If you try to apply Earth’s formula to that atmosphere, you get absurdities (like the OP sea level air density becoming 5e5231 kg/m^3). This is evidence that Earth’s equations don’t scale, not that the clouds don’t exist.
When did I say anything about applying the Earth's formula to this?
And you're acting like absurdities aren't introduced by accepting this method anyway; you said here:
You can't take real-world breathing difficulty at 7 km and apply it directly to a setting where the observable atmospheric ceiling is many orders of magnitude larger. The comparison is simply invalid.
But I'm not taking just the real-world breathing difficulty issues into account here, but the fact that in the manga itself they tell us that the air is noticeably thinner only 7 km up above sea level. If the rate of density progression was so long that you have to go up 57000 kilometers just to get to half of the atmospheric density, then the effects at just 7 km high would not be noticeable. This proportional method doesn't actually solve this issue from what I can see.
The angsize reflects what Oda drew.
To an extent; Oda didn't provide us official sizes for the country itself. We extrapolate that based on the stated size of the river. That doesn't mean it can't produce results that are inconsistent with what the scene is actually showing.
For example, if we use
this panel from the same page:
Height of Alabasta = 319 px = 7955 km
Panel height = 490 px
2atan(tan(35deg) * (319/490)) = 0.855415254 rad = 49.011683785433 degrees
Giving us a height of
8725.5 kilometers above the ground.
What seagull is flying around 8725.5 kilometers above sea level? The highest altitude for bird's flight IRL is 11,300 metres.
If we treat that value of 114 million meters as the distance that the rain is actually falling in that scene, even with the highest speed of rainfall at 10 meters per second that'd mean that it would take the rain
131 days to fall that distance.
It seems easier for me to accept that Oda took artistic liberties in the scene, rather than intending to portray the rain as
literally falling over a hundred million meters in a short span of time.
The feat uses a standard accepted method used in the wiki.
Angsizing being an accepted method is not the same as all angsize calcs being equally valid. We can see this easy enough in cases where people try to angsize astronomic bodies visible from Earth like the Moon in many panels, or the Sun, and get distances that make zero sense whatsoever.
You can't dismiss or ignore a calced result because it has inconvenient implications for you. If what we see yields a massive atmosphere, then the atmosphere is massive until disproven.
It's got nothing to do with it being inconvenient for me. It's about producing results that are inconsistent with the setting.
If the height were inconsistent with the world building, we would have contradictory panels, but we don’t.
Contradictory panels like what? We've only seen one character actually leave the atmosphere so far and we didn't get a good look at him doing it. There are no
supporting panels for it either.
vsbattles.fandom.com
I've already explained the situation and gave 2 potential assumptions in the blog. This was previous thread on this topic if someone's interested.
