gamer_extreme_101
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Jatopian wrote:
The site page on fegundos seems to be inaccessible, or I would mention them.

It's there, just shuffled around. Though, this does seem like a good time to leak a sneaky new feature of the site upgrades:

http://forum.caravelgames.com/site/fegundo

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Jatopian
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I kind of assumed that when the sun isn't actually there it's still too hot to pass through - just not hot enough to dissolve molecules. You don't have to be too close to our sun for the heat to kill you, certainly, though I imagine the Eighth's sun doesn't put out as much heat. In fact, I bet the fegundos go at night when they're not mating, which would make a spectacular display for the Akandians, rather like a meteor shower.

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[Last edited by Jatopian at 08-10-2012 08:43 PM]

Trickster
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mrimer wrote:
This is a very interesting discussion to me, Trickster. You describe how particles cannot actually travel from the Edge to the Tip, assuming it is a "one-dimensional singularity". What about waves, like photons?

Photons exhibit a wave-particle duality when they are not interacted with by other non-virtual particles, but they obey the same rules. The only means by which they could pass through the gap is by quantum tunneling.

Essentially, think of it like this. If the slit is too narrow for the wave or particle to pass through, it bounces off. Here, the slit is infinitely thin, so only by quantum effects which allow impassible barriers to be bypassed can anything get through.

mrimer wrote:
What if the Tip were not a singularity, but an incredibly small space, possibly a millimeter in width?

Excellent question.

It's really difficult to say, though. It's a small thing for a mathematical space to work this way, but when you add physics, well...

If The Edge held a vacuum, and The Tip were large enough for matter to pass through, then matter would get sucked through The Tip and destroyed in a shower of gamma rays and other forms of high-energy radiation.

If The Tip held a vacuum, matter would get sucked through The Edge and promptly become a black hole sizeable enough to devour The Eighth.

If both have an atmosphere...I think it'd be the latter situation, unfortunately. There's more pressure at The Edge than The Tip, carried by virtual particles which easily cross the barrier (they did even when it was a singular point), so matter would flow from The Edge to The Tip and destroy The Eighth via a black hole.

There may be, of course, more forces at work here than the ones we're familiar with. But making a big space become a small space or vice versa is a kind of problem similar to the "interior" of a black hole. In many cases it will create an environment where part of the space is inaccessible to the Universe (where it doesn't really exist), and so the way you think about it must change by necessity. Physics is poor at handling such cases.

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Zaratustra00
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The friction of the molecules entering the Sun might be what powers it in the first place.

What puzzles me more is just what someone sees at the -other- edge of the Eighth. If the sun is just a fixture of the Tip, you'd see a wide band of light in the sky, and gigantic islands far away:

image

mrimer
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Zaratustra00 wrote:
The friction of the molecules entering the Sun might be what powers it in the first place.

What puzzles me more is just what someone sees at the -other- edge of the Eighth. If the sun is just a fixture of the Tip, you'd see a wide band of light in the sky, and gigantic islands far away:

image

That looks pretty neat. Theoretically, you probably could see this repetition. However, with the naked eye, I'd expect range of sight would still be limited to maybe 20-30 miles, depending on the weather. Maybe I'm wrong about that number. I'd bet that you'd have to be on Sun Island to actually see a repeated view. But then, of course, this island would appear as a single unified land mass, and not multiple ones.

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hyperme
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mrimer wrote:

Zaratustra00 wrote:
The friction of the molecules entering the Sun might be what powers it in the first place.

What puzzles me more is just what someone sees at the -other- edge of the Eighth. If the sun is just a fixture of the Tip, you'd see a wide band of light in the sky, and gigantic islands far away:

image

That looks pretty neat. Theoretically, you probably could see this repetition. However, with the naked eye, I'd expect range of sight would still be limited to maybe 20-30 miles, depending on the weather. Maybe I'm wrong about that number. I'd bet that you'd have to be on Sun Island to actually see a repeated view. But then, of course, this island would appear as a single unified land mass, and not multiple ones.

If you got a high enough view on Akandia you'd probably be able to see some form of repetition.

Of course, since the Eighth is a sector of a circle, unless you look directly towards the Tip, you will always see part of Edge, providing you can see that far. Most of the time rain, mountain, flood water or solid rock will block your view, depending on location.

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[Last edited by hyperme at 08-16-2012 08:17 PM]

Trickster
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hyperme wrote:
Of course, since the Eighth is a sector of a circle, unless you look directly towards the Tip, you will always see part of Edge, providing you can see that far. Most of the time rain, mountain, flood water or solid rock will block your view, depending on location.

Most of the time, I would guess dust particles in the air itself would be sufficient to obscure normal vision such that landmarks would not be visible.

Let's make a extremely liberal assumption just to illustrate how this might be: pretend that continents on The Eighth are only one-tenth the size of continents on Earth. That means they would average one million square miles in area. Tueno is an average continent, and roughly circular, giving it a radius of around 564 miles. This is slightly more than one longitudinal marker, so this gives The Eighth a radius (i.e. length) of roughly 8,000 miles.

If you're facing anywhere at The Tip, you have 8,000 miles between you and The Edge. If you're facing 45 degrees off-Tip from The Edge, you have about 11,300 miles between you and The Edge.

Now, I don't know how much sky you can look through before it becomes obscuring, because it doesn't block vision completely on Earth. You can see to the horizon and further, but that's only a few hundred miles at most. If we're talking eight thousand miles, it seems highly unlikely that dust would play no role. Even mountains would be invisible against the wall of blue, I think.

However, if The Edge were the shimmering wall of light I predicted earlier, then you'd definitely still see it. The air would waver and flicker like a mirage of hot sands in all directions.

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[Last edited by Trickster at 08-17-2012 01:17 AM]