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Comment found here. Rather than clog up comments I'm going to reply here to Shanvir.

As for your last point, I'm honestly intrigued. What metagame do you come from? I don't mean this as an insult, I've played in two or three different parts of the US and what's good and bad varies greatly depending on where you're at (heck I've seen it change greatly just an hour or two drive away). The tactics you're mentioning makes me wish I didn't scare away the local Tau players (they played gunline footslogging...I wish they'd gone heavy mech and made it an interesting match like you're discussing). Anyways I'm curious as to what metagame you're from because I hardly see raveners (given what's being played a lot here) as worthwhile (my second army is nids) while at the same time writing off nobs. Yes, they are expensive. But throw them in a battlewagon and they gain range and a bit of durability over bikers. A tad cheaper too given the number of bodies you can amass. Apologies if you thought I fielded nothing but boyz but with the warboss being both an incredible combat HQ and a way to field one of the nastiest melee squads in the game I find myself taking at least one nob squad in every list. It does cripple me a bit in single HQ games but they're pretty rare anyways.

Firstly, there is no metagame. Everyone plays under the same rules and each codex is capable of making a balanced list which can take on any other list. Some books do this significantly better than others (i.e. Tau, SM/SW, DE, IG, Eldar over Orks, Daemons, CSM, Daemonhunters, Necrons). When you start changing your list to what other people play in your local "metagame" you're tailoring. You should be able to take your list anywhere and win. So I play in the "metagame" of good armies.

Secondly, Nob Bikers suffer from egg basket syndrome and the Orks can't put a good army around them. This leaves them open to blocking and feeding sac units. Nobs in BW need lots of upgrades to still be effective in combat and are still extremely vulnerable to shooting. They are certainly an upgrade on Boyz but the Nobs still don't scare any true CC units.

I'm not quite sure what you mean about training. I don't have a warseer account or anything but do you mean lining it up so the facing you're looking at is completely obscured by another vehicle? In most cases its going to be some real interesting geometry to pull that off for two vehicles affecting each other. Do you have a diagram of it? It sounds quite interesting.

A trukk is roughly 80% of the length and about the same width as a battlewagon. While I rarely need it its not that terribly difficult to get cover to my wagon from a trukk. I do agree on the footprint of the wagons...I sometimes envy the people with the oldschool shoebox sized battlewagons. The area covered by their KFFs is huge.

I'll see if I can make a picture model with Vassal or find a post on it from Stelek's blog. I doubt people on Warseer know anything about this, they don't listen. Essentially you use the initial chasis to completely block LoS to the armor facing of tanks behind. This gives it a 3+ save or requires you to move to a different facing. Utilising a few smokes or when you get good at it (see StJohn) 1 or 2 you can give your whole mech army at least a 4+ save and quite a few a 3+ save. Orks can't do this and its still not easy to get Trukks to give 4+ cover saves to BWagons. Remember you have to cover 50% of the facing and because of it's narrow width you need to cover the sides which Trukks against find difficult on BW.

The whole point of the big mek (and the reinforced rams tbh) is to try and help me ignore the table as much as possible. That's mostly because I'm rather weak when it comes to initial setups regarding line of sight taking first turn shots but I've found the setup works quite well. There's very few things that make me play a board full of terrain and a bare one differently...until my stuff is out of its transports. But that's more about my personal failings as opposed to a failing of the army list.

Again with other mech though they don't need to rely on outside help and rate of fire still really scares Trukks with or without cover. Even when one wrecks (and doesn't explode) they provide cover for other vehicles. Trukks never do.

I've used lootas before to pad points in my list and I've experimented with a lot of different builds but I'm not quite 100% happy with any of them. Maybe you're correct, maybe its just a bad list and I'm against a bunch of really bad players. But I think you're overlooking a lot of things in your analysis.

Use lootas, they're good against whatever you want. If the players you play against (present and past) used Tau gunlines I'd lean towards bad. In a direct matchup with other Mech or Hybrid style lists, Orks fail miserably. Even if my analysis is off on Trukks they still cannot reliably take out other Mech which still gives the advantage to other Mech lists.