I think something along the lines of an augmented powered exoskeleton, or passive ones…

https://www.fieldtexcases.com/blog/medical-military-applications-exoskeleton-suits/

… could plausibly upscale into basically Power Armor… and you could maybe also upscale them into basically forklift with legs that you wear, from the loading bay in Alien…

I think those kinds of things are certainly within the realm of plausibility… presuming the power source can be made actually usefully weight efficient.

You can be a kind of up armored and up armed soldier, you can lift heavy shit, carry it a really long way, across broken terrain (that can support the weight).

Pair these with an active defense system, and they might actually be reasonable useful in certain military scenarios.

Its kinda like how just saying ‘drones’ is reductive… different sizes, scales, carrying capacities / payloads, ranges, speeds, methods of communication, propulsion systems, power sources … create a huge spectrum of different types and niches.

We have humanoid robots that can do bipedal locomotion pretty fucking well, without a pilot.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vW3QoaPnDGA

Pair a similar kind of software with something closer to a suit, strapped around a human, all it has to do is translate human motions to the scale of the suit, do intelligent stabilizing, kinda like how modern aircraft controls are fly by wire, not pure analog.

Now… would these kinds of things be practical, in terms of production costs vs actual utility?

No fucking clue lol.

Boston Dynamics got started making weird leggy robots specifically for terrain that’s too rough for wheels and tank tracks, so if there was somehow a need for a bipedal robot it might end up looking somewhat like a mech.

My guess is that legged ground based war machines are usually going to have 4+ legs for stability, though. Airborne drones are probably going to be way more common.

Personally, I hope we achieve a utopian future where war is obsolete, scarcity is history, and we build giant mecha robots and battle with them as a power sport

I cannot answer this question objectively. Mechs are too fucking cool and I want to see them too much.

after “don’t be there”, next layer of survivability onion is “don’t be seen”, there is no advantage to walking robot over something with lower profile, like a normal tank

Bipedal locomotion has some pretty big drawbacks. Like falling over. You’d be surprised how many people die that way.

Best not build trillion dollar robots that can trip and fall. You become vulnerable to obstacles, Mines, tripwires, and Ewoks.

It’s your standard superweapon problem. Why put all the money and resources into a single massive weapon that can be destroyed when you could instead make a lot of smaller, more practical stuff for the same price? We don’t make battleship sized tanks, and not just because of the physics problems they’d have trying to move on land. Hell, we don’t make giant battleships for the sea any more either, and that’s the one place where there isn’t a physics problem.

What advantage is there to using a giant robot? What does it do that’s more effective than existing vehicles, drones, weapon platforms etc? Sure, it can walk over terrain that might be hard for some ground vehicles, but we already have shit that can fly. It could have multiple weapons to choose between if it uses them by hand, but we are still paying for those and could instead mount them on cheaper platforms and use them all at once. Other than style points, the only thing I can think of is the utility that comes from having giant hands to pick stuff up. Being a heavily armed combat crane is probably not worth the investment.