/k/ - Weapons

only when making legs becomes as cheap or cheaper then making tracks. just like in battletech and then tanks will still be a strong option

>>527887

No.

>>527887

In space, maybe. AMBAC, bruh. Probably won't be humanoid, more like vector thrusting and other such junk.

>>527887

Most of the Armored Shrikes just rolled around. The size is right but the method is wrong. You can get quite a bit of speed by having a larger gait. No reason a Walking Machine shouldn't be able to get 50 kph on a run.

>>527887

blue gender was so fucked up.

Too many weaknesses for such an expensive machine. Exoskeletons and then exosuits are more likely.

>>528076

Power armor could actually be extremely handy - if you make it strong enough to take rifle fire. The power armor suit is too small to be (worth being) targeted by tanks, rockets and large IEDs, the weapons being capable to reliably take it out. At the same time it's near impervious to small arms fire. The only kind of gun adequate to engage power armor with is anti material rifles, which are simply too heavy to be widely issued weapon for any kind of infantry. If an armored shield oversized shoulderpads is added then nothing short of anti-tank weapon could disable it. Then you could engage against sandniggers on foot with little fear of getting killed. On top of that, power armor could carry very large supply of ammo or large caliber weapons.

The reason power armor does not exist as of today is because technology isn't there yet, simple as that. By "technology" I of course mean specific design features of a power armor, such as muscular effort sensors, because actuators and motors are abundant and well developed.

>>528077

RPGs are too widely available in sandnigger country for your dream to be realized, I think.

>>528077

>A man who is effectively invulnerable to the majority of man portable weapons.

Hell yes that would be cool, but who can afford that kind of kit for every man? Or even for selected units?

>power armour could carry very large supply of ammo or large calibre weapons.

and now I'm imagining a power armoured infantryman with grenade MGs on each shoulder firing airburst rounds at the enemy as he advances.

>The reason power armor does not exist as of today is because technology isn't there yet

Largely in terms of power requirements, running something like that on batteries would require taking up most of the suits load capacity with the actual batteries. I'd love for someone to build a suit that runs on Heinlen tier diesel/electric generators built into the suits legs, but I can't see that happening.

Also, as >>528086 pointed out RPGs are pretty widespread and cheap at the moment, and if something like this ever went into production you can bet that another country would design a cheap and simple 'panzerfaust' tier weapon and issuing them to every man who could hold one.

>>528077

>Alright men, each of you have been hand selected by virtue of your combat record and skills to recieve these power armor suits. Each of them has had the full researching power of our R&D divisions and millions of dollars in funding invested in them, cost a small fortune to manufacture and require extensive maintenance, and will turn you into an invincible man of steel that can shrug off any small arms fire and even grenades.Bring fire and steel to the enemies, men. Hoorah!

Meanwhile, on the insurgent side…

>Abdul-Karim-Muhammed-Jaffar Sharifdontlikeit, my brother, the infidels have sent a group of soldiers in armor that even our machine guns can't harm! What can we do?

>Just grab one of the hundreds of RPGs we have lying around and shoot them like we do the tanks, idiot.

>Oh, right, lol

Main issue is the military is ridiculously obsessed with price penny pinching a few dollars per soldier to shut down a project - if the contractor doesn't pay off the decision makers, if they do bribe properly it's smooth sailing even if the project is a million dollars overbudget per soldier. Army currently is unwilling to pay an extra few hundred bucks to replace M4 stocks with SCAR or some similar improvement. Or even a few hundred bucks per platoon, they spend $2200 per M2HB upgrade of old M2 stocks, while a brand new M87 straight from factory is $2500. Same caliber far superior machine gun.

>>528077

>The reason power armor does not exist as of today is because technology isn't there yet, simple as that. By "technology" I of course mean specific design features of a power armor, such as muscular effort sensors, because actuators and motors are abundant and well developed.

I remember reading that the biggest issu is power density, actually. We don't have a power supply that can power something like that and be small enough to be mobile. If we did have one, we would see them pretty shortly after.

>>528086

You have to land a direct hit to the head, torso or motor bay, pretty sure sandniggers wouldn't be able to do that with such a mobile and small target.

>>528088

America could afford millions for its aircraft and tanks. Russia could simply build them for cheap. Also nobody's talking about batterries, you'd be using either fuel cells or internal combustion motor-generators.

>>528103

You need maybe 50 horsepower to haul around a 1.5 ton suit.

>>528132

For the amount of money to build them, cost to train and employ technicians to repair them on base, and cost to train soldiers how to use it properly, you could just build a shitton more tanks. And any weaponry a power armored soldier could bring to bear, a tank could beat in terms of ammo capacity, power, and/or number of said weapons. Meanwhile, you'd be losing the self sustainability of regular soldiers (because good luck carrying the equipment and spare parts to keep them maintained out in the field), the ability to fit as many of them into transports (bulky motorized power armor means less space), the concealability of regular soldiers (a lot of good that power armor does you when any enemy can see the giant silohuettes sticking out from behind scant cover and just call in artillery strikes instead of engaging them in a fire fight). Sure, they can call in artillery on regular unarmored soldiers too, but in one case you're losing hundreds of thousands of equipment along with the soldiers, and in the other only thousands.

Space Marines should stick squarely to science fantasy.

>>528141

Well you don't send tanks to attack other tanks, let alone across open terrain where they're easy target for enemy artillery. No reason you should do that with power armor.

Also I'm fairly confident that power armor would be magnitudes cheaper than tanks, probably cheaper than IFVs - due to smaller size and simpler design. High grade industry robots cost upwards of $100 000, a power armor that's coarsely speaking a four robot arms slapped together can't cost more than a million, even if you bloat the budget.

>>528148

I still don't really see any reason to use power armor on the battlefield, with the prevalance of artillery and anti-tank infantry weapons, that would justify all the logistical downsides and the difficulty of having to maintain entire platoons worth of the stuff in comparison to utilizing passive protection like kevlar or plates that don't require regular testing and maintenance alongside teaching soldiers the importance of cover and the like. There's only two situations I can think of where power armor would be absolutely useful, and that's if you need to breach a heavily fortified position that you can't just blow to bits (which I think would come up more with law enforcement agencies like in hostage situations), or if it's not really power armor and just a load bearing exoskeleton that allows cargo workers to haul around supplies without having to rely on forklifts, power lifts or other such equipment, freeing up budget and space for other things.

>>528155

You could get a fair bit of use out of a simple exoskeleton to help a soldier carry his pack and gear on a patrol, if that had any leftover weight after all his gear you could mount hard plates on the exoskeleton to give you ersatz power-armour.

>>528132

>You need maybe 50 horsepower to haul around a 1.5 ton suit.

At what, 0.000001 km/h?

>>528165

You'd probably get a lot more bang for your buck looking into improving the soldiers themselves. Sports medicine, improved training (maybe including the civilian population so you have a better pool to recruit from), performance enhancing drugs, or even eugenics/genetic engineering.

>>528166

At normal human speed. Since, you know, you'd be walking in it, dummy. A human can briefly produce just over 1 horsepower, and that's more than plenty to throw around its 70-100 kg body. Considering electric actuators are 60-80% efficient, 2 kilowatt per 100 kg sounds about right.

>>528155

Yeah well you know militaries used to think airplanes would not be any good in battle, and yet here we are.

>>528174

I worked a micro excavator to fix a driveway, it had 1 arm (obviously) and about 15 horsepower engine. It moved that arm at a snails pace.

Imagining it with 4 limbs and increased engine power for each limb… I can sort of guess how fast it would be if it had to move the limbs to actually move the whole thing (had no tracks).

No idea about theory or engineering, this is just my personal experience.

>>528169

Genetic engineering has to be done with the eggs, sperm, or fertilized eggs if you want to really do something useful. You can't make otherwise normal young adults into super soldiers with genetic engineering. But when you're genetically engineering something before it even has a chance to be a fetus, at that point you have a race of people literally created to be soldiers. Men created to be physically better than everyone, only to be sent to die.

That's not exactly ethical. You're marking people before they are born and saying "you're purpose is to kill and die for whoever happens to be in charge when you're 18 years old. We put 13 million dollars into you, and 20 billion into the program that made you, you don't have a choice."

>>528176

When they said that, airplanes actually existed in a form that was useful outside a laboratory/stage show. Power armor/mechs don't so it's more justified to say "it's unlikely we'll see these in actual military survive outside of XYZ situations".

>>528187

That would be an extreme case. I was honestly thinking more along the lines of how sports medicine has improved over the years permitting modern athletes to pretty consistently beat older records, extend their careers, recover from injuries, etc.

If you wanted to go into genetic engineering, either free market style or full blown mandatory communist, I wouldn't suggest super soldiers, I'd suggest eugenics. Not in the death camps and racial purity sense (inb4 Hitler did nothing wrong) but in the sense of generally improving the human condition. Most things which would improve peoples' lives would also make for better soldiers. I think low hanging fruit examples would be making small improvements to, or at least preventing deficits in:

- vision

- disease resistance

- anaerobic and cardiovascular endurance

- ability to build muscle

Stuff like that wouldn't give you a Space Marine. Modified individuals would still need to work out and train, but they'd have more potential and these traits would probably improve their general quality of life outside the military. Unless they ate junk food and shitposted all day.

>>528185

First of all, hydraulics are very inefficient mechanisms, it's just they're very cheap for what they do. Also they're slow by design, you need to pump shit ton of pressure and only small thick walled pipes could take it, severely limiting fluid throughput and thereby actuation speed. Normal industry robots weigh well over half a ton and are very agile and strong with their small electric motors.

>>528198

What's the KW rating for a robot arm?

>>528212

That really depends on the payload capacity but a half a ton arm that can just about lob itself around is 10 kw or something.