[Wild Goose]

Originally Posted by Haesslich

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Originally Posted by Evangelion Xgouki

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Originally Posted by Haesslich

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Awesome posts mean I don't need to reply. Good job, guys.

One thing I will touch on is this:

Originally Posted by Daigo

HELL NO. Legs have more PSI than treads ever will. You are concentrating an enormous amount of force on just two small points. Treads distribute weight evenly over a much larger area. Legs will not only devastate a road, they will sink into soft ground and get stuck.

With regards to Daigo's argument that the weight of the Monster on the legs would drive it into the ground, cracking everything, I would like to refer everyone to Macross Zero episode 5. Bird Man is active, the rest of the UN fleet has been shot to hell, and nukes have been authorised. The Asuka-II thus deploys a Monster to the flight deck - 300 tons of pure destroid. It takes slow, ponderous steps to the #1 Catapult, and locks into firing position, back stabiliser leg deployed.

The flight deck is undamaged from the Monster's steps.

No carrier captain will allow a tracked vehicle on his flight deck because tracks will damage the deck surface, and he needs that surface because if it's damanged, he can't launch or recover his fighters. However, note how the Monster easily moves into position, like the pilot has drilled this before (actually he MUST have done this before, since in militaries they won't let you do anything if you haven't drilled it), and then ask yourself this: if legs are more damaging to surfaces because the weight is concentrated, why is it that the captain has allowed the Koenig Monster to drill there? If the surface is all damaged, how the heck was Fokker able to launch from that same cat? (Carriers do not carry more than the basic tools for repair. Repair of something huge - like the flight deck getting all torn and chewed up - would have to be done at dock.)

Originally Posted by Haesslich

In contrast, the largest mobile artillery piece currently deployed by the US Military is the M109A6 Paladin... which uses a 155mm (15.5 cm) bore. Big motherfucking rounds, which can be reaction warheads... and the equivalent of an Iowa-class battleship's main guns as you pointed out. The nice thing about railguns, in theory, is that you can adjust the velocity by varying the charge used to throw the round... or have more KE involved as you can ramp up the power.

And should I point out again that the thing's braced anyhow on several struts, two of which happen to be heavily-engineered 'legs' for Destroid/Battroid mode? I'm not even going to address 'losing thrust is bad' - but that the forces here are incredibly high, and I'd want to deal with it as 'part' of a 9500t mass (like a Guantanimo-class cruiser's size) rather than as a measly 100t one.

There's 2 pics on Wikipedia of the Iowa firing a broadside: here and here. Look at the shockwaves.

If I'm going to be throwing that sort of firepower around, I want to be braced against something. The Iowa is braced on the water, afterall (to a certain extent, but it's still something, versus the nothingness of space).

Also, one more nail in the coffin for "use the gun recoil to manuver": Ammo. Ammo is always at a premium, especially for the big guns. There's only so much of it you can carry, and wasting it just to turn is pointless. Not to mention that when you need it, you'll be combat ineffective since you're out of ammo, not to mention the ass-chewing you'll get when you RTB and debrief. Wasting ammo due to having crap weapons - early Sidewinders and the Sahfrir-1 missile were notoriously inacccurate - is understandable. Deliberately wasting your ammo just to turn? An ass-chewing by the CO, at the very least.