Bay 12 Games Forum
Finally... => Creative Projects => Topic started by: ggamer on February 06, 2013, 09:24:19 pm
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I am... sort of possessed to do this? I guess this is the awkward human equivalent of a strange mood?
Anyway, feel free to add absolutely anything to this is you feel it. I'm writing completely off the cuff here, and I urge you to do the same while writing.
So, in some small tucked away universe, maybe god got a little creative, tucked it away somewhere, there is a planet.
This planet is called Sphaera.
Sphaera is unique in that It is so large that instead of orbiting a sun, suns orbit it. This affects the tides in strange ways, as well as the gravity.
Safe to say, Sphaera is strange.
Any normal planetary body of sufficient enough size should have strong enough gravity to simply snuff out any life that would attempt to develop. But, for unknown reasons, Sphaera simply has 1.5 times normal earth gravity, allowing life to develop normally on the planet.
Life, and in relation, biodiversity, are both another way that Sphaera warps the fabric of reality. See, as a planet as large as it is, Sphaera has an incredible variation among it's climates. Somehow, in some sort of pseudo-scientific pseudo-god's will it has developed five separate sentient races which vie for control of the planet.
In addition, there are several caves on Sphaera that house intricate caverns. Caverns so large and well designed that they might seem man-made. Under the crust, thousands of fantastic creatures roam, seemingly springing to life from the dreams, and in several cases nightmares, of the beings they live under. Large seas have somehow formed under the crust, forming Journey-To-The-Center-Of-The-Earth level ecosystems in these caverns. These caverns go as deep as they can, before gravity itself seems to make up it's mind and, in combination with the heat of the planetary core, keeps the caverns from going extraordinarily deep.
Another addition to the Sphaera-hates-physics club are the floating islands. Ranging from as small as normal islands to as large as some small countries, they hang over the landscape, sometimes providing shade from the orbiting sun on a hot day, sometimes plunging the ground below into eternal night.
Welp, that's all I've got. Feel free to add anything you wish (Even if it conflicts with all known laws of nature, 'cause fuck scientists). Or, feel free to let this thread die. Either way, I'm finished being siezed by a strange mood, so i'm going to sleep.
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The five races are:
Elves. They have four eyes. They produce great rangers. They are famous for their seminaries. They are exceptionally good at transmutation. A great doom awaits them, and they are all too aware of it.
Chimera-people. They reproduce slowly. They are very cunning. In their culture, every person is expected to be good at metalsmithing. They are integrated into kobold culture, but have no land of their own. They are a magical mutation of kobolds.
Zebramen. They can astrally project their minds. They are famous for their drug dens. The only kind of magic they can do is alchemy. They exist as servants to the elves.
Kobolds. They are furred and have silver eyes. They are famous for their banks. Their government is a theocracy. They control a rich state that is the site of many ancient tombs.
Dwarves. They have orange eyes. Their presence can induce terror in others. Their magical practices focus exclusively on death magic. They worship a matriarchial pantheon of gods and goddesses. They believe the powers that be are generally distant and uninvolved in their lives. Their government is a dictatorship that is efficient. They exist as nomads. They are a magical mutation of kobolds.
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Gravity is 1.5x for unknown reasons? Surely we can do better than that. A not-so-dense planet with a large enough radius could theoretically get that low, depending on composition. How big are we talking? I'll do the math and see what kind of interior this bad boy has.
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Gravity is 1.5x for unknown reasons? Surely we can do better than that. A not-so-dense planet with a large enough radius could theoretically get that low, depending on composition. How big are we talking? I'll do the math and see what kind of interior this bad boy has.
Well the problem I see is that if it does indeed only have 1.5x Earth's gravity, how are suns orbiting it instead of the other way around? For reference our sun has a surface gravity 28x that of Earth's.
Here's a possibility. Maybe the planet is hollow. Like maybe the size of the planet is somewhere around that of our solar system but it's actual thickness is roughly that of Earth's. In the center would be a very massive but very small star, constantly sending out waves of energy which somehow balances out the pressure of the Earth-like crust, keeping it from collapsing in on itself. In this way other stars could actually orbit the planet, but technically they'd be orbiting the star inside of it.
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...how literally are we doing this world-building here?
edit: Herp typo.
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I've already contacted the Dutch requesting their assistance in dredging up new land.
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I'm trying to imagine the situation where the barycentre of a planet-sun system lies within the planet. (And even harder to make it significantly within the planet, without the sun skimming the surface of a very undense but massive sphere, burning a swathe around the equator while leaving the poles frigid, convection/etc only mildly mitigating the latter effect.)
I've come to the conclusion that the least physically impossible situation is to have a very small sun (or at least very unmassive), orbiting whatever type of planet it is. I suggest we go for a 'white-hole'. Not very big, and thus a standard "ball of gas" star wouldn't even undergo fusion at that size, but it's channelling energies from somewhere. Alternatively, a strange construct which makes the sun a shell. The mass of an impossibly small sun, but concentrated to fusionable levels of pressure into a hyperdense shell.
A completely different 'solution' is to have the visible sun (might or might not also need to be made impossibly small), orbiting around a dark neighbour, illuminating the inside of a Dyson Sphere of the (inner) surface-area you're proposing for the planet, with some form of weird electromagnetic 'baffles' betwixt it and the surface rebounding the oscillating sun's rays so as to make it appear to go 'over the horizon' (the effect of which is also dictated to via those self-same-baffles, in the manner of 'straight lines' between non-opposite points of a Poincaré disc). The baffles/space-distortion effect might well be derived from whatever mechanism is used to stabilise the shell around the sun/dark-companion barycentre.
Alternately alternatively, highly distorted space, shell-like, centred upon the planetary core but most significant at the planetary radius? Pi=/=approx(22/7)? A far larger surface area around a massive internal mass, more than you'd normally get, so that the large "gravitational force per radial area" value of further down in the depths (and out in 'orbit') gets... diluted... across a far large steradian value at the surface itself... Not sure if that works out right. Or, of course, how you'd arrange matters to be that way.
(The only fictional example I can dredge up from memory is Egg, the Neutron Star. Can't remember if it had a 'sun' orbiting it, but it was massive enough to do so in the suggested manner, albeit at the expense of having a very exotic planet-side environment (and living beings upon it). I'll look that up later. Of course, one can imagine that our 'magic', in this case is to take the surface of the Neutron Star and make it habitable to tiny-enough creatures for them to imagine that the surface is as large as we expect it to be, and as a side-effect you need less effort to make their effective 'g' value tolerable.)
That aside (and it could also all be Magic, anyway... 'arrangements are made', sort of thing), carry on. Consider me PTW, and I hope to be part of the non-handwavey discussion as soon as I get my bearings.
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Yay! More worldbuilding projects are always fun to watch.
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Gravity is 1.5x for unknown reasons? Surely we can do better than that. A not-so-dense planet with a large enough radius could theoretically get that low, depending on composition. How big are we talking? I'll do the math and see what kind of interior this bad boy has.
Not sure. I was thinking that it was quite massive, though. Let's say that you could probably fit several hundred Jupiters inside of it. It really is as big as it needs to be, I just sort of thought of it being a supermassive planetoid.
...how literally are we doing this world-building here?
edit: Herp typo.
As literally as two soul-searching teenagers reenacting the story of Icarus. Which is to say, tragically literal.
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Guys? What made you think this was a real-physics world? The god? The reality warping? The chimera-people?
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This world can have as much or as little real world justification as we want it to.
If we want to hand-wave having an orbiting sun, das cool.
But wouldn't it be cooler to have a planet the size of six billion jupiters that has suns that orbit it AND makes perfect sense in physics?
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Right, let's look at the floating islands issue. Are they unusually buoyant? (Or, come to that, is the atmosphere unusually dense?) Repelled by whatever it is that keeps the shell of the planet (if it so possesses one) from collapsing? Are the held up by the same mysteryforce that counteracts the massive gravity at short range (i.e. not as far as the sun, but also ensures that the several-hundred jupiters of mass doesn't crunch down into a brown dwarf, or worse a neutron star[1]), either in conjunction with the above or due to 'leaked' localised resonances that sustain (and carry) 'pockets' of rock, and whatever lies above.
Superconductivity/magnetism 'maglev'? Whatever it is that happens in Avatar/Transformers Beast Wars/etc with an exotic element? Naturally-occurring Cavorite 'ores'?
How about... A whole lot of massively strong banyan vines/similar attached the the rock, with (for example) helium or (perhaps easier to create through biological processes) hydrogen in massive balloon-'tops'. Used by the plant(s) to out-compete neighbouring plants in the search for light, particularly abundant stands of vines upon certain rocky areas prosper so much that, having integrated themselves into soil and even rock below them, their oversized lifting 'buds' generate so much force that they've ripped huge swathes of the land beneath them out of the topmost later of the very crust itself of the planet itself.
(Now imagine someone bursting/igniting those balloon-buds. Especially the latter, with the chain reaction along the whole set of balloons, and no "softly settling mountain" to worry about, because it's probably too late to worry if you're beneath it when it happens. ;))
Yes, and Magic, disguised as Handwavium as required.
Apart from the (possible) lift-vine population, fauna and flora upon the floating mountains? Well, avian life of some kind, obviously. (Includes bats, pterosaurs, flying insects (massive ones, probably, at least as the more obvious ones), and anything else with powered flight. Just like a rocky island in the middle of the ocean, it might be the sanctuary/breeding place of a given species (or several) of the active fliers. Each 'flying-island-mountain' might have its own population(s) and when onverging air-currents contrive to draw such mountains together there may be 'territorial' conflicts over the intervening airspace, and the 'penumbral' hunting grounds planetside.
(Doubtless there'll be specialised underside-dwellers, although if there's any risk of the mountains 'grounding', probably very nervous ones living quite close to the edges.)
If we've already got floating mountains, doubtless we also have floating creatures. Either intrinsically blimp-like themselves or commandeering the lift-gas or lifting-buds themselves. Floating more easily on air currents (and perhaps using intelligent vertical control, as well), they'd probably intercept the mountains that are subject to inertia as well as winds. Perhaps they'd breed there (and grab some more gas/bit off more buds, if necessary?). But they'd be lower in the food chain than the active-flying residents (unless significantly large and whale-like, perhaps).
Plants... well, as with island plants, so with floating-island-plants. Although they may more readily disperse seeds to the air to land on other floating islands (or the ground below; probably to be grazed to death as shoots, however...) The more the floating masses are transient (potential to fail and fall, new ones arising periodically) the more migratory/'dispersary' the residents will be of course, but if they're permanent features you'd probably find fairly insular (ha! literally!) speciation.
Intelligent beings will almost certainly attempt to get onto them. I can't imagine there not being a civilisation or two that has staked its claim (however transiently) upon such a prize. Whether climbing up ground-dragging dangling roots, hitching a ride (intentionally or not) upon a new upstart floaty mountain or developing/hijacking the power of flight for themselves, as individuals. If there is such a thing as a long term island-in-the-sky, it'll doubtless have temples (or a cultural equivalent) carved out in its rocks, even if abandoned (or not apparently of the current inhabitant culture... say like Amazonian Indians clambering of Aztec temples without much care what they are, or at least interest in maintaining the 'Caves Of The Gods'). If we have tech-savvy inhabitants, maybe there's something they're doing (or trying to do) to steer their home-mountains. Out of necessity or to a purpose such as warfare with other 'floaty-island-states'. If they are not technically capable, then they may still be ritualistically attempting to influence matters through their gods, etc. (What would be interesting is if there's a mix, either new "rationalist" members of the society have developed the capability even while it remains superstition for the remainder, or a prior technically-able culture has left behind remnants of the tech and its control panels that are (knowingly or not) used by the priesthood to 'worship' their way around the world, to whatever end).
Should controllable flying mountains be a reality, then ground-dwellers are probably subject to those flying them. Tributes to be paid to ensure that their shadow of 'eternal' night[2] is cast down upon some other poor blighter's settlements/territory. If they (or enough of them) remain uncontrolled, then there's pot-luck. Probably encourages nomadic lifestyles, ground-side, or at least territories featuring a number of "alternate" home bases, garrisoned and maintained by volunteer troops (even while under a shadow) so that when the current 'capital' is threatened by shadow
If the mountains are in fixed aerial locales (not subject to the winds, perhaps just stuck in a resonant "lifting force" area) then we'd be talking permanent areas of darkness (although.. sun-rise and sunset would, at the very least, creep in under the edge to most of the enshadowed area, making it more a place where the sun rarely shines), with dark/twilight-adapted populations perhaps occupying these areas. Temperatures would be barely below the surroundings (a few degrees, but wouldn't make a temperate zone arctic in nature, for the size of shadow-casters I'm thinking of, but Ym2MV) but would definitely not support the same plant-life as in the open. A transitional zone of shade-lovers merging into non-chlorophillic plants? A potential for the clichéd "large carnivorous, semi-motile thorny-vines", and some-such. Mushroom Town a possibility for the other. Think of where the nutrients are coming from. (Rivers washing through a zone might be a good source of organic material.)
I'm somewhat minded to imagine there'd be giant ants/similar, farming mushrooms and occasionally raiding neighbouring 'non-nightside' settlements (or ones only marginally under the shadow above) for protein (cows, normally, but perhaps people too if they aren't too disadvantaged in the weaponry stakes and don't have their own morals against farming the farmers...) for themselves or various organic stuff (again, with varying possible prime targets) to set the mushroom crops atop.
If not them, then all kinds of 'normal'[3] outcasts could use this zone as a 'badlands'. By choice or exile. (Alternatively, a twilighter-race could exile its undesirables and inconvenient-heir-to-the-throne-people to the unshadowed landscape, probably to be treated with suspicion and/or awe, if not open hostility. Reverse that as necessary for a good socio-political setup.) Pale skins, the tendency to squint etc, and/or their tendency to wear heavy clothing against the sun, would mark such exiles out, whenever roaming the 'outer lands'.
By the way, sorry... but I've a feeling you want something solid rather than "we could do this... or this, or maybe this... and we can do that as well, perhaps with a bit of this..." If so, feel free to pick and choose, because right now I'm just seeing a whole lot of different possibilities and having a hard time nailing myself down onto any particular one. ;)
[1] Not sure about that. Jupiter is 1/1000th the mass of the Sun, and you're looking at at least 1.4 solar masses (thus 1400 Jupiters) to make up te smaller neutron stars. Although the advantage is that if it's a less fusion-ready set of elements (iron+, especially) it won't have that additional residual 'pressure', nor need to "blow off" so much of the top mass in order to drive the deeper mass down.
[2] And threat of settling down? ...however practical that might be, possibly being catastrophic for the island if the bluff is called and it is attempted!)
[3] i.e. human in a human-settled area, but switch and swap for the various actual races this planet is actually going to be supporting. Consider humans as a shortcut tern in this example, and anywhere else I've inadvertently mentioned them.
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Let's make some assumptions.
1. The floating mountains work, in spirit, like volcanic islands. They sometimes erupt from "hot spots," and eventually crumble from erosion or what-have-you, only for new mountains to rise. They also move some on their own, starting at almost a foot a week but slowing to a few inches per month once it gets off the ground.
2. Aside from their own natural movement, the floating mountains don't move much or easily. Artificial influence can, however.
3. Race-by-race: The elves abhor flying mountains. The kobolds, including chimera-people, love them; in fact, one of the reasons chimera-people were originally created (aside from accident) was that they made good messengers and porters and such between flying archipelagoes. As for the dwarves, their kobold legacy leads them to also live on flying mountains, but they turn the enchanted stone into more of "flying fortresses." (Imagine a normal dwarven fortress, but flying. And neither caverns nor magma.)
The planet has about twenty-seven continents and a hundred major islands or archipelagoes on its surface; most are controlled by elves. However, five continents and a couple dozen island groups are under kobold control, three continents are under contest between elves, dwarves, and kobolds, a couple nearby archipelagoes are controlled by a republic of Zebramen, and the flying mountains mean that most areas of "control" are broken up by warlords and such from above. As it is, there are two dozen large islands or small continents in the air, plus an innumerable number of smaller islands a mile or less across. While 17 of the large flying landmasses are controlled by kobolds, the remainder and many of the smaller islands are under the control of the efficient, decentralized dictatorship of nomadic dwarves.
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What about if the world's core was so huge it had a solar system inside it, with other planets that had life and the sentient life there already mastered spaceships and photon cannons and they were having an entire war with each other inside the core.
One planet, which was richer in Bay12tonium than the other planets, a substance which caused psychopathy and diarrhea in every single sentient being with a future to ruin, was called Unicornicopia which was inhabited by the Unicorncarne.
The Unicorncarne were a subrace of Unicorns except their horns grew heads which grew horns and so forth. They were a socialist warrior-society who worshiped a flower-god named Roger. They had mastered alternative-physics and space-travel and had conquered and colonised half of the 30 planets in their solar system.
The Unicorncarne patiently wait for the day when they ascend from their mortal state and break the barriers of their star system and rid themselves of the horrible Bay12tonium which their species loathes and loves, where they can finally kill on their own free will.
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Right, let's look at the floating islands issue. Are they unusually buoyant? (Or, come to that, is the atmosphere unusually dense?) Repelled by whatever it is that keeps the shell of the planet (if it so possesses one) from collapsing? Are the held up by the same mysteryforce that counteracts the massive gravity at short range (i.e. not as far as the sun, but also ensures that the several-hundred jupiters of mass doesn't crunch down into a brown dwarf, or worse a neutron star[1]), either in conjunction with the above or due to 'leaked' localised resonances that sustain (and carry) 'pockets' of rock, and whatever lies above.
Hydrogen-containing pumice would float in Venus' atmosphere, so that's not even that far out.
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To synthesize a few ideas tossed out so far, what if the planet is essentially a Dyson Sphere? it has a neutron star (or something similar) at the core, and all the life lives on the *inside* of the crust. Suns orbit the whole shebang and produce enough heating to keep the "surface" temperature habitable (because the neutron star wouldn't help much in that regard). Could work if it's several M-class red dwarfs -- most of their output is in the infrared range anyways, and their mass is relatively low such that it's conceivable they could orbit a Dyson Sphere and not create much tidal force (perhaps just enough to keep water and atmosphere circulating inside). Obviously anything like this would have been created either with magic or extremely advanced stellar engineering (which as Clarke reminds us, is indistinguishable from magic).
Could also have the effect that some of those "bottomless pits" scattered around (in fact, holes through the crust) are typically pitch black but occasionally glow a hellish red and get warmer as one of the red dwarfs passes by on the outside.
Might want to take a look at Niven's The Integral Trees & The Smoke Ring for additional inspiration....it's set in a ring of matter and gas orbiting a neutron star.