Boundary Conditions for "Real Robots" Setting [Archive]

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-02, 04:06 PM

As part of my development work for Days of Blood & Chrome ("DoB&C") I realized I needed to put a lot more work into the setting of the game than for my others. This is mainly because DoB&C is a Real Robot (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealRobotGenre?from=Main.RealRobot) RPG which means I need to justify why everyone is using Real Robots instead of tanks or Power Armor.

In brief, the world needs to be set up such that the following are reasonable and common occurrences:
Ground forces primarily use humanoid Mecha between 8' and 20' tall
Combat is waged at line-of-sight ranges and melee combat is not unusual
Human Pilots are necessary and valuable on the battlefield

I think these are the absolute minimums needed to create the sort of atmosphere in DoB&C -- although it should be noted that a lot of assumptions need to be baked into the world to make any one of those requirements "true."

So far I've decided on the following:
Anti-Personnel Weapons are extremely effective: being unarmored on the battlefield is basically suicide. Soldiers would near to have Power Armor, at a minimum, to live long enough to do something useful. So we develop Power Armor.
Guided/Seeking Weaponry is foiled by Minovksy Particles (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MinovskyPhysics?from=Main.MinovskyParticle). The Minovsky Field functions best at cloaking humanoid figures of varying sizes. Non-humanoid vehicles are easily destroyed by Guided/Seeking Weaponry without this protection, which leads to armies phasing them out.
Long range communication/scanning is hampered by Minovsky Fields on the battlefield. Overlapping or massed Miovsky Fields disrupt all broadcast signals and most bands of electromagnetic detection. Hard-links or Visual (or near visual) signalling permit tactical communication but the sort of coordination for effective ballistic warfare is infeasible as are aerial or space-based sensor systems. Eyes on the ground are needed for tactical intelligence in hostile areas.
Thoughts? Are there assumptions I'm missing, or more elegant means for delivering them? Or would anyone like to mull over what they'd like in a Real Robots RPG? :smallsmile:

Water_Bear

2013-06-02, 04:17 PM

Tengu_temp

2013-06-02, 04:31 PM

Make the mecha motion capture machines, copying the movements of the pilots controlling them - either faithfully, like in G Gundam, or make a small pilot gesture result in a much more exaggerated movement from the mech like in Full Metal Panic. This explains a lot why a humanoid shape is used. Combine with Minovsky Particles and you have a more or less believable explanation for giant robots.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-02, 04:45 PM

Have you considered having it be a question of asymmetrical technology? If the robots are relics of a lost high tech past (like old Aliens-style powerlifters in a WWI level setting) or were made or left behind by beings beyond human comprehension (Aliens, AI, deities, Great Old Ones, etc) then that handily explains why an otherwise inferior design might be preferable to ordinary vehicles.
The main problem here is that "Real Robots" are supposed to be recognizable technology that works like you'd expect. Escaflowne-style Lost Tech isn't going to work thematically, and is kind of a bad thing to base your military around.

Make the mecha motion capture machines, copying the movements of the pilots controlling them - either faithfully, like in G Gundam, or make a small pilot gesture result in a much more exaggerated movement from the mech like in Full Metal Panic. This explains a lot why a humanoid shape is used. Combine with Minovsky Particles and you have a more or less believable explanation for giant robots.
So, there's an old argument at the core of the Real Robot Genre -- "why not tanks?"

There is literally no reason to choose a humanoid figure for a military vehicle. It has complicated joints that cannot be as well armored as a tank and is inherently less stable as both a firing platform and a method of locomotion. What you've given me is a way to make Giant Robots work but no reason why you'd field them instead of tanks.

The Minovsky Field being well suited to the humanoid shape is basically ripped from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagaan as their reason for everything being a Giant Robot. Physics, as far as we know, simply doesn't work that way but I'm making up a new Law of the Universe to justify the existence of Giant Robots on the battlefield. Perfect ECM would be such a huge advantage on a modern (or near-future) battlefield that I can see armies giving up on tanks, jeeps and APCs to develop and maintain Power Armored Infantry.

A good start though. Keep it coming!

Frozen_Feet

2013-06-02, 04:47 PM

Some thoughts regarding your premises:

1) Primary conflict areas are low gravity. This means mechs/powered armor can have more things piled on it than on earth, but they're also piling on "extra" weight so that movements of the armor feel more like natural movements to pilots from high-g environments. The idea here is that each mech is calibrated to feel like a real body to anyone inside it. Moving in light gravity for someone who's unused to it would otherwise be much harder.

2) Primary conflict areas are enclosed spaces, such as underground tunnels, space ships or "greenhouse" colonies on planetary surfaces. Either ranged weaponry runs too great of a risk of puncturing walls, placing non-mech-pilots at risk, or there simply is no need for greater range.

3) Related to the point above, primary conflict areas are shaded from radiowaves, so remote control is impossible, or distances are so great that the time delay becomes too great for efficient remote control. Say, a 7-minute delay is a-ok for a research drone, but not for combat mech.

4) There is no strong AI. Remote controlled drones have limited capacity to act independently. If essentially real-time control can't be established (see the above item), human presence is required for decision-making.

EDIT: some of the above also answer the "why not tanks?" question. Tanks are *great* when fighting is done on a relatively open plane. They lose relevancy fast in cramped corridors or uneven terrain. Let's face, even the best of tanks are not going to plow through a thick forest or climb a mountain. A human in powered armor could.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-02, 04:57 PM

1) Primary conflict areas are low gravity. This means mechs/powered armor can have more things piled on it than on earth, but they're also piling on "extra" weight so that movements of the armor feel more like natural movements to pilots from high-g environments. The idea here is that each mech is calibrated to feel like a real body to anyone inside it. Moving in light gravity for someone who's unused to it would otherwise be much harder.
I thought about this actually. I'm not sure how "necessary" it is in light of the additional problems it may cause (altering Fg has a literally world-spanning impact). But yeah, the "footprint" issue is something that needs to be dealt with. Plus, everyone loves Jump Jets :smallbiggrin:

2) Primary conflict areas are enclosed spaces, such as underground tunnels, space ships or "greenhouse" colonies on planetary surfaces. Either ranged weaponry runs too great of a risk of puncturing walls, placing non-mech-pilots at risk, or there simply is no need for greater range.
Interesting. The issue with enclosed areas is that you would want to have smaller, rather than larger, combat vehicles. Power Armor makes sense, but anything larger than that would be at a huge disadvantage.

3) Related to the point above, primary conflict areas are shaded from radiowaves, so remote control is impossible, or distances are so great that the time delay becomes too great for efficient remote control. Say, a 7-minute delay is a-ok for a research drone, but not for combat mech.
Distance is an interesting thought. You could fight in some alternate dimension which you can't communicate through and which is sufficiently hostile that you would never build a base in it.

EM shielding is good of course, which is why I've already included it :smalltongue:

4) There is no strong AI. Remote controlled drones have limited capacity to act independently. If essentially real-time control can't be established (see the above item), human presence is required for decision-making.
Naturally. The primary problem I foresaw here is that Mecha are really complicated. Anything more complicated than a Starship Troopers-style negative feedback control system is going to require computer assistance to be combat useful and the more computers you use, the more you have to question why you'd bother with a pilot at all.

Sadly, you don't need Strong AI to break many settings. Even modern guidance systems in missiles are "smart" enough to navigate long distances at high speeds to hit small targets. If you can build Giant Robots, you probably have the technology to make missiles that can destroy them without much in the way of human interaction.

tensai_oni

2013-06-02, 05:12 PM

If you're looking for a realistic excuse on why to use giant robots, you are going to fail.

Humanoid giant robots are inherently unrealistic (or at least highly impractical) as a machine of war. This is why we don't, and never will, have them in real life. So my answer is: stop caring about realism, at least in this one field. Create an explanation that, rather than realistic, is CONSISTENT. Stick to it and you'll have a good setting.

erikun

2013-06-02, 05:14 PM

The video game Ring of Red (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Red) gave the logic that tanks work on a relatively flat plane, but something with legs (either four or two) is much more functional in mountainous terrain.

For that matter, technology tends to progress from one stage to another. Tanks are clearly armored cars, so if you have a world where cars don't exist, it is highly unlikely that anyone would spontaneously develop a tank independently. A world with highly rough terrain - mountains, deserts, swamps - isn't going to be productive to horse-drawn carriages or cars, and so wouldn't likely develop tanks. In such a location, travel is mostly likely to occur by pack-mule or even ballon than by wagon. As such, when people begin mechanizing travel, they are most likely to go with zeppelins and four-legged mechs than cars for travel.

Not sure how practical this is, as I don't know if you are trying for a real-Earth setting.

Randel

2013-06-02, 05:29 PM

Maybe the robot platform was designed to be as multi-functional as possible and the legs allow for quick repairs/replacement in the field?

With a humanoid robot, you could design the arms and legs to be modular, replacing a leg (or part of one) just involves lifting up the leg, unbolting the part, slapping on a replacement, and running off. Tank treads would require lifting up the whole tank to get at the components to replace and tanks are just harder to lift.

The basic robot design could have been originally for doing work in hazardous environments where its dangerous for the pilot to leave the cockpit. So, on-site repairs often require the pilot to use the vehicles arms to perform repairs. A humanoid robot could easily position itself in a way so its hands can access any other given part of its body (one arm could even detach and replace the other arm if necessary). So one pilot with access to a bunch of modular replacement parts could stay in the cockpit for as long as needed while performing all his own repairs with no need for an external "garage".

So, as long as your robot has a supply of spare limbs stashed away, it can simply crawl back to base with one arm, singlehandedly replace all its busted limbs with spares, head back into the field an hour or so later, and fight again. The busted limbs could then be repaired more efficiently later.

Similarly, the human body is basically a Universal Turning Machine (since we can use our hands to move things into any
position). So the factory that makes the bots could just consist of other bots programed to cut, bend, or weld the right components in a way to make them.

Think self-replicating robots except except they still need a furnace to smelt the metal and equipment to make individual components. But once they have a supply of metal, bolts, wires and stuff then assembling that into a robot is just a matter of prgramming the bots to assemble them. Once you make more robots, just have those bots join the assembly line.

The cool thing about an assembly line composed of humanoid robots is that they can be reprogrammed to build pretty much anything else, and if need be you could repurpose the robots to some other task like mining or fighting a war.

So the humanoid robots in this scenario aren't specifically war machines. They could have originally been one of millions of bots being mass produced for assembly line work or construction. Its just repurposing them for war just involves bolting on some armor and giving them some weapons onto the existing moddable frame. Any innefficiancy in their design is negated by there being loads of replacement parts and a self-replicating workforce to supply more parts.

Mastikator

2013-06-02, 05:34 PM

[snip]

In brief, the world needs to be set up such that the following are reasonable and common occurrences:
Ground forces primarily use humanoid Mecha between 8' and 20' tall
Combat is waged at line-of-sight ranges and melee combat is not unusual
Human Pilots are necessary and valuable on the battlefield
[snip]

They use jamming technology to make long range targeting systems useless, which take up some space, that's why they're at least 8 foot tall, they're no taller than 20 feet because of weight-to-strength issues.
It's all in line of sight because of the jamming tech, so all targeting must be by eye. It's also why human pilots are vital.

Zahhak

2013-06-02, 06:20 PM

Ground forces primarily use humanoid Mecha between 8' and 20' tall

Are we talking primary in the sense of "instead of tanks, artillery, mortars, AA guns and the like" or "the majority of combat is between mecha"? Because if the former, I imagine that the knee/hip joint of a mecha allows for greater use in rough terrain (mountains) and for it to swim* in shallow water like rivers and swamps. If the later, because there are no cities anywhere. Seriously, a city is the worst possible place to use any sort of armored units (tanks, artillery, etc) because destroying it becomes a fairly simple matter of getting above it and dropping a bomb. Tanks (and probably your mecha) is the most heavily armored on the front, then the sides, then the back, and finally the top and bottom. WWII-era tanks could be reasonably destroyed by dropping two or three sticks of tnt on the top. Being in a city also makes it easier for a guy with an RPG to sneak behind the mecha and blow out the vital knee joint, making your mecha little more than an immobile gun position that could be completely surrounded and destroyed or avoided by the enemy.

From a real-world perspective (which I think you're going for with a Real Robot setting) a mecha would be used to complement infantry in the same way that tanks, mortars, artillery, and AA guns are. They don't replace infantry, and realistically cannot, they help infantry out by providing heavy fire power, destroying enemy emplacements, eliminating enemy fortifications, and protection from airborne units (respectively).

Your mecha, on that note, would probably be divided into two or three basic types: tanks and artillery. Tank type mecha would be heavily armored, slow, be equipped with organic** AA guns and take over for tanks and mortars, being used to provide heavy fire support to infantry and destroy enemy emplacements (like a group of enemies in a building, or a tank). The other is your artillery replacement. They would still be armored, but would be focused more on speed, maneuverability and huge firepower. They would be used much like modern artillery (sit in a place, take orders from an fire control center and blow crap up on the other side of the horizon, with a focus on fortified positions). They might have organic AA guns, and might even help in AA warfare. The reason you would want fast and maneuverable artillery type mecha is because it allows them to move quickly to a new fire point as the front line moves. This would be the primary advantage of a mecha over traditional artillery. And the whole "more maneuverable in rough terrain" that would make it so there is no place to hide from artillery

* "Swimming" is a military term for a non-aquatic vehicle that can be partially or completely submerged in water for a period of time/at a certain depth and still operate. Useful in river crossings
** "Organic" here meaning 'attached by design'

Combat is waged at line-of-sight ranges and melee combat is not unusual

Natural combat evolution: warfare is being fought closer and closer in every year as more and more often battles are being fought in/immediately near cities as more and more people as a percent of the world population is concentrated in cities.

Human Pilots are necessary and valuable on the battlefield

Well, yeah. You don't spend tens of million dollars in RnD on a fighter plane, and several million on each individual unit, and then give it to any random guy off of the street. These are going to be highly trained and respected people. They will all probably be officers, much like how modern aircraft pilots are all officers.

Anti-Personnel Weapons are extremely effective: being unarmored on the battlefield is basically suicide. Soldiers would near to have Power Armor, at a minimum, to live long enough to do something useful. So we develop Power Armor.

You are basically talking about a vehicle firing a 120mm shell. You don't take that to face and expect to be around to talk about it. You also don't expect to take a .50 caliber heavy machine gun burst and live to talk about it.

Guided/Seeking Weaponry is foiled by Minovksy Particles. The Minovsky Field functions best at cloaking humanoid figures of varying sizes. Non-humanoid vehicles are easily destroyed by Guided/Seeking Weaponry without this protection, which leads to armies phasing them out.

No idea how that would work, but OK.

Long range communication/scanning is hampered by Minovsky Fields on the battlefield. Overlapping or massed Miovsky Fields disrupt all broadcast signals and most bands of electromagnetic detection. Hard-links or Visual (or near visual) signalling permit tactical communication but the sort of coordination for effective ballistic warfare is infeasible as are aerial or space-based sensor systems. Eyes on the ground are needed for tactical intelligence in hostile areas.

Know what would be probably the first thing that would happen then? The military spends all of the money in the world to develop either a replacement or a way to get around that. Communication is right about the most important thing in the world in combat.

It has complicated joints that cannot be as well armored as a tank and is inherently less stable as both a firing platform and a method of locomotion.

Assuming a bipedal design. If you used a quadruped you could get pretty fast. MIT recently built a robot cheetah that runs much faster than Usain Bolt. Give it 50-100 years and the kind of funding that militaries have access to and you could reasonably have a quadruped mecha that can travel much faster (and possibly more fuel-efficiently) than a traditional wheeled/tracked vehicle.

Naturally. The primary problem I foresaw here is that Mecha are really complicated. Anything more complicated than a Starship Troopers-style negative feedback control system is going to require computer assistance to be combat useful and the more computers you use, the more you have to question why you'd bother with a pilot at all.

I have a theory about battle computers: they're basically highly evolved chess computers. Interesting fact about chess computers: Deep Blue (the computer that IBM built that debatably beat a chess master) cost a crapload of money. I recall it being in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars. That is not something you will put on every mecha you have. Or any mecha you have. But a moderately advanced chess computer (like the one on your computer) plus a human with a decent understanding of the game can roflstomp chess masters. Assuming a battle computer is an evolution of a chess computer, you would want a human pilot so you aren't spending more money than god on your battle computer.

Primary conflict areas are... "greenhouse" colonies on planetary surfaces.

Unless you're planning on having them march around carrying swords and spears, this is a recipe for disaster. A mecha is basically a tank. A 5.56/7.62 round probably wouldn't break through the greenhouse wall, a 120mm round sure as hell will.

Let's face, even the best of tanks are not going to plow through a thick forest or climb a mountain.

For the life of me I cannot remember what it is called, but this (https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/524698_3186165775461_219282667_n.jpg) is a mine sweeper on the front of an Abrams mainbattle tank that is based on a design for a brush cutter from WWII that was used to allow tanks to punch through thick brush.

Grinner

2013-06-02, 06:39 PM

There's a comic book film adaptation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogates_%28film%29) you should see.

As far as military matters are concerned, by using robot drones, you can preserve an individual soldier's experience while still allowing him to engage in risky maneuvers. As a bonus, a humanoid drone would be far more familiar to the soldiers.

There's a bunch of other benefits to using drones as well. Just watch the movie. It explains everything.

Frozen_Feet

2013-06-02, 06:58 PM

Wait, I came up for one interesting reason to favor melee combat:

Because ammunition is weighty. And before someone says "energy weapons", batteries for those are weighty too.

So we need a scenario where it makes sense to travel light. Possibly, these mechs are sort of reconnassaince or first-response troops. Or they are pioneers/engineers who go to an area to facilitate building/arrival of more conventional troops. Without strong AI and soft-sci-fi replicator technology, humans still stand out as comparatively efficient "anything machine" to build things outside factory environments.

Mr Beer

2013-06-02, 07:07 PM

A couple of things for melee combat:

1. You can take the Minvosky Particles trope and extend it to include a sort of discriminatory force field that blocks anything moving over a certain speed. Bullets and missiles are blocked. Melee weapons are not.

2. A particularly effective armour busting weapon that cannot easily be put into a missile for whatever reason; it's too heavy/expensive/energy intensive. Maybe hyperdense or monofilament edged weapons or some kind of energy enhanced blunt instrument (think 40K).

Frozen_Feet

2013-06-02, 07:09 PM

Unless you're planning on having them march around carrying swords and spears, this is a recipe for disaster. A mecha is basically a tank. A 5.56/7.62 round probably wouldn't break through the greenhouse wall, a 120mm round sure as hell will.

Giving them a reason to march around with swords and spears was the main intention, yes. :smalltongue: I can imagine close combat mechs/power-armored troops to be pretty efficient peacekeepers in such colonies, especially if their enemies don't have similar devices. If using anti-tank projectiles will spell a disaster for your enemies, you will be pretty well-off.

Imagine a bunch of low-tech dissidents trying fight against a mech/power-armor in such environment. The kind of firepower they can safely use will not bother the mech, while the kind of firepower that will bother the mech puts the dissidents themselves in peril. Meanwhile, the mech doesn't really need projectile weapons with expendable ammuniton. It can safely close the distance and flail away with fists or blades.

Zahhak

2013-06-02, 07:10 PM

Because ammunition is weighty.

Thats actually a terrible reason. Modern armored units have incredibly heavy ammunition too. A 120mm shell ways 19kg/42lbs, and tanks carry a crapload of them. You might as well say "because swords don't run out of bullets": true, but guns have this thing called "range"

Tengu_temp

2013-06-02, 07:14 PM

Why use melee:

Use the excuse Gundam did at first. Armor is so thick and hard that it takes many physical shots to penetrate it. On the other hand, beam weapons go through it like hot knife through butter. Beam guns are extremely rare and unwieldy prototypes that consume a ridiculous amount of power with each shot, but beam swords and other melee weapons are much more common.

Frozen_Feet

2013-06-02, 07:23 PM

Thats actually a terrible reason. Modern armored units have incredibly heavy ammunition too. A 120mm shell ways 19kg/42lbs, and tanks carry a crapload of them. You might as well say "because swords don't run out of bullets": true, but guns have this thing called "range"

So come up with a scenario where weight is a disadvantage and range is unnecessary like I'm doing. :smalltongues: And just as a note, getting that "crapload" of ammunition to the frontlines is costly and takes a long chain of logistics. EDIT: it doesn't matter if you outrange your opponent, if your opponent can ignore your bullets.

So what if that chain of logistics is strained or compromised? Like, say, in case of a backwater space colony? A mech invulnerable to personal firearms and potent in close combat would be a pretty effective peacekeeper in any such place. It would be pretty effective in most real cities, even.

Zahhak

2013-06-02, 07:47 PM

So come up with a scenario where weight is a disadvantage and range is unnecessary like I'm doing.

I don't think there is any scenario where that is the case.

it doesn't matter if you outrange your opponent, if your opponent can ignore your bullets.

I doubt if anything can ignore a 120mm round.

So what if that chain of logistics is strained or compromised?

If your logistics is unable to provide ammunition to its troops, it won't be able to provide fuel or replacement parts for the mecha, and it won't be able to provide food either. If your logistics cannot equip its units, then those units are going to die. Thats pretty much the end of the discussion.

Water_Bear

2013-06-02, 07:49 PM

So what if that chain of logistics is strained or compromised? Like, say, in case of a backwater space colony? A mech invulnerable to personal firearms and potent in close combat would be a pretty effective peacekeeper in any such place. It would be pretty effective in most real cities, even.

A giant sword-wielding robot is going to need lots of fuel, spare parts (even under 'normal' conditions), and replacement melee weapons as they are quickly blunted or shattered. The logistics are not significantly improved.

And worse, it's legs will be even more vulnerable to mines and IEDs than a tank or up-armored wheeled vehicle and it's size means that those melee weapons will be useless for clearing enemies out of buildings which vehicles with actual weapons could simply destroy. Not to mention it is unlikely to be able to fit in alleyways, so it's maneuverability in urban combat is pretty much equal to that of a conventional vehicle. In terms of urban combat it seems like a poor solution.

The logical way to deal with this is not to try to find situations where mechs beat tanks, because there aren't any, but to find reasons why tanks and other ground vehicles have not been developed or are at an early stage of development. If the "asymmetric technology" idea isn't in play, then there needs to be a pretty serious evaluation of how these people managed not to develop working tanks by the time they can produce giant robots.

Zahhak

2013-06-02, 07:56 PM

Steep or loose terrain like on Mars would basically stop a tank and most vehicles, but a quadrupedal mecha could function.

chanman

2013-06-02, 07:58 PM

Just a note on the ECM side: Reduced sensor ranges cause a bias towards optical targetting, right? That actually selects *against* giant robots since vehicles have a much lower profile - 2 to three meters for modern MBTs vs. well... way more than that for anything taller than powered armour.

Additional note on AIs or computers or whatever: They will almost certainly be needed for situational awareness for the pilot. Fighting vehicles have a minimum of 3 sets of eyes looking out - one concentrating of movement, one on firing, and one on the tactical situation. Giant robot has one pair. Fighters get help from AWACS or ground control stations. One hangup I have with Real Robots is how to avoid information overload for the pilot.

As for why robots and why melee? I would suggest the following conditions:

1) Terrain: This... place is mountainous/overgrown with gigantic forests/under-developed/rugged like Terran badlands. (The interesting question is where the food is being grown. Agricultural areas are prime real estate for tracks).

Underdevelopment really boils down to: Crappy roads and not enough of them. Mind you, Real Robots will be constrained by the same logistical needs as tanks (parts, fuel, ammo, technicians, rations, water, etc.). Actually, robots might actually need more logistical support: Tanks have 3-4 crewmen to perform maintenance and more space to carry sundries than a robot would.

2) Culture: If the inhabitants have a fixation on individual warrior ethos and personal ability over multiple individuals crewing a vehicle. The Mechwarriors of Battletech have definite shades of fighter pilot egos.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-02, 08:38 PM

Just a note on the ECM side: Reduced sensor ranges cause a bias towards optical targetting, right? That actually selects *against* giant robots since vehicles have a much lower profile - 2 to three meters for modern MBTs vs. well... way more than that for anything taller than powered armour.
Note that my Minovsky Field only works on protecting humanoid structures. While long-ranged sensors and communications are disrupted by high amounts of Minovsky Field activity in the area, the short-ranged stuff you'd find in guided missiles would still work fine on tanks et al. that happen to be on the same battlefield but unprotected by personal fields.

Additional note on AIs or computers or whatever: They will almost certainly be needed for situational awareness for the pilot. Fighting vehicles have a minimum of 3 sets of eyes looking out - one concentrating of movement, one on firing, and one on the tactical situation. Giant robot has one pair. Fighters get help from AWACS or ground control stations. One hangup I have with Real Robots is how to avoid information overload for the pilot.
The easy way is a neural uplink -- the Pilot is capable on Moving and Firing as if he were unarmored. Tactical would be limited mostly to what the Pilot and any nearby Scouts could directly observe -- perhaps "displayed" as overlays on the Pilot's own vision.

This keeps the humans relevant and puts another column in the Giant Robot Column -- you can't use a neural uplink on a non-humanoid vehicle.

Re: Melee
As a clarification, I don't want the Mecha in DoB&C to be primarily melee but combat should be sufficiently close and mobile that close-combat is a reasonable thing for Mecha to be designed to deal with.

So I want a mobile battlefield where using Jump Jet Mecha is a reasonable tactical choice.

Zahhak

2013-06-02, 08:49 PM

As a clarification, I don't want the Mecha in DoB&C to be primarily melee but combat should be sufficiently close and mobile that close-combat is a reasonable thing for Mecha to be designed to deal with.

For a bipedal mecha give it knuckle dusters and spikes on the knees. For a quadruped, give it claws or a bite attack. If anything gets too close the mecha can do some reasonable damage (or just kill a human) to create space to fire a 120mm round into centermass.

Beleriphon

2013-06-02, 09:39 PM

I think what you want are weapons that are just heavy enough that a human could never reasonable carry them but are still small enough that they could be man portable. For example the miniguns and gatling lasers from Fallout. Sure a sufficiently strong human using the SPECIAL system can carry one but its much easier to get with power armour. Even a human in power armour (at least Fallout sized) can still get into buildings and is much more mobile than tank or artillery piece. They can carry a heavy weapon that could threaten a tank, but are vulnerable to the tank's return fire.

Apply that logic to a scaled up robot and it starts to make sense. You want the mobility of something that can maneuver and lean around buildings, but don't necessarily want to use a tank. Anything below a certain size is going to work best in a dense urban environment since it functionally emulates man sized combat.

On the topic of overstimulation of the pilots I recall a sci-fi story where the pilots were neurolinked into their star fighters without a filter. Those that could adapt were trained further, but even the best of them eventually became addicted to the extra senses and felt totally incomplete without without fighter's extra senses being added to the pilot's. While linked they had a full sphere of "vision" provided by the sensors and felt the craft as if it was their own body (flexing their toes moved different parts of the aft sections like the directional thrusters).

TuggyNE

2013-06-02, 09:44 PM

Well, yeah. You don't spend tens of million dollars in RnD on a fighter plane, and several million on each individual unit, and then give it to any random guy off of the street. These are going to be highly trained and respected people. They will all probably be officers, much like how modern aircraft pilots are all officers.

You're assuming no strong AI or effective remote control, though, which was the point of that stipulation: no strong AI or effective remote control or whatever else you can come up with. For example, no Predator drones.

You are basically talking about a vehicle firing a 120mm shell. You don't take that to face and expect to be around to talk about it. You also don't expect to take a .50 caliber heavy machine gun burst and live to talk about it.

Given that infantry are actually deployed today in combat situations involving 120mm shells and .50cal machine guns, and they do not have power armor, much less mechas, I think anti-personnel weapons in the setting need to be cranked up to 11 to actually make it sufficiently suicidal.

I have a theory about battle computers: they're basically highly evolved chess computers. Interesting fact about chess computers: Deep Blue (the computer that IBM built that debatably beat a chess master) cost a crapload of money. I recall it being in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars. That is not something you will put on every mecha you have. Or any mecha you have. But a moderately advanced chess computer (like the one on your computer) plus a human with a decent understanding of the game can roflstomp chess masters. Assuming a battle computer is an evolution of a chess computer, you would want a human pilot so you aren't spending more money than god on your battle computer.

So far, computers have tended toward steadily decreasing costs for the same capabilities for the last 50+ years (or, put another way, steadily increasing capability for the same cost). It is not especially difficult, if you're already fiddling with physics, to assume that this continues for another hundred years.

I doubt if anything can ignore a 120mm round.

You mean besides actual current main battle tank armor?

Beleriphon

2013-06-02, 10:00 PM

You mean besides actual current main battle tank armor?

Even then, I wouldn't expect it to withstand a direct, square strike.

Zahhak

2013-06-02, 10:28 PM

You're assuming no strong AI or effective remote control, though, which was the point of that stipulation: no strong AI or effective remote control or whatever else you can come up with. For example, no Predator drones.

I mentioned elsewhere that AI at the level of Deep Blue cost (IIRC) a hundred million dollars. Putting that on each mecha would be a really bad idea. And drones have some limitations: anything that interrupts radio signals would kill a drones effectiveness and there's a signal delay over distance (from Arizona to Afghanistan there's about a 15 second delay) which in combat would give local forces a huge advantage, even if the delay is only a second. Kind of like with the stock trading companies doing everything they can to get closer to the internet for the speed benefits (http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html). Only with tanks.

Given that infantry are actually deployed today in combat situations involving 120mm shells and .50cal machine guns, and they do not have power armor, much less mechas, I think anti-personnel weapons in the setting need to be cranked up to 11 to actually make it sufficiently suicidal.

A .50 caliber round will shred cinderblocks like tissue paper, are used in anti-tank rounds, and .50 caliber rounds have been used to record kills at nearly a mile and there is a recorded kill of three targets on the farside of a cinderblock wall with a single round. Believe me when I say that getting shot with a .50 caliber round will not be fun, no matter what kind of armor you're wearing. Best case scenario with modernish technology is that you stop the round, but still take most of the inertia, so you go from being killed by a .50 caliber round to knocked on your butt and with a few broken ribs. And that assumes a pretty serious improvement in materials technology in the next 50 years.

So far, computers have tended toward steadily decreasing costs for the same capabilities for the last 50+ years (or, put another way, steadily increasing capability for the same cost). It is not especially difficult, if you're already fiddling with physics, to assume that this continues for another hundred years.

But you'd have to improve a chess computer several hundred times over to deal with combat, so that effect won't help all that much.

You mean besides actual current main battle tank armor?

The best modern tank armor actually cannot ignore a 120mm round. A 120mm round won't destroy the tank, but it won't survive much after that shot.

Water_Bear

2013-06-02, 10:50 PM

I mentioned elsewhere that AI at the level of Deep Blue cost (IIRC) a hundred million dollars. Putting that on each mecha would be a really bad idea. And drones have some limitations: anything that interrupts radio signals would kill a drones effectiveness and there's a signal delay over distance (from Arizona to Afghanistan there's about a 15 second delay) which in combat would give local forces a huge advantage, even if the delay is only a second. Kind of like with the stock trading companies doing everything they can to get closer to the internet for the speed benefits. Only with tanks.

The best chess program in the world, as rated by computerchess.org, is the Houdini Chess Engine which is designed to run on an AMD Opteron-6128. The total cost, for both combined, is about $300. To run it at it's max specs you pretty much double the cost from what I can tell.

Either way, it's nowhere near a hundred million dollars.

Zahhak

2013-06-02, 10:55 PM

I call bull****.

Beleriphon

2013-06-02, 10:58 PM

I call bull****.

On what exactly?

Mastikator

2013-06-02, 11:02 PM

I call bull****.

The Deep Blue computer performed about 11.4 Gigaflops.
The Powermac G4 (personal computer) performs 4 gigaflops.
That's less than 20 years of development, in some 10 years a cheap smartphone will outperform the supercomputers of the 90s.

In an even more distant future they might have quantum computers on mechas, which may well be able to process more information than there exists in the known universe (quantum computers are cheaters like that).

Zahhak

2013-06-02, 11:03 PM

That it cost less than 300 bucks for that program.

Beleriphon

2013-06-02, 11:05 PM

In an even more distant future they might have quantum computers on mechas, which may well be able to process more information than there exists in the known universe (quantum computers are cheaters like that).

I think I read IBM has a working model on how to get a quantum computer actually working, even if they haven't built it yet.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/36901.wss

Mastikator

2013-06-02, 11:11 PM

That it cost less than 300 bucks for that program.

I may well cost a 1 million to develop am AI program, but then it costs 20 bucks for a technician to install it on all the mechas. :smallwink:

Mastikator

2013-06-02, 11:12 PM

I think I read IBM has a working model on how to get a quantum computer actually working, even if they haven't built it yet.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/36901.wss

Technically, a quantum computer has already been built in Chalmers University. Not exactly battle-ready.
http://www.nanotechwire.com/news.asp?nid=10110

TuggyNE

2013-06-02, 11:13 PM

Even then, I wouldn't expect it to withstand a direct, square strike.

That's kind of what it's for, though. And the combat record of modern main battle tanks suggests it works out OK, too. (I.e., deliberate friendly fire under optimum conditions to scuttle damaged tanks often requires multiple shots to get the tank to proper unusability, never mind destruction.)

A .50 caliber round will shred cinderblocks like tissue paper, are used in anti-tank rounds

What. Gonna need some citations on that one.

But you'd have to improve a chess computer several hundred times over to deal with combat, so that effect won't help all that much.

Doubling every year and a half, or even every three years, is surprisingly powerful. It takes only 24 years at the slower rate to get the needed power (256 times), and then another say 30 years brings the price down from $100,000,000 to $100,000, which should be cheap enough for mass individual deployment.

As briefly alluded to earlier, real-world physics at nanometer scales are likely to mess this effect up something fierce, but since we can conveniently hand-wave that away, it's not too big a problem.

The best modern tank armor actually cannot ignore a 120mm round. A 120mm round won't destroy the tank, but it won't survive much after that shot.

The M1 Abrams can fire M829A3 120mm APFSDS rounds with an estimated penetration of 800-900mm RHAe, point blank. Its turret armor is about 800mm RHAe, which would presumably not survive a direct hit. However, the German Leopold 2A6 is estimated to have 920+ RHAe on its turret, which probably would survive. (The T90 seems to have turret armor somewhere in that range, but a bit lower; the Challenger 2 might actually be better.)

Not that I'm more than a barely-educated layman, but that does seem like the best armor can in fact pretty much shrug off a given high-performance 120mm round. Of course, that doesn't apply if you manage to get a good shot at the most vulnerable areas, which have maybe half as much or less.

Zahhak

2013-06-02, 11:28 PM

I may well cost a 1 million to develop am AI program, but then it costs 20 bucks for a technician to install it on all the mechas.

You know companies generally like to recoup the cost of development, right?

What. Gonna need some citations on that one.

That was partly a lie, since Anti-Tank Rifles/Recoilless Rifles haven't been used since Korea, but anti-tank weapons until then were basically all .50 caliber rifles, like the Boys anti-tank rifle, which used a .55 caliber round, which is based on the .50 caliber BMG. Although modern weapons called Anti-Material Rifles are basically modern versions of an Anti-Tank Rifle. They're used to rip up APCs and other armored vehicles that are less armored than tanks. Oh, and older model tanks from the Cold War.

Doubling every year and a half, or even every three years, is surprisingly powerful. It takes only 24 years at the slower rate to get the needed power (256 times), and then another say 30 years brings the price down from $100,000,000 to $100,000, which should be cheap enough for mass individual deployment.

... Assuming of course a concentrated effort to develop battle computers from chess computers.

As briefly alluded to earlier, real-world physics at nanometer scales are likely to mess this effect up something fierce, but since we can conveniently hand-wave that away, it's not too big a problem.

I have this massive errection for hard sci fi, so, no we cannot.

The M1 Abrams can fire M829A3 120mm APFSDS rounds with an estimated penetration of 800-900mm RHAe, point blank. Its turret armor is about 800mm RHAe, which would presumably not survive a direct hit. However, the German Leopold 2A6 is estimated to have 920+ RHAe on its turret, which probably would survive. (The T90 seems to have turret armor somewhere in that range, but a bit lower; the Challenger 2 might actually be better.)

That seems like that actually proves what I said: it can survive one shot, but not much more than that. Also, what kind of a background do you have that you know that?

Mastikator

2013-06-02, 11:38 PM

You know companies generally like to recoup the cost of development, right?
[snip]
... Assuming of course a concentrated effort to develop battle computers from chess computers.
[snip]

A, being snide isn't conducive to a discussion.
B, those who develop the mechas may well develop the software too.
C, there's concentrated effort being put into AI, there's no reason a campaign setting with mechas wouldn't have civilian AI robots which the battle AI is adopted from.

Zahhak

2013-06-02, 11:51 PM

B, those who develop the mechas may well develop the software too.

The military (any military) likes making things that go boom and things to let people talk to each other. They generally aren't keen on anything else.

C, there's concentrated effort being put into AI, there's no reason a campaign setting with mechas wouldn't have civilian AI robots which the battle AI is adopted from.

AI is being developed, but not for anything like a battle computer. Again, militaries are incredibly stubborn when it comes to adapting anything that doesn't go boom or let people talk to each other.

warty goblin

2013-06-03, 12:20 AM

Salbazier

2013-06-03, 01:09 AM

2) Primary conflict areas are enclosed spaces, such as underground tunnels, space ships or "greenhouse" colonies on planetary surfaces. Either ranged weaponry runs too great of a risk of puncturing walls, placing non-mech-pilots at risk, or there simply is no need for greater range.
.[/I]

Interesting. The issue with enclosed areas is that you would want to have smaller, rather than larger, combat vehicles. Power Armor makes sense, but anything larger than that would be at a huge disadvantage.

This reasoning is used in Muv-Luv franchise with TSF. The conflict are beetween humanity Tyranid/Zerg swarm kind of aliens called BETA (no insect motif, though. They are creepier than that). The BETA build giant Hive TSF are meant to be able to enter and combat inside this Hive. Many strains of BETA are themselves giant robot sized so the Hive itself is quite spacious. Giant robots able to fare better against giant-sized enemies in limited space also make sense.

chanman

2013-06-03, 01:49 AM

Note that my Minovsky Field only works on protecting humanoid structures. While long-ranged sensors and communications are disrupted by high amounts of Minovsky Field activity in the area, the short-ranged stuff you'd find in guided missiles would still work fine on tanks et al. that happen to be on the same battlefield but unprotected by personal fields.

If the Minovsky field works on humanoid suits that are lying on the ground, then they can work for tanks. Unless there's a requirement for the object to be near-verticle relative to local gravity (in which case its effectivenes sin space would become questionable)

The easy way is a neural uplink -- the Pilot is capable on Moving and Firing as if he were unarmored. Tactical would be limited mostly to what the Pilot and any nearby Scouts could directly observe -- perhaps "displayed" as overlays on the Pilot's own vision.

That doesn't change the fact that it's one person doing the job of three, even if the interface is much slicker. It's why rubbernecking causes accidents. In an AFV, one person is concentrating on movement, one on shooting things, and one on the tactical situation. It's not that the mobile suit can't do what the tank does. Rather it's that it really has trouble doing them better.

This keeps the humans relevant and puts another column in the Giant Robot Column -- you can't use a neural uplink on a non-humanoid vehicle.

The laws of physics in terms of protection (lower profile, less area to protect relative to volume), mobility (lower ground pressure), firepower (lower center of gravity and ability take recoil), and maintainability (larger crew, less exposed gubbin's) are largely going to argue for tanks over mecha.

So we're going to go back to your necessary conditions on why mecha are used: Either they can't be used because the terrain is plain unsuitable (and mind you, when pressed, tankers can get their tanks in a lot of places you might not initially expect - Ardennes, the moutains of Italy and Korea...), or there's a reason why the people refuse to use tanks. (Cultural taboo, disagreeable historical associations, etc.)

If the latter, you can run into a later situation against a group without the same taboo/phobia/disconnect that ues tanks that will comparatively out-armour and out-gun your players

Hubert

2013-06-03, 04:28 AM

So we're going to go back to your necessary conditions on why mecha are used: Either they can't be used because the terrain is plain unsuitable (and mind you, when pressed, tankers can get their tanks in a lot of places you might not initially expect - Ardennes, the moutains of Italy and Korea...), or there's a reason why the people refuse to use tanks. (Cultural taboo, disagreeable historical associations, etc.)

Even if the terrain is not suitable for tanks, I think "spider" tanks (à la Tachikoma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachikoma)) are still more practical than humanoid mechas.

TuggyNE

2013-06-03, 04:30 AM

That was partly a lie, since Anti-Tank Rifles/Recoilless Rifles haven't been used since Korea, but anti-tank weapons until then were basically all .50 caliber rifles, like the Boys anti-tank rifle, which used a .55 caliber round, which is based on the .50 caliber BMG. Although modern weapons called Anti-Material Rifles are basically modern versions of an Anti-Tank Rifle. They're used to rip up APCs and other armored vehicles that are less armored than tanks. Oh, and older model tanks from the Cold War.

Indeed. .50 caliber rifles with HEAT rounds; HEAT rounds which are, mind you, useless against personnel, or almost any heavy armor that's been designed since then, since they can only penetrate about 3.5 or 4 inches of RHA, given the limits of shaped charges. For that matter, if vague memory serves, anti-tank tactics were a bit different due to the mobility of the AT weapons; it was a little easier to get behind the tanks to shoot the weaker spots, and you could fire a few more rounds, maybe.

So yeah, 50 years ago, specialized .50 caliber rifles could be used against tanks. Not these days, and not likely against future tank armor either.

... Assuming of course a concentrated effort to develop battle computers from chess computers.

Honestly? No. Only assuming a usual effort on developing computers. "Chess computer" is not a specialized field of research, off away over there a hundred metaphorical miles from any other computer research. Rather, it's just hardware and software, and supercomputing hardware has been getting more commoditized lately, not less; any progress on making better algorithms is just that much of a bonus.

so, no we cannot.

The OP indicates a desire for a minimal set of assumptions that break or alter actual rules of physics for the purpose of the setting. This particular conceit is, I think, small enough to be manageable; it's certainly rather smaller than Minovsky particles.

That seems like that actually proves what I said: it can survive one shot, but not much more than that. Also, what kind of a background do you have that you know that?

It can survive one shot, and it's quite difficult to get two shots in exactly the same place on a moving target. Difficult to the extent that, from what little I know, that's not generally what gunners attempt to do. (Instead, they aim for weaker points if possible.)

Background? Like I said, I'm a barely-educated layman; I've been reading a lot lately, mostly on WP, about HEAT, armor designs, history of tank systems, guns, and so on and so forth. Cross-checked my assertions before posting, for the most part. In particular, the data on RHAe comes from WP articles, presumably verified to some degree or other, but it generally fits the patterns of a lot of other sources; the data on penetration comes from various sources, including WP.

Bulhakov

2013-06-03, 06:36 AM

My suggested reasons/scenario:

- warrior culture - the civilization shuns all technological devices that require more than a single operator, and that operator needs to feel part of the machine, only vehicles allowed on the battle field need to be operated by a single warrior (possibly from a special high-ranking cast, with engineers developing/servicing the tech ranking much much lower)

- vehicles with multiple operators (ships) cannot take a direct role in combat, but are also safe from attacks (it's considered extremely dishonorable to kill a non-warrior, and a city/ship that loses all it's warrior defenders becomes the property of the victors)

- EM and atmospheric interference - limits communication to line-of-sight or wire technologies

- extremely rugged terrain limits the use of wheels (there can be wheeled machines for civilian/city use, however a "real warrior" needs to be able to stomp his foes!)

- artillery is severely limited due to the "one operator" rule and poor communication (though there can be mortar or sniper mechs)

- there are no guided weapons, as no machine can have a mind of its own

- something in the atmosphere severely limits the effectiveness of explosives (e.g. guns need 10x more gunpowder to fire, which greatly limits ammo, and it's difficult to pack enough explosive into a missile for it to be very effective)

I can already think of some slogans for the culture: "One machine, one brain, one heart! "

This setup immediately begs for a whole scenario of mecha vs tanks as the engineer caste rebells against the aristocrat warriors and slowly starts developing more practical technologies (such as guided missiles, tanks, battleships).

ellindsey

2013-06-03, 11:27 AM

With a humanoid robot, you could design the arms and legs to be modular, replacing a leg (or part of one) just involves lifting up the leg, unbolting the part, slapping on a replacement, and running off. Tank treads would require lifting up the whole tank to get at the components to replace and tanks are just harder to lift.

Complete nonsense. Tank tracks are designed to be repaired in the field. You don't have to lift up the entire tank. Road wheels and drive sprockets can be replaced from the side, using spare parts and tools that can be carried on the tank itself. If you need to replace an entire track, you just unhook two links on the top, lay the track flat, roll the tank off it (since it can still roll on the road wheels even without the track) and onto the new track, which you then lift up and link together on the top. Tank crews practice doing this and can easily do it in the field. And if the tank is somehow damaged too badly to move without major repair, you can tow it to a repair shop - using another tank as the tow vehicle if necessary.

There's essentially no condition where you'd have to lift the tank up to repair something. The bottom of a tank is a solid armor plate, all the replaceable parts are designed to be lifted out of the top, or from the sides in the case of the tracks.

A mech on the other hand is much harder to repair in the field. For a humanoid mech, lifting one leg up is going to leave your mech balancing on one leg while you try to do a major repair on it. Removing the damaged leg and bringing the new one in will at the very least require a crane and probably scaffolding to support everything. You can't carry a spare leg on a mech like you can carry spare track segments and road wheels on a tank. And if your mech is too badly damaged to repair in the field, you can't tow it. You'll need a crane and a flatbed truck to get it out of there, which might be impossible if the mech is stranded in the kind of terrain people imagine mechs are required for. Speaking of which...

Steep or loose terrain like on Mars would basically stop a tank and most vehicles, but a quadrupedal mecha could function.

In the real world, a vehicle's ability to handle uneven or loose terrain is primarily determined by ground pressure. The less weight per area in contact with the ground, the more uneven or unstable the ground you can pass over. Tanks have the lowest ground pressure of anything other than a hovercraft. Mechs have high ground pressure, and will be much more terrain-restricted than tanks. Having legs does you no good if the side of the mountain crumbles underfoot when you step on it.

I suppose if your battlefield consists of giant concrete staircases or something, mechs might make sense. For real offroad conditions (jungles, swamps, sand dunes) lower ground pressure will get you more capability than the ability to step over things.

You really can't make mechs make sense from any kind of technological standpoint. Powered armor suits could make sense for urban warfare, but once you're making something too large to go indoors there's no point in not having wheels or tracks.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-03, 11:38 AM

I don't understand the point of this exercise. If your audience wants giant robots stabbing each other with spears, they'll play a game involving giant robots stabbing each other with spears. I suspect they'll do this regardless of how many pages of technobabble waffle with which you preface robots stabbing each other with spears. If they wanted something realistic, they'd be playing something else to begin with.
If I wanted to do Super Robots (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperRobotGenre?from=Main.SuperRobot) then yeah, I wouldn't bother with such setting concerns. However, a major conceit of the Real Robot (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealRobotGenre?from=Main.RealRobot) genre is that they produce "realistic" Giant Robots -- which means that my potential customers will indeed be concerned about "realism."

Whether or not I can posit a setting where Real Robots are reasonable is rather the point of this exercise. To be honest, I think I'm making a pretty good fist of it :smallsmile:

If the Minovsky field works on humanoid suits that are lying on the ground, then they can work for tanks. Unless there's a requirement for the object to be near-verticle relative to local gravity (in which case its effectivenes sin space would become questionable)
Good point. My thinking here is that the humanoid form permits optimal placement of emitters to create a perfectly effective field. Trying to place emitters on a less humanoid form results in discontinuities and interference which renders the overall effect useless.

That doesn't change the fact that it's one person doing the job of three, even if the interface is much slicker. It's why rubbernecking causes accidents. In an AFV, one person is concentrating on movement, one on shooting things, and one on the tactical situation. It's not that the mobile suit can't do what the tank does. Rather it's that it really has trouble doing them better.
On the other hand, people are able to move and fire on the battlefield pretty damn well. I'm sure a well-coordinated tank crew can reach the effectiveness of moving as a single organism but people can do that for themselves pretty much from birth.

The neural uplink turns the Giant Robot into basically a "big guy" as far as battlefield coordination goes. That should make him better than a crew of guys working together, unless the argument is that a tank-crew functions better on a battlefield than a given infantryman.

The laws of physics in terms of protection (lower profile, less area to protect relative to volume), mobility (lower ground pressure), firepower (lower center of gravity and ability take recoil), and maintainability (larger crew, less exposed gubbin's) are largely going to argue for tanks over mecha.
This is why I leaned on the Minovsky Field and superior Guided Munitions.

If Guided Munitions Technology is so good that basically every shot fired at a tank is going to hit it then a perfect ECM is going to be worth "trading down" to a Giant Robot if that's the only thing that can use that technology. Plus, if the high-end weapons tech is recoil-less (e.g. lasers) then the advantage of tanks vis-a-vis firepower begins to diminish.

I'm not saying these aren't problems, but I think I'm making good progress towards addressing them.

Water_Bear

2013-06-03, 11:55 AM

That it cost less than 300 bucks for that program.

Actually the program itself is only 60 euros ($78), as you can see on their website here (http://www.cruxis.com/chess/houdini.htm#BuyBuy). And as you can see, that's for the Pro version; if you want to cheap out there's a cheaper one available.

The $300 figure I gave is for that and the AMD Opteron 6128 16-core processor ($219 according to Professor Google) which is recommended to use it with, and people have used two of those to make ghetto 32-core processors capable of running it at it's theoretical maximum. If you want to throw in the 262GB of memory it needs (~$100 for a terabyte), a cool box and a defense-budget-inflating markup for it you might be able to charge $1000 for the whole package.

Computers have come quite a long way from Deep Blue, and software development even further. And by the time we can build robots of that size, they'll both have advanced much further than that.

kardar233

2013-06-03, 12:10 PM

Good point. My thinking here is that the humanoid form permits optimal placement of emitters to create a perfectly effective field. Trying to place emitters on a less humanoid form results in discontinuities and interference which renders the overall effect useless

The point I think chanman was making (ironic that I see you talking about giant mecha here, too) is that even if you make that the case, then you'd probably want to have lying-down mechas with tracks (basically, mecha-shaped tanks) as legs are inherently worse than tracks for the reasons outlined by others.

You could get around that by saying that even in the humanoid form, the field is ineffective against attacks on the same plane as the body, so attacks from the sides and above aren't affected and a tank form wouldn't work. There are probably a whole ton of issues that arise from that, though.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-03, 12:16 PM

The point I think chanman was making (ironic that I see you talking about giant mecha here, too) is that even if you make that the case, then you'd probably want to have lying-down mechas with tracks (basically, mecha-shaped tanks) as legs are inherently worse than tracks for the reasons outlined by others.
Fair.

As for the mobility issue I had some fixes:
- Lower Gravity Planet
- Jump Jets (tanks are not the best at "jumping")
- Neural Uplink (legs are as easy to use as, well, legs)

Perhaps there needs to be a minimum height for the field to unfold correctly. If you don't have a 8' vertical displacement from the top emitter and the bottom emitter then the ECM effect is ineffective. This means that crouching Mecha are problematic but it would also explain why larger Mecha are developed to reduce the likelihood that the field integrity would be compromised during battlefield maneuvers.

ellindsey

2013-06-03, 12:35 PM

Perhaps there needs to be a minimum height for the field to unfold correctly. If you don't have a 8' vertical displacement from the top emitter and the bottom emitter then the ECM effect is ineffective. This means that crouching Mecha are problematic but it would also explain why larger Mecha are developed to reduce the likelihood that the field integrity would be compromised during battlefield maneuvers.

That just leaves me imagining an Ogre tank and the vaguely pyramidal armored tower each one had. I think it was supposed to be a sensor head, but would also work as an ECM emitter if your physics requires that.

tensai_oni

2013-06-03, 01:27 PM

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-03, 01:40 PM

That's right. Nothing. Mecha as a genre already includes the unrealistic assumption that giant robots are somehow good as combat units, so you don't need an explanation better than "we have some sort of technology X that makes them better than tanks/jet fighters/artillery". The real/super divide falls after that - if further assumptions of reality are broken. If the robot uses magic, is sapient (without the use of AIs), or can combine with others in a fusion that is physically impossible to replicate, then it's probably a super.
I rather thought the bolded statement was the whole point of the thread :smallconfused:

After all, even the father of the Real Robot Genre invented Minovsky Particles to explain why his world worked the way it did. I'm trying to do something similar, but, well, better.

Zahhak

2013-06-03, 01:45 PM

Indeed. .50 caliber rifles with HEAT rounds; HEAT rounds which are, mind you, useless against personnel, or almost any heavy armor that's been designed since then, since they can only penetrate about 3.5 or 4 inches of RHA, given the limits of shaped charges. For that matter, if vague memory serves, anti-tank tactics were a bit different due to the mobility of the AT weapons; it was a little easier to get behind the tanks to shoot the weaker spots, and you could fire a few more rounds, maybe.

So yeah, 50 years ago, specialized .50 caliber rifles could be used against tanks. Not these days, and not likely against future tank armor either.

The inertia of a .50 caliber round would still mess up any individual in a powered armor suit.

Honestly? No. Only assuming a usual effort on developing computers. "Chess computer" is not a specialized field of research, off away over there a hundred metaphorical miles from any other computer research. Rather, it's just hardware and software, and supercomputing hardware has been getting more commoditized lately, not less; any progress on making better algorithms is just that much of a bonus.

That's true, but specializing a battle computer would require much more specialized algorithms, and with the almost inherent conservatism of militaries I doubt very much if a battle computer will be adopted in the next hundred years.

The OP indicates a desire for a minimal set of assumptions that break or alter actual rules of physics for the purpose of the setting. This particular conceit is, I think, small enough to be manageable; it's certainly rather smaller than Minovsky particles

I was partly being snarky, and partly ignoring the OP because you seem to have more than enough knowledge of relevant fields to be able to hold up a discussion on this from a real world perspective.

It can survive one shot, and it's quite difficult to get two shots in exactly the same place on a moving target. Difficult to the extent that, from what little I know, that's not generally what gunners attempt to do. (Instead, they aim for weaker points if possible.)

You don't need a second tank round in the same spot, something like an RPG would still get a kill. Infact that's how groups like the Iraqi militias and the Taliban/Mujahadeen in Afghanistan defeat reactive tank armor: launch of a volley of 6-8 RPG rounds into the side, when the armor blows, launch a second volley of 6-8 rounds. If you can launch a 120mm shell into the side of the tank, and quickly follow up an RPG (maybe 2) you can probably get a total kill before the tank crew has much of a chance to respond.

In the real world, a vehicle's ability to handle uneven or loose terrain is primarily determined by ground pressure. The less weight per area in contact with the ground, the more uneven or unstable the ground you can pass over. Tanks have the lowest ground pressure of anything other than a hovercraft. Mechs have high ground pressure, and will be much more terrain-restricted than tanks. Having legs does you no good if the side of the mountain crumbles underfoot when you step on it.

Ever seen a tank go up the side of a mountain? It doesn't end well. That's what I'm talking about, getting up and down the side of a steep mountain. Maybe with feet like a mountain goat's.

Actually the program itself is only 60 euros ($78), as you can see on their website here. And as you can see, that's for the Pro version; if you want to cheap out there's a cheaper one available.

The $300 figure I gave is for that and the AMD Opteron 6128 16-core processor ($219 according to Professor Google) which is recommended to use it with, and people have used two of those to make ghetto 32-core processors capable of running it at it's theoretical maximum. If you want to throw in the 262GB of memory it needs (~$100 for a terabyte), a cool box and a defense-budget-inflating markup for it you might be able to charge $1000 for the whole package.

Computers have come quite a long way from Deep Blue, and software development even further. And by the time we can build robots of that size, they'll both have advanced much further than that.

Two possibilities: that program is either not able to defeat a chess master, or they are taking a serious lose.

Water_Bear

2013-06-03, 01:58 PM

Two possibilities: that program is either not able to defeat a chess master, or they are taking a serious lose.

It's estimated Elo (the way chess players are ranked) is 3000. Right now, according to FIDE, the highest Elo of any living human is 2868 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_World_Rankings).

This is not even all that exceptional in terms of chess software (although Houdini is supposedly the best commercially available program); after all, in 2009 a smartphone broke into the Grandmaster rating (http://www.chess.co.uk/twic/twic771.html#13).

As I said before, computers have come a long way since Deep Blue and software has come even further.

ellindsey

2013-06-03, 02:03 PM

Ever seen a tank go up the side of a mountain? It doesn't end well. That's what I'm talking about, getting up and down the side of a steep mountain. Maybe with feet like a mountain goat's.

It will end worse for a mech. Higher center of gravity means it's easier to topple over, and higher ground pressure means the side of the mountain will crumble and give way faster. Mountain goats don't weigh tens or hundreds of tons, so their hooves don't have enough pressure to destroy the mountainside they're trying to climb.

Fouredged Sword

2013-06-03, 02:09 PM

Ok, start with a reason to move away from tanks.

Reason 1 - Your armor is useless. They invent a AMSC (Anti-Mater Stream Cannon). It was invented to wipe the floor with any armor. It produces a stream of energy that tears through a tank in half a second. The best armors buy you fractions of a second to get out of the line of destruction or be disables as the beam cuts through your vehicle. Tanks became simple targets due to the predictably of how they move, IE forward or back. Worse the cannon can't form a beam closer than 300ft from the end of the barrel (it focuses far out from the tip of the gun), so if you closed with a tank, you could just walk up and plant a bomb on it's chassis.

So they put it on a low flying satellite. Combat become a nasty afair for a little while, as death rained from the skies on all ground troops.

Then they developed The FAST rocket defense system. Fragmentary Anti Sensor Technology rockets can be deployed to remove the ability to target ANYTHING in the area (a salvo can deny an area several square miles in diameter for days and multiple salvos are common) by anything more than direct visual, and even then it creates a very low level refractive haze (like a heat mirage) that makes visual targeting at over a mile very hard.

So they put the AMSC on a light walker frame and combat evolved into a game of hide and seek, with a tag leveling or crippling a target, but clean hits became rare. Active camo and smart pilots are able to be sneaky with a 20ft tall mech.

It has gotten to the point that many mechs don't carry a AMSC, due to the effectiveness of more standard weaponry vs lightly armored mechs. They still exist though, and everyone has them. If someone fielded tanks, they would be cut down by stealthed mecha with AMSC's.

Armor remains light, because short distance mobility is the primary point in a bipedal mecha. You can alter your position one mecha width in any direction faster than any other frame type. The point is to hide, to dodge, to evade, and to get within 300ft so engage with conventional arms.

Zahhak

2013-06-03, 02:26 PM

It will end worse for a mech. Higher center of gravity...

For a bipedal mecha. I have said it several times already: I am not talking about a bipedal mecha.

ellindsey

2013-06-03, 02:39 PM

For a bipedal mecha. I have said it several times already: I am not talking about a bipedal mecha.

For any mecha. You can't get the CG lower than a tank does with any reasonable design. A spider-mech comes close, and would be a lot better than a humanoid mech, but it still has the ground pressure problem (in addition to being far more mechanically complicated and slower).

Bulhakov

2013-06-03, 03:49 PM

tensai_oni

2013-06-03, 03:53 PM

I rather thought the bolded statement was the whole point of the thread :smallconfused:

After all, even the father of the Real Robot Genre invented Minovsky Particles to explain why his world worked the way it did. I'm trying to do something similar, but, well, better.

Yes, this is the point of the thread. But frankly, I think you are trying too hard. You do not need a large, overly detailed reason. The longer and more detailed your explanation, the more likely that it either will be internally inconsistent somehow or that something inside it will strain suspension of disbelief too much and the whole thing will break.

Keep it simple. Here's a few fictional examples that rationalize the use of giant robots:
-Controlled by a man-machine interface that translates the pilot's movement or thought into that of their machine
-Black box of unknown or alien origin that can be used only for humanoid shapes somehow
-The setting has melee-centric combat, or one when quick reaction times/dodging are otherwise somehow important

Minovsky Particles are a system that accomplished the rare feat of being both very complex AND internally consistent, but that's because they are written by Tomino, a man who really has a lot of experience and, say what you will of his characters and plots, is a world-building god. Also the first Gundam was made in late 70s, and science has moved on since then. New technical developments made Minovsky physics seem much less "realistic" nowadays.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-03, 04:23 PM

I still think the exotic cultural solution I posted coupled with a different path of technology development is a better reason than inventing some dubious Phlebotinum that somehow makes mechs harder targets to hit than tanks or drones.

What if the society developed in an environment that had little use for the wheel (Aztecs are a real-world example), but someone invented brilliant electric or pneumatic artificial muscle mechanisms making all sorts of walker-tech popular?
The main issue is that you have very little to say to the Player who wants to invent the wheel and rule the world with tanks :smalltongue:

Cultural preference is all well and good but, IMHO, it's just not sustainable in an area as important as warfare. People tend to "try new things" when they're at the point of being willing to kill people to make a point and, well, tanks are really good at what they do.

I'd feel more comfortable with a setting that has made tanks obsolete on the battlefield instead of one where nobody bothered to have the idea.

TuggyNE

2013-06-03, 06:12 PM

The inertia of a .50 caliber round would still mess up any individual in a powered armor suit.

I'm … not totally sure what you're arguing here. It's apparently not that future infantry in this setting would be incapable of deploying non-suicidally (given that they would only suffer bruises and maybe drop a weapon when hit), and it's apparently nothing to do with tanks anymore.

That's true, but specializing a battle computer would require much more specialized algorithms, and with the almost inherent conservatism of militaries I doubt very much if a battle computer will be adopted in the next hundred years.

Given the existing combat-oriented AI/remote control work, and the sheer pressure toward being able to eliminate friendly casualties? That seems like a sucker's bet.

You don't need a second tank round in the same spot, something like an RPG would still get a kill. Infact that's how groups like the Iraqi militias and the Taliban/Mujahadeen in Afghanistan defeat reactive tank armor: launch of a volley of 6-8 RPG rounds into the side, when the armor blows, launch a second volley of 6-8 rounds. If you can launch a 120mm shell into the side of the tank, and quickly follow up an RPG (maybe 2) you can probably get a total kill before the tank crew has much of a chance to respond.

Not sure what the point of that is, though, since you still have to have essentially an ambushing squad, it just doesn't need to be quite as large.

(I'm also not sure how easy it would be to get an RPG to go right down the same axis and impact point as the roughly 24mm hole left by the round, especially since kinetic penetrators don't set off reactive armor. Could maybe be solved by firing 6-8 RPGs after the shell hits in a tight cluster, but then you don't have any particular reason to be using that at all….)

I'd feel more comfortable with a setting that has made tanks obsolete on the battlefield instead of one where nobody bothered to have the idea.

Yeah, it's best to avoid an unstable equilibrium like that, especially if it's at the heart of the game's tone and genre. It should be increasingly difficult to deviate far from the chosen system, but not for on-the-fly arbitrary reasons.

Saph

2013-06-03, 06:17 PM

The only other thing I can think of would be making the robots interface more directly with human biology. If it's a direct neural link, the human brain might just have less trouble adapting to a more human set-up and negate the advantages of other systems that way.

This'd be the one I'd go for. It makes enough intuitive sense that people are likely to accept it.

I was actually planning to use something like this in a mecha-using story I'd been going to write a long time ago . . . ended up never doing it, but I think the idea's a good one.

tensai_oni

2013-06-03, 06:47 PM

Personally, I had a story floating in my mind with a setting where mecha are used for pseudo-chivalric duels that mostly replaced conventional warfare. This is why they are humanoid in shape, tend to use melee weapons and focus on quality over quantity.

This setting would then cross over with a modern day one, with a modern day military force to be precise. When some factions from each side finally come to blows, the acting commander of the military would consider the impractical melee units with no concept of covering fire or combined arms an easy target... and that arrogance would be his downfall.

Anima

2013-06-03, 07:21 PM

Regarding the chess computer, that's a completely different technology. Boardgame AI is usually based on min-max algorithms. That's really really expensive to process since you have to visit every single state. And chess has a lot of possible states. The advantage is that you get the best possible solution if your algorithm is correct.
This fails hard when the number of states increase, Go for example still lacks really strong AI players.
A real battle situation has way more states still, so using the approach will fail for the foreseeable future anyway.

Luckily there are other systems. The core are probably expert system which belong to the rule based AIs. Basically they have a database with rules. If a rule matches the current state it's action is fired. The problem is of course that someone has to write good rules for the database. And the AI can not react to situations that are not in the database.

Though leaving a tank in the hand of an online learning AI, which would help with adaptability, is probably a very very bad idea. And I don't mean AI rebellion. Rather you can't predict sometimes what the AI will learn from a situation.

In addition we'd probably employ neuronal networks for pattern recognition and classification. And still pray that the networks didn't learn the wrong thing. A military, I think it was the US army developed a neuronal network to recognize hidden tanks. For the teaching material the made photos of a base with hidden tanks and without. In tests the AI worked great but when they made a practice test at the base it failed completely. What went wrong?
Well the photos were obviously taken at a different time which changed the weather and lighting condition. The AI learned to recognize these changes instead of the tanks...

That will probably be the main problem, finding enough good teaching material for our AIs instead of computation power constraints.

Or in short comparing a battle computer with a chess computer is like comparing a bicycle with a hovercraft. Both are vehicles and used to get from A to B, but the common points pretty much end there.

Regarding the Minovsky field that only works on humanoid shapes, please don't. It makes about as much sense as saying that mech are better because they are humanoid.

And lower gravity means much more powerful plains and helicopter. Humanoid robots in space make no sense at all and melee combat between giant mechs in space even less. Since two mechs colliding at orbital or higher velocities will create more damage than the could ever create with their swords.

Good luck finding a reason that will hold up, you'll need it.

chanman

2013-06-03, 08:28 PM

If I wanted to do Super Robots (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperRobotGenre?from=Main.SuperRobot) then yeah, I wouldn't bother with such setting concerns. However, a major conceit of the Real Robot (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealRobotGenre?from=Main.RealRobot) genre is that they produce "realistic" Giant Robots -- which means that my potential customers will indeed be concerned about "realism."

I think by 'realism' what we're talking about is 'internal consistency' to help suspension of disbelief. (I'm a Battletech fan and an economist. The two things don't go together so well)

Good point. My thinking here is that the humanoid form permits optimal placement of emitters to create a perfectly effective field. Trying to place emitters on a less humanoid form results in discontinuities and interference which renders the overall effect useless.

The problem here is that the humanoid form is far more variable than a non-articulated vehicle. The tank's shape is going to change only in so far as the turret can rotate and the crew and strap junk to the outside. A humanoid mecha can fall down, stand up, bend at the waste, crouch, kneel, and all that other stuff that having all those joints and neurohelmet let you do.

On the other hand, people are able to move and fire on the battlefield pretty damn well. I'm sure a well-coordinated tank crew can reach the effectiveness of moving as a single organism but people can do that for themselves pretty much from birth.

If you watch some youtube vids of soldiers in combat in the field (as opposed to clearing houses like SWAT teams), you'll see that they move in groups, one group moving while the other covers and fires. You can certainly provide suppressive fire while moving, but actually trying to hit something is another matter. Try it - take a golf club or hockey stick, put it to your shoulder and look down the shaft at a point. Now start walking or trotting around, then remember that the further the target is, the more the effect will be amplified.

The neural uplink turns the Giant Robot into basically a "big guy" as far as battlefield coordination goes. That should make him better than a crew of guys working together, unless the argument is that a tank-crew functions better on a battlefield than a given infantryman.

Infantrymen don't work solo though. They work in pairs or fireteams which are the elements of a squad, several of which go into a platoon, etc. A 4-man fireteam works almost like a vehicle crew. There's the leader, the grenadier, the machine gunner/automatic rifleman etc. who each contribute to the functional unit.

This is why I leaned on the Minovsky Field and superior Guided Munitions.

If Guided Munitions Technology is so good that basically every shot fired at a tank is going to hit it then a perfect ECM is going to be worth "trading down" to a Giant Robot if that's the only thing that can use that technology. Plus, if the high-end weapons tech is recoil-less (e.g. lasers) then the advantage of tanks vis-a-vis firepower begins to diminish.

I'm not saying these aren't problems, but I think I'm making good progress towards addressing them.

I don't think guided munitions are actually the biggest issue anyway. The bigger one is that mecha provide large targets for *unguided* munitions. Ground-launched anti-tank missiles are almost always human-guided. The operator steers the missile with a wire-guided system. Modern fire-and-forget missiles still work the same way: The operator has to visually sight the target in for the missile before launch, and 'walking mecha' is still the tallest thing on the battlefield.

Have you considered a vacuum environment? That would really crimp the style of infantry. In fact, try a setting on the equivalent of the moon or Mars. Between the unbreathable atmosphere and treacherous terrain, it could be the perfect excuse for mecha.

Fouredged Sword

2013-06-03, 10:06 PM

Also, another though on the value on increase armor. It increases the cost and weight of the oncoming munitions required to score a kill. A larger, more focused strike is needed to breach tank armor, meaning a greater opportunity cost to deliver the munition to target. It makes the delivery method more vulnerable to countermeasures like AMM's and SAM's capable of removing it before the strike.

If you can get the oncoming force to waste more expensive missiles on fewer effective hits, you can force them to face you in direct conflict, or to project air power into unsafe airspace.

This goes doubly so if you can project your force onto soft targets like airfields from enough range to force the opposing force to intervene.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-03, 10:34 PM

The problem here is that the humanoid form is far more variable than a non-articulated vehicle. The tank's shape is going to change only in so far as the turret can rotate and the crew and strap junk to the outside. A humanoid mecha can fall down, stand up, bend at the waste, crouch, kneel, and all that other stuff that having all those joints and neurohelmet let you do.
That's true, but what I'm saying is that the Field is made up by several emitters. Even with dynamic movement the Field remains stable among the range of "human" motion but fails with the sort of movement that a tank makes and/or it's form. 360 degree turret rotation, or even the protrusion of the turret may break up the field.

Yeah, I know it sounds weak but I need something.

Infantrymen don't work solo though. They work in pairs or fireteams which are the elements of a squad, several of which go into a platoon, etc. A 4-man fireteam works almost like a vehicle crew. There's the leader, the grenadier, the machine gunner/automatic rifleman etc. who each contribute to the functional unit.
And the Robots can move in teams too.

I don't think guided munitions are actually the biggest issue anyway. The bigger one is that mecha provide large targets for *unguided* munitions. Ground-launched anti-tank missiles are almost always human-guided. The operator steers the missile with a wire-guided system. Modern fire-and-forget missiles still work the same way: The operator has to visually sight the target in for the missile before launch, and 'walking mecha' is still the tallest thing on the battlefield.
Well, as I said before you don't have infantrymen on the field due to extremely effective anti-personnel weapons.

The primary reason for extremely good guided weapons is to make sitting in an unshieled vehicle suicidal. If you can, say, fire "smart" Cruise Missiles over the horizon and pick out any tank you want you're going to want to be fighting your war in something that is not a tank.

Have you considered a vacuum environment? That would really crimp the style of infantry. In fact, try a setting on the equivalent of the moon or Mars. Between the unbreathable atmosphere and treacherous terrain, it could be the perfect excuse for mecha.
That's a good thought. Outside of a gravity well you wouldn't want a Mecha (shielding and propulsion are problematic) but on the surface of a planet a Mecha might still be a good idea.

The next issue is why are the Mecha fighting a ground-war on a planet where nobody can live :smalltongue:

Beleriphon

2013-06-03, 10:45 PM

The next issue is why are the Mecha fighting a ground-war on a planet where nobody can live :smalltongue:

Just because its a vacuum surface doesn't preclude one from building self contained, or underground, cities. It also doesn't preclude above ground mines or other operations like solar farms.

warty goblin

2013-06-03, 10:46 PM

Minovsky Particles are a system that accomplished the rare feat of being both very complex AND internally consistent, but that's because they are written by Tomino, a man who really has a lot of experience and, say what you will of his characters and plots, is a world-building god. Also the first Gundam was made in late 70s, and science has moved on since then. New technical developments made Minovsky physics seem much less "realistic" nowadays.
According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, the Minovsky effect only really messes with visible or longer wavelengths. Which means a UV laser guided missile will work absolutely fine. Some later Stinger missiles use a passive UV system to track a target, so it's possible to pull this trick off without line of sight. Not that getting line of sight to a giant robot armed with an axe is particularly problematic anyways.

Besides that, messing with the longers wavelengths presents no particular obstacle either. Take a drone, add radar. Point said radar at the ground. The ground has a radar return. The robot doesn't. You have found the robot. Use your drones to track the robot, and direct an appropriately sized explosive to its current location.

Like I said, forget realism, just get to robots hitting each other. If people were going for realism, there'd be a lot smoking robot carcasses, and dudes with laptops perched on top of mountains saying things like "Roger one-niner, we have a confirmed kill on that clanker. Good job Eagle two-four."

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-03, 11:40 PM

Just because its a vacuum surface doesn't preclude one from building self contained, or underground, cities. It also doesn't preclude above ground mines or other operations like solar farms.
Even so, why robots fighting in that vacuum?

If the valuable stuff is underground, you need to deploy people there to control it. Giant Robots are bad in confined spaces.

If the valuable stuff is in bubble-domes, you need to deploy something inside. Since puncturing the bubble-dome will deny you its value, the best defensive action you can take is make the airlocks small enough to not admit Giant Robots.

The best case scenario is "automated above-ground factories" in which case Giant Robots might be a reasonable choice for assaulting and holding them. Still, there's not a whole lot of room for humanity when you just have soldiers fighting over automated equipment... which can make for a boring roleplaying game.

Still, I like this "uninhabitable surface" idea. Keep the thoughts coming!

TuggyNE

2013-06-04, 12:44 AM

Vague idea: how about making an active shield system such that its power consumption (or some other important metric) increases exponentially with increasing cross-section of its protected structure, where thinnish mecha limbs are narrow enough to avoid too much trouble, but tanks or APCs require enormously more power. (Side effect: all the mechas will be as spindly as possible. Not sure this is desirable.) After that, you just have to make sure it's impractical to remote-control or autonomous-AI-control the mechas/drones/whatever, and there you go.

According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, the Minovsky effect only really messes with visible or longer wavelengths. Which means a UV laser guided missile will work absolutely fine. Some later Stinger missiles use a passive UV system to track a target, so it's possible to pull this trick off without line of sight. Not that getting line of sight to a giant robot armed with an axe is particularly problematic anyways.

Besides that, messing with the longers wavelengths presents no particular obstacle either. Take a drone, add radar. Point said radar at the ground. The ground has a radar return. The robot doesn't. You have found the robot. Use your drones to track the robot, and direct an appropriately sized explosive to its current location.

I think both of these could be suitably adjusted with tweaks to the concept; there's nothing inherently impossible about making the made-up physics work on all wavelengths.

And, if I'm not mistaken, the idea of the I-field is that you scatter it all around to block any radar returns at all, so that nothing can be seen from more than a few meters (or tens of meters, or whatever) away. So there isn't a small empty spot with no return; there's just a large diffuse cloud covering the battlefield.

chanman

2013-06-04, 12:45 AM

That's true, but what I'm saying is that the Field is made up by several emitters. Even with dynamic movement the Field remains stable among the range of "human" motion but fails with the sort of movement that a tank makes and/or it's form. 360 degree turret rotation, or even the protrusion of the turret may break up the field.

Yeah, I know it sounds weak but I need something.

Yeah, but there's not even a requirement for a long barrel unless you need the muzzle velocity. Breech-loaded mortars are stubby as all-get out. You'll find way more movement from the robot than a tank. Think humanoid robot swinging a gun around while twisting at the waist.

And the Robots can move in teams too.

Yeah, they can, but the point was that since we're comparing war machines of (blatent assumption) comparable size and cost, the tank is going to have 3-4 sets of eyes and brains to the mecha's one. Can the pilot pick his way through rubble while drawing a bead on a concealed target and watch his back at the same time? The tank can. Sure, 4 Mecha could too, but then we're comparing armoured platoons, not individual vehicles anymore.

Well, as I said before you don't have infantrymen on the field due to extremely effective anti-personnel weapons.

If you're in any moderately hard sci-fi setting, that won't fly. The strength of infantrymen isn't that they're hard to kill when you hit them; it's hitting them that's the problem. And you'll always have to root disagreeable people out of holes and their annoying facilities and... other places that are sized for humans of normal size and weight and not 3 meter tall 600 kilos of walking powered armour.

The primary reason for extremely good guided weapons is to make sitting in an unshieled vehicle suicidal. If you can, say, fire "smart" Cruise Missiles over the horizon and pick out any tank you want you're going to want to be fighting your war in something that is not a tank.

What you can have are weapons whose anti-armour performance is SO good, that the difference in protection between a lightly armoured mecha (comparable to say, an armoured car) and an MBT is mostly immaterial. Of course, the mecha is still easier to hit, but maybe they've got those fancy hovering verniers so they can deke incoming fire like a tank can't. (Or they can hit the dirt like a gigantic infantryman) And maybe with their distributed systems, while they're more liable to be crippled by system loss (or limb removal), they aren't liable to catastrophically brew up and kill everyone inside (like a tank on a nasty penetrating hit).

That's a good thought. Outside of a gravity well you wouldn't want a Mecha (shielding and propulsion are problematic) but on the surface of a planet a Mecha might still be a good idea.

The next issue is why are the Mecha fighting a ground-war on a planet where nobody can live :smalltongue:

Because it possesses vital mcguffins for making more mecha, d'uh. Have you seen the previews for Hardware from Blackbird Interactive? (Studio founded by former Relic staff).

If your main conceit is that the factions are trying to salvage ancient/advanced/mysterious/alien hulks, then they need that reach and articulated limbs. Everything else becomes an issue of improvised self-defence and firepower. You wouldn't bring pure combat vehicles because they'd be total deadweight when you aren't fighting.

Bulhakov

2013-06-04, 02:29 AM

The main issue is that you have very little to say to the Player who wants to invent the wheel and rule the world with tanks :smalltongue:

Cultural preference is all well and good but, IMHO, it's just not sustainable in an area as important as warfare. People tend to "try new things" when they're at the point of being willing to kill people to make a point and, well, tanks are really good at what they do.

I'd feel more comfortable with a setting that has made tanks obsolete on the battlefield instead of one where nobody bothered to have the idea.

Let the player try - he would need to find willing engineers and drivers and face prosecution from all of the society, de facto becoming a mad scientist / heretic.

Plus the environmental reasons would make tanks much less useful and not that worth developing (at least in the short run). I'm not saying the wheel wasn't invented at all, only that it never found much military use.

The more advanced a technology you try to adjust to plot reasons, the weaker the explanation. I still don't understand why the Minovski field/particles make mechas less likely to be hit by guided missiles than tanks. It's much less of a stretch to build a society from scratch, on an alien planet with a tech tree that naturally leads to mechas due to a logical combination of cultural, environmental, and mechanical reasons.

Fouredged Sword

2013-06-04, 06:38 AM

War can be between corporation in a lawless space.

You field mecha on mars because the surface elevator is the only way into the underground Unobtanium mine, and both sides don't want to damage it. It needs to be controlled, not destroyed.

To get to it you need to close over the field of the fixed defenses. They sorty mecha to keep you away from the elevator, and you sorty mecha to push through with your troop transports. You meet in the central area and it becomes a killing field.

You can't use heavy munitions or ground strikes because you will damage the underground infrastructure.

Interspace Law forbids orbital bombardment. There is no atmosphere, so flight is very difficult. Tanks can't handle the ground with the total lack of infrastructure and the deep rifts of powdered dirt that can swallow a vehicle whole.

Waar

2013-06-04, 08:38 AM

Ground forces primarily use humanoid Mecha between 8' and 20' tall
Combat is waged at line-of-sight ranges and melee combat is not unusual
Human Pilots are necessary and valuable on the battlefield
:
8' to 20' is (unless i messed up) about 2.5 to 6 meters.
Now at 2.5 meters you basically have heavy powerd armor, usefull in the same situations as infantry, for clearing buildings from hosile forces this would be an absoulute beast (unelss the celling is to low :smalltongue:) thereby "forcing" all involved factions to field them in cqc situations if they want to stay competitive.

Letting lasers or "laser" be the dominant ranged weapons solves the line of sight issue (since they don't have balistic tragectories) and the urban nature of many conflicts means melee happens. Additionally one could let the ranged weapon be a form of beam, capable of killing unprotected infantry very quickly but requiering some time (depending on game balance :smallwink:) to burn through the armor of a mech. this would lead to melee becoming a resonable action when you already are upp Close as well as making the low mobility of tanks a problem (and make them suceptible to light mech/Heavy powerd infantry fire) leaving the main combat unit slot open for: The 5-6 meters tall Heavy Mech which with its superior mobility,range and resistance to rough terrain, making it the naturall choice for any high tech military (provided you can solve/ignore the physics problem, a tip would be carbon nano things :smallwink:)

Note that the use of lasers as the primary ranged weapon system makes missiles, drones and planes fairly worthless combat assets due to AA laser weapons.

Finally Communications jamming and the difficulty of creating a proper computer/"ai" to controll your mechs makes putting Pilots in you expensive stuff make sense (some cultural stuff might be involved as well, such as wanting to avoid civillian casualties).

Hope this helps :smallsmile:

DoomyDoom

2013-06-04, 09:07 AM

I need to justify why everyone is using Real Robots instead of tanks or Power Armor.
I really think you are kind of overemphasizing the military aspect. Since we are talking about creating a setting, it means that there must be some sort of history. And that is where you can draw your justification from. So, here is my take:

From what I gathered from the rest of replies, it's a "space exploration happened" setting, right? So, at some point humanity started to explore space. They invented space ships to carry stuff across planets/galaxies. Now they needed vehicles to use on site. Moreover, as early explorers we about to venture into the unknown, these vehicles had to be rather universal. This is where mecha came in: they could fulfill a lot of roles. Mecha can fly (even if limited in time), submerge under water (you wouldn't carry a submarine aboard a spaceship "just in case", would you?), move across difficult terrain. It's easy to equip them with various tools to perform almost any sort of work precisely because of humanoid shape. Anything a human can do, they can too, only on a bigger scale. Of course, combat is also one of things they were designed to do.
In short, mecha were developed as a "jack of all trades" vehicle, rather than a specialized one. They are not better* than tanks in ground combat. They are not better at flying than, uh, "planes"(or whatever they got replaced with). They are not better at digging tunnels than special task-corresponding equipment. But when used properly, and with enough technological research and investment, they can cover all of these roles on a such a level that potential advantages make them a safe choice.
As such, regular vehicles are still going to be used in appropriate environments. If you come to a completely explored planet with big population, cities and such, you'll bump into both tanks and mecha there. But if you're going somewhere less civilized, you'd better have something that can do virtually anything, not just shoot stuff.

* "not better" here means "there exist somewhat common conditions where X can perform better than mecha". Example: cargo plane can carry more than a mecha. But it needs a runway, bigger crew, is way more vulnerable to attack etc.

Maybe that's not quite what you're looking for, but at least it is a different take on the problem.

Beleriphon

2013-06-04, 11:43 AM

The best case scenario is "automated above-ground factories" in which case Giant Robots might be a reasonable choice for assaulting and holding them. Still, there's not a whole lot of room for humanity when you just have soldiers fighting over automated equipment... which can make for a boring roleplaying game.

There's still solar farms or small outposts that don't have the resources to build a full underground city. There will always be reasons to fight over surface stuffs. If you want you can just make the surface of the world such that its unbreathable rather that uninhabitable. That way you can still have surface resources that require human extraction.

Zahhak

2013-06-04, 11:43 AM

I'm … not totally sure what you're arguing here.

I thought we were talking about military sci fi tropes generally at this point.

It's apparently not that future infantry in this setting would be incapable of deploying non-suicidally (given that they would only suffer bruises and maybe drop a weapon when hit), and it's apparently nothing to do with tanks anymore.

I imagine there would be some cracked ribs and what not.

Given the existing combat-oriented AI/remote control work, and the sheer pressure toward being able to eliminate friendly casualties? That seems like a sucker's bet.

The DODs solution is basically to increase the effectiveness of communication though. And if you had, for example, drone tanks and planes controlled by an internal battle computer, they will need to coordinate with each other, atleast. So there would probably be some kind of communication equipment set up between them, probably with some kind of communication system back to the command staff. All well and good, except the default would be to use some kind of intranet to communicate. This could be attacked by either blocking the (probably) LAN signal or using an operative to alter the drone behavior (such as through some form of remote control, a virus, or altering the programming). So, I see drones possibly being used, but not after a section of them suddenly ends up working for the enemy. That whole "the military is really reactionary" thing again.

And another problem with battle computers (atleast in vehicles) is that if the enemy destroys the vehicle with the battle computer intact, then they can use the code in the computer to find out exactly what the vehicles are programmed to do, and then you have a whole different problem.

Not sure what the point of that is, though, since you still have to have essentially an ambushing squad, it just doesn't need to be quite as large.

Tanks and other armored units are often deployed with infantry, so it is not at all a stretch of the imagination to see a guy with a rocket launcher working next to a tank.

(I'm also not sure how easy it would be to get an RPG to go right down the same axis and impact point as the roughly 24mm hole left by the round, especially since kinetic penetrators don't set off reactive armor. Could maybe be solved by firing 6-8 RPGs after the shell hits in a tight cluster, but then you don't have any particular reason to be using that at all….)

The RPG-7, and many other rocket launchers made since the 80s, are actually extremely accurate. You could also start with a few rocket launchers (or one AT4) to blow the reactive armor, and then hit with a 120mm round.

@ Anima: The problems with learning computers that you listed are why I've assumed chess computer. It's just that my idea of a good use for a battle computer was one deployed at the battalion level in a central and highly guarded region that could be destroyed if the enemy got too close. A supercomputer with 50-100 years of development could, I imagine, figure the ideal movement of vehicles (and maybe troops) quickly enough to minimize the processing delay from dealing with all of the variables.

Bulhakov

2013-06-04, 04:18 PM

This thread really got my imagination running.

I really like DoomyDoom's explanation. It's short, consistent and unlike my "alien warrior culture" can actually be used for a human-centric scenario.

The space colonies are basically fighting with whatever they brought along with them. There are no tanks, power armor or missiles, as there is no infrastructure to manufacture them (yet?) and no one brought them along (or maybe they brought a few "just in case" but they were quickly destroyed/used up/sabotaged or are being kept as a secret weapon). However, the jack-of-all-trades all-environment mechas were the vehicle of choice for building the new colonies and are in plentiful supply. Guns and armor are crude and improvised by the colonists on the spot. The few weapons/guns that are military-grade have severely limited ammo. A lot of fighting is done using retrofitted tools and even mech-sized melee weapons.

The colonists are limited in number, so few want to risk their lives as infantry.

chanman

2013-06-04, 06:40 PM

It could be that the actual militaries of the setting DO use tanks, but ragtag miltias, adventurers and pirates make do with conversions of work mechs into improvised weapons. Tanks and mecha would co-exist with the mecha replacing irregular technical and gun trucks rather than dedicated AFVs. It also gives you a way to keep the players in check if they're no match for actual powers in a straight up fight because a hull-down MBT is going to put a hypervelocity slug into their torso from 3 km away before the players have a hope of seeing their attackers.

TuggyNE

2013-06-04, 07:37 PM

And another problem with battle computers (atleast in vehicles) is that if the enemy destroys the vehicle with the battle computer intact, then they can use the code in the computer to find out exactly what the vehicles are programmed to do, and then you have a whole different problem.

Carefully designed self-destructs and fail-safe hardware/software. A bit of an engineering problem, but not inherently insoluble; in particular, you can use continuous system health checks and have the computer securely wipe itself if they fail substantially.

Tanks and other armored units are often deployed with infantry, so it is not at all a stretch of the imagination to see a guy with a rocket launcher working next to a tank.

Sure, but then you lose the stand-off distance.

The RPG-7, and many other rocket launchers made since the 80s, are actually extremely accurate. You could also start with a few rocket launchers (or one AT4) to blow the reactive armor, and then hit with a 120mm round.

Basically, what this reduces to is "if you can get a fair number of anti-tank weapons close in without the tank noticing you have a good chance of killing it", which is already obviously the case. The 120mm rounds are irrelevant here; you could accomplish the same thing with the aforementioned volleys, trading difficulty in coordinating shots for larger immediate team size.

In other words, no, there isn't currently a trivial "fire a shot from five miles away and insta-kill an enemy tank" solution; the closest is probably Javelins, which go to some lengths to be sure they don't have to punch through the strong points in armor (effective range a bit over a mile).

Gnoman

2013-06-04, 08:41 PM

Yeah, they can, but the point was that since we're comparing war machines of (blatent assumption) comparable size and cost, the tank is going to have 3-4 sets of eyes and brains to the mecha's one. Can the pilot pick his way through rubble while drawing a bead on a concealed target and watch his back at the same time? The tank can. Sure, 4 Mecha could too, but then we're comparing armoured platoons, not individual vehicles anymore.

Your core assumption is wrong. A typical tank has 4 (3 if Soviet-designed) crewmen. There is a Driver, a Gunner, a Loader, and a Commander. (Soviet-designed tanks use an autoloader to eliminate that crewman, allowing smaller tanks.) The loader can see the inside of the tank, and nothing else. The driver has a tiny window to look out of, unless he pokes his head out of the hatch. If he does so, the bulk of the tank restricts him to no greater than a 100-degree arc, which he will not be monitoring well, because his job is to drive the tank, not watch out for threats. The gunner's only viewpoint is his gunsight, so he can see where the main gun/coaxial machine gun is aimed. That's it. Only the commander has the ability to monitor the area all around the tank, and even then he has severe limitations (if he doesn't expose himself) or is extremely vulnerable to machine-gun and rifle fire (if he pokes his head out.)

TuggyNE

2013-06-04, 09:08 PM

The loader can see the inside of the tank, and nothing else.

Some tanks (such as the M1 Abrams) allow the loader to man a machine gun out of the hatch when not actively loading; how much situational awareness this gives is uncertain, but non-zero.

Some tanks also have (or had) more than one loader, although I think this is quite rare these days.

The driver has a tiny window to look out of, unless he pokes his head out of the hatch. If he does so, the bulk of the tank restricts him to no greater than a 100-degree arc, which he will not be monitoring well, because his job is to drive the tank, not watch out for threats.

I.e., "pick his way through rubble", as quoted.

The gunner's only viewpoint is his gunsight, so he can see where the main gun/coaxial machine gun is aimed. That's it.

I.e., "drawing a bead on a concealed target", as quoted.

Only the commander has the ability to monitor the area all around the tank, and even then he has severe limitations (if he doesn't expose himself) or is extremely vulnerable to machine-gun and rifle fire (if he pokes his head out.)

I.e., "watch his back at the same time", as quoted.

So, given that it would certainly appear from your breakdown that the various tank crewmembers can accomplish the tasks listed, what precisely is your counter-argument?

Gnoman

2013-06-04, 10:25 PM

The gunner cannot locate a target. Period. Aim at one that's already IDd by the commander? Certainly. Find one that he's already aiming at? Sure. Anything else? Well, he's blind.

Contribution to situational awareness: ZERO.

All other positions rely heavily on if the tank is "buttoned up" or not.

Buttoned up.

The driver can see something of what's in front, enough to not drive off a cliff. Anything more, and he relies on the commander to give direction.

Contribution to situational awareness: ZERO.

The loader can't see.

Contribution to situational awareness: ZERO.

If not buttoned up.

The driver can see about a third as well as the driver of a private automobile. His driving ability is much improved, and he has some ability to watch out for threats.

Contribution to situational awareness: 30% at best.

It's true that the loader has a hatch, on which many tanks have a machine gun. This can contribute to visibility, but it is of almost no use in anything but skirmishing. If heavy combat is in progress or anticipated, having the loader looking around is a very bad idea, as it eliminates the primary weapon. Exposing the loader is thus only possible when traveling or fighting light forces where the main gun is unnecessary.

Contribution to situational awareness: 100% if not threatened, ZERO in serious combat.

In optimal situations, the extra crewmen are slightly better than two persons, at the cost of a farmer with a rifle being able to mission-kill the tank, as gaining such awareness requires the crewmen to not be behind armor.

Compare this to the standard Real Robot, where the pilot is at least as aware of his surroundings as a standard infantryman (in other words, better than any one tank crewman, as the commander has so many other things to worry about) and does so without sacrificing armor protection.

The extra crew of a tank is NOT an advantage.

TuggyNE

2013-06-04, 10:43 PM

Compare this to the standard Real Robot, where the pilot is at least as aware of his surroundings as a standard infantryman (in other words, better than any one tank crewman, as the commander has so many other things to worry about) and does so without sacrificing armor protection.

OK, here's the thing, though: what does a tank commander have to worry about that a mecha pilot doesn't? The pilot has all the same tasks (sans intracrew communication), whereas the commander can offload firing and driving, at the very least, to someone else. So while those crew members do not necessarily directly contribute to situational awareness, they do reduce the distractions to the person in charge of that, which is fairly crucial.

Presumably the answer is to have super-sophisticated controls that make piloting vastly simpler and automated, but since it's probably easier to automate a tank than a mecha, that requires either a really strong reason not to use tanks, or some further phlebotinium to make tank automation less effective. (I guess the usual standby is vague handwaving about humanoid shapes being easier to pilot, or something, but given the difference in scale I'm not sure that's really valid.)

Arbane

2013-06-04, 11:52 PM

How hard does your science-fiction setting need to be? Because one good excuse for giant robots would be magic, by whatever name.

A humanoid wizard/Chi user/psion/biotic user finds it multiple orders of magnitude easier to channel their powers through a matching humanoid mecha than through a wheeled vehicle.

warty goblin

2013-06-05, 12:06 AM

Zahhak

2013-06-05, 12:31 AM

Carefully designed self-destructs and fail-safe hardware/software. A bit of an engineering problem, but not inherently insoluble; in particular, you can use continuous system health checks and have the computer securely wipe itself if they fail substantially.

Those security protocols will eventually fail, and the less likely it is for them to be in a position to be used (by being farther from the actual combat), the less likely it is for the enemy to be able to exploit those security failures. I believe there's a quote about the best security system is not being in a position to need a security system.

Sure, but then you lose the stand-off distance.

"Tanks deployed with infantry" means the tank is serving basically to be a big gun and moving shield for the infantry. While they have standoff, they often don't actually use it.

Basically, what this reduces to is "if you can get a fair number of anti-tank weapons close in without the tank noticing you have a good chance of killing it", which is already obviously the case. The 120mm rounds are irrelevant here; you could accomplish the same thing with the aforementioned volleys, trading difficulty in coordinating shots for larger immediate team size.

I'd probably phrase that "if you can get an anti-tank weapon close to a tank without the tank killing you, you have a good chance of killing it". Which is basically modern anti-tank tactics.

In other words, no, there isn't currently a trivial "fire a shot from five miles away and insta-kill an enemy tank" solution; the closest is probably Javelins, which go to some lengths to be sure they don't have to punch through the strong points in armor (effective range a bit over a mile).

Right.

Wait, how does this relate to the original discussion? I think I said something about a 120mm shell wont kill a tank, but a tank wont be able to survive much more, but I don't know where that came from or where it was going.

OK, here's the thing, though: what does a tank commander have to worry about that a mecha pilot doesn't? The pilot has all the same tasks (sans intracrew communication), whereas the commander can offload firing and driving, at the very least, to someone else. So while those crew members do not necessarily directly contribute to situational awareness, they do reduce the distractions to the person in charge of that, which is fairly crucial.

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. The only reason a tank commander would have less situational awareness than a robot pilot is because the tank offers less visibility. Presumably because it's got big chunks of armor everywhere instead of windows. How would the robot get that extra visibility without sacrificing armor?

My assumption is that the machine has a series of sensors around the vehicle that creates a heads up display with actual commands given from a computer style interface (like the exact same thing used by trillions of computer games). Then reloading is a hotkey (assuming a mecha that fires a magazine/belt fed weapon) or automatic (for all others), identifying targets is done with your eyes, firing on targets is done with (probably) a touchpad, and movement would be with your regular wasd keys. Bam.

Mecha, I imagine, would be more intimidating, and a could deal with steep terrain better. Bam.

chanman

2013-06-05, 01:10 AM

I suppose it's a bit late, but I think one core question that should probabloy answered is what the OP's setting looks like aside from the existance of Mecha?

The more it resembles the real world (nation states with substantial populations as the dominant powers, profesional standing armies, etc.), the more we need to grapple with 'why not tanks?'. As we get further from that, we might encounter situations where standing armies might simply not exist.

Imagine an Ancient Greece situation where the landed citizenry of city states fund and equip themselves for battle on behalf of their polis. These city states don't have standing armies or a military-industrial complex to continually research new arms. If giant robot walkers was the technology the colonists brought with them, that's the technology these neo-Athenians and neo-Spartans are going to bring to war.

The context is important because it'll determine:

a) Who's got guns
b) Who is the shooty action going to involve
c) What kind of guns and how many

You could take the knight trope all the way and go all neo-feudal with each mecha being hand-crafted by a lord's vassals who fill out his retinue of foot soldiers, technicians, etc. While tanks are the fearsome death machines crewed by the analogue of Swiss mercenaries whom everyone agrees not to hire because they're simply *too* scary for chivalrous warfare.

chanman

2013-06-05, 01:29 AM

My assumption is that the machine has a series of sensors around the vehicle that creates a heads up display with actual commands given from a computer style interface (like the exact same thing used by trillions of computer games). Then reloading is a hotkey (assuming a mecha that fires a magazine/belt fed weapon) or automatic (for all others), identifying targets is done with your eyes, firing on targets is done with (probably) a touchpad, and movement would be with your regular wasd keys. Bam.

Mecha, I imagine, would be more intimidating, and a could deal with steep terrain better. Bam.

That's all well and good, but those self-same sensors could just as easily be used on a tank to provide each crew member with a greater field of vision.

The commander designates the direction for the driver to take the tank, leaving the details like avoiding trees to the driver, then designates priority targets for the gunner leaving aiming the actual shot to the gunner. The commander is now free to watch the tactical situation, call in artillery or air support, coordinate with his infantry support, etc. (The French tanks in early WW2 were superior statistically to Panzer IIs and had superior armour and guns to some of the Panzer IIIs, but had poor division of duties. French tank commanders were expected to direct the tank while also loading, aiming, and firing the main gun).

Even with stabilization systems and assuming much more advanced command and control techniques that allow mecha pilots to let their commanders worry about the situation (like Soviet air interceptors).

Now, suppose you took a Gundam trope with the genetically engineered humans (or maybe elves). Maybe they would have the ability to multi-task and perform each task close to as efficiently as a baseline human. That could change things in favour of mecha. Especially if your enhanced humans can't stand the presence of each other for evolutionary or psyonic or cultural reasons. (See the vampires from Blindsight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)))

TuggyNE

2013-06-05, 01:37 AM

Wait, how does this relate to the original discussion? I think I said something about a 120mm shell wont kill a tank, but a tank wont be able to survive much more, but I don't know where that came from or where it was going.

If you've lost track of it, let's just call it good. :smallwink: No sense getting het up about something that's only tangential to the thread.

warty goblin

2013-06-05, 08:24 AM

My assumption is that the machine has a series of sensors around the vehicle that creates a heads up display with actual commands given from a computer style interface (like the exact same thing used by trillions of computer games).

And this system wouldn't be put into a tank because...?

Then reloading is a hotkey (assuming a mecha that fires a magazine/belt fed weapon) or automatic (for all others), identifying targets is done with your eyes, firing on targets is done with (probably) a touchpad, and movement would be with your regular wasd keys. Bam.

I don't think piloting the thing like a computer game is going to work all that well. Foot placement is very important for walking things on actual terrain, and keyboard or gamepad style controls are nowhere near precise enough to control where the robot puts its feet. Since anybody driving a robot is going to live in constant terror of concealed holes, pits, soft bits of ground, or anything that could cause slippage, those feet have to be controlled in detail. Anybody who's done any walking in even slightly rough terrain knows that you spend a lot of time worrying about where you put your feet.

Mecha, I imagine, would be more intimidating, and a could deal with steep terrain better. Bam.
The math doesn't really work out this way I suspect. Unlike videogames, actual ground isn't an undeformable solid that allows for infinite friction. Real ground deforms when you step on it, and only provides so much friction. Robots stomping around will put more pressure on the ground, causing greater deformation. When walking uphill, if your footing starts to crumble because you're putting too much pressure on it, it crumbles downhill, and you fall over. Usually no more than annoying for a human, probably disastrous for a multi-ton war machine.

In short, heaven help the mecha that has to climb a sand dune.

And people are usually intimidated by things that are scary. Which is distinct from things you can cripple or kill very easily, and see very far away.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-05, 04:07 PM

Man, this thread was a good idea :smallbiggrin:

I'm going to drop a few responses here in spoilers, because my "first post" setting has been dramatically revised as a result of this discussion. So here's some responses to lingering points:
Re: Awareness
"Neural Uplink" is doing a lot of work here.

The senses of a pilot in a mecha are at least as good as a man on the battlefield -- binocular vision, peripherial vision, binaural hearing, etc -- with reasonable advantages given by technology. Sound filtering, multi-spectral vision, and the like. This should be obviously superior to the sort of battlefield awareness available to even the best-trained modern tank crew, or at least plausibly so.

You can't put it on tanks because the Neural Uplink only works on humanoid forms.

Re: Mobility
"Jump Jets" are doing the work here.

Mecha doesn't have to climb sand dunes or rubble piles; it can hop on top of or even over them. Because the jump is rocket-assisted you don't even have to worry (much) about the Mecha sinking to his hip into the ground with the down-thrust of his leap. I'm not sure how the physics for this sort of thing would work for regular vehicles but I'm sure they're complicated.

Again, Mecha can use the natural balancing ability of humans to jump gracefully via Neural Uplink. No, this doesn't solve all the mobility issues with Mecha but it should help a little.
So here's the big change: this thread has convinced me that making Mecha for the battlefield is a losing proposition. So I've built on the discussion in the thread to make a battlefield to suit the Mecha.

Highlights:
The primary battlefield is within the sprawling ruins of megacities. During some unknown catastrophe these cities were heavily irradiated, making unarmored exploration lethal. Mysterious "storms" of heavy EM interference likewise make remote exploration difficult and drones are insufficiently sophisticated to fend off rivals and survive rogue defensive systems.
Conflict is between rival teams of Scavengers in Real Robots ("Armor"). Armor is suited for maneuvering through the urban landscape, dealing with damaged buildings, and extracting "City Tech" -- post-Singularity devices still intact (or mostly so) that survived the catastrophe.
Armor is an outgrowth of "native" technology. The Planet was left with an ordinary colonial seeding and was then inexplicably cut-off from the Gate Network for hundreds of years. When the connection was re-established the explorers found the ruined megacities (filled with extremely advanced technology) and Schizo Tech communities far outside the "dead zones." These "natives" appeared to be descended the original colonists although their genetic structure has been altered to unknown ends. They have access to advanced cybernetics and mind-machine linkups (powered suits being their primary labor device) but no record of their past before Year Zero (when the megacities were already in ruins) and an aversion to non-human mediated cybernetics.
Salvage Teams are backed by large, Colonial Powers (governments or corporations) although they can be Native Hirelings, Colonial "New Type" Pilots (Military or Corporate) or Free Mercenary companies. Their primary income is from getting City Tech to their masters who provide upkeep and support.
So instead of armies of Mecha I've gone with small-squads who operate where they are the best vehicle for the job. I envision Salvage Teams being mostly Power Armor-sized with a few "specialists" who would be larger for heavy lifted / greater firepower. Instead of being a "war stories" focused game, DoB&C now is feeling more like "Mecha D&D" with Exploration and "Monster" Slaying as its primary themes. I'm not so pleased with that, but the setting feels much better.

Thoughts on the new setting details? Holes, criticisms, or fancy new ideas?

TuggyNE

2013-06-05, 04:29 PM

I like it! I think that solves most of the biggest problems, maybe all of them. And it seems like it should be fun to play, especially if there's a lot of backstory ideas on what happened way back when.

Mr Beer

2013-06-05, 05:16 PM

This is the first Mecha setting I've heard described that makes me want to play in it.

Zahhak

2013-06-05, 06:24 PM

That's all well and good, but those self-same sensors could just as easily be used on a tank to provide each crew member with a greater field of vision.

Right, so again, the visibility issue goes away.

Now, suppose you took a Gundam trope with the genetically engineered humans (or maybe elves). Maybe they would have the ability to multi-task and perform each task close to as efficiently as a baseline human. That could change things in favour of mecha. Especially if your enhanced humans can't stand the presence of each other for evolutionary or psyonic or cultural reasons. (See the vampires from Blindsight)

I suppose that that works, even if it wasn't what I was going for. Although I'm not quite sure how that changes things too much from a computer interface with hotkeys for specific actions.

If you've lost track of it, let's just call it good. No sense getting het up about something that's only tangential to the thread.

But I was enjoying having an intellectual discussion about near-future military technology with someone. Do you know how rarely I get to do that?

And this system wouldn't be put into a tank because...?

I think I specifically said you could do that and the heads up display with either one.

I don't think piloting the thing like a computer game is going to work all that well. Foot placement is very important for walking things on actual terrain, and keyboard or gamepad style controls are nowhere near precise enough to control where the robot puts its feet. Since anybody driving a robot is going to live in constant terror of concealed holes, pits, soft bits of ground, or anything that could cause slippage, those feet have to be controlled in detail. Anybody who's done any walking in even slightly rough terrain knows that you spend a lot of time worrying about where you put your feet.

If we're assuming 50+ years of development we could easily imagine that the mecha use something like bottom facing radar to find pitholes and what not and step around them automatically.

The math doesn't really work out this way I suspect. Unlike videogames, actual ground isn't an undeformable solid that allows for infinite friction. Real ground deforms when you step on it, and only provides so much friction. Robots stomping around will put more pressure on the ground, causing greater deformation. When walking uphill, if your footing starts to crumble because you're putting too much pressure on it, it crumbles downhill, and you fall over. Usually no more than annoying for a human, probably disastrous for a multi-ton war machine.

Yeah, I've hiked plenty of steep hills made of what amounts to gravel. It helps to take wide steps and kick into the hill. Maybe use your non-weapon hand to reach forward and pull yourself up. You cannot do that with a tank. Or you could use a jump-jet like the OP keeps bringing up.

In short, heaven help the mecha that has to climb a sand dune.

I've seen tanks try to climb steep hills, and it does not work out very well.

And people are usually intimidated by things that are scary. Which is distinct from things you can cripple or kill very easily, and see very far away.

You're making several assumptions with this statements that I've already said (several times) I am not working from.

TuggyNE

2013-06-05, 07:08 PM

But I was enjoying having an intellectual discussion about near-future military technology with someone. Do you know how rarely I get to do that?

Heh. Try over on Real World Weapons and Armor? It fits OK there, although discussions about that are rarer than historical technology.

Salbazier

2013-06-05, 08:29 PM

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-05, 08:58 PM

Love it as well. This has quite a lot of potential. No need to limit yourself to Salvage teams. There are possible faction/opponents/allies: Native/Local Tribes resisiting Colonial and Salvagers for various reason (independence/resentment against colonialism, religion that see exploration of certain ruins as sacrilege, plain raiders and bandits ect), Sleeper faction from pre-Catastrophe (which may exist both in the Planet and/or entreched somwhere inside one of the Colonial Powers), ect.
The main reason I'm focusing on Salvage Teams is that, outside of the megacities, Combined Arms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_arms) rules the day. I'm thinking of having a Spacer's Guild that has a monopoly on Aerospace Transport which makes open warfare unlikely.

From your description I'm getting impression the Colonial powers have lesser tech than the megacities civilazation. Does this mean the Colonial powers has experience their own dark age and tech regression or it just The PLanet that somehow advanced very fast during the time it was 'lost'?
The short answer is that something caused what should have been a normal colony to advance in technology extremely quickly and that "something" is one of the Ontological Mysteries (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OntologicalMystery) of the setting.

Bulhakov

2013-06-06, 02:38 AM

The suggested setting is great for mecha.

Makes me immediately think of Necromunda - Warhammer 40k street gangs fighting in the underground of Hive City. You might get some inspiration from checking the backstory and factions in that game.

DoomyDoom

2013-06-06, 06:07 AM

So I've built on the discussion in the thread to make a battlefield to suit the Mecha.
-snip-
Well, the only unexplained thing here would be: why Mecha and not "APC + Power Armor"?
If PA is not capable of protecting humans from environmental hazards, then even leaving "clean" areas without sealed transport becomes impossible. I find it hard to imagine that there can be an environmental protection suit that can't be incorporated into PA in a world where we have scientifically created giant robots.
If PA is capable of protecting humans from environmental hazards, then we get the same "tanks are better" problem.
Something like "PA can only protect humans for a limited amount of time" still leaves the same problem open. Best I can think of is to say that PA can't be created, because internal components would be too small and can't be produced yet. Or make "power core" too big to be installed into a human-sized suit, but just right size for a giant robot.

Frozen_Feet

2013-06-06, 12:16 PM

DoomyDoom

2013-06-06, 01:01 PM

The difference between "power armor" and a "small mech" has always been a slight one. The lower end of armors stated by OH are 8 feet tall, with largest being around 20 feet. The larger ones do make sense for heavy lifting or transport.
I'd say the difference is that power armor is around your whole body in a "suit of clothes" sense, while mech is something featuring a cabin with a seat. In the end, we say "wear PA" but "pilot a mech", don't we?
Also, I cannot quite imagine a 8 ft tall humanoid mech. I mean, 8 ft < 2.5 m, no way you can fit a cabin and legs/arms while keeping humanoid proportions.

MukkTB

2013-06-06, 01:45 PM

In SC2 for ****s and giggles in the Terran campaign I'd run an army mix as follows: Marine, Hellbat, Maurader, Goliath, Viking, Thor.

Randel

2013-06-06, 04:06 PM

Why not include tanks working alongside mecha and power armor?

Power armor for regular people to survive in hazardous areas, tanks and other vehicles to fill various specific combat roles, and mecha act as a jack-of-all-trade hybrid of the two.

In open warfare, you can expect to see mostly tank and power armor with a few mechs filling niche roles.

But in urban salvage zones, mecha can be more commonplace.

Or, mecha can be popular in various non-combat areas like construction, mining or the like, and are thus favored by mercenary groups, local militias, terrorists, or security groups because of how easy they are to aquire and modify for combat.

Basically, if you want Real Robot mechas but can't ignore the fact that tanks could be better then... incude tanks!

Maybe mechs are superior in some areas and tanks are better in others. In that case, make your army/squad up with a combination of mechs and tanks. Or Tanks, Mechs, and Power Armor (or aircraft) like some sort of Warrior, Rogue, Mage balance.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-06-06, 08:12 PM

I'd say the difference is that power armor is around your whole body in a "suit of clothes" sense, while mech is something featuring a cabin with a seat. In the end, we say "wear PA" but "pilot a mech", don't we?
Also, I cannot quite imagine a 8 ft tall humanoid mech. I mean, 8 ft < 2.5 m, no way you can fit a cabin and legs/arms while keeping humanoid proportions.
The 8' tall model is Power Armor. All that armor, sensors and strength enhancement takes up some room y'know :smallamused:

Why not include tanks working alongside mecha and power armor?
The primary reason is that Tanks will (or should!) overshadow Mecha in their intended role: combat vehicle. It's not much of a Mecha RPG if the Mecha are overshadowed by another role -- it'd be like calling D&D a Swords & Sorcery RPG when we all know it's actually Sorcery & Sorcery :smalltongue:

That, of course, is for a generic setting. In my revised setting Tanks (or APCs) would be inferior for navigating massive urban ruins and doing urban combat. Likewise, "truck" vehicles (i.e. wheeled/tracked vehicles for hauling salvage) would be sitting ducks for rival Scavengers.

DoomyDoom

2013-06-06, 11:44 PM

The 8' tall model is Power Armor. All that armor, sensors and strength enhancement takes up some room y'know :smallamused:
Let me quote the OP first:

Ground forces primarily use humanoid Mecha between 8' and 20' tall
PA is not a mecha. PA is a suit of armor. A mecha is a vehicle. When somebody cuts an arm of PA, he also cuts the actual arm of the guy inside. When somebody cuts an arm of a mecha, the pilot within the cabin remains unharmed. So I argue that there cannot be a 8' mecha, since you cannot maintain humanoid proportions while building it (Giant robots we have in mind have them mostly correct: hands reach to their hips when standing etc.). Imagine attaching arms/legs to a modern car (take a small one).
I'd say there can hardly be a mecha smaller than 6 meters (~18' I believe. Not used to imperial units). Why? Because a sitting human is around 1.5 m (4.5') tall. So let's say the cabin (the main body) is around 2m (6') to account for electronics and such. Legs should be around 1.5x-2x that, so 5-6m. Add a head on top of it, that's 5.5-6.5m.
So, PA can exist and be around 8' ft, but it should be, I think, explicitly called "PA", and not "mecha".

MukkTB

2013-06-07, 02:14 AM

Tanks do overshadow mecha in most operations. On the other hand mecha allow an alternative transportation mode for the armament. There are environments where legs would be far superior to treads. Without using magic like minovsky particles the small ones can fit in for specific jobs realistically.

But if your group wants to play a mecha game, it can all be handwaved away. If the group wants relatively hard science they're going to get hung up on the magic of the minovsky particle as a cheat. There's a point where the audience is either on for the ride or not. Mecha requires and active suspension of disbelief to pull off. To be honest, the fact that they aren't plausible scientifically has pushed mecha more into the realm of fantasy than science. This isn't a damning thing because our stories go into the science fantasy ring all the time. Space opera is just as unlikely as Mecha. FTL is that genre's minovsky particle.

If the group is being really tough and simultaneously demanding mecha and hard science, well you can have small ones as part of a combined arms force for very rough terrain where a tank couldn't go. You can still get all the romance without requiring mecha to be the alpha and the omega of warfare.

Think about WWI. It was a ****ty unromantic war. Between the trenchfoot and the pointless charges into no man's land, the ****tiness of the war is almost its romantic quality. When a writer goes to that period they paint it bleakly. Except for those magnificent men in their flying machines. Like knights of the sky they would go up in dinky little planes and duel each other in impressive aerial battles. There is an incredible romance about them. It was a place where lone men could be heroes. Figures like the Red Baron are legendary. The romance isn't afflicted by the fact that the air battles were pretty unimportant. It doesn't matter that there were early tanks too. It doesn't matter what was happening at sea or in trenches. It doesn't matter that the air battles were more a matter of pride than military gain. The rickety planes fighting over the trenches in WWI capture the imagination.

The application to mecha is obvious. Mecha do not need to be the only viable weapon system. You can have troops and tanks and airplanes. All mecha need is a tactical use. Preferably they'd like some arena where they are the weapon of choice. If you take this, going forward you don't need to rewrite all of military science. You just need a set of circumstances at a particular place and time where mecha would be the preferable weapon system.