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Author Topic: Eventide  (Read 12419 times)

Gothars

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Eventide
« on: November 28, 2015, 02:21:30 AM »

This thread is a continuation of a discussion that came up in the typo thread.  -G

Eventide again: the mouse-over description claims "one day~one year", while the twilight world market condition claims "one day ~ season".
« Last Edit: November 28, 2015, 09:25:42 AM by Gothars »
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Clockwork Owl

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Eventide
« Reply #1 on: November 28, 2015, 02:28:44 AM »

Regarding Eventide. A day in a year means, I guess, the planet is not rotating at all. Which is weird.

Cities in the 'habitable zone' created by mirrors, stellar shade means the planet is indeed tidally locked. Otherwise the said zone will constantly move. Which contradicts above.

"A day in a season" contradicts the two above.
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Gothars

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Eventide
« Reply #2 on: November 28, 2015, 02:55:32 AM »

Regarding Eventide. A day in a year means, I guess, the planet is not rotating at all. Which is weird.

Cities in the 'habitable zone' created by mirrors, stellar shade means the planet is indeed tidally locked. Otherwise the said zone will constantly move. Which contradicts above.

Well, the mirrors can simply be tilted slightly to keep their light on the same area. The shades would have to be moved, though.

If the planet would not be rotating at all, it would have no days at all. You can see it slooowly rotating btw if you follow it around. Not that I would have time for such nonsense, hrmhrm.
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Clockwork Owl

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Eventide
« Reply #3 on: November 28, 2015, 03:53:23 AM »

If the planet would not be rotating at all, it would have no days at all. You can see it slooowly rotating btw if you follow it around. Not that I would have time for such nonsense, hrmhrm.
The day and night is created by the relative position of the star from a point on surface. Whether the cause is rotation or revolution doesn't matter.
Well, the mirrors can simply be tilted slightly to keep their light on the same area. The shades would have to be moved, though.
And no, it's not that simple. I guess it is best explained by animated image.
Spoiler

Simply put: If the Eventide is tidally locked, everyone survives. If it has a day per year, no one survives.
[close]
« Last Edit: November 28, 2015, 04:00:22 AM by Aron0621 »
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Gothars

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Eventide
« Reply #4 on: November 28, 2015, 09:21:32 AM »

If the planet would not be rotating at all, it would have no days at all. You can see it slooowly rotating btw if you follow it around. Not that I would have time for such nonsense, hrmhrm.
The day and night is created by the relative position of the star from a point on surface. Whether the cause is rotation or revolution doesn't matter.

Weeell, that is a question of your frame of reference. You can have planet rotation relative to the position of the star, and planet rotation relative to the planet-star reference-system. The former rotation has to be zero for a planet to be tidally locked, while the latter has to be identical to the revolution period to archive tidal lock. So when I said it has to be rotating to have days, I meant relative to the position of the star. Sorry for being unclear.




Well, the mirrors can simply be tilted slightly to keep their light on the same area. The shades would have to be moved, though.
And no, it's not that simple. I guess it is best explained by animated image.
Spoiler

Simply put: If the Eventide is tidally locked, everyone survives. If it has a day per year, no one survives.
[close]

Neat gif, did you make it yourself?

It does however neither include a tilting of the mirrors, nor movement of the shades. As said, those would be necessary to keep the temperate areas constant. (If you had a point light source then the shades could also be just tilted, so it depends on the distance of planet and sun. Which is probably very low when the planet is approaching tidal lock.)
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David

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Re: Eventide
« Reply #5 on: November 28, 2015, 09:55:20 AM »

First: Those gifs are amazing and I love them.

Eventide again: the mouse-over description claims "one day~one year", while the twilight world market condition claims "one day ~ season".

The market condition description is incorrect, then.  It should be more like "one days is one cycle of the seasons" or something.
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Gothars

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Re: Eventide
« Reply #6 on: November 28, 2015, 10:08:32 AM »

Mh, I guess the mirrors/shades could also cycle around the planet to always stay about one point of its surface. Assuming, quite literally, both are two sides of the same coin, they would then have to flip around every half year to transition from mirror to shade. After all, a mirror is the perfect backside for a shade anyway, it allows it to dissipate its heat.
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Abradolf Lincler

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Re: Eventide
« Reply #7 on: November 28, 2015, 10:16:52 AM »

I just can't stop staring at those beautiful gifs...
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Clockwork Owl

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Re: Eventide
« Reply #8 on: November 28, 2015, 10:32:15 PM »

Thanks  ;D Made it by myself. Flash is amazing tool.

@Gothars: Then there would be numerous shades, enough to cover an entire orbit and have some spares, constantly shifting their position to maintain the habitable zone. While it isn't what looks like in-game, it sounds plausible alternative.

And no, I don't want to see Eventide surrounded with 16 mirror/shades. Eochu Bres(or whatever it was called) is enough.

Random thoughts: there could be a city-on-wheel(fleet of land vehicles with various roles like house or shop) to keep themselves in a habitable eclipse zone.
...Maybe the fact that I bought and played Convoy yesterday is responsible for that one.
« Last Edit: November 28, 2015, 10:38:57 PM by Aron0621 »
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Serenitis

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Re: Eventide
« Reply #9 on: November 29, 2015, 02:59:23 AM »

Best gif.

The market condition description is incorrect, then.  It should be more like "one days is one cycle of the seasons" or something.
If a planet is tidally locked, it doesn't have days at all.
The planet rotates so that one side faces the star. The opposite side faces empty space. And there's a band of twilight in between.
Forever.

Same thing with the Moon, which is tidally locked to Earth.
The Moon always looks the same because it rotates once for every orbit it makes so the exact same spot stays facing the Earth.
This is the confusing thing. It doesn't look like its rotating, but it is. And it's why I really liked that Eventide appears not to rotate in the "large" display because it differentiates it in a manner from which it is easy to infer its circumstance.

Description should be something like....
Spoiler
Eventide is a tidally-locked world that was found to otherwise be an ideal candidate for terraforming. Eventide does not possess an appreciable day/night cycle, leading to one hemisphere baking under a permanent mid-day sun while the other freezes in darkness. Between them is a narrow band of twilight constantly battered by energetic winds fuelled by the constant barrage of solar heat. Judicious employment of stellar mirrors and shades allows ideal conditions to prevail in large pockets of carefully maintained territory where the majority of the population is settled in leased urban cantons surrounded by vast aristocratic estate-plantations.
[close]
« Last Edit: November 29, 2015, 03:04:10 AM by Serenitis »
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Alex

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Re: Eventide
« Reply #10 on: November 29, 2015, 11:03:59 AM »

There's tidally locked, and then there's "almost tidally locked, on the way to being fully tidally locked in the next <large number of years>". Preeetty sure the latter is what David is going for here.
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Gothars

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Re: Eventide
« Reply #11 on: November 30, 2015, 04:39:56 AM »

The lore probably would be easier to understand if the planet were tidally locked, then the cities would stay in one place and how they got illuminated/shaded would be obvious. As it is now, with he moving cities and the seemingly unmoving mirrors/shades it's a bit wonky. It could be explained away (as I have tried), but on the other hands there are no benefits (mechanical or lore-wise) to an almost locked planet, are there?
Well, 99% of players would not notice or care about these details anyway :D
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SCC

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Re: Eventide
« Reply #12 on: November 30, 2015, 09:54:37 AM »

Seeing Eventide has atmosphere I think both sides of it are going to be warm because of winds - and those are either impulse-like or constant (or so I'm imagining).
Impulse are when light side is getting hotter and hotter, thus air expands more and more and goes to the dark side because of expanding, but, eventually, air on the dark side is so compressed it goes back to the light side (possibly in a explosion-like wave) and gets warmed again and... You know, the cycle repeats.
The second option I've thought is that simply in some places air goes to the dark side, in other goes back and Samarra gives power to this... thing.
I'm saying this because it means Eventide isn't that screwed in either case (since warm distributes itself...) or is screwed even more (...violently).
I'm not sure if I'm right (and possibly I'm not).
And when I've looked at it I thought about something... How shades and mirrors stay in the same place? Shade and one mirror (L1 and L2, respectively) can stay in relatively one place, but others? They would have to orbit the planet and that would probably be a bad thing, as warmed areas wouldn't stay consistent and effects may be marginal, if visible at all. There possibly is a workaround by getting two mirrors in L4 and L5 and letting them shine on the dark side, but that probably wouldn't efficient.
Now that I have thought a bit, if DoM had a sufficiently durable materials they could just link mirrors together and make sure centre of mass is in L2.
After even more overthinking the issue, I concluded tidal lock for a planet with water is a curse because all of water will evaporate and eventually freeze on the cold side, whereas not-locked would have this ice eventually melted by the star.
tl;dr: Eventide is screwed.

Clockwork Owl

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Re: Eventide
« Reply #13 on: November 30, 2015, 06:53:15 PM »

Wind will be constant. It won't distribute much heat tho - water carries far more heat energy(and is also a primary heat distributor on the Earth).

Stationary orbit refers to a specific orbit around a planet or a moon which has same cycle length as the planet(or moon)s' revolutionary cycle. Any satellite in this orbit remains same position relative to a point on surface. On the Earth, it is something like 30,000km above surface. On Eventide, it would have to be far, far away. A day is(or is nearly) an year so cycle is longer.
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Serenitis

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Re: Eventide
« Reply #14 on: December 01, 2015, 12:07:39 PM »

Stationary orbit refers to a specific orbit around a planet or a moon which has same cycle length as the planet(or moon)s' revolutionary cycle. Any satellite in this orbit remains same position relative to a point on surface. On the Earth, it is something like 30,000km above surface. On Eventide, it would have to be far, far away. A day is(or is nearly) an year so cycle is longer.
And due to being further away the mirrors would have to be much larger to achieve the same effect. Like approaching "that's no moon" large.
Either that or create an even bigger hugenormous mirror to sit at L2.

[edit]
I'm trying to have a go at working out exactly how far out the mirrors would need to be, but I've got as far as figuring out Earth has an equatorial velocity of ~460 m/s-1. If it were tidally locked it would have a Veq of 460/365 --> ~1.2 m/s-1. Big orbits required to hover over something going that slow. How big? I don't know, my head is literally swimming looking at these formulae. I am awful at numbers.
Not touched this stuff in nearly 20 years. Damn yooooooooooou spaaaaaaaaaace gaaaaaaaaaaame!
« Last Edit: December 01, 2015, 12:23:30 PM by Serenitis »
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