17th April 2007, 6:02 PM
Mech Assault style mechs never sat well with me. What's so great about the human form, in terms of battle I mean? There are far more efficient designs than a walking humanoid robot. Also, it just seems really stupid if the robot is just going to shoot people to actually give it a hand for the sole purpose of putting a really big gun IN that hand. There's also the issue of scale. Since 2D forces in construction vs 3D forces don't scale at the same rate, it takes a lot to get that working. Blowing up a gun just wouldn't do the job. The bullet would never leave the chamber! Look at cannons and the difficulty, historically, of increasing their size (these days scaling down is important though).
I expect giant robots to resemble bugs more than people. Those are good designs, though again the issue is scale. An ant 100x the size will not have efficient blood pumping and, on top of collapsing under it's own weight, it might just cave in on itself, which would be really gross and take a while to clean up. (There's a reason bugs only get so big on our surface world, whereas boyancy underwater allows for much bigger bugs, also known as king crabs and such.)
I expect giant robots to resemble bugs more than people. Those are good designs, though again the issue is scale. An ant 100x the size will not have efficient blood pumping and, on top of collapsing under it's own weight, it might just cave in on itself, which would be really gross and take a while to clean up. (There's a reason bugs only get so big on our surface world, whereas boyancy underwater allows for much bigger bugs, also known as king crabs and such.)
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)