Horrors Options

[Kremlin KOA]

given that city roads can take steel tracked cran es in the backk woods podunk part of the world where i live... I doubt that this thing will kill the bitumin.

[Stormdrake]

Ok back on topic. So acourding to shadows of europe all traces of Horrors have not been scrubbed from the game. After the death of the Big D I was under the impression that no more had been done with the Horrors and any connection between ED and SR had been cut. Did Fanpro change that after they bought the franchise or where the people I was talking to smoking something? Keep in mind I played SR I and am now coming back to SR III with very little exposure to SR II

[Req]

My impression is that the Dragonheart stuff has prevented the Scourge from happening for a long-ass time. That said, the ED connection is still apparent. Every SR book I've read recently has either an IE or a great dragon or someone making some comment about the Ancient Times, somewhere.

I think between Harlequin's Back and Dragonheart the ED connection is no longer the primary focus of the metaplot, but there's still plenty of it to be used if that's what you're into. Which I am. :)

[hyzmarca]

given that city roads can take steel tracked cran es in the backk woods podunk part of the world where i live... I doubt that this thing will kill the bitumin.

Kenetic Energy is Mass*(1/2)Velocity^2. The genetic energy that a tracked vehicle dumps into a road is exactly 0, since the tracks have no vertical velocity relative to the road. Feet, on the other hand, would dump quite a bit of energy into the road with every step. But, shock absorbers and light-weight materials would reduce this.

Police mecha would probably be less intimidating that some other alternatives for dealing with mechanized armor, such as rocket launchers. If some wacko decides to take his heavy duty construction mech on a rampage, regular police won't have much chance against it. In such cases, an anthroform mech with a shock baton would be preferable to a tank, an armed helicopter, or cops with bazookas from both a PR and property damage standpoint. The trick is to not build the mech as a war machine, instead making it as light, agile, and friendly as possible. Against tanks and helicopters using AV rounds it would be all but useless, but it would be less likely to cause absurd amounts of damage when confornting rampaging civilian mecha.

WIth the proliferation of drones, I suspect that many police forces would have special vehicle units specifically to deal with criminal riggers and rampaging robots. For the most part, they would have riggers with the best equipment available to take control of criminal rigger networks. However, they'd probably have a variety of specialized drones to employ when option A doesn't work.

[Kremlin KOA]

yeah but force exerted is mass on surface area... hence why vehicles that ARE too heavy for a road damage it (I've seen what a tank does to a cheap hot mix road)

[hyzmarca]

yeah but force exerted is mass on surface area... hence why vehicles that ARE too heavy for a road damage it (I've seen what a tank does to a cheap hot mix road)

Your right. This also points out a flaw in my logic. I was assuming that the cow was a ball when I should have been assuming that it was a sled.

Because the walking motion is pendulum-like, the KE exerted against the ground lateraly, the same as with wheeled vehicles. It is only running, with uses a spring-like motion, which exerts considerable KE agaisnt the ground.

But, still differance is huge.

Take a two-legged, 5 metric ton walker with a footprint of 1 square meter per foot and a two-tracked 5-metic-ton tank with a footprint of 5 square meters per track.

The formula for force is mass*acceleration. In this case accelleration=Earth's gravity=9.8m/s^2

5,000kg*9.8m/s^2= 49,000 Newtons

This is the same for both machines. However, the formula for pressure is force/area.

The tank, with 10m^2 worth of track exerts a pressure of 4,900N/m^2 or 4,900 Pascals against the road surface.

The walker exerts a force of 24,500 Pascals when standing on both feet. However, when walking all force is focused on one foot, resulting in a total pressure of 49,000 Pascals, 10 times the pressure of the tank with the exact same weight. This become worse if the walker ties to run or jump.
I'm not going to try to claculate the force of a running walker, there are too many variables to assume. But, jumping walker would produce a pressure equal to mass*(gravity+acceleration) Assuming that it takes exactly 1 second for the jumper to leave the ground (A big assumption, it should be considerably less) and the height of the jump is 1 meter, the walker would exert 35,567 Pascals on the road surface.
Edit: The walker would land with 11,000 Jules of energy and again exert 35,567 Pascals on the road, assuming that decelleration takes 1 second. However, decelleration would probably be much shorter

Of course, weights and footprints in this example were purely arbitrary, but you get the idea. The footprint/mass ratio of a walker will always be smaller than the footprint/mass ratio of a tank and the walker will frequently half the seize of its footprint due to its very nature.
This doesn't invalidate the idea of a road worthy walker, it just means you have to keep the weight low compared to a tank. This can be done if you remember that civilian law enforcement rarely needs military-grade armored vehicles. A lightly armored and armored mech would work just as well.

[Kremlin KOA]

true but two quick points
1 the walker can be four legged
2 the mass of a body 4 walker is 1.5 tons where a body 7 APC is 25tons or a body 6 heavy truck is 12 tons... there is a significant weight difference there and the APC at least is not supposed to damage bitumen.

[Moonstone Spider]

Why not just give the Walker relatively large feet for it's size? I've seen the Mobile Propulsion Labs (A group dedicated to constructing a real life mecha) perform calculations showing a 4 Ton Mecha 20 feet tall (Granted this thing had no armor) with feet large enough to practically walk on quicksand, far lower ground pressure than human feet have. You don't have to use normal human proportions, just give the thing snoshoes and you're good to go through a guy's lawn without damage.

[Toptomcat]

[Kagetenshi]

[Moonstone Spider]

Yep, not like those 50 foot wide strips of pavement we need for cars.

[hyzmarca]

Yep, not like those 50 foot wide strips of pavement we need for cars.

That's really the point. The only advantage that humanoid mecha have over cars is agility. A mech can go places where a can't. It can maneuver in tight spaces in a way that a car can't. Ideally, it can step over obstacles. Having giant feet kind of defeats this advantage, without which a mech is just an absurdly expensive, vulnerable, and slow car.

[Jeff Hauze]