The square-cube law explains why you can't have 100-foot-tall humans mainly because we're going with the idea that expanding a human 20x in size doesn't change literally everything else about the physics of a human They're still made of the same flesh and bone
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CascadianGrimd1 and
A world "without the square-cube law" would be a world where this wasn't true, where whatever process "makes things bigger" also makes the materials it's made of stronger, allows it to process more energy with no negative effects from doing so, etc.
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CascadianGrimd1 and
A mythological giant that looks like it's made of flesh and bone but its bones are stronger than steel and its flesh burns many times hotter than a forge (because it has to process enough energy to move a mass many times the size of a human) without catching fire Like Godzilla
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CascadianGrimd1 and
You can change the proportions though, or give up things like speed in exchange for size. Or try to move around some of the weight.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
Supporting all the weight is another issue, yeah. This is part of why tanks and bulldozers and such have tracks instead of wheels. They need to spread their weight over a proportionally greater area, or they'll bog down constantly
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Replying to @CascadianGrimd1 @mssilverstein and
It's another big issue with the concept of bipedal mecha. At the sizes most of them are depicted as, even just regular steps should be putting their feet well into the ground. Even on pavement or stone. Something like the climax of LoK, Kuvira's mech should have sunk instantly
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Replying to @CascadianGrimd1 @mssilverstein and
Right, it's not just that the magic that "compensates for the square-cube law" means the molecules that make up the thing itself have to behave differently, it has to affect everything that object interacts with
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CascadianGrimd1 and
Basically scenes that "violate the square cube law" have things interact in a way that's fundamentally contradictory Godzilla crunches buildings like cardboard (because that's what they are) while the pavement and earth he's standing on still acts solid as ever
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CascadianGrimd1 and
It's like Superman violating the square cube law in his own small way when he does stuff like lift a car You can pick up a tiny toy car by its bumper just fine A real full size car will have the bumper tear off
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CascadianGrimd1 and
It's not just that Superman *himself* is super strong but that the things he interacts with also get whatever measure of super-strength necessary for his powers to work in the way the audience expects Picking up and throwing things without tearing them apart
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It's like the thing about Superman giving the speech about the "World of Cardboard" Like, there's a certain level of physical strength the materials that make up the world have, and they don't scale up or down, it's fixed
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CascadianGrimd1 and
So when you make everything big the world is suddenly very flimsy If I just tip a model skyscraper a foot high, made of glass and steel, onto its side, it will be fine If that happens to a real building it will catastrophically smash into pieces
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CascadianGrimd1 and
Everything "buckles under its own weight" all over the place at that size, it's literally why rock formations have the shape they do, it's the reason, generally speaking, things on Earth have a maximum size
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