Bakker XLVIII - Selected to LEAD not to READ

[Darth Richard II]

No, I think it was just a dumb plan.

[LuckyCharms]

Perspicacious as always.

[Darth Richard II]

Hail Hydya.

[Callan S.]

18 minutes ago, LuckyCharms said:

No Schoolmen; mundane Ordeal is defeated quite easily by the Horde.

Sounds a fair assessment and that's probably the clincher - it was to pick off the sorcerers. All sorcerers in the hand are worth two ordeals in the airburst.

What I don't get is the detonation method. From my reading Kellhus digs it up, has a good gander at it and the ISIS terrorist on a nearby hill observing it doesn't just dial his phone for detonation then? How'd Kellhus get to look at a nuke but not get nuked? There were clear seconds, perhaps minutes before he teleported away - that's within the range of mortal reaction times.

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

3 minutes ago, Callan S. said:

Sounds a fair assessment and that's probably the clincher - it was to pick off the sorcerers. All sorcerers in the hand are worth two ordeals in the airburst.

What I don't get is the detonation method. From my reading Kellhus digs it up, has a good gander at it and the ISIS terrorist on a nearby hill observing it doesn't just dial his phone for detonation then? How'd Kellhus get to look at a nuke but not get nuked? There were clear seconds, perhaps minutes before he teleported away - that's within the range of mortal reaction times.

It was on a timer, right?

[jurble]

So what's going on in that spoiler thread.  I'm scared to even look.  I wish got ARCs still. I used to have a family friend who got me them.

[Darth Richard II]

1 minute ago, Damned with the Wind said:

So what's going on in that spoiler thread.  I'm scared to even look.  I wish got ARCs still. I used to have a family friend who got me them.

Nothing. If we say peep before release wert murders us in our sleep.

[Kalbear]

Luckycharms idea makes sense save for one issue - they hid it in the place that Kellhus would most likely look for something. If they wanted it to trap people the best bet would have been to put it somewhere that wasn't so curious. 

And again - bombing sakarpus would have been better. As we have seen they are willing to sacrifice what to meet their goals.

[Kalbear]

Also, while schoolmen would fall, they wouldn't get hurt. There's no indication that falling without hitting actual ground hurts. Titirga didn't die from the fall, he died from being buried alive and unable to escape.

[LuckyCharms]

22 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Luckycharms idea makes sense save for one issue - they hid it in the place that Kellhus would most likely look for something. If they wanted it to trap people the best bet would have been to put it somewhere that wasn't so curious. 

And again - bombing sakarpus would have been better. As we have seen they are willing to sacrifice what to meet their goals.

The base of the Viritic Well is below Dagliash, it's the perfect place to set off a chain reaction to collapse the whole shebang, a necessary gamble on the part of the Consult. I don't think they anticipated Kellhus excavating the entire vent shaft.

As for Sakarpus, idk. The nuke may be something that they jerryrigged incredibly recently, like months before Dagliash. But this is just speculation.

20 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Also, while schoolmen would fall, they wouldn't get hurt. There's no indication that falling without hitting actual ground hurts. Titirga didn't die from the fall, he died from being buried alive and unable to escape.

I think this is empirically false. In the omniscient POV sections when the Schools march up to the Urokkas it says they have to negotiate the arcane Echoes of the jagged ground because they are afraid of losing their footing and breaking their necks. If you cast an Echo of the ground, and if you lose that Echo and are cast down like 200 feet and just cast another Echo, you don't magically lose your inertia—you keep your momentum. Which means you go splat.

If we keep with my hypothesis and the entire mountain range collapses all the Schoolman would've most certainly died.

[Callan S.]

3 hours ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

It was on a timer, right?

Timed against what? Timed is so iffy - especially when you can have a spotter AND timed. How do you time that?

Then again the Inchies always seem to have technical troubles at the worst times

Perhaps it was like the Joker walking out of the hospital, hitting his detonator and wondering why it wasn't going bang...then Aurang jumps on the school bus he put the kid on, the one that was gathering salter sorcerer.

Maybe they went double or nothing, anticipating Kellhus's curiosity - that he'd stick around to dig it up for some reason. It was the bait as well as the trap. Just screwed up on the timer.

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

@Callan S., what I meant was the description we're given in the book suggests it was on a timer. I agree it was the wrong method to use.

[Happy Ent]

Thank you, @LuckyCharms, that made sense.

The way to kill a thousand sorcerers is to remove the ground beneath them. And we’ve been told several times, such as in the False Sun. So the nuke is chosen not so much because of the catastrophic incineration and radiation effects, but for its pure kinetic energy. Had the Consult plan worked, the detonation would have been well below ground.

Questions

Q1. Kellhus knows this as well as us. He also knows that Viri is the perfect place. So he knows there’s a bomb? That’s why he’s digging. Only when he sees the nuclear device does he understand that a detonation above ground is also a catastrophe.

Q2. Why did all the Scranc die, but not all Ordealmen? Ideally, I’d like somebody to draw me a map of the battle, with a more precise location of the Urrokas, the main Horde, and the various Ordealmen. I’m not sure how these armies are distributed around the hills. How much is going on North and East of the mountains?

Speculation

After Kellhus unearths the nuke, his probability trance goes like this:

Plan A. Fling the device into the Neleöst, or teleport it to somewhere else, before it goes BOOM. Doable, with minimal risk. Situation is unchanged.

Plan B. Denotate the device anyway, after warning away the schoolmen and -women. This destroys a fair fraction of the Ordeal, but all the Sranc. (But why is this true? See Q2 above.) This is a fair tradeoff from Kellhus’ point of view.

I believe that Plan A was the original shortest path, had Kellhus merely found a large crate of Inchoroi dynamite. When he saw the nuke (the nature of which needed some figuring out, but which he pieced together from Mandati scripture), he chose Plan B instead. 

With a crate of Inchoroi dynamite, Plan B would not have made sense. The dynamite would have evaporated Dagliash, but not much else.

The Consult plan is:

Denote the device below ground while all Schoolmen are engaged fighting Sranc (or the Bashrag distraction/faux trap on Antareg). The mountains crumble, all Schoolmen fall, many break their necks, others are buried below rubble. The Sranc now overrun the infantry. The rest (20% surviving Schoolmen without infantry support) is easy.

Aurang’s task was to hit GO when he thought that enough schoolmen were busy fighting. That is a more subtle task than “hit GO when enough Ordealmen are near the mountains so as to nuke very many of them”. In fact, if that had been the aim, he could indeed just have delivered it by air.

Question:
Q3:  A high-level Schoolman would probably survive a nuclear blast just fine, right? After all, you can drop quite a few Falling Suns on a Mandati before his wards begin to crack. So what did Gwanwë die of? Wards don’t protect from radiation poisoning? In that case, speculation above is party wrong because a nuke would be a fine weapon against Schoolmen. 

[.H.]

12 minutes ago, Happy Ent said:

Q1. Kellhus knows this as well as us. He also knows that Viri is the perfect place. So he knows there’s a bomb? That’s why he’s digging. Only when he sees the nuclear device does he understand that a detonation above ground is also a catastrophe.

I do believe that the plan was to drop them all down the Well, a la Titirga.  However, as per my pet theory, I think Kellhus knows about all of it, even if he doesn't specifically know every exact detail, because the Thousandfold Thought is a plan cast backwards from the future, from Kellhus himself in the future.

This means that some elements of the plan do not have a direct cause and effect relationship, as "Before and After," but rather an "After and Before."  By this, I mean that the reason why something happened already lies in the future, not the past.  An example would by why Kellhus allows Akka to live at the end of TTT.  It makes little sense to allow an enemy to roam free, especially one who knows as much as he does.  But the reason to let him live is plain after the fact, he will impregnate Mimara (the reason she has the Eye), will write the Compendium of the First Holy War which, at the very least, will draw the attention of Zëum, will later guide Mimara to Golgotterath via Ishûal, will later probably do something else important.

I don't know that Kellhus knew all of this, but I think he had to know some of it, to know that Akka would be important and so to let him live, despite it not making much sense at the time.

In the same manner, I think Kellhus knew about there being a trap at Dagliash, probably even that it was a nuke.  He almost certainly seemed to know where it would be.  I don't think he could simply cast it away though, because, as we'll probably see later, The Scalded will be important, the elimination of the Sranc and fall of the Ordeal in the cannibalism will be important and so on.

I think it is a valid question to ask if Aurang was really there at all, or if that was just some glamour made to distract them, although we don't know enough of that sort of sorcery to know if it is even possible or not.

[Happy Ent]

2 hours ago, .H. said:

I do believe that the plan was to drop them all down the Well, a la Titirga. 

And just to spell out the alternative explanation: The plan was to drop them all down the entire mountain range. All of the Urokkas are hollowed out thanks to the Nonmen. Denote a sufficiently large kinetic bomb at the bottom of the Well, then the entire mansion of Viri collapses, taking the 5 tops with it, including all the Schoolmen, not only the Swayali at Antareg.

[Kalbear]

And again, a bomb delivered by skin spies to the umbilicus would have been better in all ways.

We also know the plan would not have worked anyways, as the mountain range didn't actually collapse and kill everyone. Above or below hardly matters as far as the explosion goes. Kinetic energy pushing down isn't particularly different.

[Kalbear]

8 hours ago, LuckyCharms said:

 

I think this is empirically false. In the omniscient POV sections when the Schools march up to the Urokkas it says they have to negotiate the arcane Echoes of the jagged ground because they are afraid of losing their footing and breaking their necks. If you cast an Echo of the ground, and if you lose that Echo and are cast down like 200 feet and just cast another Echo, you don't magically lose your inertia—you keep your momentum. Which means you go splat.

If we keep with my hypothesis and the entire mountain range collapses all the Schoolman would've most certainly died.

Breaking their neck from falling from a great height or because they lost their concentration and hit the ground? To me it's unclear.

And as we have mages literally magically losing their inertia when they fall - they can control their height- it literally is that they can control their inertia magically. 

[Happy Ent]

8 hours ago, Kalbear said:

And again - bombing sakarpus would have been better. As we have seen they are willing to sacrifice what to meet their goals.

(I think I agree, but let me mount a counterargument, just to help me think about this.)

Bombing Sakarpus would have destroyed a large fraction of the Ordealmen and an insignificant number of Schoolmen. Moreover, getting the device in place is not easy. (Aurang would have to be doing it himself, probably.) Cost: 1 nuke.

Collapsing the Urokkas would destroy a large fraction of the Ordealmen and a significant number of Schoolmen. 

—

Killing a shitload of Schoolmen 101.

Plan A. Tie them up and throw Chorae at them. (Problem: get them separated from their supporting infantry.)

Plan B. Pummel them with more Falling Suns and Third Quyan Theorems than they can shoot back at you. (Problem: You need more Quya than they have Gnostic mages.)

Plan C. Collapse the ground beneath their feet. (Problem: Ground-collapsing is not easy. You need them to stand on top of a Nonman mansion or something similar. And even if you had such a mansion, and a large enough bomb, getting them all to stand on top of the same mansion is also not so easy. Hm… looks at map…)

[Happy Ent]

4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

We also know the plan would not have worked anyways, as the mountain range didn't actually collapse and kill everyone. Above or below hardly matters as far as the explosion goes. Kinetic energy pushing down isn't particularly different.

OK, that would be an important point—I admit ignorance in that matter. My intuition was that the nuke was placed at a structurally important point of Viri. (Of course, we need to argue about our perceived understanding of Bakker’s understanding of detonation science.)

[.H.]

5 minutes ago, Happy Ent said:

And just to spell out the alternative explanation: The plan was to drop them all down the entire mountain range. All of the Urokkas are hollowed out thanks to the Nonmen. Denote a sufficiently large kinetic bomb at the bottom of the Well, then the entire mansion of Viri collapses, taking the 5 tops with it, including all the Schoolmen, not only the Swayali at Antareg.

Yeah, fair point that I didn't elucidate.  That is also made more plausible by the fact that we know that the mansion was damaged by Ark-fall as well, IIRC that part in TGO where we learn more about it.  I still think a key to it all is the fact that Kellhus is beyond the simple Probability Trance and the Thought is not just playing the odds any more, it's a deliberate plan featuring something akin to "backwards" causality.

2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

And again, a bomb delivered by skin spies to the umbilicus would have been better in all ways.

We also know the plan would not have worked anyways, as the mountain range didn't actually collapse and kill everyone. Above or below hardly matters as far as the explosion goes. Kinetic energy pushing down isn't particularly different.

Well, it can be, although of course our real world knowledge tells us that such a bombs are detonated above ground to effect the maximum dispersal of energy and not waste it into the ground itself.  But in this case, the effect wanted was actually to move the ground, not achieve dispersal.

A plausible explanation could be that since the weight of the mountains didn't already collapse Viri, it would be braced to handle downward pressure.  The bomb was below to either, undermine those braces, or push the braces sideways, causing a collapse.  It's like how concrete won't compress so it can hold up great weights, but push or wiggle it sideways and it will crack and fail.