Frost Peak on the wiki

On the wiki, Frost Peak reads as being south of the Great Marshes.

"Frost Peak is a seven thousand foot tall mountain, standing in the middle of a smaller mountain range to the south of the great marshes."

However, Soral Swamp is...

"The Soral swamp is situated just between the mangroves of Chidokai forest and the Great marshes further east, and is bordered on its north side by the Frost peak mountains"
So how can you be south of Frost Peak and west of the Great Marshes, if Frost Peak is to the south of the Great Marshes? Unless the Great Marshes encircle Frost Peak on its west, that's impossible. I recommend moving Frost Peak to the north of the great marshes. You know, like it reads on the map.

hey you've been promoted to "naga food" congradulations.

anyway that does seem kind of a problem, but you might wanna contact one of the wiki editors. i think oldman40k is one...

I got promoted? Whoo-hoo! Well, I'll do just that.

Didn't you notice that naga following behind you?

quick stabs- RUN!

of course that wouldn't save you anyway, but hey, if you manage not to get eaten you might get promoted "roaming thug". of course the naga's may like you even more, so thats only more running you'll have to do...

... is it a wiki editor naga?

If not, then I'll take refuge... IN AUDACITY! YAAARGH! (draws a rocket launcher and a katana)

Yes this is right there is some serious glitches here ^^;

thank you for pointing it out

I believe that this inconsistency has been fixed now. Please let us know if you find other inconsistencies.

i see some redundancies in explanations on the wiki. for example:

"Felarya is a strange and immense jungle world, situated at a crossroad between dimensions, making it dimensionally unstable. Lots of odd things happen there. For one, random worlds often connect themselves to Felarya for no apparent reason."

you dont need to have "...between dimensions, making it dimensionally unstable" we already know its a dimension from that, perhaps something like:

Felarya is a strange and immense jungle world, being located (improperly?) between dimensions makes it unstable.

something like that. having "dimensions" located so close to each other makes the statement sound off.

The wording wasn't grammatically incorrect, but I adjusted it some to remove duplication.

Mhh I went back to

"Felarya is a strange and immense jungle world, situated at a crossroad between dimensions, which make it dimensionally unstable"

because I think it made it easier to understand thet the world is unstable because it's situated at a crossroad between dimensions. What do you think ?
In anyway, please don't hesitate if you think there is further parts that could be better worded there

sure i just dont like repeating adjectives so close to each other.

Well, since this thread already exists, I suppose I'll just post my suggestions/questions here then, instead of creating a new Frost Peak thread.

Due to the new and improved map I looked up Frost Peak, and something struck me as rather odd:

The Wiki wrote:

Frost Peak is a seven thousand foot tall mountain... ...The upper two thirds of the mountain are covered with ice and snow...

The reason this strikes me as rather odd is because where I am from, a 7,000 foot high chunk of rock isn't very tall, and it certainly doesn't have two-thirds of itself covered in snow and ice(*) (and I live in a temperate region, not a tropical area like what seems to surround Frost Peak, which would require even more height to get snow and ice.)

For example, here is a 7,000 foot mountain in the same state where I live. No snow, and no ice.

The wiki doesn't say anything about Frost Peak's size, shape, or the processes that created it, but from the map I get a general feeling that it is a round mountain with smaller round sub-mountains/foothills at its base. I know of an entire mountain range of mountains that are tall enough to have lots of snow and ice on them all the time, are round, and have roundish foothills/sub-mountains near them: the Cascades.

Many of your probably don't know them, but here are some examples:
12,286 foot tall Mt. Adams, a volcano with some small foothills in the foreground.
9,677 foot tall Mt. St. Helens as seen from the shores of Spirit Lake, before the mountain blew up.(Another view taken from a nearby large foothill, though note that this was taken a day before it blew, so most of its snow and ice had either melted or had been covered with ash.)
14,411 foot tall Mt. Rainier with some of it's foothills. (More, more, and more.)


So what do you guys think? Is 7,000 feet too short for Frost Peak? Do you think it's a rounded or jagged? Volcanic, folded rock, or created by some unique Felaryan process? (IE:it's a pile of bones of the deceased. )




* I know of an exception to this, though it is not a single mountain but a range of them, and it requires truly huge amounts of precipitation: The Olympic Mountains. The tallest is about 7,900 feet, but the lot of them are covered in glaciers and snow, because they get tons of snow and rain. Enough that it has its own temperate rain forest, and everything is covered in moss. The mountains aren't very "round" though.

It definitely needs to be taller, so that the top can have snow. As well, it needs to be bigger to fit into the, well, bigness of Felarya. It must be gigantic, imposing and mysterious!

For the tropical surrounds I'd say it needs to be at least twice that - Kilimanjaro, for example, only has snow on the top part of it, yet is 15,000 ft high. Though this is a fantasy world so I'm sure you could fudge the snow level a little, but still, more mountain is needed here.

gah ! you're totally right here. Somehow I forgot to do the conversion. Like 7000 foot = 7000 meters ^^;

What I have in mind is something definitely massive, like 20k - 25k feet or so. What do you think ?

thats what i suggested earlier on the chatbox. some people think thats too massive though. I think it suits felarya just fine! especially since the size in general of the world.

Mhmm, over 20,000 feet is getting up to Himalaya/Everest size (Though Everest itself is almost 30,000! It makes 7000 look like a hill)

Do note though that humans at least can't function over about 23,000 ft or so, though they do prefer even lower than that. Not sure what that translates to for other creatures. Basically, a human body will not like very high altitudes, but up to 23,000 it can, with time, adjust itself to that.

I'd say something like 21,000 ft or so - three times what we got here.

Karbo wrote:

gah ! you're totally right here. Somehow I forgot to do the conversion. Like 7000 foot = 7000 meters ^^;

What I have in mind is something definitely massive, like 20k - 25k feet or so. What do you think ?

As both Archmage_Bael and Jætte_Troll pointed out, there are some non-obvious implications of having an Everest sized mountain right there.

(I hope this is readable and makes sense, I am rather tired right now, so I might be writing gibberish. I apologize in advance for any spelling errors, grammar errors, insults about you or your mother, and gibberish that I write right now.)

1. Assuming that Felarya's atmosphere is similar to Earth's, then as Jætte_Troll pointed out, the far upper parts of the mountain are not going to be survivable for humans for very long. The air up there will simply be too thin for humans to be able to get enough oxygen from it to survive.
   
   
2. A massive mountain will create a large "rain-shadow" behind it, while collecting extra precipitation on the side opposite the shadow. We get lucky with Frost Peak, since it has an sea next to it. If the prevailing winds (and thus rain) come from the West or the North West, that puts the rain shadow over the sea, where nobody will notice or even care. On the other hand, if the winds come from the South then all that extra moisture could explain the Great Marshes, though that puts the rain shadow over the Lakeland area.
   
   
3. It seems rather odd/unlikely to me that the tallest mountain on Felarya would be located all by itself; on Earth the tallest mountain is part of a chain of tall mountains, and generally the tallest mountain in an area is also part of a chain of mountains. Assuming that this is true of Felarya as well, that implies that there is a mountain range out there somewhere that has mountains taller than Frost Peak, with even more of their surface unsurvivable to humans.
   
   (The next two problems are more problematic if Felarya's surface is not inwardly curved, less so if it is. (By "inwardly curved" I mean a surface that, if you shot a laser beam off in any direction perfectly perpendicular to the ground at the point it was fired from, the ground would curve away from it. IE: if Felarya is a sphere/planet, or other shape that qualifies. The wiki doesn't explicitly say if Felarya is flat or not.))
   
   
4. Assuming that Felarya has sunsets and sunrises, a large mountain like that will cast a very large shadow. If Felarya is flat, then the shadow will at times stretch hundreds of miles... possibly across the world itself.
   
   
5. Another side effect of having a large mountain is one that I am personally familiar with: a large mountain dominates the horizon for miles and miles around. If Felarya is flat, then this becomes an even bigger problem.
   I did a little research and a little math, and here is what I found. On Earth, under certain conditions (refraction of light caused by air-masses), objects have been seen directly at up to 300 km away, and objects have been seen in silhouette up to 1000 km away. If Felarya is flat, then the maximum viewing distance of objects is limited only by how quickly the air absorbs and scatters the light coming from that object. Further away objects will appear closer to the color of the sky, until they cannot be distinguished from it. Wet air causes things to fade more quickly, drier air causes them to fade less quickly.
   An objects size at a distance is called it's angular diameter, measured in degrees, and the bigger it is the larger the object appears. For reference, the Moon and Sun both have an angular diameter of about 0.54 degrees, and the width of your finger/thumb at arms length is about 1.334 degrees.
   
   Using simple trigonometry and assuming a flat Felarya, you can easily figure out the angular diameter of a 21,000 foot (~4 miles/6.4 km) tall mountain. For ease of calculation I assume that the mountain's base is twice as wide as it is tall.
   At a distance of 100 km (62 miles) (doable under most conditions) Frost Peak would be 3.66 degrees tall and 7.2 degrees wide at the base. That's 3 fingers tall and 5.5 fingers wide when held at arms length. That's quite big, and anyone with an elevated position would be able to see it quite easily... it would likely be the largest landmark around,
   At a distance of 1000km (621 miles) (doable only under perfect conditions, or when the mountain is silhouetted by the sun), Frost peak would be 0.366 degrees tall and 0.733 degrees wide at the base, about the size of the sun/moon when they are half over the horizon. Also, the top of Frost Peak might be visible while the bottom might not be, because light rays from the top of the mountain have to travel through less air (and it is colder, drier air) than rays from lower down.

Some possible solutions:
Solution to #1: make the atmosphere thicker. A thicker atmosphere means that the "Death Zone" on the mountain is pushed up. A thicker atmosphere also give Harpy wings more "stuff" to push against, making their ability to fly more plausible.
A downside: Winds are stronger and do more damage with a thicker atmosphere.

Solution to #2: say that there are no prevailing winds, and thus no rain-shadow. Our prevailing winds are caused by the differential heating of the Earth (because one side is in the light and the other is in the dark, plus higher latitudes get less sun), and by the rotation of the Earth. If we assume that Felarya is flat and all of it undergoes sunrise/sunset at the same time, then the only winds that would exist would be from localized heating imbalances: IE: one section of Felarya absorbing or releasing energy differently than another.

Solution to #3: Ignore it, or make the atmosphere thicker/not-Earth-like. The tallest mountain just might be all by itself, or there might indeed be mountain ranges out there that are taller and inhospitable to human life in their upper reaches. If the atmosphere is thicker, or not like Earth's, then the dead-zone problem goes away and then we don't care how tall the mountain is.

Solution to #4: Ignore it, make use of it, make Felarya rounded. Ignoring it works so long as nobody thinks about it. Making use of it would be just that. Certain areas would be in darkness longer than others, might lead to more interesting weather conditions. Making Felarya rounded solves this problem (any shadow falls off the edge eventually), but brings others, like requiring Felarya to have a rotation speed and an axis around which it rotates (and also a day and night side.)."

Solution to #5: Ignore it, use it, make Felarya round, move the populated areas further away. Thankfully this "problem" is partially solved in that the jungle trees will block the view of anyone who isn't on one of the tall ones, so people who don't regularly go up into the trees will never see the mountain from a distance. Ignoring it means just that. Pretend it isn't a "problem". Using it is also just that: it could be a landmark know for hundreds of km in all directions. Making Felarya round will cause the mountain to "sink" under the horizon quickly. Moving the populated places further away makes the mountain smaller, but also vastly increases the distances to be traveled. Even so, for a place like the Jungle Bowl, the mountain is going to loom very large.

That's an amazing demonstration !

Not only it makes sense but I think it made me understand things better in a physic point of view
Mhh I think we can reduce it's size a bit, to let's say 17k ? and have a ticker atmosphear. As for the death zone, I think it's not much of a problem. After all humanss are not necessarily meant to be able to live at the peak of the mountain ( Miratans are situated much lower )

3 feet = 1 yard =1 meter more or less, a meter is just a tiny bit longer, but it holds up fairly well.

Karbo wrote:

That's an amazing demonstration !

Not only it makes sense but I think it made me understand things better in a physic point of view
Mhh I think we can reduce it's size a bit, to let's say 17k ? and have a ticker atmosphear. As for the death zone, I think it's not much of a problem. After all humanss are not necessarily meant to be able to live at the peak of the mountain ( Miratans are situated much lower )

I am a geek at heart.


I hope I didn't give the feeling that there was anything wrong with a large mountain, just that are implications of having one so big.


Sure, a 17k foot mountain is still big, but it's not epically big. As for a thicker atmosphere, there is one additional thing that having a thicker atmosphere will do, other than creating stronger winds: the boiling temperatures of liquids will go up. It's probably not much of a concern though, even if you made the atmosphere 10 times thicker(IE: increased atmosphere pressure 10 times) the boiling point of water would only go from 100 C to 167 C (from 212 F to 332 F).