I see this topic is escalating quite a bit. Athom wrote nicely, and already admitted Titans are not feasible without some fundamental technological change.
Byron, you scolded him for that, but I think that is not fair in the context.
You're into 'indistinguishable from magic' territory with this one. It's the best answer I've heard, but at that point, I don't think we can say much about what ground combat will look like.
Antigravity is not just 'yet understood', it's firmly in magic territory. Also, that proposal has other issues. Among other things, you'll see limited maneuverability, as you're dealing with what is essentially poor traction.
For real life there are enough phenomena about gravity that are not understood to make this at least not complete wonderland in matters of sci-fi, as who knows what comes up that explains the theoretical discrepancies we currently have.(can only be view re-inventing though) But most important thing today is that in Aurora, this kind of 'magic' already exists, as we have proven movement methods that defy gravity and newtonian mechanics, so that should actually give the proposition of agile battlesuits some argument.
..That is at least if you are really going with agility as the main convincing factor, but then again we happen to know that they are WH40k Titan inspired, and to propose that those walking cabinets would move more dynamically than any tank is just a dead end.
If we scale the human up, his ground pressure will rise linearly with our scaling factor, due to the square-cube law. (This neglects that a mech will probably have a higher density than a human.) So a human the size (length) of a tank will have twice the average ground pressure of a tank, and four times the peak ground pressure. In mud (always a good bet on the battlefield), the mech will have much worse problems than a tank.
Yeah, this is probably the most striking argument against any traditional mech. There is a reason why small insects walk on water, while we break in, and if you make mechs large enough, they will eventually start to "sink" on even solid stone footing too.
..But we have that physics denying argument here again, so the reason to have large war-machines as this in Aurora could actually be that you need it to be at least around 100tons, like with the fighters, so that one of those TN generators fits onto a land vehicle.
Maybe that accounts for other kind of weapons too, like it would need to be another 50tons at least to have a shield generator, which could be a huge tactical asset to have, so you just
need to build something big.
The size of a war-machine is mostly determined by how much we can miniaturize the things we want mobile. If we could build tanks in nano format while retaining all their striking power, and somehow even fitting personal in, we would do it. If 100+tons Titans are the only way to fit in shields, newton denying generators and anti-orbital weaponry, then that will be the size they will come in.
And if science eliminates the critical ground pressure problem, then tank shape is really not needed anymore, albeit most Mechs of science fiction are then still not exactly what you would come up with when the shackle of weight has been reduced to (ghost-)impulse only.(why have so much weak-points; one leg done, whole mech down)
But that's not really a mech anymore, is it? It's more like one of the walkers from Star Wars. I can't see a good way to set up a human-shaped robot with multiple operators.
As Athom said, walkers are mechs. There are multiple franchises that have all kinds of walking steel all listed under mech armor corps.
I'm still puzzled over some of the objections to titans, at the end of the day they will be like other ground units. All ground units are simply a set of numbered attributes that all function in exactly the same way, the actual aesthetic details of any of them are completely arbitrary and exist only in the mind of the player. All titans are going to be is simply a high strength ground unit that happens to require it's own method of transport, for all we know they could actually be squads of staypuff marshellow men.
Good point. Others have said that they would rule them to be giant tanks, or just ignore them, but who says that they cannot be something like "a mobile bunker installation", essentially just a ground HQ building with artillery and all that gets dropped from orbit. It could also be a "drone factory" whose damage can be interpreted as constant attrition from fresh disposable semi-AI troops.
Being a building can easily explain why you'd need an extra component to carry it around in comparison with just normal troops.
Atmospheric gunships does sound nice too, though there might be a similar argument between them and fighters as there was between mech and tanks.