# To carry a person in its palm (like King Kong) how much pressure and at what speed would a kaiju need to apply?

Assume my kaiju is around 200 feet tall, weighs around 4,000 US tonnes and resembles a large lobster with two giant claws for its front legs and long spindly limbs with tiny pincers on the ends for its second, the latter being the ones it'd use to carry a person.

• At 4000 (US) tons, your kaiju will need to stay on paved roads (deforming them as it passes). With only 6-8 legs to distribute the weight, it will sink deep into many dry soils, and will become immobilized rapidly in dry sand or mud. Watch those bridge weight restrictions! – user535733 May 27 '20 at 12:51
• @user535733 The body profile of a lobster is specifically designed to move in loose silt and mud; so, yes it will sink, but that will not immobilize it at all. "Mudbugs" specifically thrive in conditions which are too thick and muddy for normal aquatic life, but too wet for other animals to walk in. It will just sink until it's body touches the ground, then use its legs to push itself across the semi-fluid surface in an action that can best be described as somewhere between swimming and running. – Nosajimiki May 27 '20 at 15:29
• A 200 foot tall lobster would be roughly 600 feet long and 450,000 US tons. – Praearcturus May 27 '20 at 18:10

If you are just relying on friction to hold the human against gravity (meaning nothing piercing in the human body to grapple it), you need to equate the weight of the human to the static friction between the creature's pincers surface and the human surface.

$$m_{human} \cdot g = F_{pincers} \cdot \mu_{static}$$

From the above

$$F_{pincers} ={m_{human} \cdot g \over \mu_{static}}$$

This means that depending on what the human is wearing the creature has to exert more or less force, which is intuitively what we experience when we try to grab a fish or a furry pet.

The pressure can be derived by dividing the calculated force by the contact area.

• If the guy is unconscious, say from the THERE IS A GIIIANTttttt....zzz. You only need to cup it and prevent from slipping. Alternatively, if the victim is a ragdoll, you can hold it by the middle. Either reduce drastically the amount of friction needed. – Gustavo May 27 '20 at 13:56
• OP says the kaiju has pincers. Not much cupping happening with those. – Ross Presser May 28 '20 at 13:52

If the person is willing to be picked up, the pincers only needs to slide under the armpits and lift the person like a fork lift. This means the only presure the person should experience would be from thier own body pressing down on the pincer from gravity.

If the person is unwilling there is no exact equation for this since humans will vary so much in strength and escape techniques, but a person can generally be grappled with much less force than it takes to crush them, so your kaiju should be able to intuitively apply the right amount of force for the resistance the person gives the same way a parent only holds a child as hard as they need to based on how much the kid does not want to get in the bath.

Either way, once you lift the person more than a few feet off the ground, they will generally be doing more to hold onto the kaiju, than the kaiju needs to do to hold on to them.