Further Reading
From Beyond A Wiki
Disclaimer
This is all additional or extraneous information regarding and used in the Final Fantasy VII fanfiction story, Beyond Good and Evil. This is not a source of official canon information and, while all of the information stated herein is based on and derived from what is given in canon, this information is not and can not be considered official or supported by the game creators or developers.
Further Reading
Spira
The "Ancients" are actually the Spirans. Gaia is Spira's moon (in X-2, machina was cool again, so space travel could totli happen :o). Spira is larger and has more gravity than Gaia. Blah blah more info on the coinciding canon of Gaia and Spira and stuff. (look this up, dorkface)
Gaia
In the FFVII Ultimania Omega, stats are detailed for all of the machinery used in the original game. The maximum speed of the helicopters used in-game is listed at 150 knots--about 278 kilometers/hour. Come the events of Advent Children, two years have passed, so it served to reason that ShinRa could have facilitated modifications to their current fleet. However, given the state the world is in post-FFVII, with the destruction of Midgar by Meteor and the fact that Rufus Shinra has a severe case of geostigma and the entire company is somewhat in shambles, significant progress in aviation was probably not high on their to-do list. We went with a slight advancement and supposed that small modifications could have feasibly been made in this state of affairs to where the choppers can fly up and over 300 kph. Going with this idea, we calculated that the maximum distance Northern Crater can possibly be from Healin Lodge is about 616 km.
Then we hit the issue of timezones. It appears that Gaia has about a 24-hour day, like earth. However, with the map being as small as it had to be for distances to be traversed in the amount of time dictated, a 24-hour day presented a few logistic complications. Northern Crater--basically the northernmost point on the map--is very cold. Obviously. Mideel--basically the southernmost point on the map--is visibly subtropical, meaning that the size of the map only encompasses about one hemisphere of the planet at best.
Saving you, the reader, the explanation of the hours and hours of math and geography it took us to reach our decision...here are two maps:
The thick red vertical lines demonstrate where the timezones would be divided, one hour being lost per timezone as one travels east Timezones on Earth fall every at approximately every fifteen degrees longitude, so we applied the same concept for Gaia, making each time zone about 269 km wide. Ergo, the circumference of the planet is 6,456 km--that means the entire planet is not that much bigger than the United States, to give you a sense of orientation. Since the map of landmasses only spans approximately 981 km, most of Gaia is water. The size being as it is, Gaia must be a moon, since no planet can be that size and still be a planet. There are two scenes in Advent Children that indicate Gaia itself has a moon in its sky, however this could easily mean that Gaia is one of multiple moons to a larger planet, and has little bearing on whether or not Gaia itself can be classified as a moon.
As further demonstration of the diminutive stature of Gaia, here is a full-area map of the world (it's mostly ocean, we assume), and an overlay that shows how big all of the known landmasses in Gaia are in comparison to the size of the United States. Please bear in mind that the second map is only for size-comparative purposes and does not show the proper latitude of Gaia's landmasses.
Since the landmasses of Gaia cover such a small percentage of the planet itself, there are only three timezones represented on land. Since Midgar seemed to be the largest and most populated, industrial city in the game, it served to reason that it was thus the most important. To prevent temporal issues that would have arisen from the fact that traveling east causes one to lose daylight, we chose to unite all three timezones under one blanket timezone: Midgar Standard Time--similar to how on Earth we use Greenwich Standard Time to synch up official timepieces. While each timezone does run on its own hourly marker, we chose to show the events of Advent Children as having a timestamp from a consistent source, giving us Midgar Standard Time.
