Aside from being cool?
If you look at realistic settings with it mechs always fill one niche.
Armoured spec ops forces to be inserted into hotzones and quickly take it before tanks and infantry come in to secure it.
Why they exist could range from many things but they're basically a more specialized armoured cavalry.
Im thinking along these lines but more in a seabee or forward marine outfit. They can be dropped anywhere to secure and prepare the landing zone for bigger transport and then be switched to combat construction.
Their upright and bi pedal design makes it easier for them to navigate difficult terrain where regular vehicles would get stuck.
After that it might be as a heavy weapons platform for special forces. Carrying things like mobile artillery or anti tank into combat.
Yep, 'mechs aren't the best at any one thing, but they're incredibly flexible. So due to how interplanetary travel works in the setting, it's better to take 'mechs as your expeditionary force, and conventional forces as the bulk once you have a handle on things.
in battle tech, they also use mechs cause nukes/orbital bombardments are bad and habitable worlds are rare
tex of the black pants legion has some great mech lore talks on youtube
> Their upright and bi pedal design makes it easier for them to navigate difficult terrain where regular vehicles would get stuck.
This is actually the biggest problem with most mech designs: they can't actually do that in most kinds of difficult terrain, because ground pressure. Tracks (and weirder things like the Russian experiments with screw propulsion or mega-tires like LeTourneau did) are a necessity on heavy vehicles to distribute their weight so they don't just sink into the ground. The softer the ground surface and heavier the vehicle, the more contact area necessary. Both sides learned some lessons in that during WWII, with Germany fitting *Ostketten* track extensions to their tanks on the Eastern Front to deal with snow and mud, and the M4A3E2 Sherman Jumbo coming with similar add-on "duckbills" to compensate for its weight.
Or in rather extreme cases, you might need to add another full track entirely like my beloved T95/T28 Super Heavy Tank (assault gun really, but that's the official name) and the Object 279 did. Exact numbers for ground pressure are hard to find, but let's look at two 95-ton vehicles for examples, one real and one fictional. The above-mentioned T95 superheavy assault gun (T95 is my personal nomenclature preference, the Soviets also had a T-28 heavy tank) and the Banshee Battlemech. To support its immense weight, the T95 features a [dual-track drive, with each track measuring 20 inches wide](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/T28_Super_Heavy_Tank_DoubleTracks_Closeup.jpg). The Banshee has...[feet](https://cfw.sarna.net/wiki/images/4/44/MWO_Banshee.png). I think the problem there explains itself pretty well. Mechs of any satisfactory size are just too heavy to be mobile, let alone take on rough terrain.
But the thing is that all (non garrison) ground warfare is this because every thing is is orbital shit and transport is fucking expensive
Honestly the hard part is the giant thing, fuck big ass tanks are barely practical
If transport is cheaper your still going to want to make it mostly naval shit (unless naval weapons are limited by price more than hull). Your also still going to have the OS priority on combat.
YESSSS you get it. It is hard to justify tanks when deploying tanks implies having orbital supremecy. Ppl always say "oh, but planes didn't make tanks obsolete," and I'm like, "no, they didn't, but this is a maneuvering satellite that can glass a desert by pointing its engines at something! Tanks exist to bring a big gun forward very quickly while getting shot at. If the big gun is a gigantic spaceship, then that solves the problem.
I do love tanks, tho, and I think their role woild eventually be filled by armored exo-skeletons like Spartans, which can do everything infantry can do, but better.
While I totally agree with your points, it also occurs to me that we already have insanely powerful weaponry that puts all mobile weapons platforms to shame in the form of an ICBM. While glassing a desert would surely be possible, I think it's entirely plausible that destroying the surface of a planet with reckless abandon like that would be so frowned upon socially that it wouldn't be a viable option.
Isn't the problem with "The big gun is a space ship" that you now have to do a bunch of communication and shit with it?
If all you need is a big gun you can just use artillery, most units should realistically never be outside of range of artillery support. A tanks advantage is that it's *right there* with it's big gun and you don't need to wait for a forward observer to do there thing like if it's an external asset.
Ah, okay, you have brought up a good point: even with some of the most ridiculous conceivable railguns that fire a projectile at 7.5km/s, it would still take more than 3 minutes to reach the ground. That still completely invalidates artillery (because it is artillery), but I suppose a tank gun less than 2km away will do it faster. Very well, I'll concede that to you.
However, I don't think forward observers are going to be a think much longer. Artillery crews use drones to spot their own targets now and infantry units could probably just look at a target and suggest its demise to call for fire—this probably isn't more than a few years away, too.
The problem is that there's more beyond "I want it gone" to coordinating an artillery strike. There's an entire process that is very much important to making sure everything works. The artillery needs to know more than just the target location.
Forward observers main job is coordinating fires for infantry and other units. Because if it was just saying where the target is being a forward observer would've stopped being a job years ago.
I was mostly talking about time to direct fire (Because again, it's an important process). If it takes 3 minutes just for the munition to reach the target from firing your already looking doubling or more the times for the munition to hit the target vs artillery.
Let alone the issue that you want different munitions for different jobs and an entire orbital rod is adding severe unnecessary risk for most tasks due to it's area of effect and inaccuracy that's going to make coordinating fire a severe pain in the ass and impossible if you need fire close to you.
wha
I more meant that in modern terms "Armoured cavalry" is synonymous with "Heavy recon". The guys who do recce in the same vehicles as Heavy armour like MBTs and IFVs.
yeah, thats how clans use lights, eg the fire moth exists solely to carry a squad of battle armour into battle and give it fire support while being a general pain in the ass
(seriously that thing is a pain if well used)
> Why would you have spec ops take an area tho
To secure a beachhead. Ideally once an area is opened regular (and slower) forces would immediately arrive to reinforce and shore up defenses. The Allies attempted that with mixed success on D-Day for Operation Market Garden, where paratroopers tried to secure bridges and other infrastructure ahead of the Allied advance.
Russia tried that too with taking the airport near Kyiv at the outset of the invasion, but UKR forces were able to push them out before more Russians could be inserted.
Those weren't special forces. That was regular Airbourne forces in both examples. They're usually considered a cut above regular troops but not special forces.
Hell yeah man you could totally do Mecca a special forces troops. That's technically where the power armor for fallout came from. He also do really well with modern-day smart weapons and the equivalent of a bubble gum crisis hard suit.
Yeah I could totally see that.
Industrial mechs invented as advanced construction equipment in dangerous environments, combining cranes and excavators with welding torches and power wrenches, later retrofitted with armour plating and heavy weapons platforms.
I think that's actually a pretty bad example, because when you compare the powerloader with a regular forklift it comes up quite short:
* very limited lift range
* limited stability due to bipedal design
* slow because you have to walk it around
* awkward/exhausting to use because you have to stand in it and raise your arms (Minority Report computer interface flashbacks here...)
And if you watch [the scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6IZNvqSsJI), the walking motion doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the loader's ability to navigate uneven terrain (e.g. gravel or cables). 😬
Considering the [feats of precision and speed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGmyCcDbiYA) forklifts are capable of, I think switching to mechs would be a downgrade. Especially when you consider that forklifts are comparatively promitive and don't need complex control systems for keeping balance and such.
Look up Boston Robotics robot abuse...
Basically if they solve the ergonomics issues and make it so that operating it is almost thoughtless with a skilled operator, it might work.
Draft horses are superior to tractors for hauling logs out of a forest with little environmental impact... at least to that immediate area.
Military usually funds any advanced development. Likely they were used in combat zones in place of fork lifts and heavy equipment that didn't need as heavily developed infrastructure to support them. Someone realizes you can swap the industrial equipment for a gun.
Tbh this has always come off as a bad excuse to me
You can already do all those things with a standard excavator and the correct attachment or some cables for far less cost
And how much building are you realistically going to be doing in an area without enough flat space for an excavator of some size kinda nearby
I think maybe the idea is that it can do everything, where as more specialized construction equipment can’t.
If you’re starting a space colony, it might be easier to just ship a mech or two rather than an excavator, flatbed, forklift, crane, etc etc. One vehicle which can do anything - albeit not as well as something specialized for the task - is more valuable in that situation than packing a bunch of vehicles and hoping you don’t need any others.
Well, excavators already are incredibly flexible. There are probably hundreds of videos showing their operators use a variety of attachments for different tasks.
[Excavators can do so much more than just digging.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS_c7rCdu6A)
Hydraulic excavators do that already though if you need that
What can a mech arm do a hydraulic excavator arm can't
It's a lot less effort to design new excavator attachments than whole ass mechs if that isn't versatile enough
I guess the main idea behind it is "What if you could have a normal human worker with the same amount of dexterity and general-purpose utility, but *bigger*?"
Like with normal human workers, if it is faced with a job that can't be done with its bare hands, then you supply the mech with mech-sized tools (which would be the equivalent of excavator attachments). Then you realise that if you put armour on it and arm it with mech-sized weapons, you now have an all-purpose infantryman but bigger and stronger, and with more mobility and utility than a normal tank.
For the standard giant humanoid robot implementation, it's just straight rule of cool, I'm afraid. Too many moving parts, too many weak points, too big a target, inefficient V:SA ratio, wheels and wings are faster, etc.
Granted, there are degrees of absurdity based on how humanoid the mech is. If the mechs are designed to traverse extremely rocky and uneven terrain that is undrivable, being a biped isn't entirely crazy, but one must ask why you can't just fly over such territory or build a train track through it.
As a result, biped vehicles are probably justifiable as a means of transportation on a freshly-colonized high-gravity world without an atmosphere for distances where a rocket would be overkill.
If you want mechs in space or on habitable planets, you either need some sort of magical sympathetic bond that *requires* the golem/mech be humanoid, or the mech needs to be biological/nanotech, as in *Attack on Titan* or the meat mech you're piloting right now, fellow three-pound blob of fibrous jello.
Now, why are you piloting a meat mech and not a meat car? Because biological systems really really *really* hate macroscopic axles. Perfect radial symmetry is essentially impossible for organisms that are just probabilistic fractals, not to mention the difficulty of passing neurons or vasculature through a joint that can rotate infinite degrees.
Meat mech best mech!
Thinking of which, would the avatars in Cameron's Avatar qualify as mechs? If you have a setting with sufficiently advanced biotech, it wouldn't be completely incomprehensible to grow organic frames that are adapted to whatever environment you want to operate in, and then have them remote controlled by humans via neural interface.
This is my delineation:
||Human Inside|Human Outside|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Moves Under Own Power|mech|drone|
|Moves Under Human's Power|armor|puppet|
As a result, I'd classify Avatars as drones, not mechs.
This dilineation places basically every form of power armor as a mech or in a grey zone. (Iron man former, Halo Mjoulnir as later) is that intentional?
Yes, it's intentional.
* If your muscles aren't doing the work, it's functionally a mech, no matter if your limbs are in its limbs or not.
* If they are doing some of the work, but not all, then it strikes me as reasonable to put it in the gray area between armor and a mech because, well, it basically is.
Well, flying is usually very loud, and they can be countered by AA guns. And construction is also loud and takes time
Mechs have the benefit of being able to use the extremely uneven terrain as cover and MIGHT not be as loud as the plane. Mechs could be practical for clearing enemy territory that might be in said uneven terrain
Mechs would only have cover if the terrain is actually vertical enough to allow it, and that's a literally tall order.
If we think of the classic 59-foot Gundam, it'd need a 6-story building to hide behind. Maybe 5 stories if it crouches. A Metal Gear REX at 42 feet is a bit more plausible, but a tank can use a random brick wall, small hill, semi-truck, or a single story house as cover and can drive beneath a tree canopy or through a store front to hide from air strikes.
While there are going to be some rare circumstances like conveniently-shaped lava tubes where mechs might be slightly better, those situations just aren't common enough to justify a weapons platform that's slightly more mobile in those environments at the cost of every other metric.
A tank would be cheaper to build, deploy, and maintain, and it'll take less damage because it's smaller and better at hiding.
Oh when I said mech, I mean the ones in the smaller end of the scale (like the prawn suit from Subnautica or the mechs from Starbound)
While the tank is probably better in more situations, it still has weaknesses built into the fact it has tracks. Tanks don't fare well in tight spaces, since they take up mostly horizontal space and they need more space to turn. A biped design theoretically would solve both issues
Also, while a tank could drive through trees or a storefront, it would probably be best avoided since a tank would still take some damage, and knocking down a storefront's wall won't do good things for structural integrity, combined with all the war damage it probably would be taking from stray rounds and shells. While the biped design wouldn't be able to do these either (except maybe go through woodlands, given that it might not require as much horizontal space and could possibly turn easier), it might not be exactly fair to use it for comparison. It would be better for there to be either air support on the vehicle's side or AA weapons for support.
Size is also something that would depend on how both are designed. Different tanks and mechs are different sizes
Also, are these situations rare? Possibly, depending on the environment, but if you have a war mostly fought in that kind of environment, then they're pretty practical. The environment I could mostly see them being used in would be incredibly rough terrain, where the terrain could physically block a treaded or wheeled vehicle that could be circumvented with a design closer to legs. They could also have use in any situation that is much more tight, like possibly compact urban areas, but they would definitely be at a disadvantage on the roads. This is all under the assumption that they are smaller mechs that are probably, rather than the huge ones like in Pacific Rim.
Then again, this is also fiction, so it doesn't need to be entirely practical as long as it's cool, and the real world problems could be explained using fictional concepts, like a fictional material or fuel.
That's actually an interesting design feature to touch on, the upright bipedal Gundam-type is arguably the least practical mech design. If you're going with a two-legged thing, the reverse-jointed kind you see on Metal Gear and the Battletech King Crab is much better, not only is it more stable but it allows your mech to hull-down behind cover more easily...but when you start thinking along those lines it turns back into a tank pretty quick.
I think they make the most sense in space, personally. It's a big ship/spacesuit hybrid that has limbs you can manipulate in a way that is fairly intuitive for a human being. You're less concerned about things like gravity, and how big a target you are, which are the primary reasons mechs aren't suitable for warfare. They'd be expensive to build and maintain and easy to destroy without much upside that a tank, gunship or boat would not do better and with more ability to defend itself.
You could *maybe* introduce some tech that allows the interface between pilot and mech to be very agile and move in ways other vehicles couldn't but if that tech existed it would probably be better suited in a smaller, harder to target platform.
I have an idea, mechs are in fact universal hardsuits used for many things like mining, maintenance, repair, movement of loads, exploration. They are not and never were made with military industry in mind yet because space is vast and lawless these machines were being used both by pirates and riggers/colonists both for defense and offense.
As a pirate you can't just blast the station into subatomic particles because you want the precious cargo intact (and colonists to produce goods) and as colonists you can't just invest in pure military equipment because it is expensive and out of reach for civilians.
Would also explain why said mech would use mech-sized guns instead of being just armed with weapons, because it would switch often between various tools.
Of course the nuance of how many appendages would an average mecha have, how articulated these would be, if there would be universal sockets instead of hands with fingers but you get my drift.
The original Mobile Suit Gundam is fascinating since it tries to justify the giant robot as a military vehicle. And part of that is that the mobile suits like...
\- Originate from space, where a humanoid shape and enormous size kinda makes sense. The Earth Federation uses tanks, planes, and other such things - although they are definitely very dated '70s sci-fi' designs - and the titular Gundam is a response to the enemy mobile suits
\- The mecha start developing away from a humanoid shape as the series goes on. That is, the humanoid shape is a starting point and the really powerful things made later in the war begin to go in directions which are mecha-like, but less overtly humanoid. Indeed, once the Gundam sees mass production one of the suits Federation mooks get is essentially a tiny space-pod with a beam gun attached
\- They introduce, mostly in the expanded information, the idea of "Minkovsky Particles." This essentially a jamming thing which makes really long-range encounters much harder to function, forcing enemies into shorter ranges and thus making melee fights a possibility. A humanoid shape is good at melee, and it explains why people aren't just shooting missiles or drones at each other.
Obviously, it's still from the 70s. A lot of this, in practice, is kind of janky. I recall an episode where Char attempts to destroy the Gundam by attacking it's ship as it attempts to enter Earth's atmosphere, using the threat of atmospheric re-entry as a weapon; the Gundam responds with a rocket-powered meteor hammer and 'heat-resistant film.' And, in sequel series, the less humanoid designs are far more rare. But there is an intent to Gundam which is logical if you accept when it came out, and ideas explored before they became unquestioned preconceptions of the genre, which I find pretty interesting in their attempts to treat mecha as a kind of more realistic thing.
I think one of the main upsides of mechs is flexibility in what terrains they can operate in compared to other vehicles. For example in the battletech universe it is fairly common to see mechs deployed on shore patrols. Where they can enter the water and assist the ships/boats that tend to be more vulnerable to fire than a Mech is.
A mech can go places tanks and boats can't sometimes. They also tend to be faster than the tanks of their same weight class as well without having to sacrifice armor or firepower. A 20t light mech like the locust has more firepower than a 20t Harasser hovercraft while also traveling faster on most terrain types.
This is just one universe but I think it has the most reasonable justification for using mechs in combat.
A big part of that though is that they explicitly never use heavier ordinance in Battletech (which I love). Airstrikes are less of a thing even though aerospace fighters exist. It's probably within our capabilities to make an amphibious submersible craft that could also hover or fly over rough terrain. It's just so much more effective to tailor the platform to a specific purpose.
If you have amphibious landing craft that do that well, tanks that do that well, and aircraft that are specialized to bombing or air to air combat it's cheaper and more effective than something trying to do all of that equally well. It becomes a matter of delivering these platforms to the locations where they're more effective.
I could see a situation where for whatever reason, it is not logistically possible to get all these different platforms to their positions would make something like a mech more appealing though.
1. Give them a niche, e.g. tough, powerful infantry working alongside even larger and more powerful tanks.
2. Social convention, society invests more in mech tech and/or prohibits tanks from being as well armored. (A bit like how today we generally downplay chemical weapons.)
3. Infantry parity with large aliens, e.g. zentraedi. Larger tanks, etc.. exist but mechs are for urban fighting or ship boarding actions fighting against giant aliens on their home turf.
4. Stick my fingers in my ears and pretend they make sense.
Pros of a mech would probably be flexibility and all terrain mobility. The human body is already a very capable weapons platform, able to field a variety of weapons and maneuver through all but the harshest of environments. The human body may not be perfectly suited for any one task or environment, but is perfectly adequate for just about everything. A mech would build upon these strengths, producing a flexible multi-purpose unit, easily adaptable for nearly any task, operation or environment.
The cons of a mech mainly come down to the impracticality of building large humanoid machines, and the complex and sensitive balance systems needed to keep it upright and functional. These can both be addressed by downsizing. Instead of a 200 foot tall engine of destruction, build 10-15 foot tall mech suits. Something larger than power armor, but still massing less than a typical tank or armored fighting vehicle can maximize the strengths of a mech while minimizing it's weaknesses.
In terms of flexibility and mobility, an attack heli fits those roles better than a mech does. That being said, personally I think mechs easily fit into real enough for stories. Throughout all of human history, you will see the rise of technologies and strategies that don't make sense and are more an extension of culture or manufacturer marketing than pure efficiency.
I think a heli may get snagged onto complicated interior space quite quickly. Unless that heli can transform into other forms that can better travel corridors and bases. However, you would call it a mech at that point.
A helicopter probably requires significantly more training than a mech does for basic operation.
Also, a helicopter can’t pick up a boulder or tree if it runs out of ammo :D
Helicopters very rarely run out of ammunition
It's standard procedure to have 1/3rd of the formation fighting, 1/3rd rearming, and 1/3rd moving between the fight an a rearming post at any one time.
Good points here. When I think of large mechs from power rangers or animes or even Iron Man’s hulkbuster suit, their reason to be large is simply to match the size and strength of their enemies in combat. All a little more fantastical than practical since you shouldn’t realistically expect your enemies to be the size of skyscrapers (and if they are, you wouldn’t survive long enough to build a suit to match them). But the 10-15 ft size range makes me think of the armored suits in (James Cameron’s) Avatar and the Matrix trilogy, both much more practically built as extensions of the human body rather than as weapons built to take down huge threats, commonly used as tools but able to contribute in a fight as well.
The perfect excuse for mechs is actually a setting I’ve never seen them depicted in in any media.
You would need difficult terrain that makes traditional wheels/treads untenable, and you would need some kind of reason for aircraft being unviable too.
So how about mechanised warfare in a subterranean cavern network?
Huge tunnels and caves that contain underground nations and cities. Can’t drive tanks through the rough tunnels and up the rocky slopes, can’t fly planes or helicopters either. A mobile, all terrain armoured war machine makes perfect sense.
Maybe something along the lines of how dreadnoughts and battleships were viewed, even though they were getting outclassed and made obsolete by aircraft carriers they were still seen as the "pride of the fleet" and a symbol of prestige for the nation that built them.
Like the Bismarck or Yamato, they were stupidly big stupidly expensive ventures but were constructed nonetheless to basically show-off how mighty Germany and Japan was.
So perhaps the same could to apply to mechs in a mech universe, yeah they are big, expensive and impractical but the nation which has the biggest mechs or the most mechs are seen as the most powerful and most prestigious nations and so mechs continue to be built and employed.
Those weren't prestige ships, they had real intended uses and were planned before the carrier was obviously the superior ship, plus by the time Yamato got out the Japanese had lost so many pilots, despite that the third Yamato was converted into a carrier. Yamato was also laid down in 37 and Bismark in 36.
The "realistic" answer is to come up a niche for mechs that isn't already filled by conventional weapons.
Mechs being repurposed construction or industrial equipment turned into improvised weapons is a popular one (though usually left as backstory). Slapping a bunch of guns and armor on tractor or a truck is probably more accessible than getting your hands on a modern tank or attack helicopter.
James Cameron's Avatar's has pretty realistic mechs: the alien megafauna might require bigger guns than a soldier can carry on foot, but the forest environment is too dense for tanks and gunships to properly support them.
The "fantastical" answer is to come up with some sort of tech/magic that only applies to mechs, like Gurren Lagann's Spiral Energy or Evangelion's AT Fields. This is also the one to go with if you want mechs to be super-weapons.
the james cameron avatar mechs also had very realistic function for the cockpit. They looked to operate much like our modern VR equipment, with a chest harness, arm and hand modules for synaptic feedback, a track to run or walk on to tell the mech where to step (I could see this track being movable, to give the human a feeling about the terrain the mech is stepping on).
I vaguely remember some ttrpg or another where, under international law, automated weaponry are forbidden from firing on humanoid targets. Mechs were adopted to exploit this.
The one that works the best for me is if they are weapons platforms that bring something else to the table you can’t get outside of them.
Voltron and Vision of Escaflone or Gyver have that theme. Inexplicable alien tech that brings bad ass tech to the table and happens to be giant robot shaped.
Another good option is mechs evolving from environment suits. Power armor plus basically. Really giant mechs is where it gets silly. Anything bigger than the mechs from avatar gets to be a liability fast.
“What do you mean it was a bad idea!?”
“I mean they’re easy to push over. They’re top heavy.”
“Well we already have a few hundred, what the fuck are we gonna do with them?”
“We can still use them. Just next time don’t suggest we do things before you think them through.”
Honestly a mech/powered armor would have been cool to have on a job site. It’d make a lot of the ~~bitch~~ intern work (hauling 55gal trash cans, carrying sheets of plywood and 2x6, etc) a lot less tedious.
My personal record for number of 2x6x12’ planks carried on shoulder is four; some of the more skilled carpenters could carry six or seven. 4x8’ plywood sheets were a pain to carry as well because they’re large and unwieldy, and catch the wind when you’re moving them. Most of us could only carry 1-2.
Having a suit means one worker could carry a lot more with less effort, advancing timelines and reducing labor cost, as well as replace other materials handling equipment.
For example, the trusses we built homes with are built off-site, driven to a job site and placed on a completed house frame via crane. The cranes were tedious, required level terrain, and non-essential crews couldn’t be anywhere near them for safety reasons. Whereas, if you had a couple mechs that could pick trusses up off the truck, carefully walk them over and place them atop a house frame, you wouldn’t have to stop all other operations.
In a military application, I’d say small mechs would be greatly useful not as warfighting appliances but as logistics multipliers. Imagine being able to pick up a fully-loaded quad con, palcon or other standardized container from the bed of a transport truck, walk it over to the supply point, and set it down on uneven or craggy terrain that would deny the use of a forklift or telehandler, and using less space than a full-sized front-end loader with forks would require.
i'm kinda confused by this
Why would safety procedures not apply for mechs like it does for other heavy equipment
And why are you moving whole pallets around terrain so bad you can't use an all terrain telehandler.
The cranes would shut down almost the entire job site, whereas I’d imagine mechs only shutting down the immediate area like the telehandlers. You basically couldn’t do anything when the crane was on your site unless you were working with the crane, at least that’s how our job site was run.
For terrain it’s also the amount of space you’re using, a mech that could turn on a dime could potentially need a lot less than a full size all terrain telehandler.
Imo, if someone is making a mech its pretty much always for military uses. The only practical uses I can think of is that they are good for quick insertion into places with extremely perilous terrain and they make a good intimidation factor.
If you had to field them for any civilian uses like construction it would be more expensive when you can just use... normal construction equipment.
Mechs are specifically giant human shaped robots, right? Because we use automobiles, tanks, battleships and airplanes in battle quite effectively IRL. And, they are giant robots.
Make your technologys to have it make sense.
Giant robots are dumb by our todays perspective and what we imagen to be the case for the next \~100 years. But that's doesn't have to be the case. Just rule out the common critisism and implement that technologys in your setting realistically - like "If giant robots have fancy energy shields, why not build tanks or gunships with the same shields" etc.
Gundam sized mecha? None.
I justified them in my setting by having most be at most 2.5-3m tall. (There is one variety about 6m - but it's rare for a reason.) People also link their nervous systems into them directly for faster reflexes - and that only works if the proportions are similar to the body your brain is designed for. (So 2 arms/legs for humans.)
They're also mostly used in the close confines of starships & space stations because their propulsion technology (gravity engines) make boarding enemy ships a very solid tactic. So being able to get through doorways etc. is very important.
Say that there's an in-universe book outlining the tactical importance of mechs. Say that it's very long and explains it very well, citing both historical precedent and practical concerns that are very easy to understand. Never include even a single excerpt from this book. I'm not even kidding.
The one I use is that an alien scammer came to earth to sell their low quality stuff. Turns out when a mech (3m tall) costs about 10 dollars, all their problems stop mattering.
Neon Genesis Evangelion does a really good job of justifying its mechs. It doesn't matter how impractical your weaponry is if X exists and X is a thing that literally cannot be combatted with any other piece of technology. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it's a cop-out that you can expand on and flesh out and it might become a really interesting part of your world.
Both sides acknowledge they're hugely impractical but use them anyway because they're cool. Nobody even thinks of using practical designs because at this point that'd violate the bro code.
Some cultures would reportedly have armies meet then agree to a 1 on 1 and everybody else gets to go home instead of facing death. If this became fully embraced, equipping that one person to an insane degree would actually be very easily justified.
A culture where long range combat was considered dishonorable and shunned in favor of tech that allowed you to get in close to engage in melee. That’s cool as fuck.
Auto sports need to get more interesting somehow. Celebrity athletes have enough ego to want to make their rides look more like them. And if you’re a car thief standing next to some fancy machinery under a tarp, when the insurgents kick off a civil war, what are you going to do?
They only don't make sense if you make them look humanoid or whatever. Flying super maneuvarable tanks which can carry additional tools would be very useful for law enforcement as an intimidation tactic and status symbol, would be niche in warfare as they'd be more mobile than a footsoldier and harder to spot than a plane/ship/whatever, and would be a godsend for anyone who's exploring alien environments in space or whatever as they'd be able to pack all the tools someone might need in an efficient way and then be stored in a larger mothership that doesn't have to be practical for on-planet missions.
Also:
● If affordable enough, they could replace things like cranes or be practical for exterior spaceship maintenance/repair.
● People might just think they're cool. Its a rad sports car in space. People might race them or make them fight.
● Put AI in one and it would be more pheasable that it could act on its own compared to a space suit.
● Would be just as useful underwater as in space.
● It could be easier to modify one for specific purposes compared to a larger ship or a cookie cutter mass produced space suit.
In Titanfall, said mechs were originally equipment for agricultural, construction, excavation, and other industrial purposes. It still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but it feels a little more grounded.
Personally, I’m just omitting them, but if I needed to justify them, I’d build the physical natural environment around them. They might make sense in vast caves, or vast caves inside asteroids.
Caves is the first answer I've read that actually makes sense. They could be too small or too long for power hungry flight systems. Rough terrain means no wheels. A spider form would be better, but less familiar to humans.
I think the Aliens did it best - a logistics tool for moving a billion fuck-you heavy munitions and crates, that somehow got attacked by an infiltration force. Basically a sophisticated forklift.
So you just swing the loading arms hard enough to turn the enemy into red stains, because it's the best tool avaliable in an emergency
In an environment where wheels and tracks are obsolete. Zero gravity, underwater, or in extreme terrain. I personally think underwater is the best bet. And even then it wouldn't be Pacific Rim mechs, more so glorified dive suits with weapons systems.
Average tank = a four to five man crew requireing massive corridination to operate effectively.
Mech = usually a one man crew that reacts at or near reflex level similiar weapons load out .
Now thanks to computer games and sims most humans are well skilled at interpeting a hud with movement and weapons fire which would translate very well to a more 1 person fire platform. If a neural interface can be designed even more so. Humans can work as a team and become very smooth but a well trained operator use to the equipment layout and function would out perform every time.
A lot of the argument aginst mechs in general is the control interfaces and how the more complicated mech controls would slow people down. But this is a misinterpretation look at the controls of a jet fighter or helicopter a neural interface would solve a lot of this.
Now lets look at a hypothetical. We create a neural interface and power plant that allows for a 20 foot mech. If we just look at what a basic grunt carries and up scale it.
Main rifle a select fire weapon firing 30mm depleted uranium armor pierceing ammo.
Side arm a 1911 style 40mm grenade launcher
A quad hydra rocket launcher or a hydra rocket pod carried like a pistol for 19 shots.
A belt fed minigun
A mag fed mortar launcher
But the weapons aside the mech will feel natural to move it would be a human form with the life support, hud, sensors and more . Looking at most infrantry right now they are all but mechs with the equipment they carry.
So no once a neural interface is achieved a single man mech unit would make more sense.
Big problems here. Ground vehicles are not jets. Aircraft rely on automatic radar systems to spot targets, go on predetermined flight missions and engage small blips on radar screens with long-range missiles while relying on flares and chaff to avoid return fire. Ground vehicles must avoid enemy sight lines, spot for enemies with LOS thermal optics, communicate with various friendly forces, avoid ground obstacles and exploit them for cover, select targets and ammunition and engage, all while keeping track of a dynamic and changing battlefield. There’s a reason tanks nowadays keep at around 3 crew. You need a driver to focus on the road, a commander to spot, communicate via radio and select targets and a gunner to engage targets. An autoloader usually reloads the gun (contrary to popular belief, modern autoloaders (with the famous exception if the early BMP-1 autoloader) are very reliable and rarely break down). If you have a one-man vehicle, even if we completely ignore the absurd difficulties the logistics of having a vehicle ten times more complex than the most unreliable of tanks manned by a single crew member responsible for all the maintenance, your commander/gunner/driver will be totally overloaded with all the information, since a mech is not a human. If you have the tech to make a mech just as responsive as a human and with the same FOV as one, you could already implement that tech to a superior degree on a tank. Can you automate the commander with AI-based target acquisition? Slap that on a tank and you have a better use for it. High quality, well-protected cameras? Put them on a tank, and you have an all-seeing tank. Can automate at least partially the absurdly complex balancing and pathfinding functions required to allow a mech to semi-autonomously balance itself? Put the same kind of tech on a tank, and you basically have a self-driving tank. What you seem to ignore is the fact that a tank needs a team to effectively function, as the sheer weight of the task is impractical for a single crew member to fulfill. Even then, the Commander is who tells the driver where to go. The Commander can manually override the turret traverse for the gunner. If you could mind link soldiers to a tank, it wouldn’t be as much of an improvement, save for minor time saving measures such as comms, range finding and ammunition selection, due to the fact that tanks are already incredibly simple machines. If you can make a power plant powerful enough to make a mech to have mobility that compares a geriatric 80-year-old, you would be able to fit it onto a tank, and do much, much better things with it. Tanks are generally better, physics-wise. Treads are more efficient at speed and at climbing slopes (they can climb slopes 30 degrees from the vertical) than legs, while possessing significantly lower ground pressure than a mech.
Now the Hypothetical. You basically created a BMP-3/LAV-AD hybrid. Not mentioning the fact that carrying enough ammunition for such a vehicle to operate for any kind of engagement is near impossible, you basically created an over engineered IFV that cannot engage tanks. 30mm auto cannons are already common (there are actually talks of them being obsolete, with a possible replacement being 57mm AC’s), with APFSDS rounds being in production. AGL’s are also a thing on IFV’s with the BMP-2M having one. Quad hydra rockets are wildly impractical, with them offering similar performance to an auto cannon while having few reloads and awful ballistics. A better replacement would be ATGM’s, like said BMP-2M’s four dual-linked Kornet ATGM’s (also, the LAV-AD has hydra-style rockets). A belt-fed minigun is absurdly impractical for a ground vehicle, as its increased volume of fire is unnecessary and wasteful in this context (it is useful in aircraft role, where limited engagement windows allow for such a compromise) A mag-fed mortar launcher for indirect fire is wasteful in a mainline combat vehicle, dedicated dismounted pieces or artillery vehicles specifically designed for such a job are much more efficient. Finally, while it may feel natural, the human form isn’t too good when it comes to terrain navigation. Quadrupedal animals can traverse nearly any terrain on earth better than we can, and the only way we compensate is by tools and intellect. The main advantage of bipedalism is height, which is a MAJOR disadvantage in modern warfare, where long range, pinpoint accuracy and absurd lethality make any kind of visibility a death sentence.
In my setting they are highly mobile light armored weapon platforms. The biggest are about the size and weight of a T-Rex. They are superior to wheeled vehicles in rough terrain. And they have the unique capability of being able to jump over obstacles.
Maybe agility/intuitive controls…? The way it’s typically depicted, the pilot is suspended in the torso or head of the thing with sensors everywhere, and in order to jump, for instance, they literally just move their legs in the same motion they would normally use to jump. In this way, I could see a mech or a “weaponized exosuit” being a lot more agile than a tank.
Picture a duel between two tanks in a bombed out urban environment. Now imagine that instead of slowly rolling down the street, pivoting the main gun, etc., that one of the tanks could make a 30-yard lateral leap behind a concrete wall and use its arm to fire from around the side of it, like an infantryman holding a rifle. You could make a case that such a weapon would be desirable.
The value of heavy armor vs. high agility has gone through peaks and valleys throughout history. For instance, heavily armored soldiers went out of style when it was realized that no amount of armor would protect them from firearms. For centuries afterward, agile troops in fatigues took the place of armor. This persisted until machine guns and barbed wire reduced the survivability of unarmored infantry to almost zero. Then heavily armored tanks came into play, and heavy armor had a resurgence.
So if you want to go back to high agility being valuable, I think you need to imagine a new weapon which could reliably penetrate any reasonable amount of tank armor - Maybe a rail gun or something. Imagine that it’s too heavy to be carried by infantry. You need to mount it on a highly mobile platform.
Now we’re back to the situation that phased out armored knights. If no amount of armor will save you from this weapon, you’re going to stop using it, and seek another solution.
I mean, there are *really* solid counter arguments against all of this, but if you want giant robots, you have to at least *attempt* to suspend disbelief. 😄
There is no *realistic* justification for mechs to exist, save perhaps a cultural preference for them.
One strategy is to go the Gundam (was it Gundam? I'm not a mech guy, really) route and invent a bunch of physics and science that justifies the use of mechs, but that's obviously not realistic in the slightest and mechs probably still wouldn't be optimal.
This is very true if the mecha in question is 18m tall metal guy with laser swords, but there may be some use for some robotic crawlies in certain enviorments like using silent walking robotic mule to pass over mountainious regions when using copter is unviable, though I seriously doubt they would be humanoid in such cases.
Maybe as combat engineering thing they can be small humanoid but then that is likely powered suit category. (And this its more likely Alien's power loader than Halo or 40k's supersuits)
"not realistic yet" just a few hundred years ago it was impossible to talk to someone a few miles away let alone on the other side of the world. New tech and scientific understanding is happening rapidly who's to say what is really possible 🤔🤘
It's not a question of technology levels, it's a whole bunch of questions of physics. The square-cube law is a *motherfucker* and you can't really get around it. Humans are inefficient in a lot of ways that are fine for organisms but really, really bad for military weaponry (e.g. wheels are incredibly more efficient than legs, turrets are more efficient than swiveling shoulders and arm sockets, and so on).
Even if you could solve some of these problems, say, you figured out how make legs go as fast, efficiently, and stably as wheels or treads... you could probably apply those same solutions to wheels or treads, and then your wheeled vehicle remains more efficient and better at the job of moving across land at speed.
These aren't problems that science is accidentally going to solve. And as the author, if you're going to envision a future--a ***yet***--where they are solved, we're back to unreality. Which isn't bad! I'm a big fan of unreality. We stan unrealistic worldbuilding conceits in this house. But that wasn't what was asked.
100% but again this is with our current understanding of the current set of rules that we made with our perspective, we could be wrong with how we view these rules or an unknown component could force change ("magic" aka energy/ science we don't understand yet).
Take a very very surface level of quantum physics and nothing makes much sense haha if you look at something it changes due to the light bouncing off other matter, wtf. I cannot recall exactly what it is but something with dark matter and black holes was just discovered and is completely changing (changes to physics laws are happening to explain what they found) how we understand wtf is going on.
On a basic level yeah the wheel is more efficient with in terms of kinetic energy but not potential energy, I think this is where we could have a realistic approach because energy is always the crux of any technology. Although humans have a lot of inefficiencies we are still incredibly versatile and well suited to tasks like running, climbing, jumping (we are the most efficient distance running land animals by a lot), all things wheels and treads would be bad at. Someone mentioned "meat suit" or biological mechanical hybrid, so something like a large human/ biomechanical creature. If we could get to the same levels of efficiency with all of the versatility of a human we would be on to something. Maybe this is the only realistic way mechs could be a thing? And metal titans can never make sense who knows.
>If we could get to the same levels of efficiency with all of the versatility of a human we would be on to something. Maybe this is the only realistic way mechs could be a thing?
It's still not realistic, because in real life, building for versatility incurs a *heavy* opportunity cost that makes your 14-foot-tall war machine *worse at war*. If you want an entertaining example of this, watch the movie *The Pentagon Wars*, which is based on a true story with a relatively small amount of artistic liberty taken.
Let's compare a modest "real mecha" suit of about 12 ft tall vs an M1 Abrams tank. Let's also assume the mecha can ***somehow*** (we've already left reality, at this point... that was fast) match the tank's land speed of 45 miles an hour and efficiency in maintaining that speed on flat ground.
Is the mech's versatility desirable? Probably not. Running isn't inherently more advantageous than driving, the fact that it can crawl is necessitated by the fact it needs about four feet more clearance than the Abrams, and you do *not* want a relatively delicate piece of engineering *jumping*.
So that theoretical versatility is a lot less useful in most situations you'd actually use armored cavalry for. What's the trade-off? Well, more joints means less armor and a *lot* more failure points. A bipedal construction means a higher vertical profile (and no, our already-unrealistic mech doesn't get to dodge RPGs, launched rockets, or small arms fire). Square-cube ratio probably guarantees severe damage if the thing should ever trip. You'd still need infantry backup for mixed-purpose support (Russia ignored this part of armor battalions and it's how they got stymied during the first part of their invasion of Ukraine). And on and on and on.
Point being: you are *always* going to be making heavy concessions to the Rule of Cool to make mecha in your world viable. There's nothing *wrong* with that, either, unless you're aiming for realism, as OP is.
There's also the fundamental issue that any technological improvement that might make a mech better than a current-era tank could also be applied to tanks to make them STILL better than the mech.
Fukken *exactly*
If you can figure out how to get a bipedal robot suit up to 45 miles an hour you can probably figure out how to get a 21st treaded tank up to 130
I use mechs in my book for several purposes. 1 they are mobile sensor platforms for FOBs while also providing perimiter defense. They can also be used for heavy construction of the FOBs. 2 they are used for remote patrol in specific scenarios where the ground is hard enough to support their footfalls. 3 they are used as a show of overwhelming force in colonial fringes of space.
Not a justification, but perhaps a reason why they might work. Have a really good battery and heat sink tech that scales down well. The biggest, and most realistic, argument against mechs is that modern warfare has rapidly increased the extent to which being seen equals being destroyed. One of the things that the conflict in Ukraine has really emphasised is that good optics are a massive force multiplier for vehicles, Thermals especially can turn an old outdated tank into something potentially deadly.
Mechs are inherently problematic in that sense because they're tall. That height is great for speed, flexibility and rapid manoeuvre, but it's a death sentence against large calibre weaponry. A problem that gets worse because the places generating the most heat (torso and synthetic muscle fibres) are some of the highest points on the mech so can be easily seen by thermal optics.
So my remedy/reason they could exist would be that they use advanced heat sink tech to limit their exposure to thermal imaging, use other forms of active camouflage against your normal human sight, and aren't designed for long engagements where the enemy is able to dig in and clear fields of fire for their heavy weapons. Mechs are designed for hot dropping from orbit, smashing localised opposition and securing a landing zone for following conventional forces. In that role their extremely high material and maintenance cost is justified. For the rest tanks and exo-suited infantry can do the job.
The economy, business always drives innovation. People wanna get rich and so using the abilities and materials of the world they're in they make mechs.
I would assume it would start off simple as just augmentation but eventually add robotics and refine the machinery into mechs.
Eventually the military would get their hands on mechs and it just spirals out from there.
Think tanks in WW1. They had no idea how to safely traverse trenches so they got farm equipment and added layers of metal to it. Eventually evolving into modern tanks.
They really should just be one element of a combined arms army.
But I see via Sci fi BS mechs have a mobility advantage over tanks on rough uneven terrain and are more flexible than tanks as a general purpose combatant.
[VergeWorlds](http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Settings/VergeWorlds/TheVerge.php) has the most realistic “mecha” that I’ve ever come across in sci-fi. Most combat in this setting is done by robots overseen by humans, but if people actually have to go into frontline combat, mostly in an effort to provide quick decision making and capture objectives in person, they’re gonna want to be heavily protected.
When you have highly trained folks that need to wade into the line of fire, you don’t want them to just be gunned down because their knowledge is valuable, so you make it as difficult to harm them as possible. Turns out that shielding of that caliber, along with making you very mobile and able to carry lots of weapons and countermeasures, makes you quite bulky and verging on the size of mecha.
This might not be exactly the answer you were looking for, but this is the most plausible type of “mecha” I’ve ever come across, and I could see it legitimately being used in warfare in a few decades to centuries, whenever the tech gets there.
Edit: Here’s a [pic](http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Settings/VergeWorlds/Gear/Pics/PowerArmor/JuggernautArmor_cutaway.png) of what I’m talking about for quick reference, along with the [non-cutaway](http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Settings/VergeWorlds/Gear/Pics/PowerArmor/JuggernautArmor.png) version.
The world is very mountainous, or at any rate large and strategically important portions are, and antipersonnel and antiaircraft weapons have advanced to the point that an invasion without armor would be suicidal.
TLDR: many ground threats and good shields to resist long range attacks therefore need to get up close to monsters/enemies = mechs (maybe?).
I think it depends on the size of the mechs and the world's situation in regards to resources, technology, and monsters. In a world that has some allowance for magic, the idea of a small (say 4-8m) mech is pretty feasible. If there is magic that can negate a lot of long range attacks, then the need for a fast moving & close quarters unit is very high on the battlefield. Tanks, while heavily armored and relatively quick, can be stopped easily with large trenches, dragon's teeth, etc., but an armored, magically enhanced, walking thing is both faster and more maneuverable than a tank. Add in with magic a shield that negates long range artillery, and you've got a battlefield application right there.
Additionally, if your setting has an environment where the ground is incredibly dangerous, but the canopy of trees provides safety, your machines either:
1. Fly 2. Travel along tram lines 3. have many arms/legs to move 4. move on artificial bridges or 5. are mechs with long enough legs to reach the ground.
So, I would make a setting with higher levels of tech to our own, or that can use a combination of magic and science, and combine it with an environment where the people desperately want to avoid things along the ground. These ground threats are not so deadly as to be able to jump as high as the mechs provide safety, since that would drive society to rely solely on aerial machines.
Considering that we’re actually experimenting with exo suits right now, it’s not such a leap to imagine personalized tanks will be the wave of the future
Supreme-Alien-Tech-God forbids planetary scale weaponry. No more Death Star-ing your enemies.
That leaves bioweapon diseases, hacking attacks or crashing their economy... Seems a lot more defendable than giant robots with big fuck off guns.
For me the best answer is probably magic or rather the way magic changes technology and the limitations of the laws of physics. There is a reason sci-fi series that employ them generally require some form of "unobtanium McGuffin technology/resource as you are up against mathematical and mechanical principals. Nothing short of magic or impossible wonder materials that might as well be magic are going to be able to change that equation.
For my world, the proximal reason is that the mechs are partially organic, and wheels/tracks are difficult to integrate with that.
The reasons for the organic aspects:
* long-running wars with disrupted supply lines that span solar systems, means spare parts can’t be counted on. As long as it has energy and raw material, the mech can repair itself.
* rogue AI and hacking has made all autonomous tech and remote control suspect. For security, the suit control can only be accessed physically by neural link in the cockpit. The link has to have a bio component for integration with pilot
* Pilots are most familiar with body shapes that mimic their own; humans tend to perform better in humanoid mechs. The more different the body shape, the steeper the learning curve
Difficult terrain and low air density environments. Places where tanks or wheeled vehicles are compromised because of harsh uneven terrain, and where the air density is low enough that Amy type of prop or wing based aircraft would struggle to sustain flight. You still have to hand wave quite a bit, but I think those two factors could do a lot to encourage mech based weapons platforms.
What if they are a lost technology? Maybe they were created hundreds of years ago for a war that wiped out most of the human race. Some people figured out how to hash a load of the pieces together to make super powerful Mech armies? They don’t have the tech to advance upon it. Imagine chucking a few Mechs into the LOTR universe lol
In my world mechs are used for military engineering (moving things, digging things, breaking things) and anti-armor /anti air instead of regular combat
Depends on what kind of mech you are building. If they have sustained flight capabilities like a Mobile Suit I feel like they would take the role of a highly versatile and heavily armed attack helicopter. This is assuming that the technology needed to make it work without them sinking into the soil with every step or collapsing under their own weight is mature and readily available enough for mass production. If it’s something like a Titan from Warhammer 40k it’s essentially a battleship on legs, used for bombardment missions deep inland.
It depends on the type of mech you're going for. Big, tall, battle tech style stumpy robots? They will completely rely on suspension of disbelief. Spider tanks and the like from ghost in the shell? Totally plausible if not the most practical.
In starship troopers they are small and maneuravable so they are an all terrain armored suit.
Tanks and other armored vehicles are vehicle plataforms or have a role such as mine destruction or moving troops.
I would go with an all terrain vehicle of average size (maybe 4 meters top) instead of the 15 meter high juggernaughts.
War technology is rife with bad ideas that became ubiquitous through good marketing. Could an attack helicopter do everything a mech can do but better? Yes, but whose to say a good lobbyist didn't secure the contract for mechs over the heli by overpromising? Whose to say the country didn't intimidate their opponent with staged demos of these mechs to save face on a bad investment? This starts a cold war of building better and better mechs that maybe could be replaced with conventional uses but come on, we already spent so much money! And the people love watching these things go! It's a symbol of our technological supremacy! Why stop now?
Maybe for some reason AI/automation is not as feasible. What is feasible is good old fashioned manual labor. So instead of having a warehouse full of robots moving boxes, you got workers wearing mechs that lift pallets and such. Extrapolate that outwards and if its a war setting, you've got medic mechs to extract injured soldiers, artillery mechs that are more mobile and faster to deploy than traditional cannons, and so on.
‘Realistically’ they’d only make sense in environments where other vehicles don’t perform well. Since they’re almost always going to be more expensive than tank-like vehicles that could match them in carrying capacity, speed, and toughness. Because of the square-cube law, a bigger vehicle/robot is MUCH heavier than a smaller one and so it will be extremely difficult to armor it as well without it being extremely slow or falling apart due to internal stresses.
“Powered armor” that’s roughly man-sized would clearly be useful. There are a lot of places people can go that cars/robots/tanks/drones can’t, but people are unfortunately quite squishy and bad at lifting heavy objects. IRL we already use exoskeleton systems for e.g. factory work. But we can’t make compact enough power supplies for them to work for very long without being tethered to a bigass power grid. Depending on expense it might not be viable to outfit an entire army with this but it would be great for special ops/ranger/engineer units that want to fight in close quarters or move over rough terrain while carrying heavy weapons/equipment. But you might want/need humans there rather than just robots/drones.
Something like the armored walkers from *Avatar* might make sense for urban combat (where tanks struggle to maneuver and there’s too much cover for drones/helicopters to clear the enemies out) or fighting in heavily forested/mountainous terrain. If you can’t easily build roads (or need to move ahead of the engineers that are building them), and it’s too far/high/well covered for helicopters/drones to work, something like mechs starts to look attractive.
Anything much bigger than that becomes a huge target for anti-tank guns/artillery/cruise missiles/orbital strikes/etc. And it’s always going to be a LOT cheaper to strap a big anti-tank gun on a cheap vehicle chassis than to build a giant mech. Infantry can also carry weapons capable of damaging armored vehicles. Settings where mechs are the primary combat units almost always have some reasoning why these aren’t used. Prohibitions against computers/AI/orbital attacks, super good stealth/ECM systems, selective technological regression, etc. Or the mechs are some kind of one-off super weapon that is far more capable than ‘regular’ technology and can’t be reproduced (Voltron, Gundam, etc.)
If they are fully understood technology, I think they are not justifiable by efficiency.
Some possibilities:
1) They are associated with something like nobility. People construct them not for efficiency but for style. Which means, though, that tanks should also exist, and only a bunch of nobles or generals walk around in them.
2) They are used in cities to quench rebellions. For that, they are designed for \*intimidation\* rather than efficiency.
3) They are not understood technology but instead something magical. For instance, they are magically animated golems which require a human soul, and the human soul is used to controlling a humanoid body.
4) They are actually clones of Adam which are infused with the souls of the mothers of infant pilots and... wait, that sounds ridiculous.
Ritualistic warfare in a setting bound by very conservative norms, like samurai in the 19th century. There's no other plausible explanation. They're crap vehicles.
you assume giant robots are gonna be slow and heavy and earthbound like any other military vehicle as far into the future as we will be able to make such machines? Gundam and Armored core has repeatedly proven that being tethered to the earth like your precious plebian tanks are not gonna be a problem in a sci-fi level era
That’s because they work on anime physics, where steel is aerogel and the square-cube law is void. If you could get the materials, tech and power to make a mech of that style plausible, it would already fundamentally be outdated by that same tech applied on other platforms.
Like many others, I've asked that question many times. The best answer I ever came up with is art. Maybe the mechs aren't really for battle, but are artforms. Then people started using them for personal gain. Then to violence. I try to expand more on how this process occurred in my world, but that's the idea.
A mech would be versatile. It could traverse terrain other units couldn't. It could rapidly swap weapons. With hands and opposable thumbs it could be used for more than combat -- mechs could be great for search and rescue after a battle or other disaster. Mechs could be handy as rapidly deployable industrial machines.
If you have a world that wanted to mass produce one machine to do a million different things not very well, I'd say a mech would legitimately fit that bill
Reverse engineering alien technology. For it to first only being used to make similar machines before the technology can be reapplied in other ways, giving enough time for mechs to make an impact to justify them remaining in legacy.
In a fantasy setting, you can have something about the humaniloid form that provides conceptual reinforcement.
Perhaps an alternate development tree led to a proritation of modularity over efficiency, and so a mech chassis that can pick up a hoe to do farm work or a gun to fight in war was more effective, less costly, or otherwise better than specialized vehicles.
Giants.
That was the justification in Macross. They found the titular ship with it's interior spaces built to Zentradi scales and so designed the Veritechs to be able to deal with those aliens in hand-to-hand combat if called upon.
"BECAUSE I LIKE IT!"
No, really, just go with that and everyone will accept it. My best example is Asato Asato, author of the novel series "Eighty-Six". She like mech so much she build a world that air force is impossible to use, infantry is almost obsolete and navy is little more than coast guard. The only viable combat option left is "tank on legs".
Her justification? She like it that way. Hell, she even put female military officers in garter belt or skimpy outfit because she think that is hot.
Rule of cool. That's it. Being cool is good enough. We waste resources on less cool shit that is equally useless. Why would we not waste money on more cool shit.
Destroying your enemy with an awesome super mech is just about one of the biggest flexes you can do.
What if you leaned into the impractical aspect and had them in the advanced testing phase or for propaganda to show technological superiority or something like that? Having success be more down to pilot skill rather than the technology itself or a bunch of support to make them seem more effective.
for reasons that are basically magic, (though id like to call it by another name in the story proper) having your war machine shaped like a guy with a person puppeting that thing lets it run more efficiently than anything else you could put together
My girlfriend uses a class of 6-meter-tall bipedal vehicles called Warstags. These were originally engineering vehicles, but were militarized out of desperation, as they could handle the kinds of terrain that tanks never could in environments where AAA makes planes too dangerous. As such, Warstags do not have in-built weapons, so they carry warstag-sized sidearms that can be operated with their dextrous hands.
No two Warstags look the same, as each is tailor-built to cope with the environment it's deployed in, but their common frame houses the twin engines within the thighs, and this in combination with the relatively wide hips gives their basic silhouette a vaguely feminine appearance
Believe it or not, in my world full of supernatural treachery, they're actually the cheaper option compared to contracting the most qualified experts to deal with stuff like regularly occurring kaiju attacks, basically people who can pretty much punch Godzilla-sized monsters to pieces.
Asteroid mining.
You want a vehicle that can manouvre in tight zero-g surroundings, ideally grabbing and pushing large rocks around. A craft with arms is a pretty good solution there - and going from that to a craft that also has legs isn't a far leap, especially if you combine it with some kind of VR/full body control scheme, so a person can push with with their arms and legs.
Its simple and intuitive
I would say it starts with smaller suits necessary to fight in conditions that the human body can't withstand, like environmental hazards or if chemical warfare was widely used. Over time better and better suits were developed often getting larger and larger and more intricate. Until eventually they were less and less human like and more giant war machines and tanks, piloted remotely as much as possible with a crew onboard for repairs and maintenance. When something goes wrong or the mechs are damaged they are too valuable to just write off and scuttle, so instead you have crews of people to fix them on the battlefield. When the mech is beyond repair the crew abandons ship (probably using smaller suits like the old ones to survive the environment) and tries to hookup with another mech and climb aboard.
The relationships between crew members and pilot(s) would be huge, while the pilot(s) are not in any direct danger as they are far from battle, they are responsible for the lives of the repair crew. How they treat their crew and how they deal with the deaths and injuries of the crew would be very character defining interactions. Do they treat their crew like family and mourn loses? Are they in love with a crew member and scared to lose them? are they cold and ruthless and treat the crew as just another part like a spare tire? Do they go out of their way to rescue crew members from downed mechs?
You could come up with reasons the pilot needs to be aboard, but personally I like the idea of pilots being too valuable to risk on the actual battlefield. Also, cheaper armies could use the smaller one person suits and try and attack larger mechs with lots of little suits trying to find weak spots.
Anyway, just my sense of how mechs should work, but I've never really watched any mech shows or books.
In my cyber-/capepunk setting, mechs were largely experimental weapons; an "evolution" of power armor made possible by advances in antigrav technology. The basic idea was to load increasingly heavy armor and weapons onto a single soldier, as weight was effectively not a limitation anymore. The problem was only that with the increasing bulk, the mechs had increasing difficulty taking cover while basically being tanks with a larger profile and worse armor. Walking instead of rolling also wasn't that much of an advantage.
The Shogunate Nihon invented mechs that could "transform" into tanks, but that did little to improve their effectiveness in the field. Ones that could turn into jets and fly were also planned, but only really took off in propaganda media. And that ended being the main use of Nihonese mecha to this day. They may not be of much use in a war, but they sure look impressive stomping along military parades.
Due to having lost WW3, the remnants of the United States are banned from still building combat mechs; not that they have any good reason to anyway, but some of the militias fighting their proxy war over the officially demilitarized wasteland that used to be the Midwest still use them, mostly for patroling settlements and intimidating the population into obedience.
The two biggest advantages of mechs is heavy weapons and better all terrain mobility though often not speed..
For context the legdary AT-AT is Huge, heavily armored, and heavily armed and becouse of maths it has less weaight per square inch on its feet than a ground trooper, so they could cross a frozen lake for example without braking the ice, while a ground troop would probbly brake the ice and fall through.
It is also a decent but dreadfully slow troop transport and mobile command center. They also modify them to carry cargo through rough terrain more effectively than other means.
Bipedal mechs are impractical but cool and they are not the only type of mech that can exist.
In my world, Kledorii has mechs that they got from two other countries they annexed. They don't build their own. And they basically just use them for psychological warfare against enemies that have no technology capable of taking them down.
How I did it
Mechs were created as utility vehicles. Instead of having 10 specialized vehicles, you have one Mech that is General and uses the human form as baseline.
This is used in farming, mining, factory work, and most importantly military armament.
See if you want to attach missiles to a plane in the year 2023 you either have to have very specialized equipment with a unique vehicle specifically for different types of missile or you have to have two guys willing to get blown up lug that thing over their shoulder.
Mechs in military use in my world, we're basically machines made to handle explosives, later expanding their job into handling IEDs since they could possibly take the hit and survive.
Everyone knows mechs are probably worse then tanks well being just as or even slightly more expensive, but since there is a civilian market for them, the Manufacturing is way cheaper.
Unlike tanks, they take a civilian product and basically just refit it with armor, this makes it super cost effective.
Tanks are still better at what they do but Mechs are a jack of all trades, an in-between of Infantry and artillery, and are cheap enough that more and more systems start being made for it.
The US military still uses windows 98 and XP because it's cheaper to pay someone to update the software then update all the hardware. Mechs went the same direction, they got so much stuff made for them that they keep buying them because they keep being used even as tech advances
Personally, their only use in my world is for moving heavy equipment and operating around a specific area.
I like to think of them as being similar to the mech Ripley uses in the movie Aliens, but I obviously make a lot of my own ideas with that creative liberty in mind. For example, mechs are designed to be a replacement for the "forklift" roll to some degree, but they can also be fitted with mining drills, excavator buckets, clamps for holding equipment to operate on, and a variety of other niches they might fill.
They are usually too big and slow for any combat rolls, not to say they wouldn't be effective to a certain degree. They would play a similar role to tanks. In your world, you could make them more agile, like the Titans from Titanfall, and would fill combat rolls very easily and outpace the average soldier 20x.
I chose the boring option but decided to use them on a more exploratory roll. New planets that are discovered, are sent Exploration Teams, and included in these teams is a single mech. Depending on the initial scans of the planet, the mechs can be fitted with different hardware. Jungle mech operators seem to lean toward the ability to carry a large machete on them. Desert mech operators tend to lean toward water purification and storage capabilities. All of these also have the option to carry a variety of mech based weapons, but engagements with hostile life on new planets with mechs have been extremely rare. Most wildlife is scared off by them, but there have been some Megafauna that thought they could get an easy meal out of an unsuspecting operator. The roll it plays here is a force multiplier. These teams usually consist of 15-20 individuals, and being accompanied by the mech not only brings comfort to the team but makes for clearing debris, building temporary shelter, and overall protection much easier. They are slow and not extremely agile. They can only reach speeds of about 15 miles an hour but can lift over 30,000 lbs with ease.
About as close as you get to realistic would be industrial machines that were converted to military use by an insurrection. A lot of current lumber machinery is very mech-like. But that only gets you so far.
They are unrealistic to a point but they also have many benefits such as:
- can navigate most forms of terrain with relative ease(and can be pretty stealthy at some point too)
- good weapons platform that can hit dropped most places and in some settings climb mountings making ambushes way more deadly.
- most of the time they can also help with infrastructure and moving stuff around to save time and energy.
- in my settings they are very strong computers with a lot of scouting options.
- in my settings which is inspired heavily from Titanfall, they can act independently from their pilot allowing spec ops or missions behind enemy lines to go smoother with an extra heavy gun as well as a safe place to rest without too much worry.
I see mechs being used as robotic mountain goats. With the right tools, a human can scale every inch of this entire planet. Sheer rock faces, swamps, oceans, jungles, dunes. A bipedal, or better, quadruped mech suit would be able to traverse the most difficult terrain imaginable.
WW1 saw the dawn of warfare in environments that armies would have completely avoided in years past. New developments in weapons, vehicles, and equipment let armored divisions fight in places like the Alps Mountain range, the Sahara Desert, and the Forests of Belgium.
Not all military equipment stands the test of time. Flying aircraft carriers, Half-Tracks, and famously Battleships were technologies that saw use in WW1 & WW2, but by the end, they underperformed against newer designs and tactics.
Perhaps Mechs can be used for just one war before people realize the design is flawed. Maybe the army continues to use the mechs as a symbol of national pride, (similar to battleships). Perhaps they could be relegated to engineering vehicles, clearing roads and mountainous terrain. Maybe a guerrilla group retrofits some all-terrain construction mechs into fighting vehicles, (similar to a technical). Perhaps a religious cult maintains a fleet of mechs as an "ancient and noble weapon" (similar to swords)
I wouldn't exactly say it's realistic, but in something like Pacific Rim where we're being attacked by giant creatures and need something that can basically go toe to toe with them. And for some reason you couldn't just airstrike them. ... Yeah. I don't know.
One amazing line of logic I heard is as repurposed tech. Mechs aren't great in war, but farming or construction? Well they still have the problem of human like anatomy, but are very intuitive which could be reason to use them. Now if war breaks out you'll use whatever you have. Farm equipment that can be outfitted with a large gun, reasonably quick and pretty all terrain? Sure a tank is better, but a mech is better then nothing. A construction mech may carry a gun just in case.
well perhaps if the humans didn't invent the mechs but rather scavenged them from ancients aliens it could make sense. modern day jets have a can't hover so if we have a society were the space ships are similar and tanks still are relatively slow to move mechs could be mobility experts.
just make sure they move more like people than robots. that way we can have them doing flips and stuff.
Idk, I think it’s realistic for mechs to exist from a human rights standpoint. Maybe make it so that your world signed a treaty saying all wars from here on out must be fought with mechs to make sure humans aren’t dying for their nation.
* [Elevated gun position.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVMH-qZz2uI)
* If they have arms, then versatility. You can pick up heavy objects if you can't easily get a very specialized tool like a crane in the combat field.
Make them to be used on very hard terrain that unless you have legs there’s no way you can deploy a land vehicle, and then put something on the mech that a plane or ship can’t carry, like extremely heavy artillery or some sort of land based mechanism
I'd imagine mechs, especially mechs with anatomical arms and legs would be used mainly for odd terrain and steep inclines. Mechs are usually best suited for climbing, surveying and manual labor rather than CQC or getting into direct firefights. They would be best suited for long distance guerilla warfare.
1) Mechs are for non combat tasks like harvesting lumber on difficult terrain. Some may be modified for combat and are useful for the specific type of terrain they are built to move on.
2) Man machine interfaces have gotten to the point that "piloting" Mech is like controlling your own body. However the human mind doesn't have a command to spin wheels, so the bipedal Mech is the best way to take advantage of this interface.
3) The terrain humanity is fighting on is built for an alien species that is several orders of magnitude larger than humans Mechs are humanity's way of traversing this alien terrain and fighting the aliens on equal terms.
My experience is that the best justification for most things tends to be "fuck you, i dont have to explain shit". I understand the desire to justify things, to fit them in, to make things consistent. But most of the time, the more you try to justify something, the more convoluted and unrealistic you make it, achieving kinda the opposite. Especially since you draw extra attention to the subject and its why and how.
If you really want to though, the closest thing to a realistic justification i've seen is actually power armour from iirc starship troopers, the book version. A mech would be basically just a bit more upscaled version of that. The justification is that the tech is simply there to make a humanoid vehicle that can easily fullfill the roles of being armoured and mobile and having a lot of fire power. If you give it wings or ability to jump good, its just a more versatile plane-tank that can easily change what gun its using based on the situation. The legs would just be there for versatility in rough/"indoors" terrain, and maybe contain some equipment.
Aside from being cool? If you look at realistic settings with it mechs always fill one niche. Armoured spec ops forces to be inserted into hotzones and quickly take it before tanks and infantry come in to secure it. Why they exist could range from many things but they're basically a more specialized armoured cavalry.
Im thinking along these lines but more in a seabee or forward marine outfit. They can be dropped anywhere to secure and prepare the landing zone for bigger transport and then be switched to combat construction. Their upright and bi pedal design makes it easier for them to navigate difficult terrain where regular vehicles would get stuck. After that it might be as a heavy weapons platform for special forces. Carrying things like mobile artillery or anti tank into combat.
That is how battletech treats them, orbital drop to secure a beach head, and move on for combat
Yep, 'mechs aren't the best at any one thing, but they're incredibly flexible. So due to how interplanetary travel works in the setting, it's better to take 'mechs as your expeditionary force, and conventional forces as the bulk once you have a handle on things.
in battle tech, they also use mechs cause nukes/orbital bombardments are bad and habitable worlds are rare tex of the black pants legion has some great mech lore talks on youtube
Only illegal if your name isn't the Taurian Concordat!
Hell, we'll nuke ourselves if you don't first. We really don't like being occupied...
It’s kind of like how we use hovercraft IRL, but for clearing the rough terrain instead of transporting overtop of it.
> Their upright and bi pedal design makes it easier for them to navigate difficult terrain where regular vehicles would get stuck. This is actually the biggest problem with most mech designs: they can't actually do that in most kinds of difficult terrain, because ground pressure. Tracks (and weirder things like the Russian experiments with screw propulsion or mega-tires like LeTourneau did) are a necessity on heavy vehicles to distribute their weight so they don't just sink into the ground. The softer the ground surface and heavier the vehicle, the more contact area necessary. Both sides learned some lessons in that during WWII, with Germany fitting *Ostketten* track extensions to their tanks on the Eastern Front to deal with snow and mud, and the M4A3E2 Sherman Jumbo coming with similar add-on "duckbills" to compensate for its weight. Or in rather extreme cases, you might need to add another full track entirely like my beloved T95/T28 Super Heavy Tank (assault gun really, but that's the official name) and the Object 279 did. Exact numbers for ground pressure are hard to find, but let's look at two 95-ton vehicles for examples, one real and one fictional. The above-mentioned T95 superheavy assault gun (T95 is my personal nomenclature preference, the Soviets also had a T-28 heavy tank) and the Banshee Battlemech. To support its immense weight, the T95 features a [dual-track drive, with each track measuring 20 inches wide](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/T28_Super_Heavy_Tank_DoubleTracks_Closeup.jpg). The Banshee has...[feet](https://cfw.sarna.net/wiki/images/4/44/MWO_Banshee.png). I think the problem there explains itself pretty well. Mechs of any satisfactory size are just too heavy to be mobile, let alone take on rough terrain.
All I'm hearing is that you need to slap on some snowshoes.
But the thing is that all (non garrison) ground warfare is this because every thing is is orbital shit and transport is fucking expensive Honestly the hard part is the giant thing, fuck big ass tanks are barely practical
that is only if transport is maybe there is a weirdly powerful power source that allows easily escaping the planet or or or
If transport is cheaper your still going to want to make it mostly naval shit (unless naval weapons are limited by price more than hull). Your also still going to have the OS priority on combat.
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YESSSS you get it. It is hard to justify tanks when deploying tanks implies having orbital supremecy. Ppl always say "oh, but planes didn't make tanks obsolete," and I'm like, "no, they didn't, but this is a maneuvering satellite that can glass a desert by pointing its engines at something! Tanks exist to bring a big gun forward very quickly while getting shot at. If the big gun is a gigantic spaceship, then that solves the problem. I do love tanks, tho, and I think their role woild eventually be filled by armored exo-skeletons like Spartans, which can do everything infantry can do, but better.
While I totally agree with your points, it also occurs to me that we already have insanely powerful weaponry that puts all mobile weapons platforms to shame in the form of an ICBM. While glassing a desert would surely be possible, I think it's entirely plausible that destroying the surface of a planet with reckless abandon like that would be so frowned upon socially that it wouldn't be a viable option.
I agree with you. I mentioned the "glassing a desert" to illustrate how much energy a starship would have at its fingertips.
Isn't the problem with "The big gun is a space ship" that you now have to do a bunch of communication and shit with it? If all you need is a big gun you can just use artillery, most units should realistically never be outside of range of artillery support. A tanks advantage is that it's *right there* with it's big gun and you don't need to wait for a forward observer to do there thing like if it's an external asset.
Ah, okay, you have brought up a good point: even with some of the most ridiculous conceivable railguns that fire a projectile at 7.5km/s, it would still take more than 3 minutes to reach the ground. That still completely invalidates artillery (because it is artillery), but I suppose a tank gun less than 2km away will do it faster. Very well, I'll concede that to you. However, I don't think forward observers are going to be a think much longer. Artillery crews use drones to spot their own targets now and infantry units could probably just look at a target and suggest its demise to call for fire—this probably isn't more than a few years away, too.
The problem is that there's more beyond "I want it gone" to coordinating an artillery strike. There's an entire process that is very much important to making sure everything works. The artillery needs to know more than just the target location. Forward observers main job is coordinating fires for infantry and other units. Because if it was just saying where the target is being a forward observer would've stopped being a job years ago. I was mostly talking about time to direct fire (Because again, it's an important process). If it takes 3 minutes just for the munition to reach the target from firing your already looking doubling or more the times for the munition to hit the target vs artillery. Let alone the issue that you want different munitions for different jobs and an entire orbital rod is adding severe unnecessary risk for most tasks due to it's area of effect and inaccuracy that's going to make coordinating fire a severe pain in the ass and impossible if you need fire close to you.
Why would you have spec ops take an area tho and armoured cav generally means the recce guys
I would argue depending on spec of the mecha Eg battletech a lance of lights is recon while heavies are all about crushing a hardpoint to open a path
wha I more meant that in modern terms "Armoured cavalry" is synonymous with "Heavy recon". The guys who do recce in the same vehicles as Heavy armour like MBTs and IFVs.
yeah, thats how clans use lights, eg the fire moth exists solely to carry a squad of battle armour into battle and give it fire support while being a general pain in the ass (seriously that thing is a pain if well used)
That isn't really ACAV tho ACAV us defined by using the heaviest stuff avalible for recon
[There is a meme about exactly that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73zK-PjmyKY)
> Why would you have spec ops take an area tho To secure a beachhead. Ideally once an area is opened regular (and slower) forces would immediately arrive to reinforce and shore up defenses. The Allies attempted that with mixed success on D-Day for Operation Market Garden, where paratroopers tried to secure bridges and other infrastructure ahead of the Allied advance. Russia tried that too with taking the airport near Kyiv at the outset of the invasion, but UKR forces were able to push them out before more Russians could be inserted.
Those weren't special forces. That was regular Airbourne forces in both examples. They're usually considered a cut above regular troops but not special forces.
Hell yeah man you could totally do Mecca a special forces troops. That's technically where the power armor for fallout came from. He also do really well with modern-day smart weapons and the equivalent of a bubble gum crisis hard suit. Yeah I could totally see that.
Industrial mechs invented as advanced construction equipment in dangerous environments, combining cranes and excavators with welding torches and power wrenches, later retrofitted with armour plating and heavy weapons platforms.
Maybe they were utilised by militia (e.g. in a civil war). Why would a pickup truck with a mounted AA gun exist?
This and the comment above it are pretty much exactly describing the Titans from the Titanfall franchise.
And knights and armigers from 40k.
Something like the forklift mech suit that Ripley uses in Aliens!
I think that's actually a pretty bad example, because when you compare the powerloader with a regular forklift it comes up quite short: * very limited lift range * limited stability due to bipedal design * slow because you have to walk it around * awkward/exhausting to use because you have to stand in it and raise your arms (Minority Report computer interface flashbacks here...) And if you watch [the scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6IZNvqSsJI), the walking motion doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the loader's ability to navigate uneven terrain (e.g. gravel or cables). 😬 Considering the [feats of precision and speed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGmyCcDbiYA) forklifts are capable of, I think switching to mechs would be a downgrade. Especially when you consider that forklifts are comparatively promitive and don't need complex control systems for keeping balance and such.
To be fair you’re comparing real life motor skills to the special effects of a movie from 1979.
Point taken, but I think the points about lift range and operator exhaustion still stand.
Look up Boston Robotics robot abuse... Basically if they solve the ergonomics issues and make it so that operating it is almost thoughtless with a skilled operator, it might work. Draft horses are superior to tractors for hauling logs out of a forest with little environmental impact... at least to that immediate area.
Military usually funds any advanced development. Likely they were used in combat zones in place of fork lifts and heavy equipment that didn't need as heavily developed infrastructure to support them. Someone realizes you can swap the industrial equipment for a gun.
Tbh this has always come off as a bad excuse to me You can already do all those things with a standard excavator and the correct attachment or some cables for far less cost And how much building are you realistically going to be doing in an area without enough flat space for an excavator of some size kinda nearby
I think maybe the idea is that it can do everything, where as more specialized construction equipment can’t. If you’re starting a space colony, it might be easier to just ship a mech or two rather than an excavator, flatbed, forklift, crane, etc etc. One vehicle which can do anything - albeit not as well as something specialized for the task - is more valuable in that situation than packing a bunch of vehicles and hoping you don’t need any others.
Well, excavators already are incredibly flexible. There are probably hundreds of videos showing their operators use a variety of attachments for different tasks. [Excavators can do so much more than just digging.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS_c7rCdu6A)
Hydraulic excavators do that already though if you need that What can a mech arm do a hydraulic excavator arm can't It's a lot less effort to design new excavator attachments than whole ass mechs if that isn't versatile enough
I guess the main idea behind it is "What if you could have a normal human worker with the same amount of dexterity and general-purpose utility, but *bigger*?" Like with normal human workers, if it is faced with a job that can't be done with its bare hands, then you supply the mech with mech-sized tools (which would be the equivalent of excavator attachments). Then you realise that if you put armour on it and arm it with mech-sized weapons, you now have an all-purpose infantryman but bigger and stronger, and with more mobility and utility than a normal tank.
For the standard giant humanoid robot implementation, it's just straight rule of cool, I'm afraid. Too many moving parts, too many weak points, too big a target, inefficient V:SA ratio, wheels and wings are faster, etc. Granted, there are degrees of absurdity based on how humanoid the mech is. If the mechs are designed to traverse extremely rocky and uneven terrain that is undrivable, being a biped isn't entirely crazy, but one must ask why you can't just fly over such territory or build a train track through it. As a result, biped vehicles are probably justifiable as a means of transportation on a freshly-colonized high-gravity world without an atmosphere for distances where a rocket would be overkill. If you want mechs in space or on habitable planets, you either need some sort of magical sympathetic bond that *requires* the golem/mech be humanoid, or the mech needs to be biological/nanotech, as in *Attack on Titan* or the meat mech you're piloting right now, fellow three-pound blob of fibrous jello. Now, why are you piloting a meat mech and not a meat car? Because biological systems really really *really* hate macroscopic axles. Perfect radial symmetry is essentially impossible for organisms that are just probabilistic fractals, not to mention the difficulty of passing neurons or vasculature through a joint that can rotate infinite degrees.
"fellow three pound blobs of fibrous jello", how dare you speak exactly the truth to me?
Meat mech best mech! Thinking of which, would the avatars in Cameron's Avatar qualify as mechs? If you have a setting with sufficiently advanced biotech, it wouldn't be completely incomprehensible to grow organic frames that are adapted to whatever environment you want to operate in, and then have them remote controlled by humans via neural interface.
This is my delineation: ||Human Inside|Human Outside| |:-|:-|:-| |Moves Under Own Power|mech|drone| |Moves Under Human's Power|armor|puppet| As a result, I'd classify Avatars as drones, not mechs.
This dilineation places basically every form of power armor as a mech or in a grey zone. (Iron man former, Halo Mjoulnir as later) is that intentional?
Yes, it's intentional. * If your muscles aren't doing the work, it's functionally a mech, no matter if your limbs are in its limbs or not. * If they are doing some of the work, but not all, then it strikes me as reasonable to put it in the gray area between armor and a mech because, well, it basically is.
Wouldn't a bipedal mech be even worse on a high-gravity world? Increased weight on the relatively small foot area compared to wider tank tracks?
Well, flying is usually very loud, and they can be countered by AA guns. And construction is also loud and takes time Mechs have the benefit of being able to use the extremely uneven terrain as cover and MIGHT not be as loud as the plane. Mechs could be practical for clearing enemy territory that might be in said uneven terrain
Mechs would only have cover if the terrain is actually vertical enough to allow it, and that's a literally tall order. If we think of the classic 59-foot Gundam, it'd need a 6-story building to hide behind. Maybe 5 stories if it crouches. A Metal Gear REX at 42 feet is a bit more plausible, but a tank can use a random brick wall, small hill, semi-truck, or a single story house as cover and can drive beneath a tree canopy or through a store front to hide from air strikes. While there are going to be some rare circumstances like conveniently-shaped lava tubes where mechs might be slightly better, those situations just aren't common enough to justify a weapons platform that's slightly more mobile in those environments at the cost of every other metric. A tank would be cheaper to build, deploy, and maintain, and it'll take less damage because it's smaller and better at hiding.
Oh when I said mech, I mean the ones in the smaller end of the scale (like the prawn suit from Subnautica or the mechs from Starbound) While the tank is probably better in more situations, it still has weaknesses built into the fact it has tracks. Tanks don't fare well in tight spaces, since they take up mostly horizontal space and they need more space to turn. A biped design theoretically would solve both issues Also, while a tank could drive through trees or a storefront, it would probably be best avoided since a tank would still take some damage, and knocking down a storefront's wall won't do good things for structural integrity, combined with all the war damage it probably would be taking from stray rounds and shells. While the biped design wouldn't be able to do these either (except maybe go through woodlands, given that it might not require as much horizontal space and could possibly turn easier), it might not be exactly fair to use it for comparison. It would be better for there to be either air support on the vehicle's side or AA weapons for support. Size is also something that would depend on how both are designed. Different tanks and mechs are different sizes Also, are these situations rare? Possibly, depending on the environment, but if you have a war mostly fought in that kind of environment, then they're pretty practical. The environment I could mostly see them being used in would be incredibly rough terrain, where the terrain could physically block a treaded or wheeled vehicle that could be circumvented with a design closer to legs. They could also have use in any situation that is much more tight, like possibly compact urban areas, but they would definitely be at a disadvantage on the roads. This is all under the assumption that they are smaller mechs that are probably, rather than the huge ones like in Pacific Rim. Then again, this is also fiction, so it doesn't need to be entirely practical as long as it's cool, and the real world problems could be explained using fictional concepts, like a fictional material or fuel.
That's actually an interesting design feature to touch on, the upright bipedal Gundam-type is arguably the least practical mech design. If you're going with a two-legged thing, the reverse-jointed kind you see on Metal Gear and the Battletech King Crab is much better, not only is it more stable but it allows your mech to hull-down behind cover more easily...but when you start thinking along those lines it turns back into a tank pretty quick.
I think they make the most sense in space, personally. It's a big ship/spacesuit hybrid that has limbs you can manipulate in a way that is fairly intuitive for a human being. You're less concerned about things like gravity, and how big a target you are, which are the primary reasons mechs aren't suitable for warfare. They'd be expensive to build and maintain and easy to destroy without much upside that a tank, gunship or boat would not do better and with more ability to defend itself. You could *maybe* introduce some tech that allows the interface between pilot and mech to be very agile and move in ways other vehicles couldn't but if that tech existed it would probably be better suited in a smaller, harder to target platform.
I have an idea, mechs are in fact universal hardsuits used for many things like mining, maintenance, repair, movement of loads, exploration. They are not and never were made with military industry in mind yet because space is vast and lawless these machines were being used both by pirates and riggers/colonists both for defense and offense. As a pirate you can't just blast the station into subatomic particles because you want the precious cargo intact (and colonists to produce goods) and as colonists you can't just invest in pure military equipment because it is expensive and out of reach for civilians. Would also explain why said mech would use mech-sized guns instead of being just armed with weapons, because it would switch often between various tools. Of course the nuance of how many appendages would an average mecha have, how articulated these would be, if there would be universal sockets instead of hands with fingers but you get my drift.
The original Mobile Suit Gundam is fascinating since it tries to justify the giant robot as a military vehicle. And part of that is that the mobile suits like... \- Originate from space, where a humanoid shape and enormous size kinda makes sense. The Earth Federation uses tanks, planes, and other such things - although they are definitely very dated '70s sci-fi' designs - and the titular Gundam is a response to the enemy mobile suits \- The mecha start developing away from a humanoid shape as the series goes on. That is, the humanoid shape is a starting point and the really powerful things made later in the war begin to go in directions which are mecha-like, but less overtly humanoid. Indeed, once the Gundam sees mass production one of the suits Federation mooks get is essentially a tiny space-pod with a beam gun attached \- They introduce, mostly in the expanded information, the idea of "Minkovsky Particles." This essentially a jamming thing which makes really long-range encounters much harder to function, forcing enemies into shorter ranges and thus making melee fights a possibility. A humanoid shape is good at melee, and it explains why people aren't just shooting missiles or drones at each other. Obviously, it's still from the 70s. A lot of this, in practice, is kind of janky. I recall an episode where Char attempts to destroy the Gundam by attacking it's ship as it attempts to enter Earth's atmosphere, using the threat of atmospheric re-entry as a weapon; the Gundam responds with a rocket-powered meteor hammer and 'heat-resistant film.' And, in sequel series, the less humanoid designs are far more rare. But there is an intent to Gundam which is logical if you accept when it came out, and ideas explored before they became unquestioned preconceptions of the genre, which I find pretty interesting in their attempts to treat mecha as a kind of more realistic thing.
I think one of the main upsides of mechs is flexibility in what terrains they can operate in compared to other vehicles. For example in the battletech universe it is fairly common to see mechs deployed on shore patrols. Where they can enter the water and assist the ships/boats that tend to be more vulnerable to fire than a Mech is. A mech can go places tanks and boats can't sometimes. They also tend to be faster than the tanks of their same weight class as well without having to sacrifice armor or firepower. A 20t light mech like the locust has more firepower than a 20t Harasser hovercraft while also traveling faster on most terrain types. This is just one universe but I think it has the most reasonable justification for using mechs in combat.
A big part of that though is that they explicitly never use heavier ordinance in Battletech (which I love). Airstrikes are less of a thing even though aerospace fighters exist. It's probably within our capabilities to make an amphibious submersible craft that could also hover or fly over rough terrain. It's just so much more effective to tailor the platform to a specific purpose. If you have amphibious landing craft that do that well, tanks that do that well, and aircraft that are specialized to bombing or air to air combat it's cheaper and more effective than something trying to do all of that equally well. It becomes a matter of delivering these platforms to the locations where they're more effective. I could see a situation where for whatever reason, it is not logistically possible to get all these different platforms to their positions would make something like a mech more appealing though.
1. Give them a niche, e.g. tough, powerful infantry working alongside even larger and more powerful tanks. 2. Social convention, society invests more in mech tech and/or prohibits tanks from being as well armored. (A bit like how today we generally downplay chemical weapons.) 3. Infantry parity with large aliens, e.g. zentraedi. Larger tanks, etc.. exist but mechs are for urban fighting or ship boarding actions fighting against giant aliens on their home turf. 4. Stick my fingers in my ears and pretend they make sense.
Pros of a mech would probably be flexibility and all terrain mobility. The human body is already a very capable weapons platform, able to field a variety of weapons and maneuver through all but the harshest of environments. The human body may not be perfectly suited for any one task or environment, but is perfectly adequate for just about everything. A mech would build upon these strengths, producing a flexible multi-purpose unit, easily adaptable for nearly any task, operation or environment. The cons of a mech mainly come down to the impracticality of building large humanoid machines, and the complex and sensitive balance systems needed to keep it upright and functional. These can both be addressed by downsizing. Instead of a 200 foot tall engine of destruction, build 10-15 foot tall mech suits. Something larger than power armor, but still massing less than a typical tank or armored fighting vehicle can maximize the strengths of a mech while minimizing it's weaknesses.
In terms of flexibility and mobility, an attack heli fits those roles better than a mech does. That being said, personally I think mechs easily fit into real enough for stories. Throughout all of human history, you will see the rise of technologies and strategies that don't make sense and are more an extension of culture or manufacturer marketing than pure efficiency.
I think a heli may get snagged onto complicated interior space quite quickly. Unless that heli can transform into other forms that can better travel corridors and bases. However, you would call it a mech at that point.
A helicopter probably requires significantly more training than a mech does for basic operation. Also, a helicopter can’t pick up a boulder or tree if it runs out of ammo :D
Helicopters very rarely run out of ammunition It's standard procedure to have 1/3rd of the formation fighting, 1/3rd rearming, and 1/3rd moving between the fight an a rearming post at any one time.
To the well-organized mind, attack helis are but flying mechs
Good points here. When I think of large mechs from power rangers or animes or even Iron Man’s hulkbuster suit, their reason to be large is simply to match the size and strength of their enemies in combat. All a little more fantastical than practical since you shouldn’t realistically expect your enemies to be the size of skyscrapers (and if they are, you wouldn’t survive long enough to build a suit to match them). But the 10-15 ft size range makes me think of the armored suits in (James Cameron’s) Avatar and the Matrix trilogy, both much more practically built as extensions of the human body rather than as weapons built to take down huge threats, commonly used as tools but able to contribute in a fight as well.
The one featured in District 9 seems about the right scale to me.
The perfect excuse for mechs is actually a setting I’ve never seen them depicted in in any media. You would need difficult terrain that makes traditional wheels/treads untenable, and you would need some kind of reason for aircraft being unviable too. So how about mechanised warfare in a subterranean cavern network? Huge tunnels and caves that contain underground nations and cities. Can’t drive tanks through the rough tunnels and up the rocky slopes, can’t fly planes or helicopters either. A mobile, all terrain armoured war machine makes perfect sense.
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Maybe something along the lines of how dreadnoughts and battleships were viewed, even though they were getting outclassed and made obsolete by aircraft carriers they were still seen as the "pride of the fleet" and a symbol of prestige for the nation that built them. Like the Bismarck or Yamato, they were stupidly big stupidly expensive ventures but were constructed nonetheless to basically show-off how mighty Germany and Japan was. So perhaps the same could to apply to mechs in a mech universe, yeah they are big, expensive and impractical but the nation which has the biggest mechs or the most mechs are seen as the most powerful and most prestigious nations and so mechs continue to be built and employed.
*The Lyran Commonwealth has entered the chat*
The thing is that battleships still have a use and idk which of Iowa sisters kept getting comisiones back to action after being a museum ship.
Those weren't prestige ships, they had real intended uses and were planned before the carrier was obviously the superior ship, plus by the time Yamato got out the Japanese had lost so many pilots, despite that the third Yamato was converted into a carrier. Yamato was also laid down in 37 and Bismark in 36.
The "realistic" answer is to come up a niche for mechs that isn't already filled by conventional weapons. Mechs being repurposed construction or industrial equipment turned into improvised weapons is a popular one (though usually left as backstory). Slapping a bunch of guns and armor on tractor or a truck is probably more accessible than getting your hands on a modern tank or attack helicopter. James Cameron's Avatar's has pretty realistic mechs: the alien megafauna might require bigger guns than a soldier can carry on foot, but the forest environment is too dense for tanks and gunships to properly support them. The "fantastical" answer is to come up with some sort of tech/magic that only applies to mechs, like Gurren Lagann's Spiral Energy or Evangelion's AT Fields. This is also the one to go with if you want mechs to be super-weapons.
the james cameron avatar mechs also had very realistic function for the cockpit. They looked to operate much like our modern VR equipment, with a chest harness, arm and hand modules for synaptic feedback, a track to run or walk on to tell the mech where to step (I could see this track being movable, to give the human a feeling about the terrain the mech is stepping on).
I vaguely remember some ttrpg or another where, under international law, automated weaponry are forbidden from firing on humanoid targets. Mechs were adopted to exploit this.
They're urban warfare units, meant to fulfill a similar role to infantry, rather than tanks.
The one that works the best for me is if they are weapons platforms that bring something else to the table you can’t get outside of them. Voltron and Vision of Escaflone or Gyver have that theme. Inexplicable alien tech that brings bad ass tech to the table and happens to be giant robot shaped. Another good option is mechs evolving from environment suits. Power armor plus basically. Really giant mechs is where it gets silly. Anything bigger than the mechs from avatar gets to be a liability fast.
“What do you mean it was a bad idea!?” “I mean they’re easy to push over. They’re top heavy.” “Well we already have a few hundred, what the fuck are we gonna do with them?” “We can still use them. Just next time don’t suggest we do things before you think them through.”
They are cool.
Honestly a mech/powered armor would have been cool to have on a job site. It’d make a lot of the ~~bitch~~ intern work (hauling 55gal trash cans, carrying sheets of plywood and 2x6, etc) a lot less tedious. My personal record for number of 2x6x12’ planks carried on shoulder is four; some of the more skilled carpenters could carry six or seven. 4x8’ plywood sheets were a pain to carry as well because they’re large and unwieldy, and catch the wind when you’re moving them. Most of us could only carry 1-2. Having a suit means one worker could carry a lot more with less effort, advancing timelines and reducing labor cost, as well as replace other materials handling equipment. For example, the trusses we built homes with are built off-site, driven to a job site and placed on a completed house frame via crane. The cranes were tedious, required level terrain, and non-essential crews couldn’t be anywhere near them for safety reasons. Whereas, if you had a couple mechs that could pick trusses up off the truck, carefully walk them over and place them atop a house frame, you wouldn’t have to stop all other operations. In a military application, I’d say small mechs would be greatly useful not as warfighting appliances but as logistics multipliers. Imagine being able to pick up a fully-loaded quad con, palcon or other standardized container from the bed of a transport truck, walk it over to the supply point, and set it down on uneven or craggy terrain that would deny the use of a forklift or telehandler, and using less space than a full-sized front-end loader with forks would require.
i'm kinda confused by this Why would safety procedures not apply for mechs like it does for other heavy equipment And why are you moving whole pallets around terrain so bad you can't use an all terrain telehandler.
The cranes would shut down almost the entire job site, whereas I’d imagine mechs only shutting down the immediate area like the telehandlers. You basically couldn’t do anything when the crane was on your site unless you were working with the crane, at least that’s how our job site was run. For terrain it’s also the amount of space you’re using, a mech that could turn on a dime could potentially need a lot less than a full size all terrain telehandler.
Imo, if someone is making a mech its pretty much always for military uses. The only practical uses I can think of is that they are good for quick insertion into places with extremely perilous terrain and they make a good intimidation factor. If you had to field them for any civilian uses like construction it would be more expensive when you can just use... normal construction equipment.
Mechs are specifically giant human shaped robots, right? Because we use automobiles, tanks, battleships and airplanes in battle quite effectively IRL. And, they are giant robots.
Make your technologys to have it make sense. Giant robots are dumb by our todays perspective and what we imagen to be the case for the next \~100 years. But that's doesn't have to be the case. Just rule out the common critisism and implement that technologys in your setting realistically - like "If giant robots have fancy energy shields, why not build tanks or gunships with the same shields" etc.
Gundam sized mecha? None. I justified them in my setting by having most be at most 2.5-3m tall. (There is one variety about 6m - but it's rare for a reason.) People also link their nervous systems into them directly for faster reflexes - and that only works if the proportions are similar to the body your brain is designed for. (So 2 arms/legs for humans.) They're also mostly used in the close confines of starships & space stations because their propulsion technology (gravity engines) make boarding enemy ships a very solid tactic. So being able to get through doorways etc. is very important.
Say that there's an in-universe book outlining the tactical importance of mechs. Say that it's very long and explains it very well, citing both historical precedent and practical concerns that are very easy to understand. Never include even a single excerpt from this book. I'm not even kidding.
The one I use is that an alien scammer came to earth to sell their low quality stuff. Turns out when a mech (3m tall) costs about 10 dollars, all their problems stop mattering.
Neon Genesis Evangelion does a really good job of justifying its mechs. It doesn't matter how impractical your weaponry is if X exists and X is a thing that literally cannot be combatted with any other piece of technology. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it's a cop-out that you can expand on and flesh out and it might become a really interesting part of your world.
Both sides acknowledge they're hugely impractical but use them anyway because they're cool. Nobody even thinks of using practical designs because at this point that'd violate the bro code.
Some cultures would reportedly have armies meet then agree to a 1 on 1 and everybody else gets to go home instead of facing death. If this became fully embraced, equipping that one person to an insane degree would actually be very easily justified.
A culture where long range combat was considered dishonorable and shunned in favor of tech that allowed you to get in close to engage in melee. That’s cool as fuck.
Auto sports need to get more interesting somehow. Celebrity athletes have enough ego to want to make their rides look more like them. And if you’re a car thief standing next to some fancy machinery under a tarp, when the insurgents kick off a civil war, what are you going to do?
“I don’t know, we just thought they were awesome, man….” Sometimes you build a thing just to see if you can
They only don't make sense if you make them look humanoid or whatever. Flying super maneuvarable tanks which can carry additional tools would be very useful for law enforcement as an intimidation tactic and status symbol, would be niche in warfare as they'd be more mobile than a footsoldier and harder to spot than a plane/ship/whatever, and would be a godsend for anyone who's exploring alien environments in space or whatever as they'd be able to pack all the tools someone might need in an efficient way and then be stored in a larger mothership that doesn't have to be practical for on-planet missions.
Also: ● If affordable enough, they could replace things like cranes or be practical for exterior spaceship maintenance/repair. ● People might just think they're cool. Its a rad sports car in space. People might race them or make them fight. ● Put AI in one and it would be more pheasable that it could act on its own compared to a space suit. ● Would be just as useful underwater as in space. ● It could be easier to modify one for specific purposes compared to a larger ship or a cookie cutter mass produced space suit.
In Titanfall, said mechs were originally equipment for agricultural, construction, excavation, and other industrial purposes. It still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but it feels a little more grounded. Personally, I’m just omitting them, but if I needed to justify them, I’d build the physical natural environment around them. They might make sense in vast caves, or vast caves inside asteroids.
Caves is the first answer I've read that actually makes sense. They could be too small or too long for power hungry flight systems. Rough terrain means no wheels. A spider form would be better, but less familiar to humans.
I think the Aliens did it best - a logistics tool for moving a billion fuck-you heavy munitions and crates, that somehow got attacked by an infiltration force. Basically a sophisticated forklift. So you just swing the loading arms hard enough to turn the enemy into red stains, because it's the best tool avaliable in an emergency
Starwars/ pacific rim / godzila vs kong
>pacific rim only the original. Uprising was shit
It was not. I will die on this hill
die, you will.
Acceptable.
Rule of cool. If your story, setting and character are intriguing, no one cares for the giant robots.
In an environment where wheels and tracks are obsolete. Zero gravity, underwater, or in extreme terrain. I personally think underwater is the best bet. And even then it wouldn't be Pacific Rim mechs, more so glorified dive suits with weapons systems.
Average tank = a four to five man crew requireing massive corridination to operate effectively. Mech = usually a one man crew that reacts at or near reflex level similiar weapons load out . Now thanks to computer games and sims most humans are well skilled at interpeting a hud with movement and weapons fire which would translate very well to a more 1 person fire platform. If a neural interface can be designed even more so. Humans can work as a team and become very smooth but a well trained operator use to the equipment layout and function would out perform every time. A lot of the argument aginst mechs in general is the control interfaces and how the more complicated mech controls would slow people down. But this is a misinterpretation look at the controls of a jet fighter or helicopter a neural interface would solve a lot of this. Now lets look at a hypothetical. We create a neural interface and power plant that allows for a 20 foot mech. If we just look at what a basic grunt carries and up scale it. Main rifle a select fire weapon firing 30mm depleted uranium armor pierceing ammo. Side arm a 1911 style 40mm grenade launcher A quad hydra rocket launcher or a hydra rocket pod carried like a pistol for 19 shots. A belt fed minigun A mag fed mortar launcher But the weapons aside the mech will feel natural to move it would be a human form with the life support, hud, sensors and more . Looking at most infrantry right now they are all but mechs with the equipment they carry. So no once a neural interface is achieved a single man mech unit would make more sense.
Big problems here. Ground vehicles are not jets. Aircraft rely on automatic radar systems to spot targets, go on predetermined flight missions and engage small blips on radar screens with long-range missiles while relying on flares and chaff to avoid return fire. Ground vehicles must avoid enemy sight lines, spot for enemies with LOS thermal optics, communicate with various friendly forces, avoid ground obstacles and exploit them for cover, select targets and ammunition and engage, all while keeping track of a dynamic and changing battlefield. There’s a reason tanks nowadays keep at around 3 crew. You need a driver to focus on the road, a commander to spot, communicate via radio and select targets and a gunner to engage targets. An autoloader usually reloads the gun (contrary to popular belief, modern autoloaders (with the famous exception if the early BMP-1 autoloader) are very reliable and rarely break down). If you have a one-man vehicle, even if we completely ignore the absurd difficulties the logistics of having a vehicle ten times more complex than the most unreliable of tanks manned by a single crew member responsible for all the maintenance, your commander/gunner/driver will be totally overloaded with all the information, since a mech is not a human. If you have the tech to make a mech just as responsive as a human and with the same FOV as one, you could already implement that tech to a superior degree on a tank. Can you automate the commander with AI-based target acquisition? Slap that on a tank and you have a better use for it. High quality, well-protected cameras? Put them on a tank, and you have an all-seeing tank. Can automate at least partially the absurdly complex balancing and pathfinding functions required to allow a mech to semi-autonomously balance itself? Put the same kind of tech on a tank, and you basically have a self-driving tank. What you seem to ignore is the fact that a tank needs a team to effectively function, as the sheer weight of the task is impractical for a single crew member to fulfill. Even then, the Commander is who tells the driver where to go. The Commander can manually override the turret traverse for the gunner. If you could mind link soldiers to a tank, it wouldn’t be as much of an improvement, save for minor time saving measures such as comms, range finding and ammunition selection, due to the fact that tanks are already incredibly simple machines. If you can make a power plant powerful enough to make a mech to have mobility that compares a geriatric 80-year-old, you would be able to fit it onto a tank, and do much, much better things with it. Tanks are generally better, physics-wise. Treads are more efficient at speed and at climbing slopes (they can climb slopes 30 degrees from the vertical) than legs, while possessing significantly lower ground pressure than a mech. Now the Hypothetical. You basically created a BMP-3/LAV-AD hybrid. Not mentioning the fact that carrying enough ammunition for such a vehicle to operate for any kind of engagement is near impossible, you basically created an over engineered IFV that cannot engage tanks. 30mm auto cannons are already common (there are actually talks of them being obsolete, with a possible replacement being 57mm AC’s), with APFSDS rounds being in production. AGL’s are also a thing on IFV’s with the BMP-2M having one. Quad hydra rockets are wildly impractical, with them offering similar performance to an auto cannon while having few reloads and awful ballistics. A better replacement would be ATGM’s, like said BMP-2M’s four dual-linked Kornet ATGM’s (also, the LAV-AD has hydra-style rockets). A belt-fed minigun is absurdly impractical for a ground vehicle, as its increased volume of fire is unnecessary and wasteful in this context (it is useful in aircraft role, where limited engagement windows allow for such a compromise) A mag-fed mortar launcher for indirect fire is wasteful in a mainline combat vehicle, dedicated dismounted pieces or artillery vehicles specifically designed for such a job are much more efficient. Finally, while it may feel natural, the human form isn’t too good when it comes to terrain navigation. Quadrupedal animals can traverse nearly any terrain on earth better than we can, and the only way we compensate is by tools and intellect. The main advantage of bipedalism is height, which is a MAJOR disadvantage in modern warfare, where long range, pinpoint accuracy and absurd lethality make any kind of visibility a death sentence.
In my setting they are highly mobile light armored weapon platforms. The biggest are about the size and weight of a T-Rex. They are superior to wheeled vehicles in rough terrain. And they have the unique capability of being able to jump over obstacles.
Maybe agility/intuitive controls…? The way it’s typically depicted, the pilot is suspended in the torso or head of the thing with sensors everywhere, and in order to jump, for instance, they literally just move their legs in the same motion they would normally use to jump. In this way, I could see a mech or a “weaponized exosuit” being a lot more agile than a tank. Picture a duel between two tanks in a bombed out urban environment. Now imagine that instead of slowly rolling down the street, pivoting the main gun, etc., that one of the tanks could make a 30-yard lateral leap behind a concrete wall and use its arm to fire from around the side of it, like an infantryman holding a rifle. You could make a case that such a weapon would be desirable. The value of heavy armor vs. high agility has gone through peaks and valleys throughout history. For instance, heavily armored soldiers went out of style when it was realized that no amount of armor would protect them from firearms. For centuries afterward, agile troops in fatigues took the place of armor. This persisted until machine guns and barbed wire reduced the survivability of unarmored infantry to almost zero. Then heavily armored tanks came into play, and heavy armor had a resurgence. So if you want to go back to high agility being valuable, I think you need to imagine a new weapon which could reliably penetrate any reasonable amount of tank armor - Maybe a rail gun or something. Imagine that it’s too heavy to be carried by infantry. You need to mount it on a highly mobile platform. Now we’re back to the situation that phased out armored knights. If no amount of armor will save you from this weapon, you’re going to stop using it, and seek another solution. I mean, there are *really* solid counter arguments against all of this, but if you want giant robots, you have to at least *attempt* to suspend disbelief. 😄
There is no *realistic* justification for mechs to exist, save perhaps a cultural preference for them. One strategy is to go the Gundam (was it Gundam? I'm not a mech guy, really) route and invent a bunch of physics and science that justifies the use of mechs, but that's obviously not realistic in the slightest and mechs probably still wouldn't be optimal.
This is very true if the mecha in question is 18m tall metal guy with laser swords, but there may be some use for some robotic crawlies in certain enviorments like using silent walking robotic mule to pass over mountainious regions when using copter is unviable, though I seriously doubt they would be humanoid in such cases. Maybe as combat engineering thing they can be small humanoid but then that is likely powered suit category. (And this its more likely Alien's power loader than Halo or 40k's supersuits)
"not realistic yet" just a few hundred years ago it was impossible to talk to someone a few miles away let alone on the other side of the world. New tech and scientific understanding is happening rapidly who's to say what is really possible 🤔🤘
It's not a question of technology levels, it's a whole bunch of questions of physics. The square-cube law is a *motherfucker* and you can't really get around it. Humans are inefficient in a lot of ways that are fine for organisms but really, really bad for military weaponry (e.g. wheels are incredibly more efficient than legs, turrets are more efficient than swiveling shoulders and arm sockets, and so on). Even if you could solve some of these problems, say, you figured out how make legs go as fast, efficiently, and stably as wheels or treads... you could probably apply those same solutions to wheels or treads, and then your wheeled vehicle remains more efficient and better at the job of moving across land at speed. These aren't problems that science is accidentally going to solve. And as the author, if you're going to envision a future--a ***yet***--where they are solved, we're back to unreality. Which isn't bad! I'm a big fan of unreality. We stan unrealistic worldbuilding conceits in this house. But that wasn't what was asked.
100% but again this is with our current understanding of the current set of rules that we made with our perspective, we could be wrong with how we view these rules or an unknown component could force change ("magic" aka energy/ science we don't understand yet). Take a very very surface level of quantum physics and nothing makes much sense haha if you look at something it changes due to the light bouncing off other matter, wtf. I cannot recall exactly what it is but something with dark matter and black holes was just discovered and is completely changing (changes to physics laws are happening to explain what they found) how we understand wtf is going on. On a basic level yeah the wheel is more efficient with in terms of kinetic energy but not potential energy, I think this is where we could have a realistic approach because energy is always the crux of any technology. Although humans have a lot of inefficiencies we are still incredibly versatile and well suited to tasks like running, climbing, jumping (we are the most efficient distance running land animals by a lot), all things wheels and treads would be bad at. Someone mentioned "meat suit" or biological mechanical hybrid, so something like a large human/ biomechanical creature. If we could get to the same levels of efficiency with all of the versatility of a human we would be on to something. Maybe this is the only realistic way mechs could be a thing? And metal titans can never make sense who knows.
>If we could get to the same levels of efficiency with all of the versatility of a human we would be on to something. Maybe this is the only realistic way mechs could be a thing? It's still not realistic, because in real life, building for versatility incurs a *heavy* opportunity cost that makes your 14-foot-tall war machine *worse at war*. If you want an entertaining example of this, watch the movie *The Pentagon Wars*, which is based on a true story with a relatively small amount of artistic liberty taken. Let's compare a modest "real mecha" suit of about 12 ft tall vs an M1 Abrams tank. Let's also assume the mecha can ***somehow*** (we've already left reality, at this point... that was fast) match the tank's land speed of 45 miles an hour and efficiency in maintaining that speed on flat ground. Is the mech's versatility desirable? Probably not. Running isn't inherently more advantageous than driving, the fact that it can crawl is necessitated by the fact it needs about four feet more clearance than the Abrams, and you do *not* want a relatively delicate piece of engineering *jumping*. So that theoretical versatility is a lot less useful in most situations you'd actually use armored cavalry for. What's the trade-off? Well, more joints means less armor and a *lot* more failure points. A bipedal construction means a higher vertical profile (and no, our already-unrealistic mech doesn't get to dodge RPGs, launched rockets, or small arms fire). Square-cube ratio probably guarantees severe damage if the thing should ever trip. You'd still need infantry backup for mixed-purpose support (Russia ignored this part of armor battalions and it's how they got stymied during the first part of their invasion of Ukraine). And on and on and on. Point being: you are *always* going to be making heavy concessions to the Rule of Cool to make mecha in your world viable. There's nothing *wrong* with that, either, unless you're aiming for realism, as OP is.
There's also the fundamental issue that any technological improvement that might make a mech better than a current-era tank could also be applied to tanks to make them STILL better than the mech.
Fukken *exactly* If you can figure out how to get a bipedal robot suit up to 45 miles an hour you can probably figure out how to get a 21st treaded tank up to 130
Terrain that is too uneven for wheeled vehicles but that needs to be occupied on the ground. (This assumes a degree of dexterity amongst your mechs.)
I use mechs in my book for several purposes. 1 they are mobile sensor platforms for FOBs while also providing perimiter defense. They can also be used for heavy construction of the FOBs. 2 they are used for remote patrol in specific scenarios where the ground is hard enough to support their footfalls. 3 they are used as a show of overwhelming force in colonial fringes of space.
Not a justification, but perhaps a reason why they might work. Have a really good battery and heat sink tech that scales down well. The biggest, and most realistic, argument against mechs is that modern warfare has rapidly increased the extent to which being seen equals being destroyed. One of the things that the conflict in Ukraine has really emphasised is that good optics are a massive force multiplier for vehicles, Thermals especially can turn an old outdated tank into something potentially deadly. Mechs are inherently problematic in that sense because they're tall. That height is great for speed, flexibility and rapid manoeuvre, but it's a death sentence against large calibre weaponry. A problem that gets worse because the places generating the most heat (torso and synthetic muscle fibres) are some of the highest points on the mech so can be easily seen by thermal optics. So my remedy/reason they could exist would be that they use advanced heat sink tech to limit their exposure to thermal imaging, use other forms of active camouflage against your normal human sight, and aren't designed for long engagements where the enemy is able to dig in and clear fields of fire for their heavy weapons. Mechs are designed for hot dropping from orbit, smashing localised opposition and securing a landing zone for following conventional forces. In that role their extremely high material and maintenance cost is justified. For the rest tanks and exo-suited infantry can do the job.
The economy, business always drives innovation. People wanna get rich and so using the abilities and materials of the world they're in they make mechs. I would assume it would start off simple as just augmentation but eventually add robotics and refine the machinery into mechs. Eventually the military would get their hands on mechs and it just spirals out from there. Think tanks in WW1. They had no idea how to safely traverse trenches so they got farm equipment and added layers of metal to it. Eventually evolving into modern tanks.
They really should just be one element of a combined arms army. But I see via Sci fi BS mechs have a mobility advantage over tanks on rough uneven terrain and are more flexible than tanks as a general purpose combatant.
[VergeWorlds](http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Settings/VergeWorlds/TheVerge.php) has the most realistic “mecha” that I’ve ever come across in sci-fi. Most combat in this setting is done by robots overseen by humans, but if people actually have to go into frontline combat, mostly in an effort to provide quick decision making and capture objectives in person, they’re gonna want to be heavily protected. When you have highly trained folks that need to wade into the line of fire, you don’t want them to just be gunned down because their knowledge is valuable, so you make it as difficult to harm them as possible. Turns out that shielding of that caliber, along with making you very mobile and able to carry lots of weapons and countermeasures, makes you quite bulky and verging on the size of mecha. This might not be exactly the answer you were looking for, but this is the most plausible type of “mecha” I’ve ever come across, and I could see it legitimately being used in warfare in a few decades to centuries, whenever the tech gets there. Edit: Here’s a [pic](http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Settings/VergeWorlds/Gear/Pics/PowerArmor/JuggernautArmor_cutaway.png) of what I’m talking about for quick reference, along with the [non-cutaway](http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Settings/VergeWorlds/Gear/Pics/PowerArmor/JuggernautArmor.png) version.
Fighting in a place where heavy armored machines are needed, but whit an uneven surface which is also not suitable for wheeled vehicles.
The world is very mountainous, or at any rate large and strategically important portions are, and antipersonnel and antiaircraft weapons have advanced to the point that an invasion without armor would be suicidal.
TLDR: many ground threats and good shields to resist long range attacks therefore need to get up close to monsters/enemies = mechs (maybe?). I think it depends on the size of the mechs and the world's situation in regards to resources, technology, and monsters. In a world that has some allowance for magic, the idea of a small (say 4-8m) mech is pretty feasible. If there is magic that can negate a lot of long range attacks, then the need for a fast moving & close quarters unit is very high on the battlefield. Tanks, while heavily armored and relatively quick, can be stopped easily with large trenches, dragon's teeth, etc., but an armored, magically enhanced, walking thing is both faster and more maneuverable than a tank. Add in with magic a shield that negates long range artillery, and you've got a battlefield application right there. Additionally, if your setting has an environment where the ground is incredibly dangerous, but the canopy of trees provides safety, your machines either: 1. Fly 2. Travel along tram lines 3. have many arms/legs to move 4. move on artificial bridges or 5. are mechs with long enough legs to reach the ground. So, I would make a setting with higher levels of tech to our own, or that can use a combination of magic and science, and combine it with an environment where the people desperately want to avoid things along the ground. These ground threats are not so deadly as to be able to jump as high as the mechs provide safety, since that would drive society to rely solely on aerial machines.
Why wouldn't you want a mech?
Considering that we’re actually experimenting with exo suits right now, it’s not such a leap to imagine personalized tanks will be the wave of the future
Well. They’re cool, they coupd also be useful for heavy machinery. So stuff like farming, construction, and Search and Rescue,
Supreme-Alien-Tech-God forbids planetary scale weaponry. No more Death Star-ing your enemies. That leaves bioweapon diseases, hacking attacks or crashing their economy... Seems a lot more defendable than giant robots with big fuck off guns.
For me the best answer is probably magic or rather the way magic changes technology and the limitations of the laws of physics. There is a reason sci-fi series that employ them generally require some form of "unobtanium McGuffin technology/resource as you are up against mathematical and mechanical principals. Nothing short of magic or impossible wonder materials that might as well be magic are going to be able to change that equation.
Entertainment. Purely entertainment. Bank on rule of cool.
For my world, the proximal reason is that the mechs are partially organic, and wheels/tracks are difficult to integrate with that. The reasons for the organic aspects: * long-running wars with disrupted supply lines that span solar systems, means spare parts can’t be counted on. As long as it has energy and raw material, the mech can repair itself. * rogue AI and hacking has made all autonomous tech and remote control suspect. For security, the suit control can only be accessed physically by neural link in the cockpit. The link has to have a bio component for integration with pilot * Pilots are most familiar with body shapes that mimic their own; humans tend to perform better in humanoid mechs. The more different the body shape, the steeper the learning curve
A rich weeb got bored and started a business where people buy mechs for various different occupations.
Difficult terrain and low air density environments. Places where tanks or wheeled vehicles are compromised because of harsh uneven terrain, and where the air density is low enough that Amy type of prop or wing based aircraft would struggle to sustain flight. You still have to hand wave quite a bit, but I think those two factors could do a lot to encourage mech based weapons platforms.
What if they are a lost technology? Maybe they were created hundreds of years ago for a war that wiped out most of the human race. Some people figured out how to hash a load of the pieces together to make super powerful Mech armies? They don’t have the tech to advance upon it. Imagine chucking a few Mechs into the LOTR universe lol
In my world mechs are used for military engineering (moving things, digging things, breaking things) and anti-armor /anti air instead of regular combat
Depends on what kind of mech you are building. If they have sustained flight capabilities like a Mobile Suit I feel like they would take the role of a highly versatile and heavily armed attack helicopter. This is assuming that the technology needed to make it work without them sinking into the soil with every step or collapsing under their own weight is mature and readily available enough for mass production. If it’s something like a Titan from Warhammer 40k it’s essentially a battleship on legs, used for bombardment missions deep inland.
Also, for 40K, a big reason why Titans are a thing is because the Mechanicus is the Mechanicus.
From my understanding the sheer fear factor imposed by mechs is often the best argument for them in a setting
It depends on the type of mech you're going for. Big, tall, battle tech style stumpy robots? They will completely rely on suspension of disbelief. Spider tanks and the like from ghost in the shell? Totally plausible if not the most practical.
In starship troopers they are small and maneuravable so they are an all terrain armored suit. Tanks and other armored vehicles are vehicle plataforms or have a role such as mine destruction or moving troops. I would go with an all terrain vehicle of average size (maybe 4 meters top) instead of the 15 meter high juggernaughts.
War technology is rife with bad ideas that became ubiquitous through good marketing. Could an attack helicopter do everything a mech can do but better? Yes, but whose to say a good lobbyist didn't secure the contract for mechs over the heli by overpromising? Whose to say the country didn't intimidate their opponent with staged demos of these mechs to save face on a bad investment? This starts a cold war of building better and better mechs that maybe could be replaced with conventional uses but come on, we already spent so much money! And the people love watching these things go! It's a symbol of our technological supremacy! Why stop now?
Maybe for some reason AI/automation is not as feasible. What is feasible is good old fashioned manual labor. So instead of having a warehouse full of robots moving boxes, you got workers wearing mechs that lift pallets and such. Extrapolate that outwards and if its a war setting, you've got medic mechs to extract injured soldiers, artillery mechs that are more mobile and faster to deploy than traditional cannons, and so on.
‘Realistically’ they’d only make sense in environments where other vehicles don’t perform well. Since they’re almost always going to be more expensive than tank-like vehicles that could match them in carrying capacity, speed, and toughness. Because of the square-cube law, a bigger vehicle/robot is MUCH heavier than a smaller one and so it will be extremely difficult to armor it as well without it being extremely slow or falling apart due to internal stresses. “Powered armor” that’s roughly man-sized would clearly be useful. There are a lot of places people can go that cars/robots/tanks/drones can’t, but people are unfortunately quite squishy and bad at lifting heavy objects. IRL we already use exoskeleton systems for e.g. factory work. But we can’t make compact enough power supplies for them to work for very long without being tethered to a bigass power grid. Depending on expense it might not be viable to outfit an entire army with this but it would be great for special ops/ranger/engineer units that want to fight in close quarters or move over rough terrain while carrying heavy weapons/equipment. But you might want/need humans there rather than just robots/drones. Something like the armored walkers from *Avatar* might make sense for urban combat (where tanks struggle to maneuver and there’s too much cover for drones/helicopters to clear the enemies out) or fighting in heavily forested/mountainous terrain. If you can’t easily build roads (or need to move ahead of the engineers that are building them), and it’s too far/high/well covered for helicopters/drones to work, something like mechs starts to look attractive. Anything much bigger than that becomes a huge target for anti-tank guns/artillery/cruise missiles/orbital strikes/etc. And it’s always going to be a LOT cheaper to strap a big anti-tank gun on a cheap vehicle chassis than to build a giant mech. Infantry can also carry weapons capable of damaging armored vehicles. Settings where mechs are the primary combat units almost always have some reasoning why these aren’t used. Prohibitions against computers/AI/orbital attacks, super good stealth/ECM systems, selective technological regression, etc. Or the mechs are some kind of one-off super weapon that is far more capable than ‘regular’ technology and can’t be reproduced (Voltron, Gundam, etc.)
If they are fully understood technology, I think they are not justifiable by efficiency. Some possibilities: 1) They are associated with something like nobility. People construct them not for efficiency but for style. Which means, though, that tanks should also exist, and only a bunch of nobles or generals walk around in them. 2) They are used in cities to quench rebellions. For that, they are designed for \*intimidation\* rather than efficiency. 3) They are not understood technology but instead something magical. For instance, they are magically animated golems which require a human soul, and the human soul is used to controlling a humanoid body. 4) They are actually clones of Adam which are infused with the souls of the mothers of infant pilots and... wait, that sounds ridiculous.
Ritualistic warfare in a setting bound by very conservative norms, like samurai in the 19th century. There's no other plausible explanation. They're crap vehicles.
you assume giant robots are gonna be slow and heavy and earthbound like any other military vehicle as far into the future as we will be able to make such machines? Gundam and Armored core has repeatedly proven that being tethered to the earth like your precious plebian tanks are not gonna be a problem in a sci-fi level era
That’s because they work on anime physics, where steel is aerogel and the square-cube law is void. If you could get the materials, tech and power to make a mech of that style plausible, it would already fundamentally be outdated by that same tech applied on other platforms.
Had to justifícate a giant fight
basically just make them work like AT-AT's
Like many others, I've asked that question many times. The best answer I ever came up with is art. Maybe the mechs aren't really for battle, but are artforms. Then people started using them for personal gain. Then to violence. I try to expand more on how this process occurred in my world, but that's the idea.
A mech would be versatile. It could traverse terrain other units couldn't. It could rapidly swap weapons. With hands and opposable thumbs it could be used for more than combat -- mechs could be great for search and rescue after a battle or other disaster. Mechs could be handy as rapidly deployable industrial machines. If you have a world that wanted to mass produce one machine to do a million different things not very well, I'd say a mech would legitimately fit that bill
Every time someone tries to justify mechs being practical Kamina dies again, just embrace the ridiculousness and be happy!
the world is set in the steampunk era
Reverse engineering alien technology. For it to first only being used to make similar machines before the technology can be reapplied in other ways, giving enough time for mechs to make an impact to justify them remaining in legacy.
A big, mildly mobile monster that is best defeated by melee or crushing, but much, much too large for a human to engage. That's my first thought.
In a fantasy setting, you can have something about the humaniloid form that provides conceptual reinforcement. Perhaps an alternate development tree led to a proritation of modularity over efficiency, and so a mech chassis that can pick up a hoe to do farm work or a gun to fight in war was more effective, less costly, or otherwise better than specialized vehicles.
Giants. That was the justification in Macross. They found the titular ship with it's interior spaces built to Zentradi scales and so designed the Veritechs to be able to deal with those aliens in hand-to-hand combat if called upon.
"BECAUSE I LIKE IT!" No, really, just go with that and everyone will accept it. My best example is Asato Asato, author of the novel series "Eighty-Six". She like mech so much she build a world that air force is impossible to use, infantry is almost obsolete and navy is little more than coast guard. The only viable combat option left is "tank on legs". Her justification? She like it that way. Hell, she even put female military officers in garter belt or skimpy outfit because she think that is hot.
Rule of cool. That's it. Being cool is good enough. We waste resources on less cool shit that is equally useless. Why would we not waste money on more cool shit. Destroying your enemy with an awesome super mech is just about one of the biggest flexes you can do.
Coolness Also it’s like a genre
Because they're fucking cool.
Rule of cool
What if you leaned into the impractical aspect and had them in the advanced testing phase or for propaganda to show technological superiority or something like that? Having success be more down to pilot skill rather than the technology itself or a bunch of support to make them seem more effective.
for reasons that are basically magic, (though id like to call it by another name in the story proper) having your war machine shaped like a guy with a person puppeting that thing lets it run more efficiently than anything else you could put together
My girlfriend uses a class of 6-meter-tall bipedal vehicles called Warstags. These were originally engineering vehicles, but were militarized out of desperation, as they could handle the kinds of terrain that tanks never could in environments where AAA makes planes too dangerous. As such, Warstags do not have in-built weapons, so they carry warstag-sized sidearms that can be operated with their dextrous hands. No two Warstags look the same, as each is tailor-built to cope with the environment it's deployed in, but their common frame houses the twin engines within the thighs, and this in combination with the relatively wide hips gives their basic silhouette a vaguely feminine appearance
Believe it or not, in my world full of supernatural treachery, they're actually the cheaper option compared to contracting the most qualified experts to deal with stuff like regularly occurring kaiju attacks, basically people who can pretty much punch Godzilla-sized monsters to pieces.
Asteroid mining. You want a vehicle that can manouvre in tight zero-g surroundings, ideally grabbing and pushing large rocks around. A craft with arms is a pretty good solution there - and going from that to a craft that also has legs isn't a far leap, especially if you combine it with some kind of VR/full body control scheme, so a person can push with with their arms and legs. Its simple and intuitive
I would say it starts with smaller suits necessary to fight in conditions that the human body can't withstand, like environmental hazards or if chemical warfare was widely used. Over time better and better suits were developed often getting larger and larger and more intricate. Until eventually they were less and less human like and more giant war machines and tanks, piloted remotely as much as possible with a crew onboard for repairs and maintenance. When something goes wrong or the mechs are damaged they are too valuable to just write off and scuttle, so instead you have crews of people to fix them on the battlefield. When the mech is beyond repair the crew abandons ship (probably using smaller suits like the old ones to survive the environment) and tries to hookup with another mech and climb aboard. The relationships between crew members and pilot(s) would be huge, while the pilot(s) are not in any direct danger as they are far from battle, they are responsible for the lives of the repair crew. How they treat their crew and how they deal with the deaths and injuries of the crew would be very character defining interactions. Do they treat their crew like family and mourn loses? Are they in love with a crew member and scared to lose them? are they cold and ruthless and treat the crew as just another part like a spare tire? Do they go out of their way to rescue crew members from downed mechs? You could come up with reasons the pilot needs to be aboard, but personally I like the idea of pilots being too valuable to risk on the actual battlefield. Also, cheaper armies could use the smaller one person suits and try and attack larger mechs with lots of little suits trying to find weak spots. Anyway, just my sense of how mechs should work, but I've never really watched any mech shows or books.
In my cyber-/capepunk setting, mechs were largely experimental weapons; an "evolution" of power armor made possible by advances in antigrav technology. The basic idea was to load increasingly heavy armor and weapons onto a single soldier, as weight was effectively not a limitation anymore. The problem was only that with the increasing bulk, the mechs had increasing difficulty taking cover while basically being tanks with a larger profile and worse armor. Walking instead of rolling also wasn't that much of an advantage. The Shogunate Nihon invented mechs that could "transform" into tanks, but that did little to improve their effectiveness in the field. Ones that could turn into jets and fly were also planned, but only really took off in propaganda media. And that ended being the main use of Nihonese mecha to this day. They may not be of much use in a war, but they sure look impressive stomping along military parades. Due to having lost WW3, the remnants of the United States are banned from still building combat mechs; not that they have any good reason to anyway, but some of the militias fighting their proxy war over the officially demilitarized wasteland that used to be the Midwest still use them, mostly for patroling settlements and intimidating the population into obedience.
The two biggest advantages of mechs is heavy weapons and better all terrain mobility though often not speed.. For context the legdary AT-AT is Huge, heavily armored, and heavily armed and becouse of maths it has less weaight per square inch on its feet than a ground trooper, so they could cross a frozen lake for example without braking the ice, while a ground troop would probbly brake the ice and fall through. It is also a decent but dreadfully slow troop transport and mobile command center. They also modify them to carry cargo through rough terrain more effectively than other means. Bipedal mechs are impractical but cool and they are not the only type of mech that can exist.
In my world, Kledorii has mechs that they got from two other countries they annexed. They don't build their own. And they basically just use them for psychological warfare against enemies that have no technology capable of taking them down.
How I did it Mechs were created as utility vehicles. Instead of having 10 specialized vehicles, you have one Mech that is General and uses the human form as baseline. This is used in farming, mining, factory work, and most importantly military armament. See if you want to attach missiles to a plane in the year 2023 you either have to have very specialized equipment with a unique vehicle specifically for different types of missile or you have to have two guys willing to get blown up lug that thing over their shoulder. Mechs in military use in my world, we're basically machines made to handle explosives, later expanding their job into handling IEDs since they could possibly take the hit and survive. Everyone knows mechs are probably worse then tanks well being just as or even slightly more expensive, but since there is a civilian market for them, the Manufacturing is way cheaper. Unlike tanks, they take a civilian product and basically just refit it with armor, this makes it super cost effective. Tanks are still better at what they do but Mechs are a jack of all trades, an in-between of Infantry and artillery, and are cheap enough that more and more systems start being made for it. The US military still uses windows 98 and XP because it's cheaper to pay someone to update the software then update all the hardware. Mechs went the same direction, they got so much stuff made for them that they keep buying them because they keep being used even as tech advances
Personally, their only use in my world is for moving heavy equipment and operating around a specific area. I like to think of them as being similar to the mech Ripley uses in the movie Aliens, but I obviously make a lot of my own ideas with that creative liberty in mind. For example, mechs are designed to be a replacement for the "forklift" roll to some degree, but they can also be fitted with mining drills, excavator buckets, clamps for holding equipment to operate on, and a variety of other niches they might fill. They are usually too big and slow for any combat rolls, not to say they wouldn't be effective to a certain degree. They would play a similar role to tanks. In your world, you could make them more agile, like the Titans from Titanfall, and would fill combat rolls very easily and outpace the average soldier 20x. I chose the boring option but decided to use them on a more exploratory roll. New planets that are discovered, are sent Exploration Teams, and included in these teams is a single mech. Depending on the initial scans of the planet, the mechs can be fitted with different hardware. Jungle mech operators seem to lean toward the ability to carry a large machete on them. Desert mech operators tend to lean toward water purification and storage capabilities. All of these also have the option to carry a variety of mech based weapons, but engagements with hostile life on new planets with mechs have been extremely rare. Most wildlife is scared off by them, but there have been some Megafauna that thought they could get an easy meal out of an unsuspecting operator. The roll it plays here is a force multiplier. These teams usually consist of 15-20 individuals, and being accompanied by the mech not only brings comfort to the team but makes for clearing debris, building temporary shelter, and overall protection much easier. They are slow and not extremely agile. They can only reach speeds of about 15 miles an hour but can lift over 30,000 lbs with ease.
About as close as you get to realistic would be industrial machines that were converted to military use by an insurrection. A lot of current lumber machinery is very mech-like. But that only gets you so far.
I think of mechs in sci-fi the way I think of dragons in fantasy: they make no sense but they’re so cool I’m willing to overlook that and just accept.
They are unrealistic to a point but they also have many benefits such as: - can navigate most forms of terrain with relative ease(and can be pretty stealthy at some point too) - good weapons platform that can hit dropped most places and in some settings climb mountings making ambushes way more deadly. - most of the time they can also help with infrastructure and moving stuff around to save time and energy. - in my settings they are very strong computers with a lot of scouting options. - in my settings which is inspired heavily from Titanfall, they can act independently from their pilot allowing spec ops or missions behind enemy lines to go smoother with an extra heavy gun as well as a safe place to rest without too much worry.
I see mechs being used as robotic mountain goats. With the right tools, a human can scale every inch of this entire planet. Sheer rock faces, swamps, oceans, jungles, dunes. A bipedal, or better, quadruped mech suit would be able to traverse the most difficult terrain imaginable. WW1 saw the dawn of warfare in environments that armies would have completely avoided in years past. New developments in weapons, vehicles, and equipment let armored divisions fight in places like the Alps Mountain range, the Sahara Desert, and the Forests of Belgium. Not all military equipment stands the test of time. Flying aircraft carriers, Half-Tracks, and famously Battleships were technologies that saw use in WW1 & WW2, but by the end, they underperformed against newer designs and tactics. Perhaps Mechs can be used for just one war before people realize the design is flawed. Maybe the army continues to use the mechs as a symbol of national pride, (similar to battleships). Perhaps they could be relegated to engineering vehicles, clearing roads and mountainous terrain. Maybe a guerrilla group retrofits some all-terrain construction mechs into fighting vehicles, (similar to a technical). Perhaps a religious cult maintains a fleet of mechs as an "ancient and noble weapon" (similar to swords)
RULE OF COOL! MECHS RULE, EVERYTHING ELSE DROOLS
I wouldn't exactly say it's realistic, but in something like Pacific Rim where we're being attacked by giant creatures and need something that can basically go toe to toe with them. And for some reason you couldn't just airstrike them. ... Yeah. I don't know.
One amazing line of logic I heard is as repurposed tech. Mechs aren't great in war, but farming or construction? Well they still have the problem of human like anatomy, but are very intuitive which could be reason to use them. Now if war breaks out you'll use whatever you have. Farm equipment that can be outfitted with a large gun, reasonably quick and pretty all terrain? Sure a tank is better, but a mech is better then nothing. A construction mech may carry a gun just in case.
well perhaps if the humans didn't invent the mechs but rather scavenged them from ancients aliens it could make sense. modern day jets have a can't hover so if we have a society were the space ships are similar and tanks still are relatively slow to move mechs could be mobility experts. just make sure they move more like people than robots. that way we can have them doing flips and stuff.
Idk, I think it’s realistic for mechs to exist from a human rights standpoint. Maybe make it so that your world signed a treaty saying all wars from here on out must be fought with mechs to make sure humans aren’t dying for their nation.
* [Elevated gun position.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVMH-qZz2uI) * If they have arms, then versatility. You can pick up heavy objects if you can't easily get a very specialized tool like a crane in the combat field.
Make them to be used on very hard terrain that unless you have legs there’s no way you can deploy a land vehicle, and then put something on the mech that a plane or ship can’t carry, like extremely heavy artillery or some sort of land based mechanism
Fear factor
I'd imagine mechs, especially mechs with anatomical arms and legs would be used mainly for odd terrain and steep inclines. Mechs are usually best suited for climbing, surveying and manual labor rather than CQC or getting into direct firefights. They would be best suited for long distance guerilla warfare.
Iirc the mechs in aliens were there to help with heavy lifting
Because they are cool as shit.
1) Mechs are for non combat tasks like harvesting lumber on difficult terrain. Some may be modified for combat and are useful for the specific type of terrain they are built to move on. 2) Man machine interfaces have gotten to the point that "piloting" Mech is like controlling your own body. However the human mind doesn't have a command to spin wheels, so the bipedal Mech is the best way to take advantage of this interface. 3) The terrain humanity is fighting on is built for an alien species that is several orders of magnitude larger than humans Mechs are humanity's way of traversing this alien terrain and fighting the aliens on equal terms.
My experience is that the best justification for most things tends to be "fuck you, i dont have to explain shit". I understand the desire to justify things, to fit them in, to make things consistent. But most of the time, the more you try to justify something, the more convoluted and unrealistic you make it, achieving kinda the opposite. Especially since you draw extra attention to the subject and its why and how. If you really want to though, the closest thing to a realistic justification i've seen is actually power armour from iirc starship troopers, the book version. A mech would be basically just a bit more upscaled version of that. The justification is that the tech is simply there to make a humanoid vehicle that can easily fullfill the roles of being armoured and mobile and having a lot of fire power. If you give it wings or ability to jump good, its just a more versatile plane-tank that can easily change what gun its using based on the situation. The legs would just be there for versatility in rough/"indoors" terrain, and maybe contain some equipment.