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 Peregrine wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
I don't know if you have ever looked at the time 40k takes place in, but it is quite far (like really incredibly far) into the future. One can reasonably assume the Leman Russ is made of fancy magical space metals and has fancy magical space technologies that allow it to operate as effectively as described in the fluff, despite the design being horrible from an early 2nd milennium point of view.

"Magical space metals" is not a solution to a geometry problem.

Yes it is. You forget we are dealing with fiction. Magical space metal is the solution to anything:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum?from=Main.Handwavium

You get it because as an engineer designing a counter-battery system you're familiar with artillery shells and know their aerodynamic properties.

Yes you could propably extract it from the data you measure, but you are not presented the data of that particular projectile the enemy fired at you in a nice table.

The only difference would be that the Imperium has a much higher tolerance for losses and will happily sacrifice a million pilots to take down an AA network if it is the key to winning the war.

They send groundforces, because that is cheap and easy to replace. Aircraft are not, unless you have seen evidence that the imperial navy likes to sacrifice fighters?

I'm not talking about making a last-second evasion and dodging a direct hit, I'm talking about making a high-g turn that the missile can't follow.

Thats why maneuverable fighters are engaged with slower missiles and sustainer motor / ramjet

 Peregrine wrote:

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:
Aircraft are much more expensive than tanks and space-capable ones probably reach crazy price territory. We're talking about 10+x the price of Leman Russ per aircraft and 100+x per space aircraft.
So, I suspect that pulling their aircraft out may make sense, especially space-capable.

Citation for this? When you answer please remember that the Imperium does not pay money for its troops and equipment, it holds a gun to a planet's metaphorical head and says "give us what we need or die".

There's no in-world citation for this. That's how things look in real world, which is where the fluff writers probably got the idea from.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Oh my god the Scorpion... I swear that thing was designed from the ground up to kill it's crew. It's thin armor, the stupidly exposed crew (Seriously, why is the crew only protected by a hatch that can be knocked off by small arms fire?), the stupid way the hull gun is operated, the lack of a coaxial machine gun... I think the reason the Scorpion did as well as it did is because it's Covenant counterpart was somehow even worse.

The Wraith is a lightly armored mortar carriage forced into front-line duty, so yeah, the covenant fields something even worse than a tank that would lose to a WW2 era King Tiger.

As an IG player, and a soon to be mechanical engineer, all of the tracked vehicles, minus the rhino chassis, and sicaran really bug me.

It added that extra motivation for me to go scratchbuild/conversions, but also made me buy the forgeworld LR bits.

The thing that bugs me the most about all of them, are the sponsons. If you were to put sponsons on a vehicle in the future, definitely do not shove them through the suspension. Have em off of the turret, or a side skirt affair.

The suspension on Imperial vehicles is just archaic, no travel, WAY TOO HIGH of a profile, for anything.

A turret and turret ring that tiny, would never happen past early WW2.

straight/flat surfaces have been the new fad for the past 20 or so odd years thanks to composite armor, so the front of the LR is meh to me.

Also, barrel length, especially with smooth bore designs, has shown to be less of an issue. Also ammunition technologies have made even low pressure, low velocity guns to still be effective, and allow use of ATGMs or other specialized ordnance.

LR is way too front heavy, and too squat of a design for me to even consider it as plausible. But the fluff behind it is why I still like it.

If I were to make 40k tank, it would definitely borrow from the majority of modern tanks, but also bring back some old ideas.

With the awesome new tech just out of material sciences, I would definitely consider a tank that utilizes a mix of bell crank, christie, and torsion bar designs.

I think the best protection for the LR against both enemy fire and criticism is its unbreakable plot armor.

Debates on its design and comparisons with modern tanks are always fun to make but mostly irrelevant. They are irrelevant not only because we apply our XXI° century mindsets to frame the "LR problem", but merely because GW said this tank is awesome and then, this tank is. Period.