Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale/No Sense of Mass: Difference between revisions

 

 

* This is fairly common in [[Marvel Comics]]. Marvel measures its characters' [[Super Strength]] based on how many tons they can lift. The problem is most people at Marvel apparently don't know how many tons a given object weighs or how much space a set number of tons of a given material will take up. Even more confusingly, Marvel's strength tiers tend to end at 100+ tons, meaning 100 tons and any number above that.

** One image from Marvel Team-Up was fairly infamous in its time, even receiving a massive splash page and a ''really'' long apology from the editors in their 'No-Prize' one-shot dedicated to pointing out their own errors that readers caught. The image? Hercules, of the Avengers, towing ''the Island of Manhattan'' through the Atlantic, bringing it back into the Harbor, by means of a gigantic chain wound about himself - thus not only stating that Hercules is capable of pulling ''Manhattan'', BUT ALSO that Manhattan '''floats'''. Oh, if this wasn't ridiculous enough, he's pulling it back ''the wrong way around'', so that Uptown is now Downtown and the Battery is the northmost point of the island. [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_O4ZzhRdo84M/TIHO5JqzyEI/AAAAAAAABxQ/AuKC51FJBb4/s1600/10-hercules.jpg This happened.]

* ''[[Alternity]] Warships'' by Richard Baker, while generally is well done (especially considering the mission to quantify an existing setting made before introduction of an uniform approach), got problems when trying to connect ship sizes with real-world units. Cargo Hold: 100 m³ (or about 3 standard cargo containers) per 3 hull points; Extra stores (freezer): 1 ton of food per 1 hull point... doesn't look very space-efficient? And now let's look at the ships themselves. See comparison with sea ships [http://www.alternityrpg.net/onlineforums/index.php?act=ST&f=9&t=8546&st=0 on the forum]. In real-world, Ultra-Large Crude Carrier that hauls about 500,000 m³ of crude oil, the biggest ocean-going container ship = 15,000 TEU capacity * 39 m³/TEU = 585000 m³. The largest civilian hulls in Alternity are Super-freighter and Colony Transport. "Super-freighter" is 3600 hullpoints = 360,000 m³ total, and "Tanker" is about 1/4 of that. These are supposed to be the largest interstellar hauls? Colony Transport (defined as delivering [[City in a Bottle|a whole self-sufficient colony - factories, houses and people]]) is 5400 hullpoints, i.e. replacing everything inside with one big cargo hold gives 540,000 m³ <ref> = 54m*100m*100 m, the size of a building with square base the length of a football field, and about 18 stories high</ref> is comparable to huge seaships, but still falls many orders of magnitude short of a ''town''. Hull points are "sheer size" allotted for ''everything'' - holds, crew quarters, engines, propellant tanks, armor... and the hull's own volume is considered negligible, as hangars for smaller ships carry 1:1 worth of their hullpoints.

 

* ''[[Super Mario Galaxy]]'' is very confused as to what constitutes a planet or a galaxy. For example: the smallest "planets" are maybe thirty feet in all directions, and the biggest are smaller than the Earth's moon. Meanwhile, "galaxies" are simply clusters of these "planets" or sometimes just one relatively big "planet," with no stars to speak of. Unless you count the abundant tiny black holes. It can be chalked up to [[Rule of Fun]], though, the setting running on cartoon physics.

** Though the actual reason is that in Japanese, the same word is used to refer to planets, asteroids, galaxies, etc., the real confusion being why that was kept in the translation.

 

 

* In ''[[Homestuck]]'', there are a couple examples. A fireball wrapping ''around'' the planet instead of simply blowing a hole in the crust, a star {{spoiler|twice the size of the universe, yet when a character flies next to it they are nowhere near dwarfed by that sheer size; they also plan to blow it up with something the size of a building that can eradicate something comparable to a solar system}}, and a few others. It's justified perhaps, via [[Functional Magic]].