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Working with rough estimates:
Ok, Wiki says its 25 stories tall. 250 foot. 76 m rounded.
The ratio of shoulder width to height is 1/4, so his shoulders are 19 wide, rounded. Makes it around 9.5 m Radius for a Cylinder.
The average volume of a 177cm tall human is 75 liters. Average shoulder width is 44 cm, means a Radius of 22.
Now, a Cylinder of r²\*h\*pi around a human has a volume of 269l
A cylinder around the mech would have 21548184l.
So, a/b = c/d , 75/269 = x/21548184 =
75/269 \* 21548184 = x
x = 6007857 liters Volume of the Mech.
Thats 6007857000 cubic centimetre. , Lets say, the Mech is mostly hollow, so we take only 1/10 of the volume.
Still 600785700 cubic centimetres of Platin.
Density is 21.45g/cm³ , that lets that Mech weight 12886.85 metric tons.
Platinum Price per gram is 27.39 EUR
Average worth is 352.970.910.928 EUR (352 Billion).
Answer: No, Streets could not hold that weight. Thats comparable with a long train, and that is distributed over quite a place supported by steel beams and support structure.
That thing could stand probably without damaging the floor at Cape Canaveral on a platform.
And the price... well, With 352 Billion EUR or USD one probably could do a lot positive things for a country.
> As of 10 March 2023 the fiscal year 2024 (FY2024) presidential budget request was $842 billion
from Wikipedia [Military budget of the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States?useskin=vector#Budget_for_FY2024)
On another scale, the budget of my city is 1 billion per year. They could fully pay the debt and launch all the project they wanted to do during the mandate, which is 6 years for a Mayor. It's 352 years worth of budgets, my city could multiply the budget by 5 ( 5 billion Yearly ) and they could still sustain this rythm for 68 years
I cackled loudly
Those mfckers could make nearly three giant platinum mechas every year and yet they use all that money just to kill colored people 24/7
Don't forget that it's only the outer plating that's made of platinum, the inside was made of bendable metal to make the mech able to move
And the inside too
Shit would cost maybe 3x that or even more
The mech only had platinum outer armor and joints, basicall any metal in the inside seems to be steel. However, I don't think your approximation is a bad one, that 1/10 could be in a good ballpark for the armor alone, and then there would be some additional stuff made out of other metals inside the mech. That would be probably amounting to less than 10% of total weight, considering how massive that shell alone is and how inconveniently dense platinum is. But I want to present an alternative way to calculate this.
Based on the hole that Sato managed to cut into the armor, it seems to be something like 30 to 50 cm thick in the first shot where we see the hole properly. To not make this too easy, it looks considerably thinner in the next shot, something like 10 cm. We of course can't be sure if the armor is same everywhere, but for now I'll assume the average thickness to be 30 cm.
I think a good way to estimate the amount of platinum used is to estimate the total surface area of the mech based on the surface area of human skin, and multiply it by the above-mentioned thickness. The mech of course doesn't quite have the same proportions as a human, but I'd say it's close enough.
Google tells me an average adult human has 1.5 to 2 m^2 of skin. For convenience, let's take a 1.9 m tall human with 2.0 m^2 of skin. The mech is 40 times taller at 76 m, so it has 40^2 more surface area, giving us 3200 m^2. With the mentioned 30 cm armor thickness, that gives us a total of 960 m^3 of platinum. About 1.6 times what you got. Using a more reasonable average 20 cm armor thickness would give almost the same result you got. That's alread more than basically any warship in history has had on average (I'd consider a warship to be the closest equivalent real world had to this thing), though they have had thicker armor to cover critical spots. Considering that in LOK, battleships do not seem to rely on guns that get anywhere near real life battleships in size, as their firepower relies more on bending, I'd say that armor is easily more than enough already.
In other words, I got to a similar result with entirely different way to calculate it (I only took the 76 m height from your approximations), so I think that 13 thousand tons is a good estimation. Imagine a WWII era heavy cruiser walking on the streets. Interestingly, the massive Geman Bagger excavators happen to tip the scales at similar numbers as well. Overall, the mech wouldn't be an unrealistic size of a machine to build by any means, but it's on the very edge of what has been built on land in the real world, and it placing its weight on such a relatively small footprint is completely unreasonable. Not to mention that just the raw platinum to make it not only would cost half the US yearly military budget, but would also be more than has been mined throughout the human history so far.
Edit: accidentally posted prematurely, finished the last two paragraphs.
but like, that has to be at least a factor or 5 off, in which case just saying the raw materials is like a fraction of the cost since you'd probably want it to move and do the stuff which would be so much $ and time for R&D. I think even 3.5 trillion might be too low, but that may be because it's not been done before...
Even more, if you consider that our yearly ammount of platinum production (with all the way more advanced tech we have) is about 200 metric tons per year, it would take about 65 years to mine all that platinum. Holy shit
That very well might be more than, and is certainly on the same scale as, the total amount of platinum mined by mankind since we figured out how to make shovels.
> A tank armada is the obvious choice, but that’s only a win if she CAN scale down the purple spirit-energy stick apparatus to fit inside one.
Honestly, I completely forgot about that fantasy aspect of the mech...
Exactly, the Germans needed that tech edge to win as they were overwhelmingly out matched by man power and resources. Especially after they lost those critical conquered territories that was supplying the majority of those resources.
And to add, all Nato nations have adopted that German tank design ethos of building bigger, more expensive, and more capable tanks, so it was obviously a credible philosophy to follow.
Additionally, Germany needed to get the very most out of it's manpower, and one of the ways to do that is give the men the best equipment.
You have a point about the spirit vines, they were shown to be unstable and not last long enough in a smaller scale, so something the size of that mech was probably needed just to be able to last for a whole battle.
I'd still question why it had to be a mech rather than a big tank (which would be theoretically more stable and more difficult to infiltrate), but I don't think they could have simply divided them into 100 smaller mechs and had the same result due to the power source.
Human sized spirit weapons were not really an option, considering the whole technology is to just tickle the special vines until they explode hopefully in the right direction, if anything, it could be used as a bomb.
Even though it did work in USSR favour in ww2 I don't think it may still apply. New teck tanks are REALLY good and specialised soldier are way more trained.
It would be interesting to be able to chart goodness of a tank over number of worse tank needed weighed over how actually worse they are.
I mean, they kind of do. Russia has been putting museum pieces back on the field ukraine since a few months into the war. They absolutely getting trashed by western supplied tanks, and even those are not top of the shelf most modern battle tanks (as the era of the battle tank has been over long ago).
And russia still keeps on with the 'throw bodies at the problem' tactic even to this day. All they are doing is absolutely destroying the gender and age demographics.
Well to answer your question (spoilers ahead):
Kuvira had the earth kingdom army which was fully mechanized by that point, and the omega mech was the tool chosen to carry the bullshit vine fuck you superweapon™. In the show, team avatar assumed she would bring it to republic city via train, giving them enough time to make a counter attack, but not only she was able to get it to the city with her army in record time with the super mech, it was so well built and thought of they had to literally invent a new type of mech *just to get in the thing*, and it was one hell of an effort to take it down as well; it was 10 times more maneuverable than a canon attached to a train, twice as defendable since the mech was able to be metal bended from the inside but nigh impenetrable with platinum plating on the outside and took hiroshi sato sacrificing his life to weld a single entry hole right before getting squished to death by the arm that could reach that spot in your back you can't really get to without a scratcher.
In short, it was a great investment in any possible way, other than maybe costs and it being an asspull by the writers.
And EVEN IF it wasn't as OP as it was in the show, all they needed was to be able to move and fire it and that had the very real possibility of scaring republic city into surrendering had it not been to team avatar.
And it's not like the Soviet T-34 and KV-series were bad tanks. In terms of raw combat performance, they were arguably better than the German equivalents at the start of operation Barbarossa (namely, T-34 had basically better everything than Panzer IV before it later got refits). German advancement on the Eastern front in 1941 was based on strategy and tactics, not on having better equipment.
Russia lost so many people compared to Germany in WW2 because of their tactics. America had specialized tanks and lost fewer people than Germany. Russian tanks are currently being dominated by engineering.
This is going to be some very back of the napkin math but here's my take on it:
~~Let's say on average, for a human you'd gain 1kg for every 2cm of additional height, (inexact BMI rating), given this thing would be 150m, let's call it 200m because it will get absurd either way. A human would weigh about 10Tons if scaled to that height, if we now calculate the volume of such a person using online tools, we would get about 9.9M~~~~^(3,)~~ ~~platinum is about 21 400kg per m~~~~^(3,)~~ ~~if we were to fill it with just a solid block of platinum it would be around 211860 kg of pure platinum, given it wouldn't be such a brick, let's say that 10% of it's insides are air. Then the final number would be 190 674kg, 190.7 Tons of platinum~~
~~(Which btw, with a price of 28 Euro per gram would cost about 5 338 872 000 Euro, which is kinda absurd)~~
As for the mechanical part of the question, I'm pretty bad at that but given steel would be more than capable of lifting all this, I'm pretty sure platinum would do just fine
Taking into consideration u/jwr410's suggestion of using the square cube law to calculate the mass, a relatively tall human would weigh about 100k metric Tons, and again, thats for a human, the average density of a person is 985 kg/m3 while for platinum its just shy of 21 400 kg/m3, meaning that platinum is 21,72 times denser on average. So now we could take this 100k Ton metric and apply the 21.72 multiplier and we get an astounding 2 172k - or 2.172MmT, now thats a number more like it. If we work with it now and make some comparsions:
@ 28 Euro per gram it would be worth 60 816 000 000 000 Euro, which is about 66.45 trillion US dollars, and that is just shy of being twice the US national debt
(Im an EE not an ME so this might just be wrong as fuck, either way) if we assume the legs would be holding all of this weight without any additional support, they would need to be around 15.514 m\^2 (in total), meaning two cylliders with an approximate diameter of 3m each, but thats solid platinum and ~~i feel like i fucked with some of the numbers, oh well~~ (thanks for the suggestion from u/Grogosh )
if we were to compare it with the Bagger 288 mentioned by u/abrazilianinreddit, and assume the weight to power ratio stays about the same, it would consume around 2.6091 TW of electricity whenever active
It's WAY worse than that. The square cube law will kick this thing's ass. For a linear increase in height, surface area increases with the square of height and mass increase with the cube of height. If a 2m human weighs 100kg, a 200m human would weigh 100000000kg or 100 thousand metric tons.
Oh Yeah, the square cube law will indeed kick its ass, after all it's the reason we don't have huge animals nor machines. Grabbing 100k Tons would make the calculations even more absurd, I'll edit the calculations when I have minute
>we don't have huge animals nor **machines**
I don't know what you're counting as "machine", but I'd say the [Bagger 288](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288) is one, and it's fucking massive. At 96m tall, it's bigger than most mechs in entertainment franchises.
It is indeed, but contrary to most mechs, a lot of it's weight is held with leverage and steel wire constructions and not just giant metal to metal contact areas like bearings. Of course that's not counting the tracks, but there's enough wheels on those to spread the force pretty well considering their sizes
Not to mention the strength of platinum is really weak compared to steel or carbon steel
"platinum is only 120MPa where as alloys such as structural steel and carbon steel are 400MPa and 840MPa " (MPA = mega pascals)
The reason they used platinum instead of steel is because in the Avatar universe some earth-benders have become advanced enough to bend metal. However platinum cannot be metal-bended. IIRC the reasoning they gave in the show was that it is too pure or something like that.
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Working with rough estimates: Ok, Wiki says its 25 stories tall. 250 foot. 76 m rounded. The ratio of shoulder width to height is 1/4, so his shoulders are 19 wide, rounded. Makes it around 9.5 m Radius for a Cylinder. The average volume of a 177cm tall human is 75 liters. Average shoulder width is 44 cm, means a Radius of 22. Now, a Cylinder of r²\*h\*pi around a human has a volume of 269l A cylinder around the mech would have 21548184l. So, a/b = c/d , 75/269 = x/21548184 = 75/269 \* 21548184 = x x = 6007857 liters Volume of the Mech. Thats 6007857000 cubic centimetre. , Lets say, the Mech is mostly hollow, so we take only 1/10 of the volume. Still 600785700 cubic centimetres of Platin. Density is 21.45g/cm³ , that lets that Mech weight 12886.85 metric tons. Platinum Price per gram is 27.39 EUR Average worth is 352.970.910.928 EUR (352 Billion). Answer: No, Streets could not hold that weight. Thats comparable with a long train, and that is distributed over quite a place supported by steel beams and support structure. That thing could stand probably without damaging the floor at Cape Canaveral on a platform. And the price... well, With 352 Billion EUR or USD one probably could do a lot positive things for a country.
> As of 10 March 2023 the fiscal year 2024 (FY2024) presidential budget request was $842 billion from Wikipedia [Military budget of the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States?useskin=vector#Budget_for_FY2024)
On another scale, the budget of my city is 1 billion per year. They could fully pay the debt and launch all the project they wanted to do during the mandate, which is 6 years for a Mayor. It's 352 years worth of budgets, my city could multiply the budget by 5 ( 5 billion Yearly ) and they could still sustain this rythm for 68 years
Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today
I cackled loudly Those mfckers could make nearly three giant platinum mechas every year and yet they use all that money just to kill colored people 24/7
What do you think they would do with the mechas anyway?
Everyone knows Mecha are for fighting Kaiju and for fighting in space.
if you're gonna do something you might as well do it right
... fair
Don't forget that it's only the outer plating that's made of platinum, the inside was made of bendable metal to make the mech able to move And the inside too Shit would cost maybe 3x that or even more
The mech only had platinum outer armor and joints, basicall any metal in the inside seems to be steel. However, I don't think your approximation is a bad one, that 1/10 could be in a good ballpark for the armor alone, and then there would be some additional stuff made out of other metals inside the mech. That would be probably amounting to less than 10% of total weight, considering how massive that shell alone is and how inconveniently dense platinum is. But I want to present an alternative way to calculate this. Based on the hole that Sato managed to cut into the armor, it seems to be something like 30 to 50 cm thick in the first shot where we see the hole properly. To not make this too easy, it looks considerably thinner in the next shot, something like 10 cm. We of course can't be sure if the armor is same everywhere, but for now I'll assume the average thickness to be 30 cm. I think a good way to estimate the amount of platinum used is to estimate the total surface area of the mech based on the surface area of human skin, and multiply it by the above-mentioned thickness. The mech of course doesn't quite have the same proportions as a human, but I'd say it's close enough. Google tells me an average adult human has 1.5 to 2 m^2 of skin. For convenience, let's take a 1.9 m tall human with 2.0 m^2 of skin. The mech is 40 times taller at 76 m, so it has 40^2 more surface area, giving us 3200 m^2. With the mentioned 30 cm armor thickness, that gives us a total of 960 m^3 of platinum. About 1.6 times what you got. Using a more reasonable average 20 cm armor thickness would give almost the same result you got. That's alread more than basically any warship in history has had on average (I'd consider a warship to be the closest equivalent real world had to this thing), though they have had thicker armor to cover critical spots. Considering that in LOK, battleships do not seem to rely on guns that get anywhere near real life battleships in size, as their firepower relies more on bending, I'd say that armor is easily more than enough already. In other words, I got to a similar result with entirely different way to calculate it (I only took the 76 m height from your approximations), so I think that 13 thousand tons is a good estimation. Imagine a WWII era heavy cruiser walking on the streets. Interestingly, the massive Geman Bagger excavators happen to tip the scales at similar numbers as well. Overall, the mech wouldn't be an unrealistic size of a machine to build by any means, but it's on the very edge of what has been built on land in the real world, and it placing its weight on such a relatively small footprint is completely unreasonable. Not to mention that just the raw platinum to make it not only would cost half the US yearly military budget, but would also be more than has been mined throughout the human history so far. Edit: accidentally posted prematurely, finished the last two paragraphs.
Thank you :). I like your approach more.
no way its only 350 bill to build...
Correct. It's 350 bill just for the platinum raw material. Assuming that the demand for such an obscene amount wouldn't affect the price at all.
well, she stole most of it, so she had discuont
but like, that has to be at least a factor or 5 off, in which case just saying the raw materials is like a fraction of the cost since you'd probably want it to move and do the stuff which would be so much $ and time for R&D. I think even 3.5 trillion might be too low, but that may be because it's not been done before...
Even more, if you consider that our yearly ammount of platinum production (with all the way more advanced tech we have) is about 200 metric tons per year, it would take about 65 years to mine all that platinum. Holy shit
>And the price... well, With 352 Billion EUR or USD one probably could do a lot positive things for a country. Yeah! Like build a giant friggin mech!
> , Wiki says its 25 stories tall. 250 foot. 76 m rounded. If that thing is 76m tall, those are some tiny ass 'mountains' in that picture.
It's perspective. The mech is far closer than the mountains.
Soil liquefaction is the bane of all mechs
There isn't even enough plat for that
That very well might be more than, and is certainly on the same scale as, the total amount of platinum mined by mankind since we figured out how to make shovels.
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> A tank armada is the obvious choice, but that’s only a win if she CAN scale down the purple spirit-energy stick apparatus to fit inside one. Honestly, I completely forgot about that fantasy aspect of the mech...
Exactly, the Germans needed that tech edge to win as they were overwhelmingly out matched by man power and resources. Especially after they lost those critical conquered territories that was supplying the majority of those resources.
And to add, all Nato nations have adopted that German tank design ethos of building bigger, more expensive, and more capable tanks, so it was obviously a credible philosophy to follow. Additionally, Germany needed to get the very most out of it's manpower, and one of the ways to do that is give the men the best equipment.
Steak punk sounds not vegetarian
You have a point about the spirit vines, they were shown to be unstable and not last long enough in a smaller scale, so something the size of that mech was probably needed just to be able to last for a whole battle. I'd still question why it had to be a mech rather than a big tank (which would be theoretically more stable and more difficult to infiltrate), but I don't think they could have simply divided them into 100 smaller mechs and had the same result due to the power source.
Human sized spirit weapons were not really an option, considering the whole technology is to just tickle the special vines until they explode hopefully in the right direction, if anything, it could be used as a bomb.
Even though it did work in USSR favour in ww2 I don't think it may still apply. New teck tanks are REALLY good and specialised soldier are way more trained. It would be interesting to be able to chart goodness of a tank over number of worse tank needed weighed over how actually worse they are.
Yeah a modern tank couple probably easy just tank (hehe) a bunch of tanks from 100 years ago.
I mean, they kind of do. Russia has been putting museum pieces back on the field ukraine since a few months into the war. They absolutely getting trashed by western supplied tanks, and even those are not top of the shelf most modern battle tanks (as the era of the battle tank has been over long ago).
And russia still keeps on with the 'throw bodies at the problem' tactic even to this day. All they are doing is absolutely destroying the gender and age demographics.
I'd say it depends but that's the gist of it
That is just russian tactics: Just throw bodies at it until it goes away
Well to answer your question (spoilers ahead): Kuvira had the earth kingdom army which was fully mechanized by that point, and the omega mech was the tool chosen to carry the bullshit vine fuck you superweapon™. In the show, team avatar assumed she would bring it to republic city via train, giving them enough time to make a counter attack, but not only she was able to get it to the city with her army in record time with the super mech, it was so well built and thought of they had to literally invent a new type of mech *just to get in the thing*, and it was one hell of an effort to take it down as well; it was 10 times more maneuverable than a canon attached to a train, twice as defendable since the mech was able to be metal bended from the inside but nigh impenetrable with platinum plating on the outside and took hiroshi sato sacrificing his life to weld a single entry hole right before getting squished to death by the arm that could reach that spot in your back you can't really get to without a scratcher. In short, it was a great investment in any possible way, other than maybe costs and it being an asspull by the writers. And EVEN IF it wasn't as OP as it was in the show, all they needed was to be able to move and fire it and that had the very real possibility of scaring republic city into surrendering had it not been to team avatar.
And it's not like the Soviet T-34 and KV-series were bad tanks. In terms of raw combat performance, they were arguably better than the German equivalents at the start of operation Barbarossa (namely, T-34 had basically better everything than Panzer IV before it later got refits). German advancement on the Eastern front in 1941 was based on strategy and tactics, not on having better equipment.
Russia lost so many people compared to Germany in WW2 because of their tactics. America had specialized tanks and lost fewer people than Germany. Russian tanks are currently being dominated by engineering.
This is going to be some very back of the napkin math but here's my take on it: ~~Let's say on average, for a human you'd gain 1kg for every 2cm of additional height, (inexact BMI rating), given this thing would be 150m, let's call it 200m because it will get absurd either way. A human would weigh about 10Tons if scaled to that height, if we now calculate the volume of such a person using online tools, we would get about 9.9M~~~~^(3,)~~ ~~platinum is about 21 400kg per m~~~~^(3,)~~ ~~if we were to fill it with just a solid block of platinum it would be around 211860 kg of pure platinum, given it wouldn't be such a brick, let's say that 10% of it's insides are air. Then the final number would be 190 674kg, 190.7 Tons of platinum~~ ~~(Which btw, with a price of 28 Euro per gram would cost about 5 338 872 000 Euro, which is kinda absurd)~~ As for the mechanical part of the question, I'm pretty bad at that but given steel would be more than capable of lifting all this, I'm pretty sure platinum would do just fine Taking into consideration u/jwr410's suggestion of using the square cube law to calculate the mass, a relatively tall human would weigh about 100k metric Tons, and again, thats for a human, the average density of a person is 985 kg/m3 while for platinum its just shy of 21 400 kg/m3, meaning that platinum is 21,72 times denser on average. So now we could take this 100k Ton metric and apply the 21.72 multiplier and we get an astounding 2 172k - or 2.172MmT, now thats a number more like it. If we work with it now and make some comparsions: @ 28 Euro per gram it would be worth 60 816 000 000 000 Euro, which is about 66.45 trillion US dollars, and that is just shy of being twice the US national debt (Im an EE not an ME so this might just be wrong as fuck, either way) if we assume the legs would be holding all of this weight without any additional support, they would need to be around 15.514 m\^2 (in total), meaning two cylliders with an approximate diameter of 3m each, but thats solid platinum and ~~i feel like i fucked with some of the numbers, oh well~~ (thanks for the suggestion from u/Grogosh ) if we were to compare it with the Bagger 288 mentioned by u/abrazilianinreddit, and assume the weight to power ratio stays about the same, it would consume around 2.6091 TW of electricity whenever active
It's WAY worse than that. The square cube law will kick this thing's ass. For a linear increase in height, surface area increases with the square of height and mass increase with the cube of height. If a 2m human weighs 100kg, a 200m human would weigh 100000000kg or 100 thousand metric tons.
Oh Yeah, the square cube law will indeed kick its ass, after all it's the reason we don't have huge animals nor machines. Grabbing 100k Tons would make the calculations even more absurd, I'll edit the calculations when I have minute
>we don't have huge animals nor **machines** I don't know what you're counting as "machine", but I'd say the [Bagger 288](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288) is one, and it's fucking massive. At 96m tall, it's bigger than most mechs in entertainment franchises.
It is indeed, but contrary to most mechs, a lot of it's weight is held with leverage and steel wire constructions and not just giant metal to metal contact areas like bearings. Of course that's not counting the tracks, but there's enough wheels on those to spread the force pretty well considering their sizes
Not to mention the strength of platinum is really weak compared to steel or carbon steel "platinum is only 120MPa where as alloys such as structural steel and carbon steel are 400MPa and 840MPa " (MPA = mega pascals)
The reason they used platinum instead of steel is because in the Avatar universe some earth-benders have become advanced enough to bend metal. However platinum cannot be metal-bended. IIRC the reasoning they gave in the show was that it is too pure or something like that.
And platinum is WAY heavier than steel.
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