Whiteagle wrote:
OOOH! Can I have some?
buruuurrrrrp sorry, finished. You shoulda been faster.
I feel kind of responsible here since I'm the one who made J sit down and actually *watch* VOTOMS and some Gundam, so it's also my fault that I didn't warn him about this stupid-ass argument beforehand. You're (more or less) right, but you're accidentally right, and you're a tool besides for trying to hash out something that has been beaten to death forever.
Originally, Gundam was going to feature Starship-Troopers sized suits, but they revised and revised to get something toy-company sponsors would actually pay for. That's why they went with the bright primary colors, too, instead of the scary Stormtroopery all-white Tomino wanted after seeing Star Wars.
The main argument for giant robots is that they're mobile. Well, something 18m tall ain't gonna be all that mobile for reasons of ground-pressure and basic physics - something 4m tall, maybe. Then there's the horizon argument, where I just note that 2m tall is already considered kind of a risky target profile for
tanks, let alone something fragile and bendy like a robot. Realism doesn't apply here, and if it does, no robots, or at least something that looks a lot more like a Scopedog than a Zaku.
Battletech-and-Guntank style hardware has all the disadvantages of a robot and a tank,
simultaneously. Macross had the decency to at least wave some hands and say 'they're stopgap machines designed to fight giants' and, you know, show the Destroids as more or less useless. "My robot has missiles and lasers and shit" is easily countered by "my robot can take cover, and get back up if it falls down."
Then there's the universal battlefield rule of big scary stuff: you can call an airstrike on
anything. Giant robot shows are historically bad about artillery for a reason. If I knock your robot over, I can keep bombing it until I run out of bombs. Soldiers have called in airstrikes on positions where they just
think there might be a sniper, on cows, on guys taking a shit in the woods. If you deploy a strategic-scale target, they will deploy strategic-scale firepower
against it. Not only is there no kill like overkill, there's nothing funnier than overkill with high explosives.
So J's actually got the right idea, because you can't argue the realism, but you can argue aesthetics all day long (and it's hard to argue with Okawara on his good days).