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

On Wed, 25 Aug 1999, Tom Anderson wrote:

> worth mentioning; i can't remember why, but i think it was partly
because
> they're rare (probably).

1 out of 9 isn't that rare in my book. 

> in any case, if a planet is end-on, it has permanent night and
permanent
> day areas, just like a tide-locked planet, even if it isn't
tide-locked.

No not permanent night and day, just about practically that... the
length 
of the siderial (one "solar cycle") period will be the length of one 
complete orbit as the planet's pole will most likely be pointed in the 
same direction. Of course the planet could precess. 

> also, John A replied to my email and pointed out one or two holes in
it.
> firstly, north and south are obsolete not because they encode no
> geographical information, but because they encode no climatic
information,
> as the light-dark climate difference overwhelms the north-south
> difference. secondly, there are not, as i stated, two regions of
twilight,
[snip]

depending on the distance of the planet to the star (stars?) this could 
make it quite inhospitable in certain areas. There was a book called 
Diary of a Space Person that among other things spoke of a planet that 
had Cities on rails that worked their way around the planet to keep on 
the edge of the twilight and at a steady hospitable temp. Crews would 
range ahead and fix any damage to the rails that had occurred over the 
"night". If a city was unable to progress due to a system outage, it 
would be blown off the tracks to allow the other cities to pass....tough

luck for those in the city ahead of everyone else....:\

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