The tank is called a tank because in WW! they had trench warfare and somebody got the idea to put up barbed wire in the middle of the field... this meant that anyone who left the trenches had a 70-100% chance of dieing to machine gun nests. This made for many of the most spectacularly high casualty rates of any style of war... ever. It also applied to both sides. And this was sucktastic for everyone on the ground.
The British got it in there heads that it would be nice to have some for of protection against... well some form of protection at all. So the made a secret device that they told the guys making them were actually water tanks... for the Egyptian front. That is why they are called tanks.
Anyway these large metal things with treads (wheels have to be insanely large and rock solid to have a chance of getting anywhere in trench warfare.) The tank started off as a mobile wall with a couple of gun ports on the side. The primary purpose was to have a portable wall for the troops to get to the enemy trenches behind.
Having a giant thing come at you that ignored your weapons and was very, very loud. The only thing the could do on the German sides was hope for one of the badly engineered things to break down or to try an take it over... so only the British had tanks in WWI... everyone else ripped off the idea for the next war. Only they made them not suck as much and gave them a main gun.
You already covered siege warfare battles... so I'd say the first thing that has a chance of being considered a mecha for war are the Egyptian chariots... which had a guy with a bow (maybe a driver also) as fast attack mobiles (like jeeps and Humvees today). Later they added spinning knives that stick out of the wheels so they could butcher people on the way by.
That is why I designed a seige walker... the idea of mecha is the old 'find a need and fill it' model of inventing. You need the legs to get up high enough to get over the wall for the ramp. It probably would have to do with walls to deep to tunnel under and torch the bottom support so the wall collapses. In which case you'd use a siege tower and push the thing along with 200 or so of you troops. The legs/steam thing could be because the enemy is using horses/chariots effectively outside their walls. So you'd lose far to many men if you pushed it around. That and it shows just how much cash you have available, that you can make such a thing.
The British got it in there heads that it would be nice to have some for of protection against... well some form of protection at all. So the made a secret device that they told the guys making them were actually water tanks... for the Egyptian front. That is why they are called tanks.
Anyway these large metal things with treads (wheels have to be insanely large and rock solid to have a chance of getting anywhere in trench warfare.) The tank started off as a mobile wall with a couple of gun ports on the side. The primary purpose was to have a portable wall for the troops to get to the enemy trenches behind.
Having a giant thing come at you that ignored your weapons and was very, very loud. The only thing the could do on the German sides was hope for one of the badly engineered things to break down or to try an take it over... so only the British had tanks in WWI... everyone else ripped off the idea for the next war. Only they made them not suck as much and gave them a main gun.
You already covered siege warfare battles... so I'd say the first thing that has a chance of being considered a mecha for war are the Egyptian chariots... which had a guy with a bow (maybe a driver also) as fast attack mobiles (like jeeps and Humvees today). Later they added spinning knives that stick out of the wheels so they could butcher people on the way by.
That is why I designed a seige walker... the idea of mecha is the old 'find a need and fill it' model of inventing. You need the legs to get up high enough to get over the wall for the ramp. It probably would have to do with walls to deep to tunnel under and torch the bottom support so the wall collapses. In which case you'd use a siege tower and push the thing along with 200 or so of you troops. The legs/steam thing could be because the enemy is using horses/chariots effectively outside their walls. So you'd lose far to many men if you pushed it around. That and it shows just how much cash you have available, that you can make such a thing.