Is there any solution to the square-cube law?
Power armor
>>14389679
No, because laws don't have solutions. You can bend physics, but you can't break it. It's like asking if there's a solution to the law of gravity. No, of course there isn't. We can find ways around it using wings, thrust, creating artificial gravity and so on, but we can't defeat it or nullify it indefinitely or anything.
Efficiency
More power into smaller packages.
So the opposite of giant robots
>>14389679
The world's not square dummy.
>>14389694
Something which attached to itself in 3-dimensional slices rather than 2-dimensional slices would provide a solution to the square-cube law though, it's not a very fundamental law.
Magnets connect in chains, so shouldn't a 2D slice of a powerful magnet, going between the poles, be effectively attached to non-adjacent 2D slices and therefore be more like a series of attached 3D slices?
>>14389679
Find the fabled alien metal that is 100 times harder and lighter than steel
Stop caring about mecha on the Earth and worry about space and the Moon
>>14389723
You can punch things harder with a mech that solves this problem though.
just build them in space or somewhere with way less gravity?
>>14389679
Fuck it.
its just cartoons m8
yeah
just need to get out of the 3d plane
1. Technology advancing in both power storage and actuator strngth
2. Make it as light as you fucking can and use current techniques and engineering to build something no larger than a Labor and completely unarmored.
3. Relegate them to Mars and the Moon where they can work (and you can make full-on TSFs on the Moon, low gravity is some fun-ass shit for engineers).
The Mass Effect?
>>14389679
Reduce mass compared to volume, there's a reason why a heavy battlemech weighs as much as an mbt but is about four times bigger
Put them in space.
>>14390641
Then it becmes the cube/hypercube law.
>>14390690
And why the average UC mobile suit weighs about 40 tons despite having FEET the size of a tank
>>14390814
Still, although it will be lighter, the strength of it will be disappointing.
It's not a solution to the square/cube law to make the robot less affected by gravity, just a workaround.
Find lighter and stronger material. Outside of that I'd honestly say look at magnets. It's not going to make your materials cope with the weight better. If anything it will just cut down on the amount of material you have to use.
You could try some next level scifi use energy to strengthen material bullshit, but that would be more of a suspension of disbelief than anything.
Outside of that it's really just finding a material that seems to be an exception. I don't know why you'd want to approach the square cube law in the first place though. It puts materials under too much strain.
Another thing I just thought of is that you could add lift to the mech in question in load bearing places so that the material isn't actually supporting its full weight. That's just another cop out though. If you just engineer a bunch of modules of armor to fly together or float together without actually touching then you could just have a mech as strong as you wanted. That's not very efficient though.
>>14390902
When I said strong, I meant the material would be strong enough to have an unreasonably sized mech.
>>14389694
>we can't defeat it or nullify it indefinitely or anything
*yet
>>14390822
You can go 40k and reinforce the structure with powerfield emitters run off an ancient ai-controlled dark age reactor. Powerfields solve any structural connundrum in the Imperium of Mankind.
WE ARE IN THE UNEEVERSE
While structures become weaker when they're scaled up, the inverse is true as well, so the correct solution is to only build robots less than 100 nanometers tall.
>>14391048
If we could magically make gravity not apply, wouldn't we just use it to make more efficient aerial vehicles?
>>14391166
If by "aerial" you mean FUCKING SPACE then yes
What is the biggest mecha in the world?
>>14389679
Move to Mars.
Less gravity means more fun.
if cube square was real then how did dinosaurs happen
checkmate physicists
>>14389679
>Square cube law
When things like human and big boy like elephant and fucking dinosaur exist?
Thing is m8, square cube law is applied mostly in stationary things like buildings, that is also focus its weight pressure point in one place. Mechas and monsters however, have multiple limbs that divide their weight pressure and actually mobile, so square cube law is less applied in here.
>>14391491
Unicron.
>>14389744
this
>>14391716
Pretty sure Getter and at least one of the Gurren Lagann forms, like Super Galaxy Gurren Lagann is bigger since from what I gather Unicron is about the size of Mars and forgoing more energy based Gurren Lagann forms, Super Galaxy is apparently about the size of the Earth when transformed. I'm pretty sure some of the Getter ships were planet sized in the manga too
So just how much would the RX-78 weight were it actually made out of titanium?
>>14390690
The thing is you can't actually do this without losing performance.
Make the pilots smaller
>>14389679
Stronger materials; better alloys, nanoscale engineering.
Modern skyscrapers would not be possible with the metallurgical techniques of even just 100 years ago. If your robot, like a building, is liable to collapse under its own weight, you need to use a material that is either lighter, stronger in some form, or both. While we have been limited to making new alloys through chemical means for much of human history, we are rapidly approaching a point where we can design what we like on a molecular-by-molecule basis and reap all the incredible advances in strength that will bring us.
People drastically underestimate the strength of the materials we already have when it comes to MUH SQUARE CUBE LAW ROBOTS ARE IMPOSSIBLE bitchfests. Check out this Liebherr crane, for instance. It telescopes out to 100 meters and can hoist 1,200 tons; consider that much of its bulk is dedicated to hiding the full length of the arm inside itself.
>>14389679
Scopedogs and other tankmecha.
>>14391743
>>14391711
>When things like human and big boy like elephant and fucking dinosaur exist?
Keep in mind that an elephant can die from like a 2 ft drop
>>14391159
BUT
What if we then built trillions of them and had them all combine into one super robot?
>>14393197
Look at how fucking tiny the arm gets at full extension. 1,200 tons on that, no squashing, no bending.
Scale a human up to 10 meters and they'd weigh roughly 12-15 tons.
Bone is the densest thing in the human body and makes up about 15% of our total weight.
Bone is 4.5 times less dense than most steels.
Let's take a human whose frame is so large that he'd be 20 tons at 10 meters tall. Let's assume bone is 20% instead. Let's use a steel that is twice as dense as actual steel is over bone. And let's make THE ENTIRE BODY out of this super-heavy bone-steel.
20 * 5 * 9 = 900 tons. Still under what the LTM can lift, and our theoretical bonesteel giant would have TWO legs which would be even thicker than this thing at full extension. So no, it's not going to crumple under its own weight just standing there. I'm not going to get into how the joints and motors would work, but you should know we have other giant machines that already go beyond what we'd need.
So we're already there. If you wanted to make a giant statue of Gaogaigar, Getter Robo, Big O, or Giant Robo, evne one that could wave its arms around (slowly) and walk (even more slowly), this would be achievable with current technology and materials. A Gundam would be fucking peanuts by comparison, and we're making better alloys and other materials all the time.
The square cube law is not what's holding back robots large humanoid robots. Having little use for them at their current level of sophistication and ability is.
>>14393242
Okay, but are transforming mobile suits possible?
>>14393810
If you can make a regular one there is literally nothing stopping you.
>>14393810
Possible, yes. Is there any reason to do it, no. You'd almost always rather have a plane and a tank than a plane that transforms into a tank but costs three times as much to build and maintain.
>>14390808
No, it becomes the cube/quart law. The square and cube are named after polynomials, not polytopes.
>>14393845
But...
>>14389679
Hollow out large portions so they look bigger than their actual mass.
Then fill those hollow portions with some immensely light gas to further lighten the body overall
Basically a giant mech would be most feasible as a bunch of balloons sandwiched between a skeleton and thin outer plating.
>>14399667
That doesn't solve the problem that the strength:weight ratio still sucks.
>>14391607
Flesh and blood weights a fraction of fucking metal alloys, and even despite that, the larger of these animals were pushing it ot the very upper sustainable limits.
>>14393810
No.
>>14393094
Solid titanium? Assuming it's basically a 1000 times bigger 1.8m 75kg male, around 337 tons.
>>14400440
Same anon, just wanted to clarify that surely the RX-78 is partially hollow, so it would be probably a bit less, 250 to 300 tons.
>>14400440
Try a ballpark of a thousand tons - mass scales not so much with size, but rather with volume.
A modern MBT is a partially hollow block with dimensions of around 8x3x3 meters, but it doesn't stop it from clocking in at around 70t ballpark.
Something the size of a gendoom, has much much more surface area, and thus much greater volume than an MBT. Get a Gundam surface area and volume values and apply square cube law with a tank as base; and you'll definitely get surprisingly large numbers.
That's the problem with mecha, usually the authors provide mass values, that would require it to be of hilariously low density and nearly lighter than air, to work
>>14400492
Well I did the maths that anon asked, not what it would actually weigh.
A gundam is 10 times taller than a human, hence it has 1000 times more volume. Given that a human of such size is around 75L in volume and titanium is 4.5kg/l, the maths are simple.
Modern MBTs are not made of titanium, but of way heavier metals, like steel and depleted uranium, which is what makes them so heavy. A MBT made of titanium would be incredibly light, but also very weak.
>>14399698
Doesn't it ease the amount of weight the skeleton is being made to support, allowing what strength it has to be closer to enough?
>>14401889
It's not a solution to the square/cube law, just a workaround.
Making a giant robot able to support itself by making it lighter doesn't change that it's really weak for something of its size, and also the skeleton itself still has weight; so you can only take so much weight off before any weight taken off also lowers strength.
What's really needed is a structure or material where the strength of a limb is not as simple as just being the thinnest cross section.
