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Or "Why Robot Jox is one of the only giant robot stories that makes sense."
Possibly the longest running discussion/flamewar in Battletech is over the question of why Mechs exist at all. Any technology that makes them feasible should be even more effective if used in a tank (other than the myomers). A tank is a more stable firing platform, it can carry more armor with fewer weak points, and treaded or wheeled locomotion is more energy-efficient than legs. A humanoid giant robot is simply not viable on the battlefield in any sort of hard SF. Even "Real Robot" stuff like Mobile Suit Gundam has to invoke weird plot devices or just sort of ignore the matter entirely. Mecha exist because they're cool, not because they're tactically sound.
Obviously, in more fantastic or magical settings, you can always handwave giant mechanical men, but there's not a lot of good reasons for them if you're trying to keep your fiction out of fantasy territory. To be plausible, you need some reason in the setting why efficiency isn't the primary motivator, and even then your mecha will likely get whomped by a tank or helicopter squad that cost the same to build.
Robot Jox, especially in the novel which goes into a bit more background, is one of the few semi-hard SF settings where giant robots make sense as a tool of combat, simply because they're ritualized gladiatorial fights. Since each side only has a few fighting machines, and they only ever fight other humanoid (or mostly humanoid) mecha, the issue of efficiency compared to tanks or planes is moot. They don't have to compete in a real war, so it's okay that they're mostly flash and bang.
There's two other situations where I can see giant mecha making some degree of sense, and both require giant humanoid aliens in the setting, which already moves you a few clicks into fantasy territory.
The first is the Ambassador Armor. Just as SF is full of non-humanoid aliens who wear human-like suits to interact with us, the existence of something like the Zentraedi would make mecha suits plausible as a way to treat with them. Such suits would probably be armed in order to let the ambassador be their own security detail (and there might be two cockpits...one in the head for interacting, one in the torso for fighting). They'd be as expensive as an entire squadron of traditional armor and pretty weak in a fight, but it wouldn't be hard to come up with situations where they'd end up in combat (i.e. a Die Hard sort of incident on the alien homeworld).
A tweak on this concept would be giant aliens that will only fight "fair" if faced with similar giant warriors. Either we develop mecha suits and face their champions in single combat, or they just bombard us from orbit or something. Diplomacy pursued by other means annat.
The second involves a giant alien race that has developed powered armor that's more like scaled up Iron Man suits. Humanity finds some of these suits (maybe the alien race has died out, maybe their invading vanguard is defeated and their tech salvaged) and while they try to reverse-engineer the basic principles they retrofit the suits to work as giant mecha, building armatures inside for control. Because no one has yet figured out how to make the tech from scratch, for a while these suits will be the best things on the battlefield. Eventually the tech will be worked out, and you'll get a shift back to tanks and planes as kings of warfare, but in the interim you have an elite cadre of pilots running the few suits that can be spared.
But, for the most part, something like Battletech where the kings of the battlefield are ponderous humanoid machines? Nah. If you want plausibility, stick with tanks and planes and helicopters. If you want giant robots, just admit that you want the cool factor and don't worry about physics...let that mech do a backflip. :)
Possibly the longest running discussion/flamewar in Battletech is over the question of why Mechs exist at all. Any technology that makes them feasible should be even more effective if used in a tank (other than the myomers). A tank is a more stable firing platform, it can carry more armor with fewer weak points, and treaded or wheeled locomotion is more energy-efficient than legs. A humanoid giant robot is simply not viable on the battlefield in any sort of hard SF. Even "Real Robot" stuff like Mobile Suit Gundam has to invoke weird plot devices or just sort of ignore the matter entirely. Mecha exist because they're cool, not because they're tactically sound.
Obviously, in more fantastic or magical settings, you can always handwave giant mechanical men, but there's not a lot of good reasons for them if you're trying to keep your fiction out of fantasy territory. To be plausible, you need some reason in the setting why efficiency isn't the primary motivator, and even then your mecha will likely get whomped by a tank or helicopter squad that cost the same to build.
Robot Jox, especially in the novel which goes into a bit more background, is one of the few semi-hard SF settings where giant robots make sense as a tool of combat, simply because they're ritualized gladiatorial fights. Since each side only has a few fighting machines, and they only ever fight other humanoid (or mostly humanoid) mecha, the issue of efficiency compared to tanks or planes is moot. They don't have to compete in a real war, so it's okay that they're mostly flash and bang.
There's two other situations where I can see giant mecha making some degree of sense, and both require giant humanoid aliens in the setting, which already moves you a few clicks into fantasy territory.
The first is the Ambassador Armor. Just as SF is full of non-humanoid aliens who wear human-like suits to interact with us, the existence of something like the Zentraedi would make mecha suits plausible as a way to treat with them. Such suits would probably be armed in order to let the ambassador be their own security detail (and there might be two cockpits...one in the head for interacting, one in the torso for fighting). They'd be as expensive as an entire squadron of traditional armor and pretty weak in a fight, but it wouldn't be hard to come up with situations where they'd end up in combat (i.e. a Die Hard sort of incident on the alien homeworld).
A tweak on this concept would be giant aliens that will only fight "fair" if faced with similar giant warriors. Either we develop mecha suits and face their champions in single combat, or they just bombard us from orbit or something. Diplomacy pursued by other means annat.
The second involves a giant alien race that has developed powered armor that's more like scaled up Iron Man suits. Humanity finds some of these suits (maybe the alien race has died out, maybe their invading vanguard is defeated and their tech salvaged) and while they try to reverse-engineer the basic principles they retrofit the suits to work as giant mecha, building armatures inside for control. Because no one has yet figured out how to make the tech from scratch, for a while these suits will be the best things on the battlefield. Eventually the tech will be worked out, and you'll get a shift back to tanks and planes as kings of warfare, but in the interim you have an elite cadre of pilots running the few suits that can be spared.
But, for the most part, something like Battletech where the kings of the battlefield are ponderous humanoid machines? Nah. If you want plausibility, stick with tanks and planes and helicopters. If you want giant robots, just admit that you want the cool factor and don't worry about physics...let that mech do a backflip. :)
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And an OGRE can simply turn all terrain into the same type...radioactive rubble.
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As for nuclear weapons, well, yes, that's so, but they do tend to have the small disadvantage of rendering the conquered territory worthless. :)
A group of us once tried to develop a combined game system that would allow the use of Battletech and Renegade Legion: Centurion units on the same battlefield. It, uh, didn't really work. I did have a character in our long-running MW2E game who was a tanker, though, just for those occasions when I felt like doing something a little different. I eventually became quite adept at exploiting the one advantage vehicles have over 'Mechs under the Citytech rules: not having to pay MPs for facing changes. ISTR he commanded a Von Luckner tank. Ah, those were the days. Good times. Good times.
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For different terrain that isn't compatible, you simply add a separate motive-engine, like jets or copter blades for places where you have to fly, pontoons or shallow-draft or airskirt for over marshy ground, and wheels or treads for over other ground.
Mecha never seem to swim, so that's not an issue.
The need for a truly ATV just doesn't come up that often.
However, personal powered armor DOES seem like a possibility, and the "lifters" like the exoskeleton Ripley used in Alienses, or the equivalent personal-armor-suit (bubblegum crisis, Appleseed, missing entirely from the horribly maladapted Starship Troopers).
The evolution from a small, light suit to something larger, and NOT one that uses a jet-stick, standard pilot controls, etc. but rather, follows the movements of the wearer's body or even nerve-docks to the spine eventually, that's more likely.
And such a system - hooking to the user's body to get the fine balance systems and such - would be a reason to have a mostly humanoid body for the mecha.
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I never did understand why the pilot needed the flight stick and throttle. If the BattleMech is going to be wired in to the pilot for balance via the neurohelm, why not just wire the complete package into the neurohelm?
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Heck, you could have a "dummy" set of grips with triggers that don't actually do anything, it's just that you've used the neurohelmet to take the "press the red button" impulse as a firing command. It makes things more concrete and therefore makes training easier. Sure, someone could learn to think "fire light laser" directly, but setting the system to fire the light laser when you push one of the buttons on your grip is easier, and allows more flexibility...a different loadout just maps the new weapons onto existing buttons.
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Hand controls for that purpose, if you have a 1:1 map to body movement, would interfere with things.
Unless you've got a "four arms" network in the brain to drive them.
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There is "one of the few", or "The one AND only."
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Another interesting take was the Metal Gear series of video games--each of the Gears, with the exception of the one from the fourth game, was one-of-a-kind, and their primary purpose was less open warfare than traversing difficult terrain to find the best spot to launch their "stealth" nuclear payload of warheads with no missile.
(There are presumably about ten things wrong with the idea of using a railgun to launch a warhead across oceans without any self-propulsion unit to set off early-warning systems, but in a setting with NASA's top-secret anti-alien-invasion ninja unit, human beehives and a conspiracy to manipulate information at the memetic level, the fact that they tried THAT hard to justify it is amazing.)
By the fifth game, though, Kojima seems to have half given up on the hard science in favor of more crazy--there's a good two minutes of a Russian scientist ranting about every single reason a "walking tank" is a terrible idea, thirty-five years before the rest of the series takes place. Still, I thought it was a weird enough example to be worth mentioning, simply for the sheer novelty.
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Doesn't help the 'giant robot' idea any, though unless the original robots themselves were scaled to help a larger species, and humanity just happened to not be in the same scale, like you've noted above.
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...
There's a Robot Jox NOVEL?
Is it a novelization or the book on which the movie is based?
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