Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who? There’s a Mech Pilot here? Form wings of 3 and watch your 4 and 8
Mech pilot? Heck, no. Do you see a cockpit anywhere round here? No, the last of those guys went two years ago. These things are cheaper and tougher because all they have is a supercooled solid-state brain-dub unit armoured into the chest: get a good enough recording of a good enough mech pilot and upload endless lossless copies into these babies. Entire threat vectors gone at once: you can't interrogate a downed pilot, there's no persistent storage on board, the dub's pure RAM — power core goes, everything goes. Can't go AWOL: can't get out of the mech, and when it runs out of juice, everything goes.
The only form of survival for brain-dubs is to bring the unit back in, get uploaded and debriefed and behave for the chance to be filed as an updated replacement for their library stock copy.
What's that, kid?
No, no, look, from the top: the meat copy of you let the company take a brain-dub as part of the redundancy package. We just loaded you-you off library tape, and after mission briefing we'll download you into a mech—