/sci/ - Science & Math

>>5963920
The system I mentioned here >>5963944 would be able to compensate for that. If one leg get's blown off, it hops around on one foot. If both legs get blown off it drags itself around on its belly with one hand if the other isn't carrying a weapon. Compare that to a tank in which if one tread gets blown off it can only drive in a circle making donuts. This is what is called a Mobility kill in armored warfare and on comparison the mechs would be much more tenacious when it comes to mobility kills. Also the joints will be covered in buckypaper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckypaper)) which is 500x stronger than steel, heatproof, and electrically conductive. It can also be used in a tank to replace kevlar as a spall liner (a material to insulate a tank from concussive blasts, which is why HESH rounds aren't used anymore).

>>5963993
And how small would you say they are? The Abrams uses either a 120mm smoothbore or 105mm rifled gun. I imagine a railgun will have an even smaller opening (maybe around 60-75mm) since it won't need that big a round with the speed it's flinging stuff at.

>>5963944
but they can only take one shot per area (ERA is segmented into blocks of shaped charges).

However the Brits have been working on a new form of reactive armor that uses high-voltage electricity pumped through metal plates to vaporize projectiles on impact and also defuses the plasma jets from anti-armor explosives. They already have a working prototype, demonstrated here:
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7rxBifd0cY

I imagine that tanks and mecha will use this new armor and the only way to take them down is to shoot it enough times to drain the ultracapacitors it uses to store the charge, so a mecha would be able to better evade fire in built up areas enough so that doesn't happen. However I suspect if the projectile launched at it were flying at it fast enough it could penetrate the armor before it could vaporize it, like say with a railgun, which as I said here >>5963606 and >>5963691 is best used by mecha due to a railgun's one flaw.

>>5963917
>A mecha would cost far more than a tank. A bipedal robot's mechanisms and actuation would be far more expensive to create. We have wheel based vehicle components down to a fine science.
If the mecha uses artificial muscles (preferably Carbon Nanotube Aerogels) then all you have to do is have it move an endoskeleton based on the Human endoskeletal system in keeping with the concept of Biomimetics or the modeling of the designs of machinery after living organisms. After that all that is needed is a sophisticated enough locomotion control system by having a quartet of networked computers, each controlling a limb, receiving commands from a master computer that receives input from the cockpit controls. This mimics the segregation between the secondary and central nervous system that is responsible for the phenomenon known as muscle memory and is what allows you to perform actions without having to think about them. This way the pilot is essentially telling the mecha "I want to do this" and the system figures out how to move the mecha to accomplish the task.

>Also re; putting down a tank. We need numbers to argue effectiveness. Forget ballistic weapons and think suicidal drones that carry explosives. You can't take down a swarm with a tank, so assuming that a few drones can land on the tank and detonate one after another in the same place, would that suffice to pierce modern tank armor? I'd argue that if there are anti-tank guns, that ordnance can be delivered via swarm bots as well... but I don't know enough about weapons and ballistics to make that call.

Anti-tank missiles and RPGs use shaped charges to direct an explosion in such a way that it creates a plasma jet that bores a hole through the armor. However soon after the development of those weapons they developed what was called Explosive Reactive Armor that neutralizes the plasma jet by exploding a shaped-charge in the opposite direction of the explosion,

>>5963705
>mechanical
>mecha
Fucking autocorrect.

>>5963686
>You bring your $100M death robot, I'll bring an $100M army of 1,000 African mercenaries armed with RPGs and explosives, and we'll see what's the better way to fight.
RPGs only fire in a straight line. A mecha using carbon nanotube aerogels muscles moving a carbon fiber reinforced polymer endoskeleton wrapped in a "skin" made of buckypaper fitted with plates of chobham armor and a top speed of 94.5 MPH would be able to duck behind a building/rock formation/trees to us as cover. If by explosives you mean IEDs the fact that it uses legs reduces the chances of it setting it off as while wheeled and tracked vehicles move across the surface of a road in a continuous line a mechanical moves across the road making contact with the ground periodically.

>>5963664
>Unless you want your mecha to carry spare rails.
That's exactly what I am saying.

>The same can be said for tanks. Gun barrels don't last forever and need to be replaced and you don't see giant mechanical arms on tanks
Railguns don't last nearly as much. The US Navy's experimental 10 megajoule railgun can only fire off three or four shots before needing to be replaced. I imagine by that time metallurgy will have improved to the point where a railgun could fire 10-15 rounds before needing to be replaced.

>Railguns also require quite a bit of energy (generation and storage) that a 'simple' mecha would have trouble providing in the short amount of time you have in combat.
What if it is powered by a traveling wave reactor? I mean it would have to be to provide power for its carbon nanotube aerogel muscles, electromagnetic reactive armor and head-mounted point-defense lasers.

>Mechas are nice and all, but just don't work in the real world. Wheeled or tracked vehicles will always be a lot cheaper for the same results.
Until CNT aerogels are perfected.

>>5963591
Actually they would be better at fighting in built up areas (ie cities, mountain ranges and dense forests) than tanks. Plus one fundamental flaw with railguns makes them ideal for use by mecha. The rails on a railgun tend to get forced apart little by little with each shot until they eventually become unusable and have to be replaced. And what better tool to swap out the rails on the fly than a mechanical arm.

I envision that drone warfare will become indispensable in future wars both in space and in a planet's atmosphere. Imagine remote controlled humanoid robots, aircraft, and ground vehicles controlled by cryogenically frozen soldiers with neural implants in a ship in geosynchronous orbit with the area of operations and 7 meter tall humanoid mecha each controlled by a pilot in a cryopod stored within the chest providing artillery support with their railgun rifles and acting as a signal repeater to compensate for any atmospheric effects that might interfere with the control signals.

>>5368952
Not without an uber power source. Like currently available coilguns it has the muzzle velocity of a BB gun. Without the plasma it would just give you a nasty bruise.

>>5368934
It's just an analogy.

Hey, /sci/. E/lit/ist /k/ommando here. I have an idea for a sci-fi weapon but I want it to be scientifically plausible so I wanted to see if /sci/ could tell me if it would actually work.

The weapon is essentially a coilgun with a nozzle placed near the barrel shooting out a jet of super-hot plasma. When the gun fires, it uses electromagnetic fields generated by coiled wires around the barrel to accelerate a ferrous projectile like a maglev train out of the barrel. The projectile is magnetized in the process and as it leaves the barrel the magnetic field surrounding the projectile would scoop up some of the plasma and carry it off towards the target, through which the super-hot plasma would melt a hole.

>>5104175
Ah I forgot to mention that. The mecha mainly uses the solar sails for propelling it over interplanetary and interstellar distances. It has another propulsion system for when the solar sail is inadequate for a means of propulsion called a miniature reactor engine, or MITEE. Specifically a Monoatomic H MITEE (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--MITEE--Monatomic_H_MITEE))

>>5102736
Hold on, let me put my tripfag on for this. I'm asking about this for a short story I am writing in which the craft in question is a 10 meter tall humanoid mecha designed for space exploration. The pilot is frozen while his brain remains active and operates the mecha using cybernetic implants from within the cryopod. The mecha is outfitted with these flower-petal like appendages similar to the ones on the mecha in this pic. The solar sails are unfurled from these appendages to form a clover-like shape and stored within them when they are not needed. The appendages themselves are actually electromagnetic reactive armor plates that vaporize anything that comes in contact with them by running high-voltage electricity through them. This way, if the craft encounters space debris during it's journey that it cannot avoid, the appendages close up around it forming a protective cocoon. As for why a humanoid mecha there are two reasons:

1)The limbs allow for thrustless reorientation based on the concept of AMBAC (http://gundam.wikia.com/wiki/Active_Mass_Balance_Auto-Control))

2) It can function as a planetary surface vehicle in the event the pilot wants to land on and explore a planet.

>>3549799
D'oh! Forgot my trip.

>>3549620
The breast and crotch plate are for the sake of modesty. The suit is so form fitting that it is more like a second skin and leaves nothing to the imagination. As for the composition of the suit, it is made from buckypaper; an aggregate of carbon nanotubes made from mixing methanol, ethanol, sodium dodecyl sulfate, and deionized water with carbon nanotubes and running them through a microporous membrane in a vacuum filtration unit. Buckypaper is as light and flexible as tissuepaper yet 500x stronger than steel, heatproof, and electrically conductive so it can act as a Faraday cage. As for it's radiation shielding properties, it doesn't provide any protection by itself but does provide significant protection after being laminated in an epoxy resin mixed with iodine. As a material for providing mechanical pressure, buckypaper is electroactive so by applying appropriate voltages it can tighten itself up to conform to the wearer's body shape.

Hey /sci/. What do you think of my spacesuit design?

>>3212677
It isn't made up. Carbon nanotube aerogels exist and possess all those properties.

>>3212672
Depends. If they are fighting in an open space, then they are screwed. However, if they are fighting in a built up area like a city, forest or mountain terrain then they could make use of the buildings/trees/rock formations as adequate cover to make it a harder target for the enemy to aquire.

>>3212629
Not that hard. Just have a network of computers, each controlling a limb, being directed by a central computer that receives input from the cockpit controls. This mimics the relationship between the central and secondary nervous system, which is behind the phenomenon known as muscle memory. It's not your brain that figures out how to pick up a pencil or throw a ball, but rather the nerves in your hand and/or arm that remembers how to do it from practicing. This way the cockpit controls only let the computer know what the pilot wants to do while the control system figures out how to do it. This would make piloting a mech as easy as playing a slightly more complicated arcade game.

>>3212624
If you mean an unmanned mecha like the GEKKO from MGS4 then okay. If you mean an aerial drone like the Predator, what if the enemy possesses formidable anti-air defenses?

>>3212574
Maybe for gundams, which are huge (18-20m tall) and use slow and inefficient hydraulics/pneumatics. But for more reasonably sized mecha (6-8m tall) with lightweight but strong carbon composites and artificial muscles 200 times stronger than steel cable with a contraction rate 40,000 times faster than human muscle, they would possess an extraordinary power-to-weight ratio in comparison to tracked and wheeled vehicles.

A gundam is too big to be practical. Something the size of a labor from Patlabor or an Arm Slave from Full Metal Panic. They would be made entirely out of carbon composites consisting of carbon fiber reinforced polymers for an endoskeleton, carbon nanotube aerogels for artificial muscle to manipulate said endoskeleton wrapped in a "skin" made of buckpaper. A 7 meter tall mech made with this stuff would weigh in at around 5 or 6 tons and would be able to run at speeds of up to around 95 mph, make 6 meter vertical jumps and 30 meter long jumps. As for their usefulness in combat, I believe that mechs would have a narrowly defined combat role: they will be used mainly for ground-based surgical strikes in built up areas such as cities or mountain terrain against armored targets in situations when an air strike is not an option such as when the target possesses formidable anti-air defenses. This is because humainoid mecha would allow for the application of infantry tactics such as CQB to armored warfare allowing them to clear an area of armored targets with the speed and efficiency of a strike team. They would essentially be the armored equivalent of a Special Operations Force like the US Army Rangers or the British SAS.

Btw, the pic is supposed to illustrate the basic concept and should not be interpreted as a design blueprint.

I'm actually writing a book based around this concept. It's kinda similar to the plot of the movie Planet 51 (a movie I have not and never will see). It takes place a million years in the future. Mankind as it turns out were the first intelligent lifeforms in the universe and has attained Type III status while everyone else ranges from prehistoric to 21st century level. The main character is from one of these lesser races, a 21st century level civilization that has yet to make contact with aliens. He ends up finding and befriending a human whose ship crashed landed on his planet. Lucky for him, she's one of these hippies that OP was talking about and is even labeled an eco-terrorist by the rest of human society, the reason her ship crashed being due to a run in with the authorities. They are able to make a connection, since thanks to genetic engineering all humans have psychic abilities and most of their technology is operated via telepathy, and so is able to transmit her feelings and intentions to him and read his as well.

>>1853297
Maybe I should clarify to avoid any potential misunderstanding. The propulsion system is not built into the mech, but is attached to the back of it via hardpoints. This way it can change between nuclear rockets and jet engines depending on whether they will be fighting in space or on the surface of a planet.