Re: Interesting concultural ideas
| From: | Almaran Dungeonmaster <dungeonmaster@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Tuesday, December 4, 2001, 8:50 |
|---|
Dan Seriff wrote:
> Has anyone contemplated (or implemented) having a conculture based on a
> celestial body other than a globe? I've been playing a little too
> much Halo
> lately, and I like the idea of placing my conculture on (in?) a ringworld.
>
> Anyone else's people live on a ringworld or (yikes!) a Dyson sphere?
<advertorial/background>
I am also on the CC2-mailing list. CC2 stands for campaign cartographer 2
and is a programm designed to draw campaign maps for world
builders/conculturalists. More info at www.profantasy.com.
</advertorial/background>
On this list, I have seen as many differently shaped worlds as their are
different shapes of patatoes. One guy there is actually working on a Dyson
sphere world, and asked me (as an astrophysics major) to help him calculate
stuff for the world. However, when doing the math, a Dyson sphere turns out
to have many, many problems, such as the lack of gravity from the sphere on
the inside of the sphere (science majors may remeber Gauss's law). This can
be solved by spinning the Dyson sphere around, as to create zones of
centrifugal "gravitation" around the equator. However, as you travel north
and south, you become lighter and lighter, and your walking become ever more
slanted as the centrifugal forces pull you more and more sideways than
downwards...
With a sun in the middle of the sphere,such as he proposed, the problem
became even bigger, since than everything falls towards the center of the
sphere ;-)
As to your idea of a rindworld: the feasibility depends for the greater part
on the design. My advice is to keep it small! Greater rings are increasingly
more unlikely as tidal forces will break up such a ring quite fast. Also
look at the total population size and see if the size of the world will be
big enough to support that many people.
If you go for the complete fanatasy approach, without scientific background,
the only limit you have, off course, is your imagination. But even then:
every world, however fantastic, has rules that govern and define it. To make
a world believable, and more than a joke, it has to be consistent with its
own rules (however weird they may be).
Maarten
Reply