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The ceiling was perhaps two or three pounces above them,and made of conventional stone, rather than the spirestone. The humans of Habble Landing had halved the height of the tunnels as well
The lift crystal was the faceted one. I expect the core crystal to be the "house" of the Predator's consciousness, since that's the crystal that's been there all along.Agreed, the other crystals on a ship are secondary to the main power one. I just meant that the faceting and more advanced techniques of creating lift crystals shortens the time it takes for a crystal to gain a soul, as it were.
You've grown so cynical since the Admiralty cashiered you for following orders, Francis
perhaps the faceting puts limits on the core? or perhaps they all have the potential for sentience, but it takes centuries for it to develop. That they become more powerful as they age would make me think this is possible.I think the faceting would hasten the process of becoming sentient. The unfaceted one Grimm has took much longer to get to it's level than one that had been created at the same time with the faceting tech of the current day and age would. (Completely unfounded opinion but that's what I think would happen)
What were people's opinion on the cats in general? I feel like they may work better as side characters. Rowl had good scenes, but I would suspect that his ego would be a bit much after a while.I like them, Rowl constantly saying people were 'almost competent' got old pretty quick. He says it about everything people do that isn't just terrible, and it got really repetitive. I feel like Jim is going to improve on this viewpoint the most though as he continues through the series. It's a 100% new approach to a new character type, and he's doing an amazing job with it but I personally feel like there is a lot that could be improved. Cats are extremely clever, cats also have a ton of pride and I would like to see Rowl fall off a chair and then huffily act like it didn't happen.
I would like to hear from Jim if there is any inter-habble transportation besides Airships. Any stairs or elevator style lifts between floors.As far as I'm aware there are 4 staircases spaced around each level so you would have to walk the entire way.
One could imagine a vertical train where the cars would stack with the floors of the cars being vertically the same distance as between habble floors. At the top, the car flips around and becomes the car going down in a second elevator shaft (both shafts could be outside the habble proper). If you need to go up, you get in one side; down in the other. It could stop for 1 minute at each habble. Would take maybe 6 hours to get from bottom to top. Maybe even faster it you stopped like an airport train. Like 10 seconds at each stop for foot traffic. You could have a second set of elevators that stop for longer to load cargo for a slow, but steady flow of cargo.
Wood seems to last a long time in this world without rot. It was stated that some of the wooden airships were centuries old and seemed to be in great shape.Yeah, but these boats are treated and constantly undergoing repairs. The ship may be 500 years old, but I can guarantee that the wood has been replaced several times over
This was an interesting thread, which got me to thinking about the spire structure and amount of living space. I came up with some inconsistencies in the numbers. I guess inconsistency is not the right word. Just different from what I was picturing.Doing the math here 10,000 ft. / 250 Habbles = 40 ft. height per Habble. Note this also includes the thickness of the floor+ceiling.Also, their animal protein takes up about 0% of their grain crops since it's grown in vats
But then we have:This must mean that the Habbles are not all the same height. I guess it makes sense that Habble Morning is the biggest, since that is where the seat of government is.
Anyway, back to topic...
A Habble has about 2000 acres (3.14 mi^2). Knnn's numbers are good about farming. on Traditional sustainable farms, you can feed each person on 4 acres, but with vats and hydroponics, I believe that it makes sense that you could get a higher density yield. Especially since they are not necessarily growing the same inefficient crops and animals. Also, since you are not restricted to solar surface area, you can potentially stack those hydroponics and vats vertically and get a much denser yield per acre from that as well. After all, in the habble light for the crops would be coming from crystals.
Anyway, fun to think about.
But they built most of the second layer of the thing out of wood, yes? A /Town's/ worth of structures above the first layer, almost exclusively out of wood right? Cost be damned, that's a matter of internal economics. Regardless of how much they charge for it, somehow they were able to acquire the wood in the first place. So either they found a way to grow it in a relatively safe location, or else Lumberjack is the most frightening job description in their culture. Which might be the case; the cost might be a matter of potential Risk in far ranging harvest operations rather than any sort of scarcity from a limited grow footprint.It doesn't specifically say what it's made out of. Just that the second layer was filled with "Masonry and wooden construction"
The divide between layers is masonry, many of the upper layer's buildings are wooden though. I'm really hoping we're going to get some good info out of future signings/AMAs. There is so much about TDF that we only learned through Jim's comments, and I really hope we get some cool details for this series too.Most of Morning's buildings are brick, it's their most common building material. Occasionally they will install a wooden door though. There was a scene in Landing where Espira was disgusted to see that there were entire buildings made out of wood. He said that much wood was worth enough to feed a family for their entire lives
You have a quote that says they can create new vats?
Espira wove his way through the hectic streets of landing. Most habbles in every spire had modified the original spaces as designed by the Builders, adding in fortifications, additional housing, more vatteries, whatever was needed-
7) In any case, all this means that in essence, each habble is going to need to be pretty self sufficient. This is partially shown by the fact that the most important habble (Morning) "wastes" space for meat vats. In any real city, this type of industry would have been moved to areas with cheaper real estate. Of course, it might be that they don't have the technological knowhow to move the vats anymore.Oh, they can still create new vats. I think they would be capable of moving them if they needed to, but it might throw off production, or ruin everything in them at the moment
Probably, My Spanish speaker is slightly annoyed not only by English being the TAW world language (except for a Latin reference) but for the use of not-metric units.I think the base language for the book is "Albion". Every habble has their own language.