Worldbuilding fun

[Valles]

Create your own!
Or better yet, help with mine. ^_^
Okay, so, the fundamental concept I was running these numbers to fit with is wondering what kind of civilization could or would develop on a world with no oceans. I don't, however, want some place like Arrakis or Tatooine - this place has a little water - enough to fill some pretty impressive lakes and/or small seas... It has crustal plates like Earth's - high, low-density continental ones and low-lying basalt 'ocean plates' - and just about enough water to fill in what would be its ocean trenches. I think you should get... some rain... downwind of them. Maybe as much as the Sarengeti does.
The average temperature should be cooler than Earth's, because less water-vapor in the upper atmosphere means less of a greenhouse effect. Midday in mid-summer is still beyond all dreams of Earthly hot, though. Likewise, it would get cold at night.
The native population are - or started as - perfectly ordinary modern Homo sapiens, and were essentially dropped on the planet by accident and without much in the way of support equipment - no libraries, modular factories, etc. By the time my story picks up, they've clawed their way back up from the rock-bottom crash to about equivalent to the nineteen-teens. For entirely arbitrary plot reasons, they've yet to reinvent radio. There are also more logical places where their emphasis differs from what Earth's had, and so they're more or less sophisticated at.
I have some suspicions about what the place is like, but I'd like to hear y'all's opinions without having me prejudicing you beyond telling you the image that started this setting percolating in my mind.
It's in the middle of a tremendous, tremendously flat desert, like if Groom Dry Lake covered from horizon to horizon without a single bit of variation. The sky above is absolutely cloudless, giving an unobstructed view of the glaring sun and an earth-like planet - clouds, ocean, green plants, etc. - covering a shockingly large arc. The perfection of the plain is spoiled by two things - the first is some sort of spaceplane, maybe seventy feet long from the scale of the space-suited but helmetless human figure standing in its shadow. It's obviously crash-landed - its skin is scratched and torn, the underside is all ripped up, and there's a long scrape mark trailing out of frame where it slid to a halt. It's equally obviously never going to fly again.
About two thirds of the way to the horizon is a vehicle that looks like someone crossed a container ship with a three-trailer road train with one of those obnoxiously huge off-road dump trucks with a windjammer with Turby-type wind-turbines where its sails should be.
And just overhead is buzzing a moderately sleek biplane, like something Earth would've built circa 1930 or so, with an open cockpit but retractable landing gear.

(Note - I suspect I'm going to be changing the worlds' orbital period to somewhere around 25+ hours; longer days and nights have more time to heat up and cool down and drive the weather patterns I want.)
Planet Scour
Diameter: 18,928 km (1.48*Earth's)
Density: 4.3 g/cm^3 (0.78*Earth's)
Mass: 1.5294*10^25 kg (2.56*Earth's)
Viewing Angle: 21 degrees (42*that of Luna as seen from Earth)
Albedo: ~5.5
Orbital Period: 21.7 hours

Planet Iden
Diameter: 11,654 km (0.91)
Density: 5.9 g/cm^3 (1.1)
Mass: 4.7794*10^24 kg (0.80)
Viewing Angle: 15 degrees (30)
Albedo: ~3.5
Orbital Period: 21.7 hours

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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[Black Aeronaut]

Airships. Gotta have airships.
Sorry, I'm just a sucker for those things. ^_^;; Failing Airships, then one helluva rail system.
Another thought - one of these worlds could have a lot of cool weather rainforests like what existed in Antartica in the age of the Dinosaurs.

---

Black Aeronaut Technologies Group, LLC
Aerospace Solutions for the discerning spacer
"To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News
of this kind a danish requires."

---

[Sirrocco]

First of all, the weather on the shores of the local water features are going to be heavy on the precipitation. You can get noticeable microclimates in California by watering lawns with imported water. You can definately get that out of small seas.
Second: water has had some significant topological effects on the damp and dirty rockball we call home. Lack of things like glacial creep, river-driven trenches, ocean tides, water to drive all that pretty precipitation-based erosion, expanding ice to push cracks and so on are going to have a *lot* of effects on the shape of the planet. At the very least, your mountains are going to be taller, sharper, and more likley to contain odd shapes. They're all going to be igneous, too, or metamorphic off of igneous, because you won't hve the water to drive sedimentary - at least not at a large scale, and maybe not at all, depending on how arid it really is. I suspect that you wouldn't see the same kind of continental shelf, either, but I don't know enough about the topic to say for sure. It is certainly the case that hotspot volcanoes (like the one that's responsible for hawaii) would be *enormous*.
Third, you're going to want to work on your water cycle a bit. If your ocean trenches are maintaining anything like a stable level of water, then they're going to need to get back all of the water that the burning sun evaporates during the day. You probably don't need to much, but you do ned enough that it's a plausible skeleton.
Fourth, people are going to be living almost exclusively on the bits that would be our ocean floor (however that winds up). It's the major available source of water - which means it's also the place that has most of the *life*. Head too far away, and you don't have enough water or enough local food supply to sustain more than a few aboriginal types. There are going to be huge areas outside the control of civilization, and it's going to *stay* that way, because they just can't support enough people for civilization to be self-supporting. The primary nation-building resource will not be Land, but Water. Civilizations that have no contiguous water-routes (or at least, no points of water within a few days travel of one another) will not naturally have any contact at all, and setting out across the trackless desert in search of them would have been very much like Columbus's trip in our world - they are smaller, and further apart, likely a bit greater in number, and possibly may be found by looking for weather, but serious similarities remain.
Essentially, the culture will shape itself according to the availability of water. Figure out exactly how you want your water to behave, and let that inform how your people organizze themselves.

[drakensis]

Anticipate a lot of work on irrigation having been done, so good pumps and related technologies.
I'm not sure how much oil there would be on the world - IIRC, it is believed that oil forms predominantly in sedimentary rocks forming under water. Coal might be more common as that involved land-dwelling plants.
Also, where did humanity get it's start here? If they all start at the same place then they'll have expanded following water and the deserts between water sources will be somewhere explored for new oases. If they landed scattered then the deserts would be barriers to warfare between them - the logistics of getting an armed force across them and then forcing your way into a water source would be challenging, to say the least.D for Drakensis
Contagious, rampant insanity isnt against the rules.
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Custos Sophiae]

Water, mostly trapped in sedimentary rocks, lubricates the tectonics plates, by lowering the melting point of the rocks. Without water, on a earth-sized planet, you get geology like Venus, which doesn't have tectonic plates. Instead, every few hundred million years, the internal pressures build up enough the volcanos erupt everywhere, resurfacing the entire planet.
With a little water, you won't get anything quite that dramatic, but there will be bigger earthquakes at the ocean trenches and fewer volcanos along the mountain chains neighbouring them. The hotspot volcanos will be bigger, since the plates will be moving more slowly.

[Acyl]

Alright, so you're talking about small seas...
...and rivers where our ocean trenches would be.
How long are these trench-rivers? How widespread are they?
Geologically speaking, oceanic trenches are margins between plates...convergent margins, where one of the lithospheric plates sinks beneath the other, instead of rising up in a mountain-esque feature.
There's something like 50,000 km of such plate margins on Earth, though not all of 'em are deep enough to qualify under the layman's definition of an ocean trench.
Still, there's a lot of 'em.
So.
I'm not a geologist, so I could be totally off about this...
But I'm thinking, hey, you've got the beginnings of continent-spanning mega-rivers here.
As Sirrocco pointed out, civilisation's going to be based around where the water is.
So, y'know, there's gonna be a lot of human settlements - and trade - based around those really big and really long rivers...
Here's another thing to consider - your planet's gonna look like a ball criss-crossed with veins of water, and the occasional little blob of landlocked sea.
You got the canals of Mars, man. =)
-- Acyl

[Acyl]

Um, okay, so I posted my last comment before reading what Custos Sophiae wrote.
I feel a little silly now. >_>
-- Acyl

[Sirrocco]

Actually, by my (admittedly totally untrained) eyes, you'ld still have those continent-spanning megarivers, since those would be the places that *would* have the water to run earthlike plate tectonics. The sections that set up convergent margins (or something similar) would tend to be self-sustaining, while other places would act in more igneous ways. Also, it wouldn't be rivers so much as very thin seas - and there'd probably be a fair bit of water being forced down there with them, whih means that anywhere that has people is also fairly likely to have geysers or the like somewhere nearby.
Also, there's the question of how fresh this water is. With the amount of geothermic activity that I suspect would be going on, it's going to have a high mineral content to begin with. If it's fresh(ish) then you're going to need to be able to explain *why*. If it's salt, then your peeps are going to have to have some sort of in-depth structure on how to turn it drinkable (and if the answer is boil-and-condense may well be running mineral refinement out of the sludge that remains.)
explanations for our micro-seas being fresh(ish):
- less salt in the rocks to erode
-- this is going to mean that salt is not as easy to come by, and will be more precious still (ameliorated to a degree by the fact that the entire place is dry, and food keeps better naturally). At extreme levels, salt could turn into another of the "vital neccessities of civilization" and become something of a tool of potential oppression. No one needs much salt, but everyone needs a little, and if they can only get it from *you*...
- less salt being eroded out of the rocks by the local water cycle
-- this ties back into the question of how the local water cycle works - which in turn depends on some bits of planetary topology.
- less time to accumulate
-- realistically, "fresh" would mean "less salty than blood" - and our blood was ocean-normal as of the point where we left the waters for the land. You wouldn't have much if anything in the way of native land-critters if this were the case.
- something is pulling the salt *out*.
-- insert handwavium here
Mind you, you can mix a few of these, and wind up with relatively minor effects. In particular, making the place a bit younger and a bit more salt-poor will get you to the fresh side of brackish pretty easily without overwhelming effects.
Warning: this post is almost entirely untrained speculation. I tend to think that I'm pretty good at untrained speculation, but if anyone who actually knows what they're doing wants to correct me, please do.

[ECSNorway]

Random note; it's kind of difficult to have internal combustion engines practical enough for a 1930's-style biplane without some form of at least basic radio being developed.
It's possible that, having never seriously explored electricity beforehand, they never developed the telegraph, which would lead to an assumption of limited usefulness on the part of the most basic of spark-gap radios (without morse code or an equivalent, you're not going to get anything out of them but static). However, that leads me to question how they get the airplane's engine to run without some form of electrical ignition system for the combustion chamber. It would be amusing to consider how that might work... some sort of impact-driven piezoelectric effect, maybe, triggered by the motion of the cylinders?--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[DHBirr]

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However, that leads me to question how they get the airplane's engine to run without some form of electrical ignition system for the combustion chamber.

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There was a thread on the General Forum back in early June referencing a steam-engine airplane. Of course, that begs the question of whether they have enough water handy that they'd be willing to "waste" it in the engine.
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Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

[deadpan29]

On the subject of average temperature, you can make that average whatever you want by placing the planet closer or further from the sun. However, less moisture in the air (and fewer clouds to block or trap heat) tends to result in wider swings of temperature over the course of a day, producing hotter afternoons and colder nights.
As someone who lives downwind of Lake Michigan, I can tell you that it is perfectly possible to have a humid climate and ecosystem in the vicinity of one of these small seas, even if the rest of the planet is mostly desert.
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No, I don't believe the world has gone mad.  In order for it to go mad it would need to have been sane at some point.

[Valles]

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First of all, the weather on the shores of the local water features are going to be heavy on the precipitation. You can get noticeable microclimates in California by watering lawns with imported water. You can definately get that out of small seas.

---

In other words, there would be areas we'd consider fairly temperate, except for the insane day-night temperature difference and the winds blasting back and forth between the plateaus and the deserts.
Hm. You might even get something wet, where the prevailing wind was blowing up onto the continent - all the water the air had picked up would be forced out on the slope and left to run back down. In the other direction it'd be a lot more gradual - that'd be where most of the farmland'd be - but... Hm. That sort of soil would be so easy to destroy - if the original colonists had any sense, and I think they must have, they'd have made sustained land use and such high on their lists of 'things not to forget, no matter what'.
All of which would make arable land unspeakably precious, which, after a couple of hundred years of population growth, would put a real pressure cooker on local politics.
...
Good.

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I suspect that you wouldn't see the same kind of continental shelf, either, but I don't know enough about the topic to say for sure. It is certainly the case that hotspot volcanoes (like the one that's responsible for hawaii) would be *enormous*.

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The mid-basin ridges would have softer slopes, too - their lava outflows would take longer to cool and flow farther.
There might not be a continental shelf, but I think that wind and chemical erosion and the various sorts of mass wasting would make the slopes behave similarly.
And yeah, Scour likely has its very own Olympus Mons, several times over.

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Third, you're going to want to work on your water cycle a bit. If your ocean trenches are maintaining anything like a stable level of water, then they're going to need to get back all of the water that the burning sun evaporates during the day. You probably don't need to much, but you do ned enough that it's a plausible skeleton.

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As mentioned above, everything slopes down to the trenches eventually. How much water is tied up in endless cycles of frost and evaporate is pretty much irrelevant... It all gets back eventually.

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Fourth, people are going to be living almost exclusively on the bits that would be our ocean floor (however that winds up). It's the major available source of water - which means it's also the place that has most of the *life*. Head too far away, and you don't have enough water or enough local food supply to sustain more than a few aboriginal types.

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*nodnod* And keep going for a little longer and you might as well be on the surface of the moon. The inner reaches of the plains, the tops of the continental plateaus... there is nothing on Earth to compare.

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There are going to be huge areas outside the control of civilization, and it's going to *stay* that way, because they just can't support enough people for civilization to be self-supporting. The primary nation-building resource will not be Land, but Water.

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Not neccessarily water, as such, at least at this technological level, so much as arable land. These seas of theirs... probably the closest thing on Earth would be Lake Baikal. There's a lot of water there, by any human scale, particularly when compared to a society that's only a generation or two past achieving the industrial muscle to, as it were, make the desert bloom. It's just that, mostly, it stays where it is rather than getting out and, well, watering things.
Most conflicts at this point in their history would, I think, be more about habit and power and old hatreds than deadly-serious survival... Which would emphatically not have been the case in the past.

---

Civilizations that have no contiguous water-routes (or at least, no points of water within a few days travel of one another) will not naturally have any contact at all, and setting out across the trackless desert in search of them would have been very much like Columbus's trip in our world - they are smaller, and further apart, likely a bit greater in number, and possibly may be found by looking for weather, but serious similarities remain.

---

You're right about the seperation of civilizations - and I'll get into their possible origins later - but there are a couple of serious points of difference from that metaphor. First, however little they might know about their ancestors' technology, these people's historical record, their classical antiquity, includes the knowledge that those other potential living sites do exist, perhaps even has a few, much copied, terribly sketchy maps. They don't have to work blind. Second, one nation to one sea would, I think, be much too optimistic. Third, those same seas would provide a fairly convenient connection within civilizations - cities need water, and all the water in a given basin is going to be connected to its sea.
And finally, of course, there's the fact that it's been at least decades, probably centuries since they regained the technical know-how to solve the practical problems of crossing those distances... which isn't to say it's trivial, just economic.

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I'm not sure how much oil there would be on the world - IIRC, it is believed that oil forms predominantly in sedimentary rocks forming under water. Coal might be more common as that involved land-dwelling plants.

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No, I don't think it would be. Any rock in the immediate area of a convergent plate boundary - as all of our livable areas are - is going to be either relatively new or not long for this world. Coal formation requires taking peat - which I don't think you'd likely get in any of these environments we're talking about anyway - and lithifying it, which takes time.
So, my conclusion is that, with water levels not having changed appreciably since the development of multicellular life, there are really just no usuable fossil fuels to be found.
This will neccessarily produce some serious changes in tech base.

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Also, where did humanity get it's start here? If they all start at the same place then they'll have expanded following water and the deserts between water sources will be somewhere explored for new oases. If they landed scattered then the deserts would be barriers to warfare between them - the logistics of getting an armed force across them and then forcing your way into a water source would be challenging, to say the least.

---

The situation I've been working out is that you have three main sources of people around when star travel collapses and the system is thrown to its own devices. First, and by far the largest demographic group, you have the first wave of colonists who had been bound for Iden - call it one to five ships, size as-yet-undetermined, some of which made it after Disaster Struck and some of which had to abort to Scour... Say also that perhaps one or two had to abandon ship and scatter lifeboats all over the place. These were hardy, healthy, positive minded people, but the tools and such they'd brought with them were more aimed at building houses and clearing farmland to prepare for the arrival of the majority of the colony. So, they were fairly well set up to survive, but didn't have any of the tools or expertise to hang onto advanced technology. Second, you have corporate prospectors and such - who had been hired to look for commercially viable mineral deposits, useful biota, etc. And third, you have the 'real' scientists, who've been in place for years, possibly decades, cataloging, mapping, essentially going over the two worlds with the finest-toothed comb they can. Among other things, they're the only ones with any sort of preestablished infrastructure, and would also have the 'domesticated-by-way-of-test-tube' variants of the native plant and animal forms that the colonists were supposed to be farming.
Hm. Say that... two ships made it down safely on Iden, one made it to Scour, and the other two broke up on their way down, leaving varying percentages of their survival pods scattered hither-and-yon.
Now, the prospectors have transportation, but only limited supplies of food, fuel, and spare parts. The scientists have some small machine shops and various other tremendously useful gadgets, if at a very small scale. And the colonists have the manpower and enough genetic variation for a stable population. It would be possible to combine the three before the remaining fuel for the prospectors' aircraft ran out.
But only by abandoning the vast majority of the people in the survival pods to die.
Which they didn't, couldn't, wouldn't.
Instead, there were a couple of trips made delivering seeds and useful critters to the grounded colony ship... and then the prospectors spent their fuel - and, often, their lives, when they ran out in mid-flight - ferrying as many of the survivors as possible to the nearest scientific base-camps (which were deliberately located in watered zone).
(Incidentally, Iden's situation was much better - besides being a much nicer place to live, overall, it started with a concentrated population. Its tech base never fell nearly as far, but its native fauna and microbes found Terran life much tastier, so that slowed them down considerably. They're only up to about what we'd call the early nineteen seventies.)
Exactly what happened next, and what effects it'd have down the line... I'm not sure.

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With a little water, you won't get anything quite that dramatic, but there will be bigger earthquakes at the ocean trenches and fewer volcanos along the mountain chains neighbouring them. The hotspot volcanos will be bigger, since the plates will be moving more slowly.

---

*nod* Right, noted, I hadn't considered that. Good catch.

---

- less salt being eroded out of the rocks by the local water cycle
-- this ties back into the question of how the local water cycle works - which in turn depends on some bits of planetary topology.
- less time to accumulate
-- realistically, "fresh" would mean "less salty than blood" - and our blood was ocean-normal as of the point where we left the waters for the land. You wouldn't have much if anything in the way of native land-critters if this were the case.

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Essentially, I think it'd be these two between them. The local system is rather younger than Earth - about in its equivalent to the Pennsylvanian Epoch - and the rate at which laden water trickles in from outside the seas' immediate drainage basins is quite slow.

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Random note; it's kind of difficult to have internal combustion engines practical enough for a 1930's-style biplane without some form of at least basic radio being developed.

---

Diesel is for unbelievers, electricity is wrooooooooooonng
Steam has got the power that will pull us along
^_^
Actually, high power-weight applications like, oh, aircraft, are likely to be diesel-types, running off of vegetable oil or something similar. I figure that the fact that you have to either grow or make your own fuel is going to be a bigger issue.
Like, 'that scout plane's fuel costs twice what its spare parts do' type issue. Extensive use of chemical engines of any sort would be, I think, a military monopoly.
Electrical and industrial energy would have to come from sources we'd consider renewable - wind, hydro, geothermal, solar (updraft towers, energy towers, Stirling engines).

---

On the subject of average temperature, you can make that average whatever you want by placing the planet closer or further from the sun. However, less moisture in the air (and fewer clouds to block or trap heat) tends to result in wider swings of temperature over the course of a day, producing hotter afternoons and colder nights.

---

There's a limit to the range I can use, though - because Iden is there, too, and equally livable in temperature range... but has a much stronger greenhouse effect.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

Have the colonists on each planet retained awareness of the other group?
...They're so close that even in the absence of radio it might be possible to communicate via semaphore mirrors.
Also, it's entirely possible that the Scour lifeforms are derivatives of Iden's, via microbes tossed around by meteor impact.
--Sam
"And so he says, 'I don't like the cut of your jib.' And I go, I says, IT'S THE ONLY JIB I GOT, BABY!!!!!"

[Valles]

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Have the colonists on each planet retained awareness of the other group?

---

The Idenites are. The marks of large-scale irrigation are visible pretty clearly, and they've got a deeper historic and scientific tradition. Scourines aren't.
Why? Well, because when you can read by the light of the 'moon', there's really no reason to spend much effort lighting your cities.
Think about it. Luna's albedo is about .12, IIRC - which means that it's only about a third as reflective as Iden is... and, as they're seen from Earth and Scour's surfaces, 1/30th the diameter. Scour-seen-from-Iden is even brighter. Those life-forms living on their near-sides that have any sort of dark-vision at all are either pelagic or orignally native to someplace else.
Yes, that includes humans; their night-vision is as good or better than anything bigger than a tree shrew, on either world.
BTW, I figure that, without the moderating effects of large oceans, Scour's weather made the first couple generations want to whimper for their mommies. We're talking Martian windspeeds in air thicker than Earth's; their architecture probably makes classical Egyptian look open and fragile.
The basin plains do have sand - mostly it's a layer a few feet thick over a massive hardpan, which in turn will lie right above the basalt bedrock. You do not want to be out when one of the planetary sandstorms whips up.
Ja, -n
(*wishes he were better at drawing random patterns, so he could start on that map*)

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

Now I'm trying to visualize the orbital dynamics.
Are they tidally locked in respect to each other, so that each world only ever sees one face of the other?
If so, there's going to be one face of each world that never has a moon in the night sky. Species exclusive to that side might well have decent night-vision.
If not, then no place on either world will always have a "moon" visible at night.
--Sam
"He says to me, he says to me, 'Baby, I'm tired of workin' for the MAN!' I says, I says, WHY DON'T YOU BLOW HIM TO BITS?"

[Valles]

---

Are they tidally locked in respect to each other, so that each world only ever sees one face of the other?
If so, there's going to be one face of each world that never has a moon in the night sky. Species exclusive to that side might well have decent night-vision.

---

Yes. You'll note that their orbital and rotational periods are the same; which is why I specified species native only to the nearer sides.
Of course, for human purposes, the far sides never see each other, so it doesn't matter what kind of lighting they have.
I'm more worried about what effect the lock would have on their tectonics.
Ja, -n

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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

Ah. I missed that detail first time 'round. n.n;
If they're close enough, it might well have a visible effect on their shape...
--Sam
"One of these days, milkshake! BOOM!"

[Sirrocco]

Worth noting: right next to the water bodies you'ld have far more regular temperatures. It's only when you get out a bit that you really start seeing the "burn and freeze" thing.
Oceanfront property is going to be precious.
The winds will still be howling, though, and will probably serve as Primary Industrial Powersource in a big way. You could invest in solar tech, but really, what's the point? Wind-powered sailing ships are likley to be a major part of the economy for a good *long* time.
Local tides aren't going to be nearly as impressive as you otherwise might think - first because the large bodies of water aren't going to cover enough space to allow for really impressive tidal effects, and second because the mutual tidal lock is going to mean that the tides don't move at all.
Also, if, as you say, the deep trenches are fresh water, then the difficulty isn't going to be the water itself so much as water transport. You could run steam just fine on the oceans themselves, if you ever had a place so becalmed to make use of it, but the further out you get, the more expensive the water is. Pulling water for nonapproved uses out of the irrigation channels is going to start looking an awful lot like "poaching on the King's land" from the feudal POV.

[CattyNebulart]

you might also see something like in the medival netherlands. People are responsible for maintaining the irigation/canals near them. Failure to do so is roughly equivalent to high treason and the peasants hate you more for it. In the netherlands it's because it could cause floods, here it would be failure of the irigation system.
How robust is the system and how well does it deal with shocks to the system? Redundancey is expensive and inefficient but potentially life saving.
How long can crops be without water before you have crop failure? This clearly depends on the crop, but it might just be a day or two, or it might be weeks. Most of our food comes from crops that do fail quickly if there is not water.
Also the people further inland might die of thirst in that case.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[Bob Schroeck]

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However, that leads me to question how they get the airplane's engine to run without some form of electrical ignition system for the combustion chamber. It would be amusing to consider how that might work... some sort of impact-driven piezoelectric effect, maybe, triggered by the motion of the cylinders?

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Or perhaps a system based on the Diesel cycle, which uses spontaneous combustion rather than electrical ignition.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[Sirrocco]

You'ld almost certainly run into gradations of water-adaptation. People who lived on or near the waterways would have as much water as they needed, while people who lived further and further out would have adjusted to less and less of it (as well as adjusting to more and more extreme temperatures.) Moving out from the waterways would get to be very uncomfortable very quickly, and the people who lived out there would likely both know how to identify the water-fat on sight and care about the difference. As you move out from the civilization clustered around the Waters (and the occasional pockets that have been pushed out either by tech or by oddities of weather patterns) life gets harsher, and the people get harder and more sharply pragmatic.
Thoughts and questions...
- The crash has got to have happened hundreds of years ago at least. Even with the "wizard on the mountain" effect of the scientists, it'll take that long to reboot. Why has no one from home come looking for them in that time?
- 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?
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.
- 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.

[Norgarth]

In reference to Iden and gravitational effects on tides; depending on whether Iden has large bodies of water, would this not result in the side facing Scour having less land area and more water area than the side facing away? __________________
We are not ninjas, we are a hedge. Please move along.
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

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Why has no one from home come looking for them in that time?

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Valles points out a few posts up that star travel as a whole has collapsed. No one's going to be looking for anyone for a while, it seems.
--Sam
"EAT MY SMOKE, COPPER! Aaaaaa-hahahahaha!"

[Happerry]

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- The crash has got to have happened hundreds of years ago at least. Even with the "wizard on the mountain" effect of the scientists, it'll take that long to reboot. Why has no one from home come looking for them in that time?

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Who said that FTL travel was easy? It might just be me but I have a picture of a realy huge Coldsleep Ship
entering a highly temperamental Warp Portal Generator that choses just this moment to overload due to low maintenance (Thereby giving you the disaster previously mentioned) that is the only efficient way to FTL speeds. Of course that means no one else is showing up until another Portal generator shows up. Which is going to take a while, even if there is some hideously expensive and slower alternative.Those who fear the darkness have never seen what the light can do.

[Sirrocco]

Mostly I'd just been saying that the crash (whatever it was) would have to be significant enough to either set back development (at least in stellar exploration) by *hundreds of years* (or more), or somehow obliterate all record of that star system as a destination. (alternately, it would require that the folks back home Just Not Care, which probably means that the society started with a group that self-selected for some odd religious/politicalsocial views and wated to get away to build their own little utopia.) This is not actually neccessary information for the story - all the peeps here know is that Bad Things Happened and then No One Came. Ignore the question - it's outside of scope. (Unless you want to use it as an excuse to pick some religious/philosophical/governmental/whatever whackos as initial settlers.)