Robots As Spaceships: Swimmers

As a sequel to terrestrial motive systems, we will be looking at aquatic motive systems. This time, we will be looking less at cost, and more at speeds when using small size modifiers. We will be inspecting Ballast Tanks, Underwater Screws, Surface Screws, and Flexibody Drive-Trains. All of these systems are from Pyramid #3/34

Robots as Spaceships: Terrestial Motive Systems

There are many jokes about physicists and frictionless vacuums. Space is the rare environment that is a frictionless vacuum, and that makes calculating spaceship movement strangely simple, if foreign to those accustomed to terrestrial movement. When on the ground, a host of forces acting on a vehicle create a complex environment to move through.

A complex environment many of us have an intuitive grasp of, and we notice when things are a bit off. We plan to use Spaceship's Motive systems in a lot of our robots, and its worth tweaking a few of the numbers.

In this article, we'll be looking at tracks, wheels, and legs, the simplest and most common motive systems for robots in fiction (along with hovering, which suspends disbelief about its performance along with everything else). Legs come from spaceships 4, while wheels and tracks come from Pyramid  3/34.

Robots as Spaceships: Responsive Movement

In our analysis of the Gunbot, we noticed two ways that robots could move. About half of them moved similar to humans, with a base move of 5 and a very similar top speed. They could move as far as they wanted in any direction, but they had a very low top speed. They moved like a person. The other Robots have very small base moves but much larger total moves. They took a few seconds to get up to speed. This sort of movement we will call "train-like".

Spaceships uses train-like movement, with the minor exception of leg systems, which start off person-like but get more train-like as leg systems are added. Its likely that both types of movement can be engineered and each will be engineered for different purposes.