Underrated GM Custom wrote: ↑Tue May 18, 2021 3:27 pm
I'd have to disagree with you there. Since Anti-MS combat is a fact of life I guarantee the government put something in their RFP to Anaheim that the MS needs someway to recover if they slip on the terrain or get knocked down by the enemy. If DARPA requested bids today on a powered exo-skeleton they wouldn't accept any machines that have broken components on non-standard jumps, the designer would need to plan for non-standard landings. MILSPEC is after all quite rugged.
Well, I'd say if a tank is being run into sideways by another tank, or being fired upon, it is much more problem than the designers can design for.
I mean, the fired upon is pretty much a non-issue because most likely the round will punch a hole in every direction other than the front, where most of its armour is. So a MS, when in a jump got hit by enemy fire, anything coming from the front is just slowing it down, making it easier to land if it did not just puncture like what killed Mikail in 0080. Anything on the sides or back is likely going to make it crash land in the most horrible way. even if it didn't puncture. So It would be pretty hard to say that its the designers fault. The pilot shouldn't really be jumping in the first place...
And if run into on the sides, or back, it is also right in a battle and I don't even think it will be able to land on its legs most of the time if this happens. Usually the enemy will be holding a heat or beam weapon if being that close range and ram into you. So landing is likely least of your concern now.
We can also look at it this way. I doubt the MS will just be utilising frontal jumps.
We see them jumping sideways, not as far as full boosted jumps, but at the same time they do not enjoy the full thrust to slow them down as well. So I doubt the legs aren't designed for a side landing.
Considering the jump won't be using the full capabilities of the legs(safety factor aren't 1
in military vehicles), the landing should also be less then the full capabilities of the legs. So a "standard jump" is well within the designs and anything not standard will really be dependent on the situation but I think regular bumps and loss of balance, etc. should be well within the realms of the designed specs.
However, that is also likely why the ground pilots are also required to be able to do certain level of maintenance, checks and minimal repairs after a fight. A loose nut might be fatal in your next jump.
Also, thinking of which, the MS should be designed to take the landing when fully loaded.
Most of the time they won't be landing when fully loaded because they must have expended propellant.
Thus having constant thrust, the downward acceleration will become less and less during the jump since the thrust to mass ratio is now getting higher and higher with the mass decreasing. At some point when the thrust to mass ratio is above 1, the legs can be taking even less force than running or maybe walking without thrust.
I must concede my initial argument is a moot point. I approached this from a modern machine design perspective but Seto Kaiba pointed out they seem to have super nuts and bolts that resist shear forces so in-universe I'm sure all the internals have the same magic material to let them land however they want.
And they also have really big nuts and bolts.
You know I really loved that scene until one day I looked up how much a MS weighs and how much the tanks weigh.
Because I know the weights before hand, I hated the scene from the beginning. It makes very little sense not only in the durability of the vehicles, but also in terms of Physics of action and reaction.
Its like they think making the MS moving slow makes them look big and heavy and realistic so they love to do so, but their artistic license doesn't give them the slightest sense of how heavy a real military vehicle made with metal is or should be, and just think of them as balloons.
Even if they have a more reasonable weight for the MS, more like a 75kg person wearing a 25kg full plate armour instead of a skinny 55kg guy like me without armour, kicking a football made from iron isn't going to be sending it flying like a normal football while the man is still standing there like kicking a regular football.
Back to OPs question. In the 0083 opening we see crashed debris in their training area that looks like a beautiful still taken straight out of Macross. Presumably these are crashed colony pieces that are partially embedded into the crust. I would hazard a guess the piece we see is at least 2,000ft in height. Might be more, might be less it's hard to tell based on the perspective shown.
In one frame we see the Zaku's easily jump to the halfway point, in another when it's blindsided by the Powered GM it looks as though the Zaku is about to clear the top of the structure, but it could also represent it clearing the side of the structure. Either way that's quite a distance!
Well, the 0083 MSs are modified after the OYW and do have higher thrust to mass ratio.
There is also this idea I have. For ground units, they can well replace the thermo-nuclear rockets with thermo-nuclear jets(or hybrid ones with chemical fuels), and just use air as propellant, thus reducing the propellant mass and giving them even higher thrust to mass ratio.