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Originally Posted by asaqe
Very interesting introduction to your series.
Also more on the whole affair of the First Raven.
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Before I say anything else, allow me to apologize in advance for any wounded egos, because lord knows every time I do so, God kills a catgirl.
Now, on the subject of mecha, well, to begin with, I was not trying to hijack the series by bringing in some new super mecha that upsets the entire power balance, considering IS themselves are already ridiculously "OP". IS ARE the NEXTs of the IS universe. Bringing in ACs short of a NEXT would be a total waste of time against an IS; hence, the drive for conventional mecha in IS: For Answer is building things smaller and making 'em more cost effective.
Massive casualties in the 80 to 90th percentile are expected any time an IS is involved in an conventional battle. Conventional forces can be equipped with reversed engineered / derivative energy shields and energy weapons, but these are still much too inferior to genuine IS weaponry / tech to be worth the investment. This is confirmed in canon, by the way.
Another reason energy-based tech is not favored in the mecha is power limitations. Conventional mecha just don't have the same absurd power generation as IS, because they are powered by banks of nanobatteries (to reduce weight and increase internal capacity for other important things) that make their artificial muscle packages work in the first place, plus all of their on-board vectronics and so on. You won't be seeing anyone running around here with a miniature palladium reactor or micro fusion reactor, no sir. Remember the objective is to be cheap and cost effective, because you will most likely die if an IS even looks at you funny.
Hell, short of throwing an Arms Fort at an IS, you are going to lose and bleed hard just about every time. Why? Let me quote a novel reader here...
"also from reading a bit more of the IS novel. the reason for the IS global domination in terms of power is because of this:
Apparently the IS could move faster than ICBMs, pilot can see everything in slow motion(similar to vanquish), they not affected by G-force so no fear of black-out/red-out and a 100% optical camouflage system. So when IS was first unveiled A single IS was able to stop a war by shooting down 2437 missiles, 207 fighter jets , disable/immobilize 5 aircraft carriers and all their naval escorts and vaporized 8 spy satellites that was tracking its movement."
100% Optical Camo, No Fear of Blacking Out / Red Out from G forces, Extrasensory 360 Vision (I'll bring up this reference too, if you like), and they have Bullet Time?
Dude, Normals / Old Gen Armored Cores are a joke. They would need strength in numbers just to take down one IS, which is the equivalent of a NEXT squeezed down to 2+ meters without the nasty after effects of Kojima Radiation.
Hey, I am not knocking on your verse here. I am just telling you that if an AC does show up in IS: For Answer, it will not be a Normal; it would have to be a NEXT, which would pretty much put the living fear of god into IS pilots. The difference in scale, despite making the NEXT a bigger target, also affords the NEXT a totally different magnitude of power and survivability that the present generation of IS just can't match.
Now, what does this all mean in in-universe terms for IS: For Answer? Lots of brutal, bloody, lop-sided battles because a single IS can turn the tide of battle. In fact, your chances of living through the day are all but decided by how many IS each side is fielding, or they are substituting the above IS with an Arms Fort. After a fashion, it's like the good old days when battles were won because X side had this famous Knight / Samurai / General on their side, while Y was S.O.L. because Y Knight / Samurai / General was at another battle.
See?
And that my friend is a lesson in verisimilitude.
Oh, and if you don't mind, allow me to correct you on just one thing: the Electronic Counter Measures fitted on OWLs does not render them invisible. If they looked invisible to you, it's because your AC didn't have night vision capability for the head part when you fought them for the first time in AC: Nexus, where Dual Face appears to kill a couple of 'em very smexily.
Now, what their ECM does do is jam sensors and disrupt fire control systems that have poor ECCM / ECM defense, meaning you can't see 'em on radar and you'll only get a few seconds to take a good shot at 'em before your FCS goes down again and has to system recover. What does this mean for an IS?
Well, those OWLs are dead meat, because the IS pilot can just Aim-Down-Sights and gun them down anyways. Sure, they can't use auto-aim, aim assist, or beyond line-of-sight guided munitions, but I imagine Infrared or Laser guided anti-tank missiles in visual range work just fine - unless the FCS for those get scrambled too. And if you decide to upgrade their ECM to the levels of Full Metal Panic's ECS, I believe that system is still vulnerable to infrared detection.
Melee specialists would have a ball making like Daizengar and "THERE ARE NONE MY SWORD HATH NOT CLEVEATH!" on OWLs. Then again, they'd do the same thing to MTs, PTs, ATs, ACs, and what have you all the same, because they are just that awesome like that, right? BADASS BOAST!
...But I am getting off-topic and nitpicky here. It's your universe, your rules, but me coming from a pragmatic, common sense oriented middle ground here, I just facepalm, man.
You gotta get your technobabble, military jargon, and vice-versa, straight. Otherwise, you just got these big gaping plot holes, and last I checked, we were not in the Naruto / Bleach fandom where that sort of thing is accepted as the norm. I understand, you want ACs to be cool, but let's practical here, you're gonna have to wait until Kojima Technology gets developed before Magi really becomes The Last Raven, probably have him settle down in Anatolia too, where he'll meet the most lovely Fiona Jarnefeldt, and get this - he'll be the first to pilot the true White Glint.
Of course, I am curious as hell how IS tactics and combat arms will have to adjust to combat NEXTs. That Primal Armor, Kojima Radiation, and so on is going to be a serious pain in the you know what. I'd say the norm for taking on a NEXT is that the IS side must have at least a 3:1 advantage, considering they can probably be instant killed by weapons with a high "Primal Armor Attunement" or "Primal Armor Piercing", since IS do not invest in honest to god armor at all.
The reason being, if the weapon in question is powerful enough to pierce the "Godly" energy shield of an IS than any armor to speak of would be utterly worthless.
Me? Well, I'd like to believe some GODLY reactive armor would buy me a few extra seconds against a hail of 30mm Kinetic Energy Penetrators, don't you?
