Saturday, November 23, 2013

Overthinking Videogames 003: Majora's Mask, Game Theories, and Rough Math


So I took issue with some rough math that was done in an episode of Game Theory.
Here's the video:


Hit the jump the critique:



(Foreword: Holy shit that got long, sorry about that. Please read if you're into math and science on interplanetary scales and questioning the fundamental assumptions of physics. The tl;dr is basically that our orbit wouldn't be thrown off and his calculation of the KE of the moon are wrong by several orders of magnitude.)

The tidal critique is fair (except we already know that their moon is too small to have any effect on the tides at all, and your predictions only make sense for our moon), but holy crap did you not do the research to understand the effect a crashing moon would have on our orbit around the sun. It would be effected in no discernible way.

Our orbit around the sun is already not consistent. At our aphelion, we are 152million km away from the sun, and at our perihelion we are 147million km away. That is a change of 5million km and we don't notice it at all. It vaguely affects our tides, but really not much. So even if we were transposed the entire 384000km distance to our moon at it's farthest orbit, we would only be moving .05% of the distance we already shift in our orbit naturally.

Also, we wouldn't move anyway. The Earth pulls on the moon as much as the moon pulls on the Earth, even if we crashed into each other, the sun is pulling both of us, and our center of mass for the Earth-Moon system hasn't moved at all (we've just moved the earth and the moon both closer to it.). So, from the Sun's point of view, nothing changed about us at all. (btw, the center of the Earth-Moon system is only 4600km away from the Earth's current location. We are so much bigger than the moon that we would barely move as it crashed.

As for the moon's velocity, I think you were misguided when you converted real time into Termina time, because the equations you used assum real time. Think about what physics in termina would look like if Link and the others actually experienced time in "Termina time" (where 1second = 60terminasecond [ts])... First of all, gravity would no longer be 9.8m/s^2, it would be 35300m/ts^2 or 3600g -- you wouldn't be able to move... or beat your heart... or have skin. Put a slightly more obvious way, take Link swinging his sword. His swing covers about 1.5m in 30ts. If we use your definition of how time behaves in Termina, link is swinging his sword at a mere 0.025m/ts or about 0.05mi/terminahour. Not even vaguely fast enough to cut anything except for air. (btw, with this different gravitational force, the termina moon would exert a force of 3.57*10^13 pounds -- or about 17billion tons -- on anything underneath it without any other forces acting on it).

So that clearly isn't true, so it's best to stick with actual time than termina time. So, using your distance calculation, the moon is actually moving 1.6m/minute or  0.026m/s, which gives it a KE = 156000J or about half the average energy of a car at highway speeds.

...But wait a second, this moon is apparently not being accelerated due to gravity. If it were actually experiencing gravity (not using in-game distances because those are clearly an abstraction), it would have a velocity in excess of 42300m/s if it were falling for 72minutes (the real-time length of 3 termina days). That would give it a KE = 4*10^24J or about 1.7 * the yield of the Tsar Bomba -- the largest fusion bomb ever detonated on Earth -- which would be 6573 times more energy than the nuclear bomb we dropped on Hiroshima. The fireball of this explosion would be more than 10km across. That kind of blast, if detonated in Washington DC, would give people in Baltimore third degree burns. Also, if it fell for three days, the moon must have started almost 100,000km away anyway (about 1/5 of the distance to our moon). This moon crashing has a lot more in common with an asteroid impact than a "moon crash", because moons -- like all satellites -- are only called moons if they have a stable orbit.

So yeah, nope. This planetary body is a significant threat to life in Termina (if not also Hyrule), but not due to anything like tidal forces or shifting orbital paths.

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