Thursday, January 31, 2008

2nd Japanese Occupation: Embrace or Reject?

ADVANCE WEAPONARY
Kew: ASSUMING... if World War 3 is gonna border around Nuclears / Chemical / Infocomm (hacking) warfare... then World War 4 is probably gonna be owned by the Land of the Rising Sun (again).

(source: listed at end of this post)
"After Japan lost the last war, they signed a treaty that stated that Japan was not allowed to form an army of humans. But there was nothing in the treaty mentioning that Japan wasn't allowed to form an army of Gundams... "


"The Japanese Ministry of Defense held a Defense Technology Symposium where part of the program covers "Towards the realization of Gundam" - the program is available in PDF format on the Department of Ground Systems Development page. Below is a snap of the PDF file showing "Towards The Realization Of Gundam (Advanced Personal Equipment Systems)" which kinda stipulates some sort of walker suit but you never know..."
PINK TENTACLE held a breakdown of the cost in building a Gundam:

"According to an estimate published on the SciencePortal website run by the Japan Science and Technology Agency. The price tag for this giant humanoid, which would stand 18 meters (60 feet) tall and weigh 43.4 metric tons (nearly 100,000 lbs), does not include the cost of labor (this is where an extensive pool of robot slave labor comes in handy), nor does it include the cost of the infrastructure needed to support the machine once you are ready to climb aboard and take it for a walk. "

"Note that unlike in the anime, the Gundam described here would merely be able to walk — it would not have the ability to fly or have any fancy weaponry. Also, instead of Gundanium, the robot would be covered in aluminum alloy plating.

An IBM Blue Gene supercomputer would serve as the Gundam’s computer system ($1.5 million sounds like a steal), and its movements would be driven by 30 giant 400KW motors — 12 in the legs, 2 in the torso, 14 in the arms, and 2 in the neck. A 400KW motor is quite powerful — by comparison, the Shinkansen bullet train uses a 300KW motor. The motors alone would cost $7.8 million, but to power them would require the equivalent of 7 Apache helicopter engines (the helicopters cost an estimated $52 million each).

While $700 million is a lot of money, it does not seem like so much when you compare it to the cost of other large-scale machinery. Military tanks costs around $4 to $7 million each, commercial passenger planes cost around $200 to $300 million, rockets can cost around $100 million to launch, expensive fighter jets can cost billions, and aircraft carriers cost about $5 billion."


"A robot of this size and stature would face a number of physical challenges, such as the inability to walk without completely destroying the ground surface beneath its feet. When humans walk, we exert about 1.5 times our body weight of pressure on the ground (and on our feet) with each step. This poses a huge problem for a 43-ton humanoid, which would probably need to have very wide feet (to distribute the pressure over a larger area) and walk very very slowly. Dinosaurs found a way to get around, though, so giant robots probably can, too.

But perhaps the greatest challenge of all would be to find the funding for an enormous walking machine with no apparent practical or military application."

Sources
1) Dannychoo’s (http://www.dannychoo.com/blog_entry/eng/1211/Gundam+Defends+Japan/
2) Science Portal (http://scienceportal.jp/reports/robbot/10.html)
3) Pink Tentacle (http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/01/725000000-gundam/)
4) Japanese Ministry of Defense (http://www.mod.go.jp/)
5) Department of Ground Systems Development (http://www.mod.go.jp/trdi/infomation/happyou/main.htm)

(Kew: "no practical or military application"? I dun think so~~ and with regards to a 2nd Japanese Occupation, if my assumption above, of WWIV, is actualized, although the first occupation didn't happened during my time, I wonder if people these days are ready to embrace it or not? Considering J-pop culture was SO HOT those days, even till now. I, for one, will be the first to adopt a new Japanese name - " 根本英俊 " wakakaka...)

No comments: