As a huge fan of Japanese culture I have always wondered how long it would be before we had mobile suits as a plausible war machine. If you have ever watched the Gundam series or even some of the earlier shows that made it to the west like Voltron then you can appreciate the attraction. I honestly have a part of me that believes that one day when N. Korea or someone else actually attacks Japan, a swarm of mobile suits will emerge from the Sea of Japan or an underground base to defend the country. Then again I also question whether or not a huge invisible force field will not be activated to defend it from a missile attack but that’s beside the point. All these years of defense only spending and perhaps due to being the most high tech nation in the world, I could totally see it. Ultimately I just wonder if it is realistic to expect mobile suits one day.
Believe it or not, some wealthy playboys have already gone so far as to make working prototypes, they aren’t exactly battle worthy but definitely interesting. Just take a look at these videos to see what I am talking about when it comes to these ventures, it is really kind of interesting:
How would these handle actual warfare? Would these be sitting ducks for attacks or could these be absolute juggernauts in war situations? It is quite possible that these machines would be too slow and clunky but at the same time one could also bet that they would handle a large number of terrains very well. The use of legs and arms does add a dimension to terrain scalability that wheels or even belts do not offer. There are many options when it comes to arming them, they could be fitted with weaponry or could carry it like a human would, but obviously much larger versions of the weaponry. It could either work more like the old Mech Warrior series or perhaps the mobile suits in Avatar.
There are other applications to such machinery, let’s face it, these could be the construction machines of the future! Having a gigantic humanoid machine with realistic reactions to human limp controls would be especially useful during certain tasks, in fact it may revolutionize the construction industry altogether.
Some movies have brought up the idea of mobile suit gladiators who would battle for sport; In fact we see references to this going back a few decades even to old PC games like One Must Fall.
So how far are we away really? The answer to the question really depends on the mainstream humanoid robotic technologies we are working on. It seems that so far we haven’t really been able to perfect balance as much as we would like to. Sure we can keep these robots standing upright but they aren’t quite stable in unorthodox scenarios like when legs are raised too high or to too extreme of an angle. This is why you tend to see robots walking in completely orderly ways rather than moving around freely with their legs. Once these suits could truly remain stable through high stress situations, we could possibly see an increase in prototypes being presented. Currently we mostly see prototypes using wheels or tank style all-terrain belts.
If I had to guess the increase in these prototypes will be seen in about 15 years as we continue to mechanize our military. Hopefully the mobile suits we end up with are as exciting as we had hoped, they may never be a reality but one can dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment