I always wanted to play 2142, so I was glad that everyone picked it for this episode. What I didn't anticipate was the trouble I would have making this. Namely finding a working version of the game. Bots that wanted to steal the vehicles I was looking at, and being revenge killed by said bots. It was an adventure, but you want to hear about the vehicles, so let's talk about those For this video I'm gonna be talking about four vehicles. I'm gonna be looking at the L5 Riesig. The EU's walker. The A8 Tiger, the main battle tank for the EU. The Type 32 Nekomata, the main battle tank for the PAC, and the T-39 Bogatyr, the walker for the PAC. I'll be following the usual format; hull, turret, weapons, crew, and performance. First up is the L5 Riesig. For the hull, the Riesig looks to be about 20 feet tall. Which is too large in my opinion. Obviously, the larger your vehicle is the easier it is to get hit. Everyone knows that I think mechs aren't practical, But I was totally on board for this vehicle until I saw how big it actually was. So if it was something more reasonable like 15 feet tall, it'd be better. The Riesig also looks to be pretty top-heavy. I'll get back to this later, but the top half looks way too big for the lower half to support, so the Riesig would be pretty unstable As far as the turret goes it looks to be relatively weakly armored But I do like the sensor pod on the front. It reminds me a bit of the one on the ADATS. Though I imagine that 120 years in the future we would be able to make ones that are a lot smaller And now on to the Riesig's weapons. The magazines for the cannons are actually visible, which is a nice detail But it does raise some questions, like why is the cannon magazine held in by straps? That seems like a very bad way of securing ammunition. I think the least you could do is put some clamps on it I'm also not quite sure how the magazines are loaded in Having them be visible from the bottom obviously implies that they're loaded from that direction But the Riesig's hips prevent you from being able to load the magazine from the bottom. The ammo could be fed into the magazine via conveyor system, but the magazine looks disposable. So I think it's all loaded in at once. The cannons are also apparently unstabilized This is obviously bad for firing on the move But this is an even larger problem because of the inherent instability And lurching motion of a mech. The cannons also have very poor elevation angles because of their underslung location. The missile tubes also don't make any sense the exhausts on the back imply they extend out from the turret face, but they actually rotate out from within the turret. So now the exhaust vent is bent, which doesn't seem idea,l and it limits the size of the missiles that you can put into it. Now on to the crew. I'm really not sure how the crew is supposed to enter or exit the vehicle. There aren't any ladders or hatches from what I can see. Jumping 20 feet when your vehicles disabled doesn't seem ideal. In fact, it seems like a pretty good way to get some broken legs. And now into the Riesig's performance The Riesig is apparently nuclear-powered which doesn't make a lot of sense for the setting and is a really bad idea in general. It doesn't make sense because the EU and PAC don't use nukes because of the fear of spreading radiation. Giving your combat vehicles nuclear generators is a really good way of doing that. I'm also assuming that they're using a type of RTG for the power source. Which is bad for this application because RT G's offer a small amount of energy over a very long time. So they're good for stuff like satellites or rovers. But for combat vehicles you want a very large amount of power over a small amount of time. The Riesig's legs are also too thin and close together. Its legs would have pretty limited strength meaning that it would be slower and have trouble going up hills. The feet pads are also too small. It could have a sort of snowshoe design to help alleviate ground pressure, especially since it primarily operates in dense snow. One thing that they got right is that the Riesig is very slow and unwieldy as a, mech would be. Now let's move on to the A8 Tiger. The hull looks to be a bit big for a main battle tank, but not by much. The hull is a bit taller than a player model. Most people are taller than main battle tank hulls. The side skirts are also unnecessarily bulky. A tank won't usually survive a shot to the side anyway, and The tiger has a shield so it seems kind of pointless. They just seem like a big maintenance pain for not a whole lot of benefit. The Tiger also has pretty bad ground clearance. Which is obviously bad for rough terrain and mine protection. And this is probably the worst part, but there are no access points are maintaining or replacing components like the power pack, making this thing basically impossible to repair. Maybe the EU can afford to just buy an entirely new tank, but it seems incredibly wasteful. There is one really nice detail, though and that is that the Tiger appears to have ribbed armor on the front of the hull. I thought it was a non-slip coating at first because it's just a flat 2d texture when you're on the outside of the tank but on the inside it's 3d. This is a nice detail because ribbed armor is relatively unknown. The US experimented with a bit in the 50s, and the STRV-103 is the only production tank I can think of the has it. Basically ribbed armor does a pretty good job of allowing you to have more protection while reducing weight. And now on to the turret. The turret's mantlet is absolutely massive. Mantlets are made as small as possible for maximum armor protection while keeping the weight down, so you can elevate the gun quickly. Having a massive mantlet would make it very weak and also slow to elevate. The turret also is a very odd layout. The pilot is located right around where the autoloader should be and the turret bustle looks too small to hold that supposeed 40 rounds of ammunition. The turret does have a storage rack though, so that's a plus. For weapons, the Tiger is apparently using a regular smoothbore gun, but it's rifled on the model. I also think we would be using a different kind of weapon at this point, like an ETC gun or a rail gun. I'm also not sure how ammunition is delivered to the machine gun on the roof. There should be a box magazine hanging off of it somewhere. And the final point about the weapons is that it doesn't have a coaxial machine gun, so it would likely have some trouble engaging infantry. Now onto the crew. The Tiger is only crewed by one person, or two if he wants someone to man the machine gun. Having only one crew member would give them massive work overload, resulting in a massive decrease in vehicle efficiency. The tank could have an AI driver but that's not really something that you would want, because you'd still have to tell it where to go and it might not do exactly what you want. Secondly, the pilot is located in the turret instead of the hull. This is bad because the turret is much more likely to get hit than the hul is. And finally, the single hatch doesn't have any periscopes on it. The pilot could be using cameras, but as I've said before, You always need an analog backup. And if for performance, there's not a whole lot to say. It seems a bit too slow for a future main battle tank. I would expect MBTs to get faster as time progresses, and the tiger also can't steer from a standstill. So that's obviously bad for maneuverability. Now, we're getting to the PAC vehicles, starting with the Type 32 Nekomata. For the hull, it looks like it'd be pretty weakly armored due to it being a hover tank though, tt does have a bumper on the front of it for when it eventually crashes into something. So it's good that they were thinking about safety. And for the turret, well, it doesn't have one. It's a casemate design with no horizontal traverse. This means if you want to engage a target, you have to move your entire tank. This is less than ideal in a lot of situations. And now onto the weapons. For some reason the main gun is offset with the hull, and since this is a hover tank, every time this thing fired, the recoil would wrench the whole vehicle to the right. I don't think I need to explain why that's a poor design choice. Much like the Tiger the Nekomata doesn't have a coax machine gun. And it also has a regular smoothbore gun. Given the tech that the PAC has, they could be using a direct energy weapon. Actually, I just thought of a reason they would need to use a regular cannon. The thrusters are probably taking up too much power for them to have an energy weapon. For the crew there's also one person controlling the tank, though the pilot at least has one periscope. So that's an improvement over the Tiger. And for the performance it handles about as well as you would expect, AKA, disgustingly awful. The Nekomata has horrible acceleration and drifts all over the place. I think this is mainly due to it not having braking or accelerating thrusters. And finally, the Nekomata would be very energy inefficient. And is finally is the T-39 Bogatyr, which will be pretty short because it's a lot like the Riesig, which makes sense because the Riesig is a reverse engineered Bogatyr. For the hull, like the Riesig, the T-39 is way, too tall. But it does look to have better weight distribution. The lower half looks a lot heavier. For the turret, it looks to be very well armored. And not only is the sensor pod much more compact, but there's actually two of them. And now onto the weapons. Unlike the Riesig, the T-39's missile arrangement actually makes sense. It could hold much larger missiles, and it wouldn't have problems venting exhaust. The Bogatyr also uses energy weapons instead of classic ballistic weapons, which is good because I think we might be using them at this point. Though the weapons still aren't stabilized, and they still have pretty poor elevation angles. And for the crew there's still no way to get in or out of the vehicle. For performance, the legs are a lot thicker, so they have more strength, making it better than the Riesig in rough terrain. But the feet pads are still too small, which is odd because I think if anyone understood the importance of low ground pressure, it'd be the Russians. The Bogatyr also uses some sort of futuristic power source, though that could be just as or more dangerous than using a nuclear generator for combat, which is something that I don't think people realize. And that wraps it up. Overall, 2142 has some really good vehicle design. I have some minor gripes, but they're not all that bad. If I had to give 2142's vehicle design a grade it'd probably be like a B. As always, I hope you guys enjoyed the video.
Shh everything in bf2142 was right