Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

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MythSearcher
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:Our current understanding of physics does not allow for spacecraft at reasonable power levels to stay hidden in space for tactically or strategically useful lengths of time. As soon as a ship is spotted via infrared scan, you can point telescopes at it and actually see it. Then it doesn't matter what sort of shenanigans it tries to pull with heatsinks and the like -- you already know where it is anyway. Given how long travel times are in space (it takes a couple days just to cross the Earth Sphere -- getting between planets takes months even under ideal conditions), you're not going to be able to "hide" long enough for it to matter.
Space combat is not limited to long range battles, before humans can be so advance as to battle at those distance, you have much more chance of fighting within the Earth's Sphere, and certainly a lot more chance when there's tons of colonies up there. Also, going from between asteroids in the asteroid belt is not going to take months or days.

While the fact that a stealth"ier" machine is still going to be advantageous in combat.

Don't forget the simple reasoning that the solar system has a lot of things that gets pretty hot when they are under the sun, so infra red imaging is not going to be as useful as you think.

You can try to create a map of all the objects, but the sheer quantity of those things and the inherently unstable orbits of a lot of them is going to be the computation of orbit like hell.
Trying to spot anything not moving naturaly is much less likely to work when you have tons of civilian ships as well. We already have tons of radars scanning our sky, and a non-stealth passenger plane can disappear with little trace, think again for your hope of humanity's ability to create a perfect scan system.
Spotting a new dot is easy under infrared, but at the same time, you will get tons of new dots if you try to scan the whole solar system, or even just the near Earth objects.
The Chelyabinsk meteor is a typical "in your face" example for people thinking there's no stealth in space.

BTW pointing your telescope to the general direction where you see an infrared signal is not going to help much if your target is a 20m tall mech, seriously, most astronomy enthusiast can tell you this much. All those super large telescopes we have on Earth now can't even see the landing ship base of the Apollo missions on the moon, all of our Earth orbiting telecopes including the Hubble cannot see those as well. And having something that big on your battleship is not really going to help much if the enemy is pointing a large laser to your general direction.(where it focuses and burns your CCD in due time)

The whole "no stealth" theory is build on the following assumptions, which are pretty poorly defined:
1) the solar system can be mapped and easily loaded from a database for comparison, and there will not be tons of ships flying around at the time, which is pretty improbable.
2) all systems are ideal designs of their best possible function, not their practicability. Like a carnot cycle model used on an external combustion engine in a hurricane.
3) you won't get shot at while you are scanning for the enemies, so you have all the time on your side, unlikely.
4) all signals can and will be picked up by all parts of your ship, and there's no blind spots. Nope, you don't get armour and sensors on the same spot, or your sensors gets damage real easily be debris.
5) there's no need to use lens on your telescope, or that your ship can be of humungous size that ultra behemoth telescopes takes almost no impact in combat strength, highly unlikely.
6) enemy will not even try to be stealthy in all aspects, and they are simply just going to give you straight signals telling you how massive, how powerful, how large they are, and they won't fake heat signals at all.
7) the propulsion heat signals they have recorded for say, 60 years, is a good indication of military designs of a complete different tech level that can emphasize stealth instead of efficiency. Which is actually not preferred in the last 60 years of rocket development because the rockets can only bearly bring human to space, not for combat, and do not need to be stealthy at all, but hey, this must be what they will be designing 600 years from now as well, yeah, heat signals are going to give us all the info and there's no way one can fool us, right?

Simply put, its the ideal situation for the sensors, and not a practical situation at all.

Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:A disguised warship is not the same thing as a stealth craft. It might have the same effect in that it allows you to "hide" to a certain extent, but it's not going to fool anyone if a random civilian vessel starts acting like a warship. A warship that's disguised is good for ambushing a target and getting off a free shot; a warship that's stealth is a significant and continuous tactical and strategic advantage.

That's not to mention that disguising your warships as civilian vessels is likely to have serious political consequences that a stealth warship doesn't need to worry about. There's a reason why international law requires all lawful combatants to be readily identifiable as such from a distance. Once you start mixing fighters in with civilians, things get ugly fast.
The first shot will be what's important.
Especially you will be facing not one, but a lot of targets that you have no idea if they are friend or foe.
And having an array of mechs that your telescope can't really see at about 1 lightsecond away all pointing their lasers to you while you are still pondering the 10 lightsecond away mothership is a civilian ship or not is not going to help either.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:Four hours is plenty of time when it takes days to get anywhere. The sort of search you're describing isn't meant for combat operations, it's meant to identify ships before anyone starts shooting. Once you've positively identified a potential hostile, you point a telescope at it and follow it that way. It's not like you only get a position update on a target once every four hours. Also worth pointing out is that that's searching for a passive vessel -- one that's just sitting in orbit or coasting to a destination. Once they actually do anything (like accelerate or fire a weapon), they immediately become much easier to see.
And four hours is plenty of time to destroy you have a powerful enough laser shot out a few light seconds away, before you enough know you engaged in combat.

Laser warfare is like this, when you see it, its too late.
If you can't identify your enemy fast enough, you don't go into evasive action quick enough, and your armour is not going to withstand the laser from a ship with that kind of travelling ability, which means it got immense power.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:When I'm talking about one-man space fighters, I'm talking about spacecraft that act like modern-day fighters -- they launch only for combat and return to a base or aircraft carrier otherwise. Large numbers of cheap warships with small (possibly even one-man, but that's unlikely -- guy's gotta sleep sometime) crews are entirely viable in space -- as long as they're capable of deploying on extended missions, rather than having the extremely limited endurance of atmospheric fighter craft. The problem isn't with "warships that are small", the problem is with "strike craft that launch, fight, and immediately return to base".

As far as stealth, well... I suppose you're technically correct in that smaller ships are, in theory, more stealthy than larger ships... but being twice as stealthy as not-at-all-stealthy is still being not-at-all-stealthy.
Good enough if you can't see them with a 10m diameter telescope.(which the whole thing with the aiming mechanism is likely 20m in diameter ball, and it is not going to cover all sides of your ship, you need at least 2 on a small ship)
Good luck in your mass efficiency.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:Photon drives are ludicrously power-intensive. Even if you're concealing your drive trail, how are you going to keep your power plant from giving you away? (For reference, a perfectly-efficient photon drive would require three hundred megawatts of power for one Newton of thrust. Even if you could build one big enough to provide viable performance on a warship, your power plant would be making you glow brightly enough to be seen from the next solar system over.
Use Carbon nano-tube capacitors, dump waste heat by shooting it away so you can only see strange heating patterns that are hard to trace to my ship.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:Strange is bad. Strange makes military sensor techs say "hey, what the hell is that? Let me take a closer look..." at which point you're caught. Making your heat signature look odd isn't going to help you avoid attention -- quite the opposite, in fact.
Strange is bad, but here I am using it to refer to faking a pattern that does not look like a spaceship of that mass.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:If you've got a crew compartment on that thing, you've still got a temperature several hundred degrees higher than the cosmic background, just to keep your crew from freezing to death. It's easy to see spaceships even when they're not accelerating -- exotic "stealth drives" aren't going to fix that.
That is the problem of this assumption.
The logical fallacy on this "no stealth" chain of thought is that it ignores the actual heat signal given out by a crew.

A single human heat flux is about 100W(and surface area of human is about 1~2m^2, so 50~100W/m^2), you don't really need much more than that to keep a human warm. With a heat shield and evenly distribute the heat on the surface of a humanoid mech that is about 10 times in height, thus 100 times in surface area, you get about 0.5~1W/m^2, which, on Earth's orbit, the Sun is giving every single object a whooping 1400W/m^2.
And remember, you have civilian ships here and there, likely in hundreds if not thousands.(the further distance out your develop, the more resources you can get and the more civilian ships there will be).
With much more debris around reflecting a lot of randomly attributed heat sources.
I seriously don't think the human heat source is going to be a problem compared to the Sun.
And hidding inside a fake asteroid skin is all I need for cover-up from the Sun.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:If the stealthier ship is still incredibly easy to see with minimal effort, then no, that doesn't hold true. As an analogy, imagine that I'm standing in the middle of an empty, brightly lit room. Really easy to spot, right? Now imagine that I'm curled in a ball on the floor, occupying the smallest possible space. I've significantly reduced my visual signature! I must be pretty hard to spot now, right? Except that no, I'm still really easy to spot, because there's no way to hide in an empty, brightly-lit room. That's what space is like.
That is why you need fighter class, not huge battleships, for stealth.
You need really large telescopes to see them even if you can catch a heat signal, and they can be pretty hard to distinguish from civilian ships, debris and meterorites if you don't have a pretty humonguous telescope system that is already comparable in size with the fighters, just to see the general shape of it.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:This is patently nonsense. It's fairly simple to isolate a turret and stabilize its aim without physically separating it from the rest of the ship.
Try to calculate the static electricity build up of the system, then a 100 man(or robots that are moving around) of about 75kg@ on average, and see how much motion a 75000ton ship will get, while moving your turrets along in a really really small angle.
And get that angle, calculate the flucturation at 1,000km, 10,000km, 100,000km and 300,000km.

The ship's computer is not going to be able to predict all the movements since they are random and not precise in nature. So it cannot do an autocorrection.
And your ship would have to be doing evasive motion(or I can target and shoot you from much further away without predicting your path), so you can't really really have it isolated without being a sitting duck.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:That's true of everything in space. Missiles are more efficient than the alternative, though, since a) they don't have to worry about returning to base after they fight, like a space fighter would, and b) they don't have squishy people that can't handle hard acceleration riding inside. That means they have better performance than any manned craft, which is why they're preferable.
They also cannot be reused, and the efficiency here I'am talking about is the mass ratio of the payload.
If you use missiles, you need it to be either really fast and rams into your target(or at least get close enough to do whatever damage its warhead can perform) or you need it to be able to do evasive actions, both needing large amounts of propellant, unless you go the extra mile to get an AMBAC missile system.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:Decoys only work in settings like Gundam that have a "sensors don't work very well" handwave. Any decoy good enough to fool an enemy target would basically be just as expensive as a real ship anyway, which defeats the purpose of a decoy as a cheap sacrificial lamb.
That is untrue, Infrared countermeasure is not only cheap but already in use nowadays.
There's also actual technology being developed to use lasers to fake a heat signal pattern to an infrared sensor.
Check DIRCM.

Of course this is given to enhance an infrared signal, and all you need is a system like DIRCM on your decoys, and they will be relatively cheap.

BTW, getting enough mass and a similar thrust propulsion system on a decoy usually is not going to be expensive either.
Mass is usually not really a problem in space if you just want to find it, and launching mass out to a selected orbit is also quite simple. Since they just need to arrive on the same time, you can have them launch in much higher acceleration systems like a rail gun, and only use a limited propellant tank with a cheap propulsion alternative to make it give out a similar infrared signal, the same speed and similar profile.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:See what I said earlier about "small warships" (reasonable) vs "space fighters" (not reasonable). You can be a full-sized warship without being a giant behemoth battleship.
A mothership with 80 small crafts can do different strength missions at different times.
You can have 10 8-unit teams at 10 locations, or 8 10-unit teams at 8 locations, or 2 40-units teams at 2 locations.
5 warships can get to 5 locations, max.

Using a WWII warship tonnage as a sample, if my fleet is around 100kton total.
I can have 80 100ton mechs, and my carrier is 60kton with supplies, with 4 8kton destroyers as escorts.(BTW, since I don't really need a long runway, my carrier can be 10 smaller supply ships as well)
Or you can have a 2 battleship fleet each weighting 50kton, or maybe 10 10kton destroyers.
But obviously you don't have stealth, is less flexible, not very likely survivable since your mobility will be lower than mechs, yet there's not really a limiting factor in getting the mechs to have less attack range(sensors on the mechs are smaller, but your ships are bigger)

In fact, the "supplies ships"/"carrier" can be just living quaters and supply/repair systems that give out really little signal by themselves. (If tech level is advanced enough, the supplies/repair system can be mostly automated and minimize human factor, thus much more stealthy)

Strap on your bed to a mech(or mechs so pilots can live together on the journey), get to the battlefield, dump the living quaters, fight, retrieve quaters and return.
If you lose, those will be pretty useless anyway.
If you win, you have all your time to retrieve them.
If you need to retreat, scattering is much easier than running away as a single ship, just make sure you dumped the living quaters far enough away so you still have time to retrieve it.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:(For those not reading the link, "point A1" is that small, cheap space fighters will be able to carry weapons capable of destroying large, expensive warships.) The counterpoint to that is simple: send a missile instead. Missiles have better performance in basically every way -- they don't have to reserve fuel for a return trip, they don't have to worry about injuring or killing a pilot into goo when they accelerate at 50 g, and computer reaction times are simply better than human ones. The only things humans are better at is making judgment calls over things like whether or not to fire in the first place -- which the missile tech back on your warship with his finger on the "fire" button is just as capable of doing as any pilot in a space fighter.
The problem of the missile is listed up there.
Missiles are good in the atmosphere, but are pretty bad in space.
Missiles are not going to perform much better if you don't have a similar cost strapped to it.
Since all your propulsion systems, computers are pretty much the same as your small crafts in space.
This is unlike the decoy, where they are designed to be shot at, the missiles are supposed to hit their target, meaning they need to avoid being shot at.
Yes, it maybe able to do 50g, but your mass ratio is going to be extremely poor.

And if you are talking about space combat, remote control missiles are not going to give you good results when your enemy can decide to shoot you at 1 lightsecond, while your missile tech with his finger on the fire button will not be able to know this until a second later, while the signal s/he send out will not reach the missile until another second later. Your 2 second delay is not a good start in combat, and will only get worse the further it goes.
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:You're contradicting yourself here. Either there aren't any defenses against lasers (in which case, I can laser you quite handily from my warship instead of having to send a fighter out to do it), or deployable ice clouds can block long-range lasers (in which case my missile with a laser warhead can get around them faster and cheaper than your fighters can anyway).
Nope, you missiles are simply going to have real trouble finding out a small target if not even your mothership can do so. And the mechs can decide to shoot at the missile when it gets closer and is noticeable, while your missile has to wait for a delayed signal from your mothership to shoot.
If its a full AMBAC drone, its not going to do much better without a pilot. The computers are not really likely to be able to take higher-gs than humans if you need them to be really advanced, think of a laptop that accidentally fell on the ground from 1~2m high, you can pretty much say goodbye to it, but a human falling from the same height is not going to receive much damage. You can build tons of buffer to lessen the g to the laptop, but a military grade laptop with a pentium class processor that can withstand 1m fall is like a brick and much bigger, and those buffers cannot withstand a continuous g-force.
Even if they can be on much higher gs, the inherent problem is still about the mass-ratio problem.
And if you don't think of the return trip and just accelerated to a high speed so you don't get hit, you either ram into the enemy or you zip right pass giving you a really short window of attack.
And your economic efficiency will be extremely low, because your strategy rely on dumping tons of battle ready drones as missiles.
Oh, and it will be pretty obvious which one is the human pilot if you have the remote controller sit in one of your missiles, that particular one will send out much more signals, and the movement will be really different unless you give up the spec of the robotic ones.
Juumanistra
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

I'd promised myself I wouldn't wade into this, but MythSearcher's special brand of...posting has prompted it. As no one's said it before, let me just say this: Military mecha larger than combat exoskeletons will almost always be impractical due to the square-cube law, and the bigger the mecha gets, the greater the odds of its impracticality.
MythSearcher wrote:Space combat is not limited to long range battles, before humans can be so advance as to battle at those distance, you have much more chance of fighting within the Earth's Sphere, and certainly a lot more chance when there's tons of colonies up there. Also, going from between asteroids in the asteroid belt is not going to take months or days.
No form of organized combat is limited ranged engagements. There will always be a preference for such, however, as distance minimizes the individualized risk to combatants: There's a reason why the history of weaponry basically boils down figuring out how to project as much destructive force as far away from the user as possible within the confines of a minimum acceptable accuracy. Space is exceptionally conducive to massive stand-off ranges, due to many of the reasons BFK enumerates, particularly the lack of horizons, ease of spotting targets, and subsequent ease of projecting movement. While it's certainly possible to engineer a setting in which the ultimate outcome of space warfare is not deathstars with light-second engagement ranges, you can't just ignore the various factors that drive logic towards that outcome.

Now then, one of way to avoid the deathstars-at-ten-light-seconds problem is through the one you postulate: A setting not dissimilar from UC Gundam, in which large numbers of orbital structures of many different allegiances have been constructed at various Earth-Luna Lagrange points and are the center of the setting's action. The problem is that the logical outcome of that isn't giant robots (or space fighters, for that matter): It's the development of "littoral" spacecraft -- similar in function to modern corvettes and avisos -- optimized to operate within the (relatively) crowded confines of L4 and L5. But even then, that might be a stretch, depending upon the level of destructive power wielded by proper warships.
MythSearcher wrote:While the fact that a stealth"ier" machine is still going to be advantageous in combat.
Not really, for all of the reasons enumerated in his brightly lit room example. In the type of congested orbital environment you're talking about, there is such a thing as "stealth", but it's only a form of hiding in plain sight: You can't evade being detected, but you might be able to evade being perceived as a threat, which is just as good in an area with lots of possible collateral damage if a shooting incident breaks out. (And, even then, that can only really work in lower-tech settings where there are no gigawatt death rays.) None of that, however, makes physical stealth in space more feasible.
MythSearcher wrote:Don't forget the simple reasoning that the solar system has a lot of things that gets pretty hot when they are under the sun, so infra red imaging is not going to be as useful as you think.
This is utter bollocks. Exposed metallic surfaces do experience sizable amounts of heating when in direct sunlight, but that's an argument for IR's usefulness: If it's made of enough metal to stand-out brightly against background of space (e.g. anything above 30 K or so), it's obviously manmade and thus something worth being aware of. There's also the fact that any spacecraft in a proper sci-fi setting is going to have some form of advanced power plant operating at high temperatures at its heart: Be it a fission plant lifted from a modern SSN, compact fusion pile from the Plausible Midfuture, or an exotic matter conversion drive, it's going to be a glowing ball of heat that'll be visible from halfway across the Solar System. If you want cool toys, then you need a proper power plant, and if you've got one of those, no amount of handwaving* is going to let you have stealth in space.

(* I'll asterik this because, if you've got a sophisticated enough tech base, you might be able to handwave it if you otherwise Respect Science. Mass Effect succeeded with this, for instance, riiiiiight up to the Ilos mission, when the whole house of cards collapsed.)
MythSearcher wrote:You can try to create a map of all the objects, but the sheer quantity of those things and the inherently unstable orbits of a lot of them is going to be the computation of orbit like hell.
Trying to spot anything not moving naturaly is much less likely to work when you have tons of civilian ships as well. We already have tons of radars scanning our sky, and a non-stealth passenger plane can disappear with little trace, think again for your hope of humanity's ability to create a perfect scan system.
You are basically saying that you believe Moore's Law will end eventually, and that it will be prior to the point in which the computation issues associated with building accurate maps of congested orbital areas. I will simply note that as almost all sci-fi series set themselves explicitly a century or more in the future or in an amorphous time in which the AD/CE calender has been abandoned, that it is reasonable to infer that the computational density issue has been solved.

Your radar analogy is foolish and flawed. While we do have many radars pointed in the sky, they tend to be clustered around certain geographic points. Points which coincide with where people happen to reside. It's rather easier to get lost in the skies above the South Pacific than over the Eastern Seaboard or the Benelux states, for instance, because of the relative dearth of eyes in the sky. All of which misses the point, because an observational network in orbit is going to record everything it sees for transmission back to its handlers for processing: You will be seen and there's nothing you can do about it, because there is an infinite horizon and you have flashing neon sign over your head if you've got a proper power plant or if you attempt to accelerate. What you're fumbling towards is the point that just because you will be seen, that doesn't automatically mean actionable intelligence is produced by it: That signals processing will create an information lag and that you might just slip through entirely, depending upon their searching parameters.

Which is a fair enough point, whose refinement is largely based on tech-level and narrative necessity. I'm personally bullish on computer-managed data mining, as it's already used in RL planet-hunting to good effect. But it's possible to reasonably disagree. But it's not possible to say you won't be seen.
MythSearcher wrote:Spotting a new dot is easy under infrared, but at the same time, you will get tons of new dots if you try to scan the whole solar system, or even just the near Earth objects.
The Chelyabinsk meteor is a typical "in your face" example for people thinking there's no stealth in space.
Which, to refer to the previous point, really is a question about signals processing and which has nothing to do with stealth in space as a physical possibility. To specifically address this issue, though, an automated search protocol at the heart of your signals processing system is going to sequence its actions more or less along these lines:
=> Examine redshifting of emissions to estimate their age and filter out those older than Time X.
=> Cross-check contacts younger than Time X for features associated with what you're looking for and filter out those not demonstrating Feature Y.
=> Cross-check contacts younger than Time X with Feature Y against sweeps of the same sky by your visible light telescope to verify Feature Z confirming craft is what you seek.
=> Refer existence of contact younger than Time X with Features Y and Z to humans for decision regarding necessity of threat assessment and potential combat action.

Again, you are free to feel that the computational issues will not be overcome to allow the aforementioned process to take place in more or less real-time. But that's ultimately a world-building decision that has no bearing on the actual feasibility of giant robots in space.
MythSearcher wrote:BTW pointing your telescope to the general direction where you see an infrared signal is not going to help much if your target is a 20m tall mech, seriously, most astronomy enthusiast can tell you this much. All those super large telescopes we have on Earth now can't even see the landing ship base of the Apollo missions on the moon, all of our Earth orbiting telecopes including the Hubble cannot see those as well. And having something that big on your battleship is not really going to help much if the enemy is pointing a large laser to your general direction.(where it focuses and burns your CCD in due time)
That's just...wow. All right, to apply your logic to another context, petrol-fueled internal combustion engines are useless if you want to be fuel-efficient, because the two-stroke engine in your Vespa guzzles gas. While the latter is true, it speaks little to the petrol-fueled internal combustion engine's potential for fuel-efficiency, because a Vespa's two-stroke engine is built to be rugged and capable of being fixed by the children of Latvian potato farmers. It is entirely possible to build a telescope capable of reading the serial numbers on a mobile suit at 150,000km: It's not that big of an upgrade over the capabilities of modern spy satellites.

Now, might it be impractical to build a single telescope capable of doing that and wide-angle sweeps of the sky? Certainly, and that might add some wrinkles to the hardware used by space-going nations. But then you'd end up with duplex systems of "search" telescopes to find things and "illumination" telescopes to zoom-in and determine exactly what they are, not dissimilar from early naval SAM systems. But none of which invalidates the usage of telescopes to sort out IR pings.
MythSearcher wrote:The whole "no stealth" theory is build on the following assumptions, which are pretty poorly defined:
...
Snip!
...
No. The present belief that there is no stealth in space is born of observing present technological trends and extrapolating based on what we know to be the physical realities of space. In the Rocketpunk Era, stealth in space was assumed as a given: While everyone knew that there was an infinite horizon and you could be seen from Pluto if you fired a vernier in LEO, it was only useful if someone spotted the light emissions from your burn. Because it was primarily men who were expected to be gazing through telescopes and sweeping the skies, it was possible for a telescope to be pointed in the wrong direction or a sleep-deprived crewman to miss things. Modern wide-angle photography and data storage have made it possible to have a telescope pointed at all corners of "sky" at once, and to record everything to make sure there's a record of it, even if a human operator sees nothing. That, at base, is why it's believed there is no stealth in space: If you want to craft a world where these are not the case, you're free to. But, again, none of that invalidates the fact that someone who's technically inclined can build a fully-functioning proof-of-concept model of a spaceborne warship's observation system for something like $1,000.

...am I only 40% of the way through? Yikes. I'll take the rest up another time. Or hope BFK's capable of adequately responding.
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Brave Fencer Kirby
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

You know, I had a huge quote-by-quote reply typed up, but after rereading it before posting it, I realized it was sort of pointless.

Here's what it boils down to: space is empty, dark, and cold. Spaceships are bright and hot. It's really easy to find bright hot somethings in a vast expanse of cold dark nothing. That means detection ranges will be very large. Detection ranges being very large means engagement ranges will be very large. Engagement ranges being very large means you need weapons that move at the speed of light (lasers) or that guide themselves to the target (missiles or fighters) due to the light speed delay inherent in very long range combat.

There is no circumstance in which a space fighter is going tp be better than a missile in terms of performance as a spacecraft. A space fighter has a lot of dead weight in the form of the pilot, cockpit, life support equipment, enough propellant to return from combat, etc. A space fighter's performance is also limited by what the pilot is physically able to withstand -- it's a lot easier to reinforce a computer to operate at 50g than it is to get a human being to do the same.

You do address missiles toward the end of your post, but you seem to be under the impression that a missile in space will work like a missile in atmosphere -- that it will actually have to hit its target, or at least get close enough to blow up nearby and damage it. This is untrue; as I mentioned, you can have the "warhead" be a single-shot laser. The missile would close range with the target and then fire its laser when it reached effective range. Most of the rest of your criticisms are simply factually incorrect, like the assertion that computers can't be built to withstand high g (they can), that missiles won't be able to track "stealth" targets (they will), or that they'll have performance problems compared to fighters (they won't).

Even ignoring all the stealth-in-space (or lack thereof) stuff, I'm curious to know what it is that you think manned space fighters can actually do better than missiles. It is just that you were under the impression that fighters can shoot lasers and missiles can't? Or was there something more to it than that?
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MythSearcher
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

Sigh, this is just a repeat of atomic rocket web site, and I have read the site over and over, so repeating that is not going to be convincing.

It comes from a very simple concept difference, in military, you never need complete stealth to be called stealthy, but your arguments are simply asking for perfect stealth.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/stealth
Stealth (stɛlθ)
n
1. (Aeronautics) (modifier) denoting or referring to technology that aims to reduce the radar, thermal, and acoustic recognizability of aircraft and missiles

What you are looking for is not stealth, but "complete invisibility".

Also, blending into the background is a known method of stealth, so faking as an asteroid is an acceptable way to attain a stealthy ability.

And, you can't say a stealth plane is not stealthy because it is not stealthy in the water.
A military vehicle designed to be stealthy in a given situation(short mission, relatively closer range) is still stealthy even if you keep claiming it to be not stealthy in a long range and long period.
BTW, the radar cross-section of quite a lot of "stealth planes" are actually pretty bad in other directions that is not the front.

Like I said, this is just simply an ideal case assumption, the trends and calculations there is accurate, but obviously impractical in military sense.
Metal reflects sunlight and heat? We already have infrared absorption paint to make your signal much less.
Human life support system? Keeping it warm enough only takes about 100W(so it is the same as the heat flux of human body), having 10~12 hours of oxygen does not really need that much energy as well.(if its oxygen tanks, a daily consumption is just about little more than half a cubic metre. so around 0.25 cubic metre) It is not going to be heavy compared to all the other combat systems.

About missiles, I refer to any automated combat system as drones, and I have replied to that up there.
If your missile has some combat capability, it is going to be as expensive a a drone.
A single use missile is not going to be efficient and does very little. You said it can see the mechs, but the truth is if your missile only has a single use laser, and it is an anti-ship laser, you will be wasting it on a relatively cheap mech.
You won't use an LRASM on a Su-35 or J-15 just because you come by one when flying to the target ship.(not likely to hit as well)
So, do you shoot multiple anti-mech missiles along with the anti-ship one before you even know there's mechs over there?(when you believe mechs will be completely useless and thus noone will develop and use them?)
If I can waste your anti-ship missiles like that to minimize my ship casualties, you will find a lot of cheap stupid drones in your missiles' way that can't even do combat.
If your missile has reusable lasers? making it not much different from a fully functional drone, and expensive as a mech, you won't get the funding to make them for single use purpose, and thus you will need to think of the return trip.

And why a human pilot will be better than a computer onboard?
Yes, without the human point, your drones can do much more g's but it is not going to be cheaper or lighter.
Computer parts are all inherently more vulnerable to g-forces, it's quite obvious that the more advance your computer tech gets, it utilizes more nano-tech level parts, which is much more delicate than the rough human body.(just like the bugs can take much more g's than humans)
Military class computers are much slower than what we are using, much heavier and takes up much more space. If you want a computer with reasonable level of decision making skills, even under ECM, its likely not going to be much lighter than a human with all the life support systems, and the power consumption is also going to be pretty ugly. Also, anti-radiation will pose greater challenge for computers, human can at least auto repair, computers are likely to lose data and processing power and thus the protection level would need to be higher, and protection from radiation usually means heavier mass to block the radiation.
An army of humans are unpredictable even if you figured out a single person's reaction patterns, while the computer patterns will all be figured out as long as you figured one out. Also, since they work in logical algorithms, it is easier to fool them with logic. I have replied to this up there, in my 3rd point. If your drones are not using the most efficient action but random ones(to avoid being fooled), my human pilots only need to flip a switch and let the onboard computer(which can be much less sophisticated than the fully automated one) take the most efficient action and it can overwhelm the more expensive computer as long as the spec of the machines are similar.(so there is an anti-drone mode)

Moore's law was mentioned up there, but I am not even talking about the processing power, I am talking about the data storage system. We can all see that the speed of HDDs have not been much faster than 5 years ago, SSDs might be faster, yet they are more vulnerable to radiation. Also I must point out, not even NASA can do anything close to mapping the whole solar system and tracking every single item, not even all the Near Earth objects, with their super computers. Doing a quick comparison and finding new dots is not as easy as the theory.

About telescopes, astrophysics telescopes are more sophisticated in seeing further and clearer than military ones, and military satellites are not looking from 150,000km away, some are located at 36,000km(the GEO), and the ones that can read the license plates are only some 250km away, those that can read headlines on newspaper need to drop down to a 80km orbit for a quick snap.
The reason of telescopes not being able to see very small things in long distances boils down to the amount of light coming into the telescope and the surface impurities on the lens and mirrors. Without sufficient technology to distinguish the small differences, you'll need to get larger telescopes.
Especially when your target tries to stay hidden, uses space camoflauge(different shades of darker grey, which is also a good colour to make oneself giving out less infrared signal), have decoys with active laser systems that mimics larger vessels, cold propulsion systems, heat conditioning systems that traps and sends waste heat in heat shielded boxes that can be launched to a pretty far distance and with laser decoys, this can mimic a larger propulsion making it looks like massive but heading from other positions and just started thrust.(the plasma within can be thrusted out as propellant so it acutally accelearates)

Also, taking your time to do the scan is bad because it leaves opportunities of impulse propulsion to be not noticeable. Taking a picture of the sky with an exposure time of say 0.5s and then wait for 4 hours later before the next photo is taken, means that I only have a really low chance of being detected if I release my heat only 10% of the time, which can be possible if I am 10 times as bright when I am doing so.

The idea of military steath, you avoid being detected, not completely, but relatively.
You blend into the background, give false trails for the enemy to follow, divert your enemy's attention, while at the same time getting much closer to your target.
Venting my heat towards directions where there's no enemy probes is also a viable option, as the probes has to send out signals to the target, so it will not be stealthy at all even if it is cold.
All I need with this system is a relatively small telescope and a passive radar, look into a certain direction and make sure that direction is relatively unmanned, unprobed and preferably empty space(so it absorbs most heat radiation like a black body), open a panel and expose my heated core towards that direction, I am extremely visble to infrared in that direction, but at least I can easily identify if that is a horrible decision before I do so. Also, if I am in a star system, doing so in the opposite direction of the star might actually prevent me from reducing the heat signature from the star.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

Would Mini Mecha still be problematic with the Square Cube Law around?
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

doghunter1 wrote:Would Mini Mecha still be problematic with the Square Cube Law around?
Please define the term "Mini". As Chinese philosopher said, an inch can be too large or too small, it's depend on context.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

Kuruki wrote:
Please define the term "Mini". As Chinese philosopher said, an inch can be too large or too small, it's depend on context.
I meant 3-4 meter mecha, like the titular mecha of Armored Trooper VOTOMS.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

doghunter1 wrote:
Kuruki wrote:
Please define the term "Mini". As Chinese philosopher said, an inch can be too large or too small, it's depend on context.
I meant 3-4 meter mecha, like the titular mecha of Armored Trooper VOTOMS.

Highly unlikely that you get enough fuel space, thus you get really limited combat time.
Unless you are talking about some yet magical(to us primitive beings) methods to propel.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

Well there's always the 5-7 meter scale.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

MythSearcher wrote:Highly unlikely that you get enough fuel space, thus you get really limited combat time. Unless you are talking about some yet magical (to us primitive beings) methods to propel.
How about graphene super capacitors? From what (admittedly little) I understand they would fit the bill quite nicely. I always thought if poor Asimo could get some of those it wouldn't have that colossal backpack causing it to tip over so much.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

If we're talking mini mecha, there's also the possibility of going with the somewhat more boring option of human-sized robots that are just remote controlled drones. They'd do all the same things that normal people do, without risking lives.

Of course, that opens up a whole kettle of fish, since being able to go into wars without as much risk to human casualties would only encourage starting them.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

Well, it's smaller than human, but I won't surprise if Google will deploy Boston Dynamic's Wildcat Mk-II (no armed yet, but bullet proofed, can run on rough terrain, and jump through your window! :D ) in next decade...(and the only way you can escape it is by throw away your smart phone!) :mrgreen:

Then it will reenact the scene from Nadesico where Batta slaughter civilians...
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

Raikoh wrote:Of course, that opens up a whole kettle of fish, since being able to go into wars without as much risk to human casualties would only encourage starting them.
That's understating it: The main risk of automated warfare is that it outright encourages killing civilians. The very unwillingness to put people in harm's way, spending large amounts of money to reduce mortal risk, implies where your arm needs to be twisted to make you cry uncle.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

This is starting to get off topic, but you might be interested to know that drone pilots have largely the same rates of psychological issues like PTSD that other soldiers in combat have. Being thousands of miles away and killing someone by pushing a button doesn't eliminate the psychological impact of the fact that you're killing people. People do not suddenly become soulless murdering automatons because they're not physically present and in danger themselves. The "if we make war less bad, we'll do it more often" (or the opposite version, "if we make war worse, we'll do it less often") argument has been made since at least the American Civil War in the 1860s -- "it is will that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it" is a quote attributed to Robert E. Lee. Hell, World War I was so bad that people called it "the war to end all wars", which the existence of WWII retroactively makes supremely ironic. Hell, even Gundam Wing made that argument with all the opposition to mobile dolls. It was silly then, and it's silly now -- there's nothing to support the idea that remote warfare leads to more warfare beyond kneejerk fear of new technology.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

Maybe because that technology still ended up in the hands of a human soldier?
Really, I don't have an ethical problem with remote operated weapon, in the end the only difference is where the operator is sitting.

Now fully automated weapons (i.e. Mobile Dolls) I do have qualms with, because a person is no longer operating the device, they are simply giving it orders. I'd have to imagine that the psychological trauma of issuing an order is less than that of having to carry it out. The other side to that is that it allows any lunatic with the enough resources to seemingly conjure an army willing to commit any atrocity they want from nowhere.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

When I brought up human sized drones encouraging war, it was less from a perspective of the soldier and more from a socioeconomic one. Because, well, here's my logic:

When this technology advances enough, the price of a single robot will probably reduce quite a bit. Now, considering there's A.I. that can be programmed to search and destroy "humanoid shaped objects" in existence today, you could just purchase a ton of robots and drop them in the middle of whatever you wanted dead. It probably would cost less to buy a robot than it would to train, house, and feed a soldier, right? Even with the need for routine maintenance, you'd be sending less actual people out there (or if you really want to go into the "genre blind sci-fi" angle then you could have them build machines to repair the machines).

As for the sociological point, well, this is pretty simple. These days, wars can be very strongly opposed when the body counts start rising. People don't like it when they hear their loved ones might not come back home, obviously. If you nearly eliminated this factor, though, they might not be so opposed to war. The only gray area I'd say is that drones programmed to kill anything vaguely humanoid probably wouldn't be getting much public backing what with killing a ton of civilians. Still, that's something that might possibly be manipulated by the propaganda machine.

But even if they have a human operator, losing a few greenbacks is nothing compared to a human life from a morale standpoint.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

Outlaw wrote:
How about graphene super capacitors? From what (admittedly little) I understand they would fit the bill quite nicely. I always thought if poor Asimo could get some of those it wouldn't have that colossal backpack causing it to tip over so much.
super capacitors can fix your energy problem, not your propellant problem.
You still need to propel mass to move, and a smaller unit means you can carry less, while you maybe able to maintain a similar mass ratio and a better thrust-mass efficiency with a smaller and lighter unit, your defences will be horrible against anything you can use with the super capacitors to power.
Also, the smaller you are, the higher percentage the error in motion will get.(smaller bipedal robots are actually harder to balance in real life than bigger ones since the absolute error remains pretty much the same in our production process but the tolerance ratio goes up as you build smaller stuff)
Not to mention the mass of your human pilot or at least the main computer unit will still be the same mass, so if you get the unit too small, its obviously going to have a worse mass ratio. The cube law dictates the thrust ratio of a smaller thruster usually having a better if not the same rate though.(unless, of course, you get too small and you can't really build it within your margin of error)

And if you are too small, your weapon might not be useful against larger and harder units like a warship, and carrying the minimum size weapon that can do damage will be hard for a small unit.
The fun thing about laser weapons is that if you want it to disperse less, you need a larger calibre(less diffraction) and for super long range combat, you'll want to have large guns with something like 1~5m calibre, which will be really hard for MMSs.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

Raikoh wrote:When I brought up human sized drones encouraging war, it was less from a perspective of the soldier and more from a socioeconomic one. Because, well, here's my logic:

When this technology advances enough, the price of a single robot will probably reduce quite a bit. Now, considering there's A.I. that can be programmed to search and destroy "humanoid shaped objects" in existence today, you could just purchase a ton of robots and drop them in the middle of whatever you wanted dead. It probably would cost less to buy a robot than it would to train, house, and feed a soldier, right? Even with the need for routine maintenance, you'd be sending less actual people out there (or if you really want to go into the "genre blind sci-fi" angle then you could have them build machines to repair the machines).

As for the sociological point, well, this is pretty simple. These days, wars can be very strongly opposed when the body counts start rising. People don't like it when they hear their loved ones might not come back home, obviously. If you nearly eliminated this factor, though, they might not be so opposed to war. The only gray area I'd say is that drones programmed to kill anything vaguely humanoid probably wouldn't be getting much public backing what with killing a ton of civilians. Still, that's something that might possibly be manipulated by the propaganda machine.

But even if they have a human operator, losing a few greenbacks is nothing compared to a human life from a morale standpoint.
I have given my arguments about automation in war up there.
They are simply easy to fool to waste all their ammo or retreat without making a decision.
Your example of robots searching human shaped objects and destroying them will simply be destroyed after they run out of ammo, and it'd be easy to get a bunch of sex balloon dolls or even just strapping a bunch of balloons and cut out cardboard boxes to fool them.(faking the heat signal is not hard if you pump hot air into the balloons)

The thing is, all AIs will have to run on logic from programming, and thus will be much easier to decipher than random individual humans that most don't really run on logic based decisions.(not saying they are not running on reasoning, but it's different from clearly defined logic steps)

AIs can be really useful when you are leading a short attack mission, just like how the US military are using them, toss a small bot in a room, it attacks all the targets(or don't attack the target hostages but everyone else) thus it makes no time for deciphering.
But if you get them on a larger battlefield, and they have to fend for themselves? You will be seeing a LOT of strange and seemingly cheating ways to deal with them, and the worse part is, if you want them to be efficient and be able to go against dumb bots that are on short missions, they cannot be too creative and reluctant, but if they are set to that, then most of them will be doing the same thing and the same reaction most of the time, which means they will be pretty useless facing prepared human troops.(and human troops carrying dumb bots around will not be too rare given that it is getting much easier and cheaper to build nowadays.
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

MythSearcher wrote:super capacitors can fix your energy problem, not your propellant problem.
Yeah, sorry about that, but I was thinking something like engine fuel, guess my brain is still stuck on ground combat. Unless someone comes up with space propellers batteries/capacitors probably wouldn't be that helpful.

Carry on, and please excuse my silly faux pas. :P
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Re: Real-Life Advantages of Mechs in Military Use

Outlaw wrote: Yeah, sorry about that, but I was thinking something like engine fuel, guess my brain is still stuck on ground combat. Unless someone comes up with space propellers batteries/capacitors probably wouldn't be that helpful.

Carry on, and please excuse my silly faux pas. :P
Well, unless you are in the CE universe, which by some magical handwave, they never cared about propellant as long as they have energy.("Freedom doesn't need to refuel since its nuclear powered" huh? Oh well, their universe obviously have a much stronger photon pressure as seen in Stargazer, SF and Destiny, so I guess...)
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