Getting Trilorne to Hover
Jun. 11th, 2020 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wrogWell okay, I guess there is a way to get Trilorne to hover.
If we're willing to toss the usual definition of "North" (rotation axis points that way), we can put the sun over the equator, and then we can have it be tide-locked. Meaning this planet is basically Mercury but farther away so that only the stuff directly underneath the sun is getting fried to shit.
And maybe having an actual atmosphere will help, too, in various ways, though I can't imagine there not being freaky weather patterns, e.g., some kind of permanent cyclone storm around the solar-maximum point wherever it happens to be at the moment, but that won't damage the story too much because nobody ever goes to the Fire Lands anyway.
The Wall then runs around the Greenwich meridian…
…and it's just that the residents have this odd convention that North is where the sun is and East/West is where we have the pole (singular even if it's showing up in two different directions for them), which we can forgive because they already have enough other weird shit to deal with.
And I guess they're going to have to have some kind of landmark-based definition of "East" since anything based on intrinsic handedness will fail for anyone who crosses the Wall. We're also going to need names for the other two directions (i.e., perpendicular to the E-W axis heading away from the Fire Lands) and bleah.
.
If we tilt the rotation axis, we can even get seasons. Trilorne will do this lemniscate (infinity-symbol-shaped) orbit over this strip of land straddling the equator, and so we'll have these East and West Fire Lands taking turns getting roasted, with corresponding East and West quarterspheres taking turns getting "summer" and "winter".
But Clarke still loses on having the Shadow Lands (where the Wall is) be the way he wants. The vicinity of the wall will still be the coldest place on the planet what with the sun always being low in the sky there, but there will not be any times of year where the sun is below the horizon, because, again, whenever the sun goes down the antipodal sun will rise from the other direction. Spring and fall (sun on the horizon), will be the actual coldest seasons there.
And if the axial tilt is large enough, then the folks in the southern portions of the civilized lands will be seeing the antipodal sun every so often. At which point it's probably game over for there being some kind of huge mystery re what's going on.
Of course, if this is the only planet in that universe, then where are they going to get these preconceptions re how planets are supposed to work or the idea that non-orientablity is weird to the point of driving anyone to madness?
Now what you could do is have a universe like ours with lots of ordinary planets/star-systems but with this "fold" in it, i.e., this one planet with the origin/singularity in the middle of it, and everything antipodally duplicated on the far side. And then you do the Explorers WTFing Thing.
I suppose this is essentially what Gerry Anderson does in "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun" (a.k.a. "Doppelganger") modulo
If we're willing to toss the usual definition of "North" (rotation axis points that way), we can put the sun over the equator, and then we can have it be tide-locked. Meaning this planet is basically Mercury but farther away so that only the stuff directly underneath the sun is getting fried to shit.
And maybe having an actual atmosphere will help, too, in various ways, though I can't imagine there not being freaky weather patterns, e.g., some kind of permanent cyclone storm around the solar-maximum point wherever it happens to be at the moment, but that won't damage the story too much because nobody ever goes to the Fire Lands anyway.
The Wall then runs around the Greenwich meridian…
…and it's just that the residents have this odd convention that North is where the sun is and East/West is where we have the pole (singular even if it's showing up in two different directions for them), which we can forgive because they already have enough other weird shit to deal with.
And I guess they're going to have to have some kind of landmark-based definition of "East" since anything based on intrinsic handedness will fail for anyone who crosses the Wall. We're also going to need names for the other two directions (i.e., perpendicular to the E-W axis heading away from the Fire Lands) and bleah.
.
If we tilt the rotation axis, we can even get seasons. Trilorne will do this lemniscate (infinity-symbol-shaped) orbit over this strip of land straddling the equator, and so we'll have these East and West Fire Lands taking turns getting roasted, with corresponding East and West quarterspheres taking turns getting "summer" and "winter".
But Clarke still loses on having the Shadow Lands (where the Wall is) be the way he wants. The vicinity of the wall will still be the coldest place on the planet what with the sun always being low in the sky there, but there will not be any times of year where the sun is below the horizon, because, again, whenever the sun goes down the antipodal sun will rise from the other direction. Spring and fall (sun on the horizon), will be the actual coldest seasons there.
And if the axial tilt is large enough, then the folks in the southern portions of the civilized lands will be seeing the antipodal sun every so often. At which point it's probably game over for there being some kind of huge mystery re what's going on.
Of course, if this is the only planet in that universe, then where are they going to get these preconceptions re how planets are supposed to work or the idea that non-orientablity is weird to the point of driving anyone to madness?
Now what you could do is have a universe like ours with lots of ordinary planets/star-systems but with this "fold" in it, i.e., this one planet with the origin/singularity in the middle of it, and everything antipodally duplicated on the far side. And then you do the Explorers WTFing Thing.
I suppose this is essentially what Gerry Anderson does in "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun" (a.k.a. "Doppelganger") modulo
- putting the origin/singularity in the middle of our sun rather than a planet,
- Gerry being generally Bad at Physics (don't get me started), and
- waffling out the Small Matter of why we never noticed the antipodal copies of Mars, Venus, etc.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-12 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-12 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-13 07:49 pm (UTC)(as in they're thinking in terms of the planet being actually duplicated, and, yeah... sigh.)