MECHA THREAD

A FUCKING LEAF

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If you're making a single large ship then arguably yes. For a swarm of orbital drones then you'd get them to do more with a spherical design. You're also underestimating the advantage gained by having no 'front'. While your conical design can bring more guns to bear on a single target at any one time you also leave blind spots that your weapons can't fire into. You're also unable to fire at a target whilst firing your main drive unless you're accelerating directly towards it. My spherical design can instantly begin to alter course without having to pivot or reduce the amount of fire it can put into a target, making it much less likely to be hit, arguably achieving the same end goal as your sloped armour for less cost and with greater capabilities. That's before we start to consider the sphereships ability to engage multiple targets at various bearings simultaneously without any kind of problem (assuming decent fire control).

The better surface area to volume ratio would also help reduce production costs (less hull to armour) while also reducing wasted mass - which is very handy for reducing the size/power of your engines and the amount of fuel required for any given manoeuvre. If you used spherical designs as the standard for every ship in the fleet these would be major strategic and operational advantages for any kind of space campaign. The only thing that might not benefit from a spherical design would be conventional missiles, as they need to keep the warhead pointing in the right direction to actually damage their target, having said that though space nukes would benefit from the extra agility, seeing as you need to get them much closer to the target (compared to flak warheads) for them to be worthwhile in a vacuum.

They'd be useful as construction equipment and in certain logistical support roles.
Lockheeb would surely love the idea of a real-life AMBAC combat Mech requiring a trillion engineers and six gorillion spare parts a day to keep it running, while being highly inefficient at its job compared to cheaper, simpler Russian spacecraft.

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This is exactly right, there are historic designs by serious people who always come up with a cylinder or cone as a orbital combat craft. For those interested minus the asshole thinking he's intelligent by pointing at my flag look up the combat station Polyus, or one of the armed space stations.

The only other design that works is a more nimble version, which looks like a giant spider, because the farther away a maneuvering thruster is from the center of mass the better torque it gets. But such designs aren't for orbital fighting.

Fighting in orbital space has nothing to do with that kind of maneuvering. You're mostly just accelerating or decelerating to shift the altitude of your orbit, there's not enough fuel to really change the type of orbit.

It's more like two trains fighting each other than two F-22s, and the trains have a few minutes every day (or week for higher orbits) when they're in weapons range.
Deep space fighting is even more different. You're thinking of this in waaaay to simplistic terms.

Fair enough.

I don't see how any of that matters.
In any significant gravitational body, because of the way orbital mechanics and rendezvous works, your tactical maneuverability basically reduces to a one-dimensional affair, the distance between 'my fleet' and 'their fleet'. You're either going to match orbits and intercept, or you're going to fly by at a relative velocity of several km/s and maybe come within a couple of clicks before you speed off just as fast as you came in.
Even something a simple as a flanking maneuver is just going to be a massive waste of delta-vee because you're fighting your own orbit. The only place I can see otherwise being possible would be near an asteroid or Lagrange point, where your "orbit" is little more than assisted stationkeeping.

Now if you're talking about random walking on approach to dodge incoming fire, that's plausible, but there's no reason the same couldn't be accomplished with lateral thrusters or RCS.

>Desigining your weapons systems as anything other than Mass-Driver Cannons to lob large amounts of debris at supersonic speeds through space
Plebs.

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It's like two trains, except once you've passed by once, you can effectively predict your opponent's orbital rotation and plant debris or shoot shit at the right trajectory to hit them on the other side in a few days time if they don't waste precious fuel avoiding the hit.

The posts above lay out preciously why missiles are undoubtedly the future of space combat. You have two fundamental problems you gotta deal with; delta-v and intercepts. Relatively close-range weapons, for example cannons, lasers, the like, require a two or three hundred kilometer digit range to be remotely accurate. How do you solve both of these issues, not using delta-v, and attacking from various directions? The answer is missiles. You can probably escape the moon five times over with a mundane modern cruise missile, reverse your orbit, do Hohmann transfer passes and the like. The future of this shit isn't going to be swarms or whatever the fuck, no fantastical retardation. It's going to be missile carriers with massive fuel tanks and an inordinate amount of point defense moving in formations with overlapping fire arcs.

Somewhat less exciting, but there is some fun to be had there.

They would not really work in real life, they are large targets, move inefficiently, they present more of an area to fire at while that area is also harder to slope and they would not deal with recoil as effectively. Reloading would also be difficult as would carrying ammunition.

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If you think about it, one end of your spacecraft is going to have to be a big honking engine, in case you need to change orbit quickly. A sphere is going to have to be huge to accommodate it.

If you're looking for weapons omni directionality, put them on the tip of the cone, and they see a fuckload and are shielded from the glare of an active engine. Using a sphere means you have to put more sensors on, and some of them will be partially blinded by the engine.

Third thing is weapons and armor. On the cone, the weapons and armor are all pointing at the enemy, while the engine is pointing away at all times. On the sphere you need more weapons and more armor because its inefficiently placed. This is space, there's no way someone can sneak up on you and hit you in the butt, you know where he is and both your paths are more or less predetermined. Pound for pound the cone also carries way more armor, because its able to focus the armor into one direction, and because it's sloped.

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You can just go prone yknow

Yes, go prone, give it treads to move while prone and mount it's gun in some kind of rotating tower on it's back.

Childhood is when you like mecha.

Adulthood is when you think power armor makes more sense.

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So….basically this?

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Alternatively…

If the enemy is fast, close, and deadly enough you have to turn on a dime to not die, PA or no PA, I don't think you're going to live very long.

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>not sending a video of you mocking and guffawing at any survivors that you purposely spared to mock before shelling them too

I swear to god you autists come up with the most ridiculous and absurd reasons why "X wouldn't work" when there are much more realistic barriers preventing power armor from becoming a reality. The nearly full range of the human body's articulation can already be achieved in a machine exoskeleton. Your spine somehow being snapped is not one of those barriers. A hard limit on spine articulation would not somehow magically prevent the rest of your body from being able to assist in completing a desired movement. Does your back's inability to flex 180 degrees prevent you from doing things in everyday life? No? Then why the fuck would it turn power armor into a literal walking casemate tank destroyer? Does the power armor prevent you from abducting the leg, turning the ankle, or extending the arm outwards parallel to the body? If not, then why?

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Pretty good, but it feels like it's missing some things. Ah, I know. An artificial pussy that self-lubricates, an artificial womb, and a loving wife subroutine.

More like a mirv really…. but obviously large enough to hold armor, weapons, targeting system, weeks supply of air, water and food, and enough fuel to make at least a few orbital changes. Maybe a slight cylinder body right behind the main.

A single space shuttle SRB should serve fine as a launching method, like Ares I.

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My point was that at that point, you should just use a fucking robot.

how do they aim individual nukes?

They're called MIRVs (Multiple Independently targetable Reentry Vehicles), the big round silver thing they're attached to is called a "bus", the bus and MIRVs are brought into a suborbital free flight, where the ballistic computer on-board the bus uses pulse jets to to maneuver itself into position to release a MIRV on to a ballistic trajectory at a target, then so on for the next MIRV, and so on until the bus has expended all on-board MIRVs. Also, have a video for visual aid.

Guess this is a space warfare thread now.

I think the likely result would be weaponized, partial GPS constellations. It has been demonstrated that satellites are vulnerable to terrestrial lasers which can be arbitrarily powerful and heavy unlike spacecraft. You could mount these on watercraft as well. So you can set up a no fly zone above your territory, and skirmishes will be fought over dominance of strategic surface installation sites.

Because of the no-fly zone any expensive satellite must be in geosynchronous orbit above you. Luxuries like GPS-guided weapons and spy sats are denied over enemy territory. In fact so are ICBMs. Meanwhile putting a telescope somewhere outside Earth orbit (eg. moon) where it can't be easily found or killed provides a huge strategic advantage, and these might be hunted by other ships. This is probably where most ship-ship combat will happen.

Are terrestrial lasers strong enough to destroy an Island 3 Space Colony at some Lagrangian point?

or this.

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That would be included in the commercial model lad.

Powered armour and remote drones. Or semi autonomous drones controlled by a man on the ground. Im seeing a guy controlling 4-5 quadraped drone dogs armed with probably a spine mounted shotgun or rifle or both and maybe a nade launcher or something. Plus jaws-of-life kind of bite force. The guy providing point to point guidance and whatnot, as well as final say for engagements. Imagine patrolling around someplace and suddenly getting jumped by a couple armoured robo dogs.

It depends on how exactly how strong the lasers are and how small/defended the colony is. However the Earth-Moon L1 is 327 Mm away (others are farther), while GEO is 36 Mm up. So it would be 10 times harder to focus the laser at least. Of course if the lasers can already be focused 100 times better than they have to be it doesn't matter. Basically the height of the no-fly zone grows with laser focusing tech.

It's foolproof. The aura of awesomeness will keep it running smoothly.

that's a digimon OP

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It looks cool don't it?

ships would be great for housing mechs.

omegamon is fucking gay though, you should have posted a real cool digimon, like pic related

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