(TFT) Thoughts on Cidri

[srydzews@ix.netcom.com]

These demon-launching thought experiments have got me to thinking a bit about Cidri itself.  For starters, how big is it?  We're told it's BIG, apparently the original idea was 'big enough that everyone's campaigns can fit on it, all in their own areas'--or, at the very least, big enough that an essentially unlimited number of settings could theoretically be placed on it.

All very nice, but it doesn't mean much.  Just throwing some numbers around I decided to see how big a planet would be if it had 100 times the surface area of earth.  I came up with a radius roughly ten times that of the earth.  That leads me to two notions:

If Cidri is a planet ten times the radius of the earth, it seems to me that it would have to rotate ten times as fast as the earth in order for each 'day' to be 24 hours long.  Now while I'm no physicist, I know that on earth its easiest to launch things from the equator because of the momentum you get from the earth's rotation.  Und zo...if the rotation is ten times faster, that might make the lauch a good deal easier, ja?  Since the gravity is apparently only 1G and all...

Goodness knows what else would be affected by having a planet this size.  The horizon would probably be about 200 miles away, and climate would either have to be produced artificially or not vary significantly across HUGE areas.  

But who says it's a sphere at all?  It could be flat, I suppose, since those Mnoren are so dashed clever and all.  If it were a flat object, but still roatating and revolving around a star, you could get a day night cycle, albeit with a very abrupt sunset/sunrise.  If it were 'corrugated' to some degree that could perhaps give regional climate variation,although it might be easier to do that by tinkering with the atmosphere to make some areas reflect more sunlight than others.

Of course, a ringworld or dyson sphere are always possible, but it's hard to give things an 'earth-like' appearance to to the residents with either of those set-ups.

What I'm thinking, though, is that maybe it's a cylinder.  This seems to be the easiest way to get a huge area with earthlike rotation speeds and sunset-sunrise patterns.  Climate variation could again be done with corrugations, or with atmosphere tinkering.

Just some thoughts.

Stan
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