Largest Mutant Armadillo, How much does a juggernaut weigh? Options

[ShieldT]

Okay, to make a long story short, I'm trying to get some people over at Twisting The Hellmouth (www.tthfanfic.com) to write a story where Buffy the Vampire Slayer gets called into consult with a team of commandos trying to take down a juggernaut.

http://www.tthfanfic.com/Challenge-1589/A+...n+Armadillo.htm

Yaeh, Weirdness ;)


Anyway, how much does a juggie weigh?

It's 14 meters (about 36 feet) in length... A bull elephant is about 3.4 m in length and 5.4 metric tons in weight, so a 14 m elephant might be 22 tons, and this guy has armor plating...

A guy named Mark MacAllister has a website called "How much does that Elephant Weigh?" http://www.fieldtripearth.org/article.xml?id=1000 with these calculations:

[Austere Emancipa...]

Nine-banded armadillo:
Total length 365-1056mm, weight 1-10kg

Giant armadillo:
Total length 1250-1500mm, weight 18.7-32.3kg

Six-banded armadillo:
Total length 520-736mm, weight 3.2-6.5kg

Northern naked-tailed armadillo:
Total length 390-690mm, weight 2-3.5kg

Theoretically, as you increase the length (and thus height and width, too) of an animal while retaining the same tissue properties, weight increases by a factor of (length increase multiplier)^3. The average weight of the above armadillo species scaled to 1 meter total length (head, body and tail) is 17.7kg, with little enough variance to make this a valid model (15.3 to 19.6, or something). Scaled up to 14 meters, that'd be an average of 48.6 metric tonnes (~107 thousand pounds).

[ShieldT]

Great idea scaling them up.

Heh, how'd you do that in 10 minutes?

Thank you.

Hey, can I quote that, please?

This post has been edited by ShieldT: Jul 9 2006, 12:47 AM

[Austere Emancipa...]

With Google, as always. :) And sure, quote away.

[bclements]

Does a Juggernaut jump when you shoot it? :)

[Dog]

Somebody with more free time than I should look up if there are any dinosaurs of comparable size, and check what the paleontologists estimated their weight to be. I have to go to work.

[Austere Emancipa...]

There are lots of dinosaurs that are 1.5x - 2x as long, and equally many that are closer to half the length of a juggernaut, but not many of about the same length. There are certainly none that are large and that have proportions at all similar. The figures are from Wikipedia.

From the Sauropods, the Brachiosaurus reached 25 meter in length and weighed anywhere from 30 to 80 tonnes. Going from the maximum figures, that'd scale down to 14 meters at 14 tonnes. The Apatosaurus might have reached 21 meters at 35 tonnes, or 10.4 tonnes at 14 meters. A Camarasaurus could reach 18 meters at 28 tonnes, equivalent to 13.2 tonnes at 14 meters.

A 7-meter Stegosaurus may have weighed 2 tonnes, or 16 tonnes at 14 meters, while a 9-meter Triceratops weighed around 5.4 tonnes (20.3 tonnes at 14 meters). Of the other horned dinosaurs, the Torosaurus would've weighed 48.8(!) tonnes at 14 meters, and the Pentaceratops 29.5 tonnes.

The problem is that none of these are really even close to the general shape of an armadillo. The closest ones, the massively armored and very thick Ceratopsia and Ankylosauria, tend to scale to anywhere from 20 to 50 tonnes at 14 meters, but most of them are less than 7 meters in length. At the same length, an armadillo would be much wider, higher and thicker than just about any very large dinosaurs.

This can, of course, be easily explained by the fact that there are limits to how much weight bones can carry and muscles can shift, and any number of other serious physiological concerns when you get to really massive critters. A 14-meter-long 50-ton armadillo-like doesn't make sense -- at that length, it could be of much lighter built, with armor that is much less thick relative to its size, etc. On the other hand, it's maaaaagic, and it's hardly the only SR meta-animal that's not logic-friendly.

[Herald of Verjig...]

Since PAoNA mentions that they can hunt fish by walking along the bottom of a lake, their average density must be greater than that of water. Given the sizes and stats, approximate the beastie to about 90 tons.