Giant suit of Battledress: 6 meters tall!

[GypsyComet]

It gets worse with Voltron 15, the one composed of 15 vehicles. That's three pilots in the relatively stable torso and 12 others who are probably ending a fight concussed and suffering from spinal compression and horrible motion sickness. It's why that Voltron is a space fighter only.

"And I'll form the Left Foot!" is a common way to poke fun at combiners on this scale.

 

[Jame Rowe]

I long ago stopped wanting combiners. My logic is that there's too much difficulty in coordinating all the various parts (though I don't know if I could have phrased it that way when I was 11).

6 meter tall battledress is a Protomech in Battletech.

 

[GypsyComet]

A few of the smaller scale combiner/hybrids can work, mostly the backpack/booster types. These can be pretty large (see several Gundams) or fairly small (the Alpha-Beta combo in Mospeada), and they also frequently depend on automation instead of multiple pilots.

IIRC the Alpha is in the 8 meter range, and I'd accept an Alpha-Beta pair (with the Beta as minimally transforming only) as borderline suitable Traveller equipment. It helps that both mecha keep the flying and reattaching parts to a minimum during transformation. The Beta just sort of unfolds, while the Alpha is a bit more complex. As space platforms they work fine; the trick is getting such shapes to survive re-entry.

 

[Reynard]

The only concern I have with combines in Traveller is it invites Giant Monsters and worlds with severely wrecked cities. Avoid any region of space settled by japanese colonists!

 

[Condottiere]

I don't see giant robots being used in Traveller, see it doesn't seem tropeic.

Having said that, grav compensators can alleviate ground pressure, but the real kicker is if the military finds the expense of the robot plus the accompanying infrastructure to manufacture, maintain and deploy is worth the expense, compared to it's combat performance and results. While vested interests, like the F-35 programme, could push it and keep it on life support until you have an undeniable military disaster wholly due to it's inadequacies, it seems unlikely that in the Imperium such a project would be beyond some local commander's pet project.

 

[GypsyComet]

The walkers established in the OTU are more like those in Star Wars: vehicles without the extra steps toward anthropomorphism. They were shown back in the MT days as typically being developed for worlds and jobs where the other types of drive suspensions are less well suited. That *someone* was going to put guns on them is a given, but they remain minority curiosities for good reasons.

As I've already suggested, I find the idea of anthroform vehicles to be more applicable in space and other low G settings, as essentially very large extensions of battledress technology. Even that most iconic of giant robot serials, the ever expanding Gundam franchise, started this way: space work pods that got more complex and were co-opted into a conflict and evolved rapidly into the anthroforms to allow the use of many tools/weapons without a suit type for each and every weapon. In the case of Gundam, it all boiled down to the hands.