NationStates Jolt Archive

New Xanthal will soon begin a program to build and employ Gundams in the its national defense. The choice was made because of the relative low cost of Gundams and their comparitive strength and ability. The military will be constructing its own unless another nation is able to offer the sale of production rights of a suitable type.

Gundams? Whats wrong with perfectly good Assult and defense mechs as well as regular ground forces.

~General Jormisi.

Nothing is wrong with them. It's just that they are not as effective as all-around combat vehicles.

There are some mecha that are realistic. Gundams are not one of these.

Ah, anouther nation heading into the field of Mecha warfare. . . lemme shed a little light on the situation. Let's begin with what it's no good for:

- it's no good for occupying territory Without a good ground force to back it up, any area struck by a mecha is still in enemy hands, all ready for rebuilding.

- It's a very stupid way of killing people No one should ever make a mecha for that reason. For the cost of one, thousands of chemical, biological or nuclear warheads could be made and deployed with far greater success and be considerably more difficult to stop. Plus mecha do not last long (I will return to this point later), so every operational second has to count.

What is it good for?

- The main benefit of a mecha is that it can destroy vital infrastructure in a very short period of time.
Without infrastructure, a region's ability to mount a coordinated resistance to invaders is greatly weakened. Communications, centers of commerce, industry and military technology, government seats (especially in centralized countries), energy plants, access to essential natural resources, all those are good targets. And if they happen to be heavily populated, all the better.
And if the area citizens are too clueless to think of defensive maneuvers or make contingency plans for attacks, why break out the party streamers.

- Destruction of military capability
Since a mecha is invulnerable to conventional weapons, it's a fantastic way to get rid of troublesome armies that would otherwise give an occupying force trouble. Indeed if one is very lucky, and the invaded region is very foolish, the entire 15-45 age group of men can be killed off without much effort on one's part.

- Major savings on time scale of invasion.
Mecha do in hours what a conventional army does in weeks -- they don't replace them, but they greatly reduce the number of men needed out there at any point in time and make a final push a lot, lot easier. And, by being able to pop up anywhere, go anywhere, blast anything, they're potentially extremely demoralizing to the invaded.

Now, how to run this thing:

Even in a world where the laws of physics are negotiable, there are certain considerations that ought to prevent one from building a flying terror machine 200 meters wide.

- A mecha costs too much
To even consider building one of these things requires an amazing depth of technological sophistication and a very ready cash supply. isn't an organization. It isn't a region. It isn't a country. It's an entire world with borrowing rights to the resources of several other worlds. And it's very determined to do whatever needs doing. While the cost is still very high.

- It'll never fly.
If you tell a group of engineers to build a working flying saucer, chances are you'll eventually get one. If you tell a group of engineers to build a working flying saucer that will carry 4 people in a safe manner, have a top speed of Mach 1.5 and will last for 5 years, I'll bet you my last cup of French roast coffee that they'll throw up their hands and tell you that it's impossible, especially if you only want to pay $50,000 for it.
Feasibility is strongly affected by how many constraints you place on a project.
Even the best constructed mecha has so many moving parts and is so large that unforeseen failures are almost certain, greatly limiting its useful lifespan. Instead of wasting increasing amounts of money on increasingly small gains in longevity, it soon becomes better to build more mecha that individually don't last long but do significant damage while they do work. And that works because the job of a mecha is to do a lot of damage in a very short timeframe.
This consideration is even more important when you have an effective team destroying mecha, so that no matter how it's made the expected lifespan of any mecha is 3 days or so.
Make those 3 unforgettable days.

- You still don't escape the supply line problem.
True, but you can stretch them like a bungee cord. And it is very, very well worth noting that most anime using mecha, built up a lot of bases (presumably at least partially self-supporting) to provide adequate ground support before it ever considered launching the first one.

you can throw away the ideal of a mecha being low cost, if you want something along those lines, build some power armor. If you are looking for a weapon that can bring a lot of destruction to vital areas in a short period of time, go with nuclear weapons, but if you want versitility, all terain movment, and the ability to launch devistatingly cripling raids, go for the Mecha, just don't expect them to run for very long, as the move moving parts you've got in something, the more maintance its going to require, and the more likely it is to break down, particulary in the middle of a battle.

((OOC: I did not write the feasability study, as I don't have time for it. Appologies to whomever I got it from for forgetting your name before I could attach credit))

Taka, just out of curiosity, why on earth do you think Mecha are invulnerable to conventional weapons?

Mecha are mostly useless. They are too complicated machines in general, for one they have too much moving parts and clear external critical parts like knee joints and the like. Head and so on. Not to mention the huge target surface they present. Do you have any idea how easy it is to hit a walking robot the size of a 10-story building? You might as well paint "Shoot Me!" on the chest of the thing.

Mecha arent faster than conventional vechiles. If you have the technology to construct a Mecha, then you have the technology to construct such super tanks that they will eat any Mecha for breakfast as soon as they see one.

In short, Mecha are a waste of time. They arent practical, they arent ideal for anything really, the only good thing in them is that they are cool, true, Mecha are cool but that does not make them usefull in practice.

While you make good arguments, our course of action is set. This is the best that we can do until our infrastructure improves.

I wouldn't call it invulunable to convential weapons. Mechs have been taken out by ground and Air forces before. Nobody with any sense is going build an Mech 10 stories high, its to vulnable to attack and way to expensive. An more idealist size is twenty to fourty feet high.

I wouldn't call it invulunable to convential weapons. Mechs have been taken out by ground and Air forces before. Nobody with any sense is going build an Mech 10 stories high, its to vulnable to attack and way to expensive. An more idealist size is twenty to fourty feet high.

http://www.tropaselite.hpg.ig.com.br/future_mix_Clan%20mechs%20on%20the%20prowl.jpg

i prefer madcats.. thors.. etc.. for my mechs, forget gundams :P

As I posted in the OOC comment, I didn't write the feasability study I posted, though I woudl assume he meant small arms fire and primarily infantry portable weapons. I as a nation do use Mecha, though the largest one we have is 10 feet tall, and the most common one is 7 feet tall. . . they are little more than Power Armor, as use of a Gundam type mecha or an Evangelion type mecha would be impractical, if not impossible. The feasability study here was done for Mecha in general, mostly in the 20 foot tall range or smaller. Mecha provide the mobility of infantry to the power of a tank, and while the tank will outgun the mecha, the mecha will be able to go places a tank can not. Remember Vietnam? The tanks were bogged down in the forrest, same as the Pacific island campain of WWII, meaning infantry were without a mobile firebase for heavy support. The tank was a seige breaking weapon of WWII, the mecha is though by some to be the seige breaking weapon of the future, with increased mobility, and it would be assumed that its form would be built more along the lines of a human body *such as the Evas* than along the lines of the tank with legs *such as the Mechwarriors series*.