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I’m surprised no one so far has answered the “tanks or power armor” question by
saying, “missiles!” As information, positioning, sensor, and guidance
technology continues to improve, it gets easier and easier to hit a ground-based
target from long range with a missile or smart bomb. Aren’t Tomohawks, at about
$7 million per shot, the most expensive missile we’ve got? Aren’t main battle
tanks more expensive than that? If you use a big enough missile, there’s no way
a tank can survive a hit.
Anti-missile technology is an option, but I think you get back to the basic
truth that it’s way easier to throw a spear than to catch one. The Navy has
batteries of mini-guns on their ships that they shoot at incoming missiles
(called CWS for “close-in weapon system”, pronounced “sea-whiz”--I’m not
kidding), but the Navy guy I know never felt much safer because of them.
I think the Pentagon is not planning a successor to the Abrams, because it’s
just too big a target. The escalation starts by bringing a sword to a
hand-to-hand combat. Then you need armor to shield yourself from your
opponent’s sword, then you need bigger, heavier weapons to penetrate the other
guy’s armor. You alternate increasing the amount of your armor and increasing
the power of your weapons until you have a massive tank or mech that can barely
move and that presents an enormous target.
Step one in the process of killing tanks (or mechs for that matter) is to
establish air superiority. After that, your ground attack aircraft can pick
them off with impunity. Reminds me of the old joke that the difference between
aerospace engineers and civil engineers is that one designs weapons and the
other designs targets.
All that notwithstanding, I’ll still build mechs because I think they’re
sweeeeeeet.
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| Hello everyone. I was checking out (URL) Ryan Wood's Jade Empire Hong Hovertank post> and he mentions that we have seen little in ground combat vehicles other than (URL) power suit>. That got me thinking, when you have Power Suits available, should (...) (20 years ago, 24-Aug-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek, lugnet.build.mecha, lugnet.space, FTX)
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