(TFT) Thoughts on Cidri

[Michael Taylor <MichaelTaylor1@compuserve.com>]

Message text written by INTERNET:tft@brainiac.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.<

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