12h ago

What's a sci-fi thing you feel is achievable with our current level of technology that you'd love to see become a thing?

Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I'd love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.

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Mech suits.
We have them IRL... Kinda. They're just hydraulic powered limb-augmentation things but there's absolutely no reason they couldn't be like an Alice from Aliens. Shit; we could probably do MechWarrior mechs just not the same scale right now, or even an Iron Man like suit if time was spent trying.
The most fictional thing about a lot of these is mostly the power source. How do you power it? But a tank with legs could just be powered by a normal engine.
- I'm an engineer in R&D and have briefly worked on an exoskeleton project. The reason we don't have mech suits is that the capitalist market doesn't demand them much, at least with our current technology.
  There are two primary markets for them: medical, and manufacturing. I worked on the medical side--the big challenge there is making devices that are light enough that the mech helps more than it hinders. The biggest challenge is power: batteries are heavy. As we continue to figure out more efficient power storage and efficiency techniques, you could see more of these devices out in the wild.
  The manufacturing market is growing, though most applications there are less "mech suit" and more "assistive arm" type of things.
- So you want wanzers.
  Seriously though, realize that if we ger Mecha, it's going to be more like Armored Core. Or a game set in an AC4 AU, Metal Wolf Chaos.
  Do you want the US President (especially the current one, to have something like that, and be told to believe in his own justice?
  
  We already know what a president with a robot body is like.
  
  IDK why they would need to be that big. I don't even think physics would allow them to be that big. The scale of these things in fiction is pretty absurd. Especially the big walker boss in AC6. Your AC is already like 4 stories tall, and that thing makes you look like an ant.
  
  Reasons I can think of for the size:
  Ammunition is large and needs to be stored carefully so it doesn't explode. And this thing will either need extremely heavy batteries, or carefully protected tanks of fuel onboard - or both. So that's going to massively add to the weight.
  Human beings are soft and squishy. We'd need huge amounts of suspension for the purpose, plus the matter of armor. Think about how large a jet plane really is, or a tank.
  Physical laws around mass and movement. Tanks are as small as they are because treads are effective at transferring torque and creating linear acceleration. If they were just on wheels, they would need to be larger. Legs would require huge amounts of mass to safely support the machine, and we'd need to have excellent stabilizer systems in addition to the suspension mentioned above so that you don't fall flat on your face
  Passive cooling (which would probably be necessary for safety - you don't want a sniper stopping your whole mech by shooting a few fans) requires wide surface areas to dump the exhaust heat.
  That's all I can immediately justify, but basically, it would have to be huge.
  
  And this thing will either need extremely heavy batteries, or carefully protected tanks of fuel onboard - or both. So that’s going to massively add to the weight.
  This is the sole reason we can't have mechs until we develop high energy portable nuclear power, or discover something equally as capable.
  A rocket launching satellites is like 90% fuel, the structure is remarkably similar to the thickness of a tin can, and it only carriers a few thousand pounds of payload, all while only running for a minute or so before being empty. We simply don't have the power capability for anything approaching a large mech without it having to be wired to a power grid.

106 comments