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

In <URL:news:local.spelljam> on Mon 14 Feb, David Shepheard wrote:
> I've got my pedantic hat on today. Please excuse any nit-picking.

Thanks! Feedback is appreciated.


> ----- 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".

I will probably use "Dysonspace" as the name.


> > 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.

All of the above are good points.

I am currently leaning towards a truely immense sphere, 100AU
radius. There will be one sun in the middle, running at least as
hot as the one in our Solar System. No other bodies in the
system. Nothing else in the system.

If the system is this big, and the atmosphere is only a few tens
of miles thick, with vacuum in most of the inside of the sphere,
then I am unsure if you would see light on other parts of the
sphere, through the solar glare, without very good instruments.


> 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.

These are all interesting ideas.

I thought about a number of approaches, including the shadow
squares of Larry Niven's "Ringworld", your cage, but I wanted to
keep the basic structure of the system as simple as possible.

Also, I wanted the sun to pass across the sky, and there to be
seasons.

So, the idea is that there are literally world hexes, each with
the surface area of the Earth (larger and smaller might be
possible). Various approaches prevent falling off the edge,
including perimeter mountain ranges, and permanent nearly
indetectable teleport links, so you leave one side, and return on
the other. Surrounding each hex are six half-hexes, which
maintain the environment of the world, distorting the sun's light
so it appears to cross the sky, making it stronger and weaker in
summer and winter, producing the "night cloud" which has the
images of the stars, etc. These also keep the flows in the
lithosphere working, so volcanos and subduction runs smoothly,
needed to ensure you get new supplies of ores, and the making of
gems, though dangerous earthquakes could be carefully avoided.

Now, the above is just one style of "hab world", and there could
be others in all sorts of styles. There could be immense ones the
surface area of Jupiter, if desired, but these would obviously
require a lot more support, and small ones only a few hundred
miles across. Also, worlds where the sun just sits in the middle
of the sky, and life is adapted to this. Water worlds, desert
worlds, or even gas giant worlds would be quite practical.

I am still thinking about how thick the worlds should be;
4000mls, the radius of Earth, is the obvious answer, but I wonder
if a few miles would be enough, in some cases.

Also, whether there should be any atmosphere, or in fact
anything, on the bits of the crystal sphere which are not world
hexes or their surroundings.

If you try and enter the crystal sphere _under_ a world hex, then
unless some provision has been made, you might either fail to be
able to enter, or be crushed by the pressure. It is likely that
"entry ports", maybe deep wells, or maybe "port" areas outside
any particular world hex, would be needed. A network of teleport
gates is something I am still trying to think through.

I am wondering if it might be possible, without bending a DMs
mind to much, to have a world hex simulate being in a 'normal'
crystal sphere, by suitable distorting of dimensions.

But, you would have to meddle with the phlogiston flows, and
maybe alter what the crystal sphere looked like from the outside,
unless there is some really sophisticated sort of layered
illusion. And, this might all be just too hard work!

Maybe a fake 'normal space', with no access to the crystal
sphere, without a lot of digging, would work?


> > > 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.

This is interesting, and getting some PCs involved as a "side
dish" ([grin]) in the Bug Wars could be quite fun! I am not
certain what the PCs could bring to the situation that would mean
they don't just get ignored as an irrelevance. Insecticide?


Also, do you refer to the set of all the crystal spheres
connected by phlogiston flows as the "universe", or should you
use "multiverse"?

(A multiverse being a collection of associated universes. See
Michael Moorcock's "Eternal Champion" books, among other things.)

I note that most people seem to assume that time flows
consistently across all crystal spheres, whereas when there are
universe gates, time may flow at different rates in different
universes.

Also, I know of some SJ settings where there are world gates
which can get you to different worlds and universes where there
aren't any crystal spheres. Are these in a different multiverse?


> > 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.

It depends on what you can get the sun to do. Straight heat is
the simple approach, flooding the sphere with ultra violet
radiation, or more energetic stuff, might do other things. Or,
maybe some sort of deadly magical energy. Or, a psychic
compulsion wave that says "DIE!".

Making the sun 'burp' could be enough to kill everything in the
sphere that is not really well shielded. If there are no planets,
then you can't be saved by being on the other side of the planet,
at the right time.

If the effect occurs quite quickly, then you couldn't outrun it
with spelljamming, as that's a lot slower than light speed. Maybe
inter-sphere teleport, if you've got fast reflexes, or a warning
from something like precognition. But, you've got to know where
you're going.


> > > 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 shield 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.

I like this as a space drive! Maybe some other race could have
co-opted this in some way, as well?


> 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.

If the plant uses explosives to blast it's seed into space, other
plants that defend themselves against plant eaters (grenade or
gun plants) might make sense. Using these as tools...


> 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.

Maybe you could make the bugs allergic to the phlogiston?

Or, need to remain in contact with their hive mind to stay
intelligent? You can't reach your god in the phlogiston, so a
hive mind link would likely go down as well.

Approaces to allow DMs to use them without them becoming a
universal menace could be useful.


> > > 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/

--
Dreamer
dreamer@??????.?????.??.uk
http://www.romsys.demon.co.uk/