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[Mephansteras]

Indeed. My mod will always have domestic giant bugs. Dwarves with Giant Beetles pulling their wagons is just too cool not to have.

[G-Flex]

I suppose it would be rather alien, but that breeding bugs to do grunt work over a long period of time could work. An extremely long period of time, maybe. But I could only see them doing simple tasks like pulling a wagon along some kind of scent trail or something.

... Or maybe they're bred to kill things that smell like elves. Hee hee.

[Mephansteras]

Not even that hard. Just have them trained to turn left or right with a given stimulus. Taps or pulls to the side of the head, maybe. Shouldn't be too hard to lead a bug, or to have it trained to walk forwards and stop on command.

I'm not even against them being as smart as normal large animals. After all, nothing says that a horse sized bug has to be as dumb as a thumb-sized bug. They may have very different 'views' on the world then mammals, but it should still be doable.

[Granite26]

It's a physics thing that large creatures with carapaces (carpaci?) don't really work.

With the new physics-enabled bodies, this might be coming closer and closer to emergent behaviour.  :-D

Not that I have a problem with them in a fantasy setting.  It's just... possible to screw up and have them fall apart when made because reality kicked in.

[tsen]

Rule of Awesome vs Square-cube law.

[Mephansteras]

Yeah, but I thought that had to do with breathing more than carapace structural capacity. And nothing says they couldn't evolve actual lungs or whatnot.

Worst case scenario, we give them an internal skeletal structure as well. Giant bugs will be in, one way or another!

[Granite26]

the point being that the square cube law may be emergent behavior

[SirHoneyBadger]

Well, don't forget that even very tiny insects are monstrously strong (eg: the mighty rubbertree- plant-moving ant).

Beetles are even stronger, pound for pound, than ants.

Dwarfs are smaller than humans (atleast my dwarfs are), so that a rhinocerous beetle that was only a foot long (not at all unrealistic as a breedable creature in a fantasy setting, since the largest Earth beetle is over 6 inches in length) would still be a valuable animal--especially since rhino beetles can pick up 850 times their own weight.

As an example, I present to you:

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/beetle.html

[Mel_Vixen]

No doubt that an beetle compared to an mamal is "strong" but this is also covered by the Square/cube law. Doubling the size of the beetle would grant him iirc only 1/3 more strength.

Or to say it with wikipedia:

If an animal were scaled up by a considerable amount, its muscular strength would be severely reduced since the cross section of its muscles would increase by the square of the scaling factor while their mass would increase by the cube of the scaling factor

[SirHoneyBadger]

Maybe so, but even if our beetle could "only" lift a total of, say, 1000lbs over it's head, that's still a *lot* of strength in a very small package.

[Mel_Vixen]

^^ thats almost nothing. The Biggest horserace has iirc a tractive force (?) of around 5 tons. This would be around 10 times as much as your litle "Bug" 

Anyway beetles as workanimals sound interresting. I am going to name my first pair Paul and John.

[Granite26]

That's the other reason carapaces are bad at large scales...  They can't really support the same strain when writ large, compared to skeletons.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Ummm...I'm talking about a creature that weighs 2 lbs, and you're talking about a creature that weighs 2 tons, or more. 

I readily concede that your Clydesdale beats my beetle in a tug of war, but it's still a reasonably sized beetle (admittedly still an extremely big-but not impossibly sized-one) versus an extremely big horse.

[Mel_Vixen]

An horse weights only around 800 Kilo. And with 1 kilo (~2 Lbs) your bugs would be almost to small for being usefull. Even my cat (fixed no cat-plosion) weights atleast 5 Kilo.

100 Kilo for the bug would be better and size 5/6 would be better for this bugs.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Well, almost isn't entirely.

And please realize that this is the single strongest creature, pound for pound, on the face of the Earth.

You really can't make them *too* large, or it takes the fun out of it. Fantasy or no, flying, fire-breathing dragons or no, bigger isn't *always* better, atleast past a certain point, even in a fantasy situation.

I think it would be frankly entertaining, just finding uses for them.

And ofcourse, they'd be great for eating. A gigantic beetle isn't so much different in appearance than a lobster, afterall, and beetles are apparently good eating, and highly nutritious, according to those that have enjoyed such fare.