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Good old square-cube law. The classic method of multiplying your weight by eight and only doubling sizes. Clothing stores and doctors hate him. Never get a gastric bypass again with this one simple trick.
In all seriousness, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle regarding a calc recently with this, and I'd like to set a standard up.
As an overview, there's a huge birdlike creature. People calculated it's mass through square cube, I said that's bad, a circular argument ensued, so we got this. Why did I say it's bad?
A bird is reliant on its surface area to mass ratio to fly. They have hollow bones, their wings provide a lot of surface area, and they have strong chest muscles for their thrust. As we know from square-cube, your mass ramps up way faster than your surface area does. These birds should quickly lose their ability to fly, but don't. Instead, they function as normal, just upscaled a bunch. Because of this, I made the judgement that the birds are clearly not following the square-cube law, and people should not make calculations based around square-cube to get their mass. It makes absolutely no sense to me to unironically say "Yes, I agree this principle is violated and therefore not in effect in this scenario. To get an AP value, I will take this principle I just agreed does not apply here and calculate as though it does apply." That is the most direct contradiction possible. Square cube just shouldn't be defaulted to with birds, because they'd all have this issue.
Now, as for some counters that were given:
Enhanced strength should allow for the birds to fly despite their greater mass, and we already assume enhanced statistics for these characters due to surviving their own mass.
It's true that if you were strong enough you could just generate a massive amount of thrust per flap to stay in the air, but that would result in a much different style of flight than what's shown. The specific example that lead to this thread has the birds gliding. They're not even flapping to stay flying, that does not work. It is still a contradiction of square cube to not depict them flying in a way that would actually work.
We don't account for this elsewhere.
I'd like a source on that. Biology was brought up as an issue, but that can also be worked around with super stats. This can't really be. Even if it does turn out that Square-Cube is just generally not possible to use uncontradicted, shouldn't we just not use it in a place we know it's wrong as opposed to inventing literal falsehoods to support ratings?
This is just a suspension of disbelief thing, fiction has giant flyers all the time.
This one is just a misunderstanding of my argument. I'm not criticizing the example of giant flyers on a plot level, that would be needlessly pedantic and not really of note to the actual quality of a product itself. I'm simply stating we should acknowledge that this is a commonly ignored part of fiction, and as such we shouldn't be calculating shit as though it can be constantly assumed to apply. For an appeal to site policy:
The tldr to all this is to nerf square cube
In all seriousness, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle regarding a calc recently with this, and I'd like to set a standard up.
As an overview, there's a huge birdlike creature. People calculated it's mass through square cube, I said that's bad, a circular argument ensued, so we got this. Why did I say it's bad?
A bird is reliant on its surface area to mass ratio to fly. They have hollow bones, their wings provide a lot of surface area, and they have strong chest muscles for their thrust. As we know from square-cube, your mass ramps up way faster than your surface area does. These birds should quickly lose their ability to fly, but don't. Instead, they function as normal, just upscaled a bunch. Because of this, I made the judgement that the birds are clearly not following the square-cube law, and people should not make calculations based around square-cube to get their mass. It makes absolutely no sense to me to unironically say "Yes, I agree this principle is violated and therefore not in effect in this scenario. To get an AP value, I will take this principle I just agreed does not apply here and calculate as though it does apply." That is the most direct contradiction possible. Square cube just shouldn't be defaulted to with birds, because they'd all have this issue.
Now, as for some counters that were given:
Enhanced strength should allow for the birds to fly despite their greater mass, and we already assume enhanced statistics for these characters due to surviving their own mass.
It's true that if you were strong enough you could just generate a massive amount of thrust per flap to stay in the air, but that would result in a much different style of flight than what's shown. The specific example that lead to this thread has the birds gliding. They're not even flapping to stay flying, that does not work. It is still a contradiction of square cube to not depict them flying in a way that would actually work.
We don't account for this elsewhere.
I'd like a source on that. Biology was brought up as an issue, but that can also be worked around with super stats. This can't really be. Even if it does turn out that Square-Cube is just generally not possible to use uncontradicted, shouldn't we just not use it in a place we know it's wrong as opposed to inventing literal falsehoods to support ratings?
This is just a suspension of disbelief thing, fiction has giant flyers all the time.
This one is just a misunderstanding of my argument. I'm not criticizing the example of giant flyers on a plot level, that would be needlessly pedantic and not really of note to the actual quality of a product itself. I'm simply stating we should acknowledge that this is a commonly ignored part of fiction, and as such we shouldn't be calculating shit as though it can be constantly assumed to apply. For an appeal to site policy:
- We aren't allowed to calc stack, but calc stacking would be totally fine if we could assume physics were consistent. It's totally necessary for the real world, once you can control for margins of error.
- We aren't allowed to get speed through AP or vice versa, because fiction often separates these in unrealistic fashion. A punch going too slow to be a certain tier might just be a certain tier, so we can't make calcs with the assumption that the physics behind this are in place.
- We separate lifting strength from the general tier. There is a way to convert this pretty well, though it'll vary on the person, but it's complicated and not supported by fiction so we don't.
- We don't calculate FTL KE despite verses having FTL characters attack with KE. Self explanatory.
- We can't derive mass from an impact shown at a given speed, because again, lolinconsistentfiction.
- With certain shows with bad art like Steven Universe, we can't even assume characters are of a consistent size between scenes, because they often just aren't and get incredibly disproportionate. This contradicts how things don't just randomly shift sizes in the real world, so with these verses we don't assume dudes sizes will be consistent.
The tldr to all this is to nerf square cube
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