Why mechs are stupid

Four legs is a minimal base for stability--just ask any table. You could get by with three legs, but you you abandon bilateral symmetry , which virtually every creature on Earth has, and you also give up some basic redundancy.

A four-legged creature can get by on three legs in a pinch, but a biped isn't going far hopping on one foot. Also, being bipedal means that any rest state requires a change in position--you can't sleep standing up.

Thus, if a bipedal mecha were to lose power--or just be turned off--it would at best be left in a vulnerable state that was easy to push over, and at worst would collapse into a heap of mangled, unconscious robot wreckage. Sure, mecha are as tall as skyscrapers, but they don't have that handy bolted-to-the-ground thing to keep them from toppling in a swift wind.

Even with quadrupeds, stability can be an issue if you don't set up a low center of gravity. Case in point: AT-ATs. Biologically, most bipeds started out as quadrupeds and gave up the forelegs and four legs to convert them into some more specialized appendage -- say, a wing or a grasping, tool-using hand. When you can flat-out design a function-specific battlebot, you don't need to make these kinds of zero-sum tradeoffs. Which brings up another point The whole point of a hand is to grasp tools and objects.

That's what it's for. Now, if you're a giant robot, what exactly are you grasping, apart from the giant energy sword that exists solely to justify the creation of your giant hands? Again, when you're custom-building a combat robot, you don't have to make a generic interface like a hand, you can just weld the energy blades, rocket launchers, laser cannons and whatnot right onto the frakkin' robot where they can't be dropped.

Sure, you can pick up some cars and hurl them for sport, but that's hardly an efficient use of resources. And there are better climbing implements than human-style fingers and thumbs -- setting aside the fact that there's almost nothing out there with the structural integrity to handle the weight of a mecha trying to climb it.

Also, a lion's mouth for a hand is cool looking but hideously impractical. Then again, so are flying robot lions. What, exactly, is the point of being the size of the Chrysler Building, unless your job is to fight the Chrysler Building? Please don't, the American auto industry has enough problems.

If Godzilla shows up, I might spot you the on-a-lark tactic of meeting the radioactive reptile with an equal-scale automated countermeasure, especially if conventional weaponry has failed and King Kong is busy filming a sequel with Peter Jackson. But since reality is tragically short on kaiju city-wreckers, what's the point?

Most mecha are depicted as military weapons, but not even armed navies like to build things any bigger than they have to. Aircraft carriers are a quarter-mile long because it's a necessary length to land and launch planes. For small mecha, I think that bipedal may be viable. However, I think that it will fall short of expectations once it is bigger than what is essentially the marine armor from Starcraft.

My proposed solution is a hexapod or octopod mecha. The additional legs would address all of the above points while maybe keeping the weight of the mech down and probably making it easier to produce. If one joint is even slightly damaged the mech is going to come down. Human locomotion is extremely sophisticated and a surprisingly delicate balancing act. It could be worse than dead weight if it won't move properly.

What is the solution? More legs! In a hexapod mecha even if one of the legs is blown completely off it will be fine, in fact, it could theoretically still remain mobile with half its legs even if it is slow. That is a lot more than can be said for the biped.

Because of the square-cube relationship where things get heavier way faster than they get stronger its unlikely that a 2 legged mecha will be able to jump or climb very well, they will be dependant on a surface that can be walked on, even if it may be able to be more jagged or steep than a surface a tank could traverse.

It would have to have very big feet for balance and to support the vertical weight. What could fix this? Hexapods to the rescue.

It has more points of contact, therefore, spreading out the weight over more space. Additionally, with all of the legs it has, it's very feasible to say that it could jump. Not as dramatically as a spider, but being able to leap a short distance in an emergency could be life-saving. I theorize that with the extra mobility options it would never have to though.

It can easily traverse tall ledges, step across trenches or over roadblocks, and because of its many points of contact, it would definitely be better at handling steep slopes and jagged terrain than tanks or bipeds although I guess not as well as planes technically. Didn't I already talk about complex joints in point 1? But not enough! The very minimum a bipedal mech would need for each leg is 3 joints Yes, but also no. The knee joint is simple, it just needs one axis of movement, hooray!

But if you want your mech to be able to balance itself the ankle needs 2 axes or the mech needs to be moving its arms around a lot to throw its weight into the balance corrections. The arms moving around a lot seems like a bad idea for many reasons even if the weapons are not attached to the arms so I am assuming that the ankle either has 2 axes of movement or its a complex multi-part foot with either 2 joints in addition to the ankle joint or 4 total joints within the foot and no ankle joint.

And then the hip joint, even assuming simplicity, will need at least 2 axes of movement. If it doesn't then the robot can't turn its legs unless you want to throw even more complexity into the feet. So how does the hexapod fix this? Well, each leg needs exactly 3 joints, just like a simple bipod, but each of these joints only needs a single axis of movement for the robot to be able to do everything it needs to do. The joint attaching to the body only needs to be able to move in an arc parallel to the ground, and the two leg joints only need to be able to move perpendicular to the ground as you can see in my incredibly detailed and beautiful diagram here.

So while it may have more joints total, the simplicity of them allows a lot more options for what can actually be used to control them and how they are manufactured and serviced. Bipedal mechs kind of have to be taller because of the nature of how they work. The stubbier their legs are the harder it is for them to balance and move and the less benefit you actually gain from having them in the first place.

They are easy targets because of their height, and being an easy target just makes it that much more likely they are going to get shot. Being shot is bad, so being tall is bad. Hexapods are able to easily stay close to the ground, in fact, they can position themselves so they are only barely taller than the cabin cockpit that the legs are attached to and still locomote. They are also able to make themselves taller than their standard resting position if necessary to poke their weapons above a piece of cover or terrain.

Now bipedal mechs would have some sort of shock absorber on them for their weapons firing I am sure, so we can assume their own weaponry wouldn't pose balance issues for them, but what about taking heavy fire? Only having two points of contact and relatively small ones for their mass is not great when you are taking that much force straight to the armor plating.

There will have to be constant balance calculations and adjustments made even for just normal operation out of combat and their stability just gets even more calculation intensive and delicate once they are in rough terrain and required to move quickly while possibly under fire. I am not a physicist but it seems to me that if its armor cant take the hits its dead, and if it can take the hits it might just fall over because of its high center of gravity. A hexapod does not suffer from stability concerns.

Even with several legs missing it is simple to move. Additionally, because of its low center of gravity and proximity to the ground it almost cant "fall over" even if it does get hit hard enough that its many legs cant stabilize it. The hexapod mech has many advantages to biped mechs. It is able to maneuver through extremely complex terrain, climb very steep surfaces, stay low to the ground, can fit through almost any space that is at least as wide as the cockpit leg configuration for fitting through narrow spaces , theoretically be straight up faster, and because of their simple joints should be easier to manufacture and maintain.

They would be advantageous over tanks for their mobility in weird terrain because of their ability to increase their height they would be better at fording rivers. Tanks usually have Deep Wading but it takes setup time, endangers the crew, and any leak in the tank is bad news.

Why not just walk above it? Advantages in a large leg-driven vehicle would be the same advantages that are leading people to pursue legged robots : maneuverability in rough terrain. Dense forests, rocky hillsides, and urban cityscapes can all have barriers that prevent conventional vehicles from driving through them.

Steep hills, as well, can be impassible for a wheeled vehicle. A legged vehicle or robot, however, can step around or jump over obstacles, and regain its balance if it loses its footing. Human-shaped vehicles that are also human sized have the additional advantage of being able to maneuver through environments that were built to be inhabited by humans.

Stairs, for example, are useless to vehicles, but a person in a powered suit of armor would be able to use them without a problem. For vehicles smaller than cars, being human-shaped also provides the best protection for the human encased within.

Compared to something like a motorcycle or an ATV, something like powered armor will offer greatly increased resistance to hostile firepower for the pilot inside. The primary tactical use for using combat mecha would be heavy urban combat in areas where it is difficult to fit a tank or other armoured vehicle. Mecha have the advantage that they would be more manoeuvrable over irregular terrain and in tight spaces, and would provide their pilot a significant force multiplier in these situations.

However, Mecha, especially of the humanoid variety, would have disadvantages in open-terrain combat in excess of that of wheeled or tracked vehicles, in that they have a greater surface-area to volume ratio as a consequence of their design, requiring more armour to be carried to protect a given volume of vehicle, thus making mecha less useful for carrying weaponry.

Another disadvantage of humanoid mecha is that for a given volume, they would stand taller than an equivalent-volume conventional vehicle, providing a more exposed silhouette to the enemy. Finally, mecha would have the additional disadvantage of a higher production cost and more complexity in maintenance due to the necessity for controlling limbs.

As to why mecha may have been fielded in the first place, one scenario I posited for an RPG game world was that mecha originated on a continent where cavalry animals became plague-bearers, and where for various reasons effective chemically-propelled projectile weapons had not been developed.

As knights were unhorsed, they were forced to turn to infantry combat, which led to literally mechanised infantry which would use giant versions of infantry melee and muscle-powered missile weaponry. It depends on what you mean by "mecha". If you essentially mean a powered suit, then making infantrymen into superheros is a good reason.

Getting beyond that you start having to reach for reasons, and the practical answer there is life support the mech carries the pilot's environment with it. Incidentally, Heinlein explored both aspects of this to some degree in Starship Troopers read it if you haven't.

For example, in the tricky and various terrain that exists on and among other planets and planetoids there pretty much isn't any such thing as a non-mech equipped infantryman, and it appears to be simply impossible to delegate all ground-level decision making to AIs a fact we've continuously been confounded by in the real world. The great flexibility of delegation afforded a military force that can send actual humans to a site of battle even if primary combat is robotic will very likely make a mech-style infantry force a reasonable compromise in the real space age of the future.

If this were true, it is also likely military industries will be tooled to build large numbers of mechs, but perhaps not many tracked or wheeled platforms simply because the utility of such vehicles is drastically limited in most space settings. If the above assumptions were to hold, then a driving force behind the use of mechs in a terrestrial setting could simply be that mechs are the primary mode of available infantry.

It would be an organizational compromise between general utility and cost effective fielding of units. Unfortunately, though, the broader decision to double-down on Iraq-focused investments in the mid-aughts made this form of HMMV pretty much the only broadly available option for much of the US military, and quite a few aspects of force-on-force combat thinking had to change to accommodate this availability-driven fact.

Some of the reasons for general terrestrial implausibility are covered in user's answer read it carefully, and also remember that the targeting style of most large weapons is basically "point and click" so the insanely bad visibility of an upright machine is a bad thing. A big part of the decision making is how plausible is "plausible enough" for you? The idea we are going to build a mech that weighs dozens of tons and can ninja flip, John Wayne slap, or otherwise go Chuck Norris in combat is a bit dense.

Consider how much torque and oblique pressure would be applied per square inch on a single foot were a ton mech to kick while standing on, say, anything other than a carrier deck or solid granite.

Anything with soil would be a no-go for an even slightly agile mech. I think some kind of mech is more likely in the near future than we might think. Two major advances will radically alter ground warfare in the near future. For the last century, offense or destructive weapons have been more powerful than defense weapons.

That is about to change. Since WWII the trend was smaller bullets, at higher velocities if possible, but always with the idea that a smaller bullet against human flesh was just as good as big round, especially if you put several close together. But in the last 20 years, body armor has begun to reliably stop the most common round sizes, usually the 7.

The US has brought back the venerable M14 7. An exo-skeletopn that let a soldier carry a hundred pounds of extra body armor would be immune to most light arms fire.

This would set off an arms race between heavier but slower firing rifles trying to punch through ever increasing mechanized body armor. Computer assisted aiming will also require body armor. Todays weapons are largely about "spray and pray" compared to automated targeting, because a human cannot spot a target, or part of a target, aim and fire before the target moves. Modern crewed, medium and "assault rifles" rely on the ability to put enough rounds into the air in a small unit of time that some will hit a target.

Humans are just not fast enough to take aimed shots at other humans who can move just as fast to avoid exposing themselves to the shot. But a computerized system move faster than humans. They see in "bullet time" in microseconds and human scale motion appears either nonexistant or takes the equivalent of hours. There is a bullet stopping system used in VIP protection that detects incoming bullets by radar and fires a Kevlar air bag to popup and catch the bullet. That's how fast these systems work.

A human aimed gun would fire thousands of rounds across a field to try to hit some of the 50 opponents peaking out a trench m away. A computerized system would be able to carefully draw a bead on each individual fire one round into eye of each target.

It would be the equivalent of firing rate of rotary mini-gun that targets like a sniper with all the time in the world. The historical analogy here would overhead airburst in WWI, leading to the return of the armored helment.

The burst laid down such a pattern that almost everyone underneath got clipped. The only solution was to armor the head. This time will have to continue armoring everything, especially the face. Very soon, military units will move under a line of sight dome of an intercept grid through which no projectile above a certain size,not moving at hypersonic speed, will survive. Now, if you have a powerful DEW system, then crouching out of sight may not be as useful having elevated perspective to see incoming threats so the DEW can eliminate them.

Besides, given modern battlefield sensing systems, hiding is becoming increasingly problematic. Instead, you'd want a tower, or tall vehicle to put your sensors and DEW projectors up high to give them most perspective and range. Naturally, DEWs will become anti-personel weapons despite treaties. A thing that can hit a missile can hit a mobile human hundreds of times before they even begin to fall. Worse, they can hit individual parts of targets precisely as in eye,eye, trigger finger, weld the rifle receiver shut, then set of a grenade on the belt.

Now, the nature of armor itself might change. It has to face two threats, kinetic weapons and DEWs. Kinetic weapons that move so fast they can penetrate the DEW grid are likely so high energy they can't really stopped, so they may not try. Such projectiles might have to be slender and solid so the best strategy might be to just let them punch though.

DEW weapons don't penetrate, stop them on the surface, absorb or deflect the plasma shock, and your good. Anti-DEW armor is not heavy or dense but focuses no deflecting energy and reflecting plasma from vaporized materials when the DEW hits. Such armors to date are more thick and fluffy than dense and heavy.

Sometime a mist of water or certain liquid plastic prove very effective. The infantry will protect the DEW unit from someone running out a hiding spot and beat it to pieces with a crowbar. Battles will beginning with low intensity DEW attacks in the thousands targeted at enemy sensor systems which will be constant, followed by precision attacks on vulnerable areas like joints or the unfortunate unarmored.

The hypervelocity kinetic weapons will be shot at armored targets hoping their velocity will prevent the DEW grid from intercepting. Note that with hypervelocity weapons, hiding behind obstructions or even laying below the line of the ground won't provide much protection, as such weapons can punch through any building and dozens of meters of earth.

This will not be any place for civilians. The sensor suppression will be blinding. Automatic DEW grids will likely target anything that moves. Even if not, mere reflected energy either from DEWs or shattered material from hypervelocity rounds will threaten all unarmored individuals. On factor that will bring large vehicles, mech or not, is that the more powerful energy sources you can lug along the better your DEW defense and offense.

It will become a race something like that in battleships from where the biggest guns and armor won. Basically only the most honoured of the Space Marines who are mortal wounded are salvaged from the battlefield the rest have their gene seed extracted and put into a coffin attached to a Dreadnought. Another advantage they have over the Space Marines tanks is close combat abilities so that jump jet equipped infantry can't as easily get the drop on them.

Instead of gigantic mech you can use powered exoskeleton which allows a soldier to carry more supplies and armor , but require no control interface. These would be used in terrain too rugged for a tank. And you cab supply deployed units by caravans of pack mules like Big Dog who know "follow the leader". In less rugged terrain, tank will still rule, because they can pack more power into same cross-section.

One of the advantages of tanks not mentioned so far is defense against armor piercing ammo. One of the defenses is to have armor in shallow angle deflecting the damage , which is much simpler in tank than in mostly horizontal mech. Also, some infantry fighting vehicles are amphibious with very little preparation - try that in a mech. I think the question is not whether Mechas would be better than Tanks or not. Is infantry better than tanks?

It depends on the situation. So I think if we can build Mechas armies would use them for warfare too. Scientists have researched artificial muscles for a long time and I think if they become successful Mechas could be build. Many of you have given square cube relationship as a point against Mechas. According to this new artificial muscles they are at least twice as efficient as human muscles.

And I think this would at least negate that point. If we could build mechas I think they would be excellent against infantry units. Mechas don't have to be very large. Even if they are 9ft tall I think a group of them would fare well against infantry. To answer the question of "Why would we make a robot that looks like a person?

We know that the development of intelligence guided our species' evolution. As our ancestors became smarter, the ability to make good use of intelligence became increasingly valuable. To prehistoric hominids, that meant tool use, which required appendages that could effectively manipulate the environment in a wide variety of ways. So the most obvious reason for having mechs is that you need machines that can effectively use a wide variety of tools that are similar to those that humans would use, but on a much larger scale, or with more durability or strength.

This need for adaptability is going to underlie most of the reasons presented here. To give a plausible near-future scenario, let's say for instance that we want to send a construction team to Mars to build a colony for the first civilian inhabitants.

An individual mech might be larger than an individual construction vehicle, but it can do the jobs of many different vehicles. Weight is an extremely important factor when it comes to space missions, and a team of mechs would add up to weighing far less than an entire fleet of construction vehicles.

The example of Mars also brings us to another possible reason: you're fighting on a planet that has very different gravity than Earth. With human soldiers, you'd need to train them how to move and fight in many different gravitational environments, which could be very difficult: you could be on an Earth-like planet for one mission, a rocky "super-Earth" for another, and then after that you could be on a dwarf planet like Pluto or Ceres.

With mechs or robotic soldiers, instead of having to retrain your soldiers, you can just recalibrate them for the new gravity. Another reason could be preservation of combat experience, like with Dreadnoughts in Warhammer 40, Perhaps military training or willing soldiers have become extremely rare, but an injury in battle has put them beyond saving by conventional medical means, to the extent where they can only be kept alive by extensive prosthesis or life-support.

A Dreadnought needs to be as large as it is because it has to contain an entire suite of life-support systems. Now, regardless of which explanation you choose to use, you are going to need to also explain two things: first, why not just use an artificial intelligence, and second, why is an on-site rather than remote-control pilot necessary? Answering the first question isn't too difficult. There are sound ethical arguments that have already been made in the real world arguing that general AI should be avoided.

For instance, there's the classic objection that creating a human-like AI to perform a specific task of your choosing amounts to slavery. Perhaps the risk of tech-savvy hostiles hacking your AI is too great.

Or perhaps you'd go for something more like in Warhammer 40, AIs, lacking a "soul" or some other essential and intangible element of humanity, are not able to feel the Emperor's presence and therefore are much more vulnerable to corruption by Chaos. Or maybe they just haven't been invented yet. As for the necessity of the pilot being on-site, this can also be explained very easily.

An enemy could, with only very simple tools, easily hijack or simply jam the remote control signal. In the real world, this has already been done with UAV drones, and the US military invests considerable time and effort into keeping their UAVs safe from being taken over by hackers.

So while we might not be seeing Gears or Gundams or Titans anytime soon, it's by no means the most outlandish thing to ever appear in science fiction. Roles of the Abrams. Tanks have a significant role in war, if we could build a Mech it would be a boost in fire power and technology plus it could give the US an edge in warfare, Not saying other countries will do the same with the abrams and its mm gun, it is a powerfull weapon of pure destruction. Although it suffers in close range combat.

The abrams it -self is a heavy tank used mainly by the US military. It is an amazing piece of machinery. Mech's Role in warfare: A mech could be an astounding feat in military tech, we are able to create mech's its just that our military doesn't want to spend time or the money to make a new weapon that may or may not be practical.

Diesel and Gasoline would make the Mech loud. Go with the turbine-like engine but it is modified to take the weight of the mech. Tracks vs. Tracks: good traction, great with rough terrain. Tracks Cons: low traction on ice or other terrains that is flat and slippery.

Break when explosives are applied with great force and cannot be repaired quickly on fields. Loud when stopping. Legs Pros: Great on hilly terrain and best for urban combat. Open fields will give you your max speed. Better at traversing obstacle terrain by stepping over or around objects such as road blocks. Better manoeuvrability with swaying and left to right movements. Faster acceleration. Can be modified and Repaired with less time depending on the complexity of the leg itself.

More responsive. Optional for modification for various terrains from ICE to SAND X-shaped feet with spiked pins for ice and flat wide feet with v-shaped trends for sand Better stability and can stop faster making less noise.

Legs Cons: Constant repairs and evaluation. Can not hold as much weight depending on what type of system it is using Pressure, Servo or Gyro. Mech: any size cannon below mm Missiles.

Machine guns. Mech styles and loadout: Infantry: 2 Missle Pods and 2 high calibre Machine guns 20 mm Body type: 2 legs, tall and slender for good manoeuvrability Amor: High speed: Machinegun's if possible. Tanks have been the dominator of the battle for a long time since WW1.

If we had made the time and money to research into mech's we could make a super weapon and get ahead of most other countries.

Mechs can have the ability to climb, crouch and other physical Abilities Tanks cannot. They may or may not be practical in a situation but I am sure as hell they could get the job done. Overall it definitely would be a good idea to spend time into making these machines, we could also use them for construction, medical, firefighting, exploring out deep ocean, ETC. There are endless possibilities for design and purpose. It would cost money but It would be worth getting rid of old tech that is obsolete.

The mechs dont have to be huminoiid in shape you can make a sleek or bulky one depending on the job!. Though replacing all of the old stuff would create imbalance for the economy in the US, WE would have to make specialised Factories to make the mechs in the first place. I could take a lot of time to get the mech project going but it would be a super great idea. Other Info: Mechs need a good armour value to be able to deflect and take shots, though tanks can get better angles a mech still has the ability to make a fear factor and it has better maneuverability not saying it will dodge bullets.

We think of tanks as superior because most of our battlefields in recent memory favor tanks. But the fact is, tanks are useless on a huge amount of the earth's surface, because they can basically only travel over roads and cleared terrain deserts, plains, etc. In fact, tanks were quite useless in Vietnam. Since most of the land that people who own tanks want to possess also favors tanks, this matchup makes sense. But Vietnam showed us the limits, and almost all fighting was done by infantry and artillery, as well as bombing.

Consider also why nature has not created wheeled creatures: although there might be plausible limits to biology which discourage or prevent the evolution of such animals, we can at least consider the benefit of legged locomotion. Legs have one extremely obvious benefit over wheels: when a leg is injured, most creatures can still move.

When a wheel is damaged, most wheeled vehicles are in trouble. In general, the only wheeled vehicles which can continue moving over meaningful distances after wheel damage are explicitly designed for robustness e.

If a tank loses just one link of one tread, it is pretty much out of commission until the tread is repaired. This is a pretty dangerous position to be in on the battlefield, and it is usually safer to abandon such a tank than to sit in it while it is used as target practice.

We already have small [6-legged] robots which can learn to walk after losing a leg[2]. Even a bipedal mecha may be able to limp along or fashion a crutch if one of its legs becomes damaged. In a worst case, it can probably crawl, which may still be better than just sitting there spinning on a single track. Modern technology is quite often optimal-but-brittle.

When it works, it works great. When it breaks, it often becomes quite useless. Biology, on the other hand, tends to be good-but-resilient. Especially if I were trapped on another planet, I would much rather be in a mecha than a tank. If I got stuck in a bad situation and had to run, it may be easy to get trapped via terrain in a tank, and much easier to escape and evade in a mecha, especially if my enemy knows my capabilities.

Then you have damage resilience w. Humans are not dangerous creatures because we have giant claws we have puny, pathetic claws or sharp teeth we have tiny, brittle teeth or massive limbs for pummelling we have fragile hands and feet. Humans are dangerous because they can turn almost anything into a weapon. And that is why humans are at the top of the food chain rather than the middle.

So while a tank can indeed ram things, using its momentum and mass as a blunt force weapon, it has no ranged attack other than its main gun and maybe a coaxial machine gun, which have finite ammo stores. A mecha can fight as long as it has energy, even if it has to use boulders and debris as weapons but as the Japanese have taught us And even just jump jets would allow a mecha to clear obstacles which are totally insurmountable for tanks. The simplest way to stop a tank is called the Czech hedgehog[3].

This is nothing more than a few pieces of iron welded together. It doesn't even move! But it pretty much impedes the motion of even the most advanced tanks. Or, you have the even simpler solution of coils of concertina wire[4].

None of these devices would presumably stop a mecha. In fact, trying to devise fixed defenses vs. Passive defenses would basically be useless. Only active defenses would be effective turrets, missiles, directed-energy, etc. Mines, trenches, and hills at least force a tank into a particular path e. Then consider armor.

While a tank can presumably carry more armor than a mecha, a tank's armor is integral and is not easily or quickly replaced when it is damaged or consumed in the case of active armor. And the armor is fixed, and thus must apply to all sides of a tank which might be vulnerable front, sides and top. This makes a tank much heavier than optimal.

A mecha can carry extra armor as well, but limit the armor to just the expected line of fire. Just like a low-tech sword has "infinite ammo", a shield can be just as effective for a mecha as for a tank, but can be trivially replaced in battle. But the richest actors would just field all-mecha armies, because the mecha are more flexible, whether human piloted or remote or AI.

They consume less energy than aircraft, because they don't need to fly most of the time, and thus, they can carry heavier weapons. If you need to cover large distances quickly, you can have transports just like you do for infantry: both ground- and air-based.

You may even be able to deploy mecha via low-orbit rocket, drop-ship style. It's not safe or efficient to deploy infantry this way, but it might make sense for mecha. Finally, consider that mecha may serve a role much like nuclear weapons do today: the threat they pose changes the way nations behave, whether the weapon is actually used on the battlefield. Nations may simply forgo tank defenses and focus on defenses which are also effective against mecha. This might actually work in favor of tanks.

If nobody builds mecha, then this approach is not necessary, and nations just bulk up for conventional warfare. If some nations have mecha, then any nation which fears them will have to defend against them, at considerably higher cost than non-mecha armies.

Thus, everyone will want to build enough mecha to pose a threat, even if it is not enough to lead a full-scale invasion on their own. More then likely the evolution of legged vehicles in combat will not go directly to mechs.

More then likely you will start with a kind of power armor ranging from 8 to 10 feet tall. Their systems would not be fielded until they were at least as maneuverable as a humans.

The major advantage of them would be increasing speed, strength and hopefully survivability of the pilot. The increase in strength is what would make tanks extinct.

Right now a man portable AT missile is very heavy and bulky and the average man can carry 1. I think where Hollywood came close to getting it right was with the various walkers in the original Star Wars trilogy.

They were slow, clumsy and incredibly tough. They were big enough to contain a small nuclear reactor which is the only thing I can think of that could power such a monster, at least with our present knowledge. But Optimus Prime? Not likely, even if we could get our hands on some energon. Definitely based on elephants. Did you ever watch Thunderbirds? The first ever anime I watched was Gundam Wing. I eventually want to write a mecha novel series. So yeah. I get the scalability issue.

Most of my mechs are more Patlabor sized than Pacific Rim sized. Also humanoid shaped anything mech-wise is just ridiculous. Escapism at its finest. The elephant, which is maybe twice the height of a horse, weighs on average anything up to 5 tons. Whereas a horse, on average, might weigh only half a ton. And I suppose if we go back a while and look at the dinosaurs, we see the same thing in the sauropods, on an even greater scale. You must be logged in to post a comment. Skip to content Matthew Wright Science, writing, reason and stuff.

Click to enlarge the photo… In Pacific Rim , the mech issue was controllabilty. Like this: Like Loading Sixty second writing tips: fast writing and sedate revision.