[TML] "Dies the Fire"

[shadow at shadowgard.com]

On 9 Dec 2007 at 19:12, Richard Aiken wrote:

> On Dec 9, 2007 3:10 PM,  <shadow at shadowgard.com> wrote:
> > The surface area is a lot bigger (the players may not see that as an
> > advantage :-) and the climates a *lot* more varied (near the inner
> > edge, conditions will resemble dayside Mercury in all the old SF
> > books, near the outer edge, you've got conditions that make the
> > Arctic look tropical)
> 
> Hmmm
> 
> So . . . a fantasy world that really IS a "flat earth."  The Sun would
> always be about at dawn, right?  So would you call it Dawnworld?
> There'd be a permenantly Light and Dark side to everything, wouldn't
> there?  Wait one.  Shadow squares, like with Ringworld?


Nope. You "bob" the sun in the hole. So you have night, sunrise, sun 
gets yup to some point in the sky and then starts down again. I 
haven't gotten around to calculating the timing for an assumed 45 
degree above the horizon at "sun-high".

This will have effects on things, such as permanently shadowed sides 
of hills and mountains.

It was kind of interesting reading the reactions to "wait... the sun 
*rose* exactly where it set?!?" 

If you rotate the disk, the stars you can see at night move. At least 
the ones near the horizon. I figure on a one year rotation. 

That *will* give some Coriolis ffects, but not as strong as on Earth, 
obviously.

On the other hand even so, if any of the seas are really big, storms 
(or even waves) that have had the wind pushing them for 50,000 miles 
or more could get kinda nasty.

Navigation for low tech types gets interesting too. You've got 
"sunward" and anti-sunward. And and maybe "spinward" & anti-spinward 
(based on the way the stars move about a degree a night)

Ah! "Starward" is the direction the stars move...

> Assuming the builders wanted to get anywhere quickly, what would they
> have built for truly long distance travel?  Mag-lev railways?
> Sub-orbital slingshots?  Teleporation networks?

Good question. But who says the builders planned to live on it. It 
could be a "science project" for a god-like hogh school student...
 
> There would be a back side to this disk, right?  If the magitech can
> keep the disk from collapsing into its primary, it should also be able
> to handle a few vertical "wells" between the two sides.  During
> periods of high-tech society, these would be conduits of trade (and
> war).  During periods of collapse, they'd be Bottomless Dungeons for
> our Heroes to explore.

Climbing down holes several thousand miles deep ain't my idea of a 
fun time...

And aside from things like what the pressure will do (even solid rock 
flows before you get to the 100 mile mark) the heat will get pretty 
bad too.
 
> > Here's something I wrote for a sort of "test" walkthru I ran a few
> > folks thru. It's the description of an object they found in a long
> > abandoned Inn/reststop/whatever along a "roman" type road (with
> > mileposts that had numbers in the tens of thousands along the road
> > :-)
> 
> [snip of comic book]
> 
> Very nice.

Obviously the parenthetical bit about the size of the page will be 
missing from what they get. I may try drawing it myself or getting 
some artistic acquaintance on the net to draw it.

If I can print it up, I'd love to see the look on people's faces 
after the scale gets bigger than any plausible planet. :-)

That'd be about page 9...



--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com