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Setting limits on the size of Roshar (the planet) and Roshar (the continent)


Everstorm

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Still, that leaves us some information. The three moons are likely captured asteroids, then, rather than having split off from Roshar during its formation, Luna-style. Three captured asteroids at the same time in relatively stable, seemingly very close orbits... Anything significant in that, science people?

 

It is 'scientific' to note that one of the theories for Earth's moon's origins is that it came from a chunk of Earth that broke off when another planet impacted Earth. Perhaps something big impacted Roshar, resulting in the multiple moons.

 

Also, The Emperor's Soul apparently had mention of many meteors falling from the sky. I don't think it's strong evidence, but perhaps a planet in the Cosmere (Yolen?) exploded at some point and Roshar's moon's are actually chunks of it. We know that 'all' of the Shards have been on Roshar at some point, and that the Shattered Plains were originally a concept set on Yolen. If Yolen was situated very close to Roshar, and exploded, this could explain a few things. Perhaps Yolen is even the origin of Roshar's legends about the Tranquiline Halls. Probably not, though.

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Not necessarily.  The forest moon of Endor is habitable.  ;)

Yes because Star Wars is amazingly scientific...

Peter's already said it isn't happening, but habitable moons of Gas Giants would require extensive work.  The closest in our Solar system is Europa, which is covered in Ice.  Getting a moon capable of holding an Atmosphere and with enough mineral resources to support life, while being in a habitable temperature zone is unlikely.  Making one work is probably within a shard's powerlevel, but it's probably easier to just find a Goldilocks Zone planet instead.  (Not that habitable moons are impossible.  I use them in my own Sci-Fi) but only with extensive terraforming and specific circumstances allowing for the factors above.)

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I expect the moons were put in their current orbits artificially, but by whom or what I do not know. On astronomical terms, these are not stable orbits, but astronomical terms means millions of years. A few thousand or even a few hundred thousand years are no problem.

 

The moons being put their artificially had occurred to me, but I generally try to avoid going "it's magic" to explain stuff. Poor instinct in this case, I suppose. :\

 

I suppose this might lend some degree of credence to the idea of Urithiru being on one of the moons. I still doubt it though, what with them being too small to naturally retain atmosphere and all.

 

By the way, I minored in astronomy while at the university, for expressly science fictional purposes.

That's kind of awesome. :D

Edited by Kurkistan
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Yes because Star Wars is amazingly scientific...

Peter's already said it isn't happening, but habitable moons of Gas Giants would require extensive work.  The closest in our Solar system is Europa, which is covered in Ice.  Getting a moon capable of holding an Atmosphere and with enough mineral resources to support life, while being in a habitable temperature zone is unlikely.  Making one work is probably within a shard's powerlevel, but it's probably easier to just find a Goldilocks Zone planet instead.  (Not that habitable moons are impossible.  I use them in my own Sci-Fi) but only with extensive terraforming and specific circumstances allowing for the factors above.)

 

It was a joke, son.

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There's still at least one piece of relevant information in the book that I haven't seen mentioned.

I'm really not sure if this is at all relevant or helpful, but it might be.

(With that wonderful introduction, *ahem*):

Shallan's been following Jasnah as of her first Chapter, for 'the better part of 6 months', and was first instructed to meet Jasnah in Dumadari, on the border of Jah Keved and Alethkar. The distance by sea, keeping in mind that they have to follow the coast to shelter from high storms, seems like an *enormous* amount of time to cross that kind of distance. For reference, it used to take 6 weeks to take convicts from England to Australia by boat. 6 months on the water, I think, could take you at least nearly around earth. Which makes Roshar like, the size of our sun or something.

I tried looking for a timeframe of Jasnah and Shallans journeying from the previews to compare, but couldn't find any.

(NB I dont know much about boats or astronomy. Just thought I'd add this information into the discussion in case it is at all useful)

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Remember that they have to stick to the coast, take frequent breaks for the highstorms, and stop in port after port, search for Jasnah, and conduct business. That gives them maybe 3 months of sailing time, and a long meandering route, not a straight line.

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For reference, it used to take 6 weeks to take convicts from England to Australia by boat.

I'm pretty sure you're underestimating the average length of the England/Australia trip by several weeks, and it's probably not fair to compare a shore-hugging trader sailing an unpredictable route and periodically seeking shelter from megastorms to the fastest ships of their day sailing 24/7 along a known route chosen for its advantageous winds and currents.

Still, six months is a long time. My first guess is that some of that time could have been shaved if Shallan's ship had completely abandoned their mercantile pursuits and just immediately set off for the next place as soon as they learned of it.

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I think it's almost definitely not the size of the sun. That piece of info is unreliable because it is way too dependent on what kind of naval technology they have, what route they took (they could've been crisscrossing all over the map for all we know) and how frequently storms occur . If I remember correctly England to Aus was also pretty much a 2 stop journey - somewhere in Africa and then somewhere in India, while we have an indefinite number of halts here.

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Four Roshar months is 200 Roshar days. Also, the radius calculation doesn't look right to me at all.

 

But yes, we do think about this kind of thing.

 

You should see my equirectangular and azimuthal equidistant map projections. Except you won't, not anytime soon. :ph34r:

 I was really interested to see that such calculations are actually made by you guys.......... it's remarkable...... but on the other hand, I have a doubt. In HoA Vin uses Preservation's power to spin the world so that they don't get fried by the heat. I thought this should be wrong since if such a sudden rotation occurred then all the people (also plants, animals, even objects) should have been ejected into space by sheer centrifugal force. If my math isn't wrong, centrifugal force =mass x (angular acceleration)square x radius. The sudden spin would have a sharp rise in angular acceleration. Now u cud argue that Preservation's power could have compensated for the force...... but at the time Vin was described as being too naive to use it properly. Could someone explain this to me?

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I was really interested to see that such calculations are actually made by you guys.......... it's remarkable...... but on the other hand, I have a doubt. In HoA Vin uses Preservation's power to spin the world so that they don't get fried by the heat. I thought this should be wrong since if such a sudden rotation occurred then all the people (also plants, animals, even objects) should have been ejected into space by sheer centrifugal force. If my math isn't wrong, centrifugal force =mass x (angular acceleration)square x radius. The sudden spin would have a sharp rise in angular acceleration. Now u cud argue that Preservation's power could have compensated for the force...... but at the time Vin was described as being too naive to use it properly. Could someone explain this to me?

Assuming of course, that she didn't subconciously maintain norms through her near omnipotence. There are few immediate consequences to what she does as a shard, but many long term ones, suggesting that intent matters in the immediate function of the action she takes(allowing her to manage said subconcious interventions.)

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There is something in the WOR spoilers that could also be used to help judge distance. But we don't have a detailed map of The Kholin camp to my knowledge so I can only guess here.

 

I guess I could add a spoiler tag for the calculations... but this is still mostly guess work.. I'm going to say that it would take about anywhere from 10 to 20 hours to walk the total distance on the Prime map of the shattered plains. Note: this is assuming a slightly uphill path the entire way(and in the interest of no spoilers I'm leaving out why this is such a large difference, those that have read the preview chapters should be able to figure it out :P). So somewhere between 45 and 100 km of the map from edge to edge

 

.  Problems with this: that puts the time it took for Dalinar to get to The Tower at about 7 to 14 hours. Since we know that they came back the same day we know it can't be more than 9.5 hours and probably wasn't even close to the 7 hours(There was daylight when they left and when they came back, so This puts us in a 8-12 hourish time block round trip assuming earth like daylight times). This could mean that the Prime map of the Shattered Plains isn't completely to scale(The tower is larger than any of the High Prince's camps, so I think this is likely). Or it could be that I don't have accurate enough tools available to me.

Edited by EvilKetchupCow
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This could mean that the Prime map of the Shattered Plains isn't completely to scale(The tower is larger than any of the High Prince's camps, so I think this is likely). Or it could be that I don't have accurate enough tools available to me.

I'm not convinced the maps are entirely accurate. They're all in-world and made by human cartographers which means they won't be perfect. I noticed the shape of Alethkar on the map of Roshar in the front of the book seems much wider in proportion than the map of just Alethkar before the prologue. If you especially compare the size of the Shattered Plains on the two maps, you can see the sizes aren't exactly proportionate to each other.

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I'm not convinced the maps are entirely accurate. They're all in-world and made by human cartographers which means they won't be perfect. I noticed the shape of Alethkar on the map of Roshar in the front of the book seems much wider in proportion than the map of just Alethkar before the prologue. If you especially compare the size of the Shattered Plains on the two maps, you can see the sizes aren't exactly proportionate to each other.

 I remember something about one of them being stylized, but the Prime map is the King's map. I would assume it to be the more accurate of them.

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Well if we look at Kaladin's storm dream as an indication he pretty much traversed the whole of the continent as part of the Stormwall.

 

The most powerful hurricanes on earth have winds at about 200mph (~325km/h) but I think it is safe to say that the Highstorms are more powerful than that since they throw people about like ragdolls.

 

So lets say the stroms are, what 2x as strong as on earth? ~650km/h?

 

So the big question is how long was Kaladin riding the storm for?

 

IIRC, an Highstorm lasts a good few hours, but to give us an upper limit, it is certainly less than 10 hours.

 

That would give an upper limit for the size of the continent of 6,500 km (10 hours of 650km/h)

 

Now, I am no meteorologist and have no idea how powerful winds would have to be in order to lift a man off his feet (such as we see with Kaladin when he is strung up) I also think 5-7 hours is a more realistic estimate for the length of the storm.

 

Either way I think somewhere between 6,000 - 7,000 km is a solid upper estimate for the east / west size of Roshar (continent).

 

EDIT: Just looked this up and this would make the continent about 30 - 35% wider than the US (about 5000km LA to NY)

Edited by The Count
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I'm not sure what missing evidence Peter is referring to from the book (I'll keep thinking), but an additional consideration that has yet to be mentioned is the presence of Ashyn and Braize, both habitable, in the same system. That adds some constraints to the planetary orbits and distances.

 

...Hm, for some reason I have been imagining Ashyn as the inner planet of the three, followed by Roshar then Braize, but I realize that I have no basis for that. Do we have any information suggesting their relative positions?

Edited by ccstat
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Okay, according to the original post about Greater Roshar, Braize is confirmed as the 3rd planet in the system. No info specifically on where Ashyn and Roshar fall.

 

Do we have confirmation that Ashyn and Braise are not in fact moons of Roshar, and any oddities caused by this are simply not mentioned in the Shadows world because they're commonplace

The linked post suggest strongly to me that the other shardworlds are not moons of Roshar but planets in their own right. (Also,if Roshar has .7g, and its moons are small and low, they will have much lower gravity themselves and likely not be particularly habitable.) Regardless, we haven't seen Ashyn yet--it's the setting for Silence Divine, not Shadows for Silence--so no oddities or lack thereof to explain away yet.

Edited by ccstat
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A couple things I thought of but haven't had time to explore fully:

 

Stars. If we had stars that were visible in one place but not another or better yet differing angles above the horizon that would be a great help. Unfortunately there are very few mentions of stars in WoK and the only mention of a particular stellar feature that I could find is Taln's Scar, mentioned twice, but both times in Alethkar AFAICT. (There's also a mention of starspren, which could actually be planets or other small nearby objects)

 

Climate. If we could figure out a climate model for a planet with a single supercontinent we could get something from that. For example, seasons don't seem to follow the solar calendar, which indicates a small axial tilt. That probably means the poles would get very cold depending on how ocean currents flow(and absent large longitudinal continents like we have on Earth, I imagine they would travel more or less laterally.) With Rosharan climates being fairly consistently mild, this would mean that the continent probably occupies a small number of latitudes near the equator.

 

Highstorms. It is possible that highstorms are a sort of atmospheric "super-tide". We know that is has a complex periodic nature, which could be consistent with the interaction between three moons and the sun, especially if the moons are artificially placed to create a sort of resonance effect. It's not like we haven't seen large-scale resonance effects before on Roshar. It travels East-to-West, which I assume is the opposite direction of the planetary rotation. If we could figure out the resonance pattern then the frequency and speed of highstorms should give us a clue.

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