After that incident resulting in the loss of at least 6,000,000 million shekels worth of military hardware in a ddition to numerous human casualties and the bots' removal from active service in Iran Lockheeb presents to Congress an upgrage package containing fully fledged hands in the front legs allowing the robot to manipulate weapons and other things while standing up on its hind legs to intimidate the enemy in urban combat
Mechs are Useless Explain Why
Connor Foster
Tyler Scott
Always impressed by German efficiency.
Lucas Cruz
"Better technology" is so vague and insipid in these sorts of discussions it practically means nothing. With no hard data, proposed specific solution, or even hypothesis to work off it means jack shit. Might as well argue bullets in the future will become useless as every gun will be able to fire miniature black holes because of "better technology".
Andrew Morris
Mechs are cool as fuck, but horribly impractical. Mainly because in engineering, it's better to keep things simple.
Replacing a mech's leg after Jihad John fucks it up with a surplus ATGM costs more time and money to replace than simply getting new wheels or treads.
Also mechs tend to stick out more, so they'll be more likely to be shot at.
Mechs will mainly stay in science fiction and if they do appear in real life like the Japan vs US mech battle from a while ago it'll be more for sport than actual military use.
Charles Davis
They might end up costing twice as much as a one-seater car due to robotic limbs being more complex than wheels. I doubt they'd even approach the price of a full-sized car though.
The biggest benefit is better armor. Assuming the current problems with power armor can't be fixed, you still might see small groups of elite troops using it.
Oliver Ortiz
The only time you'll ever see human shaped, limbed vehicles is in space. Emulating human motion to conserve thruster fuel by using Newton's third law to orient a craft along its multiple axes is great to have in a micro G environment. The only problem is that space is more about long distance missle attacks rather than within visual range attacks so strategic weapons would be used, not space mechas.
Xavier Morris
Mechs will be useful in the future, obviously.
Gas yourself.
Charles Adams
Again, tell me this won't do the job better.
Nrekhta light multipurpose drone (infantry), officially adopted last year.
Jayden Torres
That's asinine.
A single robot arm (used in construction) costs 60k. If its stripped down as much as possible (no tools, no safety features, just metal and hydraulics) the cost can maybe hit 20k. You're going to need four of those to make a real exoskeleton, total 80k. Lets say the part which mates it to the human body is another 20k at the lowest possible end. Added on top of that is fitting it out with sensors, weapons, and control systems, which would be another 100k. In the end a finished very rough exoskeleton would cost 200k, at the base lowest market price. Built at a loss, shittier than the exoskeletons in that tom cruise movie, and it would still cost a couple of hundred billion to outfit an infantry force.
A suit would be several million apiece if it got built by Lockmart, which translates to several trillion dollars to outfit an army.
There's no fucking way a military that refuses to massively improve its combat ability in the present day with a few hundred million dollars would be willing to pay a few hundred billion dollars or a few trillion dollars.
William Davis
The cost will go down over time as the tech matures. People can 3D print robot arm parts at home already.
You could always just not do this.