Fatigue is not very realistic!?

[brxbrx]

Originally Posted by Knai

But, clearly, if any form is a size, all things can be that size. That's why we keep seeing the thousand kilogram ants all over the place. The square cube law is obviously nonsense, as are details like "temperature regulation within the body" or "pressure exerted upon the ground by varying sized surfaces".

What?

Anyways, I'm sure there are materials tougher than hydroxylapatite and that fictional muscle tissue could be pound for pound stronger than what we see in real life. Giants would have to compensate by eating a lot more is all. A lot more.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by brxbrx

What?

Anyways, I'm sure there are materials tougher than hydroxylapatite and that fictional muscle tissue could be pound for pound stronger than what we see in real life. Giants would have to compensate by eating a lot more is all. A lot more.

I've heard that before. It leads to entertaining stories about engineering designs which called for material-properties that no material actually has. This is a dangerous area to make assumptions in, because people's intuitions for this stuff is *really really bad*. Even trained professionals don't have very good intuitions about plausibility of material properties *after they've specced out the exact requirements* - they need to go check those against real materials. (True story btw. Or rather, many true stories - of designs which were perfectly sound works of engineering if you ignored the fact that the required material properties could not be found in reality. At least one such story relates to an aerospace design).

I'm also reminded of the Manhattan project requesting more Osmium than existed in the solar system. By over an order of magnitude.

Keep in mind that there are more constraints on muscle and bone than 'have a requisite strength', and you have to solve for all those constraints simultaneously.

[Knai]

Originally Posted by brxbrx

What?

Anyways, I'm sure there are materials tougher than hydroxylapatite and that fictional muscle tissue could be pound for pound stronger than what we see in real life. Giants would have to compensate by eating a lot more is all. A lot more.

Sarcasm is what. The elephant-giant comparison is bad enough that sarcasm was really the only option.