This blog is here simply to give Max some numbers. They may not be that impressive, may not even be any upgrades, but she's one of, if not my favorite characters in fiction, so I just want to make sure that her profile is right. Specifically, the stat that I am looking to work on is her Enviromental Destruction feat. The storm.
Ready? Let's get started!
The Storm's Weight[]
One good thing about Life Is Strange is that it gives you no end of possibilities to look at this storm. Guess SquareEnix thought that that was their money shot. And in every shot, you can see that the storm easily stretches to the horizon and beyond. The picture to the right is from a shot when Max was looking at it from the absolute maximum height reachable in game (not counting the aeroplane scene). On top of the peninsula by the lighthouse. As you can see, the storm at least stretches to the horizon. And, as Max is practically in the direct centre of the storm, the distance to the horizon is likely to be the radius.
So, how high is Max when she saw this? Well, I have a shot of the peninsula in question, but the only things with actual measurements in this game are people. Enter this image. A shot of Chloe sitting next to the lighthouse. Because she's sitting, I'm gonna have to do a little bit extra measuring.
Unfortunately, you get very few shots of Chloe's full body during the game. One of the only ones is during the pool scene, and I am not 100% sure that I am allowed to use it for ...*ahem*... reasons.
However, I found this character model. Annoyingly, she is sort of slouching, but I can make it work. In this image, she is 1022 pixels tall. Ingame, she is offically 175 cm tall. Huh. Shorter than I thought. Anyway, that means that in this image, 1px = 0.17 cm. Distance from waist to top of head is 507 px, which is equal to 86.82 cm.
Now to measure the lighthouse. In this image, the distance between the top of Chloe's head and her waist is 48px. That means that 1px = 1.81 cm.
The lighthouse is 1527 pixels tall. Multiplying that by 1.81 gives me a total height for the lighthouse of 27.6387 meters tall. As average lighthouses IRL range from 18-30 meters tall, that measurement seems accurate.
Now, I need to scale that up one more time using this final image. In this shot, the lighthouse is 50 pixels tall. That means that 1 px = 0.55 m. And, the distance between the top of the peninsula and the sea surface is 249 pixels... or 137.64 meters.
Using that height, I can find that the horizon is 41,900 m away via this calculator.
Plugging that value as r into the formula V = pi * r^2 * h when h=13,000 spits out the cloud volume value of 7.1700349 x 10^13 m^2.
As clouds weigh 1.003 kg per cubic meter, I just need to multiply size by density and...
Bam. Weight equals 7.191545e+13 kg.
Let's talk about instability[]
The storm in Life Is Strange is serious business. I am of the belief that it is sitting at the maximum end of the spectrum, at 8 kj/kg. Why? Read on.
Firstly, let's compare it to the other 8 kj/kg tornado that we know of. The 1990 Plainfield Tornado. Arcadia Bay is on the left, an IRL town that Plainfield destroyed is on the right. Look similar? It should. Both towns were absolutely annihalated. Some buildings have retained their structural integrity, however, most have been destroyed, and loose rubbed is strewn hapahazrdly.
How powerful was it?[]
Multiplying the value of 8000 j/kg by the weight of 7.191545e+13 kg gives me the total energy output as:
5.753236e+17 joules or 137.51 megatons of TNT | Mountain level
Holy mother of upgrades! That's 17640 times stronger than Max was previously considered. And I haven't even touched the moon feat yet!
Message to anyone who evaluates this. I am NOT calculating the tornado! Look in the background of the images I provided. It's a storm. Stop looking at the tornado