Post by KitKat on Feb 18, 2018 18:22:54 GMT
*Some preparations are made farther back.*
The bolts are about nine feet long? How tall is this hallway, exactly?
Yeah, I'm going to have to null that.
Tell me, did you actually go through the structural diagrams of the mountain to properly route all of this? I have a very difficult time imagining something of this size being torn down by a small avalanche powered only by gravity, yet remain structurally sound for likely hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years of wear-and-tear. While such a keystone idea might work for relatively small structures, it becomes increasingly less reliable as the system grows larger, until eventually it just can't be trusted to hold together. That limits the amount of mountain that can be used to tear down the rest. For the rest of the collapse, you're going to have to crack probably hundreds of pillars to collapse the whole mountain above (a few well placed ones could collapse very small portions, but nothing devastating). Put those two things together, and I don't think there's enough material to knock out as many pillars as you'd need. Plus, your chutes are also going to sap out the energy for the tip collapsing. Every time a rock bumps its chute it's going to lose both mass and speed. By the time it gets to the bottom, it won't have enough mass for its limited speed to do nearly enough damage.In short, I'm not likely to believe your collapse possible until I see a proper diagram and structural analysis showing how this works, with (realistic) numbers to back it up.
Oh, and there's also the question of the legality of permanently altering Middle-earth's geography.
no, the bolts are fired from nine feet above the floor. about 14 feet high.
Seriousely! gah.
No, I didn't go through the structural analysis, I don't know enough about that to do it. My thoughts were thus: Trigger collapse of the tip of the Mountain (and only the tip of the mountain) with chunks of it falling through chutes, which will send the boulders into a number of keystone-like pillars, triggering similar reactions in other rooms until the entire mountain is collasping.
Technically, it is just a keep, so if you permit collasping walls/tower/keeps, you should allow this too. At least from that perspective. And I know that you do, so...
Ah, that makes more sense.
Yup!
Google, my friend, is an amazing resource.
While you could pull it off in small areas, I just don't see that working for an entire mountain. The balance between being structurally stable yet collapsible in this situation with the energy you have is extremely hard to maintain, and the calculations and other information needed to pull off such a feat seem to be far beyond the Orcs of this time. It's not like the design can be tested and then refined. Everything has to be done perfectly the very first time, and the slightest miscalculation will cause the reaction to fade and die off long before it reaches the area of the mountain that we're in.
Is it? From my understanding, the mountain is your keep, with some little side structures (if that's not the case, then there are some serious corrections that need to be made). Most structures that we destroy can be rebuilt relatively easily. That can't be done for a mountain. Once a mountain is damaged like that, it can never be repaired. And you clearly stated that you're collapsing the entire mountain, not just one of the smaller structures.
