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Post by DM Kiado on Jan 17, 2016 6:28:21 GMT
Now what about a world that is an inverse orb? With the center of the planet being the sun and where gravity is pushing in all directions outward... Check out " The Death Gate Cycle" By Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman. One of there worlds is an inverse orb, basically a blazing orb in the center, and insane rain forests covering the entire inner sphere (if I remember right). There was no nighttime. I can't remember many other details, but the world in the book is split into many parts by magic, based on elements (fire, air, water, earth)
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Post by Tesla Ranger on Jan 17, 2016 14:59:16 GMT
A common mistake I find that authors make when describing walking in simulated, rotational gravity is they describe moving along the arc as feeling like it's "going up hill". So if a character were to walk west around the equator they might tire because to them it feels like they're going uphill. If you consider the physics a bit, that doesn't make much sense. The hypothetical character isn't lifting their body relative to the surface. More so, one of the Skylabs had a rotating section so we know from the astronauts reports that it felt normal, once they got used to it.
This rotational force isn't exactly the same as gravity, objects that go up wouldn't necessarily fall back down (or at least not in a conventional arc). That might make ranged attacks tricky for anyone on a rotating station. In a hypothetical dyson sphere, with a radius of 1 AU, those effects would probably be so negligible as to be conventionally unobservable.
The lack of night would be a good point. I'm not sure if tides would either eliminated or enormous (might depend on how the thing came to be). Each point would be equidistant to it's star, but it's own mass might create tidal forces at that scale. You probably wouldn't have any stars (except one) or planets/moons you could observe either. Assuming the whole thing turns you'd still have weather. But you're at a consistent distance from the sun so there wouldn't be any seasons. I've only seen Dyson spheres come up in the context of Star Trek or NASA so approaching one from a fantasy standpoint is pretty novel (at least to me).
I can't even begin to imagine how you'd draw a map for all that. Assuming that radius of 1 AU for convenience's sake, that gives a circumference at the equator of 584,000,000 miles. And when a weary traveller (or their descendants) completed that journey, they'd be right back where they started. My calculator's having a hard time with numbers that big but if they managed to cover 24 miles/day the journey would take 24,333,333 days (about 67,000 years). But on that note, how would such a traveller measure days and years? How would cultures develop differently sans night, years, moons, seasons, etc? Would Pelor be just that much more powerful?
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Samuel Wise
Demigod
Ready to Help...
Posts: 989
Favorite D&D Class: Warlock
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Post by Samuel Wise on Jan 17, 2016 17:15:46 GMT
I can't even begin to imagine how you'd draw a map for all that. Assuming that radius of 1 AU for convenience's sake, that gives a circumference at the equator of 584,000,000 miles. And when a weary traveller (or their descendants) completed that journey, they'd be right back where they started. My calculator's having a hard time with numbers that big but if they managed to cover 24 miles/day the journey would take 24,333,333 days (about 67,000 years). But on that note, how would such a traveller measure days and years? How would cultures develop differently sans night, years, moons, seasons, etc? Would Pelor be just that much more powerful? A map could be drawn upon an unfold sphere. All you would need to do is peel the world like an orange slice and be sure to remember that all that connects. Now, perhaps there is night. (because with constant sunlight, there would be some environmental problems as well). Imagine the core is surround by a rock-type core with a slit in it to allow sunlight. As the crust revolves about the core (or as the core inside revolves by itself) you could get the same affect as sunlight (although with shading in the poles of the palent, which would not be too different from our artic/antartic). Also, for travelling, perhaps they found a way outside of walking/horse for long distance travel. Airships can almost be considered fantasy, if you think of them rightly, they could easily just bypass a lot of walking by flying over to one half of the planet. If, of course, the populace believes that planet exists. Finally, and this would be cool, the underdark could be on the surface of the planet. That would be an interesting journey.
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Post by Tesla Ranger on Jan 17, 2016 18:20:55 GMT
Flying craft would have some complications from the physics. Aircraft wouldn't need to compete with gravity, just their own velocity (which wants to swing it through the Sphere/surface and out into open space). Once the vehicle (or anything else) cancels that out to lift off the surface it's effectively in micro gravity (if not zero gravity. In essence, once the airship took off, it would immediately start falling into the star and anyone/thing inside the vehicle would cease feeling any gravity-like effects.
I might suggest that because the centripetal force isn't consistent across the interior, that habitation may only be possible around the poles. Anything that went too far north or south would be going too slowly to counteract the pull of the star's gravity and they'd fall up (from their perspective). This would apply to the atmosphere as much as anything else so the unfortunate traveler would have other things to worry about besides their month-long tumble into a nuclear fusion engine. The atmosphere would be densest around the equator and progressively thinner further from it. Come to think of it, natural bodies of water would probably flow towards the equator. The good news is that that should simplify the geometry of the map, but the sheer stupid scale of it still breaks my brain. Earth as a circumference a shade under 25,000 miles. That's a far cry from ~600,000,000 miles.
Presumably any biology inside the sphere would be adapted to its conditions (such as a lack of day) but it's a good idea about the "night maker". Essentially it just needs to be a curved wall, appropriately opaque and massive that the orbital math works out and it casts a large enough shadow. Even then, I suspect there would be enough reflected light from the rest of the sphere that you'd never be in total darkness. Probably a dim twilight at worst? I might suspect that any cultures inside the sphere might develop deities for the sun and the "shield".
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Post by robosnake on Jan 17, 2016 20:10:56 GMT
Now what about a world that is an inverse orb? With the center of the planet being the sun and where gravity is pushing in all directions outward... Check out " The Death Gate Cycle" By Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman. One of there worlds is an inverse orb, basically a blazing orb in the center, and insane rain forests covering the entire inner sphere (if I remember right). There was no nighttime. I can't remember many other details, but the world in the book is split into many parts by magic, based on elements (fire, air, water, earth) Yup - Pryan, the World of Fire. And that's a very cool series - some of the most creative worldbuilding out there, I think.
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Post by DM Kiado on Jan 17, 2016 21:02:07 GMT
Agreed, they do some cool stuff with worlds in those books. I need to re-read that series at some point.
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Post by DM Kiado on Jan 17, 2016 21:09:50 GMT
67,000 year to walk the circumference would make for a long campaign. Haha.
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