Glamdring804

Couple short stories and a novella. I'll post them when I have more time later.

Basically the title. I kept on getting distracted by worldbuilding when I tried to write in my own universe, so I decided to write some works sent in the universe of my favorite game, Destiny, so that I could actually feel like I'm accomplishing something. I want to get a gauge of how many people here follow Destiny, so I can decide whether it's worth me sharing my stuff here.

Holy crap. The number of Kirchoff loops in that tangle of resistors is making my head hurt.

You should be fine then. He could push through a plywood and sheetrock wall fairly easily, a brick or cinderblock wall might take a few blows.

Hm, that's interesting. I'm not sure if such a precession would be possible. Your planet would probably need to lack any major moon. Even planets without moons like Mars have longer wobble periods. I'm not 100% sure on this though. It's possible, but highly unlikely to be natural. In any case, you could just rule of cool it away.

The general weather would be generally what you find in the middle of large oceans on Earth. With very little land to break up storms, they could really get going though. I would imagine massive hurricanes thousands of miles across would be a regular occurrence, depending on the temperature of the world. Temperatures would be fairly uniform. Water is a wonderful heat regulator, so extreme hot and extreme cold would be rare. I'm not even sure there would be ice caps. Again, that depends on the average temperature of the world. Prevailing winds actually follow a planet's rotation. Winds in middle latitudes move from west to east, while the sum moves from east to west. However, when you think about it, if you treat the sun as a stationary point, this means the any part of the planet is moving towards the east, just like the wind. Also, depending on how mountainous the continent is, it could have huge effects on the weather. If it has a lot of mountains, then they would force the clouds to drop all their moisture, making the western part of the continent very wet, and the eastern part rather dry. Also, any islands immediately downwind would be less lush as a result. I'm not sure what you mean by rapid procession of equinoxes. Are you saying you want the planet to not have a stable axial tilt, and wobble back and forth several times in a single orbit? "Strength" is a messy way of looking at something like this. What a "super strength" hero can do depends an a variety of factors, including his bone strength, muscle strength, and the situation he's in. Lifting a car would require a much lesser impulse than punching through a wall, since the punch would be instantaneous, while lifting the car would (presumably) take several seconds. I'm not 100% sure, but I'm fairly confident that punching through a wall would take much more force than lifting a car. For a human fist to have enough momentum to break the wall, it would have to be going absurdly fast, and the tissue of the person's hand would have to be much stronger than normal human tissue.

Elastic energy wouldn't really effect how resilient something is. Elastic energy is a form of potential energy, i.e. energy stored in an object by deforming it. A compressed spring or a drawn bow is a good example of elastic energy. To make something physically stronger, broadly, you would have to increase the strength of the bonds between the molecules of the substance. If you wanted to put this in terms of a form of energy, it would probably be binding energy. I want to make a note about "energy" in general. A lot of authors in speculative fiction tend to treat energy as "stuff," a physical substance that you can hold in your hand if you concentrate hard enough. This is wrong. Energy is a property of an object, like its color or its texture. It's something that describes an object, not an object in itself. Specifically, energy is the ability of a system to do work, as my professor once put it, it's the potential of an object to do damage. A speeding bullet can do more damage than a lump of lead just sitting on your desk, which means it has more energy. A rock a hundred feet over your head can do a log more damage than a rock sitting next to your feet. This is something you should bear in mind as you write your magic system. @Eagle of the Forest Path, @Oversleep, I'll try to answer your questions tomorrow. I'm sorry about not responding sooner, I've been kind of busy with my own writing.

We already have. Her name is Eshonai

Indeed. A lot of people forget that mass is both the proportionality constant of acceleration, and the amount of matter in an object.

Inertia is, for all intensive purposes, mass.

Well, for starters, the habitable zone of a red dwarf is going to be very close to the star, meaning that planets in the region will likely be tidal-locked. This of course means that one half of the world will be desert, the other will be covered in glaciers, and any habitability will be limited to a small band around the twilight region. You would bypass this two ways: having a thick atmosphere or significant ocean, to help regulate heat and expand the habitable zone, or to have the world be a moon of a gas giant. Red dwarfs are also unstable. They can be covered by huge sunspots, significantly reducing sunlight emitted, or they can flare unpredictably. This would make environments and habitability very unstable. As a result of the red coloration, any life that evolved on the world would have its visible spectrum shifted into infrared. They would be able to see higher wavelengths infrared radiation, and they would not likely be able to see greens or blues. So, in a nutshell, things would be weird.

It says it in the OP, but the title just says "Math and Science." Maybe we could change the title to make it more of a help thread than a general discussion thread, since we now have a whole forum.

So, since we're all taking names and specialties, maybe this thread could be our general STEM help thread? @Chaos @Silverblade5

Okay. So. There are a couple ways to get them to appear different sizes, but it gets messy. If you have them locked in a giant plus symbol, all the same distance from the center of mass, then two of them will be the same distance from the third, and hence the same size. The fourth will be a little smaller. There are two ways to get more variation. 1) Make the planets different sizes. I'm not sure how exactly like Earth they need to be, but you could make some slightly larger or smaller than each other. This would work well with one of them having a defunct geo-magnet, as a smaller planet's interior would cool faster, and its interior would solidify, leaving it without a magnetic field. This is what happened to Mars's magnetic field. Note that this would cause the planets to have slightly different gravity and surface areas. The gravity you could mitigate by varying their density a little, i.e. the small planet could have Earth-like gravity by having an extremely large metal core. 2) Put the planets at different distances from the center of mass. This would get very messy very fast. Moon-planet systems are stable because one mass is much larger than the other. In cases where the bodies are comparable in size (Earth & Moon, Pluto & Charon) there are only two bodies with significant mass. However, four planets orbiting a mutual center of mas at different rates wouldn't even be remotely stable. It would fall apart within a matter of days. You would get the planets to have different sizes in each other's skies, but they would grow and shrink as they got closer and further from each other. I wouldn't really recommend this option. I don't know exactly how to make a planet's sky not blue without making it poisonous. You should probably have a chemist answer this question. I can tell you however, that without significantly increasing the cloud content of the atmosphere, you wouldn't significantly change it's appearance from space. The sea is blue because it sorta reflects blue light and absorbs everything else, not because it reflects the color of the sky. Again, you could in theory change the color of the sea with various chemicals, but I don't know how to do this without making it toxic to conventional life. Seriously, find a chemist if you want to pursue this line of reasoning.

Sure. I'll reply to this post there.

I would love that. I have some awesome and quirky ideas for worlds that I'd love to share!

Depends on the water coverage. If they have surface water comparable to Earth (60% ~ 75%) then they would look mostly blue, with swirls of white clouds, and bits of brown and green underneath. Less water would mean more brown and perhaps less white, and more water would mean more blue. Their relative sizes in the night sky would depend on how far apart they are. I would assume you will want them to be roughly the size of Earth's moon when viewed from the planet. I'll do some calculations here in a minute as to how far they would be. If they orbit in a giant plus formation, meaning they all are the same distance from the mutual center of gravity, then they would be fixed distances apart in the sky, specifically, each one would be 45 degrees away from the other.

There are a number of other ways you could work around this. If a planet has a weaker magnetic field, then more high-energy radiation would strike the surface and atmosphere. Over millions and millions of years, water molecules in the air would be zapped apart, and the hydrogen, being an extraordinarily light gas, would be swept away into space. This is essentially what has happened to Venus, and it could have some interesting effects. When one planet is behind the planet leaking hydrogen, there would be heightened auroras on the outer planet due to the influx of hydrogen ions, though I'm not sure how noticeable the increase would be. Also, the people on the dry planet, if they've been their for a long amount of time, would naturally develop darker skin tones to accommodate the higher levels of ambient radiation. Another way you could do it is have the water locked away in the planet's crust. Something similar happened to Mars. The surface of mars is orange because the crust has a moderately high iron content. The rocks absorbed a good portion of the planet's water, and essentially ended up rusting into their current color. The water is technically still there, but it's all been sequestered in the molecular structures of the rocks. I'm not sure if either of these works for what you have in mind. I personally would use a combination of both of them. They would make an awfully beautiful surface, with sweeping landscapes of rusty red desert. Bear in mind that for your dry planet, you'll still need at least 10% of the surface covered in water in order to support enough photosynthetic life to sustain livable levels of oxygen in the atmosphere.

The only way to really get one planet to stay closer to the stars than the other would be to put them all in eachother's Lagrangian points. This would be stable without godly intervention for a few years, but it brings up some problems. The planets would all have to be in a line, meaning at least one planet would be blocked by another no matter which world you are on. The two middle planets would each have two "moons," and the outer planets would have only one. Also, the planets would be in fixed positions in the sky. For your intents and purposes, I think you are better off having them orbit a common center of mass. As long as you are okay with having a powerful magic presence keep the system stable, you should be fine. Brandon does the same thing with Taldain in White Sand. As for one planet being closer to the sun than the others, there are some workarounds. Because they all orbit the same center of mass, then each planet would spend half it's time within the orbit of the CoM, and half it's time further out. As @Dunkum said, you could make one planet have a really long orbit. That would also require magical interference to make happen. If your intent is to make one planet hotter than the others, then there's other ways you could achieve that by tinkering with the biosphere. Water is a heat regulator, and planets with more water would have more stable temperatures. If you gave a planet low surface moisture, then it would have hot days and cold nights, like an actual desert.

What exact kind of setup are you thinking of? Four planets locked in a giant plus symbol? Four planets orbiting a center of gravity like Pluto and Charon? A sketch and some elaboration would be very helpful. In general though, it's very hard to get a large number of similar-sized astronomical bodies into a stable configuration when they are very close to each other. Our own Earth-Moon system is unstable on the scale of billions of years. Something like what your describing would probably only be stable on the scale of a few tens of thousands of years, like Roshar and its three moons. Each of the planets would also likely experience HUGE tidal forces. So yeah, of course it's possible, but getting it to work would probably require some insane geoengineering or shardic-level intervention.

I think that's it. Thank you.

Thanks! I've been meaning to go through the annotations anyway.

I seem to recall reading a Brandon quote somewhere that goes along the lines of: "Often times, the best way to figure out how to write a seen the correct way is to write it the wrong way first." I'm 99% certain this isn't the exact quote, but I can't find the original. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Thanks.

Actually, this effect would be too small to matter, on the order of about 0.3% weaker gravity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth#Latitude

I think @Aonar Faileas covered what you were looking fore. "Fire" is the combustion of carbon based molecules with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and other byproducts. Flames are actually just superheated gas, so you don't strictly need combustion to create them. You can make pseudo flames by heating the ambient air until it glows. Of course, as Aonar so astutely pointed out, glowing air wouldn't look like fire flames because of the emission spectrums of nitrogen and oxygen. I solved this problem in my magic system by giving fire mages both the ability to add energy to systems (heat stuff up) and mentally control hot objects and substances. They can create a fireball between their hands, and then launch that fireball forward, etc.