[FT] Islamic Federation ships and request to Nyrath (fwd)

[oops - got the address wrong. this should work.]

John (and audience),

> On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, John Atkinson wrote:

> --- Tom Anderson <thomas.anderson@university-college.oxford.ac.uk>

funny; when i came up with some ideas for the Finns as background for my work
on the Dutch, i put them as aligned with the Romanovs. i think that this
merely demonstrates my lack of understanding of Finnish history and attitudes:
i bow to your doubtless superior understanding <edits webpage>.

> > i wouldn't say that north and south are meaningless,

i see your point. i'm not happy with calling the terminator (the line between
dark and light) the equator, but that's probably because my
background is in FT rather than DS - geometry should be arranged to make
my starmaps harmonious, not for local convenience!

anyway, north/south does make some climatic difference: unless the
planet's axis is parallel to the ecliptic normal, then the planet will have
seasons like any other planet. on a tidally locked world, this means that the
terminator will essentially rock back and forth, pivoting at the equator, so
that at the arctic and antarctic, there will be potentially quite wide regions
which see both light and dark over the course of the year. i should imagine
that only the darkmost reaches of these regions would be habitable, but in
'winter', when the terminator has rocked to a position leaving that hemisphere
in maximal darkness, the limits of twilight might be an attractive holiday
destination.

now, i don't know how common it is to have an axial tilt (i think all of the
planets in out solar system do), and i'm not sure if tidal locking would lead
to elimination of the tilt, but it's something to think about.

anyway, i've knocked up some diagrams, largely to help myself figure out
what's going on:

http://members.xoom.com/gzg_l/geom/

> > note that on a tide-locked planet, there are two

<thinks> oh yes, it is, isn't it. oops. that said, it can be divided into two
parts according to whether it's a permanent dawn or a permanent dusk, although
this isn't a very important distinction.

all the best, tom