Subject: (whorl) Blue/Green orbits, and other things

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at sirius.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 14:56:24 +0000

First off, welcome John Clute: we honor you as "First Tracker" and "Major
Inspiration"! <everybody give the big Wolfe Howl>

Second, thank you Nigel Price for the symposium report.  Sounds like it was
really great!

Finally, the latest saga of "(more) Orbital Thoughts" (heh).  With IGJ it
seems to me that the model for Blue and Green is more like what we first
thought, that is, Blue is to Earth as Green is to Venus.  Green has an
orbital eccentricity that brings it frighteningly close--really, this is
spitting distance.

I visualize it this way: Blue's orbit as a circle, Green's orbit as
egg-shaped (should be an oval, but still). Blue pokes its way around the
circle, Green careens around in a fraction of the time it takes Blue; and
every six years they have their closest encounter.  Every year Green
arrives at that spot of apocentron (furthest from the star), but only every
sixth year is Blue actually there when it arrives.

So Green rides from the inner edge of the ecosphere out to the middle or
mid-outer edge.  (This "ecosphere" [known by a number of different names]is
the band of orbital space where water can be in a liquid state: inside the
inner edge, water boils off; outside the outer edge, water freezes up
permanently.) In our solar system, we would have to move Venus outward to,
say, .75 AU (the width of the ecosphere is contested by some) at its
pericentron and 1 AU for its apocentron.

Does anybody recall what we know about the length of years on Blue?  We
safely assume that the Whorl years are Urth years, but how close to that
standard are Blue years? (I've recently been giving myself a headache
[again, mind you!] over the length of years in 5HC . . . )

"Some call it a cattle barge, but others call it the `Love Boat'"; or
another observation on young inhumi on Blue: hey, don't forget the landers
that make the crossing from time to time.

=mantis=

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