> 1. "Dragon" > > I could not make head or tails of Vlad's marching path from Castle Black to > Mount Drift. It seemed to me he marched nearly 900 miles in 3 days, which > is ludicrous. Assuming he marched from dawn to dusk, about 16 hours a day > I'm guessing, that's 900 miles in 48 hours, or nearly 19 miles per hour. > The world record for the 100km marathon is a little over 6 hours, and works > out to be about 10 miles an hour. So Vlad would have gone almost twice as > fast as the fastest human on record, without even noticing it was a > particularly fast march. With a full pack, even! > > Since I released version .1, however, I've gone back to Alexx's Timeline, > and he shows it took 7 days to reach the Eastern River. I had it at 3 days, > Alexx at 7, I went back and double-checked, and it turns out I missed a > couple of lines like "it rained for the next two days." [...] > During those 7 days, he marched in the vicinity of 800 miles, which works > out to about 7 miles per hour... still an awfully fast march but... well, I > don't know enough to call that impossible. Dragaeran days are 30 hours long, not 24. AFAICT, the "hour" is still roughly equivalent to our own. Which gives an avergae speed of less than 4 mph -- but only if you assume that they march for seven days without ever stopping to rest, which I don't remotely believe. We've seen Vlad occasionally use drugs to reduce the immediate effects of fatigue, but that's always been portrayed as working on a scale of minutes or hours, not *days* (see especially the end of _Taltos_). One *could* posit that there is some simple sorcerous means of eliminating fatigue for a week, and still leaving the army in proper condition to fight a battle at the end of that week -- but *my* suspension of disbelief would crack badly. I'm AFB, but my next move would be to see if there's any convenient place to insert extra days in the march. My general policy, in working out vague spots in the timeline, is to assign the minimum plausible duration. If your map strongly suggests, say, a 12-day march, see if the text can be made to fit that. Maybe take the real-world figures of "standard marching distance", add 25% for length-of-day issues, maybe add another 10-15% for longer stride and general Dragaeran Coolness, then see how many days it would take to cross the apparent distance. Alexx Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employers. alexx at carolingiaSPAMBL@CK.org http://www.panix.com/~alexx "It is revelation to the first person only, and _hearsay_ to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it." -- Thomas Paine, _The_Age_of_Reason_