even joking that walkure was some sound system to motivate troops inserting via air cav. I also remember not really caring if my mecha vote lost and we got flying supervillain island instead.
Why? Because at the end of the day, it seemed like everyone would still have fun.
Sorry if us wanting to have a good time with big stompy robots is disappointing to you. Maybe you can make your own quest where things go the way you want without caring about the votes or what anyone else wants if you get too.
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I mean yeah, I probably would have picked anti-gravity too, that being said I think we've done pretty well for ourselves considering the shitty situation we started out with.It bothers me to no end that I missed that vote, because you lot picked the exact wrong thing for an island nation, lmao.
Anti-grav would have been so much better from the standpoint of something that would legit give even the USA pause before trying to invade us.
Anti-gravity missile battleships are like... as close to a hard counter to carrier battlegroups as I can think of.
We could have gone maximum Ace Combat, with supersonic stealth air-ships, and we could have gone back for seconds with aerial ICBM launchers.
- Location
- SEAsia
- Pronouns
- Thou
True. Plus Hcooky's not gonna punish us for our choices.
Not unless the dice rolls a nat 1.
- Location
- Australia
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- She/Her
[X] Steel Leopard
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[X] Steel Leopard
- Location
- USA
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[X] Steel Leopard
What's up folks, I'm back.
What's up folks, I'm back.