Need a scientist?

I hope nobody minds me jumping in on this thread, but I have a similar question (so didn't want to start a new thread).

I'm at the very early stage of starting a story.

I've drawn my world map and the easiest way to explain (I hope) is as follows.

Take the flag of St. Andrew (flag of Scotland) imagine it standing vertically.

Now imagine that the four blue triangles(for want of a better/easier description) are the four kingdoms of this world. The white cross are the rivers, but in the centre of them is an island. I'm currently thinking that there are only two rivers and they start at the North and travel down to the centre, then meet at the island, to then travel to the South.

The question is, with the rivers meeting at the island and joining briefly, what way would the current flow around the island?

I want a strong, fast, swirling current all around the island, so it cannot be swam or crossed by boat.

Apologies to any Scots for abusing their flag :D
 
My first thought is why do the rivers split again to form the lower half of the X? It seems very unnatural.
 
That could be a problem, I was thinking about having four rivers, but then why would they all meet in the centre?

Just open to sugestions, problems etc..


Thanks alchemist
 
Hmm interesting, that looks good at least it can work. There would also be smaller rivers running off the main rivers as I'd planned.

Thanks again alchemist
 
Re: Saltired river world. I can think of a number of ways of doing it. Depends a how you imagine the land that's arranged about the rivers

When you described your map the first thing that came into mind is of:

- the 'Left-to-right' river being a huge Amazon that by the time it gets to the central island part hits a series of huge waterfalls - make it fast flowing and deep - so it makes it dangerous to cross (incase you get pulled over a waterfall of course!) Then...

- the 'Right-to-Left' river is smaller but forks a bit to the north so that the two forks make the central island, both joining the main river. To make them impassible, why not stick them in deep canyons?

- The big river can of course then fork after the island on its way down.

So there you have a central 'island' that's kinda a plateau and quite hilly.

I don't think physically you can get the water in the centre to rotate around the island. The main river, in my case, would run NW to SE (and SW eventually) and the other river would flow from the NE to join the main river, both arms going sort-of NE to SW. Hope that makes sense!



If on the other hand you want the central island to be quite low-lying. Then I think the above directional set up can still work - but no waterfalls or canyons though. The lower limbs of your cross could be two sea channels - hence making your southern landmass an island of sorts, and the central island a part of the rivers deltas. Then you could have treacherous tidal sands on the South of the river and big deep rivers all around it.

I'm sure there's other ways to do it!
 
(stream ecosystem being my area of study)

Depending on what you want, you can argue anything with a river. The reason being is that a river/stream is always changing. A river naturally waves back and forth, or atleast puts pressure on different parts of the river eroding it and depositing that sediment at different parts. Only in rare circumstances are rivers stuck in a channel like form (Grand Canyon, human intervention). Mountainous regions will obviously have more channels, lower regions have more wave like structure. In the end though, the river with the most power makes the decision.

Back to the X. It can happen by having the left and right side rivers eroding the banks until it breaks through and forms a type of X.

The Problem: It will never stay that way unless humans keep intervening. The river that has the most "force" will decide the river movement and will eventually make a Y type of river.

Solution: Geological Time frame. No one can really tell how fast that river will recover and no longer be an X. You can argue that the rivers use to be apart but close enough that borders followed the X pattern and the river eventually formed the X (current time), and no one knows when it will cease. (maybe, use a line saying it was "gods will" for these nations to form these boundaries)

There are other considerations if your looking at a more realistic approach but it might be to much. (Slope, type of rock/sediment, how it is feed)
 
With your expertise confirming that it can happen, and the link that alchemist posted showing it happening, gives me reassurance that I can continue with my work without worrying about my map.

Thanks Arkose
 
Hello!

My name is Tom, I'm a 4th year university student who specialized in Computer Science and Space Science, although I'm stronger in the latter.

If anyone has any questions about Astronomy, Space Systems (Satellites), Physics, Satellite/Rover Instrumentation, or some other space related topics, I'll do my best to answer them.

While I'm completing my education, it's paid for by the Canadian Forces as I am a CF Officer, so if anyone has any questions relating to modern militaries and their functioning I can try to answer that too.
 
Um, I think I need a lot of scientists.

Again, I'm not trying for hard sci fi on any level but there are a couple of things I need to sharpen up a little - a lot, actually.

1. I have a port which I'd like to be self-defending once shields are up ie if there is enemy fire it is repelled back to the source. Is there a type of shield could do this? Ionic?

2. the port also has the capacity to fire plasma bolts when shield is down; if shield went up would such bolts be able to pass through? I can work around it if not.

3. The system/galaxy I have this in has a centre of 12 planets and associated satellites with around 30 planets around what I've described as the outer rim although this is more to do with their proximity to the centre of government than any spacial consideration. Is this big enough for a galaxy/too big? I'm not going to get into light years etc as I think it takes me into detail that will confuse the book/slow it down.

Thanks to anyone who can help :D
 
Can't help you with the port thing, but about (3) you do realise that galaxies are big, don't you? Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big, to coin a phrase. The Milky Way (our galaxy) contains 200-400 billion stars. Even if only a tiny percentage of them have planets, that still an awful lot.

A system is presumably a solar system? ie the planets around one star? 42, even 12, might be pushing that a little, I'd have thought, if they are all meant to be habitable. As you can see from our system, you need a Goldilocks planet, one that's not too close to the sun, not too far away, but just right, to sustain life. I don't know how many could jostle into that amount of space without affecting each other adversely with their gravitational forces.


EDIT: don't know if this will help, but the pictures are pretty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way -- about half-way down it talks of a Solar Interstellar Neighborhood [sic] which might be more the name you need rather than system, perhaps?
 
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So maybe two/ three systems in close proximity or a galaxy in which the forty or so planets are the habitable ones? Assuming they may have extended the parameters for making a planet habitable?
 
Hey Springs,

for (1) You could either go for a 'thingy-ma-jig' technolgy and just give it a cool name and exactly the right sort of properties - for the example the city-wide shield of Arrakis in Dune is not really made physically 'right', but we know that 'atomics' are required somehow to break through them.

or

we'd have to know what the enemy fire is to try and guess what sort of shield might stop it. (and what you mean by plasma bolts - real plasma?)

If you take first approach then you can build whatever property you need to satisfy (2) with of course.

As for (3) - when I was building my universe for my current WIP I said that there was probably ~130,000 earth size planets at the right orbit in our galaxy. But it all is based on very rough estimates that can be fixed to give you practically any number.

I could post/mail you my research notes on the calculation if that helps.
 
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Another common way of adding planets is by having habitable moons orbiting gas giants in the Goldilocks zone of a star. One thing that always bothered me about this is that, in orbiting the gas giant, the moons will go behind it and be blocked from the sun for a period of time, but it's never, or rarely, addressed. It could work for you though, in adding extremely cold, two week long (or whatever) nights every X months. The other thing that moons can do to a story is show differing gravities from each other and from the habitable planets in the system.

If you're looking at wiki's Milky Way page, you might also want to look up stellar classification. Not all stars are the same colour, obviously, and this affects the distance of the Goldilocks Zone from the star - red closer in, yellow further out, orange in between. Just as a (possibly useless) note of interest, it has been suggested that plants' leaves under a red sun might appear black or dark brown as opposed to green.
 
I'm not sure I dare answer a Springs science question; I show a slight but definite tendency to freak her out;).

There is no type of shield which would repel electromagnetic (laser etc.), kinetic and particle weapons. If you need one, I'm afraid you're going to have to invent it yourself, which has the advantage that you can specify exactly what it needs to do.

A solid, material screen (say a perfectly reflecting superconductor sheet) has the disadvantage that it has inertia, so would take time to put into place. If multilayer, it can reflect back laser beams (and superconductivity dissipates the waste heat at the speed of light), while electric currents circulating in it generate magnetic fields which dissipate particle beams, or plasma (which is by definition ionised). Which leaves us bunging kinetic energy weapons at it (like Roman catapults) or impact fused nuclear rockets. Since we can see these coming, we can try and burn them up with laser weapons; easier for warheads than mere fast moving lumps of rock.

Force fields presumably propagate at the speed of light. We don't actually know, because we can't yet generate them. This makes 'closing the door' much faster. A gravity generator, if one could be built, would make quite a good shield, assuming it could be given a sufficiently high gradient – a sort of black hole a picometre thick. What you would get off it in the way of radiation when it was tuning on or off, and the energies involved, I don't really want to know. And you wouldn't be able to see through it, so you couldn't know when it was safe to turn it off, let alone be able to lob plasma bolts back. A spindizzy lets visible light through, so is useless against lasers and their ilk. A stasis screen allows no time to pass inside the shield, so the on-off switch has to be outside the shield itself, as does the generator, otherwise it can never switch off; which is a pity, as otherwise it would protect against anything, including siege.

A scanning shield (a point shield, like say a quantum black hole moved across the area to be covered like the electron beam in a TV set, although much faster, obviously) a percentage of radiant energy would get through, and, if you synced things perfectly, you could get your plasma bolts out. Unfortunately, if the enemy could analyse your pattern, they could get their plasma bolts in, so perhaps that's not so good an idea.

Or invent your own; nobody can contradict you.

As regards sizes of stellar configurations, Galaxies are big; why not go for a stellar cluster; a hundred or so stars, many probably have planetary systems, a few inhabitable planets or moons (after terraforming; I don't expect to find many use as delivered), plenty of loose junk; radiation levels probably a bit higher than on Earth, but hey, like that you can evolve faster:)…
 
1. Any kind of shield is inevitably speculative in nature as we have no technology to produce such a thing right now. So you could theoretically give it any properties you wish. However I would personally think a shield that actually repells the enemy's fire back at them would be pushing believability. If you are talking physical weapons like missiles then I would say definitely no. If you are taking beam weapons then they could possibly reflect the beam in some way but the chances of that reflection going straight back at the attacker would be slim.

2. Most people using shields in their stories generally drop the shield for a microsecond or so whilst their weapons are firing. Again it would be pushing believability a little to have a shield that let stuff through one way but not the other.

3. I think having more than two or three planets in the habitable zone is unlikely however, further to Abernovo's post, they were talking on the last Sky at Night about the perfectly reasonable possibility of a gas giant in the habitable zone (they have actually detected a system with a gas giant so close to its sun that it orbits in a matter of days). Now such a gas giant could have multiple moons all of which would share it's position in the habitable zone. Though as Abernovo comments few authors seem to give much consideration to the long nights you would experience whilst in the gas Giants shadow. Of course that assumes that the gas giants moons orbit in the same plane as the star system's ecliptic. If the gas giant's moons orbit orthogonally to the star systems ecliptic then, although they might be spinning (ie. not tide locked) they may still only present only one face to the star itself which would be their poles.
 
Chrispy I cannot tell you how much I enjoy a Chrispy response - I do not neccesarily understand said but I always read with much interest;)
Seriously ty to everyone my understanding is the shield's okay supported by a weaponry system as opposed to firing back indepently and I could go with linked solar systems with a nice Imperial name :eek: see how I totally bypassed the science but it's all sinking in and appreciated
 
springs1971 said:
3. The system/galaxy I have this in has a centre of 12 planets and associated satellites with around 30 planets around what I've described as the outer rim although this is more to do with their proximity to the centre of government than any spacial consideration. Is this big enough for a galaxy/too big? I'm not going to get into light years etc as I think it takes me into detail that will confuse the book/slow it down.
Click to expand...

There are approx. 1,400 star systems within 50 light-years of Earth containing 2,000 stars (due to binaries etc.). This should accomodate the number of habitable worlds you are using. The following link gives a good overview map:
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_alien/esp_hall02a.htm

Equally, if you want to generate planetary systems, try stargen:
http://fast-times.eldacur.com/StarGen/RunStarGen.html
 
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