That ammunition is not explosive ammunition and a bullet isnt going to set them off, think of it more like the fuel tank; you make those thick. Its called a Bulwark; it should be definition be heavily armored (even though the other definition is just a defender) and being a Dvar unit it should thematically be armored too, at least more armored than fast moving scout bikes that dont even have doors You could just as easily argue that its ALREADY slowed down in armor at 24 speed, and since its one of the few things they actually built for combat as opposed to retrofitted so it should have more armor than most of their other stuff since you dont need combat armor for mining.
If the ammunition is chemically propelled, it's still going to be potentially dangerous if an attack lands in the ammo compartment even if the shell itself is a pure kinetic penetrator. A HE round cooking off may be worse than a kinetic anti-armour round cooking off, but the latter is still
bad enough.
Furthermore, once you get through the armour, then whatever's on the inside is going to be something you'd rather not be hit with. I went with ammunition because the Bulwark is relatively small for something that has a total of ten barrels - in order to keep firing for any extended period of time - especially if it's carrying multiple ammunition types - a lot of that internal space is probably given over to ammunition. However, if an attack is getting though the armour, it's likely hitting
something important. The more dangerous a hit in a particular area, the more armour is likely to be over it, but a penetrating hit is likely hitting
something that the designers would have preferred not to be hit, and meanwhile you might have spalling and/or the original penetrator still ricocheting around inside the cavity. Tanks and other armoured vehicles are surprisingly fragile once you get something that can penetrate the armour - a big animal (particularly one produced by advanced bioengineering) might well be more able to take those hits (and it is worth mentioning that the size of the Bulwark's weapons do appear to be antipersonnel in nature, although it's hard to say just what caliber they're supposed to be firing).
Adding more armour might seem to be intuitively obvious... at the risk of Godwinning the thread, Hitler would agree with that, as shown by the Panthers and Tigers of World War 2. Both were designed to be lighter than their final production weight, but Hitler insisted in up-armouring them: which did have the intended effect of making them very tough for the standard Allied and Russian guns at the time to crack, but also added several tons to their weight (the Panther actually ended up in the weight class that the Tiger was originally intended to be in. This caused serious logistical problems: they were slower than what the Wehrmacht had asked for, it wasn't practical for either to have a drive train that could handle pushing their final weight causing the notorious mechanical unreliability of the 'big cats', and in the case of the Tiger, it was so heavy that standard transportation and breakdown recovery options available at the time often just didn't work for it. Put bluntly, while they were reasonably well suited for the defensive war the Wehrmacht ended up mostly fighting after Kursk, they were poorly suited for the kind of war the Germans
wanted to fight.
The Bulwark might well have a similar consideration: you could put more armour on it, but it wouldn't simply be a matter of just slapping extra armour on: you'd need a more powerful engine, stronger legs, and other improvements to maintain the same performance, ideally without taking up more internal space. Stuff which they probably could do, but which would make the Bulwark more expensive (in game terms, bump it up to a higher tier). Instead, when push came to shove, the Dvar engineers decided they'd prefer to have two Bulwarks that were relatively fragile but did the job, over one tougher Bulwark. A justifiable decision, if the Bulwark's role is essentially to provide fire support to the Dvar front line rather than being put on the front line itself.
Sigh...maybe its just because I feel dinosaurs are super lame, and am disappointed when I see them braught back in SiFi or fantasy. Imho the best thing about them is that they´re extinct.
And they were very primitive lifeforms: jaws unable of lateral movement or chewing, only one type of teeth per species, bad eyes, no external ear parts to improve hearing...guess they were just as subuptimal in areas I know less about. So, if I were tasked with bioengeneering a superior lifeform for battle, dinos definitly wouldn´t be my starting point of choice. Thats also why Zerg and Aliens kind of work for me as enemies in SiFi, but dinos(enchanced or not) don´t.
That... does not match with the opinion of most paleontologists, and smacks of the old 'dinosaurs deserved to become extinct and replaced with more evolved mammals' thinking of some decades ago. More recent studies have indicated that in many of these areas, dinosaurs actually outperformed even modern mammals: hadrosaur jaws and teeth were quite complex (although they operated differently to mammalian jaws, they certainly
were capable of both lateral movement and chewing); the eyes of tyrannoraptors were actually
more impressive than modern birds of prey*; and we have little idea about external ear parts because soft tissue and cartilage doesn't fossilise well, but modern birds seem to do well enough. Dinosaurs were, after all, dominant for much longer than mammals (although mammals also started becoming larger earlier than many people think: as most dinosaur groups grew in size, mammals also grew to fill ecological niches vacated as the dinosaurs that formerly occupied them grew larger) - in most evolutionary considerations except brain capacity, mammals still lag behind what dinosaurs achieved. (Keep in mind that, compared to the age of dinosaurs, the age of mammals would still be roughly in the early Jurassic, or
maybe the early Cretaceous if you consider the true reign of dinosaurs to have started with the Triassic-Jurassic extinctions.)
*Most mammals actually have relatively poor eyesight for daytime conditions, due to spending most of the Mesozoic being nocturnal and therefore having eye structures suited for daytime vision atrophy away over millions of years of evolution. Humans probably have the best eyesight of any mammal - primates regained trichromal vision (most mammal groups are dichromal) in order to distinguish between different kinds and ripenesses of fruit, and human ancestors had additional evolutionary pressure towards good eyesight when they started throwing things as a hunting strategy. Birds have us beat by a country mile, though.
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Why both vehicle models so poorly detailed? I remember same problem in AoW3.
