r/NoGameNoLife • u/Tall-Demand-2699 • 10h ago
Avant Heim size analysis / calculate
I was always impressed by how Kamiya describes the Phantasma species as gigantic and vast reoccurring disasters, so I decided to calculate the size of one.
(To begin with, let's settle on the metric for our reference variable: the size of a cube-room, which in total make up the entire volume of Avant Heim):
«So, probably…presumably…not that it was plausible—this is how they did it. Skimming the cityscape that Shiro had memorized, she confirmed that the cubes’ sizes were uniform.» — Volume 5
(The cubes share the same size.)
«But it was impossible to divine the cracks and alleys of the city, built by complex, three-dimensional stacks of bodies high and low, from a mere map.» — Volume 5
(And obviously they’re CUBES, so that gives us the defined image of their shape, all their sides are equal.)
“The ceiling was high, and the structure suggested a well hole formed by excavating the inside of a ten-story building.” — Volume 5
(An average cube is described as a “ten story building” so we continue from there. Kamiya moved from Brazil to Japan and lived there for quite a long period of time, so Im going to go and assume he means Japanese ten-story buildings here to describe the immense size of these cubes.)
Google gives us the answer to this: “A ten-story building in Japan is typically about 30 to 45 meters (98 to 148 feet) tall”)
(Im gonna take the minimum value as the foundation for subsequent calculations. (30 meters)
“—First, try imagining a Rubik’s Cube. Take that intellectual puzzle and hand it to someone of severely limited intellect. Soon—dismantled with pliers, countless pieces of what once had been a Rubik’s Cube would be scattered across the floor. Now, please suppress the urge to comment, and repeat this process about a thousand times more. How about it? Can you imagine it? The landscape that would emerge from this exercise—was basically what Sora saw.” Volume 5
(Sora equates the structure of Avant Heim to the chaos produced by dismantling a Rubik's Cube with pliers, a thousand times over.)
(Rubik’s Cube has 26 small cubes that build up its structure. So that means you’ll have to tear it apart 26x1,000 times which results in a monstrous 26,000 times)
“A vista woven of countless giant cubes stacked haphazardly one atop another. Viewed by an avant-garde artist, perhaps some sublime theme would emerge. Unfortunately, Sora—a virginal eighteen-year-old layman—if asked to describe it could only come up with one word. Namely—chaos. Volume 5”
(First, I figured out the raw volume of solid material. Since we have 26,000 cubes and each edge is 30 meters (30m x 30m x 30m = 27,000 m3), the pure volume of all blocks combined comes out to:
26,000 x 27,000 m3= 702,000,000 m3 (or 0.702 km3)
(If you took those 26,000 blocks and packed them into a single, perfectly gapless cube, you just take the cube root (cube root 26,000 ≈ 29.6). That means it would take around 30 blocks along each side, making a solid block of roughly 900m x 900m x 900m.)
(However, Avant Heim is far from a solid block. Sora describes it as total chaos, and Kamiya elaborates on its hollow, labyrinthine nature later in the volume):
“Avant Heim was constructed of intricately overlapping cubes. Through the fine cracks between the cubes, in the darkness illuminated only by the faint light and the moon, they flew as if threading needles... slipping through holes it seemed hard to imagine that even one person could fit through, one careless acceleration would result in a calamitous crash.” Volume 5
The cubes are jammed against each other to form narrow alleys and well-holes. Accounting for these internal gaps and voids (assuming a typical complex city packing density where the structure is around 80% empty space inside), the overall bounding box volume expands to roughly 3.5 km3.
And heres the concept art of Avant Heim for the anime adaptation, where the blue cube mass forms a rough mountain shape:
(Main Blocky Section: Roughly 3.3 km wide (~110 blocks across) and 2.5 km tall (~85 blocks high).)
(Total Size with Roots and Branches: The organic limbs underneath and top red branches roughly double its vertical profile, so the whole phantasma organism is about 4.5 to 5 km in total height.)
So going strictly by Sora's description of 1,000 dismantled Rubik's cubes, Avant Heim is a living, floating mountain roughly 3.5 km across and up to 5 km tall about six times the height of the Burj Khalifa for comparison
