But you keep coming back to the fact that we didn't invent human sized vehicles like that because we don't need to because we are humans and can just do those tasks ourselves
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
And the real life reasons we think of "vehicles" as being shaped a certain way in the first place is we built them to be bigger than us in order to carry us and therefore they have to distribute weight differently from us
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
Without getting too handwavy and Panglossian ("everything that exists is already the optimal way it should be"), humans and dogs and horses are pretty much the right shape for what they are (legs are much more versatile than wheels)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
But cars and trucks and tanks are also the right shape for what they are (wheels and treads are comically easy to get stuck and useless for a human sized thing, but a tank-sized thing *has to have them* because legs would break at that level of weight)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
An interesting historical note here would be to read HG Wells' "The Land Ironclads", which predicts the idea of tanks incredibly well in a time before gasoline engines were even commonplace The one thing he got wrong was failing to imagine the caterpillar treads
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
TIL Wells apparently really liked ironclads
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Replying to @LizardOrman @BootlegGirl
I mean, they're tanks, but the word "tank" was a decade in the future
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
I mean, both because he's using it as a metaphor for tanks, and because IIRC Thunderchild is a literal one
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Replying to @LizardOrman @BootlegGirl
Oh yeah, from War of the Worlds Well, ironclads were pretty much the state of the art in cool military shit at the time It's also because that scene is supposed to be a pyrrhic victory for the humans and the Thunder Child beats the Martians by suicidally ramming them
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The Martians fail to deploy a weapon that can stop it in time partly because it's a badass ship but also partly because they don't fully realize what it's doing until it's too late Classic "evil cannot comprehend true courage" moment
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But yeah it's a scene where the really important thing is the armor Kind of interesting that the 1953 movie's version of this scene completely reverses it and has the humans' most devastating weapon be an offensive one, the Bomb, and has it totally fail vs alien shields
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
I guess tech from ~1950 on causes a problem because it's too good - it can reliably hit the tripods hard enough to destroy them regardless of conventional armour, so you need to cheat and give them shielding.
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Replying to @LizardOrman @BootlegGirl
Interestingly the Martian tripods are, in fact, early mecha Which Wells mostly used because they're terrifying and alien from the POV of an 1890s human, but he also gave realistic weaknesses for such a thing (as Mr Hyde lampshades in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen)
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