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Homemade Mecha Walks in Japan
EtherAlchemist writes "Sakakibara Kikai has pictures and even a movie of their Land Walker robot (Babelfish translation here) which appears to work. Powered by a 250cc gas engine and armed with several guns (including 2 that fire Nerf-like balls) it stands at a little over 3 meters. What makes this one interesting is that it is actually armed and it is piloted instead of being an exo-skeleton. Makes me wonder if the creators of shows like Robotech or comics/RPGs like Battletech have any kind of licensening rights on appearance. I'd like to see a Warhammer..."
... Except that it's more of a shuffler than a walker. Still, some cool hacking went into this thing.
In case of a late-night Slashdotting, I've got a copy of the movie stashed temporarily: robo movie
It takes too much power to drive actuators to raise the feet off the ground. A lot more energy efficient to use the wheels. Of course, it's a lot more complicated to build a walking mech too, and what they've built thus far is remarkable already. Still, they take a hit in terms of agility - this mecha ain't going nowhere fast. Now it needs a jetpack...
While it has legs, it's really a stretch to call this walking.
Now this is a walker: http://www.plustech.fi/Walking1.html
Video: http://www.plustech.fi/WalkingVideo.html
Yes, it has more than 2 legs, but at least they come off the ground and wouldn't be stopped dead in it's tracks by a speed bump.
The walker reference probably came from it's gait, it looks like an old man in slippers while pushing a walker in front of him.
Disclaimer: I'm a retired real-life Armoured officer - and incidently, a former hard-core Battletech (board game!) player.
Sadly, there's a few reasons why we're unlikely to ever see 'mechs striding the landscape:
1) Vulnerability. Modern anti-armour weapons, especially guns, are insanely powerful. The 120mm gun in the M1A2, when equipped with the latest APFSDS ammo, has a muzzle velocity of over 1800 m/s, and a penatrative capacity of 960mm of Rolled Homogeneous armour - yes, nearly a full metre of solid steel. 1 cubic metre of steel weighs roughly 17,000 lbs
Tanks get away from this by using armour that has greater protection capacity at thinner thicknesses, and heavily armouring only the portions of the tank likely to see fire - the turret, and the front of the tank. Tank commanders are heavily trained to use terrain and situational awareness to keep the armour pointed at the enemy. The punishments for getting caught "tracks up to the world" or "broadsides" were severe (although not as severe as what the enemy could dish out)
Ideally, the only part of the tank visible to the enemy at any given point in time is the gun muzzle and the front of the turret.
Effectively, the armour on the turret is worth about 800-900mm of RHA, and the glacis is between 500-600mm. The sides, top, and rear are much, much less - and the way that you generate those high effective thicknesses is through the use of super-dense materials like depleted uranium - lighter than the equivelent resistive thickness of steel, but still not exactly light.
Your Atlas, even if the front arcs are more heavily armoured than the rear, stands so much taller than a tank that concealment and the use of terrain will be much tougher, if not impossible. That means that the forward arcs will have to be *at least* as well armoured as the turret of an M1, and it has a MUCH larger surface area to cover. That's going to weigh a LOT more than 100 tons.
2) Mobility: Given the massive weight of the chassis (dictated by the armour it needs to carry) and the high ground pressure (dictated by the bipedal form factor) this thing is going to tear up terrain like nobodies' business. Tanks, with low ground pressure and (typically) rubber-padded tracks, still rip the shit out of roadways and open country. Your Atlas is going to be far, far worse. It will be difficult to move any number of them from place to place without transforming the roadway into an untraversable morass, and bridges will be right out of the question.
Even assuming ideal conditions, mobility is still going to suffer. In a world dominated by line-of-sight projectile weapons, the proper place for a biped is on his stomach - or squatting. Soldiers walk and run, yes - but only for short distances. A quick burst of speed to the next position of cover, and then dive on your face.
I doubt your Atlas will dive more than once.
There are other reasons... but the basic problem is one of scale. Bipeds do not scale well past a certain size.
DG
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