Voidwalkers Outpost

Tons of fun

Boom said that a TV man weighs 5 tons. I think he was being goofy or greatly underestimated how much a ton weighs. (Or possibly he meant Polycephaly - 5 tons is about the weight I'd expect for someone that size).

A motorbike weighs about 200kg. Let's pretend a TV man is basically built like a motorbike in human shape. Let's be generous and add the weight of a suit of plate armour: about 50kg. And the CRT monitor itself is hefty, don't forget. Let's say it weighs 100kg, just for the hell of it. We're still well under half a ton!

What would it take for a human-sized entity to weigh 5 tons?

Human flesh is 993kg per cubic metre. (That sounds like a lot until you remember water is 1000kg per cubic metre, and humans float in water.) A 100kg human condenses to a cube about 46cm a side.

However, TV men are a bit bigger than humans. We've been told 8 foot (244cm) as a canon size, and humans typically don't get that big. I used a BMI calculator to estimate the healthy weight of a 244cm man (yes, I know BMI is hogcock, but so is this article). It's about 120kg. Our hypothetical 8 foot human condenses into a meat cube about 49cm on each side.

Let's make it easier for ourselves and say 50cm. How can we fit 5 tons of matter into that space?

Osmium is the densest stable element, at 22.587g per cubic centimetre. 5 tons of osmium would fit into a cube about 60cm big. Even if TV men are pure osmium, that's still not dense enough to fit into an 8 foot human space!

(A fun fact about osmium: it's remarkable for being the heaviest natural element, but it's not named after this fact. It's named after 'os' for smell. It's so stinky that that's its nominal characteristic rather than its density. We can only assume that TV men bloody well stink, which is probably why they're so grumpy. Maybe that's why the Cams were throwing furniture at that one who said 'analyse this thoroughly'. Enclosed space! Go away stinky!)

Thus, this back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that it is impossible for a TV-man to weigh 5 tons even if the TVs are made of pure osmium, the densest stable element.

How can we make them weigh 5 tons anyway?

Another fan1 suggested that the Titans have some gravity fuckery going on, to allow for the fact that such huge metal entities can run and jump, and even fly with relatively small rockets.

You can't delete gravity. That gravitational pull's got to go somewhere. What if it's distributed evenly among the other faction members?

The cameras are numerous enough that it's not really a problem. Each cam is only, say, the equivalent of 50kg heavier than they'd be if the Titan didn't exist. This is about the weight carried by a modern soldier with all their gear, so it should be manageable for techfolk.

The TVs, however, are few enough that each one has to carry 5 tons of displaced Titan-mass-equivalent, which is why they're so grumpy.

  1. ^ Feraliminal, whom you can find in the Inspirations section of the About page.

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