Elinore - A Diachronic City WIP

[feanaaro]

In terms of realism and beauty, you are right. The problem is that if I make the main channel realistically wide (say 500m or more), then it would also be unbridgeable, defeating the story-driven purpose of having islands in the first place. (btw, what would be in your opinion the maximum width which would be bridgeable with some plausibility in a non-mechanized society?)
6km would be too wide. I think of this river a bit like a longer Mississipi; that is to say a great river but not one so huge as the Amazon or the Congo in terms of discharge. This is because even if it drains a very large area, it is almost all within temperate/cold climates and almost all in the rain shadow of one or another mountain chain. Thus I would not expect the rainfall to be substantial enough to generate an Amazon-wide, or even Yenisei-wide, river.
Wikipedia says that the Mississipi is ~1.6km at its widest. This one would probably be more, but since this place is still quite far from the mouth, I think that ~1.2-1.3km is within the realms of plausibility.
Does this make sense?

[RedKettle]

...The problem is that if I make the main channel realistically wide (say 500m or more), then it would also be unbridgeable, defeating the story-driven purpose of having islands in the first place. (btw, what would be in your opinion the maximum width which would be bridgeable with some plausibility in a non-mechanized society?)...

Poking through a looong list of old Roman bridges on Wikipedia, I came across:

Puente Romano (Mérida) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

...It is the longest surviving bridge from ancient times, having once featured an estimated overall length of 755 m with 62 spans...

I am not sure which conditions led the Romans to build this bridge, but I assume the large island helped. Based on that example, I would have to say bridging a river 500m wide is plausible to me, especially in an area where the river is shallower/has islands.