I’ve heard building mechas is really difficult but there is no problem in building small humanoid robots (Boston Dynamics). So can’t we just upscale them and make mechas this way?
In: Engineering
The big problem is what is often called the “square-cubed-law”. It’s called that because some properties of an object increase with the area (square), whereas others increase with its volume (cubed).
In other words: If you make something twice as big, it’s less than twice as strong. For example, ants are strong enough to lift objects that look ridiculously large in relation to their body size, even though they have tiny legs. But if you scale an ant up to the size of an elephant, its legs would just collapse under its own weight – which is why elephants have legs like tree trunks.
For engineering, this means that making things bigger is often difficult. A hobbyist can make a scale model of a passenger airliner using nothing but styrofoam, whereas Boeing has to use strong materials like aluminum and carbon composite for the real thing. And likewise, a boston dynamics robot scaled up into a mecha sized war robot would probably crumble under its own weight.
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