Berserk, 1: I created this account to say that you are being an a$$. 2: I to believe that mechs are not only feasible, but they are also viable in the combat theater. Now, hear me out if you don't mind. First off, let me cover design. The most obvious choice is hydraulic actuation. With a little ingenuity it isn't hard to at least rough out locomotion with compliance incorporated nor is it hard to cushion the major joints. A simple encased ball joint with a constant feed of hydraulic fluid would decrease friction exponentially and help to cushion impacts in the knees. Not to mention compliance devices incorporated into the lower leg and feet. Modified accumulators in conjunction with segmented tibia counterpart is a simple compliance device that is easily incorporated into design. Proper use of maraging alloys in crucial junctions can help as well. There truly is no feasible way to pilot one of these unless using a haptic feedback human machine interface, allowing the pilot to literally make the balancing corrections in real time using the pilots natural gyroscopic sense (yes like Pacific Rim, minus the consciousness meshing, but I was designing this system well before I had even heard of the movie). With antagonistic setup of actuators, you can greatly reduce the reservoir requirement, or with more advanced hydraulic circuits perform similar to power by wire design. Armor/Armaments: armor would, obviously, be of paramount importance. But, remember, even anti-armor munitions are highly dependent on direct angles of impact to perform properly, if at all. What you can do in this template (it also conserves weight) is use continuously sloping armor, greatly increasing chances of partial and full deflections or refraction of DU/tungsten penetrators and HEAT munitions. Chobham armor can be of even greater effect here. Furthermore, you can readily mount area denial munitions to defeat man portable anti-armor equipment like they are using on that self propelled howitzer you guys keep mentioning. Armaments couldn't justify this template of a weapons platform more, you can take any piece of battlefield artillery, tear down to barrel, firing mechanism, magazine, and sights and hand it off to a mech. With the aforementioned piloting scheme, literally you have a multi-role weapons platform. The problem with tanks, howitzers, etc. is that they can only perform the explicit function they are designed for. In this setup, you rely on the pilot with advanced targeting assistance. For years battlefield artillery has been used with analog aiming and firing mechanisms to great effect, only recently have fully computer automation come into play and the computer does nothing more than perform the actions of the firing crews it replaced. Powerplant: reaching into the little black bag of classified technology, a micro-supercritical water turbine reactor can theoretically put out more than enough power, though heat dissipation is going to be hard to conceal. But it would mean protracted engagements wouldn't be of hindrance, so long as ammunition was readily available. Speed would be limited, yes. My most effective hydraulic based designs can only get strides of 5 second intervals if having to use full contractions (but why the hell would you sprint in the first place?!?) But sustained speeds of 30 mph isn't hard. The big boon here is agility. With bipedal designs, anything of appropriate size becomes cover. You can hide behind any building of x stories, expose yourself long enough to engage, then drop back behind cover. No tank can do that effectively. You wouldn't even have to fully dedicate like a tank would, simply peeping around the corner is an option. I'm no idiot, there are hurtles to the endeavor but flight was considered not only SciFi, but pointless to even pursue with the technology that was present when it was finally invented. Engineers, scientists, and most everyone else believed it fallacy to pursue because of the amount of weight in fuel you would have to carry to attempt any prolonged flights, not to mention design specs that seemed insurmountable at the time. Still, a few advocates worked for years on it till they proved that not only was it possible, it was viable AND performed better than anticipated. Since then it has become the apex means of civil and commercial mass transportation, edging out all other means of mass transit in every field save the most massive payloads that at this time can only be transported via freight, and were still working on minimizing that. Much less getting into space, orbit and beyond. Using electricity as the primary mover in thrust baffles people now, but not only is it possible, it's being used to keep modern satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Literally nothing more than a bunch of sub-atomic particles. We are a hard-headed species, hard to persuade without direct physical proof of viability. But, we have to mental capacity to follow through no matter what the odds seem like. Time and time again, we have proven that science fiction is usually prelude to science fact, given time and dedication.
