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I'd say that fiddling the shape of the L-133 nose fins a bit would also help. Turn them around- flat edge back instead of forward- and you get more of a 'delta wing with the middle cut out of it' feel.
Building on Valles' idea concerning Hitler, I submit a fourth setting for the Silliness Switch (because 'Silliness Dial' doesn't flow as well); Das Cyberfuhrer pretending to still be crippled. Comes in cane, wheelchair, and palanquin varieties. Makes for a surprising boss fight, too, of whatever difficulty level you care to use (since not all cyber is created equal). I figure you could do anything from 'chose to serve as bait, only to prove mobile enough to escape the deathtrap room before the party could', to 'Ubersoldat-lite', to 'Heil Das Eisenfuhrermensch', to 'so this is why the Clans had Elementals!'.
...yes, I might've been playing the new Wolfenstein recently. Why do you ask?
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Sadly, no Cyberfuhrer - he's not a psi, so no bullshit space magic for Hitler. It's why possibly the world's strongest unamplified telekinetic is his bodyguard and shortly afterward girlfriend, instead of out ripping tanks in half barehanded. He only got scratched up and a bunch of splinters in his legs OTL, anyway. There's no telepathy (empathy and projective empathy, yes) teleporting or precog beyond combat-time for the setting, but Eva would be strong enough to shield the two of them from a missile hit that destroyed an escape craft/ambulance, to spirit him away on foot/carried by TK under cover of the dust and smoke. The rest of the modified scenario does sound workable, though.
In the pre-war era, no one in charge was actually convinced that mecha were going to be such a big factor - "The Bombers Will Get Through." "A few dozen esper pilots can't possibly make a difference compared to thousands of well-trained conventional troops with the latest weapons." "Yes, yes, the Kloggs that were tested against then-current equipment when they landed in 1920 were unstoppable, but our Red-tech has developed a long way, and the new Blue-tech mecha aren't nearly as sophisticated as those few examples." And so on. Notably, I chose the L-133 to be the first US fully-jet-powered mecha design because it can be transformed with only a minor adjustment to the narrow (original) Klogg design, before I split off a second teardrop-flying-saucer version.
As for naval fighters, the variable P-38 can VSTOL if not quite VTOL and has folding wings, so it's perfectly capable of carrier operations and using it for them means not needing to organize parts and training for a second mecha type. From a design perspective, one of the things that I've been using as a nearly absolute requirement is that the cockpit remains in the same attitude, or at most tips forward a few degrees, when transforming, and the few exceptions mount the seat and controls on a gimbal so they stay stable as the unit moves around them. IC, spinning around on two axes sounds like a horribly disorienting and time consuming thing to do in the middle of combat, either of which would turn it into a suicide sled. It does sound like it would make a cool toy, though. Honestly, I could have made the FW-190 end up sleeker in battroid, but being a bit primitive and awkward looking is part of the concept since it was the first earth-made mecha to be deployed in regular service.
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Ah, OK, that pilot orientation requirement makes a lot of sense. Hmm. OK, put the engine on the front, with hips and shoulders attaching to the back of it... Assume Wildcat. The landing gear assembly are on the hips, which swing down to lock in place to the bottom of the engine block. Legs and feet go back from there to basically form the lower half of the aft fuselage. Weapon blocks articulate off of the hips, and the wings articulate off of and separately from the weapon blocks. The shoulders swing up and out - the arms are the outer parts of the mid-fuselage, going around either side of the cockpit. Once they've swung out, the cockpit slides forward and down under the upper cowling of the nose to snug up against the back of the engine block. The 'razorback' slides on top of it, because it holds the head and its cameras and com gear, while the other tail surfaces come forward and split in half to fold over top of the shoulder blocks and add bulk and protection to them.
The 'Navy Vs Army' debate would likely have more to do with service rivalry than practicality, although real land planes were really not built to take either carrier landings or sea salt exposure, but said rivalry was pretty fierce. I mean, cost or disbelief could provide reasons not to, but I have to admit that, when going for a forum or 'live' game rather than a computer game, i don't see why we'd want to limit the selection that severely, OOC.
...Also, is it just me, or are we likely to end up with a Strike Witches type of cast, here? Note that, allowing for a less creepy art style, I don't consider this a bad thing.
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Hmmm... the Wildcat with propeller-chest might work, but lack of a gerwalk would hurt it quite a bit, I think. It's also damn hard to find a cutaway view of.
http://hsfeatures.com/features04/f4f432cl_1.htm
http://www.largescaleplanes.com/article ... hp?aid=777
http://weaponsandwarfare.com/?p=4960
http://richard.ferriere.free.fr/3vues/f4f_1_3v.jpg
With all the mounted weapons in the wings, some shenanigans might be needed to have them useable when transformed.
I was looking at the Avenger some more, too... Use Blue-tech derived radio gear so the operator can be in the same cockpit block instead of a tail cabin that'll need to become legs, tip that cockpit block down ala the SV-51 and pull the nose/engine plus upper forward cowl/head up and over it, so the pilot is in the lower abdomen, radio guy is in the middle of the body, and the ball sticks out of the shoulder blades/behind the head, though arranging everything else around it is the challenge and the radio guy would be kind of hosed in terms of bailing out if necessary. The wings would either also take cues from the SV-51 or fold to the sides in a kind of odd way I'm having trouble describing.
http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_su ... ?sort=DESC
http://aviationtrivia.blogspot.com/2010 ... f-tbf.html
http://www.warbirdinformationexchange.o ... f=3&t=2207
http://iloveww2warbirds.com/flying-grumman-tbf-avenger/
Having a US variable bomber/command unit does make some good sense, and if it's got flaws that limit it compared to the variable pursuit craft that's a good reason to bring the Lightnings east after the Shinden gets deployed. I'll see if I can get a 3d sketch of at least one of them set up to rough out a transformation.
Edit: Hm, the Avenger didn't go into service until Midway, though... Maybe the SBD Dauntless then? Or just stick with the Wildcat.
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The Wildcat config is easy to put in Gerwalk, actually - leave the hip block, cockpit, and tail components in place, then deploy the legs and arms out of the body. The weapon mounts I see ending up as hip-packs, a la the 3D Maneuver Gear from Attack on Titan, or the Freedom's hip-cannons from Gundam Seed. True, this limits their field of fire somewhat, but no design should be perfect, and the Wildcat is pretty much guaranteed to be the 'quick and agile' counterpart to the Lightning (which was, I believe, easily the largest and heaviest successful day-fighter of the war), so giving it a narrower field of fire feels balancing.
The Dauntless'd be an option, but you could also just set it up such that bomber/command design isn't available immediately and doesn't show up until partway through the war. I think that that's what I'd do - have the Wildcat and the Lightning be the 'starting options', and then the Avenger is introduced, you're fighting the Japanese and their Shindens until some boss encounter over Tokyo, and then the war in Europe ends and you're sent there, gaining access to the Wurger and Schwalbe for the first all-out offenses against aliens on Earth, and then the Brunhilde and V-2 become available in time to ascend into orbit.
Or something like that. Doubtless I'm missing arcs.
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You... don't want to be a V-2 pilot. Really really. They're active from Game Start Time, though, and sortieing to defend against at least one raid using them on London is likely.
Also, the war in Europe doesn't end until you make it end, having come back from the Pacific by way of China and Siberia after Bad Stuff happens.
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So I have to ask. How do you pilot a V-2? For that matter, why would you pilot a V-2?
Also, WRT V-E Day not coming until the PCs make it happen, is that because the Allies are diverting more men and materiel to the ET war effort, blunting their IRL production advantage? Or is it because of superior Nazi Ausländwunderwaffen? Or both?
(Looking for a Watsonian explanation, not a Doylist one.)
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I'd figured that it had to be a completely different craft, possibly a rocket-powered mecha along the lines of the Me 163, since it was on the list of 'fully realized units'. Which I'd taken to mean it was a playable design that only happened to share a designation with the RL V-2.
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Note, this post is very spoilery if you care about that, but given the relatively low probability of an actual game getting off the ground I did want to answer the questions - and besides, a lot of this can be surmised from reading what's been said in this and other threads.
Well, a little of one, a little of the other. Europe is the only place where Earth's militaries were concentrated and fortified enough to avoid having the main invasion fleet roll them under, so the Axis has equivalent or better production capacity post-Bombardment. The active war does slow down to only the occasional skirmish since both sides have to deal with Zzard thrusts, and as previously noted the main sticking points are Stalin and Hitler both wanting to be in charge of any final alliance. Japan is blasted to a few scattered islands, the East Coast of the USA is a hundred miles further inland in most places if very shallow, and the San Andreas did what all those disaster movies predicted and dropped that seaboard as well from the geological shocks. The Tuskegees were in the middle of a major exercise and the beams too spread out to destroy battroids, the surivors flew to Britain because they were chased all the way. The surviving Pacific and India/Burma forces headed for an inland crossing to rejoin with the forces in Europe and counterattack instead of back across the ocean because of, again, overwhelming alien forces sweeping out from NA airspace, with the other main landing site in Africa blocking a southern route with patrols extending out to the Arabian peninsula and western India.
The Variable V-2 is somewhat larger and has, as the name implies, a battroid form, used to rampage about once it arrives in the target area via its exceptionally fast and difficlt to interdict ballistic flight pattern, and also has both a nose/shoulder blaster and a pair of side turrets which become the head in the humanoid form. They fight to destruction or until radio contact tells them they can withdraw without incurring retribution on the hostages used to motivate them, it's what the Nazis do with untermensch espers, you see. Most are kind of insane anyway, since they only have a sense of touch on twenty pressure pads on each hand and six on each foot, while little attention is given to not leaving the organs included in the biopod in constant pain. You really, really DO NOT want to be a Kreigerakete pilot. There's a reason Germany's top ace is willing to be party to treason to free the camp full of hostages and let them all escape to the Allies after she finds out the more secret details, and it's not a lack of devotion to the people of her country.
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The Macross similarities are becoming even more obvious...
...though I don't think that anything the Protoculture got up to quite equals the VV-2 for sheer 'ugly thought' potential. Jesus.
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Nazis, what can you do?
ETA: The VV-2 would be playable by adding one as a wingman after the mass defection in the video game version, or by switching PCs for a PbP/tabletop game, so as to have a transatmospheric unit (with the Verstärkt Ausrüstung/Boosted Equipment) for the orbital raid to prevent another round of bombardment from stopping Operation Alien Overlord when the combined earth forces move to capture the African base and its Blue-tech space travel and manufacturing infrastructure.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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I could see a politically-motivated Bad Hereditary Science dodge that insisted that obviously human psi-talents always originated with the Superior Aryan Race, and that any psi was therefore actually an Aryan... Even those whose bloodlines had suffered past... interference, which might unfortunately disguise their natural features.
That said, leaving aside the horrifying torture-cyborg aspect of it, there's a definite truthiness to the VV-2's mission description and capabilities. Designing a pure-rocket mech would be an obvious first step in taking the fight into orbit, and using its engines for ballistic suborbital hops into ground deployment in the enemy backfield is actually a really clever application of such a design's capabilities. Granted, it'd work better 'dropping in' on factories and military supply dumps than major population centers, but given the real V-2's lousy accuracy, it could easy just be that the VV-2s tend to end up walking the last few miles to reach their actual targets, with orders to make a mess along the way.
...Really, it's a hell of a lot more effective than the real one could ever have hoped to be.
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...Aaaand I just got ambushed by a character concept.
Rank: Ensign, USN
Name: Frances Washington Gillette
Callsign: Razor
Aircraft: VFF Bobcat
Pilot Identity Number: 165-885986-56BB
Granddaughter and heiress of the late shaving magnate King Camp Gillette, Ensign Frances Gillette enlisted in the United States Navy at the age of sixteen, part of the first wave of fully-trained Navy mecha pilots. Now, a year later, she's assigned to the first fully-operation Navy mech squadron, stationed at Mines Field outside of Los Angeles for final working-up.
Born into wealth and comfort, Gillette is known to lose focus and capability when stationed in poor accomodations, a tendancy unmistakable in her training scores but ferociously denied by the pilot herself, while in-squadron friction can occaisionally arise from her tendancy to forget that most of her fellow pilots come from less privledged backgrounds. In balance of these weaknesses, however, she is dedicated to her duties, to her comrades, and to the defense of the Earth in general and the United States of America in particular, and routinely posts the highest gunnery scores of any mech pilot stationed at Miles Field by a margin of fifteen points or more.
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Looks nice, but I have to reiterate - mecha are at the upper reach of the techbase, and variable ones strain at that. Flight training is done in fixed-config burds, mecha training is done with ground units, and when a pilot is ready to tackle gerwalk they do it in the real deal. There's probably a dozen prototypes floating around (and those are properly experimental hack-and-baling-wire jobs, not Super Prototypes) but two production model tranforming unit types with another in development as of start time is pretty much it, so no variable trainers. Instead, you get shown something like this after the initial walk-around, hatch inspection and butt test of your newly assigned bird.
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Note that you do of course get actual instruction time in the aircraft, and a flight or two in a rumble seat as seen above, not JUST a training movie. Lots of manuals on the machine and its components, too.
As an added challenge, try watching that all the way through, and then not hearing the narrator's voice when you try to read something else. It sure does make fan-fiction hilarious to imagine a 1940s fella as the narrator, though.
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Oh, absolutely. 'Working up', in my mind, would be the state where pilots and aircraft are still trickling in to full strength, and the ones that are there are officially checked out on all their hardware and theoretical knowledge, but are practicing to get it completely down, and, more importantly, to learn how to work with each other and do the other parts of their job, like tactics, navigation, and so on.
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So, two thoughts I had while at work.
First, I've never been entirely satisfied with the 'engine-on-chest' layout of the Bobcat's battloid mode; it puts the propeller in the way if you try to use it, and raises awkward questions about what you do with the thing otherwise, and generally strikes me as 'maybe this is kind of ugly'. But if you used the cockpit block as the 'anchor' of the rest of the transformation rather than the engine firewall, then you could put the engine block on a rotating yoke, like the VF-0's legs use (the VF-1 is supposed to use a kind of detaching ram arrangement, which is silly but oh well), that would rotate up and over the cockpit while the arms and tail assembly split outboard to either side. This would mean stuffing the head into the space between the engine and the front of the cockpit, since there wouldn't be room for it to basically reverse the engine's motion in the same space, but that'd be doable.
Second, while the sheer complexity of producing a working variable mecha is obviously more on the order of creating a modern latest-generation jet fighter than the actual fighters of the 1940s, the reference to a salvage mechanic suggests that the RL examples where planes that had been designed for piston power were reworked as jets might be worth investigating as possible design territory.
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Wait, what are you calling a Bobcat here? Searching for the name just gave me a twin engine Cessna that was used as a trainer during the period, which was what prompted me to mention the "no transforming mecha trainers" thing. Did you mean the Wildcat?
What you're describing with the engine on a swing and the head between it and the cockpit is pretty much just what I did with the VFW-190 Würger by the way, (V for ?"Vielgestaltig/multiform," or maybe U for "Umerziehung/transforming") though that one was intentionally designed to have a kind of beastial hunchbacked appearance both because it's a villain mecha that's also a mook suit and not likely to be desireable as a salvaged/captured ride for a hero later, and as the first variable mecha to be deployed on a wide basis (by anyone on earth) it's not as polished as, say, the Shinden or the Schwalbe.
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Ohhhh. OK, sorry, yeah. I was figuring, given your reference to the transforming Lockheed as the 'Aurora' earlier in the thread, that the names Lightning and Wildcat would be attached to the historical pure-aerodyne planes, and that the variable mech models would have their own, distinct names. 'Bobcat' fit Grumman's fighter theme of the period, but wasn't actually used as such, so I figured that that would be attached to the Variable Fighter, supplier F (Grumman). But I am dumb and forgot to explain this clearly.
Or I suppose it could be the other way around, and the Bobcat is the F4F while the VFF is the Wildcat.
But yeah, looking at it again, the UFw-190's transformation seems to stop halfway through the motion I'm picturing, before the engine goes all the way back and the head locks into place above the cockpit so the extra tail kibble can fold around to protect the pilot.
...Camera/Sensor failure while the VFF is in Battloid mode would be bad, incidentally.
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Well, that would be true in any battroid mode, I expect - the 190 left the cockpit exposed (though still with an armor/display plate to the front) because the head doesn't have enough range of motion to look backwards under any circumstances and the engine assembly blocks up as well, but really given the soda-can-size cameras I'm assuming as available due to technological advancement over OTL mounting enough of them for a full-coverage virtual environment good enough to notice "something is there" and train the higher quality head sensors on it is surely the way to go - the Schwalbe and the two Lightnings both have this, more or less, as part of their design. LCD and even TFT flat displays are not a huge technical challenge once the techniques involved are actually known, nor are the backlights for them, it's miniaturization where semiconductor tech gets hard and 70's level is where I've pegged it for that, using the volume requirements of much simpler mechanical or tube-type equipment to scrape through with the bare minimum of computational capacity. There's no target recognition or tracking etc. beyond the pilot him or herself, though, and automation is limited to translating complex interactions (like the unavoidable fly-by-wire control connections, or moving and balancing a humanoid robot) into simple inputs and outputs.
I did have a different name on the VP-38 for a bit, but then figured it would just make things more confusing (as happened above) and dropped it. fixed-config versions of the units certainly existed for the prototype stages, but for practical purposes the Lightning is the Lightning and the Wildcat is the Wildcat.
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Named-as-they-look works for me.
I was actually figuring that the 'you seriously need to be telekinetic to operate this' factor driving Blue-blooded pilots wasn't anything to do with making the machine move - its own mechanisms can articulate and shift just fine - but in coordinating the controls.
In the absence of AI support, neural uplinks, or power-armor style servo slave gear, you'd pretty much have to have a separate dial/throttle type control for every articulated joint, which'd be utterly impossible as an actual control scheme...
...unless the operator could telekinetically operate all of them at once.
This also implies that the inside of a F1942 mecha is banks and banks of humming machinery - I've never seen so many knobs, which I find highly apropos to the dieselpunk side of the genre.
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Quote:Valles wrote:
This also implies that the inside of a F1942 mecha is banks and banks of humming machinery - I've never seen so many knobs, which I find highly apropos to the dieselpunk side of the genre.
Not sure how the telekinesis works, but I'm imagining the *all the knobs* hidden- either behind otherwise-unremarkable panels, or under the normal fighter-mode controls.
Why? Loose lips sink ships, y'know- better to make it look like just another fighter model, at first, then wave a "this is a transforming mecha" sign in front of the Hun's nose. With hidden controls, you could even have a normal piloting it in Fighter mode without a) jostling a mecha control accidentally, or b) realizing that they were in a mecha at all.
Of course, this would only be a thing at first. Once both sides are expecting mecha, there'd be no point.
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No, you seriously need to be telekinetic to operate a mecha due to the square-cube law - you can't shut down a humanoid-mode transforming mecha or have the pilot bail out unless it's rigged up to a support gantry at all the major joints, because actuator and materials technology isn't up to the task of keeping one from collapsing and being severely damaged by its own weight; even with pure Blue-tech moving at the proportionate speed of a human would do some damage. The TK shell around the skin is what provides most of the armor effect, too. Most of the inner empty space in the structures is shaped into waveguides and studded with amplifier nodes for the psychic heterodyne effect to extend an ESPer's automatic body reinforcement to the overall unit, and while this does provide some degree of fine control the gross movements are handled by the manual inputs.
Oh, and since I don't think I actually said why the Zzard don't just Rain Of Fire the place into a cinder, their goal is conquest, preferably with a surviving population large enough to become a net producer to feed and supply their empire within a decode or two, not xenocide. At a minimum, they require a viable biosphere, and coast-to-coast plains of glass under a sky of ashes and acid does not a viable biosphere make. They squashed the major population and control centers in North America but left the breadbasket and midwestern production centers intact for just that reason, and Japan because they had the most Blue-tech per square mile without significant production capacity. Africa didn't have much in the way of significant (to them) militarization and lots of untapped resources so it was their second site for landing in force, but Europe is a tougher nut to crack with nearly all the armies in the world (again, from their perspective only the mecha count for anything) concentrated there.
Disguising the mecha as normal craft wasn't considered originally because no one thought earth-built units would be effective enough for the limited number of pilots compared to conventional weapons to have any significant effect - none of the commanders wanted to hear or believe the reports that said you'd need a minimum of 10-to-1 odds to do significant damage to one (in humanoid form, the less similar the shape is to the pilot's body the weaker the TK heterodyne effect is) and more like 100-to-1 to kill it, so up until the UFw-190s and (thus far largely undefined) German ground units started dealing the hurt in the blitzkreig no one else was particularly taking their mecha programs seriously, aside from slow, heavily built ground units that didn't need a top-tier ESPer to operate at combat levels, basically walking heavy tanks. A pilot capable of handling a variable fighter can still equal the defensive performance of one of those under control of the lower 80% of pilots, which are rare to begin with as previously noted. Eva Braun can very nearly equal that strength on her own, but has a fear of heights too great to tolerate the viewpoint of one, or she'd be a terrifying pilot. Likewise, you can have a communications operator or a gunner, but handing off control to a copilot is only safely done in aircraft form since only one person can have their TK extended linking their body to the mecha at a time.
The pilot's TK is also generally expected to transfer gunpods between hands and storage hardpoints and for missile guidance, and makes the primitive laser weapons into blasters that have slower moving beams, but can actually do damage rather than just blinding someone who happens to catch one in the eye and giving them a sunburn, scorching paint, or setting fine-weave cloth or very dry wood on fire.
Past a certin point the larger the unit is, the more effective the amplification is, also, something the UMe-262 begins to tap into with its relatively extreme height in humanoid form, as do the UHo-229, LPL, Raven, and larger constructions like the players' variable aircraft carrier and (later) St. Rodney class space cruisers, along with the alien Boloss and Toggel. Zzard ships are universally not built to transform, as no single commander, let alone the client-race crews, are trusted with such power.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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OK, the amplification effect built into the mech's humanoid structure makes that requirement make sense, then. Without that, the mentioned degree of telekinetic force would've been far too low to affect something the size of a fighter plane, so I went looking for other reasons for the need.
Also, I am genuinely amused by the visual of each motion of the transformation and limbs having its own control, but this is a much lesser concern.
I am curious, however, what happens when you put a 'top fifth' pilot in a walkertank; does the increased psi potential boost the mech's durability proportionally?
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Indeed, and a top pilot can make them at least somewhat faster too (up around 60-70mph vs 40-50mph at a sprint, around 2/3 that for a sustainable run - the most common way to move ground units around quickly is a six axle articulated truck, one steering, two directly driven axles, and three on the flatbed with electric motors in the hubs) but once the combat value of mecha was proven, the mobility afforded by an aircraft form proved greater over all - both because of how rare pilots are, so getting them where you need them in a hurry is a primary consideration, and also because of the need to have mecha escorts for the bombers or they'll be completely destroyed before even getting into the mission area. Ground units most often act as a mobile strong point to rally around or to break fortified enemy positions, with tanks and infantry supporting them like a capitol ship's battle group, or heavy artillery with their Blue-tech weapons.
Basically, it's written into the mechanics of the setting that variable fighter pilots are the kings of the battlefield, because the thing that makes it interesting to me is making classic warbirds into variable fighters.
Besides, I needed to explain the space magic somehow anyway; making it also be the explanation for why you can't just use the same technologies to build ubertanks that crush the giant bipedal marksmanship targets is just efficient.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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