why do "mega-weapons" don't work?
why can't we have WH40K titans, or EVAs?
i'd prefer big ass mechas instead of the shitty drones. but drones work.
why bigger is not better?
Why do mega-weapons not work? Why can't we have cool war shit like WH40K titans, or EVAs?
Physics.
they already existed. and I assume they failed if armies are not going for bigger toys but instead for stuff like drones.
I know shit about weapons and war.
that's why I question what happened here and why bigger is not better in these matters.
Destroying something isn't about rolling to hit, wound and armor safe
It's about detecting if and then getting the platform that can kill it in position. Preferably in a way that the cost to you to destroy it is less expensive than the cost of losing it is for you adversary.
If you make your system smaller it is harder to find, if you make it cheaper it is less likely to be economical to destroy it over and over again.
Think of it like this.
If you bring a land raider you only have to pen it and roll a 4 or up.
If for the same points you bring 5 sentinels you now need to pen and 4 and up 5 times.
I'm not using nuhammer vehicle rules because they are gay.
Just look at the way weapons evolved and use common sense. Why build a big delivery system when you can increase range and damage in the warhead itself. We don't need big guns because we have missiles. It's as simple as that. As for why we don't have mechs and titans: physics.
physics is not just "it is impossible to make something," it is also "the diminishing returns on a machine of this size are so great so as to make it worthless". yes you can make a very large thing but you are going to sacrifice a lot of performance or man hours of engineering trying to gain a performance goal for a result of ultimately dubious utility. huge frick-off weapons or vehicles are curiosities or one-offs for very special purposes, like the NASA crawler/Spruce Goose/German digger thing; otherwise they are only proposed for the novelty of being big which is not a solution to any real practical problem
The gustav did its job fairly well. Knocking out entire massive superbunkers with handfuls of shots fired. Bunkers that would've eaten untold thousands of men had they attacked conventionally.
It's important to remember that Rail mounted artillery like this had a range of only something like 20-25km
pic rel has a range of up to 100km
>155mm
> 800mm
>155mm is longer range
well, yea, man. You can probably fire more shots per unit time with the 155, too.
wasnt that thing taken out by a single paraglider with a handful of thermite? that's why these massive things are not used. The enemy can spot them from the sky EZ and they take far less resources to put out of commission than it takes to build and opporate them. that's it
Walter lied
first time I notice the guys standing at the top of the gun.
I kinda imagined it to be bigger ... I know, sounds weird
No, I'm with you. I imagined some GIGANTIC gun, which, I mean it still is, but it's not this cyclopean work I thought it was.
How deaf were the guys around this thing when it fired?
We need to bring back big guns.
And logistics.
The tools, parts, and ratio of maintenance time to operation time all scale up. So a greater percentage of support goes towards a narrower area of the front. Is it a net benefit to half the number of tanks you can field, but double their shell caliber and armor thickness? What happens to that cost-benefit analysis when you now also limit the bridges you can cross? Etc.
More specifically weight. Even if all the weapons and armour on your mechs worked as advertised and you had a badass AA-system to keep a bomber from shitting on them, they'd still sink into the ground without some kind of magic anti-gravity device in which case why are you even bothering with legs?
because legs are cool and can crush things.
>sinks
>looks at skyscrapers
Soil quickly reaches its compression limits, for vehicles the problem is that the tires/treads aren't big enough.
soil is compacted and stabilised before said skyscraper is built,
hell even wooden houses have foundations...
Material strength can be worked around. The real problem is heat dissipation.
overrated. the model is always changing as is, so to strictly adhere to it doesn't make much sense after a certain point. we've most likely missed tons of innovations because someone was boxed in by the physical model of the day and didn't think outside of it because what's the point. there's nothing wrong with trying an idea out that "isn't physically possible" just to see if it actually worked or not.
Do thirdies really think this way?
don't be obtuse you two midwits. that was just a long winded way of saying it pays to think outside the box.
"Let's design our equipment as if the laws of physics doesn't exist and hope that we get lucky" is not the same as thinking outside the box.
>intentionally being this dense
only a genuinely autistic sperg would use the word trite and be completely incapable, just like the other moron, of understanding an idea as simple as thinking outside the box.
>”I was only pretending to be moronic”
No, you're saying some trite nonsense that makes no sense in an attempt to salvage your battered ego, it is not the same thing.
you are a moron
have a nice day
you are a moron
>overrated. the model is always changing as is, so to strictly adhere to it doesn't make much sense after a certain point
How does bickering of subatomic particles effect considerations of the weight and strength of steel and titanium?
yeah bud you have no idea what youre talking about
I don't understand, why do people being able to read minds make mega weapons impossible
Square cube law. So
but also
Besides, why one mega-thing rather than many smaller things? Unless it's a nuke or comparable weapon, having a single mega-fricker isn't better than many smaller ones.
Because the single megafricker can fit several void shield arrays in an overlapping pattern with adequate power for them while the many small things might not even be able to fit even one.
I bet it can’t withstand an orbital bombardment though.
Pretty sure titan grade void shields are on par with void ship shields. Might not be able to take a sustained bombardment, but a single salvo won't put one down either.
Well it can’t exactly fire back and it can’t exactly hide either so it’s fricked anyways
Titans can actually target and hit orbital targets. They just almost never have to because no way are you even going to consider deploying one if you don't control orbit.
Sounds like those resources would better be spent just building space battleships then.
Not as cool as a walking cathedral.
No, not really. Mainly due to things like dedicated antiorbital weapons preventing useful orbital bombardment. Especially if there are things groundside you want to keep somewhat intact, such as munitions factories or hive cities. You CAN certainly go full bombardment every time, but that won't guarantee victory and will put your vessels in a very vulnerable state as they have to take up previse orbits and dedicate resources, weapons, targeting and shit to hitting the ground. Which means that if the enemy shows up in system with a fleet of their own, you might get fricked, lose void superiority and then the ground battle.
Kept void superiority + titan > tenuous void superiority + orbital bombardment
Mainly due to things like dedicated antiorbital weapons preventing useful orbital bombardment.
Those anti-orbital weapons can easily be turned on your Titan as well though.
>Especially if there are things groundside you want to keep somewhat intact, such as munitions factories or hive cities
You won’t be using a fricking Titan if that’s the case, because not only are you walking into a city with a spaceship sized vehicle armed with spaceship sized weapons, but the enemy will have to defend against that vehicle by using their own spaceship sized weapons. Basically just by bringing the Titan onto the battlefield you’re 100% guaranteeing that everything around it is going to be pulverized into dust and there’s never a reason to use it if you want to keep anything intact.
No, you generally wouldn't be able to turn antiorbital weaponry on a ground target. You can barely use them for suborbitals.
And a titan is far, FAR from spaceship sized. Even just a claymore class corvette, a small escort vessel, measures 1.4km long and has a crew complement of 21 000.
To compare, Emperor-class titans (imperator and warmonger) are on the scale of 50-150 meters from foot to spiretops, with the next largest warmaster class being at roughly 40-50 meters.
The most commonly used titan marks are warlord battletitans (30-40m) and warhound scout titans at 10-20m height. They are orders of magnitude different in size, scale, and expenditure. And that's measuring against a fricking escort craft, not a cruiser or battleship.
Titans can and have left plenty of things intact post-deployment, with one famous deployment taking place INSIDE a macro-manifactorum complex on the world armageddon against ork gargants. Another famous titan conflict was during the siege of vraks. That one in particular involved both titan v titan as well as numerous other armored and artillery elements, very good stuff.
They are in effect the final escalatory ground based step. If you need more destructive power, you essentially have to use orbital bombardment.
And with all that said, titans can still both survive orbital strikes and strike back at orbital targets for the larger titan classes.
>No, you generally wouldn't be able to turn antiorbital weaponry on a ground target. You can barely use them for suborbitals.
Why not? It’s not like anti-orbital weapons wouldn’t be able to turn to the side, they would HAVE to in order to protect against orbital bombardment, because not all orbital bombardment would come from directly above, since a spaceship could easily just sit over the horizon and fire it’s guns horizontally to hit the city from the side.
>And a titan is far, FAR from spaceship sized. Even just a claymore class corvette, a small escort vessel, measures 1.4km long and has a crew complement of 21 000.
Well, it’s big enough to mount enough void shields that it can withstand an orbital bombardment for a while before being taken out. Which means the only way to take one out is to use something at least as strong as an orbital bombardment if not more powerful. And if the vehicle you’re using is so powerful that the enemy HAS to use methods that render the surrounding countryside barren of life just to take it down, then for all intents and purposes you have just built a weapon of mass destruction, and you should expect everywhere you send it to be destroyed.
>not all orbital bombardment would come from directly above,
Funny because that's almost exactly what they do.
>a spaceship could easily just sit over the horizon and fire it’s guns horizontally to hit the city from the side.
No, not really. Spaceboard macrocannons and lasers are really not meant for atmospheric long range interaction, at all. Which is what you'd get when firing through atmo across most of the horizon. Your idea could work on a non-atmo low-grav world, but you'd instead run into issues of accuracy.
Orbital bombardment in 40k is done from geostationary orbits as close to the planet as possible, and usually by dedicated weapons systems in the ship's keel or belly. This is because if your aim is off by a fraction of a degree you're going to vaporize a chunk of your own army and possibly cost the entire front due to the hole you made, and surfing in a gravity well with a multikilometer ship while trying to keep it steady enough to land an accurate strike is damn near impossible.
In turn, this means that a hive city's antiorbital defense needs to cover just that - a decent zone around the geostationary orbit point above the city and it's surroundings.
Cont.
So it sounds like the DAOT Humanity was actually fairly primitive and they couldn’t do advanced scientific shit like precision orbital bombardments and instead had to make do with just making shit bigger instead, and building giant fricking robots that look like cathedrals because they were a bunch of vainglorious morons whose AI ended up rebelling against them.
He's making shit up, precision orbital attacks have been a thing in a setting since forever. And of course in theory any ship should carry a fighter wing that carries enough firepower to simply obliterate any titan. It's just not done because that's not how the setting works.
homie DAOT was way the frick better than actu 40k. They had sun-snuffers and nanoplagues that you could tailor to kill exactly what you wanted. Weapons like those used on titans or ships would be like basic mining equipment.
Hell, the terminator (iirc) armor astartes use is based on a HEV type suit normals could use back then.
DAOT could certainly precision strike, but their computers weren't based on actual ornery spirits and lobotomized augmented criminals.
No, this shit is in setting. Precise orbital strikes are not a thing, unless by 'precise' you mean 'bathing a general several kilometer area in fire'.
And no, a fighter wing does not carry enough to 'obliterate any titan'. Are air threats a concern? Of course. Would a bomber wing be able to take down an imperator or even a warlord titan in an isolated environment? Frick no.
Precision orbital strikes happen several times in the fluff and they happen in the tabletop game too. Lascannons are anti-titan weaponry, and Imperial aircraft carry plenty of those.
Dude, lascannons are anti-tank, you'd need an entire synchronized array of them to take down anything larger than a warhound, and even then you'd at least need the heavier field ordnance type. If you want to go against anything larger you'd need baneblades lor landraider tanks.
To prove a credible threat to a warhound titan you'd need thunderhawk gunships, and that's multiple, not a single one, equipped with turbolaser destructor cannons, and thunderhawks aren't exactly small either, a single one weighs in at like 120 tons. To credibly attack a larger titan class you'd need a lot more, and much more coordination.
>DAOT could certainly precision strike
Then why build the fricking Titans? The entire justification I’ve heard for Titans is that DAOT couldn’t precision strike shit from orbit, and in fact had to be directly over their target to orbitally bombard anything because they couldn’t do the calculations to hit things from across the horizon. Something that modern humanity knows how to do was beyond the capability of DAOT humanity.
Nah dude, titans first emerged well into the age of strife (after the "its going to shit" point for the DAOT) to fight the cy-carnivora, whatever they were, by the proto-mechanicus of mars. As far as tech goes they're relatively original to the mechanicum.
Much smaller things like knights (smaller than warhounds) are DAOT kit though, but they were originally meant to serve essentially as colony heavy ordinance in case some nasty shit crawled out of the woods, or some orks made planetfall.
Well that makes more sense, I can kinda understand a knight sized mech, even the Tau have a knight sized mech specifically used to take out bigger mechs.
yeah, knight suits (as they are single occupant) were more or less made for "hey, here's a thing we can't really call an exoskeleton anymore that you can use basically wherever a truck can fit but with ambulatory mobility" use on fresh colony worlds. AFAIK they did serve as the basis for the concept of the titans, but this is age of strife lore so it's really fricking muddy. the titans were created by the early mechanicus as a matter of fact though, so the religious connotations were already there.
also, unrelated - why the frick does the captcha have a fricking cloudflare captcha in front of it?
The base pattern of titians was a much bigger upright walking titians. It was properly sentient and seemed to be built out of something resembling armored myloner of battletechs fame then the traditional pistons and shit of 'modern' titians. It apparently joined chaos at some point but the thing had languished in a forgotten realm of dirt for so long it had forgotten it was even a demon. That was until a grey knight pointed that out normal things don't replace their ranged weapons with rotary auto cannons chambered in bloodthirsters of khrone. They then blew it up. I liked that book.
I like Grey Knights, but then I've always liked those kinds of organizations in fiction, the whole secret army created to fight supernatural threats trope is just cool to me. I hope James updates more of their models to the new scale some time before the end of this century. The new Crowe model looks really good.
Specifically, termies are based on a suit used for performing repairs on a ship's plasma reactor while said reactor was still running.
yes, that's what i was thinking of. thanks anon.
>They had sun-snuffers and nanoplagues that you could tailor to kill exactly what you wanted.
>Hell, the terminator (iirc) armor astartes use is based on a HEV type suit normals could use back then.
tbh that sounds cool only out of context. If you think about it, sun-snuffing is actually nothing special in 40k, drukhari basically do it for breakfast. Plagues and shit isn't exactly that far off from what assassinorum does on regular basis. And suits, well, if it was originally made for plasma reactors maintenance or whatever doesn't mean it was bad, it could've been considered a very hardy equipment even back then, just more commonly available.
imo DAOT is kindof overblown out of proportion, exactly because it is always described that way, very cool achievements and phrases but in overall murky context with too much left on imagination fueled by the glimpses of greatness. But when you start look closer there's just not so much bigger stuff than the shit Imperium deals with in 40k. If anything Imperium is the very longest, and therefore the most powerful and stable form of statehood humanity ever existed in.
>drukhari basically do it for breakfast
well, kind of. they steal suns more than just snuff them.
but the necrons have their orrery that can detonate any star in the galaxy with a touch... though they don't use it much, something about disasterous galaxy breaking consequences.
the bigger deal about the DAOT is the level of their peak wargear and the great big AI humbug.
DAoT could freely terraform planets which is something the Imperium really misses.
I wonder how many capabilities the Imperum has lost simply because they could only be practically ran by AI.
IOM can still terraform, but it's much more limited in scope. They went from being able to make Eden like worlds out of something that maybe had one qualifying factor like the right gravity to being able to just adjust atmospheric quality by a decent amount with significant effort. Most hive and forge worlds use such system to keep the air somewhat breathable.
>Most hive and forge worlds use such system to keep the air somewhat breathable.
homiewhat? Hive cities tend to seal themselves off from the outside atmo and use massive air filtration systems to stay useable. The outside air is FRICKED. Picrel is a diagram of necromunda's primus spire, and it serves as a good guide, as anything from the bottom quarter to half (not counting underhive) of a hive city is surrounded by a thick smog of toxic gas waste and vast swathes of dead radwastes, and respirator use is very, very necessary should a breach occur. Or more realistically, swathes of lower hive trash die and get converted into corpse starch.
Forge worlds aren't much better - they're mechanicus worlds with continent spanning metalworks. Most 'life' there relies on respiratory implants, are servitors, or live very short and brutal lives.
> drukhari basically do it for breakfast
Not really. They have several suns in Commoragh, held in pocket dimensions, but they're basically catching a sun in the Webway, no more.
Contd:
>use something at least as strong as an orbital bombardment if not more powerful.
Yes and no. To an extent, it is a matter of the area of effect. An orbital bombardment will frick up a large area, whereas a titan macrolance is a (relatively speaking) point-strike weapon, which delivers all that punch to a much smaller area.
The usual way to combat a titan, especially if you do not have one to match it, is to coordinate fire at the same point so that you overwhelm the void shields covering that strike point and then strike the titan beneath before the shields come back up. You could orbitally strike one, but you won't have the precision to only strike the titan and you probably don't have the capability of concentrating all your strikes at the same time.
If you abstract it to game terms (as that is what 40k is, ultimately) a titan void shield has to take 10 damage in one round to collapse, and the titan has 3 overlapping. An orbital bombardment does 5 damage in 16 strikes, but over a scattered area, and a titan lance does 35 damage in a straight line.
>for all intents and purposes you have just built a weapon of mass destruction, and you should expect everywhere you send it to be destroyed.
This is partially true, though not exactly for the right reasons. You certainly should expect mass destruction in the wake of a titan, but it's more like a tactical nuclear deployment than a country spanning saturation launch of MIRVs. A scalpel, by MWD standards.
>Sounds like those resources would better be spent just building space battleships then.
Well yes, that's always been a problem with the setting. When they care enough to bother, It's usually explained by having space assets being incredibly rare, to the point that they are always needed for transportation and rarely have any time to actually support ground forces. Or just simply have forces do incredibly stupid things like having an inferior space force run a gauntlet to drop troops into a planet and then flee. 40K is a hero-based setting which translates to an army-based setting and Games Workshop simply ignores anything that detracts from this.
A decent Hive City has a void shield array thats on par with a Battleship except size and weight and power draw all don't matter because it never has to move and is powered by something that never has to move, which is why if you want to destroy it you have to destroy the planet its built on, and if you want to invade it, you have to walk or drive into the city itself.
>why one mega-thing rather than many smaller things?
look at this picture
look at that fricking thing.
It's one of many they have. And smaller Ork gargants could compete with numerically fewer big machines.
This.
40k titans and other mechs work because they have anit grab tech that helps them stand upright, allowing them to have ridiculously heavy armour and void shields that stop them from getting instantly annihilated(as they often do as soon as their shields fail)
Also, 40k titans actually do have merit as mobile artillery batteries that are basically immune to counterbattery fire.
Specifically the inverse square law.
You have to 18 years old to post here
There are several superweapons that "could work" if tech was a little better but they'd also be really impractical if they actually followed everything to specification.
Bigger machine = bigger target. And they're made of regualr metal which is really not that strong, so it'll just get destroyed really fast. EVAs have force field to mitigate that, and mechs in WH are just bullshitю Also the mass of something like an EVA made out of metal will just crumble like it's from paper.
Even flesh has limits. There's a reason that only a couple dinosaurs, elephants and that primitive herbivore I forget the name of (parathecium?) have ever gotten all that big. EVAs are made of out of the biological equivalent of bullshitium. Anything that big would have much slower nerve impulse travel than as depicted. Their bones and muscle would need to be made of magic, alien material.
The fast impulse of high explosives also makes all-around armoring difficult at best, and completely infeasible at worst. Damage compartmentalization requires resilience and redundancy in the systems, and this is not particularly feasible either. The best approach is to expect losses and substitute unattainable durability with an attainable number of units that can make up for unavoidable attrition.
>bullshitю
Кoлпaчeкю?
because they'd catch a JDAM or ATGM and get totally fricked.
But you don't understand, in MY universe the powers that be probibited effective weapons because they liked big stupid duels with robots
What "effective weapons" are prohibited in Battletech. I mean other than WMDs because everyone learned the lesson about Mutually Assured Destruction the hard way.
Its not weapons so much as space travel. A mech carries more weaponry for space taken up in a dropship then anything else. Thats why they are the primary attacker. Most defensive units are traditional armor which can and will frick up battlemechs given the chance. Air assests are also a royal pain for most battle mechs and why you really don't see them in games because fighting an aerospace fighter or even just a normal attack craft is a pain in the ass for anything but a dedicated AA mech
>Most defensive units are traditional armor which can and will frick up battlemechs given the chance
Not really. The earliest designed mech, the Mackie, basically a bucket with legs and guns, was able to destroy 16 tanks and an entire infantry company with only 4 mechs the first time it was used in combat, and it didn't lose a single mech in the process, or even suffer any major damage.
Mechs are basically the super weapons of the setting. If you don't have them, you want them, and anyone who doesn't have them is just coping with whatever conventional shit they have.
eh, a mech armed with a bunch of top of the line energy weapons for a couple tanks with the a single mount of the shittiest canon, a medium rifle, in the setting?
The tanks would've been equipped with their top of the line weapons as well, not a rifle. The tanks used were explicitly the best at the time.
>A mech carries more weaponry for space taken up in a dropship then anything else
Weapons aren't the question, a Shrek PPC carrier and an Awesome have the same armament (no the Awesome's small laser doesn't fricking matter) and they both weigh 80 tons. The difference is that the Awesome is jacked into one pilot's brain, while the Shrek is crewed by 6 men, and the rule of thumb is that each man added to a dropship crew adds 7 tons of food, fuel, air, and life support equipment to the manifest. The Awesome is much cheaper to deploy between planets because you don't have to pay for the other five guys.
I think a bit part of what makes them viable in battletech is they are being deployed to planets with various gravities and atmospheres.
You can send them to the moon and fight, you can't send planes to the moon.
The big part of what makes them viable in battletech is that they are made out of space magic that defies physics. They can move like people, have none of the problems of real world machinery and for the sake of the setting are mostly impervious to conventional weapons unless those weapons are strapped to another mech.
True
This is also true for basically any fantasy setting involving Mechs. No it is not "scifi", they use magic space elements and magic space power to magically make the giant robots work.
"Space Opera" seems to go hand in hand with space fantasy.
This, and also "muh lost technology". People can't make ballistic computers anymore (but they can still make all other types of computers), so that means all fights have to happen within very short range (no, don't think about why you can't just aim manually), and the short ranges make having fists on your tanks advantageous, because that way you can punch the other tank.
Also "muh lost technology" means that they can't build any of the more or less sensible weapons (such as aerospace fighters, or warships), but they have all of these battlemechs in storage, so why not use them.
There's also the feudalism aspect, where the grand Duke of whatever back water planet wants a single war machine that he personally controls by himself to make sure he doesn't get couped, and also this machine has to be a jack of all trade that can participate in any engagement at any range in any environment. Only a battlemech fits these criteria, so therefore mechs exist.
Ostensibly battletech is "what if Europe in the low middle ages, but instead of family heirloom swords they have family heirloom mechs, and instead of the church they have AOL".
>instead of the church they have AOL
Truly an ascended world
>They can move like people, have none of the problems of real world machinery and for the sake of the setting are mostly impervious to conventional weapons unless those weapons are strapped to another mech.
Not a single one of these thing is actually true in-setting.
The mechs literally use muscles to move and they have a fricking skeleton. And their armor is so powerful despite being super lightweight that 1 point of damage to it is described as requiring 3 120 mm Abrams rounds to hit the exact same spot at the same time.
> 3 120 mm Abrams rounds to hit the exact same spot at the same time
Which is something that is completely possible with modern technology and is conducted in-setting with special AP munitions. The Void Shields are the bulk of a Titan's durability.
G11 mechanism with vertical axis in 120 mm, mounted on Leopard II with double drive chains.
They still don't "move like people" - this isn't some anime setting - and their armor is the same as that mounted on everything else in-setting. Same goes for the weapons - a Gauss Rifle doesn't care if it's mounted on a Mech or a tank, it'll hit things equally hard at equal range either way.
Not only do they absolutely move like people (in fact people’s minds are synced up with the robot so they can “feel” the robot like those animes), but the mechs also have the magical quality that they just don’t take damage like other vehicles do. They’re just magically tougher for no particular reason even given the armor of the setting.
You've outed yourself as only knowing the setting through mechwarrior. I love battletech, but they go through great hoops with both the writing and the science to make it so that the mechs are not only viable, but the preferred weapon of choice.
You've outed yourself as knowing literally less than nothing about the setting. Mechs do not "move like people", their armor is no different from that mounted on other vehicles and their weapons are also literally identical to that mounted on anything else with very few exceptions - those being stuff that's too fricking big to fit into a Mech.
Keep proving you've only ever played mechwarrior.
Once you see 4 mechs take on 16 main battle tanks alongside their company of infantry support and completely wipe out the enemy forces without losing a single mech, it becomes impossible to take Battletech seriously as a 'grounded' setting.
It's not much of a stretch when you consider modern tanks can do that to 50s era shitboxes today
And what magical quality makes mechs able to do that to tanks
Better sensors and fire control. If South Korea decided to strap its bleeding edge all the electronics it could on pic related, it would be able to tear Russian T-80s and T-64s a new one, and the same can be done in any setting that wants to make their cool vehicles shit on the less cool vehicles, sensible engineering be damned.
What most people don't get is that something like the Bradley is actually a pretty objectively poor chassis for a vehicle fighting other vehicles, being as tall as the M3 Lee with similar armor layout and thickness, but the superiour sensors allowed it to school the Iraqi's on-paper superior T-72 chassises en-mass for less losses than you probably have fingers on your hand.
But why doesn’t anybody bother putting modern electronics in the tanks?
Because they are very short-sighted people who would rather sell it to the black market so they can afford an additional bottle of alcohol.
Battlemechs have fusion reactors and artificial muscles. Neither of these things are magic. We already have fusion reactors, we just haven't cracked making them have a net-positive output for more than a few seconds, and we already have made superstrong artificial muscles in labs, the problem is just learning how to mass produce carbon nanotubes. Beyond that? Titanium alloys would probably do the job just fine, honestly. Battlemechs, at least the smaller ones, aren't much bigger than typical IFVs/tanks if you sat one upright on their rear, not exactly huge. Think about how huge an Su-27 or F-15 is, and how massive the forces those thing slices of metal are dealing with when one pulls 9+ gees going over 500kph while having missiles on the rails.
>Neither of these things are magic
The artificial muscles are given that they basically allow the mechs to do all sorts of bullshit while somehow being more efficient at it than a tank. While we do have artificial muscles, they don't work anywhere close to the level that they do in BT.
>Beyond that? Titanium alloys would probably do the job just fine, honestly
The armor in BT goes way beyond that, to the point that it's both incredibly strong and also incredibly lightweight and also nearly impossible to pierce with any weapons resulting in mechs having to sheer it off one layer at a time.
>. Battlemechs, at least the smaller ones, aren't much bigger than typical IFVs/tanks
The Urbanmech, one of the smaller mechs available, is typically depicted as being about 10 stories tall.
>10 stories
FRICKING WHAT. It's barely 2, 2.5 tops.
That’s not how it’s typically depicted.
>Battlemechs, at least the smaller ones, aren't much bigger than typical IFVs/tanks
Now that you mention it, that just adds more to the magic. A locust is 20 tons. A Bradley is 27 tons. A locust is frequently depicted as being the size of a house. Realistically it'd probably be as tall as a Bradley is long. So the materials mechs are made out of are lightweight magic that can resist incredible punishment. It can also run at 100kmh. A 20 ton vehicle running at that speed would shake itself apart at the joints.
Myomer muscles are fricking nuts son.
Please remember thats not a mech issue but an artist scale issue
>we just haven't cracked making them have a net-positive output for more than a few seconds
And we may never will. Force doesn't come from nowhere and you have to make up for all of the force of gravity that we can't make use of for obvious reasons somehow.
No, you can't fly planes on the moon, but rocket engines would be way more efficient there than planes are here
You'd still have air power on the moon, just without the air
That sounds pretty dumb, to have this thing permanently equipped with a pressure capsule that may or may not make any difference
>Escort
That's the Iranian navy
Battletech does it right, IMO. It brings in the artificial muscle tech that actually makes bipedal movement viable and uses ablative armor that further reinforces the tactic of being quick and not spending a lot of time in combat.
It almost feels like the tech was written first and evolved into mechs.
Even then for the mechs to be practical in Battletech they had to make almost everything else around the battlemechs lostech and then all of society had to collapse multiple times.
The lost tech problem sucks because the world has to impose limitations for gameplay. Make them significantly faster and crank up engagement ranges, and it instantly becomes a lot more grounded.
The setting is about post-apocalyptic robot knights punching each other in the face for their feudal kings. Any changes to the setting that try to make it more “grounded” are missing the entire point of the setting.
Carriers and nukes work fine, it's just that they have been around long enough people forget how insane they are.
Hell a B-52 would be a super weapon in 1940.
>why do "mega-weapons" don't work?
>why can't we have WH40K titans, or EVAs?
gravity. It must suck being brown too.
Some do work, for example ICBMs and aircraft carriers.
Mechs don't work because big, tall, and slow targets in range of ATGMs and air strikes = bad time.
because reality is fricking gay and instead we got the drone spam meta now
Google “square-cube law” and learn about the world around you.
even if it wouldn't destroy bridges it's trying to cross and sink on people's lawns, it's too valuable a single target to justify since if it gets hit once now the whole war is over and you've lost
see also: railway guns, monitor ships, aircraft carriers
>square-cube law
literally came ITT to read this
Evolutionary priniciple. If you are not seeing it used despite the tech being available to build it, or only used in a one-off capacity and never seen again, you have to assume it doesn't work in the real world.
Have a 37mm gatling ADA vehicle, a gun that make an A-10 go "whoooaaaa!" but was never actually put into service.
I know what you are saying but reality is more complex with plenty of great weapons being rejected by the military several times only for a major war to premit their production and prove they are great.
Tube SMGs, the AIM-9 and radar are all examples from the top of my head.
It was real in my mind (command and conquer generals)
What justifies its existence? What threat does it need to destroy, and can it survive other threats in turn?
The answer to all of these questions is "nothing" and "no."
You know it's funny, in the actual game titans are almost always huge point sinks that rarely make their cost back before getting focused down in the first few rounds. Really highlights why putting all your eggs in the super weapon basket is a terrible idea even in a game.
We did. They were called Battleships. The problem was that air power developed to the point they could drop armor piercing bombs that moved fast enough to punch through armored decks.
The other problem is the amount of capital such a ship consumes. They do not provide nearly as much combat power per dollar spent as an aircraft carrier and its air wing.
And that was the real death knell of the Battleship. Those big guns could chuck HE 30 nautical miles but a carrier could send fighter bombers out ten times that.
Airpower wasn't the problem, since you still needed a stupid amount of aircraft and losses to take it out due to the inaccuracy of bombing and density of AAA. The issue was guided weapons, which increased lethality by a crazy degree on both sides
Nice escort.
Why do officers still join if a long and successful career where they make general rank is off the table if they didn’t go to West Point? What is the point? You already have a degree. You don’t need the GI bill.
They get a pension in their 40's.
They don’t though.
https://myarmybenefits.us.army.mil/Benefit-Library/Federal-Benefits/Retired-Pay?serv=128
Yeah they do anon, plus if they want to work more they get that pension plus big bucks working for some contractor.
Try getting a job with a history degree right out of college.
Because the real world doesn't have plascrete, plasteel, adamantium, void shields, portable fusion reactors, machine spirits, mind meld links, literal actual power of belief or any of the other thousand things needed to make a godmachine walk.
Most important among those are
1: we do not have materials that are strong enough to support a giant combat walker without collapsing under it's own weight
2: we do not have an adequate energy supply system for one
3: we do not have shield envelopes which are necessary since without them you could just turn a macro cannon towards the legs of a titan and bump it on it's arse.
Once we solve those then maybe, MAYBE you could build one. But odds are it'd be more efficient to use a dispersed force.
>1: we do not have materials that are strong enough to support a giant combat walker without collapsing under it's own weight
>2: we do not have an adequate energy supply system for one
we actually do but they're not the reason mecha are stupid or why large capitol ships were phased out
more modern battletech installments have made non-mechs more dangerous by letting you throw mech weapons onto them. they're still not good but if you want a cooperative narrative campaign and to ever fight something not another mech wing it's feasible now
>more weak points
>less space efficent
>larger profile
>less armor
>physics
As opposed to what happens in video games, being bigger doesn't give you more hp. This thing would be as easy to cripple as a machine ten times smaller.
Superweapons work, you just haven't been paying attention.
I think they meant super-sized weapons
granted i don't think people normally realize that Ohio's and soon to be Columbias are a bit over half the length of a carrier
https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/a1-a2-grammar/question-forms
because anti-armor weapons are incredibly effective and way cheaper. most fictional settings work under the rule that these "mega-weapons" are somehow impervious to anything not mounted to another mech.
there simply isn't any kind of material strong enough to make something like that
EVAs and Titans use bullshit science energy shields
yeah, I know. of course when I started this thread I wasn't asking why tanks aren't guided by omnissiah or when we will develop AT fields. I was asking about why don't we have big ass war machines
I've been answered
In 40k terms, a warlord titan costs 3,500pts. A guardsman is 6pts. You could field 583 guardsmen against a single Warlord titan. 583 guardsmen will hold all of the boards objectives for five round without the titan being able to kill all of them.
War is logistics. Make you numbers work better than your opponents and you win.
why aren't anti-titan mines a thing in 40k? maybe hundreds of krak or melta mines the size of cars would work
Eeh, there SORT OF is. There are things like nuclear mines. The issue with that concept becomes that the mine sites are so obvious at the size necessary to cause a collapse in a titan void shield array. Any infantry would be able to spot that there's frickery afoot because there's a spot of disturbed ground the size of a bungalow or a big ol bomb tube, and most machines would be able to pick it up on auspex arrays.
That's sort of why a titan grade force is needed to defeat a titan, by the way - the void shields. You need a concentration of power high enough to punch clean through or overload the void shields and still have the energy to bust through armor and vitals, and it's not just hogh grade steel, it's future bullshittium.
Void shields by the way, are projected shoelds that essentially dissipate what is shot at them into another dimension entirely.
It’s important to remember that superheavy tanks were originally the “cheaper” counter for titan sized threats and that titans were far, far more common before the horus heresy because of how they we’re running up against frickhuge existential threats to humanity like the rangdan xenocides. The reason they’re uncommon obscenities they are in 40k are because they killed all the mega threats they were originally designed for then the titan houses proceeded to murder each other so hard during the horus heresy that they never recovered+were never needed in such large numbers again
There are lots of mega weapons. Aircraft carriers and battlecruisers are a good example. The B2 Spirit and Tu-160 are both pretty big too.
The thing about "mega-weapons" is that they demand that you dominate the battlefield before you use them, or else they get instantly targeted and destroyed.
????
Make the Navy great again.
because bigger shit like titans will need to have very specific enviroments for them to even have a chance at operating well, trying to operate it in something with even slightly loose ground will be a death sentense, then there is the fact it would be a massive hit meat target especially in the joins which will be hard to replace, then you have the killing blow being there are other machines that can do the same job but at a better cost efficiency
In 40k the crazy weapons mainly exist because
>Technology is obscenely advanced even if it is backwards in-setting (DAOT humans were yeeting black holes around)
>Making the impractical practical for the sake of religion is the mechanicus’ specialty and titans use the gravity tech used to generate gravity on starships and make hovercraft to artificially carry some of their weight and violate the square cube law. Why? Because a walking icon of the omnissiah is worth it.
>xenos did it too and warranted a response during the dark age of technology and both knight and titan houses were established as a response to protect human settlements from similarly ridiculously OP threats.
Please remember too that the best titans ever will still get fricked on by a few anti-titan superheavy tanks and the best superheavy tanks will also get fricked on by a squad of guardsmen with melta guns hiding in a ruin.
The dark age of mankind makes no sense in the lore. Every xenos race treats humankind as some new upstart that doesn't understand technology, but 20k years before the setting, humanity owned almost all of the galaxy and was in a golden age of technology where a lot of the shit they had was basically so advanced that it may as well have been magic until the AI rebelled and the big warpstorm cut everyone off. Humanity in the present setting deals with the xenos fine, but they would have absolutely destroyed them in the past. The great crusade didn't even claim everything they lost in both territory and technology.
It's only the Eldar and Necrons that treat humans that way, and they're justified to do so. The humans don't understand technology anymore, it doesn't matter if they did in the past.
Every other alien race that isn't part of the model line has either been exterminated by humanity or is in the process of being exterminated
The Eldar utterly fricked when it came to technology and then literally fricked themselves to obscurity
Any race with technological parity or psychic mastery, typically in the form of cosmic horrors far worse than the eldar, was wiped out by crusade era humanity. The rangdan xenocides almost destroyed the Imperium, required 3 full legions and elements from more, and possibly destroyed the 11th legion and its implied one of the missing primarch’s demise involved the Rangdan. There’s also the small detail of humanity’s AI dependent tech getting corrupted by chaos and rebelling with permanent results into modern 40k where code from the war of iron turned the data vaults of mars into a death trap/corrupted a lot of data, the occasional men of iron encountered are extremely dangerous and at least one was in control of a titan with a daemon bound to it, and inefficient servitors are around as a bandaid solution because lobotomized human brains are still technically people with souls and can’t get corrupted so easily
The scale of technological development in 40k is pretty fricked due to multiple races having gone through multiple apocalypse level events, anon.
Top of the list: necrons. Literal robot fellas, unparalelled masters of the physical.
Then there's the eldar, psychic masters that can sing magic bones into existence and at their height did so enough to make entire world ships, and who inherited a lot of the tech of the old ones, who had rough parity with the necrons tech wise at both their heights during the war in heaven.
Then there's DAOT humanity, who are younger than both necron and eldar by several ages, and still swung enough technodick to have an uneasy peace with the eldar before the birth of slaanesh.
THEN you have current era humanity using the scraps they recovered after thousands of years after the fall of humanity.
DAOT humanity could probably deal with the reemerging necrons and could frick up the current eldar, but that's because the necrons are still drowzy and hungover, and the eldar rendered themselves quadraplegic on an empire scale. And even then, daot humanity would have issues with things like the nids.
Humanity ARE a young race compared to the eldar and the necron, we were banging rocks together when the war in heaven was raging between the necron and the old ones, and in the current setting humanity IS fricking moronic with tech, because much like the eldar humanity got kneecapped by their own actions, though not as severely.
Oh, and "deals with xenos fine"
The orks, a degenerated remnant of one of the species made by the old ones, have proved empire-threateningly powerful threats multiple times, including threatening terra with a fricking attack moon.
The tyranids have been steadily munching on human worlds.
A necron tomb awakening is a direct write-off for at minimum the solar system and more likely an entire subsector.
The eldar don't matter though.
And that's not mentioning the threat of chaos, which recently ripped the galaxy in two.
The empire is not dealing with the xenos 'just fine'. As another anon mentioned, the rangda almost ended not only the crusades but the whole imperium during it's resurgence.
>we were banging rocks together when the war in heaven was raging between the necron and the old ones
It was 60 million years ago iirc, which means we had dinosaurs back then.
Main reason i went with banging rocks is due to the emperor being created by the joining of the shamans to act as a safeguard for earth against warp predators. You're probably right though, "warp's fricked" has a pretty wide timespan to it
i like the idea that the emperor was some daot experiment to deal with the increasing problems with the warp and chaos interfering with human technology
I feel the same way, the whole "the Emperor is really 50k years old" doesn't hold water when you read about the utterly moronic things that the Emperor did.
>Men of Stone
The current lore of "they're actually notAI! while being AI" is fricking stupid. Men of Stone should be a euphemism for unmodified humans or "stone age genetics". Men of Gold are/were the elite of the DAoT humanity and were also a big reason why everything went to shit.
Weren't men of Gold just Humans from earth who became the elite, then the men of stone were humans they altered for space travel and colonisation who while low class at first inevitably became the main branch of humanity since they were the ones colonising everything and then they made the men of iron who were robots to do everything else and they became the dominant ones. That whole chunk of the lore reminds me of Hyperion with men of gold being the Hegemony, the Ousters being the men of stone adapted for space and the technocore being the AI that rebelled.
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Men_of_Stone
Again, the lore is pretty fricking dumb.
>why the Men of Iron rebelled
I'd love to see a glimpse, not a whole other Horus Heresy of the DAoT and the only reason we survived was because half of the MOI stayed loyal. If the entirety of the AI decided to wipe out humans it would have been the same as all 20 Primarchs and their legions deciding to wipe out humanity, there would have been no war, just a long slow genocide.
>I'd love to see a glimpse
Nah dude, I've learnt my lesson from Dune. Keep the mysterious past AI rebellion mysterious. It's always better in your head. Considering 40k takes that aspect of its law straight from Dune, it's done a much better job of keeping it interesting than Herbert Jnr did with his books.
>Dune
Yeah, but on the flip side the Horus Hersey books.
>headcanon
Chaos frickery. They had the most to gain utterly fricking human civilization and coincides with psykers.
>Yeah, but on the flip side the Horus Hersey books.
Horus heresy doesn't go too far back, but yeah I'm sure some make the argument that having a 70 book series about the heresy took away a lot of the mystery of them. I don't mind it, but I feel like them writing the AI rebellion might step too far out of 40k. I suppose they could do a new game with it.
>It was 60 million years ago iirc, which means we had dinosaurs back then.
So did the eldar, and they still do, they ride them like horses.
>doesn't think the Flintstones and 40k are the same universe
>but 20k years before the setting, humanity owned almost all of the galaxy and was in a golden age of technology where a lot of the shit they had was basically so advanced that it may as well have been magic
Lore is completely fricked and inconsistent before 30th millennium so it's hard to get a full picture. But in general, as I understand it at least
>DET period wasn't that much advanced, they were cool, but everyone sticks to very few examples of super-tech like reality eating planet sized mech-worms or smth like that and forgets that they mainly relied on the same tech that Imperium uncovers in STC, with only difference being that they could freely produce very best of those designs, not just bottom of the barrel. Their tech was nothing like Necrons, which is actual fricking magic.
>Humans didn't actually rule all the galaxy at that time, Eldar did. Eldar were also at the peak of their civilization during DET but with a few dozen millions years of headstart over humans, and unlike humans at the time they knew magic, not technology but literal warp magic which humans only recently began to uncover, with only saving grace for others being that by the nature of their society they didn't fricking care about anything. And they also fell for ultimately the same reason that DET humans did - they automated too much of their actual labor and were fricked over by the excess from it.
>Absolutely everything was fricked up by Slaanesh, universe before and after it are two very different levels of fricked up. After 25k not just humans, but basically whole galaxy lives in a space scale post-apocalypse. Which is a major reason why Emperor was able to conquer whole galaxy in the first place, as by that point it was pretty much wiped out and it was a blank start for everyone and he just jumped on the train first.
>Humans didn't actually rule all the galaxy at that time, Eldar did
The great crusade's goal is literally reuniting what they lost and they never even achieved that. Humans had complete control and there are thousands of branches of humanity and offshoot civilisations because of it. Eldar ruled the galaxy way further back than that. By the the point of their collapse that caused the big warpstorm, they'd completely withdrawn for hedonistic pursuits and lost their empire and humanity had filled the vacuum.
>Humans had complete control and there are thousands of branches of humanity and offshoot civilisations because of it.
They may have colonized most of it, but it doesn't mean they ruled all of it just like Imperium does, we don't even know if they had a single government to actually rule over with or just lived in autonomous enclaves and were like less aggressive orks for everyone around. Moreover we can't even tell what amount of galaxy was colonized by pre-imperium humanity and what is done by Imperium in many thousands years of its dominance over the galaxy. Imperium in 40k might as well have the most amount of humans around there ever lived.
As I said, people clinge to very few sentences describing extremes and ignore how incredibly underdeveloped overall that period of time is.
Eldar ruled what would become the eye of terror, cause Slaanesh.
The eye enveloped their core worlds, not all their inhabited worlds. There's shitloads of maiden worlds now inhabited by humanity, not to mention the exodite planets.
The eldar empire at it's height was anywhere from tens of thousands to ten million worlds, most of them classed as habitable worlds, so not desert rocks or atmo-less chunks.
To compare, the present imperium is quoted at around one million, and that's with settling anything that can give value, atmo and habitability be damned.
Given that the eldar had... approximately the entire span of the galaxy's existence, while the age of technology spanned M15 to around M25, it makes zero sense for the still-tech-inferior humanity to rival the aeldari in size.
At most I'd put daot humanity at 3mil planets with eldar closer to 5-10 million worlds before the fall of either.
And keep in mind, the eldar reproduced pretty fricking fast before they fricked so hard their dicks shriveled.
>humanity owned almost all of the galaxy
Nope, that was the Eldar before their fall. Golden Age humanity compared to them, at best, like the Tau compare to the IoM.
>like the Tau compare to the IoM.
Don't be absurd. We know what the galaxy looks like. Even with how everything has gone to shit, the Imperium still has most of it. The current Imperium is smaller than it was post crusade and that was smaller than it was during the dark age of tech. The size of the galaxy doesn't just get bigger when the eldar are in control of it to prove your point.
If I remember the lore correctly, it tends to take 3 Shadowswords ambushing a Warhound to bring it down effectively while larger titans take considerably more than that between their void shields and the sheer amount of armor and redundant internals they have.
40k is gay and for children
So are you, you'd think you'd love it.
It's just legs are hard anon, modern tank weigh 70 tons (the same as decent sized mechs in battletech), we have giant war machines, planes like f-15 weigh ~20 tons and move at mach 2 like muh armored core. Mecha are cool because were autistic as shit and anthro is fun, but that doesn't amke the real shit not cool too.
I like the super weapons that show up in the Ace Combat series
If only lasers were good enough to make most of them even halfway real.
Closest thing we had for Titans were battleships, and they died out primarily because destroying them, while still difficult, was infinitely easier than building them.
So to get mega-weapons back into meta we would need one of two things: either our offensive capabilities should regress greatly to the point where hulking metal monstrosity would have little to fear on the battlefield, or it should become so cheap to produce them that losing them left and right becomes acceptable.
The relationship between economies of scale and diminishing return on investment. Basically, the smaller a production run is, the less cost-effective each individual unit of the production run will be. Likewise, increasing the complexity of a construction project will always increase cost at a higher rate than it increases performance.
As a result, it is a general rule that, for the same amount of money/resources it costs to build one unique superweapon, your enemy will always be able to built enough mass-produced ordinary weapons to overcome that superweapon.
Offense > defense at the moment, so you get a better return from having your lethality distributed so that the enemy can't cripple you with a single missile. Stealth is also better then the tradeoffs in defense, and big things are harder to make stealthy.
Diversifying your weapons is simply better, especially due to the fact that the increase of localized firepower quickly caps out or is negligible to having more total assets. Would you rather have one big nuke that can flatten a country or a thousand city sized small nukes that can overcome countermeasures, approach target from multiple directions, surgically strike targets and be just as effective as the big superweapon?
Not even taking basic physics into account in this case, just generally the idea of focusing on a single megaweapon.
Even if you can somehow overcome all the physics problems you'll still end up with something that isn't any better than at doing its job than something much smaller and cheaper.
I mean, take an F-16 for example. That thing required 17 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight. That's for a relatively small fighter. What sort of maintenance do you think a 40k knight or a titan might require? Would they be any better at giving fire support than a multi-role aircraft? Why waste your time mounting a gun of missiles on some complicated piece of machinery when you can stick it on a tank or a truck. The battleship is a great example of this. It's a giant, expensive, heavily armed and armored ship that ultimately end up lobbing the same missiles that the cheaper smaller destroyers do. So what's the point?
The real world has budgets. Fiction writers aim for selling a vibe and they can write whatever the frick they want.
Because they are moronic, expensive, and easier to shoot at. Sorry anon, I wish things were different.
mecha wouldn't work in real life because of ground pressure
they would sink
This can be mitigated with sufficiently advanced lightweight materials. The real failing of mechs is mechanical complexity and size for their capability, which occupies a lousy middle ground between what a tank and attack helicopter can do.
yet elephants, dinosaurs etc don't sink
If you doubled an elephant's size (volume) you'd quadruple it's weight, making it need much larger feet. They also aren't made of steel and fueled by nuclear reactors full of heavy elements.
There's a reason tanks have wide treads, if you mounted a bob-semple on legs you'd need either massive feet or a lot of them.
loser mentality
>why do "mega-weapons" don't work?
The third world gaining access to the internet is the greatest tragedy of our time.
Okay. I've written a paper about this but long story short minus graphs.
Mankind can't make materials strong enough cheaply yet and mankind hasn't created batteries with the energy density yet. If things continue on the same path by 2050 mech suits will first start being tested by 2070 in production. We are very close to doing it at a very basic level but an outside power source is still needed for extensive work and neural link isn't fully evolved. Carbon 60 most likely has to become mass produced
Also
40 k is set in around 41500 ad
Timeline roughly for humanity from now
Now -5000 ad humanity slowly conquering the solar system
5000-15000
Humanity starts taking solar systems with slower than light generation ships
15000-20000 robots becoming more sentient technology advanced at extreme rate humanity is limited by speed of light only
20000 warp travel is discovered. The warp is a higher dimension created the lower dimensions it allows faster than light travel.
20000-25000 ad humanities golden age. Millions of planets colonized it's start trek quadrillions of humans, extra galactic travel being planned
25000-30000 the fall and dark age
Robots rebel. Humans with the ability to plug into the war become able to alter reality at will using it's power are born after the Terminator war. Then the mutants war. The warp be becomes usable all of the planets are cut off from each other in faster than light. Huge chunks starve.
28000 emperor pops up. Begins on devasted earth uniting humanity. Created 20 clones of himself with different aspects put in. They are scatter to the starts by chaos. He starts his great crusade to unite all of humanity. He nearly finished. He's making a new method of FTL and a place for humanity to hide until the coming war ends. His son horus who was right rebels and nearly kills him. The emperor backstabs him and kills him then they put his body on this thing that guides humanity's survivors through the war
40000 ad ever thing sucks thanks to the emperor beating horus. Spacd bugs from outside the galaxy want to eat everything, fungus wants to kill everyone, Egyptians who can't die in robot suits, mecha communist . Plus elves and vampire aliens.
Really the current setting is everything is bad. The emperor screwed humanity. Everyone is waiting on the hero / Christ figure Horus to come back right now it's some random demon prince named Guillman and Leon the Liger (a homodemon) returning. They are the evil emperor clones.
True that. Without horus the galaxy will burn. They act like praying to the emperor will save them but we all know tzenitch is where it's at.
Shut up Magnus, you did literally everything wrong.
It honestly feels like it would take less than 10000 years for sentient robots to be invented. I imagine self-aware AI would be a thing as early as the late 2nd millennium.
There's actually another thread up about big dick gunboats with the funny bit about ships that got tested and flipped/sank/failed to do anything of value.
Similar thing with mega weapons, a big gun with a slow rate of fire loses to lots of smaller guns that can collectively have a huge rate of fire unless you really need the larger bullet.
At relative scales, ofc.
W40k gets a pass since it’s basically “our technology is moronic because this is all we have blueprints for and researching new designs is HERESY” so there’s no way to really develop weapons to perform super specific roles so instead you get
>meat
>super human meat
>walker
>treads
>treads but moar guns
>walker but HUEG
Because when a "mega weapon" does work, it stops being a mega weapon and starts being a standard weapon. Familiarity breeds contempt.
>mega-weapons
They are called nuclear weapons
God I miss when Warhammer 40k was smart enough to acknowledge that a couple fighter bombers with railguns strapped to them is enough to take out a Titan worth a million times their cost in resources.
The largest they ever took down was a warhound. Reavers and Warlords have enough void shields and heavy weapons to swat anything smaller than a Manta without breaking stride.
You're leaving out how much of a tech advantage those mechs had on the tanks, I see.
>You're leaving out how much of a tech advantage those mechs had on the tanks
None? Other than myomer every single piece of technology on the Battlemech would've also been available for tanks.
Myomer, fusion engines, brand new energy weapons and autocanons, and the newest generation of armor against tanks that had the equivalent of AC-2s.
No they weren't.
>fusion engines
Used by tanks
>brand new energy weapons and autocanons
Used by tanks
>and the newest generation of armor
Used by tanks
>No they weren't.
Yes they were. The Merkava was a top of the line tank at the time, and it was destroyed effortlessly by mechs by the dozens even when it was supported by infantry and the mechs were alone and outnumbered 4 to 1.
So let me get this straight:
You're saying that new energy weapons, AND autocannons, AND armor, AND fusion engines, AND myomer was all invented AT THE EXACT SAME TIME, and not only that, but it was all put together in a GIANT ROBOT before ANYBODY in the entire universe thought to put ANY of these technologies into a tank?
The Mackie (the first Battlemech) was literally a case of "let's throw all of our experimental next-gen shit onto a single plattform" at the end of a like 20-year period of extremely high military R&D spending by the state, done under immense secrecy.
It was basically the HMS Dreadnought of its time, only even more extreme and designed from ground up to be a propaganda piece intended to shock&awe the other interstellar powers into backing off from messing with the Terran Hegemony. (And much like Dreadnought it backfired hilariously, only intensifying the arms race it was supposed to decisively win.) So when it came out it stomped all over over last-gen systems and cemented itself a legend that ended up persisting even when all these next-gen technologies were then applies to tanks, AFVs etc.and also revolutionized them.
Based moron not realizing that entire titan v Tau Airforce fight was a riff on the Battle of Malaya.
I'd say it more resembles the Battle of the Bulge.
The Titan STCs were developed when humanity was 10000+ years into their Star Trek/Gunbuster future and the fricking Eldar, who had ruled the galaxy for millions of years, had a truce to not frick with them. Orks, in their quintillions, did not want to fight them despite living for battle, because having your entire army having your flesh atomized in seconds by a planet-sized nanoswarm cloud was not "fun." The war between mankind and their abominable intelligence saw the deployment of weapons the size of saturn's rings called "sun snuffers." A handful of fighter bombers should not be a threat to titans, because they are technological gods of the battlefield.
>A handful of fighter bombers should not be a threat to titans, because they are technological gods of the battlefield.
They WERE gods of the battlefield. Then they got the Russian treatment and sat in a warehouse for 10,000 years with almost no proper maintenance.
I love how all human technology above a certain size in 40K has to also be a gothic cathedral.
"I'm just saying I don't think they're necessary..."
"Building a ship without spires or 10 story statues is tech Heresy and punishable by immediate execution."
As has been stated already, with the titans those were Ad mech, AKA cult of the machine god creations to start with, who see every piece of technology as a part of their god, so it makes sense that they would put a church on the giant robots back so they can worship it while they're also using it to blast the omnissiah's enemies into radioactive vapor.
*Playing in the background*
In the case of mechs it's mainly down to the fact that getting it to balance and walk is a very complicated thing to get a machine to do especially compared to just giving it wheels or similar. Once they manage it to a reaonabe level with smaller bots though as they are starting to then you may possibly see it in scaled up applications as well.
They do work.
These threads always feel like battleship threads. Where we yell at the fact that aircraft and missiles exist to stomp extremely large objects apart from very specific situations.
You know the answers so just pretend what you think is cool then be happy.
does the Gun Devil count as a weapon?
aircraft carriers get pretty beefy, but doesn't have the same steez as the gustav gun
I hope some of you guys get the chance to read titanicus some time. It paints a very different picture of titian on titian and titian vs anything else combat then what most people here are discussing.
The israelites in charge would rather save a dime than push the bodacious awesomeness of man’s war machines to its destiny.
Because material characteristics and logistics and cost and manpower don't scale well to that size.
Also big target for tiny effective munitions that are everywhere today.
If you want code:geass style slightly-larger-than-tank mechs you still have the worry about maintenance and reliability and unit cost and vulnerability that doesn't pay off in real-life mobility... yet...
Square cube law
>Another mech thread
I think we have had this conversation before.
Only mechs feasible in military use are spider mechs and even those would be lightly armored or unarmored gun platforms for mountains.
For each megaweapon you can build at least a hundred regular weapons and those hundred regular weapons will always beat one megaweapon
bigger machine = bigger target
bigger target = gets hit more often + slower
gets hit more often + slower = dies faster
making a good weapon is a balance of small * capability + protection
All those arguments are relatively mute when you spam AA placements and escorts IRL. US supercarriers for example, and the schwerer gustav having two entire AA battalions. 40k Titanpunk warfare often also involved multiple elements in field. Occasional lucky hits IRL (mostly from subs, but also theoretically a 200+ missile swarm on a US carrier) can get through in drills but they are the exception and not the rule.
Well the schwere gustav ended up being largely a waste of resources, and the carrier, although big, ends up being useful because it's a transport for many, much tinier vehicles.
The gustav pacified the southeastern front for the entire duration it was there. And it was never captured or disabled by enemy action despite being moved by man laid rail. You've fallen for the israelitelaid.
It fired 47 shots in its entire lifetime. It's unlikely it pacified anything let along an entire front.
It destroyed the most fortified positions on Earth at the time unopposed by counter battery fire. As usual in WW2 the German advance was stopped by supply shortages and over extension of its MIC capabilities across 2000 miles of front.
>It destroyed the most fortified positions on Earth at the time
Which would be amazing...except the German army just ended up going around those fortifications anyways so that ended up being a complete waste of time and ordinance.
It actually destroyed those forts in Sevastapol. Along with the 600mm guns and bombing. Two consecutively placed shots from the gustav would penetrate up to 60 ft of solid reinforced concrete and up to 100 ft of soil. If they built the langer gustav early they could hold siege line at 100 km.
And was destroying a couple of outdated forts really worth all the resources they desperately needed for regular artillery? They weren't exactly winning the artillery war.
What part of "most fortified positions on Earth at the time" are you not understanding. Their first assaults on them failed. The follow up with the heavy guns completely turned sevastopol to wasteland. Similar to how a couple of US battleship guns could waste everything within range and replicate 100+ bombing runs of damage in a few salvos in Korea and Japan.
okay but how was that more useful then just going around them
They're really not. US super carriers are big, but they're big because that's the minimum size required for them to be effective since you just need so much space for a large enough fighter wing to be stored and worked on. There's a reason the US has double digit carriers instead of 5 super big ones protected by even more escorts. Spending your money on a single vehicle means that it being down for maintenance cripples you much more then if you have two which you can rotate, for example.
Where does anyone say that such constructs must be limited to single vehicles. The US had no less than 90 16" guns built for 10 battleships, not to mention dozens of carriers in field in ww2. All sides had a frickton of huge guns. As stand alones nothing can survive in field, not even small fighters in contested airspace without backup. The utility of mega constructs comes from their niche roles and relies upon the industrial might of the hosting nation being able to allow and sustain production and maintenance, and secondarily relies upon the support structure in field. When these combos are met, literally no coastal fortress or land fortress in the world within range of those weapons were able to survive (ie the point of the mega constructs). For example a single 9 gun 16" battleship in the USN during ww2 was able to send 61 tons of ordnance into a target at range in 5 full ship sequenced salvos. The philosophy of mega constructs is only realistic for nation with the industrial and support structure to build, sustain, and protect them. But when they are built and protected then fielded, they are monsters a tier above anything else.
does anyone say that such constructs must be limited to single vehicles.
it's implicit in the op since wh40k titans, EVAs, etc. are mostly limited run items that in the LORE are rare one-offs each and even in games are generally the kind of thing you field maybe one of (and even in games it's usually better to have a larger number of more economic assets anyway so your entire gameplan isn't fricked when one unit gets destroyed/disabled lol)
>and even in games it's usually better to have a larger number of more economic assets anyway
That is INTENSELY dependent on edition. In some fielding a titan just means "This side of the table is mine now, go home"
aren't titans only legal in Apocalypse anyway, which requires a second mortgage just to think about without GW suing you?
iirc there's rules for warhounds at normal scale but reavers and up are apoc only
Even if a superweapon like that was practical, it wouldn’t look like a Titan, it would look more like a Bolo.
The biggest reoccuring arguments are that they are easy to take out with cheaper stuff and that you'd rather have a bunch of cheaper stuff instead of one big frick off toy to play with. Both are valid arguments in a sense but also really moronic because it's never a decision of either this or that. It's always supplementing one with the other because neither works on it's own. The real reason why Battlemechs or Titans aren't a thing is the very first post. Physics. It's impossible to make them at this point and we only have this planet to fight over as of now. If that context should ever change then supplementing an army with a titan would be a valid investment since one titan could easily threaten many solar systems into submission without any bloodshed same as an airplane carrier strike group can do with countries right now.
Well even if we could make them, the prerequisite technologies that would make them possible would make other weapons even better. The only reason Battlemechs and Titans even work in their own setting is because both settings have modern computing having gone the way of the dodo, so any sort of long-range precision shots are nigh impossible.
How are you going to take and hold ground with long-range precision shots? They're worthless if the enemy isn't forced to bundle up somewhere which they only are if there's a significant threat in the vicinity which would be a ground troop push in combination with smaller more agile vehicles who enable the larger more capable vehicles to gain and hold ground and threaten strategically significant positions that are virtually impossible to take without them.
>How are you going to take and hold ground with long-range precision shots?
By using those long-range precision shots to clear out the enemy, then move up, then clear them out even further, same way we do IRL.
Why do you cut off the second part of my post just to say the same thing but pretend that it disagrees with me? Long-range precision shots or tanks don't take cities anyways. A mobile weapon platform that can walk through buildings might very well do though. Especially cities in the wh40k universe that can hold billions of people.
>A mobile weapon platform that can walk through buildings might very well do though.
A mech can’t walk through a building, it’s too big. Only infantry can do that.
Mechs can walk *through* a building, infantry can walk *into* a building. Big difference.
A tank can roll through a building too.
No, it can't.
Yes it can, pretty easily in fact.
I disagree.
Tanks disagree with you
Quantity is a quality all its own
Russia would disagree
>barrel hits concrete rebar
>barrel is now misaligned
>anon goes to shoot
>blows out his barrel and is now entirely useless for the rest of the battle
OP mentioned 40k and Titans (especially the monstrously big ones) are extremely rare. Even Knights/smaller titans are quite rare. In the Cain books theres a quote that one character went most of their career without ever seeing one until they were a general in the guard.
>barrel hits concrete rebar
>barrel is now misaligned
Mechs would have barrels too. Barrels which would likely hit things and get misaligned.
HEY MECHJOCKS
TWENTY VTOLS WITH AC2S INBOUND
homosexual
Children want to buy toys associated with their favorite franchise. The bigger and flashier the toy, the more it sells for, and the more likely it is to break and need to be bought again. That’s it. All the meme shit about how giant mechs could be practical is just bullshit made up to appease the older demographic who still want to buy those toys.
That would sense if not for the fact that neither Warhammer nor Battletech have ever been aimed at kids.
They’re aimed at manchildren, which is basically the same thing
It's ironic because in WH40k, most of the weapons and vehicles are specifically stated to be complete ass compared to what was available a few millennia ago in universe, and tech didn't even get that much better between the 21st century and 38000 or whatever
>tech didn't even get that much better between the 21st century and 38000 or whatever
There is an arc mechanicus whose main weapon sends the target a tenth of a second back in time, causing it to catastrophically fuse with its past self.
there is also literal magic in the setting
Yeah but that's not an example of it. Zero warp shit involved.
still ive never heard of this weapon so im gonna assume it's from the only questionably canon new xcom ripoff game
>in 40k
>entire stories of titans being boarded and sabotaged from the inside, legs targeted and dropped or just being ground down by artillery fire
As cool as this shit is, when it comes to reality, the final question is always over efficiency. Is this wunderweapon the most efficient way to achieve the objective. Weapons have their place in war, a tank has its role and as a result so too does the ATGM. The infantryman has his role and thus so too does the landmine or mortar. What role does a massive walker fill?
Can it traverse terrain as well as armoured vehicles? Can it rain down death better than artillery sat 10 miles away? Can it provide intelligence and recon better than a drone or satellite. It all comes down to if the cost justifies the utility.
Still itd be fricking ace to pilot one of these.
itd be fricking ace to pilot one of these.
having played a lot of gmod let me tell you that stompy mechs are absolute ass to pilot. flying ZoE/Macross/Gundam style space mechs are where the hotness is
In what universe is gmod a good representation of mech combat?
You have to build the mech yourself, it responds to physics reasonably, and the only real world concern you don't have are power sources and the mech sinking in soft ground. But you can still just drive a baja buggy into its legs to topple it, the weapons being high-mounted makes it hard to shoot at things close to you, and they're ponderously slow if you don't want to trip over a small ramp and go flying into a lake.
Greetings, anons. I bring to you a lance of Annihilators each armed with eight light AC/2s. Prepare to CLANG.
late to the party
basically weight increases so much faster than volume that the bigger it gets the harder (or comically expensive) it gets to move them
You don't have to be a genius to figure out that a $200 drone and a box of frags is much more cost effective than a fricking slow-moving, easy-to-break, titan thing. Are you fricking having me on?
Pretty much every setting that uses these superweapons ironically has to make their tech more primitive in a lot of ways to make it work, because if any other technology is also allowed to advance other than the ones that specifically make the superweapons work then the superweapons would no longer be superweapons but instead just be garbage. This is also why so many settings that employ these superweapons have such shitty economies, because it’s easier to justify using your super special mech that’s been passed down for generations when cheaper more pragmatic stuff can’t be produced because economies of scale don’t exist anymore.