Before the big reveal of the first track at a minute after midnight tonight, I have a few issues to raise with Adam Burke’s otherwise wonderful cover art. There are some huge approximations in what follows, my apologies, but still:
One average UK/Irish garden slug is an inch long (let’s say 2.5cm with a 1cm diameter). We’ll treat it as a cylinder so it has a volume of 0.00000196349 cubic metres. The average weight of said slug is 2.8 grams. As such, to attain the weight of 10 tonnes, you would need 3,571,428 slugs.
Multiply the volume of one slug by 3,571,428 and you get 7.012 cubic metres… smaller than a modern hatchback. To get a feel for the size / weight, check out this video of one tonne of topsoil which, again as an approximation, would believably be above the same volume as 1 tonne of slugs, allowing for moistness.
This is within the bounds of reason as slugs are mostly water, and a ton of water is 1 cubic metre. Therefore, a ton of slugs should be roughly the same volume… though arguably slightly larger due to the less dense matter in their makeup. This discrepancy could be explained by the approximate cylindrical shape I have given the slugs in the volume calculation.
Regardless, the slug in the album artwork must be significantly heavier than 10 tonnes. While I appreciate that the titular slug is “10 Ton” as opposed to “10 Tonne”, this would be of negligible difference as the imperial Ton is 1016kg whereas the metric Tonne is 1000kg.
If you like what we do, consider joining us on Patreon for as little as £1 per month!
Let’s reverse this as best I’m able.
Let’s say an average person is 1.7m in height. Looking at the artwork, the nearest person is some distance from the slug, but envisioning them closer, the slug’s “shoulders” would be approximately 16 people in height (27.2m). The length is harder to quantify, but it appears to be roughly four times longer than it is tall at the shoulders – let’s say 108.8m. Width at the shoulders is slightly less than half the height, so 13m. If we discount everything above the shoulders to help compensate for the tapering towards the tail we end up with a cuboid 108.8 x 27.7 x 12m in volume, or 36,165.12 cubic metres.
As opposed to 7 cubic metres for our 10 ton slug.
So this fucking _beast_ weighs in at 36,165 tonnes, if we really go all out on the approximations and assume it’s made of water (1 cubic metre of water is 1 tonne). Funnily enough, the Chernobyl New Safe Confinement (the largest land-based moving structure in the world) weighs approximately 36,000 tonnes as well, and given the reason that it’s needed could explain the existence of a 36,000 tonne slug.
As you can tell, I have far too much spare time and I’m pretty much definitely neurodivergent. I’m also not a mathematician (I teach Computing Science and Krav Maga), so apologies to any of my colleagues who actually perform in the more numerical fields. Corrections and more accurate estimations would be very much welcomed. As the band themselves responded:
While your maths are accurate, what you have failed to take into consideration is that a single ton of slug can weigh as much as 100 tons.it doesn’t make sense, but then again neither do we most of the time!
Works for me. Love and slimy hugs – OUGH!
Don’t fancy Patreon? Buy us a one-off beverage!
Artwork by Adam Burke (Nightjar Illustration)
Ten Ton Slug: facebook | twitter | instagram | spotify | bandcamp
wpDiscuz