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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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That's how many resonances a Waystone Foundation will need to keep clear from one another unless we allow it to make dhar as a byproduct of its function (and in so doing, break the Articles).
 
Boney said:
How many unique combinations of two or more of the eight Winds would there be? I think it's 247 but it's been a long time since I regularly did maths with letters in it.
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Okay so I realized that you wanted combinations of 2+ not just 2 and found another site to use and deleted the other post looks like 3,003~ combinations if order isn't important.

Edit: okay I've read Stormy's post and it checks out so now I'm going to spend the next half hour trying to figure out what this site is trying to actually tell me then.
 
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Sounds like we're getting into the bones of the Foundation action. I wonder if we'll have a brief talk with Boris first to figure out the tributaries, or if narratively Mathilde will immediately go back to Laurelorn to give Boris time to purge the Lahmians and stuff.
 
This is presumably regarding the Waystone foundation and how it could be made to deal with various Wind combinations - specifically, that whole "two winds set to orbit a core of Dhar sent down the line" tidbit. (Which explains why it was specifically "two or more" winds, monowind environments can't use that method).

That said, even if we assume a unique methodology needs to be used for each wind, is the Wind/Wind resonance actually meaningfully distinct in this case?

The entire property that the system exploits is that the Winds repel each other unless they're forced together enough to make Dhar (shades of the Strong vs Weak nuclear forces), and that seems fairly universal across all of the Winds?

Does Hysh repel Aqshy less than it repels Ulgu?
 
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Redshirt Army said:
This is presumably regarding the Waystone foundation and how it could be made to deal with various Wind combinations - specifically, that whole "two winds set to orbit a core of Dhar sent down the line" tidbit. (Which explains why it was specifically "two or more" winds, monowind environments can't use that method).

That said, even if we assume a unique methodology needs to be used for each wind, is the Wind/Wind resonance actually meaningfully distinct in this case?

The entire property that the system exploits is that the Winds repel each other unless they're forced together enough to make Dhar (shades of the Strong vs Weak nuclear forces), and that seems fairly universal across all of the Winds?
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The problem isn't the orbiting, it's putting them in the orbit. Enchantment doesn't have a programming language so you can't bodge together 247 nested if/then statements, you need some sort of elegant method of the Waystone 'knowing' which storages to draw from at a given time.

(this isn't a challenge for the thread, it's a challenge that Mathilde and company are going to have to tackle in-universe)
 
Ironically, using the River Leylines to boost the existing Ulthuan network, we might not need to rely on the attractant property of Dhar at all - the river does all the pulling instead of the Dhar.

Like, we will need to know how the existing two-wind-orbit thingy works if we ever do get the waystone passcodes out of Ulthuan, but with our current method, we could in theory get away with not creating any Dhar at all.
 
The first thing that comes to mind for me is whether the Waystone doing more than two winds at once is actually necessary. If you quantize it, you can chew through an arbitrary amount of winds in any combination just by accounting for 8c2 (which is 28) combinations.

Still tricky, but it's a much smaller possibility space.
 
Boney said:
The problem isn't the orbiting, it's putting them in the orbit. Enchantment doesn't have a programming language so you can't bodge together 247 nested if/then statements, you need some sort of elegant method of the Waystone 'knowing' which storages to draw from at a given time.

(this isn't a challenge for the thread, it's a challenge that Mathilde and company are going to have to tackle in-universe)
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It is the decision making problem again. I am starting to understand why daemonology and necromancy are so popular :V

I think now might be a good moment to reconsider the spirit solution that Baba N brought up for the tributary. After all if the Waystone can think you do not need a programing language. Of course that does mean one has to find and negotiate with spirits which makes the problem into a diplomacy one.
 
chocolote12 said:
... What's he supposed to be suspecting?
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Yeah, its not a well constructed joke and I was leaning a lot on the actual quote to imply both awareness of the magical nature of the assassination and how the wind chime could have alerted people.
I'm surprised people enjoyed it as much as they did. I think its a testament to the power of Spongebob reaction images.
Boney said:
making a God of Luck a hard sell.
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The God of your Enemies Misfortune?
 
Boney said:
The problem is that when you know what logic gates are, it's very easy to knock something together that would work and then backport that into something mechanical or hydraulic.
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Doesn't even need logic gates just find the minimum number of combinations needed to handle all use cases. Fairly sure that the number isn't actually high. There might be 247 possible combinations, but I doubt that you actually need to use a 10th of them. Was just thinking about the math to prove it.
 
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I suppose you couldn't just use 28 combinations for the pairs of Winds, because if you did then that'd cause problems when there's three or more of them - you'd have conflicting instructions? That does seem rather tough, particularly if you consider that Mathilde is only scratching the surface of multi-wind interactions with Windherder.

I imagine this is one of those parts where either Hatalath and Sarvoi or Thorek are going to really shine. I don't see this as something the humans will be able to do so easily.
 
So the waystone obviously is going to prioritize the wind that it is most full of that just makes sense. So if each wind has a preferred pair that would only be 8 combinations and that should work most of the time. By the time one side of the two wind combination runs out the other one shouldn't be the most full.

However we want these things to be in constant operation for thousands of years at a time in all sorts of wind balances. So ...no not thinking about it.

Edit: Ideally the most full wind storage would pair with the second most full wind storage.
 
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Thorek's anvil-charger splits the winds using repulsion, so filling the tanks without creating Dhar isn't a problem.

I guess one could rig it up so the eight tanks only vent into the central stream when all eight have reached a minimum pressure threshold, with a vent at the "top" of each chamber so that any tanks that fully fill early let the excess leak back out. That way you only ever have an even mix of all eight winds inside the stream.

The problem then is that you could be venting a heck of a lot of excess straight back into the environment while waiting for that eighth tank to fill. The vented winds get picked up again, sure, but it's real messy.
 
Hm. Insofar as you have wind storage, wouldn't "first come, first served" work out fine as long as you kept it limited to two at a time? You don't actually need a dedicated balancing mechanism, if there's more of a wind then it'll simply come up as first in line more often probabilistically.

Just have it "reshuffle" periodically and let chance do the heavy lifting.

(It just occurred to me that this kinda sorta invokes Ranald, doesn't it?)
 
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This makes me wonder how winds behave in a perfect vacuum. I'm pretty sure that came up at some point, but the details elude me.
 
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fictionfan said:
Doesn't even need logic gates just find the minimum number of combinations needed to handle all use cases. Fairly sure that the number isn't actually high. There might be 247 possible combinations, but I doubt that you actually need to use a 10th of them. Was just thinking about the math to prove it.
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Yeah, first, they are likely just dependent on count, if all winds push against each other with equal strength. Then you are down to 8 or so possibilities.

But as for orbiting? To get the spacing right, just release them far enough apart into a concentric pipes (i.e. a pipe with a cross section of a concentric circle) that the weak repulsion force causes them balance out. Send Dhar through the inner pipe, then have it continue past the pipe.
 
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