What are Issues of Transforming Robots or Robots that Combine into Bigger Mechs?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Actually, it's not the square-cube law -- the square-cube law is only a barrier if your artificial muscles and bones have the same performance as real muscles and bones. If your artificial materials have ten times the strength of human tissues, you can achieve ten times the size (thus, after applying the square/cube law, the 10x size version is 100x stronger because of increased cross-section, 10x stronger because stronger materials, for a total of 1,000x stronger, which makes up for being 1,000x heavier).

However, the human shape controlled by a human brain model still doesn't work, because the speeds are wrong. A human at a brisk walk takes about 0.5s per step, and each step is a bit under a yard. A 60' giant would take about 1.6s per step and each step would be ten yards. Reflexes that are suited to 0.5s steps aren't really very good for 1.6s steps.

I mentioned the speed too, though I used arm motion as an example.

But the square-cube still applies, it's a difference of degree. Yeah, stronger materials and power sources and power trains can make up for it, to a point, but the same technologies can make non-human-shaped vehicles and machines more effective too. The conceit of humanoid mecha is that you can scale up human interaction to giant machines, which doesn't generally work.