Board Thread:General Mod Discussion/@comment-26553378-20160724223320/@comment-26888709-20160725200931

Recneps wrote:

Maltalidenta Kwuitidherali wrote:

Minecraftmage113 wrote: um... its a mumakil, i get the point that it would be unreasonable for feeding but it is quite possible it just has a more efficient digestive system plus when the harad went to war there werent very large amount (im just going to have you yell at me about the movie stuff again now but...) and there werent any more than 20 in that battle scene if i recall correctly and that would undoubtedly be getting the mumakil any way possible so they are extremely rare, if you're woried about overpowered i guess i get that but they would be expensive as well as rare and they really were powerful (no it is nowhere near giant gold velociraptors) and it was never said they live in the savanah, by mods lore they live in jungle, by tolkiens lore he never really gave a native land they were just captured and used somehow by the haradrim And "Mûmak" is nothing more than a word in another language, likely being elephant in our own. Elephants themselves spend 80% of their time feeding, and there is no digestive system that is randomly quick. We'd be able to observe it in the animal kingdom, and have presumably larger animals because of it. But we can't, and so it's reasonable to call such an excuse rubbish.

Aye, I'll get at you for using the films as evidence. I could quote Shakespeare, but that doesn't mean Caeser actually said "Et tu, Brute."

By the mod's law, they live in the jungle, hmm? That's near enough impossible for them to even get through a jungle without some very major drawbacks, so we can presume they aren't natives. And if they are, then they'll in all likelihood eat large parts of the trees, which would have extreme difficulty growing back, and so major deforestation would have taken place and the elephants would therefore have killed themselves mostly out. So, we've established they aren't native to the jungle. Where, then, the Savannah? Well, there's even less food there. To put it very simply, it's just unreasonable to say they could exist there in the dimensions you place them at. And if they were rare, how do you propose the Haradhrim saw the potential as war machines? With normal African elephants, which were rare in themselves, few were used in war. With these, if they were rarer still, it's fairly likely they wouldn't even be used in war.

There are limits on when their size becomes unreasonable. Anything over about 1.2-1.5 times the size of an African elephant is wholly unreasonable, and six would also be an umreasonable amount of tusks for something of that size too. According to your map - which only states that Elephants do exist - Elephants live in the Desert. I think they would live in thw jungle. Wikia says they come from the jungle:

Quote from wikia,

Mûmakil live in the jungles of Far Harad and some of them were taken in and domesticated by the Haradrim. The Haradrim had been enemies of the kings of Numenor since the second age, when later tyrannical kings began demanding tribute from the fledgling Haradrim tribes. Mûmakil were likely used during the Haradrim wars with Gondor before the War of the Ring, and when their grudge against the men of the West was rekindled by the opportunity to crush Gondor by way of an alliance with Sauron, the armies of Mordor began to include Mûmakil forces.