Andy Kent wrote:

Ever heard of the dive bomber? They drop anti-tank bombs and would be
perfect to take out walker as well without getting into machinegun

range

with the walkers.

<facefault> Um... yes, the Stuka would be perfect for this. Of course,
the Stuka is a German aircraft... and the Allies really didn't use
dive-bombing that much. Besides, dive-bombers are NOT that good against
a fairly agile target... heck, they're almost useless against anything
that moves more unpredictably than a railroad train anyway.

Actually, there was a Stuka variant introduced on the Eastern Front
that was a very effective tank killer.  It mounted two 37mm anti-tank
guns instead of a bomb load.  I believe the top german tank-killer
scroed more than 500 tank kills flying thise plane.
As for the Allies not being able to duplicate this - the US had a few
carrier based dive-bombers which were quite obsolete at the beginning
of the war.  The Germans demonstrated teh effectiveness of dive bombers,
so it wouldn'be inconceivable that the US upgraded their designs.

I like the idea of smaller ones, AT-ST size, though.

Even those are next to useless without energy weapons.

Well, yeah, in RL of course it's a useless concept, which is why we use
tanks and half-tracks for weapons platforms instead.

I still maintain that anything with a power cord will be confined to
city fighting.  If you ditch the power cord, open terrain works, but
in that case, tanks would be a) faster, b) cheaper, and c) mount 
more firepower.  
On the other hand, as someone pointed out, unless extremely agile,
it would still not make much of a city fighter (Put the big-@$$
flamer on it, I say!), as it would get swarmed by infantry.

-skeezy5