...I was just trying to move this discussion off thread, hence the earlier [/derail] tag.

...PM response forthcoming

Nearly the right weight? 300kg = 661 pounds. The wiki has him at 525 pounds before a wrestling match. The tallest he was ever believed to be was 7ft, trolls average at 8'2".

Also, the weight range for trolls given in the book is 300-350 kg (661-771lbs).


Not only was he at least a foot too short, but at least 100lbs if not 200lbs underweight to be a troll.

Hell, the BMI says I'm morbidly obese despite having a pulse rate of low to mid-60s just sitting in a chair (goes down below 60 if I'm laying down). Couple that with a blood pressure of 125/70. I weigh in at 255 pounds and am 6' 2". Fingertip to fingertip, I measure in at 7'.

I asked my doctor about it and she told me that as long as my vitals stay like that and my waist line continues to stay the same or shrinks, I'm doing perfectly fine. She also cautioned me that the BMI scale does NOT account for people who have denser body structures than average or those who are athletic / fit.

She said for me, a better measurement was my vitals and body fat. As long as both stay reasonably low, I'm good to go. They've not changed in the last 10 years. She still marvels at my low cholesterol levels.

DTF, I wholly understand.

thats kinda the way I'd always seen it.
It took some work but I did learn to appreciate orks

According to the official Andge the Giant website, his tallest recorded height was 7'5". SR4 doesn't give an average range for height and weight for trolls; but at the level's we're tallking about, a hundred pounds isn't the same difference that it'd be in a much smaller person.

..to anyone who recorded things about him, and survived to do so...

Well, seriously, he probably complained when he was a teenager, realized that complaining accomplished little, and got it out of his system.

"Trolls are slow on the update, and mighty suspicious about anything new to them" - The Hobbit
Do SR4 6W trolls turn to stone in daylight?

No idea if that was a joke or not, but no, they don't.

i'm thinking he probably went home every night and cried inconsolably on his giant pile of money.

Ugh...that makes me very sad that he's still around and acting. I guess the movie is probably going to be pretty shitty are are relying on Alba's good looks and his "Star Wars appeal" to draw people to the theatre. <Shudder> And movie studios wonder why they aren't making money.

I totally hear you about Natalie Portman too. Padme is a lot easier to ignore than Anakin so her general crapiness doesn't stink up the movie as much.

George Lucas has a very good business plan. He mostly uses unknown actors as his "stars" so that he doesn't have to pay them much and gears his movies at 8-12 year old boys so acting doesn't matter anyway. Why pay for something that his target audience doesn't care about?

Really? Funny, I see something different. As of March 29, 1987, he weighed 520 lbs and had a recorded height of 7'5".

As far as the weight range for trolls goes, the book lists the 350 kg weight as something of a record; the "more common" weight is around 300 kg. Since it didn't say "average", this number refers to the mode weight, not the mean or median. The mode leaves a wide array of variability behind, so the average troll could weight anything. We know that 300kg occurs more often than any other number, but that doesn't even make it the majority of trolls.

Since you present this as 'fact' please explain how you know it to be true.

Lucas started out as a very good and highbrow director. His experience of Star Wars and the marketing frenzy the movie generated made him very cynical. He came to believe that no one wanted 'good' movies and decided to make money instead.

that's ridiculous, man. someone trying to provide generally useful data about the height and weight of a fantasy race is not going to tell us the mode of their weight. they're going to tell us the average, because averages are much more widely understood--and more useful, in this case--than modes.

There's a lot of ridiculous things about the SR4 main book. I'm just repeating what's there. The "most common" number is, by definition, the mode.

It should also be questioned what sort of precision you're measuring with. If you have a sample of 300 290-kiloers, 300 310-kiloers, and 400 100,000,000,000-kiloers, weights closer to 300 are significantly more common, but unless you're measuring within a 20-kilo spread, the mode is not even remotely close to 300 kilos.

That's before getting into the ridiculousness of calling anything measured in kilos a "weight", of course.

I should also add that your statement is meaningless—mean, median, and mode are all averages (and there are more besides). I know you meant to say mean, but it's exactly this sort of imprecision of language that gets us into these ridiculous problems.

~J

Yes, really. As I said, in his bio page on the website... Besides which, its a whole one inch, and 20 pounds. Hardly anything in comparison to trolls.

As far as the "upwards of 350kg" in the book, a quick google tells me the heaviest recorded person weight was 850lbs. So, its quite factual to say humans weigh upwards of 850lbs. Though, thats a far cry above the average weight. I do believe the text intended to give 350kg as the upward average weight of trolls, with 300 being the lower end, (roughly the same variations in weight as with people). So, andre is still considerably shorter than the average troll, and considerably lighter than one too. And compared to a similarly large troll, he'd be quite tiny.

Your arguments that because Andre had little to no trouble functioning are unfounded. Even though he is the closest approximation to a troll we have, he still doesn't really come close.

A better approximation is a polar bear. Pulling from the wikipedia article, "Most adult males weigh 350–650 kg (770–1500+ lb) and measure 2.5–3.0 m (8.2–9.8 ft) in length. Adult females are roughly half the size of males and normally weigh 150–250 kg (330–550 lb), measuring 2–2.5 m (6.6–8.2 ft)"

So, they're roughly as heavy as a female polar bear, but about as tall as a male polar bear. Thats BIG. Polar bears don't go walking down regular hallways.

What cracks me up about the nit-pickery surrounding Andre the Giant isn't just the "Trolls aren't that much bigger than him!" angle, but the basic premise of the, as you put it, "had little to no trouble functioning" aspect, too.

The guy was, to put it plainly, a freak. A kind, gentle, talented, freak? Sure. But nonetheless it was his absolutely ridiculous size that made him a pro wrestler, an actor, and a guy that was able to get a reputation for being kind and gentle and talented. He was housed in the back of an eighteen wheeler on the movie set. As far as most people care his last name might as well be "The Giant." Half his ring names had the word "Monster" in 'em, for pete's sake.

Don't act like his size was a ho-hum no big deal, and that people are that size on average and folks run into them every day and their size never earns them a second glance, or an uncomfortable shuffle through a doorway or a little joke in an elevator or a sigh of irritation when someone's next to them in a movie theater or on an airplane. He was kicked out of the army because the issued stuff didn't fit him. He almost couldn't be cremated, he was so large.

He was smaller than trolls by a significant amount and he most certainly DID have trouble functioning in day to day life.

And megacorps -- the towering, unstoppable, cold-hearted bad guys of Shadowrun's setting, who care for nothing so much as the bottom line -- aren't going to bend over backwards to make life any easier on trolls than the everyday world did for Andre. When 98% of the population can't use a product sized for a troll, and the 2% of the population that's left may or may not live in an urban area, may or may not have a SIN, then may or may not have the normal everyday consumer desire for the product in question...wasting time making said product isn't going to get you a cookie and a pat on the head from the guys higher up in management.

The least populous metarace, with the most populous needs, and the already-determined antisocial tendencies (by choice, racism, or biology)...just isn't a moneymaker.

i purposefully used 'average' rather than 'mean', because 'average' is the common term.

well, sure. they saw a) a market to exploit, and b) a way to brand themselves as being 'better' than other megacorps, in certain sectors.

Aztechnology doesn't stamp "we perform blood sacrifices!" on all of their products, because most of the people they sell to would find that disturbing, and would stop buying. similarly, the divisions of Evo that sell to Japanese markets are put out under a different brand name, one that is quietly disassociated from Evo.

I can't even be around the basketball players here without wanting to stare or just ... not be near them. And that happens with guys who are only 6'8" minimum.

I met a man at a party once whose shoulder span was easily 40 inches (He was well over six feet tall and just a heavy mofo). Life was not in any way comfortable for him.

i can ^^
we're talking several hundred pounds mostly of muscles, bones and natural armor here . .
If the Troll wants in, the Troll wants IN! . . why do you think buba the love troll is such a scary image? O.o
I use the same tactics when getting on a bus or subway . . i say OUT OF THE WAY or MAKE ROOM once out loud enough for half of the people in there to hear me and give them some seconds to react . . and then i shrug and walk in and shove and press untill they make enough room for me to breathe in . . and i'm only a measly 1,86m tall and weigh in at about 100 kilo . . plus minus 10 or something and not all of that is muscle as i've let myself get soft <.< . . and none of it is armor (aside from the worn heavy leather coat) which would protect me from feeling the people who do not want to budge . . but it still works . . now image, say . . a Troll of about 3m tall and 200 to 300 kilo of muscle telling you to move and then just coming in wether you like it or not . . again with the bubba image kinda x.x . .

i know it has to be english, 'cause i know some of the words . . but heck if i actually understand that . .

depends . . to me, HELL YES IT IS! . . and as a troll i'd probably be much more like that too . .

Well... that's not entirely true.

I've went to school with a person that got drunk and beat the crap out of his truck door because he thought it was insulting him. Granted, he did fragged up both his hands - but he did beat the hell out of that pickup door - even put a hole in after about 30 minutes of beating on it.

I can imagine trolls failing a composure test and proceeding to beat on the bus, car, door, refrigerator, or anything else sized incorrectly. Actually I could see that as a fairly common occurrence... Trolls (and maybe even orks) suffering from "Usage Rage" and going nuts and destroying stuff around them. Its just more proof for polite society that they are correct in ostracizing Trolls - after all, can't have them around when they might go "usage" and destroy your furniture and/or building.

Edit:

I think he's saying that the door is physically to small for the troll to fit through. Which is probably true, bus doors are somewhere around 40"x80".

Like Smilin' Jack suggests, when you're as massively strong as Trolls generally are, you can indeed cop an attitude to many doorways and some walls.

~J

Like I've said several times here, I'm 6'8 and 305-15 lbs. So, opposite end of the spectrum from you, and yeah, it's a bitch to find clothes, and nothing is ever sized correctly for my hands or just me in general, but it's something I've dealt with for many years now and I don't even think about it anymore unless I see myself in a mirror standing next to someone. Also, 300+ lbs is very mildly overweight for my height and build. I look like a less muscled(also less fat usually) really tall linebacker. With a shoe size of 17EEEEE shoes are probably the most annoying things to get.

Chris

Not in nearly the same way you can just try to look tough and part a crowd, though.

The size of Trolls is an inconvenience when it comes to mass transit not on account of the other number of passengers (as Stahlsteele seemed to think), but because of the sheer mass of a Troll compared to the amount of space available -- not just space left vacant by other passengers, but the seats and doorways and cabs and subway cars themselves.

Sure, you can probably BREAK something. But who gives a shit? That doesn't do you any good when you're trying to catch a ride on a subway. You yank a door off, the subway stops. You try to stand up straight (smashing horns through the ceiling), the subway stops. The bench can't bear your weight, you just fall on your ass. It's not a matter of glaring at another passenger and having them give you room, like some denim-and-leather clad tough guy... it's a matter of your height and girth making normal sized modes of transportation uncomfortable. Using your bear-like strength to yank the door off a taxicab doesn't do you any actual good, therapeutic as it may be, in regards to then being able to comfortably and safely ride in that cab a moment later (assuming the driver hasn't just freaked out and sped away).

Not if you plan on using it in the next week or so.