For this thread, I am only talking about movies, however, novel MI one member of each squad is given multiple tactical nukes... which they DROP as they jump kilometers over their enemies. They don't deploy their squads in tight formations, they spread out a single squad over multiple kilometers.
Novel MI are bullcrap.
Their Rocket Launchers/Hand Flamers (they all have them, although, only the officers have nuke warheads)
Said launcher can be set to automatic (so the wearer doesn't have to worry about aiming)
"A suit isn't a space suit - although it can serve as one. It is not primarily armor - although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are. It isn't a tank - but a single MI private could take on a squadron of those things and knock them off unassisted if anybody was silly enough to put tanks against the MI. A suit is not a ship but it can fly, a little - on the other hand neither spaceships nor atmosphere craft can fight against a man in a suit except by saturation bombing of the area he is in (like burning down a house to get one flea!). Contrariwise, we can do many things that no ship - air, submersible, or space - can do.
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No need to describe what it looks like, since it has been pictured so often. Suited up, you look like a big steel gorilla, armed with gorilla-sized weapons. ...
But the suits are considereably stronger than a gorilla. If an MI in a suit swapped hugs with a gorilla, the gorilla would be dead, crushed; the MI and the suit wouldn't be mussed.
The "muscles," the pseudo-musculature, get all the publicity but it's the control of all that power which merits it. The real genius in the design is that you don't have to control the suit; you just wear it, like your clothes, like skin. Any sort of ship you have to learn to pilot; it takes a long time, a new full set of reflexes, a different and artificial way of thinking. Even riding a bicycle demands an acquired skill, very different from walking, whereas a spaceship - oh, brother! I won't live that long. Spaceships are for acrobats who are also mathematicians.
But a suit you just wear.
Two thousand pounds of it, maybe, in full kit - yet the very first time you are fitted into one you can immediately walk, run, jump, lie down, pick up an egg without breaking it (takes a trifle of practice, but anything improves with practice), dance a jig (if you can dance a jig, that is,without a suit) - and jump right over the house next door and come down to a feather landing.
The secret lies in negative feedback and amplification.
... I can do field maintenance and field repairs and check off the three hundred and forty-seven items from "cold" to ready to wear, and that's all a dumb MI is expected to do. ...
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But here's how it works, minus the diagrams. The inside of the suit is a mass of pressure receptors, hundreds of them. You push with the heel of your hand; the suit feels it, amplifies it, pushes with you to take the pressure off the receptors that gave the order to push. ...
The suit has feedback which causes it to match any motion you make, exactly - but with great force.
Controlled force ... force controlled without your having to think about it. You jump, that heavy suit jumps, but higher than you can jump in your skin. Jump really hard and the suit's jets cut in, amplifying what the suit's leg "muscles" did, giving you a three-jet shove, the axis of pressure of which passes through your center of mass. So you jump over that house next door. Which makes you come down as fast as you went up ... which the suit notes through your proximity & closing gear (a sort of simple-minded radar resembling a proximity fuse) and therefore cuts in the jets again just the right amount to cushion your landing without your having to think about it.
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Your "eyes" and your "ears" are rigged to help you without cluttering up your attention, too. Say you have three audio circuits, common in a marauder suit. The frequency control to maintain tactical security is very complex, at least two frequencies for each circuit both of which are necessary for any signal at all and each of which wobbles under the control of a cesium clock timed to a micromicrosecond with the other end - but all this is no problem of yours. You want circuit A to your squad leader, you bite down once - for circuit B, bite down twice - and so on. The mike is taped to your throat, the plugs are in your ears and can't be jarred out; just talk. Besides that, outside mikes on each side of your helmet give you biaural hearing for your immediate surroundings just as if your head were bare - or you can suppress any noisy neighbors and not miss what your platoon leader is saying simply by turning your head.
Since your head is the one part of your body not involved in the pressure receptors controlling the suit's muscles, you use your head - your jaw muscles, your chin, your neck - to switch things for you and thereby leave your hands free to fight. A chin plate handles all visual displays the way the jaw switch handles the audios. All displays are thrown on a mirror in front of your forehead from where the work is actually going on above and back of your head. All this helmet gear makes you look like a hydrocephalic gorilla but, with luck, the enemy won't live long enough to be offended by your appearance, and it is a very convenient arrangement; you can flip through your several types of radar displays quicker than you can change channels to avoid a commercial - catch a range & bearing, locate your boss, check your flank men, whatever.
If you toss your head like a horse bothered by a fly, your infrared snoopers go up on your forehead - toss it again, they come back down. If you let go of your rocket launcher, the suit snaps it back until you need it again. No point in discussing water nipples, air supply, gyros, etc - the point to all the arrangements is the same: to leave you free to follow your trade, slaughter.
... You practice jumping because, while you do it with a completely natural motion, you jump higher, faster, farther, and stay up longer. The last alone calls for a new orientation; those secconds in the air can be used - seconds are jewels beyond price in combat. While off the ground in a jump, you can get a range & bearing, pick a target, talk & receive, fire a weapon, reload, decide to jump again without landing and override your automatics to cut in the jets again. ...
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There are three main types of MI armor: marauder, command, and scout. Scout suits are very fast and very long-range, but lightly armed. Command suits are heavy on go juice and jump juice, are fast and can jump high; they have three times as much comm & radar gear as other suits, and a dead-reckoning tracker, inertial. Marauders are for those guys in the ranks with the sleepy look - the executioners." - Pg. 80 Fantasy and Science Fiction
Yeah.... You don't really want to go up against the MI infantry.. you would want to leave that to jets (which really should have no issue) or supported combined arms.
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