It is also a very misleading argument in this case. The square-cube law is why you can’t just scale up a human to 40 meters tall. The design and materials of our joints (and, at that scale, bones?) just can’t handle it.
But nobody is suggesting we make mechs out of blood and skin… well, okay, Attack on Titan. And arguably Escaflowne. But aside from that. You make them out of sturdy metal and ridiculously powerful and magic fibers. And you reinforce the joints and use different designs that are able to handle much greater stress and strain (I can never keep track of the difference between those two).
Same with the design. There is almost zero chance of a skyscraper sized sentai mech that is just a person with some cardboard shin pads ever working (and I am fundamentally incapable of admitting Gundams fall into this category). But the more “realistic” mech designs take a lot from construction equipment and focus on having a lower center of mass and an almost “frog” like shape.
Even with modern equipment, we have proof of concept bipedal mechs. They tend to be closer to the 12-18 foot range (which corresponds to Armored Core 1, if memory serves) and have limited utility (basically just youtube videos and county fairs), but they work. And there are even commercial quadruped walkers (Hacksmith bought two or three, tried to fuse them, and fucked up the math, right?).
And… I’ve seen some proof of concepts made out of wood with minimal amounts of metal. So the limiting factor has not been “the square-cube law” for decades (arguably centuries).
The issue is really utility. A biped has almost no use over a quadruped (sorry, “tetrapod”). With a biped you can fit it in narrower spaces but… not that much more narrow since you are likely to have “t-rex arms” in terms of being able to do work close to the cockpit. Like, gonna make a tangent to this deranged rant but: Fuck the mechs in The Matrix. You are fighting flying squids with knife tentacles. So you obviously use a glass cockpit with arms that can’t even protect you if they get in close. I know we pretend that was The Machines seeding them for failure but… anyone with a modicum of engineering knowledge should have said “What the fuck? This is stupid. At least weld some metal plates to that frame”. Err… anyway.
With a quadruped you have MUCH easier math to control both the movement and the tolerances and MUCH better balance. And MUCH more carrying capacity whether that is for construction supplies or… a dozen NLAWs and a big ass machine gun. Except… why would you need that carrying capacity for a construction machine? If you are remote enough that you can’t get the usual stuff there… why are you building in the first place? We don’t need a skyscraper in the middle of nowhere. And military outposts increasingly depend on prefabricated buildings that can be airlifted in. And if you can’t airlift something in, how are you going to defend it? The idea of having a walker schlep a bunch of metal beams across a mountain has never made enough sense to justify the R&D.
Even for the idea of a (WW1) “storm trooper” kind of situation where you want a heavily armored exosuit to break the enemy line, such as the suits from Live Die Repeat/Edge of Tomrorow: You can have almost the exact same capabilities with a tetrapod/centaur design. And those would cost enough that you want your soldiers to have enough training to control them. Like, you will NEVER mass produce these to the point where “we can train people to use them in a day because of the ergonomics” is a priority.
But… that gets to the other side of why mechs are just incredibly impractical. There is a reason we discuss “the death of the tank” every time there is a major battle. The window where tanks were an unstoppable force was… a year or two after WW1 until part way through WW2? In almost every other time period, infantry are more than capable of taking out tanks/armor with the kind of weapons you can equip every squad with. That is why tanks are mostly weapon platforms that are good at oppressing an unprepared populace. Against any “near peer” force, they are just giant missile/rocket magnets and are increasingly being treated as fire support and a deterrent rather than an actual offensive force.
Which is the reality. Amuro or Mikazuki appearing on the field would not be a moment where the entire enemy force collectively shits their pants and hopes that someone in a giant mech can stop them. It would be when every single NCO tells their infantry squads to light them up and then Gundam would get blapped like a kid on the Ideon. Which is why it has been an ongoing joke for decades at this point that the “meta” in Battletech is to not field mechs. It is to field a shit ton of tanks and (effectively) technicals with cannons and missile launchers on the back (I THINK the most recent ruleset found a way to make that not true? Been a minute).
Which is why you almost always need some other convoluted mess to justify “real” mechs. Gundam generally builds it around the idea of magic energy fields where long ranged attacks don’t work in space… and that still doesn’t justify the use of mechs over fighters or bombers. And still makes absolutely no sense for the obligatory arc on Earth. And is often outright referenced during the space base assault where Zakus and GMs are fucking things up because they are firing from cover and ambushes. Armored Core (at least the good ones) have sort of made it work with the idea that in 1 and 2 and 3 these were evolutions of construction equipment and almost entirely operate in enclosed spaces. 4 and 6 largely shift that to being more about having Newtypes who are so insanely good at piloting that the only thing that can REALLY stop them is another Newtype… and that the reason we don’t have a shit ton of infantry with Javelins is because most of humanity is dead. Battletech goes back and forth with the idea that we have a VERY limited subset of technology available but… tanks and jeeps with guns win.
But to argue that The Square Cube Law is why we can’t have mechs is like saying we could never have personal vehicles because you can’t fit a coal engine in a small enough form factor.
And just because I am clearly a nerd who has been obsessed with mechs since they were a child, I do think it is actually worth looking at the UC timeline of Mobile Suit Gundam.
it has very much been retconned, but the OG 0079 actually had a really clever take on it that almost justifies mobile suits (mechs). Pretty much everyone was dependent on “balls” and the kinds of weapons that actually evolve out of construction equipment. And then Zeon more or less said “We can fit a lot more armor and guns on something larger” with the Zeong heavily implying that even they knew a biped was stupid but were required to make one because of politics and the royals.
And while the suits let them conquer almost the entirety of the solar system, they never really got a foothold on Earth. Because… tanks and artillery. Like, we pretend that White Base is what saved those military installations but even the modern retconned timeline shows that Zeon made very few gains in a ground war.
And… that actually makes sense. Zakus, and later Gundam, were very much a rapid reaction. Similar to the crazy shit we saw in WW1 and WW2. But even by the end of the one year war, we had mass produced GMs and the effectiveness of a mobile suit was DRASTICALLY reduced. And that is why Zeta and ZZ were all about “mobile armors” that were a lot closer to tanks and small battleships.
IGLOO sort of touched on this. but Thunderbolt and MS 08th Team (and now I am sad again) very much undermined it and it was basically just a generic mech fantasy by the time of F91 and later Unicorn.
I appreciate the time spent writing that, that was a really cool read :) love reading takes from people who have put a lot of thought into niche topics.
Just to add on a bit:
It is also a very misleading argument in this case. The square-cube law is why you can’t just scale up a human to 40 meters tall. The design and materials of our joints (and, at that scale, bones?) just can’t handle it.
But nobody is suggesting we make mechs out of blood and skin… well, okay, Attack on Titan. And arguably Escaflowne. But aside from that. You make them out of sturdy metal and ridiculously powerful and magic fibers. And you reinforce the joints and use different designs that are able to handle much greater stress and strain (I can never keep track of the difference between those two).
Same with the design. There is almost zero chance of a skyscraper sized sentai mech that is just a person with some cardboard shin pads ever working (and I am fundamentally incapable of admitting Gundams fall into this category). But the more “realistic” mech designs take a lot from construction equipment and focus on having a lower center of mass and an almost “frog” like shape.
Even with modern equipment, we have proof of concept bipedal mechs. They tend to be closer to the 12-18 foot range (which corresponds to Armored Core 1, if memory serves) and have limited utility (basically just youtube videos and county fairs), but they work. And there are even commercial quadruped walkers (Hacksmith bought two or three, tried to fuse them, and fucked up the math, right?).
And… I’ve seen some proof of concepts made out of wood with minimal amounts of metal. So the limiting factor has not been “the square-cube law” for decades (arguably centuries).
The issue is really utility. A biped has almost no use over a quadruped (sorry, “tetrapod”). With a biped you can fit it in narrower spaces but… not that much more narrow since you are likely to have “t-rex arms” in terms of being able to do work close to the cockpit. Like, gonna make a tangent to this deranged rant but: Fuck the mechs in The Matrix. You are fighting flying squids with knife tentacles. So you obviously use a glass cockpit with arms that can’t even protect you if they get in close. I know we pretend that was The Machines seeding them for failure but… anyone with a modicum of engineering knowledge should have said “What the fuck? This is stupid. At least weld some metal plates to that frame”. Err… anyway.
With a quadruped you have MUCH easier math to control both the movement and the tolerances and MUCH better balance. And MUCH more carrying capacity whether that is for construction supplies or… a dozen NLAWs and a big ass machine gun. Except… why would you need that carrying capacity for a construction machine? If you are remote enough that you can’t get the usual stuff there… why are you building in the first place? We don’t need a skyscraper in the middle of nowhere. And military outposts increasingly depend on prefabricated buildings that can be airlifted in. And if you can’t airlift something in, how are you going to defend it? The idea of having a walker schlep a bunch of metal beams across a mountain has never made enough sense to justify the R&D.
Even for the idea of a (WW1) “storm trooper” kind of situation where you want a heavily armored exosuit to break the enemy line, such as the suits from Live Die Repeat/Edge of Tomrorow: You can have almost the exact same capabilities with a tetrapod/centaur design. And those would cost enough that you want your soldiers to have enough training to control them. Like, you will NEVER mass produce these to the point where “we can train people to use them in a day because of the ergonomics” is a priority.
But… that gets to the other side of why mechs are just incredibly impractical. There is a reason we discuss “the death of the tank” every time there is a major battle. The window where tanks were an unstoppable force was… a year or two after WW1 until part way through WW2? In almost every other time period, infantry are more than capable of taking out tanks/armor with the kind of weapons you can equip every squad with. That is why tanks are mostly weapon platforms that are good at oppressing an unprepared populace. Against any “near peer” force, they are just giant missile/rocket magnets and are increasingly being treated as fire support and a deterrent rather than an actual offensive force.
Which is the reality. Amuro or Mikazuki appearing on the field would not be a moment where the entire enemy force collectively shits their pants and hopes that someone in a giant mech can stop them. It would be when every single NCO tells their infantry squads to light them up and then Gundam would get blapped like a kid on the Ideon. Which is why it has been an ongoing joke for decades at this point that the “meta” in Battletech is to not field mechs. It is to field a shit ton of tanks and (effectively) technicals with cannons and missile launchers on the back (I THINK the most recent ruleset found a way to make that not true? Been a minute).
Which is why you almost always need some other convoluted mess to justify “real” mechs. Gundam generally builds it around the idea of magic energy fields where long ranged attacks don’t work in space… and that still doesn’t justify the use of mechs over fighters or bombers. And still makes absolutely no sense for the obligatory arc on Earth. And is often outright referenced during the space base assault where Zakus and GMs are fucking things up because they are firing from cover and ambushes. Armored Core (at least the good ones) have sort of made it work with the idea that in 1 and 2 and 3 these were evolutions of construction equipment and almost entirely operate in enclosed spaces. 4 and 6 largely shift that to being more about having Newtypes who are so insanely good at piloting that the only thing that can REALLY stop them is another Newtype… and that the reason we don’t have a shit ton of infantry with Javelins is because most of humanity is dead. Battletech goes back and forth with the idea that we have a VERY limited subset of technology available but… tanks and jeeps with guns win.
But to argue that The Square Cube Law is why we can’t have mechs is like saying we could never have personal vehicles because you can’t fit a coal engine in a small enough form factor.
And just because I am clearly a nerd who has been obsessed with mechs since they were a child, I do think it is actually worth looking at the UC timeline of Mobile Suit Gundam.
it has very much been retconned, but the OG 0079 actually had a really clever take on it that almost justifies mobile suits (mechs). Pretty much everyone was dependent on “balls” and the kinds of weapons that actually evolve out of construction equipment. And then Zeon more or less said “We can fit a lot more armor and guns on something larger” with the Zeong heavily implying that even they knew a biped was stupid but were required to make one because of politics and the royals.
And while the suits let them conquer almost the entirety of the solar system, they never really got a foothold on Earth. Because… tanks and artillery. Like, we pretend that White Base is what saved those military installations but even the modern retconned timeline shows that Zeon made very few gains in a ground war.
And… that actually makes sense. Zakus, and later Gundam, were very much a rapid reaction. Similar to the crazy shit we saw in WW1 and WW2. But even by the end of the one year war, we had mass produced GMs and the effectiveness of a mobile suit was DRASTICALLY reduced. And that is why Zeta and ZZ were all about “mobile armors” that were a lot closer to tanks and small battleships.
IGLOO sort of touched on this. but Thunderbolt and MS 08th Team (and now I am sad again) very much undermined it and it was basically just a generic mech fantasy by the time of F91 and later Unicorn.
I appreciate the time spent writing that, that was a really cool read :) love reading takes from people who have put a lot of thought into niche topics.