Will walking tanks be humanities first mecha? also walking

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>>10985433

No. We already have mecha. The logging industry beat the military to it by quite a bit.

Pretty sure we're just about done with tanks.

>>10985481
Don't forget the mining industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NhAR_qJVZk

>>10985493

As someone who's not normally interested in the military, care to elaborate on this out of interest?

>>10985481
>>10985536
Construction zones also have mecha as well.

It make sense for these things to be civillian pioneered though. Hell the tank wouldn't be here without the caterpillar track tractor

>>10985601

Got a pic of a construction mech?

>>10985481
>>10985536
Technically you're both wrong. DARPA and the various branches of the military have been playing with mecha style weaponry for ages now. The problem is that what's sufficient for civilian use isn't capable enough for military use. Unlike the logging industry or mining industry the military industrial complex has to deal with constantly evolving weaponry in every field.

>>10985584
Tanks thrived in open warfare, but with the advent of infantry weapons capable of disabling tanks, the increased capabilities of long range missile bombardment, focus on urban environments, and air superiority the tank is essentially useless.

Anywhere a tank could be used something else can do its job better, and it has never been a multipurpose vehicle.

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>>10985607
pic related

There's also this one backhoe tractor that has adjustable wheels and shit that let it climb over hills easily and pivot on point. It's also lighter than your average backhoe tractor too.

I forgot its name though.

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>>10985658
My favorite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxLdavUlZXs

The rest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctd4RWcYgE4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjd2t6KL94o


But yeah, you can operate mecha, complete with a cockpit in today's world and be useful.

>>10985681
Found an even more impressive vid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y85nfQuU0M

But yeah, these things are so fucking cool. Well IMHO of course, some of you must think they're lame as shit.

>>10985692
Is he a Newtype?

>>10985681
>>10985692
Tank vs one of these

WWW.YouTube.com/watch?v=AUC2CanBcLY

>>10985718
>Watch video
>Menzi vehicle outperforms tank over crazy-steep bank

Checkmate, /k/

>>10985433
not a tachicoma fuck this shit

>>10985837
The thing still got wheels, you can't checkmate /k/ unless you have a clip of mechanical legs beating tank treds.

>>10985610
>Tanks thrived in open warfare, but with the advent of infantry weapons capable of disabling tanks, the increased capabilities of long range missile bombardment, focus on urban environments, and air superiority the tank is essentially useless.

Shut the fuck up.

Know it alls like you have been saying this since the fucking 70s, and they keep getting proven wrong in actual conflicts.

It's like saying

>we have MANPADS and air superiority fighters, helicopters are essentially useless
>we have tanks so big that infantry can't carry anti-tank weapons required to defeat them over rough terrain. light infantry is essentially useless
>with jamming and stealth technology, missiles are essentially useless

Open warfare still happens all the fucking time, tanks as part of a combined arms force supported by infantry and air assets are extremely capable and powerful weapons.

The only things that can reliably and effectively kill modern tanks used properly are precision missiles and artillery. Contrary to the uninformed, you still need to visually acquire tanks with these these, there are no BVR weapons systems that can kill a moving tank without spotters.

This thread shows yet again that articulated legs with wheels on them beat both wheels and legs.

Articulated wheeled legs > wheels > legs.

>>10985912
But I just wanted to make a joke, anon.

>>10985942

>Know it alls like you have been saying this since the fucking 70s, and they keep getting proven wrong in actual conflicts.

People have been saying that since at least 1919.

If anything, the point where tanks were at their most vulnerable was the 1950s. They actually stopped bothering with heavy armor for a while due to the sheer power of shaped charge warheads. Recoilless rifles and rocket launchers could wreck even the heaviest ww2 armor, so they doubled down on mobility and mobile firepower, essentially killing the heavy tank concept completely.

Now, armor has made up significant ground, to the point where any credible infantry-portable anti-tank weapon is either huge and cumbersome (RPG 29 is 41lbs loaded, can penetrate the sides of a modern tank with some reliability, only penetrates the front on a fluke) or expensive and reliant on some clever gimmick (Javelin top-attack missile costs 78,000 per missile, 128,000 per launcher). That's cheaper than a tank, but you don't trade rockets for targets 1:1. If you want any chance of those rockets being where they're needed when they're needed, you need to buy and issue a fuckton.

And now hard-kill active protection systems are finally catching on, which puts the defense on the offense. the PG-29N is supposed to defeat them by firing two rockets, but now that everyone knows about it, I can't imagine that particular trick will last very long.

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>>10985433

No. we already had walking excavators for a while. They were invented in Switzerland.

>The swiss beat the japanese to actual functional and practical mechs.

>>10985717
It's.... Beautiful

>>10986048
Yes but now they're deploying less tanks and more Strykers instead due to urban combat needs.

>>10985584
Drones are the future of warfare.

>>10985953
So Code Geass best mecha?

Am I not the only one excited for Advanced Warfare?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow

>>10986634

Moar like

>Drones are the future of special force assassinations within allied countries

They're going to be of fairly limited use against an opponent who actually does have AA-weapons and EW capabilties.

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>>10986640
i think you mean high macs,

>>10986640
>>10986656
Scope dog and Tachikomas best mechas

>>10985610
This tanks in are useless in urban environments myth just won't die with mecha fans will it. Sure, they have problems in cities but so does everything else, look at the battle of Mogadishu back in the 90s. Light infantry had a hard time, and bringing in armor was one of the things they did to get them out. It's just a sacred cow for mecha fans, and it doesn't even make sense. Narrow streets and buildings don't cause any problems for tracked vehicles that would go away if you put legs on a vehicle. The argument needs to have more logic behind it than just they are good for urban combat because you say so.

>>10986656
Source?

>>10986727

A faster armored version of this would rekt infantry and tank's shit thoroughly

>>10986183
>>10985718
>>10985692
>>10985681

>>10986620
True, but that is more because they are wheeled and on streets you can get closer to the enemy before they hear you. They also can fit in some aircrafts tanks can't. I don't see legs replacing either of those requirements.

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>>10986740
But could it defeat the champion?

>>10986727
It's not so much that tanks are useless in cities so much as they loose most of their advantages in urban combat. Those long range cannons are firing at less than a tenth of their maximum range. It's too easy to hit the vulnerable flanks and treads of a tan by sneaking through a building. It doesn't matter how tough the tank is if a building falls on it. The darn thing will get stuck in the rubble and it could take days to dig it out.

Small end mecha like powered armor is more like infantry with more firepower.

>>10986740
Unless it doesn't live up to how good you imagine it to be. The argument kind of needs to be better than "It will be awesome!" They history of military tech is full of seemingly cool ideas that never ended up working.

>>10986775
That's why alot of new vehicles and tank upgrades have been about giving more all around protection and firepower to stop stop stuff like that. Why attaching legs will make all that more effective has always been the sticking point of mechs in urban combat. As for power armor you run into the problem of doing trying to balance two contradictory aspects. If they are too big they will have trouble getting around, bomb suit already have trouble fitting in alot of the places infantry fight, and smashing through door frames may be fine when dealing with stationary bombs, but against a mobile force it may not be able to keep up. If they can't follow infantry they will be stuck in the same realm as vehicles which will almost always be better armed and armored.

>>10986728

gungriffon

also not high macs! jagdpanther

>>10986763
Flippers ruined everything.

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>>10986775
>The darn thing will get stuck in the rubble and it could take days to dig it out.
It's all a question of traction.

>>10985433
babbys 1st mech . such an original design

>>10987395
And then came the symmetric bots that could drive on both sides, so they had to get creative with stage hazards or other weapons.

>>10985433
Only if it uses hydraulics/pneumatics and servomotors, but I feel that technology is outdated. Instead it would be more likely to use artificial muscles, in which case it would probably be a design based on a living organism.

>>10986727
A humanoid mecha woild be able to aim and shoot around corners, allowing to use the buildings as cover more effectively. A tank needs to expose at least 30% of itself when rounding a corner to establish direct line-of-sight with a target around that corner. Aiming around cormers would also allow a humanoid mecha to fight more effectively than a tank in a dense forest as the surrounding trees would impede the rotation of the tank's turret.

a walking tank would be dificult to deploy, slow, more than a regular tank, a hit from some high caliber weapon on the joints and is useless and have problems with recoil, the only reason they created something like this, is for especific terrain and they need the firepower REALLY BAD

>>10989270
the problem with humanoid mechas, at least one that have the style like gundam, is that their armor would be really weak, some hits on the joints, from a high caliber sniper and cant walk anymore

for something like that, I would suggest something like the legs of a ac from V/VD, biped, a shield on the legs, a small one so it can have one each leg, or the ones from the heavy ones

>>10989301
>the only reason they created something like this, is for especific terrain and they need the firepower REALLY BAD
My sister once had a friend with benefits who was in the army. He said that he had been deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan and said that Iraq was a cakewalk while Afghanistan was a slaughterhouse. I suspect that this may be due to the fact that Iraq is mostly open desert making it easier to deploy tanks and other armored vehicles whereas Afghanistan is mostly mountain terrain, making it significantly harder to deploy armored forces there.

>>10989348
Or you could just wrap the mech's innards head to toe in this stuff:
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckypaper
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkijxr4z_mY
>http://www.buckypaper.com/
Then fit armor plating over it like medieval plate armor. While it probably won't protect it against artillery fire and anti-tank weaponry such as an RPG, it would probably still provide decent protection against small arms and other kinds of light weapons fire.

>>10989507
>Or you could just wrap the mech's innards head to toe in this stuff:
Actually I think I worded that wrong. What I meant to say was wrap the mech's endoskeleton structure and artificial muscular systems in Buckypaper to act as armored "skin" to protect the mech's internal components.

>>10989507
also, if we want to create a good militar mecha, a booster system is require, because I doubt that, at least the firsts one, will manage to reach a decent speed just walking

In my opinion, and like this anon say >>10989348 probably the AC from V/VD are good examples for real mechas, specially the tank and for legs, if someone say about the tank AC and why just not use a big tank, the uper hand that a AC have would be adaptability and easy change on weapons

>>10989567
What if it uses this material for artificial muscles?
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube_actuators#Artificial_muscles_and_giant_strokes_by_MWNT_aerogel_sheets
>http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16806-robots-could-flex-muscles-that-are-stronger-than-steel.html#.U6uYtfndWrE
>http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2009/03/20-001.php
They are 200x stronger than steel cable and contract much faster than human muscle in that while human muscle only contracts at a rate of of 20% per second, CNT aerogels contract at a rate of 30,000% per second.

That said, I imagine that a 7-meter-tall mech using these artificial muscles to provide locomotion for an endoskeleton structure composed of carbon fiber reinforced polymer would be able to achieve a top speed of 95 mph due to the mech's longer gait, which would be 3.5x longer than a human gait, and the fastest recorded human running speed is 27 mph. Although an acquaintance of mine in college who was a chemistry major and a self-proclaimed expert in carbon nanotubes told me that a mech using these muscles would greatly exceed those estimates.

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If anything I believe our first mecha would be that of an armored core. Fast on its feet and can take out multiple targets. Now if we opted the tank treads for hover based technology and took away the tanks cannon, added two heavy machineguns to cut back on the recoil I believe a tank could be the first mecha.

>>10989621
Chemistry majors aren't mechanical engineers so take everything he says with a grain of salt. Also alot of the stats you see for materials can be extremely misleading, throwing around huge numbers and super properties, but when actually applied to real technology the increase in performance is nowhere near as drastic as those numbers would lead one to believe. Those numbers are measuring a single property in laboratory conditions. As for the speed thing, one to one scaling does not exists, period. There is no situation in engineering where making something X times bigger makes it X times faster. Weight scales drastically, 3.5X scale equals over 40 times the mass and it would have to cover 3.5X the distance in the same time so the amount of power you need would be over 140X. Plus, when this is loaded down with armor and weapons the amount of strain generated would be incredibly intense, carbon fiber reinforced polymer is not immune to those kinds of stresses. Any leg would have to be bade out of multiple components and probably a great many different materials, so no matter how strong the best of them are, it can't do more than the weakest link. Long story short, engineering is alot more complicated than most mech advocates understand, so all these little technology bullet points that get thrown around don't mean much.

>>10989377
The problem with rough terrain making mechs plausible is that, if it is hard for a tank, it's usually just as hard for everything else. People and horses have alot of trouble in difficult terrain like alot of Afghanistan, their main advantage being to fit on the trails. The rough terrain argument is like the urban combat argument, it became a truism to mecha fans mostly through repetition, but never really diligently analyzed.

>>10989861
Well one anon in a previous thread pointed out that an unarmored mech made of those materials would weigh in at about 5 or 6 tons and another anon who claimed to work with nuclear reactors said that either a gas-turbine engine or a hydrogen fuel cell coupled with a dozen or so nanotube-enhanced ultracapacitors would provide sufficient energy for something that light. Also, 7 meters isn't that much bigger than a dinosaur and their muscles probably weren't as strong as CNT aerogels, but they managed to get around just fine though a they were a bit slow if those shows on the DIscovery Channel about them are anything to go by. If anything, their max speed would then be around half of what I originally estimated, which is still pretty fast. In fact, it would be just a bit faster than the M1 Abrams' top speed on a paved road (42 mph, as opposed to the mech's 48 mph).

>>10989941
Humanoid mechs would be able to scale the cliff faces like a mountain climber, perhaps using winch cables as safety lines and scale smaller rock formations too steep for tanks to traverse like a traceur and avoid the trails altogether.

>>10990011
yeah but dinosaurs didnt get shot at by rockets (that we know of)

10990011>> If you really want to make a mech of some sort like a gundam. Might as well just miniaturize it. Give a guy a jetpack, an exo skeleton, some sort of armor padding like dragon skin, a helmet, give it a cool name. Good to go. Besides faster mechs are always better and more safe in the line of battle against infantry and carry some sort of anti tank weapon on them.

>>10990150
But you have to remember that aerogels are insulators so they get real hot. One anon pointed out that they would probably get hot enough to melt steel. While this wouldn't be much of an issue for the aerogels themselves, which can operate well in extreme temperatures, the same can't be said for the power cables that supply them with power. This can be fixed for the mechs by wrapping the aerogels in a plastic membrane and filling said membrane with ethylene glycol, but I don't think it would cool it down enough for someone to wear comfortably.

>>10990170
Now, I'm no scientist like you are. I may have to read up on this whole thread. But I have an imagination and It would be an idea to have some vents on this mech to give them some sort of breezy comfort. The high speeds of the jet could cool off the pilot. The pilot is going to need a breathing mask as well so they don't suffocate. But not only that the pilot will not be able to scratch themselves, so it would be best for the pilot to be totally hairless, or go through some sort of pyscho therapy to not scratch themselves in the fly suit.

>>10990287
Well I'm not a scientist either. I majored in Computer Information Systems. I'm just an aspiring hard sci-fi novelist. But even so, something tells me that your idea wouldn't work all that well.

>>10990011
I'm not sure they would be able to scale cliffs. Something that size I would worry about finding hand and foot holds large enough to grab onto and support it's weight. Even light modern armored vehicles are in the twenty ton range. Also as a general rule for people talking, be very skeptical of people who who calculated specs for a mech, it involves so much theoretical tech interacting with other theoretical tech, it is borderline impossible to get reliable numbers. Also be skeptical of tech buzzwords, people tend to treat them like a magical solution to any and all problems. The truth is most are so early in development we don't actually know how they would work in any particular application.

>>10990170

Oh, hello.

How's your little story with reckless pilots escaping being discharged from the military after needlessly ruining priceless military equipment and buckypaper-armored mechs fighting Iranians coming along?

>>10989270

Not like we have things with two arms and legs that can already do that with a multitude of weaponry, no sir.

METAL
GEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR

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>>10990516
They'd use a cable fired attached to several grappling hooks embedded in multiple points on the cliff face attached to a motorized winch. As the mech ascends the winch reels in the cable until they reach the top, which takes some of the weight off the hand and footholds. The winch would probably need to be made of carbon nanotubes in order to keep it from snapping and the gun would have be powerful enough to bury the grappling hooks pretty deep in the rock, I guess.

>>10990535
It's progressing slowly. I've already finished the chapter I was stuck on last time I posted about it and I've figured out a way to finish the chapter I am currently working on, which will include the moment Aya and Aram meet face to face for the first time, but I keep getting distracted by video games and porn. Also buckypaper isn't the only armor that covers them. They also have pieces of Chobham fitted over them like medieval plate armor.

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activisions unique mech design team

>>10985481
fist thing i want to do is blow that thing up

>>10990704
The grappling hooks would possibly have to be guided so when they get to the top they steer towards the top of the cliff and have explosive bolts on them that get drivin into the cliff face, sort of like the pile bunker from mellowlink but it locks in place after penetrating.

>>10986727
You. I like you. One of the few comments in this thread that isn't dipped in pure head fantasy.

I can't believe how ignorant the general populace when it comes to warfare of all ages.

I remember the police chief in Washington D.C. said something similar about people who were saying that during a car chase the police should have just shot out the tires to stop the car. Basically, he said that people have completely fantastical ideas about how general combat and weapons work aka they're fucking delusional. Most people in this thread are no different and the sad thing is that they don't even realize it while thinking their logic is flawless.

>>10992325

> aka they're fucking delusional.

It's less delusion and more uniformed, because most people have no reason to know how a car reacts when it's tyres have been shot out amongst other things (and I count myself fortunate enough to be one of those people). They only ever care about this stuff when it enters their life in some fashion, but want to have their opinion heard regardless of how uniformed it is because that's just people in general. Most people don't care enough to really push it though, and just make the suggestion and move on with their life because they have other, more pressing things to worry about frankly.