First, you tell us walking is better for the environment and then you tell us that it won't be possible because some stupid numbers law thing? What do you expect us to walk on? Our own fucking meaty feet?! They go all ouchie after a time!
Even ignoring the square-cube law, it's just a really bad design. If you look at modern main battle tanks, they have been getting lower profile. This is for the simple fact that not being a massive target sticking up from the terrain is a really useful feature. Even then, they often use terrain to try and lower their visible profile further. Add to that all the complexity of making legs and arms work, and it's begging for a stealthier vehicle to drop the mech with a 105mm penetrator to the knee.
Patlabor addresses this somewhat. Bipedal mech started as a way to rapidly rebuild Tokyo after a massive earthquake. They became so ubiquitous, that regular people had access to them so between drunk/disgruntled construction workers and some bank robberies, Tokyo police had to add two divisions of "Patrol Labors" to deal with it. They're costly and annoying to everyone. The mech carriers are two lanes wide and no body likes giving them the right of way in traffic. After that, the companies making them diversified into military and meches have a limited roll depending on the terrain. Mostly swampy jungles with bad line of sights, so the legs are useful and the high profile a none issue. High end military models are very quiet compared to civilian models.
In the same spirit: I laughed at this and upvoted it, but I don't know what the square cube law is or what it has to do with mechs. I don't really understand the joke and I'm honestly a fraud for upvoting it and engaging with it, at all.
Think about any part of your body... say your arm. Now imagine scaling it up to double the size.
Your muscles are now double the length but also have to move a doubled distance. That changes nothing.
That same muscle (it's roughly a tube) has doubled it's diameter, so it 2² = 4 times as strong because it's cross-section is a circle and the surface of a circle is (d/2)² * pi.
But your whole arm has doubled it's size in all 3 directions. So it's volume/mass is now 2³= 8 times as high.
So in short: double your size and you are 2² = 4 times as strong, but you also have to move 2³ = 8 times the mass. That's the square/cube thing that makes just scaling up impossible.
PS: Yes, if you ever wondered how you were so incredible good at climbing things when you were a child... small children are much stronger than you compared to their own body weight.
In addition to what others here have said, it is also the cause of scaling fall damage.
An ant falles down a mine shaft and doesn't even notice.
A mouse bounces and runs off.
A person breaks.
A horse splashes.
Surface area decreases max fall speed. Mass increases max speed. Mass times speed indicated how much force something feels at the end of the fall. The issue is, surface area scales as a square, Mass as a cube, and thus the bigger something has the less drag it has and the more energy it absorbs as it lands, getting hit coming and going.
The square-cube law is about how increasing the size of an object increases its volume much more rapidly. So if you make an ant, say, twice as large, it ends up 4 times as heavy (don't take these numbers as anything but an example, I'm pretty sure there's formulae and shit). For that reason, massive vehicles, like mechs, are impractical - something twice as large as a tank is gonna end up much more than twice-as-heavy.
Actually, did the surface area math for a Timberwolf/Madcat mech years and years ago and they were (unexpectedly) fine.
They had something like 25% more surface area per foot than a challenger 2 does with both treads.
The bigger issues are that chicken walker legs don't work to support 60 some odd tons of weight, and that the 10-15m height is a little bIt too noticeable
Picture a bipedal mech with a big gun that looks like rock. It has a shroud for people to hide under, so they can't be seen by thermal imaging. It could allow special forces to exist on mountains undetected for extended periods of time.
Admittedly, a quadruped would be better for traction purposes, but there could be specialized use cases.
Or the Titanfall mechs, that are much smaller than typical and used for industrial purposes, which canonically are used to speed up colonization because they don't need a lot of the infrastructure that wheels need.
Carbon fiber! 10 times stronger than steel yet light as a feather!
...
Good luck mass producing that in the correct form though. Carbon fibers, while pretty much our currently best material is so far unusable besides on microscopic application.
I say this too, not as an engineer, but when reading the self important downers in battle forums saying a giant chicken wouldn't beat a lion only because of this stupid law, instead of just entertaining the idea
They're also completely wrong. You can go see Lucy in Chicago and see with your own eyes the skeleton of the giant chicken that would take out a lion in one bite.
My hen and I were having a bit of a staredown one afternoon and she instantly and with no warning snapped her head to the side and chomped a bee out of the air, swallowed it, and was immediately back to staring me down.