Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

Looks like moving sideways and forwards/back simultaneously is out and I shutter to see how you're supposed to maintain them.

On the bright side you could literally sidestep an enemy attack. Maybe.

Yea that's the thing, those are going to be way beter....

At making your maintence crew commit suicide.

Also I always see them in clean situations, I cant imagine they are mud friendly

They would offer greater maneuverability than a tank typically has but yeah the maintenance will likely be unpleasant. I am a bit more interested in the omni-ball. You could do a half hardball and with the right surface have an offroad type tire.

As for the dual wielding thing, an alien with several independent brains, like an octopus, could probably handle it.

I imagine dual-wielding would be practical for a four-armed dual-brained alien with eyestalks (so he can aim down both sights at the same time).

Honestly cybernetics would also make dual wielding more practical. Give our cyborgs two guns and optics in their hands and their aim is dead on.

Question, 4 armed aliens... what would the diffrence in weaponry be?

Like what could you do with 4 but not 2.

How do they reload?

Any advantage that allows you to dual-wield practically applies double to carrying a single weapon. It’s theoretically possible to dual wield guns in real life, but nobody does it because if you’re a skilled enough shooter to do so then you’re far more dangerous with one gun than you could ever be with two. It’s less an issue of ability than one of practicality.

Install autoloaders in the cyberlimbs.

@Imca A lot of it is going to depend on how their brain and eyes are set up. Even though humans have two hands and two eyes our brain forces our eyes to work together so we can only engage one target at a time. There are ways to cheat this but it's a distinctly unnatural feeling.

At the very least, it should be easier to reload multiple weapons.

Quad-wielding.

Or two-handed dual-wielding. You'd need some pretty impressive brain design to make that work. There's a valid question about what advantages extra manipulation limbs convey from an evolutionary standpoint that would justify the energy cost of developing them and the brain structures to support them.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 28th 2020 at 10:42:57 AM

Well if it's an alien, we can presume a alien environment that encouraged the need for more than 2 arms.

To be fair, evolution doesn't need to 'justify' anything. It leaves a lot of room for random mutations that may or may not be beneficial or hinder an organism, so long as the organism survives long enough to reproduce. It's not a truly guided process. If the random mutations (like those that gave extra limbs and the supporting neural structure) don't straight up result in termination of the organism and the organism can pass their genes on, then the organism's descendants would have extra arms and and the neural structure to support them.

While that is true, it's not the whole story. Species survive not just by being suited to their environment but by being efficient. If two species are competing for a niche and one uses 50% more energy for the same task, it's going to lose out absent some other factors.

Growing extra limbs and the brain power to control them is expensive. Four is the minimum needed for effective locomotion on land, so there has to be a reason why more than four would provide an advantage that outweighs their cost. Our distant ancestors had lots of fins, but got rid of the extras once they had the minimum effective number.

There certainly could be six-legged land animals, but we don't see any. Why? It's not because of some arbitrary bias.

Insects are a different matter, of course, but they have physical limits on how big they can get.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 28th 2020 at 12:50:05 PM

Yup. Be thankful earth isn’t oxygen rich like it was millions of years ago. We’d probably would’ve set the atmosphere on fire with the industrial revolution

The aliens in my Stardust story, despite being soft scifi, each come from planets that have encouraged certain traits. At least one set however is considered to be a possible precursor genetic experiment considering they have outright working telekinetic powers.

I've said many times that you can do whatever you want in your sci-fi universe; it's your writing, go nuts. Where I take exception is when you misrepresent science to justify something you want to put in your work. If you're making stuff up, own it. Evolution isn't a random number generator that will produce all possible creatures given enough time.

There are some environments where one could imagine extra prehensile limbs being useful, but Earth didn't produce any even in situations where it might have, like in arboreal mammals. What we got instead was the adaptation of existing appendages to more varied tasks, such as prehensile tails in some species. Heck, there are even prehensile noses.

Growing more than the minimum necessary number of limbs is a straightforward evolutionary disadvantage for an endoskeletal, land-dwelling creature. Exoskeletal creatures, on the other hand... so maybe your planet is populated by giant insects.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 28th 2020 at 3:00:25 PM

Well the only aliens with multiple limbs are in fact descended from insect and arthropod species from their home planets. Everyone else has only 4, two arms, two legs.

Why Didnt You Just Say So

It never came up, we were just talking about alien evolution at that point and I felt my setting would fit into the discussion.

In fairness, there are other problems with giant bug people, such as the square-cube law and the ability to maintain circulation and respiration, but it's not completely impossible that workarounds could be found. One of my favorite Space Opera universes, the Humanx Commonwealth, has exactly such a species as an evolutionary coequal to humans, but it's not pretending to be scientifically accurate.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 28th 2020 at 3:45:01 PM

Well the Locus aren't exactly tall, they're absolutely gigantic by bug standards, but despite their name being "Locus" that's just the closest thing translations to human tongues can get, they actually don't resemble Locusts at all, they truly are alien like insectoids. The tallest of Locus are around 5 feet, still gigantic but by human standards that's getting kind of short.

The Le'Ka may have had a insectoid history but have long since left that past, and are a post-singularity type society where certain conditions forced them to merge biology and synthetics to the point that they are essentially living androids who have specialized nanomachine like cells that form their bodies, brains, and so on.

It's soft sci-fi but I am trying to keep some things within a realm of scientific reason, just for fun on my part for worldbuilding.

How big does something have to be before the squar-cube law becomes an issue? Like, we've got elephants, how much bigger could you get before biology says "No"? I know the biggest animal alive is the blue whale, but because that's in the water it can grow bigger than it ever could on land.

Edited by WillKeaton on Jan 28th 2020 at 2:05:32 AM

The short answer is: it depends.

The long answer involves a huge variety of factors, which I will try to discuss but will probably miss some of. Also, this isn't quite on-topic for this thread, not that it's mattered in the past.

• Supporting its own weight. Mass increases faster than cross-sectional area. At a certain point, an organism is too heavy for any legs it could grow to hold it up. This is why the largest animals in the world are water-dwelling, where it's not an issue.
• Overheating. Large animals have slower metabolisms because their surface area is lower relative to their mass than small ones, so they have to generate less heat per unit volume. There's a limit to this as well, and again water mammals have help from their environment.
• Oxygen supply. Oxygen demands grow with mass, while the ability to intake air grows with the area of whatever orifice you use. Sooner or later it's just not efficient enough. Heart capacity is a related issue: it takes vast energy to pump blood all the way around a massive body. Dinosaurs used some amazing tricks to keep blood flowing to their heads.
• Diet. The bigger you are, the more food you need. Large animals spend vast amounts of time eating and digesting food, making their existence dependent on the availability of such food and increasing their susceptibility to famines/droughts.
• Slow development. The bigger an animal is, the greater the investment it takes to bear and raise young. At a certain point, attrition will reduce potential population growth to zero.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 28th 2020 at 4:11:55 AM