I keep seeing people say, “how do they fly then”, but there’s nothing fundamentally keeping supersized insects from flying. Insects on earth used to be much larger, enabled if I understand correctly by a higher atmospheric concentration of oxygen. The limiting factor is respiration because modern insects don’t have lungs or a circulatory system, so they have to use direct gas exchange with their environment.
If you assume the mega insects have a radically changed metabolism, that removes the primary limiter on insect size, flight ability is neither here nor there.
I don’t mind cow tools problems much when they’re kept to small parts of the game. On occasion I aim for them, because the player avatar isn’t supposed to have a clear idea what’s going on.
The copy on that specific snippet could benefit from a small edit adjusting the perspective and assumptions of the avatar, but I’m unlikely to get to it myself in the next forever at my current rate.
i personally wouldnt mind going to clear out a wasp nest, killing a few giant wasps, and then all the sudden having one of the wasp nests break open by stray bullet fire to reveal a titanic sized wasp that’s headed my way, my first thoughts would be ‘oh fuck’ and ‘imma get outa here’ not ‘wait how does that thing fly’
That’s why I used the weight of the Condor as a quick sanity check on how heavy a living organism that flies can be. (Huge bee passes, by that criteria)
The new limiting factor is going to be metabolism. There’s no reason why a crazily mutated bug couldn’t be as large as a concord and fly - but it would need to eat food and process it crazy fast into a concentrated high energy form. In fact, you’d probably need a whole hive of insects bringing back food from far around just to support a short flight. It wouldn’t be able to hunt and eat fast enough by itself to support the energy needs.
I’ve butchered the undamaged corpse of an alpha bee (values: 625 L, 815 kg) with the highest butchering tool currently in the game (Autonomous Surgical Scalpels) and all skills set to 20. It is save to assume that even those do not extract all the gas sacs in the animal.
None the less, here’s what I got:
2280 clusters of gas sacs: 570.00 L, 114.00 kg
1281 strands of endochitin 384.30 L, 115.29 kg
as well as
butchery refuse: 35.17 L, 52.75 kg
bee venom gland: 9.68 L, 11.44 kg
chunks of chitin: 320.25 L, 115.29 kg
bee sting: 0.25 L, 0.54 kg
mutant lungs: 4.50 L, 4.03 kg
mutant organs: 14.50 L, 17.17 kg
chunk of mutant meat: 221.50 L, 262.26 kg
sinew: 14.25 L, 11.40 kg
As you can see, even the sacs and endochitin alone are already larger than the corpse itself.
I’ve listed the strands of endochitin as well, since I’ve figured they probably also contain parts of the gas/vacuum.
In case you don’t want to calculate it yourself, all the parts have a total of 1574.4 L and 704.17 kg.
So, we know that something that has measurable (positive) weight can’t float in air by itself, therefore it’s save to assume that - whatever held these sacs afloat - was vented.
Now the uncertainties begin:
Did the sacs change size when they were vented? Did they collapse (like popping a balloon), inflate (like opening a plastic bottle that was squeezed when it was sealed) or just stay the same?
Is the whole body filled with the gas and the sacs just give additional lift or are they the only gas bearing thing?
Did I forgot to look my door again?
What exactly are the sacs filled with? It’s unlikely Helium… with a higher probability Hydrogen or Hydrocarbons. But it could also be at a vaccum to an unknown degree.
Are the sacs pressurized, evacuated or at atmospheric pressure? While partially bound to the first question, it’s possible that the state of the sacs changed during / do to the death of the creature even though not directly related to the content of it.
…
There’s so much to guess, we could just say that the sacs have collapsed to 1/100 of it’s size. That would make the alive creature a size of 57 m³, about the size of a small mobile home.
That would mean it comes close to your calculation from your first post in this topic: the bee is really that large and just collapsed in itself when killed - nothing wrong with gas sacs (other than… see below).
However, this answer isn’t really satisfying. While the point why you made this topic (gas sacs are too big) was cleared up (the bee is more voluminous alive than dead) and may based on “wrong” assumptions (“10% of the bee are gas sacs” → volume anomaly aside, it’s closer to 1/3… 36% to be exact, excluding endochitin & “gas still affects weight” → probably no longer in the case), it still leaves so many other questions open… Like - among other things - do they actually provide lift?
So, let’s retry this and change a few things up…
Let’s assume the gas sacs are “filled” with Hydrogen and are still the same shape as when the bee was alive.
Air has a density of 1.225 kg/m³ (at specific parameters). If we take all of it out, it would reduce the weight of all these sacs by 0.69825 kg, leaving us with 113.30175 kg weight alone from the sacs - at a vacuum, even before filling them with Hydrogen, in which case they would be useless as they’re already heavier than what they provide in form of lift, so this can’t be the answer which makes it clear that they in fact have to be collapsed.
So, where do they break even (makes them still useless, as it would be the same if they don’t have them at all)? At around 93060 Liter, they would be able to carry there own weight. That would mean they collapsed to at least 1/163.25 of their original size.
That would mean, to provide any meaningful lift, they’d probably have to be 200 or 250 times the size they are now…
I’m not sure if I should discuss in full lenght why that’s logically seen impossible (especially if they follow you inside) or be scared of my own imagined living room sized bee…
Anyway, I think I put an end to it here. If the sacs aren’t as heavy as they are now, I’d consider it possible for them to provide some meaningful lift one or the other way and I’d assume the main lift would still be provided by the wings, but as it is now it’s just too abstract to wrap my head around (other than that they are really, really big).
Ah, but that one can be easily dealt with: They just take the missing energy from the same source the blob does (aside from the hive they also have).
Uh… I only agree on that if I get to be a crazy doctor/professor (with certification) !
“I’m accustomed to the sound of shuffling from the Zombies, the annoying occasional screeching of a Shriekling, the flapping of some stupid birds… But there’s one sound, that I will never forget! The terrifying, bloodcurdling ‘BOING BOING BOING’ of an alpha bee…”
I assume you don’t get “lungs” per se, more the trachea of them… With that size, they can probably be extracted.
Not sure if they are edible, though…
Or they mutated lungs to support their flight?
I raised similar question about skeletal corpses once (not butchering, just that they were too big for their mass). The only “answer” I got was along the lines of “that’s just how much space they take - you know, with arms spread and the like. you can’t pack them tighter”.
Same “logic” be applied here - the butchered parts take more space because they are not packed tightly inside the body.
Yes, exactly. That’s why I didn’t argue about that in my post, because it makes sense that they are larger if spread out. I just mentioned that it’s more voluminous because the first post in this topic states the corpse size of 625 Liter is “fix” for the animal as a whole, and that no one points that out thinking I made a mistake in that calculation.
!