Big Tank

[Waipunga]

This is extraordinarily interesting to me on a number of fronts as I am an engineer, I am an artist, and I am also a published author. So I am a mashing of all these things and I also have the worst affliction of all: I need to get things right which is just the way I am.

Al and I had a fascinating conversation earlier today in that he quite rightly said that as a SF writer all I have to do is create a sufficient state of belief in the reader, so it does not really matter if the science I use is not entirely factual. I of course need to future proof my writing, give myself a running chance with the train spotters and of course the engineer in me screams loudly if I stretch things too far subsequently I do shit loads of research and get the science as right as I can.

And a most interesting aspect of this is that the readers who do not read SF, but have read mine, love it and they say the reason why is because it is all totally believable.

So, Mega tanks. For the gaming world they empower the gamers to get bigger, meaner, faster and harder hitting without any of the grit blood shit and nastiness which is actual battle.

Subsequently I believe that we are all right. The games developers get what they want, massive, noisy, exciting machines, the artists get the visual thrill and the engineers who will spend inordinate amounts of time figuring out if these superb looking machines can actually be made.

Who will Al sell these designs to? Probably me. I will take them up and incorporate it into a future story about megalithic structures and of how ultimately they are the expression of power and money because they are good for television. In my stories the battles are all created for AV and controlled by a corporate group called The Games Board who play all the angles to maximise profits and subsequently create social control. So mega tanks are good for the AV market because they are huge rumbling monstrosities that can level city blocks with a single shot. Then of course me as the writer and me as the engineer has to find a way to wreck them. And that I like as I will have to think hard about it and of how to compromise them in an inventive way. Also they fit beautifully into a document that I wrote called "The Articles and Rules of War" which all parties in any conflict have to adhere to or they do not get paid.

Swamp Thing I really like your idea of a huge carrier vehicle with perhaps dozens of smaller little tanks and maybe have them working as a hive mentality. Oh and blades are the extension of the killing hand whether it be meat or vegetable. They are the tool that allows us to eat.

Now, the interesting part of these discussions. What is a beautiful weapon and why do we like certain shapes? I believe we like them on a base level in that they remind us of the human form.
Look at any weapon, vehicle or structure that appeals and then overlay the form and sweep of human form onto them. The curve of the lower back, the sweep of the thighs, the ankle, the multiple forms and structure of the face and so on. We like them because we can relate to them. Plus all those shapes and forms that we see and know off from our environments, those thing we are comfortable with.

Al your question of how will an AI design a building? I believe that you are quite right: they will do a wonderful job. Not because of what they are but more because of what we as humans impart to them as we build them. Your question of an alien's design ethic and of what they would find appealing is a huge and most interesting question.

[bill618]

Interesting discussion going on here.

Humans are the greatest of apers. We also innately impart meaning to any and all pattern we perceive. Our apperceptions, in many cases, are tinted and flavored by an anthropormorpic/anthropocentric theme.



This Anthro theme, with its pantheon of archetypes, still rules the roost for most of us primate mammals, from prehistory on, from Animism to Anthropotheism, to the Anthropic Principle. We can send a person to walk on the Moon and certainly Mars, but the one thing we still cannot do is escape the gravity of our own anthropocentric egos. But having said that, I don’t think that aesthetics, in all of it’s philosophical manifestations, or simply what we find beautiful revolves solely around anthropomorphically themed apperceptions, based on empathetic familiarity, e.g. the beauty in an equation that only a theoretical physicist with an IQ of 140+ can appreciate.
---
‘Night Hawk’ is a fitting name for the 117, to me. I always thought it looks like an abstracted (geometrically simplified) Nighthawk or Nightjar, aka Goat Sucker (not related to the Chupacabra–afaik). I researched the origin of the 117 name and it turns out the nick of the test squadron is Goat Suckers.

http://www.naderlibrary.com/icouldtellyou.42.htm

[Velocity Kendall]

Im going to tap up Jeff and Chris Id like to hear their take. And Kev if he can stand it.

One concept closely tied to beauty that I can see would have mundane roots is elegance. That is, in the case of the equation, showing how complex behaviour might be governed by extremely simple rules.
Or in the case of a device or plan, to use minimal resources for maximal effect. It makes obvious game theoretical sense in an environemnt of scare resources to be frugal. Conversely, extreme brash consumption in New Money is a reaction to this enforced frugality, but doesn't last more than a generation or two. People who've had money for generations tend to prefer simple, high quality items that flash trash.
I could never get more than 140 on an IQ test no matter how much I cheated by practicing hehehe. The wonders of mathemetatics are not for me to see. i read new scientist to get the baby talk version.

The fact that we communicate so much information via our faces (not, in my view, through the eyes themselves, but in the many small muscles around the eyes, brows, cheeks, forehead, lips) etc and therefore dedicate a huge amount of mental capacity to watching faces makes sense to me. The idea that our unruly minds try and map this process onto the world, sometimes successfully, modelling the motivations and behaviours of prey animals for example, makes sense. And the idea that we also see faces in clouds, and gods in nature makes sense too.
I read a fascinating study which showed in war time, men preferred tougher looking women, while in peace time more babyfaced women were selected for. Our aesthetic sense is amorphous and evolved in for sound evolutionary reasons.
I cant resist this babyfaced cuty:



One thing I find thrilling about modern science is these seemingly highly abstract concepts are being tested and explored, rigorously, right now.
I like how the big unis put a lot of their lectures online, and this guy is one of my absolute favorites. He's like a brilliant cross between Boris Johnson and Ted Dansen, and he's cool as fuck.
Enjoy!



http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/psyc-110#sessions

[Velocity Kendall]

[Velocity Kendall]

sorry! maybe we should move this to art discussion.

I welcome rock throwers in my sb sorry for the inconvenience crit folks.

[Waipunga]

Yeah, get back to designing something so we can throw rocks at it Al!

[bill618]

One concept closely tied to beauty that I can see would have mundane roots is elegance. That is, in the case of the equation, showing how complex behaviour might be governed by extremely simple rules.

Me thinks, a lot of our aesthetical moments involve our hedonic resonance to the emergent phenomena of well orchestrated things, i.e. what we perceive as well orchestrated things, or the ‘whole’ that is greater than the sum of its parts—like sunsets, elegant equations, biological form, well composed images, landscape environments, etc. They give us pleasure in contemplation, hence they are beautiful. We like order. Order is a proponent of life and its perpetuation.

That Lambo is as cute as an Axolotl. It has that amphibian neotenous thing going on.



Or maybe it’s as cute as a baby stingray?



Art Discussion might draw a more diverse crowd, for this thread.

[LaCan]

Kendall, I think in this case you tend to consider things at their face value a tad too much. Let me just expand on my previous post.

What I was speculating about was a set of morphological properties that "run deep". They may not be immediately obvious as the key design principles for two reasons: 1) they're not something you directly "see" and 2) they are so archetypical to humans that you don't even realize they are there.

Let's take a look at your two examples.

On F117 I see prevalent similarity with all other existing airplanes, rather than distinction. The difference is just in nuances. Here are some of 117's "deep" properties:

1) Highly in favor of ratios that are found in the human body (ranging from 1:1 to 1:8), as a whole and in all parts.
2) Highly favors convexity over concavity of the form
3) Pronounced hierarchical arrangements of parts from big-central to small-peripheral
4) One dominant plane of symmetry, introducing notions of left and right
5) One dominant main axis, defining the direction vector and notions of the front side, and the back side
6) Strong distinction between the top side and the bottom side
7) "The bird" paradigm of flight (both: symbolic and aerodynamic)
8) Notions of the exterior and the interior. Exterior shells and protects. Interior contains (humans and their stuff)
9) Having portals for transferring the body between exterior and interior (doors, teleports).
10) Having portals for transferring information readable by human senses between exterior and interior (windows, cameras...)
11) Size that is proportional to number of human bodies that inhabit it.
... and the list goes on

Now try to go through this list for any other airplane and then for any fictional spacecraft. Look at Millennium Falcon. It obeys almost all of them. Being a completely fictional future-space design, it could have done whatever it wanted. Anything. Super crazy rule of cool. But it didn't. It has all important properties of an airplane. It even bears a bird name. Prefixed by a human unit of time measure.

At this level there is no difference between F16, F117, Millennium Falcon, Leonov, Discovery One...

Some of these properties seem ridiculously obvious. But that's only because we're humans. An intelligent amoeba or a smart willow tree designing a craft would probably disregard some of them. A non-DNA organism would deviate even more. Non-physical entity might come up with completely different set, not merely looking alien while still being deeply human (e.g. Giger), but actually completely alien to us. Something we couldn't relate with at all.

Dare to break some of these principles when designing even craziest fictional stuff and watch how the reception of your design goes down the drain. The window of opportunity for creating a believable thing is rather narrow.

What about the Monolith.

I don't think it meant to represents an alien lifeform/craft in the movie. But that depends on one's hermeneutics and it's beside the point here.

It's easy to see how utterly human the Monolith is. It's a box. Nothing says "human" like a box. A box is typical abstract conception sprouting from the human mind. It doesn't exists in the world sans humans. Only humans are capable of conjuring boxes into physical world. In the movie, it's a symbol of divinity, which is, again, just one of the functions of the psyche.

Monolith proportions are that of a homo sapiens body. It could have been any proportions. Say 37 kilometers long, 6 micrometers wide and five billion parsecs deep. How's that for a cool entity having it's own agenda? But it's not like that. It's exactly in width/height proportions of the body.

[bill618]

It's easy to see how utterly human the Monolith is. It's a box. Nothing says "human" like a box. A box is typical abstract conception sprouting from the human mind. It doesn't exists in the world sans humans. Only humans are capable of conjuring boxes into physical world.

Monolith proportions are that of a homo sapiens body. It's exactly in width/height proportions of the body.

The 2001 monoliths were close to 50% wider than the average human adult at the same height. The shoulder width of an average person is usually less than 30% of the persons height, not 44.44% (w/h of the 2001…monolith). The size ratio of the monoliths were 1:4:9 (1^2 : 2^2 : 3^2) from what I’ve read.

As far as boxes in nature, Pyrite has been around a lot longer than Homo sapiens. I wouldn’t discount crystalline structures as early inspiration for the contemplation and construction of regular solid shapes.



Humans are the greatest of apers.

[LaCan]

The 2001 monoliths were close to 50% wider than the average human adult at the same height. The shoulder width of an average person is usually less than 30% of the persons height, not 44.44% (w/h of the 2001…monolith). The size ratio of the monoliths were 1:4:9 (1^2 : 2^2 : 3^2) from what I’ve read.

As far as boxes in nature, Pyrite has been around a lot longer than Homo sapiens. I wouldn’t discount crystalline structures as early inspiration for the contemplation and construction of regular solid shapes.

Humans are the greatest of apers.

You're missing my point, bill. As per usual.

[Velocity Kendall]

Lovely posts, lots to think about. Still feel bad this is in the crit forum, ill get Spot to move it.

OK lots to ponder, but Ill quickly address the issues i didnt agree with. please assume I am in complete agreement unless I mention here:

ok "Being a completely fictional future-space design, it could have done whatever it wanted. Anything. Super crazy rule of cool. But it didn't"

Nope thats not correct; the breif was for a used-future futuristic looking heavy fighter bomber. George wasnt after orbs or klein bottles, but a metal can full of buttons and wires. that looked like a ww2 bomber in space.
i was lucky enough to climb around in a Vulcan bomber once, its incredible!!!!

"Monolith proportions are that of a homo sapiens body. It could have been any proportions. Say 37 kilometers long, 6 micrometers wide and five billion parsecs deep. How's that for a cool entity having it's own agenda? But it's not like that. It's exactly in width/height proportions of the body"

Again, for production design reasons, see interesting video, love to know what you think... allso "in the story, the monolith was 1 by 4 by 9 by 16 , ie the squares of the integers. the 16 was the dimension through which Dave moved on his way to being dismantled in the hotel room. the idea being maths is uniquely the preserve of intelligence.
this is clearly bullshit, ants measure area very accurately when scouting by measuring the number of times their path crosses itself, and they have brains the size of pin heads.
bats do complex spacial caluclations when catching bugs with sonar...
but anyway
i like this vid



Im not sure I agree with the fact or significance of all these , (many seem self evident or tautologies; they are because they have to be or they are because they are (in order to exist in the unvierse as material objects) but they are interesting:


"1) Highly in favor of ratios that are found in the human body (ranging from 1:1 to 1:8), maybe, not sure how you measured or define this. or its significance. sounds a bit like the Da Vinci code stuff about spirals. many things contain spirals. not interesting or deep. the makeup of spacetime and natural selection that leads to volumes being efficiently packed in spirals by evolution is interesting, but doesnt in my mind show deep mystery.
2) Highly favors convexity over concavity of the form... does it? how do you analyse this? is an engine duct that passes right through a plane concave or convex?and what significance does it have? i guess anything that contains pther things will need to be convex (on the outside)
man i wish id studied maths more. topology and geometry are interesting.
3) Pronounced hierarchical arrangements of parts from big-central to small-peripheral; yes, in systems design we do tend to prefer heirarchical over distributed. but we have robots that are breaking this rule i follow the subject with interest.
4) One dominant plane of symmetry, introducing notions of left and right [Yes definitly. our own apparent external symetry is incredibly deeply engrained. facial symetry as as function of sexual attactiveness is well known for example.]
5) One dominant main axis, defining the direction vector and notions of the front side, and the back side.. so? it has to fly... although the wobblin gobblin is well known for being so unaerodynamic its ipssible to fly without a computer.. so cool!
6) Strong distinction between the top side and the bottom side.. again so? humans dont really have a top. not sure about that one. more like a fish (or a leaf) , light coloured on its belly but dark above to avoid predator vision; a product of moving in a 3d fluid enviro not a 2d plane like us..
7) "The bird" paradigm of flight (both: symbolic and aerodynamic) it looks like a bird because it flies. no surprise there i suppose. although flight has evovled many times. it also looks like a bug and a manta and a bat and those gliding seeds, and like nothing that ever existed before.
8) Notions of the exterior and the interior. Exterior shells and protects. Interior contains (humans and their stuff)
9) Having portals for transferring the body between exterior and interior (doors, teleports). we often design machines with faces, ie cars. so agree.
10) Having portals for transferring information readable by human senses between exterior and interior (windows, cameras...) yep, machines will need to work with or enhance our senses... i think an alien could figure out our proprtion, stenth, metabolism and brain size from studying a cars ergonomics.
11) Size that is proportional to number of human bodies that inhabit it. a very loose rule. a 2 player trainer Blackbird is the exact same size as the normal one. sure the volumes that actually contain the humans is twice as large for twice the humans, but thats self evident. bigger things are bigger. so?

EDIT I went back and reread your post more carefully, and see you made these points, making the above superfluous.. this was interesting:

"Dare to break some of these principles when designing even craziest fictional stuff and watch how the reception of your design goes down the drain. The window of opportunity for creating a believable thing is rather narrow."

So true. I would, for contrariness's sake, but certainly for popular Ips where the audience must understand instinctively or with only a little information what things are and how theyre used, yep, deffo. Proper ID is all about finding those limits and working within them for maximum user friendliness.

i guess all designs can br graphed in terms of the different dimensions of their parent IPs; realism, fun, usability, alienness, whatever.

i tend to break things up into catagories at the start of a project; for example people like to see basic, sporty, technical and luxury versions of car accessories. thinking along these lines helps generate the most number of usable concepts.

Oh and boxes dont exist in nature? dont understand this at all ( i mean that literaly, i think i misunderstood you?). what about skulls and crab shells? hard protective casings for containing objects (boxes) are common in nature.

heres my dream car
in the future when i imagine we can manipulate matter and energy very efficiently, and machines can assume almost any asthetic form, there will be a lot of equivalents of the annoying custom ringtone. i certainly expect a fashion for flying around in giant Mickey Mouse heads made of gold to sweep the nation for 12 minutes in August 2078.

[Velocity Kendall]

Also wanted to say thanks for bringing so much interesting stuff in guys. Im learning loads and thinking about this stuff like never before.

[bill618]

You're missing my point, bill. As per usual.

Yeah--you're exactly right.

I guess there are quite a few rectangular aspect ratios one could use as an excuse to frame a body in. ;/

[LaCan]

Yeah--you're exactly right.

I guess there are quite a few rectangular aspect ratios one could use as an excuse to frame a body in. ;/

Sure. Any aspect ratio that can frame the body nicely would carry *exactly* the same symbolical significance here. There are infinite other ratios, however, that don't have this property. That's the distinction I was interested in. Not if 1.7 ratio is better in framing than 1.3 ratio. It's irrelevant.

[Waipunga]

This may be a small spanner thrown in for good measure.

Mega tanks. The basic designs from pre WWI until now are all restricted size wise by what can be carried on a train and go through train tunnels.
So if that restriction is removed (and Al's huge designs would not go through any rail tunnel I am aware of) then why restrict them to a linear system such as Stalin's Land Battleships (all of which incidentally had somewhat disastrously brief careers!).

Why not look at five tracked units all linked and articulated together forming a square footprint. The center one has the massive weapon, the outer four with smaller weapons for offensive and defensive operations. Each has its own powerplant fuel etc and because of the layout would have good battlefield capabilities and maneuverability.

[Velocity Kendall]

Yeah I think a trainlike design is definitely a contender.

There are already some cool 2 body articulated crawlers around.

Also, me and King Kostas were talking about having the tank breakdown into two big parts; left tracks and cabin, right track and turret, that can fit inside a C5 Galaxy

Again tho, assume the brief calls for megatanks. saying they shouldnt exist in the real world is interesting but not immediately useful.
For a scene like this, infact:





no ones bitching about whether its practical, theyre running and hiding if they know whats good for em

check out my mate Konstad (Metalfingers') blog its an essential text on the subject

http://brainfunkd.tumblr.com/

[bill618]

Sure. Any aspect ratio that can frame the body nicely would carry *exactly* the same symbolical significance here. There are infinite other ratios, however, that don't have this property. That's the distinction I was interested in. Not if 1.7 ratio is better in framing than 1.3 ratio. It's irrelevant.

Thanks for clearing up your idea. What you meant by “exactly in width/height proportions of the body” needed clarification.

I disagree that any ‘pose framing’ shape other than the shape of the narrow vertical monolith/symbolic doorway structure (emphasized by its thin depth) would have worked equally well in symbolic strength, such as a thin depth square cuboid alternative.

[Quike Garcia]

Also, me and King Kostas were talking about having the tank breakdown into two big parts; left tracks and cabin, right track and turret, that can fit inside a C5 Galaxy

The time for reassembling and functional tests once assembled could be a real dealbreaker for a quick deployment, apart form the required manpower. It would be a great design exercise to come up with a believable folding/unfolding solution

[Velocity Kendall]

The time for reassembling and functional tests once assembled could be a real dealbreaker for a quick deployment, apart form the required manpower. It would be a great design exercise to come up with a believable folding/unfolding solution

Hehe listen seriously, dont worry about functional tests and man power. Kids with control pads dont care. its really not important. as long as it makes more sense than anything about Prometheus, im happy.

i know we've talked about this ad nauseum but you need to remember we're not designing tanks, we're designing entertainment assets, which have a subtly but strictly different brief.

two shots of he thing partly disassebled being unloaded and rebuilt are all anyone needs, not crew rostas and invoices..

this is cool looking by the cunning Kemp Remillard.

[Quike Garcia]

I know, I know, but from my gamer point of view: Folding/unfolding trumps Disassembling/assembling (unless is the machine itself who does it : P )

[Velocity Kendall]

I know, I know, but from my gamer point of view: Folding/unfolding trumps Disassembling/assembling (unless is the machine itself who does it : P )

speaking of which i watched this yesterday; Mike Crow and Tom Servo rip Transformers a new tailpipe:




what is with former Coen Brothers stalwarts shitting their careers away in these movies???

[Velocity Kendall]

hey lads check this out

http://www.worldslargestship.com/building-triple-e

[krysjez]

I have nothing useful to say but damn that's a lot of tanks.