Jump to content

Mata Nui: much shorter than we thought


Jacks

Recommended Posts

Lets take the 'month=year' to be inside the MU as the equivalent of Tron's 'cycles'. So judging we're ignoring GregF's No Sense Of Scale, how long would we expect a Spherus Magna day of 36 hours and a Year? I'm leaving out months, because it's simpler to focus on the Solis Magna/Spherus Magna arrangement.

:r: :e: :g: :i: :t: :n: :u: :i:

Elemental Rahi in Gen2, anyone? A write-up for an initial video for a G2 plot

 

I really wish everyone would stop trying to play join the dots with Gen 1 and Gen 2 though,it seems there's a couple new threads everyday and often they're duplicates of already existing conversations! Or simply parallel them with a slightly new 'twist'! Gen 2 is NEW, it is NOT Gen 1 and it is NOT a continuation. Outside of the characters we already have I personally don't want to see ANY old characters return. I think it will cheapen the whole experience to those of us familiar with the original line...

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wanna say SM years would still be equivalent to our years, because having two differing timescales to work with would get taxing. But then we have to decide what we mean by "equivalent:" is one SM year is 365 36-hour days, or ~243 36-hour days (approximately equal to 365 24-hour days*)?

 

EDIT: And here's another important question: how do we even know their hours are equivalent to ours?

 

*fun fact: I've used the calculator on my phone more in the past two days than the entire three years I've had the device already :P

Edited by Junkbot Master of Trash

-------------------------------------
bohrok_lol.jpg
-------------------------------------
Rate The Song Above You

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wanna say SM years would still be equivalent to our years, because having two differing timescales to work with would get taxing. But then we have to decide what we mean by "equivalent:" is one SM year is 365 36-hour days, or ~243 36-hour days (approximately equal to 365 24-hour days*)?

 

EDIT: And here's another important question: how do we even know their hours are equivalent to ours?

 

*fun fact: I've used the calculator on my phone more in the past two days than the entire three years I've had the device already :P

Either of them could work. I like the second one myself. Slightly longer days seem a prerequisite for a desert as big as Bara Magna.

 

Odd how there isn't a fourth magna (region here not planet after split.  :D) for a polar environment. Wonder why it's like that besides the Unity, Duty, and Destiny symbology. 

Bionicle is amazing.

Legends Never Die!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

 

Here's a question, though. When we talk months or years, we mean our time. But how long would the day and year be on a spherus magna planet? If the planet is larger, the days could be much longer, and ditto for the year.

I figured this would come up; funny how these topics always seem to follow the same lines, huh? :P Basically, we know the years are our years, but we don't know the days or months. However, I wouldn't rely on this in attempts to explain the travel times. Most likely the days and months are like ours for the same reason the years are -- to be easier to relate to for human audiences.

 

Ah, fair, but for the EP to transform the rock of a planet so that the rock nullifies gravity... well, it'd have to somehow be the destiny of the rock, or EP would have to do so deliberately, and there'd need to be a planet-creation process in which the planet starts out at a reasonable, gravitationally-allowable size, and somehow grows as the EP in its core starts to imbibe the closest level of rock with that power.... so it would be very strange to imagine Spherus Magna actually coming into existence in the first place. :P


Well, this is where we could dive off the next predictable line from past topics into my old "Greater Beings" planet-seeding theory, which described basically that sort of thing. :) Or something like it. But canonically, we don't know how the planet got this way, it's just a given that it is, and apparently many others are too.

 

Also not at all clear on what aspects of the story are fundamental to the 40 million feet number?  We can still have a tremendously huge Great Spirit Robot that isn't so tremendously huge that it'd have to wrap itself completely around the earth to sit down on it, and every element of the story would still make perfect sense.


Well, not "continents" inside him, like I said. :) And most of the story took place inside him, so I'd say seriously downsizing the giant does indeed have a major impact on the story. You'd think that would affect their society in some ways; having two legitimate continents versus really little islands just called that would affect a lot. Not just population size (since the MU actually has a fairly small population for the land area, but that too makes sense as a lot would be automated, there'd be plenty of wilderness areas for environmental recycling, etc.) -- for one thing, it would affect... yeah... travel times. :P And there being so many secrets all over the place would seem pretty odd.

 

We get reasonably-sized planets, don't need to postulate extra weird stuff for EP to do


Problem is, having weird twists on things like this is part of Bionicle's "genre." You could (and some have) make the same argument against the many-millenia lifespans, or the biomechanical nature, against mask powers, elemental powers, or anything about Bionicle that is different from our world.

Some things do need to be like ours to be relatable, but it's more a matter of where you draw the line. I think that one probably comes down to the old issue of taste in a lot of ways. What to one person is "don't need weird stuff" is to another "boring, too much like our world", etc. And vice versa. :P

I would suggest that generally it's a bad idea to base arguments on what should or shouldn't be in fiction like this on a "need to postulate", simply because that puts the primary focus on dry thought -- as much as I heart thought -- rather than where it really is for entertainment; what's more emotionally pleasing. If having a giant, and a planet, "unimaginably vast" is the emotion they're going for, then whatever needs postulated, as it were, to make it work, within reason, isn't really a bad thing anyways, but also fits into something else Bionicle intentionally tried to be -- "requiring work to understand."

 

Ah, the continents might be slightly smaller?

Er, as I said at the start, if slightly smaller is all you want, why bother? A giant only slightly less unimaginably vast is still unimaginably vast. Don't you mean continents that aren't really continents anymore? :P More to the point, this actually works against your argument as I see it. You're saying the benefit to your way is the continents are smaller; the downside is we don't get to use our brains and imaginations to try to solve a puzzle and we have to have a more "run of the mill" universe.

I don't see why the upside is so worth it. Sounds like a lot of it comes down to taste about what you want out of a story -- if you aren't looking for things that feel "out there", they can seem like a problem, but if you are, they are the solution. :)

And again, the "need to postulate" goes both ways. It may be that you haven't tried to think of what would need to be re-thought to force a smaller size into the story. Since that size was decided, and not just at the very end but some amount of time before the end, there could be any number of things in the latter part of the story that were built on it that you could easily be taking for granted.

I think most of them would be in society and things like that. Look at how many topics have picked on just one oversight in that subject for 2009 -- the travel times. Now flip things on their head, and if we went through the whole thing carefully I bet we could come up with many more like it that would be hard to square with a small giant/planet.

Also, not sure I really buy your descriptions of just how 'weird' this all is. This is a story that lasted ten years with powers, and EP was well known for a while, etc. Weird for Earth, yes, but for Bionicle, not at all.

 

Well, given that EP is a living entity, I just figure it can do whatever it wants.


Actually, it seems like the Entity sort of inhabits EP, and does not control the results of transformations. If memory serves...

But I do think that what does determine such destinies is living in a sense too. I'd comment more, but it's basically the theme of my retelling so I won't spoil anything more there. :P Suffice to say, what we know from the canon alone fits that anything that is needed, in a transformation, where EP actually is in contact with the thing, basically HAS to be done, or else the thing has to be destroyed.

So logically, if gravity-nulling is needed, EP can either let gravity pull rock into it bit by bit, destroying the planet (choosing not to transform it), or transform it in the way needed. That's basically the rules, as I understand them.

The other solution is that it's not SUPER huge but still has more gravity than Earth, and that seems to be the way Greg has chosen to go.

 

the MU could fit into an Australia-sized robot with no change to the story.


Whoa there. Australia is the smallest continent. It's so easy to type the words "no change to the story", but so difficult for it to be TRUE, yanno?

See above comments, and I stand by that that's all probably just for starters. Put it this way -- Greg, the expert on the story, the expert of all experts, evidently overlooked the travel time issue for 2009 since the story doesn't even comment on it -- so you really think it's impossible you're are overlooking problems with greatly shrinking the giant?

More likely all of us, me included, are forgetting problems with shrinking it. Basically, it's safer to "bet" that it's worse to change something decided a reasonable time before the end, prior to a full analysis of both pros AND cons. (And if you really want an answer, you gotta look at everything carefully. I don't think that's been done yet far as I recall, by anybody, even me.)

The Destiny of Bionicle (chronological retelling of Bionicle original series, 9 PDFs of 10 chapters each on Google Drive)Part 1 - Warring with Fate | Part 2 - Year of Change | Part 3 - The Exploration Trap | Part 4 - Rise of the Warlords | Part 5 - A Busy Matoran | Part 6 - The Dark Time | Part 7 - Proving Grounds | Part 8 - A Rude Awakening | Part 9 - The Battle of Giants

My Bionicle Fanfiction  (Google Drive folder, eventually planned to have PDFs of all of it)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What bothers me most about the 40 million feet number is how large Aqua Magna, Spherus Magna, et al. would have to be.  Can you even have a solid planet with a radius 70x that of Jupiter?  I mean, they certainly aren't all gas giants, but you'd think they'd have to be, based on those sizes...

 

Although maybe we shouldn't expect the planets to obey ordinary rules of physics as we understand them anyway-- after all, the perfect three-way split of Spherus Magna might only be possible if we suspend ordinary cosmology and astronomy, and once we've done that, supermassive planets are perfectly fine.  But that makes the setting almost completely alien, when we lose even the possibility of existing in a similar sort of universe, and I personally don't find that appealing.

 

Well a Planets contruction is based not on size so much as its general location from the home star as well as materials in the area. It is as equally possible to have a Very small gas planet equal in diameter though maybe not density as earth, while also having a solid planet equal to or greater than multiple times the size of Jupiter. This is true of every astrological body. Our Sun is dwarfed several hundred times by the largest known star to date. So it cannot really be said that a rock planet even perhaps one with a liquid or gas core possibly reducing gravity's effect on it's surface that exceeds known dimensions does or could not exist. After all, Black holes were thought to be a concept more than a reality not that long ago. Now it is believed that every Galaxy houses a supermassive black hole at it's core.

 

 

Here's a question, though. When we talk months or years, we mean our time. But how long would the day and year be on a spherus magna planet? If the planet is larger, the days could be much longer, and ditto for the year.

 

Well let's think about this for a second, what defines our concepts of these times? A Year is the time it takes for a planet to make a single rotation around its home star. This has nothing to do with planet size so much as orbit size and speed. A massive planet could just as easily have a very short year vs a smaller planet with a very long one. It is very possible that while I do not know personally Greg's knowledge on the mechanics of galactic travel he had some concept of this and thus knew that Spherus Magna could and does have years equivalent to our own. What you should be asking is by what reference of time is Greg using to calculate this year?

 

Now our year is equivalent to 365 of our days. As it takes the earth 365 full rotations before it completes a single orbit around our home star. A day is the time it takes for the Sun to rise then set then rise again in the same location on Earth. Or for the Earth to make a single complete rotation. We further break this time down into hours and then minutes to seconds. This again is not so much based on the size of the planet but the speed in which it rotates. Two Planets of vastly different sizes could have equal length of days. Or on the flip side while both planets have the same orbit time they have different rotation times. Thus altering how many days are in their respective years.

 

Now Greg could just say that for simplicities sake both Earth and Spherus Magna have the exact same Orbit time as well as rotation. So its year is also equivalent to 365 days. Because Spherus Magna is thought to be so much larger than earth, it would be spinning substantially faster in order to keep up. This would cause massive weather patterns. As I do not know what the weather was like you can make your own assumptions here. However the length of the days are in question. Hours over seconds do not really matter in a story stand point.

 

Now one would think that due to the larger size of SM it would take weeks or months to cross and get from one location to another but we are thinking too much on our own concepts of time and distance rather than at the larger scale presented here. With the days being longer on SM it could not be unheard of for someone there to travel for only days or weeks as it is defined to them. Their days could be equal to a week of ours however as natives they would not feel it was any longer. As their bodies developed to that particular rate of time.

"A stranger will always be a stranger unless you give them a chance."

:m_p: :r: :m_o: :w: :l:    :n: :i: :g: :h: :t: :w: :m_o: :l: :f:

 |premierball.png| <- My Pokémon | BZPRPG Characters: Po-Matoran Doseki & Nui-Jaga Scorpio; Ga-Matoran Orca 
Matoran und Panzer: Doseki & Glitch | Marvel RP PC | Mata Nui Monopoly: Come... Own a piece of the legend!

Onua.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The biggest problem with shrinking the giant is the amount of power required to reform this giant planet - if it's too small, not enough power. Another problem is if the bot is too small, someone could travel the whole thing in ten minutes (or a lifetime), make a map, and say "This looks like a giant Toa!" 

 

(Of course, that's possible anyway, but unlikely as most Matoran would stay in one place doing their jobs, but still. There's always one Takua in the group, and if the bot's small, easier to figure out the big secret.)

 

There's probably more reasons, but those are the ones I thought of off the top of my head.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

Here's a question, though. When we talk months or years, we mean our time. But how long would the day and year be on a spherus magna planet? If the planet is larger, the days could be much longer, and ditto for the year.

I figured this would come up; funny how these topics always seem to follow the same lines, huh? :P Basically, we know the years are our years, but we don't know the days or months. However, I wouldn't rely on this in attempts to explain the travel times. Most likely the days and months are like ours for the same reason the years are -- to be easier to relate to for human audiences.

 

 

Ah, fair, but for the EP to transform the rock of a planet so that the rock nullifies gravity... well, it'd have to somehow be the destiny of the rock, or EP would have to do so deliberately, and there'd need to be a planet-creation process in which the planet starts out at a reasonable, gravitationally-allowable size, and somehow grows as the EP in its core starts to imbibe the closest level of rock with that power.... so it would be very strange to imagine Spherus Magna actually coming into existence in the first place. :P

 

Well, this is where we could dive off the next predictable line from past topics into my old "Greater Beings" planet-seeding theory, which described basically that sort of thing. :) Or something like it. But canonically, we don't know how the planet got this way, it's just a given that it is, and apparently many others are too.

 

 

Also not at all clear on what aspects of the story are fundamental to the 40 million feet number?  We can still have a tremendously huge Great Spirit Robot that isn't so tremendously huge that it'd have to wrap itself completely around the earth to sit down on it, and every element of the story would still make perfect sense.

 

Well, not "continents" inside him, like I said. :) And most of the story took place inside him, so I'd say seriously downsizing the giant does indeed have a major impact on the story. You'd think that would affect their society in some ways; having two legitimate continents versus really little islands just called that would affect a lot. Not just population size (since the MU actually has a fairly small population for the land area, but that too makes sense as a lot would be automated, there'd be plenty of wilderness areas for environmental recycling, etc.) -- for one thing, it would affect... yeah... travel times. :P And there being so many secrets all over the place would seem pretty odd.

 

 

We get reasonably-sized planets, don't need to postulate extra weird stuff for EP to do

 

Problem is, having weird twists on things like this is part of Bionicle's "genre." You could (and some have) make the same argument against the many-millenia lifespans, or the biomechanical nature, against mask powers, elemental powers, or anything about Bionicle that is different from our world.

 

Some things do need to be like ours to be relatable, but it's more a matter of where you draw the line. I think that one probably comes down to the old issue of taste in a lot of ways. What to one person is "don't need weird stuff" is to another "boring, too much like our world", etc. And vice versa. :P

 

I would suggest that generally it's a bad idea to base arguments on what should or shouldn't be in fiction like this on a "need to postulate", simply because that puts the primary focus on dry thought -- as much as I heart thought -- rather than where it really is for entertainment; what's more emotionally pleasing. If having a giant, and a planet, "unimaginably vast" is the emotion they're going for, then whatever needs postulated, as it were, to make it work, within reason, isn't really a bad thing anyways, but also fits into something else Bionicle intentionally tried to be -- "requiring work to understand."

 

 

Ah, the continents might be slightly smaller?

Er, as I said at the start, if slightly smaller is all you want, why bother? A giant only slightly less unimaginably vast is still unimaginably vast. Don't you mean continents that aren't really continents anymore? :P More to the point, this actually works against your argument as I see it. You're saying the benefit to your way is the continents are smaller; the downside is we don't get to use our brains and imaginations to try to solve a puzzle and we have to have a more "run of the mill" universe.

 

I don't see why the upside is so worth it. Sounds like a lot of it comes down to taste about what you want out of a story -- if you aren't looking for things that feel "out there", they can seem like a problem, but if you are, they are the solution. :)

 

And again, the "need to postulate" goes both ways. It may be that you haven't tried to think of what would need to be re-thought to force a smaller size into the story. Since that size was decided, and not just at the very end but some amount of time before the end, there could be any number of things in the latter part of the story that were built on it that you could easily be taking for granted.

 

I think most of them would be in society and things like that. Look at how many topics have picked on just one oversight in that subject for 2009 -- the travel times. Now flip things on their head, and if we went through the whole thing carefully I bet we could come up with many more like it that would be hard to square with a small giant/planet.

 

Also, not sure I really buy your descriptions of just how 'weird' this all is. This is a story that lasted ten years with powers, and EP was well known for a while, etc. Weird for Earth, yes, but for Bionicle, not at all.

 

 

Well, given that EP is a living entity, I just figure it can do whatever it wants.

 

Actually, it seems like the Entity sort of inhabits EP, and does not control the results of transformations. If memory serves...

 

But I do think that what does determine such destinies is living in a sense too. I'd comment more, but it's basically the theme of my retelling so I won't spoil anything more there. :P Suffice to say, what we know from the canon alone fits that anything that is needed, in a transformation, where EP actually is in contact with the thing, basically HAS to be done, or else the thing has to be destroyed.

 

So logically, if gravity-nulling is needed, EP can either let gravity pull rock into it bit by bit, destroying the planet (choosing not to transform it), or transform it in the way needed. That's basically the rules, as I understand them.

 

The other solution is that it's not SUPER huge but still has more gravity than Earth, and that seems to be the way Greg has chosen to go.

Now I'm not suggesting that Mata Nui is so small that our "continents" become islands-- just that Mata Nui might not be 40 million feet tall.  We don't need to shrink him down completely, he can still be quite large and still have very very large landmasses inside of him that any reasonable person would call "continents".  It'd be sort of a middle ground between the full-sized Mata Nui that necessitates a massive Spherus Magna, and the pint-sized Mata Nui you have a problem with.  

 

My motivation, ultimately, is for Spherus Magna to be a sensible size instead of a super-planet, and that's because I think it's a more interesting story if it's more relatable to its audience, even if only in a minor way-- and that minor way is being in a similar universe with similar cosmological constraints with a background setting (in this case the planet) that operates, apart from those interesting changes relevant to the story, similar to the way our own planet operates.  Maybe it's just a difference in taste, but I'd rather not have to postulate all sorts of additional, unmentioned goings-on in order to fit a massive Spherus Magna into a universe with otherwise ordinary laws of physics.  

 

I mean, of course it's fun to figure out, but I think it's also interesting to figure out the reverse puzzle-- how close can we make the Bionicle world to our own, and how close can we make it stick to our intuition of how it ought to be?  Ultimately I suppose I just don't like the picture of Mata Nui standing next to earth, or wrapping himself head-to-toe around the planet when he sits down on it, and I want to get closer to the image I have of a giant robot standing up on a relatively earth-sized planet, and I just see the 40 million number thrown out there without any real, necessary story purpose (because, as I said, he doesn't have to be as huge for us to have things we can call "continents" in his chest, or for there to be large oceans and landmasses requiring significant travel time) as an obstacle to that.

  • Upvote 2

8NHf8fu.png


 


Everything is some kind of a plot, man.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, not "continents" inside him, like I said. :) And most of the story took place inside him, so I'd say seriously downsizing the giant does indeed have a major impact on the story. You'd think that would affect their society in some ways; having two legitimate continents versus really little islands just called that would affect a lot. Not just population size (since the MU actually has a fairly small population for the land area, but that too makes sense as a lot would be automated, there'd be plenty of wilderness areas for environmental recycling, etc.) -- for one thing, it would affect... yeah... travel times. :P And there being so many secrets all over the place would seem pretty odd.

Well, technically, they can't properly be called "continents" as canon stands now, given that there are no tectonic plates inside the GSR (at least as far as we know :P)

 

"Continent" in the case of the MU, as I read it, seems to refer primarily to a landmass which is divided into multiple nations/species habitats/territories/, as opposed to Xia, Zakaz, or Stelt, which all have one primary species; or Odina or Daxia, which both have a diverse array of species but only one faction. The "continents" do seem to be larger than the "islands," but to assume thereupon that they must be would be to import our own definition of a "continent" (which we already know does not necessarily apply; again, tectonic plates).

 

The Southern Continent could probably be made as small as the island of Mata Nui in area with hardly any change to the story.

 

 

Er, as I said at the start, if slightly smaller is all you want, why bother? A giant only slightly less unimaginably vast is still unimaginably vast. Don't you mean continents that aren't really continents anymore? :P More to the point, this actually works against your argument as I see it. You're saying the benefit to your way is the continents are smaller; the downside is we don't get to use our brains and imaginations to try to solve a puzzle and we have to have a more "run of the mill" universe.

A robot 18-20 million feet tall is also still incredibly vast :P It's just easier to reconcile it with the size of everything else.

 

Honestly, you might have been able to convince me of the 40 million feet thing if it weren't for the point that SPIRIT raised about the geographical names on the island of Mata Nui -- why would the story team have named a mountain "nose," a volcano "mouth," etc., if the GSR's facial features were not meant to line up directly beneath them?

 

This has, however, convinced me that the "Mata Nui Rising" video is indeed in error re:face placement, though. If you line the GSR's face up with the two mountains, it puts the island on a slight diagonal. This, I suppose, would open up the possibility of a larger robot. I, sadly, have neither the time at the moment, nor the mathematical skills at any moment, to form a new estimate on this basis.

 

If somebody can visualize this and it proves the robot's larger size, I'd jump ship on my own thread and side with bones on this :P

 

EDIT: Just from eyeballing the image you linked in your first reply, it doesn't look to me like the face of the 40 million foot tall GSR would fit even on the diagonal. However, I'd forgotten that you stated in the image that halving the robot's height would be acceptable. Given that I accepted 20 million feet as a sensible height over a dozen posts ago, I'm not entirely sure what we're debating now xD

 

 

Actually, it seems like the Entity sort of inhabits EP, and does not control the results of transformations. If memory serves...

yknow I'm pretty sure you're right, my bad. Your memory does serve.

 

 

Whoa there. Australia is the smallest continent. It's so easy to type the words "no change to the story", but so difficult for it to be TRUE, yanno?

Not that difficult, if you ask me -- see previous comments on what "continent" entails, etc.

 

 

Well let's think about this for a second, what defines our concepts of these times? A Year is the time it takes for a planet to make a single rotation around its home star. This has nothing to do with planet size so much as orbit size and speed. A massive planet could just as easily have a very short year vs a smaller planet with a very long one. It is very possible that while I do not know personally Greg's knowledge on the mechanics of galactic travel he had some concept of this and thus knew that Spherus Magna could and does have years equivalent to our own. What you should be asking is by what reference of time is Greg using to calculate this year?

I briefly addressed this very point in post #42

 

 

The biggest problem with shrinking the giant is the amount of power required to reform this giant planet - if it's too small, not enough power.

This argument seems circular to me, since the original estimates of the planets' sizes were based on images of the robot/s on/with the planets. So to say "The GSR must be x size in order to reform the y size planet" gets us nowhere, because the planet is only assumed to be y size based on the pre-existing idea that the robot is x size. If the planet is bigger, the bot's gotta be bigger. If the planet is smaller, the bot can be smaller. It's common sense but it doesn't really prove anything new :\

 

 

Another problem is if the bot is too small, someone could travel the whole thing in ten minutes (or a lifetime), make a map, and say "This looks like a giant Toa!"

 

(Of course, that's possible anyway, but unlikely as most Matoran would stay in one place doing their jobs, but still. There's always one Takua in the group, and if the bot's small, easier to figure out the big secret.)

Dangerous giant Rahi in the legs would make travel down that way pretty difficult except for extremely powerful entities such as BoM or OoMN members -- who already know about the GSR -- or Vortixx et al., who as far as I can imagine would not care since their immediate profits are more important. Travel to the arms would be fairly difficult for Matoran as well, given that the arms tend to be the habitat for the aforementioned powerful entities IIRC. Given that, I'm not sure it's any more likely in a less-massive robot than a supermassive robot :P And like I said above, 18-20 million feet is still incredibly massive.

 

 

My motivation, ultimately, is for Spherus Magna to be a sensible size instead of a super-planet, and that's because I think it's a more interesting story if it's more relatable to its audience, even if only in a minor way-- and that minor way is being in a similar universe with similar cosmological constraints with a background setting (in this case the planet) that operates, apart from those interesting changes relevant to the story, similar to the way our own planet operates. Maybe it's just a difference in taste, but I'd rather not have to postulate all sorts of additional, unmentioned goings-on in order to fit a massive Spherus Magna into a universe with otherwise ordinary laws of physics.

 

I mean, of course it's fun to figure out, but I think it's also interesting to figure out the reverse puzzle-- how close can we make the Bionicle world to our own, and how close can we make it stick to our intuition of how it ought to be? Ultimately I suppose I just don't like the picture of Mata Nui standing next to earth, or wrapping himself head-to-toe around the planet when he sits down on it, and I want to get closer to the image I have of a giant robot standing up on a relatively earth-sized planet, and I just see the 40 million number thrown out there without any real, necessary story purpose (because, as I said, he doesn't have to be as huge for us to have things we can call "continents" in his chest, or for there to be large oceans and landmasses requiring significant travel time) as an obstacle to that.

Basically this :P

 

TBH though at this point I'm enjoying the task of disentangling this puzzle, no matter what the final conclusion ends up being

Edited by Junkbot Master of Trash

-------------------------------------
bohrok_lol.jpg
-------------------------------------
Rate The Song Above You

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

 

Now I'm not suggesting that Mata Nui is so small that our "continents" become islands-- just that Mata Nui might not be 40 million feet tall.  We don't need to shrink him down completely, he can still be quite large and still have very very large landmasses inside of him


I know, but again, you won't really please the people who are reacting against his being "quite large" that way.

 

I mean, of course it's fun to figure out, but I think it's also interesting to figure out the reverse puzzle-- how close can we make the Bionicle world to our own


Sure -- I'm just saying, that's not the primary goal of what Bionicle set out to do. :)

 

Well, technically, they can't properly be called "continents" as canon stands now, given that there are no tectonic plates inside the GSR


The term makes sense to use for landmasses over a certain size, regardless of the geology (or technology :P) beneath them. :) Where that line is, is actually arbitrary, but I'm saying it makes sense to make the line basically where ours is since it's written for us (and this is even "translated into English" so it's probably using our definition).

 

seems to refer primarily to a landmass which is divided into multiple nations/domains/territories


Eh... that's kind of a good point, but then Metru Nui has six regions, and it's fairly small even as an island. (Compared to Mata Nui Island anyways.) And I highly doubt every other island in the MU is all one domain, though admittedly nothing else is coming to mind offhand.

Although Metru Nui was ruled by a single Turaga, so I guess it works. But is there any evidence that the story team intended this meaning? It's clever, but I think it's much more speculative than size.

 

Honestly, you might have been able to convince me if it weren't for the point that SPIRIT raised about the geographical names on the island of Mata Nui -- why would the story team have named a mountain "nose," a volcano "mouth," etc., if the GSR's facial features were not meant to line up directly beneath them?


As my image showed in my first post, they do line up. :) It's basically just that the sun-holes line up with the "tear duct" parts of the eyes instead of the pupils as people tend to assume (but that's only an assumption anyways).

And these clues were out-story anyways, and need only give readers the clues to "a face" -- size need not be exactly part of it. This doesn't really work as evidence for size, thus. In-story, the Turaga named Ihu after Nuju's fallen mentor, for example, with no idea it was symbolic of a nose. Even had they known, they wouldn't have had a way to measure where the facial features were exactly anyways.


 

 

 

The biggest problem with shrinking the giant is the amount of power required to reform this giant planet - if it's too small, not enough power.


This argument seems circular to me, since the original estimates of the planets' sizes were based on images of the robot/s on/with the planets.


I agree there's a danger of turning that into a circular argument, but I don't think it quite is, because the Reformation plotline was invented apparently around the time that the size of the giant was pinned down, and I strongly suspect it has something to do with the "enormous feel" of the size -- and the size we have was picked to make that feel.

And this topic itself (and past incarnations) is strong evidence that it succeeds at that -- if it didn't feel unimaginably vast, we wouldn't have some fans struggling with just how huge it is. :)

In other words, the argument shows why pushing it toward the larger options is probably better.


 

Travel to the arms would be fairly difficult for Matoran as well, given that the arms tend to be the habitat for the aforementioned powerful entities IIRC. Given that, I'm not sure it's any more likely in a less-massive robot than a supermassive robot


Simple logic -- less area to cover, higher likelihood of discovery of the shape. Not really debatable. :P

Note, though, that some beings like the Makuta or the Barraki likely did notice the odd similarity, especially with moving tunnels in the joints, since those organizations dealt with territories including the whole upper half of the giant. For the Makuta it doesn't matter at a later point because TK told them the truth anyways.

For the Barraki I'm not sure, but if they suspected, they weren't going around telling people; more likely they'd keep it to themselves as something to possibly use somehow to their advantage. (Okay, the Barraki likely didn't know since they expected to find Mata Nui as a titan or something like that in Metru Nui... yeah.)

The Destiny of Bionicle (chronological retelling of Bionicle original series, 9 PDFs of 10 chapters each on Google Drive)Part 1 - Warring with Fate | Part 2 - Year of Change | Part 3 - The Exploration Trap | Part 4 - Rise of the Warlords | Part 5 - A Busy Matoran | Part 6 - The Dark Time | Part 7 - Proving Grounds | Part 8 - A Rude Awakening | Part 9 - The Battle of Giants

My Bionicle Fanfiction  (Google Drive folder, eventually planned to have PDFs of all of it)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Eh... that's kind of a good point, but then Metru Nui has six regions, and it's fairly small even as an island. (Compared to Mata Nui Island anyways.) And I highly doubt every other island in the MU is all one domain, though admittedly nothing else is coming to mind offhand.

 

Although Metru Nui was ruled by a single Turaga, so I guess it works. But is there any evidence that the story team intended this meaning? It's clever, but I think it's much more speculative than size.

I just went back and edited that part of my post for more clarity, but I was too late :P

 

Basically, what I was thinking by "territories" was species habitats or factions. Metru Nui has six regions, yes, but it's also primarily inhabited by Matoran, and -- as you said -- ruled by a single Turaga, so here we have both a primary species and a single faction. Then you can consider islands like Xia, Zakaz, and Stelt, which each are inhabited by one primary species -- although Stelt does have some diversity, it's still primarily ruled by one specific species -- or places like Odina and Daxia, which are home to a multitude of species, but to only one faction each.

 

Of course, now that I check BS01 in a state of actual alertness, unlike the reply I wrote at 2am, I see I'll have to scrap that whole idea -- for some reason, I'd always assumed that the Continents were inhabited by multiple species, but it appears that they were populated only by Matoran and Rahi, along with the resident Makuta. Now I'm just wondering where I got that earlier notion :huh:

 

Nevertheless, I hold to what I said about size: the Southern Continent could be as small as the island of Mata Nui and still be larger than all the other landmasses inside the MU. IIRC Odina was one of the largest islands, and it's still small enough that its huge, sprawling fortress is clearly visible from above, so it'd have to be smaller by far than the aforementioned Mata Nui.

 

 

As my image showed in my first post, they do line up. :) It's basically just that the sun-holes line up with the "tear duct" parts of the eyes instead of the pupils as people tend to assume (but that's only an assumption anyways).

 

And these clues were out-story anyways, and need only give readers the clues to "a face" -- size need not be exactly part of it. This doesn't really work as evidence for size, thus. In-story, the Turaga named Ihu after Nuju's fallen mentor, for example, with no idea it was symbolic of a nose. Even had they known, they wouldn't have had a way to measure where the facial features were exactly anyways.

Yes, but if you line up Mt. Ihu with his nose and Naho Bay with the tear duct of his left eye, his mouth is still chilling off the coast, south of the point where Le-Wahi and Ta-Wahi join. I'd demonstrate but I have no skills whatsoever in image manipulation :P If, however, you halve the robot's size -- as your own image suggests -- I'm pretty sure it would all line up right on the dot.

 

And of course this means nothing in-universe -- the fact that these are out-story clues is the foundation of my argument. I'm trying to get back to what the story team was thinking while cooking this all up fifteen years ago.

 

 

I agree there's a danger of turning that into a circular argument, but I don't think it quite is, because the Reformation plotline was invented apparently around the time that the size of the giant was pinned down, and I strongly suspect it has something to do with the "enormous feel" of the size -- and the size we have was picked to make that feel.

 

And this topic itself (and past incarnations) is strong evidence that it succeeds at that -- if it didn't feel unimaginably vast, we wouldn't have some fans struggling with just how huge it is. :)

 

In other words, the argument shows why pushing it toward the larger options is probably better.

That's what I've been trying to do with this thread -- push for the largest possible option that does not, in my mind, contradict the intentions of the original story team. When I said the GSR could be as small as Australia, I didn't mean that I necessarily think it ought to be, at least from where I stand now. Sorry for failing to clarify that

 

When you say that "the Reformation plotline was invented apparently around the time that the size of the giant was pinned down," though, do you mean that the Reformation wasn't part of the original giant robot concept? Because if so, that too miiiiight force me to adjust my position again :rolleyes:

 

 

Simple logic -- less area to cover, higher likelihood of discovery of the shape. Not really debatable. :P

Higher likelihood, yes. Naturally :P But my thought is that the likelihood is negligible in either case -- 40 million feet or 20 million feet alike.

 

I should've worded it in terms of negligibility, but again, it was way too late for me to be posting :wired:

Edited by Junkbot Master of Trash

-------------------------------------
bohrok_lol.jpg
-------------------------------------
Rate The Song Above You

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

Now I'm not suggesting that Mata Nui is so small that our "continents" become islands-- just that Mata Nui might not be 40 million feet tall.  We don't need to shrink him down completely, he can still be quite large and still have very very large landmasses inside of him

 

I know, but again, you won't really please the people who are reacting against his being "quite large" that way.

 

 

I mean, of course it's fun to figure out, but I think it's also interesting to figure out the reverse puzzle-- how close can we make the Bionicle world to our own

 

Sure -- I'm just saying, that's not the primary goal of what Bionicle set out to do. :)

Well, naturally-- the primary goal of what Bionicle set out to do was sell toys. :P  I mean yeah obviously the goal isn't to make a world just like ours... but that's sort of a little bit of a goal in every well-told story, is a setting that feels familiar in some way.  You can have very surreal, very out-there stories, but at the core of all the best ones will be something relatable, and the more relatable that setting is, the more the surreal or otherwise out-there elements are going to make an impact.  It's a way to connect with the audience.  So when I say I'm trying to solve the puzzle of doing that for Bionicle, I'm not claiming it as Bionicle's primary goal, I'm claiming it as an important element in any story; and, in fact, one that is already present in the canon Bionicle story-- because in that story, we have no references to super-massive planets or omniscient EP forming them, we get a planet that a giant robot stands up on and eventually pushes back together, and we get images to go along with that story that can make us imagine the robot doing that on earth, and it making sense.  All I want to do is reconcile that very natural part of the Bionicle story with as much of the extra information we've been given, and my worry is that only one piece of that information (the 40 million feet number) doesn't fit into that  otherwise very natural picture.

 

The only other complaint seems to be how big a landmass has to be for it to be called a continent, and to me it just seems natural that all the really, really big landmasses (relative to the much much smaller islands everywhere else) in a given world would be called by that world's inhabitants the continents; and that these continents would have the property of being able to support lots of different, independent settlements that required significant travel time to go between and would have significant portions of their surface without coastal access.  That is something that is obviously possible in a wide range of giant robot sizes, from the 40 million feet down to a lower bound that, while still fairly large, in no way needs to be within a few significant figures of the entire diameter of earth.  If you or other defenders of the full-size Mata Nui want to insist on continents exactly or very nearly the same size as those on earth, then just by definition you can't arrive at anything other than the full-size GSR.

8NHf8fu.png


 


Everything is some kind of a plot, man.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

 

Basically, what I was thinking by "territories" was species habitats or factions. Metru Nui has six regions, yes, but it's also primarily inhabited by Matoran, and -- as you said -- ruled by a single Turaga, so here we have both a primary species and a single faction.


But, honestly, do you think that if there is a tiny island where multiple species live as different factions, the story team would call it a continent? Clearly it's about size.

You could still salvage this by saying it's about relative size (the NC and SC are the largest landmasses), but still, an actual continent-sized continent is the more obvious choice. :)

Another problem, brought out in another of my images (in the same folder, I think, as the one in my first post here), and in at least one other artist's interpretation, is that you can't fit the continents to scale as they are in the official map into the giant -- you actually have to enlarge the giant even more to fit them. Two ways:

1) My way put the SC into the lower torso, which is fairly small compared to the rest of the giant. I go with this as it's more consistent with the map.

2) Another interpretation is to put both continents in the chest. Either way, you have to shrink the continents in a relative sense.

I haven't put together an image comparing the results of both interpretations (best case scenarios) to real-world continents (namely the resulting NC size to Australia), but I don't think there's a lot of wiggle room. Somebody should seriously run the math on that (visually :P); that would be interesting to see. Just how much wiggle room to shrink the giant is there, such that the NC remains no smaller than Australia?


 

Of course, now that I check BS01 in a state of actual alertness, unlike the reply I wrote at 2am, I see I'll have to scrap that whole idea -- for some reason, I'd always assumed that the Continents were inhabited by multiple species, but it appears that they were populated only by Matoran and Rahi, along with the resident Makuta. Now I'm just wondering where I got that earlier notion :huh:


BS01 may just be talking about what's confirmed. I wouldn't put much weight into that unless it confirms there aren't other species/factions.

 

the Southern Continent could be as small as the island of Mata Nui


Northern. The northern was the smaller of the two, so it's that one we need to worry about. If you make the SC as small as Mata Nui, the NC is way under anybody's reasonable definition of continent.

 

Yes, but if you line up Mt. Ihu with his nose and Naho Bay with the tear duct of his left eye, his mouth is still chilling off the coast


Yes, but the eyes and the nose do line up. You can't really get the nose not to, since it's in the center (just not the whole nose) and if he were only slightly larger than this, the eyes wouldn't fit. This isn't the same thing as what the sentence "why would the story team have named a mountain "nose," a volcano "mouth," etc., if the GSR's facial features were not meant to line up directly beneath them?" implies. Three of the four relevant features are directly underneath. So that's not really a fair way to describe it, make sense?

And again, the question I just re-quoted is answered by the fact that even if none of the features lined up at all, by no means would it be evidence that the giant is smaller so that it has to fit the island's scale of features. The shape of the island as a face was only an out-story clue to fans, and it works that way regardless of the proportions. In-story the purpose of the island was the exact opposite -- to disguise that there was a massive face under it. :)

Put it this way -- if you put something in a container, and then put a picture of the something on the container, is there some magical reason the picture has to exactly represent the size of the thing inside?

Of course not. That's not the point of the picture; it's simply to tell you what's inside. :)

And many labels do this all the time. Cereal boxes that zoom way in to make it look far more interesting than it really is. A box with an electronic device where the image is smaller to put a cool background around it and fit information about it next to it, etc.

Short answer to "why" -- because they weren't trying to tell you about exact size, just give a highly vague clue to basic supersize and location.



Also because the size wasn't even decided then anyways, so why would they be worrying about having the features line up, exactly? :P

 

If, however, you halve the robot's size -- as your own image suggests -- I'm pretty sure it would all line up right on the dot.


It would, but the image also points out that halving this thing doesn't really get it into "tame" territory. And as I've pointed out, it also creates other problems.

Another one we haven't spent much time on is the Metru Nui suns problem. The camouflage island being smaller than expected solves that perfectly -- the suns appear close together in the dome-shaped sky (of a dome that has to fit well inside that head mind you), because they are close together. Shrink him so the sun holes have to be the pupils, and the suns should seem wider apart.

That.... kiiiinda would work since an illusion effect bends the light for sunrise/sunset anyways, but why overcomplicate things.


 

do you mean that the Reformation wasn't part of the original giant robot concept?


Correct. The concept was that the giant was a metaphor of a human with a disease who needed medicine, and the Toa/etc. analogize the particles of the medicine. The reason the giant existed was not considered. In hindsight, it does seem "implied by and unpacked from" that concept though, that there'd be some BIG reason for such a big creation, and it would be about saving lives, so motivation to actually do it. But at the time it wasn't pinned down yet.

(They ended up making it seem like it well, though, by using that UDD symbol as a "retrospective clue." :P)

 

Well, naturally-- the primary goal of what Bionicle set out to do was sell toys. :P


I'm talking about story direction. :) I'm saying, trying to make it like our world is the opposite of one of the main goals they had.

 

and to me it just seems natural that all the really, really big landmasses (relative to the much much smaller islands everywhere else) in a given world would be called by that world's inhabitants the continents


I just don't think this is consistent with the suggestion we fans heard around that time when Greg said "there could even be continents in the domes". This was before we knew about the giant. It was fascinating -- why would there be such huge landmasses in domes like Metru Nui? When it became a 40 million feet tall giant robot, so big he has environments inside him for the maintenance workers, it clicked perfectly.

Making them "actually just bigger islands" would rob that of its value. Greg gave no impression at all that "it's just how the characters in-story see it". And again, this isn't a Bionicle term -- it's an English word presented as it's always used in English. The imaginary "translators into English" didn't have to use it; two different words for something like "island" that don't exist in English are often translated as one word in many real translation scenarios.

The Destiny of Bionicle (chronological retelling of Bionicle original series, 9 PDFs of 10 chapters each on Google Drive)Part 1 - Warring with Fate | Part 2 - Year of Change | Part 3 - The Exploration Trap | Part 4 - Rise of the Warlords | Part 5 - A Busy Matoran | Part 6 - The Dark Time | Part 7 - Proving Grounds | Part 8 - A Rude Awakening | Part 9 - The Battle of Giants

My Bionicle Fanfiction  (Google Drive folder, eventually planned to have PDFs of all of it)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Boy, sure wish I had been following this topic more closely before it became so large; that's a lot of reading-material.

 

Anyway, I am uncertain why there is still a debate about the size of Mata Nui. As miraculous and lucky as it is, a 600 mile-high head fits on a forty-million foot body with the proportions that were used. Since Mata Nui is so large, continents in the sense that we think of them can exist inside without needing to make the smaller. Assuming that Energized Protodermis can turn the rock within the planet into negative-mass, Spherus Magna is a super-massive planet with the gravity of Earth. If Spherus Magna is that big, then the surface is still mostly flat relative to the giant robots so no balancing-act is required. The size of the planet has nothing to do with the passing of time, Spherus Magna simply has to move faster.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have a question... The Matoran live inside Mata Nui yes? Well while he is laying down everything seems level, no big. Yet what about when he get's up? Yeah the island of Mata Nui was destroyed but what about the internal civilizations? Did everyone's stuff just shift all in one direction(Expecting south for ref) I mean the world in question just got turned on it's side. Or do the internal Continents rotate to remain level? Also wasn't there a movie or something where there was a Toa sized character named Mata Nui? I may be remembering that wrong but anyway...

 

This answer could lead to the gravity questions posted above regarding how Mata Nui effects it.

Edited by Prowl Nightwolf

"A stranger will always be a stranger unless you give them a chance."

:m_p: :r: :m_o: :w: :l:    :n: :i: :g: :h: :t: :w: :m_o: :l: :f:

 |premierball.png| <- My Pokémon | BZPRPG Characters: Po-Matoran Doseki & Nui-Jaga Scorpio; Ga-Matoran Orca 
Matoran und Panzer: Doseki & Glitch | Marvel RP PC | Mata Nui Monopoly: Come... Own a piece of the legend!

Onua.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

The biggest problem with shrinking the giant is the amount of power required to reform this giant planet - if it's too small, not enough power.

This argument seems circular to me, since the original estimates of the planets' sizes were based on images of the robot/s on/with the planets. So to say "The GSR must be x size in order to reform the y size planet" gets us nowhere, because the planet is only assumed to be y size based on the pre-existing idea that the robot is x size. If the planet is bigger, the bot's gotta be bigger. If the planet is smaller, the bot can be smaller. It's common sense but it doesn't really prove anything new :\

 

 

Another problem is if the bot is too small, someone could travel the whole thing in ten minutes (or a lifetime), make a map, and say "This looks like a giant Toa!"

 

(Of course, that's possible anyway, but unlikely as most Matoran would stay in one place doing their jobs, but still. There's always one Takua in the group, and if the bot's small, easier to figure out the big secret.)

Dangerous giant Rahi in the legs would make travel down that way pretty difficult except for extremely powerful entities such as BoM or OoMN members -- who already know about the GSR -- or Vortixx et al., who as far as I can imagine would not care since their immediate profits are more important. Travel to the arms would be fairly difficult for Matoran as well, given that the arms tend to be the habitat for the aforementioned powerful entities IIRC. Given that, I'm not sure it's any more likely in a less-massive robot than a supermassive robot :P And like I said above, 18-20 million feet is still incredibly massive.

I think bones addressed the first point well enough. 

 

For the second point, may I remind you that Toa can have speed powers? Wouldn't take too much finagling to rig up some disks of speed and, if the bot was small enough, take a high-speed "boat-cruise", draw up a map, and give the results to Turaga Dume Makuta Teridax  the Barraki some random guy on the Southern Continent. 

 

* * *

The size of Australia is 2.97 million square miles according to Goooogle. That's approximately 15, 681.6 million square feet.

 

Now I'm going to go for an approximation and take the square root. That's 125.2262 million feet.

 

The size of our robot, 40 million feet, doesn't even come close to that size. :P

 

Therefore, I hypostulate that continent is being used as a relative term in regards to Mata Nui, Metru Nui, and Voya Nui respectively. (Unless I got the math wrong, as usual, which would be classic fishers. :P

Edited by fishers64
  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

You could still salvage this by saying it's about relative size (the NC and SC are the largest landmasses), but still, an actual continent-sized continent is the more obvious choice. :)

That claim ignores the fact that continents are different sizes. What does "continent-sized" even mean? Surely you're not suggesting we impose our own ideas of scale onto the GSR's interior environment, since that's exactly what you've spent this whole thread trying to convince, me, Cressona, et al. not to do? :P

 

It would, but the image also points out that halving this thing doesn't really get it into "tame" territory. And as I've pointed out, it also creates other problems.

Well, that's fine. I'm not trying to get it into "tame" territory anymore, not now that you've shown me how SM can remain its canon size with no contradiction to storyline :P

 

Another one we haven't spent much time on is the Metru Nui suns problem. The camouflage island being smaller than expected solves that perfectly -- the suns appear close together in the dome-shaped sky (of a dome that has to fit well inside that head mind you), because they are close together. Shrink him so the sun holes have to be the pupils, and the suns should seem wider apart.

Shrinking him down doesn't mean the sunholes have to be the pupils, though. Even at half-size I was still picturing the sunholes as his tear ducts. Besides, I just like the idea of the Toa Metru flying airships out the tear ducts -- it's very Fantastic Voyage :lol:

 

Also because the size wasn't even decided then anyways, so why would they be worrying about having the features line up, exactly? :P

Correct. The concept was that the giant was a metaphor of a human with a disease who needed medicine, and the Toa/etc. analogize the particles of the medicine. The reason the giant existed was not considered. In hindsight, it does seem "implied by and unpacked from" that concept though, that there'd be some BIG reason for such a big creation, and it would be about saving lives, so motivation to actually do it. But at the time it wasn't pinned down yet.

Ok, that's a bit of a game-changer for me then. At this point I take no concrete position on the GSR's size.

 

 

I have a question... The Matoran live inside Mata Nui yes? Well while he is laying down everything seems level, no big. Yet what about when he get's up? Yeah the island of Mata Nui was destroyed but what about the internal civilizations? Did everyone's stuff just shift all in one direction(Expecting south for ref) I mean the world in question just got turned on it's side. Or do the internal Continents rotate to remain level?

Remember that the robot was designed to spend a very significant portion of its existence flying through space. That necessitates a system to produce artificial gravity for the interior, a system which the GSR has been confirmed to have.

 

 

Also wasn't there a movie or something where there was a Toa sized character named Mata Nui? I may be remembering that wrong but anyway...

You're thinking of 2009's The Legend Reborn (typically referred to around these parts as TLR). That Toa-sized character was Mata Nui.

 

 

The size of Australia is 2.97 million square miles according to Goooogle. That's approximately 15, 681.6 million square feet.

 

Now I'm going to go for an approximation and take the square root. That's 125.2262 million feet.

 

The size of our robot, 40 million feet, doesn't even come close to that size. :P

 

Therefore, I hypostulate that continent is being used as a relative term in regards to Mata Nui, Metru Nui, and Voya Nui respectively. (Unless I got the math wrong, as usual, which would be classic fishers. :P)

This is an excellent point. We should have been considering what the upper limits are for the size of the interior continents. As it is, you have shown there'd be no way to fit an Australia-sized continent inside the GSR even at a height of 40 million feet (I'm choosing to trust your calculations, because I haven't the motivation to try to work through them myself :P), so I'm going to go ahead and assume that the NC is considerable smaller. Let's go for New Zealand-sized, maybe

Edited by Junkbot Master of Trash

-------------------------------------
bohrok_lol.jpg
-------------------------------------
Rate The Song Above You

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

To be clear, I heard somewhere that the diameter of the Earth is 40 million feet. That would throw my calculations into considerable doubt, if true.

The diameter of the earth is 41,807,040 feet.

 

It may just be that I can't do geometry - it may be possible that a sphere with a diameter of 41 million feet could have a 125 million foot long landmass stretched on it. In which case my calculator doesn't lie, but my brain does. 

 

The formula for surface area of a sphere is 2pi r^2: 41, 807, 040/2 = 20,903,520 ft for the radius. Square that, and you get some HUGE number (4.36957 x 10^14 ft squared) and then double it and multiply it by pi, and I get 2.74548 X 10^15 ft. 

 

Now I have to put it back in terms of millions of feet, so I divide that by a million, and I get 2745482735 million ft. Therefore a line of 125 million ft on the surface wouldn't even make a scratch. 

 

So far, I guess I'm right. :shrugs: Giant robot, I relegate you to puny-lands. 

Edited by fishers64
Link to comment
Share on other sites

EDIT: Just saw fisher64's post after posting this, checked the math, and he's right, the robot is a perfectly legitimate size.  I have no complaints.

 

 

 

and to me it just seems natural that all the really, really big landmasses (relative to the much much smaller islands everywhere else) in a given world would be called by that world's inhabitants the continents


I just don't think this is consistent with the suggestion we fans heard around that time when Greg said "there could even be continents in the domes". This was before we knew about the giant. It was fascinating -- why would there be such huge landmasses in domes like Metru Nui? When it became a 40 million feet tall giant robot, so big he has environments inside him for the maintenance workers, it clicked perfectly.

Making them "actually just bigger islands" would rob that of its value. Greg gave no impression at all that "it's just how the characters in-story see it". And again, this isn't a Bionicle term -- it's an English word presented as it's always used in English. The imaginary "translators into English" didn't have to use it; two different words for something like "island" that don't exist in English are often translated as one word in many real translation scenarios.

 

I argued, however, that the purpose of the story isn't to create a world very different from our own, but that, as a part of the good telling of any story, it will be made to be similar to our own in certain respects (in this case the size of Spherus Magna; to that I refer you to my previous posts).

 

And it does sound like ultimately it'll come down to how big something has to be to be a continent.  If you propose a lower bound, we can work out the minimum Great Spirit size that such a particularly sized continent can fit into, but if you're pre-committed to the 40 million foot tall Great Spirit, then your minimum required continent size is going to vary with that.  I think if you put an English-speaking human inside a GSR that's significantly smaller than 40 million feet but still within my acceptable range and showed him one of the continents there, they'd be more than comfortable calling them continents, whether or not they are the same size as continents on earth, because they meet all the criteria I listed (again, refer to previous post).  

 

But, again, if you're pre-committed to a particular size of GSR, you're pre-committed to a particular continent size, and you're similarly pre-committed to a particularly massive Spherus Magna, and so you're already pre-committed to a setting or background for the Bionicle story that is fundamentally, disconcertingly different from our own world upon examination, and I believe that's something that makes for a sub-par story for many reasons, among which are the comfort of the audience within the world and their ability to fit the setting in some sense into an existing paradigm.  

 

This is why the settings of many years of the Bionicle story worked very well, because they were a tropical island, a city, an apocalyptic island (familiar in concept if not direct experience), underwater (the same thing), the skies/a swamp (maybe fairly abstract but still easily conceptualized within existing paradigms), and a desert planet.  These are very simple examples, but the point is that there does have to be something simple to anchor the audience, concept-wise.  Even when the nature of the GSR was revealed, because everything was on a scale we could understand and the world within the robot was one we could be familiar with, it wasn't disconcertingly different.  Even when the setting switches to a different planet, it's not something that's completely foreign to us-- different planets are common settings in fiction, and we have a general cultural knowledge of what other planets are going to be like.  To suddenly multiply the size of that planet into something massive beyond comprehension is to sweep the rug out from under the audience, to tell them they do not, in fact, actually understand what this setting is like, that it (or at least the experience of it) is something very much beyond your comprehension, that this story is taking place in a very foreign environment (of course by environment I mean the large-scale background of the setting).  Perhaps I am alone in thinking that a supermassive Spherus Magna is unsatisfying in this way, but that is my charge.

Edited by Cressona

8NHf8fu.png


 


Everything is some kind of a plot, man.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's amazing how a change of perspective can work wonders on your thinking, isn't it? Interestingly enough, this means that Mata Nui could lie down comfortably in one of our oceans, which expands that amount of planets he can visit. 

 

Also, I recall that someone pointed out that the size of the robots was used to argue for SM's huge size. I thought that argument was because of the amount of space/mass required for the robots to stand and fight and not knock the planet out of orbit. I'm not sure that the writers accounted for that when they made the story, which would explain why Greg would think SM would have normal gravity without absorption - if you don't account for that, SM could be the same size as Earth. Hence normal gravity. 

 

Of course, that would make Aqua Magna smaller than Earth, making gravity all goofball there - you'd have to make some robot gravity generation excuse. Which is more complicated than the standard bonesiii theory, but it does explain Greg's thinking.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Also, I recall that someone pointed out that the size of the robots was used to argue for SM's huge size. I thought that argument was because of the amount of space/mass required for the robots to stand and fight and not knock the planet out of orbit. I'm not sure that the writers accounted for that when they made the story, which would explain why Greg would think SM would have normal gravity without absorption - if you don't account for that, SM could be the same size as Earth. Hence normal gravity. 

Actually, the reason that Spherus Magna is believed to be so huge has to do with calculations based off of some images depicting both Spherus Magna and Mata Nui. I made links to these images in post #4.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That claim ignores the fact that continents are different sizes. What does "continent-sized" even mean? Surely you're not suggesting we impose our own ideas of scale onto the GSR's interior environment, since that's exactly what you've spent this whole thread trying to convince, me, Cressona, et al. not to do? :P

 

I think I've made it pretty clear several times why the use of language here should be taken on the larger side rather than smaller. The physics subjects in Bionicle tried to be different (to an extent). The use of language generally did not, or not much, and things like the length of a year, etc.

 

 

The Matoran live inside Mata Nui yes? Well while he is laying down everything seems level, no big. Yet what about when he get's up?

 

Artificial gravity. :)

 

Edit: I see I was Radar'd... er.. Kapura'd... on that one. But thought of another thing I should have said:

 

Shrinking him down doesn't mean the sunholes have to be the pupils, though.

Actually we'd have to check that, because the Ga-Wahi bay doesn't come all the way in to the center of the island and we know one sun-hole is under that. So at least the tear-glands place wouldn't fit, if you shrink the robot a certain amount. How much so is what we'd need to check. Plus the Ko-Wahi one probably can't be under the thicker mountains near the center-north line of the island as depicted on the map, though arguably that could come closer.

Edited by bonesiii

The Destiny of Bionicle (chronological retelling of Bionicle original series, 9 PDFs of 10 chapters each on Google Drive)Part 1 - Warring with Fate | Part 2 - Year of Change | Part 3 - The Exploration Trap | Part 4 - Rise of the Warlords | Part 5 - A Busy Matoran | Part 6 - The Dark Time | Part 7 - Proving Grounds | Part 8 - A Rude Awakening | Part 9 - The Battle of Giants

My Bionicle Fanfiction  (Google Drive folder, eventually planned to have PDFs of all of it)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's amazing how a change of perspective can work wonders on your thinking, isn't it? Interestingly enough, this means that Mata Nui could lie down comfortably in one of our oceans, which expands that amount of planets he can visit.

I'm not actually sure it does. The circumference of the Earth is about 25,000 miles/40,000 km; in feet, that's 132,000,000 -- barely more than thrice the robot's canon height. So while it's possible for him to lie down, it would be on a noticeable curve. He'd also probably be unable to stand up at all under the planet's gravity, given that he's the same height as its diameter, and thus it would probably be impossible to take off without knocking the planet out of orbit.

 

 

I think I've made it pretty clear several times why the use of language here should be taken on the larger side rather than smaller. The physics subjects in Bionicle tried to be different (to an extent). The use of language generally did not, or not much, and things like the length of a year, etc.

Nah point taken. I was just being facetious there :P

Edited by Junkbot Master of Trash

-------------------------------------
bohrok_lol.jpg
-------------------------------------
Rate The Song Above You

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...