The Quick Questions About World Building Thread

Ok, so the Dominion are pretty authoritarian when it comes to Parahumans, but there are in-universe justifications for that authoritarianism. Is there any kind of Parahuman liberation movement?

"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

There are some. The most popular one is called Inheritor Movement (temporary name). It originated in Japan, but it's getting more and more popular on other continents. Basically, members of the movement believe that one day humanity will go extinct and Parahumans will inherit the Earth. Their belief is based on a theory that Parahumans are a next step of human evolution, and increasing growth rate of Parahumans across the world is the proof of that (I feel like I need to work on that part).

In the past, the movement was pretty radical, as they didn't want to wait for the promised day. They were heavily pro-Parahuman and anti-Muggle. Because of this, the group was fairly unpopular and eventually disbanded. Then, came Takeshi Kobayashi. He reformed the group and their ideology. He wanted to promote cooperation with non-Parahumans and strive to build a better future for everyone. While the members still believed in "inheritance of Earth" idea, they didn't want their future be based on hatred and bloodshed, as the radicals wanted. Once people started to believe in the movement's Heel–Face Turn, they started to support them.

Dominion was, for a good reason, wary of this movement, taking into consideration their past. While they allow them (for now) to spread the world in Europe, they're keeping a watchful eye on them.

I know I'll have to work on this movement a bit more.

I will become a great writer one day! Hopefully...

So, they started out as the Brotherhood of Mutants and then became the X-Men, basically? Ok. Are they still in favour of the military service etc? What is their stance on Parahuman v Parahuman conflict when it comes to wars between states? Are they internationalist for example?

"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

Well, the Inheritors (that's how I call them for short) aren't all in favor of military service. They, among many others, wanted to change the law in the Dominion to lessen the punishment I mentioned before. But, they do take into consideration that not every Parahuman was forced into military service. Some of them joined voluntarily.
It is worth mentioning that many of Japanese Inheritors were or are members of JDF. While they disapprove of Dominion's harsh punishments, at least they understand they want to help Parahumans learn to control their powers and teach them a bit of discipline.

The thing about Parahuman vs Parahuman conflicts during wars. While they wished such conflicts never happened, they do know that not all Parahumans are forced to fight by their respective states. They are still people with their own reasons. In case of Eurasian War, many Parahumans willingly chose to participate. On Dominion side: Patriotism, hatred towards Russia or wanting to bring them to justice for almost starting nuclear world war or other reasons motivated them to fight. As for Russian Parahumans, they fought to protect their home. Some of them, however, defected to the Dominion side. Either because they were sick of their government, mainly for starting this war, or because they learned the awful truth about the war and wanting it to end quickly.

Yes, Inheritors are internationalist, as they often promote cooperation between nations for the sake of a better future.

I will become a great writer one day! Hopefully...

Nevermind

Edited by Count_Spatula on Feb 4th 2020 at 12:20:34 PM

What would the horizon look like on a flat Earth^note Please assume that there's a handwave for any other issue involving a flat Earth.? If it would not exist, then what would we see in its place?

Also... no feedback for this question?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

The literal definition of a horizon is a place beyond which one cannot see because light cannot travel the path in between. On a convex surface, the horizon is the distance at which your angle of sight intersects that surface. In spacetime, horizons define such things as the distance beyond which light emitted can never reach you, or has not yet had time to reach you. Sufficient gravitational curvature creates horizons as well, such as the "event horizon" of a black hole. No causal influence or information can cross that boundary back into the universe. On the other hand, extreme curvature can eliminate horizons. Light curves around neutron stars and black holes such that you can see things on the other side.

On a perfectly flat surface (ignoring intervening obstacles like hills or buildings), there is no horizon by that definition. You can see as far as you can resolve objects, or as far as light will travel through the atmosphere without being scattered or attenuated. I'm not sure if the maximum range that light can travel to you given those factors would count as a horizon by a literal interpretation.

If, in FlatLand, someone built a 1 km skyscraper 1000 km in the distance, you might be able to see it on a clear day, if nothing is blocking your line of sight, your vision has enough angular resolution, and all other factors are suitable.

There are many other physics issues with a flat world, but you said to ignore those. For one thing, the gravity of such a world would have effects on light traveling across its surface. This curvature would eventually create horizons, but over a very long distance, like hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

For example, if you take a perfectly flat surface with the gravitational attraction of Earth's surface (9.8 m/s^2), light moving ~300,000 km would be bent 4.9 meters downwards. If you could somehow resolve something that far away (perhaps with a really good telescope and in a vacuum), it would appear about 5 meters lower than it actually is. A typical human with eyes at a 2 m height would therefore experience a horizon at around 192,000 km.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 9th 2020 at 12:22:05 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

As suggested above, and presuming an atmospheric properties and optics similar to those of our world, I would expect distance-haze to be a significant effect. Just as in our world distant mountains shade blue, so too, I think, would objects on a flat world slowly fade into indistinctness with distance.

That point about gravitational curving is an interesting one, and not one that had occrured to me. Interesting!

And in addition to what you said, that curvature implies to my mind somewhat of a lensing effect, as light that would have been too high curves down to the viewer, with higher origin-angles reaching the viewer at longer distances. I'm not entirely sure of the effects—presuming that one could resolve images at that distance. However, I imagine that objects would seem to "tilt" toward the viewer with distance, as light from increasingly higher angles is bent down to viewing-level.

My Games & Writing

So the objects that one sees would gradually become more "faded" in detail and color as they become more distant, until the point where the light reflecting from them becomes too scattered/attenuated to reach one's eyes and give a detectable image? I notice a similar phenomenon in real life when I look at the mountains and tall hills far in the desert near my city even on clear days with little to no airborne dust; the farther ones appear "foggier" — if that's the right word — than the ones closer to me.

By "5 meters lower", do you mean that I would essentially only see the part of the object (assuming that it's of sufficient height) that starts from 5 meters above its "root", i.e. as if the surface is actually curved and the horizon is located in the right place for that to happen?

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 9th 2020 at 11:36:54 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Correct to both points. Of course, the optical resolution of your eyes would also determine what you could see, and on a super clear day you might lose the ability to resolve things before they faded into the background haze.

That "planar gravity" thing is a serious abstraction. In reality, no flat surface hundreds of thousands of kilometers in length could exist for long, as it would be torn apart by shear forces almost instantly. However, in the most basic "flat earth" concept of an infinite plane accelerating through space at a constant 9.8 m/s^2, it would work as a first-order approximation.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Actual flat earthers don't believe in gravity. They actually don't explain why things fall down besides "Buoyancy".

I don't honestly care what flat Earthers believe; when asked a question like that, I address it from the point of view of science. If we're going to discuss actual Flat Earth fuckwittery, I may just bow out... or at least point out that it's off topic.

One small positive that I can concede is that it has given us some very interesting hypothetical scientific explorations, such as how gravity would actually work on a planar body.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 10th 2020 at 9:21:09 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yeah, but in a sci-fi fantasy where we've already established that a flat earth is part of the world, going "actually it would be scientifically impossible" feels a little nitpicky. We're already past the point of science when it comes to that particular topic.

"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

Of course. So then we get to have fun exploring those possibilities. That said, there is a certain inconsistency in presenting a scientifically impossible thing and then asking "how would science work" with respect to it. It would be remiss not to point that out even while discussing the topic seriously.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 10th 2020 at 9:26:39 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Sure, no doubt about that

"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

My personal viewpoint is that a good storywriter should only disregard scientific plausibility and realism as much as it's absolutely necessary for the story they're writing. If said writer is doing a "standard"-ish fantasy story that's set on a flat world rather than a round planet, then it's logically necessary to handwave away the obvious problem that is the scientific impossibility of such a world being able to retain its structural integrity ^note assuming that the rest of the universe's cosmology is even remotely similar to ours; the writer might instead go with one of the non-scientific cosmological models of antiquity where it's the Sun and the other celestial bodies that move around the stationary Earth., but not so for the physics of visible light if the writer has chosen not to alter them in any way.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Yes, although it's worth pointing out that the scenario I mentioned requires that your flat world be hundreds of times larger than Earth in radius. Most flat-world concepts involve something roughly the size of our own planet (or a portion of our planet), and over those scales the gravitational curvature would have no appreciable affect on light. Certainly it wouldn't be measurable without the sorts of lab equipment not typically found in medieval fantasy.

That said, it still wouldn't maintain structural integrity, but we are explicitly ignoring that problem.

This ties in to some fantasy world-building that I did many years ago for a D&D campaign set in the Spelljammer setting. Spelljammer postulates that gravity on bodies the size of, say, a typical sailing ship, is planar: that is, it attracts everything on board that ship to an invisible flat surface set parallel to where the waterline of the ship would be were it in an actual ocean.

This is, of course, ridiculous, but lets one have a lot of fun. For example, if that applies to ships, why wouldn't it apply to larger objects? Thus, my primary world in that campaign was flat... well, ovoid, but really squished like a pancake. Since gravity is planar, everything would work fine without problems like angled gravity near the edges or the atmosphere thinning out.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 11th 2020 at 7:02:47 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

So I had this thought after stumbling upon another thread here about how aliens would react to human technology; supposing that we never invented gunpowder, what would have become the chief ranged weapon instead? Would armies in the present be armed exclusively with rocket launchers, or would they have invented some kind of early mass driver? Or hell, perhaps we'd all be using repeating crossbows. :V

"If you think like a child, you will do a child's work."

"Invented" is perhaps a strong word here. "Discovered" is more appropriate. Combustion is a fundamental property of chemistry, and using rapid combustion to generate force is such a basic mechanical concept that it's hard to imagine any civilization getting beyond the equivalent of the Medieval era without it. Surely someone would have figured out eventually that mixing certain things together and lighting them on fire makes a boom. Putting a bunch of combustible material behind a projectile and setting it off is so basic that you can't get to more advanced stuff without figuring that out first.

Rocket launchers are all about combustive propulsion, so having those without also having guns is not credible. Going from muscle power to electromagnetic propulsion while skipping combustion is similarly insane. Now, steam power is certainly one way you can develop technology without gunpowder, and the two developed in parallel for a long time. We still do a lot of things with steam power, in fact, but it's not really practical for man-portable weaponry.

Steam-powered rockets are actually a thing, but haven't ever been particularly practical. A German company named Aquarius Aerospace is currently trying to build a steam-powered orbital rocket. Still, it's difficult to imagine going directly there without trying explosive combustion along the way.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 12th 2020 at 11:23:17 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

It's honestly pretty hard to not invent gunpowder, the ingredients for it are among the most abundant and easy to get on the planet, but if some magic block was placed that didn't allow people to string two and two together to make four, then I'd have to assume that ranged weapon dominance just wouldn't happen for a while and we'd still be using more and more advanced versions of crossbows, trebuchets, recurve bows and yeah, I guess railguns would get theorised about eventually and a TON of research resources pumped into them since they'd be such a leap forwards compared to the tension and counterweight weapons that would most likely still be in use. Oh, and I assume if rocket science becomes a thing without inventing gunpowder, Macross Missile Massacre would most likely be employed as well.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Feb 12th 2020 at 4:19:27 PM

"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

Sounds fair. I just remember reading a line somewhere on this site that was like 'what if we skipped over small arms and just went straight to high explosives?' and I think I might have misinterpreted it. :V

"If you think like a child, you will do a child's work."

You can't really make high explosives without making gunpowder first.

Bit of a linear part of the tech tree as it were

Oh really when?

Just so you know just how common the ingredients for gunpowder are, and how it's borderline impossible to world-build around them without just changing science:

• Charcoal - self-explanatory.
• Sulfur - the fifth most abundant element on earth, and an essential element for life.
• Saltpeter - or potassium nitrate - as long as animals shit, you can make this.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Feb 12th 2020 at 4:27:32 PM

"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

Pure sulfur is a bit of a pain to get a hold of. It's highly reactive so most sulfur is found in compounds. Extracting it is a complicated process and not one I'm entire sure how to do.

The easiest method is to find a salt dome. These tend to have very pure sulfur just under them and salt is an easy mineral to mine. However, this does require you to actually have a salt dome.

The more common method was to extract sulfur rich ore, scatter some sulfur powder over it, and then ignite it while on a slope. The free sulfur will then run down hill.

Of course, you only need 1 in 10 parts sulfur so it's not like you need a whole lot.

Yep, me again. This time I'm thinking about alien biology - supposing you had some Insectoid Aliens who, like real-life insects, don't have lungs and breathe through trachea on their abdomens (let's ignore for a moment the unlikelihood of them evolving in the exact same manner as Earth insects, I just like the Intelligent Gerbil trope, it seems :V). As a result of this, they can't survive in earth-like conditions because there's not enough oxygen in the air to support them - and, in fact, they've had to abandon their homeworld because, due to environmental changes, there's not as much oxygen as there used to be.

If these bugs needed to go planetside, could they get by with some esoteric 'breathing apparatus' that supplies extra oxygen to their trachea, or would they need full-on Quarian-style environment suits?

"If you think like a child, you will do a child's work."