How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

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Voitan
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by Voitan »

The Mechs in "Obsolete" are basically armored exoskeletons that pilots piggyback on a seat, while grasping the control ring. In terms of scale, they're similar to the tachikomas, just bipedal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzqPSoMXAig

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orion1836
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by orion1836 »

We are a long way from the tech that would make a tachikoma work, but there is a good example of a role where a mech would shine.

Regarding space, I think any fighter in the near future will be a glorified gun turret with a thruster. Without gravity or atmosphere, the only thing that matters is how fast you can track your weapons.

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Werra
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by Werra »

This might not be quite the correct thread. But I found a very interesting write-up of Chinas developing understanding of modern warfare. While the article does deal with exoskeletons and AI controlled vehicles, it also seems to imply that future battles will be fought in the sphere of information with means of mass psychology.
http://archive.ph/eMARE
Traditional battlefields and battlefronts will “be hard to reproduce.” The current battle domains in warfare (the physical dimensions of land, sea, air, and space and the informational dimensions of electromagnetic and cyber) will be updated to include a new dimension: the cognitive domain, which would fall under the cognitive dimension.

Intelligentized warfare will see the integration of military and non-military domains; and the boundary between peacetime and wartime will get increasingly blurred. The outcome of a war will not be determined by who destroys whom in a kinetic sense, but rather who gains maximum political benefits. Intelligentized warfare will see the integration of human and machine intelligence. It will reshape warfighting in every dimension and within every realm. Human fighters will eventually stop being the first line of fighting and intelligent systems will prevail. “Human-on-human” warfare will be replaced by “machine-on-human” or “machine-on-machine warfare.”
[...]
“The cognitive domain will become another battle domain next to the land, sea, air, space, electromagnetic, and cyber domains of warfare.”
[...]
The boundaries of war will extend into the deep land, deep sea, deep air, deep cyber, and deep brain domains… Intelligentized warfare will be generalized to all military conflicts and rivalries, giving rise to a more striking feature of integration between military and non-military domains. The scope of warfighting will expand to the extremes. The boundary between peacetime and wartime will get increasingly blurred.
Thank god Silicone Valley hasn't spend the last two decades cataloguing virtually every single citizen and developing pinpoint means of AI assisted influencing. Can you imagine what would happen if a country with a Great Firewall were to somehow gain access to that data?

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SaintofM
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by SaintofM »

@orion1836: In the case of everyone's favorite spider tank with the personality of a hyperactive 6 yearold, I would think the AI as weill as the hardware are still far off.

@Werra: That is some scarry stuff. Just robot on robot action, Machio Mako once said along the lines if that ever happens it will be all the more easy for the powers to be to want to drop a nuke on the area. No need to worry for colateral damage when you have no living fighters in the area.

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Arioch
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by Arioch »

Except that if there is nothing of collateral value in an area, there's not much reason to be fighting there.

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SaintofM
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by SaintofM »

Arioch wrote:Except that if there is nothing of collateral value in an area, there's not much reason to be fighting there.
Depends on who is valueng it, or the risk/reward ratio. A pair of cities might be very valuble, but if they are the main production centers for an enemy then nuking them might be very valuable.

Go into more space opera, and planet devastating weapons are seemingly a go to option. Potential colonization/and or resource producers of food and other reco Even you used them in the background information for this series.

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Arioch
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by Arioch »

SaintofM wrote:
Arioch wrote:Except that if there is nothing of collateral value in an area, there's not much reason to be fighting there.
Depends on who is valueng it, or the risk/reward ratio. A pair of cities might be very valuble, but if they are the main production centers for an enemy then nuking them might be very valuable.

Go into more space opera, and planet devastating weapons are seemingly a go to option. Potential colonization/and or resource producers of food and other reco Even you used them in the background information for this series.
If the attacker didn't value the asset, he wouldn't have sent troops to capture it in the first place; he would just have nuked it to begin with. If the defender didn't value it, he wouldn't have sent troops to defend it.

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CrimsonFALKE
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by CrimsonFALKE »

Arioch wrote:The basic problem that you have to solve is to explain in a plausible manner why a humanoid form for your vehicle is a distinct advantage that would justify the added cost and complexity over a more simple form. Whether the materials science is up to the structural task of holding together such a vehicle can be hand-waved to ultra-tech (which is no more implausible than dozens of other standard science fiction tropes), but what's not so easy to ignore is why you would need vehicles to be shaped like people in the first place. The primary justification for humanoid robots (which is not a very good one) is that they operate in environments designed for the human form, but when you scale things up to the size of an armored vehicle, that's no longer true.

Current tanks do their job very well, so to justify a humanoid tank you'd need to invent some kind of environment in which legs would be a distinct advantage, and the height of a mech wouldn't be a disadvantage. Perhaps some kind of environment with incredibly rough terrain, but in which you can't fly for some reason, and in which visibility range is very low. The problem here is that the optimal legged vehicle would probably have four or six legs; bipedal forms are actually not very good over rough terrain; human bipedalism is optimized for efficient long-distance movement on flat terrain, something which wheeled vehicles are much better at. A four- or six-legged mech would at least be lower to the ground and not quite as easy a target as a standing bipedal mech.

I really can't think of any use cases that would justify a humanoid tank. There are no advantages and tons of disadvantages. Human-sized powered armor might make sense if you could somehow make it work, but I don't see, short of magic-level ultra-tech, how you can engineer a human-sized powered exoskeleton that can move well enough to fight effectively without shredding its human occupant. Especially when with scifi-tech information science you could so much more easily engineer an autonomous or remote-controlled armored robot to fill the same role.

For non-military tasks, again you need to have a use case that justifies the added complexity. Ripley's power loader is a laughable example: there's nothing it can do that a regular wheeled forklift couldn't do just as well (except, of course, fight alien queens); a starship hangar is hardly a rough terrain environment, and even if it were, you can see that the power loader is so clumsy that it couldn't handle rough terrain anyway.

First a battlemech in battletech even at 50tons has more firepower than a platoon of mbts and cover more ground that if they have jumpjets can land inside the line of enemy vehicles. For a time only house Cameron had battlemechs and 5 mackies took out a company sized force of tanks and support units.

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Arioch
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by Arioch »

CrimsonFALKE wrote:First a battlemech in battletech even at 50tons has more firepower than a platoon of mbts and cover more ground that if they have jumpjets can land inside the line of enemy vehicles.
But there's no logical reason why this would be the case... there's no reason that a tracked vehicle (or whatever) of the same weight shouldn't be able to mount the same weapons and equipment as a humanoid mech.

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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by discord »

tanks are simply a better design for armor+gun/total weight ratio, combined with low ground pressure, it simply is the better platform for anything 'big'.

which is why so many say that any 'mecha' would be small, power armor, probably not more than 3 meters tall nor over at very maximum 10 tons, more sensibly 2 tons or less, which can still make for a very potent INFANTRY scale unit.

my guess is something flexibly around 10cm beyond height of operator and between 100-1000kg. weight difference mostly being armoring levels, and would probably end up at the lower end of that weight.

and the only plausible reason i have come up with is the neural interface and humans being unable to 'connect' to anything not humanoid, a one man light tank(mech) with very good response times is actually a signfiicant advantage, which is needed for it to be deployed.

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CrimsonFALKE
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by CrimsonFALKE »

Arioch wrote:
CrimsonFALKE wrote:First a battlemech in battletech even at 50tons has more firepower than a platoon of mbts and cover more ground that if they have jumpjets can land inside the line of enemy vehicles.
But there's no logical reason why this would be the case... there's no reason that a tracked vehicle (or whatever) of the same weight shouldn't be able to mount the same weapons and equipment as a humanoid mech.
Incorrect at least in battletech only battlemechs have the ability to use myomer strands. Mechs carry more fire power and armor per ton of myomer. Case in point the Demolisher II MBT weighs 100 tons has the same fire power and protection as 75 ton Warhammer assault mech. the down side is you need fusion power plants

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Arioch
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by Arioch »

CrimsonFALKE wrote:Incorrect at least in battletech only battlemechs have the ability to use myomer strands.
This thread is about the problem of how to make mechs work in a realistic setting. Saying "Because only mechs can use handwavium!" doesn't seem like a very compelling solution.

In fiction, if you don't have an explanation for something, I think it's better to simply not try to explain it, rather than shout "Midichlorians!"

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GeoModder
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by GeoModder »

Arioch wrote:
CrimsonFALKE wrote:Incorrect at least in battletech only battlemechs have the ability to use myomer strands.
"Midichlorians!"
"Taimat!" :lol:
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Turrosh Mak
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by Turrosh Mak »

GeoModder wrote:
Arioch wrote:
CrimsonFALKE wrote:Incorrect at least in battletech only battlemechs have the ability to use myomer strands.
"Midichlorians!"
"Taimat!" :lol:
Oof! Direct hit, Captain :lol:

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Arioch
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by Arioch »

GeoModder wrote:
Arioch wrote:
CrimsonFALKE wrote:Incorrect at least in battletech only battlemechs have the ability to use myomer strands.
"Midichlorians!"
"Taimat!" :lol:
I expect you're joking, but I'm going to explain the difference anyway, and I'll be sure to do so in the most patronizing tone I can muster. :D

There's nothing inherently wrong with "handwavium"; there's plenty of good science fiction that wouldn't work without it. So if your story needs scrith or philotes or whatever, go for it. However, to feel like science rather than magic, your handwavium should obey logical rules that are self-consistent. The problem with "myomer" is not that it's some futuristic super-strong whatever; the problem is that it can, apparently, magically only be used by humanoid mechs. That doesn't make sense, and making sense is the whole point of handwavium. Otherwise it's just pointless technobabble.

The problem with midichlorians is not that they're fanciful or silly (certainly no more than "The Force" itself); it's rather that they don't actually explain anything about how the Force works... they're just an unnecessary intermediary. (And it doesn't help that they were never mentioned before during the course of Luke's Jedi training... so in addition to being completely unnecessary, it feels like a random idea pulled out of Lucas' arse just because he wanted some way to measure The Chosen One's staggering Force potential.)

And let's remind ourselves what the original question was: how to believably depict mechs in a realistic setting. If someone asked me how to believably depict starships in a realistic setting, they would look very little like those in Outsider.

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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by boldilocks »

The description of midichlorians in relation to the whylls and Lucas' planned final trilogy is actually pretty interesting, but it does open up a question:
1. The midichlorians are sentient and communicate the will of the force to those who can wield it
2. The midichlorians, according to prophecy, actually conceived anakin in order to defeat the sith and bring the force into balance.
3. But, by the nature of how the force works according to this conception, the midichlorians also exist in sith and are allowing the sith to wield the force.

Based on that it would seem like the sith are wielding the force against the will of the midichlorians inside them or the midichlorians inside them are somehow corrupted (according to lucas the force is in balance when it is in the light side) or lucas didn't think this through. Or maybe he did. It would have been nice to have a trilogy exploring it, nonetheless, if he was going to de-mystify the force anyway.

Edit: personally I prefer the force as it is described in the first trilogy. Mystical and non-material.

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Ithekro
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by Ithekro »

The old EU has some sort of Imperial Force Aura scanner to check for Force Sensitives and if they were more Light or Dark Side auras. The New Republic found one some time after Endor and Luke started using it to find people suitable for his new Jedi Academy.
Midichlorian allow for a similar, though biological in nature, test to find Force users. They did sort of follow through on the idea of the Midichlorians and the Whylis near the end of the Clone Wars series, with Yoda finding a source of the Force while hunting for clues about Darth Sidious and Yoda's visions about what was about to happen (Order 66 and the potential New Hope).

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CrimsonFALKE
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by CrimsonFALKE »

Arioch wrote:
CrimsonFALKE wrote:Incorrect at least in battletech only battlemechs have the ability to use myomer strands.
This thread is about the problem of how to make mechs work in a realistic setting. Saying "Because only mechs can use handwavium!" doesn't seem like a very compelling solution.

In fiction, if you don't have an explanation for something, I think it's better to simply not try to explain it, rather than shout "Midichlorians!"

Okay first myomers are synthetic muscle which as the universe explains in great detail permits mechs to function. The setting is one of the most hard scifi settings around there is no artificial gravity in the year 3100 also there are essay length explanations on the workings of a battlemech. Myomers being able to lift more than they weigh, and I explained that you can save at least a quarter of the weight of a tank with a mech; eg the WHR-6R being 75 tons vs a tank with the same load out being 100 tons while lacking the same protection. But by all means you can just Midichlorians hand wave away the scientific explanation made in universe. Currently we lack fusion engines, and myomers the two things that make mechs work. Myomers are able to come in almost any size and can be used to replace lost limbs or even be used in construction systems as they are more efficient than bulky hydraulics. Again we do not have half this stuff but Fusion engines and synthetic muscle prosthetics are in the works.
Myomer is composed of microscopic poly-acetylene tubes filled with an acti-strandular fiber. These fibers are created by mixing biologically engineered bacteria with specific polymers within the tubes. An electric current is sent through these tube, causing the fibers to arrange themselves into a complex nano-structure similar to the proteins myosin and actin that allow biological muscles their movement
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-F ... wsNum=2885
http://romano.physics.wisc.edu/winokur/ ... node5.html
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/1 ... mars_trip/

Not very handwavium but that's neither here nor there. What is important is we are looking into making this stuff now. If you would want an argument against battlemechs I'd say the size of target is the issue as all combat vehicles get a low profile look first shoot first bonus roll and insanely cheap to make given they can run on ICE power plants. If any of you want to talk hard science go to Sarna.net they bend over backwards to keep things grounded. If you want mechs realistically I guess pour money into the research links mentioned above. Seriously how hard is it that synthetic muscles could open up new avenues of weaponry?

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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by GeoModder »

Arioch wrote:
GeoModder wrote:
Arioch wrote: "Midichlorians!"
"Taimat!" :lol:
I expect you're joking, but I'm going to explain the difference anyway, and I'll be sure to do so in the most patronizing tone I can muster. :D
Of course I was. ;)
Not that I understand why you felt the need for a 'cheaper' annihilation reaction in Outsider then antimatter, with a similar energy output.
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Arioch
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Re: How to Make Mecha Work in a realish setting

Post by Arioch »

CrimsonFALKE wrote:Myomers being able to lift more than they weigh, and I explained that you can save at least a quarter of the weight of a tank with a mech; eg the WHR-6R being 75 tons vs a tank with the same load out being 100 tons while lacking the same protection.
Superstrong synthetic muscle fibers may explain how a mech can be strong enough to stand up, but it doesn't explain why a mech can carry more than a tank of the same weight, since a tank doesn't need to stand up, nor does it need to "lift" anything. The weight of a tank is mostly in its armor, engines, and weapons; very little of it is in structure. Even if it has superstrong, superlight synthetic fibers to help hold it up, a standing mech with the same armor, weapons and engines as a tank will have to weigh more, because tanks don't require this additional structure.

This is to say nothing of the additional expense and maintenance issues of this fiber and all the additional moving parts required in a humanoid mech, or how a 75 ton mech is able to avoid sinking into the ground without feet like giant showshoes.
GeoModder wrote:Not that I understand why you felt the need for a 'cheaper' annihilation reaction in Outsider then antimatter, with a similar energy output.
The problem with antimatter is that it's not an energy "source"; there isn't a ready-made supply of antimatter that you can harvest or mine, so you have to synthesize it... which is incredibly expensive. The amount of energy needed is massive... a single starship outputs more energy than an entire planet produces. So if I say I'm using antimatter, I also need to explain where all this energy needed to create the antimatter is coming from. One could propose a fictional way to create antimatter cheaply, but I figured it was less of a stretch to propose a cheap way of making ordinary matter unstable.

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