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Old 11-07-2012, 03:45 PM   #11
CoyoteGestalt
 
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Default Re: [IW, Yrth]"You arrive ... where?"

It's not entirely an Yrth-specific problem, though; there are other worlds that are established to be reachable by Infinity that don't have even remotely Earthlike geography... like Discworld.
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Old 11-07-2012, 03:53 PM   #12
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Default Re: [IW, Yrth]"You arrive ... where?"

I'm afraid your question can only be answered using transdifferential equations. But then it's quite easy. dump them wherever you want to
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Old 11-07-2012, 03:55 PM   #13
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Default Re: [IW, Yrth]"You arrive ... where?"

Elastic stretchy point to point comparisons that don't maintain equal distances between them seems the simplest explanation. Ha!
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Old 11-07-2012, 05:26 PM   #14
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Default Re: [IW, Yrth]"You arrive ... where?"

Possibly relevant: one of my very first posts on the forums was the question of whether the Plane Shift spell took you to (a) an analogous point, or (b) the same point every time. The answer was, "as the GM pleases."

For technological conveyors, I do like the 1-1 mapping of points that is not necessarily isometric but is at least continuous. (Although a correspondence that sends, say, points in the old Roman Empire to most of Megalos while America all squashes in to Tredroy or something could be funny.)
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Old 11-07-2012, 07:27 PM   #15
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Default Re: [IW, Yrth]"You arrive ... where?"

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Originally Posted by CoyoteGestalt View Post
It's not entirely an Yrth-specific problem, though; there are other worlds that are established to be reachable by Infinity that don't have even remotely Earthlike geography... like Discworld.
It's a problem on any two worlds that don't have exactly synchronized dates.

Even if tau gamma whatever keeps you within the refernece frame of the Earth and doesn't drop you off in vacuum going from a world where it's 2012 to one where it's 1492 raises questions of "what is the equivalent point?".
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Old 11-07-2012, 07:41 PM   #16
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Default Re: [IW, Yrth]"You arrive ... where?"

The Banestorm seems to have a ground-level reconciliation mechanism that is effective at least some of the time, IIRC entire villages and fields have arrived intact and kept on, implying that the well came along in working order or they happened to "land" near a replacement water source. Likewise, ships and castaways arrive reporting really stormy weather but nothing like the ocean falling away. Of course, we wouldn't hear from the ones who showed up underwater or underground.

I handled this by having banestorms and other such travel mating up with suitable weather at the far end. The storms are matched for each end's altitude and orientation, and any inaccuracy in the banestorm effect is swallowed up in the disorientation of the normal storm conditions.
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Old 11-08-2012, 10:13 AM   #17
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Default Re: [IW, Yrth]"You arrive ... where?"

A scheme I've thought about using is that you don't really arrive at an equivalent point, but in the same spacial relationship to a set of equivalent atoms (I guess three of them, for orientation). Conveyers for some reason normally use reference atoms deep in the ground, which on worlds with equivalent geology will *usually* be in the same place, but there could be occasional surprises. In principle you might use others - perhaps some jumpers always travel to an equivalent "object" even if it's been moved. And of course if the geology is radically altered, or you lock onto something like air or water, you could end up anywhere. Note this also means that conveyers are unreliable to worlds that have "new" continents, which is fine. An inability to run a conveyer directly into downtown Atlantis, but only to places on one of the older continental shields, is a positive benefit for most plots involving it.
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Old 11-08-2012, 10:35 AM   #18
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Default Re: [IW, Yrth]"You arrive ... where?"

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A scheme I've thought about using is that you don't really arrive at an equivalent point, but in the same spacial relationship to a set of equivalent atoms (I guess three of them, for orientation).
There seem to be problems with that idea. How do those atoms get selected? Even in bedrock, some atoms will get moved away by groundwater.

With these kind of essentially rubber science, being too specific can be a problem.
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Old 11-08-2012, 11:22 AM   #19
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Default Re: [IW, Yrth]"You arrive ... where?"

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With these kind of essentially rubber science, being too specific can be a problem.
True, the best question to answer is probably "What's a set of playable assumptions that feel reasonably plausible and reasonably consistent with the rest of the game?"

I'm just not sure what will work well and what's been done before.
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Old 11-08-2012, 11:35 AM   #20
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Default Re: [IW, Yrth]"You arrive ... where?"

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Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
A scheme I've thought about using is that you don't really arrive at an equivalent point, but in the same spacial relationship to a set of equivalent atoms (I guess three of them, for orientation). Conveyers for some reason normally use reference atoms deep in the ground, which on worlds with equivalent geology will *usually* be in the same place, but there could be occasional surprises. In principle you might use others - perhaps some jumpers always travel to an equivalent "object" even if it's been moved. And of course if the geology is radically altered, or you lock onto something like air or water, you could end up anywhere. Note this also means that conveyers are unreliable to worlds that have "new" continents, which is fine. An inability to run a conveyer directly into downtown Atlantis, but only to places on one of the older continental shields, is a positive benefit for most plots involving it.
My problem with "equivalent atoms" is that by definition there's no way of sticking a label on an atom - once you've established that it's 12C, there's really nothing to distinguish it from all the other 12Cs in the universe. Breaking that has implications for e.g. radioactive decay that could start snowballing quite fast. (Not to mention information storage! If each hydrogen atom is meaningfully unique, it's carrying around enough information to distinguish it from the other 1E53 hydrogen atoms...)

The "same arrival place" is clearly a direct borrowing from H. Beam Piper's Paratime stories, where it's used primarily for comedic effect (in the first one, our hero's conveyor head is set up in what's normally the ladies' shower room at a factory; after that it's barely mentioned). In that setting, there aren't any worlds with radically different geography or astronomy, so he can get away with it. As far as I can see, the only real virtues in the IW setting are (a) to stop PCs translating into para-Fort-Knox without someone on Homeline knowing about it and (b) to restrict them mostly to the surface of Earth. Except that that doesn't work.

I've gone on before about my idea of "staging worlds". One per quantum, find a world with a breathable atmosphere but otherwise as safe as possible. Build a few big, airmobile conveyor stages for one-off missions. Whenever you find a place that matches somewhere you want to go repeatedly, build a permanent stage there. Presto, no more hurried cross-Quantum jumps.

But this applies to everyone else too. If I want to break into any world's Fort Knox or Hermitage or Bank of England, I just find a sufficiently empty world on the same quantum, get my conveyor there, and hop across.

As for the surface of Earth, how important is that? It's mostly where things are happening anyway. A scenario that forces the players to use local travel because the conveyor on Homeline can't be put where it's needed can be flipped so that putting the conveyor on target would cause other problems ("we can't drop you straight onto that Lucifer-5 space station because they'd notice the mass imbalance").

So I think, on balance, I'd be inclined to dump the "must arrive at same point" requirement. Here's an alternative: for a new world, the first few arrival locations (by automated probes, usually) are random. Once some of them have sensed the local geometry and reported back, arrival can be anywhere the navigator likes.

What does this break, in setting terms?
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