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Relative size of combatants

"Hell's Gate" and "Hell Hath No Fury", by David, Linda Evans, and Joelle Presby, take the clash of science and magic to a whole new dimension...join us in a friendly discussion of this engrossing series!
Re: Relative size of combatants
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sat Jul 25, 2015 3:17 pm

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brnicholas wrote:This is a nitpick but what textev are you thinking of here?

I don't recall the text ever saying when the cut was finished. It isn't inconceivable to me that they finished the cut five years ago and hadn't extended the railroad past Salbytown at the beginning of Hell's Gate because exploration only started after the cut was finished and there wasn't enough development beyond the cut yet to justify extending the railroad.

Nicholas
I suspect that they made the cut in a series of steps down (instead of straight in from the side); because coming from the side it would seem to have been less work to simply tunnel through the mountain than cut a 2000+ foot deep valley across it.

Also that would let them make multiple cuts, each of more reasonable depth; while letting them leave a series of stepped ledges on the cut's sides where they could mount cable cranes for the next round of excavation.


If so then the downstream exploration might have begun at some point during excavation. After the work had notched through the cliff face to some depth, reducing the height you'd have to decent from there to the Karys side ground, but well before they'd approached the final cut floor where the railroad and permanent service road would go.
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Re: Relative size of combatants
Post by bkwormlisa   » Sat Jul 25, 2015 3:38 pm

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I was thinking of HHNF Prologue:
The good news was that Karys was outbound from Sharona. That had allowed the Trans-Temporal Express’ construction crews to come at it from the slopes of Mount Karek rather than straight out of the mountain’s heart. The portal was actually located east of the mountain’s crest, which made the impossible cliff several hundred feet shorter from the Karys side and the approach slope perhaps three or four miles shorter from the Traisum side. TTE’s engineers were accustomed to stupendous construction projects fit to dwarf the Grand Ternathian Canal or New Farnal Canal, but this one had been a stretch even for them. It had taken them years (and more tons of dynamite than Kinlafia cared to contemplate) to complete, and all meaningful exploration down-chain from Traisum had been bottlenecked until they’d finally finished it. The cut was five miles long, eighteen hundred feet deep where its Karys terminus met the top of the approach ramp, and wide enough for a four-track right-of-way and a double-wide road for wheeled traffic. The grade, needless to say, was steep.
As I read the quote, they continued exploring (Kinlafia thought bottlenecked, not stopped) but it was much harder.
brnicholas wrote:This is a nitpick but what textev are you thinking of here?

I don't recall the text ever saying when the cut was finished. It isn't inconceivable to me that they finished the cut five years ago and hadn't extended the railroad past Salbytown at the beginning of Hell's Gate because exploration only started after the cut was finished and there wasn't enough development beyond the cut yet to justify extending the railroad.

Nicholas

bkwormlisa wrote:...snipped...

(textev is that they continued exploring while the Cut was being made)

...snipped...

And I just checked. Fort Salby located at about the city of Medina, Saudi Arabia, not the Rockies. According to Wikipedia, the ground there is basalt and the hills are volcanic ash. If the mountain in question is basalt, construction is possible. If it's made of soft tuff, forget any chance of its bearing a load.
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Re: Relative size of combatants
Post by brnicholas   » Tue Jul 28, 2015 8:16 pm

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Thanks for the information. That quote seems subject to enough different interpretations that it can mean whatever RFC says it means but your interpretation is reasonable.

As for the mountain, I would bet on volcanic ash because that would explain why they didn't but a tunnel in, too much risk of collapse.

Nicholas
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Re: Relative size of combatants
Post by Castenea   » Tue Jul 28, 2015 9:04 pm

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brnicholas wrote:Thanks for the information. That quote seems subject to enough different interpretations that it can mean whatever RFC says it means but your interpretation is reasonable.

As for the mountain, I would bet on volcanic ash because that would explain why they didn't but a tunnel in, too much risk of collapse.

Nicholas

I would expect that they did not tunnel in due to the width of the cut. That cut has a floor that accommodates a quadruple track mainline, and a two lane road, figuring out how to ensure the roof of any tunnel did not fall in would be a serious engineering challenge. I think the mountain is basalt, not tuff. While I have seen an eight lane highway go through a tunnel, the Ft McHenry tunnel is four separate tubes of two lanes each.
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Re: Relative size of combatants
Post by bkwormlisa   » Wed Jul 29, 2015 7:29 pm

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I doubt tuff would be at much risk of collapse. They've hollowed at least one entire multilayer city out of the stuff. In the desert (which this is) and with columns, admittedly, but while it's soft and easily carved it's still stone. Lousy for holding any spike in against force, but solid enough when the pressure is straight down. Said city was in central Turkey and could hold up to 20,000 people and was an estimated almost five million square feet, so it was far from small. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/150325-underground-city-cappadocia-turkey-archaeology/

And I don't see why they would really want to tunnel. They started at the cleft of a valley at the top of a cliff and blasted out what I think is a path with no roof, though it might have an overhand over some of it. It certainly has an open side, which means the rock they blasted out could fall down to the bottom, not have to be hauled back up through the increasingly long tunnel top clear the way for the next blast. That would have made the project a lot easier and faster

Yes, they could probably have made a tunnel at a shallower grade, but it would have been a lot more work. A steep grade requires good brakes going down and a lot of locomotive per weight going up, but with steam power it's doable. Now, a tunnel designed for horses to pull heavy loads is a different story.
Castenea wrote:
brnicholas wrote:Thanks for the information. That quote seems subject to enough different interpretations that it can mean whatever RFC says it means but your interpretation is reasonable.

As for the mountain, I would bet on volcanic ash because that would explain why they didn't but a tunnel in, too much risk of collapse.

Nicholas

I would expect that they did not tunnel in due to the width of the cut. That cut has a floor that accommodates a quadruple track mainline, and a two lane road, figuring out how to ensure the roof of any tunnel did not fall in would be a serious engineering challenge. I think the mountain is basalt, not tuff. While I have seen an eight lane highway go through a tunnel, the Ft McHenry tunnel is four separate tubes of two lanes each.
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Re: Relative size of combatants
Post by phillies   » Sat Aug 01, 2015 12:25 pm

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A steep grade requires a counterweight system where you haul rocks in one direction, have steel cable supported every ten feet, and use the weight in the downhill direction to do all the work.
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Re: Relative size of combatants
Post by bkwormlisa   » Sun Aug 02, 2015 10:42 am

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Assuming you have the cables and the rocks, and are willing and able to load all the rocks every time someone goes down. Or can balance useful weight going down against weight going up, which seems more likely, especially with lots of weight heading down it to get to the front (before the front stopped at Fort Salby). We don't know that the Traisum Cut works that way. Or that it doesn't, admittedly, but in HHNF Prologue, Kinlafia was headed up the cut with a locomotive running all the way. I think that's the only textev we have of the system in action. Nothing that says the counterweight system isn't there, but nothing to say it is either.
phillies wrote:A steep grade requires a counterweight system where you haul rocks in one direction, have steel cable supported every ten feet, and use the weight in the downhill direction to do all the work.
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Re: Relative size of combatants
Post by Mil-tech bard   » Fri Aug 28, 2015 5:38 pm

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Catching up after a lay off here...

Regards this:

brnicholas wrote:Yet my quotes from HHNF say explicitly that the sidings were put in to support the digging of the Traisum cut and Fort Salby's status as the end of the line. There are a number of ways to read these quotes together including Howard's suggesting that the rail head being referred to here bypasses a rail ferry the Sharonans had been using to move trains across the Red Sea. It seems far more probable to me Janaki is either in error (for Janaki's reliability note that the line was well past Fort Salby by the time Darcel arrived) or referring to something other then the first arrival of trains at Fort Salby. So there was a railroad available to bring supplies in for digging the Traisum cut.

Nicholas



Please see the following passage regards the several hundred mile rail gap to Ft Salby and the distance gaps in the Sharonan Voice Network.:

1st Multiverse book, Chapter 9 pg 151 - 154


* * *

Haliyar Narmayla struggled to hold back tears as the carriage clattered through the cobbled streets of New Ramath. The cavalry escort riding in front of her cleared the way, giving her carriage absolute priority, and the port master had already been alerted to expect her arrival. The dispatch boat was undoubtedly raising steam even as the well-sprung, rubber-tired carriage swayed and vibrated over the cobbles.

It was impossible to see much, or would have been, if she'd had the heart to look out the window in the first place. New Ramath was a respectable small city—or very large town, depending on one's standards—but it was no huge metropolis. It was also out towards the end of the explored multiverse. In fact, its only reason for existence was to serve Fort Tharkoma, perched in its mountainous aerie almost four hundred miles inland, where it covered both the exit portal from the universe of Salym and also the railhead from Sharona itself. Additional track was being laid beyond Tharkoma, of course. In fact, the actual railhead was currently no more than a few hundred miles short of Fort Salby in the universe of Traisum.

But New Ramath was a critical link in the chain which bound the ever expanding frontier to the home universe. The entry portal for Salym was guarded by Fort Losaltha, almost fourteen hundred miles from Fort Tharkoma. The rail line could have been extended from Losaltha directly to Tharkoma, but Losaltha was located at the Salym equivalent of Barkesh in Teramandor, where the fist of the Narhathan Peninsula and the Fist of Bolakin closed off the eastern end of the Mbisi Sea. A rail line would have had to skirt the northern coast of the Mbisi and penetrate some of the most rugged mountains to be found in any universe. With its long experience, the Portal Authority and the shareholders of the Trans-Temporal Express had opted to avoid the huge construction costs and delay that would have entailed and utilize the water route, instead.

The city of Losaltha, built on the splendid harbor which had served Barkesh for so many thousands of years back in Sharona, was in the process of becoming a major industrial city. For now, however, the Express and Portal Authority were still shipping steamships through to Salym by rail. They arrived as premanufactured modules, which were assembled at Losaltha and then put into service, closing the water gap between Losaltha and New Ramath. In fact, it had amazed Haliyar when she realized just how big the modules the Trans-Temporal Express's specialized freight cars could transport really were. Of course, most of the shipping here in Salym was still of local manufacture—small, wooden-hulled, and mostly powered by sail. That was the norm in the out-universes, after all.

But given the fact that New Ramath's sole reason for being was to handle the bigger, faster TTE freighters and passenger vessels plying back and forth between Losaltha and the Tharkoma Portal, its dockyards and wharves were several times the size one might have expected, with not a few luxury hotels under construction. But it remained a provincial city, for the most part, with few of the amenities those closer to the heart of civilization took for granted. Which had struck Haliyar as particularly amusing when she was first assigned here, since Tharkoma was little more than two hundred miles from Larakesh, the Ylani Sea seaport serving the very first portal ever discovered, and little more than three hundred miles from Tajvana itself. Or, rather, from the locations Larakesh and Tajvana occupied in Sharona.

And why are you letting your mind run on like a crazed tour guide at a moment like this?

Her mouth tightened as the question drove through her brain, but she knew the answer. It was to keep from thinking about the message locked in the agonized depths of that self-same mind.

If only Josam hadn't taken ill, she thought bitterly.

But he had. Josam chan Rakail was the Voice assigned to Fort Tharkoma, and he had the range to reach Chenrys Hordan, in the small town of Hurkaym. Hurkaym was actually little more than a village, built on the island which would have been Jerekhas off the toe of the boot of the Osmarian Peninsula to serve as a link in the Voice chain between Fort Tharkoma and Fort Losaltha. Josam could reach Hurkaym easily, but Haliyar's range was far more limited. That was why she'd been assigned to serve as the New Ramath Voice and link the city to the portal fortress. But Josam had come down with what sounded like pneumonia, and his assistant Voice at Tharkoma had even less maximum range than Haliyar did. Which meant all he'd been able to do was to relay the message to her for her to pass on to Chenrys.

And since I don't have the range to do it from here, either, I'm going to have to get into range in the first place, she thought.

She finally glanced out the window. It was the middle of the night in New Ramath, and without gas streetlamps, the city was wrapped in slumbering darkness, sleeping peacefully. She wondered how that would change when its inhabitants discovered the news she was about to pass on.

Her fingertips traced the hard, round outline of the pocket watch in the breast pocket of her warm jacket. It was hard to believe, even for a Voice, that less than half an hour had passed since the vicious attack on the Chalgyn Consortium's survey crew, five universes, two continents, and an ocean away from New Ramath. Haliyar bit her lip, fighting back a fresh burst of tears.

She'd met Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr and her husband on their way through Salym. As a Voice herself, although never one in Shaylar's league, she'd been unable to avoid feeling the echoes of their mutual devotion. Their marriage bond was so strong that no telepath—whether of Voice caliber, or not—could spend five minutes in their company without feeling it, whether she wanted to or not. And that made the agony of Seeing Jathmar's horrible death before Shaylar's very eyes, and then Seeing—and feeling—the even more terrible moment when Shaylar's Voice went abruptly silent, even worse. The experience had been like an ax blow, and now it was her job to pass that dreadful, soul-searing experience on to Chenrys in all its horrifying detail.

She wouldn't have had to do this if Josam hadn't fallen ill. She might have managed to avoid the unbearable immediacy of knowing exactly what had happened to two people she had both liked and admired deeply . . . and envied more deeply still.

The carriage slowed, and she drew a deep breath, preparing to climb down when the door opened. The dispatch boat—an incredibly fast little vessel, powered by the new steam turbines and capable of sustained speeds of thirty knots or more—lay waiting for her, smoke pluming from its two strongly raked funnels. It wouldn't have to take her all the way to Hurkaym. Haliyar's range was almost three hundred miles; getting her as far as the west coast of Osmaria would allow her to reach Chenrys, and that would take the dispatch boat less than four hours. Then the message—and all its grim, horrible imagery—would go flashing further along the transit chain literally at the speed of thought.

There were still water gaps which couldn't be closed by convenient relay stations like Hurkaym, Haliyar thought as the carriage came fully to a halt. Those were going to impose delays much greater than just four hours. Still, the message would reach Tajvana and the Portal Authority's headquarters there in less than a week.

And what happens then, she thought as the coachman's assistant opened the door for her, scarcely bears thinking on.

She stood for a moment, gazing at the dispatch boat under the bright, gas-powered lights of the TTE wharf, and tried not to shiver.


NB: The several hundred mile but under construction long distance rail gap to Ft Salby was no mistake...

...And Howard's speculative point about a sea port and short service railway for Ft. Salby Logistics is a lot stronger.
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Re: Relative size of combatants
Post by Mil-tech bard   » Fri Aug 28, 2015 5:57 pm

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Now, regards this --


bkwormlisa wrote:I was thinking of HHNF Prologue:
The good news was that Karys was outbound from Sharona. That had allowed the Trans-Temporal Express’ construction crews to come at it from the slopes of Mount Karek rather than straight out of the mountain’s heart. The portal was actually located east of the mountain’s crest, which made the impossible cliff several hundred feet shorter from the Karys side and the approach slope perhaps three or four miles shorter from the Traisum side. TTE’s engineers were accustomed to stupendous construction projects fit to dwarf the Grand Ternathian Canal or New Farnal Canal, but this one had been a stretch even for them. It had taken them years (and more tons of dynamite than Kinlafia cared to contemplate) to complete, and all meaningful exploration down-chain from Traisum had been bottlenecked until they’d finally finished it. The cut was five miles long, eighteen hundred feet deep where its Karys terminus met the top of the approach ramp, and wide enough for a four-track right-of-way and a double-wide road for wheeled traffic. The grade, needless to say, was steep.
As I read the quote, they continued exploring (Kinlafia thought bottlenecked, not stopped) but it was much harder.
brnicholas wrote:This is a nitpick but what textev are you thinking of here?

I don't recall the text ever saying when the cut was finished. It isn't inconceivable to me that they finished the cut five years ago and hadn't extended the railroad past Salbytown at the beginning of Hell's Gate because exploration only started after the cut was finished and there wasn't enough development beyond the cut yet to justify extending the railroad.


And I just checked. Fort Salby located at about the city of Medina, Saudi Arabia, not the Rockies. According to Wikipedia, the ground there is basalt and the hills are volcanic ash. If the mountain in question is basalt, construction is possible. If it's made of soft tuff, forget any chance of its bearing a load.


I'm going to point out the following --



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza

Wikipedia

It is thought that, at construction, the Great Pyramid was originally 280 Egyptian cubits tall (146.5 metres (480.6 ft)), but with erosion and absence of its pyramidion, its present height is 138.8 metres (455.4 ft). Each base side was 440 cubits, 230.4 metres (755.9 ft) long.


NB: The top of the ramp into the Traisum Cut -- at 1,200 feet tall -- is three times the height of the Great Pyramid.

This structure is topped by a four track railway, a four lane road (and possibly) a pipeline.

It has a grade of somewhere between 3.4% and 1%, and is at least 50-miles long.

The construction equipment, work crews and logistics for all of the above had to be there for years constructing that ramp such that the cut could be passable for trains.

During this period is when we would see both ropeways in massive size, capability and numbers as well as a major push up the universe chain, as the marginal effort for further exploration would be dwarfed by the logistics involved with constructing the Traisum Cut's approach ramp.
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Re: Relative size of combatants
Post by n7axw   » Sat Aug 29, 2015 7:05 am

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Back to the original theme of the thread, are we given any numbers for the population of Arcana?

Don
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