Agreed, I was more talking about a kind of madness coming from going through the deadlands, that might make living spirits a kind of living agent of death.Invicus wrote:On Dead Lands
Also agreed, flesh should be an aspect of stone.Invictus wrote:On the nature of Flesh
I've been thinking a little more about this since yesterday, and it may be possible to reconcile this with the existence of Stormlands if the thickness of the Shell and the distance between it and the Storm differs strongly across the Shell due to the presence of things like ventilation towers and newly arrived continents. Both of these things would tend to draw the Storm up towards the shell, as would holes in the Shell since they would create regions of very low pressure. which would draw the thicker gases of the Storm upwards, thus drawing them away from other regions. This would still mean the distance between the Shell and Storm would have to be much less than a full .6 of the radius of the world, though.Invictus wrote:On the Scour, Storm and the 'Gulf'
An idea, still not, as I commented on MSN, very neat.
EDIT:
Now for a few thoughts on the geography and solar arrangements.
Invictus, I still, after our extensive discussion on this, don't see how making the fast ring an oval will make the length of a day constant throughout the year. If you or anyone else can explain to me how this would work then please do so because it still makes no sense to me.
For the matter of which poles are hot and which ones are cold; I had believed that your (Invictus) idea was that the slow ring, which I assume is the outer, was elliptical and that the further points would be at the axes, e.g. the east and west poles, making these places colder. In fact I now think you meant the fast ring to be elliptical meaning that the north and south poles would be beneath the furthest points. If this is the case I would imagine it would mean that the north and south poles would be the cold poles since they would not only be beneath the point where the sun is farthest from the Earth, but would also receive strong sunlight for only part of the year.
There is a further complication, though, in that the higher latitudes will receive more sunlight per area unit during certain times of the year than they will when the sun is directly overhead, due to the angle of the sun (as you pointed out, Invictus), whereas the east and west poles will always receive the same amount of light since the sun always goes directly overhead.
The relative importance of these factors depends on how much heat the sun emits and how close it is to the different geographical locations.
Either works, and having north and south be the cold places is simpler.
Now a quick note on the way the year would work: There will be two important times, which I call Ring Light and Cross Light. At RL the two rings will be aligned, only for a few minutes at most, but it will be important in determining where the sun passes over, at this time the path of the sun will run north-east-south-west. At CL the rings are at 90 degrees to one another and the path of the sun runs from east to west directly, also passing through the two meridian points directly inbetween all four poles.
Here is a picture.
This is also an example of a way one could draw a map of a four-poled world, though in fact this one has ten 'poles', the axis poles, the two meridians and the northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest sub-meridians. It's kind of limited in that I haven't yet figured out how to do it withoug dividing it into four quadrants like that, but it's got a limited kind of use if you have all four poles to hand.
And a few more thoughts on recurring geographical features:
1)Medieval natural philosophy held that different minerals were grown in the earth, and matured from one kind of mineral to another, with I think gold being the final product. It occurs to me that the Earth could contain 'fields' of iron, copper, fiberoptic crystals, etc, slowly maturing, maybe with veins literally acting to carry them from one part of the Earth to another. More vigorous stone at the base of the Earth might be more likely to have these fields and to distribute them upwards to maintain the older stone at the top.
2)Also underground lakes and rivers as some way of either feeding and watering the stone or as a source for the oceans.
3)Growth points and distribution points; basically different types of areas which are the centre of movement of life force or ley lines. The first would have the lines moving into it and be made up of fast and aggressively growing stone, the seconf would not grow so fast and would have lines leading away from it to feed other areas.
4)Warped land, where a new mountain has come up through the stone and pushed aside old or dead ground around it into ridges of old land.
And finally 5) Ghost cities or living cities, depending on the type. In both cases the ground itself remembers the city, so the city itself is a living spirit in the ground. But in a living city there are still people within it, the growth of the city out of the ground responds to the conscious and unconscious will of the people living within it, growing softly and wondrously in the night. Ghost cities, on the other hand, have no living inhabitants, but will grow up out of the ground after the original city has been destroyed. Sometimes they may even populate themselves with facsimiles of the people who once lived there, or the souls of the dead housed in weird new bodies.
OK that's most of my ideas for now.