[tt] astronomy of azeroth

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.spaaace.com/cope/?p=111

n00b World Reorder, part 1

The text that made up my Interesting 08 talk ‘Brave n00b World’ was part of a
much longer document I’ve been working on for a while. I’m not sure it’s
ready for primetime—I’m not sure it’s ready for anything—but to catch the
tide of interest in the video, here’s the first part of it. This one repeats
a lot of the material in the talk but bear with me: it gets better, and
there’s a lot of new stuff still to come.

* * *

I have spent the last few months on sabbatical, visiting a persistent fantasy
world known as ‘Of Warcraft’. During this time I have made some preliminary
observations about the nature of the world, which I am going to publish here
in a series of short papers. It is my hope that this work may lead to further
examination of this curious habitat, and the foundation of the academic field
of Azerothian Studies, with a nice chair and honorarium for myself, &tc. &tc.

BRAVE N00B WORLD

A PRELIMINARY SCIENTIFIC REPORT IN SEVERAL PARTS

Part 1: The Physical World of Warcraft

The world of Warcraft, called Azeroth by those of its inhabitants who care
about such things, is supposedly one of a handful of small spatial bodies in
an area of space referred to as the Great Dark. It is comprised of three main
landmasses: Kalimdor; the so-far-unexplored Northrend; and the Eastern
Kingdoms. This consists of two continents, Lordaeron and Azeroth, the latter
of which is made up of two countries: Khaz Modan and Azeroth. This confusing
situation is analogous to the continent of America, which consists of the
regions of South America, Central America and North America, the latter of
which contains the country usually called America. One might think this
indicates that there may be other interesting parallels between Azeroth and
Earth. One would be mistaken.

Even though it has an advanced civilization capable of creating flying
machines and an astonishingly advanced postal service—of which more
later—Azeroth has no local system of measurement. The idea of lengths or
distances are alien to its inhabitants, which makes them annoyingly bad at
giving directions. Occasionally ‘yards’ are mentioned but nobody can ever
point at an item or a distance in the world and say that it is N yards long;
and there is no way of knowing if this ‘yard’ is equivalent in any way to the
terrestrial yard.

Despite all this, it is still possible to determine the size of the World of
Warcraft with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

The longest straight, flat line that an adult human can walk in Azeroth
without being interrupted by obstacles, mobs or the Horde stretches from the
eastern end of the north parapet of the bridge into Westfall, across Elwynn
Forest to the southernmost of the Three Corners in Lakeshire. An adult human
walking at a steady pace will cover this distance in 18 minutes and 15
seconds. Humans walk at an average speed of 5.6 kilometres (3.5 miles) per
hour, and therefore this route is roughly 1.7 kms (1.05 miles) long.

Extrapolating this to the whole of the Eastern Kingdoms, and using the best
maps available, the continent is 5.8 kms by 14.25 kms (3.6 x 8.85 miles) and
Kalimdor is Kalimdor is 7.3 kms x 14.75 kms. Taken together, the two main
continents have a combined area of approximately 113 square kilometres. In
terrestrial terms that’s about the same size as the city of Newcastle, or the
London Borough of Hillingdon.

And if we assume that the world-maps produced by Blizzard Entertainment show
approximately the entire surface area of Azeroth then we can wrap it around
an imaginary sphere and calculate the diameter of the hypothetical
‘planetoid’ of Azeroth at 12 kilometres.

To a subjective observer, gravity on Azeroth seems to be lower than on Earth.
Once again it’s hard to given an exact measurement, but given the existence
of giants (whose hipbones would shatter as soon as they took a step under
terrestrial gravity), plus the fact that a typical adult human can make a
standing jump approximately 90% of their height into the air, and most adult
humanoids can not only survive a fall of over fifty metres but can land on
their feet and walk away, it appears to be less than 1G. This is not quite as
expected: though small celestial bodies typically have low gravity, for a
planetoid of the size of Azeroth one would expect to see gravity of about
0.003 m/s² or, in the vernacular, buggerall.

We can calculate Azeroth’s gravity to a reasonable degree of precision. As
noted, scales of measurement are rare on Azeroth but a chart on page 66 of
one of the only authoritative works of Azerothian Studies to date (World of
Warcraft Game Manual; Hutchens, Catalan et al, 2005) shows the heights of
various humanoid races against a series of regular lines, allowing exact
comparisons. Assuming that an average human on Azeroth is the same height as
an average human on Earth, then a typical female Tauren is almost exactly two
metres tall. We can therefore use a female Tauren—let’s call her Rula—as a
measuring-stick to calculate the height of buildings, towers, cliffs and
other tall things that can be fallen off.

According to the Rula scale, a drop from a measured point on the flight tower
in Thunder Bluff is 33.5 metres. According to tests conducted by myself and
members of my research group, the guild <unassigned variable>, it takes a
given body—Rula—an average of 2.5 seconds to fall that distance. An
equivalent fall under 1G would take 2.61 seconds. We will blame the
difference on the approximate nature of the measuring processes and cheap
stopwatches, and assume that Azeroth’s gravity is the same as Earth’s.

This means, if Azeroth really is a spherical planetoid with a diameter of 12
kms, that the planet must have an average density of roughly 5850 grammes per
cubic centimetre. That makes its average density more than 500 times greater
than lead. (I am indebted to Dave Morris for his assistance with these
calculations.)

The extreme density of Azeroth would explain why it is impossible to pick up
many objects from the ground, including ones that you have just dropped. As
soon as a discarded object hits the earth we theorize that it picks up a thin
coating of superheavy dirt, making it impossible to lift. Living creatures
avoid the effects of this dirt sticking to their extremities by having
evolved frictionless pads on the soles of their feet. This observable
phenomenon, endemic to Azeroth, is known to virtual-world scientists and
animators as “foot slide”.

Rare soils that do not possess this extreme density (pieces of coal,
elemental earth, Un’goro soil) are prized by the locals and can fetch high
prices at the auction houses. In addition, pressure within the superheavy
crust of the planetoid causes deposits of comparatively lighter elements like
copper, tin, iron, gold and mithril to be extruded through fissures in the
surface, where they form regenerating nodes that can be mined. It also
explains why, though many locals are seen toiling at rock-faces with picks
and shovels, they never seem to get anywhere, and why there are never any
root vegetables for sale.

More interestingly, the existence of such a small, dense planet has
implications for the relativistic flow of local spacetime. Einstein’s theory
of general relativity states that time runs at different speeds under
different gravitational strengths, and the Pound-Rebka experiment has proved
that clocks at high altitudes run slightly faster than those at low
altitudes. On a small body with a very high density these effects will be
much more noticeable over comparatively short distances. We believe that
these effects of time-dilation and compression can explain the well-known
Azeroth temporal phenomenon of ‘lag’, although we are trying to form a
theoretical model to show how zeppelins can cross an ocean in the time it
takes to draw a line across a map.

However, all this assumes that Azeroth is a standard astronomical body, and
it isn’t. Despite the existence of in-world globes depicting its surface as a
sphere, and that anyone standing at the Black Temple in Outland can see a
small round planet in the sky that appears to be Azeroth, the world of
Warcraft is in fact flat. There is no visible curvature of the world, which
is unusual given its small size. Stars do not move across the night sky,
indicating that Azeroth is static in relation to the rest of its universe.
What’s more, dawn happens simultaneously wherever the observer is in the
world, and sunset works the same way. Ergo it’s flat, albeit populated by a
number of misguided “round-earthers”. Berks.

Conclusive proof on the matter comes from the research of the Canadian Dr T
Paypayaso (I’m assuming from the quality of his research that he has a PhD,
plus frankly they’re easier to get hold of than parking tickets these days),
who has demonstrated by swimming to its edge and jumping around like a prat
that Azeroth is (a) flat, (b) finite and (c) rectangular.

I will examine the implications of this extraordinary discovery in my next
post in this series. Meanwhile I need your essays, a thousand words on “How
can Azeroth be said to have a food chain when nothing ever eats anything
else?” on my desk by Thursday.