What reasons could a society have to use mechs in war? other than they're cool

Strict laws placed by the galactic federation prohibit the number of personnel and combat androids that are allowed in a warzone under pain of crippling sanctions.

To get around this, humanity and other like-minded ayy lmaos deck their precious handful of soldiers in gigantic fucking mechs because technically mechs are just very, very big suits of armor.

Because "Galactic Federation" is synonymous with "Red Tape" they get away with it.

Mechs are intrinsically pointless. Power armor is the best you'll get.

culture. mechs are the 'proper' way to do war. tanks would still be used since they're far more effective, but don't discount people putting arbitrary limitations on themselves in the name of identity.

>Except there's no reason to have legs in those environments. We already have deep-sea construction robots. They certainly have arms, but otherwise they're a box and a propeller

I never said they had to have legs.

They're all tiny, and their giant robots are just regular size robots to us

Different terrain. Tanks are only good in 1G Earth Gravity.

If I remember and understand it properly, original Gundam had similar excuse. Magic-particles cause long range sensors to be unreliable and even fries unprotected electronics, so the combat is more up close and personal. And that's why mechs, somehow.

Dense terrain, mechs can just be highly athletic tanks that climb, jump and dash around.
Traditional tanks can just be leapt on and torn apart.
Cloaking technology makes them extra effective for rapid strikes.

Or the idea that it's the honorable way to do war, like knight shit.

Gundam also proposed that mechs were a more natural way for humans to move in zero-g (if you're a newtype).

>much more agile than a tank
>see and shoot from an elevated position
>can be used in any terrain and in space
>can easily change weapons
>can grab and carry things
>can jump really far, possibly fly
>easy to pilot with mind/machine interface
The fun police like to screech about mecha to show how smart they think they are, but they have some real advantages over other vehicles.

Maybe controls. If there's some sort of Evangelion-esque feel or synchronization, a humanoid shape would be far more comfortable to control than a tank.

Physiological warfare and enclosed urban fighting, I';m thinking stuff that is basically very large power armour.

Would they make sense if the majority of the population lives inside of massive O'neill Cylinders?

They're cool. No need to even ask.

Legs are better than wheels on uneven terrain. Treads can handle rough terrain, but can't climb over things, where legs potentially can.

In an environment with unknown terrain, legs are the safe option.

Consider that pretty much all high tier life forms have legs, outside of the ocean.

...

That, and the AMBAC system saves a hell of a lot of fuel for maneuvering.

At the end of the day even if you manage to figure out some niche for mechs (megacity warfare I would think) power armour will always do it way better simply because they can go inside buildings, thats such an overpowering advantage. Its like combat zeppelins, they will exist but they won't become common because whatever they can do something else can do better.

I feel like cars or some equivalent would still be more accessible and effective weapons platforms

Huh, that's a pretty good premise for a conflict that never ends as far as I've ever heard of

Usually its just a war that never tips significantly in favor of one side or the other, which seems like bullshit to me

I dropped off of Hawken after they fucked up the sense of scale by trying to turn it into a low-TTK arena shooter. How's it doing these days? I heard the devs got bought up.

the problem is, even if power armor was kept as an idea, some asshole somewhere is going to want it slightly bigger, with just a bit more stuff welded on.
after several generations of assholes building it bigger, you have various one-off mechs. sure some maybe only super weapons but just beneath that you will breed a class small mechs.

just bigger than powerarmor, not really bigger than any tank, with options, options, options.

DId you read my post? If the armour is to big too go into buildings it becomes useless.

How else are you going to punch the Giants in the face?

then that's not a mech

Fite me

A post apocalyptic setting where resources are limited and salvaging enemy equipment is a neccesity. Bombs and artillery destroy too much so warfare is geared towards disabling and incapacitating quickly and cleanly.
Mechs becomes dominant as it can use upscaled melee weapons that fits the type of warfare conducted.

You start from powered armor then scale up from there.
It's the same general way we got warships and warplanes.

>Consider that pretty much all high tier life forms have legs, outside of the ocean.
You can optimize a snake to be effective but yeah, in general you're right.

youtube.com/watch?v=bWOe2Znb74I

>Why would you ever use mechs, besides them being cool?

There are a couple reasons, many of which have already been listed in this thread. And it depends on the scale of your "mech."

A very small mech that can still fit inside buildings and is more like large powered armor is a pointman's wet dream. It enables him to carry enough armor that they have to break out rifle or even light anti material weapons to put a mark on him, which greatly increases his odds of survival and thus the odds of the people behind him. You would see these being used both by the military, when they can bring them in, and by elite police units as well - since the police scenario more or less rules out any anti armor weapons and the potential limitations of short battery life and mechanical failure stranding the operator aren't as damning. They'll always be able to get them on site, and they'll always have overwhelming conventional manpower for plan B if the goons somehow manage to disable them.

If you want to talk mech mechs, I would imagine they would secondarily be weapons and primarily be for performing the duties of a forklift. The advantage of a mech with hands is that it can be a forklift, backhoe, bulldozer, crane, etc etc etc with a relatively minor amount of extra equipment. Sure, it's a little harder to maintain, and sure it doesn't do the job QUITE as well as a dedicated platform, but it simplifies your logistics a lot if you have one general use machine that covers most of your needs and you only have to bring in specialist equipment occasionally. This is nice when space and weight is at a premium, like if you're spending a lot of money to ship a colony effort across the system/galaxy.

So you could hand these things a gun and slap armor on them and they could secondarily perform the duties of a light armored vehicle that is slower, but offers a higher vantage point.

The way I see mech actually developing is starting with skeletons for troops and slowly up-armoring and up-gunning them. Eventually you'll get to a mech, albeit a small one.

>tfw no Ariadnan TAGs

I could see them having a niche in extreme mountainous terrain full of ore, or that kind of area. Rough terrain that the conventional military usually doesn't deploy to en masse and conventional locomotion systems aren't really good for.

And you can point out that air power fucks them in that case, and you'd be right. But air power is an equal opportunity dick that fucks most other ground vehicles too, so that's really a moot point - if you don't have air cover or rigorous AA, a tank is just as fucked as your mech is.

But anyway, the way I see it mechs are really going to be the weapons of rebels and upstarts. Your angry union bosses, your ideological warriors, your shitty third world militias that can't afford any better. Yeah, it's essentially a weaponized forklift, and conventional military gear blows you out of the water - but when all you've got to fight is infantry and other forklifts, you do okay. And if you can get in the right terrain, some of that conventional stuff can't be brought to bear.

So basically Killdozer, 2040s edition?

Depends on whether drones take off first or not.

It really doesn't. Flywheels are a thing.

This is a pretty good excuse, if you need a tall, armoured antenna to project or protect against ECM, a mech fits the bill quite nicely. It's also possible whatever planet you're fighting over doesn't have satellites in orbit yet, and so said antennas are also crucial for communication.

>None, a tracked tank is a superior war vehicle to a mech.

Tracks were mainly used because wheeled vehicles were also still in their infancy at that point, bro. They're much less efficient than wheels, but having a continuous track gave them enough of an edge vs really, really shitty trucks and cars people had during that period on the really shitty terrain they had to deal with.

The balance can easily change again.

Yeah more or less. Killdozers and toyota technicals. You can match a military thing in one or two aspects (firepower, armor, speed, whatever) but the rest will be lacking. Which is fine when the military you're fighting only has that too, or when you have a way of negating the disadvantage those inadequacies present.

Hell, that guy talking about apocalypse stuff, I think he was onto something. I think you'd see a lot of these on a wild planet sort of place, a mad maxish planet with tribals and established pirates/raiders but enough material wealth that there are continuous exploitation attempts by different corps and/or nations that regularly start up and fail in different areas.

The conventional forces mop the floor with the tribals/raiders when it comes to a pitched battle, but the raiders have overwhelming numbers if push really comes to shove. You'd be seeing lots of these put down in the colonization efforts and then abandoned when it's deemed too costly, because they either literally aren't worth the cost of blowing up/getting out of the gravity well or the nation is trying to minimize their pulling out cost period. They would demo or extract their actual military gear to keep it from falling into the hands of the raiders or rival corps.

So your tribes, raiders, and any nascent nations forming on the planet are going to have access to lots of these things but not so much real military gear. And there will probably be a focus on melee weapons for them over guns, because guns at their scale are either hard to come by or converted out of industrial tools and thus kind of shitty.

Oh, and it goes without saying that the raiders and tribes have most of their population secreted away into portions of the geography that make killing them all and wiping them off the map very costly, because you either need to spend a fortune on HE to blow it all up or send squads in to kill every last one of them in room-to-room fighting. Which is going to have silly attrition rates and also be very expensive, morally and fiscally for empires with casus belli.

Aren't you going to still have the issue that roads are still really useful for any amount of traffic. You might see the occasional legged vehicle but not nearly as many as wheeled ones.

Sure, you'll see plenty of wheeled vehicles conventional technicals too. But their niche is that instead of packing a bunch of specialized treaded and wheeled construction vehicles - the bulldozers, the backhoes, the cranes, the forklifts, whatever - you pack this thing and a to scale shovel, and then you can build facilities that build more of them and their conventional counterparts. They aren't for long haul trucking of supplies, they're mostly for construction and in place industrial applications.

And because they're there, the natives are gonna use them - they're not entirely useless.

Like the guy above got, they're 2040s killdozers. They'll slot in alongside the rest of the traditional shitty militia arsenal, but never did I claim they'll supplant it entirely.

None. Mech is a shit concept and a sitting duck for artillery, aircraft attacks and man-portable AT weapons, literally standing out over the field of vision. And they would get even worse in hard terrain. It also uses complex movement system that once broken, would require going back to a repair shop, using a truck. Or not using anything, since it's too big.

If you want ro justify mecha with anything else than rule of cool, you are retarded and delusional about your favourite toy.

>Tank is a shit concept and sitting duck for artillery, aircraft attacks and man portable AT weapons, almost two stories tall and impossible to miss. And they get even worse in hard terrain. It also uses a complex movement system that once broken, would require going back to a repair shop, using a wrecker of even greater tonnage. If you can get the wrecker to it in the first place.

>If you want to justify tank with anything else than rule of cool, you are retarded and delusional about your favorite bulldozer.

The Timberjack isn't a military machine. The fact that it's possible to construct a walker, doesn't mean that it would be effective as a weapon of war.

Unless you're fighting on Giant Stair World, tanks are always going to be superior, because a box is easier to armour, can be made a lot lower, is more stable (and can thus mount a bigger gun) and is significantly less fragile than a mech. If you are fighting on Giant Stair World, you're probably better off with a fleet of helicopters considering how shit a mech would be even then.

>much more agile than a tank

Litterally fuck off. If a walker is more agile then a tank, the tank was nerfed to make it happen because the mech received magic animu tech and didn't share.

>seen and shot by something because they overexposed the vehicle by being tall.

Fixed that for you.
>can be used in any terrain and in space

Where Tanks and other AFVs can't go but are worth fighting over... so not many places beyond the world of infinite stairs.

>can easily change weapons

That is an entirely normal feature of all modern war machines you dipshit.

>can grab and carry things

And all tanks have hitches on them for towing shit. This means nothing.

>can jump really far, possibly fly

I think we should take a step back and ask ourselves "could this tech be applied more effectively in other ways?"

Take the mech's ability to "jump". Those jump springs are pretty gud. Now....stay with me here.....it might just be so, so much better to attach those jump springs to an engine or turret instead of a robomuscle and use it to provide an incredibly boost to horsepower or drive ludicrous speeds across the battlefield.

Fuck off with your animu shit.

>easy to pilot with mind/machine interface

A normal tank would be even easier to control with the kind of magic 360 degree zero lag limited sphere of controled omniscience you are fapping to.

>Jeep is a shit concept and a sitting duck for artillery, aircraft attacks and man-portable AT weapons, so loud it's literally impossible to miss. And they would get even worse in hard terrain. It also uses complex movement system that once broken, would require going back to a repair shop, using a truck. Or not using anything, since you drove it to the middle of buttfuck nowhere where the truck can't get.

>If you want ro justify jeep with anything else than rule of cool, you are retarded and delusional about your favourite go kart.

I think they kind of make sense in Macross.

jesus, who shit in your cereal?

he is right though, there isn't any reason that would hold up to logical scrutiny to justify mechs, maybe if it was a kind of cultural thing, then perhaps it wouldn't be too far fetched, but that wouldn't last for long.

Either in the universe, or just the planet (in the latter case, perhaps created by an ancient advanced civilization) there is an extradimensional energy source, not unlike gridfire from "The Culture," but one that possibly due to its nature, or possibly due to old programming, only interfaces with things that are of humanoid shape. The inefficiency of a humanoid shape in war machines is made up for with the free power-source that doesn't need to be carried, and from and extreme power output of this "totemic energy field." Possibly, if you want Zoids in your setting, it could also work for animal shaped things as well, but then again maybe not, it's all dependent on what your setting needs.

Drones have already taken off and people still use tanks. Why not mechs?

>Litterally fuck off. If a walker is more agile then a tank, the tank was nerfed to make it happen because the mech received magic animu tech and didn't share.
Yeah, no, I'm not buying it. The walker has significantly faster and better from-stop direction change than the tank does, brakes faster, and exposes significantly less surface area - let alone critical surface area - when trying to peek or shoot around a corner.

>Elevated positions have never conferred any advantage, no military has ever used watchtowers and helicopters are unfeasible because they fly too low
Fixed that for you.

>Where Tanks and other AFVs can't go but are worth fighting over... so not many places beyond the world of infinite stairs.
I dunno, mountains full of valuable unobtanium is a pretty valuable place. Let alone an urban setting, which is approximately 3/4ths of all fighting ever and in which conventional vehicles suffer because they can't turn or maneuver from a stop nearly as quickly as mech can. In addition to struggling with roadblock obstacles

>That is an entirely normal feature of all modern war machines you dipshit.
Show me the Abrams that can swap out its main cannon for a battery of ground-to-air AA or a MLRS battery in two seconds.

Or a Humvee that can do the same with its MG turret mount and a 20mm recoilless rifle.

Or a Paladin that can exchange its 155mm cannon for a bracer of tomahawks.

con'td

? But they have a TAG.

>And all tanks have hitches on them for towing shit. This means nothing.
Show me the Abrams that can lift a marksman to a higher vantage point. Show me the Abrams that can drag cars around to form barricades and fighting positions without spending fifteen minutes hooking up and then another fifteen minutes unhooking from each obstacle. Let alone stack them on top of each other.

>I think we should take a step back and ask ourselves "could this tech be applied more effectively in other ways?"
>Take the mech's ability to "jump". Those jump springs are pretty gud. Now....stay with me here.....it might just be so, so much better to attach those jump springs to an engine or turret instead of a robomuscle and use it to provide an incredibly boost to horsepower or drive ludicrous speeds across the battlefield.
>Fuck off with your animu shit.
Show me the tank that's capable of stepping over a low wall, a concrete barrier, or a car without destroying and potentially damaging itself in the process. When, say, you want to use that wall later when you've taken the position. Or you want to be nice to the locals.

Furthermore, your assumption that a more powerful joint translates automatically to a power boost for an axial engine is no less absurd than most anime. Fleas can jump hundreds of times their own heights and generate a tremendous mount of power to do so, why don't we all drive super cars whose wheels are spun with that flea's amazing locomotion potential?

>A normal tank would be even easier to control with the kind of magic 360 degree zero lag limited sphere of controled omniscience you are fapping to.
Not really. Humanoid form is a lot more intuitive and easy to pick up because our brains are literally designed to drive them. Would take very, very little training to get right. Literally comes naturally. Whereas a wheeled or tracked vehicle takes years of training to reach that kind of instantaneous and instinctive response time.

Putting the word "realistic" beside the word "mecha" makes my brain bleed.

I know nerd as a whole, love Mechs. And I know a bunch of them are big anime fans.

But mecha are simply a BAD IDEA. You can't get a level of protection on a walker that you can on a standard ground vehicle.

With realistic weapon ranges and engagement ranges, the vaunted """"manueverability""" of mecha (and we can barely make robots walk on pavement these days) is less of a factor. And you don't want to know how insanely fast the legs of a 10m tall mecha would have to move to make it go 80km/hour ... which a modern LAV can do with current technology with little effort and even less maintenance.

It is easier to make, and operate, and protect, a ground vehicle using wheels or tracks. Tanks just plainly win.

>Tank is a shit concept and sitting duck for artillery aircraft attacks.

Tanks are built with the intent of staying down and profiting from a low field of vision to better avoid that very concern.

>and man portable AT weapons

Actually tanks deal pretty well vs at. and a mechwill never have the same level of armour as a conventional tank.

>[[[almost]]]

Is the kyword and very much an intentional design choice for tanks to stay under the cover of buildings.

>and impossible to miss.

Very much incorrect as the majority of modern war is fought at beyond visual range a tank hiding behind a blasted out house is a perfectly valid means of hiding itself.

>And they get even worse in hard terrain.

Everything does mate, wanna take a guess at what happens when the mech steps in mud or tribes walking through bush?

>It also uses a complex movement system

Treads are wheels with extras. Most tanks do indeed Cary around a spare set of along with them and they are still capible of ditching the treads altogether should they need to.
Furthermore treads are not delicate in the slightest.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=cjva7OXdwJE

Your first point is flawed. Just because a human can accelerate to their maximum speed faster than a car, that doesn't mean the human is moving faster than the car.

SPIDER LEGS OVERCOME THE MAJORITY OF THE WEAKNESSES OF A BIPEDAL MECH WHILST RETAINING SOME OF THE BENEFITS OF A TANK.

YOU WILL SOMEDAY UNDERSTAND THE SPIDER TANK IS THE SUPERIOR WALKER BATTLE PLATFORM

My first point is fine. I'm not talking about maximum speed. I'm talking about going in the direction you want to go from stop, regardless of your original facing.

Tank has to turn on the spot and then advance, or advance an then turn as it moves.

Mecha just steps around, pivots almost instantly. And is moving.

...

...

So the only movement advantage you can come up with for legs over treads is that it turns faster? Ignoring the fact that high speed turns will likely make a mech topple due to an obscenely high center of balance, in what situation is that actually useful? It would mean that a mech would gain maybe a 2 second head start compared to a tank, while a tank with the same power source will have a MUCH higher top speed. I guess you could corner peak easier? In an urban environment I can see mechs performing bette in an armored role than tanks, but they would still be BTFO by entrenched infantry.

...

...

...

Because they never figured out wheeled locomotion beyond the horse and cart.

>Muh "realism".
>Muh "barely make robots walk on level ground'
300 years ago, if you said humans were flying by creating vessels out metal and burning dead bones, you'd either be stoned to death or marked as the village idiot. Just because today's tech can't recreate bipedal movement, does not mean we'll never achieve said tech necessarily.

So what if tanks benefit more from mech tech than mech themselves. Sooner or later, tanks would be ubiquitous enough that infantry cannot contest the field because a tank would just obliterate everything and no infantry weapon can take one down. Then someone invents one that can and requires one powered exo-skeleton to do so. And suddenly your billion dollar tank with 4 crewman with thousands of hours of tank training worth millions is killed by a million dollar exo by an infantryman trained for 3 months.

Tanks no longer become cost effective. Military trend towards powered exo, exos become larger to contest one another, etc, etc.

Then you get your mechs.

Creativity, user. Don't be such a killjoy.

>You can't get a level of protection on a walker that you can on a standard ground vehicle
Compared to a tank, maybe. And you're assuming the mech has to 1:1 fill the role OF a tank and carry that much armor for its intended role in the first place.

>With realistic weapon and engagement ranges
Show me the tank that can peek around a corner, exposing only its gun.

>And you don't want to know how insanely fast the legs of a 10m tall mecha would have to move to make it go 80km/hour
And who says that it needs to do 80 km/h in the first place? Again, you're demanding it fill the exact same role as your existing platform and be flat out better, dismissing the legitimate advantages it offers out of hands, and then poo pooing it when it falls short in some areas. Tell me how the tanks of yesteryear that topped out at 30-40km/h were at all usable if this top speed is the make or break component of armored vehicles - hell.

>It is easier to make, and operate, and protect, a ground vehicle using wheels or tracks. Tanks just plainly win.
Operating a mech is more intuitive with mocap and requires less training. It also requires one crew member, which is significantly cheaper than training four people to man the same vehicle. You are also assuming that these laws are going to hold true in the hypothetical future, or whatever setting you've created for this - rear wheel drive in cars was all the rage up until relatively recently because they were easier to make, but advancements in technology have made front wheel drive easier and a lot cheaper to do than RWD. And I've covered the protection point already.

they are also 3 times as sharp and twice as hard, and folded 1 million times

whatever legs can cut through, tracks can cut through better

The alien invaders are 13 meters tall humanoids.

>Tanks are built with the intent of staying down and profiting from a low field of vision to better avoid that very concern.
A tank and a mech are going to be equally vulnerable to artillery. They will also be equally vulnerable to aircraft attack because, excepting the drivers being idiots and highlighting their vehicles on ridges for absurdly low flying aircraft to see, the tank and the mech both present roughly similar amounts of surface area. If push comes to shove and the mech NEEDS to hide, it can lay down and present a similar height profile to the tank - if not a smaller one.

>Tanks deal pretty well vs AT weapons
You mean, tanks can only really stop them frontally, and are generally mobility/mission killed whenever enough of the road wheels and tread are fucked up because the AT weapon doesn't have to get through the armor to damage those? Which is also what's going to happen to the mech at about the same rate?

And yeah, I'll concede that the mech isn't going to have as thicc armor as the tank. But that's alright because defense against man portable weapons is going in the direction of active countermeasures and ERA, both of which the mech can mount in about the same amounts as the tank.

>Is the kyword and very much an intentional design choice for tanks to stay under the cover of buildings.
What is crouching

>Very much incorrect as the majority of modern war is fought at beyond visual range a tank hiding behind a blasted out house is a perfectly valid means of hiding itself.
See above.

>Everything does mate, wanna take a guess at what happens when the mech steps in mud or tribes walking through bush?
So it isn't a valid point to use against the mech in the first place, yes.

>Treads are wheels with extras. Most tanks do indeed Cary around a spare set of along with them and they are still capible of ditching the treads altogether should they need to.
You mean they carry a few spare links with them, if that. And you do realize that catastrophic damage to the road wheels, or even just losing a link while rolling and rolling off the treads before coming to a stop is not a field fixable thing?

...Perhaps not, since you seem to think that tanks are perfectly capable of driving without treads. I'm not sure if that level of delusion is worth arguing with, with one or two insane abortive exceptions from the 40s that just flat out isn't the case.

>Furthermore treads are not delicate in the slightest.
Pic related

>tracks designed specifically to crush barbed wire
>gets stopped by barbed wire anyways
why do we even bother with anti-tank ditches or tank traps? clearly wire is all we need
even if alien demons attacked, we dont need guns or anything, theyll just get tangled in wire

Same reason why they designed a man-portable nuke launcher. To dupe the poor bloody infantry that they have a chance.

Show you the tank that can peak a corner and only expose it's gun? Ok!
>it's fucking all of them
Google "hull down" dipass.

>The walker has significantly faster and better from-stop direction change.

(Very complicated moving parts. Delicious mantainence)

Giant Mechs - anything past 10 meters in height (33 feet-ish) and you're looking at a giant bullseye on two legs for anything able to spot it. Unless you're talking EVAs, it's not going to survive for more than ... an hour at most in the wild I'd guess - depends on what you're shooting it with.

>brakes faster

The legs would need to be made of pseudoscience to be able to change or stop directions or stop on a dime and you don't want to know how insanely and supersciancly fast the legs of a chicken walker would have to move to make it go at the same kind of speed that a tank does.

Mechs would necessarily be slow-moving, in part because they would jounce the hell out of the crew at any real speed.

>exposes significantly less surface area

Elevation matters. See the "shoot me" comment earlier.

>let alone critical surface area

All surface area is critical surface area on machines. A mech would be utterly ruined if it gets blasted by something.

>when trying to peek or shoot around a corner.

(More very complicated moving parts, Delicous maintainence)

For a mech to do the kind of dynamic movement requires a level of tech so vastly outside of our context that it's very likely to be impossible.

>Elevated positions have never conferred any advantage, no military has ever used watchtowers and helicopters are unfeasible because they fly too low
Fixed that for you.

Firstly that has nothing to do with what I said about vehicle heights and secondly.....Elevation of the vehicle matters. It matters so fucking much in this real life world. You obviusly don't comprehend just how vital it is.
Tanks vent heat to the ground to avoid detection by heat vision for example. When an enemy can detect your mech above some cover from a foxhole twelve miles out they will report on your position and get you blasted by arty fire.

>a hill is a corner
T. obi-wan
its only a corner from a certain point of view

the M3 Lee on the other hand, could definitely peek-a-boo around a corner

Small mechs, Heavy Gear or Appleseed style, would be far superior to tracked vehicles in urban environments. They have a much better field of fire than tanks. They can peek around corners, fire by only exposing their weapons (smartgun link), hide behind rubble, enter buildings, etc. Another advantage is that tanks are usually only equipped with three non-interchangeable weapons (tank gun, coaxial MG and AA mg), while a mech with arms and hands could be equipped with different types of weapons depending on the mission. Small mechs would also be better in forests since they can walk around trees that would stop tanks. I assume that a small mech would also be agile enough to be used in mountainous terrain, where tanks could simply not go. Finally, the small mech would be relatively easily transportable (plane/helicopter) while tanks are a pain in the ass to transport (reason why the French army relies on wheeled light tanks for operation in Africa). Tanks would have superior maximum speed on road and flat terrain, superior armor and superior firepower, though. Bigass Mechwarrior style mechs on the other hand make no sense. They are too large, too slow and would make easy targets.

Technically speaking, where is the line drawn between a small mech and powered armor?

Is it that one has a cockpit and the other is more like a suit?

Best girl. Zents really need more love.

Zents are the men. The ones with the tits are Meltrandi

By "peaking a corner" are you talking about camping a narrow viewing angle or are you talking about slicing the pie? The tank can do both, in just trying to decipher your siege tier tacticool lingo.

That's one of the most common lines, but technically speaking it can be wherever the fuck you want because it's an arbitrary distinction.

It's like trying to figure out the exact point at which a crossover turns into a SUV, or a station wagon.

Lots of vehicels can swap guns too, hardpoints etc are a think. But I mostly agree with you, landmates/votoms/heavy gear mechs would be useful in places like mountains or urban setting,perhaps even jungles or 0-g enviros, but would be proably outclassed in open terrain like plains, steppes etc. If you think mechs as a replacement for tanks? Bad idea, but if you look at them as a infantry force mutliplier? It could carry a few of them ala BA in BT or supplies, act as heavy weapons carrier team, be used to make ditches or help building stuff, and could be used as a tank hunter in ambushes etc but in plain fight a tank would obliterate them only because it can carry better shit and more armor.

I once went into a full autistic breakdown of this based on size, but yes essentially.

Exosuits do not full cover, enhance bodily function.

Power Armor does full cover, enhances or supplants bodily function.

Mecha is the next largest, these have cockpits and cover the 10-20 foot range.

Mech is 20-40 foot range

Giant Robo is 40-60 foot range

Titan is 60-100 foot range

Super Robo is 100+ up to shit like Gurren Lagann or Demonsbane

for global domination

Important link.

quora.com/Why-are-mechs-straight-out-of-a-sci-fi-show-impractical-to-use-in-modern-warfare

Mechfags be on suicide watch after viewing.

>Giant Mechs - anything past 10 meters in height (33 feet-ish) and you're looking at a giant bullseye on two legs for anything able to spot it.
Make it 5 meters tall then. Don't know what would be the point of making such a big mech when you don't want it to get hit due to low armor.
>Mechs would necessarily be slow-moving, in part because they would jounce the hell out of the crew at any real speed.
Give it an alternate method of movement, like rollerblade-like wheels or something. Legs are convenient for climbing but not for moving around. Besides, humans have ridden big legged animals without much trouble before.
>When an enemy can detect your mech above some cover from a foxhole twelve miles out they will report on your position and get you blasted by arty fire.
A mech in a static position is dead, so don't leave it static? Helicopters and planes rely on speed to stay alive. A mech could not fulfill the role of a tank, but it doesn't have to.

I don't even think mechs are viable IRL, I just don't think they're as stupid a concept as space battles or wizard freelancers.

If you are fighting on Giant Stair World, you're probably better off with a fleet of helicopters considering how shit a mech would be even then.

What if there is no atmosphere?

The small mech could offer protection from all light weapons. Being fully-enclosed, the pilot also would be safe from blasts caused by anti-personel mines, grenades, as well as fragmentation, fire (to some extent) and NBC threats. Taking out a small mech would require direct hits from HDP grenades, HEAT rockets, HMG with SLAP ammo, autocannons or very large explosions (artillery, aircraft bomb, anti-tank missiles, IED made from artillery shells...).

ITT: People seriously consider mecha a good option and try to justify them

user, everyone knows Mecha are impractical. We already know about the square law. This has been described to death, we fucking know.

PS: the answer is spider tanks