Re: Couple Old Style Space Opera questions...

On Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:34:09 -0400, Sea Wasp
<seawaspObvious@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


In a number of REALLY old time settings, or comic/pulp settings, we
had places where planets or at least "worlds" that were floating in
air (rather than proper vacuum). (the most recent example I can think
of was the movie Flash Gordon).

Now... if you had such a place, how far would light travel? Here, the
sun's light only goes through 50-100 miles of air. How many miles of
air can sunlight pass through before it disappears?

And in such a place, the other interesting ... well, ONE of the other
interesting things... would be getting to other worlds. Even if they
were only separated by hundreds of thousands of miles, rather than
light-years, could you even FIND them? Radar, sonar, all that stuff
would fade out long before, wouldn't it? would the sky be black, blue
all the time? Blue when you were near a "sun", then turning pitch
black in the area between?

Since the light fades to black over a hundred miles or so, the suns
have to be small and close, and therefore the planets small and close.

Which raises the question of Olbert's paradox. Where is the heat
sink?

We suppose that the atmosphere is gravitationally bound in the
"galaxy", but not bound to the quite small planets and "suns". Escape
velocity from a planet is quite small - you can escape by a
sufficiently powerful catapult, or a chariot pulled by swans. The
stars are even smaller, but much heavier, so their escape velocity is
quite substantial - but they are light enough that orbital velocities
are well below the speed of sound. You might get speed of sound
orbits on close approach to a star. Dark matter, rather than the
"stars" provides the gravitational binding that holds the atmosphere.
The "galaxy" is a few hundred miles thick, and a few tens of thousands
of miles in diameter.

The stars are extremely small and energetic, and the photosphere is
ordinary air ionized by being too close to the star. Plumes of hot
gas rise from the photosphere, so that it looks more like a bunch of
flames than a sphere

--
----------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.

http://www.jim.com/ James A. Donald
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