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Comic Discussion => QUESTIONABLE CONTENT => Topic started by: Cheetaur on 28 May 2019, 14:10
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Mo Mo and May and a lot of the others are like 4ft nothing...why? It seems strange, not sure why? Any thoughts.
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I would imagine its just different designs of chassis.
Or Momo and May might have civilian chassis compared to the industrial designs like Crushbot or military designed like Bubbles.
Or it might not really matter.
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In Momo's case, it's likely due to her original function as companion-AI - it makes sense to make what is essentially humanities'first contact with a new sentient species as non-threatening as possible, especially considering our strong xenophobic instincts. Momo referred to herself as an ambassador, which I took as indication that the companion project is relatively recent.
With May, it's probably simply common sense - she has a proven strong affinity for high-powered chassis' and poor impulse control, and weakly developed prosocial tendencies. Not really who you'd want to jam into a large, high-powered chassis to practises their Impulse control and prosocial tendencies.
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Over the lifetime of the comic we've seen AI go from a size you could easily pick up with one hand to a size where it could pick you up if it wanted to. I imagine the development in chassis sizes progressed in such a way that humans did not feel threatened by the sudden appearance of similarly-sized robots among them, and starting out small helped people acclimatize to them. Right now society seems to be at a point where human-sized AIs are acceptable, but since height is still a thing for humans, with its strong association with status, the AIs might prefer smaller form-factors to facilitate human-AI relations. Exceptions for military and industrial purposes are obvious.
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There could be a significant power consumption advantage to cutting mass wherever possible, and the square/cube law is a harsh mistress.
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Or simpler yet, smaller ones with fewer materials are presumably cheaper.
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The previous two answers are probably both correct.
Hell, in Transformers lore, there's a whole generation of bots that opted to be smaller so they consumed less energon. The Micromasters (http://"https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Micromaster") were followed by the post-Great Upgrade (http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Great_Upgrade) bots and both are smaller than the G-1 bots everyone knows by name.
EDIT: fixed the link
[still trying to find my old thread]