kzt wrote:But yeah, the issue is what the mission you expect the damn thing to do? Based on that, how much can it weight, how big does it need/is it allowed to be, and how much armor does it need to have in what aspects? Big and heavily armored is going to be a serious problem. Small lightly or unarmored will probably work better.
Mecha are going to be almost completely unarmored. The issue is surface area (need to put armor here) versus volume (can use this for stuff). A tank is a giant rectangle, so you get a lot of usable volume per unit of surface area you have to armor. A mecha is a series of long, thing tubes, so there's a ton of surface area per unit of usable volume, which means that armoring it is more difficult. Even worse, those long thing tubes are your
legs, which you're actuating by applying torques to swing them around. Any weight you put on them is going to slow you down significantly. So you really can't armor your legs at all. Torso armor is better, but still not good. So it's likely that you'll put on just enough to stop small arms and depend on maneuverability and AMS for everything else.
Whipstitch wrote:Yeah, that's why I was thinking primarily of rocket based artillery, actually--something that can be relatively light and depends on shoot 'n' scoot tactics anyway.
Actually, I've just realized something. There's an entire role that mecha fit perfectly: medium urban combatant.
Tanks can kind of drive over small obstacles (though bigger cars and czech hedgehogs stop them easily), and infantry can walk between cars and over rubble, but nothing in the middle can get through. Throw in the fact that helicopters don't work in cities (updrafts, can't dodge, can't hide behind buildings and
all they do is hide, etc) and you have a ready-made niche.
Mecha are land helicopters, not walking tanks. They can walk over anything anybody tries to do to block a street, they can instantly go around a corner if something big drives into view, and if something gets too close (say, a dude with a molotov cocktail or a satchel charge) they can just slap it silly. Their height doesn't matter because buildings are definitely taller than they are; the extra height actually helps them see into upper floors and see over small barriers, which is a huge help. They also have hands, which means they can lift particularly wedged blockages out of the way. And, these days, all you need to do to kill a tank is realize there's one nearby and throw
some of these into the air. So that's what mecha do: sprint around chucking missiles at things.
Also, I don't think that two legs is the way to go. Four or six legs will almost always be better. That way you can lose one or two to enemy action without much loss of capability. It also makes it easier to cross really rough rubble. Best of all, though, is that you can do spider legs or lizard legs rather than mammal legs, which means you'll be lower, maybe even low enough to get into larger buildings. Think
something like this, albeit with improved vertical range of motion on the upper leg links and with rocket or mortar tubes everywhere.
