I have a good idea and no-one cares

Ahh, but that is because organisms on earth are highly tuned to minimise energy consumption. The engine in a car can apply much more force than a muscle of equivalent weight (although it will also guzzle a lot of gas).

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http://maze5.net

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting mazemaster</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>Ahh, but that is because organisms on earth are highly tuned to minimise energy consumption. The engine in a car can apply much more force than a muscle of equivalent weight (although it will also guzzle a lot of gas).</DIV></DIV>

True, but that isn't the point. Energy requirements are a problem for something like this, but you could always use a jet turbine, right? This has less to do with energy generation than structural integrity. You can't just make a structure bigger and expect it's strength to scale equally with it's mass.

If you have a steel strut of a given size, and you double every dimension, it will be roughly twice as strong for any given direction of force applied to it, but it will also be eight times more massive! Because of this problem we use trussing systems and I-beams, but this is just another example of the new design paradigm required by a change of scale.

The same rules apply to a gasoline engine. Yes, if you double it's size you will also double it's energy output. However, the forces that the engine components can withstand will have increased more slowly than the forces being generated and you'll end up having to additionally strengthen all the components so it won't simply blow itself up. It amounts to the same thing in the end. You have something that will far more than double in weight when you double it's output, assuming that there is no significant redesign.

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Some people are like slinkys...

They aren?t really good for anything, but you can't help but laugh when one tumbles down the stairs.

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting Tracer Bullet</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>
If our hypothetical mech were running across the lunar surface, it would have to apply exactly the same amount of force to move forward or to stop as it would on earth, it just wouldn't have to spend as much energy to keep it from hitting the ground. Low gravity would certainly help though. A giant mech on the moon would just end up being ponderously slow because of the immense force it would still take to accelerate.

</DIV></DIV>

wouldn't it take even longer to accelerate in low gravity. the reduced friction could be one factor. another could be the way that humans(and i presume these mech things) walk. walking involves letting your body weight fall forwards, and then getting a leg out in front before you fall all the way. in low grav however, it would take a little longer for your bodyweight to fall into the right position for each step.
in short, it should take longer to get into the 'sprinting from the blocks' position that good acceleration demands.

[edit]even the filmmakers that faked the moon landings thought of this, and got the actors to do that two footed hop-skip thing.[/edit] :rolleyes:

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i eat paint

The point is that metal trusses have a far greater strength-to-weight ratio than human bones, and engines have a far greater power-to-weight ratio, so just because something is impossible in the natural world doesn't mean that we can't build it with current tech.

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http://maze5.net

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting mazemaster</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>The point is that metal trusses have a far greater strength-to-weight ratio than human bones, and engines have a far greater power-to-weight ratio, so just because something is impossible in the natural world doesn't mean that we can't build it with current tech.</DIV></DIV>

I don't think the improvement is significant enough to make a difference in this case. We don't build airplanes that fly like birds for more reasons than just mechanical complexity. I highly doubt that a huge vehicle that walks like a human would be any more successful, regardless of how good our materials are.

Say you wanted to make a 40-foot tall mech, proportioned like a regular human. That is roughly 6.7 x larger than an average man whose proportions are taken to be 6'0" and 180lbs. Further let's define an arbitrary term to represent his strength, a "strength factor" and set it arbitrarily to 180 for convenience sake, making the strength to weight ratio = 1. Lets assume that the strength factor goes up linearly with size and encompasses both muscular and skeletal strength.

Now, a 40 foot tall man with the same proportions would weigh 54137lbs and have a strength to weight ratio of 0.02. Therefore any machine built along these lines will have to have components which have 50 times better strength to weight ratio than that of a human. I have no idea if modern technology is up to this requirement, but I highly doubt it. Not for the system as a whole anyway, and certainly not if you wanted to armor it.

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Some people are like slinkys...

They aren?t really good for anything, but you can't help but laugh when one tumbles down the stairs.

Besides, those huge mechs just make big targets. I frequently find that killing a small, fast-moving snark from HL1 is more frustrating than killing a Gargantua. They move quickly and are so small that they are extremely hard to hit.

As far as weapons, I imagine it would be cheaper to make a lot of little bots that move extremely fast than a large mech. Imagine you're surrounded by hundreds of small bots that shoot bullets at you. Your chance of survival is zero, even if you can smash some of them.

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"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." -- Toulouse-Lautre, Moulin Rouge

You theory has many problems...

• Plant DNA and animal DNA weren't exactly supposed to mix
• Our whole mindset includes the idea of eating, if we don't, it's
  possible we could die just because we think we should, or we may go
  insane.</li>
• I don't think you could mix the two and get a living organism out of it, the two organisms are just too unsimilar.
• There's more, but I'm just too lazy to post them.

Note: I'm not puttng you down with this post...

Until Later...

i actually hate eating, i do it anyways though... its very boring for me...

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.else /me ~kill you
www.arclan.net

Yeah, true. Not much exciting in eating.

Eating is meant to be a social skill.

Sometimes really useless. No wonder eating alone is boring.

And now I'm having some rolls with cheese on them.

Once I saw this episode of "outer limits" where this scientist developes nanobots. They are meant to enter the human body and repair everything.

They make a illegal test. And the nanobots start changing the body so all the disadvanteges are eliminated.
So this guy grows gills, about a double set of ribs to protect the inner organs.
so far so good. But then he grows some cnidoblasts like all over the body. And a pair of extra eyes at the back of the head. He really became a mutant.

My favorite episode. It's called "The new breed"

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Never try to be perfect - just try it and make the best out of it