Human-sized bugs: Cool? Retro? Amateurish?

I think human-sized bugs is approaching the limit of exoskeleton physics. But as a visual? yeah, it's cool.

I like giant insects!

I'm only going to pick apart the science if you present me with science. Tell me you became a superhero through a mysterious radiation type, and I'm fine with that. Tell me it was radiation from a nuclear bomb landing on you, and you've given me science. I will pick that apart.

So if you do some hand-waving, that they're aliens and have a different physiology, I'm not going to think about it.

Only your writing can make your story appear amateurish. Build me a world where giant bugs make sense and I'm with you.

I love the Geonosians!

Just don't make your bugs bi-pedal.

Do something like Vernor Vinge did in "A Deepness in the Sky."

Throwbacks to the Carboniferous?

kuwisdelu said:

I love the Geonosians!

Click to expand...

I noticed. That was a huge picture.


Regard the question and human-sized bugs. I like the idea and the retro angle may even work. Things come back into fashion. I'm thinking of the films Tremors or Indiana Jones.

OMG!

My novel, the Cold King, is a mashup of King Arthur, Dexter and Starship Troopers.

And I'm not talking about Dexter as in Dexter's Lab.

Anywho, I have small bugs, big bugs, castle-cracker bugs, queen bugs, pacifistic bugs...

Basically, there are

Warriors: Warriors are fast, scuttly, and alarmingly good and finding chinks in plate mail and turning the knight inside into sticky, gooey manjuice. They don't like fire or getting stabbed.
Workers: Fast, scuttly, and have many arms. They also secret a resin that allows them to set up fortifications. They can also dig, if the soil permits it.
Scouts: These guys are like ants crossed with bigger ants. They leave behind scent trails and can take on lone humans but are easier to kill than warriors. They're a bit smarter too. They find food, human settlements (which also counts as food), more food...and leave a scent trail that leads right up to it. So the other bugs follow the trail and get to the food! FOOD!
Renders: These guys grab food, digest it, then regurgitate the goo. The can do this really fast, really efficiently. Then they leave a goo pile in which the bugs nom. Nom nom nom.
Armor/Heavies: These are the BIG ASS bugs. Big and armored. They are used to smash into big armies, crack castles, and generally be bad asses. Also, when you force feed them manjuice, they shed their armor and become...
Queens: Big, gooey, and they lay eggs. Lots of eggs. Workers build fortifications around them...
Farmers: Now...if a warrior is in an inactive state for a long enough time, it enters a phase of change. Just like how a salamander, if forced from water, will grow legs, a warrior will mutate into a farmer. Farmers are bipedal, have arms that can use humanoid tools...and they are also INTELLIGENT. And they're pacifists as well!


Now! The way the bugs work...is the warriors and the armor bugs smash up the enemy armies (using intelligence passed on by scouts). Then renderers grab the dead, digest em, then splatter up goo piles. The armor bug, if the terrain is fertile and bountiful, will gorge itself till it becomes a queen. Worker bugs hatch, build fortifications, and the warriors head out to attack.

Now, once the entire area is beaten flat (with no humans left), the bugs don't have enough food to feed most of their warriors...BUT...as they start to starve, they ALSO start to sit in place and try and conserve their food.

And this sitting in place triggers their "maturing" into farmers. The farmers start to farm, using ancestral knowledge to farm. Most of them die, but the fit, the hardworking, the smart...they survive and create a communist utopia where everyone is happy and they built up a level of technology to launch a dormant queen off to another planet.

This is the *plan* mind you.

It gets a bit screwy when the bugs run up against Conrad Kaksonen, the military genius who's rag tag army stops them short.

Conrad is charismatic, a tactical genius, a master observer, a quick student.

He's also a sociopath who could care less for the people he leads, if only that if they don't beat the bugs, he won't get to rule his empire.

I love him so much! <huggles Conrad>


PS: Also...something important to remember: If you want to know how to do bugs right, READ A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY by VERNOR VINGE.

In fact, fi you want to know how to write at all...just read that book.

If you want to have a good time, read the book.

If you want to not be killed by rabid Vernor Vinge fans...like...me...READ THE BOOK!

I am bored to tears of the Giant Bug of Outer Space. Please, please, stop it, everyone.

That said, I will still play Fallout 3 and love it. And the Alien series of films are still my favourite of all time.

But it really, really is time to stop it now. It's certainly not retro. It never went away.

...xenomorphs aren't bugs.

No, but yes. As much as I love Giger and everything he does, the aliens are bugs. They turn to goo when you squish them. Acidic goo, but still.

Noooo, they don't have exoskeletons.

They're not bugs, damn it!

They most certainly DO have exoskeletons. While the facehuggers don't. Which relly doesn't make sense at all.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, good icky bug is good icky bug. I don't care about the physics. Monsters of all shape and variety are cool. It's a fantasy or sci-fi world for crying out loud! I just say make the icky bug or bugs relevant to the story. Plus, who's to say the world you have created has the same gravity as earth?

Didn't Alan Dean Foster do bugs in one of the Pip and Flinx books? Or in one of those universes of his?

"You smash the entire area, you kill anything with more than two legs. You get me?"

"We get you, sir!"


I wrote a sci-fi western about a US Cavalry troop that engages a bug-like alien race in old-tyme Arizony. Well, it was New Mexico. But Arizony sounds more old-tyme westerny

If the bugs are on their own planet could the gravity be low and oxygen content high as compared to Earth. What did someone say upthread like the Carboniferous period. Only with less gravity. Or does gravity have anything to do with it?

AceTachyon said:

Didn't Alan Dean Foster do bugs in one of the Pip and Flinx books? Or in one of those universes of his?

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Spellsinger had giant spider people. I haven't read anything else by him, but giant spider people are nifty.

Okay...having conducted extensive research on the topic, including interviews with entomology PhDs and PhD candidates, insects can only reach a certain size due to a number of factors, all of which have to be calculated.

BTW, I;m currently wrking on a novel that deals specifically with the subject of the re-emergence of giant insects into the world ecology.

Basically, it boils down to 3 things - the square/cube law of proportionality, and the oxygen and CO2 exchange efficiencies of the insect's tracheal system.

The square/cube law prevents insects from reaching a size of roughly 30 times normal before the buckling strength of their limbs is exceeded by their weight. This is also about the same point at which CO2 exchange rate exceeds a 1:1 ratio. O2 exchange rate in insects is about 200 thousand times more efficient than it is in mammals, but CO2 exchange rate is only about 10 thousand times more efficient which means the ability to get rid of CO2 from the body's tissues is surpassed far sooner thn the O2 exchange rate is.

The other problems are metabolism and energy - if you grow an animal 100 times normal size, you increase its metabolism and energy needs by a factor of the increase in size to the two-tihirds power (about 35 times in this case) due to something called Kleiber's Law (look it up). Building chitin is a very energy-intensive process.

So, despite those old 1950s movies, it's impossible to have an ant 10 feet tall (max size is about 3-4 inches before things start to break down all over the place, but ants are small) or a grasshopper 20 feet long. The animals own weight will crush it long before it reaches these kinds of sizes (the same holds true for that 50-ft woman).

However, higher oxygen concentrations probably are part of what allowed insects during the Carboniferous/Permian and Jurassic/Cretaceous eras to grow to very large sizes. It's been estimated that O2 concentration back then were up around 30-35% compared to our 21% today. Temperatures were also higher. Experiments have shown that insects like high O2 concentrations and temperatures and that this may lead to larger insect sizes. It definitely leads to higher insect population densities.

So, 6-ft insects, human-sized bugs? No, not possible unless they evolved under lower gravity conditions and higher temperature and O2 concentrations. That might work.

They're going to be frikkin' ravenous though...

FOTSGreg said:

They're going to be frikkin' ravenous though...

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Exactly what we want from our giant bugs! ^_^

And nobody mentioned Them! or Mimic, two of the best IMHO

Put me down as a bugaholic.

FOTSGreg said:

Okay...having conducted extensive research on the topic, including interviews with entomology PhDs and PhD candidates, insects can only reach a certain size due to a number of factors, all of which have to be calculated.

BTW, I;m currently wrking on a novel that deals specifically with the subject of the re-emergence of giant insects into the world ecology.

Basically, it boils down to 3 things - the square/cube law of proportionality, and the oxygen and CO2 exchange efficiencies of the insect's tracheal system.

The square/cube law prevents insects from reaching a size of roughly 30 times normal before the buckling strength of their limbs is exceeded by their weight. This is also about the same point at which CO2 exchange rate exceeds a 1:1 ratio. O2 exchange rate in insects is about 200 thousand times more efficient than it is in mammals, but CO2 exchange rate is only about 10 thousand times more efficient which means the ability to get rid of CO2 from the body's tissues is surpassed far sooner thn the O2 exchange rate is.

The other problems are metabolism and energy - if you grow an animal 100 times normal size, you increase its metabolism and energy needs by a factor of the increase in size to the two-tihirds power (about 35 times in this case) due to something called Kleiber's Law (look it up). Building chitin is a very energy-intensive process.

So, despite those old 1950s movies, it's impossible to have an ant 10 feet tall (max size is about 3-4 inches before things start to break down all over the place, but ants are small) or a grasshopper 20 feet long. The animals own weight will crush it long before it reaches these kinds of sizes (the same holds true for that 50-ft woman).

However, higher oxygen concentrations probably are part of what allowed insects during the Carboniferous/Permian and Jurassic/Cretaceous eras to grow to very large sizes. It's been estimated that O2 concentration back then were up around 30-35% compared to our 21% today. Temperatures were also higher. Experiments have shown that insects like high O2 concentrations and temperatures and that this may lead to larger insect sizes. It definitely leads to higher insect population densities.

So, 6-ft insects, human-sized bugs? No, not possible unless they evolved under lower gravity conditions and higher temperature and O2 concentrations. That might work.

They're going to be frikkin' ravenous though...

Click to expand...

I was about to say the same, though in a much less ...umm..scientific manner.

same boat as darzian.

i know in the early history of life on earth bugs got to be as big as a mans head, so on a world with more oxygen it isn't that inconcievable.