Vorpal
Making the rounds.
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2013
- Messages
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Even on an ideally completely spherical Earth, doing it on that scale means reliably measuring angular differences less than a millionth of degree. Assuming your sticks have heights either known or match each other also to ridiculous precision. Assuming they are balanced with verticality perfect to similar level of precision. I don't see Dio doing all that, but even he's that super-sensitive, it's still worthless because at that level he can't eliminate the noise, such as vibration or atmospheric distortion of the light rays (if you've ever seen air above a hot road, you know what's going on). Not to mention this exercise still assumes perfect sphericity of the Earth, while in practice variation of topography are going to mess you up even if hypothetically you could deal with all of that.FurikoMaru said:Clarify, please. Precision: B is nothing to sneeze at; the stat covers both one's movements and perception, and the Stand and the user are one.
The difference in sunset times across a known height is one method I've mention above. He's going to need to do some further optics to compensate for horizontal refraction and know his latitude; otherwise, the method is rather unreliable and so would not be very conclusive (unless this planet's size is very off from Earth's). The latitude he can find through some methods, e.g., fairly simply through a Foucault pendulum, although he'll probably not be able to hide one big enough to be reliable (meh, it's not ruinous to his reputation anyway). The former he's just going to have to do some optics for, and you can assume he's smart enough to do it.FurikoMaru said:What would be within his means? Because there's no way he wouldn't try something to figure out whether the library is completely full of shit. I just went for the simplest thing I could think of.
Except of course, if he simply performs this method without such compensation anyway, through simply being unaware of confounding factors that he should be compensating for. That's both simple and IC. He doesn't have to be logically perfect here, after all. Edit: erratum: he'd still have to figure out the latitude somehow, actually. It's the further optics that he could ignore.