Re: Need "Under the Dark Fist" info, please

I've got my pedantic hat on today. Please excuse any nit-picking.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dreamer" <dreamer@??????.?????.??.uk>
Subject: Re: [SPELLJAMMER] Need "Under the Dark Fist" info, please


> In <URL:news:local.spelljam> on Tue 08 Feb, Clint Whelly wrote:
> > Hi Dreamer,
> >
> > I don't know the article, but what you are referring to is called a Dyson's
> > sphere.  Even a "small" sphere is going to represent a massive land area
> > larger then all of known space put together.
>
> Yup. I thought "Dyson Space" might be nice name for it, a usable
> surface area more than billions of Earth-type worlds.

If you are going to follow the convention established by TSR for almost *all* of their
other sphere names then "Dysonspace" would be better than "Dyson Space".

> So big, you could have multiple high tech civilizations, and
> unless they went scanning with something like SETI, they'd never
> find out about each other!
>
> Maybe.

I don't know if that is true. From Earth orbit the shapes of cities can be observed from
street lighting.

While a D&D culture would not normally have the sort of street lighting that we have, I'm
sure that there would be occasions when large amounts of light was visible at night. War
would be a reason for an army to carry a large amounts of torches.

Natural disasters, like forest fires and volcano's would also give off a large amount of
light that could be spotted from far away.

Activity like this would draw the attention of sages and spyglasses would be pointed at
that area of the sky to see what else happened. Eventually someone might see some sort of
sign of life.

If an observer was trying to look through hundreds of miles of air then the light might be
too dim to be seen, however if the air in the sphere hugged the outside layer of the
sphere and the centre of the sphere was a vacuum there would be nothing to stop the light
from travelling to points almost opposite the fire. Imagine turning the Earth inside out
to see what I mean. Someone in Canada looking at the USA would be looking through a lot of
air, but someone in the UK looking at Australia would be looking through a lot of vacuum
and two thin bits of air.

Points directly opposite a fire would be eclipsed by the sphere's primary, by the way.

The problem you have then is the relative brightness of the sphere's sun(s). With the
sphere constantly facing inwards there would be no night and fires on other parts of the
sphere would be hard to spot, but if the sun was dark at certain times then a local night
could exist and astronomers would look at lights on the other sides of the sphere and
think they were stars.

Things that could give a dyson sphere a nightime include:

1) A sun that gets brighter and darker

This sounds like a fantasy idea but look up "variable stars" and "flare stars" for
something similar in real life.

2) A rotating sun that is half light and half dark

The sun could be made from a hemi-sphere of elemental radiance joined to a hemi-sphere of
elemental ash.

Alternatively the sun could be a hemisphere and the flat surface on the inside could be
dark.

3) Orbiting planets that cause shadows on the surface of the sphere

I don't like this solution, because planets would be too small and wouldn't allow people
to have a night of 50 percent of the day length (especially above and below the plane of
the ecliptic). These planets would need to orbit like electrons in order to cover every
part of the surface. If there were hundreds of planets then I suppose that they could all
take 12 hours to pass overhead and have 12 gaps in between them, but there would be lots
of eclipses at certain locations that would mess the day up.

4) The sun could be orbited by a giant spherical cage with large "gaps" in it.

The gaps could allow the light to pass through and the cage and the cage could rotate
slowly with each gap taking 12 hours to move its shadow across an area on the sphere. The
number and width of gaps would depend on the speed of rotation. If the cage had 28 bars
(and 28 gaps of identical width) then it would take 28 days (1 month) to rotate around the
sun.

5) The sun could be orbited by a hemisphere of light absorbing material.

This is similar to the last idea but instead of many strips the night causing object would
have one fat strip blocking out half of the sun. It would rotate very quickly and go
around the sun in one day.

6) Something closer to the ground could block out the sun.

This gives you a night but makes it impossible to see the stars (if you have any) as they
would also be blocked out.

However if you did want to do that then very thick clouds or clouds that had the effect of
darkness spells could do the trick.

> > In my game I have one with a working title "Bug Space"

My pedantic hat tells me to remind you that by TSR's convention your working title should
be "Bugspace".

> > This is the latest focus of my intrepid band of marry makers as they are
> > trying to deal with the race of xenophobic bug creatures that seemingly
> > threatens the entire universe. There numbers and resources are comparatively
> > infinite and this is a problem that's going to take more then firepower to
> > resolve :)

Hang on. What makes you think there would be one race of xenophobic bug creatures? If this
is a dyson sphere the sheer distances involved should allow for much more variation than
we have on Earth.

Even if all life has evolved from insects, you should still think about having thousands
of different varieties of bugs in a dyson sphere. Some of these bugs should be intellegent
and some should be animals.

Perhaps there is a xenophobic bug that threatens the universe, but I would have thought
that they would be at war with the bug on the next continent that has two more or two less
legs or the wrong sized head.

You could also have a society of advanced technology using bugs that are under threat by
buglike monsters, the size of dinosaurs.

I know that it is possible to have a fantasy culture that is dominated by one race, but I
think that it would add more realism as well as giving you more to do in the sphere if you
added other factions that keep the main faction under control in some way. This is
especially important in a dyson sphere as it has much more surface area and that would
suggest more possible paths for evolution to take. A DM could then throw the players up
against various identical looking bugs that act in different ways. Some could be friends
and some enemies.

> Definitely a social engineering job. Or, pull the "flush" chain
> on the sphere's sun, and have to live with being a species
> genocide for the rest of your life (see Orson Scott Card "Enders
> Game" series).

Killing the sun would not neccesarily kill off life in the sphere. There is a crystal
sphere in the adventure Crystal Spheres that has had its sun turned off and people are
still able to live on its planets.

Making the sun explode could kill everything off if the explosion was strong enough to
cook the entire inside of the sphere.

Even still this might just cause any bugs that can spelljam to leave the sphere and go
somewhere else. If only a small percentage could get out they still might be able to
overun several conventional spheres.

> > Some details include the inclusion of a form of infinity vine that encircles
> > the sun right now.  The bugs tend this vine and have a symbiotic
> > relationship with it.  Even to the point where a bug will burrow into a seed
> > pod and be cocooned within. Over a number of years, this pod will grow with
> > some external help into a spell jammer with built in strategic spell jamming
> > capabilities (no need for a helm). As the bugs have weak physonic powers,
> > the ship is then controlled via this method.
> >
> > So far the PC's have snuck into the sphere to steal a pod and sample of vine
> > in the hopes of making their own ships in the far future. They just found
> > out about the recipe calling for one part bug however:)

How about a ground based plant that shoots fruit of some kind into space as part of its
natural life cycle. It could do this to spread itself to other continents, but the bugs
could climb into the seed before it turns into a "space apple". They could then hook into
its nerve system (via psionics, magic, natural ability or science) and control its
propulsion system to make it land on whatever part of the dyson sphere that they want to
travel to.

The fruit could sheld the bugs from the reentry and impact and they could then eat their
way out and fight the bugs at their new location in order to secure that territory. The
bugs would need to keep this space "apple plant" alive if they wanted to return home or go
to other places so they would plant its seeds. This means the two would get into a
sybiotic relationship and would be found together.

If these bugs were smart bugs, they might also find other plants and animals that can help
them become more successful and use them as tools as well.

Make the bugs part of a hive society ruled by a queen and the bug "invasions" could be
battles to capture a male drone from a rival nest and/or kill its queen.

As long as the bugs are contained within this sphere they will pose no threat to
outsiders. They might be slowly eating every other type of living thing (including other
races of bugs that have intellegence) but you could make them really dangerous without
having them take over the universe.

> > I have this sphere done as a series of notes and such but if your interested
> > I'm willing to put it into a legible format.  You can then pick and choose
> > what you want.
>
> Would you consider posting some of it to the list, for everyone's
> interest?

I'd second that.

David "Big Mac" Shepheard
Virtual Eclipse Role Playing Club
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/virtualeclipselrp/links/d20_system_001071937434/Spelljammer_001071430476
http://virtualeclipse.aboho.com/