How big do you consider Cybertron to be?

[Grand Moff Muffin]

With the possibility of a map or atlas being developed, how big do people reckon the main metal sphere of Cybertron is?

The Marvel comic said it was Saturn-sized. Not counting its rings, Saturn appears to be 120,000 km across at the equator, almost ten times the diameter of the Earth. But, according to NASA:

Most scientists believe Saturn is a giant ball of gas that has no solid surface. However, the planet seems to have a hot solid inner core of iron and rocky material. Around this dense central part is an outer core that probably consists of ammonia, methane, and water. A layer of highly compressed, liquid metallic hydrogen surrounds the outer core. Above this layer lies a region composed of hydrogen and helium in a viscous (syruplike) form. The hydrogen and helium become gaseous near the planet's surface and merge with its atmosphere, which consists chiefly of the same two elements.

No-one knows the diameter of the solid core.

The newly discovered rings of Saturn are 480,000 km across.



Alternatively, you may hate the idea that Cybertron is Saturn-sized because comic and cartoon both show normal TFs alongside Unicron, and Unicron alongside Cybertron, and putting the two together Cybertron is clearly much smaller than Earth.

Also, having a Saturn-sized honeycombed planet of solid metal may be just too implausible for the scientists and engineers among us when it comes to structural/gravitational stability, and the number of stars required to generate that much metal.

So, how big is it in _your_ mind?

Martin

[Bogatan]

I always thought the cartoon and comic, mostly the cartoon made Cybertron seem very small, Earth moon small. That always felt wrong to me. The moon is in reailty still big to a human or even TF though so it might not be unreasonable. What didnt sit right was the war raging on such a small planet for so long 5 years of WWII caused vast damage. The same or greater war raging on a smaller planet, by larger participants for many many, times longer seemed unfeasible.

The only way I could imagine such a war running for so long is because the planet was large enough for each side to have plenty of space to witthdraw to rebuild infrastructure.

The hooneycomb nature of Cybertron, something I never really took in to account growing up would mean that even moon sized the surface area of Cybertron would be massively greater than Earth, but would not offer the distance for the armies to avoid unfeasably constant fighting.

For one reason the surface of Cybertron has been shown to be liable to major damage. Being honey combed the planets surface is less solid (obviously) than say Earth. All those layers would soon be demolished by constant fighting.

So I like the idea of it being Saturn sized or at least not smaller than the Earth. I imagined it being Earth sized to begin with, a very dense bal of metal/ore, then the earliest inhabitants began using the metal of the planet to build ever upwards until its volume grew massively. By the marvel orign I suppose Primus began the work engineering the planet but it would have been continued by the first transformers.

Andy

[blueshift]

Personally, I always saw Cybertron as large as Earth /for the Transformers/ ie scaled up for giant space robots. So Earth x4 or whatever the size scale of human:robot is

[Grand Moff Muffin]

I don't believe that TMUK ever established a firm position on this in fiction because it's a difficult question. I am in favour of democracy here, and haven't voted yet because I am open to all possibilities. (While I think a solid planet the size of Cybertron does contradict laws of engineering, I am happy to use Matrix energy/nanobots to explain that away - particularly as Cybertron was seen to begin to collapse when Primus was sort-of dead after the 1991 Unicron war.)

BUT! Have those who favour a bigger Cybertron thought through what this means when it comes to the battles with Unicron? I mean, it does imply that Marvel US #75 didn't happen as it appeared to happen to the reader. If Cybertron and Unicron were really planet-sized or larger, then it would take the TF jets hours to travel from the surface to Unicron's head (assuming he was standing still) and hours or even days for TFs on the ground to drive the length of Unicron's foot. Prime telling Waverider, Quake and Joyride to concentrate their firepower on Unicron's foot was like telling three guys with pistols to concentrate their fire on Mount Everest. And the flame-breath that Unicron blasted Scorponok with would have been as wide as the Atlantic ocean and taken a good few minutes to travel from his mouth to his feet below.

Unicron cannot pick Galvatron up between finger and thumb to swallow him because his finger and thumb are the size of countries. Rodimus Prime cannot smash Unicron's eye by driving through it because it is the size of Siberia and probably several miles thick.

Are those of you who like Cybertron and Unicron big happy with all this? (I'm not against it myself, I just want to be clear about things! )

Martin

[Bogatan]

I think Unicrons size would be too vast even at 1000km. Using the planet toys as a guide the robot is about twice as tall as the diameter as they are basically folded over. That would make Unicron around 2000km tall or 2 million meters tall ( if my maths is right). Lets call Galvatron 20m tall to keep the maths simple. That would make Unicron 100,000 times bigger. Unicron would be around twice height of Britain, while most of the Transformers fighting him are small enough to walk along the streets of a British city.

If I substitute me for Unicron and call myself 2m tall that would make Galvatron a fraction of a millimeter tall. That would make Galvatron like a very fine grain of sand (probably much smaller if my twice the height of Britain comparison is correct)) which I suppose could be picked up though not so much between finger and thumb.

I'm doubting my maths as the figures seem mental, but I cant see I've gone wrong, I'm sure some one will tell me though.

I think I would argue that Unicron may be about that size and possibly Cybertron was originally of a similar size before effectvely hollowed out and expanding as in my take on the origin.

Most of the size anomolies between Unicron and a much larger Cybertron could be explained by the perspectives of the images.

So a big Cybertron isn't a big problem for me I just accept there was no way to sensibly translate the sheer scale of Unicron in relation to other Transformers. Unicron should be smaller than Cybertron though.

Andy

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Whoops, it's Saturn's E-ring that is 48,000 km across, the new ring is tens of millions of km across. But never mind, no-one's voting for that option.

Another thing. It takes sound 3 seconds to travel one km in air. So if Unicron is hundreds of km in dimensions and he not much more slowly than a normal person from his own perspective, then he must be breaking the sound barrier all the time. Non-fliers stand no chance of getting out of his way when a hand the size of England comes flying at them at Mach X. Even the air being pushed aside by his movements would probably kill everyone, TFs included.

We can see how this poll is going. Anyone want to start a separate Unicron poll?

Martin

[Nigel]

Martin makes some good points there. I hadn't looked at the battle that way before.

I would like to think that Cybertron is Saturn-sized, as the only occasion that I know of where a size has been specifically stated is within a canonical story. (Without getting into a true/correct canon debate, of course. Let's just say that it has been stated as Saturn-sized within a particular canon.) However, when a reader letter mentioned Saturn much later, the letter-answerer didn't know what he was talking about, which casts a shadow over that idea.

At the same time, I have always thought that most drawings of Cybertron, from whichever series, make it look very small, with huge spires or canyons. In comparable pictures of Earth from space, such features can't even be seen to rise above sea level. Spires reaching orbital height make Cybertron look as small as a large asteroid.

.....


I just took a look at Marvel #1. It doesn't actually say that Cybertron is Saturn-sized. It says that Cybertron was Saturn-sized. "Circling the star Alpha Centauri, ages ago, was a planet unlike any other in the heavens - Cybertron... It's content was entirely mechanical. Cybertron existed, from metallic surface to core as a vast Saturn-sized machine world... a world whose origins were lost in the dead past." The narrative goes on to describe the start of the war. Now, here's a theory. What if Cybertron was originally Saturn-sized, but the war caused it to shrink: a war lasting millennia would not only have caused massive, planet-wide destruction but also would have used innumerable resources.

[Nigel]

Oct 8, 2009 10:35:10 GMT Grand Moff Muffin said:

Even the air being pushed aside by his movements would probably kill everyone, TFs included.

What air?

[Deleted]

I tend to follow the comic continuity mor ethan the cartoon's, so I'd say Saturn sized :3

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Oct 8, 2009 10:39:58 GMT Nigel said:

Oct 8, 2009 10:35:10 GMT Grand Moff Muffin said:

Even the air being pushed aside by his movements would probably kill everyone, TFs included.

What air?

The air that enables the Neo-Knights to breathe, jet aircraft to fly, combustion of any sort to take place and sound to propagate through space.

Martin

[Nigel]

That's a lot of assumptions.

[Shockprowl]

Well, the comic says Saturn sized, so I'll run with that, but, like many others, I've always thought Cybertron as being multi-layered, with many deep layers underground. So, perhaps, Cybertron is a large as Cybertron, but only as dense as, I dunno, the Earth or something. Although it's made of metal and stuff, it's very 'spread out'.

[grahamthomson]

I am happy to go with the general consensus.

[Benn]

In a letters page, either Grimlock or Soundwave stated that Cybertron was much bigger than any of the poxy planets in our solar system. So that's where I've always sized it. But don't worry, I'm not going to start fights about it.

[The Doctor]

Cybertron is as big as our imaginations want it to be.

-Ralph

[Deleted]

Oct 8, 2009 10:37:22 GMT Nigel said:

I just took a look at Marvel #1. It doesn't actually say that Cybertron is Saturn-sized. It says that Cybertron was Saturn-sized. "Circling the star Alpha Centauri, ages ago, was a planet unlike any other in the heavens - Cybertron... It's content was entirely mechanical. Cybertron existed, from metallic surface to core as a vast Saturn-sized machine world... a world whose origins were lost in the dead past." The narrative goes on to describe the start of the war. Now, here's a theory. What if Cybertron was originally Saturn-sized, but the war caused it to shrink: a war lasting millennia would not only have caused massive, planet-wide destruction but also would have used innumerable resources.

On the Unicron poll, I totally forgot the Saturn Cybertron comparison. After spinning around the universe with a full scale war and more than likely pieces of Cybertron peeling away like a skin on an orange, I could see Cybertron getting smaller over millions of years.

How many levels of Cybertron are there?

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Oct 10, 2009 10:25:53 GMT The Doctor said:

Cybertron is as big as our imaginations want it to be.

Yesss... and how big that is, is what I want to find out from this poll.

Scientific plausibility may limit how big some people's imaginations want it to be, or it may not.

Very surprisingly for me (but happily!) the Hub seems pretty unanimous on the approximate sizes of both Cybertron and Unicron! Which makes kick-starting any collaborative map or atlas project a whole lot easier.

Diaclone1982 asks how many levels Cybertron has got. Well, if it has a diameter of 120,000 km, and therefore a radius of 60,000 km, it can have... hmmm, about as many levels as our imaginations want there to be. If each level was 1 km above the next and it was totally hollow, there could be 60,000 levels, though I suppose gravity would reduce to zero as you get to the centre, and right at the middle you would feel totally weightless.

Various TMUK stories though have suggested that Cybertron has a solid rocky core on which the metal outer laters have their foundation, so the levels would only go down so far, presumably with Primus' head on one of the lowermost levels (but not at the centre of the planet, as we've seen there is gravity there).

There could be half a dozen levels to Cybertron, or thousands.

Martin

[Deleted]

Instead of the levels of Cybertron arranged like a honey comb, what if they are in a three dimensional arrangement along the x, y, and z axis. Perhaps the exterior levels, like an orange peel, are smooth and one on top of the other but the interior is more a kin to a spider's web in every three dimensional axis. It would be sort of a jumbled mess but to robots with balance systems, they would never realize they are upside down or sideways.

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Bear in mind though that gravity pulls you towards the centre of the planet, so you kind of need the levels to be arranged so that your feet always point to the centre, i.e. the levels need to be spherical shells.

Hmmm, I wouldn't want the honeycomb metaphor to be taken literally.

Martin

[Kingoji]

Unicron is big! So IMPOSSIBLY big!
Unicron is this big...

Cybertron is this big.

POWER BEYOND MEASURE!!

The Ark is of a decent enough size to chin Unicron (too big for his eyes). The Ark fits snugly within the base of Mount St. Hillary.

That's all I got.

[The Doctor]

I dunno. Unicron is clearly just firing at a stat of Cybertron rather than planet Cybertron itself so the matter remains unresolved!

-Ralph

[jameso]

Despite being the one that started the map/atlas thread, I'm not sure how to approach this, I don't really like the 'well, it said in the comics saturn sized so...' argument because it's fairly unimaginative and the comic also suggests it's small enough that you can see window slits from space. I am seriously leaning towards some kind of how long is a piece of string argument more in line with Ralph's post about it being as big as our imagination wants it to be.
When I started thinking about the map I was thinking more along the lines of something like: If the Transformers got a distress call from the other side of the planet would they be able to pop over there that afternoon or would it take months to get there? But I guess that's more of how fast are their shuttles question.

[legios]

I tend towards the "Visible sphere of saturn" size myself, and darn the scientific conundrums that this leads to. (If we want to start basing things on an application of how physics works in our universe then there are a number of transformers whose feet appear to be vastly too small to prevent their ground pressure making them sink into the earth up to their knees for that matter).

I've always tended to assume that things like the Unicron battle take place with considerable dramatic license, with physics bent in the interests of telling a good story. So I am fairly comfortable with squaring the circle between these two contradictory set of facts. The sheer mass of, even a mostly hollow Cybertron makes for some interesting possibilities - it's passing through our solar system four million-and-a-bit years ago might actually be responsible for why some of the smaller bodies are where they are for example, with Cybertron's mass having perturbed their orbits sufficiently that they have ended up in very different places than they otherwise would.

Perhaps that is why the asteroid belt that Cybertron encounters in TF#1 is far denser than it is in the present day - perhaps some of the Earth-crossing asteroids were originally on very different orbital paths until the great cosmic bowling ball that is Cybertron rattled across the snooker table of the solar system.

Karl