More stuff to support my fanfic. . .

Does TES use the unit of measure of feet? It seems so based upon the following UESP wiki quote relating to the magical effect of detect life:



I have avoided specifics on this up to now in my fanfic, but would like to be able to use some sort of unit of measure. Feet seems obvious - I see evidence to support it and nothing to contradict it, but in a land with two moons, who knows? :shrug:

I appreciate a second opinion for the wizards of lore here.

As I remember, in games always used feet, miles, etc.

But there is at least one lore-specific unit of measure - pertans - according to The Pig Children orcs commonly forty pertans in height. There is also angaids - orcs commonly fifteen thousand angaids in weight.

Feet and miles are used in lore. Though if you are describing gameplay you might be better of with jotting everything down in the units used by the game and providing a rough conversion to feet and meters.

Unfortunately, I don't think we're told just how big either of those units are, unless they're obscure real units I've never heard of that Bethesda borrowed.

I believe that for spell effects in game, feet is the measure unit used for radius, but that's gameplay mechanics, and it could just be for player convenience, now if real units of distance are used in actual dialog or books, then we can assume those units exist in lore. Usually, NPCs in the game tend to avoid using any actual measure units and instead just use landmarks when giving directions, but I think I may have heard miles mentioned a few times, so I guess those exist in Tamriel, not surprising, of course. Writers of fantasy often get lazy and use real world measure units (Which, for Americans, are usually miles, feet and all that.) instead of making up new ones for their world.

Thank you all so much! I think I will use feet, when appropriate, then.

I have certainly noticed that the range for detect life in Oblivion seems to measure out pretty close to feet as I can estimate. If it says range of 50, it seems a lot closer to feet than what I pace off as yards, meters or paces. That, combined with the UESP quote I cited, and the concurrence of what I seem to find here with the lore experts cinches it for me then.

I have been on here several times to get lore help for my fanfic story and have never been disappointed by the curteous, knowledgeable and timely help. Again, thank you! :icecream:

Nirn should just use the metric system, dammit.

How about leagues? I had the same question, would miles fit within TES lore? IIRC, a mile is a 1/1000 part of the Earth's circumference. I don't see how that would relate to Nirn.

America is around 3000 miles from New York to California. It isn't three times the size of the world. I'm fairly certain miles were just made up in england for ease of mesurment. the same could happen in Nirn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFF_System.

A league is 3 miles, so that's still using miles.

OH MAN! Haha, check it out, these are the units of measurement used before Metric: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_units. Pretty cool stuff. I think that's probably the sort of thing you'd find in the TES universe, unless there are precise instruments to measure weights, and the ability to manufacture objects consistently, along with the ability to do complex math with an abacus within a reasonable amount of time.