Premise
- Post-apocalyptic survival [story?] with mech-scale combat.
- Combat between a very small group of characters and
…not sure what it’d be against. Other groups? A sort of Death Planet? Terminator-style murderous, armed automatons?a death planet of murderous, armed automatons. - An at least marginally reasonable look into the logistics of maintaining gigantic war machines in a setting that implies such a thing would be impossible. May or may not be open to supernatural elements.
- a GW Tiger for an HQ/main support piece
- Minovski particle nonsense (and/or visibility issues) to justify combat at visible ranges with these gigantic guns.
Justifications, lore
Mechs:
- special (alien?) engine tech + synthetic muscle tech that, in an odd twist of events, scales up favorably.
- Size is limited by the square cube law of regular materials. Cue pictures of tanks or mechs shearing in half thanks to muscle torsion on steel/composites.
- Tanks cannot make large use of said muscles because most effective applications would not scale with the size of the tank very well (or worse than scaling up engines?)
Heavy industry-level war vehicles in an industry-less setting:
- Heavy use of salvage, with a fleet of tracked vehicles for the mechs to defend, containing the salvaged material and of course, the Tiger as artillery support. Perhaps a post-apocalyptic setting in the middle of what is clearly a past warzone?
The setting:
- discovery of mech tech coincides with development, accumulation of automatous war machines between US and Russia
- developments to bring them to WMD status: being built into good “infiltrators” with destroying without the proper IFF signature as a sole objective.
- deployed within country, replicate and cannibalize material to build some preset combat forms, move onto larger combat forms as more ground is conquered and more material becomes available?
- bla bla cold war nuclear war actually happens-style scenario
- several combat forms rely on mech designs (to help IFF’d soldiers refit the machines into regular-army stuff once returned to the country of origin) so those who survive said apocalypse fight back using these refitted designs.
Missing content
- plot, characters, etc.1)
Suggestions, comments, otherwise
Iverum
- Why is the Tiger the HQ? Isn’t it rather small? How big of a band of people are we talking about?
- Let me get the setting straight: The US and USSR develop autonomous mechs to wage war on each other? Or do they develop like Terminators (human-sized killing machines to infiltrate places)?
- In terms of scavenging, if you go the route with alien tech that violates the square cube law you can have locations that are rich in the materials needed. So the ruins of military bases would be prime locations to hunt for material. You could also have the characters create alloys of the alien and Earth materials to create specialized, smaller weapons if you want to take it that way (like power armor or Geckos from MGS). Of course, I kind of see the main characters as nomads to avoid the death machines. They’d need some kind of mobile garage (reminds me of IGPX) to keep the death bots from figuring out where they get materials from.
1)
Write what you know: nothing.