Quote:
Originally Posted by SudsySutherland
Bi-peds would certainly be far too expensive beyond the exo-suit armor concept! Why waste computer brain resources, better put to use targeting and blowing stuff up, keeping a warmachine upright? That and the armor would likely kill any major increase in mobility unless it was only done lightly in the manner of a GEV... Still, you get too little for the investment! Treads or Ground Effect are the way to go beyond infantry!
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In the Battletech universe battlemechs have a huge advantage that conventional armor simply cannot match - strategic mobility. A company of battlemechs can cross a thousand km of utter wilderness as fast or faster than an armor company could make the same trip by road. This is very important in a universe where you are very frequently invading planets that consist of 2-3 major population centers separated by a few thousand km of prairies, forest, or mountains, with no roads, or even trails connecting them.
Also, along the "invading planets" theme, they can drop from orbit and fight the instant they touch down, and they are the most powerful and flexible armor units available, which is important when your invasion dropships are tightly limited in how many discrete units they can transport.
Even at the end of the Last War, Earth still has more than enough highways and passable roads to make the battlemech's strategic mobility expensively redundant, and laser towers and anti-orbit defences make attack-via-orbital-drop a suicidal gamble, so that capability is unneeded too.
Agreed. Very little room for mecha in the world of the Last War. They do have strengths, but those strengths are basically unneeded.