Inkthinker

I'm not even sure a submarine would work... I'm not an underwater engineer, but I imagine a powerful storm on the surface creates all sorts of pressure shifts and currents and forces under the water, at least near the surface when the waves are all Perfect Storm huge and vertical. Whales and such dive deeper, and I bet submarines would have too as well, but we're talking about a world where the submarine hasn't necessarily even been invented. In our own world it took several attempts and a lot of dead men just to get one that sorta works near the surface with the air being pumped in and out through bellows. A proper diving submersible might be more of a leap than we should expect from the inventors of Roshar. Especially if we follow the theory that naval technology is only important to a fraction of the world's populace, namely those on the coasts. Before we see submarines, I reckon we'll see Radiants using their powers to survive underwater, and maybe even to keep a ship of people alive underwater, but I bet it won't just be fabrial technology.

We would need WoB to confirm, but I want to say that because the continent is largely solid, sail travel is minimal compared to land travel and trade, and there really may not be any ships capable of surviving a full eastern highstorm... they've all failed, and it's considered a losing game to try and design one, it will probably get you killed. In the far west, where the storms are weak, they might make it, but I don't know if they need to modify the ships to make it possible... out there, it's just a really bad storm, and sailing ships have survived those before. That being said, I wonder what they do to protect ships in port during a highstorm... as a resident of Florida, I've seen what happens to boats in the harbor when a hurricane rolls through, and just being locked down and shipping the mast and sails won't help, the next morning there's always some footage of a sailboat smashed through someone's garage after being docked a quarter-mile away. I'd think the ports must have some considerable coverage, or dry-dock abilities, or I don't know what... probably many different things, from naturally guarded coves like Kharbranth to harbors with huge covered docks, and other stuff yet to be imagined. Of course, there's nothing to stop us trying to imagine a prototype. It might come up in some later book, or be useful if and when Stormlight is ever licensed as a game, especially a tabletop RPG.

I think you're underestimating the power of the Church, or you're overestimating Elkohar's stretch as a ruler. He can't just waive the fees... there are costs (soulcasting ruins gems), and they must be paid, and if he told the ardents they needed to spend their gems on his soulcasting needs without being repaid, I think he would quickly lose the support of that organization. Loyalties are not absolute, and he's just a king... kings can be replaced. Religious institutions are historically quite good at that. In addition, the other highprinces only obey him as a sort of "first among equals", they're not his vassals. If he stopped paying the Ardentia, all it would take is for a snake like Sadeas to offer to pay them what they want, under the table, and BAM, guess who's the next king? Dalinar might support permanent bridges, but Sadeas has no reason to do so, he's currently winning the game with his "throw the meat-shields at it" strategy... his technique is fastest and cheapest, if you're not counting the costs in lives (which they do not, slaves are livestock). His bridges are inexpensive but functional, and he doesn't have to share them with anyone if he don't wanna. Remember also that the various Highprinces aren't just winning money to spend on their own camps and costs, they presumably send money back to their provinces, to support costs there as well. It's all about getting richer, and one way you make money is by spending as little as possible. Your point about Dalinar's plan of assault is valid. Now that he's taken command as The Highprince of War, the nature of the game may change. But as I was saying, this was the game up to now. The Highprinces don't cooperate, they compete. They're not interested in "winning" by defeating the Parshendi, they want more money and they get it by taking chrysalis. They fight the Parshendi because the Parshendi also want the gemhearts. Dalinar is about to change all that... or at least, he's about to try.

Thanks! You've got it, it's more-or-less a hollow frame on wheels, but the sides at the lowest level are shielded and the bridge is a shield until it's dropped . The top levels might have archers to helps soften the landing, but it's still probably like hitting the beach at Omaha every time they go in. The long bars were some thought I had of being both a counterweight and acting as reinforcing beams that you slide into place after the bridge is set, when you want to roll the heavy superstructure over the top. The front and back of the tower would be identical and interchangeable, so when the tower gets to the other side you would slide the bars through, re-attach the bridge and raise it back up, turn the tower around and trundle along, back becomes front and rinse + repeat. That design is probably one story too tall, but I liked the look of the proportions and wasn't much concerned with the added weight of another level.

So, the question of soulcasting comes up a lot, but there's a few points to remember: 1) Soulcasting is expensive. Like, we don't know exactly how much, but it costs a lot, and the Highprinces are not absolved from paying the Church for their service. Most of the soulcasting funds of the Highprinces go into making food, and some into construction, but mostly for food, and it's a telling expense. It's possible that even the wealthiest don't have the spare funds to soulcast food AND housing/infrastructure in the camps, AND bridges out in the plains. Especially when you take into account that... 2) Bridges are not meant to be permanent beyond a certain point. For one thing, a bridge you can use is a bridge the enemy can use, and moreover it's a bridge your competition can use. Remember, to the Highprinces this whole war is a game with gemhearts as the prize. Why would Sadeas pay for bridges that Dalinar might use? Is he going to set up a tollbooth? And for another thing... 3) The nature of the Plains is such that the target plateau is random (or at least chosen for reasons unknown), and the target plateaus keep getting farther away. There's no point in setting up a permanent bridge between plateau A and B that costs a lot of money and gives advantage to both your enemy and your fellow competitors if you can't be certain that you'll need to go from A to B next time your scouts spot a chrysalis... perhaps this time the gem is over on plateau X, and you need to get there via an entirely different route. NOW. If someone was actually investing in winning a war, with a direct target and a select series of routes, where permanent bridges were important as a means of establishing infrastructure to support staging attacks deeper into the Plains... but that's not the game they've been playing up to now.

I get very limited say in what gets drawn for the books... it would have to come up in the narrative again, and there would need to be a document in-world that involved bridges for some reason. It's possible, but I think we might be past that point in the story. Then again, he surprises me every volume. Someday we'll collect an art book of aallll the concept art and background stuff and everything that everyone on the team has done so far, and all that has yet to come. There's a lot of stuff behind the scenes, failed concepts and portraits and so forth. It's gonna be an amazing book, but it's not likely to happen until after we wrap the first five-book arc at the soonest. I might do up Dalinar's bridges just for my own satisfaction, same as I did these. Nothing too complicated, just a loose design to get the idea across. You can see a sorta rough hint of what I've been thinking in the final I sent to Michael Whelan for the Shallan painting. It's like a tower with a folding drawbridge, and after it lays the bridge the tower itself can cross over. Troops pass through the tower at ground level and over the bridge, and then the tower folds up the bridge behind itself and trundles along, towed by chulls. Thing is, I imagine that moves at about a steady walking pace, so maybe 3mph? Plus time to hitch, unhitch, drop, fold, lift, carry, cross, jump down, turn around, do the hokey-pokey. In comparison, Sadeas can run his men to death at a pace of at least a steady 5mph jog and the process of dropping, crossing, transferring and picking it up again is much faster. Dalinar has the advantage of being able to bridge wider chasms, so he can take more direct paths, but just the same he's soooo sslllloooowwwww... it's a wonder he ever gets a gemheart at all.

Yeah, someone else pointed that out on reddit, this design as-is offers some coverage at least from the chest/shoulders-up. THIS DESIGN ISN'T DEADLY ENOUGH. One suggestion was to put the front rank right below the front lip of the ramp, which would also allow me to shorten the length slightly (not that I want to). I can also lower the shoulder-resting crossbeams to raise the profile some, to the point where they would be exposed at least from the eyes down, though this does lower the clearance to about 6 inches. Between that and the Parhsendi usually being on a plateau slightly lower, the rest of the angles work out. I'll rework the design to account for these notes, if I find the need to make this more comprehensive. For now, I think I've made the point I was going for, so I'm probably not going back in there to change the original again. The fun I have when interpreting the text is finding how far I can stretch it and still stick with the description. He says thick boards and broad beams, but how thick is "thick"? I imagine the boards being about 2"-4" thick, depending on placement, which (as someone who misspent his youth around a tablesaw and chopped a lot of wood) strikes me as reasonably thick for the given value of the term. I expect the boards would be a variety of widths, but we're basically talking about thick planking, like a hardwood deck. As it was, when I was sketching this out I wasn't concerned too much with anything more than the basic dimensions and a loose structure. The drawing isn't detailed enough to work out which planks are thick and which are beams and so forth, but if someone wants to expand up on it I won't mind.

I feel like you could get away with single-file charge so long as you were following up in close formation and zippering off as you cross. That first horseman really has to power through the infantry on the other side, but if he leans left and the man behind leans right and the next fellow left and etc, they could clear space pretty fast. Of course, if the Parshendi set spears it's gonna be a mess (such is ever the fear for cavalry), but if they have good front barding and a horse trained to bite and kick and slash in concert with his rider, I can see them pounding through at a full gallop with longspears set, shafting a few Parshendi on the run, then dropping the lance and laying in with the sword, mace, axe and hoof, creating pools of constantly moving havoc in the enemy lines. But I think if you ride stirrup-to-stirrup you could do the same double-wide, and at 8 feet across I guess there's just enough room to get away with it. We're gonna have to presume for now (in lack of someone with engineering experience) that the bridge can take it.

I'm painfully stuck with the Imperial measuring system, but the basic premises are the same... if the bridge extends beyond it's mid-point, it will start to tip. If the opposite side is further than half the length of the bridge, it had better be lower because that bridge is about to slide down. But if we go with 40' (cheating), then that's a 20' gap, which is not small... about the width of a two-lane street common to most suburbs. Much farther than anyone can jump. I'm thinking Dalinar's tower-bridges can cross gaps up to twice that distance, because the design I have for that would let almost the whole bridge extend over the chasm rather than half, but his bridges are slow. He can take a more direct route, but he's not as fast. Does it say the horses charge in double-wide formation? The width is about 8 feet, so that's possible, but man that's a tight fit. I figured troops for double-wide with a shield wall and set spears (see the charge of the orcs up the ramp at Helm's Deep in Jackson's LotR for a similar formation, sans battering ram), but that cavalry would charge single-file across multiple bridges. If I were sending in the troops, I'd send over a shield-heavy spear group to clear the immediate area around the bridge, then blast in the cavalry to wreck their lines deep, and follow through with more troops. But I know when Kaladin wrecks the plan with the side-carry, he's expecting a cavalry charge first. I just don't recall it specifically saying they charge two abreast. Structurally, all the weight is born by the outer walls, distributed along a grid of crossbeams. I'm not enough of an engineer to know if that would hold a couple tons of galloping horse and armored rider, but I think that might be the point where we start shuffling our feet and waving our hands. There's beams and a box and It's only got to be believable enough. When calculating weight, don't forget that Rosharan gravity is .7 of Earth, and the oxygen count is higher. I'm also not sure their common cavalry horses are on weight with a warhorse, Ryshadium horses being another beast altogether... I have a feeling that if we nailed it down, the cavalry horse of the Alethi would probably be a hardy little charger rather than a lumbering warhorse. Outside of Shinovar grass is a sneaky little devil, which means that grazing has got to be expensive and tricky, and I feel like lighter, smaller horses would be the norm.

The side-carry! I can fit five men per rank for the full 40 (not that Bridge 4 had a full 40) but they need to stagger in 3/2 rows and double up in the space. The shortest man is lifting most of the weight, doing a sort of low-roadie-run, but he gets to lift more with his back so maybe it's okay,. And they trade the short position every time they flip the bridge to the other side. The Parshendi could skip arrows under the edge, but that's a heck of a trick shot (and the narrative does mention arrows skipping around their feet). You can see how this messed up the other bridge crews that hadn't practiced the side-carry. But I think this works.

I think you could fit as many as 20-30 if they shuffle more than run, but yeah... not as many people are carrying that weight, even on a diagonal. I'll mess around a bit and see if I can work it out. Some of them are going to end up lifting by pushing and some will lift by pushing. We need a minimum of 25 to lift the bridge, according to the text. Hah. It's even more important that it be a little longer than 30'. Thank goodness for that "about", it's the weasel word we can squeeze until it's squeaks. I don't think the push bars need to be more than three feet out each side in order to let two men push on them, and I imagine the Side Carry as more of a diagonal angle than straight up/down. And in the end it was a really awkward technique that never worked well, and got several other, less-coordinated crews killed.

As noted above, I revised the design to remove the posts, extend the bars and increased the height to place those bars at a a better pushing position. I reckon 4 feet is a bit too steep, that would be a near 45-angle coming on and off, but 2-3 feet seems right to me... pushing at about the height of a car bumper, which is something I think we can all relate to easily. Thoughts?

Not canonized in any way, bear in mind! I haven't run this past Brandon or Isaac or Peter (well, actually I sent this out to them at the same time I put it up here, but who knows when I'll hear back). I'm working off the reservation, here. The posts are certainly a cheat... having now gone and re-read that chapter, there's references to handholds and men grouping at the sides and back, but I'm sure he didn't have these posts in mind. Problem is that if you've ever tried to push something at a point around your knees or lower, it's REALLY hard to direct force forward rather than down. And at the back, if you're pushing on that sloped surface, you almost certainly can't get traction or apply a forward push effectively. I added little runners about four inches high so that you're not impacting the crossbeams along the bottom against the surface of the plateau. It probably could work at 30' or somewhere between, but since I'm not on the clock I decided to try it the way I wanted it. If I wanted to shorten it up a bit, I'd make the ramps half their length... that would bring it to 35' or so, but they'd be quite steep. The narrative isn't clear how far back they start pushing, but I reckon if all eight ranks start off then you can get some momentum and inertia will help carry it forward as the first four ranks clear off to the sides or get taken out by arrows. Ideally those men peeling away as they cross would run to the back and keep helping the push, but in practice they probably just run out of the firing lane or die. So long as you have at least 20 men pushing, it ought to keep going, I think.

I really like the OP design, but it suffers from the concerns that made me want to modify the specs a little... most importantly, how would your bridgemen place themselves to push the bridge? The horizontal beams give you something to push against, but only for about one person, and if they're too low to the ground then that would be very difficult to push. I've got the horizontal bars about 1.5 feet up, and the vertical bars so that you can have at least two on each side, but in doing so I've really pushed the line on "no railing". Anyone got a third idea?

MWAHAHAA... I just did this tonight, I wish I'd thought to look here sooner (I hope I'm not hijacking by inserting my own idea, but it seemed sensible to keep any ideas for bridge specs in one thread). -EDIT- In light of some feedback from both fans and Peter/Isaac, I made a couple revisions. The posts are removed, the height increased by half, and the horizontal posts extended to make room for two men. I think that pushes this a bit closer to "correct".

In one of the Kings Interludes, it's shown that to record information about a spren is to make it more "real", sort of a quantum observation thing.

I generally refer to the slot canyons and gullies of Utah when seeking reference, partly because it's ideal for the formations and partly because it's in Brandon's back yard (so to speak), and I think it's most likely what he imagines when he's writing about it. Antelope Canyon is an ideal example of how I imagine the rock of the chasms to be, with the tops like rough mesas, and the deep floors almost swampy and moist, with clinging rockbuds and cremlings growing anywhere they can. https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&q=antelope+canyon Google Image is our friend. I think there's a tendency to default thinking about rock and stone as "grey", but there's a lot more color potential there than we might realize.

I need to stick my head in these forums more often, this is really nice! I especially like the line-ups.

Has anyone figure out yet why they're called Honorblades?

I believe there's evidence to suggest that you can enter Shadesmar both cognitively AND physically, and that to do the latter is VERY dangerous. Shallan does this accidentally the first time she goes there (so does Jasnah, it seems), and we know from WoB that Shademar traversing is the method by which Hoid travels from world to world.

Needle in a chair is good. Can't see how the arrow would work, since the either the archer isn't aiming at the target, or he's aiming at the target and the second arrow is... going where? Though I could see that working as a way to blindly fire a large mass of arrows into a target-rich environment (like enemy ranks). All you need is one archer who can accurately drop his arrow into the center of the enemy formation, and have a dozen or a hundred arrows beside him that follow more-or-less the same arc. If you can pair multiple gems to a single master-gem, you could effectively force-multiply a rank of archers into an army of them. The problem with that is that arrows are, by nature, more-or-less disposable in battle, and gems are valuable. If they don't break or get lodged in a body, then you can reuse them, but firing off gem-tricked arrows as a rule would be super expensive.

Michael Whelan is pretty much Brandon's favorite painter ever, so I think he's okay. It's worth noting that all the interior artwork is created in direct collaboration with Brandon... he commissions the concepts from the art team, reviews them as they're being designed, provides corrections and suggestions, and signs off on them at the end. Cover art is a different game, with different people involved and different dynamics.

The only thing I would add is that when looking at details like the way in which the segments of the limbs join, or the shell segments, look into extreme close-ups of lobsters and crabs, as well as arachnids and insects. This may also come in useful if texturing. Well, he's working from a single, limited reference. It's certainly one of the best attempts I've seen so far. I will say that when designing the shelled creatures of Roshar, I look primarily at crustaceans (as per the design mandate), but I also draw influences from all varieties of arthropods, including arachnids and insects. They all share common evolutionary ancestry.

Well, for one thing it's not formatted correctly. While we very carefully DID lay it out such that you could cut it in half and still get a full Shallan painting (so it's good for marketing and such), if you wanted to make a wraparound book cover you would need the main subject on the full right side of the composition, so that the left side could fold around the spine and onto the back. Take off any wraparound dust jacket and you'll see what I mean. Here, we have the focal character on the left, meaning that if you wrapped it around a book, Shallan would be on the back. And if you flipped the image (which would be the usual solution to a left/right fix), that it would put Shallan's safehand on her right, not her left... a minor sin, but I think it would bother people besides me, partly because we made sure to put it on the correct hand in the first place. More importantly, we didn't compose this with the expectation that someone would want to add a title or the author's name... where would you put WORDS OF RADIANCE and BRANDON SANDERSON in huge letters, without covering up something important? I wouldn't want to be the Tor designer who had to make that work, there's solutions but they all kinda suck. Whereas when this is printed inside the hardback, Shallan will be on the left side, glued against the cover as a backing, and it'll look beautiful. In some ways, I think it might look better than the cover, because I'm not a huge fan of glossy stock. If we had wanted to make this an alternate cover, we would have composed for it, but that was never our mandate. And in some respects, I'm actually happier that this is the endpaper illustration... dust jackets get lost.

Wow, I bet it will look pretty cool after printing! The only thing I would mention, then, is that the antennae might be difficult to deal with (so thin, very fragile), but you can opt to show them closed and laid back against the shell (aggression indicator) instead of perked forward and open. Alternatively, if you could put it together and the pieces were tough enough, little ball-sockets at the base of the antennae would make them both articulate and add a variety of expressions. Each antenna could be symmetrical, so you can print up a dozen and they can be either left or right.