Anime Discussion

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Razor One
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Razor One »

Nemo wrote:
You're confusing the issue here, which is that I was talking about how the author's politics drives a narrative that supports his own views at the expense of the story.
You said they were talking about expelling foreigners and cutting off contact. I pointed out thats not what was referred to in the work, certainly not in the manga at least (chapter 7), but that its something you read into it. Unless the manga itself is the odd man out and the anime scene was in line with the original work which included additional details you are familiar with? While I doubt this I can not verify myself, can't read them. Im told the novels are rather difficult to translate properly.
You've conflated two of my sentences. The first one was "the fact that Japan is seriously considering using the resources from the Gate as an excuse to go full isolationist again" whilst the second was "No, the isolationism they're advocating for isn't the kind where a country minds its own business and keeps out of international affairs as America used to be at certain times and on certain issues, they're advocating completely cutting themselves off from the rest off the world, North Korea style, expelling all foreigners, etc. etc.". The former is what the manga had in it, but was seriously toned down from prior adaptations of the same material.

The latter is referring to what the author advocates through the narrative he weaves, in the same manner that Tolkien advocated pastoralism over industrialism through The Lord of the Rings. You won't find a direct reference where Tolkien wrote "Industrialisation is bad", but the work illustrates his point through peaceful idyll of the hobbits as contrasted by Mordor.

Likewise, the author's views are present in the demonisation of foreigners and rosy coloured portrayal of Japan. While discord did mention that this was Nippon Strong and that it's more or less a variant of America Fuck Yeah and HFY, there is a difference. Most American works that have AFY present in them aren't nearly quite as bad. Independence Day, for instance, has foreigners sitting around waiting for the Americans to save the day. Bad, but not that bad. Stargate had a lot of AFY, with foreigners shown to have their own agenda's and were frequently fed into the meatgrinder in place of Americans. They were however never portrayed as evil or utterly stupid, not as badly as Gate does it.

The narrative portrayal of foreigners and foreign governments being meddlesome, stupid and evil in the Earthside chapters, contrasted with the relatively 'smooth' operation happening on the Gateside chapters sends the message that Japan would be better off without foreign entanglements. If you ignore the Earth chapters and don't think about the lack of foreign involvement for the Gateside chapters though, the work is fairly enjoyable, but I think any work where thinking is the enemy doesn't deserve to be defended.

I refer to the manga while you are refer to the anime. Unlike discord I thought the anime was a terrible adaptation. It weakened all the female characters, especially poor Tuuka but the Princess Pina as well. It dropped large sections of characterizations and internal dialogue in favor of fan service bath scenes etc. And it changed a number of things, like the scenario we are discussing here, making the scenes needlessly weaker as a result. If you're basing your reactions off the anime then I can see where our disconnect is coming from but I have to lay the blame for that at the feet of A1. I spent most of my time watching it groaning in pain, waiting for a pay off that never came.
I've read the manga, but my freshest memories are of the Anime, so that may be clouding matters. In either case, they're already quite a few steps removed from the author's original webnovel, which I understand did contain a lot of his rather jingoistic views.
Pipelines and trains are only going to be able to bring in minuscule amounts of resources in comparison to modern shipping
Modern shipping is fed by pipelines and trains, both of which are more efficient and faster in general. Can the volume of material necessary to support the economy of Japan pass through the gate? Haven't seen numbers. Oil likely so, pipelines are very efficient. TAPS, the trans Alaskan pipeline, runs 340,000 cubic meters of oil day. Japan consumes about 690,000 cubic meters a day. The TAPS system is all of 48 inches in diameter. So 120 inches or less to fully accommodate current and future oil needs. Thatd be a yes and given the shorter distance required to transport the oil its likely you could use a higher temperature/pressure system to get a higher flow rate for the space given. I don't have numbers on their current raw ore imports, but whatever they are you could reduce them greatly if Japan really was going full Isolationist as much of their industry is focused around exporting products to the world. The Aussie iron trains regularly run 35,000 tons of ore with a record 99,000 tons of ore in a train 7 km long. At speed it took all of 6 minutes for the record setting train to go past.

Is it a good idea to go full Isolationist? Likely not. Is it something that must be explored as an option for the extreme case? Yes, absolutely. Access to the Gate may threaten the stability of world powers to the point of provoking conflict, with a worst case of nuclear strike on Japan. Not exploring possibilities would be dereliction.
The problem is that the gate is incredibly narrow. The area where the gate is implied to appear, Ginza 6-Chome in the anime is roughly here, at least according to the street sign.

At most, the Gate is 4 lanes wide plus the pavement. In the anime, tanks were shown rolling in two at a time with a bit of leeway. The manga also depicts the gate being at a rough count 20 men wide marching in phalanx formation, though that last one is a bit rough.

Lane width is 3.25 - 3.5 meters in Japan, giving a minima of 13 meters and a maxima of 14 meters.

Assuming an upper bound, and using some of your figures:

The pipeline eats up 304.8 centimeters. Allowing for clearance and various other linkages, that's one lane gone, so we're down to 10.5 meters.

A Japanese freight train is likely to have a gauge of 1067 mm, but the width of the track is not the width of the car. Checking this diagram, we can see that freight and passenger trains come in a whole mess of widths and heights. I'll go for something middle of the road and say that the width of the train will be around Plate C or 3251.2 cm in width, eating up another lane.

However, you can't really expect to run trains without clearance on either side for both safety and maintenance, so that's more room eaten up again. Clearance width seems to vary from 1524 cm to 2515 cm, adding either 3048 cm or 5030 cm. Assuming you need to be able to run wide loads through the Gate, we'll go with the upper bound.

Adding all this up, running a train through the gate needs:

3251.2 cm (Train) + 5030 cm (Clearance) = 8.281 meters of clearance. Subtracting that from what we had left above, we get 2.219 meters of space left. While you could fit a car through it, it'd be a tight fit and a one way lane, most likely used in case of emergencies.

While you can certainly get a lot of freight through the gate, the narrowness and location limits your options. Ginza is a major city and space is at a premium in Japan. You can either have a secure location or a massive freight hub, you can't really have both. You'd need to demolish a significant amount of expensive real estate in order to turn it into a freight yard large enough to service the entire nation. You also need to be able to ferry through everything you need to extract those raw materials such as mining trucks which are, last time I checked, not small. You'd need to cut the entire thing into pieces and reassemble it on the other side to get even one through the Gate, which would slow everything down.

You also need to get the infrastructure into place. Building a pipeline in America is very different from building a pipeline through untamed, unexplored, and insecure territories. Primitive as the inhabitants may be, a long pipeline is unlikely to be protected at all points along its length from errant dragon attacks. You need to import all your workers and materials until you can source them locally which is yet more infrastructure projects, requiring raw materials and personnel, that also requires infrastructure and yet more personnel.

But even supposing these difficulties are overcome and you have material on the other side of the gate waiting to be delivered, new issues arise.

Space, for instance, is severely limited, moreso in Japan, and even moreso in Ginza. Once you've delivered your materials, you need a place to put them to be delivered elsewhere, to park trains, and you'd want to send the trains back through the gate to pick up more. The trouble with this though is that there's space for only one track, meaning you would have 50% downtime while the trains head back to the Gateverse to load up again.

Using Iron Ore importation as an example and rounding up to a years worth of ore by average, Japan imports ~136.284 million tons of iron ore per year. Using your train as an example, 99,000 / 6 = 16500 tons of ore per minute. 136,284,000 / 16500 = 8259.6363 minutes to freight all that ore through, or 137.66 hours. Double that for a return journey loaded with freight required by the Gate side, so 275.32 hours, or almost 11.5 days round trip for iron ore importation and exportation of needed material for the other side.

This is just one material being imported by Japan. It also imports all of its natural gas, meaning 12,176,244 cubic meters, and 204 million tons of coal.

If we take the 16,500 tons of ore per minute to also apply to coal importation, 12363.63 minutes, 8.58 days of continuous coal train rolling in, 8.58 days rolling back out loaded with supplies. Iron + Coal = ~two weeks of non-stop importation to meet the nations needs for the year, assuming you can distribute and store it properly and fast enough.

Add Gas onto that. It's unlikely that you could pipe gas through the oil pipeline while there's oil in it, so that needs to be trained too. Using your iron ore figure again, we can convert that volume of gas into mass and roughly factor how long it would take to train in.

Density of gas = 0.5kg/l
1 cubic meter = 1,000 liters
12176244000 liters of gas / 2 = 6,088,122,000 kg = 6,088,122 tons / 16500 = 368.97 minutes, 6.15 hours to train in. Which would be nice, if we lived in a world where natural gas were as dense as iron. We can refactor this by taking density into account.

Iron is 7,870 kilograms per cubic meter, whilst LNG is 500 kilograms per cubic meter. 7870 / 500 = 15.74, which should be our conversion factor.

6.15 * 15.74 = 96.801 hours, 4 days to import, 8 days round trip.

I could go on and try to cover Japan's total imports and calculate a reasonable buffer to allow for a setup that doesn't have a 100% efficient throughput so that there's some spacing and realism to deliveries, but the jist of this is that you can only ram so much material through the gate so quickly even with the necessary infrastructure. You have to allow time for it to get through, get delivered and get distributed before allowing time for a return trip to do another delivery. I am reasonably certain that amount of materials required to be materially independent from the world would exceed the amount you can push through the gate in a year. This still does not allow for technical expertise that Japan may not have, the lack of which would result in a decrease in the standard of living. It also doesn't account the enormous cost of all that infrastructural development and redevelopment necessary. Between the benefits of being completely independent of the world versus simply trading for resources as they always have, any sane person would realise that it's far more beneficial, short and long term, to engage in trade and take resources from the new world as being supplemental at best, except where such resources are unique, IE, Dragon Scales.

It's one thing to consider your options, but considering the possibility of an impossible scenario can and should always result in "Avoid this happening at all costs". If the other powers need the Gate so badly, they'll be willing to trade for it before war and isolationism ever become even a blip on the radar.

As for the science bit, Id be more interested in the stability of the gate first of all. Hard to plan a military beach head when you don't know when or how it might shut down on you. Figure out how it works later. I was surprised that hasn't been brought up at all so far, not in the manga at least.
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From what I've heard about the light novel and novel adaptations, that becomes a plot point later on, though not from a scientific standpoint.
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by discord »

razor: whatever you CAN shunt through a pipeline instead of a train would be done that way, so LNG would probably not eat up train time....and why drive a car through? you got trains going back and forth pretty much constantly....
and the gate is actually pretty damn HIGH i do believe you could do a double rail line with some pipes on top, no more walking through, no more driving through, you get on the train with whatever you want moved.
or if you want to get real fancy, vacuum tubes, for even faster transportation, but that would take years to get to work, and rather pointless over such a short distance.

bottom line, i believe it is POSSIBLE, especially when you do refining on the other side since metal bars are a hell of a lot more space/weight efficient compared to ore.
is it a good idea? fuck no, but i believe it to be possible, as long as you only piss off HALF of the old world, they would need at least one major trading/alliance partner in the old world, which boils down to one of the major players, china, russia, india, EU, america. UK might work alone, if they start up the commonwealth again but that would most likely lead to WW3 within a few years(due to if nothing else hongkong screaming they want back in and china going 'nu-uh')

which brings us to 'securing it' on the old world side, not really needed as long as you got a really good checkpoint on the new world side but you would probably do it anyway, since the market value of that particular area just twisted into a knot(take the offered government deal or just get evicted sounds about right) it would not really be a problem if they really wanted to do this, national security lets you get away with quite a lot of things.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Suederwind »

Hm... Gate was an interessting show and I still need to finish reading the manga. I felt not offended by how they showed western politicians. Its an japanese story for an japanese audience after all. If you watch a Michael Bay movie, you should not wonder about a lot of US patriotism, too. However, I think anime and manga can provide us with a differen, more japanese point of view on various thing and thats very interesting, at least to me.

I felt much more disgusted about those events in that hot spring and Rorys character in general. Its one thing if someone doesn' t age in a fantasy story, but why did she have to look like a little child and got aroused when people were dying around her?

Another thing, and I am not sure if they adress that in the light novel or later on in the manga, but why has no one tried to find out why and how that gate was created? One would think, that this would be one of the main goals for the japanese mission to the other side. But as far as the anime goes (or I have read the manga) they didn't even try to find out or ask questions in that direction.

One of the positive aspects of the show to me, was how they showed the characters from the other side discover our side, its culture, technology, etc... and talk about it. But overall, Gate was not an especially good show/story to me. Interessting, yes, but it could have been much better.
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discord
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by discord »

sueder(and others): on the 'how does the gate work? it is not a very interesting story arc that starts with boffins standing in a room and promptly saying 'not a clue, still working on it, might have something in a few years.' end of arc.

ffs they got at least one probably more entirely NEW fields of science, they literally have no clue.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Absalom »

Razor One wrote:You can either have a secure location or a massive freight hub, you can't really have both. You'd need to demolish a significant amount of expensive real estate in order to turn it into a freight yard large enough to service the entire nation.
NO, that's not what you want to do. What you want to do is tear up some street, replace it with railroad tracks, and as early in the path as possible split it into two separate tracks: one coming, one going. The gate is narrow, but once a train is through the gate your space opens up more. The gate section of track always gets run at speed, and once it's through to the outgoing-only section the incoming train switches from a speed-maintenance loop to the incoming-only section, and from there to the gate-section. You maintain safety, but you space traversals as close together as you can within that restriction.

I don't know how fast Australian freight trains run, but if you actually want to then you should be able to greatly increase your speed: I believe that trains in the US likely max out at 70 mph, assuming that they can get up that high with our screwy lines. High-speed corridors, in comparison, are expected to hit at least 120 mph with little in the way of special equipment: we don't normally run those speeds because the tracks aren't straight enough, and there are too many crossings for it to be safe anyways. That's why high-speed rail in the US revolves solidly around track work: even if we replace vehicles, we still won't hit higher speeds without the track work.
Razor One wrote:Space, for instance, is severely limited, moreso in Japan, and even moreso in Ginza. Once you've delivered your materials, you need a place to put them to be delivered elsewhere, to park trains, and you'd want to send the trains back through the gate to pick up more. The trouble with this though is that there's space for only one track, meaning you would have 50% downtime while the trains head back to the Gateverse to load up again.
You should never run a rail company like that. In the real world your next load is being packed before you deliver your current load; for a confined route like the gate it would not only be loaded, but in fact at speed with a different locomotive, waiting only for you to reach a safe point beyond the gate before it switches from a holding loop onto the actual gate-line itself.
Razor One wrote:I could go on and try to cover Japan's total imports and calculate a reasonable buffer to allow for a setup that doesn't have a 100% efficient throughput so that there's some spacing and realism to deliveries, but the jist of this is that you can only ram so much material through the gate so quickly even with the necessary infrastructure. You have to allow time for it to get through, get delivered and get distributed before allowing time for a return trip to do another delivery.
And this is where you make the mistake in your calculations, because with a mature infrastructure (and let's face it: once you can take these numbers seriously, you've started talking about mature infrastructure), you only need time for it to get through, + a little padding. So, the time to pass the gate, plus a little padding, then multiplied by two. Other factors (such as delivery, loading/unloading, and distribution) are distractions because a proper setup would arrange those in such a way that they do not impose anything other than an extra trip (hence the * 2) on the one, lone bottle-neck in the situation: the gate.

Though whether it would be possible to support Japan like this I don't know: I'm just pointing out a flaw in your analysis.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Krulle »

I don't know enough Anime to even understand much of the stories you're talking about here,
but the railroad going through a portal/gate/wormhole reminds me of the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton.
There, all of Humanity and their colonies are connected by wormholes, and travel is effected with the use of trains going through these gates.
As the gates are expensive, on minor colonies only one is installed, and the gate switches connection every now and then, and the trains line up on the tracks to go through at precise moments to reach their destiny.
It is THE trademark of Human civilisation in this series: trains are everywhere. Medieval planets (by choice living pagan like) get services by steam trains, modern planets by electrical trains.

If a planet commits war crimes, or are not willing to remain peaceful, or are otherwise punished, the wormhole connection is withdrawn, thus forcing that planet into isolation (with all the negative problems that are associated with that). Mostly, those planets are described as waiting for the day the connection is resumed.
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Nemo »

Absalom wrote:Though whether it would be possible to support Japan like this I don't know: I'm just pointing out a flaw in your analysis.

Wanted to add: my numbers gave 18 minutes of rail time one way to fulfill Japans current iron ore needs. Gives 36 minutes round trip which I called a half hour. I figure its a fair estimate as the world record train we based that on was less efficient than their normal runs at only 45 miles an hour, but it does give us a solid baseline. So 36 minutes a day or less. If Japan were to reduce their import/export footprint so as to avoid disrupting the world economy and potentially provoking Gasprom/Russia to war etc. the requirements would be considerably less. And as discord pointed out, can't ignore the vertical space.

I see no reason by the numbers it shouldn't possible, just a matter of whether its practical or necessary.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Razor One »

discord wrote:razor: whatever you CAN shunt through a pipeline instead of a train would be done that way, so LNG would probably not eat up train time....and why drive a car through? you got trains going back and forth pretty much constantly....
and the gate is actually pretty damn HIGH i do believe you could do a double rail line with some pipes on top, no more walking through, no more driving through, you get on the train with whatever you want moved.
or if you want to get real fancy, vacuum tubes, for even faster transportation, but that would take years to get to work, and rather pointless over such a short distance.
The problem is that pipelines take up room. The oil pipeline alone takes up quite a bit of room; adding more for gas pipelines and whatever other liquids and gasses you want to bulk transport permanently removes space you could use for something that has a bit more than a single utility, such as a train line. Pipelines are more efficient, but train lines can carry more variety when you don't need to transport that one particular good. You trade efficiency for utility.

Cars tend to be attached to trains; it's how they ferry cargo.

As for the height of the gate, going by the manga depiction it is actually shorter than it is wide. I'd eyeball it to be around 10 - 13 meters tall at most. You can certainly get some more efficiency out of that, but heaven help you if something breaks, since that more or less shuts down your entire resource train until you can clean the mess up.

bottom line, i believe it is POSSIBLE, especially when you do refining on the other side since metal bars are a hell of a lot more space/weight efficient compared to ore.
is it a good idea? fuck no, but i believe it to be possible, as long as you only piss off HALF of the old world, they would need at least one major trading/alliance partner in the old world, which boils down to one of the major players, china, russia, india, EU, america. UK might work alone, if they start up the commonwealth again but that would most likely lead to WW3 within a few years(due to if nothing else hongkong screaming they want back in and china going 'nu-uh')
Refinement on the gateside of things kind of changes things from resourcing operations, which was already changing things from the start considering Gate justified military adventurism on the basis of a policing action, to colonisation. You're more or less creating a new nation state on the other side of the gate, which given the history of colonisation and Japanese colonisation in particular is not something that will inspire great confidence amongst the Earth nations. Even if it does work out, political differences on the farside of the gate is likely to end up becoming America 2.0 by way of Japan with whatever surviving cultures assimilated by the colonists
Absalom wrote:
Razor One wrote:You can either have a secure location or a massive freight hub, you can't really have both. You'd need to demolish a significant amount of expensive real estate in order to turn it into a freight yard large enough to service the entire nation.
NO, that's not what you want to do. What you want to do is tear up some street, replace it with railroad tracks, and as early in the path as possible split it into two separate tracks: one coming, one going. The gate is narrow, but once a train is through the gate your space opens up more. The gate section of track always gets run at speed, and once it's through to the outgoing-only section the incoming train switches from a speed-maintenance loop to the incoming-only section, and from there to the gate-section. You maintain safety, but you space traversals as close together as you can within that restriction.
You still need places to offload significant amounts of raw material of all types, preferably keeping volatile, sensitive and toxic materials separate from each other as well as from passenger and bulk freight. You need enough trains to keep the Gate section of track operating at all times with a viable safety and maintenance margin, you need enough space to warehouse material that gets delivered because there is no such thing as a perfectly efficient transportation and delivery service, you need yard space to store trains that require downtime, maintenance or replacement, etc. etc.

This is not an insignificant part of Tokyo here. It's a large chunk of it, with other chunks ripped up to allow goods to be ferried to other parts of the nation. This means multiple city blocks, ripping up a lot of road, rerouting subways and water services, etc. Decades of work and expense.

I don't know how fast Australian freight trains run, but if you actually want to then you should be able to greatly increase your speed: I believe that trains in the US likely max out at 70 mph, assuming that they can get up that high with our screwy lines. High-speed corridors, in comparison, are expected to hit at least 120 mph with little in the way of special equipment: we don't normally run those speeds because the tracks aren't straight enough, and there are too many crossings for it to be safe anyways. That's why high-speed rail in the US revolves solidly around track work: even if we replace vehicles, we still won't hit higher speeds without the track work.
In open air that's a viable case, but since the Gate is very tunnel-like, you run into the problem of air resistance mounting up a lot more. The Channel Tunnel took this into account, capping speed at 130 Km/h and running at 120 Km/h, since running at 140 Km/h corresponded to a 30% increase in energy demands. The economics of things demands a maximum speed that is almost certainly lower than an open air freight train.

You should never run a rail company like that. In the real world your next load is being packed before you deliver your current load; for a confined route like the gate it would not only be loaded, but in fact at speed with a different locomotive, waiting only for you to reach a safe point beyond the gate before it switches from a holding loop onto the actual gate-line itself.
This in no way refutes the fact that space is limited and the amount of room you'd need to accommodate a nations worth of goods and raw materials is not insignificant, nor does it refute that there's only room for one track, and that trains can only come or go when they're on it. You will always have 50% downtime on the importation of goods from the Gateside, unless they're building new trains there and dumping them here, which is horribly inefficient, not to mention insane.

And this is where you make the mistake in your calculations, because with a mature infrastructure (and let's face it: once you can take these numbers seriously, you've started talking about mature infrastructure), you only need time for it to get through, + a little padding. So, the time to pass the gate, plus a little padding, then multiplied by two. Other factors (such as delivery, loading/unloading, and distribution) are distractions because a proper setup would arrange those in such a way that they do not impose anything other than an extra trip (hence the * 2) on the one, lone bottle-neck in the situation: the gate.

Though whether it would be possible to support Japan like this I don't know: I'm just pointing out a flaw in your analysis.
...I think we may be talking at cross purposes here. I mention the logistics of distribution past delivery as an example of external problems since they're not insignificant, such as the amount of space required or the fact that your maximum rate of delivery will always be capped by your ability to receive those goods since warehousing takes space which is at a premium etc, but the assumption was that you would always have one train either going to or arriving from the Gateworld, minus maintenance and safety.

If we assume that 10% of the time is going to be taken up with maintenance, the maximum theoretical uptime for delivery of raw materials will be ~45%. We have to minus a bit more, since you want trains to run with enough spacing so they have adequate stopping distance between them, and probably a bit less than that again since no system is perfectly efficient. The faster and more massive the trains are, the more stopping distance they require to run safely. There's a limit to how much you can ram through the gate at speed.

My contention is that you can't support a nation purely on the Gate's resources. Not economically in comparison to bog standard trade in any case, and that's while allowing for magically mature infrastructure to be wizarded into existence in the first place. Factor in infrastructural costs and the notion becomes absurd, since your return on investment without foreign trade is going to be ludicrous.
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Roeben »

On a slightly less realism centered topic:

I highly recommend everyone to watch Onepunch Man this season. It's fantastic.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Suederwind »

Might give One Punch Man a try, as the only anime of this season I picked up so far is Comet Lucifer. So far its not a bad show, too.
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Grayhome »

What I wonder is what is keeping that gate open and how long it will last. If the gate closes those JSDF trapped there will be a long way from home and resupply. We don't even know if the planet the gate leads to is in our own galaxy.

That might have been the plan of whoever or whatever opened the gate in the first place. Lure earthlings though, and then snap the gate shut.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by discord »

roeben: hilarious and sad at the same time....
not seen utawarerumono s2 yet(due to getting some friends up to date) but i am expecting it to be a highlight of this batch, heavy object seems kinda cute too in a retarded way.

razor: well bugger, it is wide enough for two rail tracks side by side and high enough for the highest standard of railway cars no problem, but NOT high enough to allow for the pipelines needed at the same time on top, however the question is if there is extra width available, cause the gate is pretty damn wide.

standard rail width(1435mm) should be the one used since turning circles are not exactly important, but the important part is the width of the standard containers which are 2438mm.
this means that even given 1m of free space on each side(i believe the standard is well under 30cm but lets say 1m given that some rail cars might need more width, like tanks for instance.) that still leaves us 5x6m or so for pipelines with TWO rail lines running.

bottom line is yes i believe it is possible to run enough freight through the gate to supply japan, it would be a monster task, but possible.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Razor One »

Grayhome wrote:What I wonder is what is keeping that gate open and how long it will last. If the gate closes those JSDF trapped there will be a long way from home and resupply. We don't even know if the planet the gate leads to is in our own galaxy.

That might have been the plan of whoever or whatever opened the gate in the first place. Lure earthlings though, and then snap the gate shut.
The backstory as I understand it is that that's exactly what happened to the Fantasy Romans. They're all descended from actual Romans that passed through a Gate long ago, got cut off, and built their own Roman Empire that continued on to this day. The demihuman races were lured there in a similar fashion.
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It also becomes a plot point later on in the novels.
discord wrote:
razor: well bugger, it is wide enough for two rail tracks side by side and high enough for the highest standard of railway cars no problem, but NOT high enough to allow for the pipelines needed at the same time on top, however the question is if there is extra width available, cause the gate is pretty damn wide.

standard rail width(1435mm) should be the one used since turning circles are not exactly important, but the important part is the width of the standard containers which are 2438mm.
this means that even given 1m of free space on each side(i believe the standard is well under 30cm but lets say 1m given that some rail cars might need more width, like tanks for instance.) that still leaves us 5x6m or so for pipelines with TWO rail lines running.

bottom line is yes i believe it is possible to run enough freight through the gate to supply japan, it would be a monster task, but possible.
I calced the width in my prior post.

The problem is that the gate is incredibly narrow. The area where the gate is implied to appear, Ginza 6-Chome in the anime is roughly here, at least according to the street sign.

At most, the Gate is 4 lanes wide plus the pavement. In the anime, tanks were shown rolling in two at a time with a bit of leeway. The manga also depicts the gate being at a rough count 20 men wide marching in phalanx formation, though that last one is a bit rough.

Lane width is 3.25 - 3.5 meters in Japan, giving a minima of 13 meters and a maxima of 14 meters.

Assuming an upper bound, and using some of your figures:

The pipeline eats up 304.8 centimeters. Allowing for clearance and various other linkages, that's one lane gone, so we're down to 10.5 meters.

A Japanese freight train is likely to have a gauge of 1067 mm, but the width of the track is not the width of the car. Checking this diagram, we can see that freight and passenger trains come in a whole mess of widths and heights. I'll go for something middle of the road and say that the width of the train will be around Plate C or 3251.2 cm in width, eating up another lane.

However, you can't really expect to run trains without clearance on either side for both safety and maintenance, so that's more room eaten up again. Clearance width seems to vary from 1524 cm to 2515 cm, adding either 3048 cm or 5030 cm. Assuming you need to be able to run wide loads through the Gate, we'll go with the upper bound.

Adding all this up, running a train through the gate needs:

3251.2 cm (Train) + 5030 cm (Clearance) = 8.281 meters of clearance. Subtracting that from what we had left above, we get 2.219 meters of space left. While you could fit a car through it, it'd be a tight fit and a one way lane, most likely used in case of emergencies.
You could probably get two lanes of track running through if you forego the pipeline, ignore safety, and farewell any ability to run wide loads (such as mining equipment) through there, but I think the net benefits are small compared to the increasing potential costs. Tunnels, which the gate seems to be the closest parallel to, are usually run single track to reduce the damage of any potential derails. You need space and clearance, and according to that diagram I dug up 30 centimeters just doesn't cut it, the minimum of minimums is 1016 centimeters. It might work for passenger and tube trains, but freight trains seem to operate with wider safety margins. At least that's my impression of it.

...

Oh, and since we're speaking of trains so much.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Mr Bojangles »

Razor One wrote:
-snipped for brevity-

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Why is that guy saying "multi-track drifting!!" like it's a thing? I mean, I know manga can get flat-out ridiculous... but, yeah, "multi-track drifting!!"

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Absalom »

Razor One wrote:
Absalom wrote:
Razor One wrote:You can either have a secure location or a massive freight hub, you can't really have both. You'd need to demolish a significant amount of expensive real estate in order to turn it into a freight yard large enough to service the entire nation.
NO, that's not what you want to do. What you want to do is tear up some street, replace it with railroad tracks, and as early in the path as possible split it into two separate tracks: one coming, one going. The gate is narrow, but once a train is through the gate your space opens up more. The gate section of track always gets run at speed, and once it's through to the outgoing-only section the incoming train switches from a speed-maintenance loop to the incoming-only section, and from there to the gate-section. You maintain safety, but you space traversals as close together as you can within that restriction.
You still need places to offload significant amounts of raw material of all types, preferably keeping volatile, sensitive and toxic materials separate from each other as well as from passenger and bulk freight. You need enough trains to keep the Gate section of track operating at all times with a viable safety and maintenance margin, you need enough space to warehouse material that gets delivered because there is no such thing as a perfectly efficient transportation and delivery service, you need yard space to store trains that require downtime, maintenance or replacement, etc. etc.

This is not an insignificant part of Tokyo here. It's a large chunk of it, with other chunks ripped up to allow goods to be ferried to other parts of the nation. This means multiple city blocks, ripping up a lot of road, rerouting subways and water services, etc. Decades of work and expense.
A large part of Tokyo that already exists. If you aren't going to hook into the already-existing rail network then you're going to go full-custom for this sort of thing anyways. You want to hook into the already-existing national rail network so that you can use already-existing facilities for everything that you can. Maintaining a constant flow is the biggest hurdle, and part of the reason for the speed-maintenance loop. The lines in and out, the "storage loop", and the liquids pipeline should ideally be the only "primary" infrastructure projects, with all of the other work done in support of them.

Odffloading facilities already exist, and can be built out in the countryside or under a mountain or wherever if they don't exist. Warehouses definitively exist, yard space exists and can be built far from the urban areas, etc. Part of it needs to be in Tokyo, but the majority of that should already exist, with everything else being either gate-dedicated new construction, or stuff that doesn't need to be in Tokyo.
Razor One wrote:

I don't know how fast Australian freight trains run, but if you actually want to then you should be able to greatly increase your speed: I believe that trains in the US likely max out at 70 mph, assuming that they can get up that high with our screwy lines. High-speed corridors, in comparison, are expected to hit at least 120 mph with little in the way of special equipment: we don't normally run those speeds because the tracks aren't straight enough, and there are too many crossings for it to be safe anyways. That's why high-speed rail in the US revolves solidly around track work: even if we replace vehicles, we still won't hit higher speeds without the track work.
In open air that's a viable case, but since the Gate is very tunnel-like, you run into the problem of air resistance mounting up a lot more. The Channel Tunnel took this into account, capping speed at 130 Km/h and running at 120 Km/h, since running at 140 Km/h corresponded to a 30% increase in energy demands. The economics of things demands a maximum speed that is almost certainly lower than an open air freight train.
The economics of things says that Japan is already expensive, and if it's signifigant enough to worry about that then it's probably signifigant enough to invest in pressure-lowering entrance and exit tunnels (like vacuum tunnels, but less extreme).

At any rate, if that level of obstacle is found, then someone attempting this sort of project in the first place will find a way around it, even if that "way" is itself impractical. To be honest, if the world's population was magically reshuffled and had to live for a few years wherever they wound up, then most islanders probably wouldn't move back to their home island for years, or even decades, simply because the various semi-remote islands (the Japanese islands included) are expensive: cargo ships are cheaper than cargo planes, but their cargo still winds up several times as expensive at the destination as it was at the source. Even f the gate portion of the route is hideously expensive, it still would have the potential to be cheaper than the current sea-based economy, since it's only the gate-portion of the route that has to deal with the higher travel costs.
Razor One wrote:

And this is where you make the mistake in your calculations, because with a mature infrastructure (and let's face it: once you can take these numbers seriously, you've started talking about mature infrastructure), you only need time for it to get through, + a little padding. So, the time to pass the gate, plus a little padding, then multiplied by two. Other factors (such as delivery, loading/unloading, and distribution) are distractions because a proper setup would arrange those in such a way that they do not impose anything other than an extra trip (hence the * 2) on the one, lone bottle-neck in the situation: the gate.

Though whether it would be possible to support Japan like this I don't know: I'm just pointing out a flaw in your analysis.
...I think we may be talking at cross purposes here. I mention the logistics of distribution past delivery as an example of external problems since they're not insignificant, such as the amount of space required or the fact that your maximum rate of delivery will always be capped by your ability to receive those goods since warehousing takes space which is at a premium etc, but the assumption was that you would always have one train either going to or arriving from the Gateworld, minus maintenance and safety.
The logistics are a concern, but Japan-side logistics are nothing: just leave everything in a yard until needed if you have to, and/or convert some cargo ships into floating warehouses (you're not using all of that port capacity anymore, so feel free to repurpose it).

The real logistics problems are on the far side of the gate, where just as examples, you surely have neither the rail and pipeline networks needed to feed your gate routes (infrastructure through the gate and the inevitable counstruction-fallout? ha, that's nothing to bootstrapping the rail and pipeline infrastructure of theoretically an entire continent!), nor (once again, just an arbitrary example out of surely numerous options) the fishing fleet required to replace all of the fish that Japan imports from whatever-half of the world it ticks off (Japan imports the majority of the world's fish catch, and in a larger sense a dangerous volume of it's food in general).

Dealing with the problems on the Japanese side of the gate is doable, even if you have to turn Fascist for a few years to actually get enough expenditure focused on the projects.

The infrastructure problems are of the other side of the gate, where you don't even have a guarantee of enough population for your needs, and are virtually guaranteed to have to train virtually all of them for tasks that they might not have even heard of, and which you yourself might not have any personel with experience in.
Razor One wrote:If we assume that 10% of the time is going to be taken up with maintenance, the maximum theoretical uptime for delivery of raw materials will be ~45%. We have to minus a bit more, since you want trains to run with enough spacing so they have adequate stopping distance between them, and probably a bit less than that again since no system is perfectly efficient. The faster and more massive the trains are, the more stopping distance they require to run safely. There's a limit to how much you can ram through the gate at speed.
The stopping-distance mostly comes down to how fast you can route trains onto multiple tracks, since that lets you drop the train's actual speed: something that you will do as soon as you can get qaway with it.
Razor One wrote:My contention is that you can't support a nation purely on the Gate's resources. Not economically in comparison to bog standard trade in any case, and that's while allowing for magically mature infrastructure to be wizarded into existence in the first place. Factor in infrastructural costs and the notion becomes absurd, since your return on investment without foreign trade is going to be ludicrous.
And once again, I'm not saying that your final conclusion is necessarily wrong, just what I consider flaws in your analysis.
Grayhome wrote:What I wonder is what is keeping that gate open and how long it will last. If the gate closes those JSDF trapped there will be a long way from home and resupply. We don't even know if the planet the gate leads to is in our own galaxy.

That might have been the plan of whoever or whatever opened the gate in the first place. Lure earthlings though, and then snap the gate shut.
It might not even be the same universe.
discord wrote:roeben: hilarious and sad at the same time....
not seen utawarerumono s2 yet(due to getting some friends up to date) but i am expecting it to be a highlight of this batch, heavy object seems kinda cute too in a retarded way.
They're doing Heavy Object? Maybe they'll do that valkyrie one next.
discord wrote:razor: well bugger, it is wide enough for two rail tracks side by side and high enough for the highest standard of railway cars no problem, but NOT high enough to allow for the pipelines needed at the same time on top, however the question is if there is extra width available, cause the gate is pretty damn wide.

standard rail width(1435mm) should be the one used since turning circles are not exactly important, but the important part is the width of the standard containers which are 2438mm.
this means that even given 1m of free space on each side(i believe the standard is well under 30cm but lets say 1m given that some rail cars might need more width, like tanks for instance.) that still leaves us 5x6m or so for pipelines with TWO rail lines running.

bottom line is yes i believe it is possible to run enough freight through the gate to supply japan, it would be a monster task, but possible.
You want electricity, water, and data as well, but unless you're using electric trains those should be minor.
Razor One wrote:
Snip: sizing stuff
You could probably get two lanes of track running through if you forego the pipeline, ignore safety, and farewell any ability to run wide loads (such as mining equipment) through there,
I think the "interesting" mining equipment will be large enough that you're going to write it off anyways, but that doesn't change the math.

Though if you're actually counting that car route then you should probably reallocate the space: a mixture of specialized low-profile vehicle, and just using the railroad allocation during downtime would probably be a better fit.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by skaianDestiny »

The new Gundam series Ironblooded Orphans looks pretty promising. Go check it out.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by hack »

... after One-Punch Man, of course.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by dragoongfa »

Changing the subject a little bit, I have recently started indulging myself in some Japanese light novels of some manga and anime I am currently following. Overlord and Rise of the shield hero to name the two latest ones.

I can't read Japanese so I have to read the fan translations, so I have to ask anyone who has read both variants is if the writing on the original Jap text is as egregious as the translations?

It's bad, bordering on the 'I wouldn't pay one dollar for this' variety. What's perplexing me is that the fan subs and translations on the various anime and manga adaptations are of excellent quality while the overall text of the light novel translations I have read is horrible (and those are often from the same people who translate anime and manga).

What is worse, I have read plenty of reviews of official translations in which readers openly complain that the translation doesn't hold water when compared with the fan translations. And those are texts that I consider badly written at best, WTF is supposed to be happening at worse.

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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Razor One »

Mr Bojangles wrote:Why is that guy saying "multi-track drifting!!" like it's a thing? I mean, I know manga can get flat-out ridiculous... but, yeah, "multi-track drifting!!"
The image is a cap from a doujinshi (Fan comic) called "Densha de D" which parodies Initial D, but instead of cars they use trains. Drifting is a major thing in Initial D because it involves street racing or something (never looked into it), so you can only really replicate that with trains by using multiple tracks, hence Multitrack Drifting.
dragoongfa wrote:Changing the subject a little bit, I have recently started indulging myself in some Japanese light novels of some manga and anime I am currently following. Overlord and Rise of the shield hero to name the two latest ones.

I can't read Japanese so I have to read the fan translations, so I have to ask anyone who has read both variants is if the writing on the original Jap text is as egregious as the translations?

It's bad, bordering on the 'I wouldn't pay one dollar for this' variety. What's perplexing me is that the fan subs and translations on the various anime and manga adaptations are of excellent quality while the overall text of the light novel translations I have read is horrible (and those are often from the same people who translate anime and manga).

What is worse, I have read plenty of reviews of official translations in which readers openly complain that the translation doesn't hold water when compared with the fan translations. And those are texts that I consider badly written at best, WTF is supposed to be happening at worse.
From what I understand, that's got a lot to do with how Japanese is written versus how it gets spoken. Kanji is a bitch to translate, the syntax and grammar are different, and some stuff just will not translate well across the languages even with a professional at the helm. Spoken Japanese is relatively easier to get translated, since speaking it strips it of some of the ambiguity.

Let's do an example.

Consider the word "I", as in the reference to ones self. The Romaji for this in Japanese would be "Watashi". The hiragana would be わたし

Now, let's list out some other Watashi's.

わたし - Watashi - I
私 - Watashi - I
渡し - Watashi - Pass
綿し - Wata Shi - Cotton To
渡司 - Watashi - WatariTsukasa (I think this one broke google)

So, the same phonetic sound has five different potential meanings, only two of which seem to refer to one's self.

The real skullduggery really comes out though when you launch into the Kanji. Let's go for the simplest rendition of I with Kanji, 私.

A quick check on Wiktionary shows that it has one Onyomi Reading, Shi, and three Kunyomi readings, Watashi, Watakushi, and Hisoka.

Watashi we know. Watakushi means the same thing as Watashi, but is incredibly formal, the kind of thing you'd only use around an emperor or someone of similar rank and respect.

Hisoka means secret, which seems out of left field, until you recognise that the Kanji has two meanings; I/Me, and private/secret/personal. The Kanji can be read in any one of those ways, and could be used as a pun so as to mean both at the same time, or be a veiled cultural reference.

Thus when translating, you need to be aware of all possible permutations of the Kanji, how it fits into the sentence, whether there's a cultural reference or pun going on, and that it may form part of a compound word with multiple Kanji strung together as a lengthier pun. When it comes to fansubbing, all you really need to do is listen to what they're saying, keep track of the context, and write accordingly.

Of course, that assumes the group you're paying attention to is even fansubbing the first place. If they're just ripping stuff, then they're not even translating; most legitimate streaming sites like Crunchyroll tend to get the script sent to them directly from the writers, so professional translators have already gone over it and there's not much work for anyone to do except for encoding and uploading. The quality of the professional translators can vary a bit too though, as Nobunagun's infamous "Heinrich Himmler" (it was apparently meant to be Heinrich Hipoi) translation goof attests to.

In short, translating the Kanji is a bitch. What gets used in novels is different from what gets used in Manga, which can muddy the waters a little, as Manga tend to use somewhat simpler Kanji compared to novels (Compare: Foundation novel vs. Superman comics). Most translations of novels are either labours of love or quick and dirty machine translations with the odd layperson trying to kludge it into something that's barely legible. Another factor is that light novels and novels often get officially licensed more often than manga (at least from what I've seen), which means the lawyers can and will come out in force to stamp down on your project as it starts to get running which tends to disperse talent, whereas a lot of manga never makes it to the west, so there's no money lost of a few foreigners translate it into English for free.

It's like putting together a ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. Except half of the pieces don't fit unless you rotate them through as few as four to as many as nineteen dimensions, a number of pieces fit together nicely but don't actually form a sensible image, and you have to do it blindfolded with boxing gloves on while a rabid honey badger feasts on your spleen.

{Edit}

If you want an example of what I consider a well translated light novel, look into Risou no himo seikatsu. From what I understand the person who translates that one did college level Japanese. It's a fairly good read and the story is good, but you still get odd cultural artifacts such as strange repetitions or obscure sentence structure.
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Arioch »

Translating prose is always going to be more difficult than translating manga, as the visuals carry a lot of the story and literal translations will usually do for dialogue. This is often not so for descriptive prose.

In addition to the problems Razor One mentioned above, Japanese prose uses a lot of idiom and metaphor, and so a literal translation often seems completely nonsensical. There are also a lot of truncations and omissions. And that's before getting into the differences between formal and casual speech, and slang.

I took three years of college Japanese, and I'm nowhere near being able to read a novel or a newspaper.

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