Cultural additions to the setting

[johndallman]

I'm running a THS game, and find myself discovering or creating various details that may be of interest.

Islandia is clearly the main place in cislunar space for flying with Low-G Wings. You learn close to the axis, but going "down" from there is risky, and thus part of the sport of the thing. Compact single-use parachutes are important, but of course, they add weight. Flying the length of the habitat under your own power is a significant demonstration of skill, and is a requirement for admission to the identify group of fliers.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Islandia is clearly the main place in cislunar space for flying with Low-G Wings. You learn close to the axis, but going "down" from there is risky, and thus part of the sport of the thing. Compact single-use parachutes are important, but of course, they add weight. Flying the length of the habitat under your own power is a significant demonstration of skill, and is a requirement for admission to the identify group of fliers.

Clarke has quite a bit on this in Rendezvous with Rama but I don't believe anyone's yet done a formal analysis of how wind shear (or convection!) might develop in a rotating cylinder in freefall.

[AlexanderHowl]

It depends a lot on the height of the structures in the rotating cylinder. In addition, flying from the zero-g center to the rotating edge would be suicidal unless you had a very high flight speed. For example, a 5 km radius object rotating fast enough to mimic 1g would have a tangential velocity of 221 meters per second (roughly 440 mph). For most fliers to safely descend, they would need to gain velocity by descending in stages. If they have a g-limit to their flight, it would mark the point where their glide becomes a plummet, as the winds would become to extreme for them to handle.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

. . . flying from the zero-g center to the rotating edge would be suicidal unless you had a very high flight speed.

That's why Islandia wingfliers carry parachutes. They should not need them if they stay close to the axis, but some like to show off how much "gravity" they can climb back out of, and inevitably, a few are too optimistic.

[johndallman]

Another detail: documentation. Lots of maintenance in space is done by LAIs and NAIs. Those are pretty good with language, but they may trip over excessively creative use of words. So there are restricted-vocabulary dialects of major human languages that are designed to be readily comprehensible to LAIs and NAIs, and accessible (if dull reading) to the fully sapient.

When the characters in QRA recently captured a robot that was part of a sabotage scheme on Mercury, I realised it would have its maintenance documentation in its computer. That gave some useful clues: it's written in a recent English maintenance dialect, and the layout and fonts are from a Nanodynamics corporate presentation package.

An SAI in the party is interested in languages, and on a good linguistics roll realised that the documentation was written by someone who had German as their first language: there are some characteristic misphrasings that show up in that combination. At this point, the players were asking if Nanodynamics had acquired any German operations recently, which, of course, they have: they acquired Exogenesis from System Technologies AG, a German-based company.

You know you're getting somewhere with a setting when its line editor, who is one of the players, starts making little squeaking noises.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Another detail: documentation. Lots of maintenance in space is done by LAIs and NAIs. Those are pretty good with language, but they may trip over excessively creative use of words. So there are restricted-vocabulary dialects of major human languages that are designed to be readily comprehensible to LAIs and NAIs, and accessible (if dull reading) to the fully sapient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpli...hnical_English was designed in the 1980s for aircraft maintenance instructions, and I do recommend that page for details about the ways in which it is kept simple. (For example, any single word can only ever be one part of speech.)