How nimble!!!! err not

[TOMAHAWK]

Now given all this ....just how the hell does the martian :

control 3 legs,
watch for guns/ shells/people
Fire the heatray
turn it's hood
and operated the tenticles / grabs

ALL AT THE SAME TIME..!!!!

Try flying a helicopter 3 different actions, ...and that is just to control the thing never mind doing anything fancy

Just how nimble were they ...given that they appear to be 100 ft tall, presumably given the design i doubt whether they could move sideways very well ..ie side stepping, they would have to turn ...so again how the hell did the FM "dodge" arty shells

[Gnorn]

I allways thought those shells missing was due to the total lack of aiming by the artillerymen... That one hitting was really a lucky shot.

-Gnorn

[TOMAHAWK]

My Mistake... after reading the book passage ...

"simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the body as the hood twisted round in time to recieve but not in time to dodge the fourth shell.

the shell burst clean in the face of the thing

(I thought the FM had dodged all the shells ) , but how could it "dodge" a shell

[Gnorn]

Suddenly The Matrix springs to mind...
"Dodge this!"
*BLAM*

-Gnorn

[TOMAHAWK]

burst in the air ...!! What they were using shrapnel shells against tripods ....!!!! I can only think they just fired off whatever they loaded at the time.... I would have thought solid shot would have been better.

Shrapnel would have just bounced off the hood, mind you It doesn't say what the 4th shell was, but the fact the hood buldged ..I suspect it was an airburst shell that exploded within the hood ..

[TOMAHAWK]

LOL

slow motion bullet/arty shell cam of a tripod bending over backwards/ gyrating avoiding 4 arty shells that are producing massive shock wave trails behind them ;D ;D ;D and catching one in its tenticals and flinging it back

[lanceradvanced]

TOMAHAWK said:

control 3 legs,
watch for guns/ shells/people
Fire the heatray
turn it's hood
and operated the tenticles / grabs

ALL AT THE SAME TIME..!!!!

2 eyes, 4 times as many limbs as a human, and a motor nerve coordination center that makes an olympic fencer look like a beached whale.

The martians wern't exactally lacking in brainpower...

[lanceradvanced]

TOMAHAWK said:

burst in the air ...!! What they were using shrapnel shells against tripods ....!!!!

Explosive shells were the weapon of choice for armies of the day, anti personell work would use canister or grapeshot, Solid rounds were only realy usefull against armored targets, which at that point in history were only really found at sea, or in fortifications, neither of which I'd expect the army in the heart of the UK to be well equiped for.

My reading of the whole dodging thing, especially how they describe it swiveling, is that there's a opening of some kind in the armored hood, where the cockpit was, the martian could shield itself by turning that cockpit away from the direct line of fire.

[Lensman]

TOMAHAWK said:

Now given all this ....just how the hell does the martian :

control 3 legs,
watch for guns/ shells/people
Fire the heatray
turn it's hood
and operated the tenticles / grabs

ALL AT THE SAME TIME..!!!!

1. The Martians were controlling their machines like waldos. In using a waldo, after some practice you don't have to think about it; you just think about what you want to do, and your hands/ fingers automatically make the proper movements. After some practice, I believe walking and turning the hood/ cowl would have taken little or no conscious thought.

2. The Martians had considerably more brainpower than we did. Supposedly they were better at multi-tasking.

3. Do we know they actually fired the heat ray at the same time they were using the tentacles? Is there a passage in the novel which supports that?

[EvilNerfherder]

Perhaps the Martians (being mostly brain) hook themselves directly up to the machine's controls and their brain impulses control the machine. They think (or look) 'left' (in Martian I guess) and the machine goes left.
Like those targetting systems on some fighters now.

[quaderni]

EvilNerfherder said:

Perhaps the Martians (being mostly brain) hook themselves directly up to the machine's controls and their brain impulses control the machine. They think (or look) 'left' (in Martian I guess) and the machine goes left.
Like those targetting systems on some fighters now.

Actually, that's a very cool hypothesis. After all, the Martians are telepathic.

Lensman and I are going back and forth over the the 'cyborg' possibility on another thread....

[Lensman]

"At first, I say, the handling-machine did not impress me as a machine, but as a crablike creature with a glittering integument, the controlling Martian whose delicate tentacles actuated its movements seeming to be simply the equivalent of the crab's cerebral portion." --WotW, Book two, Chapter 2

Keep in mind that telepathy or direct neural connections would have to interface with some sort of highly developed, sophisticated control system, a computer or the equivalent-- in other words, cybernetics. Wells gave the Martians the most sophisticated form of mechanical mastery he could imagine, but he couldn't imagine computers or independently "thinking" automatons.

[EvilNerfherder]

Oops.. missed your conversation on that.
Wells Narrator is an everyman and so his descriptions are purely as he sees things (and what he has read about the Martians subsequently).
Their knowledge of the control systems of the fighting machines is limited to guesswork and I doubt cybernetics were within the realms of most imaginations then but it's interesting that Wells' likens the Martian pilot to the HM's brain (or that's how I took it to read).
Perhaps it is a combination of both manual and neural control.. which meets the idea half way. Maybe it's just the weapons systems that are controllled by the brain whilst the tentacles move the machine around.

[Lensman]

If the Martians had cybernetics, and therefore computers, wouldn't they have automated certain tasks? For instance, the handling machine which mines and refines aluminium works from dawn till dusk. Surely the narrator would have noticed, and mentioned, if it had no Martian controller.

Just my opinion of course, but I think it's a mistake to assume the Martians do things the way we would. They don't use the wheel-- that's a very strong indication their approach to things is very different from ours.

The Martians have a huge amount of brain power, so arguably they don't need computers as we do. And I find nothing whatsoever in the novel which suggests they use any sort of cybernetics, computers, nor even any transistor-level technology.

[lanceradvanced]

Lensman said:

And I find nothing whatsoever in the novel which suggests they use any sort of cybernetics, computers, nor even any transistor-level technology.

I would tend to agree with you on cybernetics (at least in the implanted direct nerve/brain connections to machine control systems sense) and perhaps even on the transistors, but I think that in the genreal sense that computers are well withing the martian capacity, transistors are not the be all and end all of electronics, and I can see the martians easily constructing a electromechanicaly actuated "diffrence engine" to control and regulate their machines.

The digging machine for example would need not only to follow a particular path, it would need to be able to detect obstacles, and either negocialte them or remove them, (don't want the thing pitching your refining machine aside as if it's a boulder) stop to let crawling martians or handling machines by, etc

Then we've got a real dilema with the machines, Waldos are easy for limbs, you have few points of articulation - they're a lot more complex for tentacles. The martians however have tentacles, so either they're using a system that is alien to their phisiology, or they have an absurdly complex control system. A computer control system would smooth a -lot- of the bumps out, the martians could then simply steer the machine with one or two sticks, leaving the other arms free to manupulate tentacles or attend other buisness...

[Lensman]

lanceradvanced said:

The martians however have tentacles, so either they're using a system that is alien to their phisiology, or they have an absurdly complex control system.

If the Martians can use each of their multiple tentacles as separate manipulators, and not mainly in groups the way we use our fingers, then they already have what we would consider "an absurdly complex control system" built into their brains. This is very much in keeping with their advanced evolution; in addition to higher intelligence, they are also more highly evolved tool-users.

[lanceradvanced]

Lensman said:

If the Martians can use each of their multiple tentacles as separate manipulators, and not mainly in groups the way we use our fingers, then they already have what we would consider "an absurdly complex control system" built into their brains.

The martians, might well be able to put their brainpower to use simeltaneously operiating 16 diffrent waldoes, at once - that brain power however does nothing to reduce the complexity of the mechanical linkages needed to operate a waldo system to operate a tentacle, without some form of computer modertation.

That's where the "absurd complexity" comes in, a parralel arcitecture vs. a series architecure.

Think on this... you have Sensors a,b,c and actuators A,B,C in a pure electrmechanically diven system, a a would have to be wired to A, b to B,c-C - etc for-every- tentacle segment down the line. for every segment you'd need X more control/power cables

In a digital system a,b,c could send identifiable signales sent to a processor, which could then send signals down the line to the corresponding actuator down -one- communication line, the actuators only respoding to singnals for -them-

[Lensman]

lanceradvanced said:

Think on this... you have Sensors a,b,c and actuators A,B,C in a pure electrmechanically diven system, a a would have to be wired to A, b to B,c-C - etc for-every- tentacle segment down the line. for every segment you'd need X more control/power cables

This is only true if you try to set it up to be able to control each segment of the tentacle individually. A more sensible approach would be to do it as animals which actually have tentacles do: They can control the entire tentacle as a whole, just as you can open and close your hand; or they can make just the tip of the tentacle move in a carefully controlled fashion, just as you can use one fingertip for fine manipulation.

It does not take "more" neural control to manipulate a tentacle than an arm or leg. Many invertebrates do it all the time.

[quaderni]

Neurophysiology was undergoing a great revolution during Wells's early years - r oughly the 1870s and 1880s. Charcot and Broca had made a number of astonishing discoveries about the spinal cord, brain, and nerve energies.

That said, Wells's description of Martian technology seems to follow notions about muscle and nervous tissue - that the nerves were conduits of the will and specific nerve energies. The same thing seems to be true of Martian mechanics.

I find the following passage really interesting:

"...it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of discs in an elastic sheath; these dics become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained" (bk. II, ch. 2).

I keep on thinking about the Cartesian mind-body split: the body as machine and the nerves as the conduits between soul and body. Wells says that the Martians have evolved into mere brains who wear their machine bodies like humans wear their clothing or other ornaments.

The interface issues is really intriguing.

[lanceradvanced]

Lensman said:

They can control the entire tentacle as a whole, just as you can open and close your hand; or they can make just the tip of the tentacle move in a carefully controlled fashion, just as you can use one fingertip for fine manipulation.

And a lot of modes in in between as that reasearch I pointed out in the Heat Ray arm discussion shows. When you "Open or close your hand" you're firing hundreds of nevers in close sequence, contoled by a master "computer" it's not -one- gross control.. to move the whole, you need to move the parts,

It does not take "more" neural control to manipulate a tentacle than an arm or leg. Many invertebrates do it all the time.

When you're talking about mechanical control systems without computer control (or some analogue, like a -nervous system-) it does. The book is fairly clear that the martians use electricity, even -without- the transistor, a computer of some sort is well within the martian's capacity.

Just because the amrtians were watched with steam age eyes, doesn't mean they had nothing but finely crafted steam age technology.