New Size Scale Discussion

AisuKaiko wrote:

Anime-Junkie wrote:

What Aisu said, please.
(Americans are taught both systems, aren't they?)

Yes, or at least I was taught it. I don't see how anyone can get 12 inches in a foot, 5,280 feet in a mile, 16 ounces in a pound, but not multiples of ten. Hell, I still don't have volume units in Am.Standard memorized, but Liters are no problemo for me.

I'll be quite honest, I don't have any of the American standards memorized, save for feet. The metric system makes so much more sense to me and I find it frustrating that this country will never get with the program.

To Karbo, please list all measurements in metric from now on.

It's a learning thing. My school system most assuredly did not use the SI system, it is something I've had to come into. Going to college and finding out that most people don't realize that slug is a unit of measurement, or that most people can't differentiate between a cup and pint and gallon and quart was a unique experience. In college though most people used a combination of English and SI, it wasn't until going around the world on deployment and being exposed to nothing but metrics - all very much culture shocks.


Fortunately, in the nuclear field we created our own measurements so I don't generally have to work on a macro scale. When the units you typically deal with are in terms of p, eV, and barns things are rather simplistic. Then again, most people in America have a sort of oddball conglomeration of unit measurement systems. Whatever they typically feel comfortable with, is how it usually seems to go. On top of that most can't even differentiate - best example, temperature. If I asked a random sampling of people, I would get told that C is the metric equivalent of F, but it is not - K is. C is a completely isolated scale developed for a specific purpose that has since been grossly expanded upon.


That giantess calculator is handy in that it shows comparison measurements, but it is also a problem given that it does not allow you to input measurements with SI, so people that don't use English would have a more pronounced time using it as they essentially have to guess/backwork things. One of the reasons I prefer to always do math myself, but it is nice to have everything already calculated for you.


Additionally, I found a more uptodate version with extra specifications in it - I couldn't find it hosted anywhere so I'm putting it up on my site for use unless someone else can find it elsewhere. Click here to use it. Of course, it goes without saying that I did not make this, and I uploaded it without modifying the contents of the file.

I don't see much difference with that version.

Sean Okotami wrote:

I don't see much difference with that version.

One word - Movement. Otherwise, the difference is all backstage - changes to some of the algorithms and such.

For those that only want a simple conversion calcultor, here is my favorite site to use. It also allows for SI inputs.

I'll second the suggestion to add, if possible, at least one of each or a spread of different species within that picture if at all possible for this since each are structured quite a bit differently. As many others have, I just went by wiki measurements for each of the preds listed and picked a size around it for the heights of my characters (except Goro, he's freakin huge). Also I agree that the metric system would definitely be a plus to use for this heh, much simpler!

Sean Okotami wrote:

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As for the size of baby nagas and dridders and the like... I once wrote that Jissy, at birth, was small enough to be carried by a human. I now think that was something of a goof. I understand the rationale that nagas should lay very small eggs, so that they never have a truly swollen pregnant belly (which would be a hindrance in such a dangerous world), but on the other hand I do think they have breasts for a purpose, not just for decoration. Any species with breasts quite clearly breastfeed their young - which implies that they're big enough to suckle a nipple.

Part of that would also come with the size of the egg. I found it really weird that Nagas would make eggs so small it would be a fraction of the cloaca's size, or wherever a snake's egg come out.

The eggs would not be that small. Remember, most of an egg's internal space is yolk to nourish the baby, and fluids to cushion and support it. If a baby naga was around human-sized, the egg itself would easily be 4 inches (10.16cm) long, and probably slightly bigger than that, since a baby naga would need more room for its tail. In terms of relative size, a naga egg would be a decent bit larger than a chicken egg. it isn't like they're laying something the size of a marble or coin.

I still think that the breasts of egg-laying preds are not commonly used for feeding their young. The babies are too small at birth, and develop so much faster than other infants. They would be moving onto solid food almost immediately after birth. Milk's main purpose is to strengthen a baby's immune system and to provide nutrition when they cannot eat solid food. Baby nagas, dridders, mermaids, etc all get most of their pre solid food nutrition from the yolk in their eggs, and either the healing factor, or their eggs could help get their immune systems jump started.

I just think that naga breasts (along with those of a bunch of other species), are just holdovers from their humanoid halves. Its like how Dryads have breasts and vaginas eventhough they never use them. Those body parts are just something they inherit from the human half of their bodies, not something that is vital for them to have.

Well, I just watched a video, cause I couldn't find a proper image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWsrACgHNOE&feature=related That egg is pretty damn large is you compare it to the snake itself. I would take that for a 300 ft long snake, the egg would be quite a lot larger than just four inches. Also, some snakes give live births, so here's more food for thought.

Sean Okotami wrote:

Well, I just watched a video, cause I couldn't find a proper image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWsrACgHNOE&feature=related That egg is pretty damn large is you compare it to the snake itself. I would take that for a 300 ft long snake, the egg would be quite a lot larger than just four inches. Also, some snakes give live births, so here's more food for thought.

Snakes are long, then and don't have a human half on top. Since the reproductive organs are in the human part, that is what determines egg size and such. Keep in mind, the main advantage of egg-laying is that you don't have as crippling of a pregnancy. The eggs are still not tiny though. I mean, they'd be a good 4-6 inches long, and 2-3 inches across in relation to the predator. If you're a human, that egg is going to be 7ft long or more.

Yep, that's been speculated on for a while in Felarya. The general consensus has been that most nagas lay eggs, but some sub-species give birth to live young. That has its own set of pros and cons. The pregnancy is harsher on the mother, and the infant isn't as developed as one born from an egg. I would imagine live-birth nagas almost never abandon their children like the egg-laying ones do sometimes. This means that the child is cared for by its parents, and has a higher likelyhood of surviving to adulthood. Live-birth nagas probably only have one child at a time though, and take longer to reproduce than their egg-laying counterparts, which would help explain why they are still a minority.

My God, I'm astounded that I have to be the first one to bring up the Square-Cube Law. (If it's been brought up before, I just did a Ctrl+F search for cube, so I apologize if someone used different terms.)

It's a physical law I've brought up before, and if I remember correctly, we ended up creating some ramshackle explanation for how such giant creatures could exist in Felarya. But to explain, the law basically states that as volume is cubed, surface area is squared. You can sort of boil it down to "as mass cubes, strength squares". This creates serious problems with the idea of giant preds. Every animal has adapted to make best use of its size, and it only makes sense that there are no giant ants.

The main reason I bring this up is to call into question the validity of "giantess calculators", unless of course they actually take this into account (in which case I'm looking like an idiot), but unless said calculator mentions "her heart wouldn't be able to pump blood into her body and her bones would snap under her weight", I rest my case.

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Sean Okotami wrote:

Also, some snakes give live births, so here's more food for thought.

Sort of. Not in the same way as mammals. It's the difference between oviviparity and viviparity. The young still develop inside shelled eggs, just that the eggs hatch inside the mother.

rcs619 wrote:

I would imagine live-birth nagas almost never abandon their children like the egg-laying ones do sometimes.

Given that nagas are sapient beings with intelligence at approximately human levels, the idea of truly independent young is highly unlikely, half-reptile or no. Eggs don't determine whether a parent is active in the development of its offspring. In birds, a chicken is pretty much independent at birth, but that's because they're dumb bastards with little adaptability or intelligence which eat rocks and fallen seeds; whereas an eagle or hawk must care for its children and guide it in learning the many things it must know to be a great predator.

Human children who were separated from any human contact are feral and bestial, proving that for all our supposed sophistication, we can only know what we are taught. As an intelligent species, it should be extremely rare for a naga to abandon its young.

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My God, I'm astounded that I have to be the first one to bring up the Square-Cube Law. (If it's been brought up before, I just did a Ctrl+F search for cube, so I apologize if someone used different terms.)

The square-cube law gets brought up every now and then. The general consensus seems to be that there is something different in the way physics in Felarya treats the giant hybrids that makes them immune to the square-cube law, allowing them to remain quick, agile, and basically behave like a scaled up human.

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The main reason I bring this up is to call into question the validity of "giantess calculators", unless of course they actually take this into account (in which case I'm looking like an idiot), but unless said calculator mentions "her heart wouldn't be able to pump blood into her body and her bones would snap under her weight", I rest my case.

Giantess calculators were made by the giantess fetish community to help give authors and artists a better idea of how large giant people of various sizes would be. Its purely just for size referrence to help make visualizing stuff easier. The square-cube law gets brought up and debated all the time wthin said fetish community, and since people often don't have something as conveiniant as Felarya's wierd inter-dimensional nature, they have to come up with various ways to get around the square-cube law (usually magic, but it is often ignored completely).

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Human children who were separated from any human contact are feral and bestial, proving that for all our supposed sophistication, we can only know what we are taught. As an intelligent species, it should be extremely rare for a naga to abandon its young.

Intelligent or not, they are still animals and still not human. Some would rear their young, others are just going to lay their eggs and move on. That is likely the main reason Fairies are so numerous. There are a lot of them to begin with, they live in groups that support eachother, and they don't abandon thier children. Dryads are a bit of a special case, since they never actually meet their kids, but the network can help dryads to raise younger members of their species as a community.

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The square-cube law

Shhhh, we don't talk abut that.

There's not much point in bringing up the square-cube law in a fantasy setting of giants as the maximum land dwelling creature can only have a theoretical weight varying somewhere between 100~1000 metric tons according to known biological body plans. Seeing as for the most part the creatures of Felarya don't have highly abnormal body constructions (with reference to themselves), we can assume it would be impossible for any such organism to exist unless it is capable of localized gravitic manipulation. Seeing as anything greater than 43 m, 84 cm tall would violate this parameter (assuming a human-like physical structure that is magnified in size starting from an initial weight of 160 lbs), you don't even need the square-cube law. It is just another tool with which you can easily prove that we will never have to worry about waking up to find Crisis staring back at us.

Seeing as most of us like our giant characters however, we just handwave these examples of physics technicalities by either ignoring them or coming up with whatever handy physics alteration explanation happens to hit us at the time. If we want to start bring real physics into this, by all means I can trounce just about everything of Felarya into nothingness starting with the technocrap of my own stories. Some openmindedness and science ambiguity is required for a fantasy setting.

Therefore, the point of the giantess calculator in this example is not to show that a giant could exist (because we know that it could not), but to show the requisite size a giant would need to be in order to carry out the actions shown in our particular universe (Felarya). Right now, humans are too large in scale with reference to listed heights of giant preds to be eaten as they are whole and alive. That is not to say the scale shown in the mangas or other drawings are incorrect - for the most part they fit well with the setting. So, as others have stated previously, this is not really about changing the size of the hybrids (they are already at the correct size), merely redefining the listed statistics to be appropriate for the ratios shown in the pictures.

Edit:
It should be noted that most people would find it difficult to swallow an object greater than 2" tall and 1" in diameter in reference to their own size without choking. Since a human is relatively 4" in length and 1" wide in scale to a giant, this is definitely pushing the upper limit of what we know to be permissible. I would say that this comes down to a hereditary condition where predators have the appropriate 'muscle training' to allow them to do this, which also allows for the more pronounced neck bulge when a human is swallowed.

Sword swallowers can do a similar thing with training, so I propose that our preds just have that as a natural instinct (though not to the same degree/threshold as a sword swallower - it is a rather extreme talent to put something like that into your body, and they aren't doing it for the longterm anyway) rather than a trained reaction.

Most of what I could find while trying to research this particular part (as I did not want to solve the scale problem only to be represented with a 'well now they can be put in the mouth, what about whether or not they could swallow them) was how large an object could pass through the human body, which is not really what we desired to know. I think we all assume that once a human is in the stomach it won't be passing through in a solid form to the intestines therefore we don't have issue with objects becoming 'stuck' there. Some extrapolation and finagling of the numbers were in order, but for the most part I do not see it as impossible.
:End Edit

As for weights and relative strengths, I would not even bother including such a thing - you'd be hardpressed trying to figure out a realistic weight anyway, particularly for creatures like dridders, miaxi, etc - as for how much an object can lift, this too is going to be limited by the figments of your imagination and what would be considered 'realistic' for the universe.



As to eggs again, I am not in disagreement with them being smaller initially, as in when they are laid. A giant hybrid that lays one to four eggs the size of their own palm or smaller to say at least the size of a pinky finger would not account for a great deal of swelling in the mother (completely nonexistent in the pinky ratio). The benefit of not having a swollen belly and all that prior to. However, I disagree with the size of any giant-hybrid hatchling being smaller than an appropriate fraction of their mother's body so as to allow them to be breastfed.

In my thought processes a dridder egg is laid with a softer shell that expands as necessary (egg never develops a hardened shell). Protection is provided by the mother as well as by the silk cocoon she wraps around the eggs (egg size however is still roughly the same as other hybrids). Once the material within the egg for growth and development has been consumed hatching occurs. They can literally eat their way out, consuming their mother's silk cocoon. I see dridders still being born with a soft shell (just like a spiderling) and the first initial growth would occur rapidly as their exoskeleton expands and hardens to be the appropriate size for further nurturing by the mother (ie breastfeeding).

For other egglaying hybrids, have the eggs initially with a softer shell that expands and solidifies as the egg matures and the material inside is consumed for the growth of the child, and once the material has been consumed hatching occurs (most probably aided by the mother, otherwise our hybrids are going to have a near-impossible task of getting out of their hardened egg shell without an egg tooth/beak/etc). Nagas and harpies are a bit more complicated in what the initial hatched state would be like, and I haven't honestly given thought to elaborate further than this in their cases.

Even if the breasts were a leftover of an unnaturally created human anatomy conflagration, after all the years these critters have existed in Felarya they would have lost those breasts due to the evolutionary non-requirement. Terra illustrated this, quite literally (though there are ways around such a thing as I have read in other stories, not at this time relevant to the discussion), not to long ago (not with the breasts, exactly, but close enough). Mammillian breasts are a big disadvantage for a creature such as them.

Truthfully, I simply disagree with them having such items and not using them for the task with which they were designed. This has devolved into a difference of opinion with relation to the size of young at this point, as I feel the young should be large enough to breastfeed regardless of egg or live birth and you obviously do not.

My take on Square-Cube Law: It's not Real Life, so nobody cares. As for bones and all that, can we just go with Required Secondary Power and say that yes, their anatomy is strong enough to support all of that. Also, if a man is shrunken to the size of a ant, how can it leap farther and pick up bigger stuff? I'm aware that I know nothing of Square-Cube Law, but shouldn't smaller muscles also mean that it can't pick up as heavy object as in normal size?

As for breasts, I would like to see them used for breast feeding, but what purpose would it have on Dryads other than fanservice? I would say that this is where tree sap is stored.

Sean Okotami wrote:

My take on Square-Cube Law: It's not Real Life, so nobody cares. As for bones and all that, can we just go with Required Secondary Power and say that yes, their anatomy is strong enough to support all of that. Also, if a man is shrunken to the size of a ant, how can it leap farther and pick up bigger stuff? I'm aware that I know nothing of Square-Cube Law, but shouldn't smaller muscles also mean that it can't pick up as heavy object as in normal size?

Just as the law disproves giants, it also shows us that the tiny races as we perceive them could also not exist - starting with the fact that their metabolic rates would be insane without some sort of conditioning similar to a hummingbirds. Not to mention their strength for the given body composition would be much greater making them 'superhuman' compared to a human. The law works both ways. That's why its best to leave it off - all it does is prove you can't have the things you're imagining. Science - crushing hopes and dreams since time immoreal.

Sean Okotami wrote:

As for breasts, I would like to see them used for breast feeding, but what purpose would it have on Dryads other than fanservice? I would say that this is where tree sap is stored.

The reproductive facilities of dryads are one thing that remains relatively untouched. I've put forth some ideas based on actual science for how it occurs, but even with my scenarios you are correct in that dryads would have no use for breasts. Probably something like my Ichneumons/Eurhyssa is required here, where the breasts, while appearing to be the same as a human's, do not serve to produce a nutritional milk for their young but instead provide some other useful purpose to themselves.

The breasts of Cactus Dryads store water, and those of Maple Dryads (original idea; do not steal) store maple sap.


But to Square-Cube Law, all I concise is this: Mass is Cubed, the rest is Squared. When scaled up, a creature's mass eventually surpasses its strength and everthing else, and when scaled down, its mass eventually becomes too small for its anatomy to properly support, or something like that. I'm aware it's more complex than that, but I prefer being given the low-down for non-scientists.

Hold on, something came to mind: Square-Cube Law has been stated so far about being scaled up and scaled down, as mass and surface don't scale evenly. What if the giants of Felarya where simply born giant, instead of creatures that had been enlarged/reduced? Wouldn't that trump Square-Cube Law if they were born with a body already made for their giant size, and if you'd shrink them to human size without the help of magic, they'd suffer all the problems from having your mass be too small?

Sean Okotami wrote:

Hold on, something came to mind: Square-Cube Law has been stated so far about being scaled up and scaled down, as mass and surface don't scale evenly. What if the giants of Felarya where simply born giant, instead of creatures that had been enlarged/reduced? Wouldn't that trump Square-Cube Law if they were born with a body already made for their giant size, and if you'd shrink them to human size without the help of magic, they'd suffer all the problems from having your mass be too small?

No. There's still the problem that bones couldn't support that much mass or muscles move the required volume of blood, air, etc. There's a reason why blue whales live in the ocean, and elephants are slow-moving behemoths with four tree-trunk legs. To quote Haldane's essay: "Let us take the most obvious of possible cases, and consider a giant man sixty feet high ... These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone." The Law is about proportions and cross-sections especially. So yes, larger animals do have bodies that can support their weight, but do you see an elephant jumping like a flea or grasshopper? Or even a human? If you look at the legs of either of them, those of jumping insects are thin and tiny compared to their bodies, with much less proportional muscle than ours or especially an elephant's. And yet, they can propel their tiny bodies so much further. As an animal gets bigger, it becomes less agile no matter how much muscle it packs on. The "crucial point" is when adding more bone or muscle just contributes more mass than strength.

Now, when I brought it up in another discussion, I proposed that it was in fact the Felaryan soil that made giants possible. The life-extending properties also serve to strengthen cells and cellular structures, and it scales up according to the number of cells, because if it granted the same bonuses to all creatures and juuuust counteracted the Square-Cube Law for giants, then humans would all be Superman. It also explains why the immune system of humans and preds is boosted, but single-celled infectious bacteria aren't.

So if I had an explanation, why did I bring up the Law as a concern? Simply because I think it needs to be taken into account, whether or not it can be explained away. Ignoring a physical law is a grave mistake, in my opinion. After all, if a writer ignored something like gravity, would he not be criticized? Regardless of how well-known each physical law is, they all have the same level of impact on our lives and especially on the world in which we live, and reality itself couldn't exist without every single one.

ZionAtriedes wrote:

So if I had an explanation, why did I bring up the Law as a concern? Simply because I think it needs to be taken into account, whether or not it can be explained away. Ignoring a physical law is a grave mistake, in my opinion. After all, if a writer ignored something like gravity, would he not be criticized? Regardless of how well-known each physical law is, they all have the same level of impact on our lives and especially on the world in which we live, and reality itself couldn't exist without every single one.

Yeah, I didn't want to derail, but since you brought it up...

You do realize that Miragia Forest violates about 10 physical laws every minute, yes?

How about your example, gravity? The 'Law' of Gravity is an accurate low energy approximation that works for common cases but is inaccurate in relativity - you know, like time dilation and travel theory? Oh, but the Akaptor Desert doesn't violate any of that...

Carnot, Coulomb, Faraday and Gauss' Laws are totally not broken by magic. Oh, and Le Chatelier's isn't either.

Kepler's Laws... not even going to try with this one.


I'm sure I could come up with more if I really thought about it, but that is besides the point. This thread isn't about physics parameters because anyone with a science background knows that Felarya breaks at least a quarter of any grouping of physical laws you can envision. This thread is about scale ratios and how they currently don't match up, nothing more, nothing less - so no, I don't really feel that their is a need to include a discussion on the laws and the reasons for how they might be circumvented. At least, not in this thread.

And really, further use of scale determination is on hold until we see Karbo's derivation of it.

Also, I might note that with the application of magic many authors can and will ignore gravity - they usually call it levitation. Oh how we love our hand-waves.

rcs619 wrote:

The eggs would not be that small. Remember, most of an egg's internal space is yolk to nourish the baby, and fluids to cushion and support it. If a baby naga was around human-sized, the egg itself would easily be 4 inches (10.16cm) long, and probably slightly bigger than that, since a baby naga would need more room for its tail. In terms of relative size, a naga egg would be a decent bit larger than a chicken egg. it isn't like they're laying something the size of a marble or coin.

If you don't mind me asking, where did you get the dimension for such here? I've got chicken egg sizes ranging anywhere from barely two inches for the largest point, to three and a half (and your four inch number). The number used, well, changes stuff. The smallest one, about 2.25 inches (the one I'm using, as a solid 2 seems a bit inexact), would put a Naga's egg at about 3'9" in height, 2'11" width. Adding merely one more foot "average" radius is still a major volume increase, and could still - readily - be overkill for a Naga-egg when you compare how much of an egg a chick can take upon hatching.

On the other end, four inches puts the egg at a little over six and a half feet (6'8", give-or-take a fraction of an inch) for its largest dimension if made chicken-sized, moreso if you try to apply extra volume (I am a bit against that, though, as it's not like you're applying a Human-Egg but instead a Chicken-Egg). Even so, extra volume could easily make a Naga's Egg taller than even a tall Elf.

The differences are somewhat obvious: The former is only slightly more than half the size (by five inches!) of the larger number. One makes them small enough that two humans, if careful, could lift the egg and run with it (well, walk with it: You don't pick something up that big, grip it hard, and run - that leads to a broken egg, and whatever caused you to run either staying behind to eat the food [if Fauna] to chasing you screaming bloody murder [if a Giant Predator]). The other, meanwhile, would practically require a moving truck to safely get it from point to point (well, actually, a truck bed could probably hold it, but it'd be very unsafe without a helluva lot of modifications).

rcs619 wrote:

The square-cube law gets brought up every now and then. The general consensus seems to be that there is something different in the way physics in Felarya treats the giant hybrids that makes them immune to the square-cube law, allowing them to remain quick, agile, and basically behave like a scaled up human.

As a note, the scaling is not perfectly linear. Things like mass, general proportions, volume, those are perfect scales. Speed is often moderately to highly inferior (which makes sense, considering a Dridder otherwise might possibly run upward of 2250 miles an hour / a kilometer a second when going full-sprint, and at that speed its feet would impact the ground so hard you'd be looking at craters under each leg), and reaction times are practically unchanged beyond minor boosts (Conscious reaction times, at least - unconscious aren't scaled linearly either, but are much more boosted).

As for the Square-Cube law's main importance, it mostly comes into effect when trying to find a Giant Predator's mass or the like. It's not always needed (A surprisingly large amount of things scaled for the Giant Predators), but it comes in handy now-and-then to know the approximate size of a Giant Predator to know just what they can and cannot do (Ex: A Giant Predator is not going to be slithering across foot-thick ice covering a river-top: If people could run across a one foot thick surface if ice along a river, the Giant Predator would be stuck around the bank / however deep it wants to wade in and saturate in freezing waters). For general character creation, unless going for something absurd (EX: A Giant made entirely out of some metal), you don't need to look up mass and the like for a Giant Predator on the reason you gave (General consensus means that Giant Predators don't collapse in on themselves).

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Also, I might note that with the application of magic many authors can and will ignore gravity - they usually call it levitation. Oh how we love our hand-waves.

Haven't actually seen levitation used before in a Felarya story. It just seems like a bad idea, lol. I mean, you're making yourself even easier to see and be grabbed by something giant.

It really depends what method you use. I don't believe it is possible to manipulate gravity through magic, one, because it is just such a powerful force that one mage trying to bend it is nearly impossible...and two, the last thing we need is someone going around black hole'ing away their problems XD Could a wind mage propel themselves short distances by using a series of "wind jumps", probably. Geomancers, Cryomancers, and maybe even Hydromancers could probably even float around on a piece of earth/ice/water they are controlling with their magic. It isn't like they'd be able to zip around at high-speeds though. I imagine all those possibilites take quite a bit of skill and focus to do, and if you mess up, you're going to fall to your death.

Just keep in mind, it isn't like magic is without rules. There are limits based on the size/skill of the caster and the environment around them. It isn't like you can just create something out of thin air. All magic does is bend and manipulate the world around the caster.

aethernavale wrote:

How about your example, gravity? The 'Law' of Gravity is an accurate low energy approximation that works for common cases but is inaccurate in relativity - you know, like time dilation and travel theory? Oh, but the Akaptor Desert doesn't violate any of that... Carnot, Coulomb, Faraday and Gauss' Laws are totally not broken by magic. Oh, and Le Chatelier's isn't either. Kepler's Laws... not even going to try with this one.

I'm sure I could come up with more if I really thought about it, but that is besides the point. This thread isn't about physics parameters because anyone with a science background knows that Felarya breaks at least a quarter of any grouping of physical laws you can envision. This thread is about scale ratios and how they currently don't match up, nothing more, nothing less - so no, I don't really feel that their is a need to include a discussion on the laws and the reasons for how they might be circumvented. At least, not in this thread.

Also, I might note that with the application of magic many authors can and will ignore gravity - they usually call it levitation. Oh how we love our hand-waves.

That's what pseudoscience is for. I'm not saying things have to be perfect. There's a difference between making a scientifically inaccurate but somewhat-plausible explanation for something fantastic, and simply ignoring laws of physics. I'm pretty sure that discussions about said explanations aren't at all uncommon on this forum. Many of us prefer that magic be handled in a rational manner and conform to as many physical laws as possible, although that opinion isn't shared by all. In any case, your arguments of magic violating Carnot, Coulomb, Faraday, Gauss, and Le Chatelier may just depend upon whose view of it you're going with. Karbo's never really said which side he favored. (Also, how is Carnot's Law violated? The others I can see, but Carnot I cannot.)

Your example, levitation, isn't always a result of ignoring gravity. The user could just be producing enough telekinetic force to lift their body from the ground. Is telekinesis real? No*, but you can apply laws and rules and make it at least sound good. For instance, my explanation involving the soil. Sure, it can be pulled apart bit by bit. But did I blatantly say "fuck physics" and go on my merry little way? Ah-nope.

*(Telekinesis has neither been proven nor disproven, and if history has taught us anything about science, it's to be skeptical but never rule anything out entirely.)

aethernavale wrote:

The 'Law' of Gravity is an accurate low energy approximation that works for common cases but is inaccurate in relativity

Did I say anything about a concrete law of gravity? No, I don't think I did, because the only thing that's known is the mathematics behind the gravitational pull, not the cause for gravity. I favor a version of the Minkowski spacetime model that coincides with Einstein's general theory of relativity when explaining the nature of Felarya's "unique" dimensions (and yes, I'm one of the few people here who is a bit of a stickler about people using the term "dimension" in the incorrect manner that's so common in science fiction).

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Edit:
It should be noted that most people would find it difficult to swallow an object greater than 2" tall and 1" in diameter in reference to their own size without choking. Since a human is relatively 4" in length and 1" wide in scale to a giant, this is definitely pushing the upper limit of what we know to be permissible. I would say that this comes down to a hereditary condition where predators have the appropriate 'muscle training' to allow them to do this, which also allows for the more pronounced neck bulge when a human is swallowed.

Sword swallowers can do a similar thing with training, so I propose that our preds just have that as a natural instinct (though not to the same degree/threshold as a sword swallower - it is a rather extreme talent to put something like that into your body, and they aren't doing it for the longterm anyway) rather than a trained reaction.

Most of what I could find while trying to research this particular part (as I did not want to solve the scale problem only to be represented with a 'well now they can be put in the mouth, what about whether or not they could swallow them) was how large an object could pass through the human body, which is not really what we desired to know. I think we all assume that once a human is in the stomach it won't be passing through in a solid form to the intestines therefore we don't have issue with objects becoming 'stuck' there. Some extrapolation and finagling of the numbers were in order, but for the most part I do not see it as impossible.
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I agree with this.

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Even if the breasts were a leftover of an unnaturally created human anatomy conflagration, after all the years these critters have existed in Felarya they would have lost those breasts due to the evolutionary non-requirement.

So, why do humans still have an appendix? What about those little parts in the eye that were left over from the times of reptiles. (The transparent second eyelid that some reptiles have? Humans have a very-very-very underdeveloped version that serves no purpose. It's just there.)

The breasts however, they still server some purpose, as Vivian frequently demonstrates. Remember that there are many species that have features soley for the purpose of attracting mates.

rcs619 wrote:

I don't believe it is possible to manipulate gravity through magic, one, because it is just such a powerful force that one mage trying to bend it is nearly impossible...

Are you sure ?

All I see here are people *coughZioncough* who can't be satisfied with a simple answer, and that makes me a sad panda. Felarya is NOT REAL, so please stop taking the giant part so seriously. Giants have been in so many fantasy verses, so why aren't you bitching those too? Honestly, I'm agreeing with Cliff, why can't we just take it simple? Is it really important that we know how the giant can move? Is it vital to a writer to explain in minute detail how they can live with such size? I don't think so. They're giant and it stops there, there's no need to explain how they are big since it's not going to affect them in any manner whatsoever. By the end of the day, they'll still be giant, except we'd have wasted our time coming up with a convoluted fake science to explain something the readers won't care about.

Sean Okotami wrote:

All I see here are people *coughZioncough* who can't be satisfied with a simple answer, and that makes me a sad panda. Felarya is NOT REAL, so please stop taking the giant part so seriously. Giants have been in so many fantasy verses, so why aren't you bitching those too? Honestly, I'm agreeing with Cliff, why can't we just take it simple? Is it really important that we know how the giant can move? Is it vital to a writer to explain in minute detail how they can live with such size? I don't think so. They're giant and it stops there, there's no need to explain how they are big since it's not going to affect them in any manner whatsoever. By the end of the day, they'll still be giant, except we'd have wasted our time coming up with a convoluted fake science to explain something the readers won't care about.

The problem is some writers will exaggerate on their abilities and justify it by the fact they are "giant" or it's "magic" but it's another debate. If I agree with you the explanation need to be simple but it has to be complete but not shallow. I follow this thread and I think people start to speculate too much because they didn't wait Karbo's draw his size chart which will give us a better support to debate. I don't ask to end the debate but to put it on pause, the time the new size chart is done.