I feel like clarifying that Earth's moon is abnormally large for a moon- a good part of the reason Pluto isn't officially a planet anymore is because we couldn't think of a good definition for planet that includes Pluto but not the moon. If we were going by size, we'd pretty much have to count Earth's moon as a planet.
And, like, by the numbers, the jump between Vegeta and Frieza is proportionally larger the gap between an average moon and average (terrestrial) planet. But that's not reflected in feats; the destruction of Namek is less impressive than Vegeta's destruction of the Bug planet, even if the latter was filler.
Scales suck...no more scales.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.IT's really never reflected in feats. Take almost any fights in Z, remove the name of the transformations and the buildup, and the fights are basically identical. Same size of Ki blasts. Same size of mountains exploding. Same people vanishing coz they are so fast. Beams going off into space have been a thing since Roshi blew the moon up.
The only new identifier of scale was when Goku's Spirit Bomb on namek was visible from space when it exploded. So we'd occasionally see a shot of earth with a big explosion on it.
That's about it. When you think about it, is there anything during the Cell or Buu fights that really establishes visually how everyone is stronger than they were when they fought Freeza outside of dialogue? What indicates that a punch from SSJ 3 Goku is more powerful than a punch from SSJ 1 Goku, outside of dialogues?
Specific Planets without known sizes.
Edited by Ghilz on Sep 15th 2018 at 8:57:07 AM
Their performance respective to their opponents.
Like, we see Goku and Vegeta fight evenly. We see Vegeta get overpowered by Boo. We see SS 3 Goku fight evenly with Boo.
We don't really need feats, even though they could have been a useful tool. And its not like the scale never changes - the fights have become more destructive over time - its just that feats arent made that important.
I'm perfectly willing to ignore filler, but the issue is more that there is not, in fact, a strong distinction between planet buster and moon buster- and once you account for how much stronger Vegeta is than Roshi, we get that the filler perfectly in line with where Vegeta should be, so the usual 'ignore filler' excuse kind of falls flat.
But, on the other hand, I will say that although the feats stop getting more impressive after Frieza, the fact that during the Android saga, pretty much everyone has to worry about accidentally destroying the earth with poorly aimed attacks does seriously affect the stakes. It's just that that would work better if they hadn't theoretically reached that point awhile ago.
Well, the real problem with comparing Arlia and Namek is that Freeza botched Namek because he didn't want to get caught in the blast. It's not meant to show how high his destructive capability is.
Also just on your earlier comment wasn't the difference between a planet and a moon based on what they orbit? Moons orbit planets, planets orbit a star. So what would be the issue with size?
The blast itself is harmless to him. Goku called out Freeza on his real reason for holding back: he wanted to test his might in a no-holds barred battle.
These are actually huge deals if you think about the implications of energy/time and area for a minute.
Edited by Kamiccolo on Sep 15th 2018 at 6:17:36 AM
Freeza gives a sly smile at him in response, basically confirming it.
EDIT: Also, in regards to visual escalation, if we're counting that scene of Vegeta destroying a planet in filler then there's no reason we shouldn't count the scenes where Fat Buu wipes out a galaxy and Super Buu almost destroys the universe.
Edited by Kamiccolo on Sep 15th 2018 at 6:22:14 AM
Yeah I don't know how much I trust that. If he wanted to win himself, but still have the option of destroying the planet he could have tried that after going 100%, surely. This just gave him a time limit (admittedly the time he can stay at 100% is shorter than that so it's probably moot).
Also when Goku says about Freeza wanting to fight it out, he says that if he didn't he'd just fire at the planet again. So I take that to mean that Freeza screwed it up the first time, but then chose to fight instead of making another attempt.
Edited by Saiga on Sep 15th 2018 at 11:33:00 PM
Then Pluto is a moon because it orbits Charon. Or rather, Pluto and Charon both orbit a point in space between them, so they have to be the same thing.
Oh, and moons orbit stars as well. The Earth's orbit is actually the Earth-Moon system orbit, and it doesn't revolve around the Sun, but rather around a point close to the center of the Sun that the Sun also wobbles around (but, in any case, only Jupiter makes the Sun orbit arond a point somewhat noticeably away from its center).
The issue with Pluto is also that there are a fuckton of objects it resembles far more closely than any of the planets, and Pluto itself was discovered in the middle of a "we gotta find the 9th planet" craze. Dwarf planet and a more restrictive definition of planet were coined so the number of planets wouldn't jump to over 20, with most of them being Pluto-like objects.
And hey, Ceres became a dwarf planet rather than an asteroid. But nobody thinks of Ceres, as between the martian and jovian orbits all there is in the mind of most people is an Asteroid Thicket, yet that region of space is not that dissimilar to the circumstances of Pluto's orbit.
Oh, and the Moon is unusual because most rocky planets don't have them (or have captured asteroids ala Mars). Blame our planet taking a collision with a Mars-sized protoplanet and the debris of the impact coalescing into a second body. But in terms of absolute size, our Moon is around the size of the important moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
(After this brief and probably outdated astronomy crash course, feel free to go back to Dragon Ball as if this wasn't here)
Well, okay, if we want to go down this rabbit hole...
Now, the definition you gave here indeed makes size completely irrelevant- by that definition, an earth-sized object orbiting Jupiter would be a moon. And maybe we're okay with that, but we're probably not okay with the idea of every asteroid, comet, and piece of space dust orbiting the sun counting as a planet. So we add the caveat the they have to be heavy enough that their own gravity makes them roughly spherical.
But then, once we look at it, the nature of gravity makes the idea orbiting a planet vs. orbiting the sun somewhat arbitrary- all planets are affected by the gravity of their moons, and thus can be meaningfully said to be orbit them as well as the sun. So we add the condition that a planet must have 'cleared the neighbourhood'; which is to say, they are clearly the dominant gravitational power within their orbit.
That is the condition that Pluto fails. It's also the most controversial part of the definition; people really didn't want to take away Pluto's planethood. But every reasonable proposed definition that would include Pluto- such as trying to be more specific about size than just 'it has to be spherical'- also ended up including Earth's Moon.
TL;DR: using the current scientific definitions, size indeed doesn't come into it when deciding the difference between a planet and a moon. But if we were using definitions where size does matter, Earth's Moon would count as a planet, not a moon.
/Astronomy Tangent.
Of course the very concept of a planet is arbitrary. Compare Gas Giants to Earth for example.
And that's without going into the concept of things like Rogue Planets (A "planet" that does not orbit a sun)
Truth of the matter is the concept of "Planet" is very much a human concept, not a specific thing that happens in nature. It's a word we invented that we sort of struggle to define now, because that's not how the universe works.
Not just Earth's Moon. Pluto is smaller than 7 moons (Several of which are bigger than our moon). Ganymede is actually larger than Mercury
Edited by Ghilz on Sep 15th 2018 at 9:52:14 AM
Except it doesn't help anything...even if it can be of interest.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.

Man. I should really stop caring about everything else and just watch this series for the fights...
...though Super ruined that.
One Strip! One Strip!