The square cube law is not in the reader's favor here, sadly.
Mars has a huge battle mech scene, because they can get away with way heavier bot designs at 0.38 g, and have thousands of kilometers of inhabited desert on which to stage battles far away from structures that could get obliterated by shrapnel.
Transcript
xXGundamfan0087Xx asked: Killian, according your long life labor skills with mechanics and vast experience on the field of technology, could you agree on the viability of humanoid robots of particularly giant size?
Killian: Ah, gigaweight upright walkers…. A beautiful dream that’s a royal pain in the ass to actually design… In battle mech competitions, gigaheavy walker mechs tend to be quadrupeds or dino-bipeds. Weight goes up exponentially with bot size, and the biggest bot classes often can't get back up after getting knocked down. Going gigaweight on top heavy designs with fiddly balancing like upright walkers just results in unimpressive, short, and expensive slap fights. There are some lighter upright walker competition classes in battle robot competitions, but they’re generally smaller than the average typ. The scale is less impressive, sure, but the fights are MUCH longer, and, in my opinion… waaay more exciting. Honestly, I prefer the good old fashioned tank types. Pete Pounder is my all time champ for Martian Mech Madness. Can’t go wrong with low center of gravity and a big fucking hammer!
59 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 35”
Hunter
There’s still Robot Wars in the future, huh? XD
HAL9000
lets fucking goooo sick ass mech battles exist in the future!! hell yeeaahh!!!!
(i know those battle bot things exist, but come on… we all know bigger’s way cooler)
Gar G
I love that these are a thing
What a time to be alive right?
eliimortal
would’ve loved to sit next to killian in physics class
JoB
Thinking some more on the topics of the last two pages …
A) If there’s (GMO) pets and (battle)bots, what about robotic toys? I mean, if we could successfully foist Furbies, Tamagotchis etc. onto the tykes, the keep-the-kids-busy-elsewhere-fu in RttS should be on a whole ‘nother level, right?
[shudders at the thought of a Bip-controlled electrician worm winding up with and whispering into the ears of a young’un under the guise of “a harmless, well-certified toy”]
[… are there any kids on Dirtball currently? Or were those that gave rise to the sticker custom really a one time exception?]
B) Considering that the labs seem to have some legal liability for the GMOs they make, and that they certainly didn’t have any original (say, Triceratops) DNA at hand to boot, wouldn’t they have a vested interest to make (at least kids’) GMO pets strictly from herbivore base genetics only? As opposed to succulent-salmon-snacking Dibi and its freedom-enjoying cousins …
[imagines boy having read all about ye olde terrifying-hunter-T-rexes (pre “wouldn’t it be more likely for them to have fed on carrion?“) and finding that his newly-bought GMO millirex’s happily munching foliage, rather than the neighbor kid’s pet]
Arcstone
I could kind of see an AI specializing as a paediatrician perhaps making use of a teddy bear robot body to help put little kids at ease.
Septemberdale
Might be that scavenger DNA is also considered a desirable source, so the beasties will be likely to recognize standard tinned cat food (surely still roughly as easy to find in the future as it’s ever been, given that cats are still a thing) as edible.
Cue the “ferocious” millirex escaping, only to be found trapped in the trash can, happily munching on garbage.
JoB
Or the even more ubiquitously available table scraps …
[adds a mousecursor to keep the millirex company]
[holds breath, awaiting the Dirtballers’ creation of a zucchinivore GMO pet]
mossrabbit
honestly tiny robots duking it out is already epic, AND you get to be real close to the action and see all the details!
i think the most realistic implementation of mechs ive seen in sci-fi is that big ol forklift suit ripley put on in the second alien movie. just a big strong metal framework over a squishy guy in the middle. not practical for fighting (i cannot imagine taking a slap from that kind of suit is anything short of agonizingly lethal) but i could 100% see suit-enhanced strength comps becoming a thing (though more as an engineering flex than a strength flex)
zaratustra
giant robot sumo
Lezzlebit
Okay but the videogames spawned by the cultural impact of this sport have to go so hard though. Games in general in this universe are so interesting to me because they are an ancient art at this point (especially to bug ferrets)… Much to think about…………………
Claire
Wait until i show up with a spinner bot
HAL9000
ah, the classic beyblade technique. wins every time
Stargazer
I love these robot designs! They’re all so cool!
Also ultrakill reference?
Jay Eaton
Honest to god I don’t know what Ultrakill is.
IncompleteMachine
shooty Vidya game about blood powered robots. v. popular, check it out on steam if you like the old school doomalikes
Plasmatic Shrimp
I’m gonna try my best not to write an essay about this [I love Ultrakill to bits and I do Not want to lore dump in the middle of a webcomic], but essentially it’s a game with an old boomer shooter vibe to it [think Doom 2, but much more focused on its unique art style and set design]. I’d highly recommend it if you ever have the time to play a video game!
bisexual
The miniature bots kind of look like the player character, similar build and head shape.
Comito
I see some Rimworld in those smaller robots- specifically scyther mechanoids.
Stray Cat
If the mech fans I know are any indication, they definitely know that the idea of humanoid robots battling it out is pure fantasy. No less than Gundam had to invent a fictional particle to justify how the giant robot battles could happen. So yeah, they’d get it.
Still, this is a fun answer – and I don’t think mech battles as a sport gets explored enough in fiction, so seeing it here is a fun change of pace.
IncompleteMachine
honestly even if you can overcome the big walker problems, humanoid mechs don’t make much sense as military equipment outside of some very specialised circumstances, so honestly I think it makes the most sense as a sport.
galmetallic
Now I’m just wondering what the Tombstone equivalent for Future Not!Battlebots is. The returning champ with no frills, nothing overly fancy, just maximum efficiency and destructive potential.
aves
I mean, Pete Pounder seems pretty conceptually similar to Tombstone – obviously the big hammer is a different weapon, but it looks pretty no-frills to me lol.
HeadWood
You know I was wondering if your setting would have robot fighting as a sport but thought it would be too violent for it to be relevant. I’m really happy to be surprised. I assume there are at least a couple of AI that enjoy or participate in the sport, are there alens that enjoy it too?
Also is it just mech swordfights and scaled up Robot Wars/NHRL, or is there any almost-military stuff with missiles and cannons like an IRL version of Nebulous, Airships or Highfleet (albiet with much more drone warfare for safety reasons)?
galmetallic
I mean, it’s a thing in real life, so I don’t see why not?
Mango The Captain
I think Killian is my new favorite character by virtue of being a fan of robots with funky shapes (also I totally wish I could watch those robot battles).
gnome_artificer
A weapon to surpass Metal Gear!
The big fuckin’ hammer.
wingedhorror
My first thought was, “Private Iron!” But then I remembered that the Private had an axe on its front, not a hammer. (It also had secret rockets.)
Gosh, now I want to rewatch Spaced.
Fallingfeather
Honestly the fact that giant mech battles exist at all in the future just makes me go “YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!”
Joysweeper
Deathblow the hammer battlebot has never really gone I see!
Apollo235
Peterpuncher, on standby
Please someone know what I’m referencing
SIGSTKFLT
i see that Grant Imahara got reincarnated
Certomistle
Hi Jay! Just a request, but for those of us trying to catch up on some missed pages, it might be good site layout to have a back/forward button at the top of the comics as well as the bottom so that you can flip backwards without spoilers in newer updates. I love your work!
JoB
Computer or phone? At least on my Firefox@laptop, the “cursor left” and “cursor right” keys work.
(Also, if you don’t want to even flip over spoilerish later pages, there’s the pagewise archive, where only small thumbnails of part of the pages are shown.)
petra
hrrg.h…. metal gear………….
SIGSTKFLT
excuse me, this is Armored Core.
Origamigryphon
PETE POUNDER LIVES!!
bryn
big fucking hammer wins again!!!!!
Squidmerchant
Oh that’s so funny, I’ve had similar thoughts that in any sort of realistic setting, mechs would probably be more of a sports thing than practical. Like sure, humanoid tanks would probably be outperformed by an actual one in any sort of combat scenario, but could you imagine mech rallies? Infinite money.
That said, Killian makes a compelling argument for big fucking hammer.
Darth Biomech
Broke: mechas are useless for military applications!
Woke: engineering, support, and construction mechas!
IncompleteMachine
leaving aside rule of cool, I think you can argue for certain scenarios where mechs make sense on a battlefield. but then again, I’m a fan of Beeg Robut…
Varahkas
This might be the most important RttS lore drop yet.
Arcstone
Yeah, this is a pretty age old argument about whether or not real life battlemechs would have been viable.
In the end, yes gundams, chromehounds and armored cores are fucking cool as shit, but theres very little in the ways of good arguments for why you shouldn’t just take that same amount of resources and just build like a fuckton of tanks instead that can split up and cover multiple objectives, don’t require hundreds of years of engineering advancements just to not fall over, can still handle bad terrain because thats what threads are for, if a few of them blow up, the rest can still fight and they’re harder to hit cause they can make better use of terrain elevation for defense, not being the size of skyscrapers.
TLDR: yes, mech are cool, but if your setting is even slightly realistically grounded, then sorry.
Entguarde
is that v2 in there or am i seeing things?
also all hail big hammer
Plasmatic Shrimp
If it actually is I just might lose it but like in the good way.
JoB
… not a fan of English, then, I take it? 😛
Plasmatic Shrimp
Not a HUGE fan of English [despite it being my first [and only] language], just taking the bit out of context on accident I fear.
Vinemaple
*WHEEZE*
Well-played, both of you! xXGundamfan087Xx asking about “Humanoid robots of particularly giant size,” Killian immediately going to “gigaweight upright walkers” and the Martian battlemech competitions…
This is why we love AMAs!
Fallingfeather
I love how this answer, even if the answer is “no on a practical level”, is a very “yes-and” way to answer the question. Working with the asker, not against them, haha.
creetur
Reminds me a little of a robot I saw. Wasn’t for battlebots but some similar competition. It was just a robot that used its whole body as a spinner and yet it was winning. Guess simple can be better at times.
JoB
[ObMathematicianProtest]
The weight increasing with the cube of the size is not “exponentially”! :-3
[/OMP]
I guess that large long-legged humanoids still have problems with coordination, then. If they could jump with any precision … why wield a hammer when you can put almost your entire weight into a flying knee coming down on your opponent?
[imagines a catalog of pointy-underside “battle kneecaps” to select from for your DIY warbot]
TauCeti
Gillian’s error feels in character, as he’s an engineer, not a mathematician, and I’ve seen sloppier terminology among my engineer friends. One of our jokes is that “infinity” is any number larger than you’d reasonably use. This eventually culminated in me saying “this is going to take me an infinite number of weeks to complete…. in this context infinity is two.”
NotOkapi
I’m partial to a drum spinner, but I have to respect the classic Big Fucking Hammer
Enai
All hail the hammer!
Plasmatic Shrimp
We love the big fucking hammer!
Madame Thunderbone
Stop! Hammer time!
JoB
U Can’t Touch This!
(‘Cause it’s electrified.)
Sea_Kerman
SHATTER! represent. Though it’s more of an ice pick than a hammer.
NotOkapi
SHATTER! I’m sorry the judges do not understand your armor is purposely destructible and give your opponents way too much credit for breaking it…