I've always been a fan of mecha related stuff, so I thought I'd post various ideas from things I've seen that could be applied to Perpetuum. As an ahead of time warning, most of these will be bad ideas . I'll try to post pictures too I can if it can be visualized, as well as how it could be applied to fit into Perpetuum. Feel free to post your own too, or troll me for knowing too much about this stuff .

Booster Jets
Where is it seen: Nearly every Japanese mecha show or game. It'd probably be easier to tell you which ones it isn't seen in

What is it: Generally a backpack attached to the back of a mech to make it jump around.

What does it look like: http://bit.ly/fGl405

How it could work in Perpetuum: If you ever played Dawn of War, I imagine it could work like the jetpack type abilities there, where you click a little circle wherever you want to land out to a certain amount of distance and that'll make you jump there. Could be cool for terrain navigation.

Why it probably wouldn't work: Most of Perpetuum's robots would look pretty silly doing this. I think there would have to be a dedicated backpack slot on the few robots it'd work with, mostly the more humanoid looking ones.

Funnels
Where it is seen: Generally the more old school Gundam shows.

What is it: Little psychic controlled modules that operate independently from a mech and fly around. In some shows they are wire guided and in others they are computer controlled rather than psychic controlled.

What does it look like:  http://bit.ly/f3LGSQ (Ignore the fact that this isn't really a mech, its the closest thing I could find to demonstrating what funnels actually are ).

How it could work in Perpetuum: They could fly around your bot and be shot independently, which would be pretty cool. It could make for some tactically distinguishable bots in the sense that these could have a lot of DPS output, but it could be pretty easily destroyed simply by the enemy targeting your fragile funnels. It could also give lighter bots an important role in the future when they finally do become outclassed in that I imagine you'd need pretty low hit dispersion to hit a funnel.

Why it probably wouldn't work: Devs seem committed to no drones, and these seem similar.

Parachutes

What is it: I hope you know what a parachute is.

Where is it seen: 08th MS Team

What does it look like: http://bit.ly/hT6fMd

How it could work in Perpetuum: They could get dropped by a huge ship (Maybe player controlled) and from there on parachute to the surface with the player struggling against things like wind and such. Could be interesting to see players get scattered around when trying to hot drop on an enemy, I don't know of any MMORPGs with that level of gameplay.

Why it probably wouldn't work: Hard to implement I imagine, especially for such a small dev team.

Melee Attacks

What is it: Beam sabers, pile drivers, heat axes, ball and chains, electric whips, there are a crap load of melee weapons for robots.

Where it is seen: Nearly every mecha thing anywhere.

What does it look like: I'm sure you can use your imagination.

How it could work in Perpetuum: I think it'd be hard to make this fun and steer it away from running up to something and autoattacking like all other MMORPGs, which would be lame in Perpetuum. I personally think that the damage a melee weapon does would be based on the mass of the robot, the velocity its going (And here it would be cool to have modules that increase your velocity for a very short period of time, like one second or so, for a quick spurt to hit your enemy hard) and independent properties of the weapon. Some weapons would be obviously silly in Perpetuum, like beam sabers, and others would fit well, like pile drivers.

Why it probably wouldn't work: Like I said, it'd be too easy to make this like WoW which would be lame.