Mainly I was thinking that that would give the story teller an excuse to drop outsiders in any time he felt like it. Say a rescue ship shows up all ready to help out those poor surviving savages (Because after all they have been out of contact with galactic culture for how long again? They must be savages after that. Or at least that's how they see it) and coincidently they just happened to have the machinery to extract these rare and valuable minerals that lie underneath the arable land. but shurly they will not mind giving up a little little bit right? Say 60% of it. Now watch wear they get told to put it and the reactions to that.Those who fear the darkness have never seen what the light can do.
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Worldbuilding fun
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 Quote: Tides don't work like that. You get a bulge towards the other gravitational body, and one away from it, because the difference in gravitational force from one side to the other produces a net stretching effect. A useful visualization I have found is to imagine a rope tied to the back bumper of one car and the front bumper of a car behind the first one. Set the cruse control on the front car to 65 mph and the following car to 63 mph. Both cars are putting energy into moving down the road in the same direction, but the net force on the rope results in a tug-of-war. Gravity is pulling on the planet in one direction but the differental between one side and the other produces these opposing bulges. So you might get water colecting in the area towards the other planet, and another such spot away from it. On the other hand, if they are tidally locked, then the shape of the planet itself would also display this sort of bulge as the rock will also deform over time. The portions of the planet toward or away from the partner would be of higher elevation, encouraging water to run away from those points. All in all, I would expect the two traits to cancel out. ---------- 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. 
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.
--Sam "I'm taking off the kid gloves, and putting on the very mad gloves."  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. 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. 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. 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. Ja, -n =============================================== "Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"
Something I want to do in this setting is play with the idea of wheeled shipping.
I mean, like, a big-rig the size of an ocean liner type shipping. Without water continuity, but with extreme expanses of at least relatively flat land, I think that this'd actually be a fairly practical way to do things. But there are some fairly signficant technical hurdles in the way, first, particularly if you want to build one for military applications. I have some ideas about that, but I'd like to know what y'all think those problems might be, and how they might be solved. Ja, -n =============================================== "I'm terribly sorry, but I have to kill you quite horribly now."
heavy objects are hard to move esspecially when you have to relly soley on muskle power, either that of animals or that of humans. Volume goes up by the cube, so after you hit a certain size you won't get any efficiency gains because your motive power is limited. Also bigger things cost more up front and it's a bigger share of buisness lost. Also for such a bigg transport it only makes sense if you have that much to tranport from point A to point B. if you are going to visit villages to trade them the things made in cities for some of what they produce a wagon is in most cases big enough.
In short they make no economic sense. Also keep in mind it was not until 1600 or so that corperations statred to appear, where people pooled their money to buy a ship do that they could make a profit. Without similar advances in the financial and social machinery such large projects are typically funded by a single person, and the amount of money to fund such large projects is rare. 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."
Well, first, the technical period in question is more to the order of 1910-1920; steam and, in setting, wind power are already well developed.
Second, these things aren't being used for the wasteful sort of individual direct shipping that we see in our own real world - a big reason to build them to ship scales is that they're making ship-scale trips of tens of thousands of miles without much or any resupply along the way, crossing deserts the size of oceans. =============================================== "I'm terribly sorry, but I have to kill you quite horribly now."
I don't really think that's enough to justify single large vehicles as opposed to large caravans of smaller vehicles. You might get some larger vehicles than are common in our world, but not on the scale you seem to want.
At sea, smaller ships are more vulnerable to weather and it's relatively hard to keep ships close together, communicate between them pre-radio, and move people and goods among them, while obstacles are few and far between. Those all push for or support a "one big ship" model. On land, on the other hand, its much easier to deal with the logistics of keeping a fleet of small vehicles together. Without the sort of pressures pushing the "one big ship" model, the greater flexibility, cost-effectiveness, maintainability, and so forth of just using lots of small vehicles would probably stop people from considering building huge "land-ships." Aaron Nowack Aaron Nowack Quote:You haven't mentioned what these people will be like culturally which, to my mind, will govern what they do with their technological knowledge. If these people live with only limited water supplies and arable land, how do they split it up? Are there huge class divisions where only a few people have all of the resources? If so, what mechanisms are in place to prevent uprisings? Is there a lot of fighting? What about population control? The higher the population, the fewer resources per capita will be available. Are there enough wars that the population is kept low enough, or are there other measures in place? Quote:Point. But, given that we're talking about a planet that gets Martian-grade sandstorms in air considerably thicker than Earth's, how small a vehicle would you want to be caught out in? Honestly I'm less concerned with whether or not they make sense than I am with 'Do they make the background look more interesting?' and 'How do I execute them such that people won't feel inclined to dispute them?' IOW, their existence is being driven by their dramatic value, and dragging their technical issues along behind. Quote:There's plenty of water, really, it's just that there's so very few places close enough to it to grow crops on. Limited supplies of land to use is a problem that's been around since forever, and given the number of isolated populations there's probably one nation or another using any version you can think of. Unfortunately, I'm fried at the moment, so figuring out what those are, exactly, would feel entirely too much like work. Quote:Population pressure is pretty fierce; not so much so that resource scarcity is a gnawing problem for any given individual, but enough to be noticable and drive a number of wars for territory. That, in turn, fuels and has been fueling some serious vendettas and power-games, like the nastier aspects of the modern Middle East and nineteenth-century Europe rolled up into one. Ja, -n =============================================== "I'm terribly sorry, but I have to kill you quite horribly now." Quote:You might be interested in Jared Diamond's "Collapse" (non-fiction), which discusses environmental degration and population pressure on several historical human societies. It might give you some ideas, at least if you're interested in how not to do things. :-) 
When you mentioned the size of the landships you had in mind, the first image that jumped to my mind was of Rodney Matthews' "Terrestrial Voyager" poster. Of which -- aaarrrgh -- I haven't been able to find a good-sized picture anywhere on the 'Net so far. If the crew are normal humans, the mainmast looks like it's somewhere around 100 meters from deck to the upper crow's nest -- which is actually enclosed like a cabin.
But the problems with this design are legion, even if you do without some of the more fantastical elements of Matthews' vision. (The bat-wing sails won't catch nearly enough wind, the axle spikes serve only to look scary, and that towering sterncastle -- .) Just to name the first difficulty that comes to my mind: friction. You've got massive inertia to overcome in order to start moving. The axles will have to be humongous to support the vessel's weight, and lubricating them to such a degree that the landship could make good use of any but the strongest winds would be an appalling task. Especially crossing deserts. Yes, I recall you saying that there're very strong winds, but those winds, you also said, are carrying lots of sand and dust and grit -- to get in everywhere and mess up the lubricants. It's really cool visually. But could it ever be workable? ----- Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING. |
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