Quote:
Originally Posted by TippetsTX
Thanks Jeff. I sometimes miss the simple 'what if' premises from classic sci-fi stories. Based on what I remember, however, I'm not sure that setting will address the challenges that I presented. Didn't they live in a world of perpetual sunlight until the fall of night which actually revealed a sky full of stars that they never knew existed?
The inhabitants of my Cidri will have never known a night sky filled with stars. There could be obscure references in ancient texts written by those who were first brought to Cidri many millennia ago (remembering their original homeworlds), but the current populace will have no frame of reference to properly interpret those concepts.
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That's quite true, Joe, but I was more attempting to give you someone else's answer as to what the attitude of people
without stars might be like. I guess that maybe "you don't miss what you never had" might be the best/simplest answer.
Of course, that doesn't really answer the navigation issue -- where everything is done by magnetic compass and dead reckoning, I suspect mapping would be a tremendous issue (and generally rather inaccurate) and trans-oceanic navigation extremely difficult (they'd generally want to hug the sea-coasts, and if there weren't extensive island chains (a la the East Indies) trade routes probably wouldn't be established at all). Which is not to say it would be completely impossible, though even the Polynesian navigators (who famously relied on the sea itself, it's taste, the feel of the water itself, the flow of the currents against their hands, the known prevailing winds, etc.) used the stars quite a bit too.
But maybe they have a new branch of magic -- we'll call it "geomancy" for the purposes of this discussion -- which has spells for navigation, mapping, and so on...