[Archinist]

Every other thread on reddit, quora or stackexchange on this topic almost always has a super-futuristic idea of the "mecha" we're supposed to build. It's 5 stories high, the motors can reliably punch through solid concrete, it's held up by two legs, it can climb, sprint fly etc etc.

Okay, what if it wasn't supposed to do any of that? Let's say it's about the same height and width as a small tractor, a large forklift or a skidsteer. It has the option of being fully enclosed and armaored for military LARP (no army would use it).

The armor isn't 10x stronge then any real world material. It's maybe a few mm of hard steel at the thickest parts, the rating is for .308 ball or lower.

If two legs are too difficult then maybe it's on wheels or tracks, goes about 5 - 10 km/h, it can't fly or leap or sprint or burrow underground.

Basically it's a regular utility vehicle but styled like a "gundamn mecha". Instead of having a front "arm" that lifts 10 tons, it has two side-facing arms that lift like 1 or 2 tons each? Or less/more? I don't know.

Question is, why isn't this possible? I've done some research and there seems to be a few vehicles like this that did exist at one point (the Megabots mech, the Hacksmith's powerloader (Aliens) mech, a quadwheeled mech with dubious arm strength and supposedly the US air force had a logistics "mech" at one point (It's in a popsci article...?) plus a Japanese rescue "mech" that resembled a forklift with two arms. No idea if the US AF mech existed there's not much evidence besides a popsci article.

Yeah, it feels like it's physically possible, but you'd have to find a bunch of personal project engineers and give them like $100k and hope for the best.
I'm sorta surprised that none of the eccentric billionaires have tried to popularize this yet. It seems a whole lot cheaper to build, heck, some Youtubers built one out of their mechan. workshop for like $50k, and you have billions poured into 25 km-long skyscrapers in the desert and AI chatbots lol.