Compare uses of tracked vehicles and combat walkers?

[Aeson]

The possibilities are endless...

Tired of fighting? Dance-off!
Troops' morale waning? Baseball!

[Maniac]

So translating in civ...?

Biped walkers: yeah right!

Spiders/crawlers: possible

Better than tracked in rocky terrain, forests/jungle and I guess urban environments too => can get defensive modifiers from terrain
Can evade/walk over minefields (some terrain improvement?).
Can't carry as heavy weapons as tracked, more used for recon, rely on stealth => Is invisible on rocky terrains and forests and jungles?

Originally posted by Blake
The question is, if crawlers would ever be more viable than simply using traditional means (meaning on foot and carving out trackways, plus whirlies).

Perhaps to save human lives? (no war weariness)

[Harry Tuttle]

I could see a crab configuration working, but only if the vehicle was small and fast moving. The ability to sidestep would be a bonus. If it was small enough to travel through a hallway then I could see use in urban combat. Anything larger would be cannon fodder.

[Impaler[WrG]]

A Tracked or Wheeled vehicle experiences HUGE amounts of static friction with the ground. Thats the friction of two surfaces coming together and then apart such as a in a rolling wheel (kinetic friction is a skidding wheel and thats a whole different story). For every vehicle length a tracked vehicle moves it puts a huge amount of track in contact with the ground, a walking vehicle would put down one foot print at a fraction the contact area. This puts a higher theoretical efficiency cap on the legged vehicle vs the wheeled one, the theoretical bit is important because currently walking robots are exceedingly inefficient. To get close to the theoretical maximum the legs have to be very springy and return nearly all the energy of each foot fall on the rebound (like those springy insole shoes) and have almost no internal joint friction (the joints of the body have a lower coefficient of friction then any thing man made). If all these engineering hurdles were over come and the processing power necessary to coordinate the limbs is reasonable a legged vehicle could be fantastically fuel efficient.

[Dinner]

Walkers make no sense at all especially if some sort of hover vehicle has been invented.

[Kuciwalker]

A Tracked or Wheeled vehicle experiences HUGE amounts of static friction with the ground. Thats the friction of two surfaces coming together and then apart such as a in a rolling wheel (kinetic friction is a skidding wheel and thats a whole different story). For every vehicle length a tracked vehicle moves it puts a huge amount of track in contact with the ground, a walking vehicle would put down one foot print at a fraction the contact area. This puts a higher theoretical efficiency cap on the legged vehicle vs the wheeled one, the theoretical bit is important because currently walking robots are exceedingly inefficient.

You have a critical misunderstanding of the physics involved. That static friction is good. The static friction is what makes the vehicle go forward. Consider what happens if your tire friction goes to zero...

[Harry Tuttle]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Walkers make no sense at all especially if some sort of hover vehicle has been invented.

Tracks make no sense at all if a hover vehicle has been invented. Of course it would all depend on the versatility of the "hover" engine.

[Kuciwalker]

And the energy requirements.

[DRoseDARs]

RPG + Good aiming = Blown-out walker knee. Hell, even a well-placed rock (or very bad luck for the vehicle) could screw up a walker.

[Lancer]

I agree walkers are pretty dumb. Great targets, lousy in soft ground or mud. Still, I'd really like to have a madcat with PPCs and lasers, stuff I could shoot without running out, lots of heat sinks of course. Nice to have a mech adapted for construction also...and a million dollars, and and...

[Blake]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

A Tracked or Wheeled vehicle experiences HUGE amounts of static friction with the ground. Thats the friction of two surfaces coming together and then apart such as a in a rolling wheel (kinetic friction is a skidding wheel and thats a whole different story). For every vehicle length a tracked vehicle moves it puts a huge amount of track in contact with the ground, a walking vehicle would put down one foot print at a fraction the contact area. This puts a higher theoretical efficiency cap on the legged vehicle vs the wheeled one, the theoretical bit is important because currently walking robots are exceedingly inefficient.

You have a critical misunderstanding of the physics involved. That static friction is good. The static friction is what makes the vehicle go forward. Consider what happens if your tire friction goes to zero...

I'll attempt to explain this further...

A track does not move relative to the ground. If you look at the motion of a tank track, you see, the track does not move. A track segment gets plopped onto the ground, it sits there, and once all the wheels of the tank has rolled over it, it's pulled back off the ground (and then travels along the top of the wheels at twice the speed of the tank, relative to the ground). The track segments do not move relative to the ground and the energy required to lift them back off the ground (the "suck") is not particularly significant.

Wheels work best on flat hard surfaces and a tracked vehicle basically carries it's own flat hard surface around with it.

The energy losses are basically in friction in the gearing and stuff.

With walkies, the energy losses is basically in that you go "THUMP" and dissipate a whole lot of energy with each footstep, a good rolling walk can help minimize this loss, but again that's mainly the domain of the "spindlies", a mech which goes "THUMP THUMP THUMP" is wasting energy with every "THUMP", that energy goes to sound and the depression left in the ground (basically).

If you've ever compared running with cycling, you'll know that wheels are uber. It stands to reason that evolution has given humans a fairly efficient walk, but we can put that through some simple gearing and convert it into circular motion and travel twice as fast for half the energy - not to mention being able to travel downhill for no energy whatsoever. When walking is better than rolling, it's because the surface is rough.

[Sandman]

Mech debunking thread. Yay!

Walkers have an massive surface area, so their armour coverage is going to be crap. Loads of vulnerable points as well.

A walker can't move without computer control. Lose the computer, lose the walker. A tank can presumably be made to go forward with no computer assistance.

Each walker is going to need a monstrous amount of logistic support, with all those fragile and differentiated moving parts needing costant replacement.

[Proteus_MST]

I love Mechwarrior/Battletech.

But I have to agree that in RL it wouldn´t be the best idea to use biped walkers in combat, for the reason already mentioned in the thread (especially because they make good targets )

Multi legged walkers (for example 8 legs like a spider) could be useful however. After all the can de factor be better in traversing certain types of terran.
Like some people in the thread I would use them in engineering companies to do construction work.

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Sandman
A walker can't move without computer control. Lose the computer, lose the walker. A tank can presumably be made to go forward with no computer assistance.

Seeing as modern tanks were in use during WW1, it'd be pretty had to contradict you here.

Also, the idea of a wheeled tank dates pretty far back. The Greeks had wheeled towers over 2300 years ago.

Each walker is going to need a monstrous amount of logistic support, with all those fragile and differentiated moving parts needing constant replacement.

Like I said, all it would take is a single well-aimed shot to bring down a bipedal walker (or 2-3 or so for a multi-legged).

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Sandman
A walker can't move without computer control. Lose the computer, lose the walker. A tank can presumably be made to go forward with no computer assistance.

There are many valid criticisms of walkers, but I don't believe this is one. It's not difficult to place the computer in a such a way that the drive mechanisms would be inoperable long before the computer was destroyed.