First, you tell us walking is better for the environment and then you tell us that it won’t be possible because some stupid numbers law thing? What do you expect us to walk on? Our own fucking meaty feet?! They go all ouchie after a time!
Even ignoring the square-cube law, it’s just a really bad design. If you look at modern main battle tanks, they have been getting lower profile. This is for the simple fact that not being a massive target sticking up from the terrain is a really useful feature. Even then, they often use terrain to try and lower their visible profile further. Add to that all the complexity of making legs and arms work, and it’s begging for a stealthier vehicle to drop the mech with a 105mm penetrator to the knee.
Patlabor addresses this somewhat. Bipedal mech started as a way to rapidly rebuild Tokyo after a massive earthquake. They became so ubiquitous, that regular people had access to them so between drunk/disgruntled construction workers and some bank robberies, Tokyo police had to add two divisions of “Patrol Labors” to deal with it. They’re costly and annoying to everyone. The mech carriers are two lanes wide and no body likes giving them the right of way in traffic. After that, the companies making them diversified into military and meches have a limited roll depending on the terrain. Mostly swampy jungles with bad line of sights, so the legs are useful and the high profile a none issue. High end military models are very quiet compared to civilian models.
Ah but the bipedal mech suits could crawl along to floor, given a really low profile. Tank can’t do that. Checkmate.
/s
I want to see a Raven crawling on the floor with a low profile.
A Dire Wolf would be quite something too.
If square-cube law then how T-Rex? Checkmate engineers.
Note: like most memes I post, this is not mine. Specifically, I am not an engineering student; I passed high school math with a 59.5%.
In the same spirit: I laughed at this and upvoted it, but I don’t know what the square cube law is or what it has to do with mechs. I don’t really understand the joke and I’m honestly a fraud for upvoting it and engaging with it, at all.
The square-cube law is the rule saying that if you increase something’s size, its volume will also increase proportionally.
Ie: if you have a 1x1x1 cube it’s volume is 1, but if you have a 2x2x2 cube it’s volume is 8.
With mech design, making a huge bipedal robot means putting a massive amount of weight on relatively weak joints at the legs.
Thanks, I don’t think I like the square-cube law. Just make the joints stronger. It’ll be fine!
Think about any part of your body… say your arm. Now imagine scaling it up to double the size.
Your muscles are now double the length but also have to move a doubled distance. That changes nothing.
That same muscle (it’s roughly a tube) has doubled it’s diameter, so it 2² = 4 times as strong because it’s cross-section is a circle and the surface of a circle is (d/2)² * pi.
But your whole arm has doubled it’s size in all 3 directions. So it’s volume/mass is now 2³= 8 times as high.
So in short: double your size and you are 2² = 4 times as strong, but you also have to move 2³ = 8 times the mass. That’s the square/cube thing that makes just scaling up impossible.
PS: Yes, if you ever wondered how you were so incredible good at climbing things when you were a child… small children are much stronger than you compared to their own body weight.
In addition to what others here have said, it is also the cause of scaling fall damage.
An ant falles down a mine shaft and doesn’t even notice.
A mouse bounces and runs off.
A person breaks.
A horse splashes.
Surface area decreases max fall speed. Mass increases max speed. Mass times speed indicated how much force something feels at the end of the fall. The issue is, surface area scales as a square, Mass as a cube, and thus the bigger something has the less drag it has and the more energy it absorbs as it lands, getting hit coming and going.
Fake it 'til you make it!
The square-cube law is about how increasing the size of an object increases its volume much more rapidly. So if you make an ant, say, twice as large, it ends up 4 times as heavy (don’t take these numbers as anything but an example, I’m pretty sure there’s formulae and shit). For that reason, massive vehicles, like mechs, are impractical - something twice as large as a tank is gonna end up much more than twice-as-heavy.
My headcanon is that mechs require a few things to be a viable weapons platform:
- Orbital bombardment is not a viable tactic
- FTL travel is cheap and easy for non-living matter
- FTL travel is expensive and/or prohibitively dangerous for living tissue
- Artificial intelligence / fly by wire is not viable
If 1 isn’t true, then toss rocks at them from space and pick up the pieces later.
If 2 isn’t true, then it would be easier to train local forces and use commando teams
If 3 isn’t true, then it would be cheaper, easier, and more effective to deploy rapid response forces of mixed armored infantry.
If 4 isn’t true, then send your swarms of autonomous weapons platforms to kill anything that moves.
I’m sure there’s a few other reasons why Urbanmechs would make more sense than the larger platforms, but at some point you just gotta enjoy the mecha
