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BL cannot decide on the size of Titans. The GW-published material makes them far more believable, running between 50 and 100m in height.

That's still plenty huge for a machine of war, no need for them to be literal mountains.

 Redcruisair wrote:
A more interesting question to ask would be how something as heavy as a titan doesn’t sink into the ground.

The same reason we humans don't sink into the ground.

Our weight is dispersed over our feet and allows the ground to support us. Sure, it might leave a foot print a meter or more deep.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Redcruisair wrote:
A more interesting question to ask would be how something as heavy as a titan doesn’t sink into the ground.

The same reason we humans don't sink into the ground.

Our weight is dispersed over our feet and allows the ground to support us. Sure, it might leave a foot print a meter or more deep.

No. That is not how it works. Reach a certain weight limit and the ground beneath the object starts to give away, regardless of how well the object can disperse its weight.

The type of terrain also plays a role. Solid rock might be able to withstand the weight of a titan, but most terrain commonly consists of either sand or soft soil.

From a post I made in http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/523743.page

So there are suspensors, but you akso just need to get the right size of foot.

Typical bearing pressures for Earth terrain range from about 100kn/sq.m for soft silt up to about 600kN/sq.m for solid bedrock.

So for a 400 metric ton titan required foot sizes range from about 7x7m to 3x3m. This is about the mass of a fully laden heavy lift 747, so probably a reasonable guess for a knight or maybe a warhound at about 50m high.

For a 160 thousand metric tonne titan you would need 125x125m down to about 55x55m sized feet if it only ever tiptoed on granite. However, this is equivalent to the weight of a 240m tall, or 60 storey building with 50m to a side, so probably a bit unwieldy, even for a giant stompy robot. It would also need each foot to have a larger surface area than itself, but I'm sure it could be finessed.

So smaller titans would be easy while the larger titans would likely need some technosorcery assistance, which also has precedence in the fluff anyway.

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 Arcsquad12 wrote:
using lightweight, yet super dense materials to form the superstructure.

Also I'm pretty sure this is a contradiction in terms

These things get hit with nuclear weapons, brawl with other enormous constructs using plasma weaponry, and assaulted with arcane magicks on the regular, and you think some lightning is going to cause them a problem? They have shields, amazing armor, etc.

If lightning doesn't cause problems for modern day vehicles why would a Titan get effected?

In today's world, planes and cars get struck by lightning and keep on going. I'd imagine if modern tech can figure it out, so can a titan.

 Flinty wrote:



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 Arcsquad12 wrote:
using lightweight, yet super dense materials to form the superstructure.

Also I'm pretty sure this is a contradiction in terms

D'oh, that does sound stupid. I'm thinking in Mass Effect BS science. Lightweight, super hard materials. If it was dense, that's just more matter for gravity to act on.

If it's a Night Lord aligned titan it just becomes part of the paint job

Was I the only one who thought that perhapes it would be absorbed throught a lightining rodesque system and used as a supplementry power source? Green titans anyone?

 Arcsquad12 wrote:

 Flinty wrote:



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Arcsquad12 wrote:
using lightweight, yet super dense materials to form the superstructure.

Also I'm pretty sure this is a contradiction in terms

D'oh, that does sound stupid. I'm thinking in Mass Effect BS science. Lightweight, super hard materials. If it was dense, that's just more matter for gravity to act on.

Things can be hard without being dense.

Okay, so maybe the Titan gets hit as per the effects of an emp. There would probably be back up systems to have mostly everything back up and running within a minute.

 Psienesis wrote:

sky scrapers would sink into the ground, unless they had the specially built foundations that either connect to bedrock or transmit the load laterally into the soil they sit in which compacts them.

Excepting very tall, very heavy buildings have existed since before the 20th century, and are still standing now. While not sky-scraper tall, neither are most Titans, and the basalt-and-granite cathedrals, reaching between 5 and ten stories high with their steeples and such, have been standing for centuries.... and are often built over a network of caverns and tunnels dug out for interring the dead.

and prior to the 20th century they either built a good foundation, built on bedrock, or they suffered the consequences.

Look at New York, a product of the 20th century. Downtown manhattan and midtown manhattan both have skyscrapers but in between there are no seriously tall buildings. Geologically the isle of manhattan is made up of either soft mud or extremely strong manhattan schist, downtown and midtown are built on this hard schist bedrock and could be made very tall, inbetween is just packed silt from the river. A tall building could be built on mud, but the foundation would need to be extensive and thus expensive.


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 troa wrote:
In today's world, planes and cars get struck by lightning and keep on going. I'd imagine if modern tech can figure it out, so can a titan.

cars are unlikely to be hit as they are suspended above the ground by giant rubber insulators we call tires (or sometimes tyres).

planes get hit all the time, and the aluminum or titanium variety suffer no ill effect(other than terrified passengers). The newer composite ones can have problems, if the current goes through some of the remaining metal fitting on the plane, but this is designed against.


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 Redcruisair wrote:


The type of terrain also plays a role. Solid rock might be able to withstand the weight of a titan, but most terrain commonly consists of either sand or soft soil.

I agree that the weight per unit area, or pressure is what matters.

but consider that we understand the terrain of this planet very very well, and the terrain of 3-5 rocky objects in this solar system somewhat. Who knows, maybe extremely hard rock surfaces are pretty common in the galaxy and thus titans make a lot of sense. Or maybe during the dark age of technology, man went out and put reinforce concrete foundations on all planets in the galaxy so his huge walkers could stride about.

Or maybe they just don't deploy titans on soft surfaces, or modify them somehow. Did they field titans on Tallarn?

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:
These things get hit with nuclear weapons, brawl with other enormous constructs using plasma weaponry, and assaulted with arcane magicks on the regular, and you think some lightning is going to cause them a problem? They have shields, amazing armor, etc.

and what's more, the current would never enter the titan, just running along the skin of the armor.

Now shields, hmm dont know how they work. Who knows?

IIRC, Void Shields work by dissipating the incoming energy/projectile into the Warp. Basically a small one way teleport.

Yep. So, Titan gets struck by lightning, Void Shield eats it, some poor schmuck of a Daemon just chilling in the Warp suddenly gets electrocuted.

 Grey Templar wrote:
IIRC, Void Shields work by dissipating the incoming energy/projectile into the Warp. Basically a small one way teleport.

I was more thinking about how the void shield would affect the voltage potential in the area, if it prevents matter/energy from entering the area, then it could prevent the titan from dispersing a charge from not being grounded. This could then lead to the lightning in the first place.

 purplefood wrote:

 Arcsquad12 wrote:

 Flinty wrote:



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 Arcsquad12 wrote:
using lightweight, yet super dense materials to form the superstructure.

Also I'm pretty sure this is a contradiction in terms

D'oh, that does sound stupid. I'm thinking in Mass Effect BS science. Lightweight, super hard materials. If it was dense, that's just more matter for gravity to act on.

Things can be hard without being dense.

which is why my original post was moronic. I hadn't considered that and I was talking out of my ass.

What happens to a titan? Most likely nothing

We have technology now that keeps our stuff going after being hit by lightning. Pretty sure they have it handled by the year 40k

Brother Michael wrote:
So, I suddenly wondered this: what happens if a titan gets struck by lightning? I mean, these things are huge and made of metal, so if there's a thunderstorm while a titan is out it's quite likely that lightning will hit said titan. Warhounds might escape the brunt of this, but the moment there's a thunderstorm while the emperor titans are out they're bound to be struck sometime.

So, do they have like some form of insulation that protects them? Or am I just overestimating the effects of lightning? Or even worse, have the GW writers just never thought about it?

It will be fine for the same reason a car or a plane that is hit by lightning could be fine. I don't remember the details but IIRC it has something to do with the current remaining on the outside of the metal body, meaning that everything inside will be fine. Of course there are some limits to this, but people have had large enclosed metal objects for a long time and lightning hasn't been a crippling issue for ships or planes or cars.

 Psienesis wrote:
Yep. So, Titan gets struck by lightning, Void Shield eats it, some poor schmuck of a Daemon just chilling in the Warp suddenly gets electrocuted.

Exalted
And yeah, the lightning is never going to reach the titan- the void shields are designed to dissipate all incoming energy that originates outside their protective range. Lightning bolt is zapping some poor daemon Or maybe tasering Draigo.

Giant titan-sized rubber boots.

Buldings have metal rods to attract lightning, I'm sure the titan has something similar.