Re: Fw: [FT] Islamic Federation ships and request to Nyrath (fwd)

[oops - got the address wrong. this should work.]

John (and audience),

On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, John Atkinson wrote:

> --- Tom Anderson <thomas.anderson@university-college.oxford.ac.uk>
> wrote:
> 
> > > >Also, can I reserve a star for Uusi Soumi?
> > 
> > the name rings no bells, unless it's a misspelling
> > (or a respelling) of
> > Suomi, meaning Finland. care to elaborate?
> 
> Suomi, right.  Uusi Suomi is New Finland (listed by a Russian
> beauracrat in UNSC's mapping bureau as Novy Finlandia, which has
pissed
> them off to no end).	I'm working slowly on a complete background.  I
> figured they would want a planet as far from Russia/Russians as
> possible.

funny; when i came up with some ideas for the Finns as background for my
work on the Dutch, i put them as aligned with the Romanovs. i think that
this merely demonstrates my lack of understanding of Finnish history and
attitudes: i bow to your doubtless superior understanding <edits
webpage>.

> > i wouldn't say that north and south are meaningless,
> > and as for living > 'slightly dark of the equator', i think you may
> have > your wires crossed.
> 
> Nope.  Meaningless in the sense that they do not denote climactic
> change in the sense that Alaska is colder than Hawaii. If your major
> directions are Light and Dark, then your 'equator' would be the
> terminator between the two, and (in this case) humans are most
> comfortable just on the other side (even twilight is too hot--it's
only
> .1 AU from the star in question.  Of course, that star has a
luminosity
> of .001).

i see your point. i'm not happy with calling the terminator (the line
between dark and light) the equator, but that's probably because my
background is in FT rather than DS - geometry should be arranged to make
my starmaps harmonious, not for local convenience!

anyway, north/south does make some climatic difference: unless the
planet's axis is parallel to the ecliptic normal, then the planet will
have seasons like any other planet. on a tidally locked world, this
means
that the terminator will essentially rock back and forth, pivoting at
the
equator, so that at the arctic and antarctic, there will be potentially
quite wide regions which see both light and dark over the course of the
year. i should imagine that only the darkmost reaches of these regions
would be habitable, but in 'winter', when the terminator has rocked to a
position leaving that hemisphere in maximal darkness, the limits of
twilight might be an attractive holiday destination.

now, i don't know how common it is to have an axial tilt (i think all of
the planets in out solar system do), and i'm not sure if tidal locking
would lead to elimination of the tilt, but it's something to think
about.

anyway, i've knocked up some diagrams, largely to help myself figure out
what's going on:

http://members.xoom.com/gzg_l/geom/

> > note that on a tide-locked planet, there are two
> > regions of twilight, on > the border between the dark and light
> sides, which > correspond to the dawn
> > and dusk regions on a normal planet (it's just that
> 
> Eh?  It's all one circular band.

<thinks> oh yes, it is, isn't it. oops. that said, it can be divided
into
two parts according to whether it's a permanent dawn or a permanent
dusk,
although this isn't a very important distinction.

all the best,
tom