[Dragaera] Teleport Shipping

[Miguel Aja]

I was thinking... if transporting tons of materials via teleport,
teleporting tons of people would be as easy, right?

That would make dragaeran warfare not so much a matter of marches and lines
drawn but of smoke and mirrors trying to prevent your opponent from
deploying 3000 elite troopers on top of your command centre/castle/whatever
while preparing to do the opposite. It's been a while since I read _Dragon_
but I don't remember anything like that, and there were some of the empire's
best wizards involved.

As a counter-argument, maybe teleporting people is a lot more difficult (do
we have any reason to think this or the exact opposite?), but then again
warfare would not have such silly things like vulnerable supply lines or
soldiers having to carry much equipment but what is immediately useful. My
copy of _Dragon_ is currently in another country, maybe someone else can
check for any mention of these advantages?

I insist on warfare to avoid the 'they can but they the noble houses won't
bother' argument, because I doubt that applies to war. With lives, and
victory or defeat, on the line, generals would employ these tricks to their
fullest. Thinking about it, Adron could be a better example: he certainly
was happy to use sorcery and had no qualms about it, given that he was doing
it 'for the good of the Empire'. did he ever abuse mass-teleport in any
significant manner?

Cheers,
Miguel

2010/1/26 Scott Schultz <scott at cjhunter.com>

> This particular discussion has kind of left the realm of spoilers at this
> point. Vlad riding a barge down a river to the city isn't exactly spoiler
> material.
>
> My take on this is two-fold.
>
> To the left, teleport shipping on a large scale is probably impractical.
> One of the reasons that there are sorcerers who specialize in teleportation
> is that there's a mental discipline involved in fixing the location in one's
> memory to the point where it becomes indelible. A person with an eidetic
> memory might be able to teleport almost anywhere she's been before, but most
> people would draw the line at a few useful locations and call it good. The
> usefulness of certain specialists was that they had "memorized" locations
> that were out of the way but that had high value to the parties that might
> want to travel to that place. Deathsgate Falls, for instance.
>
> Even if a shipping company had a legion of sorcerers on hand to teleport to
> dozens of shipping hubs, and there was no problem sending the goods, you
> still have to distribute the goods away from the hub somehow. That means
> keeping resources on hand at the hub. In other words, despite cutting out
> some of the travel distance and time, in the end, you still have to load up
> wagons and draft animals to deliver it to the final destinations.
>
> Given that, it may simply be that it's more economical to use ordinary
> shipping and let it get there a couple of days later. Tekla cost next to
> nothing whereas trained sorcerers are rather more expensive to maintain.
>
> On the gripping hand, you also have the established commercial Houses like
> the Orca, Chreotha, and Jhegalla. These guys have all of their trade routes
> and agreements in place and stand to lose business if things suddenly change
> dramatically. You can be sure that their Imperial Representatives would be
> fighting to hold onto their commercial power and leverage the Empire's
> business as much as possible. Even if teleportation IS practical, it may
> simply be that it's politically unviable for the same reasons that we
> subsidize various kinds of industry in our own world. Self interest and a
> desire to preserve certain ways of life and ways of business.
>
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