Collapsing World

[Marken4]

Okey.. You convinced me, the cities isn't that lame anymore, and I guess you got a reason for having floating cities too, 'cause if they had the technology to make flying cities they would probably be pretty far into the future, which again predicts a pretty populated world. (sorry for my english)

I'll keep stalking this map

[jbgibson]

If you want to make it possible but difficult to get from level to level, you could have half a beanstalk... or more than one... dangling from low orbit (hey, you imply you were using only physics that make things work, right?) Every so often the drifting sky cities snag on it (or on them). Perhaps one of the broken-off lower stalk pieces trails from old-surface down into lower-level ocean or rubble-continent. Maybe a large sky city even caused one of the stalk breaks by running into one during The Catastrophe , and itself drifts with a piece of stalk dragging on the higher bits of remaining ground.

On a map the result of that last might be visible scratch marks, aligned with the prevailing winds aloft. Maybe the whole base station is still attached to the bottom of the trailing bit - the ground failed, not the stalk's no-doubt immensely strong fiber.

[bartmoss]

The font is Aquiline Two: http://www.dafont.com/aquiline-two.font
Which seems to be a clone of: http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/grouptype/aquiline/

[Ascension]

A2 is less dramatic in that the swashes are not as long in the capital letters as in A1. Other than that they're the same.

[bartmoss]

Okey.. You convinced me, the cities isn't that lame anymore, and I guess you got a reason for having floating cities too, 'cause if they had the technology to make flying cities they would probably be pretty far into the future, which again predicts a pretty populated world. (sorry for my english)

I'll keep stalking this map

Your English is fine mate. - I don't mean they are necessarily technological (though I may throw that in, too) just that I am going with a more modern feel to the floaty things, cause I really do dislike the way it's usually done. To me, something that floats should be light and, well, airy, not fly the way a brick usually doesn't.

If you want to make it possible but difficult to get from level to level, you could have [I]half[I] a beanstalk... or more than one... dangling from low orbit (hey, you imply you were using only physics that make things work, right?) Every so often the drifting sky cities snag on it (or on them). Perhaps one of the broken-off lower stalk pieces trails from old-surface down into lower-level ocean or rubble-continent. Maybe a large sky city even caused one of the stalk breaks by running into one during The Catastrophe , and itself drifts with a piece of stalk dragging on the higher bits of remaining ground.

On a map the result of that last might be visible scratch marks, aligned with the prevailing winds aloft. Maybe the whole base station is still attached to the bottom of the trailing bit - the ground failed, not the stalk's no-doubt immensely strong fiber.

Oh I like this, thanks!

Edit: No, not only physics - it is a high fantasy setting, but if you can use physics to achieve something then you don't need to resort to the supernatural.

[A.J.A.]

One way of putting up a higher layer would be to encase the whole thing in a worldhouse, which is basically a transparent sphere surrounding the whole planet. You'll want it some distance away from the atmosphere, otherwise high-pressure zones will create hurricane force winds all the time. It probably implies a smaller planet because the whole reason for building one is to keep the atmosphere from drifting away to space when the gravity isn't enough to do it naturally. Or maybe they needed extra radiation shielding.

Maybe instead of being transparent all the way around it's made of segments of material in geometric shapes, with "seams" in between, which are actually transportation corridors linking together the cities, which are placed at the intersections. Some or all will have elevators down to the surface (although I'm pretty sure you have to be near the equator for a beanstalk to work, otherwise it won't stay still relative to the surface -- maybe a pole would work too). You can imagine who might still live up there.

From the surface all you could see would be the lines and the circles on which the cities sit, and if you're lucky a beanstalk, otherwise it's just a clear sky like the one we're familiar with on Earth.

[mearrin69]

Interesting idea. Never heard of that before. Would something like that be stable? I remember the Niven discussion of ringworld orbital mechanics but don't know the hows and whys.
M

[bartmoss]

The world-in-a-sphere is interesting, it never occured to me someone could do the crystal spheres idea in a high tech scenario. I do doubt it's stable - even if you impart the exact same momentum on the sphere as the planet has, you'll get friction with the atmosphere etc and eventually the planet and the sphere will collide.

Doesn't mean it couldn't be used though, in a fantasy world, everything is possible. And the job of those cities at the seams might exactly be to keep the sphere in stable, say by utilizing some form of antigravity devices. If the "glass" can change its color, it could be used to control the influx of sunlight on to the planet. Think global warming. In wartime, it could become a nasty weapon: Just switch off the sunlight in your enemy's country. They don't dare shoot down the glass sphere, not only would it doom the planet if we assume it was built for an important enough reason - the destroyed sphere would also fall down on the person shooting at it!

This idea's definitely going into the scrapbook :-)

For this particular world though I think I prefer the floating cities to be unachnored. The glass sphere doesn't give our protagonists more space to adventure in, and if the cities float freely, they can crash individually, drift away and "get lost", and so on. Of course I could have both free-floating city and the sphere. I'll have to think about that.

[A.J.A.]

I'm pretty sure it could be. If nothing else it can be built to support its weight against the centrifugal force of pieces of iron rotating around the planet, contained magnetically inside cables, in the way proposed for launch loops and supramundane planets. There's nothing implausible here except the scale, but who knows what scales will be possible in the future?

I've actually been toying with the idea of a multi-layered world based on the supramundane concept. Birch's original proposal only seems to contemplate one level, the surface. But adding a second, lower one doubles the usable space, adding two triples it, and so on. A supra-Jupiter already has 318 times the surface area of the Earth, so the amount of territory in such a world becomes ever more unimaginably vast. Maybe Jupiter needs a worldhouse too. They've got lots of radiation because it gets caught up by Jupiter's magnetic fields, after all.

There's no reason two settings can't have cities embedded in worldhouses...

[bartmoss]

Thanks - that'll be an interesting read, at least. I am really not sure about the stability aspect, I am hardly a physicist. It seems to me that such a system would have to be in perfect equilibrium, or it would become unstable eventually. One of the beauties of planets is that, barring any collisions with other planets or similar objects, their lifespan is that of their primary. At any rate, it may make a really interesting setting. Just as we can use Ringworlds, we can use this too. I still don't see that it really adds to the collapsed world setting though.