((And they should have been fielding compact plasma rifles by now. Instead what they have is slightly better than the equipment handed to death row inmates sent on suicide missions.))
((That's assuming compact plasma weapons are at all efficient, cheap, and effective. Remember, the only plasma weapon they have is the plasma cannon, which uses automanips to drive the round. ARM's the type of group that might put automanips in all our weapons, but not the UWM. And plasma is more expensive/difficult to make. There's really not very many problems that a 20mm slug won't solve, and for those problems, you'll probably want to be inside a battlesuit regardless of your weaponry.
((But that's the thing - nobody bothered to try and create a working plasmagun via conventional means! A smaller glob of plasma, if a self-sustaining containment field can be devised, can be propelled exactly the same as a gauss round. And a small glob of plasma can solve a lot more problems than a gauss slug can.))
And the equipment used by inmates is surplus weaponry. Much like old surplus war rifles, just put to a better use than selling to civilians.))
((Surplus,
outdated equipment, that is still not much worse that current-generation tech. It's the same as if, in firearms terms, the inmates were given breech-loading Ferguson rifles, and the government had break-action rifles. That's still not even to the level of bolt-action or lever-action semiautomatics that they
could have, nevermind the belt-fed repeaters they
should have.
I realize that the Gauss Rifle is a sturdy, simple, no-nonsense design, but come
on - two hundred years later, and it wasn't improved at all! Not even so much as a burst fire mode! (mental note: see about adding burst fire to gauss rifles)))
((Not necessarily. Consider, say, Uranium. You can make a bomb that's orders of magnitude more powerful per unit mass with it, compared to conventional explosives, and that gap only increases as you go bigger. But it has side effects, and it doesn't scale down, meaning that up to a certain point, conventional explosives will trump nuclear devices. Exactly where that point is depends on the development level of both techs, and you can push and pull that point around by making advances and finding more circumstances where one or the other is more useful.))
((Arguable. I'd say that synthflesh, at least at mecha sizes, is superior to any conventional material. I thought of another advantage it has- bonuses to rolls. An avatar grants a +1 to everything, and even a basic synthbody, which is too small for most benefits, gets +1 to physical stats.))
((So does a Mk3, if you don't remember. It's all a matter of having stronger muscles and the ability to use them properly. The Avatar's bonuses are more a result of the pilot being physically plugged into the machine, so the synthflesh's intelligence is affecting him.
If the myomer is strong enough, and the programming is good enough, a small mecha (5 meters is small for a mecha) will work just fine.))
((I want to make something better than synthoid muscles, not synthflesh. Objectively, no conventional myomer is going to be better than synthflesh for all applications. But as I mentioned earlier, it's possible to push the point of the myomers' cost-efficiency higher, and find bigger and better uses for them.))
((Again, arguable. I'll still say you won't be able to do it at mecha sizes.))
((We'll just have to wait and see, I guess.
I kinda doubt it myself, but that's no reason not to try. ^_^))
((Because it'll be cheaper, it will not require its pilot to remain locked inside of it, and it will not go on a rampage if someone with appropriate know-how and tools (or a random rookie with a microwave amp) takes out the control system.))
((So you just want a cheaper alternative for a "DESTROY EVERYTHING" role?))
((A cheaper, safer alternative, yes. At least if something goes wrong with a 'mech or its pilot, you can shut it down reliably.))
((If they do progress technologically, they haven't shown it very well yet. Sure, they seem to run experiments from time to time, but they don't seem to be advancing their baseline.))
((...Even the troops that are never supposed to even see combat were equipped better than us. And their sods were wearing light armor, something we certainly don't have, milnoplate and longcoats notwithstanding.))
((We do have armor, it's just mostly DIY. I already listed the reasons why we don't really have armor here - given the weapons we have as standard, no amount of "light" armor is going to do you much good if you get hit. Light armor is only good for fighting against civilians, with their lower-caliber Gauss weapons and firearms.))
((Pushing technology ahead does not mean relying on space magic and unknown alien tech to go forward. It means making an effort to create new technologies, and to understand and reproduce previously unknown technologies.
Consider this. Can we make better synthflesh? We could try, but we don't know how exactly it works. Can we make better amps? Probably not, because we don't know how they work, and in all likelihood they can't get better. And we can't outproduce the UWM, so if we try to take them on while relying on technology we don't understand, we will lose. But what we can do is take technology we know, and improve it. Push up our baseline, so that we can make lesser stuff that's better than the UWM equivalent, in greater numbers.))
((I didn't find anything here objectional up until "we will lose". If the UWM is using well-understood S, which adds A(4) and B(6) together to make S(10), then why would we lose if we used M, which adds F(?), Z(?), and X(7) together to make M(19)?
((Because in almost every case, we can only make M(19) with what we know (as opposed to, say, M(20) or M(22)), and we can only make it in very limited quantities because of how dangerous and unstable it is to produce. Whereas the UWM can make not only S(10) in far greater quantities than we can, but it can also create far more effective R(22) and V(48), which will rather effectively crush our few M(19)s.
However, perhaps we can perform research and become able to combine B(6), F(2), and C(
, into G(16). It's far weaker than even our M(19), and will be soundly trounced by UWM's R(22)s - however because we fully understand how G(16) works and use primarily conventional materials for its construction, we can ramp up their production to the point where we can effectively counter R(22) by
our superior numbers of G(16)s, and have our
own R(22)s and V(48)s deal with UWM's V(48)s.
Does that make sense?))
Here's another argument against relying on conventional materials: There's a lot more UWM scientists than ARM scientists. Once they're in a war, with people who have better materials then them, why wouldn't they be able to research the same stuff? Or just take some discarded armor, and reverse-engineer it? We'd have a short-term advantage, but it would be supplanted because they can out-produce us in conventional terms. If we use risky, poorly understood alien space magic, then they will hesitate to try to repoduce it.))
((UWM will not hesitate to use risky alien space magic. Cases in point: Amp Specialists, Ghost Ships, Sharkmist, and, hell, the whole synthflesh/space magic thing that's powered by repeatedly stabbing an elder god's left testicle with an interdimensional spear. UWM doesn't want
others to use the risky alien space magic, so us doing it is only natural.
And true, we can't outproduce them if they copy our tech, but we have ways to prevent them from getting hands on it in the first place (their idea), which aren't likely to work as well with alien tech.))
((Mecha have weight distribution problems mostly, not weight per se. They tend to end up top-heavy, which makes balancing them difficult. Up to a certain point, given the right structural material in the legs (where weight can be beneficial), mecha are not really subject to weight concerns. You generally want your materials to get lighter as you go up in the mecha's structure, heaviest materials in the legs, lighter materials in the torso and arms. This incidentally also addresses the issue of mecha legs being "vulnerable" - being built from heavier materials or having more armor in general, coupled with them being comparatively narrow targets and being in constant motion, makes them rather less of an instant-kill target. At the point where you can aim and hit a mecha's leg and punch clean through to disable it, you might as well be shooting for the torso, which is going to be lighter armored on the overall, have more critical systems to destroy, and easier to hit.
I may be slightly diffusing the concepts of "mecha" and "battlemech" in my mind, so pardon any inaccuracies.))
((Okay, I agree with all that. Now I want to play mechwarrior, and snipe enemy mech legs with laser alpha strikes. Too bad they haven't made a good MW game in over a decade.
Also, aren't "Mecha" and "Battlemech" pretty much synonyms, as the latter is just a name for the former in a particular game?))
((I'm really sad that after all those years, the next MW game to come out is a free-to-play MMO. They shut down everything, from Living Legends to MekTek, and all they came up with was
that? *headdesk*
Also, no. "Mecha" is a catch-all term for Japanese anime-inspired robots, generally either bipedal humanlike machines or animal-/insect-form robots, but in all cases they have far more mobility than their size should allow. As a rule, they are mostly unrealistic. "Battlemechs" are a fairly specific subclass of walking combat machines, nearly off the far end of the Real Robot scale of mecha. They are described as walking tanks, far more simplistic (and realistic) in their motions and capabilities, made with believable technology and materials, albeit with somewhat unbelievable targeting systems. As in, unbelievably short-sighted. Battlemechs are pretty much what you'd have if you made a single-seater MBT, swapped out its drivetrain for a pelvic joint with legs, and mounted way more weapons than any tank should have on it. My favorite example of a realistic 'mech is the
Vulture/Mad Dog, although the
Shadowcat is a close second. Both suffer from the "what the hell was the designer smoking" syndrome in regards to cockpit placement, the Vulture less so than the S-cat, but that's more of a common Battletech-verse problem.
Unrelatedly, I swear I never saw one of
these before. Clan Hell's Horses, you need to lay off... whatever it is you have your mech designers on. That thing makes less sense than anything I ever came up with, even in-universe.))
((Case in point: fighting other Battlesuits. You can be sure that the amount of enemy Battlesuits we face is only going to go up as we move forward, and simply having Battlesuits of our own might not cut it, as we're likely to be outnumbered. A few Avatars can level the playing field (literally, along with a neighboring city or two), but the UWM has ways of countering Avatars, as a skilled enough amp user can certainly give one no end of trouble. Having something bigger, faster, and stronger than a Battlesuit on the field will simultaneously allow us to roflstomp enemy Battlesuits, and give potential anti-Avatar people something less expensive to target.))
((Hmm. Something not as vulnerable to PSLs and plasma would be good. But it would be even more defensless against amp users and such than an avatar, although we might be able to get around that for some time by putting the cockpit in a strange place. It still wouldn't supplant the use of avatars, and would be vulnerable to their deployment, but overall it's not a bad idea.))
((It wouldn't exactly be "not vulnerable" to those, but yeah. Plus one more benefit of a piloted mecha - it can be purchased with the Mission Fund. You can't exactly return an Avatar.))
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Topic: Hephaestus No Longer Exists: Crater thread. (Read 191306 times)