Why not make Moble Suits?

You know one of the best ideas for a uav mech ive seen was in a film. In terminator 3 those early terminators, the T-1. Tracks like a tank probably quite quick on open terrain, expendable and probably A.I programmable in the current day. Oh and not to mention the 2 miniguns on each side.

However these "T-1's" could be outfitted with anti-tank, anti-air,sniper equipment, mine laying, artillery laser markers etc etc. The possibilities for those sort of platforms are quite long. The army could make just the mech base i.e main body and have the desired attachments.

Like I said before, its an absurdly easy target, it will never have the armor to stop the rounds people will be shooting at it, and *Cannot* mount a tank gun or field gun of any effective size. They simply have too much recoil. You need a solid firing platform for them, and the armor to defend them, thus, no walking robots.


Never assume the enemy doesnt have a class of weaponry at their disposal. Even loosely organized militia can get their hands on rifles, HMGs, and AT weapons. They often have mortars and mines. They can even get their hands on artillery pieces, rockets, and light armor vehicles. Those rebels also know very well how to use their equipment most effectively, especially against large targets like armor, which was proven so effectively in Chechnya.

Against a real army, there is no upper limit on the size of shells being shot at you. Thus, you couldnt hope to defend such a obvious target.

"Cannot* mount a tank gun or field gun of any effective size. They simply have too much recoil. "

I beg to differ. Here is small scale of what might become something bigger and they are already using them in Iraq.

LINK

haha ... this thread reminds me alot of the ones in anime forums ... as in the "Can we have a Gundam?" or ... "Are the mech from Full Metal Panic viable?"

Well, from a scientific and technological standpoint, it is perhaps feasible to create a very crude humanoid "mech" ... but it would be nothing like the hyper responsive and quick mechs portrayed in anime.

The most limiting problems would be in the following:

1. Power source -

Nuclear? Unfortunately upright locomotion for such a massive object is at odds with our gravity and consequently very energy intensive.

2. Control interface

Direct human interface? Reaction times will be critical for movement ... compounded by the forces of mass at rest and inertial ... and incidental g forces induced by battle.

3. Overall Complexity

Incredibly complex subsystems just to walk, let alone the intricacies of combat maneuvering

4. Cost

Given even optomistic costs per unit, a battlemech would be expensive ... probably extremely expensive ... as compared to the numbers and types of weapons that can damage it or take it out ....

5. Limitations in physics

As seen with any large manmade vehicle, a battle mech of say 50 - 100 tons would encounter the problems of detection from noise, vibration, line of sight, along with the host of established means ... infrared, electromagnetic signature etc.

Bottom line is that with the best of todays technologies it is theoretically possible to make a mecha that would terrorize unarmed or poorly armed individuals ... but for such a vehicle to go against todays conventional tech? ... a very expensive metal coffin.

I beg to differ. Here is small scale of what might become something bigger and they are already using them in Iraq.

It is firing a missile, which has no recoil.

a tank gun has tremendous recoil, too much for most APC's to mount.

I used to feel the same way about mechs and gundams; something that would be cool if possible.

All the points made are valid, but if you do more research into each area, you quickly learn that its not all that complicated to build a gundam type suit, it does however require a tremendous about of work and effort.

Being a gundam fan myself, as a personal project, I'm going to take on the challenge of building a 25-30 ft prototype. I have a pretty good plan as to how i'm going to do this:

1) design the mobile suit skeleton frame
2) build a 1:2 scale prototype skeleton frame
3) Construct a 1:1 scale cockpit
4) Install walking system --> Testing

Those are my 4 major goals that i need to accomplish before I can think of anything else. I'll let you guys know when i get everything together and build a site.

raideur if u were on about me sayin anti tank, anti air capabilities, i meant missile/rocket silos not guns

well as peeps are sayin about power ive been on a construction site where they had a small dumper on tracks. It an on a small 50cc motor and could run for hours while using its hydraulics and moving.

besides everyone is kinda goin on as if mechs would be sent out to frontlines for months straight non stop. All modern war vehicles still have to be refueled too. Its just size/mileage efficiency we have to work out.

Bipedal walking robots have major problems with stability and cannot handle rough ground. This is bad enough for miniature robots like Asimo, but far worse for large machines. It is going to need very fast reactions just to stay upright. One could easily see such a machine falling over and not being able to get up.

Ground pressure will also be an issue; either it has very big feet or it is going to keep sinking into the ground.

Modern MBTs are designed to minimise the profile from the front so armour can be made as thick as possible. A humanoid robot has a very unfavourable aspect ratio, so the armour is going to be proportionately very much thinner, while at the same time making it a much easier target.

I Highly doubt its possble atleast in this current time it is, we highly tiped the ice berg. The closest thing i can think of a mobile suit is a A.I Controled Tank
or a jeep sized robot, ( Terminator 3) until then work with what we got.

The psychology of Mecha obsession is that of the Knight Warrior which is a refusal of the 'socialized' (dehumanization) effect of warfare, particularly in males who are not socially adept anyway.

OTOH, the economic reality of mechwarriorism is that if you take out the 7-10 guys in an infantry squad and replace them with technically /vastly/ more skilled 'ground crew' plus one pilot, you are removing an element of the money-in-out control by which generals demand budgets for billets and the defense industrial base is maintained by Congressionally district-partisan payoff.

That's 'bad' at the power politics level, even if it can be made to work tactically.

And it never will.

Because, as so many others have pointed out, if you have a 300 ton, 50ft tall battlemech standing on BOTH feet, you will sink into the ground (through pavement whatever) of 50-70% of the worlds surfaces.

Mecha also have another problem in that they 'seat' their pilots in cockpits which cannot possibly translate human analogue feedback movements /in time/ to balance out all the limb reductor and gyro balancing actions needed for the robot to move.

And every time particularly one of the Japanese manga 'sword swingers' spins or jumps or or or. It is moving with accelerations on the order of about 4-5G. While every time it /lands/ after such a movement (or is knocked down by a blow) you have the cat-spun-on-tail effect of inertially multiplied impact force equal to or greater than falling off a 5 story building.

OTOH, for human scale systems there are still problems. Because any time you hitch your legs to something and that something moves faster than you do, you risk breaking bones or ripping cartilage and ligaments as the force of the steel actuator is in effect transfered TO YOU. Not the other way around.

And this is why you could never use 'amplified' movement that required sensor-feedback. Because the inertial moment of the device would always lag your intent and unless you moved _very_ slowly with multi-pace slow down and idler-AI stop (like a power adaptive transmission, as soon as intent was sensed, the machine logic would gradually slow to an in-balance halt within a predictable spatial count), you would just rip yourself to pieces.

There is a bloody damn good reason why cheetahs and leopards look like they do.

And anything less than a cat like amplificiation of capability would be useles because, 'at cost', the only useful thing you can expect this platform to do better than a vehicle is to play scout within a complex (builtup or otherwise elevated) terrainscape.

i.e. Leaping to a rooftop. Or running down a sidewalk ahead of a vehicle convoy looking for IEDs. Or climbing up stairs to support a forced entry door breaker scenario.

NONE of which the macroscaled (i.e. non 'Mask' like) robo systems are apt to do well.

If it just lumbers along, as a load carrier, it will take fire. And if it carries heavy weapons or specialist sensors, that fire will be FIRST targeted to kill it so that anybody standing beside it will be 'very grumpy' about their associative vulnerability and inability to leave it behind.

We now use Gator (golf cart) type vehicles to carry our packs. And the Gator can motorvate along an Afghanian trail at 15-20mph. Leaving the only-bodyarmor, water, weaponized (still a 50lb load) troops free to move out at about 6-8mph instead of their usual 4.

Which means that, after a HUGE catch up interval, we can typically catch Mullah Ackbar and his band of merry men who have all of a blanket and a bag of rice plus two clips for their AK and maybe a recoiless round as they zip along from cache to cache like mountain goats at about 7mph constant.

ARGUMENT:
It's time for a reality check folks.
1. Operative Psychology
For a primitive barbarian is that if he finds something abridging his territorial instincts, and it bleeds enough to give a satisifying shriek when he kills it (especially if his buddy is watching), he will take the shot.
If it /never was alive/ and stands an excellent chance of killing him (if only through it's own friends) even if he hits it, he will avoid dying for his god that day. Because he knows that man vs. machine is a trade of 20+ years and Sex vs. a 2-3hrs and an assembly line.
2. It costs 23 cents to make a 5.56mm bullet. Personal Body Armor won't stop a ricochet off the ground from shattering your femur and crippling you for life. It won't stop a mine from taking that leg off at the knee or the nuts. It won't stop a sniper shot from blowing your brains out your ears. The only difference is whether or not you can make the impact happen as a function of 'being there' (predictably at a point of interest or transit choke) to make the shot happen. And having the accuracy _for range_ to get the hit.
3. Agility is scalar. A flea has 'superhuman' capabilities relative to it's small inertial mass. i.e. when you can be blown away by a strong wind, having the muscle twitch capacity similar to a thumb flipped quarter is truly amazing. If you want to avoid being hit, you have to deny the ingrained channelization psychology which begins when kindergartners are taught to walk down the right side of a school hallway between classes.

CONCLUSION:
Man does not belong on a battlefield dominated by half mile per second autofire weapons. He never has. The reason being that he is so slow and unagile as to be unable to avoid or leave the predictor zone by which AMBUSH gets first-shot dominant kills. And then the assymetric threat runs away.
The real threat of a terminator type robotic synth is not that you can make one machine so tough 'while looking like a man'. But rather that you can make HUNDREDS of men, as machine standins, in hours not years.
As such, the process of dehumanization and certainly deoccupancy of the battlespace is not going to reverse with the use of anthropomorphic fighting suits (DARPA's Pitman project goes back to the late 70's IIRR). It's going to accelerate.
Why? Because a robotic cat along the lines of Asimo could move like a leopard. Shoot a .22 caliber weapon that looks like a small fountain pen with the accuracy of a sniper. At 100m or 10.
And talk the local dialect, perfectly, while 'interviewing witnesses' in the hunt for an IED emplacement team that would literally never see it's 2ft tall mass coming at their feet to bite them with a neurotoxin that leaves them paralyzed 'for later recovery and further interrogation'.
That it would do so 'selflessly' (no need to run away, if damaged, wait for relief or blow up in the enemy's faces as they come up to you) in packs of 10-100 whose total production run cost could be less than what it takes to train a single platoon (50 men) of infantry.
Is what makes it scary.
For a single battalion of such robots, inserted at a border, could stalk and kill an entire conventional army (as we know it today) and win wars by depopulating the human factors of their leadership and logistics.
NEVER FORGET.
That Wars Are Won In The Will (Well fed, Well led='W2 Factor'). Not the fighterplane. Not the tank. Not the sub or ship. But THE WILL. And the ultimate 'guerilla' intimidation-of-assymetry of force is that which makes blood realize it could easily be murdered in place without ever having fought a similar chunk of flesh for ownership of the dirt it's standing on.

With that in mind, the old saying that 'Only the dead have seen the end of war' is proven to be an outright lie. Because //only the living// can realize they must outgrow conflict before it's autonomously superior tools outgrow them.


KPl.

I still say its because a 5' high tank can throw a 10lb. carbine rod through it at 4 miles.

Raideur,

The problem isn't armor perse, it's interactivity with the environment.

M1 Abrahms, before they were given the special field upgrade kits, were taking turret bustle kills from RPG and Recoilless that were just as _brainless_ for want of the fact that these are open field vehicles whose frontal arc was 'supposed to stay frontal' with a conventional mechanized enemy. Not a bunch of idiots that force it to play whack the gopher thru 360`.
Furthermore, it is a limited asset which cannot be deployed to support every unit.
In these, the MBT is veritably it's own 'mech' of contradictory (say laughable) indications bordering on anachronism.
For where the battlefield is under 500yds most of the time and (handheld) chemical energy rounds can go through the 'undefended majority' of the vehicle, given slant-advantage from buildings or other 'untouchable' elevated terrain; a ten foot tall vehicle silouhette is just as much a "Shoot-me-I'm-stupid!" advertisement as a multistory mecha at 3-5km.
Indeed, the tank's armor and ton-weight global logistics almost /require/ such a 'tilting at windmills' (conventional, super sized) threat to seem economical. When you consider that a Hummer can get the same /style/ of kill out to 8km with a LOSAT or 5km with a CKEM. At 1/10th the palletized deployment weight.
On the interoperability level (have to see the micros to fight them), one of the reasons the Battlemech/Clan systems supposedly use contract challenges is because they want to 'save the cities' of a declining society from lasting economic damage. Because a single mech wades through multistory buildings like a hippo through the reeds. Except the hippo keeps the river clear and the Mech simply ruins the remaining tech needed to keep it in shape.
Yet whether you believe that reason or go for the 'unconventional threat is a killer of short LOS' as a function of a hundred little pongos throwing up boiling-oil 'inferno' LAW weapons to overheat it and defeat it's AMS; the fact remains that their knights charter based system of fighting relegates warfare to just another joust wherein the few dominate the many by not letting them seem equals worthy of fighting.
And that is yet again a very elitist if not altogether humanist action.
Real war (the 70% of which that is irregular against a desperately economically overmatched enemy) occurs at the street level 'among the common man' and so MUST BE FOUGHT THERE TO DEFEAT THE WILL OF THAT OPPONENT.
What we need is something which can observe in such density ("We are watching you...") that nobody dares kill a single sentry because all the others will still take your picture with netcentric perfection of memory. And then they will chase you down, on foot.
The alternative being to sweep through an area, looking for snipers and cell phone observers while moving at 30-40mph in a mass small enough to 'duck and weave' human-scaled obstacles. As a function of acting as a security element on a convoy passing through.
IF mechs could do that.
They would be superior to tanks.
As is, they are simply a Darwinistic gigantism extension of the concept of traditional armor without understanding any of the real drivers on WHY you want a legged vs. wheeled system to (negotiate human styled operating environments) begin with.
Thus removing the last obstacle to infinite-duration 'as long as you want to bleed, I'll be happy to send a robot to kill you' assymetric warfare. As we catch and/or kill their too-small-to-see-it-coming threats with something even more micro-not-macro endemic to their attempted rapid displacement maneuver and logistics system of supporting small ambush style raiding tactics.


KPl.

mech would be better in space and the ocean not on land and in the air

The armor of modern tanks are highly resistant to RPG rounds. This includes American, british, and russian designs, thought they all tackle the problem differently. Disregarding an urban environment, where armor is not designed to operate, a mech, given you could actually build one, would be pointless. A mech has no value at all on the battlefield besides the purely morale effects.

It will never have enough to armor to defend its size. If you scale up the mech, you have to scale up the armor, until its weight is impossible. The crew would be vulerable to even the smallest rounds, unless you have insane amounts of armor.

It is an incredible target. It will draw fire from everything, since its an upright weakly armored target. It will also be bombed into the ground by aircraft. You cannot also hide it with ease, due to its size.

It cannot sport cannons of any firepower to defeat modern tanks. It would only be able to fire small arms or missiles.

It is immobile. It cannot move as quick as vehicles and most of the terrain it could cross is also passable by tanks. Extremely difficult areas would be impossible to move, much less fight in. Forests, cities, mountains.

The cost would be insane. I dont need to explain that.

There is no real tactical reason to build them. No reason at all. Anything it could, (somehow) do, a modern tank can do better.

If you can mount 400mm+ armor on your mech and give it the ability to run 50mph, and allow it to engage targets at long ranges, and not be the greatest bullet magnet of all time, you might have something.

Like I say,

If you pull the man and his permanent spinal-injury-waiting-to-happen challenge to 'suit' mobility (axis orientation) and volume wasteage (him in, exo-surrounding) from the picture.

And scale to a level where a 1-10hp rotary engine (smaller than a lawnmower powerplant and with space age materials, lighter than a dictionary) could be stuffed into an ungulate styled cat body whose total weight was perhaps 30-50lbs.

The resulting power loading and efficiencies would be /tremendous/.

Where 1 hp = 33,000 foot pounds per minute or 550 foot pounds per second, you are talking about a 'scout' vehicle which is less than 4ft high and can manage perhaps 90mph in about 3 seconds from a standing start. Or 'lope along' (electrical energy recovery systems in it's pneumatic shock compression systems) at 40-60mph for perhaps 8hrs at a time.

Something no current vehicle with a similar (motorcycle) equivalent amount of gas could possibly do.

Thus the possibilities of 'walking' machines vs. wheeled ones open right up.

Because they can interface with humans, IN a human (urban) environment, in ways that NEITHER wheeled platform NOR BTech envisaged meccha, can even dream of.

BLUNTLY: It ain't the concept. It's the size and configuration that kills you.
That and the damn freeweight 'rider'.


KPl.

Even a remote controlled mech with no pilot to guard, would never have teh defense needed compared to its size.

If you have it light and agile, with some robotic breakthrough, because conventional electric servos leave something to be desired, it would be killed by something smaller than cannon rounds, say a .50 cal.

Leopards move at around 35-40mph in the charge. That's 58fps. /90mph/ is 132fps. Now imagine that said 'animal' is able to leap to a rooftop. Or skid around sidewalk corners and around the refuse heaps and parked cars and along the /outside/ of guardrails alongside a road.

Now imagine that it is 3-4ft tall and about 6ft long.

Stand off about 50-100m (minimum safe distance= 3 seconds travel time) and try leading it with an AK.

Now REMEMBER that these units are hunting in /packs/ ahead of a vehicle convoy so if you kill one (as it's about to find an IED with a scanning MMW/Lidar package) it's ten buddies AND the gun truck HMWWVs behind are all going to open up on your a$$ in the seconds you have before they come for you.

Not least because, if they are running a staggered skirmish line like so:

2 3 4 5
/```\__/``\__/``\
1 6

They may very well be (themselves) covering a frontage of 100-200m.

THIS is how you defeat junior with his cell phone 'waiting to the last second' so that Iraqi Granny can toodle by with her shopping cart before he sets the IR diode motion sense trigger on that IED.

Because robotkitties (or wolves if you prefer) will see junior loitering about and either bag him directly or record his face for later backtrack.

Given that, through simple use of ballistic nylon and chassis layering, you can probably render these devices proof to 7.62mm and that a truly /heavy/ weapon (12.7mm, 14.5mm) is going to have a helluva time slewing-to-track as well as being swept underneath a coat to walk off with.

Agile, Armed, Responsive (Kill, Capture, Sense) scouts of this nature could add incredibly to the capabilities of a U.S. force which has for too long relied on manned cav units that are increasingly just as heavy and expensive to replace as the main van.

And in a FIBUA /infantry/ fight (enemy holed up in building X) systems like these represent the ONLY way to have 'casualty less' fighting. Because only they can scamper up within 20ft without being noticed, climb stairs or stage rooftop ambushes. Cross 100m no _mans_ land and use both lethal (10mm pistol caliber) and non-lethal systems (Tazers and Paint Ball Mace incapacitators) to work around the "But robots might hurt someone we didn't want to!" whiners.

All while taking live pictures of threat-X as he raised his AK-47 so that, push comes to shove, the little 14 year old wanker could be tried and hung as an adult without complaint over cruelty.

Similar capabilities vs. main force units ARE possible, provided you infiltrate them with the ideal of scoring logistics and leadership/manpower kills so that every time a unit went to defensive laager, they faced the potential of trying to lay a 125mm main tube on a threat that, bound to bound, could shift faster than the turret could slew.

CONCLUSION:
The problem is that we are so used to justifying our presence on the battlefield via an 'absolute' level of protection that there is no sense of gambit and risk to get the enemy to expose himself that we might roll him up and FINISH him. In detail. Every time he gopher-goats his ugly head from the surrounding sheep.

That has got to stop and when you consider the 20 grande and 8-18 months it takes to 'train up right and proper' an infantryman. And the 100 grande that his guaranteed life insurance coverage also must be covered for, the reality hits you right smack in the face as to what a robot 'somewhere inbetween' could really do.

If it was designed to replace humans in it's ability to negotiate humanoid obstacles (stairs, walkways, doors) as a walking rather than rolling device.

Either way, man's place on the battlefield has long since past.


KPl.

ya aite! MS eh....

why dont we simply train ourselves like Goku in dragoonball and able to detroy Earth within second?

i guess that's a very good idea!!! ="=

#1 Everything you said was totally out of the realm of reality in terms of combat effectiveness.

#2 We're fairly off topic.

For the record, a mounted .50 cal has very quick traverse and can defeat many APCs armor at various angles.

The first "mecha" will be neither mobile, nor piloted. In fact, you probably wouldn't even consider them a mecha except for their artificial intelligence. The first "mecha" are likely to be .50 cal machinegun "sentinels". Imagine a big ball-o-sensors attached to a machinegun that can be mounted on walls, the tops of buildings etc, and has the artificial intelligence to tell the difference between friend and foe. You could mount these doodads anywhere and know that that area is secured.