#combining robots

Alright time for the next character poll. Same idea as the lat one goes for this one. Help me decide between two characters of mine that need an update.

First option is again Joan Pendragon. I still want to give her armor a proper update. Copy pasted from the last poll: "I originally made her back in 2015 when I was going through a bit of an anime-obssessed, weeb phase. Which led to me giving the blonde-haird white girl the name "Joan Muramasa", and magical Samurai Armor... which... Yeah. After maturing more I decided to change things up. So along with the name change I have plans to change her magical armor to be more Knight-themed."

That being said I also have been needing to update a special combination my robot character Emgear

I somewhat recently redid his standard Knight combination...

... But I haven't done a redesign of his upgraded "Knight EX" combination. Part of the reason why I haven't done so yet is because I haven't yet is because I was having trouble coming up with a new upgraded design for the robot that becomes his legs, Axcel.

I came up with "EX" forms for the two, Balista (the beetle) and Sparrow (the Bird/Dragon), but Axcel proved to be a bigger challenge.

So I guess you could kinda consider this a bit of a 2-for-1 design update since they are a team. XD

Sorry for getting a little long there, but with all that said...

Watching a number of vehicles transform into robot parts and then combine to form a single, larger robot is cool and I want to see more of it.

But I also would like to make it make sense. Because if at all possible, you do not want to design a robot this way.

It’s already bad enough that the robot is designed to come apart so easily, with so many of its internal mechanisms dedicated to the task of combining and separating, rather than having the structure entirely dedicated to maintaining its physical integrity in the face of damage.

It’s made even worse by designing the individual components to transform into shapes that have absolutely nothing to do with their component forms. A machine that transforms into a completely different machine already introduces so many more parts to break just from facilitating such a transformation, not to mention making room for all of the parts necessary to make the component function as a completely different kind of machine.

But from an outside point of view, we want the characters to do it anyway!

So, what would force an engineer to design a giant mecha this way?

Ah, now you’re thinking of complications that the protagonists must work around, and this introduces tension to your story.

Underdogs

Maybe the protagonists are The Resistance, and they can’t openly transport their giant mecha around, so they need to sneak it from place to place in the guise of various smaller vehicles that are easier to disguise. All of this effort is absolute hell on the maintenance crew, but they have no other choice.

Rules of the Game

Or maybe both the protagonists and antagonists labor under the same complications. Maybe their world features some kind of portal-based transportation network with a strict size-limit, so they can only send their giant mecha from place to place in pieces, and those pieces need some ability to move and fight by themselves until the whole team is assembled.

Magic! (Original Voltron)

In the original version of Voltron, the giant mecha was designed and built as a single robot rather than five. It didn’t become a combining mecha until the witch Hagar used a powerful curse to destroy Voltron by dividing it into five separate pieces.

But since it was magic that divided them rather than physical damage, the pieces twisted into five independent robots rather than broken and severed parts, and those parts could fight back against the curse to briefly return to their original form.

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it! I had this random idea to give my combining robot a special Christmas combination.

And now he has joined my small club of 4 or so characters that had a Christmas/Winter themed special outfit/form. XD

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I made myself promise that I’d start getting some of the dozen-odd combining mech doodles I do actually sort of designed and refined this week. So here’s what I did today, a pass at Terrain Shark, Rampage Manta and Crawler Kraken. Terrain Shark has a robot mode on its own, but it can also split to form arms for a larger combination with Crawler Kraken. There are a few more for this series, but this is all I got done today.