Blue/Green orbits, and other things The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 28 Aug 2000 https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/986 Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. ============================================================================== Michael Andre-Driussi — 28 Aug 2000, 14:56 First off, welcome John Clute: we honor you as "First Tracker" and "Major Inspiration"! 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= *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------