22 KiB
Matters of Scale
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Author: u/totorox92 Because I want to Know*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/5nh6f8/matters_of_scale/
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Score: 34
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Created: 2017-01-12T04:05:32
Post:
A few people have written rational Naruto stories, and I'm trying to write one which is, at least, consistent, but I'm running into some trouble with the numbers that I hope you smart guys can help me with.
So, in the manga it takes Naruto and team three days to run from Konoha to Suna. Ninja are fast; we don't know how fast exactly but 100 kph sounds like a nice round number, and suitably super human. Ninja are also stamina freaks, and keeping up a quick pace for 16 hours a day is possible for even normal humans. The Land of Fire is bigger than the Land of Wind; let's assume it takes two days to cross Hi no Kuni and one to cross Kaze no Kuni. This gives us a distance of 3200 km from Konoha to the border. Lets assume that Konoha is on the opposite side of the country from Suna and Hi no Kuni is roughly square.
This gives a total land area of Hi no Kuni at 10 million km^2, slightly larger than the US. Now, going off some numbers I found on the internet we can assume at least 10% of that land is being farmed. Rice is popular, and while labor intensive doesn't require very much land for the amount of crop it yields. You can feed a single person off of about 2 acres of rice. If we assume that the Land of Fire is a major exporter of food, we can call it ~ 4 acres per person. With a total area of 2 bill acres, 200 mill or that being used, and 4 acres per person, we get a total population of 63 mill. Which is about equal to the population of China in 1100 AD. Not a big leap.
Now, how many of those people hire ninja for jobs? Ninja need to work to eat too you know. A standard sort of mission would probably be something like a merchant escort job; a trader needing protection from bandits while transporting their valuable goods. How many merchants are there who could afford these services? Hard numbers are really hard to find, but my estimate is about 1 merchant per 2000 people. That might sound a little low, but it actually turns into more than 30,000 in total given the sheer population of the country. Lets say only one in ten actually hire ninja, after all bandits can't be that common, which leaves us with 3,000 merhcants hiring Konoha Ninja every year. Most of this commerce is done via ox drawn carts which are painfully slow compared to ninja or other modern methods of transport so completing four or so long distance missions a year for these merchants sounds pretty good. That's going to take about a month for our ninja to complete, which isn't too bad. But they can't be taking these missions all the time, they need to train to keep their skills sharp too, and they might have other more important missions to run on behalf of the village as well.
12,000 missions a year, each taking a month, takes 1,000 ninja. Since you only spend half your time on it, it actually takes 2,000 ninja. And remember, this is Konoha, you need your team of four, bringing the total number of ninja required just to guard merchant caravans up to ~8,000.
8,000 ninja in Konoha who are essentially career Genin or Chunin, the sort who plateaued skill wise and are comfortable taking low risk, low reward missions until they retire. This ignores all the Jounin and upwardly mobile Chunin and Genin, which should bring the total to around 9,000. Again this sounds like a lot, until you remember the Allied Shinobi Forces were fielding ten times that number. Unless the other ninja villages are somehow much larger than Konoha, the most populous, or the minor villages aren't actually so minor, this seems kind of difficult to make practical, even including in the samurai who are supposed to be part of the army. But it gets worse.
The Uchiha clan was one of the backbones of Konoha's power. And yet two ninja managed to kill off all of them in a single night. This is, again, a problem purely from a logistical perspective. If the Uchiha are so important, they must be fielding a pretty large force of shinobi. But not all of them are combatants, in fact a good number of them have to be devoted to raising or producing children to keep their numbers up. Even if Uchiha only made up something like 5% of the village's combat capacity that is still at least 450 ninja, and half again as many non-coms. 1,350 people to kill off, two people to do it. Even if we assume several key people in the village knew to turn a blind eye, that's still a lot of people to kill in not very much time. Someone not in the loop is going to notice the chakra usage and come to investigate. Sure we've got a couple S-rank badasses here, but there are still practical limits on how fast you can find and kill trained ninja. Even if we assume they had 2 uninterrupted hours, that's still one new corpse every 10 seconds, non stop. These are supposed to be your elites, not the cannon fodder filling in the Genin corps, you expect me to believe that 13 year old Itachi is knocking off an A or B-rank ninja every minute for 2 hours straight? Impractical.
One logical conclusion is that the Uchiha clan are a lot smaller than my estimates, possibly only a a couple hundred ninja and barely that many civies. Now knocking them off is made much simpler. The new problem becomes, how did the Uchiha think a coup could work? How are they a major contributor to the strength of the village?
On the flip side, if there are not that many ninja in the village, say only about half of my estimates, a more reasonable sounding 4,000, how can they afford to fill all the mission requests they are likely to get? And if they are so few, where did all the shinobi and samurai come from for the ASF?
Obviously the real answer to all the questions is 'Kishimoto is an idiot'. But how would you resolve such issues?
Comments:
u/ulyssessword [+23] (43 minutes later)
If I'm reading all of your math right, changing the running pace to 50 km/h for 8 hours/day (instead of 100km/h for 16 hours) is enough to make all of the subsequent numbers 1/16 as big.
u/totorox92 [+8] Because I want to Know (an hour later)
Yes, that is how squaring numbers works. But honestly none of that is really the issue.
Are there lots of ninja? If yes, how do things stay the way they are? Who pays them? What rank spread are they? What clans do they come from?
Are there not many ninja? If yes, why aren't there more? Why does it seem like there should be more? How do the villages remain financially solvent? What rank spread are they?
There is a lot of evidence to support either conclusion. Like the Chunin exam, which is apparently designed to promote a maximum of 10 or so Genin at a time.
u/torac [+10] (10 hours later)
From what I remember of the Manga, the ninja population was tiny. As in, maybe 50 members per clan with perhaps a few hundred per ninja village. Even the largest fight I remember might have had less than a thousand ninja all together.
As for your other questions, they pretty much fall apart in the story. There is no focus on it, what with being a simple shonen. Speculation leads me to say: Things stay the way they are because the ninja mostly occupy themselves with each other and are largely independent from the mundane population, while at the same time not wanting to directly rule them (excepting Nagato or what he was called). Rank spread is pretty unknown, but most adult professional ninja seem to be of the Jonin rank, so that seems to be where they end up. What do you mean which clans do they come from? There are not many ninjas because a) It is mostly family business. b) It takes a lot of resources to train someone. c) Not everyone has the talent for it. d) Ninjas roughly kill each others as fast as they grow. It doesn’t seem like there should be more to me. They remain solvent because they have learned to exchange services for goods. Their services are very valuabe (even small teams are capable of changing the fate of nations). Again, professional adults seem to be around Jonin rank, which seems to encompass quite a spectrum of capabilities.
The exam is one of the few pieces of hard evidence you actually have and you seem to pretty much throw it out of the window. I think field promotions are a thing, but other than that the exam should give a good picture about how many ninjas there are.
Anyway. The source is not very detailed and any details it gives do not have to make sense. Keep in mind that the author created information cards on the characters one time and pretty much everyone was dangerously underweight. The only one not underweight was Chouji or something like that.
u/dwibby [+8] (19 hours later)
Expanding on the exam, we have a few pieces of information that tells us how quickly ninjas are created and how fast they are supposed to rank up into chunin. The public tournament was scheduled to have eight or nine fights (depending on if the expected Ino/Sakura to fight), with nine or ten participants. Considering that prior to this, each examinee had to pass with their three-man team intact, it was likely meant to be three teams, or nine total participants.
Anko states that her stage has, at a minimum, a 50% fail rate, with an observed rate of 75% (of the 26 teams that passed stage one, seven passed stage two), with an expected rate of 90% (since she was expecting the number of ninja to pass her stage to be in the single digits, or three or less teams). Since Anko was surprised that 26 teams made it through the first stage, 3 passing teams and the 30 teams to start stage two that a 90% attrition rate would imply is too many. Anko was likely expecting 2 teams to pass stage two, and therefore 20 teams to pass stage one, for an expected attrition rate of 60% in stage one. 95% of the teams entered into the exam were not expected to reach the finals.
Together with the information about Kabuto has failed the test 7 times, which is surprising to Hiruzen, and that the tests are biannual according to Kabuto and this is his fourth year taking the exams, we can say that the majority of genin take the chunin exam somewhere less than that many times. Additionally, while the rookie teams being nominated is surprising, Guy's team is not surprising while being only a year older. So, most of the 51 teams have been genin for somewhere between one to five years.
While other villages may have sent limited numbers of team, it's likely that all the Konoha genin teams that thought they had a chance to become chunin participate. The breakdown of the 51 teams was 19 teams from Konoha, 10 from Suna, 7 from Ame, 2 each from Kusa and Taki, and a single team from Oto. 19 teams across 5 years is approximately 3 new teams a year. Additionally, Konoha is less than 100 years old, so even if we double the number of teams produced because of the losses incurred by the Kyubi's Rampage and the Uchiha Massacre, that's an upper bound of 900 ninjas ever produced by Konoha.
However, if we look at Kakashi's bell test and Kakashi's statement that only 9 of the 27 graduates become genin, with the rest sent back to the academy, there are some 16 people every year who have almost genin level skills and a ninja registration number. That's some 1600 people over the Konoha's history that have enough training to do very basic ninja work, but are not considered even low level ninjas.
Personally, I expect genin-chunin-jonin to be roughly equivalent to apprentice-journeyman-master, and that most ninjas are expected to reach chunin, with some percent (probably a third or less) becoming jonin, with something like 1 out of every 30 students eventually going on to become jonin.
u/torac [+4] (a day later)
It’s sadly unreliable to use the exam for historical reconstruction, since it is very new. From what I remember, promotions used to happen for achievements in the field, with even young children expected to help the constant war effort. Much more lethal, but often quicker.
u/buckykat [+4] (21 hours later)
Your analysis overlooks a fundamental principle of ninjas: the law of conservation of nijutsu. This means that the effectiveness of a force of ninjas is inversely related to the size of that force. This justifies the outsized power of the Uchiha clan and how hundreds of trained ninjas were defeated in mere hours.
u/clawclawbite [+1] (17 hours later)
Yea, ninjas are great at peak power, but not long distance speedsters. They likely are traveling no faster then non-ninja sprinting, because they need to be paying attention to where they are going, and don't have smooth even modern roads to run on. Usain Bolt peaks at 44 kph, so I'd estimate 30 to 40 kph for a normal traveling ninja.
u/None [+17] (13 hours later)
[deleted]
u/clawclawbite [+8] (17 hours later)
30 to 50 ninja in a class, 20 to 30 year careers in general and you get 600 to 1500 ninja. Your 600 to 900 range is right there, especially as I did not subtract for crippling injury or death.
u/totorox92 [+3] Because I want to Know (20 hours later)
This is about what I've settled on for my story as well. It's a neat idea to have armies of ninja, but besides being kind of contrary to the point of a ninja to move in armies, lots of story elements seem to favor a ninja village clocking in at pretty close to a thousand active shinobi.
u/zarraha [+13] (11 hours later)
A good rule of thumb is that whenever a story throws out a number that's way too big, you should just assume they misspoke and it's actually something more reasonable.
ex: "I went into a dimension where time slowed down and trained for the equivalent of 10,000 years so I could beat this villain." No. No you did not, you would forget or dull the vast majority of your memories, your personality would have changed completely as your mental age increases over that vast time period, and you would likely go insane from isolation and boredom. You trained for 1 year at most.
u/epicwisdom [+1] (2 days later)
It would also make more sense, if you had 10,000 years, to take a digital library with you, and discover a theory of everything.
u/fullplatejacket [+12] (16 hours later)
In regards to the Uchiha, there's a simple explanation for how their role in the village would work even if they're smaller in numbers: S-rank ninja are a BIG DEAL. A village's ability to produce S-rank ninja is the most important factor in their ability to be successful in war/conflict against other villages. One S-rank ninja is enough to change the course of a war, and 10 are enough to fight against the entire world by themselves for a while. But to be an S-rank ninja, you either need to have a bloodline (or similar inherent advantage) that can be advanced to an S-rank level of power, or you need to be a genius that is able to innovate your way to S-rank. The latter variety is not reliable, and the former is difficult because bloodlines are rare, and some of them aren't even powerful enough to be S-rank on their own even at their peak. The Sharingan bloodline reliably produces about 1-2 ninja with S-rank potential every generation, which is an amazing asset.
With this in mind, there are some simple reasons to explain the coup situation. First of all, it's possible that the Uchiha didn't originally intend for the situation to become outright violent - they thought that they would have enough clout to get their way just by threatening to leave, or recalling their ninja from active duty or something. Then Danzo/Tobi/etc stirred the pot and took the situation beyond the point of no return.
It's also possible that the Uchiha were under the impression that they would have backing from some additional force, such as another village. This might have been real, or a ploy cooked up by Tobi.
Finally, it's also possible that their plan was to assassinate the Hokage (presumably with Itachi's help, which Fugaku would have assumed he would have), and assume control using genjutsu: either to force the Konoha council to "legally" appoint an Uchiha successor, or to have someone impersonate the Hokage and have that person choose an Uchiha successor. In that scenario, total force doesn't really matter, as long as they can pull off the assassination and transfer of power without getting caught.
u/totorox92 [+5] Because I want to Know (20 hours later)
That is a very intriguing angle. I hadn't considered it from that perspective; the Uchiha are awesome because of the reliability of obscene power houses.
I'm not sure how likely it is about a bloodless (or mostly so) coup though. The Uchiha are often framed as kind of power mad and megalomaniacal; I would be more likely to assume their plan was more subtle, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out they thought they could get away with just openly declaring themselves the rulers of the village.
On a side note: We only see a little bit of Uchiha Fugaku in the manga, but he comes off as being a very level headed sort of guy. I can see him being very unhappy with the current state of affairs, but not enough to push for something as insane as a coup. Which suggests the Elders of the clan had a lot of sway on clan policy, even though it is never suggested that they could interfere in the line of succession.
u/epicwisdom [+4] (2 days later)
According to the same wiki page that you linked:
In the manga, Tobi stated Fugaku organised and planned the coup d'état. In the anime, however, it was stated that he did not plan it, but as the representative of the whole Uchiha Clan, he had no choice but to go along with their decision. However, he opted for an option that would satisfy the Uchiha Clan and lead to the least bloodshed. To this end, he asked Itachi to help him take over the seat of Hokage by force.
The Uchiha are popularly considered so violent likely because they were directly opposed to the Senju prior to the founding of Konoha, Madara eventually came to disagree with the First Hokage, and obviously, Itachi's "senseless massacre." There's not much actual evidence that the clan as a whole was actually any more power hungry or bloodthirsty than average. Plus, their politics were directly being manipulated by Madara/Obito/Zetsu.
u/epicwisdom [+4] (2 days later)
Actually, in retrospect, Konoha was completely stacked, considering they had the Hyuuga and the Uchiha and the Senju, i.e. all of the direct descendants of the Otsutsuki who would therefore be presumably the most powerful (evidenced partly by Madara/Hashirama).
u/Subrosian_Smithy [+2] Nudist Beach (4 days later)
Given the Kaguya clan (who did admittedly die out, but also had a knockoff of Kaguya's bone powers) I figure there must have been other Otsutsuki bloodlines.
u/epicwisdom [+2] (4 days later)
Sure, it's just that three major clans, including the two strongest dojutsu, ended up in one village, which is, from what we've seen, a huge advantage.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+11] Godric Gryffindor (18 hours later)
You're trying to make the economics of Naruto make sense? God help you, that's the series I used as my example in Intelligent Characters in Fiction for how not to do economics.
u/DrunkenQuetzalcoatl [+3] (19 hours later)
Intelligent Characters: Inexploitability with the mention of Naruto.
u/serge_cell [+10] (10 hours later)
Many rationalizing fics just assume Naruto media are unreliable narrators. For example Root operatives did most of killing while ANBU held perimeter. Inconsistent technology development require reworking anyway, and comparing to that any warping of numbers is insignificant. If author reinterpret radio headsets into magical devices (fuinjutsu etc) all economy can be remade into magic based as well, and that makes any numerical estimates completely arbitrary.
u/thrawnca [+6] Carbon-based biped (16 hours later)
The likelihood that there are merchants who would like to hire ninja guards does not necessarily mean that there is an adequate supply of such ninja.
u/SimonSim211 [+5] (7 hours later)
So let's make im more complicated, how much food is lost due to bugs and mold?
And easier https://youtu.be/8HSgmCwBNbI
u/hoja_nasredin [+3] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 days later)
Honestly Land of Fire as big as USA seems too much. It is just too big for a medieval fighting wizards setting. I would reduce the running pace (they are genin after all) to 30 km/h. Also I would suggest to nerf S ranks a lot. Worldbuilding you are goign to do would matter a lot less if everything is decided with power balance between 20 individuals.
u/hoja_nasredin [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 days later)
I always disliked the Chunin exams numbers. My head canon is that 90% get a promotion for being genin long enough and completing a certain number of missions. If you wanted to be oe faster you risk attending the Chunin exam.
u/hoja_nasredin [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 days later)
One of fanfics tried redoing Naruto World to make more sense. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10263221/1/In-Fire-Forged
People become genin at 15, power levels are much lower (Madara at his height can be taken out by two dozens jonin) so infrastracture have becomes more important.