Viability of a robot/mecha body with jumping-stilt/Cheetah-blade-like legs?

Saw Pacific Rim for the first time with a friend recently; I'd never really thought too hard about giant robots/been as into Mecha and Gundam stuff as some of my friends before, but the Jaeger concept got me kind of in the mindset for thinking up Fun Robot Designs, and now I'm trying to come up with some fun designs and quirks that make sense for something like fighting Giant Kaiju-Style Monsters, but which I haven't really seen in other designs I've looked up?

An idea that I thought would be super neat is to basically have a Smaller and more compactly-built Jaeger-Type Mech, built to use its low center of gravity to its advantage and get up-and-under bigger foes to attack them where they're more vulnerable, use their opponent's own weight and momentum against them, and sacrifice increased size and outright lifting capacity for greater Durability (I noticed there were a lot of problems in the movie with Bigger Mechs not having much in the way of Crumple Zones, and being Long and Tall seems to come at the price of Balance and Stability- I like the idea of a Little Mech that's built in such a way that even if you do manage to crush it, the ways in which it Crumples/distributes stress shields the people on the inside and gives them time to either Recover and Fight On, or Bail Out if necessary). I also liked the idea of this bot having a sort of "Spring-Loaded" feel to it, something that can absorb a lot of physical shock and Bounce Right Back- Maybe even using the shock of your own attack to bounce back at you. XD

That made me remember things like prosthetic running "blades" and jumping stilts, and thought it would give the mech that spring-loaded feeling, improve its mobility when fighting large opponents across things like cityscapes and different terrain, and look really cool and unique if I could somehow incorporate something like these into the design of my Mech's legs!

This isn't really something I've seen in very many Mech Designs, but that begs the question: Is that because someone who is Better At Robots than Me has already figured out that there are more disadvantages to this than advantages? I remember the argument about whether or not these sorts of prosthetic limbs gave human athletes too much of a competitive edge to allow them to compete alongside runners with Regular Human Legs, but is there any reason why this would be a serious design flaw for a mech, or impair the mech in some way? I'm sure there are disadvantages, everything has those, but do the disadvantages of a "blade-stilted" mech outweigh the potential advantages of one?

I guess what I'm trying to get at is this: What advantages does a mech with "traditional" legs and feet have over one with Running Blades, and Vice-Versa?

posted almost 6 years ago

BonnetBee‭

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