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?
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.
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
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.
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.
I could see it personally. Targeting systems, bigger heavier equipment capabilities, nimbleness over odd terrain. The only obvious oversight is that drones exist now and are a much more valid platform, just in larger numbers. The extra power required for all the bs could be better utilized for drone batteries, the weapons could be mounted on vehicles. Seems a bit unnecessary but for maybe a few niche scenarios
Targeting systems
Drones
bigger heavier equipment capabilities
Bigger Drones
nimbleness over odd terrain
Drones
Under no circumstances is walking better than flying, tactically. Once you introduce airborne combat, a mech loses all tactical benefit. Tanks/mobile artillery? Sure, that you can justify, mostly because it’s low profile and easier to hide if necessary. In almost every other circumstance, if you can have an airborne gunship you want an airborne gunship, and you don’t even have to alter the laws of physics to make them work.
The only way you could make the case for mechs is if whatever magic Clarke-Tech you were imagining for moving them was astronomically more efficient than flying for approximately the same tonnage, and you were desperate to conserve as much energy as possible, to the point where flight just isn’t an option, and even then, the most efficient machine would look something like a gigantic beetle.
Absolutely. Humanoid robots would be effective because we live in a world suited for humanoids.
First, he’s talking about humanoid robots that are enormously larger than the average human.
Second, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRn3-MN92H4%3Ft%3D16m56s
I know what mechs are. And I ain’t watching all that.
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 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.
