Time kaladin spent as bridgeman

[king of nowhere]

Reteading words on radiance, i caught on a small detail, and i can't let it go.

In chapter 9, kaladin enters a chasm, using a sapphire broam for light, musing how it's worth more than all his wages as bridgeman.

Sapphire is second most valued stone, a broam is 500 clearchips. As a bridgeman slave, kaladin earned a clearmark per day, so the line implies kaladin spent less than 100 days as bridgeman. 

It seems not enough time for all that happens. I spent the better part of an hour looking, but i could not find a chronology of the book, only of the wider cosmere.

So, when kaladin is first assigned to bridges, he goes on for a while until all those in his original crew died - most of those who replaced them died too. For all that bridge crews have terrible casualty rates, the same book states an average of one run per week - and not all are bad. To lose 96% of their original members, it must have been at least a month. In wok chapter 30, kaladin states he's been on a couple dozen runs - implying 120 days as bridgeman already, and it's a third of the book.

Then he decides to fight. He spends at least a couple weeks taking control of bridge 4. He trains them; they exercice until they can run with the bridge for hours and be only mildly tired; that kind of training doesn't come in a few weeks. 

Then he thinks of the side carry, he takes time to train the men at it; it ends poorly, and he is left to the highstorm. He spends ten days recovering. Then he starts training the men in combat, and from there more weeks of training pass. 

All in all, 200 days seem a more likely estimate.

[Treamayne]

4 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

In chapter 9, kaladin enters a chasm, using a sapphire broam for light, musing how it's worth more than all his wages as bridgeman.

Sapphire is second most valued stone, a broam is 500 clearchips. As a bridgeman slave, kaladin earned a clearmark per day, so the line implies kaladin spent less than 100 days as bridgeman

 Sphere value. If Kal is "earning" 1 clearmark per day, how do you get 500 Clearmarks is 100 days? Should it not be 500 days. At 5 Rosharan days per Rweek, that's 100 Rweeks or 10 RMonths which is 1 Ryear. 

 

[alder24]

5 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

Sapphire is second most valued stone, a broam is 500 clearchips. As a bridgeman slave, kaladin earned a clearmark per day, so the line implies kaladin spent less than 100 days as bridgeman. 

It seems not enough time for all that happens. I spent the better part of an hour looking, but i could not find a chronology of the book, only of the wider cosmere

Here:

Kaladin arrived at the Shattered Plains at the year 1173, 7th month, 9th week, 3rd day (1173.7.9.3), the Battle of the Tower happened at 1173.9.6.4 - 86 days in total. A month is 50 days, a week is 5 days, there are 10 weeks in 1 month.

[king of nowhere]

On 5/29/2024 at 2:41 PM, alder24 said:

Here:

Kaladin arrived at the Shattered Plains at the year 1173, 7th month, 9th week, 3rd day (1173.7.9.3), the Battle of the Tower happened at 1173.9.6.4 - 86 days in total. A month is 50 days, a week is 5 days, there are 10 weeks in 1 month.

Reading the notes, though, you see that a lot of that is speculative. in particular, in reference A427, the author notes that the time is very constrained, and he's making some generous assumptions to fit the timeline. that is, it does seem like kaladin is doing an awful lot of things in a very short time, but there are constrains in how long he can be spending as a bridgeman, so those assumptions are needed to fit the timeline - which actually does vindicate my point that kaladin spending less than 100 days as bridgeman seems short.

i didn't go look those details - I am not aware of any book reference for when, exactly, kaladin arrives to the plains relative to other plot events. the closest i can think of is amaram winning his shards, but iirc, amaram himself faked the date, so we don't have any reliable in-book reference "amaram took the shards from kaladin exactly 11 months before arriving at the warcamps, and kaladin spent 8 months as a slave before arriving there, so he must have spent 3 months as bridgemen". I haven't seen anything like that. so I'm not sold on why kaladin can't have arrived at the shattered plains a couple months earlier, and have started training bridge 4 a bit earlier.

[Treamayne]

5 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

Reading the notes, though, you see that a lot of that is speculative.

You might find these two articles interesting

• Rosharan Dates
• Oathbringer Timeline
  • Includes a picture of part of the Timeline for Way of Kings

So, Karen would have in her notes (nearly) exactly when Kal arrived and how many days he was a bridgeman. We can hope that, someday, we'll get access to at least some of these timeline sections.

[Jofwu he/him]

On 5/30/2024 at 8:56 AM, king of nowhere said:

Reading the notes, though, you see that a lot of that is speculative. in particular, in reference A427, the author notes that the time is very constrained, and he's making some generous assumptions to fit the timeline. that is, it does seem like kaladin is doing an awful lot of things in a very short time, but there are constrains in how long he can be spending as a bridgeman, so those assumptions are needed to fit the timeline - which actually does vindicate my point that kaladin spending less than 100 days as bridgeman seems short.

The boundary dates are relatively fixed though. The "Rosharan Dates" link that Treamayne shared gives the date of Kaladin's first POV chapter, approaching the Shattered Plains (9.3.1 = K73, so 72 days prior is 7.8.3), and the end of TWoK at the Battle of the Tower (18 days after K73). So the official timeline has Kaladin spending less than 90 days as a bridgeman.

The assumptions being made in my timeline are about how some of the stuff in the middle fits in. It does need another pass. A while back I got Peter to comment on Kaladin's time in part 1: their official timeline apparently has that as 18 days and my guess was that it's 14. So there's definitely some guesses that need to be refined. Hoping to incorporate those tweaks in the Wind and Truth update.

[Master Silver]

90 days is roughly how long basic training takes. A lot of the first couple of weeks is like bridge runs, last week or so is fluff, so getting a platoon to come together in that time, especially when it is life and death is within reason.