Dome, Dome on the Range

Jeff Wilson · 13 Jan 2011, 18:36 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 12:36:19 -0600
Subject: (urth) Dome, Dome on the Range
In-Reply-To: <4D2F2F1F.1070800 at verizon.net>
References: <850030.91086.qm at web84105.mail.mud.yahoo.com>	<261903.11019.qm at web161805.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>	<980429.72652.qm at smtp820.mail.ird.yahoo.com>	<4D2EEA53.7030002 at verizon.net>	<4D2F1B2B.1010702 at io.com>	<4D2F20C9.9030809 at verizon.net>	<4D2F2C6E.2000907 at io.com>
	<4D2F2F1F.1070800 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <4D2F4623.2090707 at io.com>

On 1/13/2011 10:58 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> On 1/13/2011 11:46 AM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> Of course, we must keep in mind that the Earth seen from the moon is
>> 4x wider than the moon seen from the earth. If Lune really is only
>> 150,000 miles away it can be seen all the better, of course.
> I thought the average was almost 250,000 mi.

It is now, but in SWORD ch XXXII, Sev mentions "Not a glimmer showed 
upon the waters of the lake, save for the green, reflected light that 
fell from the myriad leaves of the Forest of Lune, fifty thousand 
leagues away."

>> extreme weather making factor would be the month-long local day. This
>> will tend to make the prevailing winds blow across the terminator from
>> dark to light, with increasing mediation in the direction of rotation
>> nearing the equator. You may get some concentric convection cells,
>> making the overall weather patterns resemble an archery target.
>
> I'm not sure what that would look like from Urth, but I certainly seem
> to have asked the right person!

It has been a while since I have mentioned that I do a lot of peer 
review and fact-checking on role-playing game books. While this includes 
a lot of fanciful "zapping" with super powers and such, the publisher 
sjgames.com courts a lot of the hard-SF crowd by making a point of 
consulting domain experts in the preparation of the books on real world 
subjects like planetary science and biotechnology. This has been a 
wonderful opportunity for me to work with some of the best informed and 
well educated folks in the world, often of fannish bent, and so much 
great stuff ends up glossed over in the books that I try to pass along 
some of it where I can.

And geting to run the top sekrit playtesting mailing lists where 
top-posting is verboten and all posters can be held to account for their 
laxity in quote-trimming is entirely a side benefit.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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