Statistics: Posted by Walrus — Fri Jun 29, 2018 12:27 am
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Take the idea of hotspots around the world with vast tracts of frozen wasteland between them. Combine that with the roof over the world and put a World Pillar at the center of each hotspot. If you put up 360,000 of these spread evenly around the globe, each one would command an area about equal to a circle 1 million km in diameter. 360,000 individual realms, each one with an area equal to 1500 earths. Glorious.
If I were stealing this for my own, I'd do something like that. But the possibilities are endless. By tomorrow I'm sure I could have five more equally cool ideas.
Statistics: Posted by Mike — Fri Jun 29, 2018 12:11 am
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However...
Where does light and heat come from on the surface? If heat comes up from underneath (presumably there's still a working star at the center of Bob, and excess heat must be vented somewhere), then you can create hot spots or thermal phenomena in whatever pattern makes you happy.
Hell, what if you say excess internal heat is vented st both poles, making them both uninhabitable, but air and ocean currents carry that heat away, and you wind up with everything above 60 degrees from the equator too hot for humans. Everything within 30 degrees of the equator is a mostly uninhabitable frozen band. The temperate zone between 30 and 60 is where most life is. Basically reverse the earth.
Or vent at the equator and keep something like you're thinking of. Or make some other pattern that you think is cool, like hotspots all around Bob creating hundreds of vast inhabited regions, all separated by hundreds of thousands of miles of frozen waste. Or spread it out evenly so that the whole of Bob is inhabitable.
Or you could leave out internal heat entirely. Whatever.
As for light on the surface, I assume you'll have some kind of day-night structure. Possibilities:
No external light sources. This seems gloomy and difficult.
Maybe you have one big, distant, Betelgeuse sized star orbiting Bob too far away to provide much heat, but it gives us some sort of day/night.
A couple dozen stars in a carefully balanced, interwoven set of orbits that provide all portions of the globe with complex patterns of light, dark, and twilight.
Maybe there's actually a roof on the whole thing. Imagine Bob as you've already laid it out. Now put a second shell around it at about 100 km up. You can have heat and light produced from fake "suns" in the firmament of the sky. And these can move and vary to create whatever kind of days and seasons you want. It would also let you have these massive "world pillars" that seem to hold up the sky and carry power and heat from the core to the outer shell.
So much you can do.
Statistics: Posted by Mike — Thu Jun 28, 2018 11:45 pm
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Well - some tech-babble can explain that, and give me some really cool options when the tech fails
Real physics is great, but I want it to support the story not break it
Say, what do you think of my 40 degrees either side of the equator to get to space-cold levels toward the poles? seem realistic enough?
Statistics: Posted by Walrus — Thu Jun 28, 2018 11:11 pm
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This is taken from an XKCD What If episode on falling through the center of the earth (I think... if I remember correctly).
Statistics: Posted by Mike — Thu Jun 28, 2018 10:11 pm
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The thing that puzzles me - not all the mass of the dyson sphere is nearly close enough to provide gravitational pull, and the shell of the dyson sphere would provide a bit more gravity to the inside surface than the star would pull folks away from it.
It's just that the mass of the shell beyond a certain distance from the point in question wouldn't have much effect, surely that would reduce the total gravitatonal pull in any single point.
Maybe I have the complete wrong end of it.
Still, I'm planning to have a lot of fun with the day length thing, two gas giants turned into red dwarves that orbit at different speeds. sun-rises that are actually rising suns not spinning globes....
Statistics: Posted by Walrus — Thu Jun 28, 2018 9:00 pm
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As for the Dyson sphere, as long as it has the mass of 1600 suns, the acceleration due to gravity at 150 million km from the center will always be 9.8 meters per second per second. If you create a thin hollow Dyson sphere that is roughly uniform, you get 9.8 m/s2. If it's a giant incredibly lightweight styrofoam ball of the same size... 9.8 m/s2. If it's a black hole with the mass of 1600 suns, the acceleration at the 150 mil km mark would still be 9.8 m/s2. As long as the distribution of matter is balanced around the sphere, the gravity doesn't change. It's cool like that.
And at that size, you'd need variations in altitude of over 650,000 km to see variations in gravity the size of those on earth.
All of which is to say that I am a huge planetary physics nerd, and while this is fun for me, you can take or leave as much of it as you want. Because you are building something that is essentially a fantasy world, and your story needs trump any "Um actually..." I might have.
Statistics: Posted by Mike — Thu Jun 28, 2018 7:07 pm
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