Re: Infantry Walkers

At 10:51 24/08/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Chen-Song Qin wrote:
>> 
>> On Sun, 23 Aug 1998, Noah Doyle wrote:
>> 
>> > Infantry walkers are at least as mobile and dextrous as Powered
Armor.
>> >  They would not have to accomodate human limbs inside their limbs -
this
>> > would allow a great range of motion.  I envision most IWs as
roughly
>> > humanoid, with the pilot sitting in the torso, probably very
cramped.  An
>> > IW should be able to walk, jog, run, crawl, kneel, jump, everything
a
human
>> Hmmm... do you know how many muscles it takes to perform these
actions
>> well with humans?  If you want to do this with some kind of vehicle,
>> there's going to be a *lot* of moving joints.  All of them have to be
>> *very* tough to withstand the strain, and also have to be very small
to
>> fit into the walker.  This is also going to wind up being a
mechanical
>> nightmare to maintain and repair.
Not necessarily. The human body is a very vertatile mechanical system -
it
can crawl, run etc.. If you build a machine to a specific mode of travel
it
doesn't need to be as complex. It's entirely possible, I would suggest,
to
build something like what Ripley piloted in Aliens if not now, then very
soon. Admittedly it won't be any use for Ballet, but you could stick a
big
frackin' gun on it and it'd do as a miltary vehicle. Of course, wjat the
distinction between one of these and power armour is I'm not sure..

>I remember reading somewhere of materials that contracted when electric
>current ran through them, and relaxed when the current was shut off.  
>I also remember that they weren't very reliable or strong, but it is
>conceivable that these are 'merely' problems of engineering, and not
>of the actual physics.
Not necessarily. There are some phenomena (like LCD's) which we sort of
understand how they work but as far as being able to generalise their
properties we're at a complete loss about.

>I guess my POV is that, if the physics makes it possible, or even
probable,
>and the only problems are 'engineering' ones, we can let the
science-fiction
>take care of that.  (So what if we only need to generate a black hole
and
>drop it into the sun?	Mere engineering trifles.  (8-) )
Typical matchmetician. What's the phrase? 'This would be considered an
undergraduate problem'. I'm instinctively more inclined to believe in a
universe where simply because we think something /might/ be possible
doesn't necessaily mean it is. Scientists can be wrong. As it is I'm
more
inclined to believe a walker might use a super-efficient standard
hydraulic
system with very fast FBW controls to keep it going rather than some new
miracle polymer.

				TTFN
					Jon
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"Information doesn't want to be free, it wants to be liberated and
expensive"
Jonathan White, Psychology Section, Bolton Institute
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