If 'mechs are so much better than vehicles per ton of metal, why do vehicles even exist at all? Why not just make the whole army out of 'mechs?
Because vehicles are way better per C-Bill.
>>98245190Escalation- and acceptable collateral damage-levels, I assume.Both vees and mechs carry battleship-grade weapons, but vees are a lot less likely to get kicked into buildings by other vees and motorized infantry fighting won't blow out all the glass panes in the block.
Different roles. Mech's main advantage is terrain dominance. They can be better armored and carry heavier weapons than aircraft, while being able to ignore a lot of obstacles that would be impassable by tanks or wheeled vehicles.If, however, you have secured a road, wheeled vehicles can transport material and personnel likely without equal, with only trains being able to do better (but requiring railroads). Tanks also have their roles, though mechs would make many of them obsolete and render their usage primarily as legacy units by armies that cannot afford to field more mechs. While a mech is better than a tank, a tank is still better than driving a yugo with your bare ass sticking out the window.
>Make a setting centered on mechs that proves why mechs are shit.Heh
>>98245190IRL, if vehicles tanks are so good why isnt the whole army planes and tanks?
>>98245190If the Marines are better than all the other branches, why don't they just make everybody a Marine?
>>98245190If jets are so much faster than cars, then why doesn't everyone just fly a jet everywhere?
>>98245262You don't have to put your bare ass out the window. You could put some pants on and drive like everybody else, you Capellan weirdo.
>>98245190If a setting had no tanks then there wouldn't be anything for autistic girls to get excited about would there?
>>98245190because they're stupid cheap (you can buy 2 hetzers for 2 AC/20s on the field for less C-bills than even 1 famously shit and cheap urbanmech with only an AC/10 and a small laser) and only need a working steel mill to keep them running.
>>98245190Mechs are more cost-effective, but you need an minimum of advanced industry to build them. And said industry often requires the resources of multiple planets, even if the assembly line is in one place.Tanks? In a backwards WW2 planet, you can field thousands of tanks, even if it's just rockets and cannons over fossil fuel-powered threads. You don't have the vessels to send them off-world, but your kneecapers will take care of most invaders limited by interstellar logistics.
>>98246058>>98246051 put it better than me
>>98245190Power armors are better than mechs.
>>98245190They are cheap as fuck, require less training and often fill different roles.
>>98245190Target acquisition and response time are absolutely everything. It serves as the best defense and offense simultaneously and what a mech does is be a machine like a conventional vehicle with the speed and agility of a living thing. It needs only to look at you to shoot you, it can see what you're doing and respond by evading simultaneously, effortlessly changing directions, sidestepping even jumping. All while still shooting at you. I know battletech media does a shit job of portraying how they are canonically but yeah, they don't actually move or control like walking tanks at all.
>>98245262>>98246011I think the main reason for mechs is they can work in any environment. The main bottleneck in an offensive campaign is the dropship-jumpship capacity and a campaign that has to fight on multiple worlds and environments will need to pick units that can fight on the largest variety possible. Mechs are vacuum sealed, fusion powered and can travel on any solid terrain; that covers anything on Earth, the Moon, to the surface of Mercury or Titan, with jumpjets they could be deployed on/in asteroids or large orbital facilities. Defensively, there's no transportation bottleneck; waterworlds have boats and subs, airless worlds use sealed fuelcell powered tanks and aerospace fighters, Earthlikes with variety of terrain will have everything from conventional aircraft and helicopters(vtols) to boats to wheeled vehicles able to use the roads to hovercraft in marshy areas to infantry and towed guns in city environments. Trading adaptability for lower cost and specialization. Logistics of running a mercenary company was always more interesting to me than the actual tactics used.
>>98245190Money
By the question I'm assuming you have not played the game very long. So lets begin the history lesson. When Battletech first came out Mech production was in decline so Mechs were rarer. Tanks filled in the defensive gap for poorer states and freed up Mechs for frontline duty for richer ones. The logic why risk a Mech if you could send in a tank. Tanks were easier to replace. Now mechs are more plentiful as are parts. Back in the day you kept track of your enemies damage hoping to kill the pilot so you could salvage a relatively intact mech. In campaign mode sometimes you could not repair between battles. Now, and this isn't a gripe, you can play whatever mech you want and fight balls to the walls.
>>98245190>Me watching my 2 billion dollar mechanical get their leg blown off by a 30 million dollar tank after being told to design the damn thing and being too terrified to tell the dictator it was a bad idea so now all the blame is going to be on me anyways
>>98245190Cost and ease of maintenance. Tanks can use internal combustion engines, a good mech requires a fusion engine at minimum not to mention myomer to get its limbs to work. That's why tanks are generally used by second line troops, militias, and pirates or mercs who take whatever they can get as they want numbers, and it's why clans can completely forgo vehicles for regular military forces.Put simply a mech is an F-35 or F-22 while a tank is an F-16 or F/A-18. The mech is far superior to the tank but it's a lot easier to field 500 mechs and 5000 tanks than to field 5500 mechs.
>>98246737Don't worry. It is the fault of the pilot for trying to close range a tank instead of using the anti-tank missile podsThat was in your design, right?
>>98246750No anon you can't think in logistics That's illegal
>>98246772It's a reason actually used in-setting for things like omnimechs and their relative lack of proliferation in the inner sphere even a century after the clan invasion.>These mechs can completely change their weapons, sensors, and jump jets and minutes>But they cost 25% more>Yeah I'd rather have 5 mechs that take 24 hours to overhaul than 4 mechs that can be overhauled in minutes
Manufacturing costs aren't just about the engineering complexity, sometimes it's because the supply chain is pork filled like with NASA rockets. A federation's mechas are stupid expensive because each sector has a factory they want to prop up and that adds to the overall building cost. But this is not a given for a society that has a vertically integrated production chain for mech construction.
>>98245214>because vehicles are way better per C-BillThis. Same reason not everyone in the military flies jet fighters.
>>98245190Depends on the context, setting and game
>>98245190>why do vehicles even exist at all?To look cool when mechs destroy themIgnore >>98245214, we've ran the tests before, mechs actually out-perform vehicles on a per-C bill basis
>>98245190Being huge does have one advantage, it's harder to COMPLETELY vaporize you. When a mech gets penetrated and crippled, as long as they aren't torn apart by ammo explosions or the fusion engine going critical a mech can usually come back after some lengthy repairs. For example a mech gets shot in the upper torso by a twin tap of a dual ac20, one burst hits the head the other the left torso ripping them off cleanly causing the mech to collapse and damage its back too. Despite all this damage the rest of the mech is intact and can be salvaged with a new cockpit, a new left torso, and a fresh coat of paint. When a tank gets penetrated the entire interior including the crew cabin, ammo storage, engine, etc all get vaporized leaving a hollowed out heap of scrap metal.
>>98247964Wouldnt this also mean that the enemy faction would be likelier to take salvage of the mech for themselves
>>98247994Yes! To the victor goes the spoils, generally though if you are getting your ass kicked you should be trying to get whatever forces you have available to provide covering fire for your recovery vehicles to drag your fallen mech away from the front lines should it be deemed strategically important enough to stop the enemy from stealing your shit.
>>98248010And there is also straight up asset denial by ordering your forces to destroy what's left of the mech.
Metal is cheap.Nuclear engines and direct neural interfaces are expensive.My favourite Battletech force is my planetary militia.It consists of a pair of Scorpion tanks, a large fleet of foor and mechanized infantry, some with towed guns, and a single Urbanmech, with a Warrior H7 for air support.It does pretty ok on the defense against late succession war era forces, especially for comparable c-bill cost.
>>98249661>single Urbanmech,Trashcans for the Glory!
>>98245190For one, logistics. Tanks are lower technology and easier to manufacture, save the most advanced designs (and these are generally as uncommon as BattleMechs). Vehicles also fill niches the "everyman" mech cannot, or cannot fill as well. Artillery and long range fire support are roles that vehicles are often VASTLY more cost-efficient at, even if you make concessions to survivability. Flight is a niche mechs will never be good at. Vehicles are also usually better in urban combat, and superior in water or on naked plains - a big, cheap force of hovertanks is a nightmare for a mech force in space Kansas or trying to move through a lake-heavy region.
>>98245262/thread
For me, it's a company of Scorpions (with 1 LRM Scorpion per lance) cresting the hill to pour down semi-effective fire on encroaching mercenary BattleMech forces.
>>98245190Are we skeletons operating flesh armor, brains operating a flesh mech or souls operating a flesh drone?
>>98250525>guts directing a spastic nutrient collection and gut reproduction monster
>>98245190You have this explained to you again in the BT general at least once a month
>>98250525We're ghosts possessing a warm lump of fat encased in living stone, controlling a meat mech via salt ion exchange.
>>98250491That depiction looks too large for the scorpion, it's a 25 ton tank. The scorpion's stats are that of the M24 Chafee light tank.
>>98251210Chaffee can't dump 10 75mm shells within 10 seconds at a single location.
>>98245190Mechs are more effective but take longer to train pilots and are more expensive than tanks.
>>98245190Mmm suck it biped.
>>98251210It's about right. Look at the guy on the left. Also, they have very light future-metal for the armor plating.
>>98252044Notice how it took 8 or so tanks to take out a single mech.
>>98250589Guts are the supreme tube Guts are attuned to the demiurgeGuts are glory
>>98252044Gundam armor is notoriously thin compared to Battlemechs. As are most their weapons.Baring the super special MC only alloys of course.Still took several direct hits to bring down the zaku 2.
>>98251210The Scorp is hauling the equivalent of a naval autocannon.
>>98245190Mechs will never exist in actual warfare and are the gayest fantasy shit ever. Literally Walmart drones would take them out. Tanks by far are a superior choice. He'll most war will be tanks with microphones to pick up drones and eventually most admies will just use trucks or ifvs. Most fighting will be done by drones and fucking radar dish guns
>>98250491tfw. we are living in timeline when even tanks become obsolete due to drones.
>>98253549Not all layers of the onion are managed by the tank crew. That's how AFVs survived the repeated news of their demise and countinued to operate effectively.
>>98245890>>98245937Thank you.
>>98245190>thinking about tanks in a sci-fi settingHere's something with some more gusto, treadhead.
>>98245190Tanks are cheaper and can be made with a lower tech-base. Mechs need a fusion engine to work while tanks can be built with an internal combusion engine and still work fine (technically BT has construction rules for gas-powered mechs, but that results in complete shitboxes that will lose the fight to the equivalent weight tank). During the late Succession Wars, when fusion engine manufacturing was a major bottleneck in mech production, tanks could fill the gap left by the limited availability of mechs. And even if you don't have manufacturing issues tanks will be cheaper and faster to produce than mechs. That's why when the Capellans rebuilt their military after the 4th Succession War their mech regiments were actually 1/3rd tanks (they swapped from the standard 12-mech company composed of 3 4-mech lances into a company composed of 2 "expanded lances" consisting of 4 mechs and 2 tanks), and why everybody was doing combined arms during the Dark Age: when you need to rearm quickly, you can crank out tanks a lot faster than mechs, even if you prefer having mechs.Also, if you just care about fitting maximum amount of gun per ton, tanks are better than mechs. The LRM carrier can have far more missile tubes than a mech if equivalent weight ever could, and trying to fit a Long Tom artillery piece on a mech would be an exercise in futility. Sure, LRM carriers and self-propelled artillery has tinfoil for armor, but when they're just supposed to sit behind friendly lines raining long-range fire on the enemy that doesn't matter as much.
>>98253374*hell*armiesI posted this way late into the night and was passing out. My apologies
>>98245271Not at all?
>>98253374>Literally Walmart drones would take them out.I think in a future with laser guns, drones would be a lot less impactful than they are now because a laser CIWS could take them out before they ever got close enough to explode.Unless the drones have their own lasers in which case I don't know what would happen
>>98255389My understanding is that with the combination of LAMS, AMS and ECM in Battletech, the current missile systems are in use entirely because making a larger, more complicated drone is just giving countermeasures a larger target that goes slower. Contrary to their vidya depiction all SRM and LRM missiles have guidance controls of varying sophistication (Streaks, of course, having both advanced onboard guidance and a smart launcher that coordinates firing).Basically the "walmart drone' argument is worthless because there's no functional difference between them and in universe missiles except the missiles are faster.There are autonomous weapons in Battletech, but once you've built it out to be bigger than an SRM you're just making a more expensive missile until you've made something big enough to not get zapped like a mosquito and with its own computer-- mind you that combat computers in BT are fucking huge and heavy.
>>98245190In setting it's because mech factories are harder to make.I was reading some battletech book and it mentioned that the weeb faction didn't know how to rebuild their factories that made their assault mechs
>>98247061hey retard, the OP pic is from battletech, everyone ITT is talking about battletech, maybe OP is talking about battltech?
>>98250591Yes but I don't like the answers I get there.
>>98255389Thats bait. Ukraine was asking for artillery munitions, tanks, jets and missiles. Not """drones""". They didn't want remote control toys but thats what we gave them to keep from escalating and they made do. Imagine how much they must hate us. Its like asking your friend for help in a sword fight and he hands you a plastic toy lightsaber with nails in it and says 'but it lights up and makes nioses when you hit them!'
>>98256530Not that anon, but what you say isn't quite true. Ukraine asks for what they can't produce. They are producing drones, and drone operators a lot. Plus they are buying cheap drones from any country they can. None of that replaces the artillery and jets, but do complement them.Their "drone technical" is actually a more promising design than the ground drones developed by countries like the US. Just a remote control turret on wheels, without several of the issues of technicals, like exposed crew. Might be more disposable than technicals.https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-remote-truck-machine-gun-turret-protector-tavria-2025-11And from the start, the foreign help wasn't plentiful, just enough for Ukraine to die while killing Russians. They have the drones and need all the rest.https://www.businessinsider.com/ukrainian-operators-dont-need-new-war-robots-want-more-services-2026-6If this sounds like I like Ukraine, I don't. Unlike the anglosphere, I paid attention to them before western media made the "Hollywood underdog can't have character flaws" campaign.https://burmacampaign.org.uk/ukraine-arms-genocidal-myanmar-military-while-asking-for-uk-support-against-russian-aggression/
>>98245190If it's a magical mech setting, then as the other anon said they're mostly for cannon fodder and to make mechs look cool.If it's a coherent mech setting, then they're trading mobility for armor and firepower, and will dominate battlefields they can physically access.
>>98245190There's a tradeoff in cost. Mexhs are better generalists and more weight, space, and manpower efficient, but lesser vehicles are cheaper
>>98256822I don't know what linking me a bunch of AI written grifter rags is supposed to prove. Drone is a marketing buzzword. What you are talking about 99.9% of the time is a remote control toy with a tiny little bit of neuralnet trained software to recognize objects or balance rotors for loitering on an X Y Z coordinate. There is no logical conclusion to this path of technology, its a dead end no matter what. Unless your plan is to use cloud datacenters and cell networks to coordinate mass bombardment of civilians for their publically posted opinions, which would only work because they have no idea its coming or reason to suspect it even would be. Looking at you palantir.
>>98257619Please consume meds retard or we'll have to get the throat dilator again.
>>98253549drones dont do the same job as tanks, which is to quickly cover lots of ground without being stopped by machine guns or mortarstanks wont be obsolete until they make a drone tank that can do the same job, but UGVs are basically just remote control machine guns from how short a distance they can move from their operator
>>98257756I beg you, please learn at least one single thing about anything outside of reddit shared tiktoks. Your species depends on it.
>>98257863He's right, anybody claiming tanks are obsolete is a moron. Drones are only so prevalent in Ukraine because its a static war between two low quality armies.
>>98257863what does tiktok have to do with anything?>>98258004its strategically static but tactically mobilethe front is actually quite dynamic, its just that neither side can commit enough material to create a massive breakthroughbut the prevelant drone use has more to do with the ability for drone manufacturers to ramp up to scale faster than tube artilleryukraine is constantly begging for more shells and missiles because they are vastly more effective than drones, they are forced to use drones as a substitute for artillery
>>98245190Mechs>Expensive, limiting their use>Operated by a single highly trained elite mechwarrior who needs to be able to both pilot the mech without falling over and shoot it's weapons accurately>Can be dropped from space to perform assaults on enemy held worlds.Mechs are the elite mechanised paratroopsVehicles>Cheaper (especially IC engines) so you can have more of them and maintain them easily>Can be operated by any group of barely trained grunts, each doing a single task>Can only be landed on an enemy world in safe or secured areas (usually secured by mechs)Vehicles tend to be the cheaper and more numerous option, used in larger lower quality numbersThis rarely comes out in the usual 'matched BV' lance vs lance arena matches people play nowadays though, as not many players bother anymore with orbital drops using Aerotech, forces maneuvering across a world map using Battleforce, to finally see what actually fights what what in a Battletech game. Also, Catalyst wants you to buy more robot figures, not field your dad's repainted ww2 panzer army.
>>98245262>Mech's main advantage is terrain dominance.unless you on an ocean world
>>98264212Which is why planetary command centers tend to be deep in the ocean and defended by submarines on worlds with adequate water. I wonder why no "aquapack" was ever developed for mechs, like those huge jetpacks for orbital drops but just a bunch of large propellers. Maybe it is just that much cheaper to just bring boats/submarines to earthlike worlds than to build extremely specialized equipment for mechs.
>>98267552I mean Mechs have Underwater Maneuvering Units (UWU), which are basically Jumpjets for Underwater...
>>98245190
>>98267915
>>98268071this one was slightly less ESL so like it better
>>98267552
>>98269131Not a fan of that mwo lancelot design
>>98267915>>98268071>Mech (Japan)>It looks like a person>Mech (America)>It does not look like a person
>>98267915Not East vs West... *both* of these are Japanese concept... the BT Warhammer is directly lifted from the Macross Tomahawk .
>>98273411ok m8
>>98273411Fucking lolAbsolute cope
>>98273429low IQ post
>>98273411low IQ post
>>98271057>>Mech (Japan)>>It looks like a person>>Mech (America)>>It does not look like a personReally now?
>>98253374theres already a bunch of drone counter measures nowif a walmart drone could take out a mech it could take out a tank
>>98268071>>98267915All bow to the true best design
>>98245890Not enough crayon manufacturing capacity.
>>98273443>>98273442Low IQ samefag
>>98256530>Imagine how they must hate us77 million of us, at any rate.
>>98273608Please tell me you get the joke in that pic
>>98278446They hate everyone anon, it's normal, they hate the Polish and they've been unrelenting in their support.
>>98278452The entire continent hates the Polish.
>>98278495Which is pretty fucking ungrateful when you think about it
>>98278449>Please tell me you get the joke in that picYes, and at least the right side has two non-humans for extra irony...
>>98278562low IQ post
I remember playing Heavy Gear as a child, and in that game heavy tanks and attack helicopters absolutely destroyed you. Pic is only somewhat related.
>>98245190Motive systems damage mostly.
>>98278495>>98278501They looked so awesome saving the day at Vienna that everybody is jealous since then. Not even horse nomads had a cavarly charge with those numbers. And they pulled a reverse card, their horsemen spiked the pikemen.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8zCv0AHnCshttps://web.archive.org/web/20110613151358/http://www.kismeta.com/diGrasse/HowHussarFought.htm>The assumption in the West was that it was not possible for cavalry to fall on a pike formation. Since the pike and lance were the same length, before the knight reached the pikeman, his horse was impaled on the pike. This situation looked like bad news to the contemporary western European cavalry, who wholly abandoned the lance*.*It seems correct, lance/spears came back for everyone during the Napoleonic period, because the Hungarians and Polish horsemen used them so well, others readopted lances.>As it happens, the situation was different with the hussar. The Hussar's Lance was constructed differently than medieval lances, as its center was bored out to save weight, and it was longer than its precursors - many were even 5.5m long- but were still lighter than western lances. (Examples exist to the present day). At the same time, the tendency of the pike was to become shorter in the West. So, the hussar could hit a pikemen before the pike reached his horse.(I was skeptic of this website, it feels a bit "polish-aboo", but didn't notice anything wrong so far) https://web.archive.org/web/20110613190232/http://www.kismeta.com/diGrasse/lance.htm
>>98278589Apparently higher than you, since the joke is all the ones on the left are Western Designs, and the right are all Japanese Designs.Thus it's doubly ironic that the Jap Mechs have two non-humanoids.
>>98280779You have b3en tricked into explaining the joke -5 Vril.
