Letagi

I'm not fully clear on the geography of this universe. Where and what exactly are BZ-Koro and BZ-Metru, and are there any other significant differences in the structure of the universe? -L

The seller's name is fussboss; I'd be willing to bet that's mfuss903, former BZPower admin. He had a thousand of them back in the day. -Letagi

Wrong topic, fikou. -Letagi

So... Voltex is in Maxilos now? Anyways, really glad to have been a part of this, Voltex. And to have survived is an added bonus! Of course, that's mostly because of the numerous times you had Agent 64 save me. Speaking of which, which Matoran does my character supposedly remind her of? I haven't read either of the first two books, but they're on my list. And I'll be keeping an eye out for Book 4 if you ever do decide to write it. One more question - seeing as all this happened in what is essentially the capital of the Matoran Universe, why weren't any Toa dispatched? I think it's really neat that the whole story was centered entirely around Matoran, because not many epics on here are, but I'm just wondering if there's a reason for it. -Letagi

Guess I was just unlucky. I got all the colours except black but I got a few silvers, which made me think the black ones didn't come in the packs. -Letagi

Strange, I always thought that silver ones came in the packs instead of black ones. -Letagi

Where else was the black launcher available? I was always under the impression it only came with the TRK but since they're so common there was obviously another source. -Letagi

Wow, very impressive if these are all sealed! And I'm amazed you managed to build such a large collection of sealed sets in just three years. What exactly is the "booster box 24 packs" from 2001 at the top of the list? -Letagi

1. I would take out half of Lewa and half of Pohatu, and turn them into LEWATU. 2. Kongu or another Toa of Air, because that's an element that we lost in G2. 3. Stone or Earth. 4. Bring back Air. 5. I wouldn't notice, because I wouldn't be awake, because Makuta would have cast me into a deep sleep. 6. Well, 2015 does a nice job of bringing back the 2001 mystical/tribal feel, so for 2016 I'd go for the big-city Metru Nui feel of 2004. Actually I'd wait a few years for that. Maybe 2018? 7. I'm gonna go with Zatth's answer to this one, because I can't think of anything as perfect as that. 8. I guess their flavours would correspond to their colours. So red = cherry, black = licorice, etc. 9. There would be a massive uprising, and Bionicle fans would take over LEGO HQ. 10. Air. Can we please have air back? Please? 11. A little more so than Mata Nui, because they have launchers and such. But not nearly at the Metru Nui level. 12. Are they really clowns if they're scary? What does it mean to be a clown? What does it mean to clown? 13. Either I'm dreaming, or LEGO's gone insane. Also how did I suddenly get to 2016? 14. THE VAHI 15. I would put pictures of myself in various places throughout the room, so they wouldn't know where to look. Then unleash the squirrels. -L

Value is determined by what people are willing to pay. Unfortunately, misprints like these don't generally sell for more than the correct variations. -Letagi

So wait, are you saying we've been overestimating the size of Spherus Magna by like 500%? Well, 200% from my mistake, and however much more depending on what we determine Mata Nui's true size to be. So yes, I definitely overestimated it. First, we don't know how big it is, only that it's larger than Earth (recently confirmed by Greg), and does officially have more gravity. This issue (plus animation portrayals) is why I theorized a long time ago that something about the megaplanets' cores made them absorb any gravitons over a certain level (about Earth level), probably as a result of transformation by contact with the energized protodermis cores. This would 1) make sense, 2) be freaky awesomesauce, and 3) make gravity on Aqua Magna the same as Spherus Magna, despite it being much smaller (so animation portrayals as everything being Earth gravity work), and 4) mean the megaplanets could be truly mega, having gobs of real estate for future population growth. Unfortunately, somebody tried to ask Greg about this, did a bad job, and he "canonized a no" to any kind of gravity leveling effect (in giving the answer mentioned above). So, we're left to assume many images are artistic license and that we don't have any actual way to estimate the size. (Fan attempts notwithstanding. ) Or, ignore that one answer and go with my theory anyways, or something like it. I've been thinking about the problem of having solid planets with huge radii. Since matter becomes more condensed closer to the core of a planet, at some point, the core reaches critical density and collapses into a black hole. We'd need a really big planet for that to happen, and I'd have to do some calculations to see whether we're anywhere near that point with the numbers I found for Spherus Magna, but I wouldn't be too surprised. Of course, first we have to find a reasonable height for Mata Nui and then I have to revise those numbers, because I started off with an incorrect value. Also, we actually don't need any sort of gravity corrections or cancelling effects to equalize the gravity on all three planets. As long as there's a careful balance maintained between mass and radius, gravity will stay the same, despite the smaller size. It's all about the ratios. The numbers I found maintained the proper ratios for gravity on SM, AM and BotaM, but the densities turned out to be too small. There's a chance, though, that with a smaller value for Mata Nui's height, the densities will work out. -Letagi

Looking back at my calculations in the other topic here, I realize now that the number I used for Mata Nui's height was incorrect. I couldn't find the information on BS01 and so used the number I remembered hearing in 2008 (80 million feet), but apparently my memory failed me. I can redo the calculations using the new information (or someone else can if they're really eager, since the procedure is all laid out in the post). First though, I'm going to try finding a more accurate number for the radio of head size to body size. That shouldn't be difficult with all the canon art we've got. -Letagi

You wrote Unity, Duty, Manifest Destiny, didn't you? I always meant to read that all the way through but never got around to it. I'd love to have the chance again. -L

I've decided I don't like Control. Also really curious as to whether my character is still alive. -Letagi

Based on the title, I would assume not. -L

I found most of this strangely coherent. -L

Just a heads-up, Black Six doesn't have any more Metru blue Matatus. They've all been given away. Also, I'd recommend specifically listing some of the more common stuff you're looking for as well, like the pieces you mention in the last paragraph. Otherwise, since all the rest of the pieces on your list are so rare, it's unlikely that this topic will go far. -Letagi

Lots. As far as I know, they were in the entire first production run of the Tower of Toa set. The thing is, people who rushed out to buy that set as soon as it came out are also probably serious collectors or fans, and so are unlikely to sell. I would guess that's why we don't see them for sale very often. In other news, here's an overpriced sealed Powerpack if anyone's really eager: http://www.bricklink.com/store.asp?p=brickstar&itemID=69553110 -Letagi

Not sure why bolded word is bolded. Whoops, it looked like a typo at first. I thought it should have been "the one named Ehks". Now I get that it's referring to Ehks with one arm. That sentence makes much more sense now. -Letagi

I like to think of Letagi as the narrator-level non-narrator. That's definitely cool with me. How'd that come about? There's something else I've been wondering about. Maybe this has been answered previously and I missed it, but are these epics meant to fit with canon in any way? I feel like this could be the story of the Matoran Civil War, but there are a bunch of discrepancies with canon, i.e. the deaths of canon characters that we see later on, and the destruction of the Red Star. How was the Red Star able to crash into Metru Nui, anyways? Metru Nui is located inside Mata Nui's head. Oh, and also: -Letagi

All that makes sense. But you still haven't addressed the fact that radius is squared in the denominator of Newton's gravity equation. Hence, an inverse square relationship. You don't even have to worry about density to see that. Frankly, we may very well both be right. The Earth example proves the inverse square relationship, and your last post indicates that the rearranged equation works. Would you mind if I consult my geophysics prof on this one? Not because I'm determined to prove you wrong, but more because I'm genuinely curious about this. -Letagi

I wouldn't have spent an hour doing the calculations and typing them out if I thought there was the slightest chance of them being irrelevant. The point of the calculations for surface gravity anomaly due to radius is to prove to you that as radius increases, surface gravity decreases. The point of the calculations for surface gravity anomaly due to mass distribution is to show that mass has an less significant impact on surface gravity than radius, and that the effects are opposite. Density doesn't play a role in these calculations. Maybe they're less pertinent than I thought at the time, but still very much relevant. My understanding of density is quite sufficient. But you're right that I got ahead of myself when I said that the opposite effect would happen in rocky planets. Note to self: don't to physics in the middle of the night... But here's the thing: we can't both be wrong, because the derivations you did are correct. We're working with essentially the same equation. Here's something we should both be able to agree on. As we increase radius of a planet, density must necessarily increase as well due to pressure. There's an inverse-cube relationship between mass and radius with regards to density. If we try to increase radius by a factor of 3, mass must increase by a factor of 27 in order to keep average density constant. This is fine, because a radial increase of 3 times also means a volume increase of 27 times, leaving exactly enough room for the new mass. But, the additional mass means that the compressional effect increases as well, meaning that we get less than a factor of 3 in our final radius increase - or, we need to add more than 27 times the original mass to achieve the desired 3 times radius increase. Either way, the density goes up. This proves that you can't add mass and radius to a planet and expect to have the same average density. Density will always increase. This is the reason why your rearranged equation makes it look like surface gravity is proportional to radius. In fact, the important variable in that equation is density. Density always increases, and so surface gravity increases as well. Another way of saying this is that you have to add more mass to attain a relatively small (and getting exponentially smaller) increase in radius. We both made the same mistake, but drew different conclusions from it: looking at your equation and thinking that density can stay constant when radius and mass both increase. It can't. It's fundamentally impossible. -Letagi

Great last few chapters. I've been keeping up, just not always posting. I'm amazed you let my character survive this far without even having him kill anyone else in the process. He's dodged death a very improbable number of times. And apparently he can hold his own against a White Turaga? Cool. Really looking forward to the rest of this! -Letagi

With regards to the Earth example, it is very relevant. More so than the Jupiter and Saturn example. When we calculate gravity at the poles and at the equator, we use different values for radius. The reason is that the surface gravity at any point on a planet is related to the distance to the centre of mass. That distance (radius) is smaller at the poles and larger at the equator. We also have to take into account the different masses. Since we have two different radii, we also effectively have two different masses; in other words, there's more mass distributed along the equator, and less along the polar axis. We don't calculate these masses specifically, but rather we use a formula that finds gravity directly. This is, the more I think about it, actually a perfect example, because it's one in which both the mass and radius change, but average density stays the same (or the difference is negligible). It doesn't matter that these two measurements are on the same planet. There are three factors that determine the surface gravity at any point on a planet: radius, mass distribution and rotation. Rotation is a factor because it causes centrifugal force, but this has a very small impact. We'll just calculate gravity from radius and gravity from mass distribution. We can calculate each one independently. Let's do radius first. We're not taking mass into account just yet; radius is the only variable we have to worry about here. re is equatorial radius, 6378 km. rp is polar radius, 6357 km. First, equatorial surface gravity: ge = GM/re2 ge = [(6.67*10-11 m3/kgs2)(5.972*1024 kg)]/[6.378*106 m]2 ge = 9.79211720754 m/s2 Now, polar surface gravity: gp = GM/rp2 gp = [(6.67*10-11 m3/kgs2)(5.972*1024 kg)]/[6.357*106 m]2 gp = 9.85691950813 m/s2 Finding the difference, gp - ge = 9.85691950813 m/s2 - 9.79211720754 m/s2 = 0.06480230059 m/s2 Gravity is greater at the poles when we only look at radius and ignore mass distribution. Now, moving on to mass distribution. This is a little more complex. The formula is as follows: g = [GM/r2] - (3/2)(GM/r2)(J2)(3cos2θ - 1) Where θ is the colatitude (not to be confused with latitude) and J2 is the dynamic form factor for Earth, a constant measured to be 0.001082626. As a side note, you may notice that the formula does appear to take radius into account, since we use the two different radii below. But it doesn't use those radii values to calculate gravity; rather, it uses them to calculate mass distribution, from which the formula then calculates gravity. There are some pretty tricky derivations using calculus to get this formula that I haven't memorized, don't fully understand, would take an hour to copy down here, and are outside the scope of this topic anyways. I can provide them if you're really curious and/or suspicious that I'm making stuff up. But here are the calculations: For equatorial surface gravity: ge = [GM/re2] - (3/2)(GM/re2)(0.001082626)(3cos290 - 1) ge = 9.79844119644 m/s2 For polar surface gravity: gp = [GM/rp2] - (3/2)(GM/rp2)(0.001082626)(3cos20 - 1) gp = 9.74441180446 m/s2 Finding the difference, gp - ge = 9.74441180446 m/s2 - 9.79844119644 m/s2 = -0.05402939197 m/s2 Gravity is greater at the equator when we only take into account mass distribution. Let's add the two numbers we've found and see what happens. 0.06480230059 m/s2 + (-0.05402939197 m/s2) = 0.01077290861 m/s2 Gravity is larger at the poles by a small margin. The reason for this, if it's not clear from the above math, is that radius has a larger and inverse effect on surface gravity than mass does. It's not that your rearranged equation doesn't work; I just tried it using Mercury's data, and g matched up perfectly with the value that Google gives me. But when we talk about changing masses and radii, things get more complicated. The point I was trying to make with Jupiter and Saturn is that, in those cases, it is fundamentally impossible to change radius and mass without increasing average density due to the effect of pressure. This is what I meant by mass increasing faster than radius. You add mass, but the radius doesn't increase as much as you expect it to due to the exponentially increasing compressional effect, and the density thus increases. I think - and I admit I have no math to back this up, but it seems reasonable - that the opposite would be true for rocky planets. Solid materials should have enough resistance to pressure that radius can increase at an appropriately high rate relative to the addition of mass, causing a decrease in average density. This is the fundamental reason why your rearranged equation doesn't work in this case: the density term by definition cannot remain constant. In a case where mass increases faster than radius (exaggerated compressional effect; gas giants), it increases. In a case where radius increases faster than mass (negligible compressional effect; rocky planets), it decreases. But the polar versus equatorial Earth example is even better, because it's a rare case where density does stay constant. However, the only reason density stays constant is that we're not adding any mass or distance to the radius; we're just taking measurements at different points on the surface where those values happen to differ already. In response to fishers64: It's not that simple. Adding mass causes an additional compressional effect, which results in the radius not increasing as much as you would think, and the density correspondingly does increase. See the Jupiter and Saturn example. As for objects not exerting gravitational forces on themselves, they actually do. This is how objects with sufficiently high mass become spherical in space, and how things with sufficiently high mass and sufficiently low radius collapse into black holes. -Letagi

You're right that mass is a function of radius. As a planet gets bigger, more mass is added. I never ignored this. But you're not realizing that the density term in that equation is not always a constant. ToV hit the nail on the head, more succinctly than I could have probably, but I'll add a bit more detail. This is something I discussed a few pages back but it turned out not to be the correct idea at the time. Pressure inside a planet is enormous. The pressure at Earth's inner core is so great that the iron is solid, despite being at well over its melting point. Most of Saturn and Jupiter are not made of gas, but rather metallic hydrogen, due to the pressure at those depths. If we want to increase the radius of a planet, we have to add mass, as you say. Depending on the material, this can go two different ways: either we have to add mass faster than radius, or the radius can increase faster than mass; however, these two possibilities result from different mechanisms. I'll give you an example of each. Jupiter and Saturn are very close to each other in radius; Saturn's radius is about 85% that of Jupiter. However, Jupiter has more than three times Saturn's mass. This means, as we add more and more mass, that the radius increases relatively slowly. Very slowly, in fact. The effect of this is that Jupiter's surface gravity is 2.5 times greater than that of Saturn, despite having very similar radii. We can add mass to either planet all we want, and as you say, radius will increase correspondingly (or vice-versa); but due to pressure, the average density still changes. An example of the converse is Earth. Due to its rotation, Earth is flattened at the poles and elongated at the equator. This means that there's more mass distributed throughout Earth horizontally and less vertically. Since average density stays the same, then according to your formula, gravity should be stronger at the equator. The opposite is true: gravity is stronger at the poles. There's less mass under the poles, creating less gravity, but there's also less radius. And when we look at Newton's equations for gravity, we see radius squared in the denominator. Therefore, and as you see from this example, radius has a greater and opposite effect on gravity than mass. To sum up: the only way in which surface gravity can increase along with radius is if the density changes, as in the Jupiter and Saturn example. If average density stays the same, then radius is a more significant determining factor than mass with regards to surface gravity, as in the example of Earth's flattening, and serves to decrease gravity as radius increases. So yes, a planet with constant average density and increasing radius (if such a thing were possible, which it isn't; refer to Saturn and Jupiter) would indeed have decreasing surface gravity. Your equation doesn't work if density stays constant. If you need me to pull out more formulas I can; we just covered this a few weeks ago in my university geophysics course. -Letagi