Worldbuilding Critical Mass
Feb. 26th, 2011 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
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Date: 2011-02-27 05:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-02-27 03:03 pm (UTC)(Says the astronomer.)
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Date: 2011-02-27 03:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-03-01 12:33 am (UTC)Permission to post this entry -- and
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Date: 2011-03-03 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-03 10:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-03-04 03:08 pm (UTC)I kinda figured that Pandora in Avatar
- was tidally locked (gas giant + laws of gravity).
- had a gravitational vortex due to tidal lock making that impossible mountain range where the dragon things lived.
- had an orbit somewhere around the 24-hour range, and is probably going to fall into the planet within the next couple million years.
- is bioluminescent as some sort of adaptation to all the killer radioactivity that would be spewed out by a gas giant. Energy in, energy out, yeah?
Corrollary to that last one: the Sky People not in Avatars are going to die horribly within the next few months, considering how much shielding there was not on those breathing masks.
Also, the modern global Earth calendar once took into account how many planets (plus sun and moon) are visible to the naked eye, and what speed they seem to travel at across the sky, and how many hours result from sacred number combinations of water droplets dripping, and how very uncool it is to use a prime number instead of a four-season-divisible one. (Chinese weeks were decimal, and we all know their zodiac though most people don't know it applied to hours of the day too.) I'd figure an alien calendar would've at least started with similar mixes of "what do we see happening regularly, what signals the getting-of-food" and sacred numbers.