Size of Nagadan

[Firesong]

The size of Nagadan leaves me wondering many things, but to start out.

It is no more than 50 miles across, I assume close to that due to the wording. Thus it is at most 1963.49540849 miles squared, a little smaller than Trinidad and Tobago, at ~1980 miles squared (as a circle would have the greatest area for the given radius, thus I used it as an upper bound). This may seem small, but it is actually pretty reasonable size if you look into it. It could fit around 6.5x the area of New York City, so it makes sense they could have several cities located across it, especially when they note how the cities were pretty small by modern standards. So, I perfectly believe the nation described fits the described scale.

What questions this raises, is 

1: How much area would the other 12 nations make up, it will not be more than 25525.4403104 in total, as we know that they are smaller than Nagadan. 

2: Why didn't they expand more? We know that they are able to banish away the Shroud in a limited area, but the stay much more sedentary. Is it just due to the sense of community and low population causing people to not really have a desire to split up and expand like that?

 

Edit: Made a mistake in my math due to assuming normal miles, forgetting he was talking to a Rosharan audience, updated size in this reply. 

 

Edited July 8, 2023 by Firesong

[Werewolff Studios]

3 hours ago, Firesong said:

What questions this raises, is 

1: How much area would the other 12 nations make up, it will not be more than 25525.4403104 in total, as we know that they are smaller than Nagadan. 

2: Why didn't they expand more? We know that they are able to banish away the Shroud in a limited area, but the stay much more sedentary. Is it just due to the sense of community and low population causing people to not really have a desire to split up and expand like that?

1. I reckon you're correct here, but it's hard to be sure since we never see them. 

2. Honestly, probably the latter. If you were surrounded on all sides by inky blackness filled with stuff that could kill you, I feel you'd only expand when you needed to; for resources and to build new population centers when the current one was getting too crowded. It's also probably a more industrial effort to draft a new Hion line, so the concept of a small exploratory group venturing out to find new lands wouldn't be too common. 

[ftl]

Yeah, the interesting thing is that for them, there's really no need to expand. The energy they get comes from Hion - they're not out there searching for more fertile land, or for more resources, they're just finding ways to exploit Hion more and more.

...I personally think that it's a bit of an odd worldbuilding choice. The scale of the story, to me, doesn't feel like it matches up to the scale of the worldbuilding. It's a machine that created a planetwide shroud of Investiture! ...out of the humans that lived in a 50x50 mile area. The resulting civilization reached for the stars and advanced to the point where they can do technological space travel! ...without really ever leaving the tiny area of the planet's surface that they've explored.

Idunno. It certainly works, the worldbuilding is solid, but I think it all would have just felt better if both civilizations, both pre and post-machine, had been implied to have been all around the world, and not just one tiny corner of it. Even if none of that other area was plot-relevant.

Edited July 7, 2023 by ftl

[Treamayne]

7 hours ago, ftl said:

It's a machine that created a planetwide shroud of Investiture!

Do we really know that the Shroud covers the whole planet? Or does it just cover the landmass of the story?

[GoldMisting]

1 minute ago, Treamayne said:

Do we really know that the Shroud covers the whole planet? Or does it just cover the landmass of the story?

Life on the planet was limited by first the steamwells (mentioned in chapter 34) and high difficulty of travel (mentioned in chapter 4) and then by the limited desire of the following civilization to ever expand likely since they had everything they needed and the unknown parts of the world were potentially dangerous

So while we would need to ask someone seeing their world from the sky or a curious horde about the Shroud that is implied to be the only truly habitable zone in the days of Torio so it's where people ended up so to the people it might as well be the whole world

[Treamayne]

8 minutes ago, GoldMisting said:

So while we would need to ask someone seeing their world from the sky or a curious horde about the Shroud that is implied to be the only truly habitable zone in the days of Torio so it's where people ended up so to the people it might as well be the whole world

Right, I knew the implication was there. My point was that with such a small surface area - there's a lot of planet in which other cultures and civilization could be/have been. Much like Era 1 Scadrial - where the "habitable area" was so small and reclusive - there was no feasible way for people of the Final Empire to have encountered the Southerners (even though they ahd a different "habitable zone" that was equally isolated). 

I just didn't want to assume the Shroud covered the whole planet, when we really just don't have that information. 

[GoldMisting]

3 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Right, I knew the implication was there. My point was that with such a small surface area - there's a lot of planet in which other cultures and civilization could be/have been. Much like Era 1 Scadrial - where the "habitable area" was so small and reclusive - there was no feasible way for people of the Final Empire to have encountered the Southerners (even though they ahd a different "habitable zone" that was equally isolated). 

I just didn't want to assume the Shroud covered the whole planet, when we really just don't have that information. 

True 

There would also obviously be areas now that were not habitable 1763 years ago that are now because of the changes Father Machine and its demise made and they may or may not have been covered

We would really need a sequel to know if there were other isolated pockets of sentient life and if so how they fared but they probably would've had their own issues with at least the geothermal activity and likely climate of the world altering very rapidly even if they didn't get their existence burned as fuel by the Machine or have The Shroud

[ftl]

7 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Do we really know that the Shroud covers the whole planet? Or does it just cover the landmass of the story?

Pretty sure it covers the whole planet. Either design or Masaka says so at some point, I think.

[Treamayne]

22 minutes ago, ftl said:

Pretty sure it covers the whole planet. Either design or Masaka says so at some point, I think.

You mean this?

Spoiler

Ch 33

Quote

 

“Kilahito,” she said, pointing to the circle. “Where we are now.” She drew another circle of similar size across the page. “The largest of the impassable zones.” Then she drew out several other smaller circles, about a dozen. Yes…those could be the size of towns. “The other ones.”

“How accurate,” Yumi said, “are these distances you’ve drawn?”

“Hordes have incredible spatial awareness,” Design said. “Comes from having bodies that can spread out to the size of a nation. Her guess will be more accurate than most people’s instrument-measured surveys.”

“Here is a scale,” Masaka said, drawing a line at the bottom with some numbers on it. “It is exact.”

 

Ch 34

Quote

With a firm hand he unrolled the scroll, revealing a map of Torio, Yumi’s kingdom. This was the map used by the driver of Yumi’s wagon to get from town to town. He studied its scale and nodded. Then, from memory, he painted a copy of Masaka’s drawing at the same size as the map, using some grid lines as guides.

He laid his copy atop Liyun’s map to find that they overlapped perfectly. The circles Masaka had drawn—each of which represented an impenetrable wall inside the shroud—were directly around some of the larger towns on Liyun’s map. Kilahito wasn’t represented in the map of Yumi’s lands, naturally, but the circle that Masaka had drawn indicating the biggest of the walled-off regions was listed on Liyun’s map as Torio City. The capital, seat of the queen, home to the university.

<Hoid>

Yumi leaned forward as she studied the two maps—his done on thinner paper, so the lines beneath showed through. “Painter,” she said, her wonderful eyes so wide they could have been canvases, “you were right. This time you were right!”

Right. He was right.

Their lands were somehow the same. Cities in Torio existed in the dark space between the cities of his nation. No overlap of actual living spaces, but many of them were shockingly close.

 

Design and Hoid never surveyed the planet, and Masaka drew a map of what she had surveyed, and it only coveres the 50ish mile radius near Kilohito. That seems far from confirming that it covers everything. There is Hoid's aside that I snipped - here:

Spoiler

(If you’re curious about the scale, both nations were relatively small by modern reckoning—less than fifty miles across. There wasn’t a lot of life on the planet. Painter’s people were quietly content with a small and intimate collection of cities. While Yumi’s nation could grow no larger than the steamwells allowed. On these maps, then, Kilahito and the town they were currently in were less than five miles apart.)

But note how he avoids a correlation. Not much life on the planet. Painter's people were content to live in only a 50 mile radius. He's trying to imply that this is the only "habitable" zone; but since he's telling this story after-the-fact he has to already know "Yumi's people" don't really exist - nor do the Steamwells.

Unless, of course, there is an unrelated exclave of former Torio people living with Steamwells elsewhere on the planet. . . 

There's always another secret.

Edited July 7, 2023 by Treamayne
SPAG

[ftl]

OK, I was actually thinking of this one, from chapter 21:

Quote

“Could I be from some other place on this world?” Yumi asked.

“We surveyed the planet before coming here,” Design said. “I didn’t pay enough attention, so it’s possible—but I think the entire thing is covered in the shroud.”

Design thinks the whole planet is covered in shroud, and they did survey it.  It certainly leaves open the possibility that she didn't pay close attention and there could be gaps in the shroud elsewhere on the planet, but I think it rules out the idea that the shroud is only right around this one tiny square (because if the planet was mostly un-shrouded and just this tiny element was covered in shroud, that would be pretty noticeable!)

[GoldMisting]

3 hours ago, ftl said:

OK, I was actually thinking of this one, from chapter 21:

Design thinks the whole planet is covered in shroud, and they did survey it.  It certainly leaves open the possibility that she didn't pay close attention and there could be gaps in the shroud elsewhere on the planet, but I think it rules out the idea that the shroud is only right around this one tiny square (because if the planet was mostly un-shrouded and just this tiny element was covered in shroud, that would be pretty noticeable!)

They did miss the 14 yoki-hijo prisons plus the ruins of Torio where apparently enough light reached the ground for sun loving plants to survive and propagate for 1763 years so by no means were Hoid and Design thorough in their assessment and Father Machine intentionally left some gaps for different reasons

[ftl]

5 hours ago, GoldMisting said:

They did miss the 14 yoki-hijo prisons plus the ruins of Torio where apparently enough light reached the ground for sun loving plants to survive and propagate for 1763 years so by no means were Hoid and Design thorough in their assessment and Father Machine intentionally left some gaps for different reasons

Well, they did say that those areas looked the same from above, since the shroud let light in one-way.

Chapter 40:

Quote

The sunlight, actually, was real—the domes over the cities let sunlight through in one direction without allowing light back out the other way. So while what she felt was authentic, those of us surveying the world from above didn’t spot these prisons.

So that particular thing wasn't due to un-thorough surveying, that was the machine messing with things.

It could have made other pockets of habitability if it wanted,  I think. Though in this particular book we don't see any indication that it would have, who knows...

[Firesong]

Addition to this, I think I am wrong. He was talking to Rosharans, and using their measurements. So fifty miles is most likely Rosharan miles, which we know are larger than standard miles. 

According to this (As it states, it does have RoW Spoilers, I was just linking it to cite my sources. I give the ending solution in this post, so you don't have to check)

It should be x1.95, thus 97.5 miles across.

So it should be 7,466.19 miles squared, closer to the area of Solvenia, or between the sizes of Connecticut and New Jersey. Exactly 3.8025x the area we previously assumed. 

So, around 24.67 New York Cities. Again, still a pretty reasonable size, I feel. 

Edited July 8, 2023 by Firesong

[GoldMisting]

39 minutes ago, Firesong said:

It should be x1.95, thus 97.5 miles across.

So it should be 7,466.19 miles squared, closer to the area of Solvenia, or between the sizes of Connecticut and New Jersey. Exactly 3.8025x the area we previously assumed. 

So, around 24.67 New York Cities. Again, still a pretty reasonable size, I feel. 

That's a very generous area to fit "tens of thousands" of people back in the Torio days (rough population mentioned in chapter 39) though they mention a sort of no man's land between towns

If there's ever a sequel it seems likely they'd have a population explosion right after the plot line ends because the habitable zone just got much larger

Edited July 8, 2023 by GoldMisting

[Firesong]

43 minutes ago, GoldMisting said:

That's a very generous area to fit "tens of thousands" of people back in the Torio days (rough population mentioned in chapter 39) though they mention a sort of no man's land between towns

If there's ever a sequel it seems likely they'd have a population explosion right after the plot line ends because the habitable zone just got much larger

Yeah, Torio and Nagadan both had a no-man's-land between settlements. Due to being focused around steamwells in Torio, and Hion Stubs in Nagadan. They were further limited by the land not being good for life even in the habited areas, with them relying a lot on the Yoki-hijo for any technology to help them with agriculture and homes.