Quote Originally Posted by Olinser View Post
Because dumb fire weapons would be ludicrously easy to avoid at anything other than extreme close range and they don't appear to have relativistic projectile weapons.

Unless ships have some way to avoid being detected in the empty void of space, 'realistic' space combat would take place at a range of hundreds of thousands of kilometers (distance from just Earth to the Moon is almost 400,000 KM).

In the time it takes a dumb fire projectile to cross the distance of tens or hundreds of thousands of kilometers the target ship only has to alter its course to move it a couple kilometers to the side to avoid getting hit.

Unless you can launch a projectile at a considerable fraction of the speed of light you either have to use guided projectiles or close the distance so they don't have time to dodge. Since guided projectiles are explicitly ruled out, Gundam uses mobile suits to close the distance.
The only problem with that arguement is that to be able to dodge, you have to be able to see the projectile incoming. A high-velocity railgun slug would likely be non-trivial to detect.



I suspect, though, like virtually all giant robot shows, you just have to accept the excuse its really all down to "because it's a giant robot show" as the genera convention, and then thank them for at least trying to come up with a semi-plausible justification for it.



It's the same reason why you just accept it as a given that ranges in BattleTech are laughable terrible compared to even... Well, let's be honest, WW2 weapon ranges and BattleMechs are made of super-magic weighs-nothing alloys. (Modern AFVs are something about just over half the hull-length than a height of a BattleMech and often in the 50-60 tons region. 'Mechs should probably be about double the weight BT gives them, if not more.) But you just ignore that (and the total bias against other vehicles and infantry that doesn't stand up, really, against logical scruteny), because at the end of the day, it's about a lot of giant robots shooting each other. Which is cool.

(Though obviously, this also means rather subjective where you draw the line of "cool;" I like BattleTech, but a lot of the anime giant robots - including, likely with some irony, the anime where BT liscened some of its designs, I don't get on with so much. (This is not to say I dislike them completely or anything; Martian Successor Nadesico is still one of my favourite animes). I narrowed it down to in anime, a lot of the time, the giant robots act like giant infantry, whereas in BT, they tend to act more like giant vehicles, if that makes sense. BT in particular also has the nuts-and-bolts, WW1/WW2 "it's about the tech" sort of attiude, whereas anime giant robots tends to be more about the pilots. (Disclaimer - these statements also should not be read as anything like definitive, as I could not possibly claim to have watched an extensive amount of mecha animes; I'm just going from what few bits I have watched.) Conversely, 40K, where has even gianter robots I get on with even less well.)