Here are some of my theories about skyrim, would like to hear your opinions

1. Nirn is a small world, like a lot smaller then Earth, some evidence for this is:

arrows fly straight and don't fall much until they hit something, lower gravity of small world wold explain that.

you can carry up to 400 pounds of equipment, that is twice your body mass, again lower gravity

you can fall from great heights and survive

dragons can fly even tough their wings are too small for the body

giant spiders can walk, in our world they would collapse under their weight, no way their legs could support them

the same with giants

this coupled with disasters like oblivion crisis, the war and various dangers like bandits and monsters could explain the low population of Skyrim.

2. Whiterun is in fact a castle, not a city, its layout is more consistent with a castle and it is small enough to be one

the layout of york castle is rather similar in layout to Whiterun. the 4 cities are Winterhold, Riften, Solitude and Markarth, the other four are larger villages.

They aren't theories. More like observations.

Interesting theory...hmmm, I must think on this data!

You're confusing game mechanics with actual lore. It would be almost impossible for Bethesda to recreate Skyrim (or any province, really) how it is actually described in TES lore. Combined with restrictions they purposefully put into the game so to make the player not become immediately overpowered, and with engine limitations, it is clear that many things in Skyrim (for example, your second point) shouldn't be taken as actual lore.

I also doubt they had biologists and physicists in their development team.

I like the idea that Nirn is a smaller planet than earth. I think it'd be cool if that was revealed at some point because as you say, it would make things like frostbite spiders and giants "possible" by real world physics standards. As for the low population... well... there's no real way to explain that. As it stands, the population of skyrim never be able to support a medieval style economy.

I would say that ALL of the "cities" are more like castles, but even castles had a much larger population than what we see in skyrim. (Also I think you mean windhelm, not winterhold.) However, the lore tells us they are cities and I think their small size can be attributed to engine limitations rather than how big they're supposed to be. If in 20 yrs when elder scrolls XII comes out (you know there will be one) I can guarantee you that the cities will be much, much bigger than they are now.

I heard that before and to extent that may be, however in this scenario player would never be able to influence the world the way he does, especially in civil war, you can break the siege by your lonesome,real world army in that period would drown you in soldiers, you can only take on 4-5 men at one time even with nest gear, imagine what an army of 10 000 would do to you.

I would like to emphasize that lower gravity would in fact make large creatures like giants giant spiders, dragons ect. more plausible. As the OP pointed out, frostbite spiders on earth would collapse under their own weight, which of course would not happen if they were on a planet with lower gravity. Also, I know that insect size is related to how much oxygen is in the atmosphere, so perhaps that could be a reason too.

Exactly. Have you ever heard of a realistic game? Game developers have to give the player some kind of unrealistic ability, be it Health points (IRL you would very likely die with two gunshot wounds, while you can survive multiple bullets in Half-Life, Fallout, etc and still walk around as if you're unscathed) or something else which we do not have IRL (best examples in Skyrim being 1. Magic and 2. the Thu'um) so that the game would even make fun.

That is why i believe population of Tamriel is relatively small, especially after oblivion crisis, my guess is that a single legion in the empire is about 1/10 of the real life equivalent so about 500-600 men, Stormcloaks could have about 300 soldiers in total. This estimate would put the imperial army at about 10 000 to 12 000 men at full strength or about 7500 after the war, it is also fairly consistent with what we see in the game, the only problem is that the number of people producing food (farmers/fishers/hunters) is too low to sustain such population so i guess things were a bit scaled down from that end, but not too much.

I remember a thread in the lore board with some pretty interesting calculations about Tamriel's population... Even though I can't fully remember the numbers, I'm pretty sure Cyrodiil had a population of over 10 million. And again, it's purely due to the limitations of the PS3 and Xbox360 (and partially PC, even though PCs are generally more powerful than consoles) that we did not see an appropriate, or atleast scaled, population in Skyrim. Also the reason for the overly small cities, and so on.

The oxygen problem is due to how insects perspire, they have no lungs, they breath trough their skin and their open bloodstream carries oxygen around, however maybe Nirn spiders have lungs, after all they produce sounds, that would explain that part.

Would like to see this calcs to see what makes them tick, else i can't be sure if they hold any value.

Nice thread;

I have another theory: Nirn is entirely populated by holograms. The proof is that when you hit somebody with a weapon, the weapon cuts through their body completely undisturbed, as if you were hitting thin air.

This insight can perhaps be linked to the dwemer; you know how they presumably disappeared? Well, maybe the Nirn we know is a matrix-like environment programmed by the dwemer and we are all trapped inside. The dwemer created it for research purposes and once they were done they abandoned it. Since this simulated Nirn continues running, I assume the dwemer are still studying us, but from the outside (i.e. from the real world).

Trolling. Trolling never changes.

Eh? but why?

In the opening post you attempted to justify obvious engine limitations (the limited physics, the small number of NPCs per city...) and design choices (impossible carrying capacity, high resistance to fall damage) with a theory that, to some extent at least, makes sense.

I did the same thing.

Do we have to do this? Ok, if you insist i debunk your silly theory here it goes, 1. Dwemer were not on that level of tech, they were in early industrial-cyberpunk age, no computers at all, best they could do was steam automata. Also i see no reason holographic sword would hurt holographic being, and if it was all a simulation why would they need holograms at all, why not just run it virtually? And why do you think a simple oversight like that would be overlooked, it is easily fixable. I also provided a range of evidence, while you only provided one and it was shaky at best.

Cool theories, my only problem is I don't feel like you CAN survive high falls? The number of times I've died walking down a hill and stepping off a rock to fall the equivalent of 5 feet or so is ridiculous, the number of horses I've killed doing similar is equally ridiculous. In real life people survive falling off the 3rd storey of a building and on occasion, far higher, thats a legit plummet which would require the become ethereal shout in skyrim, and it might even wear off before you hit the ground. Characters also can not jump high at all, if this small planet theory is true it follows that our characters are fairly weak and lame, which is upsetting to me.

What they can survive which we can't is very very very high falls into water, with seemingly no ill affects, perhaps the absurdly high levels of oxygen in the air make it so thick that there is limited contrast in thickness between air and water, reducing surface tension... lol ok now I'm just talking nonsense.

I'm afraid you missed the point of my question.

When I asked you why, what I was in fact asking you is 'why you think I'm trolling?'.

Apparently, you seem to believe that my theory is too silly to be taken seriously hence I must be trolling. Am I correct?

Now my theory may or may not be silly but I'd like you to notice that, in the end, it's not so different from yours. Indeed; both notice engine limitations/unrealistic design choices and try to justify them. My theory is more far-fetched but in the same way that it looks silly to you, I can imagine that yours would look silly to other people. Why? Occam's razor: if there are several explanations for some phenomenon, the most parsimonius one will generally be preferred. It's much easier to accept that Bethesda didn't care about physics than to think they adjusted the player's inventory and all those monsters (dragons, giants, spiders...) so that their dimensions would be believable in a world with lower gravity.

And talking about gravity, aren't Skyrim's hair styles behaving a little strangely if gravity is supposed to be lower than in Earth? I would imagine they should be moving some more? They are really really stiff in game (except for a physics-enabled ponytail I downloaded; that one is great!).

You are what we may call a party popper, i know my theory is not 100% consistent but i think it's a fun way of looking at things and explains a whole lot, Nirn is imaginary anyway, there is no real model that the game is scaled down representation of, and i think(for me at least) looking at things this way improves immersion, if it is just a design choice and reality(what is reality in imaginary world anyway) is different then where do you draw the line between imaginary and real?