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[TheBronzePickle]

Railguns apparently ignore the 'equal and opposite' rule. The only 'recoil' they have is pushing against the rails to either side.

[Vattic]

Seriously can I get a source on that? It was a while ago I read about them, and even people making them for fun, and recoil was always mentioned. One video I saw they had to bolt the thing to a huge concrete block to counter it.

Edit: I can only find conflicting information. Most say they do have recoil but some are saying otherwise. I found one study but also a lot of criticism of said study .

[TheBronzePickle]

I remember reading an article where a Naval testing center apparently fired a railgun in order to test the force of recoil it generated, but they got a reading of zero. Can't find it anymore, though, so it may have been debunked or something.

[misko27]

I remember reading an article where a Naval testing center apparently fired a railgun in order to test the force of recoil it generated, but they got a reading of zero. Can't find it anymore, though, so it may have been debunked or something.

I 've heard that. The probalem, that I've heard, is that the magnetics in the gun interfere with the radar.

[TheBronzePickle]

Why would you use radar to measure recoil? Hell, why would you use any electronics in the vicinity of an electromagnetic object?

I was under the impression they were using mechanical measurement devices.

[Kogan Loloklam]

I think the radar problem was "in general, therefore we cannot use this gun"

Drones aren't robots, but remote controlled aircraft. They can do anything an aircraft designed in a similar manner with a human pilot can do, but with a delay that comes from waiting on a signal. A Jammable signal. This means a 13 year old kid playing videogames is training to be a foot soldier in the next war. Wars will be fought between drone armies trying to get to control centers, and then by drone armies trying to spread jammers. Humans will still come into play to destroy jamming sites, until we start with reliable quantum communications or something equally unjamable. I expect as time goes on and human casualties in war to go down, there will probably be laws of war that outlaw killing of humans at all. And then people will throw that out the window like all other laws of warfare. Toxic Biochemical spraying drones because they can't find the peope operating the opposition soldiers...

Space warfare will be fun. We can drop rocks out of range of ground-based weapons, so the bigger and easily seen stuff would be worthless. Small, insurgant-friendly weapons is what a ground force can expect to see. This means we are accomplishing NPR's mission of preparing for alien invasion, by training crops of insurgants all around the world.

The problem is, if the aliens don't see value in us greater than the cost to pacify an insurgancy, it's cheap and easy to make us, and all life on earth, extinct.

(EDIT:Forgot to talk about railguns.
A railgun works by accelerating a slug through the miracle of magnatism. There is recoil, but thanks to the difference between friction, and the fact we are talking about constant acceleration instead of burst acceleration from an explosive one-off compound, it's not going to be as noticable. Recoil of a firearm is all from acceleration in a fraction of a second. Spread it out over a little time and it's easy to deal with.
)

[Loud Whispers]

Seriously can I get a source on that? It was a while ago I read about them, and even people making them for fun, and recoil was always mentioned. One video I saw they had to bolt the thing to a huge concrete block to counter it.

The way modern projectiles are slugged is explosive gases and all that jazz. So it makes a helluva lot of recoil which can only be directed elsewhere (which is why "recoil-less guns" have little hampering recoil. It's directed elsewhere, despite the recoil still existing). As for rail guns, no explosive gases are involved. It's an electro-magnetic explosion. All depends on how it's made I guess, we're still talking about a weapon that's never been fielded yet.
Talked to my local science man, he says it'll have recoil; I am inclined to agree. Will it affect a big ol' tank or a battleship? Not nearly as much as a boom stick.
So that's +1 for the chance that someone will make a rail gun on wheels.

[Mr Space Cat]

I'm disappointed at the lack of mention of giant robots.

If the future of terrestrial warfare doesn't have giant robots with railguns in it, I will be a sad panda.

[PyroDesu]

I'm disappointed at the lack of mention of giant robots.

Inefficient and, if you're abiding by the laws of physics, improbable to the point of near-impossibility. If you did manage to make one, it would be more on par with an aircraft than a tank. Actually, no, it would combine the worst elements of the two, and possibly add in some of its own (slow, only able to mount lighter weapons (unless you WANT to break the thing's legs with recoil or have it be 100% stationary while firing), massive target, highly vulnerable areas, light armor, inability to go across different terrains very easily, and more.).

[TheBronzePickle]

Actually, walker bots would be perfectly fine in the rugged terrain on mountains, where they'd have a massive advantage over wheeled and tracked vehicles. Although they'd probably be neither giant nor bipedal: just swarms of small mechspider tanks.

[Armok]

Quadrotors everywhere.

[PyroDesu]

Actually, walker bots would be perfectly fine in the rugged terrain on mountains, where they'd have a massive advantage over wheeled and tracked vehicles. Although they'd probably be neither giant nor bipedal: just swarms of small mechspider tanks.

More an issue with weight distribution, they wouldn't be very effective where the ground isn't solid enough to support them. Tanks can drive on soft ground because while they're heavy, that weight is spread out by the tracks. Bipedal has all that weight, and possibly more, on two much smaller points. Mechspiders are little better, and it'd be pretty frakking hard to make them anywhere approaching "small".

And then there's balance issues to worry about.

[RedWarrior0]

The future of terrestrial combat is basically going to stay stagnant until fleshbags in the field are obsolete. Sure, things will be more streamlined, but I'm not seeing any major paradigm shifts. Wars are going to tend asymmetrical, similarly to Afghanistan and Vietnam; even wars that start as traditional wars will end asymmetrically as international favor swings one way or the other, and the shortchanged side gets desperate.

Once things get interplanetary, however, things get more interesting again. A contested planet with few civilians is going to have battle scars. Lots and lots of battle scars.

[Vattic]

Seriously can I get a source on that? It was a while ago I read about them, and even people making them for fun, and recoil was always mentioned. One video I saw they had to bolt the thing to a huge concrete block to counter it.

The way modern projectiles are slugged is explosive gases and all that jazz. So it makes a helluva lot of recoil which can only be directed elsewhere (which is why "recoil-less guns" have little hampering recoil. It's directed elsewhere, despite the recoil still existing). As for rail guns, no explosive gases are involved. It's an electro-magnetic explosion. All depends on how it's made I guess, we're still talking about a weapon that's never been fielded yet.
Talked to my local science man, he says it'll have recoil; I am inclined to agree. Will it affect a big ol' tank or a battleship? Not nearly as much as a boom stick.
So that's +1 for the chance that someone will make a rail gun on wheels.

From what I learnt in physics class method of propulsion should be irrelevant as you'll get just as much backwards momentum as the projectile has been given. You even get "recoil" from throwing an object away from you. The recoil will be different in so much as it'll happen over a longer duration than in traditional firearms (the slug from a railgun still accelerates at a huge speed) but the overall result should be the same (unless they really do have no recoil as some have suggested in this thread).

As for putting them on wheels I wasn't saying it was impossible. I was replying to people saying you could get around the problem of recoil from a huge gun on wheels by using a railgun which has no recoil. I'd imagine the problems would be pretty much the same.

[Kogan Loloklam]

Rail guns always have recoil. However, the laws of physics say that recoil on a railgun doesn't matter to ground-based firing platforms (from human rifleman to megamecha) thanks to friction. To move something on the ground you have to apply enough direct force to overcome friction, the exact amount dependant on the gravity and surface of the world. This is true for anything that fires something that impacts a target with force.

Bipedal tanks aren't out of the question from physics or a usability standpoint, but as they aren't robotic devices, chances are they won't be deployed. A "shell" body might though.