Quote:Because, in the generation or so that they'd have been doing all their writing and storage, they had much more important things to worry about.
- Speaking of the wizard on the mountain, the scientists *would* have most of the raw information necessary to rebuild to a high-tech society, in their brains if nothing else, in a great many fields if not across the board. Scientists are like that. If they had any chance of doing so, once they realized what was going down, they *would* have put as much as they could think of in permanent or semipermanent storage media - everything that they couldn't take advantage of straight off. Scientists are like that, too. If we're in the early 1900s equivalent, then people are firm believers in advancement and development as Good Things, and have been for at least a little while, and have enough spare resource production to have a significant number of people devoted to developing technology full-time. Why, then, are we not seeing a sudden huge leap as all of the remaining ancient information is absorbed and applied?
Like not starving. Supporting even a fraction of the colonist population out of the base-camps' resources - without access to the supplies and equipment they'd brought along to do so themselves - strained the very limits of the possible. A sizable fraction of the scattered settlements failed to pull it off, and are, at best, lost to the desert.
That's on Scour. Iden is showed exactly that pattern.
The smaller settlements' purpose in the plot isn't to preserve the knowledge, see, it's to allow more than just the one cultural tradition arising from the landed colony ship.
Quote:I have very little faith in my own ability to follow through on actually writing the story that I've conceived - there are just too many shiny things in the world to concentrate my energies that long.
If we go realistically, their 1900s-equivalent isn't going to be anything like our 1900s. The renaissance was born of the dark ages, which were born of the fall of Rome, which was born of Rome itself. WWI was born out of a form of diplomacy that took its shape directly from the ideas of feudalism and monarchy - of nations driven by the honor of individuals, and family ties. How much do you care, and how deep into the weeds do we want to go on this? I know that I am fully capable of joinging in on a projects that take a premises like this and spin them out into stuff with as much detail as the Shining Spiral or Teikoku Kagekidan: 1940, and likely the same fate. I don't think that's what we want, though - it's great for practice with worldbuilding, but you never get to see the end. What level of realism and detail are we looking for? Heck, for that matter, what kind of story are you trying to write? There's a certain point where background becomes irrelevant, and that point varies dramatically on the scope and intent of the story.
I don't think I'd ever see the end either way, but by throwing it out here and, mm, exploring the place with the assistance of others, I'll at least have the satisfaction of having the setting created and written and ready and waiting for a short story or RPG campain or whatever.
Besides, worldbuilding exercise is, as I said at the beginning, fun in its own right.
The story-bunny that started this off, for me, is an evolution of the 'habitable gas giant' concept I mentioned on a thread on these very boards where original ideas were being discussed... although, alas, I haven't been able to find it again.
Quote:Scour's lower density relative to earth would probably make metals and such a bit scarcer, but I think the fact that ores and deposits are pretty much always found on the uninhabitable plateaus would be a bigger factor.
- as a sidebar question, are there any set pieces you particularly want to include? If you want castles or airships or cannons or whatever, then the world can be bent to accomodate them, but in some cases it may not be trivial. If nothing else, the distribution of chemistry ingredients and metals may well be rather different.
Set pieces? I really can't think of any beyond those mentioned in the starting image in my first post... *shrug* Land battleships, maybe? Flying crabs?
Quote:*shakes head* No, they're well apart - the seperation is about eight and a half times Scour's diameter, which is very close to the Roche Limit (which I did find a site that said how to figure) compared to any major moon in the Solar System, but not dangerously so - Iden is only about two and a half times as far out as it needs to be.
If they're sufficiently close (and I admit I have no idea how to calculate Roche's Limit) their upper atmospheres will even mingle. At that point both planets will be visibly egg-shaped and you have yourself a Rocheworld scenario.
Ja, -n
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