Impervious Ships (spoilers RWC)

[Farseer]

Been cautiously reading this forum over the last few months and decided to join in now that I only have the epilogue from city of dragons to finish on my way home tonight and can't run into spoilers.

Well met and welcome, astagg (the hobb obsessive in me sees 'stag' which is a small step to 'buck'! ). Yes, spoilers aplenty here within thePlenty so l look forward to a time when you can roam freely.

Thought I would start a discussion

Wonderful!

on what you think the new impervious ships are protected by? I am thinking that either someone else found a log like Leftrin did and perhaps grounded it to a paste that they have applied to the hulls.

Or due to the number of mentions of local wildlife being able to survive in the water something similar has been done with their skins...

Yes, to create the paint that the new, impervious hulls are painted with, ground wizardwood could certainly have been used. Possibly even ground memory stone which is much, much more accessible and lawfully obtained as opposed to wizardwood. There are reserves of it (memory stone) in various forms aside from wizardwood (blocks, cubes, gravel, ground) in various locations throughout the realm.

I hadn't given hide a thought but that would be a clever use of hide and something easily sourced/found?

I recall the 'thul beings speaking in another thread about the roots of Rain Wild trees being impervious to the acidic waters of the Rain River also, so the use of those in some fashion could be a possibility for the hull paint as well...but I am more for memory stone or wizardwood or somesuch myself.

I had planned to one day get back to the Others' Island thread with this small point but, seeing as it may contribute to this new discussion in some fashion as welI, I plonk it here for the time being ...

Putting the rest totally under spoiler tags as the thread title only has RWC spoilers quoted and I'm not sure how much else of the RotE series you have read, astagg.

**Farseer, LST & TM spoilers**

Spoiler

...the Elderling-wrought artifacts that end up on the Treasure Beach are all impervious to the ocean and other elements such as weather etc, just as liveships and simulacra dragons etc have proven to be impervious, and just as these newly-painted hulls have proven to be impervious. A memory stone, wizardwood or Skill-wrought connection between them is thus obvious to me?

An added point is that maybe the paint for the hulls is even a concoction of the priests of Sa, though I can't remember what is said of the creator of the paint in RWC (?), created while under the influence of the Skill during training/artwork creation sessions? Those priests have some role to play in the downfall of the realm, I am certain of it!

Seems strange that after all this time of the rain wilders attempting to find other ways of making a usable boat (other than liveships) someone from Jamaillia does it in a couple of years after finding out about the river...

More Farseer, LST and TM spoilers*

Spoiler

This all makes my mind flit like a flea back to the hulls of the Red Ships, as I did once before:

Was there ever a reason given WHY the hulls of the Red-Ships were painted red, other than an obvious one, like, that the PW liked red?

I know the ships all looked exactly the same and this made it difficult for Fitz, Verity etc to determine how they were going with decreasing the size of the fleet: "We could not even put an accurate number to the Red-Ships that plagued us, for they were painted identically, and as like as peas in a pod."

Possibly the Pale Woman was on to something with not only the simulacra dragons (creating her own with Kebal Rawbread to outdo the SD simulacra) but also painting hulls? Maybe she, with her Skill abilities and knowledge from scrolls, somehow stumbled onto the thought that memory stone etc could be used to create paint for impervious hulls and this is what the red hulls were actually for? Maybe she was giving priority to creating the simulacra dragon first and then would use the ships to plunder the Rain Wilds or something (thought this was never suggested at any point...just a pondering on the red hulls on my part as I can't help but think of the red hulls when I consider these new, impervious ones! ). She would not overly need impervious hulls for anything else as she already had a source of memory stone in the Aslevjal quarry...but then may have wanted to reach Kelsingra etc to make sure of its destruction and was not aware of the use of the Skill-pillars to do so? Tsk! I digress, and digress....!

I bring all this up simply to point out the possibility that an impervious hull may not be freshly created/thought about. Also, as those beings known as 'thul have said, Jamaillia did know of the river well before. During the LST series though, it is pointed out often how the Rain Wilders and Bingtowners held their cards (secrets) very close to their chests and how little those outside of their circles knew. More and more as Time trundles on (and I use a capital 'T' here deliberately as a connection to Fitz, Fool and Time) and the gradual move to unity is made, as per the first precept of Sa, the more that others will learn the secrets and full history of the realm...and want to take action.

EDIT: Will have to re-read and come back, I think!