Modular mechs

[Stephanov]

 

NSS Cyberiad

Modular mechs

 

 

The general idea:

The current set of mechs we have are already pretty cool. But what if we took mechs to the next level?

What if we had the ability to actually design and hand craft our mechs rather than use set blueprints?

 

I know for sure a company like NanoTrasen would be tempted to showcase new, efficient designs. It could even create a new non-antag objective.

 

For example:

"NSS Cyberiad. We need a new design for a Medical mech in Sol. Design, create and test a mech with the following specifications:

-Must use light weight materials

-The pilot must have adjustable lights

-The mech must have an arm equipped with high quality manipulators

-The mech must have military grade medical scanners"

 

Modular mechs are in every sense prototypes. As such protolathes would be the likely way to aqquire parts. Parts would have their own assembly steps that will decide their quality prior to actually being attached to a chassis.

 

So, modular design

As seen in the image above, there'd be categories.

All parts would have some general choices - and some part specific choices.

 

General:

-What (mixture of) materials are used? A mech made of ordinary metal would be cheaper and lighter than one made of pure plasteel.

--A mixture of some materials potentially raising resistances against certain damage.

-What's the purpose? (See categories below)

-Protection, speed(weight costs), energy efficiency

 

Specifics:

-The head: What type of sensors does it have (med/sec)? Lights? Scanners? X-ray? Meson? What communication apparatuses are available?

-Chest: Battery charged? Power station? If so, what type of fuel? Extra equipment/systems to keep operator alive?

-Arms: Quality of on-board manipulators, matter bins or lasers. Tools (see categories below)

-Lower body: Dictates how much weight the mech can actually carry. Will these legs let the operator manouver at high speed? Or will the mech be so heavy they might as well use a modified mulebot to carry it around?

-Armour (if applicable) Will a sheet of glass do or is there need for 200mm of diamond coated plasteel? You decide!

 

For this idea I felt it be necessary to separate the designs into two categories.

-Utility; so Medical, Engineering, Mining.

Think high quality, but extremely expensive to build techs like mobile cryo pods, automated surgery wards. Less expensive techs as mobile part printers. Built in cutting/matter holding facilities that let the engineers truely patch hull breaches like never before. Mobile toxin filters that can get rid of those round-breaking plasma leaks. A mixture of cryo and fire fighting techniques that can take out the worst of fires.

Or lastly, high tech mining techs that will likely push quotas up, up and up.

 

-Combat; so Security.

Basically anything that the armoury would have but bigger, better. I'm not as creative with weapon techs. So if anyone finds the ideas I have remotely interesting I'll let you fill this in.

 

The combat mechs require a randomly generated number, requested by 2 heads swiping simultaneously to activate - because this is talking tech that could potentially out-class a Phazon-Durand hybrid (In my head anyway)

 

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Ideas? Thoughts?

 

[Earthdivine]

 

I'll try to find the Pull Request for it but I am pretty sure another code base already did this, so it would just need ported.

 

On the other hand, I remember a coder frothing at the mouth muttering something about Ody legs with Durand torso and Gygax arms being the most broken thing.

 

[Stephanov]

 

On the other hand, I remember a coder frothing at the mouth muttering something about Ody legs with Durand torso and Gygax arms being the most broken thing.

 

I think using existing textures wouldn't work seeing the whole torso-legs-arms deal isn't uniform positioned and therefor looks weird.

Making some new parts to use with such a system however should eliminate that?

 

[Arenn]

I love this idea, I really do. It would make eleventy times more sense for there to be a mech specialist title for Robotics, and might slightly increase the odds that when Research wants a mech (for their traitor ass shit) they might ask the EXPERT that could probably build one FASTER than them. I'm against it being a lathe item, though. If it's from a lathe, that counters every point I like about this idea. Any shitler nerd could walk in, build the parts, assemble them willy-nilly, and they have a mech, ladies and mentlegens. I propose a solution to that, however! I, as a recurring mechatronic engineerRoboticist, only really ever use one fabricator, the other one is usually storage for extra materials when that ever happens because mining is almost always too slow to fill up the matter bins. Instead, replace one of the exosuit fabricators with an Experimental Fabricator(Patent Pending), which only purpose is to create these new modular mech parts. Then you could further enhance construction options before they are even built, by having tiers of armor for each part (which would impact the mech's durability), maybe each torso has a power rating (Determines starting total charge?), legs have an inverse speed rating that goes down with each tier, different arms can hold different mech equipment...And you could further go over to using different materials in the design for different effects (think uranium and diamond being top-tier mech parts, so their ratings are beefed compared to plasma/silver/gold, which is better than iron, for starters.)

[Holyass]

 

mm this will be great to have.

 

we can make the exoskeleton in metal or plasteel or a mix of both.

 

metal wights more it be slower while plasteel is lighter and it will be a bit faster.

 

and the parts can be from uber light wight to uber heavy.

 

like this one mech.

 

paper thin metal armor on a light wight exoskeleton that can only mount the drill and claps to hold a ore box, but it moves fast due to less wight in total.

 

[Earthdivine]

I found it.