# Travel and Scale



## Devor (Nov 12, 2011)

I'm not sure, perhaps this should be in the World-Building thread.  But I have a map of my country and I'm completely lost about size and scale and travel time, and I figure that's a pretty technical question.  I may be redrawing it soon so I want to know more about whether there's any troubles with it.

Here's the map.

Right now, so far as scale is concerned, I have that you should be able to leave from "C" in the middle of the map, follow the road east and end up at "W" by foot in under a day.  With a day of travel between each waypoint, it should take three days to get from "C" to the town at the bottom.

This is supposed to be a map of one relatively small country.  Is that a reasonable size?  How big is my country?  And are the population centers too big/small for the scale?  I get the feeling I have too many mountains and that cities are too big.

Thanks in advance for the help!


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## Benjamin Clayborne (Nov 12, 2011)

I think the average healthy person can walk at a regular pace of about 3 miles per hour, and probably manage 8-10 hours a day, assuming clear weather, level terrain, and they don't have to stop and hunt (either they're carrying food with them or they can stop at inns/taverns for a meal). That means 25-30 miles per day.

To scale, that means your country there is about 100-120 miles across. That's a pretty big area to walk around on foot, but it's not what I'd call colossal. I don't know how big the population centers are, though.


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## Hans (Nov 13, 2011)

Benjamin Clayborne said:


> That means 25-30 miles per day.


I agree, the distance measured as a "days travel" was about 30 km for a long period of time. It is not a coincidence that the distance between Caravanserais is ~30 to 40 km. It is about the same for oxcart or camel caravans.
This can increase with good roads or friendly landscapes and is less in mountains or swamp areas. But not as much as one might think.


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## Ravana (Nov 13, 2011)

I usually figure that the basic size of a low-level political division will be about as far from its center of administration as one can get in a single day… at most. More often, though, I assume that it should be as far as one can make a _round trip_ in a day, as the lord isn't likely to want to spend the night at some rat-trap on the edge of his territory. (This, of course, changes if he happens to own multiple properties spread out around his lands.) With good roads, this radius could be as much as 15-20 miles, though there are plenty of reasons it might be less… not the least of which is lack of "good" roads. Maybe a bit above that, if the lord normally travels on horseback. Also, that's distance _actually_ traveled, not linear distance: the more the road departs from straight, the smaller the geographical radius. 

It's probably even more useful viewed in reverse, however: the peasants shouldn't be expected to live farther away from the nearest administrative (or at least market) center than they can reasonably reach in a single-day round trip. Which doesn't mean there may not be multiple such centers within a single administrative region, spaced no more than twenty miles apart, and probably less. (Why, in a minute.) I'm guessing you haven't chosen to represent every single village with a market in it, though.

Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to answer the rest of your questions directly. Assuming the terrain is fairly open and level (I'm guessing the lighter green represents some such), and the roads are at least good enough you're better on them than off (which need not be the case: only wagons have to be better on them than off… completely different things), then your waypoints are probably about twenty miles apart, maximum. Covering sixty miles a day on foot is certainly doable, but most people wouldn't want to. Are you talking intrepid adventurers, or soldiers making a forced march? Then it could be eighty miles or more total. Are you talking peasants with little motivation to hurry, possibly not in the best of health or accompanied by children or elders, perhaps lacking decent (or any) shoes, maybe carrying a burden? Ten miles a day, _maybe_ fifteen.

The rest depends on the scale you end up with. Can't tell you about the cities, since I don't know how big they are. (Their scale on the Civ-style map is definitely exaggerated. On the other hand, look at the size of that boat…!  ) The "mountain" areas are almost certainly too small to be actual "mountains," but that's assuming you actually want them to be. (And assuming the geographical model you're after isn't central New Guinea–which has ranges so sharp you could cut yourself on them. There's a reason one-sixth of the world's languages are found on just the eastern half of that island.) 

The overall size of the "country" is "reasonable" enough… depending on what you had in mind when using the term "country," and what other political entities exist on its borders that might roll over it if they were too much larger and took it into their minds to do so. As an independent monarchy, it would probably fall into the low end of the scale of historical Western European countries, though not necessarily by much: there have certainly been smaller. As an effectively autonomous state, possibly within a larger framework, it could be huge. Find some detailed maps of the Holy Roman Empire from around the 12th century onward and you'll see what I mean: it can be a real shock to realize that the largest single division on a particular highly intricate map is Luxembourg. (Even if it _was_ about 40% larger back then.)


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## FictionQuest (Nov 13, 2011)

On the subject of the mountains, you should do a little study on how mountains are formed. I'm not sure that you can just deposit them randomly. There needs to be some sense and order to them I think. I am not an expert and it may not bother anyone in the story, but if you are looking for authenticity then it's worth a little study.


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## Devor (Nov 13, 2011)

Thanks for all the comments.

I think I'll cut the scale by about half, so that you can get from "C" to "W" and back in a day, so about 15 miles.  That brings things closer together and should fix a few issues.

By extension, how far could you get by horseback in a day?  Or in a wagon?  If someone just wants to post a link that would be fine too.

As for the mountains, do they become more believable if there's a large mountain range which more or less ends just below the country?  Could it be viewed as a large valley?  I suppose the mountains aren't overly necessary and tall hills would suffice, at least in parts.


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## FictionQuest (Nov 13, 2011)

To my limited knowledge, mountains are generally created along fault lines where one plate pushes over another. So you typically get a long, thin range of mountains. Not sure it matters exactly where it ends, whether near to the sea or not. Tall hills might be better, especially if your characters have to navigate them.


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## Elder the Dwarf (Nov 13, 2011)

FictionQuest said:


> To my limited knowledge, mountains are generally created along fault lines where one plate pushes over another. So you typically get a long, thin range of mountains. Not sure it matters exactly where it ends, whether near to the sea or not. Tall hills might be better, especially if your characters have to navigate them.



That, or when two plates push together, both rising upwards.  To illustrate put your fingertips of both hands against eachother and push together.  I believe these instances create the largest mountains, although your story could be at the beginning, middle, or end of this process.


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## Sheilawisz (Nov 13, 2011)

Hello Devor!! =) Your map is very beautiful, I was surprised by its colours and now I think that I should add colour to my own maps... because so far they are just black ink on white paper

The distances that you describe are short, considering that an experienced walking traveller can cover a distance of 40km in a single day or by walking all night- Travel by horse can be impressively fast, as here in Earth the mongol riders could travel for hundreds of kilometers so fast that they took people by surprise...

The best option for your map is to include a scale in it like 1:3000000 (1cm=30km) I have scales in all my maps and they help very much when I have to calculate travels =) About the mountains, if you want to have a "believable" geography you must be careful with where exactly you place them- That's not a problem for me because my worlds are very surreal and I don't care about having a believable geography!!

Sheila


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## Devor (Nov 13, 2011)

Sheilawisz said:


> Hello Devor!! =) Your map is very beautiful, I was surprised by its colours and now I think that I should add colour to my own maps... because so far they are just black ink on white paper.



Thanks.  I did the outline in colored pencils and asked my wife to color it in crayon.  It sounds a little simple, but having a colored copy on the desk in front of you helps to bring the place alive in my mind.



Elder the Dwarf said:


> That, or when two plates push together, both rising upwards.  To illustrate put your fingertips of both hands against eachother and push together.  I believe these instances create the largest mountains, although your story could be at the beginning, middle, or end of this process.



Thanks for the input.  I'm not extremely concerned about the mountains.  The place has a magical history and the mountains can fit into that story easily.  Most of them will also work as hills.  I just don't want readers to be thinking about it before the story comes up.  So if there's a specific feature which stands out as unreal or the most unreal maybe I can work on that, but as I mentioned the country is located at the tip of a large mountain range and I'm hoping they could be considered an extension of that range.


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## Elder the Dwarf (Nov 13, 2011)

Sorry, I was just expanding on his point, I didn't mean it was a problem with your map.  Map looks great, by the way.


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## Ravana (Nov 13, 2011)

Mountains are formed at crustal boundaries, yes: how broad the range is depends on how long the plates keep moving. The Rockies extend for a quarter of a continent in many places (I gather that technically these are multiple north-south ranges from the Great Divide to the Pacific Coast; I tend to think of them as one large feature); the Himalayas aren't a whole lot narrower in the Tibet region. 

What they end up looking like after they're formed depends on the rest of their history. The newer they are, the higher they tend to be: the Appalachians, which many mountain connoisseurs would probably consider ambitious hills, are nine times older than the Rockies, for instance. Weather and vegetative erosion have honed them down to their present condition. Broad plateaus could form between sequential upthrusts, which could account for mountains on either side of your peninsula; or this could be a microplate (for an example of something similar, look at the terrain around Port-au-Prince, Haiti); or, the plates slid along one another, only raising ridges intermittently. Or the lowlands could be the result of river erosion, say, coming down from the south between the two ridges (assuming there's more continent there for it to come down from), then building up the land beyond them through sedimentation. 

Keep in mind that the "footprint" of a mountain is generally several times its height; exceptions are rare–though where they exist, they tend to be exceptional indeed. I mentioned New Guinea earlier… here's a sample:

Fileuncakjaya.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
File:OwenStanleyJungle clad mountainsPapuaNew Guinea.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What I unfortunately could not locate offhand were any of the pictures I've seen where mountains like the first one (the highest in New Guinea) run in parallel ranges for dozens of miles; the second pic barely hints at what these look like from the air. If you like (or just dig scenery pics), look for the Owen Stanley Range or the Ekuti Range. (There are others, I'm sure.) A dramatic and well-known example from the Alps is the Matterhorn: one look from any angle will tell you why it remains famous, even though it's barely half as tall as Everest. 

Even with these, though, the "mountain" will spread outward for miles and miles, at gradually shallower slopes–or if it doesn't, it's because it's up against another one. Gravity just kinda works that way. So I'd say what you really need to do is figure out roughly how high you want your ridges to be: if it's more than, say, 10-15% of the width of the range (remember the ridge slopes on both sides, so that leaves the foothills spreading a mere 3-5x the ridge's height–which would actually be very steep), you may want to consider unusual means of formation, and what results these would give. If you don't need that much detail, just leave them as "hills" of some unspecified form or other.


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## Ravana (Nov 14, 2011)

Sheilawisz said:


> The distances that you describe are short, considering that an experienced walking traveller can cover a distance of 40km in a single day or by walking all night



An "experienced walking traveler" can; distances between settlements are not based on how much an experienced walking traveler can cover when he's pushing it. And considering you're using kilometers where others were using miles, this isn't much of an increase anyway: it comes to just under 25 miles. An experienced walking traveler can actually cover more than that (experienced _running_ travelers do it every weekend: they're called marathons)–_if_ he is also in good health, not heavily burdened, has good footwear, is on a paved road, the weather is favorable, and so forth. For more realistic numbers, look at how much an army on the march can cover in a single day… and also how much it is _normal_ for them to. Before motorized transport, an army marching ten miles a day was considered _good_–though there were certainly ones that could cover more, at least under ideal circumstances… which is why the reason the Romans built such damn good roads. They considered 20 miles a day to be good, as I recall. (Though what was amazing about them is that they built a bloody fort at the _end_ of each day's march.)



> Travel by horse can be impressively fast, as here in Earth the mongol riders could travel for hundreds of kilometers so fast that they took people by surprise...



You're badly overestimating the capacities of horses. Yes, a mounted army _can_ travel as much as a hundred miles in a day (or at least the Mongols could–under perfect conditions)… but it can't necessarily do it two days in a _row_, any more than marathoners run races on consecutive days. Besides, the Mongols didn't need to travel that fast to "take people by surprise": all they needed to do was travel _as quickly as the warning of their approach_ did–which was the speed of anybody else's horse. (They didn't even need to travel _that_ fast, actually: all they needed to do was to be able to get to whoever was being warned before _they_ could get the word out and gather their troops from all around the countryside. Which, for any force large enough to resist the standard Mongol tumen, would have required a week or so, even in a densely populated area. Or, easier still, they'd just have a few scouts run down anyone trying to spread a warning: then it didn't _matter_ how fast they were moving.)

Again, for a comparison: try the Pony Express. Riders covered 75 to 100 miles a day… _getting fresh remounts_ an average of every 10 to 15 miles. The horses would only cover a _single_ stage before being rested. Forty miles a day is not unreasonable for a rider on a single horse, and more is possible… again, under ideal conditions. Wagons would realistically rarely be driven at faster than a walk (not meaningfully faster than a human walk) under normal circumstances, but as long as the wagon (and the road!) are in decent shape, the horse could pull it pretty much all day.



> The best option for your map is to include a scale in it like 1:30000000 (1cm=30km)



I believe that's what he's trying to determine. He isn't beginning by fiat (map first, story second): he knows what he wants the travel time to be, and is trying to work out a map scale based on that.


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## SeverinR (Nov 14, 2011)

http://mythicscribes.com/forums/world-building/1072-autorealm-tutorial.html

I liked this program for mapping.
It has the ruler and string measure to estimate distance. Simply set the measure to foot/horse/wagon/ ship and then string out the ruler to make a town so far from another land mark.  Then change it to another and it will tell you how long it would be with a different mode of transportation. 

This really helped point out weaknesses in recent novel.  Just having a map was nice, but then to have it scale and know how long it would take to move in the world.


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## Sheilawisz (Nov 14, 2011)

Ravana said:


> You're badly overestimating the capacities of horses. Yes, a mounted army _can_ travel as much as a hundred miles in a day (or at least the Mongols could—under perfect conditions)… but it can't necessarily do it two days in a _row_, any more than marathoners run races on consecutive days. Besides, the Mongols didn't need to travel that fast to "take people by surprise": all they needed to do was travel _as quickly as the warning of their approach_ did—which was the speed of anybody else's horse. (They didn't even need to travel _that_ fast, actually: all they needed to do was to be able to get to whoever was being warned before _they_ could get the word out and gather their troops from all around the countryside. Which, for any force large enough to resist the standard Mongol tumen, would have required a week or so, even in a densely populated area. Or, easier still, they'd just have a few scouts run down anyone trying to spread a warning: then it didn't _matter_ how fast they were moving.)


They could ride for many days in a row because every Mongol rider used several different horses, so they would not wear off a single horse and this allowed them to advance really fast... sometimes the warning of their approach was indeed faster, but people just did not believe that those riding armies could arrive within days or weeks from such a great distance

Anyway, it all depends on the kind of terrain- it's not the same to ride across open plains and fields than it is to enter dense forests or mountains, and the mongols tended to suffer ambushes and heavy casualties in such places... back to the original question, I think that 1:3000000 is an excellent scale for maps of a country that is not very large, like Devor's map here =)

For my own maps I use 1:12320000 but it's a world the size of Alaska.. by the way, sorry for using metric!!


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## Ravana (Nov 15, 2011)

Sheilawisz said:


> They could ride for many days in a row because every Mongol rider used several different horses, so they would not wear off a single horse and this allowed them to advance really fast...
> 
> Anyway, it all depends on the kind of terrain- it's not the same to ride across open plains and fields than it is to enter dense forests or mountains, and the mongols tended to suffer ambushes and heavy casualties in such places..



Why do people persist in thinking that horses (or Mongols) are magical?

Let's itemize:

(1) Mongols–or anyone–could ride for many days in a row. But they could _not_ ride 100 miles a day for many days in a row. Those rare stretches were exceptional, and were, I repeat, made under _ideal_ conditions: in good weather, over firm, level ground, with ample available fodder along the way. (The thing that sped the Mongols up the most wasn't their horses: it was the absence of a supply train.) Most of the time riding that distance in one day would have been pointless–because settlements were not situated that far apart; riding thus would have required bypassing multiple targets. Which is exactly what they did whenever they _did_ push themselves that hard… in order to strike an army, or its assembly point, before it could fully prepare or link up with other forces. They were fully aware of the military value of such a forced "march," _when the military situation called for it_; but their normal method of operation was to work targets as they came upon them, not to romp randomly back and forth over the same ground. They never would have ridden several hundred miles in a single week: there never would have been a _reason_ to.

(2) Yes, the Mongols tended to operate with more than one horse per rider–as did every other mounted unit, and for all the same reasons. The problem with this is that even if you change from one horse to another after twenty miles, you are _not_ changing to a "fresh" horse: you're changing to another horse _that's also gone twenty miles, at the same speed as the one you were riding_. It will be _less_ tired, because it hasn't been carrying your weight… but if your horse was trotting, _so was it_; if yours was cantering, so was it. (And if you were cantering, and continue to, both horses will drop dead at some point during the second leg… unless they already did in the first one.) Then, twenty miles later, you switch off again, to… what? You're changing back to your first horse, which has now gone forty miles, half of it with your weight on top. Unless you have three riding horses; even then, all have still covered the same forty miles at the same speed. And all will have gone sixty miles at the same speed when you make your next switch… and so on. Each stage represents a diminishing return. Pony Express riders managed a hundred miles a day on eight or ten _fresh_ horses, not on ones that had been keeping up all along; and even _with_ fresh horses, that's about _all_ they could manage. 

(3) Even here, you're assuming the additional horses are unburdened–which they may not have been: one horse would have been carrying the rider's excess gear, as it's far more efficient to spread out the weight than to put it all on a single horse, since it's the distance traveled, and especially the speed at which it's traveled, that constitutes the largest drain on the horse's resources. (A human carrying a pack weighing 20% his body weight, about the same ratio as rider to horse–and assuming he was accustomed to the weight–would be only marginally more tired than one carrying nothing for the same distance: combat loads for infantry normally run closer to 40-50% of body weight, and modern soldiers are still expected to be able to cover 25 miles a day with this… though, again, not day upon day.) This gear may weigh less than the rider, so the switch-off would still be of some benefit, but this really only begins to become efficient if each rider has at least three horses, two for riding and one (or more) for gear, or else rotating the load rider-gear-unburdened. And this is about what the Mongols had.

(4) Each additional horse also represents a diminishing return in itself, because they all eat the same amount of food. A Mongol _tumen_ consisted of 10,000 warriors; each additional mount per person represents another 10,000 horses that have to eat that day. The normal ratio was three to four horses per warrior: 30k to 40k horses. That's a lot of horses to feed. This, plus the fact that the horses were all getting tired at close to the same rate whether ridden or not, was why they didn't operate with five or ten remounts per warrior.

(5) The other thing that sped the Mongols up was their habituation to riding: being on a horse does not, by itself, prevent one from becoming worn out–and here they did possess a real advantage. They could remain in the saddle for days, while their opponents rarely could… _regardless_ of the speed the horses were going. At a much more reasonable pace of 50-60 miles per day, they could still outdistance almost any pursuit or outmaneuver any opposition, and do it without exhausting their mounts or bypassing every target of opportunity (or necessity) in their path. Even in the rare cases where their opponent _could_ keep pace with them, they'd generally be exhausted when they caught up–the people, whether the horses were or not; this was, in fact, a tactic the Mongols employed repeatedly. They didn't conquer half the world because they were better warriors… most of their victories were because they fought _smarter_.

So, no, a hundred miles a day is _not_ a reasonable figure to work with in determining the distance a mounted rider can be expected to travel, any more than fifty miles a day is a reasonable figure to work with in determining the distance a human on foot can travel, even though there has been the occasional highly-trained (and lightly burdened) force in history capable of doing this.


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## Sheilawisz (Nov 15, 2011)

We have totally hijacked Devor's thread, sorry Devor!! I'll give you different scales that you could use in your maps =)



Ravana said:


> Why do people persist in thinking that horses (or Mongols) are magical?


What? I have never said that horses or mongol riders were magical =P They could indeed ride for longer distances and way faster than the riders of other cultures could at those times, that's a fact... I also never mentioned that they would always ride like that, all the time: as you said, it was only sometimes that it happened but they could indeed ride like that...

They conquered such a huge empire only because the terrain in most of that part of the world was suitable for their horses and their warfare tactics, and wherever they ventured into forests, mountains (Europe) or even into jungle (Vietnam) they were easily ambushed and defeated many times 

The Magyars invaded Europe a long time before the Mongols with very similar tactics and victories at the start, but when they reached Western Europe with its forests and fortresses they were stopped and pushed back

Now on a different matter, I think that people in our modern times usually underestimate how far you can travel without cars or airliners =) Devor, here you have a list of scales that you can use for your maps:

1:12000000 is good for a map of something continental size, like a region the size of Europe, Canada or Alaska (1cm=120km)
1:4500000 is good if your country is more like the size of Sweden (1cm=45km)
1:3000000 would be the best choice for a map of a country that is the size of Great Britain (1cm=30km)

Now, if you want something smaller, like Belgium, a good scale would be 1:1500000 (1cm=15km) and a very little scale to draw the map of a tiny country or maybe a large city would be 1:250000 that is 1cm=2.5km

I know that using kilometers is boring in a Fantasy setting -personally I use my own version of miles- but for a map it's better if you use metric because it's more precise =) The scales mentioned here come from my book of World Maps by Rand McNally so they are as realistic as it can get.. I hope it helps =)

Sheila


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## Devor (Nov 16, 2011)

Ravana said:


> He isn't beginning by fiat (map first, story second): he knows what he wants the travel time to be, and is trying to work out a map scale based on that.





Sheilawisz said:


> We have totally hijacked Devor's thread, sorry Devor!! I'll give you different scales that you could use in your maps =)
> 
> . . . .
> 
> ...



Thanks Shiela.  Ravana is right, those scales are only interesting and not really usable for me because the map and the country is already drawn with some idea of travel times.  But I posted and asked instead of googled because I figured there whould be others here who are tackling, or have tackled, these same questions.  Those scales may be very useful to someone at a different stage of the process, and they might spot this thread.  Thanks.

And I did find the Mongols thing interesting, if a little tangential.  It helps that I was just watching their episode of Deadliest Warrior on Netflix.

By the way, I've got to use miles because medieval folk would've used miles, as do American readers.  I have no commentary on the metric system.


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## Ravana (Nov 16, 2011)

So whose "mile" are you using?

Or should I not have gone there…?


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## Sheilawisz (Nov 16, 2011)

Devor said:


> Thanks Sheila. Ravana is right, those scales are only interesting and not really usable for me because the map and the country is already drawn with some idea of travel times. But I posted and asked instead of googled because I figured there whould be others here who are tackling, or have tackled, these same questions. Those scales may be very useful to someone at a different stage of the process, and they might spot this thread. Thanks.


That's fine, I hope it helps someone with their Fantasy maps =)

Miles are actually of Roman origin and they are mentioned in the Quijote de la Mancha, the greatest literary work of Castilian language ever.. That's why I use miles too when my characters talk about distances and speeds, and my own version of mile is equivalent to 1760m exactly compared to 1609.344m of the standard international mile

It's fun to come up with your own version of miles and use it in your stories =)


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## Jess A (Dec 7, 2011)

This is a great thread. I have 'distance/travel/leagues' on my 'to-research' list. I have nothing of value to add that hasn't already been said, so I will simply say thank you to all.


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