Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

New verses in "With Your Brain and Your Resourcefulness"

Tags: cyberfunded creativity, fantasy, fishbowl, gender studies, poetry, reading, weblit, writing
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  • 3 comments
siliconshaman

siliconshaman

August 23 2015, 02:29:49 UTC 5 years ago

Not to be a wet blanket or anything, but I'm pretty sure a Velvet worm that size is a physical impossibility.

Polychete worms rely on hydrostatic pressure to retain shape, kind of like a balloon animal but made with water balloons. The problem is that as you increase the size, the weight goes up as the cube of the liner scale, so double the length, you increase the weight by a factor of 23, or 6...and that means the internal pressure has to increase by X3 times the surface area or X2 [where x is the factor you'e increasing by, which I guess in this case is several thousands]

Basically, she'd either explode or go lie there in a puddle, depending on whether or not her physiology simply scaled internal pressure or not.

However... polychete worms use silica to make their claws... if she had a fully formed skeleton made of silica, which is both light and on this scale, surprisingly bendy [rather like steel springs] then it could be possible... but then she wouldn't be Velvet worm, she'd be an entirely new species. Probably one worthy of having it's own genius even.. as no even remotely similar species exists.

Which would impose some interesting physiological limitations... she wouldn't be a squishy [which is kind of the point], and she'd have to have defined points of articulation. Joints, in other words. [although given her skeleton could be snake like, that wouldn't be obvious.]
ysabetwordsmith

Well...

ysabetwordsmith

August 23 2015, 02:36:23 UTC 5 years ago

Remember that superpowers tend to bend natural laws rather than violating or following them exactly. Humans can't ordinarily fly, but can build machines to fly them around.

Everything is made of energy, so if you can tweak the fields, you can change how the matter behaves. A larger creature with hydrostatic format needs to be tougher, so you don't have to worry about Velvet getting mashed on a normal scale (although she is still vulnerable to punctures) but it comes out even on a super scale.

No, you couldn't have an ordinary velvet worm that big. You also couldn't have a woman the size of Gargantua or a spider the size of Nerissa.

That's also why some powers are rarer, not just less common to develop, but fatal without the required secondary powers. :( Hence the high rate of failure when people try to make supercritters in a lab. It's hard to think of all the problems and solutions in advance.
siliconshaman

Re: Well...

siliconshaman

August 23 2015, 03:10:31 UTC 5 years ago

Actually.. the spider is possible. The limiting factor there is the method of oxygen diffusion [or perfusion in the smaller species.] using tubes. Larger species have 'book' lungs which look like as the name suggests and work like bellows forcing air under pressure into their air tubes. Given better lungs, and a circulatory system like ours... there's no reason spiders shouldn't grow that size. [and that's my nightmares fully booked for the next week]

Gargantua wouldn't work... and even if she did [somehow] all that weight on feet proportionally human scaled..she'd sink into the ground up to her ankles at every step and don't even get me started about what she'd do to underground utility lines and subways... and then there's the problem of heat generation and dissipation [she'd cook from the inside, just because of her body heat]... so yeah.. no.

There's bending physical laws into a pretzel, and then there's outright breaking them!

Velvet could maybe stand up if her skin was made of stronger stuff... but then the pressure would be so high she wouldn't be able to bend. The same problem NASA has with space suits, which is partly why the use an atmospheric mix that has a very high oxygen percentage, because then they can use it at low pressure [typical 1/4 atms]

I suppose, if her structural integrity was largely a matter of force fields, or 'tweaking' the binding forces in her molecular structure then that could increase the stiffness without increasing pressure... although you'd have to selectively decrease it as she moved, otherwise she still wouldn't be able to bend but for different reasons. So, effectively she'd be bullet-proof unless you hit a point where the skin was being actively deformed. Unless of course you can decrease her mass...or create a selective and localized decrease in gravity.

But by Stan Lee's holy right hand.. the number of physical laws you have to play fast and loose with! it's kind of stretching the suspenders of disbelief beyond breaking point.

Honestly... there's a reason big creatures have skeletons.

I mean, it's your universe and you can write it how you want.. but I'm saying, if you are going to throw out the laws of physics, and not just bend them... perhaps it would be better if there was a good reason to do so, other than it's a cool character.

Or perhaps you need a better work-around or something, because as neat as she is... she's just not believable, and that kind of ruins it.