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In lugnet.off-topic.geek, David Rabadan wrote:
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Hello everyone. I was checking out Ryan Wood’s Jade Empire Hong Hovertank post and he mentions that we have
seen little in ground combat vehicles other than
power suit. That
got me thinking, when you have Power Suits available, should tanks be used /
are they really needed? Can tanks add anything that power armor cannot?
As a power armor fan myself I believe that they can replace tanks and do a
better job than mechanized armor. They can carry a diversity of weapons;
they are a bipedal weapons platform system. They can access areas that tanks
may not. They can perform “surgical” strikes and with less collateral
damage. What do you think?
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I used to think that bipedal war machines had absolutely no advantages over
their tank-al equivalents beyond “wow” factor (and face it, getting your enemy
to say, “wow, that’s cool that they can do that,” just before he blows you to
kingdom come is a pretty lame consolation for the fact that you just got
pasted). More recently, someone posted a link somewhere on LUGNET (can’t even
remember which group it got posted to, but maybe O-T.geek?) to an article that
detailed why legged walkers are actually more energy efficient in motion than
wheeled vehicles. So, that’s one practical and one frivolous reason for using
walkers over tanks.
Now, on the flip side, anything that’ll be able to walk back out of a combat
zone (after all, a blind, three-legged dog with a monkey perched on its back can
walk in, but Vegas would probably give some really long odds on both of them
making it back out afterwards) is going to cost an arm and a leg, and any
military that can afford to shell out that kind of bucks is probably the same
sort of military that can afford to fuel their mail trucks with jet fuel because
it helps to streamline the supply lines and reduces the chances that your jet
fighters won’t be able to get off the ground because all you’ve got left to fuel
them with is 87 Octane. Cost not being an issue pretty much kills any obvious
strategic advantages that could be gained by switching to walkers.
On the tank side of things, you present a dramatically smaller target (which
also reduces the chances of you being spotted before you’re ready to “announce”
yourself...with a barrage of depleted uranium spikes), your motive mechanisms
are both smaller in quantity and less complicated to keep working (KISS
principle in action, aka Scotty’s Law), you can have your treads completely
blown off and still be in a position to defend yourself against attack (as
compared to falling flat on what’s left of your back), if your enemy doesn’t
have weapons that can penetrate your armor they won’t be able to take you down
with a magnetic tow cable, you don’t have to worry about tripping on stuff, you
can be air-dropped from a cargo plane and get right to business without “some
assembly required”, you can get in and out of your vehicle safely in the field
(as compared to needing elevated gantries to reach the cockpit), and it’s “at
rest” position doesn’t require any powered systems to keep it balanced in an
upright position. Tanks are quite simply more suited for enduring sustained
combat without having constant access to reliable high-tech repair facilities.
They just don’t have quite the same visual appeal as bipedal machines beating
the tar out of each other with fists and swords.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Tanks or Power Armor
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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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