Mecha in SAoY

[Guard Dog]

Holy shit this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about and that is beautiful! There is no true hardpoint vulnerability from notable transformation and it doesn't require anti gravity to stay in the air to deliver weapons. Plus it would be a beast on the ground. The shape of the machine is fluid, organic; and more importantly relatively aerodynamic. The F14 tomcat is the perfect example also on their swept wing design, the purpose of which was to give the F14 maneuverability over a broad range of speeds which is essential in a dog fight. I would be willing to say that the swept wing concept is actually a bold improvement on my conceptual pylon laced flight harness if they don't get in the mechs way on the ground. Osakan knows exactly what I'm talking about without a doubt. Agreed also that the cockpit should be deeper within the armor in contrast to modern flying machines as once on the ground it will be in the thick of it, and a larger target at that.

 

[OsakanOne]

Coming back to the aerodynamics argument: Why spend more energy than you have to, to achieve a task?

Yes, we have bullshit tech but we're also no longer in a big primary war with a primary opponent. We're seeing the damaging effects of big super weapons and over-powered equipment, so we're preferring on a political level to have lots of equipment that's "good enough" that can grow over time rather than super-weapons which become hopelessly heavy handed in scenarios where precision is required.

Cheating aerodynamics means lots of problems.

You spend more energy than you have to, to move through the air. You're heavier, so you need to spend even more. It also means you're more sophisticated, so there's more inside your body to go wrong with you, that you'll fall into disrepair and need more maintenance, get sick more often and be more temperamental. Worse, all the screaming you have to do to lift yourself makes you louder, so you're heard from a huge distance away and all that wasted energy means you either can't loiter (a critical function of close air support) as long or you use an expensive powerplant making you both a high value target and a big risk since your powerplant if it goes up could result in big scary collateral.

As an animal, what we're looking at here is a swan with no head and the legs and arms of a kangaroo. She can soar and use her legs like air-breaks for very tight turns or tuck her legs back, spread her wings and fly very slowly with huge stability with no specialist gravity systems -- meaning she looks like a conventional weapon so less emphasis is placed on knocking her out of the air by the enemy because she's under-estimated: It also makes her a lot harder to identify from a distance using sensors.

Even better? If you do suffer a nasty nasty hit, you can just glide back down and not roll and smash into the ground and skid-row into pieces across a plateau, sparks, fire and smoke: You can just approach tenderly, come in at your own rate and do your best to use what altitude you can to make sure wherever you plant your feet is good to you.

Edit:
Reading this post back, my technophilia is pretty obvious lol

 

[Guard Dog]

Exactly, you understand the art of close air support, loiter times are a huge part of the reason why the A10 fleet has an uncanny combat performance against ground targets to this day. If you have an aerodynamic frame any altitude you have is energy you can use to move the machine somewhere, It's all potential energy not just the engines. Part of being a good pilot is managing this potential energy properly. There are A10 that landed even after being shot up by light machine guns literally all over the underside; even with both hydraulic systems completely gutted and one of the AC converters destroyed the pilot flew back on wire and landed it, she was a woman by the way. She learned why not to fly within a mike of a tank with a fifty caliber machine gun on top the poor girl. But yes this concept is actually extremely viable and more importantly, it offers a strategic flexibility other suggestions haven't retained coupled with a relatively cost effective approach to my own observations, and admittedly you're probably better at conveying this to others as well I can be a bit dry at times.

 

[OsakanOne]

What I've always really loved about aircraft is their fleeting and dangerous nature. Unpowered, a boat, a car, a ship, a person are all fine. But a plane? It plunges, possibly to to its death. And to be its very best, it has to fight passionately on that knife-edge: to be unstable to react faster than whoever she dances with.

I think its funny that birds still involve eggs if they use energy based maneuvering. Its quite charming.

 

[OsakanOne]

So, Wes, tell us more about what you want out of her. We know the movement and platform: Let's talk teeth.

 

[Guard Dog]

I think you're probably the first person out of the air force that I've spoken with who even knows what a tactical egg is! Yes it is fairly ironic perhaps that they used the symbology together or maybe the very nature of flight kept that for us the whole time intentionally it's a subjective matter I suppose. The A-10 is a bit of a slow poke but you still need to know air to air combat geometry, basically the tactic is if a fighter ever threatens you; you turn the gau-8 and keep the nose faced at them so if they come into range you can release a burst. Also typically the craft is also armed with two IR missiles. But only the A-10C would be able to fully use the boresight aptitude of the most recent Aim-9x variety. CAS craft ideally never have to fight another craft, but there is an expected reaction in place when you do. Unfortunately as I said it is a bit of a slow poke so you can't outrun a designated air to air platform. You would need to as you so aptly put it "dance" with them.

 

[OsakanOne]

Guard. I know its not much but I've flown the A-10C somewhere around fifty to a hundred hours in DCS -- granted, with the benefit of a HOTAS and for a little while with a borrowed Occulus Rift. My first launch took 45 minutes with a printed checklist. Now I can do it blind in about 8 minutes or abridge the sequence to 3 and continue waking the bird up in flight: there's more than enough time after snap and run. Its not clever (or sensible), but its fun.

You should get a giggle out of this.

I love that he doesn't even know to mute/brief the Master Caution on the CWP and around 16 minutes in wonders why such a thing doesn't exist (it does). You should mute MC immediately so if the situation changes, you're notified of a new problem. Its like "Okay, okay, I'm dealing with it" -- "NEW PROBLEM!"

Oh and 7 minutes in, he's cooked it causing right engine fire.

 

[Guard Dog]

I don't know if I realized exactly how realistic these civil sector simulations were getting till I watched the start up sequence which is strikingly similar in nature to the A-10a and I'm abruptly envious as I see the virtual displays that the C modifications hasn't been preformed to the entire fleet yet. I believe this is because they're waiting for the new package of wings to be put on the crafts before gutting the cockpits a little, those two MFCD are probably the most impressive part about watching that game and now I suddenly find myself checking to see if I have enough hardware to play it myself. Although the single best thing I was excited about regarding the C, the data link suite that most modern craft have yet the A has been lacking because of It's status. The truth of the matter is that the united states air force generals have been looking for any reason to try and shrug off the A-10, yet they can't because of It's aptitude in close air support roles. The A can fire everything the C does but the JDAM bombs they drop everywhere now, but you believe me sweetheart more A-10 are going to be going up as the need for attacking the ground increases. Already coalition airstrikes are responsible for killing over eight thousand islamic state insurgents. I have to say that your ability to even use that simulation is considerably impressive as it takes a relatively intelligent individual to navigate a cockpit and prime the craft for flight. I've never flown a C but I predict it starts just like that minus the obvious fuck ups. hahahaha

 

[OsakanOne]

Its actually a General Dynamics pilot training simulator, given a front-end in 3D instead of talking to a solid simulation cockpit. The software behind the simulation is all identical.

And yeah, the glass and the DTS is very very cool. It saves a lot of hassle programming or mucking about, though I don't know the a-10a very well: My experience with non-DLS DTS is mostly in Russian aircraft (specifically the SU-27 and SU-33 -- О, детка, да! Ты грязная девушки!)

The C supposedly fixes a few bugs in the flight controller -- namely digitizing a lot of formerly analogue components for reliability and so at different airspeeds the flaps behave differently, meaning your flight tends to be more stable and you consume less fuel. Oh and all the obvious improvements to acq/tar stuff, which means you can id early and shoot from muuuuuch further away.

The A-10C is a beast - she's so capable that the 35 is going to give a lot of pilots sleepless nights and maybe even turn some of them to alcohol, mourning their lost wives. Or would it be like bromance, since the A-10C definitely has a dick? Haaa.


~~This post has been edited to removed content which violates the Star Army community guidelines~~ (NSFW in a SFW forum)

"No head when landing on a carrier"

And here's some fitting music to go with the video.



Okay, let's get back on topic.

 

[Nightowl]

For weapons, I'd go with twin rapid fire railguns. Material based for knocking things like buildings down as opposed to simply melting holes in them and rapid fire to spread the love around in a single pass, similar to the A-10 really. Slow firing weapons may be contra-indicated as it simply hits a single location with a lot of damage, but leaves almost everything else untouched.

 

[Guard Dog]

Aahahahaha, that picture is amazing. Yeah I predict that some of the changes regarding the avionics include the flaps changing position at certain speeds, most more modern aircraft do that automatically as well. You see in the A10-a you can actually over speed the flaps slightly if they're extended but I would imagine that the best part about the automated control is you could set them to deploy; accelerate something past 200 true air speed have the flaps raise themselves up again only to cut back on the throttle later and allow the flaps to provide extra lift again once in a safe speed. Granted the targeting pod new to the C could be very useful as well but I believe the a-model isn't that far behind with the sights of the mavericks for hardware that was wrought in the cold war era. I prefer to think of the 10 like a woman cause I just want to get inside and ride her.

 

[OsakanOne]

Night: What, like each slewed to an elbowless arm as an arm-weapon, side by side? The problem here is you start running into problems with drag. Most units usually compensate for this using thrusters or other propulsion systems to try and cancel/compensate for it (air deflection using fields for example).

I figure we can probably compensate for it pretty easily though, given we have leg thrusters too so we can counter-match drag either with thrust or counter-drag and the slower airspeed is actually beneficial. The hard-landing and VTOL capabilities would be helpful on this front.

I also see this thing being able to mount a large mission pod about two thirds the size of the front fusalage. Missiles, bombs, specialist sensors, even AWACS & ECM gear could be mission swapped. Going down the Skyhawk route of a solid reliable unit which is mission tailored rather than all purpose probably suits the SAoY more.

 

[Guard Dog]

You should give it an automatic gauss cannon as a built in weapon system and then have a variable of other large scale equipment to be attached to the machine given the circumstances that it will be launched into the battle. I believe that this can be a counter to many other units on your battlefield if the doctrine of this army is as singularly power armor heavy as it seems. A variety of heavy weapons and counter measure gear against other units would make it a brutal addition, offering firepower when coupled with a single PA unit and a broad flexibility. You should deploy them after the armors have already engaged the enemy, and then use something like a joint data link and shared sensory information like modern aircraft do

 

[Nightowl]

I was thinking extended from the front of the engine pods, didn't like the idea of the arms, drag as you said. Sacrifice of a lot of arc of fire, but that thing looks like it could turn on a dime, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

 

[Nashoba]

Nashoba you haven't followed this thread as intently as I have in the past two hours so let me elaborate as well.

Guard Dog, kindly don't presume what I have or have not done. Or what I understand. I am a veteran from the Air Force.

And while I enjoy watching Robotech and Macross and plenty of other things of that genre. Robotech/Macross used the transform the fighter into a giant robot because they were fighting giants.

But Transformation is a gimmick, it looks great in anime, but reality or sci-fi with a dose of reality, every piece of a craft that is going to move or transform is actually a weakness. Fighters get their structure and strength from how they are put together. As soon as you start adding joints to make legs and arms , etc, those points weak points. Plus you are wasting internal space for other items that your vehicle needs.

To me, a veritech while it looks cool is like a Swiss Army Knife, sure it has a lot of need gadgets but give me a real set of tools if you want something fixed. Give me a fighter or give me a mecha and they will surpass a veritech.

If Wes wants to introduce a Veritech style mecha into the Star Army, that is certainly his purview as he is the FM for Yamatai. Its not necessarily original, but it has the cool factor.

But since this tread has gone from working on a 'mecha' to going into Robotech. I'm done with it. Have fun guys.

 

[OsakanOne]

Nash: It has no transformation. It just lifts its legs out of the airflow, that's all.

 

[Guard Dog]

Well brother if you actually bothered to read my idea at all you would realize that my original conception was basically just an aerodynamic mech tucked in a neat fetal position wrapped with a neat pylon laced exo skeleton; no transformation required I already said that I realized such a concept would produce weak hardpoints clearly you haven't put in enough effort to read my posts Sir. But seeing where it has evolved now is obviously not a veritech and the gimmick you reference at the moment is basically just wings being moved to different locations that's the extent of the platforms shift. And if your an AF vet from any nation then you realize that fighters are basically tissue paper when they're actually hit most of the time. From your argument why don't we also question the tactical need for things like armored fighting vehicles in real life? After all we have both a tank and an armored transport why is there a need to go anywhere in between as a tank can destroy an armored combat vehicle lazily and a soldier carrying anti armor weaponry can step out of a Humvee and produce the same result?

To me your issues don't actually emanate from the concept and instead from your disposition and unwillingness to even read them all the way through without presuming things about it that obviously aren't a part of the elaboration provided. If anything the fact that you haven't realized what we're talking about doesn't really transform is solid proof you don't even have enough mental dexterity to go through the thread without resorting to bias.

 

[Wes]

As admin, I'd like to remind everyone that we are an actual community and I expect a certain level of friendly respect for the other players of this site, and that violating this expectation can result in consequences, particularly if someone is concerned enough to report it to me using the forum's reporting system (which I encourage you to use when appropriate). It's natural that will we sometimes disagree but that's no excuse for being so rude.

Please take a moment to review the site rules.

Thanks.

 

[OsakanOne]

Because I'm not going to ruffle any feathers, I'm not going to explain why but I expect you to understand why I disagree with your decision.

Moving along swiftly... Incoming sketch-dump:

 

[OsakanOne]

No takers? Where'd the discussion go?