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PostPosted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 5:12 am 
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BTW, good call. Now if we can get cannonical confirmation, from the Poe, we can stash it in the Wiki.

pillaroforder wrote:
Good guess. But I wonder what that white circle around Tsuirakushiti means. A lake, border of ex-cloaking device area?


I think it's more of a cartographer's mark, like the dot that represents the city.

pillaroforder wrote:
And another thing occured to me - if the cloaking device was knocked out, why didn't the same happened to the levitation engines? Causing Tsuirakushiti to fall to the ground/water ofcourse.


A simple explanation; the cloaking field would be the furthest extended field of the city. The EMP-like blast wave would hit it first and expend some of it's energy there. Considering the function of the cloaking field, that would be quite a lot of energy, maybe 80%? Only whatever is left would hit the rest of the city.

Now, after the fall of Malacia, flight systems should have been made triple, quadrupal, or even quintupal redundant and shielded like hell's own, against magical effects (EMP shielding anyone?). Plus, they're buried inside the upside-down mountain peak that is Tsuirakushiti, which would further attenuate the wave. (I keep wanting to think about James Blish's "Cities in flight" here).

The flight systems wre Spin Dizzy Drives?

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Last edited by Slamlander on Sun Jun 03, 2007 3:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 5:33 am 
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Yeah, somebody should color the maps and use neon green, deep purple, electric orange and the like


Well, I don't know. I just sort of had this weird idea that if your choices are various shades of grey, you might not want to put the two really dark ones right next to each other.

Just saying.


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PostPosted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 6:10 am 
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wrog wrote:
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Yeah, somebody should color the maps and use neon green, deep purple, electric orange and the like


Well, I don't know. I just sort of had this weird idea that if your choices are various shades of grey, you might not want to put the two really dark ones right next to each other.

Just saying.


Word, man.

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PostPosted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 8:18 pm 
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Slamlander wrote:
pillaroforder wrote:
Good guess. But I wonder what that white circle around Tsuirakushiti means. A lake, border of ex-cloaking device area?


I think it's more of a cartographer's mark, like the dot that represents the city.


I'd always figured it to be an impact crater of some sort that was deep enough to have turned into a lake later. Its really big to be a cartographer's mark, and the color is the same as that used for water, but its too perfectly circular to be an ordinary lake. So an impact crater seemed about right.


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 12:31 am 
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Kerostasis wrote:
Slamlander wrote:
pillaroforder wrote:
Good guess. But I wonder what that white circle around Tsuirakushiti means. A lake, border of ex-cloaking device area?


I think it's more of a cartographer's mark, like the dot that represents the city.


I'd always figured it to be an impact crater of some sort that was deep enough to have turned into a lake later. Its really big to be a cartographer's mark, and the color is the same as that used for water, but its too perfectly circular to be an ordinary lake. So an impact crater seemed about right.


If you can carve off the top of a mountain, making a circular lake is trivial. It doesn't need to be an impact crater.

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PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 7:29 am 
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Slamlander wrote:
If you can carve off the top of a mountain, making a circular lake is trivial. It doesn't need to be an impact crater.


Not really. Carving the top off a mountain is done all the time (can you say "strip mine"?) on a fairly large scale. Digging a large-scale circular lake is not, unless the terrain is particularly cooperative -- reasonably flat, no drainage issues, uniform geology over the area of the lake, and so on. The "easy" way to do it is to set something off underground (like, say, a nuke) that produces cratering through collapse. If you fly over the area near the Nevada Test Site in the US, or presumably Novaya Zemlya in Russia, you can see all manner of circular subsidence craters that would turn into circular lakes if filled with water. But simply excavating it from the top is not easy at all, because of all the natural stuff that makes the excavation want to be non-circular.

Incidentally, I would prefer not to get corroboration of any of this stuff from Poe, wiki or no wiki. Half of the fun of this story is the anticipation. Having identified the feature, let's now wait for the little dribs and drabs of information to come out as the story progresses that confirm or deny it. Poe is very good about such trickles of information, so why spoil the fun before the story is told?

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PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 7:35 am 
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Yeah. Energy wise, leveling a mountain involves moving material downhill, creating a lake involves moving it uphill and away from the site. Also, creating even a fairly small lake involves moving many times the volume of material than leveling the average mountain.

Both have been done, of course.

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PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 12:08 pm 
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The main argument I have against it being an artificually created lake: Why make it? I've seen artificial lakes in city parks, but I can't think of a reason to make one several times the size of a city.


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BloodHenge wrote:
The main argument I have against it being an artificually created lake: Why make it? I've seen artificial lakes in city parks, but I can't think of a reason to make one several times the size of a city.


A good way to stop anyone from accidentaly bumping into cloacking field, descovering the city, or it's a remnant of the city's arrival to the spot (by a teleport spell in this case).

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PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 2:18 pm 
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BloodHenge wrote:
The main argument I have against it being an artificually created lake: Why make it? I've seen artificial lakes in city parks, but I can't think of a reason to make one several times the size of a city.


Instead of calling it an artificial lake, call it a moat. Visible at the map's apparent scale, it's at least 5 miles across. Likely 2-3 city diameters and I would guess Tsuirakushiti to be at least 1-2 miles in diameter. It's floating city, a densely packed floating city.

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PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 3:46 pm 
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What's the point of having a moat around a flying city?


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 3:57 pm 
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Because even mages would have a handicap trying to siege a city while in a ship or standing on water.


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Because there is alway some stupid morron mage who believe that they can flight for 35 min when they run out of mana after 20.

(Not that will ease theirs falls at this hight, but ground have to be clean-up to not have insect/animal infestation, a lake take care of the body without human intervention, much more pratical...)

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 05, 2007 12:04 am 
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Boss Out of Town wrote:
Yeah. Energy wise, leveling a mountain involves moving material downhill, creating a lake involves moving it uphill and away from the site. Also, creating even a fairly small lake involves moving many times the volume of material than leveling the average mountain.


<B>Levelling</B> a mountain involves moving material downhill, but that's not what was done with Tsuirakushiti (or Malacia before it). The top of a mountain was sliced off along a flat plane, then picked up and turned upside-down while intact. Much different than just pushing a mountain over piece by piece. Consider chiselling a boulder into gravel versus picking it up and turning it over. The latter is much more difficult, requiring a far greater impulse (i.e. force must be applied all at once instead of over time) and much more energy overall since you're lifting the material up rather than just pushing it over.

So, if they can neatly grab the top of a mountain intact and turn it upside-down in the air, I'm sure they could just as easily grab a big circular hunk of earth out of a field somewhere and drop it somewhere else. The question then is, why?

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 05, 2007 5:49 am 
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Maybe its a moat and a uncertainty barrier?

Moat in the normal sense only bigger, and they could probably apply horticulture to it.

Uncertainty barrier in the sense that the city could probably move around slowly so maybe it's here and maybe it's there today probably helped in keeping it cloaked.

In anycase, if the cloaking field were two-way, then how could they see out? If it were only one way, wouldn't they have wondered about all the sky and trees and lake and land they could see from the edge of their city and what effect would either of it have had on their collective psyche?


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PostPosted: Tue Jun 05, 2007 2:50 pm 
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Mestro wrote:
In anycase, if the cloaking field were two-way, then how could they see out? If it were only one way, wouldn't they have wondered about all the sky and trees and lake and land they could see from the edge of their city and what effect would either of it have had on their collective psyche?


On <A HREF="http://www.errantstory.com/archive.php?date=2003-08-27">this page</A> Meji refers to the cloaking field as having "kept Tsuiraku [presumably meaning Tsuirakushiti -ed] hidden away from all the ignorant masses and religious nuts for centuries". Now, that may just be Meji speaking anachronistically as a modern Tsuirakuan who knows about the outside world, but it sounds to me like the people in the city could see out, knew what was going on in the world, and just kept to themselves rather than muddy their hands messing with the affairs of savages. They were an isolationist culture, in other words; they knew the rest of the world was out there, but fuck, why would anyone want to go visit it? Nothing out there but a bunch of backwater hicks without even indoor plumbling.

I seem to recall from elsewhere that Tsuiraku hid itself away specifically to escape all the crap going on in the rest of the world (i.e. the blossoming Errant War); though that may just be me remembering my own interpretation of the above passage in light of other information.

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