Posted June 04 2011 - 06:58 PM
				
				
				
					I am completely against this, sounds too much like Gundam, which in my opinion are probably the worst and most unrealistic concept for bipedal war machines of any sort. Most of your equipment, shields, repair kits, etc is likely to be part of your mech setup versus as items found in battle. The reason why humans use handheld guns is because most people don't appeal to the idea of having their arm replaced with some sort of bionic gun arm, but if it did happen you would be able to fit a much larger fixed firearm then any weapon that can be held by man.
Hands are for geeky science droids, not war machines. If you want a machine to have changeable weapons you have them built in and available at any time, you don't build in a hand and pray that they happen to find a giant assault rifle weapon when they need one. Realistically, if you design a robot with a hand and a set of giant weapons to go with it, you would have to design an independent reload system for each gun, like ammo clips, and a more generic basic targeting system that is compatible with all your guns, instead of having a system specially designed to fire a single fixed weapon well.
The reason for not having giant mechanical hands dates all the way back to the first cannons, you may ask why didn't they design cannon carriages with a flexible gun mount that could be adjusted IN BATTLE to hold any barrel? Well that would mean more separate pieces, which results in a weaker hold, which means you can't hold anything really big because the weight and recoil from it would smash your mount to pieces and you would get blown away by the other guy who built larger, stronger, further shooting fixed cannons. You would also have to bring along a whole set of different barrels, and ammo, adding a whole lot of extra baggage to deal with, having a single standard cannon would mean no need to drag along a bunch of different barrels and you could carry a lot of one type of ammo versus a small amount of different ammunition.
The same issues would apply to a giant mechanical hand which is essentially a very flexible gun mount with lots of little pieces and complex machination which would weaken its structure and make it more vulnerable to damage and limit it to holding much smaller weaponry then what a fixed gun could be using the same amount of material. Would you rather have your mech be armed with two standard cannons, or one standard cannon and one arm that MAY be holding a much less powerful handheld gun?
Mechs are designed to survive missiles and lasers, what would a thrown rock do? Unless you have some super gigantic neo-trebuchet tossing arm to pick up garbage dumpsters and automobiles your not going to do anything besides give away your position, and even if you did you'll probably get blown away by the guy who used that space for a bigger cannon
Same goes for wielding a giant melee weapon of some sort. You might say "but what if you got into close combat, huh, what about then?" Think about it this way, how many times in multiplayer FPS do you get close enough to use a melee weapon? And how often when you see an enemy getting dangerously close do you pull out your shotgun or pistol instead of your knife? The incidents where having a dedicated melee weapon are few and highly circumstantial, you would be far better off using the space for another ranged weapon to win in more common conventional shooting battles, instead of having a better chance at winning in rare unlikely battles.
If I did find myself in a melee range situation I would rather use the massive mass and weight of my mech to ram the enemy mech then put resources into having an arm to pull out some giant sword to hit him with, which would realistically probably do less damage then the crushing force of an entire metal giant crashing at speed into another.