Naga snake/human ratio

Something that bothers me a bit about Nagas. Some people give them their heights when they are standing upward, but for Sea varieties, what would it be since they can't stand up? I don't get how 178' in length for exemple would equal in height. Is there a proportion between the snake part and the body part? Like, I know the snake part is longer, but is it twice the human part? Is it 1.5 time? I don't know, its not self explanatory. Furthermore, there's also a part of the snake half included when it stands upright, but what's its proportion compared to the totality of the tail? Is it 10%? I have no fucking clue, and the wiki doesn't explain either. I really need to know, cuz I sometime confuse high lenght for colossal size compared to the average predator found, and vice versa.

Yeah, this question really is confusing as well. I often do not know how much of their tail a naga is using when they stand upright.

I even made a full ranting about it, and you may recognize the style.

http://seanokotami.deviantart.com/art/Ranting-About-Nagas-81796185

In my opinion, twice than the human part is a bit short (I prefer them long ), for the human part would be just the torso, and if they want to slither upright, they'd need a reasonable length of tail to support them. Also their height is variable depending on the length, so they can effectively choose their height, for example rearing up to appear intimidating.
Edit: I'm guessing the upright ratio would be a maximum of 7/16 or about 45% to maintain balance, while aprox. 10% would give a height more or less proportionate to a human.

P.S. Imperial units confuse me. Does the apostrophe( ' ) mean foot?

observer88 wrote:

In my opinion, twice than the human part is a bit short (I prefer them long ), for the human part would be just the torso, and if they want to slither upright, they'd need a reasonable length of tail to support them. Also their height is variable depending on the length, so they can effectively choose their height, for example rearing up to appear intimidating.

P.S. Imperial units confuse me. Does the apostrophe( ' ) mean foot?

Again, that's the problem, they have no real set height, like a human can stand on its toes to slightly increase its height. But in the case of a naga, what is the minimal proportion of the tail needed to stand upright, like how a human stands up, heels touching the floor.

Note that I edited my previous post. Again, they'd probably use 10 to 45% of their snake part to stand upright. I've used my own (relatively crude) drawing of a naga as a reference.

Well, from the wiki the proportions appear to be 3:1 For every three feet of Naga's full length, they "stand" one foot without effort.

So a 6 ft "tall" naga would be 18 ft from tail to head.

Also, roughly half of a naga's standing height is in its tail. so that same 6 ft naga would have 21 ft of serpentine length and 3 ft of human torso length.

Of course, this is assuming the standard Felaryan forest naga. From what I can tell, though, they have proportions such that the tail is the minimum proportion needed to sit in a coil or effectively climb trees. This is because it's pretty clear that at least the stomach is in the same place where a human's would be, so many of the organs would be similarly scaled in order for that sized stomach to support them. Approaching a 4:1 ratio would be overly taxing on such a metabolism, resulting in a constantly tired and hungry naga. Approaching a 2:1 ratio would be awkward for standing, and would be too stubby to wrap around more than one branch (also would look pretty goofy).

Naga breeds that have their major organs in the serpentine portion rather than in the humanoid torso can have much larger proportions. I don't know where a Sea naga fits into that.

If the question had more to do with how one records or relays the proportions of a naga, the length and standing height still work. With the naga having the noted total length and the torso being the size of a human that would stand at the noted height, regardless of weather or not the naga actually has a habit of standing.

I think we should wait for Karbo, or Zoekin to help us clear that up.

Sean Okotami wrote:

I think we should wait for Karbo, or Zoekin to help us clear that up.

Oof, I guess I'm not expert enough. >_<;;

Well, I'm pretty clueless, they should have a short explanation rather than a long one. Besides, according to wikipedia, the stomch is very, very small when empty. But it expands when food is coming, not to the point where you have a bloated belly yet, but still. So the stomach wouldn't be too much of a bother.

Sean Okotami wrote:

Well, I'm pretty clueless, they should have a short explanation rather than a long one. Besides, according to wikipedia, the stomch is very, very small when empty. But it expands when food is coming, not to the point where you have a bloated belly yet, but still. So the stomach wouldn't be too much of a bother.

A simple explanation would be this. basicly what Feign said if a naga is about 6ft tall standing there tail would be roughly 18 ft long, 3 times the height maybe alittle less or alittle more depends on the speices. Also the length a naga uses to stand up would probably be roughly the length of legs if the naga wasn't well a naga. When slithering I believe for stealth reasons they would be lower to the ground but when standing still they would rear up abit.
So Crisis is about 75-80ft tall her tail would be around 150-225 so about 180-190 ft long would be about right.

Though the factor that Crisis doesn't seem to rear up very much would be another factor there so her tail could be longer. Still I stick with the fact that naga's tails are almost always 3times there height when reared up in a standing position.

Ooh. Well, that makes my proportions off. My naga char is much longer than 150 feet.

Man. I need to redo my specs.

Pendragon wrote:

Ooh. Well, that makes my proportions off. My naga char is much longer than 150 feet.

Man. I need to redo my specs.

No it doesn't, it's your own naga, I'm just explaining what naga's tail length generaly is. Theres nothing wrong with your naga being longer or shorter then that, long as they can slither without falling over lol.

Well, the thing is that I didn't take into account the specs of an average naga, and my naga needs to be a certain height or the story I'm working on will not make sense.

The original specs I had didn't make much sense now that I think about it. According to them, she couldn't slither 1 foot without falling over. I think her appropriate length, to make the story sensible, would be about 200 feet.

Pendragon wrote:

Well, the thing is that I didn't take into account the specs of an average naga, and my naga needs to be a certain height or the story I'm working on will not make sense.

The original specs I had didn't make much sense now that I think about it. According to them, she couldn't slither 1 foot without falling over. I think her appropriate length, to make the story sensible, would be about 200 feet.

Ahhh well glad I could help and if it works make her 200feet long ^^

I avoided this little issue by simply stating the actual height of my characters as standing. Lengths seem too varied and questionable, and a reader may get confused if you happen to use both statistics (Especially if you mistake one for the other, even just once). Height - no problem. Length? Hmm, we've got a problem.

I've always though that the human part of a naga was about 20% of their full body length. So if Crisis' human part is about 60ft, her snake part would be about 240ft. That makes her about 300ft long in total. (20% = 60ft. Therefore 10% = 30ft. 30ft times 10 = 300ft [100%])

Sephimink|Kyle wrote:

I avoided this little issue by simply stating the actual height of my characters as standing. Lengths seem too varied and questionable, and a reader may get confused if you happen to use both statistics (Especially if you mistake one for the other, even just once). Height - no problem. Length? Hmm, we've got a problem.

I just list both height (Ground to head) and length (Head to tailtip) just because it's easior to understand that way. Like Flare, standing, is appx. 5 feet tall, depending on how far back she's reared. Though from head to tailtip, she's about 18 feet long.

I don't know about anyone else but I use a one third ratio for my nagas, (example: a naga 100 ft from head to ground would be 300 ft total length.) as for human to snake, take the height and have 10% snake, (the naga stated before, would them be, 90 ft of human to 210 ft of snake)