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

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

> > > 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.

<snip>

> > 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.

Have you ever looked through a very thick pane of glass? It is a lot harder to look
sideways that it is to look straight through. Looking straight through you don't notice
the glass so much.

The main problem is going to be the sun. If the sun is always "up" then you don't get a
night. If you could somehow ignore the sun then seeing things on the other side of the
sphere would not be a problem. Telescopes or spyglasses could help.

> > Things that could give a dyson sphere a nightime include:
<snip>
>
> 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.

If you want the sun to appear to pass accross the sky then why not actually make it a
moving sun?

"Night" could be achived by one of two means:

If, for example, you were to make the sun orbit 1AU from the edge of the sphere everyone
would see it pass overhead every time it orbited. An eliptical orbit that itself rotated
around the sphere over the course of a year could give you normal seasons.

When the sun far to the left and right of a location the angle of the atmosphere could
stop most of the light getting in. You wouldn't get a normal day/night cycle, but you
could have a normal brightness (when the sun was "overhead") followed by darkness as the
sun travelled westward, followed by a second "distant day" (when the moon was on the
opposite side of the sphere and appeared to be much smaller and perhaps dimmer) finally
followed by a second period of darkness as the sun came back towards the day position.

A second way to have a night is to make your sun a moon and stick a much larger solid body
in the centre of the system.

That way whenever the sun is on the far side of the central planet, you get night. You
will not have a night as long as a day, but you will have a night. Again a slightly
eliptical orbit can vary the length of days and give you seasons.

If you made the central planet a glassy voidworld you could allow a dim shadowy light to
go all the way through and make people on the surface see it as if it was a gigantic
"moon". You might even be able to simulate the phases of the moon that we see on Earth, by
making certain regions of the moon non-transparant. That would give you the appearance of
a different shaped object at the centre of the sphere as the glassworld rotated.

This sort of approach would give the sun much less movement across the sky (unless you
made your central planet very large - possibly a quarter or half the diameter of the
sphere might be needed) but would have the benifit if giving you some moonlight. This
might help if you want to use werewolves or other moon based effects.

You would get a problem close to the north and south poles of your sphere with either of
these methods, but around the "equator" they might an easy way to deal with this.

You would also need to look at the mathematics to double check either approach if you
wanted to move it.

> 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.

Do these world hexes tilt to simulate day and night? Sounds like a lot of work just to get
days.

If you want to go with hexes just to do this then why not put them into the sky and make
them distort the light instead. If air hexes bent the light of the sun then it would seem
to travel across the sky and disappear before appearing on the other side of the sky.
Hexes could either be in-phase (for global days and nights) or out-of-phase (for different
days and nights in different places).

The only problem with this approach is that it would stop you seeing things on the other
side of the sphere. (Unless the hexes somehow teleported light from one side of the sphere
to the other at the same time they were blocking out the sun.)

> 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.

If you kept this as a standard dyson sphere, you could still have different parts of the
surface act in different ways. Earth has seas, ice, mountains and volcanoes. You could
have bits of your sphere, with the same size surface area as Earth or Jupiter that all had
certain properties.

On one section you could remove all the earth between the ground and the edge of the
sphere and replace it with water. This would give you a sea the depth of the rest of the
world (similar to an earthworld).

Another section could be molten magma and could have the ecology of a fireworld. It could
be surrounded by desserts.

Another section could be totally empty. Containing only air. Cliffs thousands of miles
high could surround an area where only birds can cross. This would be similar to an
airworld and would also be a good place to put a portal to the phlogiston.

> 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.

4000 miles is as good a number as any. However, a bit of variation could give you world
sized cliffs so high that you can not see the bottom from the top.

> 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.

Taking away atmosphere in certain areas would keep people out of them. So if you didn't
want to use the north and south poles, you wouldn't have to deal with the unusual effects
of day, night and seasons at high lattitude.

You could make some empty areas have no air and make other empty areas "seas of trapped
air". This would let you put in a couple of areas similar to what I was saying above.

You could even place a world sized island in the centre of a sea of air. Cliffs thousands
of miles high would contain this separate eco system and isolate it from the rest of the
surface.

If there are a lot of seas of air then any inhabitants (if you change your mind and put a
few in) could perhaps possess technology that enables them to fly.

How about an air jammer? Something similar to a spelljammer, that only works inside the
air. This would stop people going into space but enable them to slowly explore the inner
surface of the sphere. It would also allow a technology to get up and down world height
cliffs and sail across seas of air.

Alternatively use spelljammers instead of adding air jammers and instead make it
impossible to travel into the vaccum in the central part of the sphere. Doing this would
give you a fixed number of entrance points into Dysonspace and force players to slowly
explore the surface at flying speed.

This would also give you the advantage that you would only need to document the immediate
area around the portal you decide to let people come in through. The rest could be added
later, so even if you start of with an "empty dyson sphere", you could add civilisations,
desserts, or anything else whenever you wanted to. The players would never be able to
explore the entire surface if the sphere was large enough.

> 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.

My guess is that portals and other similar magic would only work in places where you can
get through. Otherwise the gaming session goes a bit like this:

"You enter the sphere...

..oh dear you are all dead. Lets roll up some new characters, shall we."

LOL

> 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?

I think that the world hexes make this sphere too far away from what is expected from a
dyson sphere. If you have to have sections on the sphere that pretend to be something
else, then you haven't got a dyson sphere any more.

I think you should deal with day and night a different way and use the world hex idea if
you want to have small areas on the sphere's surface that are similar to wild magic areas
on other worlds.

You could then have a small area that has the imprisonment properties of the Ravenloft
setting, without having to make it a demi-plane. A magical item could have created a
gigantic world sized maze where people think they are leaving but really walk around in
circles.

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/