Armor Cost and Weight for 1+ SM

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Necromancy FTW. There's no such thing as a realistic SM+3 giant humanoid (at least if made of conventional flesh, blood, and bone, and living on a 1G world), so you just have to decide how to make it unrealistic.

Oops. I was sent here from another thread and forgot to check the date. My bad.

Since I'm already here, is there a way to change the human body slightly to accommodate for such size difference (such as slightly different build, different bone structure, etc.)?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

Oops. I was sent here from another thread and forgot to check the date. My bad.

Since I'm already here, is there a way to change the human body slightly to accommodate for such size difference (such as slightly different build, different bone structure, etc.)?

Since there were some bipedal dinosaurs that size, I would have to say yes, of course, if you played with the humanoid form a bit.

[gilbertocarlos]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Since there were some bipedal dinosaurs that size, I would have to say yes, of course, if you played with the humanoid form a bit.

Dinosaurs are reptiles, we are mammals, mammals have bigger problems being bigger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHe1wmEaYWo

[chandley]

Originally Posted by gilbertocarlos

Dinosaurs are

avians,

we are mammals, mammals have bigger problems being bigger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHe1wmEaYWo

Fixed it for you.

[Anthony]

Okay, if you take a human and multiply scale by 3, the result is limbs that are 9x as strong, and a body that is 27x as heavy. That's not really practical -- it's like an average person carrying twice his body weight in encumbrance (and that's discounting any actual encumbrance, and it's generally a problem for even people in very good shape to carry around more than their own body weight. So, what can you do to help?

First of all, you probably want to add more bone, since the bones are also only 9x as strong. Fortunately, tripling bone strength isn't that hard -- bone strength scales as thickness^3/length -- but it still means bones that are proportionately 44% thicker and 108% heavier than a normal human, increasing typical skeletal mass from 14% of body weight to 29%.

Next, you have two choices for how to make the muscles stronger. First of all, you can move the muscle attachment point further from the joint -- limbs are levers, so the actual maximum force for a limb scales as (muscle cross-section) * (bone length / distance from joint to muscle attachment). Unfortunately, moving the attachment point away from the joint makes the limb slower, and if you move it too far away the limb is no longer able to bend fully (muscles only have a certain range of lengths where they contract properly). Secondly, you can just add a bunch more muscle. This will usually also limit flexibility, but does so more slowly. If we scale about the way bones do, we move the attachment point 44% further out from the body (changing max knee bend from maybe 135 degrees to 94 degrees) and also make the legs 44% thicker. This will require extremely wide hips, resulting in a body that looks like a huge dwarf. It's actually worse, because the upper body typically also needs to scale up in similar ways, meaning weight is no longer 27x greater. In general, it turns out that weight has to scale as the 5th power of weight in order to retain the same strength to weight ratios.

You can somewhat compromise by just having a lower strength to weight ratio, but a height of more than 8-9' is going to require pretty considerable shape changes.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by chandley

avians,

Since when? At best I've seen arguments that -some- of them had feathers.

[gilbertocarlos]

Originally Posted by chandley

avians,

Fixed it for you.

Today dinosaurs(I.E. Birds) are avians, HOWEVER, the big ones from 65 to 220 million years ago were not, they were reptiles.

[gilbertocarlos]

Originally Posted by Kenneth Latrans

Since when? At best I've seen arguments that -some- of them had feathers.

Many biologists say that because birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs.

I think the problem was that I used "are" instead of "were". Dinosaurs today are avians, because the reptile ones died out.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by gilbertocarlos

Today dinosaurs(I.E. Birds) are avians, HOWEVER, the big ones from 65 to 220 million years ago were not, they were reptiles.

It's more accurate to say that birds are dinosaurs, not that dinosaurs were birds. However, dinosaurs were more closely related to modern birds than modern reptiles.

[simply Nathan]

I'd say that "birds are descendants of dinosaurs" is contentious even if you take macroevolution as a given (as most do in the modern Western world), "birds are dinosaurs" is inaccurate, and "dinosaurs are avians" is just downright silly.