I think the consensus is that anime style mechs are physically impossible given how fast and nimble they usually are, but if physics were no object would they be a viable solution to any real world problems?
I cannot answer this question objectively. Mechs are too fucking cool and I want to see them too much.
I think something along the lines of an augmented powered exoskeleton, or passive ones…
https://www.fieldtexcases.com/blog/medical-military-applications-exoskeleton-suits/
… could plausibly upscale into basically Power Armor… and you could maybe also upscale them into basically forklift with legs that you wear, from the loading bay in Alien…
I think those kinds of things are certainly within the realm of plausibility… presuming the power source can be made actually usefully weight efficient.
You can be a kind of up armored and up armed soldier, you can lift heavy shit, carry it a really long way, across broken terrain (that can support the weight).
Pair these with an active defense system, and they might actually be reasonable useful in certain military scenarios.
Its kinda like how just saying ‘drones’ is reductive… different sizes, scales, carrying capacities / payloads, ranges, speeds, methods of communication, propulsion systems, power sources … create a huge spectrum of different types and niches.
We have humanoid robots that can do bipedal locomotion pretty fucking well, without a pilot.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vW3QoaPnDGA
Pair a similar kind of software with something closer to a suit, strapped around a human, all it has to do is translate human motions to the scale of the suit, do intelligent stabilizing, kinda like how modern aircraft controls are fly by wire, not pure analog.
Now… would these kinds of things be practical, in terms of production costs vs actual utility?
No fucking clue lol.
Definitely rule of cool.
The problem is that they’re unnecessarily complex, and bulky, and don’t really offer any thing more than what you can get with more traditional platforms.
You’re wasting tech and effort on just making them functional, where a traditional platform could be made extremely capable with that same tech.
Take Star Wars walkers. Chop the legs off, install repulsorlift. Suddenly a slow vulnerable platform becomes fast and nimble and even harder to kill.
I love mecha, but the larger you are, the easier it is for things to find you. this is why tanks try to stay low to the ground.
and walking is a really inefficient mode of transit compared to wheels or treads. and keeping 50+ tons of mecha balanced on two legs while going up hill or on rough terrain would be quite a feat.
so no, barring tremendous advances in point defense (to counter drones and atgms), I don’t see it happening any time soon, and even then it’d have to be in response to some other pressure.
About the only advantage it has is intimidation factor. Kaiju are spectacularly intimidating, and a gigantic robot kaiju would definitely make some people evacuate their bowls on the spot. However there’s no edits you can make to the laws of physics that make it better at anything, from a tactical perspective, than a different form factor.
I doubt it. The logistics just doesn’t really work out. You can go over uneven terrain with a tank and you can probably pack a much bigger gun on a tank than on a mech, seeing as you have better support (treads instead of 2-4 feet).
Also, tanks are sturdy with thick armor with minimal weak spots. A mech with legs is an invitation for an attack. Disable one leg and the mech is not longer a threat, and again, limited weight on those legs means limited armor.
Also, I very much doubt you’d have a human sitting on the inside. Why would you? The human takes up space and could just as easily sit remotely and control the mech wirelessly, like how drones are piloted. Or even better, make the mech autonomous. If we have mech technology, we probably have that technology too.
So yea, nah. It’s a rule of cool thing, not an actual realistic thing I would say.
Also, tanks are sturdy with thick armor with minimal weak spots. A mech with legs is an invitation for an attack. Disable one leg and the mech is not longer a threat, and again, limited weight on those legs means limited armor.
Just to nitpick: tanks have a similar vulnerability: its treads. If you’re in a tank crew in an actual armored engagement and your tread is taken out, you’re likely better off bailing out.
That being said, replacing tank treads is way easier and requires less technical skill than replacing mech legs. Plus the whole tank would be significantly simpler to do maintenance on and require less fuel. Logistics is a huge factor in war, it’s why the US army runs the M1 Abrams on jet fuel with a fuel hungry turbine engine. It just simplifies the logistics
after “don’t be there”, next layer of survivability onion is “don’t be seen”, there is no advantage to walking robot over something with lower profile, like a normal tank
I love the idea of a survivability onion.
Edit: Lmao it’s real.
Don’t be killed
“Just win you fucking noob”
It’s your standard superweapon problem. Why put all the money and resources into a single massive weapon that can be destroyed when you could instead make a lot of smaller, more practical stuff for the same price? We don’t make battleship sized tanks, and not just because of the physics problems they’d have trying to move on land. Hell, we don’t make giant battleships for the sea any more either, and that’s the one place where there isn’t a physics problem.
What advantage is there to using a giant robot? What does it do that’s more effective than existing vehicles, drones, weapon platforms etc? Sure, it can walk over terrain that might be hard for some ground vehicles, but we already have shit that can fly. It could have multiple weapons to choose between if it uses them by hand, but we are still paying for those and could instead mount them on cheaper platforms and use them all at once. Other than style points, the only thing I can think of is the utility that comes from having giant hands to pick stuff up. Being a heavily armed combat crane is probably not worth the investment.
and that’s the one place where there isn’t a physics problem.
Actually there is a physics problem, but it came about after battleships were largely phased out.
The issue is the addition of missiles to naval munitions. They tend to use “plunging fire”, where they try to have a fairly vertical trajectory on impact. That means they’re more likely to hit the deck, not the hull.
Battleships have the bulk of their armor on the hull, not the deck. Trying to armor both the hull and the deck would result in a large amount of displacement (the allowable amount of weight when fully loaded) being used just for armor, limiting storage for ammunition, fuel, crew, and supplies and would severely limit its ability to operate for extended lengths of time.
Sure, a modern battleship could potentially only armor the deck with minimal hull armor, but then that would open them up to guns and torpedos, and missiles could be modified to have more level trajectories on impact.
And to further expand on your comment:
In modern navies, big ships are turning into a liability (The superweapon problem you pointed out). If you have the bulk of your power on a single hull, then losing that one ship cripples your combat effectiveness. Aircraft carriers gain a ton of advantages from being larger to affset those risks, but a battleship is just a big gunship, and that job is better served using multiple smaller cruisers.
And there’s even debates in the US Navy about whether to develop smaller carriers and have 2-3 of them in a task group instead of a single supercarrier. With VTOL and STOL (Short Take Off and Landing) being commonplace with the F-35, Harrier, and V-22, smaller carriers are significantly more feasible than they were 20 years ago.
Counterpoint: Liberty Prime throwing nukes like footballs
If physics were no object why not have a better tank?
Walkers generally have lots of problems compared to conventional warfare. Mainly they aren’t resilient enough to stand up to much more than rifle or pistol caliber weapons without some hand waving. Joints are super vulnerable if you want them to still move and you can’t mount as big a gun as you could on a conventional vehicle on something that walks. We don’t currently have something that is portable and powerful enough for what would be needed for most sizes of mech. Also depending on how tall your mech is they are way bigger targets for equivalent firepower compared to a tank and by virtue of following a human body pattern are less armoured.
So yeah if physics is not a problem then have an anime mech powered by unobtanium with vibranium armour and a giga buster gun, they could fill every role in a conventional military. Mechs are all about the rule of cool. If you want realism then maybe something like an exoskeleton to help infantry carry more kit or bigger weapons. Up to a little bigger than a person they could potentially be useful in dense environments like urban or jungle where things like tanks are vulnerable to ambush by infantry.
If physics was no problem, many things become viable solutions to real world problems. I’d go so far as to say that every world problem is, eventually, a problem of physics.
I feel like giant robots are only necessary once you have regular sized robots to deal with, and by then we would have likely found a better, more efficient tool besides “robot but bigger.”
Bipedal locomotion has some pretty big drawbacks. Like falling over. You’d be surprised how many people die that way.
Best not build trillion dollar robots that can trip and fall. You become vulnerable to obstacles, Mines, tripwires, and Ewoks.
Mechs as vehicles, absolutely not. It’s much too complicated and fragile, one mild hit and it won’t be able to move.
Small legged robots in large numbers is an other discussion though, and a scarier one.
Boston Dynamics got started making weird leggy robots specifically for terrain that’s too rough for wheels and tank tracks, so if there was somehow a need for a bipedal robot it might end up looking somewhat like a mech.
My guess is that legged ground based war machines are usually going to have 4+ legs for stability, though. Airborne drones are probably going to be way more common.
Personally, I hope we achieve a utopian future where war is obsolete, scarcity is history, and we build giant mecha robots and battle with them as a power sport
There’s a problem with legged machines in that they tend to be heavier, require more maintenance, and have a higher ground pressure for the same task/payload as an equivalent wheeled or tracked vehicle.
While there’s some terrain where they’re more effective (mountains), that’s fairly limited. Plus, if the terrain is too extreme then even legged machines can’t get through, so you’re looking for a goldilocks zone for deployment.
The Armored Core arena but for funsies and not as a side effect of corporate war culture
Just the other day I found out that One Must Fall 2097 has been released as freeware and there’s a solid community-built source port you can just download and play.
Oh I played the shit out of the shareware version of one must fall. Great game. Loved the RPG-stats tournament mode
Oohhh yeah. That game consumed a lot of my childhood! I found a browser-based port of it a year or two ago. Hearing the music again really hit some feels!
I would point to construction cranes as a case study in favor of mechs. At its core, a crane lifts loads heavier than humans or even teams of humans can manage. But as they are, they’re kinda slow and are finicky, requiring great care and slow operation.
If you had a mech, moving the raw materials up would be no big deal. Although one could argue that outfitting a crane operator with equivalent dexterous control of a crane would enable similar improvements, but in a smaller, stationary footprint.
