the wall and baldanders

Jeff Wilson · 18 May 2010, 21:27 · from 2010-May.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: Tue, 18 May 2010 16:27:46 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: (urth) the wall and baldanders
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTikxUYnOs0SDscX3xZ0z5Ut5dDv-HIsNgxIrHc5K at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTimmU6pZYUC1rb5Pwk2mFCDjE_k6UJ8FMqNlVq3X at mail.gmail.com>
	<a456b0028bdcce6150233d9233c0542f.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>
	<AANLkTikxUYnOs0SDscX3xZ0z5Ut5dDv-HIsNgxIrHc5K at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <3e4750c6617a9868811ee34f20a7253d.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>

> I assumed Nessus was really really big. It's very old, still expanding,
> and
> yet there is a bunch of real estate inside the wall that is rural.
>
> How big in diameter does the Whorl need to be? Fifty miles?

They might have similar diameters, but the Whorl is similarly long or
longer lengthwise, and is visibly (from the outside) made from an
asteroid. The Wall is overtly artificial and there's just not enough room
for miles of height extending into the sky or depth below the soil.

The best-sounding guess I've heard is that the great Wall surrounded the
world's primary spaceport in some earlier age, partly for controlling
ingress and egress and partly as a protective berm in case of an accident.
The towers of the citadel are the grounded ships of course, and the
citadel's curtain wall was added in a later but still antique age to form
a redoubt within the Wall. The curtain wall is generally masonry, but the
Great Wall may also be an atom smasher or otherwise serve a third purpose.

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