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Combat Mech
May 8, 2026 at 08:56 AM
Applied Title Case to body headings
The combat mech is a player-controlled ground unit deployed from the TARTARUS battleship's hangar bay. It is the game's answer to fights that play out at a human scale rather than at the dreadnought scale. When the player drops into the mech, the camera and combat shift down from a city-sized warship to a single ground-level machine, and the engagement plays out at that smaller register before control returns to the TARTARUS.
The mech is a secondary combat layer, not the central one. The primary fight in the overview is the battleship versus cities, armies, and other large targets. The mech is layered on as a smaller-scale option. Players who go in expecting a mech-first action game will find that framing inverted: most of the campaign happens at the battleship layer, and the mech is one tool inside it.
Mech use follows a simple round trip from the battleship and back to it.
Launch from the hangar bay
. The TARTARUS carries the mech onboard. When a fight calls for it, the player drops into the mech and it is deployed from the battleship's hangar.
Fight at ground level
. The engagement plays out at the mech's scale rather than the dreadnought's, with the player handling the smaller target directly.
Return to the TARTARUS
. After the engagement, control returns to the battleship layer, and the campaign continues across the strategic map.
Because the campaign is structured as a continuous campaign rather than a series of mission loads, the mech drop is something the player chooses inside the same ongoing battle flow rather than a separate game mode.
benkimchi has framed the mech as the option for smaller-scale confrontations that do not warrant the full attention of a city-leveling battleship. The TARTARUS's main batteries are tuned for targets at the city or fleet scale; pointing them at a much smaller objective is overkill, and in many cases the collateral footprint of doing so is undesirable on its own. The mech gives the player a precision-scale alternative for those situations.
This is the same logic players first meet in the getting started guidance: not every fight against the four enemy categories warrants a city-leveling response, and the mech is the deployed answer when the dreadnought's main guns are the wrong shape of force.
The combat mech is where DREADNOUGHT TARTARUS leans most directly into its anime-genre influences. The dev has pointed at Macross and Gundam as touchstones for the project's tone, and the mech is the most legible expression of that lineage: a single human-piloted machine dropped into a ground engagement, framed in the early-to-mid 2000s anime sci-fi register the rest of the game lives in.
Several aspects of the mech have not been clarified in pre-release material and should not be treated as confirmed:
How many distinct mech variants exist, if more than one.
Mech-specific loadouts and whether they share parts with the battleship's customization.
Specific weapon types fitted to the mech.
Pilot or named-character details associated with the mech.
Mech durability, hit points, or damage values.
Cooldowns or limits on how often the mech can be deployed.
Scope of mech customization relative to the TARTARUS's modular system.
Treat anything beyond the launch-from-hangar deployment loop as an open question until benkimchi shares more pre-release material.
