Last week I talked about Elysium’s towns and cities. One teensy detail I mentioned in passing - the ridiculously large vehicle garages - might have raised an eyebrow or two if anyone stopped to thing about it.
Why would they need garages anywhere up to three hundred meters long?
The answer is, they need to shelter ridiculously large vehicles.
The people on Elysium travel the surface in modular vehicles, that can easily stretch half a kilometer in length. These giant crawlers are made up of alternating cars slung between wheel and power units (called yoops - short for Universal Power Unit). The wheels are lightweight, sprung mesh seven meters in diameter. Think moon buggy scaled up an order of magnitude. The cars they support are giant boxes about twelve meters square and four floors tall.
Of course, these aren’t the kind of vehicles you take out on a jaunt, or drive down to the corner store. These are working vehicles.
The colonists make a living harvesting materials from the depths of the planet-girdling plant mass. During the summer months they can spend weeks out in the field, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest town. Crawlers carry everything they need to support a harvesting crew of fifty, along with climbing, cutting, and hauling machinery, and storage to carry their finds back for processing.
At the turn of the seasons, these same crawlers carry the entire town’s population, belongings, and equipment across the equator to towns in the other hemisphere where they resume work for the next few Earth years.
Showing posts with label Worldbuilding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Worldbuilding. Show all posts
Sunday, June 16, 2019
Saturday, June 8, 2019
The Long Dark - habitats
Last time I talked about worldbuilding The Long Dark, I mentioned cities and towns made up of enclosed domes. All the centers of population are built from dozens or hundreds of units that follow similar basic designs. From the air, a large city would probably resemble a rumpled sheet of bubble wrap.
All the units share some features in common. They are either circular or oval in plan, with a basin-like rigid base topped by a slightly flexible weather shield supported by ribs. Together they form an airtight bubble to keep Elysium’s poisonous atmosphere out.
The base is sunk into the surface of Sponge. The upper surface doesn’t have to hold in air against vacuum - Elysium’s surface pressure is not too different from Earth’s - but it has to cope with extreme weather including wind speeds in the hundreds of kilometers per hour. Hence the ability to flex (within reason) instead of trying to stand rigid against the storms.
Any internal structures are built onto the base, and stand well back from the weather shield to allow room for it to move. Each dome has its own power supply, air filters, waste treatment etc. so towns don’t need much in the way of centralized infrastructure.
To complete the picture, domes have a series of standardized airlocks evenly spaced around the perimeter. Domes are linked together by a network of semi-flexible tunnels, to allow for the slight movements that come from making your home on the skin of a living organism.
A standard habitat dome is about ninety meters in diameter. It has six airlocks around the edge, and hallways running into the center as well as a walkway between the weather skin and the buildings inside. The buildings form a circular stepped pyramid about ten floors high, containing living quarters, kitchens, and communal dining halls. At full capacity, a single dome can house up to a thousand people.
There are smaller circular domes for workshops, administration, and community spaces - schools, hospitals, entertainment.
Finally, there are much larger oval structures - up to a hundred meters across and three hundred meters long - for warehouses, vehicle garages, and hydroponic farms.
All the units share some features in common. They are either circular or oval in plan, with a basin-like rigid base topped by a slightly flexible weather shield supported by ribs. Together they form an airtight bubble to keep Elysium’s poisonous atmosphere out.
The base is sunk into the surface of Sponge. The upper surface doesn’t have to hold in air against vacuum - Elysium’s surface pressure is not too different from Earth’s - but it has to cope with extreme weather including wind speeds in the hundreds of kilometers per hour. Hence the ability to flex (within reason) instead of trying to stand rigid against the storms.
Any internal structures are built onto the base, and stand well back from the weather shield to allow room for it to move. Each dome has its own power supply, air filters, waste treatment etc. so towns don’t need much in the way of centralized infrastructure.
To complete the picture, domes have a series of standardized airlocks evenly spaced around the perimeter. Domes are linked together by a network of semi-flexible tunnels, to allow for the slight movements that come from making your home on the skin of a living organism.
A standard habitat dome is about ninety meters in diameter. It has six airlocks around the edge, and hallways running into the center as well as a walkway between the weather skin and the buildings inside. The buildings form a circular stepped pyramid about ten floors high, containing living quarters, kitchens, and communal dining halls. At full capacity, a single dome can house up to a thousand people.
There are smaller circular domes for workshops, administration, and community spaces - schools, hospitals, entertainment.
Finally, there are much larger oval structures - up to a hundred meters across and three hundred meters long - for warehouses, vehicle garages, and hydroponic farms.
Saturday, May 25, 2019
The Long Dark - human habitation
Continuing occasional posts about worldbuilding for my current WIP.
Aside from extreme weather patterns, the colonists in The Long Dark have another major problem to contend with. The planet is superficially Earth-like - similar gravity, similar temperature on average, abundant water and an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. All sounds moderately livable. Except for one thing. Both the air and the water are laced with a cocktail of poisons. Without treatment they are deadly.
OK. I decided the toxins would be large organic molecules and relatively easy to filter out, so there is no shortage of air and water per se, but they do need treatment.
That means you can’t go out onto the surface without a mask, and all living areas need to be enclosed and secured to keep the native atmosphere out.
This isn’t as extreme as living on, say, the Moon, where you have to pressurize living spaces against vacuum, but you do need a reasonably airtight barrier and airlocks everywhere. So, the colonists live in large domes, clustered together into towns and cities.
The dome arrangements of the town of Serendipity, where most of the action takes place. The large ovals are vehicle garages and warehouses. The smaller domes are habitats and workshops. The town is roughly a kilometer across.
The relatively habitable equator is ringed by eighteen large cities. These are occupied year-round, and contain all the major industrial processing and hydroponic growing areas.
Away from the equator, in the twenty to thirty-five degree latitudes, there is a scattering of nearly fifty smaller towns in each hemisphere. These are only occupied during Elysium’s summer months. Half the planet’s population live here, harvesting medicinal products and other useful materials from the depths of the plant mass. At the turn of the seasons they have to migrate across the equator to escape the winter deep freeze - the “Long Dark” of the book’s title.
Map of Elysium showing up to forty degrees north and south. The equatorial cities and the northern towns are marked here.
Aside from extreme weather patterns, the colonists in The Long Dark have another major problem to contend with. The planet is superficially Earth-like - similar gravity, similar temperature on average, abundant water and an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. All sounds moderately livable. Except for one thing. Both the air and the water are laced with a cocktail of poisons. Without treatment they are deadly.
OK. I decided the toxins would be large organic molecules and relatively easy to filter out, so there is no shortage of air and water per se, but they do need treatment.
That means you can’t go out onto the surface without a mask, and all living areas need to be enclosed and secured to keep the native atmosphere out.
This isn’t as extreme as living on, say, the Moon, where you have to pressurize living spaces against vacuum, but you do need a reasonably airtight barrier and airlocks everywhere. So, the colonists live in large domes, clustered together into towns and cities.
The dome arrangements of the town of Serendipity, where most of the action takes place. The large ovals are vehicle garages and warehouses. The smaller domes are habitats and workshops. The town is roughly a kilometer across.
The relatively habitable equator is ringed by eighteen large cities. These are occupied year-round, and contain all the major industrial processing and hydroponic growing areas.
Away from the equator, in the twenty to thirty-five degree latitudes, there is a scattering of nearly fifty smaller towns in each hemisphere. These are only occupied during Elysium’s summer months. Half the planet’s population live here, harvesting medicinal products and other useful materials from the depths of the plant mass. At the turn of the seasons they have to migrate across the equator to escape the winter deep freeze - the “Long Dark” of the book’s title.
Map of Elysium showing up to forty degrees north and south. The equatorial cities and the northern towns are marked here.
Saturday, December 8, 2018
The Long Dark - more about life on the surface
It’s been a while since I talked about the worldbuilding for The Long Dark.
Last time, I delved a bit into the single superorganism covering a large part of the planet’s surface, and I mentioned something about the internal structure. Given the extremes of temperature through the seasons, thanks to the planet’s 90 degree tilt, any life has an obvious major problem to contend with - temperature control.
Much of Sponge’s structure is related to solving this problem. Its enormous thickness provides natural insulation, but the surface layers are still in danger of baking during summer, and intense frostbite during the long spells of darkness. To solve this, Sponge moves water around to shunt heat from where it’s overabundant to where it’s needed. Short term local movements between the surface and reservoirs in the depths help to even out the day/night cycle, while vast subsurface rivers shunt heat back and forth across the equator.
These mechanisms protect the plant tissue from thermal damage, and also help moderate the climate extremes in the atmosphere. And, as well as photosynthesis like Earthly plants, Sponge makes good use of the temperature gradients to generate chemical energy from thermosynthesis.
Finally, as an aside, what does the sun look like from the surface?
I had no idea what a red giant star might look like from an orbit in the habitable zone, so I did a rough mental calculation. A star similar to the sun that evolves to the red giant stage will swell up to swallow the orbits of the inner planets. It may or may not reach as far as Earth’s orbit, but that’s a moot point. At best, Earth would be grazing the surface of the star, so you can bet things would be somewhat toasty.
Anyhooo ... that makes a “typical” red giant anything up to 200 times the diameter of our sun. And orbiting somewhere out near Saturn, say 10 times the distance away, that means the star would appear anything up to 20 times the size in the sky.
That’s one whopping big sun! No wonder the colonists call it “Big Red”!
Last time, I delved a bit into the single superorganism covering a large part of the planet’s surface, and I mentioned something about the internal structure. Given the extremes of temperature through the seasons, thanks to the planet’s 90 degree tilt, any life has an obvious major problem to contend with - temperature control.
Much of Sponge’s structure is related to solving this problem. Its enormous thickness provides natural insulation, but the surface layers are still in danger of baking during summer, and intense frostbite during the long spells of darkness. To solve this, Sponge moves water around to shunt heat from where it’s overabundant to where it’s needed. Short term local movements between the surface and reservoirs in the depths help to even out the day/night cycle, while vast subsurface rivers shunt heat back and forth across the equator.
These mechanisms protect the plant tissue from thermal damage, and also help moderate the climate extremes in the atmosphere. And, as well as photosynthesis like Earthly plants, Sponge makes good use of the temperature gradients to generate chemical energy from thermosynthesis.
Finally, as an aside, what does the sun look like from the surface?
I had no idea what a red giant star might look like from an orbit in the habitable zone, so I did a rough mental calculation. A star similar to the sun that evolves to the red giant stage will swell up to swallow the orbits of the inner planets. It may or may not reach as far as Earth’s orbit, but that’s a moot point. At best, Earth would be grazing the surface of the star, so you can bet things would be somewhat toasty.
Anyhooo ... that makes a “typical” red giant anything up to 200 times the diameter of our sun. And orbiting somewhere out near Saturn, say 10 times the distance away, that means the star would appear anything up to 20 times the size in the sky.
That’s one whopping big sun! No wonder the colonists call it “Big Red”!
Saturday, October 20, 2018
The Long Dark - plant life
A peculiar world is likely to support some peculiar life. What I’ve settled on is by no means original, but I’m trying to develop the basic idea into something unique to this story.
I’m entering new worldbuilding territory here, because up until now I’ve not dealt with any form of alien life. Even in Shayla’s world, they never encountered another inhabited planet. Everything there has its origins on Earth (even though they’ve long ago forgotten that Earth even existed.)
In The Long Dark, the planet Elysium is girdled by a single plant-like superorganism. The locals call it Sponge.
Like Earthly life, Sponge is based on carbon chemistry, with water as the medium, and an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. During the summer season, Sponge photosynthesizes for energy.
But similarities end there. Sponge is not based on cellular structures like our plants and animals, and it has no DNA. I don’t get into these kinds of details in the story, but my basis is that there are other mechanisms possible for self-organization and replication.
Something I am fleshing out, though, is some insight into the inner structure of Sponge as that is important to the story. The plant mass forms a carpet hundreds of meters thick - kilometers in places - that covers the equatorial to mid latitudes, ending about 40 degrees north and south. Given the extreme conditions at the poles, I figured this was a reasonable extent for life to persist.
The name “Sponge” conjures images of a fairly amorphous uniform spongy mass. In the story I try to dispel that with images of specific and detailed structure at all kinds of scales from the microscopic to the gargantuan. There are vast structural ribs holding the plant’s shape, and complex networks of veins, aquifers, and chambers to convey liquid, nutrients, and air to where it’s needed. The mass is riddled with chambers, deep chasms, and vast hollows that would easily swallow a town, along with a variety of specialized structures that make up the living portions of the plant. It is these depths that the colonists harvest for a living.
I’m entering new worldbuilding territory here, because up until now I’ve not dealt with any form of alien life. Even in Shayla’s world, they never encountered another inhabited planet. Everything there has its origins on Earth (even though they’ve long ago forgotten that Earth even existed.)
In The Long Dark, the planet Elysium is girdled by a single plant-like superorganism. The locals call it Sponge.
Like Earthly life, Sponge is based on carbon chemistry, with water as the medium, and an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. During the summer season, Sponge photosynthesizes for energy.
But similarities end there. Sponge is not based on cellular structures like our plants and animals, and it has no DNA. I don’t get into these kinds of details in the story, but my basis is that there are other mechanisms possible for self-organization and replication.
Something I am fleshing out, though, is some insight into the inner structure of Sponge as that is important to the story. The plant mass forms a carpet hundreds of meters thick - kilometers in places - that covers the equatorial to mid latitudes, ending about 40 degrees north and south. Given the extreme conditions at the poles, I figured this was a reasonable extent for life to persist.
Map of Elysium, showing the active growth zones north and south,
and the main north-south systems of veins
The name “Sponge” conjures images of a fairly amorphous uniform spongy mass. In the story I try to dispel that with images of specific and detailed structure at all kinds of scales from the microscopic to the gargantuan. There are vast structural ribs holding the plant’s shape, and complex networks of veins, aquifers, and chambers to convey liquid, nutrients, and air to where it’s needed. The mass is riddled with chambers, deep chasms, and vast hollows that would easily swallow a town, along with a variety of specialized structures that make up the living portions of the plant. It is these depths that the colonists harvest for a living.
Saturday, October 6, 2018
The Long Dark - surface conditions
I’ve talked about the peculiar day/night cycle on a world with a 90 degree axial tilt. That much is straightforward observation of how the sun would look at various points on the planet’s surface. But the next part of worldbuilding is a lot more speculative.
Most of a planet’s weather is driven by convection currents caused by temperature differences in its atmosphere and oceans. With that in mind, think about a planet where the sun hovers directly overhead at the pole, baking it remorselessly for months, then disappears for a whole half of the year plunging that same pole into darkness. To me, that adds up to massive temperature fluctuations across the globe during the course of a year.
I know the same thing happens on Earth at the poles, with six months day and six of night, but the sun stays low in the sky and the days stay cold. The poles don’t turn into the tropics at midsummer, and most of the Earth’s surface sees a reasonable day/night cycle all year round. On this planet, by contrast, periods of light and darkness are taken to extremes across most of its surface, and everywhere gets a dose of tropical heat at some point in the year.
One thing I think we can safely assume - there will be some pretty violent weather going on. Beyond that, I certainly have no way of knowing how it would look, so the rest is pure invention.
Earth has many stable circulation patterns, but its axis only wobbles 23 degrees back and forth relative to the sun during the course of a year. My world does a complete 180 and then back again, so any circulation patterns would completely reverse, which suggests a lot of turbulence to cope with.
In this world, a ‘year’ lasts about thirteen Earth years, so that gives a lengthy season. My worldbuilding has global weather patterns switching through a series of states as the seasons change. Each state is reasonably stable - though not necessarily benign - for a long stretch of time as the planet slowly turns new latitudes to the sun, then the pattern becomes unstable and flips in a rapid and violent transition to the next season.
The height of summer is the calmest time, and this is when most of the outdoor work is done. Meanwhile, in the winter hemisphere, temperatures bottom out at minus two hundred Celcius, lashing the winter pole with storms of nitrogen rain.
The most violent conditions arrive some time after midsummer, as the winter pole starts thawing and the summer pole plunges into darkness. Through the mid-seasons, convection currents in the atmosphere undergo dramatic shifts powered from the poles. I’m expecting storms and winds that would put an Earthly hurricane to shame.
On top of this, a red giant star itself is pretty active compared to our tranquil sun. Outbursts of solar flares make nearby space inhospitable to orbiting craft much of the time, and the colonists long ago gave up trying to keep satellites working. I’ve given the planet a powerful magnetic field to shield the surface from the worst of the solar storms, but it’s still a dangerous place to be. And all this electrical activity makes communications tricky at best. The colonists rely on land lines laid between permanent settlements, and short wave radio when conditions allow.
Most of a planet’s weather is driven by convection currents caused by temperature differences in its atmosphere and oceans. With that in mind, think about a planet where the sun hovers directly overhead at the pole, baking it remorselessly for months, then disappears for a whole half of the year plunging that same pole into darkness. To me, that adds up to massive temperature fluctuations across the globe during the course of a year.
I know the same thing happens on Earth at the poles, with six months day and six of night, but the sun stays low in the sky and the days stay cold. The poles don’t turn into the tropics at midsummer, and most of the Earth’s surface sees a reasonable day/night cycle all year round. On this planet, by contrast, periods of light and darkness are taken to extremes across most of its surface, and everywhere gets a dose of tropical heat at some point in the year.
One thing I think we can safely assume - there will be some pretty violent weather going on. Beyond that, I certainly have no way of knowing how it would look, so the rest is pure invention.
Earth has many stable circulation patterns, but its axis only wobbles 23 degrees back and forth relative to the sun during the course of a year. My world does a complete 180 and then back again, so any circulation patterns would completely reverse, which suggests a lot of turbulence to cope with.
In this world, a ‘year’ lasts about thirteen Earth years, so that gives a lengthy season. My worldbuilding has global weather patterns switching through a series of states as the seasons change. Each state is reasonably stable - though not necessarily benign - for a long stretch of time as the planet slowly turns new latitudes to the sun, then the pattern becomes unstable and flips in a rapid and violent transition to the next season.
The height of summer is the calmest time, and this is when most of the outdoor work is done. Meanwhile, in the winter hemisphere, temperatures bottom out at minus two hundred Celcius, lashing the winter pole with storms of nitrogen rain.
The most violent conditions arrive some time after midsummer, as the winter pole starts thawing and the summer pole plunges into darkness. Through the mid-seasons, convection currents in the atmosphere undergo dramatic shifts powered from the poles. I’m expecting storms and winds that would put an Earthly hurricane to shame.
On top of this, a red giant star itself is pretty active compared to our tranquil sun. Outbursts of solar flares make nearby space inhospitable to orbiting craft much of the time, and the colonists long ago gave up trying to keep satellites working. I’ve given the planet a powerful magnetic field to shield the surface from the worst of the solar storms, but it’s still a dangerous place to be. And all this electrical activity makes communications tricky at best. The colonists rely on land lines laid between permanent settlements, and short wave radio when conditions allow.
Saturday, September 29, 2018
The Long Dark - building a habitable planet
Almost a year ago, I talked about the unusual world setting of The Long Dark. This is a world with a roughly 90 degree axial tilt - so it’s effectively spinning on its side compared to the plane of its orbit.
The most obvious characteristic of such a world is its extreme seasons. Other than a narrow strip around the equator, everywhere will experience midnight sun and some day-long darkness. The closer you get to the poles, the longer those periods of perpetual day and night become.
The strangest points on the surface are the poles themselves. At midsummer, the sun will be stationary, directly overhead. Expect it to get very hot! As the days proceed, the sun will start to move in small circles, gradually getting wider and wider and closer to the horizon. When you reach the equinox, the sun will hug the horizon, then dip below, and you then have half a year of complete darkness. This is “the Long Dark” of the book’s title.
This extreme light/dark cycle was really the foundation for the story, but there are other important features I wanted to bring together, which meant some research to build a credible and consistent world.
When I first came up with the idea, I pictured the world circling a white dwarf. I don’t know why, but that was my mental image. As I developed the setting, though, I realized I wanted this world to have a very long year. I wanted my colonists to have several Earth years of “summer” in one hemisphere, before they had to migrate across the equator and set up camp in the other hemisphere.
This meant it had to be orbiting far out compared to Earth’s orbit, yet still warm enough at that distance to support liquid water and life. A white dwarf was not going to give me the conditions I needed.
I had an idea for how to resolve this, but no idea whether it was workable. I was delighted when some reading from a number of sources suggested I was on the right track.
In a few billion years, our own sun is expected to go through a red giant phase. It will expand to swallow the orbits of the inner planets, maybe even Earth’s. This led me to two very important realizations:
First, in this phase the “Goldilocks zone” will push outwards to cover the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. The “Goldilocks zone” is what astronomers refer to as the habitable zone, where liquid water should be able to exist on a planet’s surface. Right now, anywhere beyond Mars is too cold, but when the sun expands, the frozen outer reaches of the solar system will get a lot more toasty.
The second note is that if this is the evolution of our sun, then a red giant like this must be roughly the same mass. This means planets’ orbital periods will be comparable to those of our own solar system for a given distance out. And somewhere around the orbit of Saturn gave me the length of year that I was aiming for!
Right there, I had a long orbit that lay in the habitable zone. My white dwarf became a red giant.
I’m sure there are other scenarios that would give me the right combination of conditions, but this one simply resonated with me. It also provided other useful features that I’ll talk about in future posts.
The most obvious characteristic of such a world is its extreme seasons. Other than a narrow strip around the equator, everywhere will experience midnight sun and some day-long darkness. The closer you get to the poles, the longer those periods of perpetual day and night become.
The strangest points on the surface are the poles themselves. At midsummer, the sun will be stationary, directly overhead. Expect it to get very hot! As the days proceed, the sun will start to move in small circles, gradually getting wider and wider and closer to the horizon. When you reach the equinox, the sun will hug the horizon, then dip below, and you then have half a year of complete darkness. This is “the Long Dark” of the book’s title.
This extreme light/dark cycle was really the foundation for the story, but there are other important features I wanted to bring together, which meant some research to build a credible and consistent world.
When I first came up with the idea, I pictured the world circling a white dwarf. I don’t know why, but that was my mental image. As I developed the setting, though, I realized I wanted this world to have a very long year. I wanted my colonists to have several Earth years of “summer” in one hemisphere, before they had to migrate across the equator and set up camp in the other hemisphere.
This meant it had to be orbiting far out compared to Earth’s orbit, yet still warm enough at that distance to support liquid water and life. A white dwarf was not going to give me the conditions I needed.
I had an idea for how to resolve this, but no idea whether it was workable. I was delighted when some reading from a number of sources suggested I was on the right track.
In a few billion years, our own sun is expected to go through a red giant phase. It will expand to swallow the orbits of the inner planets, maybe even Earth’s. This led me to two very important realizations:
First, in this phase the “Goldilocks zone” will push outwards to cover the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. The “Goldilocks zone” is what astronomers refer to as the habitable zone, where liquid water should be able to exist on a planet’s surface. Right now, anywhere beyond Mars is too cold, but when the sun expands, the frozen outer reaches of the solar system will get a lot more toasty.
The second note is that if this is the evolution of our sun, then a red giant like this must be roughly the same mass. This means planets’ orbital periods will be comparable to those of our own solar system for a given distance out. And somewhere around the orbit of Saturn gave me the length of year that I was aiming for!
Right there, I had a long orbit that lay in the habitable zone. My white dwarf became a red giant.
I’m sure there are other scenarios that would give me the right combination of conditions, but this one simply resonated with me. It also provided other useful features that I’ll talk about in future posts.
Monday, September 24, 2018
Worldbuilding The Long Dark
One of the guilty pleasures of speculative fiction is the opportunity to imagine whole other worlds, and then bring them to life on the page.
There are some aspects of worldbuilding that I like to treat as a pastime in their own right in parallel to the actual writing. I wrote a whole series of posts about the massive drawing project for Admiral George Leonard, from The Ashes of Home.
https://thebaldpatch.blogspot.com/search/label/Battleships
That project was self-indulgent relaxation for me. It goes light years beyond the handful of rough sketches that I actually needed for the purposes of the story. In fact, the novels I’ve written so far have been fairly light on true worldbuilding.
The Shayla stories are set thousands of years in the future. There’s space travel and advanced tech, ships and planets for story settings, but strip out those elements and the world she inhabits is firmly rooted in current and past Earthly cultures. Worldbuilding largely consisted of placing a filter over the world we know, and deciding which features to amplify and which to fade out.
When it came to Tiamat’s Nest, I was starting even closer to home. Earth, later this century, but changed by a shifting climate and the ravages of conflicts and migrations as a vastly diminished population makes a new life in the new habitable zones.
Writing The Long Dark is presenting an entirely new challenge for me. Here, I’m starting out with a planet similar in size and temperature to Earth, but vastly different in most other respects. It supports non-Earthly life - a first for me - but humans can’t survive unprotected out in the open. In fact, their entire way of life is different from anything we know.
So, I’m having to go back to the drawing board and question just about every aspect of life that we take for granted. Of course, for simplicity and sanity, there has to be an undercurrent of familiarity, but I still have to look for hidden assumptions and bring them out into the open to see if the environment might drive a different set of norms that will play into the story somehow. I can’t simply transplant “small town England” onto alien soil and hope for it to make sense.
As a result, I’m expecting the first draft to take longer than usual, to leave me more time to mull over worldbuilding aspects as I go. Having said that, the last couple of months have been more productive than I expected and, for now at least, the words are flowing well.
Ha! I’ve probably jinxed it now!
There are some aspects of worldbuilding that I like to treat as a pastime in their own right in parallel to the actual writing. I wrote a whole series of posts about the massive drawing project for Admiral George Leonard, from The Ashes of Home.
https://thebaldpatch.blogspot.com/search/label/Battleships
That project was self-indulgent relaxation for me. It goes light years beyond the handful of rough sketches that I actually needed for the purposes of the story. In fact, the novels I’ve written so far have been fairly light on true worldbuilding.
The Shayla stories are set thousands of years in the future. There’s space travel and advanced tech, ships and planets for story settings, but strip out those elements and the world she inhabits is firmly rooted in current and past Earthly cultures. Worldbuilding largely consisted of placing a filter over the world we know, and deciding which features to amplify and which to fade out.
When it came to Tiamat’s Nest, I was starting even closer to home. Earth, later this century, but changed by a shifting climate and the ravages of conflicts and migrations as a vastly diminished population makes a new life in the new habitable zones.
Writing The Long Dark is presenting an entirely new challenge for me. Here, I’m starting out with a planet similar in size and temperature to Earth, but vastly different in most other respects. It supports non-Earthly life - a first for me - but humans can’t survive unprotected out in the open. In fact, their entire way of life is different from anything we know.
So, I’m having to go back to the drawing board and question just about every aspect of life that we take for granted. Of course, for simplicity and sanity, there has to be an undercurrent of familiarity, but I still have to look for hidden assumptions and bring them out into the open to see if the environment might drive a different set of norms that will play into the story somehow. I can’t simply transplant “small town England” onto alien soil and hope for it to make sense.
As a result, I’m expecting the first draft to take longer than usual, to leave me more time to mull over worldbuilding aspects as I go. Having said that, the last couple of months have been more productive than I expected and, for now at least, the words are flowing well.
Ha! I’ve probably jinxed it now!
Friday, July 20, 2018
Building a battleship - administration
This will be my last post about the process of designing the Firenzi battleship, Admiral George Leonard, which Shayla infiltrates in The Ashes of Home.
Previous posts talked about the general design, the arrangement of weaponry, machinery spaces, and crew accommodation, as well as some of the practicalities of such a large drawing project. We wrap up with a quick look at how a ship like this is run.
As with any large ship, the analogy of a good-sized town joins forces with that of a fair-sized corporation. And organizations of any size do love their bureaucracy. And Shayla is ready to exploit any loophole that such cumbersome machinery inevitably reveals, after some preparation to seed minds and systems with her newly adopted identity ...
She reached the ship’s administration office and paused a moment to bring her mind back to the task in hand, and to the persona she’d adopted. She asked for the admin clerk the CPO recommended.
Petty Officer Isobel Mullin spun her tale of woe.
The clerk looked up her record, asked questions. Shayla had answers to match the records. Those records also confirmed that tales of woe followed Petty Officer Isobel Mullin everywhere.
He shook his head and helped Shayla access her account. Rolled his eyes when she promptly managed to lock herself out of the system again, though buggered if he knew how she’d managed that under his watchful eye. The system really did hate her. They started again, this time with idiot-proof instructions to keep her account safe.
Petty Officer Isobel Mullin blessed him with a smile to light the darkest night, and Shayla left with a spring in her step that needed no feigning. She’d just completed a paper trail of authenticity that she couldn’t achieve with any of her fictitious identities. She’d created personnel records, training records, disciplinary records, transfer papers, all the administrative details within reach of a payroll clerk, but it took someone with specialized security clearance to activate her system account. She was now officially legit.
The administration office is part of a sprawling suite that includes stores and supply, procurement, finance, payroll, HR, as well as a mail room and the ship’s own internal news room.
The deck below that, right in the heart of the ship, is the command center, or bridge.
I’ve never understood why sci-fi depictions of spaceships so often place their bridges in the most exposed positions imaginable. On a sea-going warship it makes sense to give the captain and command crew as good a view of their surroundings as possible, but in a space battle I expect speeds and distances to be too great for that to make any sense. Plus, you are working in three dimensions, so no matter where you place yourself the ship itself will obscure at least half your field of view. So in my world, all command decisions are fed into tactical displays fed from arrays of sensors covering the whole sphere. It follows that the last thing they need is access to windows, so the command center is placed in the most protected location possible.
The command center of Shayla’s old Martha Sandover had been strictly off limits to lowly grunts like her. A shiver of excitement ran up her spine as she crossed the threshold into this holy of holies.
The noise struck her first, or rather the lack of it. She remembered her first experience of an Imperial capital ship’s command deck and the cacophony of sound that pervaded the space. Here, the air was heavy with a hundred murmured conversations that seemed muted and distant in comparison.
The captain stood, feet apart and hands clasped in the small of his back, behind a ten-foot-wide tactical display set into a central well in the floor. His white uniform jacket seemed to glow in the twilight world, lit by rank on rank of screens. In front and around him control stations radiated away into multi-hued corridors. A quick survey of insignia confirmed Shayla’s assumption that the most senior officers manned the inner circle of stations, with their underlings seated in decreasing order of rank towards the outer reaches of the wide, low-ceilinged room.
The end result looks nothing like a ship’s bridge, but should closely resemble a modern warship’s Combat Information Center.
If you want to see more, remember that the full completed plans are posted to my website here.
Previous posts talked about the general design, the arrangement of weaponry, machinery spaces, and crew accommodation, as well as some of the practicalities of such a large drawing project. We wrap up with a quick look at how a ship like this is run.
As with any large ship, the analogy of a good-sized town joins forces with that of a fair-sized corporation. And organizations of any size do love their bureaucracy. And Shayla is ready to exploit any loophole that such cumbersome machinery inevitably reveals, after some preparation to seed minds and systems with her newly adopted identity ...
She reached the ship’s administration office and paused a moment to bring her mind back to the task in hand, and to the persona she’d adopted. She asked for the admin clerk the CPO recommended.
Petty Officer Isobel Mullin spun her tale of woe.
The clerk looked up her record, asked questions. Shayla had answers to match the records. Those records also confirmed that tales of woe followed Petty Officer Isobel Mullin everywhere.
He shook his head and helped Shayla access her account. Rolled his eyes when she promptly managed to lock herself out of the system again, though buggered if he knew how she’d managed that under his watchful eye. The system really did hate her. They started again, this time with idiot-proof instructions to keep her account safe.
Petty Officer Isobel Mullin blessed him with a smile to light the darkest night, and Shayla left with a spring in her step that needed no feigning. She’d just completed a paper trail of authenticity that she couldn’t achieve with any of her fictitious identities. She’d created personnel records, training records, disciplinary records, transfer papers, all the administrative details within reach of a payroll clerk, but it took someone with specialized security clearance to activate her system account. She was now officially legit.
The administration office is part of a sprawling suite that includes stores and supply, procurement, finance, payroll, HR, as well as a mail room and the ship’s own internal news room.
The deck below that, right in the heart of the ship, is the command center, or bridge.
The command center of Shayla’s old Martha Sandover had been strictly off limits to lowly grunts like her. A shiver of excitement ran up her spine as she crossed the threshold into this holy of holies.
The noise struck her first, or rather the lack of it. She remembered her first experience of an Imperial capital ship’s command deck and the cacophony of sound that pervaded the space. Here, the air was heavy with a hundred murmured conversations that seemed muted and distant in comparison.
The captain stood, feet apart and hands clasped in the small of his back, behind a ten-foot-wide tactical display set into a central well in the floor. His white uniform jacket seemed to glow in the twilight world, lit by rank on rank of screens. In front and around him control stations radiated away into multi-hued corridors. A quick survey of insignia confirmed Shayla’s assumption that the most senior officers manned the inner circle of stations, with their underlings seated in decreasing order of rank towards the outer reaches of the wide, low-ceilinged room.
The end result looks nothing like a ship’s bridge, but should closely resemble a modern warship’s Combat Information Center.
If you want to see more, remember that the full completed plans are posted to my website here.
Friday, July 13, 2018
Building a battleship - living spaces
Continuing my tour of the large and ancient battleship, Admiral George Leonard.
Most of the ship’s crew of roughly 6,000 bunk down in the three main mess decks occupying the forward lower section of the ship. Here is the plan of the “G” deck mess where Shayla stows away.
Most of it is given over to rows of bunks and lockers, a cramped labyrinth with occasional more open spaces for mess tables. The bunks are in sets of three, much like this shot from a real battleship.
Knowing your way around a maze like this helps in an emergency, like when Shayla realizes she’s being ambushed ...
As she diverted away from her bunk and towards the locker area, the undercover agent once more, hairs on her neck prickled. In her fatigued state, focused on her bunk and sleep, she’d missed small signals that should have put her on high alert. It was near the end of the night watch, the mess areas were normally quiet but there was always someone, a few small knots of people, eating, playing cards, gossiping in low murmurs. The mess tables around here were suspiciously empty. Instead, a few unfamiliar figures lurked at corners between bulkheads and lockers, feigning innocence. The stake out was obvious. Casual onlookers had been warned away. Casting back through her memory, Shayla pictured who was stationed where as she’d entered the labyrinth of the mess deck. In her mind’s eye she mapped the outline of the quarantined area, aware of a slow drift of people closing in behind her. The epicenter lay ahead, where her locker was.
Each of these decks includes shower and washroom facilities, laundry drop-off and pickup points, and a servery linked to the kitchens a couple of decks above by a hoist. While many crew members might choose to eat down in the mess decks, they also have access to a large canteen, open all hours, in the middle of the main recreation area.
As well as the main crew messes, there are at least another two dozen smaller mess areas for the roughly 1,000 officers and petty officers. To help plan these out, I researched navy ranks to get an idea of a realistic proportion of different ranks in a ship’s population.
A ship like this might be away from civilization for months at a time. It’s not enough to provide basic eating and sleeping accommodation, the ship is a fair-sized self-contained town with essential amenities to keep everyone mentally and physically healthy. The recreation deck includes a coffee shop, library and study rooms, and a chapel. The deck above houses a comprehensive suite of fitness facilities including a running track circling the core of the deck. Along in the next section, there are stores for civilian items, and tailor, cobbler, and barber shops.
Most of the ship’s crew of roughly 6,000 bunk down in the three main mess decks occupying the forward lower section of the ship. Here is the plan of the “G” deck mess where Shayla stows away.
Knowing your way around a maze like this helps in an emergency, like when Shayla realizes she’s being ambushed ...
As she diverted away from her bunk and towards the locker area, the undercover agent once more, hairs on her neck prickled. In her fatigued state, focused on her bunk and sleep, she’d missed small signals that should have put her on high alert. It was near the end of the night watch, the mess areas were normally quiet but there was always someone, a few small knots of people, eating, playing cards, gossiping in low murmurs. The mess tables around here were suspiciously empty. Instead, a few unfamiliar figures lurked at corners between bulkheads and lockers, feigning innocence. The stake out was obvious. Casual onlookers had been warned away. Casting back through her memory, Shayla pictured who was stationed where as she’d entered the labyrinth of the mess deck. In her mind’s eye she mapped the outline of the quarantined area, aware of a slow drift of people closing in behind her. The epicenter lay ahead, where her locker was.
Each of these decks includes shower and washroom facilities, laundry drop-off and pickup points, and a servery linked to the kitchens a couple of decks above by a hoist. While many crew members might choose to eat down in the mess decks, they also have access to a large canteen, open all hours, in the middle of the main recreation area.
As well as the main crew messes, there are at least another two dozen smaller mess areas for the roughly 1,000 officers and petty officers. To help plan these out, I researched navy ranks to get an idea of a realistic proportion of different ranks in a ship’s population.
A ship like this might be away from civilization for months at a time. It’s not enough to provide basic eating and sleeping accommodation, the ship is a fair-sized self-contained town with essential amenities to keep everyone mentally and physically healthy. The recreation deck includes a coffee shop, library and study rooms, and a chapel. The deck above houses a comprehensive suite of fitness facilities including a running track circling the core of the deck. Along in the next section, there are stores for civilian items, and tailor, cobbler, and barber shops.
Saturday, July 7, 2018
Building a battleship - fighting capability
The whole point of a battleship is to be able to fight. As I mentioned in earlier posts, I gave the Admiral George Leonard several docking bays to mount weapons or other payloads, giving the ship class tremendous flexibility during the course of their long service lives.
One of the most common weapons in Shayla’s world is the particle beam. This class of weapon shoots a tightly-focused bolt of charged particles - essentially controlled lightning - and the technology is scalable from hand-held to gargantuan.
In George Leonard, the primary weapons are mounted in pairs as shown in this cross section. This view also shows a lower pod of torpedo launch tubes attached to the ship’s ventral docking points.
The hatch popped open and Shayla slipped inside the weapon bay. How to board a ship without boarding the ship, that was the trick. Although she was now technically on board, safely enclosed at last within the ship’s armored walls and shielding and subject once more to gravity, this cavernous hold was unpressurized and still technically open to space.
Shayla examined her surroundings with a pang of nostalgia. Life had been so much simpler back then in her days as a lowly marine. A wash of red light barely dispelled the darkness. Suspended overhead, the barrels of two particle beams—warehouse-sized siblings of the hand-held weapons she heartily despised—each dwarfed the scout she’d recently abandoned.
Pale green striplights marked a maze of companionways and catwalks that weaved between the inert bulk of machinery clinging to the bay walls. She craned her neck, eyes tracing the lines of cables and conduits high above.
Of course, this kind of offense needs a comparable defense, which Shayla later uses to her advantage ...
The maintenance corridor ran near the outer skin of the ship. In compartments alongside, electromagnetic shield generators lay dormant ready to protect this flank of the ship in combat. Thick doors at intervals down the narrow passage gave access to the shield machinery. Vivid signs on each door warned of deadly levels of radiation and electrical discharges.
Shayla cracked open the nearest door and slipped inside. She stopped a few minutes to study the layout of cables and machinery. The shields may be dormant but the circuits would still be hot, ready to come to life at a moment’s notice. She might not be an engineer, but she knew engineering, especially anything to do with weapons and defense systems—how to use the former, and how to disable the latter.
A ship’s shields worked by deflecting the energy from charged particle weapons—beams and plasma. Most incoming offense was deflected straight back out into space, but the shields caught and channeled a significant amount of run-off. Shield machinery also contained a large quantity of delicate electronics. The two were not meant to mix.
Shayla stood between two green-painted electrical cabinets. Massive bus bars along the far wall linked the shield coils to banks of cells, reservoirs to contain the leakage. Florescent hazard lines on the floor warned against straying too far into the room. She eyed a run of white-painted pipes along the ceiling, picking her target.
One of the most common weapons in Shayla’s world is the particle beam. This class of weapon shoots a tightly-focused bolt of charged particles - essentially controlled lightning - and the technology is scalable from hand-held to gargantuan.
In George Leonard, the primary weapons are mounted in pairs as shown in this cross section. This view also shows a lower pod of torpedo launch tubes attached to the ship’s ventral docking points.
The hatch popped open and Shayla slipped inside the weapon bay. How to board a ship without boarding the ship, that was the trick. Although she was now technically on board, safely enclosed at last within the ship’s armored walls and shielding and subject once more to gravity, this cavernous hold was unpressurized and still technically open to space.
Shayla examined her surroundings with a pang of nostalgia. Life had been so much simpler back then in her days as a lowly marine. A wash of red light barely dispelled the darkness. Suspended overhead, the barrels of two particle beams—warehouse-sized siblings of the hand-held weapons she heartily despised—each dwarfed the scout she’d recently abandoned.
Pale green striplights marked a maze of companionways and catwalks that weaved between the inert bulk of machinery clinging to the bay walls. She craned her neck, eyes tracing the lines of cables and conduits high above.
Of course, this kind of offense needs a comparable defense, which Shayla later uses to her advantage ...
The maintenance corridor ran near the outer skin of the ship. In compartments alongside, electromagnetic shield generators lay dormant ready to protect this flank of the ship in combat. Thick doors at intervals down the narrow passage gave access to the shield machinery. Vivid signs on each door warned of deadly levels of radiation and electrical discharges.
Shayla cracked open the nearest door and slipped inside. She stopped a few minutes to study the layout of cables and machinery. The shields may be dormant but the circuits would still be hot, ready to come to life at a moment’s notice. She might not be an engineer, but she knew engineering, especially anything to do with weapons and defense systems—how to use the former, and how to disable the latter.
A ship’s shields worked by deflecting the energy from charged particle weapons—beams and plasma. Most incoming offense was deflected straight back out into space, but the shields caught and channeled a significant amount of run-off. Shield machinery also contained a large quantity of delicate electronics. The two were not meant to mix.
Shayla stood between two green-painted electrical cabinets. Massive bus bars along the far wall linked the shield coils to banks of cells, reservoirs to contain the leakage. Florescent hazard lines on the floor warned against straying too far into the room. She eyed a run of white-painted pipes along the ceiling, picking her target.
Friday, June 22, 2018
Building a battleship - filling in the details
Continuing my posts about drawing up plans for the ancient battleship, Admiral George Leonard.
Once I had the main structure in place and identified the broad layout, it was time to fill in the details. This is what took most of the time on this project.
There was one aspect of the design that helped here - not planned, it’s just the way it worked out. The deck areas were sharply divided up into distinct zones by the keels and structural frame. This suggested that it would make sense to designate zones to specific purposes, and focus my efforts on one zone at a time.
Here, for example, are close-ups of the main medical center and ship’s administration offices.
Once I got going, I quickly realized something that I hadn’t fully thought through yet. Faced with all those empty boxes, repeated deck after deck, I had a lot of space to fill! In the book, despite the overall enormous size of the ship, I do my best to give the impression of cramped and crowded living and working conditions. But in practice I seemed to be faced with a positively embarrassing surfeit of real estate.
Of course, there’s also a lot of stuff needing to go into that space, but I had to start getting pretty inventive thinking through all the possibilities that might be required in a fighting ship with a crew of six thousand, isolated from planets and bases for months at a time. I had to be fairly generous in my use of space, without making it look too generous. So I carved the deck up into lots of small compartments, and assigned functions to them as creatively as possible while making it sound and look credible.
One of the upsides of taking on a large project over a long period of time, new thoughts would pop into my head from time to time. I can tell you, I was always happy when a new idea cropped up, and I thought ... yes, that is going to need a lot of room! And it was a big relief when I neared the end and found I was now having to look for odd corners to squeeze things in.
BTW - the full set of completed plans are posted to my website here.
Once I had the main structure in place and identified the broad layout, it was time to fill in the details. This is what took most of the time on this project.
There was one aspect of the design that helped here - not planned, it’s just the way it worked out. The deck areas were sharply divided up into distinct zones by the keels and structural frame. This suggested that it would make sense to designate zones to specific purposes, and focus my efforts on one zone at a time.
Here, for example, are close-ups of the main medical center and ship’s administration offices.
Once I got going, I quickly realized something that I hadn’t fully thought through yet. Faced with all those empty boxes, repeated deck after deck, I had a lot of space to fill! In the book, despite the overall enormous size of the ship, I do my best to give the impression of cramped and crowded living and working conditions. But in practice I seemed to be faced with a positively embarrassing surfeit of real estate.
Of course, there’s also a lot of stuff needing to go into that space, but I had to start getting pretty inventive thinking through all the possibilities that might be required in a fighting ship with a crew of six thousand, isolated from planets and bases for months at a time. I had to be fairly generous in my use of space, without making it look too generous. So I carved the deck up into lots of small compartments, and assigned functions to them as creatively as possible while making it sound and look credible.
One of the upsides of taking on a large project over a long period of time, new thoughts would pop into my head from time to time. I can tell you, I was always happy when a new idea cropped up, and I thought ... yes, that is going to need a lot of room! And it was a big relief when I neared the end and found I was now having to look for odd corners to squeeze things in.
BTW - the full set of completed plans are posted to my website here.
Saturday, June 9, 2018
Building a battleship - drawing practicalities
One thing that most distinguished this drawing project from others, is the sheer scale of the drawing.
To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s the kind of window I am usually working in ...
... it looks small as an image here but this is a snapshot of the drawing window in iDraw that takes up most of my screen. This kind of scale is comfortable to work at, close enough to handle small details but not too close to give me tunnel vision.
And here is the view zoomed out to the whole page, with the previous portion highlighted. You can see that at any one moment I am only working on a tiny fraction of the whole plan.
And this is just page one of three!
A task of this size poses a series of challenges.
The big picture
For fine positioning, iDraw has a grid feature. Helpfully, it lets you set up a two-tier grid, with large and small units. In this case I worked with a 0.5mm fine grid, with heavier grid lines every 5mm. My scale is 0.5mm to 1ft. Yes, I’ve always been weird that way - measuring in metric but thinking in feet, but the latter makes sense in Shayla’s world because I have them talk in terms of Imperial units (miles etc.) to give a sense of tradition and antiquity.
This grid is great when it comes to drawing the detail of rooms and corridors, but to help with overall orientation I add in a broader grid of lines to give me a large scale framework.
You can see that the plan is actually a series of plans - mostly decks, but also profile and section. Laying these out on the page needs some forward planning. I decided on the overall dimensions for the different elements and then worked out how much room each one needed on the page - not so close that they overlap, but not too far apart either. I then laid out my own large scale grid lines to mark out the boundaries. I put these in their own drawing layer behind everything else so they are visible but don’t interfere.
Here is that same view of the page with the grid lines emphasized.
Keeping it together
The next challenge, which applies to any plan but is made trickier working on such a large scale, is vertical integrity. Decks don’t exist in isolation of each other, there are elements that link them together and which therefore have to be positioned correctly from one to the next. I’m talking here about obvious things like elevators and vertical service shafts, stairs, and inner and outer structural members.
Again, this benefits from some forward thinking. I started off with the main structural framework of the ship - keels and horizontal and vertical plates. Again, I put these into a drawing layer of their own for easier handling. Making this ship a fairly boxy shape helped, because there was a lot of repetition from one deck to the next. Once I had worked out the parts of the framework that pierced one of the main decks, it was a matter of copying and pasting to the others.
Even that simple exercise was a bit of a headache until I developed a technique to handle positioning. With such a large drawing, when you zoom out far enough to see the whole deck you are too far out for accurate positioning. And at that distance I also found it next to impossible to “grab” a set of lines I’ve just pasted to drag them into position. My solution was to add some temporary drawing elements to help move and position. You can see one or two red triangles nestling in the corners of my grid. I select the items I want to copy, along with one of these triangles. When I paste into the next deck, the large triangle is easier to grab while zoomed out, so I can get things roughly into position. I then zoom in on the triangle and nudge it until it is precisely positioned against the grid lines and I know everything else - out of sight because I’m zoomed in - is also moving with it into correct alignment.
With the structural framework laid out, I moved on to the outer hull, and then internal elements such as shafts and stairs. This was a game of patience, and checking and double-checking everything before I started filling out the details.
Keeping track
The last major challenge was simply keeping track of the overall plan, and keeping motivated by seeing progress as I fleshed out the enormous amount of detail.
Here I set up a spreadsheet to mark out zones along the length of the ship, and decks down the page.
This became my master plan for what went where. On a copy of this master plan I used traffic-light shading to show which sections were complete, in progress, or still to do. At first this served to emphasize what a daunting task I had embarked on, but it was satisfying to see the steady spread of green as time went by.
To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s the kind of window I am usually working in ...
And here is the view zoomed out to the whole page, with the previous portion highlighted. You can see that at any one moment I am only working on a tiny fraction of the whole plan.
A task of this size poses a series of challenges.
The big picture
For fine positioning, iDraw has a grid feature. Helpfully, it lets you set up a two-tier grid, with large and small units. In this case I worked with a 0.5mm fine grid, with heavier grid lines every 5mm. My scale is 0.5mm to 1ft. Yes, I’ve always been weird that way - measuring in metric but thinking in feet, but the latter makes sense in Shayla’s world because I have them talk in terms of Imperial units (miles etc.) to give a sense of tradition and antiquity.
This grid is great when it comes to drawing the detail of rooms and corridors, but to help with overall orientation I add in a broader grid of lines to give me a large scale framework.
You can see that the plan is actually a series of plans - mostly decks, but also profile and section. Laying these out on the page needs some forward planning. I decided on the overall dimensions for the different elements and then worked out how much room each one needed on the page - not so close that they overlap, but not too far apart either. I then laid out my own large scale grid lines to mark out the boundaries. I put these in their own drawing layer behind everything else so they are visible but don’t interfere.
Here is that same view of the page with the grid lines emphasized.
Keeping it together
The next challenge, which applies to any plan but is made trickier working on such a large scale, is vertical integrity. Decks don’t exist in isolation of each other, there are elements that link them together and which therefore have to be positioned correctly from one to the next. I’m talking here about obvious things like elevators and vertical service shafts, stairs, and inner and outer structural members.
Again, this benefits from some forward thinking. I started off with the main structural framework of the ship - keels and horizontal and vertical plates. Again, I put these into a drawing layer of their own for easier handling. Making this ship a fairly boxy shape helped, because there was a lot of repetition from one deck to the next. Once I had worked out the parts of the framework that pierced one of the main decks, it was a matter of copying and pasting to the others.
Even that simple exercise was a bit of a headache until I developed a technique to handle positioning. With such a large drawing, when you zoom out far enough to see the whole deck you are too far out for accurate positioning. And at that distance I also found it next to impossible to “grab” a set of lines I’ve just pasted to drag them into position. My solution was to add some temporary drawing elements to help move and position. You can see one or two red triangles nestling in the corners of my grid. I select the items I want to copy, along with one of these triangles. When I paste into the next deck, the large triangle is easier to grab while zoomed out, so I can get things roughly into position. I then zoom in on the triangle and nudge it until it is precisely positioned against the grid lines and I know everything else - out of sight because I’m zoomed in - is also moving with it into correct alignment.
With the structural framework laid out, I moved on to the outer hull, and then internal elements such as shafts and stairs. This was a game of patience, and checking and double-checking everything before I started filling out the details.
Keeping track
The last major challenge was simply keeping track of the overall plan, and keeping motivated by seeing progress as I fleshed out the enormous amount of detail.
Here I set up a spreadsheet to mark out zones along the length of the ship, and decks down the page.
This became my master plan for what went where. On a copy of this master plan I used traffic-light shading to show which sections were complete, in progress, or still to do. At first this served to emphasize what a daunting task I had embarked on, but it was satisfying to see the steady spread of green as time went by.
Saturday, June 2, 2018
Building a battleship - machinery spaces
Armed with a general idea of the overall layout, it’s time to start piecing the main parts of the jigsaw together.
As I said last time, with a seagoing warship you are pretty much constrained by the realities of marine engineering. The general shape and proportions of the hull follow a common pattern and everything fits into that. But with a space craft you have a freer hand to invent your own body plan.
Even so, it helps to pay a bit of attention to basic physics and structural mechanics. It helps to have something that at least looks like it would hang together.
In the case of the Enforcer battleships, my starting point was the structural frame of the ship. I settled on a box frame arrangement. Typical sea ships have a single keel running along the bottom of the hull, to which everything else is attached. Admiral George Leonard has four keels arranged in pairs, upper and lower. Large horizontal and vertical plates link the keels together, forming a series of boxes down the length of the ship.
I placed most of the ship’s tanked storage (water and fuel) and services (e.g. waste processing) in the upper and lower spaces between the keels (click on image for a closer look).
Down ladders once more to the lowest level, Shayla found the laundry and clothing store. Each deck on a ship like this had its own distinctive look, smell, and sound. The similarities to her old Martha Sandover were uncanny, and brought back sharp pangs of nostalgia. Down here, in a space nestling between the massive frames of the lower longitudinal keels, it felt subterranean. Yellow light glistened off cream walls. Pipes twisted thick overhead. Steam and chemicals tainted the air.
The framework between upper and lower keels extends all the way through the decks in between. Everything else has to work around these immovable structural members.
In this view, you can see that most of the ship is taken up by the two main machinery spaces.
In Shayla’s universe, there is one important design constraint that I don’t have to worry when it comes to the ship’s drive. Most ship designs have to accommodate large rocket (or other) exhausts at the rear. Interstellar technology in this world, however, uses fields that manipulate space and gravity. No opening to the outside world required, so critical machinery can stay safely tucked away behind shields and armor.
Industrial ear muffs barely deadened the noise echoing back and forth in the cathedral space that rose through most of the height of the hull. She’d grown used to near silence in Blazer’s machinery space, but here the quintuplet of hulking, pot-bellied power units was anything but quiet. The curving shells that filled most of the compartment hummed an almost subsonic note that tingled her bones. Accustomed as she was to technology from the microscopic to the gargantuan, she had never been this up close and personal with the living heart of a capital ship. Despite herself, her skin crawled in awe at the unimaginable power contained a few feet away. Behind layers of armor and magnetic containment fields, humans dared subvert the power of suns.
She shivered, and returned her attention to the job at hand and the instructions in her earpiece fighting to be heard. From her vantage point high above the deck, the shrieking din of ancillary equipment that clustered at floor level was lessened, but only just.
A narrow slice of unencumbered air ran the length of the power plant on either side, giving minimally-adequate working room. Canary yellow gantries spanned the engineering space and hoisted the two ton dead weight of the fuel injector high into the air, but it took sweat and muscle, and a constant stream of commands mingled with colorful invective to line the cylinder up with its housing forty feet above the deck.
As I said last time, with a seagoing warship you are pretty much constrained by the realities of marine engineering. The general shape and proportions of the hull follow a common pattern and everything fits into that. But with a space craft you have a freer hand to invent your own body plan.
Even so, it helps to pay a bit of attention to basic physics and structural mechanics. It helps to have something that at least looks like it would hang together.
In the case of the Enforcer battleships, my starting point was the structural frame of the ship. I settled on a box frame arrangement. Typical sea ships have a single keel running along the bottom of the hull, to which everything else is attached. Admiral George Leonard has four keels arranged in pairs, upper and lower. Large horizontal and vertical plates link the keels together, forming a series of boxes down the length of the ship.
Down ladders once more to the lowest level, Shayla found the laundry and clothing store. Each deck on a ship like this had its own distinctive look, smell, and sound. The similarities to her old Martha Sandover were uncanny, and brought back sharp pangs of nostalgia. Down here, in a space nestling between the massive frames of the lower longitudinal keels, it felt subterranean. Yellow light glistened off cream walls. Pipes twisted thick overhead. Steam and chemicals tainted the air.
The framework between upper and lower keels extends all the way through the decks in between. Everything else has to work around these immovable structural members.
In this view, you can see that most of the ship is taken up by the two main machinery spaces.
In Shayla’s universe, there is one important design constraint that I don’t have to worry when it comes to the ship’s drive. Most ship designs have to accommodate large rocket (or other) exhausts at the rear. Interstellar technology in this world, however, uses fields that manipulate space and gravity. No opening to the outside world required, so critical machinery can stay safely tucked away behind shields and armor.
Industrial ear muffs barely deadened the noise echoing back and forth in the cathedral space that rose through most of the height of the hull. She’d grown used to near silence in Blazer’s machinery space, but here the quintuplet of hulking, pot-bellied power units was anything but quiet. The curving shells that filled most of the compartment hummed an almost subsonic note that tingled her bones. Accustomed as she was to technology from the microscopic to the gargantuan, she had never been this up close and personal with the living heart of a capital ship. Despite herself, her skin crawled in awe at the unimaginable power contained a few feet away. Behind layers of armor and magnetic containment fields, humans dared subvert the power of suns.
She shivered, and returned her attention to the job at hand and the instructions in her earpiece fighting to be heard. From her vantage point high above the deck, the shrieking din of ancillary equipment that clustered at floor level was lessened, but only just.
A narrow slice of unencumbered air ran the length of the power plant on either side, giving minimally-adequate working room. Canary yellow gantries spanned the engineering space and hoisted the two ton dead weight of the fuel injector high into the air, but it took sweat and muscle, and a constant stream of commands mingled with colorful invective to line the cylinder up with its housing forty feet above the deck.
Saturday, May 26, 2018
Building a battleship - general arrangements
When you design a seagoing warship, especially a WWI/WWII battleship, you pretty much have to start off with the general arrangement of big chunks of machinery. Main and secondary armament with their associated shell rooms and magazines demand large unbroken slices of real estate, as do the propulsion units. Together, these largely dictate the overall profile of the ship.
With a traditional ship, you are always working within the constraints of a hull, along with rules of buoyancy and center of gravity.
When it comes to a spaceship, two obvious differences spring to mind immediately.
First, you can abandon the need for streamlining. Depending on how things work in your story world you may have other unique constraints to think about, but spacecraft generally don’t have a dense medium like water to plow through, or depend on aerodynamics for lift. So you can think beyond the ship’s hull or aircraft’s fuselage and go for different shapes - blocky and angular, spindly and fragile - and you essentially have complete freedom over basic body plan. Who else remembers the shock of the first appearance of the starship Enterprise, making a break from sleek Buck Rogers-style rocket ships?
To me, that freedom actually makes it all the more important to start off with some overall concept to work within, otherwise you risk ending up with a mess (unless, of course, a disordered mess is what you actually want)
Second, a seagoing warship is typically designed to afford its main armament as broad an arc of fire as possible. With superimposed turrets fore and aft, the entire main armament can usually be brought to bear on a target broadside on (and for maybe 15 degrees either side of perpendicular.)
Outside of that arc, you can bring no more than half your guns to bear, either the forward or aft batteries. But you only have to think about coverage over a two-dimensional surface. In space, this problem extends to three dimensions, posing new challenges and compromises.
In the case of my Imperial Swords, I chose to compromise. The ships are designed to attack ground targets, to terrorize rebelling planets into submission, so the primary weapon doesn’t need a broad arc of fire.
With almost leisurely movements, Hammer rolled away from George Leonard. With a sick feeling in her gut Shayla knew this was no act of submission. The Sword’s primary weapon, her city-wrecking plasma cannon, occupied the full two-thousand-foot height of the battleship from the bulbous upper pod containing hangars and the main battle platform down through the height of the hull to project from her underbelly. She was taking up an attack posture, lining up a kill shot.
Their secondary armament forms a ring around a broad pod spreading above the main hull. This gives almost complete field of view, but there are gaps ...
Icy fury flooded Shayla. She blinked her eyes clear and brought herself even closer in. From past experience she knew these ships had many blind spots up close, the most extensive being right on top of that upper pod.
Hammer maneuvered away. Her captain was also aware of those blind spots and determined to bring his weapons to bear.
Unlike the ground-assault Swords, battleship Admiral George Leonard is intended for general ship-to-ship combat so all-round cover is vital.
I started with an image in mind of a fairly slender body, with paired pods of weapons down either side. The pods jut out from the sides and give relatively clear all-round cover, with roughly half the main weapons able to target any given point of space. The feel I was going for was of a narrow and cramped interior surrounded by machinery. As it happens, some of that thinking went by the wayside as I’ll explain in a later post, but this gave me the conceptual framework to build from. What you can see here is a plan view of the frame.
The weapons are mounted in separate modules that dock in the bays on either side.
Once aboard, the going should be easier. Enforcer-class ships were huge, second only to Imperial Swords, and the mainstay of the Firenzi navy for the last five millennia. A bulky hull contained machinery and accommodation, but farsighted architects had designed them with pairs of vast docking points to mount weapons or more specialized payloads. This flexibility, and the ability to upgrade weapon systems over the years without a massive overhaul, was the secret of the ancient ships’ longevity.
If Admiral George Leonard was typical of her class, she’d be packing six batteries of beam weapons at those docking points. Shayla hoped to identify the source of the blinding shot that had vaporized the scout. From her stint aboard a similar ship, she had the glimmer of a plan to avoid arousing suspicion.
The main engineering spaces lie between the pairs of docking points, with main crew accommodation forward, and hangars aft.
More of that in future posts ...
With a traditional ship, you are always working within the constraints of a hull, along with rules of buoyancy and center of gravity.
When it comes to a spaceship, two obvious differences spring to mind immediately.
First, you can abandon the need for streamlining. Depending on how things work in your story world you may have other unique constraints to think about, but spacecraft generally don’t have a dense medium like water to plow through, or depend on aerodynamics for lift. So you can think beyond the ship’s hull or aircraft’s fuselage and go for different shapes - blocky and angular, spindly and fragile - and you essentially have complete freedom over basic body plan. Who else remembers the shock of the first appearance of the starship Enterprise, making a break from sleek Buck Rogers-style rocket ships?
To me, that freedom actually makes it all the more important to start off with some overall concept to work within, otherwise you risk ending up with a mess (unless, of course, a disordered mess is what you actually want)
Second, a seagoing warship is typically designed to afford its main armament as broad an arc of fire as possible. With superimposed turrets fore and aft, the entire main armament can usually be brought to bear on a target broadside on (and for maybe 15 degrees either side of perpendicular.)
Classic big gun broadside
Outside of that arc, you can bring no more than half your guns to bear, either the forward or aft batteries. But you only have to think about coverage over a two-dimensional surface. In space, this problem extends to three dimensions, posing new challenges and compromises.
In the case of my Imperial Swords, I chose to compromise. The ships are designed to attack ground targets, to terrorize rebelling planets into submission, so the primary weapon doesn’t need a broad arc of fire.
With almost leisurely movements, Hammer rolled away from George Leonard. With a sick feeling in her gut Shayla knew this was no act of submission. The Sword’s primary weapon, her city-wrecking plasma cannon, occupied the full two-thousand-foot height of the battleship from the bulbous upper pod containing hangars and the main battle platform down through the height of the hull to project from her underbelly. She was taking up an attack posture, lining up a kill shot.
Their secondary armament forms a ring around a broad pod spreading above the main hull. This gives almost complete field of view, but there are gaps ...
Icy fury flooded Shayla. She blinked her eyes clear and brought herself even closer in. From past experience she knew these ships had many blind spots up close, the most extensive being right on top of that upper pod.
Hammer maneuvered away. Her captain was also aware of those blind spots and determined to bring his weapons to bear.
Unlike the ground-assault Swords, battleship Admiral George Leonard is intended for general ship-to-ship combat so all-round cover is vital.
I started with an image in mind of a fairly slender body, with paired pods of weapons down either side. The pods jut out from the sides and give relatively clear all-round cover, with roughly half the main weapons able to target any given point of space. The feel I was going for was of a narrow and cramped interior surrounded by machinery. As it happens, some of that thinking went by the wayside as I’ll explain in a later post, but this gave me the conceptual framework to build from. What you can see here is a plan view of the frame.
The weapons are mounted in separate modules that dock in the bays on either side.
Once aboard, the going should be easier. Enforcer-class ships were huge, second only to Imperial Swords, and the mainstay of the Firenzi navy for the last five millennia. A bulky hull contained machinery and accommodation, but farsighted architects had designed them with pairs of vast docking points to mount weapons or more specialized payloads. This flexibility, and the ability to upgrade weapon systems over the years without a massive overhaul, was the secret of the ancient ships’ longevity.
If Admiral George Leonard was typical of her class, she’d be packing six batteries of beam weapons at those docking points. Shayla hoped to identify the source of the blinding shot that had vaporized the scout. From her stint aboard a similar ship, she had the glimmer of a plan to avoid arousing suspicion.
The main engineering spaces lie between the pairs of docking points, with main crew accommodation forward, and hangars aft.
More of that in future posts ...
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
Building a battleship - look and feel
In both Ghosts of Innocence and The Ashes of Home, Shayla spends quite some time on board warships of one sort or another.
When writing scenes, I find it important to have a firm idea of the look and feel of the setting, the kind of atmosphere I am trying to evoke. For warships, I have always avoided the clean, shiny ultra-modern feel of Star Trek or Star Wars interiors. One possible exception is the vast Imperial Sword-class which are big enough to hide messy machinery out of the way. Apart from that, though, there are few sops to creature comforts.
Everywhere is certainly clean in the sense of not dirty - navy standards are strict - but definitely not clean in the sense of uncluttered. Everywhere, there are hard surfaces, painted metal, and pipes and machinery are exposed. Living and working spaces are cramped. Function comes first. The needs of people have to fit in and around the workings of the ship.
This is particularly true of the Admiral George Leonard. This ship is five thousand years old. Although well-maintained, it is ancient and I wanted to convey some of that sense of antiquity and solidity.
My main influences were twentieth century large warships. These have always held a fascination for me anyway, so it’s only natural that I should want to recreate some of this atmosphere in my writing. Hey! I’m the author! I get to decide things like that :)
So a typical corridor is likely to look more like this ...
than this ...
She headed aft, to where she knew another near-vertical highway connected the ship’s decks. Shiny gray walls reflected yellow-white light. Battleship gray. In her time in the navy nobody had ever been able to explain why this particular shade of gray should be associated with battleships. Tradition, they said, as if that explained everything.
She ducked through an open blast door into another corridor. Pale green decking gave way to dark blue. Refreshed by her brief rest, she bolted up the last three flights to ‘A’ deck.
Crew sleeping accommodation is similar to this ...
Down a couple more decks, the cramped warren of the crew’s mess was a marked contrast to the hubbub upstairs. In between ranks of kit lockers, mess tables lay mostly vacant. A few off-duty crew members lounged, read, played cards. Shayla avoided these oases of light, tuned to the artificial day/night cycle, and scurried through the permanent twilight of the dormitory areas. Past rows of curtained sleeping racks, she counted until she found the rack she’d assigned herself, the lowest of three. Low level racks, inches off the deck, were least favored but also least likely to attract notice. She crawled silently in and drew the curtain.
This could easily be a corner of the kitchens where Shayla works undercover ...
And this could definitely be a model for the officers’ wardroom where she overhears useful information ...
And finally, there’s the place that Shayla always seems to end up in. The brig ...
She woke, head pounding, on a hard metal bench and thought for a moment that she was still on Eloon. Her surroundings came back into focus: white-painted metal walls, a steel toilet and basin in one corner, a sliding metal grille for a door. The door and floor were painted a fetching blood red. The heavy omnipresent thrum of the warship enveloped her. The air was warm and dry, but pricked with a whiff of disinfectant.
When writing scenes, I find it important to have a firm idea of the look and feel of the setting, the kind of atmosphere I am trying to evoke. For warships, I have always avoided the clean, shiny ultra-modern feel of Star Trek or Star Wars interiors. One possible exception is the vast Imperial Sword-class which are big enough to hide messy machinery out of the way. Apart from that, though, there are few sops to creature comforts.
Everywhere is certainly clean in the sense of not dirty - navy standards are strict - but definitely not clean in the sense of uncluttered. Everywhere, there are hard surfaces, painted metal, and pipes and machinery are exposed. Living and working spaces are cramped. Function comes first. The needs of people have to fit in and around the workings of the ship.
This is particularly true of the Admiral George Leonard. This ship is five thousand years old. Although well-maintained, it is ancient and I wanted to convey some of that sense of antiquity and solidity.
My main influences were twentieth century large warships. These have always held a fascination for me anyway, so it’s only natural that I should want to recreate some of this atmosphere in my writing. Hey! I’m the author! I get to decide things like that :)
So a typical corridor is likely to look more like this ...
She ducked through an open blast door into another corridor. Pale green decking gave way to dark blue. Refreshed by her brief rest, she bolted up the last three flights to ‘A’ deck.
Crew sleeping accommodation is similar to this ...
This could easily be a corner of the kitchens where Shayla works undercover ...
And this could definitely be a model for the officers’ wardroom where she overhears useful information ...
And finally, there’s the place that Shayla always seems to end up in. The brig ...
Saturday, May 19, 2018
Building a battleship
Worldbuilding is an essential part of speculative fiction, and it’s something I enjoy at least as much as the actual writing. In fact, there’s a visual part of worldbuilding that I’ve come to regard as a natural extension of the visual arts that have always been a part of my life long before I started writing.
While I’ve been writing The Ashes of Home some of my time has been devoted to a massive drawing project. The project is a detailed deck plan of the ancient battlewagon Admiral George Leonard that forms the backdrop to about a quarter of the story.
Because Shayla spends so much time on board this vast battleship I needed a clear idea of the general layout, and enough detail of specific locations to be able to write scenes effectively. I’ve previously posted about the importance to me of visualizing the physical setting as a way of avoiding the dreaded writer’s block.
Of course, I fleshed out enough detail for story purposes ages ago, and I could easily have stopped there. But this project has gained a life of its own, and is close to completion.
Over the next few weeks I plan to talk a bit more about the parallel processes - conceptualizing the ship itself, the influences and thinking that went into its design, and the challenges of converting this into drawing, keeping track of a wealth of detail across two thousand feet in length and thirteen decks.
And in case you are wondering, yes, this is the ship depicted on the book cover.
While I’ve been writing The Ashes of Home some of my time has been devoted to a massive drawing project. The project is a detailed deck plan of the ancient battlewagon Admiral George Leonard that forms the backdrop to about a quarter of the story.
Because Shayla spends so much time on board this vast battleship I needed a clear idea of the general layout, and enough detail of specific locations to be able to write scenes effectively. I’ve previously posted about the importance to me of visualizing the physical setting as a way of avoiding the dreaded writer’s block.
Of course, I fleshed out enough detail for story purposes ages ago, and I could easily have stopped there. But this project has gained a life of its own, and is close to completion.
Over the next few weeks I plan to talk a bit more about the parallel processes - conceptualizing the ship itself, the influences and thinking that went into its design, and the challenges of converting this into drawing, keeping track of a wealth of detail across two thousand feet in length and thirteen decks.
And in case you are wondering, yes, this is the ship depicted on the book cover.
Saturday, October 21, 2017
Spinning misconceptions
Last week I talked about a world for my next novel, where the planet’s axis is tilted at a full 90 degrees to the plane of its orbit. In other words, if you picture the sun in the middle of your living room and the planet’s orbit traced out on the floor around it, it’s rolling around on its side rather than spinning upright like a top.
When I first envisaged this, I wondered if that meant one pole would always be pointing toward the sun. I quickly realized I’d fallen into a popular misconception. A bit more thought showed that this just ain’t gonna happen. Simple physics doesn’t allow it.
Yes, some worlds do have one side always facing their sun, but their axis is the more normal perpendicular (or near enough) to the plane of the orbit.
The perpetual day/perpetual night arises if the planet’s day (one rotation on its axis) is exactly the same length as its year (one full orbit of its sun).
This may sound like one heck of a coincidence, but tidal forces between two orbiting bodies act as a braking mechanism, slowly bringing rotational and orbital periods into line. This is called “tidal locking”. A familiar example of this phenomenon is our own moon, which always shows the same face to the Earth. For many years, astronomers thought Mercury was tidally locked to the sun, although that’s now known not to be true.
Back to our topsy turvy world. Although it’s spinning on its side and swinging around its sun, if you were watching it from somewhere outside the solar system you’d see that the planet’s axis is always pointing the same way relative to the universe as a whole.
The whole planet is acting like a huge gyro compass. Again, this sounds bizarre and far-fetched, but our own Uranus is doing exactly this.
So, if anyone describing a sci-fi world proudly proclaims that their north pole always points at the sun, you can set them straight.
When I first envisaged this, I wondered if that meant one pole would always be pointing toward the sun. I quickly realized I’d fallen into a popular misconception. A bit more thought showed that this just ain’t gonna happen. Simple physics doesn’t allow it.
Yes, some worlds do have one side always facing their sun, but their axis is the more normal perpendicular (or near enough) to the plane of the orbit.
The perpetual day/perpetual night arises if the planet’s day (one rotation on its axis) is exactly the same length as its year (one full orbit of its sun).
This may sound like one heck of a coincidence, but tidal forces between two orbiting bodies act as a braking mechanism, slowly bringing rotational and orbital periods into line. This is called “tidal locking”. A familiar example of this phenomenon is our own moon, which always shows the same face to the Earth. For many years, astronomers thought Mercury was tidally locked to the sun, although that’s now known not to be true.
Back to our topsy turvy world. Although it’s spinning on its side and swinging around its sun, if you were watching it from somewhere outside the solar system you’d see that the planet’s axis is always pointing the same way relative to the universe as a whole.
The whole planet is acting like a huge gyro compass. Again, this sounds bizarre and far-fetched, but our own Uranus is doing exactly this.
So, if anyone describing a sci-fi world proudly proclaims that their north pole always points at the sun, you can set them straight.
Sunday, October 15, 2017
Unnatural seasons
Although I’m still plugging away at editing The Ashes of Home, I’ve started turning my mind to a new project. Tentatively titled The Long Dark, this is another far-future story but set in a universe very different from Shayla’s.
More to the point, it’s set on a world rather different from anything we normally read about. For some reason, I had it in my mind that it would be fun to set a story on a planet with a 90 degree axial tilt.
What the heck does that mean?
Well, our Earth has a 23 degree axial tilt, which means that at midsummer/midwinter the poles are tilted 23 degrees towards or away from the sun. This tilt gives us our seasons.
Near the equator, day and night are roughly the same length no matter what time of year it is. But the further away from the equator you go, the greater the difference between summer and winter hours of daylight. When you cross the Arctic or Antarctic circles - lines of latitude 23 degrees down from the poles - something strange happens. You get periods of round-the-clock daylight and darkness. The closer to the poles you travel, the longer those spells of continuous light and dark last. The poles themselves experience close to six months each of light and six months of dark.
If your planet has a tilt of 90 degrees rather than 23, this picture is taken to extremes. The Arctic and Antarctic circles would actually run along the equator, and everywhere other than the equator will be a “land of the midnight sun”.
Because the planet’s spin is in line with the plane of its orbit, the motion of the sun will look very strange compared with what we are used to. At midsummer, the planet’s axis is pointing right at the sun, so the sun will be stationary in the sky - direct overhead at the summer pole, or hovering on the horizon if you’re at the equator. This will make for ferociously long and hot summers at the poles.
As the year progresses, the sun will start to move in increasingly large circles in the sky, a bit like the handle of a spinning top that’s losing speed and starting to topple over. Sooner or later, depending on what latitude you’re at, those circles will start dipping below the horizon and you’ll get a few weeks or months of a true day/night cycle ... until the sun vanishes below the horizon for good and you go into a much longer night.
Which is where the title comes from.
More to the point, it’s set on a world rather different from anything we normally read about. For some reason, I had it in my mind that it would be fun to set a story on a planet with a 90 degree axial tilt.
What the heck does that mean?
Well, our Earth has a 23 degree axial tilt, which means that at midsummer/midwinter the poles are tilted 23 degrees towards or away from the sun. This tilt gives us our seasons.
Near the equator, day and night are roughly the same length no matter what time of year it is. But the further away from the equator you go, the greater the difference between summer and winter hours of daylight. When you cross the Arctic or Antarctic circles - lines of latitude 23 degrees down from the poles - something strange happens. You get periods of round-the-clock daylight and darkness. The closer to the poles you travel, the longer those spells of continuous light and dark last. The poles themselves experience close to six months each of light and six months of dark.
If your planet has a tilt of 90 degrees rather than 23, this picture is taken to extremes. The Arctic and Antarctic circles would actually run along the equator, and everywhere other than the equator will be a “land of the midnight sun”.
Because the planet’s spin is in line with the plane of its orbit, the motion of the sun will look very strange compared with what we are used to. At midsummer, the planet’s axis is pointing right at the sun, so the sun will be stationary in the sky - direct overhead at the summer pole, or hovering on the horizon if you’re at the equator. This will make for ferociously long and hot summers at the poles.
As the year progresses, the sun will start to move in increasingly large circles in the sky, a bit like the handle of a spinning top that’s losing speed and starting to topple over. Sooner or later, depending on what latitude you’re at, those circles will start dipping below the horizon and you’ll get a few weeks or months of a true day/night cycle ... until the sun vanishes below the horizon for good and you go into a much longer night.
Which is where the title comes from.
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Research
One of the cool things about writing sci-fi is the opportunity for research.
In most genres, research means getting your facts right before someone picks you up on some inaccuracy. But where does that leave stories set far away in time and space? No-one can tell you that you made a mistake in describing your imaginary world because nobody's ever been there! And the cornerstone of speculative fiction is to imagine things that lie beyond our known world. But does that put them beyond research?
Most of the technology in Ghosts of Innocence is hugely speculative although mainstream for the genre. Most far-future stories involve some form of faster-than-light travel. Many have weapons that throw something more futuristic than crude bullets. Much of the time these miracles of technology are introduced with diversionary hand-waving and little more than a passing nod to any solid scientific foundation.
I'm as guilty of that as anyone. For FTL travel, I make a passing reference to folds in space and leave it at that, because, quite frankly, nobody cares. Just throw in enough to suspend disbelief and get on with the story. In fact, the only reason I offer any kind of rationale for my FTL drive is to lay the ground for some of its limitations that affect the plot in some way.
With all this freedom, if you can simply lay out impossible technology limited only by your imagination, where is the place for research?
Well, for starters you can't have it all your own way. No matter how far out your concepts, your readers need your world to have some inner consistency, and that takes some serious thought.
Just as important, the basis of sci-fi (and what distinguishes it from fantasy) is its roots in science. The connection may be tenuous, but it needs to be sufficiently credible to keep the reader hooked. The connection might be nothing more than some speculative theorizing about wormholes or multi-dimensions that may or may not ever be put on a firmer foundation, but there should be some traceable roots back to present day science. That means researching at least enough about science and technology to be convincing, and then stretching that knowledge as far as you can without losing your reader along the way.
The strangest thing about sci-fi, though, is that people happily accept blatant present-day impossibilities like FTL travel, or artificial gravity fields, without so much as a blink of an eye, but they get picky about smaller things. It's relatively easy to get away with big bold lies, but the closer you get to some version of recognizable reality the more demanding people get.
Like trying to plan the perfect murder, it's the little details that'll trip you up.
In future posts I'll be sharing a few things I've come across in the line of duty, but meanwhile, what cool things have you researched for your stories?
In most genres, research means getting your facts right before someone picks you up on some inaccuracy. But where does that leave stories set far away in time and space? No-one can tell you that you made a mistake in describing your imaginary world because nobody's ever been there! And the cornerstone of speculative fiction is to imagine things that lie beyond our known world. But does that put them beyond research?
Most of the technology in Ghosts of Innocence is hugely speculative although mainstream for the genre. Most far-future stories involve some form of faster-than-light travel. Many have weapons that throw something more futuristic than crude bullets. Much of the time these miracles of technology are introduced with diversionary hand-waving and little more than a passing nod to any solid scientific foundation.
I'm as guilty of that as anyone. For FTL travel, I make a passing reference to folds in space and leave it at that, because, quite frankly, nobody cares. Just throw in enough to suspend disbelief and get on with the story. In fact, the only reason I offer any kind of rationale for my FTL drive is to lay the ground for some of its limitations that affect the plot in some way.
With all this freedom, if you can simply lay out impossible technology limited only by your imagination, where is the place for research?
Well, for starters you can't have it all your own way. No matter how far out your concepts, your readers need your world to have some inner consistency, and that takes some serious thought.
Just as important, the basis of sci-fi (and what distinguishes it from fantasy) is its roots in science. The connection may be tenuous, but it needs to be sufficiently credible to keep the reader hooked. The connection might be nothing more than some speculative theorizing about wormholes or multi-dimensions that may or may not ever be put on a firmer foundation, but there should be some traceable roots back to present day science. That means researching at least enough about science and technology to be convincing, and then stretching that knowledge as far as you can without losing your reader along the way.
The strangest thing about sci-fi, though, is that people happily accept blatant present-day impossibilities like FTL travel, or artificial gravity fields, without so much as a blink of an eye, but they get picky about smaller things. It's relatively easy to get away with big bold lies, but the closer you get to some version of recognizable reality the more demanding people get.
Like trying to plan the perfect murder, it's the little details that'll trip you up.
In future posts I'll be sharing a few things I've come across in the line of duty, but meanwhile, what cool things have you researched for your stories?
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