> > 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. Actually, I was using 16 hours per day for marching, 14 hours for setting up camp, sleeping, and tearing down camp. So, 7 days * 16 hours = 112 hours of marching, and 800 / 112 = 7.14 miles per hour. To get it down to 4 mph, they would have to march 28 out of 30 hours per day. > 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. Now that you mention it, I didn't even consider the "sorcerous aid" angle. That could be good for maybe an extra mph a day. And with 14 hours to camp, sleep, uncamp, they'd get plenty of rest after each march. > 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. There is a line, right at the top of page 168, where Vlad says, "Eventually, late one evening, we reached the Eastern River." I guess "Eventually" could be stretched out to cover as many days as need be. > 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. I'm not sure of the context, but consider this site: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/history/marshall/military/mil_hist_inst/ m/march2.asc Looking over the examples on this page, 3 mph is an "ordinary" march, and 5+ is extraordinary (a forced march). This does not seem to vary by historical period. So, 7 mph for 1 day sounds doable, but there are no examples of a sustained forced march lasting 7 days on this particular page. I'll keep looking. As to the longer stride and general Dragaeran Coolness, Vlad had to keep up, and he never mentions being particularly over-marched or anything. Dragaerans average about 7', Humans average slightly less than 6', I believe, so the ratio there is roughly 7 / 6 or 1.17. Let's call it 1.2, and I'll use that for the "extended Dragaeran stride". So the "standard" Dragaeran march might average almost 4 mph. Vlad's in an Elite unit, so let's just call it 4mph, and say that his conditioning and desire not to appear weaker before Dragons allows him to keep up without complaining to us the whole time. At 4mph, 16 hours per day, that would be about 12 days to make this march, as opposed to the 7 you used as a minimum. And, really, the 7 days is just to get to the Eastern River. He can see Mount Drift from there, but I wonder how far away it really is. However far away it is, we'd have to subtract those miles from the 800-850 I've been using for the distance marched. Bryan