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The Gps thing made sense fo you?

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  • The Gps thing made sense fo you?

    The safetex bad guy kidnapped lois at the talon! After 3-4 minutes clark and oliver arrived at the talon...1 minutes later the gps send to oliver the position of lois at the safetex base in Metropolis! But this no made sense! In less of 10 minutes is impossible arrived from smallville to metropolis!!
    Someone explain please...that made sense for you?

  • #2
    The distance between Smallville and Metropolis depends on the episode and sometimes even on the act within the episode.

    It once was said that the travelling distance between S and M was three hours. Let's take traffic jams into account and only set the speed at 30mph (48km). That means Metropolis is 90mi (145km) away. If we were to take the usual speed limit of 65mph, the distance would go up to 195mi (314km).

    But in season one's Nicodemus we already learned that you can see the skyline of Metropolis from Smallville. On ground level, due to Earth's roundness the horizon is 3mi (4.8km) away. From an elevated point like the windmill at ~50ft (~15m) the horizon is 8.7mi (14km) away. Metropolis has skyscrapers, so let's just assume Empire State Building dimensions of roughly 1300ft (396m), so the distance between the windmill vantage point and the tip of the Metropolis skyscrapers is 52.7mi (84.9km). And that's the top of the skyscraper, but you could basically see down to ground, which would bring Metropolis back to the 8.7mi (14km) range.

    And from a storytelling point of view it makes much more sense considering the constant commute of all characters from and to the city.

    I found it more irconic, that Oliver's portable device would show street names so Oliver would know where to go but the same map that Clark saw in the Arrow Compartment did not have these names (story reason: so that GA could save Lois and Clark was kept away) - why they then bothered to have the map at all in the compartment, I do not know.


    The trope regarding the disctance is called "traveling at the speed of plot": http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...TheSpeedOfPlot (Smallville is listed under "Live Action TV")
    Last edited by DJ Doena; 11-08-2015, 01:06 PM.

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    • #3
      And for the math freaks.

      To calculate the distance you only need three informations. The elevation a, the elevation b and the radius r of the circle. In our case the radius r is Earth's radius. This radius r is the hight of our triangle. The sides are a+r and r+b respectively. And the distance is the side between A and B. This image represents it:

      Click image for larger version

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      We have two right triangles, one with sides r and r+a and another with r and r+b. And thus we can calulate the missing third side. The standard formula is c² = a² + b² wheras c² is our (r+a)² and (r+b)² side (because it's the one opposite the right angle). Since the Earth is not a perfect sphere, we take the mean radius of 6,371km or 6,371,000m.

      (6,371,000 + 15)² = 6,371,000² + x²
      x = 13,824.986m

      (6,371,000 + 396)² = 6,371,000² + y²
      y = 71,035.124m

      z = x + y
      z = 84,860.11m = 84.9km = 52.7mi
      Last edited by DJ Doena; 11-08-2015, 12:51 PM.

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      • #4
        By the way: here's the view from the windmill:

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