Discussion Mountain Heights (by time)

I just decided to try Douluo Dalu again. A few sentences into the prologue I noticed this statement:

"A rock thrown from on top of the precipice at Hell’s Peak would take a full count of nineteen before the echo of it hitting the bottom could be heard, thus its height could be seen, and it was also because of these nineteen seconds, even surpassing the eighteen levels of hell by one, that gave it its name."

That didn't actually seem very high, so I decided to do some calculations out of curiosity. And since I was lazy I just found online free fall calculators to convert seconds of free fall to distance.

19 seconds is a whopping... 1770 meters. Just over a mile tall. That would make it the 1,245th tallest mountain on Earth, about on par with Mt Adams in New Hampshire in the United States.

If you want to go comparative with it: that's less than 5 Empire State Buildings. Mt Everest is about 20 ESBs. Looking at the levels of hell comparison, that would mean that 18 seconds -> 1588 meters -> ~88 meters per level -> 264 feet per level. Each level of hell is as tall as 3/4 the length of a football field, which is about the world record distance for hammer throw (not even javelin throw) in track and field events.

Are seconds in chinese novels different from western seconds, like with the whole "stick of incense" and "time to brew a cup of tea" thing? Does the author genuinely think that's high enough to merit being called Hell's Peak? Or is this just a classic case of chinese fantasy authors (looking at you, IET) having the screwiest distance scales you've ever seen?

 

Well for reference, the legendary Mount Tai is only 1,524 meters high. Aka, despite all the props, it's a quite tiny mountain. The city of denver is at higher elevation than the tallest point of mount Tai.

 

Oh plz, had IET written this novel, u wouldn't hv needed to worry about height (or making this thread). IET scales r less screwy than astronomic. It would hv been 19 million seconds or something, and deeper than anything known- beyond a shadow of doubt.

 

It's even shorter than that, since you're hearing the echo at 19 seconds, not hitting the bottom. Even so, it didn't say the mountain was only that high just that a precipice at the top was. A cliff that's a mile high or so at the top of a mountain is pretty tall.

But yeah, one of the most immersion-breaking things for me in a lot of these novels is the ludicrous distance numbers. Characters standing "next" to each other in one sentence are described as 30 km apart in the next. A random martial arts move levels everything in a 1000 km radius, and random people are standing right there commenting on it. Sigh....

 

The question is, can you hear the echo from the top of mountain? That must be a lot of wind to disturb your hearing and the wind factor (able to blow it far away) can change the trajectory of thrown rock. The synopsis didn't say only super high cultivators can hear it, so common people should be able to hear the echo too....kinda contradictive

 

Wait how big was the supposed thrown rock? A rock, rock? Or a boulder, rock?
If direction of the throw and wind resistance is not a factor. What is the fall rate if no other forces but gravity is at work?
If a cultivators world mirrors earth's gravity then I guess you're math makes sense. But whose to say the force of gravity isn't greater.

Now If i throw a rock of a super extra tall heavenly peak, and I don't hear a sound/echo shall I perceive that the mountain has no bottom?

I guess my point would be, it be nice to have a good grasp of the authors standards of measure, even if they can't always be explained.

 

Well, seeing that the planet is far much bigger than our earth, I assume the gravity power is much higher than us.

We have 9.8m/s2 while Jupiter are 26m/s2 or almost 3x earth gravitation power

This assuming the gravity are following earth calculation