Vermin Lord

THEY LIVE IN MOSS.

THEY ARE CUTE AS FUCK!

Your basic Zaku is like the size and durability of an Assault Mech with the speed and maneuverability of a Light Mech, but only armed with something like an AC10 and a melee weapon in Battletech terms.

On land it would be terrifying, but Battletech space fighters are on a whole other level, basically Valkyries from Macross (sometimes literally).

On the non-mech side, Battletech has infantry in powered armor and tanks with lasers or PPCs, while Gundam ground troops, even decades after the One Year War, mostly use gear that wouldn’t look out of place in the Vietnam War, or even WWII.

Gundam spaceships tend to primarily rely on ECM, decoys, and point-defense guns to survive, and die in just a couple hits from each others’ weaponry, while Dropships and Warships in Battletech are balls of armor with engines on the bottom.

You simply don't get shit like this from franchisees that are more starry eyed and less cognisant of the failures of the Military Industrial complex

I was exactly the kind of nerdy kid that collected dedicated books filled with diagrams explaining the various sci-fi vehicles or technology from my favorite shows and movies, and I cannot recall any other fictional universes that went out of its way to deliberately imagine stuff that was canonically crappy.

Here's the starting snippet from the Sarna's BattleTech wiki entry on the Charger:

Can you imagine playing a game where more than one of the options it offers are deliberately bad and making them even somewhat passable requires you to jump through more hoops?

Why do these things exist? Same reason crappy military equipment exists in real life: lobbyists, corruption, graft, lazy or rushed engineering, take your pick. Some 'Mechs like the Assassin are noted for being so uncomfortable to use that its pilots developed fucking back problems.

It's one thing to have players argue about what mechs or builds are superior in which situations but BattleTech took the bold stance, "What if you were just given sub-par equipment and had to make the best of it?"

Sure you get a giant robot...but what if you were given the giant robot equivalent of a lemon?

And yanno what? Some people still like the bad mechs. You can run into forums where people defend the Assassin or the Hollander or argue about the Cicada. There is a meticulous and frankly excellent Youtube video that defends the "abject failure" of a 'Mech that is the Charger with a run time of one hour and sixteen minutes and it is fucking riveting. It has to be the most mecha pilot things I've ever seen: it incorporates the 'I love my ancient, shitty car' attitude to your giant stompy death robot shenanigans.

You want to attack me sososo bad You want to hit my stupid light mech face and take away all my armor

You simply don't get shit like this from franchisees that are more starry eyed and less cognisant of the failures of the Military Industrial complex