Come up with mecha series

[Zor]

In this scenario you are to come up with a basic concept for a Mecha TV series.

There are three rules...

• You gotta have Mecha in it front and center. Both the heroes and the villains use mecha. Giant Robots (which are fully automated and have a computer instead of a pilot) and monsters can be used alongside the mecha.
• No, this is not all "tanks pwn all the mechas". Tanks can at best hold their own against mecha.
• At least one side has people dressed up in fancy pants 18th/19th century style uniforms at least some of the time.

Beyond that go nuts.

Zor

[Shroom Man 777]

Soft sci-fi space fantasy setting where posthuman nobilities and other crazy Dune-esque societies means they've got ultratech war-gear, including power armor and huge mecha, but their combat can range from conventional combined arms warfare to honor duels where designated knights and princes in their mobile suits of varying sizes can bludgeon each other with space-maces. I guess the protag can be some ragtag plucky hedge-knight on a Campbellian hero's journey... and we can take cues from A Knight's Tale or Princess Bride but the environment is something that's a combination of Dune or Game of Thrones but with robbits.

The Knight's Tale tournaments can be a place where baseline humans with their shitty rundown mechs can prove themselves by killing or maiming each other. Then whatever dignitaries are spectating - be it low-ranking noble or great count or merchant who's either actually there or watching it from cyberspace - can reward the winners with neater mechas or DOMINANT GENES that can boost their baseline bodies (and allow them access to gene-locked noble-tech).

Space bugs, psychics, Kirby-esque Giant Space Men, Magic Girls, etc. can all happen in-verse and wreck shit up. So there can be a Space St. Patrick who's revered since he banished all the Giant Space Slugs or Zerg Hydralisks or Robot Samurai Jack Centipedes from Planet Ireland or whatever. There can be biomechanical Space Dragons who are ancient god-robots that hoard archeo-ultratech instead of gold.

Xeno-Vikings pillaging for some reason - either they are gene-engineered to be living weapons and have lost their control systems ala Orks, or their homeworlds were lost and their material and sociocultural decay means they need to take desperate measures to survive. On the other hand the human space knights also go on aggressive wars against other alienoids who're all advanced and benefiting from MAGIC SPACE SPICES and who've allied with other humans who the mech-aristocrats regard as HERETICS or something.

Hurm I'm actually drawing a lot from this setting we're making... but re-phrasing it in this way.

[Shroom Man 777]

For an added twist, we can fuck people's heads by giving this ostensibly Euro-centric feudalistic description... an Eastern/Oriental aesthetic since actually on-paper description of knights and samurai aren't THAT different, so everyone's expecting this description to depict European knight-mechas but then it turns out the mecha's got like Hanya demon face armor and unsheaths a katana - a Japanese sword - and shows everyone who the REAL SAMURAI is!

Is the description of chivalry some Kingdom of Heaven-esque lecture from the Hospitalier to Balian? Or is it some Ken Watanabe bushido rumination to a sake-craving TOMO KURUZU?

Kind of like how in the Game of Thrones series, it's great how Lannister armor has Japanese design features...

Or we can utterly combine all of them anyway.

[Tribble]

My series would be "Battle Planets". Everyone lives on planets which also happen to be Mecha. Size varies depending on the size of the planet, and some can combine to form Giant Planet Mega-Zord type constructs. This way the stakes are a bit higher when one Mecha faces off with another, since it's an entire planet full of people on the line. Losing an arm might mean losing billions of people, they'd better take care!

Full range of military gear from single-person to planet sized. Basically picture everything from a ground fight, to a space fleet fight and a whole bunch of Unicrons duking it out all at once. Naturally, the planet mechas can use planet sized objects as weapons. Nothing like having a moon thrown at your mecha's face.

Series is about a solar system "team" of planets leaving their native aging star to go explore and kick some ass. Aliens of all sizes (including mecha planet size) will be around of course. Maybe have a war break out throughout the galaxies to really make things interesting. Or have gladiator arena battles on Dyson Shells. That sort of thing.

[Shroom Man 777]

My series would be "Battle Planets". Everyone lives on planets which also happen to be Mecha. Size varies depending on the size of the planet, and some can combine to form Giant Planet Mega-Zord type constructs. This way the stakes are a bit higher when one Mecha faces off with another, since it's an entire planet full of people on the line. Losing an arm might mean losing billions of people, they'd better take care!

Full range of military gear from single-person to planet sized. Naturally, the planet mechas can use planet sized objects as weapons. Nothing like having a moon thrown at your mecha's face.

Series is about a solar system "team" of planets leaving their native aging star to go explore and kick some ass. Maybe have a war break out throughout the galaxies to really make things interesting. Or have gladiator arena battles on Dyson Shells. That sort of thing.

That's pretty bad ass.

What if the mecha components are, at a high enough degree, irreplaceable so MECHA SOLAR SYSTEMS have to either collaborate to fix each other up and share components... or KILL EACH OTHER FOR MECHA-PARTS!

What if the mechas are semi-sentient and so it's not so much as purely piloted but somewhat "directed" or "steered" by the inhabitants... so there are some MECHA-WORLDS that have gone utterly berserk and are now totally predatory, feasting on other mecha-worlds to recycle their components! Irreplaceable energon crystals or reactors or whatever. And then either one must defeat these predatory mecha-planets or deploy people to take-over the mecha's subsystems... but these huge mechas have IMMUNE SYSTEMS made up of smaller mecha! Defensive mecha-moons and mecha-mountains and even "microscopic" man-sized ANTIBODIES!

The plot twist is that in ancient times, the origins of these world-mechas are NANOMACHINE ELIXIRS that mutate ancient peoples (human or otherwise) and turn THEM into the sun-basking asteroid-eating GIANT SPACE MEN who are the mechas that modern people now ride!

The ending is that the Hero Protagonist's world has been destroyed and so to save his/her refugee society and his family and tribesfolk, he must imbibe the ELIXIR and himself or herself into the GIANT SPACE MAN-MECH!

[Shroom Man 777]

HOLY CRAP what if the NANOMACHINE ELIXIR needed to make a human or any average being TRANSCEND into a WORLD-MECHA is itself made out of the distilled SOUL ESSENCES of billions of people! Like the Philosopher's Stones of Full Metal Alchemist! Or my theorized purpose of the Death Star involving Palpatine making Sith holocrons out of billions of orphans crushed in the Death Star's cavernous pits (that are actually giant juicing machines) (BY GAWD KING! This is the true purpose of Palpatine! After he gobbled the holocron, he would BE the Death Star! He'd Akira all over the place and his ORGANS would fuse throughout the Death Star... and eventually the Death Star would've EXPLODED and a gigantic Unicron-sized Palpatine would hatch out of the battlestation LIKE AN EGG! THE DEATH STAR IS A GIANT BALUT!).

Yes, the antagonists would be men on planet-sized mecha who themselves want to BE planet-sized mecha!

[Tribble]

That's pretty bad ass.

What if the mecha components are, at a high enough degree, irreplaceable so MECHA SOLAR SYSTEMS have to either collaborate to fix each other up and share components... or KILL EACH OTHER FOR MECHA-PARTS!

What if the mechas are semi-sentient and so it's not so much as purely piloted but somewhat "directed" or "steered" by the inhabitants... so there are some MECHA-WORLDS that have gone utterly berserk and are now totally predatory, feasting on other mecha-worlds to recycle their components! Irreplaceable energon crystals or reactors or whatever. And then either one must defeat these predatory mecha-planets or deploy people to take-over the mecha's subsystems... but these huge mechas have IMMUNE SYSTEMS made up of smaller mecha! Defensive mecha-moons and mecha-mountains and even "microscopic" man-sized ANTIBODIES!

The plot twist is that in ancient times, the origins of these world-mechas are NANOMACHINE ELIXIRS that mutate ancient peoples (human or otherwise) and turn THEM into the sun-basking asteroid-eating GIANT SPACE MEN who are the mechas that modern people now ride!

The ending is that the Hero Protagonist's world has been destroyed and so to save his/her refugee society and his family and tribesfolk, he must imbibe the ELIXIR and himself or herself into the GIANT SPACE MAN-MECH!

HOLY CRAP what if the NANOMACHINE ELIXIR needed to make a human or any average being TRANSCEND into a WORLD-MECHA is itself made out of the distilled SOUL ESSENCES of billions of people! Like the Philosopher's Stones of Full Metal Alchemist! Or my theorized purpose of the Death Star involving Palpatine making Sith holocrons out of billions of orphans crushed in the Death Star's cavernous pits (that are actually giant juicing machines).

Yes, the antagonists would be men on planet-sized mecha who themselves want to BE planet-sized mecha!

Yes, that would indeed be rather epic.

And speaking of Palpatine, there will need to be a couple of cross-overs. Such as an episode where the heroes take the Death Star and stick it on the end of their gun to blast Unicron while fighting on top of the Dyson Shell seen in TNG's "Relics" right as the E-D shows up. That kind of thing.

[Shroom Man 777]

It'd be amazing if like these mecha would have a facade of typical mecha armor, colorful and stuff, but some of them get damaged extensively and we see the MASSIVE PULSATING BIOMECHANICAL ORGANELLES beneath the continental armor plates.

FERAL WORLD MECHA will guard CLUSTERS OF MOON-EGGS!

[Eternal_Freedom]

Couldn't we just do "Battletech: The Series?" For that matter, we aren't we making "Battletech: The Series?"

[Shroom Man 777]

Sure if Battletech culminates in a Full Metal Alchemist sequence where people start gobbling Philosopher's Stones to turn into all-powerful mecha themselves.

YES a mecha pilot uses a banned mecha magic ritual to save his brother from disintegration, accidentally transmuting his brother into a mecha! FULL MECHA ALCHEMIST!

[Eternal_Freedom]

On a more serious note: Battletech gives you a huge amount of history to work within. You could do like five different series covering the Reunification War, the Fall of the Star League, the Succession Wars, the Clan Invasion, the Word of Blake Jihad, easy.

And it gives you choices like Space: Above and Beyond, you can use CGI for the Mech combat (and space combat, damnit) and only need sets for Mech and fighter cockpits.

[Formless]

The series takes place on The MOON. Robots aren't commonplace in war at the beginning (although powered armor is), but an advancement in artificial muscle technology is suddenly makes it possible. Only, robots have kinda slow reaction speeds at first and there has yet to be a breakthrough control system to make mecha really shine. AI aren't trusted, remote control suffers lag issues (although you don't lose the pilot, so they are the Disposable Goons of the show), and most machines that put a man inside are slower, more "western" style mecha that only crazy people step into.

The breakthrough is when a brilliant engineer realizes that the best control scheme is the human body itself. Our hero is a quadruple amputee with heavy cybernetics that connect prosthetics to his nervous system and who lost most of his limbs as a child, and the engineer makes him a custom bot that basically works like a giant set of prosthetics. Our hero is fast, experienced with moving, knows kung fu, and is all gung ho to fight the GREAT MARTIAN REBELLION. He's not a guy in a mecha, he IS the mecha!

At first, he's an absolute terror on the battlefield, but soon others follow and he's no longer the only amputee with a mecha. Now the military is recruiting anyone with cybernetic replacements they can get their hands on, especially veterans from the infantry. The enemy soon learns the trick as well, and now the show shifts focus from the GLORIOUS WAR story to the morality play. Our hero starts seeing people with all sorts of messed up backgrounds being either recruited or even FORCED to pilot because they are natural ACES on the battlefield. You got the veteran who is guilt tripped into continuing to fight for his country while secretly struggling with PTSD, you have the enemy soldier who wasn't injured but surgically altered to be an ace, you have the girl whose body is paralyzed yet they think that if they hook her brain-link directly into a computer they will have an even greater advancement that will make the rest of them obsolete. Oh, and maybe a conspiracy to take all these innovations and create a true AI controlled mecha-- and have to "invent" a person with a false identity to fool everyone as well. And all our hero is left thinking is, my god, what are we all doing?! They're winning the war, but at what cost!!!1?

Throw in a role model for the hero who fights in the air instead of the ground so that we can eventually have that talk about how distant the fighting can seem for fighter aces VS mecha aces, and we can make it as topical or as timeless as you feel is necessary. Bonus points, this premise gives you an excuse to make every single hero mech unique and customized as its basically less a standardized vehicle and more an extension of the character's bodies in almost a literal sense-- you can't just take one pilot and put someone else in their mech because the mech adapts to the pilot and not the other way around. Heck, it even gives you an excuse to use that old anime trope where the characters call out their attacks, as they would need voice controls to activate weapons and stuff that isn't a part of their phantom limbs.

Inspired by such real life research as this or this, incidentally.

[Shroom Man 777]

There was a Gundam mini-series that focused on amputees...

[Formless]

Really? Huh. Well, you know, several decades of Gundam I'm sure they've covered most of the really good ideas. ...aaand probably most of the really bad ones, too.

[FaxModem1]

In this scenario you are to come up with a basic concept for a Mecha TV series.

There are three rules...

• You gotta have Mecha in it front and center. Both the heroes and the villains use mecha. Giant Robots (which are fully automated and have a computer instead of a pilot) and monsters can be used alongside the mecha.
• No, this is not all "tanks pwn all the mechas". Tanks can at best hold their own against mecha.
• At least one side has people dressed up in fancy pants 18th/19th century style uniforms at least some of the time.

Beyond that go nuts.

Zor

In an alternate universe......

There is only the Empire, Pax Romana, anywhere else will become part of Rome when the Roman military gets to it. Prisoners from the front lines are enslaved and those with an aptitude for fighting are forced to wear mecha suits and fight each other in the coliseum, fighting using the 'meant for show' mechas. Those who don't, and don't have the strength to work in the factories, are consigned to be the meat for the games, and try their best against the Mecha Gladiators.

Eventually, Mecha Spartacus will rebel, and lead a slave revolt. Will he win? Who knows? But he will at least die free.

[Shroom Man 777]

The one with the amputee Zeon super-Zaku pilots was pretty dope...

[Tribble]

Or what about a sequel to that Pixar flick about emotions... only this time they are piloting their human hosts into battle for sport? And they augment their humans with cybernetics, making them grow to mecha size? Would that still count?

[Shroom Man 777]

Or what about a sequel to that Pixar flick about emotions... only this time they are piloting their human hosts into battle for sport? And they augment their humans with cybernetics, making them grow to mecha size? Would that still count?

Yes! It turns out these inner-people are actually the descendants of an INNERSPACE kind of thing... where their progenitors were ANT-MEN and Wasps' PYM PARTICLE machines malfunctioned and they ended up stuck inside these people FOR GENERATIONS and as the centuries went by they reproduced and their descendants eventually learned to control and live within symbiosis of their human hosts, riding the sperms and eggs to terraform new hosts and the spawn of their hosts, knowing of the eventual mortality of the human vessel they "pilot." But as the centuries went by, for some reason their descendants forgot their history and started thinking of themselves as... part of their vessels, like the emotions from Inside Out! Their tech is now organic, nano-scale machines mined from the amino acid and protein chains of their vessels' cells! Like those worms from Futurama that infested Fry!

And THEN their hosts start piloting mechs or end up being IN the world-mechs! And these microscopic peoples' quest for a new Pym Particle to de-shrink themselves ended up accidentally creating the PHILOSOPHER'S STONES that mutated their hosts into planet-sized biomechanical sun-suckling abominations!

[K. A. Pital]

First: mechas are biotechnology which are armored and armed by man (Evangelion-like creatures). Their use is not limited to war: as versatile construction machines, or exploration craft in space, they're being sent all over the solar system.

Second: opposing powers have a race of biotechnology and nanotechnology weapons. So giant monsters, nanobot swarms and other shit is normally, casually used weapons.

Third: Earth's environment and quality of life is rapidly degrading due to a sustained technology explosion. The setting is a postcyberpunk dystopia. Piloting the mechas is putting your life at risk in case of war or unexpected discoveries, but normal life is basically being confined to a 15 sqm prison cell that counts as "living quarters", working for the corporations that produce mechas. Whole of Earth is just gigantic slum cities. The elite lives in closed compounds guarded by PMCs. Private military companies also have access to modern war technology. Warring members of the hostile powers' elites like to dress as aristocracy a lot.

Fourth: the protagonists are a rogue group of war-tired lower class soldiers who aspire to build a better future. They overthrow the aristocrats with lots of cool fighting and massacring in strange and uncomfortable ways. They want to achieve world piece. However, once they succeed to overthrow the nation's corrupt Marie Antoinettes and Nicholases, their ways start rapidly diverging between anarchists and techno-fascist leanings.

At some point in the development of the series' plot, the core group of protagonists completes their evolution - some of them become the new villains of the story, while others become the flawed antiheroes, Saw Guevaras of the story - violent, unpredictable, partially luddite. They hack the enemies' technologies and turn them on themselves, like in Appleseed. But unlike Appleseed, there's a lot more genuine reflection on just why this shit is happening.

The story is long and complicated, kind of like a space opera, where you get to know the military commanders and also in parallel see the evolution of society. The show-start two/three powered setting collapses and gets reformed into a different power balance on Earth, mirroring the rapid political shifts from 1900 to 1950 in the first half of the XX century.

The show spans a similar period and ends with most of the original cast dying from old age and reflecting on what they have achieved.

Name.... hmm...

MECHS OF OUR FATHERS

[Sea Skimmer]

Dinosaurs in power armor is the logical way to approach this.

[K. A. Pital]

Dinosaurs in power armor is the logical way to approach this.

Why not just go all the way with exoskeletons? What is inside can be pure goo (or pure muscle), anyway. Also solves the problem of fragile bones.