No, you seriously need to be telekinetic to operate a mecha due to the square-cube law - you can't shut down a humanoid-mode transforming mecha or have the pilot bail out unless it's rigged up to a support gantry at all the major joints, because actuator and materials technology isn't up to the task of keeping one from collapsing and being severely damaged by its own weight; even with pure Blue-tech moving at the proportionate speed of a human would do some damage. The TK shell around the skin is what provides most of the armor effect, too. Most of the inner empty space in the structures is shaped into waveguides and studded with amplifier nodes for the psychic heterodyne effect to extend an ESPer's automatic body reinforcement to the overall unit, and while this does provide some degree of fine control the gross movements are handled by the manual inputs.
Oh, and since I don't think I actually said why the Zzard don't just Rain Of Fire the place into a cinder, their goal is conquest, preferably with a surviving population large enough to become a net producer to feed and supply their empire within a decode or two, not xenocide. At a minimum, they require a viable biosphere, and coast-to-coast plains of glass under a sky of ashes and acid does not a viable biosphere make. They squashed the major population and control centers in North America but left the breadbasket and midwestern production centers intact for just that reason, and Japan because they had the most Blue-tech per square mile without significant production capacity. Africa didn't have much in the way of significant (to them) militarization and lots of untapped resources so it was their second site for landing in force, but Europe is a tougher nut to crack with nearly all the armies in the world (again, from their perspective only the mecha count for anything) concentrated there.
Disguising the mecha as normal craft wasn't considered originally because no one thought earth-built units would be effective enough for the limited number of pilots compared to conventional weapons to have any significant effect - none of the commanders wanted to hear or believe the reports that said you'd need a minimum of 10-to-1 odds to do significant damage to one (in humanoid form, the less similar the shape is to the pilot's body the weaker the TK heterodyne effect is) and more like 100-to-1 to kill it, so up until the UFw-190s and (thus far largely undefined) German ground units started dealing the hurt in the blitzkreig no one else was particularly taking their mecha programs seriously, aside from slow, heavily built ground units that didn't need a top-tier ESPer to operate at combat levels, basically walking heavy tanks. A pilot capable of handling a variable fighter can still equal the defensive performance of one of those under control of the lower 80% of pilots, which are rare to begin with as previously noted. Eva Braun can very nearly equal that strength on her own, but has a fear of heights too great to tolerate the viewpoint of one, or she'd be a terrifying pilot. Likewise, you can have a communications operator or a gunner, but handing off control to a copilot is only safely done in aircraft form since only one person can have their TK extended linking their body to the mecha at a time.
The pilot's TK is also generally expected to transfer gunpods between hands and storage hardpoints and for missile guidance, and makes the primitive laser weapons into blasters that have slower moving beams, but can actually do damage rather than just blinding someone who happens to catch one in the eye and giving them a sunburn, scorching paint, or setting fine-weave cloth or very dry wood on fire.
Past a certin point the larger the unit is, the more effective the amplification is, also, something the UMe-262 begins to tap into with its relatively extreme height in humanoid form, as do the UHo-229, LPL, Raven, and larger constructions like the players' variable aircraft carrier and (later) St. Rodney class space cruisers, along with the alien Boloss and Toggel. Zzard ships are universally not built to transform, as no single commander, let alone the client-race crews, are trusted with such power.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Oh, and since I don't think I actually said why the Zzard don't just Rain Of Fire the place into a cinder, their goal is conquest, preferably with a surviving population large enough to become a net producer to feed and supply their empire within a decode or two, not xenocide. At a minimum, they require a viable biosphere, and coast-to-coast plains of glass under a sky of ashes and acid does not a viable biosphere make. They squashed the major population and control centers in North America but left the breadbasket and midwestern production centers intact for just that reason, and Japan because they had the most Blue-tech per square mile without significant production capacity. Africa didn't have much in the way of significant (to them) militarization and lots of untapped resources so it was their second site for landing in force, but Europe is a tougher nut to crack with nearly all the armies in the world (again, from their perspective only the mecha count for anything) concentrated there.
Disguising the mecha as normal craft wasn't considered originally because no one thought earth-built units would be effective enough for the limited number of pilots compared to conventional weapons to have any significant effect - none of the commanders wanted to hear or believe the reports that said you'd need a minimum of 10-to-1 odds to do significant damage to one (in humanoid form, the less similar the shape is to the pilot's body the weaker the TK heterodyne effect is) and more like 100-to-1 to kill it, so up until the UFw-190s and (thus far largely undefined) German ground units started dealing the hurt in the blitzkreig no one else was particularly taking their mecha programs seriously, aside from slow, heavily built ground units that didn't need a top-tier ESPer to operate at combat levels, basically walking heavy tanks. A pilot capable of handling a variable fighter can still equal the defensive performance of one of those under control of the lower 80% of pilots, which are rare to begin with as previously noted. Eva Braun can very nearly equal that strength on her own, but has a fear of heights too great to tolerate the viewpoint of one, or she'd be a terrifying pilot. Likewise, you can have a communications operator or a gunner, but handing off control to a copilot is only safely done in aircraft form since only one person can have their TK extended linking their body to the mecha at a time.
The pilot's TK is also generally expected to transfer gunpods between hands and storage hardpoints and for missile guidance, and makes the primitive laser weapons into blasters that have slower moving beams, but can actually do damage rather than just blinding someone who happens to catch one in the eye and giving them a sunburn, scorching paint, or setting fine-weave cloth or very dry wood on fire.
Past a certin point the larger the unit is, the more effective the amplification is, also, something the UMe-262 begins to tap into with its relatively extreme height in humanoid form, as do the UHo-229, LPL, Raven, and larger constructions like the players' variable aircraft carrier and (later) St. Rodney class space cruisers, along with the alien Boloss and Toggel. Zzard ships are universally not built to transform, as no single commander, let alone the client-race crews, are trusted with such power.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows