The Apu-Punchau Eclipse

Jeff Wilson · 12 Jun 2008, 08:25 · from 2008-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:25:24 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Apu-Punchau Eclipse
In-Reply-To: <BAY103-W45226CBCC5BFB8F70CD769D7AD0 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY103-W45226CBCC5BFB8F70CD769D7AD0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4850DD74.6030903 at io.com>

b sharp wrote:
> At the beginning of UotNS, while on the Ship deck, Severian specifically 
> notes his weight has been
> reduced by 7/8. So Roy's assertion that the Ship is of planetary size is 
> a bit exaggerated but not
> by so much. A bit smaller but of similar size to our Moon, and thus 
> surely capable of causing an eclipse. 

Gravity doesn't dictate size, rather mass and distance dictate gravity. 
An asteroid can have a gravity of 1g is you pack it itghtly so that you 
can be withing a few meters of the whole thing. Likewise, the Ship has 
about 1/8 gravity at most, but Severian writes that he is much closer to 
the center of its mass that people on the ground are to Urth's center.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net