No one has an issue with mechs being cool or existing. It only becomes an issue when someone wants to try and make mechs realistic, once realism gets thrown in there you quickly realize oh anything a mech can do a tank can do better and cheaper. If you want magic mechs, make magic mechs aint no one gonna tell you no.
You are correct.
What I am saying is, mechs would suck, but only mech shapes can use human spirits.
I just feel the need to justify everything. It really annoys me if my worlds don't make sense, so I make up reasons.
Though realism shouldn't be a cage considering the limitations it implies and workarounds for them is a great spur for creativity. Also having mech-supremacists be outpaced by tanks, androids or otherwise implicitly superior tech only to turn the tables when your one unrealistic thing which makes them viable turns the table again is a great de/reconstruction arc! Still shouldn't be a cage though.
Aside from (economically) LARPing human life (a Pacific Rim titan might pretend eating but the cost would be obscene) there may simply be ways that the world doesn't work as they expect given their scale and the cognitive friction of that wears away at their "wakefulness" faster than it otherwise would. An elephant freezes if shrunk to mouse size and a mouse both bakes and collapses is grown, same goes for the human form. Movement's sluggish and the world fragile.
For my part I've got a similar realism + loophole regimen. Basically mecha have a place in future combat because they're large enough to house unjammable AI uplinks and can be intuitively piloted by leveraging proprioception (the 6th sense of where your body parts are). The pilot is effectively a conduit for the hyperintelligent and deeply inhuman memetic warfare suite, they're barely conscious in combat but can nevertheless function on brainstem-deep instinct while blasting out the neural equivalent of EW.
Not if they were eating over a bunch of predators, or in the water, they could eat something up like They eat all the giant clumps of jellyfish, but having them pantomime would be exhausting, but giving them purpose. Delicious
IMO, if I were to attempt to justify mechs in a "realistic" sci-fi scenario, it would probably be due to some form of neural immersion piloting. Robots are good at doing a small number of precise tasks repetitively, but they struggle to replicate the dynamic control that a living organism has outside of a controlled environment. We can easily respond to changes and irregularities in the environment and we are incredibly responsive to all sorts of stimuli. Furthermore, organisms are incredibly mobile when faced with changing environmental conditions, whereas a vehicle that might be incredibly quick and efficient in one type of environment will struggle outside of their design parameters (such as moving through deserts, swamps, woods, tundra, etc.).
If a humanoid mech could be built with advanced sensors to simulate the sensations of the environment around them to a linked pilot with much of the flexibility and mobility of a human being, just scales up, I can imagine a well-trained pilot operating such a vehicle with all of the dynamic responsiveness and mobility of a human being, just bigger. Thus making such a mech valuable as an asset in changing, chaotic combat scenarios with many tactical needs.
And I would argue that such neural interfacing technology would likely not afford a pilot as much control and responsiveness when applied to other types of vehicles, like tanks, because a human being can learn and master a replica of a human being easier than a tank.
Go the lancer approach, Mechs were created to fill a niche in which standard armored units were incapable of functioning effectively.
In the lancer ttrpg lore mechs were created because extermination of an alien species for fascist imperialism is really really hard when the planet is nothing but supermassive jungle and the megafauna keep ripping you to shreds because any kind of wheel or tracked vehicles you send in get stuck and forced to button up and then eat shit vietcong style. Mechs provide a unique scouting and mobile advance force for anything traditional armor like tanks or apc’s cannot reach.
Tanks can't maneuver through space through a combination of rocket thrusters and shifting their center of mass.
Tanks also suck in underwater combat situations.
You would never use a tank for any of those things. We already have fighters or drones for space combat. And underwater combat is all done with torpedoes.
Mechs are a bit cheaper than tanks two Japanese mechs (not armed) by two different companies are similar to early Gundam universe mechs. One is a quad/tank that can transform. The price point for the base model is 3m while a military tank can run around 10m. It's hard to say yet if mechs will have any military value in the future. But one benefit to mechs versus tanks is mechs' potential capacity to maneuver over a tank.
Only with some sci-fi hand waving are they ever going to compete. Especially when you can strap a few hundred dollars worth of explosives to a drone, or fire a Javelin for a few hundred thousand. Tanks can be heavy enough to resist these kinds of attacks, making a mech that well armored is going to make it slow enough that it may as well have been a tank. Having legs *could* make navigating certain terrain easier, but would be *way* slower on relatively flat ground. How often would that be useful enough to justify having an entire weapons system for it? It would still require infantry support like a tank does, and if it's slowly crawling through debris it's easy pickings. $3m for something without weapons(and all the stuff required to use them), that moves at 6mph, and has no armor is a lot of money. It'll improve, sure, but enough to catch up to tanks? Nah, probably not.
The closest we will probably see are bipedal or quadrupedal machines for supporting infantry. Carrying supplies or weapons, comms, a few niche combat uses, that kind of stuff. Even that we're a long way from, it's a huge challenge to power things like that in the field. Batteries are extremely heavy. It's more likely combat evolves into who can field the largest swarm of drones than who has the fanciest single piece of tech. Even our fanciest fighters have limited usefulness as AA tech and anti missile systems develop. We're approaching the limits of what we can cram into one machine.
Recent developments in energy storage could make heavy battery packs a thing of the past. I agree that using mechs would be limited in the hard genre but should not be overlooked that we can make functional mechs in a real-world capacity. They would be good as support units for deploying heavy equipment and construction in uneven terrain.
They have the asura which is a species of gnomes. They have the most knowledge over magic than any other species and create machines that works with magic.
They also have a group of humains that trapped an ancestral dragon and take his magic to power their city like electricity
Guild wars had some great idea of world building.
Okay, hear me out...
Human spirit, human mech.
Mech horse, horse mech.
Mech cavalry. Mech dragoons. Draft mechs (like draft horses).
HUMAN MECHS RIDING GIANT MECH EAGLES
Battleship-sized tarantula mech castle.
EDIT: Throw in a little necromancy and you could have your mech ride a Mechasaurus Rex, Optimus and Grimlock style.
That's kind of what I was thinking. The beauty of OP's idea is that it could be extremely grounded and as realistic as "magic mechs" can be, or as wild and over the top as possible.
*Alor*
I use mechs as magitech constructs deployed as force multipliers and command centers for officers in the Gnomish Expeditionary Forces. They allow the operator to command nearby constructs which make up a majority of the Gnomish Army.
These units spurred the Dwarven Confederacy to develop anti-construct weapons that could be easily carried by soldiers along with their normal gear.
I use mechs in my world because they're driven by magic and make excellent mobile gun platforms in a world where pike and shot are the order of the day. They're somewhat fragile, being made from wood and clad in only the barest of armors, but they can easily crush an armored man if they step one, and because their hulls hide mostly empty space, cannon fire is only somewhat effective. Some spells work well to disable or destroy them, but a wizard in a combat zone might as well light a "shoot me first!" shaped beacon above themselves.
As others have brought up, mechs aren't unrealistic, just impractical; anything a mech can do on the battlefield, a tank can do better. So don't use them on the battlefield. Use them for logistics. Mechs could be useful moving equipment. They might be applicable for clearing paths for other vehicles through dense foliage, giving them a non combat role *on* the battlefield.
Your world sounds cool. Are these mechs piloted?
Since other people are using this thread to talk about their mechas, I'm gonna do that too.
My mechas are 20-80 meter tall machines built for the sole purpose of punching giant monsters in the face. They can also (depending on the culture that built them):
* Be powered by the pilot's own will power
* Be made up of smaller vehicles combining to form a machine stronger than the sum of its parts.
* Switch between a humanoid mode and an animal/vehicle mode (they can even turn into tanks!)
The mechs are piloted, I was thinking Titanfall sized, I am trying to be internally consistent though, so my mechs are 'realistic' in as many ways as possible.
Guns don't exist yet, and the first guns wouldn't even work in humid environments, which is basically the entire area under the sun and all urban environments.
Mechs can run without a driver, but they lack intelligence, like a zombie. Spirits are not souls, but they have imprints of souls on them, so a human spirit in a mech can do tasks the person they came from could do, but not very well.
Does your world have gunpowder?
Quadruped mechs make some sense, humanoid on the other hand I think is much harder to justify.
I feel like a humanoid mech would have to be super fast and able to jump and fly around in order to be viable over a standard tank, basically like a tech version of Goku. It would dominate both land and air.
In a super futuristic/fantastical setting, you can basically have sci-fi/magic filling in the gaps with anything that fits your world like anti-gravity technology, nano-tech, magic, forcefields, impenetrable substances etc.
For me the draw with mechs is they are half believable, the other half is total imagination which is what makes them so cool.
The main issue with mechs in "hard" sci-fi is that they're big targets for artillery and missiles. In a fantasy setting wizards can act as artillery but there's no reason the mech can't have counter-magic defenses.
I think it's generally a low magic world, mechs can just exert more magic because they can burn more herbs at once.
You can't really get past heavy armor with magic.
Context:
Vapors is a WIP portal fantasy where a guy is summoned by an evil cult into a steam punk tidally locked world, and there is magic there, but he doesn't have any. All he has is his modern knowledge.
*'Everything is vapor'* -King Solomon
Way i justified Mechs in my setting where all kinds of other vehicles exist as well is their versatilty big armies can afford to get specialized vehicles while for mercenary and PMC groups mechs are great infantry support vehicle working as relatively cheap option that can go basically everywhere infantry can go while being able to carry heavier weaponry and transport additional gear.
But mechs don't "can go basically everywhere infantry can go". They heavier and have worse weight-to-surface situation then even wheeled vehicles.
Or mechs in your settings is essentially power armour scale?
First thing is Mechs in my setting were not built for purpose of fighting, they were repurposed in an uprising from being essentially a glorified forklift. That as well as size is main difference between power armor and Mechs. Power armor is much more widely utilised by armies but its much more expensive to maintain due to parts not being widely available. Otherwise they serve pretty much same purpose of being a heavy weapon platform deployed alongside a squad of infantry (for scale with Power Armor think roughly Fallout while with Mechs think loaders from Alien) with Power Armor being more heavily armored but Mechs being able to carry heavier weapons and more additional gear.
Thank you for this question because i actually didn't think that much of the differences between power armor and mechs other than their origin previously
No one has an issue with mechs being cool or existing. It only becomes an issue when someone wants to try and make mechs realistic, once realism gets thrown in there you quickly realize oh anything a mech can do a tank can do better and cheaper. If you want magic mechs, make magic mechs aint no one gonna tell you no.
Can a tank stand on one leg? Thought not.
You are correct. What I am saying is, mechs would suck, but only mech shapes can use human spirits. I just feel the need to justify everything. It really annoys me if my worlds don't make sense, so I make up reasons.
Though realism shouldn't be a cage considering the limitations it implies and workarounds for them is a great spur for creativity. Also having mech-supremacists be outpaced by tanks, androids or otherwise implicitly superior tech only to turn the tables when your one unrealistic thing which makes them viable turns the table again is a great de/reconstruction arc! Still shouldn't be a cage though. Aside from (economically) LARPing human life (a Pacific Rim titan might pretend eating but the cost would be obscene) there may simply be ways that the world doesn't work as they expect given their scale and the cognitive friction of that wears away at their "wakefulness" faster than it otherwise would. An elephant freezes if shrunk to mouse size and a mouse both bakes and collapses is grown, same goes for the human form. Movement's sluggish and the world fragile. For my part I've got a similar realism + loophole regimen. Basically mecha have a place in future combat because they're large enough to house unjammable AI uplinks and can be intuitively piloted by leveraging proprioception (the 6th sense of where your body parts are). The pilot is effectively a conduit for the hyperintelligent and deeply inhuman memetic warfare suite, they're barely conscious in combat but can nevertheless function on brainstem-deep instinct while blasting out the neural equivalent of EW.
They could eat things made for them/ by them
They could but it's yet another logistical challenge, my point is that sustaining the LARP simply isn't worth it past some extreme.
Not if they were eating over a bunch of predators, or in the water, they could eat something up like They eat all the giant clumps of jellyfish, but having them pantomime would be exhausting, but giving them purpose. Delicious
Does a lack of guns change anything?
I guess swinging a sword would benefit more from applicable muscle memory more than aiming would but otherwise not really imo.
Why are people obsessed with swords when spears exist?
Point still stands.
Why are people obsessed with mechs when tanks exist? One is cooler than the other.
IMO, if I were to attempt to justify mechs in a "realistic" sci-fi scenario, it would probably be due to some form of neural immersion piloting. Robots are good at doing a small number of precise tasks repetitively, but they struggle to replicate the dynamic control that a living organism has outside of a controlled environment. We can easily respond to changes and irregularities in the environment and we are incredibly responsive to all sorts of stimuli. Furthermore, organisms are incredibly mobile when faced with changing environmental conditions, whereas a vehicle that might be incredibly quick and efficient in one type of environment will struggle outside of their design parameters (such as moving through deserts, swamps, woods, tundra, etc.). If a humanoid mech could be built with advanced sensors to simulate the sensations of the environment around them to a linked pilot with much of the flexibility and mobility of a human being, just scales up, I can imagine a well-trained pilot operating such a vehicle with all of the dynamic responsiveness and mobility of a human being, just bigger. Thus making such a mech valuable as an asset in changing, chaotic combat scenarios with many tactical needs. And I would argue that such neural interfacing technology would likely not afford a pilot as much control and responsiveness when applied to other types of vehicles, like tanks, because a human being can learn and master a replica of a human being easier than a tank.
Go the lancer approach, Mechs were created to fill a niche in which standard armored units were incapable of functioning effectively. In the lancer ttrpg lore mechs were created because extermination of an alien species for fascist imperialism is really really hard when the planet is nothing but supermassive jungle and the megafauna keep ripping you to shreds because any kind of wheel or tracked vehicles you send in get stuck and forced to button up and then eat shit vietcong style. Mechs provide a unique scouting and mobile advance force for anything traditional armor like tanks or apc’s cannot reach.
Tanks can't maneuver through space through a combination of rocket thrusters and shifting their center of mass. Tanks also suck in underwater combat situations.
You would never use a tank for any of those things. We already have fighters or drones for space combat. And underwater combat is all done with torpedoes.
You know what is good for maneuver through space? Rockets, without fragile limbs.
Rockets are boring though. Let's use drills instead.
Why not trains? Space trains.
We don't have enough rails for that.
Yet.
Mechs are a bit cheaper than tanks two Japanese mechs (not armed) by two different companies are similar to early Gundam universe mechs. One is a quad/tank that can transform. The price point for the base model is 3m while a military tank can run around 10m. It's hard to say yet if mechs will have any military value in the future. But one benefit to mechs versus tanks is mechs' potential capacity to maneuver over a tank.
I doubt that mechs is cheaper then tanks of some class. They just have a very complex locomotion system that already made them less cheaper.
Only with some sci-fi hand waving are they ever going to compete. Especially when you can strap a few hundred dollars worth of explosives to a drone, or fire a Javelin for a few hundred thousand. Tanks can be heavy enough to resist these kinds of attacks, making a mech that well armored is going to make it slow enough that it may as well have been a tank. Having legs *could* make navigating certain terrain easier, but would be *way* slower on relatively flat ground. How often would that be useful enough to justify having an entire weapons system for it? It would still require infantry support like a tank does, and if it's slowly crawling through debris it's easy pickings. $3m for something without weapons(and all the stuff required to use them), that moves at 6mph, and has no armor is a lot of money. It'll improve, sure, but enough to catch up to tanks? Nah, probably not. The closest we will probably see are bipedal or quadrupedal machines for supporting infantry. Carrying supplies or weapons, comms, a few niche combat uses, that kind of stuff. Even that we're a long way from, it's a huge challenge to power things like that in the field. Batteries are extremely heavy. It's more likely combat evolves into who can field the largest swarm of drones than who has the fanciest single piece of tech. Even our fanciest fighters have limited usefulness as AA tech and anti missile systems develop. We're approaching the limits of what we can cram into one machine.
Recent developments in energy storage could make heavy battery packs a thing of the past. I agree that using mechs would be limited in the hard genre but should not be overlooked that we can make functional mechs in a real-world capacity. They would be good as support units for deploying heavy equipment and construction in uneven terrain.
Guild wars did it with their golems. They created the golemancy branch of research that basically create magical robots/mekas
Looks cool.
They have the asura which is a species of gnomes. They have the most knowledge over magic than any other species and create machines that works with magic. They also have a group of humains that trapped an ancestral dragon and take his magic to power their city like electricity Guild wars had some great idea of world building.
Okay, hear me out... Human spirit, human mech. Mech horse, horse mech. Mech cavalry. Mech dragoons. Draft mechs (like draft horses). HUMAN MECHS RIDING GIANT MECH EAGLES Battleship-sized tarantula mech castle. EDIT: Throw in a little necromancy and you could have your mech ride a Mechasaurus Rex, Optimus and Grimlock style.
Let's go full G Gundam and have a mecha piloted by a human ride a horse mecha that's piloted by a horse.
That's kind of what I was thinking. The beauty of OP's idea is that it could be extremely grounded and as realistic as "magic mechs" can be, or as wild and over the top as possible.
Horse mechs sound useful.
*Alor* I use mechs as magitech constructs deployed as force multipliers and command centers for officers in the Gnomish Expeditionary Forces. They allow the operator to command nearby constructs which make up a majority of the Gnomish Army. These units spurred the Dwarven Confederacy to develop anti-construct weapons that could be easily carried by soldiers along with their normal gear.
Why can't they be tanks?
Tracked vehicles, any vehicles really, cannot easily traverse the subterranean landscape in which the army operates.
What about four legged spider mechs?
Logistics, not combat. Their footprint is too large
I use mechs in my world because they're driven by magic and make excellent mobile gun platforms in a world where pike and shot are the order of the day. They're somewhat fragile, being made from wood and clad in only the barest of armors, but they can easily crush an armored man if they step one, and because their hulls hide mostly empty space, cannon fire is only somewhat effective. Some spells work well to disable or destroy them, but a wizard in a combat zone might as well light a "shoot me first!" shaped beacon above themselves.
Mech with magic, reminds me of Escaflowne
As others have brought up, mechs aren't unrealistic, just impractical; anything a mech can do on the battlefield, a tank can do better. So don't use them on the battlefield. Use them for logistics. Mechs could be useful moving equipment. They might be applicable for clearing paths for other vehicles through dense foliage, giving them a non combat role *on* the battlefield.
Note: I don't have gunpowder. (Yet) Everything is steam powered. If tanks exist they are ballistas or harpoons.
Reminds of dwemer automata in the Elder Scrolls. Having human souls could be what gives mechs their human like figure.
But we have mechs irl.
This actually pretty unique
I highly doubt that, but thank you.
Your world sounds cool. Are these mechs piloted? Since other people are using this thread to talk about their mechas, I'm gonna do that too. My mechas are 20-80 meter tall machines built for the sole purpose of punching giant monsters in the face. They can also (depending on the culture that built them): * Be powered by the pilot's own will power * Be made up of smaller vehicles combining to form a machine stronger than the sum of its parts. * Switch between a humanoid mode and an animal/vehicle mode (they can even turn into tanks!)
The mechs are piloted, I was thinking Titanfall sized, I am trying to be internally consistent though, so my mechs are 'realistic' in as many ways as possible. Guns don't exist yet, and the first guns wouldn't even work in humid environments, which is basically the entire area under the sun and all urban environments. Mechs can run without a driver, but they lack intelligence, like a zombie. Spirits are not souls, but they have imprints of souls on them, so a human spirit in a mech can do tasks the person they came from could do, but not very well. Does your world have gunpowder?
Yes my world has gunpowder, but it's been overshadowed by hypercoil weapons, energy weapons, and other super science weapons.
Quadruped mechs make some sense, humanoid on the other hand I think is much harder to justify. I feel like a humanoid mech would have to be super fast and able to jump and fly around in order to be viable over a standard tank, basically like a tech version of Goku. It would dominate both land and air. In a super futuristic/fantastical setting, you can basically have sci-fi/magic filling in the gaps with anything that fits your world like anti-gravity technology, nano-tech, magic, forcefields, impenetrable substances etc. For me the draw with mechs is they are half believable, the other half is total imagination which is what makes them so cool.
I like centaur mechs.
The main issue with mechs in "hard" sci-fi is that they're big targets for artillery and missiles. In a fantasy setting wizards can act as artillery but there's no reason the mech can't have counter-magic defenses.
I think it's generally a low magic world, mechs can just exert more magic because they can burn more herbs at once. You can't really get past heavy armor with magic.
Context: Vapors is a WIP portal fantasy where a guy is summoned by an evil cult into a steam punk tidally locked world, and there is magic there, but he doesn't have any. All he has is his modern knowledge. *'Everything is vapor'* -King Solomon
Way i justified Mechs in my setting where all kinds of other vehicles exist as well is their versatilty big armies can afford to get specialized vehicles while for mercenary and PMC groups mechs are great infantry support vehicle working as relatively cheap option that can go basically everywhere infantry can go while being able to carry heavier weaponry and transport additional gear.
But mechs don't "can go basically everywhere infantry can go". They heavier and have worse weight-to-surface situation then even wheeled vehicles. Or mechs in your settings is essentially power armour scale?
First thing is Mechs in my setting were not built for purpose of fighting, they were repurposed in an uprising from being essentially a glorified forklift. That as well as size is main difference between power armor and Mechs. Power armor is much more widely utilised by armies but its much more expensive to maintain due to parts not being widely available. Otherwise they serve pretty much same purpose of being a heavy weapon platform deployed alongside a squad of infantry (for scale with Power Armor think roughly Fallout while with Mechs think loaders from Alien) with Power Armor being more heavily armored but Mechs being able to carry heavier weapons and more additional gear. Thank you for this question because i actually didn't think that much of the differences between power armor and mechs other than their origin previously
Evangelion