I'm loving The Witch From Mercury so far, and was hoping something like this would crop up. A few questions.
Students are sponsored by mega-corps, will we be making those up with our characters, or will there be a list of canon ones?
Will different corps have different specialties and styles for their Knights?
Are there any prejudices or particular societal notions regarding people who are enhanced go pilot a System Type Knight? Like we see in Iron Blooded Orphans(if you've seen it).
You'll be making them up, I'll be filling in the blanks between them. Makes it less limiting that way.
Yes, different corps do have signature specialties and styles. Think of Lancer's corp differences (although smaller since the world's scale is much smaller). IPS-Northstar's sturdy, purpose-built designs. SSC being the Ferrari of mech design. Horus being weird, nearly organic with bizarre shit going on. Harrison Armory's chunky, futuristic designs. Etc.
There's some prejudice resulting from the older surgeries that required massive hunks of bodies to be replaced. Besides that, most of the downsides beyond you feel the pain of your own mech are pretty hidden by political leaders and there wasn't a pre-series hate crusade against it ala Iron Blooded Orphans. The largest degree of prejudice will be from where your character is born, essentially.
OK cool. What's the scale of the mechas we're working with? Would piloting something like an Atlas be unfeasible?
7-12 meters is the standard for Mechs. Think of this as light to heavy. There are mechs smaller than 7 meters and larger than 12, but those are more for special operations. From what I remember, the Atlas (and other 1/2 size Lancer mechs) are closer to exosuits. That's probably a bit too small. Your pilot should be able to fit entirely into the torso, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. A minimum size of 4 to 5-ish meters?
You can still have a manlet mech, it just won't be as freakishly small or nimble as an Atlas.
But what kind of style are they?
Less toy-like than a stereotypical Gundam, less real human faces than Transformers, less stilted and realistic than Battletech. I'm not going to be an exact stickler on the style.
Here's an album of some random mechs I have saved.Most of the mechs are built on the corpses of alien mech invaders. Depending on the degree of how much of the original scavenged design they want to keep, it can range from human-military-industrial type designs to pretty freaky stuff.
