Jofwu

*whispers* It's beautiful...

My expert analysis of Argent's glyphs! Just the make up, no speculation on what they represent. Editing to say: My main goal here was to compare the two versions of the glyphs. The differences are pretty notable! Particularly interesting to me is the idea that the characters can be mirrored (horizontally or vertically) or swapped.

Relevant WoB is below: This line: "Yeah. So Recreance is more recent than late." I think suggests pretty clearly that the Recreance was on "this side" of the 4500 years. So 2250 years ago max. Probably in the 1500-2000 years ago range.

Hey! I hadn't had a chance to check my email yet. That's fun.

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@Blightsong I'm not sure really what you're proposing here. We don't know anything about this chart except that it relates to voidbinding. Are these 10 specific spheres? Or just a chart of ten types of spheres? What do they do? What do they hold? This doesn't really tell us anything meaningful about the sphere does it?

@Stormcrown (and everybody else) No Oathbringer spoilers outside of the Oathbringer Spoiler Board please.

I expect Shallan's Oathbringer storyline will essentially involve her building more personas and getting worse in this respect. She's spoken a few Truths so far and it's left her splintered. Now that she can't hide from them, she has to partition them. But I think in the end she's going to come to a place where she has to accept herself as who she is. Her next Truth will relate to how she views herself. Essentially an acceptance of who she is. I find it hard to believe that Shallan will fail to progress, so the only way is forward. Doesn't mean the road won't be bumpy though.

Different levels of stress. Just shared for the pretty factor. The model isn't good enough to share actual numbers and their implications. In particular, its showing von Mises stress, which I don't believe is accurate for stone. .

I've been working on a computer model/analysis. Might take me a few days to get something useful though. It's a weird thing to model. Got to figure what will yield useful results, and from there how to interpret them properly.

There are rumors and legends. If you're specifically referring to the location, that's pretty thoroughly explained in TWoK. Nobody traveled there by foot; the fragments of maps that remain all just point at oathgates. The place hasn't been visited in 1000+ years, and for the Vorin world it's a symbol of the reviled Knights Radiant. So it's not surprising that anything specific would be lost. Even if a specific reference does exist, it would probably be at odds with other mistaken or erroneous claims. And traveling through tall mountain ranges is not something easy to do. You'd have to know exactly where you're going if you don't want to spend a lifetime searching the mountains. Assuming it's actually possible to reach it by foot in the first place. It's big, but it's not THAT big. You'd have to get reasonably close before you could see it.

As I pointed out, the use of arches (and domes) would be vital. The Adolin example was a poor one, as it is probably an exception. I"m more concerned about simple large rooms that only take up one story. This is a really good point. It sounds like the tower is nestled between two peaks. Edit: Just came across this in TWoK chapter 32 epigraph: —Though The Song of the Last Summer is a fanciful tale of romance from the third century after the Recreance, it is likely a valid reference in this case. See page 27 of Varala’s translation, and note the undertext. You can never know how accurate it is of course, but "crafted by the hands of no man" seems notable. And @ccstat, I think you'll want to add this quote to your list as it describes what you've got really well. It's from WoR chapter 86. I can't shake the feeling that Brandon imagines it being more slender than we've got it shown... But the evidence is definitely more supportive of what you have unless the story heights are greater than expected.

Yeah. Sure, a semi-circle isn't a full ring. But I think with the semi-circle you can properly say that they "ring the field". The full circle out in front of the tower doesn't "ring the field". It's a ring in the middle of the field. Is there anything that would contradict a compromise? What if the platforms form MOST of a circle, with Urithiru taking bite out of one side? Allow me to display my incredible MS Paint skills. Something like this, though I think it feels best if all the platforms are all visible from one another (i.e. not obstructed by the tower).

It's described as if it were cut with a shardblade, so I don't think that fits. And seems like "semi-circle" is explicitly mentioned. Need to look at the quotes again though. Isn't the tower on the edge of a cliff? For some reason I thought the sheer side was on the edge of a cliff, so the oathgates wouldn't be able to ring it completely. Maybe I imagined that. Either way, @ccstat, I don't see a problem saying that they make a half-circle "ring" around the field, with the tower at the base of the semi-circle. The tiers are described as things and they don't go all the way around after all.

I can't add much to the conversation on required head space. My work is focused on industrial structures--not skyscrapers--and it's more of an architectural concern anyways. I agree with all of your assumptions there. I think 3.5m is plenty of room there. I did some rough numbers on floor/ceiling thickness, and its easy to see why we don't use stone for this. It's not a material I'm familiar with, so I did some brief research. It sounds like 170 pcf is a reasonable weight to use for granite (120 at 0.7g). I also threw on 150 psf for loads on the floor. That's high for residential, but not unreasonable conservative I think. (Doesn't matter terribly anyways because the weight of the stone itself is more significant.) The other key number I dug up is a flexural strength of 1500 psi. What we're going to do is load up the floor slab and see how much stress it causes. We need it to be less than this number to physically work. Realistically, I think you'd want a safety factor of 3, meaning you don't exceed 500 psi.... But... For 1500 psi my calculations say you need 2 feet of stone to span just 5 feet, 5 feet of stone to span 10 feet, 10 feet of stone to span 15 feet, and basically exponentially worse from there. I saw one source saying the bending stress for granite can be up to 3 times higher than this, and the weight could be a little lower.. With those assumptions (and NO safety factor) you can span 20 feet with a bit less than 2 meters of stone. Slate looks like it can give a 25 ft span with 6 feet of rock (at its best, and with no safety factor). Now, this is all assuming a flat slab of rock spanning between opposite supporting walls. If we can thicken the floors near the walls (i.e. the ceiling drops a number of feet near opposite edges in the room below) then we can go further. But then you throw on a safety factor and we're still not in great shape. I'm personally not convinced it's very feasible unless the stone is enhanced in some way. Or unless the tower makes significant use of arches. Arches would go a long way, though I don't think there's been any mention of them so far? Haven't had a chance yet to think about walls.

This is fantastic! Is there anything in particular you're wondering about? I can do my best to help. Unfortunately stone is not a common structural material. Particularly for something of this scale and particularly for anything besides walls. The strangest thing to me is the nature of the construction. It sounds like the whole thing is solid stone, as if the tower were carved rather than built. I have no idea off the top of my head how you would size a solid stone slab floor. If it's as wide as you figure, I wouldn't be surprised if it can handle its own weight well enough. I was totally forgetting about the 0.7g. That helps a lot. To do some super basic calculations for walls we'd need to make a guess at what kind of rock we're dealing with. (i.e. numbers for the weight and compressive strength) In general you probably don't need to worry about deep floors. You definitely wouldn't want load bearing walls to be supported in the middle of a slab. The offset of the outer wall should be manageable, and the walls support less weight there. Though I'm curious what kind of open spaces are inside. Take the cavernous area Adolin was at in chapter 2. What's going on with the roof there? I don't see how a stone slab can span dozens of meters. The other amusing thing to me is the glass. It's a single 180 story pane of glass? Surely that's magic? You mentioned fabrials... I know with some Surges we've seen the magic is time limited before it bleeds out. But I think it's possible tension and/or cohesion are different. And if nothing else, the tower could be soulcast in some way. So if all else fails we can say that the stone was soulcast into something with unnaturally high strength and/or light weight.

Well, unfortunately this didn't solve all the problems. I drew a great circle from the mountains between Shinovar/Iri to somewhere off the east coast. I originally tried putting it through the Shattered Plains, but I just don't think there's a good great circle that passes through the Plains AND stays relatively centered over the continent. In any case, I don't think it would matter if you picked a slightly different path than the one I did. I assumed the storm is basically a straight wall extending to either side of this path. So I used this for calculating the time of the storm and it didn't help much. The problem is that the distance across the continent is shortened this way. The arrival times (mainly Urithiru and Hearthstone, which are my basis) are fixed. So if the storm less angular distance to reach these two places that means it's the calculations will just have it moving faster. It circles the globe in far less than 8 days. On the plus side, I got the timings on the continent itself to be a little more reasonable! So my best guess is that it moves more slowly over the ocean than it does on land.

@Fatling That's not an error. "Overmastery" is when you use up dangerous amounts of your body's water. That doesn't happen to Kenton. His sudden loss of powers in volume 1 is a mystery at this point.

The Stormseat gate in Urithiru was obviously unlocked, but we can only speculate as to why. I don't see any reason to assume there's no good explanation. For example, maybe Urithiru wasn't on good terms with the other kingdoms before its demise and it locked them out to make a statement. And they just didn't bother with Stormseat because it was destroyed long before. Then the other sides were locked later.

@Diamond Mind I realized today that in the WoR epilogue (set during the night in the Unclaimed Hills) Hoid mentions that the Everstorm will hit Shinovar "tonight". Shinovar is 6-7 hours behind, so if it's just past sunset then it's late morning in Shinovar and afternoon in Urithiru. This seems like another useful data point. It's broad... It could be hitting as they speak, and thus around noon in Shinovar. Or he could mean that it's hitting when night has set on Shinovar. Something to keep in mind though. If nothing else, that rules out the Everstorm hitting Shinovar in the morning. If you put Urithiru as far West as possible and have the Everstorm arrive there shortly before (or at) midnight, it hits Shinovar around noon (early night in the far east, as per WoR epilogue) and Yeddaw a little before sunset. So that works pretty good. My only problem with this is that I don't see how Salas could be up that late over central Roshar. Any chance you care to comment on this @PeterAhlstrom? But it also sort of works if you put Urithru as far East as possible and have the Everstorm arrive shortly after sunset. In this version it hits Shinovar around the same time, but one day earlier, and it hits Yeddaw late the night before. First case seems to fit better, but I'm not ready to write this one off And the moon thing bothers me. @ccstat This is a very good point. I vaguely considered it early on, but was too lazy to consider that approach. But I think you're probably right. Aside from making a lot more sense, a great circle path would also fit some Edgedancer comments better. Shinovar is further west than Iri, but they suggest it hit both around the same time. The same is true for Tashikk and Azir, more or less. If it's headed slightly more in a southeast direction (in western Roshar) this would fit better. We know from Arcanum Unbounded that Roshar is 90% of the "standard cosmere" size (i.e. Earth). Assuming she's talking about the radius/diamter, that means Roshar's circumference is 36,000 km. The great circle distance from north Shinovar (south Iri) to the Shattered Plains is about 7,400 km by my calculation. (using this map). This means the continent takes up only 20% of the storm's path compared to almost 40% if the storm just moves west to east. This might be the key. I'll have to rework my spreadsheet with that in mind. The Everstorm presumably spans the entire continent (Reshi Isles to Theylenah) and possibly beyond. Anyone care to speculate where the center of it's path follows?

@DiamondMind Yeah, so Shallan being on a different timeline than Kaladin surprised me. I was hoping they'd fit nicely. But I guess it should be obvious they don't, since Part One for Shallan is all one day while Kaladin expresses multiple weeks passing. I worked backwards from the WoR timeline and forward from a few other points. For example, we know the date of Kaladin's recruitment to within a week. (year is easy to figure and it's the first half of a Weeping) Anyways, they're both fairly well locked in. You can follow the references for details. Chachel's are noted (for now) because there's a single mention that new bridgemen are purchased on chachel. Without more certain information, that tidbit helps pin down a date on a few occasions. And yeah, I'd like to do something fancier with how it's held together. Can't quite think of a system I'm happy with... If you have interest in making a simple, short mockup, be my guest. I may try to rebuild it a better way once I've got the rest of TWoK nailed down as best I can. The Everstorm sheet does assume that constant rate over land (ignoring time passed over sea), and yeah there just isn't a single speed that aligns nicely, unfortunately. I heard they made a spreadsheet to track it during the beta read, so I'm assuming we just have a bad assumption or two right now. Something to keep an eye on.

Any particular recommendations? I'm open to them. There are a few things I'd do differently concerning how it's set up, but I got too far into it. Maybe for a later revision of it though... Yeah, I think I was equating "several" with "dozen" for some reason. Staring at numbers too much. I think I'd put the wedding a bit earlier... That puts it at something like 3am our time, which in my book is really early morning rather than middle of the night. But if the moon is up a bit earlier or the "several hours" a bit shorter could account for that. And that's just my opinion--your way works. Yeah, the conclusion there is that it probably changes speed. Not unreasonable. I just hoped it wasn't the case because it makes things complicated. Should have shared my calculations on that before: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FRPLWz6JlSLU0dis9L5pv0jd7kvNIIgqu3VUsEQdq5E/edit#gid=650018079 As you pointed out, Roshar is pretty big and the time zones matter. The best map I'm aware of is here: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/59890-roshar-map-reimagined/. Peter apparently said it was "very close to spot-on," though it's hard to say how picky he was being. The first tab on my sheet assumes the Everstorm is straight north/south and moving at a constant rate across this map. The second sheet is a projection that the creator provided further down in the thread. I marked some locations as best I could figure them to be. Note that I've got a third sheet which assumes the continent is scaled down a little. I felt another source where Peter suggests the continent spans 120 degrees, while this map has it spanning 150. So that third sheet is the same as the first, but with longitudes scaled in by 120/150. The most definite time/location we know is noon at Hearthstone. And the second best (with your observation made) would be Urithiru, I think. The mountain range in the center of the continent gives it about 30 degrees of wiggle room. The moons are weird... The first moon rises just after dark and takes about 1 hour to cross the sky from the Shattered Plains (per WoR-42). There's reason to believe it rises earlier and takes longer to cross the sky in Urithiru I think, but in any case that gives us a window of a few hours. My strategy was to play with the location and timing at Urithiru and see if I could get the rough timing to work out in other places. The main measures being (1) dusk/evening arrival in Yeddaw, (2) arrival in Shinovar "many hours ago", and (3) about 8 days elapsed since it was summoned. (assuming constant speed, including over the ocean) And it doesn't work out really well. In order to have the Everstorm hit Yeddaw in the late afternoon, you have to place Urithiru as far west as possible and make the arrival time there later than I think is reasonable. (168 deg longitude and arrival 2 hours before midnight on the scaled down map) Even then it arrives an in the afternoon rather than dusk. This puts it hitting Shinovar around noon Urithiru time, on the same day. Alternatively, you can put Urithiru as far East as possible and set the arrival time very early (192 deg on the scaled down map and arrival 1 hour after sunset). This makes it arrive in Yeddaw a few hours after midnight the night before, and Shinovar earlier that day. It's a toss up between those options. I suppose I tend to side with you so that Shinovar happens the same day. You can argue that the coming of night in Yeddaw was premature (because of the storm). And I think the guesses in WoR based on the Sun tended to put Urithiru further West. So I'll probably adjust the timeline. But I don't like either option very much. Both are stretching the numbers. And in either case it totally ruins my hope that the storm circles the planet at a constant rate. It must go slow over the ocean if it takes 8 days to reach Urithiru. Perhaps the speed is variable, even over the land. That would help the numbers. But it would also make our hopes of calculating the timing very small.

Follow-up on my last post... In working through the timeline for TWoK I've found a number of minor contradictions. If this is ever being reviewed for the 10th anniversary edition or something... I'll try to remember to add them here as I find them.(1) The Chasmfiend hunt and aftermath happens in chapters 12, 13, and 15. In the next Kholin PoV we see Dalinar meet with Elhokar and the hunt is mentioned as having happened "last week" and "a week ago". In the next Kholin PoV after that we have two references to Dalinar's meeting having been 2 days prior and one reference where Elhokar says the hunt was "3 days ago". By one reckoning there was a week between the first two sets of chapters, by another a single day passed. There's a few more soft pieces of evidence in later chapters that slightly suggest one timeline or the other, so nothing that conclusively says which reckoning is incorrect. I can dig these up if necessary. I suspect Elhokar's statement is false. (2) We have been told that Kaladin's (20th) birthday happens over the course of TWoK. This leads to two problems I see with Kaladin's flashback timing. Chapter 31 is "Six Years Ago" and Kaladin states that he will turn 15 in 5 months. If his birthday is within a month or two of the present date, this flashback should be at a half-year increment. He's currently 14.5 and in TWoK he is roughly 20, making this flashback 5.5 years ago rather than 6. (3) This isn't in the book exactly, but maybe there's some basis prompting it that's incorrect... Karen mentioned that "Chapter 40, when Kaladin recovers from being strung up in the storm, is the same day as the chasmfiend hunt in Chapter 12." There is a bridge run in the second half of chapter 40 (same day), but Sadeas is apparently off on the hunt. Maybe his army went without him? It doesn't seem his presence is explicitly mentioned. But I figured this was worth pointint out. (4) And we have the same problem with Chapter 41. The chapter is "Five and a half years ago." Kaladin comments on what his father did (in Chapter 31) "five months ago". This would put him at roughly 15 years old, toward the end of the year, and the chapter should be 5 years ago. (5) In chapter 30, Kaladin claims to have been on two dozen bridge runs. ("Kaladin had been on two dozen, and he was already one of the most experienced living bridgemen.") It would be complicated to delve into all the details here, but by my calculation he can't have been on more than 15 at this point. I believe there's an argument to be made that the two dozen is an exaggerated number. Some have also proposed that dozen=10 on Roshar. But if Kaladin's statement is meant to be taken literal, it isn't very well supported. This leads to a large point, which is that Kaladin doesn't seem to spend as much time as a bridgeman as it seems he actually has. Again, this could be a matter of Kaladin exaggerating. But multiple things give me the sense that Brandon imagined Kaladin being out there longer than the book seems to say. (6) The same could be said of the Dalinar chapters. By my calculation, Dalinar's Part 2 chapters are set much later than the Kaladin chapters they are intertwined with. When you do the math, his TWoK storyline is compressed more than some wording would suggest (e.g. a sense that months have passed, but when we look at the clear numbers we are given, it's more like a matter of weeks). (7) Speaking more generally, it seems like the three different main viewpoints aren't in sync with one another. I'm assuming it wasn't Brandon's intention to do so, in which case... Nothing to see here. But if it was... When you fit all of the pieces together you find that: (A) Shallan's Part 1 chapters happen a few weeks to a month before Kaladin's Part 1 chapters. (B) Kholin Part 2 chapters run a few weeks behind Kaladin's Part 2 chapters. (C) Shallan's Part 3 chapters mostly happen during Kaladin's Part 4 chapters. (D) Even when timelines are mainly synced up, it's not uncommon to have some Kaladin chapter X happen after a Kholin chapter X+1. (or similar) Again, I'm assuming that this level of interconnectivity isn't intended. Just wanted to highlight that there are some issues (most of which could probably be adjusted easily) if it is.

Is something missing here?

No, I think Peter answered that. Kaladin's "nahn" glyph is not associated with the caste system name.