There's a lot of settings that use giant mechs like Battletech and Lancer, but why don't we see settings where giant mechs are embraced as the next stage of transhumanism? It makes a hell of a lot more sense that humanity would embrace giant bipedal robots as an attempt to upgrade upon the human form than them using them as the predominant weapon on the battlefield while never being more than just a weapon.
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Infinity for example.
Mechs are not good for getting hit and never should be.
Mechs are good at being small sized while carrying infantry heavy weapons or all the backpacks of the squad (actually a huge deal)
That's not always true. In Battletech for example, mechs are better at taking hits than tanks, while also hitting harder than tanks, and being faster than tanks. The only downside is that they're a little more expensive than tanks, unless you're transporting them across space, in which case they're also cheaper than tanks too.
Battletech is moronic.
Battletech is probably the most fair when it comes to tanks, I’ve seen combined arms armies that can compete and even sometimes out do mech only armies
Back when I played MWLL every now and then, I used to dominate dudes by using one of the hover tanks with a nice gun on it. Sometimes the smaller mechs or the longer ranged mechs could give me trouble but being compact, fast, and heavy-hitting made it pretty easy to outmaneuver and shit all over most people.
Saladin my beloved
You'll either frick up mechs with your high speed death cannons, or you'll drift out of control and impale yourself on a forest
I fricking love this thing. It's the kind of creation that would only come out of the BT Universe.
In the game sure, but in the lore mechs are very clearly dominant.
In lore, weapons struggle to hit a target beyond a kilometer. And that's not for hitting moving targets, thats also applies to stationary targets like buildings
Yes, and?
I'm very slowly making a miniature agnostic wargame for 6-10mm sci-fi miniatures. Smaller mechs are more or less like you describe, but larger ones go much larger and rely on bringing a shitload of countermeasures in order to remain alive. They have a full crew instead of a pilot and as such are more reminiscent of naval assets.
>I'm very slowly making a miniature agnostic wargame for 6-10mm sci-fi miniatures.
Every year or so someone puts out one of these and it is always boring slop.
If you can see it you can blow it up.
The easier to be seen the easier to blow up.
A tank by complexity and articulation will always be way more protected than a mech.
Infantry squads have to carry a lot of heavy stuff during days.
Armies are wishing to put even more heavy stuff on infantry.
Buildings are infantry sized.
There is no army without infantry.
Cheap and expendeable is the way for success.
Those are realities of the real world, anything that fits in to that would make sense for a mech/robot. Giant mechs will never make sense, small mechs are quite likely to happen in the future.
>"uhm, you're supposed to be disposable, where does this fit into existing doctirine?" gays when a chrome god crushes him underfoot
Zoom zoom says the under 1000$ drone when it disables the chrome god (or gets bombed in to oblivion by artillery after being spoted)
It was a hologram
Under 1000$ remember? There are as many as you want, there are even drones that deploy drones right now in ukraine.
Holograms are free
I also have mirages, after images and psychic projections, if you'd prefer
Don't forget that any military worth its money also has jamming equipment that would deny shitty consumer grade drones.
so funny seeing an actual underage doing the "nuh uh but my big brother would do THIS" routine
would
counterpoint, a tank is 100% critical space. most of a mech can eat a tandem heat head with no issues. noone is getting ammo racked by a random leg or arm hit
Your logic confirms how moronic battletech and you are.
Do you really think a leg is easier to protect than a brick? Do you really think spare space is something applicable to armored vehicles?
substantially easier, there's nothing IN the leg to protect. what are you going to hit me with, an anti-femur warhead? oh no! there's a small hole in my thickass leg that still works fine because its solid steel! however will i cope?!?
>a leg hit cripples the mech
does it though? its not like a mech is gonna bleed out, and with 3+ joints per limb its not like there's no redundancy either. in an age where smart weapons are designed to war a logistical and economic struggle more than a martial one the ability to wade through conventional munitions is hard to beat
>ill roll up some giant specialized shotgun and blast mechshot at it
and while you're doing that some random infantry squad will wipe out your entire company with mortar drones
There is nothing on the leg, ok then you have armored an empty space and added weight to your vehicle while doing so.
Meanwhile the tank with less weight has more armour and a bigger gun while being faster and having less surface preasure.
The future of the mech is not being big or being armored like a tank.
It's pointless to argue with you since for some reason you believe that battletech is something more than moronic 80s setting.
Who says i armoured the leg?
>the tank simultabeously has less weight, more armour and a bigger gun while being faster and having less surface preasure.
Ah i see, you're delusional
Nta but you don't put any armor on your leg and also don't expect it to be crippled on the battlefield? You sound stupid
> still works fine because its solid steel
>ok then you have armored an empty space
There's no point to continue if you lack the reading comprehension necessary to understand the concept.
>Does it though?
Yes.
>3+ Joints
Easier to destroy, more likely to fail.
>ESL nonsense
Nobody cares, mechs are stupid, and unrealistic, and very cool if you don't try to pretend it's anything more than an excuse for robots to punch eachother.
>Do you really think a leg is easier to protect than a brick
If somebody has a lightsaber, a tank is more vulnerable than a mech. It's like asking why fighters don't curl up into a ball and let people just beat the shit out of them, but instead stay upright and strike with their limbs. Because you'll get curb stomped.
We are currently at a moment in time when armor development renders many weapons ineffective, but that hasn't been the case for human history. We had guns and cannons at the same time people were wearing cloth uniforms just a few hundred years ago. If we develop weapons that can pierce through tanks like a hot knife through butter, suddenly somebody being in power armor walking through mountainous and wooded terrain with heavy cover sounds a lot better than being in the death trap brick.
> It's like asking why fighters don't curl up into a ball and let people just beat the shit out of them
Curling up with your arms and inwards is literally one of the more effective ways of avoiding getting hurt, fightlet, and the best fighters these days are all inverted grapplers.
That's because they're not allowed to kick the back of peoples necks. All the most effective ground attacks are banned. Going to ground would be insanely more risky if eye gouging was allowed.
>We are currently at a moment in time when armor development renders many weapons ineffective
Are you posting from the early 1940s? Armor is borderline useless today.
a leg hit cripples the mech
an arm hit, i dunno takes out its gun?
dont rationalize mechs. they are awesome.
let that be enough
>leg
Mobility is gone, then the mech is mission kill. Except unlike a tread, it's irreparable in the field and harder to recover.
>arm
Weapon storage unit. Detonation means a dead mech, destruction just a disarmed mech, which is mission-kill and can no longer complete its objectives. Might also mean a mobility killed mech depending on its balance, too.
>Those are realities of the real world
cool.
>Giant mechs will never make sense
Ok.
Still doing it.
>They have a full crew instead of a pilot and as such are more reminiscent of naval assets.
So utterly useless? Naval assets have been gradually obsoleted since the Kamikaze was invented. Even the US doesn't dare frick around in Iran's neighborhood anymore since they know a CSG would get dropped in ten minutes.
what a stupid fricking moronic post
They are just tanks on legs that’s why.
Can a tank punch? Can a tank dig a foxhole, or pick up a tree and swing it at an enemy? Can a tank rip the turret off of another tank with its hands? No. Mechs are not tanks, they are better.
>Can a tank punch?.. dig a foxhole...pick up...with its hands
None of the 8 mechs in your pic seem capable of any of this.
The one on the middle left can
Now make tank with same tech
Battletech technology is exclusive to mechs. You CAN'T make a tank as good as a mech, because only mechs can use it.
Not true. Mechs use same weapons as mechs. Mount same armor. They also use same power plants. Only difference is inturnal parts and motive systems.
>Mechs use same weapons as mechs.
But can mount more of those weapons thanks to their increased amount of surface area.
>Mount same armor.
But mechs are more durable thanks to fewer points of failure and more areas needed to destroy before they're disabled.
>They also use same power plants
Only some conventional vehicles use the fusion power of the setting, most are just ICE powered.
>Only difference is inturnal parts and motive systems.
The motive system of the mechs allow for both far more speed, far greater carrying capacity, much better maneuverability over rough terrain, and fewer crew requirements.
Conventional vehicles have precisely one advantage and use on the battlefield: They are cheaper for a planetary garrison to maintain. Which means that they're mostly used as cannon fodder by the local military forces and largely exist to die to show off how cool and amazing the mechs are.
You literally cannot, because tanks use different game rules and the battletech lore intentionally reflects the game rules.
Tanks are worse than mechs because the motive system damage table is extremely punitive, ammo always has to be in the hull and vehicles aren't allowed to run hot, there's no qualitative advantage available to vehicles. Mechs outperform combat vehicles in basically all cases unless the vehicle is designed to be extremely cheap.
Are humans just RC cars on legs? No.
Mechs are rarely depicted as making proper use of the bipedal form and rarely designed for it, but that is in good part due to animation being limited to what it is.
Protomechs in battletech are this, it typically drives the pilot mad. Use of myomer fibres (the robotic muscles used to drive mechs) are also used for limb replacement in setting
I too enjoyed id-0 op but also generally transhumanism focuses on *reducing* catastrophic amounts of wasted energy and points of failure which a giant anything will have in spades because the alternative is dying like a b***h.
This is an idea I've been building on. In lieu of some FTL type travel, people are able to remotely pilot mechs via psychic technology. The downside is you can't permanetely stay in this state although that's never stopped anyone from trying to.
Sure and then we'll just make everything else ten times bigger too because that makes perfect sense.
Because i wouldn't give up my dick for being a giant metal killing machine, nerd
>It makes a hell of a lot more sense that humanity would embrace giant bipedal robots as an attempt to upgrade upon the human form
No it doesn't. That makes no sense whatsoever. The benefits of just being bigger are pretty much non-existent. Nevermind the power requirements.
So why aren't humans trying to become smaller, and praising small people for their efficiency and usefulness?
>Be me, a real human being from the planet known as Earth
>See a fellow human with a height of 0.83 under median
>"Nice point of gravity, dude!"
>"Sweet matter-to-energy conversion ratio!"
>"Hey, is that a more compact and fuel-efficient shape for long-distance travel? Keep it real!"
>"I see there's comparatively less strain on your internal lattice for a human within your demographics of age and lifestyle. Yeah!"
Interesting World Wars trivia: taller men were statistically more likely to survive combat.
Why is that?
longer legs to run the frick away from explosions and artillery fire, taller and more leverage so more likely to win a hand to hand struggle. Feeding taller soldiers versus shorties is not a serious issue for any modern military.
>Why
Cause it's half bullshit. Depending on the study there's either no difference, or 0.1-1 inches of difference in height between surviving and deceased soldiers. This only covers WW1 though, is incomplete and has a small sample size, and there is no reliable data for WW2.
It probably correlated with general health at the time.
>giant bipedal robots
>upgrade
In what way?
Kinda like how car companies paid Hollywood to make it seem like cars can get a boy laid.
Why would I want to be a giant robot? If anything I'd like to be a really small robot so I can live inside a shoe, go exploring the drain, and wrestle crabs (nature's mechs) for turf rights.
It doesn't make sense for humans to be big, in general. Everything becomes more expensive.
Though it would make sense for transhumans to put on giant bodies for specific tasks, like construction or combat.
I read a book where people move their consciousnesses directly into fighters or tanks for a battle, then back into something more reasonable for day-to-day. In fact, sometimes they'd copy a single mind a bunch of times to make a unit that could cooperate perfectly, then after the war shove all of them back together (unless one didn't want to be shoved back, in which case it was allowed to become a new person).
Giant robots don't make sense for war period, but if you're going to have them it makes more sense that humanity's basically reached godlike tech levels and can ignore pragmatism.
Such as when 'conventional' warfare reaches a point where the collateral of ANY attack that can take on an equivalent unit or vehicle all but guarantees anything you could be fighting over will be vaporized.
At that point gargantuan punchbots become a 'reset switch' of sorts - a rule of engagement that, while it will EVENTUALLY climb back to such danger levels as THAT new tech advances, at least offers a few decades or centuries of conflict resolution not involving glassed planets.
What's this gif from? Looks dope.
Gasaraki
>gasaraki
Neat. Thanks anon.s
Ya better be prepped for Japan regaining the national honour lost when the Emperor surrendered by crashing the global economy through rice futures gambling.
gasaraki is good but it's a little janky
>why don't we see settings where giant mechs are embraced as the next stage of transhumanism?
Isn't that what the hot giantesses are in Macross essentially? They're giant mechas from the POV of humans but it's just because they're transforming power armor piloted by actual giants
Or hell Ultraman is basically the same thing. Or Gridman, kind of. Why pilot the giant robot when you can BE the giant robot
It wouldn't make sense from a transhumanist standpoint because it'd be wasteful. If you're going to go full robot bodies it'd be better to have human sized stuff because that's what everything is made for.
You could do something like pilots literally 'becoming' their mechs or something to that effect. With its own upsides and downsides. Maybe even a temporary thing like a GiTS style ghost transfer.
Armored Core 6
This is sorta the plot of the Armored Core series
or rather the plot of Armored Core 1, which has been retold about 14/20 times now