That’s great news! Because otherwise building a 60 foot robot and letting it walk would be a really bad idea.
You got me, I guess?
We don’t even have the technology to do something anywhere close to as big as the Gundam. The only thing that could move the mass is hydraulics, but that doesn’t have nearly the precision of control, or speed for bipedal motion. There’s a reason all the Boston Dynamics stuff is pneumatic, but that has a hard ceiling on the mass it can move.
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As a mechanical engineer who has worked on hydraulically-actuated robots and motion-based-simulators I have to strongly disagree with you there. You’d be amazed at the level of precision and control that large hydraulic actuators can have, and in most cases they’re much more precise than pneumatics.
There are other disadvantages with hydraulics of course, such as leaks, maintenance, the whole mess of plumbing and the hydraulic power units, so I’m not exactly advocating their use in large bipedal robots. But large bipedal robots are just an impractical idea in general, which due to their instability are very dangerous in the event of any kind of failure, regardless of the actuator type. And as I mentioned the square-cube law is a pain when it comes to mechanical engineering.
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Not sure where you got that impression but it’s not accurate.
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So, who’s funding this, and why?
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As a software engineer with a half-assed grasp of these things, I’ll shut my big mouth and defer to your expertise now. 
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It’s being built as a tourist attraction/visitor center. So I think even the funders probably have few illusions about fighting off alien invasions with the thing.
Or maybe that’s just the cover story and the robot is just pretending to be an elaborate sculpture, like that scene in Iron Giant when they fooled the military guys.
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All of the above!
Nothing better to do with the time and money? No worries about the virus, world on fire state of democracy, inequalities etc. Let’s build a giant toy. This is twitter/musk stupid.
“Nobody build any non-utilitarian form of art or entertainment until we solve all the world’s problems!” Seems like an unrealistic goal. At any rate, this project was mostly complete before the coronavirus.
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Also, the source I just looked up for Japan’s coronavirus numbers were cases: 79,438, recovered: 71,648 and deaths: 1,508 so I think the Gundam makers are clear on worrying about that. But then I’ve always been team Zeon so what do I know.
What outrage, exactly? That Japan has a history of invading nations? Sorry, that’s just fact.
The Ryukyus are still considered occupied by many residents (both by Japan and the USA). It’s kind of hard to argue that they aren’t.
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Oh no. No no no no no. Both Twitter and Elon Musk are so much stupider. So, so much stupider.
It may be that my outrage was misplaced. As I read your first post, you seemed to be wistfully wishing that Japan was still the kind of country that invaded others so that they could invade someone with this monstrosity. I still read it that way, but based on your response to me, I accept that I might be incorrect.
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Aha. No problem. I was a little surprised that someone here on BBS would be somehow unaware of Japan’s Imperial past.
Well shit, now that you mention it…
I keed, I keed!
Yup, definitely got you.
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