Timeline for Would tanks or small walkers be better for Lunar militaries?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 16, 2018 at 10:00 | comment | added | Ruadhan | Depends very much on the situation, and you can't plan for everything. It's probably more applicable now than it ever was, urban combat being the current paradigm it's perfectly possible that even when there are armies in play a fight becomes one-on-one between war machines. in a moon-war meanwhile, the amount of war-materiel is likely to be very minimal simply for lack of resources and manpower and the expense of delivering an army to the moon. So I would expect battles to be skirmish-sized. Still. two tanks close together would have the exact same problem of one agile vehicle at close range. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 16:09 | comment | added | Keith Morrison | @Ruadhan, and if there are two enemy tanks? Much of the time when I see people trying to justify something like this, they seem to assume a fair fight--one mech vs one tank, or one mech vs one helicopter--when one of the primary jobs of any military commander is to make the fight as utterly unfair as possible. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 13:27 | comment | added | Ruadhan | I meant Knife fight in the military sense of being too close for big guns rather than literally wielding edged weapons :P In any case the idea being that a fast moving walker can outmaneuver a tank at close range and evade its turret-rotation rather than dodge bullets and shells. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 13:24 | comment | added | Ian Kemp | @TomTom Of course drones are simpler/better in all regards, but that's not what was asked for. :) | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 13:24 | comment | added | Ian Kemp | @Ruadhan2300 It definitely depends whether you're going with the walkers being mobile tanks, or knife fighters. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 13:05 | comment | added | Ruadhan | In the regard of not being where the enemy is aiming. in extreme close quarters (dozens of meters) a walking machine may simply be able to strafe around its turreted tank opponent and move faster than the turret can track. The real awkward bit is getting to that knife-fight range without being exploded a kilometer out. 20+ foot war machines aren't exactly stealthy, especially if your enemy is actively watching for giant thermal signatures like theirs. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 10:39 | comment | added | Mermaker | @KeithMorisson that's an excellent point! That's one of the factors that make cover so important in ground battles. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 5:23 | comment | added | Ian Kemp | @KeithMorrison I'm well aware that projectile weapons travel at extremely high Mach numbers that make a mockery of human reaction times. The trick (with unguided projectiles at least) is to simply not be where the projectile's launcher is aiming; for guided projectiles you will almost certainly require a hard-kill system of some sort. | |
| Mar 13, 2018 at 22:45 | comment | added | Keith Morrison | @T.Sar, people often talk about "dodging" and being "too nimble to hit" when it comes to weapons because they've seen too many fictional representations where the weapon is coming in slow enough that it can dodged. Consider the reality: a rocket like the CRV7, velocity of around 940 meters per second. Which means that if someone gets a launcher to within a half-kilometer of the dancing robot, the machine has about a half-second to identify the threat, calculate trajectory, and move to avoid. How far can a robot move to avoid in well under a half second (assuming very fast threat ID)? | |
| Mar 13, 2018 at 15:22 | comment | added | Mermaker | @KeithMorrison Could you elaborate? | |
| Mar 13, 2018 at 14:15 | comment | added | Keith Morrison | People have a vastly mistaken belief in how fast missiles and other projectiles actually travel. | |
| Mar 13, 2018 at 13:16 | comment | added | TomTom | "if your walkers are capable of jumping, dodging, and frustrating enemies by being generally too nimble to hit with weapons strong enough to bring them down, then you have a case" A case hwich is better for a non-walker (i.e. flying drone). YOu will mostly rely on thrusters anyway (thanks to low gravity9, so why bother with all the walking apparatus on top? | |
| Mar 13, 2018 at 12:35 | history | answered | Ian Kemp | CC BY-SA 3.0 |