(TFT) Hollow Cidri

[Rick Smith <rsmith@lightspeed.ca>]

When I was in high school a teacher and I did some
calculations.  What would the density of Cidri be
so that the surface gravity would stay the same as
it got bigger and bigger.

We found no one density would do it.  As Cidri 
increased in size the density had to keep dropping in 
order to keep near one gravity.  It did not take long 
to reach a size where there was no iron core, just 
rock and the gravity would start increasing.  (This
assumes no compression of the rock at the center 
of the world.)


>From this I decided that Cidri was a hollow world
(a la Edgar Rice Burrows).

Makes no sense science wise (why would it not crush
up especially if it has moons stretching and keeping
the rock plastic with the tides) but could be done
if you had super science.

So my take for a while was a hollow world.  Inside 
the hollow, are several small suns a couple km 
across that move in irregular 'orbits' inside lighting
sections of the world.  When I sun is directly over
head, it would be VERY bright and hot.  Often forest
fires start.  The oceans steam.   When it is fairly
near you would get bright light and sharp shadows.
When no sun was near, you would have dark and twilight
with wandering bright suns visible many hundreds of 
thousands of km away moving like brilliant planets in 
the sky.

Toss in a few small moons 'orbiting' inside this 
world and by flying up to them you would have a mass
transit system to continents hundreds of thousands of
miles away.

The air would fill the entire space inside this world
so flying to a moon on a magic carpet or something was
certainly possible.


I considered running a campaign 'inside' Cidri but my
current campaign was going great guns and I didn't 
want to stop it.  I sent a (hand written) offer to
HT to work on this, but he never bothered to reply and
I learned about a week later that Metagaming had 
vanished.  (So it was probably KIA when I posted the
letter.)


Anyway, that was always my take on what Cidri was:  A
hollow artificial world with the rock ~500 km thick 
and ~150,000 km in radius.  That would give you a
surface area of about 500,000,000,000 square km which
(including the inside) felt about right.


Rick
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