Technical Dissertation on Mobile Suits
Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2009 4:18 pm
this was brought about by a mental review, and revelations regarding Mobile suits provided by Watching the Anime known as Code Geass and various Gundam Series.
the basic Premise of this Dissertation is to outline the various usages and cost effectiveness of a Mobile suit in most areas of combat.
the Basic Mobile Suit
[spoiler]
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is in fact highly Impractical at least by modern standards. the multitude of moving parts, and light armor compared to current vehicles makes the Mobile suit outclassed by already contemporary units. The moving parts require lots of extra parts and technical work to keep the whole thing operating at peak efficiency, increasing the maintanance cost, and personnel required per unit compared to our modern Tanks. a conclusive proof of that, is the Variable-Sweep wing of previous generations of jet fighter craft. if it was getting prohibitively expensive to manage aircraft with only two moving parts, how much more expensive would it be to run Mobile Suits with at least 12 moving joints, not counting actual hands? Additionally, in the Modern Era the Mobile Suit would be used in Land engagements. Land Engagements favor two main trees of development in terms of effectiveness.
[spoiler]
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The first, is Armor. a heavier, more armored unit is more durable, and thus better in it's "combat survivability" role. Its staying power means the armored unit would be able to endure a siege type situation, at the front lines for most of the battle. now, on a Mobile Suit, Armor is prohibitive, in the fact that more armor, means more powerful engines to move the various joints, increasing the weight, and decreasing the room for armor. the mobile suit would likely be extremely heavy, slow and much like a contemporary tank, but more complex. It would however, have the power systems and load capacity of carrying extremely heavy payloads. a heavy Mech could probably carry as many as 16 differant weapons, with others being still possible as add ons to various parts. Perhaps the best example of this type, is the GN-05 Gundam Virtue(see image) which carries heavy armament, and defensive equipment. This type of Mobile suit would see limited uses in today's field, and that's because the modern tree of land combat is Mobility.
[spoiler]
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Mobility, the ability of weapons and personnel to move quickly around the globe, and the battlefield easily. Mobile Suits by default have legs, which take alot more work to get up to a reasonable speed than wheels or tracks do. in current terms, that means that a basic mobile suit would be too slow to account for it's reduced mass and the flexability of the legs for unconventional arenas. the only places i can think of where a mobile suit might be useful, is in a forested or mountainous region where conventional tracked and wheeled vehicles would have trouble moving about. However, the Mobile Suits in Code Geass, the "Knightmares" are perhaps the best solution to this problem, adding wheels to the legs on a folding quadrupedal system. This solves the mobility problem in most areas without compromising the basic premise of a Mobile suit. the suit can then move fast enough in open areas to the best effect. The Mobile suit would be limited to medium/light weaponry due to the need for speed/maneuverability over firepower, but these scale weapons should be easily able to compare to modern tank weapons or even surpass them, depending on configuration/technology. I would consider this type of mobile suit to be the second best kind of planetary mobile suit, which leads to the question: what is the best type of planetary mobile suit? The Variable Fighter.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
the Variable fighter is in fact the most mobile version of Mobile suit available, due to the fact that it transforms into a Jet form, which is both Aerodynamic and uses the engines to best effect. however, carries little to no real armor, but merely external plating. it also would be limited in it's armament due to the weight limits, and folding capability that would be needed to make the suit capable of transforming. this means the Variable fighter will probably at most have 5 weapons. one or two internally mounted Machine guns, for fighter dogfight ability, a specialized rifle, designed to be folded into the fighter, and possibly one or two externally carried missiles types, an exploitable weakness in "conventional" mobile suit combat. The Variable fighter is quite honestly, the most flexible, and most expensive/complicated planetary Mobile Suit. but, there's still one area where Mobile suits can be used, Space.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
Space Mobile suits are actually more effective than most series Starfighters for one main physics reason: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. "Any Action gives an equal and opposite reaction". how does this apply to mobile suits you ask? the same way that Astronauts now are able to move their arms to change direction while in deep space can be applied to Mobile suits on a much larger scale. combined with a proper thruster system and calibrated control operating system, a Mobile Suit could fly circles around most "starfighters" of Sci Fi origins. This is because the mobile suit would have two primary directions it would want to direct its thrust: down, and back. this provides movement up, and forward respectively. Since a normal starfighter's engines would be designed for turns and bursts of thrust forward, the Mobile suit would be more practical due to the ability to both direct thrust forward, up, and change forward and up quickly with a properly balanced control system. Since the Mobile Suits would have their maneuvering thrusters on their limbs, a mobile suit could change the position of it's maneuvering thrusters mid maneuver to perform an entirely differant maneuver than the one it entered, whereas the starfighter would have to stop it's maneuver, and then start a new one. This, combined with the Mobile suits "turreted" arm movement, allows a Mobile suit to fire almost anywhere in it's forward hemisphere, while it's moving this hemisphere almost as fast as a starfighter is capable of flying. Now, there's one major inherent problem with this type of control system, and that's the forces put on the pilot, it'd not be one continious direction of force, but possibly 4 forces on all parts of the body at any one time. Inertia, Centrifugal Force, gravity, Engines, these will all effect the pilot, with varying degrees and at the same time. but if an Elite pilot can withstand these forces, and expertly control the mobile suit, a Mobile suit would be capable of ripping to shreds any "conventional" Strike craft while in space. if a Space Mobile suit was combined with a Variable Fighter from the previous section, and made capable of both entering and leaving the atmosphere, there would be almost no reason for any other main military vehicle to be involved in strike craft level combat. at least, that is my belief.
and so, you can see that with all of the above trees and types of mobile suits, there is alot of variability, but the train of research to get to the more useful types would not be feasible in a combat role, at least, not as they are now.
an area i neglected to cover in this, is the advent of missiles in current combat that would destroy most mobile suits rather quickly, making the expense of making them not worth it anyway.
the basic Premise of this Dissertation is to outline the various usages and cost effectiveness of a Mobile suit in most areas of combat.
the Basic Mobile Suit
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]is in fact highly Impractical at least by modern standards. the multitude of moving parts, and light armor compared to current vehicles makes the Mobile suit outclassed by already contemporary units. The moving parts require lots of extra parts and technical work to keep the whole thing operating at peak efficiency, increasing the maintanance cost, and personnel required per unit compared to our modern Tanks. a conclusive proof of that, is the Variable-Sweep wing of previous generations of jet fighter craft. if it was getting prohibitively expensive to manage aircraft with only two moving parts, how much more expensive would it be to run Mobile Suits with at least 12 moving joints, not counting actual hands? Additionally, in the Modern Era the Mobile Suit would be used in Land engagements. Land Engagements favor two main trees of development in terms of effectiveness.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]The first, is Armor. a heavier, more armored unit is more durable, and thus better in it's "combat survivability" role. Its staying power means the armored unit would be able to endure a siege type situation, at the front lines for most of the battle. now, on a Mobile Suit, Armor is prohibitive, in the fact that more armor, means more powerful engines to move the various joints, increasing the weight, and decreasing the room for armor. the mobile suit would likely be extremely heavy, slow and much like a contemporary tank, but more complex. It would however, have the power systems and load capacity of carrying extremely heavy payloads. a heavy Mech could probably carry as many as 16 differant weapons, with others being still possible as add ons to various parts. Perhaps the best example of this type, is the GN-05 Gundam Virtue(see image) which carries heavy armament, and defensive equipment. This type of Mobile suit would see limited uses in today's field, and that's because the modern tree of land combat is Mobility.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]Mobility, the ability of weapons and personnel to move quickly around the globe, and the battlefield easily. Mobile Suits by default have legs, which take alot more work to get up to a reasonable speed than wheels or tracks do. in current terms, that means that a basic mobile suit would be too slow to account for it's reduced mass and the flexability of the legs for unconventional arenas. the only places i can think of where a mobile suit might be useful, is in a forested or mountainous region where conventional tracked and wheeled vehicles would have trouble moving about. However, the Mobile Suits in Code Geass, the "Knightmares" are perhaps the best solution to this problem, adding wheels to the legs on a folding quadrupedal system. This solves the mobility problem in most areas without compromising the basic premise of a Mobile suit. the suit can then move fast enough in open areas to the best effect. The Mobile suit would be limited to medium/light weaponry due to the need for speed/maneuverability over firepower, but these scale weapons should be easily able to compare to modern tank weapons or even surpass them, depending on configuration/technology. I would consider this type of mobile suit to be the second best kind of planetary mobile suit, which leads to the question: what is the best type of planetary mobile suit? The Variable Fighter.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]the Variable fighter is in fact the most mobile version of Mobile suit available, due to the fact that it transforms into a Jet form, which is both Aerodynamic and uses the engines to best effect. however, carries little to no real armor, but merely external plating. it also would be limited in it's armament due to the weight limits, and folding capability that would be needed to make the suit capable of transforming. this means the Variable fighter will probably at most have 5 weapons. one or two internally mounted Machine guns, for fighter dogfight ability, a specialized rifle, designed to be folded into the fighter, and possibly one or two externally carried missiles types, an exploitable weakness in "conventional" mobile suit combat. The Variable fighter is quite honestly, the most flexible, and most expensive/complicated planetary Mobile Suit. but, there's still one area where Mobile suits can be used, Space.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]Space Mobile suits are actually more effective than most series Starfighters for one main physics reason: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. "Any Action gives an equal and opposite reaction". how does this apply to mobile suits you ask? the same way that Astronauts now are able to move their arms to change direction while in deep space can be applied to Mobile suits on a much larger scale. combined with a proper thruster system and calibrated control operating system, a Mobile Suit could fly circles around most "starfighters" of Sci Fi origins. This is because the mobile suit would have two primary directions it would want to direct its thrust: down, and back. this provides movement up, and forward respectively. Since a normal starfighter's engines would be designed for turns and bursts of thrust forward, the Mobile suit would be more practical due to the ability to both direct thrust forward, up, and change forward and up quickly with a properly balanced control system. Since the Mobile Suits would have their maneuvering thrusters on their limbs, a mobile suit could change the position of it's maneuvering thrusters mid maneuver to perform an entirely differant maneuver than the one it entered, whereas the starfighter would have to stop it's maneuver, and then start a new one. This, combined with the Mobile suits "turreted" arm movement, allows a Mobile suit to fire almost anywhere in it's forward hemisphere, while it's moving this hemisphere almost as fast as a starfighter is capable of flying. Now, there's one major inherent problem with this type of control system, and that's the forces put on the pilot, it'd not be one continious direction of force, but possibly 4 forces on all parts of the body at any one time. Inertia, Centrifugal Force, gravity, Engines, these will all effect the pilot, with varying degrees and at the same time. but if an Elite pilot can withstand these forces, and expertly control the mobile suit, a Mobile suit would be capable of ripping to shreds any "conventional" Strike craft while in space. if a Space Mobile suit was combined with a Variable Fighter from the previous section, and made capable of both entering and leaving the atmosphere, there would be almost no reason for any other main military vehicle to be involved in strike craft level combat. at least, that is my belief.
and so, you can see that with all of the above trees and types of mobile suits, there is alot of variability, but the train of research to get to the more useful types would not be feasible in a combat role, at least, not as they are now.
an area i neglected to cover in this, is the advent of missiles in current combat that would destroy most mobile suits rather quickly, making the expense of making them not worth it anyway.
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