The Lamps

Tan(10°) = .176
Tan(15°) = .268
Tan (20°) = .364
Tan (25°) = .466
Tan (30°) = .577

Distance from Pillar x Tangent (angle of viewer) = Height of Lamp

The higher the angle, the higher the pillars have to be at each distance. It's natural, when contemplating a 700 mile tall Lamp, to want to go for the lower angle. I think we should choose what looks best, and ignore how unreasonable the Lamps are.
 
Okay, so a 15-20° angle for the view of the Lamps from Almaren.

Now, next question, are the Lamps 'nearby', or are they half a continent away, or somewhere in between? Referring to a real world map can help to give meaning to distances.
 
Either we place the Lamps ridiculously close, or they must be ridiculously tall. I prefer the latter, if I must choose. I'm not sure where the balance point is.

I think the clouds reach up to around or just below ten miles. Perhaps that's a reasonable height. That would put the Lamps 37-38 miles from Almaren. Not too far. Perhaps too close. I'm open to pushing the height upward a bit.
 
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I don't know that there is a balance point, to be honest. It's probably gotta be either or. At half-continent distance, which I'm calling 4K mi. (6400 km in heathen units), they have to be absurdly tall, but you can't really see the pillars from Almaren. At the base, the atmosphere would make the pillars invisible; higher up, the light from the lamp would do the same. It avoids the whole, gee, those are some big lamps, thing you would get in every single shot if you had pillars 100 miles tall a mere 374 miles away.

This whole thing would be the equivalent of seeing the Empire State Building from a mile away, incidentally.
 
About the catastrophe and avoiding earthquakes and breaking of the land - if the heat from the rivers of fire from the broken Lamp globes is really intense, the pillars will melt, right? This would mean just rivers of magma. No great chunks of rock crashing down.
 
Haakon said:
About the catastrophe and avoiding earthquakes and breaking of the land - if the heat from the rivers of fire from the broken Lamp globes is really intense, the pillars will melt, right? This would mean just rivers of magma. No great chunks of rock crashing down.
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But the amount of lava is another matter. Feel free to calculate. ;)
 
I think the minimum height is 'taller than Mount Everest' (29,000ft/8,850m/5.5 mi). So, I'm fine with the Lamps soaring above the clouds, and, well, that works, right? The thermosphere at 56-373 mi (90-600 km) seems to be the upper limit, as past that, we really are in Outer Space/Void territory, and that is best avoided.

I know I have (jokingly) mentioned a space elevator several times in relationship to this. That depends upon the rotation of the (globed) earth, though, and would not be at all feasible on a flat earth design. The Hosts do not want to show a flat earth, so we have to pick a design that does not 'give away' the lack of curvature, even if the world is flat.
 
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Haakon said:
But the amount of lava is another matter. Feel free to calculate. ;)
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What I'm thinking of is that with intense enough heat, we might gain more magma/molten metal/divine liquid light as we go down the handy channel the Valar have carved to make sure that Almaren has optimum lighting. Normally, the liquid would cool as it flowed, but we need to assume that the lamps have some kind of super-dense plasma or something so that it melts the rock as it flows along.
 
MithLuin said:
I think the minimum height is 'taller than Mount Everest'. So, I'm fine with the Lamps soaring above the clouds, and, well, that works, right? The thermosphere at 56-373 mi (90-600 km) seems to be the upper limit, as past that, we really are in Outer Space/Void territory, and that is best avoided.

I know I have (jokingly) mentioned a space elevator several times in relationship to this. That depends upon the rotation of the (globed) earth, though, and would not be at all feasible on a flat earth design. The Hosts do not want to show a flat earth, so we have to pick a design that does not 'give away' the lack of curvature, even if the world is flat.
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Well, limiting the size of the lamps to 400 miles limits the distance from Almaren to about 1500 miles. So if Almaren is in Kansas, that puts the Lamps in New York and California. If Almaren is in Berlin, it puts the Lamps in Messina, Italy and Nordland, Norway. Is that far away enough to make sense?
 
Nicholas Palazzo said:
It avoids the whole, gee, those are some big lamps, thing you would get in every single shot if you had pillars 100 miles tall a mere 374 miles away.
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Then again - why would we avoid that? I'm fine with showing some Lamps. JRR dreamed up Lamps, let's have Big Lamps and show them! I suggest 100 miles high, in the lower range of the thermosphere. It will be hard to make out at that altitude wether Arda is flat or round I believe.
 
Nicholas Palazzo said:
Well, limiting the size of the lamps to 400 miles limits the distance from Almaren to about 1500 miles. So if Almaren is in Kansas, that puts the Lamps in New York and California. If Almaren is in Berlin, it puts the Lamps in Messina, Italy and Nordland, Norway. Is that far away enough to make sense?
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Can we make them that big and still avoid showing that Arda is flat or round? If we can, I'm for it.
 
Well, we will see them close up two times. Once during their construction and once during their destruction. We don't necessarily need to show the curvature of the earth if we are close enough to them. If we want to see a wide shot of the Lamps' ruin, we can do so, but have the camera facing down so that we don't see the horizon.
 
I think the shot of their destruction would be much more dramatic if the camera is on the ground, watching them come crashing down. (But also avoids showing the earth curving away on the horizon.)
 
Yeah, as long as we avoid the horizon in either shot, the pillars could be as tall as we want without having to worry about whether Arda is flat or not.
 
I don't think the lamps are going to look much bigger/smaller no matter what we set their distance at, now that we've established the ratio. The sun and the moon appear the same size in the sky, because even though the sun is much, much larger, it is also much, much further away. I mean, yes, we can style the mountain-base and the pillars differently, but....it's not going to change greatly.

But it's also true that if they're both 1500 miles from Almaren, then the entire base would be obscured by the curved horizon - if we want to see the mountains they are on, we need them closer.

I don't feel like doing math right now; here's a picture (note that this assumes the radius of the Earth is much greater than the height of the boat...er, lamp):
HorizonDistance.png


So, if Almaren is at sealevel (hB=0), then the distance at which the Lamp would disappear over the horizon would be 3.57*sqrt(hL). For a 400 mile tall Lamp, that's 71.4 miles. The Lamps don't work on a curved earth, and rely on a flat earth.
 
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I know I'm kind of jumping around saying I think this and then that, but having slept on the matter... I think we should give the Lamps a height of 500 miles and put them roughly 3000 km from Almaren. I think we should presume a flat earth but never show it. The globes containing the liquid light will be huge and shine like small suns.
This way, the Lamps will be two amazing masterpieces, but also magically weird in a way that fits the early days of the Valar before they decided to be more careful, and it's also good to make them extreme in a way that implies Melkor's influence.
When they are attacked, it will take some time and considerable use of force to destroy them. And when they go down, I think we have to make them melt more than break. There will be a lot of molten rock and liquid light, which will cause enormous fires and devastation on Arda. This might be too much. One solution could be to add some explosive effects. Perhaps some of the liquid and rock can spread like fireworks and fiery rain, or the molten rock can cool down quickly and become stone rain and ash.

Is ice as pillar material an absolute no-no?
(Higher up and not too close to the Lamp globes some ice might actually be a good idea. It will be cold enough there to keep the ice hard - but when the balrogs attack it will be a weakness.)
 
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