but no carts or wagons. - Edit 1
Before modification by darius_sedai at 07/06/2010 12:16:20 AM
After all, the a'dam prevents damane from linking, thus severely limiting the size of gateways. Having small gateways may help for scouting or assassination attempts, it won't help much for moving armies. Thus they will be limited at first in their war against Rand. (And I also think that Tuon will see the difficulties here and maybe decide to dispense with the a'dam altogether, at least during the Last Battle.)
If each gateway is 6 feet wide, that means 2 men can run through it quite easily. Multiply that by a hundred if you have 100 damane making gateways side by side, and you can run 200 men through the gateways simultaneously. Let's say 3 seconds per pair, and you can transport 4000 men per minute, and 40000 men in 10 minutes.
That is a pretty useful strategic advantage.
Not all that useful if you can't transport food and spare weapons and big war machines etc... sure you can send tons of men from one spot to another, as DREWRULESWOT said, useful for a raid but there are practical army needs that they will be unable to meet easily.
Also consider how many times have we seen 100 damane/sul'dam paires in one place, even Ituralde only encountered a few pairs at a time. And how many women have the strength to open Gateways 6 feet by what 10 feet tall to allow for horse/grolm/torm riders through? Seems to me that there are only a handful of channelers who possess enough strength/Talent to generate these gateways. More likely by far that there would only be 5-10 women with any given group of Seanchan with maybe a couple strong enough to make a gateway big enough for more than a single man to pass through at once. Even if they had women strong enough to open gateways large enough for carts and mounted soldiers they would exhaust themselves to the point of uselessness quickly.
Take Perrin and his Asha'man for example. They where moving his forces, but after only a few weeks of moving a relatively tiny force (some 5000-odd people) they were so exhausted they could hardly Channel. Grady and Neald are fairly strong, but neither of them could do much after a day of holding the Gateways open for the whole force to Travel through.