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Everyone is all Assault pilled until some jackass in a medium sitting on a ridge starts slinging 40-LRM’s in a single salvo at them.

If the Locust has a million fans, I am one of them.
If the Locust has 100 fans, I am one of them.
If the Locust has 1 fan, I am the only one.
If the Locust has 0 fans. I am no longer alive.

...and that is the tale of how my entire locust battallion was wiped by one assault mech.

"I'm sorry M'Lord but 50 Banebaldes just went out on patrol."

The guardsman standing nearby; "WE HAD 50 BANEBLADES?!"

"The bigger the mech the more gunnier it can be" A man after my own heart. More tonnage= more blammo

A bit of a clarification: zombie mechs actually have a set of fairly specific requirements to be called that. Those are:
1. Have no ammunition-dependent weapons (or at least have no explosive ammunition or weapons in it).
2. Not have a light or eXtra-Light engines (only standard or compact, armoured or not).
3. Have at least 1 weapon in either center torso or head (more is always better).

With all these requirements met, a newly born zombie mech can lose both of it's arms, both of it's side torsos, one leg and still be a threat and a valid target on a battlefield. The perfect example here is the mighty Crab: it has no explosive components, it has standard engine, at least in succ wars variants (meaning that side torso loss won't kill it) and it has 2 lasers (medium and small) in center torso and head. Therefore, if you will face a Crab in battle, your only choice of actually killing it os to either break both of it's legs, kill the pilot or destroy the engine, maybe alongside the entire center torso, all of which (at least in battletech table top) require either a very generous luck or a long and tiring grindnding of that mech to dust.

Compared to most of the mechs that don't meet these requirements, zombie mechs are not particularly stronger than them, but they will remain an active target on the battlefield for much longer, providing both cover by distraction to their allies and damage to their enemies.

Essentially, if a regular mech design can use only part of its armor (usually not even that big of a part) before it takes critical damage and either explodes or can't fight anymore, a zombie mech will have, on average, 2-3 tikes more available armor, because it can use ALL of it's armor via good piloting and shielding and not be afraid of taking sudden killing blows onto ammo bins, or losing all of it's weapons.

There is an Urbanmech fitted with an Arrow IV launcher.... with nukes.
When you decide hidding in the city isn't working anymore, just remove the city.

The story of the Blackjack reminds me a lot of the story of the Chauchat. Ask the internet what the worst gun ever made was, and many will point to the Chauchat (ignoring the slew of objectively worse examples like the Cobray Terminator or the Breda 30), but much of its rep is undeserved. Why did it get the rep that it did? Because for a good portion of its production run, the people who were building these things, Gladiator Cycle Company, were so incompetent at producing these weapons that misaligned sights were so commonly encountered that the French military had to build doctrine around misaligned sights. Which is really wild because the general manager of the company was the guy who designed the thing. Issues related to the actual design and not the horrific build quality were fairly easy to mitigate (including that slot cut in the magazine everyone likes to bring up) that the French, for all its flaws, loved it because it was a light machine gun at the time when the only other light machine gun in widespread use was the British by way of Belgium by way of America Lewis gun, and it left the Germans scrambling to try and catch up.

Your response then may be "but doesn't that mean the design was bad"? The French military eventually got fed up enough with Gladiator to hand production over to another company, SIDARME, and once they got their hands on it, pretty much all of the major issues with the gun vanished.

The savvier gun experts might be ready to respond with "ah, but what about the American .308 version?" Well, yes, that was an objectively terrible weapon. But it was also built for the American Expeditionary Forces in a rush and proved to be such a disaster that the vast majority of the gun's bad reputation was based around the American experiences with their .308 Chauchats. But they, too, loved the 8mm Lebel version the French used. And so did many of the 20+ nations that adopted them during and after the war.

And guess who was tasked to build the American Chauchats? If you guessed "those bike-building doofuses at Gladiator", you'd be right. It was quietly shoved off in favor of other light machine guns by the AEF and relegated largely to obscurity, despite its bad reputation having a knock-on effect on the Chauchat as a whole.

So yeah, long and overly hyperfixated comment short, this absolutely happens in real life and shows why you shouldn't just take people's statements at face value about anything without doing some research for yourself and that first impressions matter, even for military weapons.

Played a base-capture match one time as a urbie light mech. We were ahead on points but our whole team got killed save my nearly out of ammo light, almost whole enemy team was still alive and consisted of an atlas and two heavies. No chance in hell of killing that, so I casually walked into our own base and hid behind one of the atlas' legs, stopping the capture long enough for the match to end before they realized why capturing wasn't working. Never count out an urbie's ability to turn the tide even if its just through shear stubbornness.

24:23 the way you enunciated every number in the M1911's name genuinely made me suffer a full-body twitch

A battle tech mech: so, what's your deal?

Titan: I am a last resort weapon to utilize against the enemies of the god emperor

Scarab: I am a worm piloted mech originally meant for archeological projects, repurposed for war against mankind

At-At: Intimidation against rebel forces

A NEXT from Armored core: takes a sip of monster energy drink: kojima particle flavor civilian casualties

The other mechs: starts suffering from extreme radiation poisoning

The only thing I'd say, and I didn't catch this in my own videos on a similar subject, is that the advanced tech of later eras does start to turn some of these roles on their head. Small doesn't always mean more agile than heavier machines- it just depends on several factors.

XXL engines, MASC, and Superchargers all can turn things on their head. Nothing scarier than a 80-ton mech blitzing you at 120 kph. This doesn't all necessarily apply to Mechwarrior though.

But overall, yes. Good video.

LOVING the non 40k stuff, I like those videos but knowing you will randomly decide to cover Star Wars or Battletech is always exiting!

Some days I'm an Archer pilot, lending Leonidas his shade, some days I'm a Hunchback pilot preaching the gospel of Big Gun. Most days I'm an anklebiter in a Flea, darting in with laser machine guns and distracting the enemy while my heavier lance mates move into position before darting away to scout out and pester the next group.

I changed my mind, I'll give you my pancreas if you give me world eaters and blades of khorne do or don't

Y’know, I need you and Tex to have a talk. Just so I can enjoy the gravelly svelte voices of two of my favorite history nerds in one video.

50 bane blades is just the 40k version of the Steiner scout lance.

@pancreasnowork9939 Hey! you used my art commission for the atlas at 30:55, Piloted that mech through a long battletech campaign, and by the end of it the Festung as it was called (german for fortress since my character was a lyran officer turned fedcom) was a mixed tech monstrosity with clantech weaponry and components and hardened armor. Survived a turn out in the open against an entire galaxy of clan mechs and it would dish out around 100 damage a turn. We never got that far but my headcanon was that my character and the mech died on terra during the jihad, fighting an omega. Seems like a fitting end since it was an ancient machine that had fought on terra during the amaris civil war.

Battle tech, mech warrior and armored core have taken over my life recently. I need mechs.