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How large is Tellius? Or, why you shouldn't trust Nasir's boat.
Okay, today I'm going to crunch some numbers to answer a very fundamental question no one seems interested in tackling rigorously: how large is Tellius?
My methods should suggest similar ways of figuring these things out for the other continents. But anyway, even if you're not interested in the math and research, at the end I provide a map with a scale and various reference lines, like "this is how far you can get on a flying horse in a day". :D
Our starting point:
Having narrowly escaped Daein's grasp the Greil Mercenaries are pleased to feel the ocean beneath their feet as they set sail. According to Captain Nasir, the voyage to Begnion will take roughly two months.
The game indicates this route. With thanks to this LP, we have this image here. I then very scientifically took a piece of floss, wound it along this path, and pulled it straight.
No seriously, this is how you calculate the length of an arbitrary path.
I colored the floss where it looked like some careful sailing was necessary.
This is how long that path looks, stretched out:
As you can see, it's quite a long path. Long enough that I have to do a little math to figure out how long the floss even is.
It's the height of this image once, and then the length down to ... that spot. Yeah. So this is how I transferred that length (and the total length of "careful traveling") to my computer.
So we've got the proportional distance of the voyage. Now we need to know how fast that boat is going.
Apparently, it matters what kind of boat we have and how big it is. Thanks again to our friend the LP guy, we've got some decent full-ship shots.
How big is the ship? I did an estimation based on Rhys's size in pixels vs the ship's length in pixels. I came up with an estimation of 26 times Rhys's height, which suggests it's comfortably over 125 ft (38 m). That's pretty big.
Other observations: It has three masts and it's a non-weaponized merchant ship.
Nothing on the allegedly complete list of ship types is a match. On the other hand, there are several weaponized ships that look very similar. Maybe Nasir's hiding some cannons. In particular, the East Indiamen catch my attention. So I went over to Wikipedia's list of East Indiamen (yes seriously there's a page like that) to find a ship about the right size.
It would be useful to know the "long ton" of Nasir's ship -- the heavier the ship, the slower the speed -- but like hell I'll be able to find that. I'm just going to try to find a merchant ship that deals in wares with density similar to what Nasir's likely to deal with -- textiles, spices, grain, that kind of thing. Probably not bars of metal. Just a hunch. (The guns'll make up any difference anyway.)
Yet despite all the effort of locating a Nasir's-ship-lookalike, very little is written on the average or maximum speed of most ships. I tried to find the Lautaro's speed to no avail. So I fall back on a much cruder estimate that puts the hull speed at roughly 15 knots (about 17.3 mph). Then, according to Dr. Math, For typical monohull sailboats, which depend upon the wind, the average speed is typically two-thirds of the max speed. The internet provides no further reference on how much slower you should sail when it's tight -- I suspect that depends on the experience and arrogance of the captain. Since I've overcompensated a little in highlighting the problem spots (a little ship would really only have to be occasionally careful) I'll call it 50% of max speed along the harder routes.
Playing a bit with my pieces in photoshop, I can fit 2.4 rough-patch-lengths into the whole route, which makes that 5/12ths of the total route.
Now for a bit of math:
(Note: If this step scares you, let me note that it's pretty damn simple if you wave your hands and say "well let's just say it's slower on average". That's probably not going to be much less accurate, either, since many of these numbers are guestimates.... God, I haven't seen that awful word since middle school.)
At last, we have our hard-earned scale. But how big is 14600 miles?
Well, the US-Canada border is 5,526 miles, according to this site. So our journey is pretty big. But remember that the route was pretty loopy, and equates to basically one and a half times the vertical height of the image.
Using these figures, here's a map of Tellius vs America, to scale.
My gut reaction is "oh my god that can't be right." The US is only marginally larger than Crimea! What the fuck.
But in fact, looking around at the lengths of nautical journeys, this is probably actually right. Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 70 days (August 3rd to October 12th of the same year) -- that's just a little over two months, and he did it with ships half as big that predate Nasir's design by a few centuries.
On the other hand...
This is substantially less mindblowing when you realize that the United States are actually rather small. These calculations mean that the known areas of Tellius make up about the size of Eurasia, which is pretty damn big but still allows for the claims that half the world was swamped in water, etc.
Still, for Tellius's level of technology, those are some goddamn gigantic empires. You guys can work out the implications, but I suspect it goes something along the lines of "vast uninhabited tracts of land, many people who don't give a shit about the government" etc.
On one hand, the Mongolian Empire at its largest (1279) was slightly larger than Begnion:
On the other hand, we still have several other nations that are still monumentally big. Also, Begnion retains its size for a damn lot longer than 15 years.
But anyway, someone else can explore that shit. Let's talk about travel times! Ones that don't take place in Nasir's boat.
According to NASA, (http://scifiles.larc.nasa.gov/educators/activities/2003_2004/athome/faster_faster.swf) a horse walking goes 3 mph; trotting, 7 mph. However, they can't keep up a vigorous trotting pace all day every day, (see "Tevis Cup", above) because they need to rest as the lactic acid builds up in their muscles, same as with human distance runners, who also need to train for their one-day event.
- This forum. (Manna, feel free to comment on this!)
Now, a pretty decent horse can gallop at 30 mph. Under super optimal conditions, with nice roads (or if we're flying) and a number of stations to change horses (say we're building the Pony Express) that means you could cover about 30 mph x 24 hours = 720 miles if people are fucking dying and you need to get there yesterday. (Also you have sick night vision.) [Btw this makes a useful "real life" comparison, because this is the same as driving on a highway for 12 hours.]
Under more normal circumstances, we might have a horse fast-walking at 4mph for 12 hours, for a total of 48 miles. That's a lot fewer miles.
And, under completely Fire Emblem appropriate circumstances, we have the speed of a military march. The Romans did a forced march at 25 miles a day (while carrying 50 pounds of supplies), which was apparently considered freakishly fast. Some history buffs here muse that 15-18 miles a day is probably more standard.
Thus, I give you the following image:
(Note that I start to use the RD map here. It doesn't line up exactly with the PoR map, which is perfectly fine -- all maps are subject to distortion due to the challenges of putting a sphere on paper. I've scaled it to the best of my ability so that all our size comparisons up until now hold.)
This is when things start smelling far too fishy. If this were the case, it'd take four months to take a trip from Sienne to Grann and back.
There are *not* four months from the beginning to end of chapter 15. No fucking way. What went wrong?
East Indiamen
These were built by the various East India companies (Dutch, English or scandinavian) to bring back tea, china, silk and spices. Over the years, the high castles disappeared in favour of a lower beamier shape. In capacity they ranged from 600-1500 tons but the speed remained around 4-5 knots for an average of 120 miles/day.
- Thanks, belated source.
We were going at about twice that. I guess that goes to show that we shouldn't listen to math people about practical sailing. So, what does the world look like at a 4-5 knot average?
Tellius is a little smaller than North America, much smaller than the Mongolian Empire, and everyone got to watch Ammie be wrong.
I was going to correct this post, but hush I'm writing this as I'm going along and I think this is a fun way to tell this story. Especially since that still doesn't completely solve our problem. It's still 2 months to march to Grann and march on back. Even if you say that Ike's mercenary group is swifter than a full army with supplies, it was definitely a full army going into Daein, and look at how long that should be taking them:
6 and a half months to get from the start of Chapter 18 to its battle. And we haven't talked even about the forests yet.
Uh, just to remind you, it's canon that this whole war concludes in a year.
So, even with the correction for sailing speed, this doesn't work.
So let's ditch Nasir. What if we constructed the world from marching speed?
The most sensitive speed we have comes from Part 2 of Radiant Dawn. Geoffrey and his forces take Felirae in the afternoon (a guess based on the lighting), and immediately send up a flare. That night, Lucia goes to consult her contact and is kidnapped. The next morning, Elincia prepares for battle. Marcia joins them as the battle begins.
Let's say the midday-afternoon difference is about 4 hours, so Marcia has been flying for 20 hours. Flying is nice and easy -- you get to ignore most terrain and make a nice straight line. Also, since pegasi consistently have the same range as cavalry (before terrain is taken into account), I'm going to assume that pegasi move at comparable speeds.
Even though Marcia's in a hurry, switching pegasi is impractical. Since she's on the same mount the whole time (which she'll have to fight on later), at best she's speedwalking flying it at 4 mph for all 20 hours, which makes that 80 miles between Felirae and Alpea. (Alternatively, she could rest her pegasus and fly 8 mph for 10 hours, which is exactly the same damn thing.) I'm going to assume for the sake of my sanity that this blue dot is Alpea.
If that's so, then Tellius is starting to look pretty inadequate.
Things start to look more sensible, though -- except for Nasir's poor boat.
I suppose it's strictly possible that a day passes while you're in 2-F base and the Marcia figure isn't accurate either, but if that's so, I no longer have any idea how to proceed. Personally, I'm happy with this sense of scale, even if it means Crimea's about the size of Pennsylvania.
But I mean, look at England.
lol england
My methods should suggest similar ways of figuring these things out for the other continents. But anyway, even if you're not interested in the math and research, at the end I provide a map with a scale and various reference lines, like "this is how far you can get on a flying horse in a day". :D
Our starting point:
Having narrowly escaped Daein's grasp the Greil Mercenaries are pleased to feel the ocean beneath their feet as they set sail. According to Captain Nasir, the voyage to Begnion will take roughly two months.
The game indicates this route. With thanks to this LP, we have this image here. I then very scientifically took a piece of floss, wound it along this path, and pulled it straight.
No seriously, this is how you calculate the length of an arbitrary path.
I colored the floss where it looked like some careful sailing was necessary.
This is how long that path looks, stretched out:
As you can see, it's quite a long path. Long enough that I have to do a little math to figure out how long the floss even is.
It's the height of this image once, and then the length down to ... that spot. Yeah. So this is how I transferred that length (and the total length of "careful traveling") to my computer.
So we've got the proportional distance of the voyage. Now we need to know how fast that boat is going.
Apparently, it matters what kind of boat we have and how big it is. Thanks again to our friend the LP guy, we've got some decent full-ship shots.
How big is the ship? I did an estimation based on Rhys's size in pixels vs the ship's length in pixels. I came up with an estimation of 26 times Rhys's height, which suggests it's comfortably over 125 ft (38 m). That's pretty big.
Other observations: It has three masts and it's a non-weaponized merchant ship.
Nothing on the allegedly complete list of ship types is a match. On the other hand, there are several weaponized ships that look very similar. Maybe Nasir's hiding some cannons. In particular, the East Indiamen catch my attention. So I went over to Wikipedia's list of East Indiamen (yes seriously there's a page like that) to find a ship about the right size.
It would be useful to know the "long ton" of Nasir's ship -- the heavier the ship, the slower the speed -- but like hell I'll be able to find that. I'm just going to try to find a merchant ship that deals in wares with density similar to what Nasir's likely to deal with -- textiles, spices, grain, that kind of thing. Probably not bars of metal. Just a hunch. (The guns'll make up any difference anyway.)
Yet despite all the effort of locating a Nasir's-ship-lookalike, very little is written on the average or maximum speed of most ships. I tried to find the Lautaro's speed to no avail. So I fall back on a much cruder estimate that puts the hull speed at roughly 15 knots (about 17.3 mph). Then, according to Dr. Math, For typical monohull sailboats, which depend upon the wind, the average speed is typically two-thirds of the max speed. The internet provides no further reference on how much slower you should sail when it's tight -- I suspect that depends on the experience and arrogance of the captain. Since I've overcompensated a little in highlighting the problem spots (a little ship would really only have to be occasionally careful) I'll call it 50% of max speed along the harder routes.
Playing a bit with my pieces in photoshop, I can fit 2.4 rough-patch-lengths into the whole route, which makes that 5/12ths of the total route.
Now for a bit of math:
(Note: If this step scares you, let me note that it's pretty damn simple if you wave your hands and say "well let's just say it's slower on average". That's probably not going to be much less accurate, either, since many of these numbers are guestimates.
At last, we have our hard-earned scale. But how big is 14600 miles?
Well, the US-Canada border is 5,526 miles, according to this site. So our journey is pretty big. But remember that the route was pretty loopy, and equates to basically one and a half times the vertical height of the image.
Using these figures, here's a map of Tellius vs America, to scale.
My gut reaction is "oh my god that can't be right." The US is only marginally larger than Crimea! What the fuck.
But in fact, looking around at the lengths of nautical journeys, this is probably actually right. Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 70 days (August 3rd to October 12th of the same year) -- that's just a little over two months, and he did it with ships half as big that predate Nasir's design by a few centuries.
On the other hand...
This is substantially less mindblowing when you realize that the United States are actually rather small. These calculations mean that the known areas of Tellius make up about the size of Eurasia, which is pretty damn big but still allows for the claims that half the world was swamped in water, etc.
Still, for Tellius's level of technology, those are some goddamn gigantic empires. You guys can work out the implications, but I suspect it goes something along the lines of "vast uninhabited tracts of land, many people who don't give a shit about the government" etc.
On one hand, the Mongolian Empire at its largest (1279) was slightly larger than Begnion:
On the other hand, we still have several other nations that are still monumentally big. Also, Begnion retains its size for a damn lot longer than 15 years.
But anyway, someone else can explore that shit. Let's talk about travel times! Ones that don't take place in Nasir's boat.
According to NASA, (http://scifiles.larc.nasa.gov/educators/activities/2003_2004/athome/faster_faster.swf) a horse walking goes 3 mph; trotting, 7 mph. However, they can't keep up a vigorous trotting pace all day every day, (see "Tevis Cup", above) because they need to rest as the lactic acid builds up in their muscles, same as with human distance runners, who also need to train for their one-day event.
- This forum. (Manna, feel free to comment on this!)
Now, a pretty decent horse can gallop at 30 mph. Under super optimal conditions, with nice roads (or if we're flying) and a number of stations to change horses (say we're building the Pony Express) that means you could cover about 30 mph x 24 hours = 720 miles if people are fucking dying and you need to get there yesterday. (Also you have sick night vision.) [Btw this makes a useful "real life" comparison, because this is the same as driving on a highway for 12 hours.]
Under more normal circumstances, we might have a horse fast-walking at 4mph for 12 hours, for a total of 48 miles. That's a lot fewer miles.
And, under completely Fire Emblem appropriate circumstances, we have the speed of a military march. The Romans did a forced march at 25 miles a day (while carrying 50 pounds of supplies), which was apparently considered freakishly fast. Some history buffs here muse that 15-18 miles a day is probably more standard.
Thus, I give you the following image:
(Note that I start to use the RD map here. It doesn't line up exactly with the PoR map, which is perfectly fine -- all maps are subject to distortion due to the challenges of putting a sphere on paper. I've scaled it to the best of my ability so that all our size comparisons up until now hold.)
This is when things start smelling far too fishy. If this were the case, it'd take four months to take a trip from Sienne to Grann and back.
There are *not* four months from the beginning to end of chapter 15. No fucking way. What went wrong?
East Indiamen
These were built by the various East India companies (Dutch, English or scandinavian) to bring back tea, china, silk and spices. Over the years, the high castles disappeared in favour of a lower beamier shape. In capacity they ranged from 600-1500 tons but the speed remained around 4-5 knots for an average of 120 miles/day.
- Thanks, belated source.
We were going at about twice that. I guess that goes to show that we shouldn't listen to math people about practical sailing. So, what does the world look like at a 4-5 knot average?
Tellius is a little smaller than North America, much smaller than the Mongolian Empire, and everyone got to watch Ammie be wrong.
I was going to correct this post, but hush I'm writing this as I'm going along and I think this is a fun way to tell this story. Especially since that still doesn't completely solve our problem. It's still 2 months to march to Grann and march on back. Even if you say that Ike's mercenary group is swifter than a full army with supplies, it was definitely a full army going into Daein, and look at how long that should be taking them:
6 and a half months to get from the start of Chapter 18 to its battle. And we haven't talked even about the forests yet.
Uh, just to remind you, it's canon that this whole war concludes in a year.
So, even with the correction for sailing speed, this doesn't work.
So let's ditch Nasir. What if we constructed the world from marching speed?
The most sensitive speed we have comes from Part 2 of Radiant Dawn. Geoffrey and his forces take Felirae in the afternoon (a guess based on the lighting), and immediately send up a flare. That night, Lucia goes to consult her contact and is kidnapped. The next morning, Elincia prepares for battle. Marcia joins them as the battle begins.
Let's say the midday-afternoon difference is about 4 hours, so Marcia has been flying for 20 hours. Flying is nice and easy -- you get to ignore most terrain and make a nice straight line. Also, since pegasi consistently have the same range as cavalry (before terrain is taken into account), I'm going to assume that pegasi move at comparable speeds.
Even though Marcia's in a hurry, switching pegasi is impractical. Since she's on the same mount the whole time (which she'll have to fight on later), at best she's speed
If that's so, then Tellius is starting to look pretty inadequate.
Things start to look more sensible, though -- except for Nasir's poor boat.
I suppose it's strictly possible that a day passes while you're in 2-F base and the Marcia figure isn't accurate either, but if that's so, I no longer have any idea how to proceed. Personally, I'm happy with this sense of scale, even if it means Crimea's about the size of Pennsylvania.
But I mean, look at England.
lol england
no subject
Uh, just to remind you, it's canon that this whole war concludes in a year.
It's canon that the civil war of Barensia lasts a year, too, and that continent has been retconned into an analogue for all of North Fucking America and then some.
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
And don't ask me how Palla and Catria crossed the Atlantic on pegasi, either.
Oh, and Hardin's "small continent" of Archanea is now an analogue for the whole Eurasian mass plus an outsized Sinai. Whatever.
As fun as this was, I suspect Fire Emblem distances are like Fire Emblem timelines-- impressionistic.
Oh, and this: Still, for Tellius's level of technology, those are some goddamn gigantic empires. You guys can work out the implications, but I suspect it goes something along the lines of "vast uninhabited tracts of land, many people who don't give a shit about the government" etc.
Or these nations have one hell of a civil service.
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The Batman thing went over my head though. :(
Yeah, FE6 supposedly all takes place in a year too (initial invasions and everything), which makes me think that's just IS's favorite length of time and they didn't think too deeply on it (that and it's artbook canon, so). Elibe always seemed on the smaller end of things to me, though. I think you get some numbers in those scripts, I'll see about playing around with them. Chances are I'll stick to at-a-glance impressions, though-- I'm nowhere near this focused. XD;
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I found it useful to include because, in a way, it's like the upper limit on speedtraveling in this universe.
I mean I suppose you could make a really contrived scenario where you're a cat laguz and you sprint a distance and then mount a horse to recover and etc, but that's silly.
Also if you live in a Fire Emblem war I guess you can make promises about the troops being home by Christmas. :P
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I feel I should have more to say, but this is more number-crunching than I've ever wanted to do for anything.
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I have briefly wondered "how big is Tellius?", but I was far too lazy to figure it out, so I shrugged it off and forgot about it. Kudos to you for using research and math and far more effort than I would be willing to put in to solve the question.
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(any meta whose grand conclusion is "lol england" is pretty great but)
(yes)
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Well, it's fun to read about, at least.
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