Ok, there are a number of examples of ‘small robots/vehicles join together to form a large humanoid robot that kicks butt’. Voltron (Lions, please!), certain Transformers/Gobots/knockoffs, Dai-X from Brian May’s Starfleet, etc. I’m fond of them, partly as an artifact of my youth. It was always lots of fun to take toys and assemble them together like clever little mega-lego thingies. And of course, much like Power Rangers for a younger generation, the TV shows expressed the principle that teamwork could achieve more than individual efforts. I have no problems with that.
What I really want to know though, is what kind of technology enabled these things when locked together to be orders of magnitude stronger than when they were apart? I mean, if you’ve got kick butt shields and lasers when you are assembled, why wouldn’t you have them when disassembled? You could argue power requirements, but joining together doesn’t really give you more power, just more coordinated power. I guess joined together could give you more short term power, but then you’re setting yourself up to be in a really bad place when you run out your power supply (although those always seemed to be infinite, no?). In some cases, like Voltron, it was clear you needed a larger robot to wield a larger offense or defense (giant electric sword…). But looking at standard operations, I would think you’d be better off in most cases as separate but coordinated pieces. Smaller targets, faster movement, the ability to swarm, surround, and flank opponents, etc. Could it be that there is some sort of super-powered energy system when they are together, but it was broken up amongst the constituent parts to make it less likely the enemy would get their hands on all the components at once? A sort of distributed key system? Was it just that there was only one _really_ good pilot who could achieve more by controlling the whole joined unit instead of leaving it up to the lesser pilots to be effective (I’m looking at you Pidge.)? It just seems tome that there would be more effective ways of doing it than having to smush into, of all things, a humanoid conglomerate.
