/me 18!!!

[Jabba The Hunt]

Yeah but your language has not culture.

[Kylilin]

Our language has all cultures. What was once the Queen's English evolved with different areas of our country, the south had its slang, dialects, and accents, as well as the North. They then changed as the first waves of Western Europeans started to arrive in the east, and Asians arrived in the West. Then Eastern Europeans came and shaped American English a little more. And so on a so forth. This is why American English is a difficult language to learn, because it has derived from so many other languages.

[Psycho Tycho]

Is that the reason why some African tribes, use clicking and tongue sounds when they communicate?

[Zargon]

ooooh a clockwork radio? thats so much better than our rail guns, neutron bombs, and stealth fighters...............now you guys needs to reinvent toothpaste and then use it this time

 

 

as for your rediculus statement about us not having culture, if you call puffy accents, monocules, cricket, soccer, beer, and fish and chips culture, then we have you aced pal.

 

We have 4 times the sports, four times the wierd foods, more odd dialects, but half the alcohol intake, give or take a few:D

[Nute Gunray]

Originally posted by Jabba The Hunt

Yeah but your language has not culture.

 

Yeah, but as least I know how to speak my language and use the proper grammar and words.

Goofus says "Yeah but your language has not culture."

Gallant says "Yeah, but your language has no culture."

 

"Not culture?" wtf, are you getting all Shakespearian or something. WHAT HO! YOUR LANGUAGE HAS NOT CULTURE! FORSOOTH!

 

It's going to kick ass in 2150 when Britian is just a province of the mighty US empire. <--there were many in Britian that believed this was going to happen by 1955.

[Jabba The Hunt]

I think thats very offencive, just because im dyslexic and have difficulty spelling.

 

If I was in America I could sue you now

[Nute Gunray]

no you couldn't. contrary to popular belief, civil suits aren't nearly as common or easy as your silly european media likes to believe.

 

Zounds!

[Jabba The Hunt]

maybe so, but they are about 10 times easier and 10 times more common than here.

[Nute Gunray]

You must have no clue.

 

Lawsuits are extremely uncommon in the US as well. They're easy, if you have the money to go through with them, because *gasp* when we wrote down our rights (US: 1 UK: 0), the guys that wrote them down thought "**** man, it was too hard under ****ty british rule. we'll make it easier to bring suits against those that have commited wrongs."

However, if lawsuits were common, in virtually no time, everyone would know at least one person that has been suited. I have never met someone that's been sued or has sued someone*

 

 

* class action suits don't count.

[Flying Beastie]

Originally posted by Zargon

ooooh a clockwork radio? thats so much better than our rail guns, neutron bombs, and stealth fighters...............

 

Hmm. Yes, weapons of mass destruction, offering dozens of possibilities for large-scale carnage and slaughter are much better. :

[Nute Gunray]

Look at the technical aspect of a neutron bomb and you'll see it's an amazing invention aside from it's use as an anti-tank weapon.

 

Yes, neutron bombs are an anti-tank weapon. The idea was "holy cow thousand of soviet tanks are surging out of east germany. let's see how they fight when the crews are dying of radiation poisoning!" and then we go laughing maniacally into the night.

[Jabba The Hunt]

nute i was only joking no need to get so stressed.

[Flying Beastie]

It's Nute. He can't help it. He's like the Bruce Banner of American patriotism.

[Nute Gunray]

Someday America will invent the mech. THEN we'll see who's laughing.

 

HULK SMASH

[Cmdr. Cracken]

I don't know Nute. If asia ever gets off it's economically slumped ass, they might do it first. Go Asia! *waves a little South Korean Flag in one hand, and a Japanese one in the other!*

[Tierce]

South Korea can't do it...too dependent on the US

 

Japan, can do it, too bad they are pretty pacifist when it comes to international affairs, and non-militeristic

[Nute Gunray]

South Korea has other things to worry about, namely the hojillion NK artillery pieces that could massacre Seoul. I hear they're throwing money at artillery defenses like there's no tomorrow, but that tech is still a few years off.

 

And now that NK has the fearsome power of the atom, Japan needs to worry about ballistic missile defenses and air defenses. I'm sure if NK launches a nuclear attack on anything, it would be bombers. I'm not sure why, but I can see NK affording bombers before missiles. Mechs aren't exactly a defensive weapon system, so the Japanese constitution hog ties them on that one.

 

China needs to worry about where its wheat and oil is coming from before it needs to worry about mechs. They also need to figure out how to make sure all their soldiers have weapons. If China wants to be messing around with mechs, they'll need a navy that can get the mechs to where they need to be. Unless, that is, they wish to air deploy, but that's not feasible in the predictable future.

 

The US, on the massive, steel other hand, experimented with a few mechs back in the late 1960s/early 1970s. They had one that was like a truck with legs, but I'm not sure they even made a prototype. They also had something that resembled the Power Loader from Aliens, but with legs. It sucked and fell over a lot. I've actually seen it. It's at Fort Eustis at the US Army Transportation Museum. The US seems to be more interested in power armor type stuff more than a full blown mech. MIT's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies is working on some sort of exoskeleton to attach to an existing suit of armor, like the Scorpion (google it).

 

I suspect that I can't be alone in thinking that maybe the gyros in that silly Segway thing may be useful. The walking machine they built back in the 70s fell over a lot...

[Jabba The Hunt]

Whats so good about mechs anyway, surely they are just like tanks but easier to knock over? Or could u completely cover a mech with armour (note the correct spelling ) making it harder to destroy?

[Nute Gunray]

You'd armor (notice the phonetically correct spelling) the **** out of them. The idea being that its too heavy to knock over. I suspect the battlefield of the future will have huge, supermechs (AT-AT like vehicles too powerful to be assaulted directly with anything less than a high-energy weapon or directed energy weapon) being supported by power armor (let's say 12 feet tall). Air support will be provided by robot aircraft operating with pulsejet engines and some means of using magnetic fields to repel itself from the ground (flying wing and triangular shaped UFO sightings out in Nevada in the 80s turned out be be the B-2 and F-117, so the current UFO sightings out there point to some kind of flying wing that uses electrostatic repulsion to maintain flight and pulsejet engines to move). Maybe we'll have hovertanks too. I remember a while ago, someone called Boeing for some WEAPONS OF THE FUTURE thing on the History Channel and Boeing, curiously, said "we cannot confirm anything concerning any anti-gravity project we are currently undertaking." It was worded really odd to me... We also have at least one working railgun and have a whole crap load of directed energy weapons.

 

Why are mechs good? Because when YOU have something that someone else doesn't, it's always good. Unless it's technologically backwards, like when the Poles attacked Nazi tanks with horses. GOOD CALL THERE PALS.

[Jem]

I think Mechs rule ever since I played Mechwarriors for the fisrt time. And owning a TimberWolf is one of my impossible dreams.

[Jabba The Hunt]

But my point is what makes it more difficult to destroy than a tank, I mean you can trip over mechs why not just make a giant tank?

 

On you point of energy weapons and rail guns while both are possible they either require enormous machines/energy or give no real advantage over their partners on the modern battle field.

 

What will truely make an important difference are such things as optical fibre cloaking devices, where a series of hi-resolution optical fibres carry light from one side of an object to the opposing side, although its not perfect it makes you far more difficult to see than standard camouflage (sp).

 

Power sources that would provide enough power for magnetic shields and plasma weapons are far in the future.

 

Plasma weapons also have a problem of decimating huge areas of land, they are not precise like modern warfare. (whether the target is a red cross or embassy building )

 

And the advantage of laser or other energy weapons? well very little really, it may travel faster but bullets are faster than human reactions anyway so there is little real need.

 

The real advantage of future warfare will be the information exchange, the location of specific enemies will be able to be reported across battle fields from the top level commander down to the marine in the mud.

[Admiral Odin]

There is also a psychological weapon presant in Mechs. Seeing a huge machine come towards you can be very frightening. More so then a Tank.

[Nute Gunray]

A mech would have a mobility edge over a tank. Tanks need fairly flat terrain to go over. A mech, simply by virture of its stride, would have an advantage in rough terrain and a speed advantage.

 

Directed energy weapons have way more applications that 'point at what you want to die.' They're fast. Really fast. You could use them as anti-artillery or anti-missile defenses. Vaporizing an incoming shell would render artillery useless for the first time ever.

 

Active camo is going to be the coolest thing ever. Some of the applications they want to use it on don't make sense, like on torpedos...?? It'll be great on fixed objects, like a SAM battery or something. Movement isnt very good for an active camo system, unless its fast enough to adapt to the movement. The one they have now isn't good enough and they don't think it will be for quite some time.

 

The US has already cornered the market on information warfare and all we can do is make sure its more reliable or something. I think we'll start to see this taper off after things like Scorpion or Landwarrior or whatever are deployed. I think we're sitting on the edge of busting open a huge tech bubble again. Robots are the next big thing.

[Jabba The Hunt]

Ok i'll agree that mechs are more mobile, but I don't think you are going to be building them much bigger than a tank anyway, so the phycological warfare idea is out.

 

And I like the idea of using directed energy weapons to take out incoming missiles but otherwise see little benefit.

[Nute Gunray]

Plasma is extremely effective against metal. If you could fling a blob of plasma at something, it would mess up a tank or something pretty good. However, all the smart countries have already been armoring their tanks with ceramics for years so this might be of little use against a determined and intelligent enemy. The US (and probably the British too) are already looking into a means to render our tanks invulnerable to standard shells. You layer your armor like so: Ceramic reactive armor (Chobam or whatever), steel plate, air, steel plate, Chobam. The two steel plates are electrified. An incoming shell pierces the ceramic armor and travels through the first layer of steel. It comes in contact with the second and completes a circuit. Poof! Shell is overwhelmed with energy and vaporizes. I believe they've tested this on RPGs and were quite pleased.

 

If everyone starts getting fancy tanks that can't be shot up with bullets and rockets and such, you're going to have to switch to lasers or something.

 

A mech would be enormous. Just to get it to have the power to move around you'd be required to have this huge power plant. I'd say you'd need something well over the output of a tank, which i believe is around 1500 horsepower (although horsepower doesn't equate into electrical power). General Electric makes a locomotive that puts out 6000 horsepower (the AC6000CW). I couldn't find any dimensions online, but I know that it's well over 70 feet long. Only about 20 feet of that isn't engine. Of course, it is longer than it need be because they were forced to make it only be like seven feet wide. The engine alone would force the mech to be enormous. Plus whatever gun you gave this sucker would be OMG SO HUGE. Imagine if you had to be some lowly Iranian grunt and over the horizon storms three US mech, 15 meters tall, shrugging off your old Soviet RPGs, and spewing death in the form of a 406mm cannon.