#tunneling

Anyways, I coined fictiblood!!

Voidfluidblood

A fictiblood/fictiamia for people whose blood should or is made out of void fluid from rainworld

So how would you/Windclan go about reinforcing the tunnels? Used to think it was just ‘put a thick branch up there and every few fox lengths, it’ll support all that’ and that doesn’t seem quite right anymore. Please and thank you 🐈‍⬛

I'm gonna try and keep this reply simple and not get into the in-depth mechanics of digging holes, that's a post for some other time and I'd have to talk about depth and learn math and shit

So very simply putting it, usually, you would naturally dig square tunnels, and this is where all the tension of digging comes from. See, a square tunnel is really bad for physically holding things up, so beams are there to help.

Think about a tunnel kind of like building a bridge. The tunnel is a structure that needs to hold up the dirt above it. Really, functionally think about how many bridges are truly flat; it's not many! You want Arches.

And, it just so happens, a tunnel ALSO wants to be an arch. I'm not sure if I'm explaining this well so I drew a little diagram of a cave-in;

[ID: A drawing of a square tunnel with a dotted line showing the arch of where the dirt will collapse. It progresses into the second drawing of a rock fall, revealing the arch of the first drawing.]

Most cave-ins aren't the ENTIRE tunnel collapsing, it's the part of the tunnel that WANTS to be arch. Arches good. Arches are physically the best way for holding things up. Problem is that you can't dig like that without dropping however many pounds of earth on yourself.

So really, what you want is a beam, not just a stick in the middle of the hole. You want to put a beam from wall to wall, supported by two columns beneath. Like minecraft.

Other various things;

Older tunnels are, actually, usually more structurally sound. There's been more time for them to "stabilize."

The deeper the tunnel, the more stable. This is because the earth above the tunnel is packed in better. You do NOT want to open up a staircase downwards like minecraft, the entrance will COLLAPSE.

However, naturally, a collapse in a deeper tunnel is more deadly and severe for obvious reasons.

Just to state the obvious, sand bad. You do not want to dig in sand. Sand Bad.

Canon vastly overstates the severity of shallow tunnel collapses. Cats will die in less than a foot of dirt :/ There's this part in DOTC where Jagged Peak activates a quicktime event and a burrow collapses on him and it was so profoundly stupid it's been in my head ever since

suffocating in an old animal burrow... girl... do you think rabbits are constantly dying in collapses? genuinely? In soft soil?

Gray Wing is like, "you almost out bro?" and Jaggy-P is like, "ya im coming" and then WHOMP. DIRT. thats not how this works thats not how any of this works

And as a final note... the problems with WC's portrayals of shitty parents aside, it actually makes perfect sense that Tallpaw would think his father Sandgorse is a lunatic for feeling safe with going right back in after a collapse. Tallpaw doesn't know that some kinds of cave-ins actually make the tunnel more safe, but Sandgorse, an experienced digger, would.