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Massive Monsters and How to Sustain Them
Fantasy creatures come in all shapes. Some are basically existing animals but with special traits or abilities. Others are chimeric, with two or more species smashed together wholesale. And still others are completely bizarre monstrosities. They can be fishlike, insectoid, reptilian, mammalian, you name it. Many are very much like humans. But some fantastical traits…
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The Square-Cube Law and Giant Fliers: Part Two
In the last post, we learned a little bit about the square-cube law and how it influences flight mechanics. To recap, the bigger animals get, the harder it is to fly because the effect of weight increases faster than the effect of lift. This makes things tricky for “giant fliers.” Airplanes can overcome the issue…
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The Square-Cube Law and Giant Fliers: Part One
Today, we’re going to start our biology lesson with a little bit of geometry. The square-cube law is one of those deceptively simple fundamentals that can be easy to miss but becomes almost obvious in hindsight. According to Wikipedia, it can be described thus: When an object undergoes a proportional increase in size, its new…