Worldbuilding Critical Mass

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Well, I’ll be damned! Designing a calendar is a million times easier when your conworld’s planet is just Earth with the serial numbers filed off! Turns out other people have already worked out enough options that I can cherry-pick. What the hell was I thinking building planets with 90-degree axial tilts or retrograde rotations or double stars or tide-locking to a gas giant? Nobody spent millennia figuring out THOSE. I have to do that myself.

And I’d say that’s also good news for JRR Tolkien. Can you imagine if some freak radioactive transporter accident had combined him, with his obsessive calendaring, with a golden-age sci fi planetbuilder like Poul Anderson or Larry Niven? The resulting hybrid abomination’s head would probably explode.

Comments

[beccastareyes]

Nah. We don't know it to enough significant digits.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

True. Calculating a galactic leap year would be a pain in the ass. ("Every 9.73528*!0^9 years, February gets an extra day!")

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Damn! 10^8, I meant! It is important that I get the calculations I pulled out of my ass in the right ballpark!

EDIT: Now my number pad is FUCKING WITH ME.