There was a previous discussion about how can so many trollocs live/eat/survive

[farthammer]

Well the DO seems to be doing a good job from preventing his prison to be closed.  Trollocs are cheap you don't need any method to be 100% reliable anyways.

[Durinax]

Well the DO seems to be doing a good job from preventing his prison to be closed.  Trollocs are cheap you don't need any method to be 100% reliable anyways.

equiping them wouldnt be cheap

 

[Barid Bel Medar]

haha, trollocs dont buy weapons and armor....

 

 

They make their own, they live for war, so they make crappy armor and swords etc... out of what they can find.

 

Kinda like the Thakandar forges, they dont "buy" anything. the DO tells them to make it, or they die.

 

Theres no money involved

[Knobs Mahoney]

...waiting for Dida's treatise on supply-and-demand economics in the Blight, and how all of this points to some plot by the Tinkers to make the Forge-Constructs in Thakan'dar embrace the Way of the Leaf...

[Barid Bel Medar]

ha, you havent heard it already? its a best seller.

 

Although, makes you wonder where they get the metal from.

 

I think the Forgers also mine crap, or some similar denzin does  it

[Shaidar]

I think the real situation is more prosaic (and I've thought over what I like to call the "Trolloc Paradox" quite a bit).

 

The orders of magnitude more Trollocs than the Blight can support... are in the Blight after all. It's just that the DO - a force of chaos, paradox and unreality - subverts the normal laws of physics to serve his ends. Just as plants in the Blight are basically dying as they live and thrive, and just as the Dark blacksmiths in Thakandar are animated by True Power alone - so the Trollocs, being the DO's creatures, are sustained well below the caloric intake they would require in the "real reality" just through the force of the DO's essence. Or in other words, were the Blight to vanish, its Trolloc numbers would quickly diminish from the current tens of millions (?)... to the two or three hundred thousand or so that it can biophysically support under normal conditions.

[Duskfire]

It'll be more likely Portal Stones then Vacoules. We know the Seanchan got their animals back from there and that there are worlds that lost to the Trolloc Wars and whatnot. So theres an actual foundation there for RJ to work on further. Vacoules on the other hand are only mentioned twice, and at random various times can break off.

[Dakota]

It'll be more likely Portal Stones then Vacoules. We know the Seanchan got their animals back from there and that there are worlds that lost to the Trolloc Wars and whatnot. So theres an actual foundation there for RJ to work on further. Vacoules on the other hand are only mentioned twice, and at random various times can break off.

As others mentioned, the DO would probably consider a vacuole breaking off here or there to be an acceptable risk for unleashing such a huge wave of trollocs into the world at once.  What's losing two or three million trollocs over the course of 3000 years when in return you can unleash a force of ten trollocs for every man, woman, and child living in the westlands?

As to vacuoles only being mentioned twice, here's an idea.  What book were they first mentioned in?  If they were mentioned for the first time in book 4-6, depending on how much other debate has gone on over them, might they have something to do with the BUT?  I could very well be wrong, as I haven't watched much of the BUT discussions.