Now that I've taken some time and come back to look at my ideas, it's occured to me that I may have been operating under some faulty assumptions and less than adviseable ideas.
First and foremost, I've kinda just been assuming that Orchid's power supply would need to be somewhere inside of her frame, but it really doesn't need to be.
I mean, she's already going to be on a cable harness, so the only real loss there'd be from moving the power supply out of her would be a thicker cable harness and having to do a bit more math to account for voltage drop.
And if making that work with DC motors ends up being too much of a pain in the ass for whatever reason, I can just switch to AC motors instead.
I could probably just move those motor controllers out as well, and have those hooked up to a microcontroller that's connected directly to the server.
If I take all that out of the equation, then the only heat producing objects will be the motors themselves, and a few electronic components. Practically a rounding error in comparison, especially since none of the motors will be operating full-time.
This way, I can consider going back to a design with a higher number of motors.
Second, I've been using way too many hinges and cramming too many small components into the joints, when I can just take the idea I was already planning on using for the head, and copy-paste it everywhere (with some modifications), an idea that's literally just sitting on my desk: ball joints.
Of course, taking this route fully commits me to making Orchid a motorized marionette but luckily that just so happens to be my fetish and running paracord everywhere, but it's no more complicated than anything else and the loss in precision is acceptable for my purposes.
Essentially, Orchid will be held together entirely by cable tension, and I'll have to apply material to lower the friction on her joints (Kiwi mentioned powdered graphite, which I may likely end up using), but at least I won't have to worry about hinges wearing out (I can just reprint any joints that fail instead).
I still intend on using pipes for the bones, since it seems like the lightest and most efficient way to go.
Also, it makes limb maintenence easier than ever. All I need to do in theory is open up the back panel, unhook the cables, and the limb will fall right off. The plush layer should be able to come off like a sleeve, as well (the head will be more complicated, but I can't think of a good way around that).
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