>90% of military fiction is just "And then this cool weapon was invented that dominated the battlefield forever and all other vehicles suck now compared to it"
But was there ever a time in history where this actually was true?
>90% of military fiction is just "And then this cool weapon was invented that dominated the battlefield forever and all other vehicles suck no...
nooks
nukes aren't meant to be ridden, Slim.
Faek and gae
Are you mentally handicapped?
>the tank for like a century
>airplanes
>helos
>practical submarines
>aircraft carriers
last century or so has been filled with "and then they invented this cool vehicle which changed everything and was super useful for a long fricking time"
>the tank for like a century
Needed infantry and air support.
>airplanes
>helos
Can't hold land and vulnerable to anti-air
>practical submarines
Vulnerable to anti-sub planes, helicopters, and ships
>aircraft carriers
Literally just a carrier for other vehicles that requires escorts
Well, if you're going to moronic be like that, then the answer is no. Even the ur-example of cavalry, chariots, elephants, bronze working, homosexual sapiens, flint knapping, homosexual erectus etc are disqualified.
Mounted knights....kinda. Training a man for years, buy a big strong horse, and fitting both with armor was a massive investment of resources. It was basically a way of throwing money at the problem.
>Tanks
Was vulnerable to grenades and direct fire artillery right off the bat.
>Airplanes
Early airplanes could be killed by a rifle. There was a period where they could fly over AAA range but then we saw SAMs develope.
>Helos
Even more vulnerable to AA systems. Early Hueys were vulnerable to AKs and there's enough MANPADs to make them ineffective in direct combat.
>Practical submarines
Depends on what you mean by submarines but they're still vulnerable to sub hunting aircraft.
>Carriers
As powerful as they are, Carriers would be useless without their aircraft compliment.
>actually carriers are strong only because they carry aircraft
your mother should've finished the job with the coathanger
But am I wrong?
>But am I wrong?
Yes, and stupid.
It's like saying a rifle isn't a weapon system because it fires bullets and that bullets are the real weapon. By your logic aircraft aren't the weapon because they shoot missiles, drop bombs and fire guns. Sorry the guns on the aircraft fire bullets.
But aircraft can fight independent from a carrier. Is a gun all that important if the bullets fire themselves?
>Is a gun all that important if the bullets fire themselves?
However, bullets don't, just like aircraft need to come from a air base. A carrier is an airbase the moves where needed anywhere you have ocean.
The carrier isn't by main purpose an anti land unit. It's purpose is to dominate the ocean far enough away from land air bases to create strategic depth.
Actually, aircraft don't necessarily need an airbase. Some are VTOL and can operate from anywhere while others can use highways or any reasonably flat piece of land to launch from.
And have almost no combat load and almost no range.
Literally no one in the world operates VTOL like you suggested so it's moot.
Regardless, planes don't need airbases and carriers to be effective. Giving carriers credit as the be-all-end-all weapon falls apart if an airbase does the same job if locally.
Irrelevant in this case. Aircraft can be shot down by SAM systems so they don't fight entirely unopposed.
>Nobody operates VTOL
USMC does and they are the third largest air force in the world after the USAF and USN. Harrier and F-35C buttfrick everything. F-35 stealth fighters also dominate all non stealth fighters. Non-stealth sucks compared to stealth.
>But muh turning radius
Didn't work out very well for Japan
Nobody operates VTOL FROM DIRT AIRSTRIPS you fricking moron
The OP is about a wunderwaffe. None of these were that kind of technology that dominated the battlefield and everything else sucks now compared to it. The closest example of this was probably literally the bow and arrow or the shield, where it absolutely revolutionized warfare and fighting without it presented a severe handicap.
horses
and then later, motor vehicles
sailing ships eventually put galleys out of business
and then steam/diesel/etc ships put sailing ships out of business
>fiction
In Patlabor, mecha are mainly used for construction and police work. The military has some but they are niche use and tend to get shrekt by tanks and particularly attack helicopters
>horses
Horses make sense. Horse archers and then later medieval knights on horseback were very much the meta and it seems like you could single-handedly win battles solely with them.
mounted troops always fought alongside regular infantry
they never totally invalidated them and they served different enough roles on the battlefield that replacing them was never an option
so its not like a gundam situation, where within 1 year of deployment, tanks and jets had been virtually totally replaced by mobile suits
The only times you get a switch that fast and extreme is when a high tech civilization sells gear to a low tech one. AKs vs spears tier tech difference.
Tanks were only "replaced" because Zeon had been driven off of Earth and they couldn't into space.
This was the top Zaku killer, not the GM.
That's not a Fly Manta.
And the Federation had Balls to fight in space.
Balls were literally last ditch weapons for the Hail Mary Solomon and A Baoa Qu offensive.
>Hail Mary
For the zekes? Because once they got kicked off Earth it was a matter of time before the Federation would have been kicking down their doors.
>within 1 year of deployment, tanks and jets had been virtually totally replaced by mobile suits
I want that kind of production, training and logistics.
gundam manufacturing pipeline is crazy, especially on the zeke side
they first learned of the gundams existence in september 0079, designed the gelgoog and had prototypes of it for field testing by mid-december of 0079 when char got his own red one to check its real world performance
and then had it mass-produced by late december of 0079, though only got to see a single battle before the war ended
>prototype field testing to mass production in two weeks
What kind of tests could you possibly run that quickly that could matter? 'Does it explode when you turn it on' is all that comes to mind
>tanks and jets had been virtually totally replaced by mobile suits
A shame for the series, because this fat bottomed, wing commander looking b***h is the best.
I love that manga doing ridiculous amount of work to retcon and justify the craziest design of Gundam.
>making core fighter boosters as a "cost recuperation" measure
I'm surprised the idea of "GM + mass-produced/modified G-Armor" hasn't been used more.
The Core Block system remains a pretty underused gimmick in my opinion. Bandai could have made some money selling GM-Guntank-esque model kits and expansion parts.
>The Core Block system remains a pretty underused gimmick in my opinion. Bandai could have made some money selling GM-Guntank-esque model kits and expansion parts.
Of course it is underused, it was toyetic addition to a setting that tried to be much more realistic than the norm of the time.
It take godlike retcon to justify it coming to existence for any kind of purpose.
It is lucky that by Gundam Standard any brick can be made to fly and we don't ask much question like where is the micro-fusion reactor is inside the folding Core fighter (since it supposedly is, no matter how little sense it make)
btw:
>where do they fit the propellant?
By Gundam standard that thing have micro-nuclear powerplant, within atmosphere it can just breath/heat the air, in space the power packed by anything nuclear would make whatever propellant is between the engines enough deltaV to reach the moon, land and come back.
Might as well ask where they put the heat radiator.
Might as well post this
And for added irony
where do they fit the propellant?
>tanks and jets had been virtually totally replaced by mobile suits
Come on now, that's not even remotely true.
>Come on now, that's not even remotely true.
MSG 0079 was the first and last gundam in the series to prominently feature tanks and non-mobile suit mecha
IBO has non mobile suits at the start, with Tekkadan being a newly established PMC that gets most of their equipment starting out from battlefield salvage. The first non MC gundam suit they get is even from a bunch of space pirates they fight.
That's a meme.
Chariots even earlier
>In Patlabor, mecha are mainly used for construction and police work.
In Patlabor, the patlabor policing work only applies to other (rogue) labors and not police in general, tho.
>military
They have sort of heavy infantry and walking tank too (those get rekt by rpgs lmao).
>the patlabor policing work only applies to other (rogue) labors and not police in general
(usually)
There's an episode of the Patlabor TV show where the police labors are used for traffic cop duties for instance, but that's mostly played for laughs.
Human history is all about this wtf man
Firearms made a huge shift in all kinds of technology, heavy cavalry, pikes, etc
Yes, but not exactly over night.
A work of fiction glossing over the development and logistics involved in bringing a new invention to the front is normal. You're supposed to assume they did all that stuff in the background and not magically create a new army overnight.
all of history, starting with the first time a monkey picked up a club
>But was there ever a time in history where this actually was true?
Basically every single period in military history at one point or another, and it started with this.
This. More evidence of chariot warfare starting before horseback warfare. Very white person aryan tribe thing.
>Let's just ignore the Egyptians
They got it from the Hyksos (who came from canaan which conquered them.
And before them the sumerians in mesopotamia
HMS Dreadnought and the Dreadnought type ships that came after it are the first thing that comes to mind. It completely changed battleship doctrines and persisted until aircraft carriers superseded it.
One thing the HMS Dreadnought doesn't get enough credit for is that time it sunk an attack submarine, back when people were worried subs would beat battleships in a cost-effective manner.
Even if it takes 10 subs to down one battleship you're still trading favorably from a raw material standpoint
It's hard to understate how revolutionary Dreadnought was, everything down to the building techniques was changed and Dreadnought even rolled off the line before an old style battleship which had started work before she was laid down had finished.
>understate
That's not the right word.
>guns
this.
the second the trigger actuated matchlock is made ubiquitous in the late 1400's it's basically been the gun on the top of the heap for 550 years.
The belt fed machinegun
doesnt really qualify for OPs question though
since bolt-actions and magazine-fed machine guns existed alongside them pretty much until today
and the semi-auto rifle and full-auto rifle exist just fine alongside the machine gun
Weapon? No, but some supporting technology certainly qualifies. We currently live in a post-night vision world, either you have it or youre victim to those who do. Weapons and vehicles are generally incrementally improved, most stuff just sucks to begin with. The tank was a game changer when it was first revealed, but of the 49 tanks first deployed, only 9 survived the Somme without being destroyed or breaking down. Every weapon has a counter, if not right away then eventually, so the anime trope of thing being the best and never having a counter just isnt applicable to reality.
The biggest counter to the tank at the Somme was their own reliability, not German countermeasures
trucks essentially made horses completely useless beyond very niche scenarios
>trucks essentially made horses completely useless beyond very niche scenarios
When the roads became too muddy for wheels, horses and half-tracks were used.
Also, if fuel ran out but somehow, there's enough horse feed / grain / water for packhorses to keep operating.
Its not weapons or vehicles but the doctrines that utilise them. The Phalanx for example was just as effective as ever vs enemy forces Caesar fought but was invalidated by Roman doctrines more than a century before. Spears/pikes and shields were not made redundant just repurposed but even so the Phalanx dominated for hundreds of years.
Heavy cavalry was implemented successfully, millennia before the big war horses of the middle ages were bred. Yet a modern Arabian race horse would be imposing compared to Alexander's cavalry while the big Percherons for example would seem like a different breed.
No single weapon however, in all of history, was an immediate game changer with total dominance as other have said not even the tank. Anti tank guns were made during WW1. Even the bow was outclassed by slingers for a long time.
What eventually became a dominant weapon of battle or war typically had to be developed over time into its 'final' form or was poorly deployed and used with inferior doctrine. Amiens is the battle that set the standard for tank use instead of the previous moronation of either letting them go forward on their own or using men as human shields to protect the precious mobile metal coffin, which was fricked as soon as those men were cut down.
Combined Arms has been the prevailing battlefield tactic and war doctrine for the last 100 years.
"Outdated" weapons can also hard counter more "advanced" forces which don't incorporate an equivalent unit or when they are used in a new way. Chariots were outdated for 1000 years before Caesar, right until he invaded Britain and found he had no counter to the skirmish tactics of local charioteers with a warrior prince and his men at arms being able to engage soldiers at his leisure then withdraw near instantly. Which is whey he brought Gallic cavalry the next time.
With the exception of British subs the US is so far beyond its competitors they might as well be fighting aliens from Proxima centuri.
F-22 and F-35?
imagine being substantially worse than a /tg/ namegay
https://desuarchive.org/_/search/image/HPhI88IKHOLnZMvuq8M6Og/
Constantly
>horses
>massed spear formations
>copper
>bronze
>chariots
>metallurgy improving enough to work with iron (way more cost-effective than bronze and doesn't require a huge logistics network to import multiple ores that don't form anywhere near one another)
>stirrups
>gunpowder
>various improvements in firearms over centuries (flintlocks, caplocks, breech-loading cartridge-fed guns, self-loading, etc)
>dreadnoughts
>aircraft
>aircraft carriers
And surely many many more: that's just off the top of my head
Try winning a war with only aircraft carriers and it won’t go well.
>stirrups
How did such a small thing make such a big difference? Why did nobody come up with them before?
All the other things listed required far more overhead to develop and adopt.
Gundam/mech = Sunrise = absolute braindead trash.
>The Musket Wars were a series of as many as 3,000 battles and raids fought throughout New Zealand (including the Chatham Islands) among Māori between 1806 and 1845, after Māori first obtained muskets and then engaged in an intertribal arms race in order to gain territory or seek revenge for past defeats. The battles resulted in the deaths of between 20,000 and 40,000 people and the enslavement of tens of thousands of Māori and significantly altered the rohe, or tribal territorial boundaries, before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.
>The increased use of muskets in intertribal warfare led to changes in the design of pā fortifications, which later benefited Māori when engaged in battles with colonial forces during the New Zealand Wars.
>Ngāpuhi chief Hongi Hika in 1818 used newly acquired muskets to launch devastating raids from his Northland base into the Bay of Plenty, where local Māori were still relying on traditional weapons of wood and stone. In the following years he launched equally successful raids on iwi in Auckland, Thames, Waikato and Lake Rotorua, taking large numbers of his enemies as slaves, who were put to work cultivating and dressing flax to trade with Europeans for more muskets. His success prompted other iwi to procure firearms in order to mount effective methods of defence and deterrence and the spiral of violence peaked in 1832 and 1833, by which time it had spread to all parts of the country except the inland area of the North Island later known as the King Country and remote bays and valleys of Fiordland in the South Island. In 1835 the fighting went offshore as Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama launched devastating raids on the pacifist Moriori in the Chatham Islands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars
Love when history proves time and time again that natives were not peace-loving noble peoples that only wished to be one with the land and were robbed by le savage, evil colonial wypipo man, and the moment you give them a pointier stick they turn it right back towards their kin
And remember, when natives use every part of the animal, it's ancient wisdom, but when white people do it it's man made horrors beyond your comprehension. Even though the only difference is the scale at which it's done.
Damn anon, wait till you learn what happened when Europeans got their hands on gunpowder
That's not even really true in your pic related. Scopedogs get fricked up all the time in their source material and really don't want to go up against tanks in an open field.
As many anons have already said, history is filled with examples.
The phalanx
Chariots
Crossbows
Firearms
Tanks
Planes
Nukes
The biggest of all of these is easily the firearm, and I'm shocked I'm not seeing more people point this out on FIREARMS board. The widespread introduction and use of the gunpowder and primitive firearms essentially turned medieval warfare on it's head and effectively made the Knight obsolete overnight. Before that if you had enough family lineage, money, and power you could acquire or have armor made. Add in a horse and you've figuratively tanked yourself up into a walking war machine. After the induction of firearms none of that mattered. Any peasant with a metal tube, some gunpowder and shot could ice your ass. It changed the way wars were fought. It fundamentally changed what people even considered a 'weapon' to be. Once firearms were widely adopted all of the previous weapons of wars - spears, shields, swords were almost wholly reduced to just ceremonial items.
>FIREARMS board.
Weapons board
> Knight obsolete overnight
Pikes made the Knight obsolete overnight. Mounted knights anyway. Foot knights persisted for a while.
> Once firearms were widely adopted all of the previous weapons of wars - spears, shields, swords were almost wholly reduced to just ceremonial items.
Saber armed cavalry persisted well into the 1800s.
Knights weren't obsolete. If anyone can afford them, it's them. Also, guns existed for nearly a millennium. All those others coexisted for a long time.
Because most of us are quite aware that knights persisted in their role for centuries alongside firearms. Cannon had a much greater immediate impact due to the required changes in fortifications to counter them and the expense of the necessary modification.
This. Medieval war was all hitched on castles and gunpowder forced every castle to change its design
Gundam was basically a story about fighter pilots in WW2.
In Gundam, straight up physics got a massive change with Minovksi physics. It's what let's everyone get nuclear fusion reactors they fit in a mech and jams radars well enough that nuking from a far distance is impossible.
Yeah but that's just a handwave for why the fighter pilots have to dogfight in space and why the fighters have to look like giant people.
MS are human shaped because toys, and also later justification that they needed weapons that could fight in EVA, on the moon, on and inside space colonies, then later on earth. Fighters and other sillier shaped weapons never stopped being useful at least in the OYW.
A lot of the early MS were wacky toys, but once they got more real robot, they filled in the background that MS developed from space construction equipment that basically looked like bulldozers with cameras, into more bipedal forms so that they could independently maneuver and use multiple tools.
But realistically, something like the MS Ball would be used 99% of the time in space.
Maybe the Machine gun? Though that would be because of arrogance and not the Machine Gun being so OP. Everyone refused to admit that their well disciplined lines and charges of men were useless against a giant hail of bullets for like two decades.
Once communication tech advanced beyond a guy on a horse or men on a wind-powered boat, humans everywhere started taking strengths and weaknesses from other warzones and figuring out how they would or wouldn't work in their own backyard warzone.
I'd argue that if there's no societal collapse, maybe in 80 years or so we'll see some stupid shit like a jet that commands 60 other jets, each one with a fuel tank enabling it to circle the globe and the radar cross section of one cubic centimeter, that can fire Ultrasonic missiles that have the radar cross-section of a water molecule. That would probably count.
Nukes are the correct answer
Nothing has had more of an impact on global politics overnight than the nuclear bomb nor has any weapon in human history so completely ensured that no one will ever frick with your territory if you have it
Tanks. Airplanes. Metal boats. Schooners.
By "90% of military fiction" do you just mean weeb gundam bullshit?
But to answer your question, yeah, kinda, though of course it's not going to be quite the same as fictional mechas you fricking autistic weeb.
>Chariots in ancient times, empires like the Assyrians equipped with them wiped the floor with surrounding nations that didn't have them
>With metallurgy this has happened a few times. If you were in the Bronze Age and didn't have bronze weapons, or the Iron Age and didn't have iron ones, etc, you were pretty well fricked if you fought someone who did. Even with steel well into medieval times, some steel weapons like the Frankish sword or Toledo steel swords were known to be dominant over others in their time because of good construction.
>Naval technology does this regularly. When the latest and greatest ship design comes out you usually get your dick kicked in if you don't have one too. Happened famously with the British Dreadnought but has happened other times too, even going back to the famous Phoenician ships in ancient times.
>Sometimes a formation or battle strategy would do this. The Phalanx dominated everything that fought it that wasn't a phalanx for a minute.
>Guns have been discussed enough already but I want to focus on cannons. Look at how the Ottomans fricking dominated for a couple centuries before everyone caught up with them in gun technology. Until the cannon, all of battle strategy revolved around fortresses and castles, occupying them, stationing troops in them to pose a threat to your enemy's movements, and besieging them. Cannons changed that whole ball game overnight by how good they were at knocking down walls.
>do you just mean weeb gundam bullshit?
No, I mean 90% of military science fiction. Battletech, Dune, "The Angel of the Revolution", they all do this shit.
Battletech is Gundam bullshit in a real-robot setting. But also aerospace fighters and warships crap all over mechs.
If it's one slightly unrealistic part of gundam, it's how fast things are phased out. Now I get high intensity wars with replacements and shit. But there's timelines where people go through mechs faster than Nazi Germany hopping over to its next desperate meme project. IRL, some hardware gets refurbished and used for decades.
Of course, there's times like in UC where Jegans remained a mainstay for decades and rear line units still used GMs. Then there's CE where GINNs are explicitly still used even during Destiny. Then we have desperate people like Zeon remnants using outdated mechs. I guess it's also observation bias. We the audience are often treated to very high intensity big conflicts where the most advanced and newest shit gets used.
yeah you're pretty explicitly following the very tip of the spear, where the magic knights fight using the newest and fanciest armors for the fate of the world
If there's one thing that is unrealistic about gundam, it's the time scales and focus on tech breakthroughs concerning military hardware.
I understand this is a carryover from ww2 aircraft improvements but shit like the f16 is extremely fricking old and still works fairly well given its mission.
(It was designed in 1978)
Even two decades is nothing when talking about military hardware
Well, the post-OYW era is a bit better about that. There's still power creep, but since Zeta era grunts generally have beam weapons by default, they can still do alright almost 10 years later. Well the GMs are usually bottom of the barrel for whatever conflict they're in, but lots of other stuff seems to do okay. In Narrative, those Gustav Karls got their shit pushed in by Dijehs.
We should see a lot more shitty legacy platforms like zakus given updated weapons, optics and guidance systems, becoming refurbished halfway decent grunt suits like a space t64
Also people really CANNOT fill a role for 10.000 leftover GMs and Rick Doms that are 100% spaceworthy and can hold a bazooka with le new high tech laser rounds or whatever?
That is basically what the Zaku Sniper type is. They gave it a giant generator backpack so it can fire long range beams from a farther support role from the back.
GMs just get upgraded into GM IIs by Zeta and GM IIIs by ZZ. As for Rick Doms, I don't think enough were left at the end of the war as surplus to seriously care about refurbishing them. If they were still being used by remnants, well the remnants don't really have factories and workshops to overhaul their machines with. Maybe if they were lucky they had ships to carry MS.
There's also this absolute unit shitting all over the zeke remnants at the Torrington base attack in Unicorn. Not bad for a suit that hadn't seen combat in a decade and a pilot(Robin Diez, ex-Titans)that probably hadn't been inside a wienerpit in the same.
why does it have a gaping ass
Extra thruster that let's a 5 story tall brick fly
Cav
Pike and shot
Dreadnaught
The airplane till, I argue, the shootdown of the U-2 in 1960 which started to herald the end of uncontested airspace domination.
Nuclear submarines
Drones with their rise as artillery observators in the first Lebanon war in 82, aided by the mass adoption by civilians, broadening capability.
nukes changed everything. No more large-scale wars between powerful countries anymore.
I'm glad nukes exist, so much peace since the postwar era.
I mean, can you imagine what history post-WW2 would've looked like if nukes didn't exist?
WW3, WW4, and WW5 could've happened up until 2024.
I shudder to think how much casualties those wars could've had.
Horseback was basically a requirement for having any kind of wider power for literally millennia, whether it was owning your own or having enough cash to pay the ones who spent their entire lives raising and training them. Horses were still very much relevant even in the context of WW2 which was only 80 years ago next year, even if just as an auxiliary role.
I’d argue the same kind of devastation a nuclear war would bring with it would still happen, and you just need to look at events like the Tokyo firebombing as evidence. Anyone with the means and will to do so can make a shitton of explosives designed solely to lob at the enemy with the purpose of causing as much destruction and carnage as possible, now imagine if there are entire bomber swarms flying 24/7 doing nothing but dropping an unholy mix of incendiaries as soldiers and partisans duke it out everywhere.
Iron weapons at the start of the Bronze age.
Steel weapons used by Conquistadors in South America.
Repeating rifles and machineguns during European colonization of the 19th-century.
The most extreme examples are when a higher vs. lower technical culture met, not so much a specific weapon.
1903.
F15 - literally the one weapon that made USA number 1
The history of war is basically people making a new weapon system then BTFO everyone else until someone copies it then a period of tactical refinement until someone made a new weapon.
Although the long stick with the pointy end held strong for like 8000 years.
Is it time for the oyakodon pasta?
I want to frick the king and her son at the same time. I want Arturia to use me to teach her son how to please a man. I want my dick between the king’s breasts as she and her son practice performing oral on me. I want the king to kiss feed her son semen and teach her to swallow. I want the king to ride my dick like a horse and I want her son’s vegana on my mouth. I want to cum inside the king as I eat out the king’s son. I want the king to part her son's legs and show me her vegana. I want Mordred to scream for her daddy as I pound her. I want to fill her with just as much cum as I filled her father. I want enjoy Arthurian-style oyakodon.
Indirect cannon fire was probably the biggest game changer in recent history. More than anything else. Though you could also argue it was the mass adoption of steam locomotives and improved command and control systems. Regardless, these technologies working in tandem were why WW1 was the way it was, as indirect artillery made the war almost unrecognizable from any that came before it and forced every army to adopt defense in depth and technology to minimize losses as preventing or countering long ranged artillery was simply impossible. In turn, mass communications and rail meant that you could now mobilize millions of men in a day anywhere you needed to. So you could kill tens of thousands of men in an hour, break open a hole in the enemy front, but by the time you’re making a breakthrough the enemy already has sent in reinforcements making it impossible to totally breach the line and improbable you’ll even hold what you’ve taken as your forces still had to fight what resistance was left + deal with counter battery while the reinforcements will be relatively unscathed. Nearly 6000 years of military tactics revolving around hammer and anvil and maneuver and breakthrough that was still used heavily in the Franco Prussian and American civil war reliant on steadfast troops engaging enemies they could see with what forces you could command via local messenger went out the door almost immediately. The end of both wars sort of were a prelude to WW1, with trench lines and an increasing use of indirect fire and mass conscription all playing a huge part. But it was the maturation and improvement of these technologies to such a scale than fundamentally changed warfare and forced a complete unlearning of military tradition and the adoption of completely new technologies to attempt to overcome the stalemate. Probably the most notable change was simply that unlike other wars, where you could break the enemy’s ability to wage war, attrition was now how war was won.
Chariots, then Horses, then long pikes, then steel swords, then horses (now featuring stirrups), then pikes again, then guns, then artillery, then turboprop planes, then jets, and now missiles.
Guns. Steamships. Horse cav and replaced by armored vehicles and dragoons by mechanized. Turboprops replaced piston props. All military helicopters are turbines, not piston.
Currently we have drones dominating recon, precision bombing, cruise missile and antiship roles. It is a huge change and that's only the last two years.
always felt this way when watching FMP. i absolutely adored the tacticool shit as a kid but even back then i realized it always came down to the mechs easily dispatching apcs, tanks, helos and about everything else inbetween, to the point when i asked myself why anyone would even use those "deathtraps" against mechs instead of there being some sort of anti-mech mpats or something. also the protagonists always being some teenaged kid super-soldier with the experience and capabilities of a 35+ year old veteran was also iffy, but that's japan shonen magic i guess.
that being said i absolutely loved those 90s to early 2000s tacticool animes mainly for their aesthetics. the artstyle and the colors are just so damn comfy.
brb rewatching
Keep in mind that Mithril was using 3rd gen Gernsbacks while the rest of the world was using 2nd gen Arms Slaves. It's like everyone is playing with F-4s and MiG-23s and then someone pulls up with a Tomcat.
>FMP
Are you my younger self?
FMP does a nice job off having pseudo tactic and at least looking like military weapons instead of colorful samurai
I was told that in the original novel the mecha are like 8m tall, not 18m tall like the anime
But when it come to details, it's magic all the way down.
- an IFV sized mecha that jump over building
- not jellifying the pilot with those 50G acceleration
- who care about fuel&range?
- invisibility fields that work on almost everything
- mecha sized shotgun that one-shot tanks with barrel bigger than said shotgun
- muh throwing knife with a blade folded >9000 times
- conventional unit can't shot straight but mecha can 360° no scope
And that's before it go into
- literal magic protection field
- gravity cancelling magic
i'm planning on reading the light novel sometime, maybe there's a bit less of the magicky stuff that's in the anime since it works better in an animation.
kinda pisses me off to no end they never continued animating the thing. shit get's shelved for more than a decade, returns with ten episodes outta nowhere only to vanish again into thin air with no plans of continuation
In fact, given the prevalence of Kepler armor in infantry and the trend toward heavily armed parsonsels, a one-man robot like VOTOMS seems to make at least partial sense.
If advanced exoskeletal equipment becomes widespread in future wars to challenge the biological weight limitations of infantry equipment, we are one step closer to robots.
Of course, modern technology can't solve the mass production and serviceability problems of bipedal weapons yet.
Ideally, this is how I did it in my stories: the mech is a combination of mini mecha and powered suit in that each of the mech's legs have to be controlled by the pilot's legs and like in VOTOMS, the mech's wheels have legs for faster travel and using them requires flipping a certain switch to go from direct control of the legs to using the wheels on legs. And as pic shows, the arms are controlled by handles that have buttons to certain functions (from melee combat to handling crates).
>mass production and serviceability problems
Back on topic, you mentioned mass production and servicability. To me, I see that as a fact in real life because more soldiers means more weapons and thus, the need to industrialize weapons manufacturing.
The gun
Didn’t immediately turn everything else useless.It took hundreds of years before it completely replaced other weapon types.
>But was there ever a time in history where this actually was true?
At least once off the top of my head. On February 17, 1910.
The number of German ships that sank in both wars were decisive as were the Hiroshimoot and Nagtosuckme magdumps.
Yeah, the gun.
Steel.
Gunpowder.
Steel + Gunpowder
Is there a battlefield without them? I think not.
Chinese and Indians whacking each other with sticks.
Sticks with nails in them. And the transports to get the crying soldiers up there.
I do wish anime stopped doing that, or at least portrayed a somewhat cohesive combined-arms force
A mecha who don't just fly to destination on its own
that have a niche in a larger army
that need to call artillery or air-support
but hold the ground and do things no tank is flexible enough to do
without plot-armor or plot-weapon
not humanoid
not ridiculous transformers
But hey, gunpla ain't gonna sell themselves!
even gundam does some of that stuff with the flatbed truck transports in victory or the base jabbers
FLAG is probably one of the most hardcore military aesthetics mecha OVAs and aaaalmost gets there, but not quite.
>FLAG is probably one of the most hardcore military aesthetics mecha OVAs and aaaalmost gets there, but not quite.
heresy, in my book it have nothing realist or hardcore in any way.
They just tried to pile up tropes like "realistic mean kinda ugly and complicated as frick" and missed big time, still made it a transformable humanoid mecha.
In fact the "Chinese mecha" is the most realistic in that OAV.
Patlabor beat it by far and the level wasn't that high.
patlabor is largely civilian aesthetics, though.
What you posted could easily be made into a military scout.
Increase wheel size,
Add sensors,
The rest is just camouflage, range and maybe a bit of armor.
>Polearm
>Longbow
>Crossbow
>Cannon
>Muzzleloader
>Needle fire rifle
>Bolt action rifle
>Machine gun
>Tank
>Submarine
>Guided ballistic missiles
>Fighter bomber planes/jets
>Aircraft carrier
>Assault rifle
>MANPA-T/Ds
>Advanced guided munitions
>Drones
The Polearm wins. Man commonly used some kind of spear from the Stone Age up to World war 1 (Bayonet).
>But was there ever a time in history where this actually was true?
Probably above all? The Ironclad.
Wooden ships instantly obsolete.
The musket and later rifles
Breachloaders.
Encased bullets
Artillery
Dreadnoughts
Anti submarines warfare
Pike and shot against cavalry
>Therefore, metallurgy is actually the strongest weapon
Metallurgy couldn't happen before having smart, therefor big brain is the stronkest weapon
Brain no work good without food, have to kill for food.
Food best weapon.
food from land
no good land
no good food
land stronkes weapon
Metallurgy isn't a weapon ya dingus, it's a tool for MAKING weapons.
You're one abstraction layer too shallow.
Guns
Planes