If I wanted to create a game system, one of the first things I’d tackle is the fundamental dice mechanic I’d like to use. Rolling dice, and the chances a player is supposed to have at succeeding different given tasks, obviously deeply influence many other design decisions – such fundamentals as attribute ranges and how they figure into the dice rolls, but all other aspects of the game system as well.
Monthly Archives: September 2011
Fixed Earth 2174 Maps
Earth 2174 maps with minor fixes:
No big changes in these. I did try to come up with more changes for southern Africa, but I found nothing that I could use. I guess either something will present itself once I write a more detailed timeline, or Africa may indeed become a fairly quiet area. They sure would deserve that.
Jump Route – Cover Mockup
Just another quick cover mockup.
Image by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScl/AURA) – Hubble Space Telescope ACS – STScl-PRC06-50b.
NaNoWriMo 2011
Oh, right. NaNoWriMo starts in less than two months.
NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month – November, when a bunch of crazy people attempt to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.
I’ve taken part in NaNoWriMo since 2008, and made the goal in both 2008 and 2009, but a new, busy job, a new girlfriend, and illness all conspired in 2010 – I didn’t even reach 10,000 words.
I fully intend a successful comeback this year. Failure, as they say, is not an option. I intend to work on something set in my Voyagers universe, but I am still working on the specific planning.
Will anybody of you take part in NaNoWriMo? What will you write about?
Earth in 2174: Membership in the Federated Nations
Members of the Federated Nations, the successor organization of the United Nations:
This map should be considered as a “draft” – I may still change the status of a few nations. Either way, some notes may be in order:
- The FN was organized by only a handful of nations, but a far greater number signed the charter when the FN was founded. The Second American Republic was a key force behind the FN treaty.
- Texas was a founding member along with the entirety of the United States, but the membership treaty failed ratification. This was a major embarrassment for the Americans. Texas was admitted seven years later, after pro-FN politicians ran a successful campaign decrying Texan loss of influence on world politics.
- The Andean Community withdrew from the FN in protest when the FN failed to force Venezuela to withdraw from annexed Colombian territory.
- Morocco was expelled after severe human rights violations came to light.
- Iraq withdrew on influence from the Islamic Union.
- The Islamic Union, and most of the countries in its influence, never joined the Federated Nations. This also implies that the FN was founded after the Islamic Union – a key point I will probably change.
- The Chinese Empire blocked membership of Xinjiang.
Ringworld Data
Consider a Ringworld, a ring-shaped world that orbits a star at the center of the ring.
Larry Niven invented this as a compromise between a Dyson Sphere and a planet, and wrote his novel of the same name to describe exploration of such a world. (And if you didn’t know that, go and read that novel. Do it now. It’s one of those classic Sci Fi stories that will get your sense of wonder going, even if the story itself is not particularly strong.
It’s an awesome concept, even with its technical problems (“The Ringworld is unstable!”) and I always wanted to build my own Ringworld. The past few days, the Ringworld concepts have been nagging me in the back of my head and yesterday morning I had an idea I think is interesting to explore. To that end, I need to find out more about the Ringworld’s properties.
First off, I prefer a Banks Orbital to a Niven Ring for three reasons:
- Banks Orbitals are marginally more realistic than Niven Rings
- Their smaller size makes them more manageable from an author’s perspective
- Since they do not orbit a star at their center, they do not suffer the inherent stability issues of Niven Rings
Rotation and Size
The width of the Ring is arbitrary, and I eventually settled on 50000 km.
Rotation is a little more complicated. I wanted it to have a 24h day/night cycle, and since the spin of the Ring determines the “gravity” through centrifugal force, this determines the size the ring can have. I worked on this many years ago, starting in November 2005, when I figured out the dimensions it would have, back when Wikipedia didn’t offer any convenient answer to that problem. I wanted the Ring to have an inner “simulated gravity” of 1G, 9.81m/s^2 (or a close alien equivalent to it, which is why I had 9.78m/s^2 in the old post I think), and a rotation matching 24 hours.
This all works out to:
- Radius: 1854969,424913 km.
- Circumference: 11655116.64 km
- Surface area: 582755831794.04 km^2 or 1142.51 times that of Earth
If you discount Earth’s ocean-covered surface the Ring would have almost four thousand times the land area of Earth. Of course that is neglecting that the Ring will not be entirely covered by land. I haven’t worked out how much is a “good” ocean to land ratio, but I’m guessing 50-70% water. This is purely based on aesthetics; the surface of the Ring should be earth-like, and that means lots of water. This still leaves 1400+ times the Earth’s land surface area.
Day and Night Cycle
The ringworld orbits slightly tilted towards its primary star. This allows light to reach the inner surface of the more distant side – creating a Ringworld day.
Seasons
You could asjust the climate – or possibly create seasons – by controlling not only the distance from the sun, but by the angle of the Ringworld’s “tilt”. One problem that needs to be solved is that the Ringworld would, according to my understanding, eventually be oriented so that the dipped side is rotated 90° from the sun. That way, the sun’s light would be blocked entirely. The Ringworld days would differ in their length from 12h to 0h in a cycle repeated twice per Orbit. This could be a strange type of season, but I think it is undesirable to the inhabitants and should probably be corrected for by some means.
Angular Size
When you look up into the sky, you see the inner surface of the other side of the ring. At a distance of 3.71 million kilometers, the angular size of that ring is 46.331 minutes, about 50% larger than the Moon appears from Earth. An observer at the center of the ring would see the ring at a size of 92.658 Minutes on all sides – a little more than three times the Moon as seen from Earth.
If the Earth was placed at the center of the Ringworld, the Earth would appear to be of a size of 23.785 minutes of arc, roughly 20% smaller than the moon appears in Earth’s sky. It would be invisible during the night – hidden against the background of the opposite side of the ring – but might be fairly visible during the day, the same way the moon is sometimes visible during a Terran day.
If the Ringworld orbits at a Lagrange point, it will still fill the sky. And even at 150 million kilometers, the distance from the Sun to the Earth, it will be easily visible by naked eye.
Ringworld Paper Model and Futuristic Projects
Pink Tentacle has a post about seven futuristic mega-projects that would make awesome settings for a sci fi novel – I am so going to steal some of these ideas and incorporate them in the Voyagers setting.
And then there’s Billybob884 who posted a paper model Halo ringworld to Devianart. You can print it out and assemble it yourself – Pretty neat!