Seret

No, nature doesn't use wheels because they're a very hard structure to create at a large scale. The only rotating machines nature ever created are on a molecular scale. Wheels and tracks are much faster, more durable and easier to control. Legs are much harder to get any kind of performance out of, and it's really only worth it if you want to tackle extremely rough terrain. Just look at the performance of actual walking robots, for the size of engine they've got on board their speed is pretty pathetic. A walking vehicle is always going to be a lot slower than a wheeled one, as you've got to waste a lot of energy shifting the mass of the vehicle sideways and vertically. Lol, why the hell would you have a "torso" and "arms" on a real-world combat vehicle. If you just wanted extra weapons independently targetable from under armour you'd just use a remote weapons station. You don't seem interested in any discussion of an actual real-world mech. If you just wanted to talk about the made-up technology of the Battletech universe then that's fine, but don't start a discussion about mechs in the real world and then talk only about Battletech technology.

Visible light is an EM signal. Your eyeballs are electromagnetic receivers.

That was me actually.

Some of the little dudes I've left on extended jaunts in space would pretty much have the whole capsule filled with beard.

Sure, you could probably make that work if you started with the station stationary, pointed its docking port at the approaching ship, then spun it up and matched the docking ship to that spin. Bit of a faff, and I'm not sure the roleplayers would find it very satisfying.

Make it happen!

I can't go into the nitty-gritty of it too much, I'll leave that to others if you want to get really techy. My high-level understanding of it is that due to the architecture of x86-64 and the longer word length the processor can handle longer numbers in fewer steps. This makes a big difference for computationally expensive tasks like encryption, video encoding and compression.

Yup. I did hear a statistic from analysis of AFV kills in WW2: hits below 1m were extremely rare, as terrain is generally masking you to some degree. ATGMs have certainly had an effect, they've changed the way armour is used. Tanks have to be accompanied by infantry, which is where the IFV came from. Ironically you're now getting APCs that are trying to be as well protected as tanks, so in a way ATGMs have lead to even more heavy armour on the battlefield. If anything is going to make tanks obsolete it's aircraft IMO. Smart weapons like Brimstone are getting pretty scary for armour in the open. A single strike aircraft could rip the guts out of a tank company in one attack.

I second this. You want to lock the station down before you try docking to it. I get that you're trying to do a bit of a role playing thing with artificial gravity FREEFALL1984, but I think keeping it spinning during a docking operation is making life way harder for yourself than it needs to be. A station that's hard to dock with is a pointless station IMO.

TL;DR version of that is: faster for complex calculations, able to use more memory.

Most vehicles on the battlefield are pretty vulnerable to infantry antitank weapons already. That's why the infantry carry them.

I tend to build stations fairly similar to that, about the only bit of advice I'd give would be consider moving as much mass as your practically can to the central hub. Having lots of weight hanging off the end of long struts puts a lot of force on them when they rotate. You want to put your mass as close to the point you're rotating around as possible. Connect everything using the big clamp-o-trons if possible. You can't keep the station rotating when it's not the active vessel. Sorry! 1g would require a hell of a spin for the size you can build things at in KSP anyway. You absolutely want the station to stop rotating when you dock. You also want to be able to rotate your docking ports to the direction your ship is approaching from. Include some reaction wheels.

Support for 64-bit needs to come from Unity, which is something outside Squad's control. Squad would (I'm sure) be happy to have 64-bit support on Windows tomorrow if the Unity devs sorted their end out.

There's no such thing as awkwardly wide for a lander. Wide is good. Stick your materials bay under your pod/lander can/probe core. Attach as many fuel tanks as you need radially to the mat bay (don't forget fuel lines). If you need more than six FLT-200 tanks something has gone seriously wrong. Engine goes under the mat bay, legs go on the tanks. Job done.

In practice the gear and the principles are similar enough that they might as well be considered the same thing. RF people are quite happy working with microwave gear, they're taught together and work the same way. It's not like there's a sharp cutoff frequency where the principles change radically. So the distinction is a bit arbitrary.

You've got the cart before the horse a bit there. The spec arises out of the role a piece of equipment would play, so what possible job could a walking vehicle fill? Let's ignore for a minute the issue of whether legs are actually any better or worse than wheels or tracks, and assume that you've got a requirement for a specialist walking vehicle for urban combat. If you're not carrying troops then what role are you fulfilling? Walking is too slow for things like convoy escort, but weapons carrier acting in support of infantry would work. You'd need machineguns, and a standoff weapon good at ranges from point blank to a max of about 1km. Ability to breach buildings and fortifications would be useful. I'd go for something like an RCL or unguided rocket launcher firing thermobaric or HESH warheads. You could also go for an AGL or autocannon, preferably with smart airburst and/or breacher munitions. An AGL or RCL would be useful for non-lethal warheads too. Autocannons would be more useful for counter-sniping, as they're a bit more surgical. Flame throwers are very nasty in urban warfare, but people are a bit squeemish about those these days. A walking mech breathing fire would certainly have shock effect though... For crew, you're probably looking at 2-3. You could get away with 2, but that would limit your ability to fire more than one weapon at a time. Combat experience has taught that having at least two independently operable machineguns is a good thing in an ambush, hence the amount of guns you see stacked onto vehicles designed to fight at short ranges like the M113 ACAV and the Achzarit. The height of a walking vehicle would be a liability most of the time, but could be turned to an advantage. If it was tall enough to access upper floors and could breach a building it could be used to assault buildings. Build the thing with ladders running up the back. Infantry quite rightly hate assaulting buildings from the ground floor, they'll always go in through an upper floor if they can. A vehicle that could make a hole, advance on the building laying down suppressive fire and provide assault access to even the first floor (second floor for you Americans) could actually be quite useful, if somewhat niche. Protection wise, you're probably looking at aluminium armour plus slats or ERA to about the standard or an IFV. You'd need to at least have a reasonable chance of taking an RPG-type shot from any angle, or it'd just be a liability down town. Having legs might actually be quite good for mine protection, if you don't mine the thing falling over in a heap afterwards. The problem is weight and mobility. It would be too slow to accompany wheeled and tracked vehicles. It would be ok with dismounted infantry, but it would need transport to keep up with them once they mounted. A big flatbed truck would be easy, but would suck off road. If you could get the weight down towards the 10t end of the range you could marry it up to a Sky Crane/CH-53/CH-47/Mi-26 type helicopter and give it to air assault units. You'd probably be sacrificing a fair bit of armour for that though, especially if you wanted to operate hot and high. You'd end up with something about as well protected as the Wiesel mentioned above, but heavier and more bulky so it would have to be an underslung load instead of being carried internally like the Wiesel can. If your mech ended up towards the 20t end of the scale I think it would start getting pretty dubious, as you'd be back to moving it around by truck on roads. Even in urban combat being able to operate off-road is useful for a weapons carrier, as you'll want to be able to maneuver on the outskirts.

No, microwave is a separate part of the spectrum from RF.

Yes, but the meet the only criteria the Star Wars universe requires: they're cool. The Battle of Hoth is the highlight of the whole Star Wars saga IMO.

Don't be silly. Do you think someone has had to actually build a chocolate fireguard at some point?

Since all these moon hoax conspiracy theories rely on the Russians being in on it I don't think we need to bother going out of our way to debunk them. The whole idea that it was a hoax is highly implausible.

A vehicle with tracks or wheels is going to have a lower profile, be faster, more stable, have lower ground pressure and have a lower surface area to volume ration (and thus require less weight of armour to protect the same volume). It'll be more mobile, better protected and harder to spot. So no, you won't be getting mechs instead of tanks.

Note that they've gone mechanical for this. Like I said, we've got really good predictive models for things like fatigue and corrosion. Interesting they've gone for something readable at 1000x magnification. That's actually pretty big.

I can totally believe that. I grew up in a town with trolley buses. If you followed one in your car the radio would be swamped with a horrible whine every time the driver put his foot down.

I don't track the science as closely as you probably do. What level of confidence does "partially" represent?