The U.F.S. has standards. If the ward is full, you can’t have blood splattered near-corpses or plasma-burnt crispies barely hanging on in the hallways! What sort of ship would that be? The Captain or the Admiral might slip on the blood or get a stain on their uniform! We can’t have that!
Protocol demands that any U.F.S. member disabled by combat, if there is no immediate hope of repair, must either be put into long term cold sleep or fed to the mass converter to provide additional supplies for later use.
Bwa … there is still a “GRRMartin’d” future for her. We’ve not bounded with the character enough. Her lost love interest needs to makes us feel sad a bit more, followed by a new hope before she comes to her bloody demise.
Sure, but that just means that she’s now a main viewpoint character, to some degree. GRR has this habit of starting and ending every book with a throwaway viewpoint character who only exists to die horrifically.
With how George meanders through books, IMO, it’s hard to trudge through a chapter knowing, “OK, yeah, but this guy’s still going to snuff it at the end so why do I care?”
Did she lose a love interest? I have re-read back from the earlier strips aboard her capital ship, and her LI was the mechanic, not her wingman. Or was the capital ship destroyed? (some were, but I couldn’t tell which one was hers)
Even if it was though, it seems like parts of it were still relatively intact, if bulkheads managed to close in time, some of the crew might have survived and get rescued after the battle.
Yeah, Cela should still be alive if the ship wasn’t destroyed.
I could only guess, that Cass, Janoras Wingman, was maybe some sort of mentor for her.
gnarph
2 years ago
Jeez MediBot: is this the <future swearword> Crimea War? This ward is unsanitary! Get some JanitorBots to clean up already…
GUNnibal
2 years ago
I have something VERY nitpicky to say, so I apologize in advance. I’m curious about what the robot says on the very last panel. More specifically, about how it phrases the first sentence.”I’m not authorized” is not quite the same as “I’m not programmed”, it’s the difference between “I am not allowed to” and “I don’t know how to”. Does this imply that even medical robots on the federation ships actually do have some combat protocols in case of an emergency and they CAN assess skirmishes, take part in them and so on, they just need the right orders? If… Read more »
I don’t know why it impresses you. Computers can run any and all sorts of completely different things, as long as drivers/software are installed. The only things your computer is “programmed to” do are the low level BIOS stuff. Everything else is software you download and install, be it a web browser, a molecular dynamics modeller, a rally simulator or operating instructions for specialized hardware (be it a printer or a robot body). So there is no reason a medbot couldn’t do tactical assessment other than not having access to the relevant data and methods. And while you can’t stop… Read more »
I think there is a slight bit of misunderstanding here, one I should clean up quite easily. What impresses me is not the possibility that a medical robot is potentially capable of combat. What impresses me is that this kind of information can be left inconspicuously for the reader to infer from a single throwaway line of dialogue.
In short, we learn more of the world the story is set in without exposition being dumped on us.
It is also possible that Tim just wrote the way he would if the robot weren’t a robot or were sentient – it’s not like non-sentient robots have a large presence in his collected works – this could be deep, or it could just be random detail caused by the fact that all of us, Tim included, live in a world where non-sentient robots are not capable of anything more than the most absolutely rudimentary conversation – and wouldn’t even get to the point being shown here.
And Tim might never say, or (as a GM of RPGs for years) he might see the interesting speculations and decide that’s really what he meant subconciously and run with that. When my players have a better cunning plan for the bad guys than I did, I’m willing to make some amendments on the fly for more tension and coolness. No reason Tim can’t use that approach and nobody would know….
Theoretically, yes. If the fight is with nukes, or giant spaceships with Starcasters, maybe Marine skills like small arms marksmanship are less valuable.
Surprised
2 years ago
I would expect very few traditional casualties in space battles. Not just because nobody can hear you scream, but because quick evacuation is typically not possible due to the sheer distances (and typically divergent travel vectors) involved, and because even minor disruptions of life support systems typically accelerate the transition from “being fine in a bad situation” to “dead” within mere minutes. Suffocation or possibly dehydration would be the likely fates of long-term survivors in a damaged ship that still has energy and atmosphere containment. But of course, this is drama and not a scientific study of future casualty evacuation… Read more »
Alot depends on the setting. They clearly have force fields so its possible they have the trek style emergency forcefields. You know the ones that snap in place over a hull breach right after the redshirt gets sucked out but saving the face character. That could result in survivable wounds from flying shrapnel from the weapon impact but not death from depressurization. There’s also just the effects from being near but not in the breached compartment. The impact could throw objects around or just an impact on the far side of the wall resulting in high speed spalling but not… Read more »
Or maybe not. What if effectively, by design and by the limits of even nuclear explosives in space, most damage to starships is of the ‘disable power/manouver/firecontrol and then board or let them drift’? That’s sort of age of sail (you could sweep the main deck, wreck the rigging, and shred the sails… and a lot of people could still be alive in a vessel that no longer has effective manouver. The armour could be a nanoskin which can move its armour around to fill patches. I mean, that’s no more bizarre than the Starcaster or interstellar drives. Or lethal… Read more »
The Legacy
2 years ago
This is something I’ve never quite understood with Star Trek; considering the size of their crews, the sickbay was never large enough to handle situations like this. I believe the Enterprise-D had multiple (with only one shown), but Voyager would have been in a mess otherwise. In fact, I think they did portray it once or twice how bad it could be.
As far as I understand the Ships in the Federation were never designed as battleships, more long distance and long time exploration vessels, so their sick bays were designed around a very futuristic medicine for most illnesses and few “stay here” beds for serious stuff which is more or less the hospital-bed to inhabitants-per-area quota used today. So 1000 crew and 10 beds is standard, with more sick bays to activate in case of emergency.I think this ratio. I guess that changed after the dominion war and the borg encounters, as the federation realized they would encounter battle situations more… Read more »
In fact, Voyager’s design featured systems to make them more capable as a fighting ship vs. the borg, so yes, likely they’d slightly up the medical capacity, but with replicators and EMH capabilities, you can up your surge capacity without changing much day to day capacity – you just flip on EMHs and replicate any life support gear you need.
As a non certified expert on make-believe-starships on a 30 year old tv series i have to comment on this. The federation Starships of that time where exploration and diplomatic ships. The first real warships where made after the battle of Wolf 359. While they had a med bay or even several. One could argue it would have been to small to handle _all_ 1000 people at once, but the odds are very small of that to happen (and when it does happen, the solution was some airborne thing through the ventilation that inoculated everyone at the same time, or… Read more »
If you check out Memory Alpha, it says the Galaxy class sickbays (two in saucer, one in engineering section) took up the majority of Deck 12.
The crew of the Enterprise-C are amazed at the size of it vs even starbase facilities of their time, but as you noted, a warship will need more facilities, and the Enterprise-D in that episode is very much one.
Plus, that vagaries of TV production budgets means we might only see a small section of it anyway.
Do remember that the Enterprise-C crew members encountered an Enterprise-D that was from a timeline involved in a protracted war with the klingons. Combat casualties were something of a way of life and the medical facilities would have been optimized for that. That said the Galaxy class was a bit of an odd duck. It was friggin enormous for the amount of crew that it regularly held. Seriously if you spread the crew evenly through just the furnished rooms and corridors all those scenes of bridge crew walking down a hall and talking should very rarely have passed anyone in… Read more »
Plus it had families aboard and teachers and various non-combatants. That did increase space required. And I’m sure they needed a lot of stores (if you’ve ever seen modern military vehicles – on land, sea or air if they have to run long missions with varied needs – they tend to have lots of places to stick stuff because you never know when you might need it).
That’s why I qualified the comment about Yesterday’s Enterprise that the D seen was using its enormous size in a warship configuration (which begs the question whether the Galaxy class would even exist in that timeline).
They could also use their holodecks as a sick bay, which was convenient for Voyager, being that their doctor was a hologram. He could move between the sick bay and the holodeck in the blink of an eye.
You’d think *all* your crew would have basic first aid training. And in every section going on an away mission or scattered through the ship during combat action, you’d find emergency medics (could be human or bots). The med bay would be essentially a big ER. Anyone less injured could be treated in place or strapped into their bunk after being stabilized. Anyone stabilized and in critical could be dumped into freeze pods for later revival. The only people you’d see in the sick bay are those who are serious or critical injury cases that are not yet stabilized and… Read more »
evilleet
2 years ago
Janora Calway sounds strangely familiar to “kathryn Janeway” or is that just me? 😮
I figured that her fighter would be lost in the clutter of asteroids, and that Speck, after making yet another hasty exit, would stumble across and rescue her.
Arcslayer
2 years ago
This could easily be made into a US Covid meme.
Jesse
2 years ago
I wonder why it’s often assumed that humans (or bipedals in general, as it seems that the vast majority of the races in this universe walk on two legs) would make robots that walk on two legs. It has to be significantly easier to put them on wheels instead of making all the joints and circuitry to allow them to walk correctly.
In the Terminator universe, Skynet built Terminators to be able to enter human hiding places and cross uneven terrain like humans do – before this, larger hunter-killers were becoming ineffective as humans learned to go underground or into confined spaces where they couldn’t follow.
That same logic could follow in this setting: the humanoid robots are auxiliaries operating in an environment intended primarily for humans. Plus, it could be reassuring to the patients to see a humanoid form vs an inhuman, purely functional machine, tending to them.
Bipedal locomotion is terribly efficient. Once moving, falling forward does a lot of the work.
We are pursuit predators by nature. Our gait is so efficient and our stamina so robust that only one quadrupedal predator can compete with us at moving long distances, over a long time frame. We ended up domesticating them. Man’s best friend was once our greatest hunting competitor.
You’re right that humans are pursuit predators, and we’re much better at endurance travel than deer or cattle. That’s something a lot of people don’t know, and it’s good to remember – we would walk after these quadrapeds for hour after hour until they exhausted themselves.
However, our prey were not using wheels. A bicycle demonstrates that rolling is much preferable to walking.
Even a skateboard or scooter shows the benefit of wheels. And a wheeled chassis can be very capable – wide stance when needed, or narrow if not, can possibly have very good rock hopping capabilities (like jeeps don’t high angle hill climbs that I wouldn’t try on foot), and they have much less energy input than human walking because of the dynamics of the wheel with a good bearing and lubrication. Plus you could easily (given what we see in today’s electric cars) outpace humans in sprints and could (given another 30 years of development) outpace humans in the long… Read more »
David has a line in Prometheus covering this concept. In short, “familiarization helps put people at ease”. The more ‘like them’ the non-sentient appears, the easier it is for them to accept.
There is also the possibility of bulkheads in these ships. So you have to step over obstacles between airtight spaces. Much easier to do with legs that feet or even treads.
Why is it an advantage to not have your hatches, even the bulkhead hatches stand higher than the floor level? That’s something we’ve done, but it is not the only design that could work.
Also, a bot with a mag-lock system, if power goes, could not only stay on the ground but could drive on any of the ship’s interior surfaces with some thought to how you’d manage 90 degree turns or level changes.
Okay say the ship suffers damage and the robot has to cross a damage section of floor or use a ladder hell even stairs. Say a patient is on the floor and has to be lifted up and carried, over damaged floor, up a ladder(those extra arms help). Sure you could design the wheeled robot to handle those situations but its easier just to give them legs.
You have no basis to say it is easier than legs. I’ve seen a number of wheeled and tracked systems whose mobility in rough terrain is better than a bipedal solution. This is part of why the US ‘big dog’ robots are quadrapeds. And their balance is pretty amazing now.
Another argument could be made that humanoid shapes allow the robot, in principle, to operate any device made for human operators. The complexity to make a humanoid robot work (nearly) as good as a trained human (in any task) is higher. But the payoff is higher too, and once that the engineering problems are solved, they can be transferred to similar designs with ease.
You believe that we cannot develop, by the time we can jump in space and do other amazing sci-fi things, that we can’t develop a more flexible and capable manipulator than the human hand with all of its various failings? I find that a hard thing to swallow. There might be many more useful manipulators that could do all our hands can do and more. There’s no reason to suggest this is not a possibility.
Since nobody else has said it, I will – all the species are humanoid in this setting because they were designed by the Aug – yes, even humans – who are the mysterious alien progenitors who also made the Starcasters.
And the Aug grew up watching reruns their probes captures of ToS of Star Trek and they venerate the IDIC concept, but only in the sense that 99% of the galaxies sentients are bipedal, roughly human layout, size and height, and most differ only by some skin patterns, funny head accoutrament or bumps/ridges.
Better mobility in dense terrain than wheels or tracks, harder to say on a ship. I’d think something with tracks and a magnetic way to stay grappled to the hull, floor, etc.
But that’d be too much like today’s useful robots like the bomb handling bots or others used in cargo moving.
CombatMagi
2 years ago
Ok I know its more likely with how many people would serve on ships but my first thought when I saw the full room was “Damn I’m impressed someone seemingly only lost an arm, thats hard to do in a space battle”
BENJAMIN SMITH
2 years ago
I can’t tell you anything about how the battle went. I can only tend to the massive, massive amount of injuries resulting from the battle.
Marine2000
2 years ago
Even a victory has a butchers bill to pay. I agree tho that the bay doesn’t seem bursting so it could have been worst.
Mostly likely that when the ships were destroyed by the Starcaster not many of the crews were left in big enough pieces to recover, let alone alive and tended in sickbay.
Halosty
2 years ago
This place must be hella busy with blood and junk on the floor.
Crestlinger
2 years ago
‘Who was in the messy bed?’ ‘A bleeder, you should see the other guy though.’
GCo
2 years ago
Robodoctors and superior automation, FTL travel, starpower harnessing items.. and no advanced roomba cleaning the floors of a hospital?
In order to be mass and space efficient, the ROOMBA for the UFS is capable of janitorial and infection control protocols, but is also able to assist in complex engineering tasks, deploy and control onboard and remote weapons systems, and seem to love solving mice mazes.
At the time in the picture, all such units were engaged in assisting engineering to reattach the two halves of the ship that were severed by a Starcaster.
Groober
2 years ago
Anyone else notice most of the beds on the right side are empty?
24
you can at least tell it went pretty bad judging by he fact the MCU is at full capacity
Nah, they clearly won easily. This is the aftermath of the victory shindig!
Well, they didn’t lose at least. If they lost, they’d be expanding gas in deep space….
Ya, having every medical bed full sure is pretty bad eh?
*wonders when this comic was actually drawn back in the patreon*
About 3-4 month ago IIRC?
More like about a year ago 😉
!!!
This is issue 9. 10 is complete and readable if you’re a $2 a month subscriber. Plus you get to vote on the plot!
Okay, this explains why Tim is able to bring those comics every working day while the normal schedule for his comics is monday, wednesday and friday.
Pretty sure that blood soaked bed is free.
will be soon
No one is lying in corridors or on makeshift “temporary” beds, I’d say it looks pretty okay
The pooling blood on the floor they dont have time to clean up. isnt a great sign.
The U.F.S. has standards. If the ward is full, you can’t have blood splattered near-corpses or plasma-burnt crispies barely hanging on in the hallways! What sort of ship would that be? The Captain or the Admiral might slip on the blood or get a stain on their uniform! We can’t have that!
Protocol demands that any U.F.S. member disabled by combat, if there is no immediate hope of repair, must either be put into long term cold sleep or fed to the mass converter to provide additional supplies for later use.
In theory the MCU could be full of, primarily, enemy soldiers.
I love that we’re getting more and more Janora, and that she’s not just GRRMartin’d into oblivion. Here’s hoping she has future plot relevance.
Bwa … there is still a “GRRMartin’d” future for her. We’ve not bounded with the character enough. Her lost love interest needs to makes us feel sad a bit more, followed by a new hope before she comes to her bloody demise.
Sure, but that just means that she’s now a main viewpoint character, to some degree. GRR has this habit of starting and ending every book with a throwaway viewpoint character who only exists to die horrifically.
With how George meanders through books, IMO, it’s hard to trudge through a chapter knowing, “OK, yeah, but this guy’s still going to snuff it at the end so why do I care?”
Did she lose a love interest? I have re-read back from the earlier strips aboard her capital ship, and her LI was the mechanic, not her wingman. Or was the capital ship destroyed? (some were, but I couldn’t tell which one was hers)
Even if it was though, it seems like parts of it were still relatively intact, if bulkheads managed to close in time, some of the crew might have survived and get rescued after the battle.
Yeah, Cela should still be alive if the ship wasn’t destroyed.
I could only guess, that Cass, Janoras Wingman, was maybe some sort of mentor for her.
Jeez MediBot: is this the <future swearword> Crimea War? This ward is unsanitary! Get some JanitorBots to clean up already…
I have something VERY nitpicky to say, so I apologize in advance. I’m curious about what the robot says on the very last panel. More specifically, about how it phrases the first sentence.”I’m not authorized” is not quite the same as “I’m not programmed”, it’s the difference between “I am not allowed to” and “I don’t know how to”. Does this imply that even medical robots on the federation ships actually do have some combat protocols in case of an emergency and they CAN assess skirmishes, take part in them and so on, they just need the right orders? If… Read more »
I don’t know why it impresses you. Computers can run any and all sorts of completely different things, as long as drivers/software are installed. The only things your computer is “programmed to” do are the low level BIOS stuff. Everything else is software you download and install, be it a web browser, a molecular dynamics modeller, a rally simulator or operating instructions for specialized hardware (be it a printer or a robot body). So there is no reason a medbot couldn’t do tactical assessment other than not having access to the relevant data and methods. And while you can’t stop… Read more »
I think there is a slight bit of misunderstanding here, one I should clean up quite easily. What impresses me is not the possibility that a medical robot is potentially capable of combat. What impresses me is that this kind of information can be left inconspicuously for the reader to infer from a single throwaway line of dialogue.
In short, we learn more of the world the story is set in without exposition being dumped on us.
It is also possible that Tim just wrote the way he would if the robot weren’t a robot or were sentient – it’s not like non-sentient robots have a large presence in his collected works – this could be deep, or it could just be random detail caused by the fact that all of us, Tim included, live in a world where non-sentient robots are not capable of anything more than the most absolutely rudimentary conversation – and wouldn’t even get to the point being shown here.
And Tim might never say, or (as a GM of RPGs for years) he might see the interesting speculations and decide that’s really what he meant subconciously and run with that. When my players have a better cunning plan for the bad guys than I did, I’m willing to make some amendments on the fly for more tension and coolness. No reason Tim can’t use that approach and nobody would know….
Every Marine is a rifleman first
Theoretically, yes. If the fight is with nukes, or giant spaceships with Starcasters, maybe Marine skills like small arms marksmanship are less valuable.
I would expect very few traditional casualties in space battles. Not just because nobody can hear you scream, but because quick evacuation is typically not possible due to the sheer distances (and typically divergent travel vectors) involved, and because even minor disruptions of life support systems typically accelerate the transition from “being fine in a bad situation” to “dead” within mere minutes. Suffocation or possibly dehydration would be the likely fates of long-term survivors in a damaged ship that still has energy and atmosphere containment. But of course, this is drama and not a scientific study of future casualty evacuation… Read more »
Alot depends on the setting. They clearly have force fields so its possible they have the trek style emergency forcefields. You know the ones that snap in place over a hull breach right after the redshirt gets sucked out but saving the face character. That could result in survivable wounds from flying shrapnel from the weapon impact but not death from depressurization. There’s also just the effects from being near but not in the breached compartment. The impact could throw objects around or just an impact on the far side of the wall resulting in high speed spalling but not… Read more »
Or maybe not. What if effectively, by design and by the limits of even nuclear explosives in space, most damage to starships is of the ‘disable power/manouver/firecontrol and then board or let them drift’? That’s sort of age of sail (you could sweep the main deck, wreck the rigging, and shred the sails… and a lot of people could still be alive in a vessel that no longer has effective manouver. The armour could be a nanoskin which can move its armour around to fill patches. I mean, that’s no more bizarre than the Starcaster or interstellar drives. Or lethal… Read more »
This is something I’ve never quite understood with Star Trek; considering the size of their crews, the sickbay was never large enough to handle situations like this. I believe the Enterprise-D had multiple (with only one shown), but Voyager would have been in a mess otherwise. In fact, I think they did portray it once or twice how bad it could be.
As far as I understand the Ships in the Federation were never designed as battleships, more long distance and long time exploration vessels, so their sick bays were designed around a very futuristic medicine for most illnesses and few “stay here” beds for serious stuff which is more or less the hospital-bed to inhabitants-per-area quota used today. So 1000 crew and 10 beds is standard, with more sick bays to activate in case of emergency.I think this ratio. I guess that changed after the dominion war and the borg encounters, as the federation realized they would encounter battle situations more… Read more »
In fact, Voyager’s design featured systems to make them more capable as a fighting ship vs. the borg, so yes, likely they’d slightly up the medical capacity, but with replicators and EMH capabilities, you can up your surge capacity without changing much day to day capacity – you just flip on EMHs and replicate any life support gear you need.
As a non certified expert on make-believe-starships on a 30 year old tv series i have to comment on this. The federation Starships of that time where exploration and diplomatic ships. The first real warships where made after the battle of Wolf 359. While they had a med bay or even several. One could argue it would have been to small to handle _all_ 1000 people at once, but the odds are very small of that to happen (and when it does happen, the solution was some airborne thing through the ventilation that inoculated everyone at the same time, or… Read more »
If you check out Memory Alpha, it says the Galaxy class sickbays (two in saucer, one in engineering section) took up the majority of Deck 12.
The crew of the Enterprise-C are amazed at the size of it vs even starbase facilities of their time, but as you noted, a warship will need more facilities, and the Enterprise-D in that episode is very much one.
Plus, that vagaries of TV production budgets means we might only see a small section of it anyway.
Do remember that the Enterprise-C crew members encountered an Enterprise-D that was from a timeline involved in a protracted war with the klingons. Combat casualties were something of a way of life and the medical facilities would have been optimized for that. That said the Galaxy class was a bit of an odd duck. It was friggin enormous for the amount of crew that it regularly held. Seriously if you spread the crew evenly through just the furnished rooms and corridors all those scenes of bridge crew walking down a hall and talking should very rarely have passed anyone in… Read more »
Plus it had families aboard and teachers and various non-combatants. That did increase space required. And I’m sure they needed a lot of stores (if you’ve ever seen modern military vehicles – on land, sea or air if they have to run long missions with varied needs – they tend to have lots of places to stick stuff because you never know when you might need it).
That’s why I qualified the comment about Yesterday’s Enterprise that the D seen was using its enormous size in a warship configuration (which begs the question whether the Galaxy class would even exist in that timeline).
They could also use their holodecks as a sick bay, which was convenient for Voyager, being that their doctor was a hologram. He could move between the sick bay and the holodeck in the blink of an eye.
And Moriarty could have helped.
You’d think *all* your crew would have basic first aid training. And in every section going on an away mission or scattered through the ship during combat action, you’d find emergency medics (could be human or bots). The med bay would be essentially a big ER. Anyone less injured could be treated in place or strapped into their bunk after being stabilized. Anyone stabilized and in critical could be dumped into freeze pods for later revival. The only people you’d see in the sick bay are those who are serious or critical injury cases that are not yet stabilized and… Read more »
Janora Calway sounds strangely familiar to “kathryn Janeway” or is that just me? 😮
I was hoping she’d meet Cort and Nyrah…..
I figured that her fighter would be lost in the clutter of asteroids, and that Speck, after making yet another hasty exit, would stumble across and rescue her.
This could easily be made into a US Covid meme.
I wonder why it’s often assumed that humans (or bipedals in general, as it seems that the vast majority of the races in this universe walk on two legs) would make robots that walk on two legs. It has to be significantly easier to put them on wheels instead of making all the joints and circuitry to allow them to walk correctly.
In the Terminator universe, Skynet built Terminators to be able to enter human hiding places and cross uneven terrain like humans do – before this, larger hunter-killers were becoming ineffective as humans learned to go underground or into confined spaces where they couldn’t follow.
That same logic could follow in this setting: the humanoid robots are auxiliaries operating in an environment intended primarily for humans. Plus, it could be reassuring to the patients to see a humanoid form vs an inhuman, purely functional machine, tending to them.
Bipedal locomotion is terribly efficient. Once moving, falling forward does a lot of the work.
We are pursuit predators by nature. Our gait is so efficient and our stamina so robust that only one quadrupedal predator can compete with us at moving long distances, over a long time frame. We ended up domesticating them. Man’s best friend was once our greatest hunting competitor.
Walking > Rolling
You’re right that humans are pursuit predators, and we’re much better at endurance travel than deer or cattle. That’s something a lot of people don’t know, and it’s good to remember – we would walk after these quadrapeds for hour after hour until they exhausted themselves.
However, our prey were not using wheels. A bicycle demonstrates that rolling is much preferable to walking.
Even a skateboard or scooter shows the benefit of wheels. And a wheeled chassis can be very capable – wide stance when needed, or narrow if not, can possibly have very good rock hopping capabilities (like jeeps don’t high angle hill climbs that I wouldn’t try on foot), and they have much less energy input than human walking because of the dynamics of the wheel with a good bearing and lubrication. Plus you could easily (given what we see in today’s electric cars) outpace humans in sprints and could (given another 30 years of development) outpace humans in the long… Read more »
If you are a sprint predator, four (or possibly more) legs are useful.You won’t outrun that cheetah and he won’t tire before you are caught.
David has a line in Prometheus covering this concept. In short, “familiarization helps put people at ease”. The more ‘like them’ the non-sentient appears, the easier it is for them to accept.
There is also the possibility of bulkheads in these ships. So you have to step over obstacles between airtight spaces. Much easier to do with legs that feet or even treads.
Why is it an advantage to not have your hatches, even the bulkhead hatches stand higher than the floor level? That’s something we’ve done, but it is not the only design that could work.
Also, a bot with a mag-lock system, if power goes, could not only stay on the ground but could drive on any of the ship’s interior surfaces with some thought to how you’d manage 90 degree turns or level changes.
Okay say the ship suffers damage and the robot has to cross a damage section of floor or use a ladder hell even stairs. Say a patient is on the floor and has to be lifted up and carried, over damaged floor, up a ladder(those extra arms help). Sure you could design the wheeled robot to handle those situations but its easier just to give them legs.
You have no basis to say it is easier than legs. I’ve seen a number of wheeled and tracked systems whose mobility in rough terrain is better than a bipedal solution. This is part of why the US ‘big dog’ robots are quadrapeds. And their balance is pretty amazing now.
Another argument could be made that humanoid shapes allow the robot, in principle, to operate any device made for human operators. The complexity to make a humanoid robot work (nearly) as good as a trained human (in any task) is higher. But the payoff is higher too, and once that the engineering problems are solved, they can be transferred to similar designs with ease.
You believe that we cannot develop, by the time we can jump in space and do other amazing sci-fi things, that we can’t develop a more flexible and capable manipulator than the human hand with all of its various failings? I find that a hard thing to swallow. There might be many more useful manipulators that could do all our hands can do and more. There’s no reason to suggest this is not a possibility.
Since nobody else has said it, I will – all the species are humanoid in this setting because they were designed by the Aug – yes, even humans – who are the mysterious alien progenitors who also made the Starcasters.
And the Aug grew up watching reruns their probes captures of ToS of Star Trek and they venerate the IDIC concept, but only in the sense that 99% of the galaxies sentients are bipedal, roughly human layout, size and height, and most differ only by some skin patterns, funny head accoutrament or bumps/ridges.
Better mobility in dense terrain than wheels or tracks, harder to say on a ship. I’d think something with tracks and a magnetic way to stay grappled to the hull, floor, etc.
But that’d be too much like today’s useful robots like the bomb handling bots or others used in cargo moving.
Ok I know its more likely with how many people would serve on ships but my first thought when I saw the full room was “Damn I’m impressed someone seemingly only lost an arm, thats hard to do in a space battle”
I can’t tell you anything about how the battle went. I can only tend to the massive, massive amount of injuries resulting from the battle.
Even a victory has a butchers bill to pay. I agree tho that the bay doesn’t seem bursting so it could have been worst.
Mostly likely that when the ships were destroyed by the Starcaster not many of the crews were left in big enough pieces to recover, let alone alive and tended in sickbay.
This place must be hella busy with blood and junk on the floor.
‘Who was in the messy bed?’ ‘A bleeder, you should see the other guy though.’
Robodoctors and superior automation, FTL travel, starpower harnessing items.. and no advanced roomba cleaning the floors of a hospital?
Ummm
They’re busy in the VERY bloody rooms, obviously.
In order to be mass and space efficient, the ROOMBA for the UFS is capable of janitorial and infection control protocols, but is also able to assist in complex engineering tasks, deploy and control onboard and remote weapons systems, and seem to love solving mice mazes.
At the time in the picture, all such units were engaged in assisting engineering to reattach the two halves of the ship that were severed by a Starcaster.
Anyone else notice most of the beds on the right side are empty?
I count 4 people with at least 1 arm each and 3 way in the back that look too lumpy to be empty.
Lucky to even have that many wounded. Space Battles dont leave many wounded