Dragaera

Reliability and POV

Mon Feb 16 19:44:14 PST 2004

> > On a mostly-unrelated tangent, where are the flying ships?  Think
> > about it:
> > Flying Ship vs Floating Castle, that's gotta have a high CQ (Cool
> > Quotient)...
>
> I believe the former sentence answers the latter question. If a
> Floating Castle takes a century to cover 50 miles, even though a boat
> is much lighter (take for example 1/1000th the mass), it would still
> take over a month (or possibly two Dragaeran months) to cover the same
> 50 miles. It might be formidable, but not a hard to hit target.

D'oh, my memory is terrible.  I just looked up the quote:

Lord of Castle Black, pg 290 -

	"Can we move?" said Khaavren.  "That is, Tazendra, can you cause this
building to float in a certain direction?"
	"Only slowly," said Tazendra.
	"How slowly?  That is, how long will it take us to reach Dzur Mountain?"
	"Five years, perhaps six."

So, err, *blush*.  I was only off by a factor of, uh, 20s if not 200s.

As to the movement rate of the flying ship, I was thinking of a more
traditional usage of sails...  use magic to hover, sails to move.

Speaking of which, I wonder if Morrolan could string up sails, or if Castle
Black is ever buffeted by the winds?  Like being in a very very (1 mile up)
tall building...

Bryan