[Haesslich]

Originally Posted by Daigo

I can not possibly respond to so much all in one post, so for now I'll just address Ithekro's

Translation: He needs time to read long wall of text and then look for individual points to take out of context in order to justify his own statements. But we'll deal with the response to Ithekro for now instead.

Originally Posted by Daigo

Ith, you aren't telling me why legs are useful considering their disadvantages. I already refuted your previous points about how they can "clamp" on to stuff, so you need to tell me why they are useful in both a space setting and a planetary setting, without repeating the same arguments that you've already used. Keep that in mind, now I'll address the points you raised.

If you want to protect civilian ships, you use military ships. Not a mobile turrent that needs to clamp on to something in order to shoot. That's a terrible idea.

That's right - they use military ships like the Guatanimo-class carrier, Uraga-class escort carrier, and the Northampton-class frigates along with converted or unconverted Zentradi destroyers and cruisers. However, at the same time, there are reasons to deploy fighters or Destroids as mobile gunnery platforms.

Let's look at those reasons.

1) The escorts should, if things go well, keep enemy ships and fighters off the convoy they're escorting. This means being able to shoot them down or to drive them off before they get into the middle of the convoy, and shooting down missiles or drones as necessary. However, this being a universe in which anything that can theoretically happen will eventually happen, escort craft may not be able to keep the enemy out of the convoy.

2) At this point, the convoy has to defend itself from incoming missiles, mecha, and raider ships. With the amount of infrastucture required to support a Macross cannon, to the point where New Macross ships and similar craft have the Macross Cannon in its own seperate component/ship, it means that the room for the weapons and their support components (spare parts, generators to support the energy requirements for the weapons, storage for munitions) will have to come out of the carrying capacity of these transports; this means losing cargo space, crew space, or equipment space. Or increasing the hull size to allow for this extra room. Plus extra personnel to handle the weapons, which means extra crew accomodations are necessary.

3) The UN Spacy doesn't seem to be big believers in making sure every civilian ship is heavily armed, or the corporations which build these don't believe in it... or they can't sell these ships to Macross fleets at a reasonable price. Or, just as reasonably, they don't want to be equipping the raiders with premade privateering vessels (transports and small multipurpose craft with a lot of guns and turrets). So, they send UN Spacy detachments along with each fleet, or with private fleets... or the private fleets buy armed frigates at great expense and under whatever end-user certificates the Macross universe and the UN Spacy requires them to buy them under.

4) Thus, when the enemy breaks through, you have fighters to intercept other fighters... and it turns out those VB-6 Konig Monsters already have anti-aircraft guns and their immediate ancestors were used as walking gun turrets in the first war as well, albeit in pre-prepared positions and under pre-planned deployments for the most part. They're self-contained turrets, don't need to be refueled or rearmed by the transports, and can move themselves back to their home carrier when done. Plus, unlike the escort craft, they can fire FROM the ship they're defending and not worry so much about hitting the people they're defending, unlike the escorts who have to worry about what a missed shot will do to the transport which may move into the line of fire.

For the most part, the escorts keep the raiders off the convoy. The gun-turret use is a secondary function, but it's one with historical precedents in the Macross universe and undoubtedly a function considered by the designers of the VB-6.

Originally Posted by Daigo

Ith, you have already demonstrated that you don't really understand how combat works in space. It's not the same as flying in the air, it's more similar to a Mac truck trying to drive on ice. Taking advantage of recoil in weapons is part of combat tactics. In any case, the idea of a mobile turrent that needs to clamp on to a bigger ship in order to fire is really really stupid on its own.

Excellent - we were well aware of your Doctorate of Science in SCIENCE!, but I didn't know you also had a minor in space warfare. Well, Doctor, if you could present us with the name of your thesis or the university you got it in, I'm sure we'll be more than glad to take your words at face value due to your obvious (and recognized by your peers) expertise in space warfare and the design of space combat vehicles.

... no thesis? Alright, then we'll continue to challenge your claims. Here's mine.

"Taking advantage of recoil in weapons is part of combat tactics" - uh.... yeah, whatever. On Earth, we try to AVOID the recoil, or otherwise dissipate it, unless you're talking about automatic weapons which use the recoil to load the next round into the gun. Notice that this is only used to load the gun, not to create an advantage in combat.

As for using it 'to advantage in combat'... minor shots aren't going to change your vector too much. Major ones.. yes. And somehow I don't see rotating to fire your guns RIGHT INTO THE MIDDLE OF YOUR FUCKING FORMATION to be all that useful in terms of defense, nor do you want to shove yourself backwards every time you're shooting at someone if the guns use that much force to drive the damned projectiles down-theatre. That's probably -the- big reason that no other fighters carry heavy guns like railcannons - instead they stick with micro-missiles or energy weapons which don't apply that much force to the firing platform. Even the missiles shoot out, then after orienting on the target, kick in their boosters to move at ludicrous speeds. They don't use their guns to 'turn' them in combat.. and neither do the big capital ships, since their mass, relative to the size of the projectile and the force applied to it, is enough that any effect from the 'recoil' is negligible.

Ergo, "Why the fucking Monster locks itself down to take a fucking shot, so it doesn't blow itself off the fucking hell and into someone's line of fire, or have its own shot go astray".

Originally Posted by Daigo

Well guess what? It's an issue whether you want to admit it or not. Legs are complicated and prone to malfunction. They are also very vulnerable. If you shoot one off, then its screwed. Legs are unstable. You can knock a walker on its ass from the recoil generated by its railguns alone. That's ignoring any impacts it recieves from enemy fire. So if they are so vulnerable, you need a DAMN good reason to use them, when there are no simpler alternatives out there, that can do the same job as good or even better. Well, there ARE simpler alternatives to bracing for recoil.

So far the argument for legs has been, they can brace for recoil (yea right, it'll be knocked on its back), they allow the machine to move on the ground, and they can clamp on to bigger ships in space (which is pointless). In my opinion, only the first two are actually useful tasks, but lets assume all three are useful. So is there a simpler mechanism that can brace for recoil, allow the machine to move on the ground, and clamp on to bigger ships?

Sure. You can brace for recoil better if it was shaped more like a tank. Low profile, wide base, and has supporting struts that extend outward.

Shooting a leg off is a problem, yes - we've seen that. At the same time, if the thing can still fly, it's less of one. Shooting a tread off a tank is also a major problem as it suddenly can't move... and may or may not be able to lock itself against the force of its gun firing. This seems to matter somewhat LESS to the VB-6 due to the other bracing systems it has.. and as we saw in episode 25, when it DID lose a leg... it braced its ass on the top of the Macross Cannon, y'know.. sorta like a tank. It had a low profile, it had a wide base, and it had supporting struts which extended outwards. The foot that got shot off also had a wide base (wider than the body of the mecha, from what we could see in that episode and earlier ones).

Also, I should note that the way the guns fired suggested the recoil of the cannons was being driven down perpendicularly into the hull... and right along the lines of the braces deployed. The barrels moved in the assembly, and the line of movement seemed to drive along a line which 'coincidentally' moved into the braces. The legs aren't taking the brunt of the shock there, but the braces - and from what we saw, they spread it along a VERY wide base and those three backside components. Y'know... sorta like a tank with its wide base, but with more coverage.

Notice that tanks aren't using a wide base that COMPLETELY covers the ground either - the weight is usually spread across the treads which total about maybe a third of the width of the tank's base... and the shock is spread mostly along the back half of the tank, with the front half just trying to hold still so the treads don't roll back too much. It's low to the ground, but at the same time it covers around as much, if not less, area than the feet of the VB-6 Konig Monster does relative to its own main body... and without the extra bracing struts.

Of course, modern MBTs only really fire sabot rounds... and yet most treaded vehicles of the type you claim to be more practical in Macross for this purpose don't really have all that much contact with the ground relative to their body area. What they do have is good brakes and shock-absorber systems built into the gun to handle the recoil... which we also see in action on the VB-6. Remember seeing those barrels recoil into the hood just around them, at the base of the mecha?

Originally Posted by Daigo

Move on the ground? Just use treads. They are simpler, weigh MUCH less than legs, easier to repair, spread the weight of the machine over a much larger area than legs, and can move a massive machine better than legs can.

Clamping on to a bigger ship? Someone said the legs have claws on them that allow them to dig into another ship's armor (destroying it in the process), which allows for a impromptu clamp (and a stupid one at that). Well if it's useful, then the claw-like devices are what clamps the machine in, not the legs. Just incorporate that into the struts and body of the machine. No need for legs at all.

Um... where'd you get the figure for the leg weights from and ease of maintenance, as compared to the treads? I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I don't have direct access to the Macross Frontier's databases from here and have to rely on other sources. If you have information on how Overtechnology-derived transformation equipment handles leg movement, I'd love to have access to those databases and specifications. Again, I will point to 'real world' figures (since you so love those) that indicate that the treads on an M1A2 Abrams - just the treads, not counting the wheels or the other mechanisms required to move the treads) about eight tons for one tank, out of 70 tons total weight.

Twenty feet of tank treads, according to some reports I've seen based on the feasability of recycling them, weighs one ton. The M1A2 Abrams is approximately 33 feet long, and you've got two tracks. The way the track system is designed along with the roller wheel at the top of each tread (IIRC), means you'd need about 76-77 feet (thereabouts, given the shape of the tread system), and you've got two of them. Now you've got 7 wheels per side (6 road wheels, one roller wheel). Then we add the torsion bar, the power train, and everything else required to turn gas turbine output into rotational motion.

The fucking treads alone are a tenth of the weight of the M1A2 Abrams tank - just the treads, not even the drive system. Add the rest of the components together to make those treads move on wheels to drive the tank along the ground, and it adds up to an awful lot of weight. Just to 'brace' or 'move' a flying artillery piece along the ground. We KNOW what treads weigh for a 70-ton tank, and those treads and brakes are required to hold it still to fire its main cannon. Which fires a sabot round out of a 120mm cannon.

Now compare this to a VB-6 Konig Monster which flies, and which has four main cannons. If those main cannons are direct descendants of the original HWR-00 Mark II Monster, they're each 40cm-bored railcannons. Pictures of the Konig Monster in action suggest, based on its specified size, that the bores are indeed 40cm wide, if not a tad bigger. Firing missiles isn't a big deal, nor are firing the Vulcan cannons - with space, if you're travelling along a certain vector it takes an equal amount of force directed in another direction to change the vector. Firing those guns doesn't create that amount of force, which is why VF's can turn on a dime, fire at a foe while in flight, and not get shoved back several meters.

Alas, this is not the case with the railcannons, which compared to the rest of the VB-6 are fucking massive in terms of the size of the projectile and the force used to send it to its target relative to a several thousand-ton capital ship using a similar railcannon to shoot at a target. On top of which, you forgot about the Battroid/Destroid mode which is, as I said before, an apparent part of Overtechnology... perhaps because the Protoculture got their hands on some Gundam DVDs that somehow fell out of a time warp and became such big mecha otaku that they focused on such things... and had the engineering know-how to make them work. Or maybe it's because they were so focused on the Vajra Queen worship and emulating its form in their own creations (Bird-Man, etc).

Besides which, the VB-6 still uses the fucking struts. It's just those struts appear to be built up to have Overtechnology-driven leg tech as well. It's certainly a more practical design than treads which weigh, without any mechanisms to move them, a full tenth of the vehicle's mass. Oh, and they're recycling an older, proven design from the first war whose leg was designed the exact same way... and which worked.

EDIT: I just reread the post and noticed a typo - those should be 40 CM cannons, based on their relative size to the Destroid. Basically 400mm in bore, or about 15.75 inches in diameter.