How tall are Amelia and Doppler (And Arrow)?
For no reason aside from curiosity, we decided to find out.
The easiest way to determine the height of someone – or something – that you don't know is to use as a reference the height of someone – or something – that you DO know. We thought about using Jim Hawkins as a reference but, as Megers67 wisely noted, Jim being a teenager makes that unreliable. Sure, you can find average heights for human male teenagers, but given the vagaries of growth spurts it's a matter of chance whether any individual actually fits that.
Instead, we decided to use an object as the reference: the wheel of the RLS Legacy. This was in part because the film gives us the following shot, in which Amelia, Doppler and said wheel are (more or less) all lined up and in full view from top to bottom. Arrow is there too, by way of a bonus:
The next step is to measure the wheel and the characters, counting the pixels. You can do this with most image editing programs.
Wheel (not including the handles): 457 pixels.
In other words, Doppler is approximately 1.3 wheels tall, Amelia is 1.2 wheels tall and Arrow is 1.4 wheels tall.
So now you figure out the height (ie, diameter) of the wheel. This proved to be rather harder than we anticipated! But after some poking around, we settled on a diameter of 60 inches as being both historically plausible for a ship of Legacy's size, as well as producing results for the characters that were reasonable. Assuming a 60 inch wheel, we get the following heights, give or take a bit of rounding:
Doppler: 78.24 inches, ie about 6 foot 6 (or 1.99m for the metrically-inclined).
Amelia: 73.26 inches, ie about 6 foot 1 (or 1.68m)
Arrow: 84.84 inches, ie about 7 foot (or 2.15m)
As a point of reference, the average height of an adult male in the USA today is 69.1 inches (ie, 5 foot 9 or 1.75m), so it turns out that with this basis, the characters are all quite tall! You can easily get different figures by making different assumptions about the diameter of the wheel, or by simply including the handles in the 60 inches (which is, IRL, how ship's wheels are usually measured).
With handles, Doppler is about 1.015 wheels tall, Amelia is 0.950 wheels tall, and Arrow is 1.100 wheels tall.
So if the 60 inches for the wheel includes the handles (making the wheel 587.1 pixels), that leaves the following measurements:
Doppler: 60.90 inches, ie about 5 foot 1 (or 1.55m)
Amelia: 57.00 inches, ie 4 foot 9 (1.45m)
Arrow: 66.00 inches, ie 5 foot 6 (or 1.68m)
Another measurement we found was for a wheel that was 66 inches in diameter. So here are the measurements both with and without the handles included in the 66 inch measurement.
Doppler:
- Without Handles: 86.06 inches, ie about 7 foot 2 (2.19m)
- With Handles: 66.99 inches, ie about 5 foot 7 (1.70m)
Amelia:
- Without Handles: 80.59 inches, ie about 6 foot 9 (2.05m)
- With Handles: 62.70 inches, ie about 5 foot 3 (1.59m)
Arrow:
- Without Handles: 93.32 inches, ie about 7 foot 9 (2.37m)
- With Handles: 72.60 inches, ie about 6 foot 6 (1.84m)
Basically, 60 inch wheel where the measurement includes the handles... far too short. In the same vein, 66 inch wheel without the handles leads to absurdly tall measurements. But 60 inch wheel without handles OR 66 inch wheel with handles makes reasonable measurements (I italicized these for ease). For official purposes, we will be using the 66-inch wheel with handles because measuring a wheel including the handles is more common.
But it's up to you what you'd prefer! Credit for these calculations (and the whole idea, really) goes to Megers67, who used a proper image editor while Firefall was trying to wrangle MS Paint into counting pixels.
- Firefall (with some additions from Megers67)
