The Speed of the Kanohi Kakama
Because I had nothing better do to, I decided to see if I could work out how fast someone wearing a Kanohi Kakama could run at, just out of pure curiosity.
So, according to Tale of the Toa, Pohatu uses his mask of speed to travel from Po-Koro in Po-Wahi to Mount Ihu in Ko-Wahi in under a minute. This is the only time in canon that I can think of that gives us both a distance travelled and a timeframe for that travel when the Kanohi Kakama is used, so I wanted to see if I could use that to figure out what speed a Kakama user is capable of moving at.
The official labelled map of the Island of Mata Nui puts the island’s length at approximately 357 Kio. A Kio is equal to 1.37km, so that means that the Island of Mata-Nui is approximately 489.09km long. I was able to then use this to count how many pixels that length represents in the official map of the island, which worked out at being 1480 pixels long. This meant that overall, this map is at a resolution of 330m per pixel (489.09km / 1480 pixels = 0.33 km or 330 meters). All I needed to do then was figure out the distance between Po-Koro and Mount Ihu, both of which are labelled on the map.
Unfortunately, at this map’s scale it is impossible to tell the exact route that Pohatu would have taken and therefore it is not possible to take into account any twists and turns he may have taken along the way or take into account the change in elevation as he went up and down the mountains of Ko-Wahi on his way to Mount Ihu. I therefore simply took the straight-line distance for this calculation, as this would be the absolute minimum distance he would have had to travel. I also decided to put the time value at a full minute, as the book and BS01 do not give specifics, only that the journey took “under a minute” – so let’s just estimate it at exactly one minute for ease of use. By taking these numbers I won’t be able to get the actual speed Pohatu was going on this journey, but I will be able to calculate the bare minimum speed he would’ve needed to be travelling at, as any shortening of the timeframe or any additional distance that the actual journey would have taken would only increase the final speed measured.
By drawing a line on the map from Po-Koro to Mount Ihu and then counting the pixels, I found that the straight-line distance between these two points was 386 pixels long, which works out at being 127,380 meters. The equation for speed is speed = distance / time, so all I needed to do was plug in the numbers:
Speed = 127,380m / 60 seconds
Speed = 2,123 meters per second
That is an absolutely insane speed. That is over 6 times the speed of sound. And remember, this is the absolute bare minimum speed Pohatu could have been travelling at, meaning the actual speed of the Kakama is even faster than this, probably by a significant margin.
I wanted to know how fast the Kakama was.
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