Hub.mn

Guido Zambelis wrote:The way I look at it, it's such a ridiculous addition that a removal would be no more ridiculous.

Where I feel no matter how ridiculous its addition was to begin with, it'd be a lot more ridiculous to remove it after all this time...

If it can't conceivably exist within the terms of a realistic geophysical simulation, then it's presence on the map (or lack of) surely can't be of any significance?

Craitman wrote:

Guido Zambelis wrote:The way I look at it, it's such a ridiculous addition that a removal would be no more ridiculous.

Where I feel no matter how ridiculous its addition was to begin with, it'd be a lot more ridiculous to remove it after all this time...

Time is not exactly on your side with things like this though. It's a continuing embarrassment and a failure to not correct something like that. The more time that goes on, the more of a bad situation it is. Sooner or later you gotta man up, fess up, and do what needs to be done.

I would support Leng being redesigned to properly fit a polar projection, but barring that, its total deletion is preferable to it staying in its current form.

Leng should never have been, and should have been removed long ago. The fact it wasn't isn't a reason to keep it. If you have a birth defect you don't leave it untreated simply because "It's always been there", you get rid of it as soon as you can. As I see it.. Leng is a horrible desease that infected the map long ago, but we didn't have the money for the treatment till recently.. for some reason.

Aesthetics aside, Leng has an established presence on the map and should not be removed.

Geographically, it fits in fine with the Pan-Micran supercontinent and is in no way whatsoever in contradiction to any aspect of realistic geophysics. Barents didn't discover Svalbard until 1596. It is entirely conceivable that the island was obscured by ice and isolated from the rest of the world until its discovery. Given the lifespan of the MCS, Leng's discovery would be roughly within the same time period.

Furthermore, the suggestion of removing Leng via some sort of mechanism, be it manmade or natural, is nigh impossible unless you want a global apocalypse on your hands. Causing an island of that size to be vaporized - either by tectonic, geothermal, nuclear, or other forces - would have a severe impact on all of Micras' climate. The only means that would circumvent this would be by magic - something which is even more ridiculous than this proposal.

It's creation was done on a whim, so it's destruction should be just as easy.

It's a continuing embarrassment

Well that's very very subjective. When I first looked at the MCS map, I didn't see anything that looked obviously wrong. When I first saw the polar projections, I thought, "Wow, look at the poor sods that claimed that continent! Suckers!" Never once did I think "This is an embarrassingly inaccurate and impossible geophysical entity" and I think a lot of people feel the same way. I'm not embarrassed. You might be embarrased by it, and Erik might be embarrassed by it, and Scott might be embarrassed by it, and Bill might be embarrassed by it, but the bawwing minority doesn't outweight the silent majority just because it Q_Q's the most and loudest. I reckon it has a lot to do with the fact that you were around when it wasn't there or something like that. Bottom line is, I don't approve of blowing this out of proportion.

"Q_Q's" ....wow.... that's all I'm gonna say to that...

Heres a realistic scenario, Ryan.

Leng was mined too much, it collapsed. No more Leng.

My real gripe here is that apparently it's okay for one person to make a mess by getting drunk one night and adding huge splotches of land to inappropriate parts of the MCS map, but to fix the mess takes a unanimous vote and a credible backstory and the power of legendary Onyx Orb which can only be found in the impenetrable lair of Hrogmorph, Slayer of Men.

Probably because the mess has been there so long that it's been incorporated into everything so much that it'd be a ridiculous idea to remove it (and really hard to do so realistically and logically) after all this time. It's much, much easier to discover an island covered in ice than it is to destroy it...

NUKE.IT.

VOLCANOS

EARTHSHATTERING KABOOMS

THE GROUND ITSELF SPLITTING ASUNDER

LENG SINKS

It could happen...

Furthermore, the suggestion of removing Leng via some sort of mechanism, be it manmade or natural, is nigh impossible unless you want a global apocalypse on your hands. Causing an island of that size to be vaporized - either by tectonic, geothermal, nuclear, or other forces - would have a severe impact on all of Micras' climate. The only means that would circumvent this would be by magic - something which is even more ridiculous than this proposal.

An island of that size? I've said it before and I've said it again - the only reason Leng looks remotely large is because of the latitude. Here's a diagram I made a while back of the size Leng would be if it was around the equator:



The green dot marked "Marisco" is Leng placed among the So Sara islands. Leng is not too much larger than islands like Santorini or Krakatoa, which were partially or fully destroyed by volcanic eruptions and could certainly be destroyed by Aster's bomb.

Or, if you're willing to play the "Well, Leng was just discovered" card, what is discovered can be undiscovered. During the early days of polar exploration, a bunch of islands were "discovered" and duly recorded on maps but later turned out not to exist. Crocker Land, New South Greenland, and Sannikov Land are all real-world Arctic islands of around the same size as Leng that were reported to exist, mapped, and then quietly removed when people discovered there was nothing there. Leng's position under an ice shelf only makes it more likely that a mistake of that sort could be made.

As for magic, I'm not usually a fan, but you yourself opened the possibility to that one. As Wikipedia puts it:

Leng is a fictional cold arid plateau...whose location seems to vary entirely...Abdul Alhazred describes it as a place where different realities converge, which might explain why its precise location cannot be pinned down.

In the Mythos, Leng appeared at various times in Tibet and in Antarctica, but I always interpreted its true home to be in the Cold Waste of Kadath in the Dreamworld. Any manifestation of Leng outside that wasn't a real permanent geographic location, but more of an intrusion of the Dreamworld upon everyday reality. You could find Leng in one spot one day, then go back the next and see no sign it had ever existed.

So sure. Maybe a bit of the Dreamworld leaked out onto Micras for a while, with its giant spiders and demons and whatever else it's got. But now it's moving on, as it is wont to do.

Well actually it's more like the width of Marisco but with Leng's length. As I said, it's essentially a ribbon.