Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Tack]

I would think it would be easier and more efficient to just make a really powerful powered exoskelengton than to mess with your mass.

Exoskelingtons are not logically agile.
Agility is badass.
Ergo:

Greater strength allows for faster and more vertical mobility. The rest is just manual dexterity, which is up to the operator anyway.

You'd go Up faster, sure, but also down.
Plus the power v weight ratio would have to be really high or you'd be going in circles.

As for "faster and more vertical mobility", making yourself weightless for a half-second would do the same too, and then you could safely land on a weathervane, or pidgeon.

Make you weigh more, but remember:
1) The servos could be used to reduce movement as well as increase it. Lower your arms and the servos, rather than ceasing to function, could function at a reduced rate allowing more finesse.
2) You'll accelerate down towards the planet you're on at the same rate. You'll have a higher terminal velocity and when you land it would be akin to FO 4's power armour landings (ie a loud smack, not a quiet one), but if you have exosuits then you probably have shock absorbers in the setting
3) I had a 3 and forgot it whilst I was writing 1 and 2

You'd also want a strong frame for when you turn the weight reducers off, or they get damaged in combat. If you can still move when they're not active, that's much better to take into dangerous situations.

Again, though, we have tech for a full fledged combat-capable exo suit. We can probably assume the material technology is pretty good compared to modern day. Heck, it might even be a pretty light exo suit if the material is made out of, say, carbon instead of metal.

The whole point of that little discussion was Tack talking about how you could afford to make a very heavy armoured suit and reduce the weight until it was usable. As such, we can assume it is made out of heavy materials.

That makes it more fun because THEN you can basically run around in tactical dreadnought armour. (I don't remember the name for those super heavy spess mahreens guys)

If it's heavy and there's a lot of materials advances, though, then the thing's gonna be pretty hard to crack. If you provide enough force TO crack the armour, then you'll probably kill the guy inside simply because their body can't take the force.

Sorry Gigla, the idea is awesome but the argument was actually Exoskeletons VS Gravity-reduced-battleplate.
But I've gotta say, having both sounds pretty sweet. Here comes super-agile terminators.

Sadly no matter how much your gravity is reduced, you're still looking at hard landings 'cos inertia.
You could use gravity dampeners to reduce your fall to a brisk walking pace but when you hit the ground, you're X heavier than usual, so it'll still be rough on the knees.

Fucking physics.


Edit:ed for clarity and quote pyramid.

[Sheb]

Except if you control gravity, you can invert it on the last few meters of the fall and touchdown with a velocity of zero.

[Tack]

Hmm. The idea I'd come up originally was that you could tinker with it only between the values of 1g and 0, leaving all of the fun to come from the rapid changes mid-flip, etc.

But I guess if you could go anywhere from 1.5 to -0.5, the coolness factor would probably spike.

Edit: Until people are essentially just flying around, in which case all of the antigrav has just become an overly-detailed hand-wave for the 'people can fly' thing.

[iceball3]

If KKV projectiles were actually made to be relevant in warfare, wouldn't their countermeasures be relevant enough to develop? Low hanging fruit in this manner would be anti-satellite lasers, really.

On the other hand, you could do handwavy physics and say the materials are much lighter. And/or self supporting. Bouncy stuff helps too probably.

Makes more sense than reversing gravity, honestly.

[i2amroy]

After a certain point, that armour is just a tank, isn't it? A lot of your idea reminds me of mass effect. They have mass-reducing tech which they use in weapons (to reduce recoil) in tanks (so they can have a heavily armoured hovertank, or a orbit-droppable APC).

Now how does that work? Wouldn't a reduced-mass incur even worse recoil issues, as it results in worse inertia of the firing platform?

You're thinking about it wrong. Instead of decreasing the mass of the bullets, you increase the mass of the tank right as you fire. (Ideally with their voodoo-witchcraft pseudo-science you would actually do both, the reduction for speed in the barrel and the increase for recoilless technology). It would mean that everyone on board would feel a very brief gravity pulse in the moment the mass skyrocketed, but it'd be no worse than having a bit of a kick to your gun, and if you were actually inside the vehicle firing you'd feel relatively little (since the increase gravity would pull you on all sides equally to cancel out at least some of it's pull).

[Tack]

Pretty sure they're talking about a MAC gun.

[Dirst]

Lasers have no recoil though, right?

Photons do have momentum despite having zero rest mass (they are never actually at rest), so technically there is some recoil... but it's negligible unless you're in using impossibly light materials in your weapon.  And probably need to be a vacuum too, since even the air would be enough to dampen the recoil.

[MonkeyHead]

Lasers have no recoil though, right?

Photons do have momentum despite having zero rest mass (they are never actually at rest), so technically there is some recoil... but it's negligible unless you're in using impossibly light materials in your weapon.  And probably need to be a vacuum too, since even the air would be enough to dampen the recoil.

... or have an insane number of high energy photons.

[Amperzand]

There is actually a proposed very-far-future spacecraft engine based on creating a tiny singularity out of photons and using its Hawking Radiation to provide thrust.

[iceball3]

Lasers have no recoil though, right?

Photons do have momentum despite having zero rest mass (they are never actually at rest), so technically there is some recoil... but it's negligible unless you're in using impossibly light materials in your weapon.  And probably need to be a vacuum too, since even the air would be enough to dampen the recoil.

... or have an insane number of high energy photons.

...I feel like that would be exactly the kind of thing you would absolutely not want to use in an atmosphere.
I need to do the math, though, and I'm not sure what the specific impulse would be of photon emissions, but my gut tells me that to make a significant enough impulse to make recoil a problem, you'd probably get a problem like this, first, at the very least on a regional scale. Maybe a bit less.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/
But since I don't know exact numbers, I can't calculate. Having a hard time finding just how much force a photon emission exerts on it's emission source.

[Dirst]

...I feel like that would be exactly the kind of thing you would absolutely not want to use in an atmosphere.
I need to do the math, though, and I'm not sure what the specific impulse would be of photon emissions, but my gut tells me that to make a significant enough impulse to make recoil a problem, you'd probably get a problem like this, first, at the very least on a regional scale. Maybe a bit less.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/
But since I don't know exact numbers, I can't calculate. Having a hard time finding just how much force a photon emission exerts on it's emission source.

I see your relevant XKCD and raise you another.

[iceball3]

...I feel like that would be exactly the kind of thing you would absolutely not want to use in an atmosphere.
I need to do the math, though, and I'm not sure what the specific impulse would be of photon emissions, but my gut tells me that to make a significant enough impulse to make recoil a problem, you'd probably get a problem like this, first, at the very least on a regional scale. Maybe a bit less.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/
But since I don't know exact numbers, I can't calculate. Having a hard time finding just how much force a photon emission exerts on it's emission source.

I see your relevant XKCD and raise you another.

Ahh, that tones the collateral damage down a bit, though, that's still a nuclear-level payload on a laser, it seems.

[Amperzand]

Which, given the inherent inefficiency of a laser, probably means an actual nuke would be more useful.

[TheDarkStar]

Why not a nuclear-powered laser?

[Parsely]

Every time someone says "infantry are on the way out" a puppy dies.