boring physics stuff... i mean important physical characteristics

So, after a hiatus of sorts (working on some map commissions and trying to get some work done on my gigantic stereographic world map) I'm back with what might possibly be my most boring post,a bout aphelions, eccentricities (not the interesting sort) and orbits.

      The following is a small excerpt from about 10,000 words-worth of details that will be included in the stereographic map (amazingly, most of the surface of the image is actually a map, despite all those words!) and I thought I'd include them here to show I'm still alive. Most of the information below was slowly cultivated over my many years of working on the world, updated, replaced, changed, tinkered with, until slowly it became something believable.

Regarding the Sphere of Elyden

Elyden. She is our home, hanging in the Æther, product of the divine shaping of the Two-and-Twenty beings known as the Demiurges – shaper-gods whose literal hands were (and are, in some cases) responsible for the creation and evolution of this terraqueous globe that is called home by us and so many other peoples and races.

            Elyden is the third of seven known Ætheric bodies, sometimes known as planets, to have been discovered by observers (astronomers, astrologers, orrerists, Penumbrists, et al) within the system known as Sorchar; the others being, in successive order moving outwards from our star Sor: Hael, Algol, Elyden, Liviad, Gnihlas, Cykranosh, and Nihav. Others have been postulated by mortal observers, though the evidence given by otherworlders and those with abilities beyond the ken of ‘mere mortals’, suggest that the Sorchar system is complete with one star and seven planets. Many of those stars are themselves orbited by one or more satellites, with Liviad and Gnihlas each known to possess seven and three, respectively. Elyden herself is orbited by two satellites – Arakhamé the Red and Siella the White (Details on the two satellites may be found elsewhere on this treatise).

            Elyden orbits Sor at a mean speed of ~65,000-miles per hour in a counteclockwise direction when observed from above the northern pole of Kholamor. She orbits Sor at a mean distance of 92,000,000 miles, with a periapsis of ~90,500,000-miles and an apoapsis of ~93,500,000-miles. She has an equatorial radius of ~6,028-miles, with an equatorial circumference of ~37,880-miles and a polar circumference of ~37,815-miles and an estimated total surface area of 455,957,666-miles.

            Elyden is a rocky planet, with a metallic core, rocky shell and earthen crust in the depressions of which collect oceans of water; giving the term terraqueous globe (Elyden is thought to be the only terraqueous globe in Sorchar, with the other planets thought to be either terraous or gaseous in nature). Above this is an atmosphere that retains gasses due to the sphere’s gravity. It is this atmosphere that largely protects us from Ætheric cauterity, severe effects of the elementae vitale originating without Elyden and also regulates temperature extremes between night and day.

            Of the seven Sorchari planets, Elyden is thought to be the only one with an atmosphere and liquid water, both believed to be vital components in the propagation of mortal life, though it has not been entirely discounted that other forms of life might exist on extraterraqueous globes or even in the Penumbra of the Firmament themselves (indeed, the number of creatures whose existence relies on one of the two elementae vitale, as they are called, would lend credence to the belief in extraterraqueous life, though little solid evidence exists to support it yet). Some claim the very existence of isawhani (Otherworlders) is direct proof of the ability of either the Firmament or the Penumbra of spawning and sustaining ‘life’, though given their detached and, for want of another term, alien personalities, first-hand evidence has been difficult to glean.

            Despite this mystery, Elyden has had no shortage of what naturalists classify as life (described as Vitalism – the fundamental difference between organic and inorganic matter, and the belief inherent that life can only be derived from organic matter), even in these dark days that bear witness to her death throes.

            If one disregards the corruption of the natural world and goes back, even as little as one millennia, one can find a plethora of examples of life in almost all conditions imaginable – the is little-to-no terrain or climate catalogued by our brave explorers that have been unequivocally bereft of life. In some form, minute as it may be, some manner of life exists. Be it microscopic organisms that subsist on the oxidisation of metal, or the gigantic behemoths that lurk in the abysms of our oceans, life has, since the appearance and hubris of the Demiurges, proliferated, and there is little reason to doubt that it will disappear any-time soon.  

Characteristics of Elyden

Age:        ~1,000,000,000 years

Epoch:   Sixth Age of Mortal life

Physical characteristics

Mean radius: 6,023-miles

Equatorial radius: 6,028-miles

Polar radius: 6,018-miles

Flattening: 1.0016616

Mean circumference: 37,845.5-miles                            

Equatorial Circumference: 37,880-miles                       37880 / 1436 minutes

Meridional Circumference: 37,815-miles

Surface area: 455,957,666-miles²

Land area: 235,274,155.656 (51.6%)

Sea area: 220683510.344 (48.4%)

Volume: 915,504,739,986.3-miles³

Mass: 2.9739x10²⁵ pounds

Equatorial gravity: 32.06 Ft/s²

Sidereal rotation period: 0.9972 d (23^h56^m4^s)

Equatorial rotation velocity: 1,582 m/h

Axial tilt: 28^O46’23”

Minimum surface Temperature: -103.4 ^oC

Maximum surface Temperature: 71.9 ^oC

Firmamental pericentre: 1.02~/O/∞1.08

Firmamental apocentre: 0.82~/O/∞1.01

Penumbral pericentre: 1.21~/O/∞1.32

Penumbral apocentre: 1.33~/O/∞1.57

Orbital characteristics

Mean distance from Sor: 92,000,000 miles

        Periapsis: 90,500,000-miles

        Apoapsis: 93,500,000-miles

Eccentricity: 0.02564275

Orbital Period: 365.8572 days

Average Orbital Speed: ~65,000 mph

Satellites: 2

Atmosphere

Surface Pressure:

Composition: 76.2% N, 19.64% O, 0.87% Ar, 0.042% CO₂, 1.624% Fir, 1.624% Pen 

the Encyclopaedia Elyden

Here's the title page of the Encyclopaedia Elyden, and the start of my new project... though don't expect it to be done anytime soon.

Title Page

I've always had an interest in bookbinding and grimoires and codices, especially prop-books used in movies, like the Ninth Gate book from the eponymous movie, 'the Ninth Gate', the Red Book of Westmarch from 'the Lord of the Rings' lore, or Lovecraft's Necronomicon, amongst others. I've always wanted to craft the Encyclopaedia Elyden to look like an in-world artifact, though until recently I envisaged creating the entire thing on computer and printing it out at a pro-printers or somewhere like createspace or lulu and then re-cover the book myself.

Though recently I've been toying with the idea of making the entire thing myself from scratch. Luckily for me, the mechanical printing press is no stranger to the world of Elyden so i could easily use an appropriate font and craft the book on computer, print signatures and bind the entire thing myself. I have some success crafting small diary-sized books and feel comfortable crafting the book, aging the pages, and binding it myself.

Even though that's the idea, its not something that'll take form anytime soon as i need to finish writing the book first, something that's a vicious circle tied to my other worldbuilding exploits... A life-long project, I imagine.

Technological Innovations of Elyden

Sorry for the radio-silence, though I’ve been busy on some map commissions (I might post some here once I get permission and they’re released) and some tinkering on broad history strokes of my world.

Over the past few days I’ve been busy thinking about Elyden and what she started out as and where she’s going (as a quick aside, like any good ship captain I always refer to my world in the feminine…). She started out as a word doodle, with no forethought and just evolved over the years (coming up to 8-years now), taking on new aspects as I researched (learning about Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Carceri d'invenzione, the art of Wayne Barlowe, H. R. Giger& Zdzislaw Beksinski, amongst many other influences), grew up and just consolidated what I wanted out of the world. This evolution of the world is still-ongoing and wreaks havoc on my futile attempts at trying to craft a solid history and mythology – new ideas have sometimes created huge shifts in the world’s tone, and added large periods of tumultuous history to nations’ timelines, making me rewrite large parts of history. 

Recently I have been thinking about the world’s technology level. This, like many other things, has evolved over the year, slowly changing from a classical late medieval period (with the Korachani empire having some magical-engines) to what I can only describe now as being a Dystopic victorian dark-magical steampunk setting with para-natural influences and swathes of body-horror. Of course technology bases differ from region to region (imagine things like the battle of ‘Rorke’s Drift’ or the ‘Last Samurai’). That’s a long way to describe the setting, though I like the fact that it cant be summed up by a single word (well, at a stretch, maybe despair or decay). 

I originally envisaged the height of real-world tech in Elyden would be: advanced printing presses, primitive telegraph system (still unsure of this) steam-powered cars with WWI artillery tracks (I’ve attached some pics of early steam-powered tracked vehicles and one of my fave’s, the Alkett VSKFZ 617 minesweeper) and I thought even that was pushing it, given that fantasy techs I decided I wanted (in sparse amounts) would be archaic powered-armour and mechs, magically-operated viewing portals (video-phone), amongst others, though again; used sparingly and not a common part of everyday life.

A couple of things I’ve come across in my research over the years have struck me, and though I’ve resisted using too many archaic real-world sources, I’ve finally relented and have decided to add a few things, some less extreme than others, with some modifications: 

1) Thao Jansen’s e Strandbeest 

2) Charles Babbages’ difference engine 

The Strandbeest 

Amazing feat of engineering and something that has really excited me since I fist found out about it a few years ago, though only something I thought I could incorporate into my world – not as a common invention though an innovation used by a particularly group of people (not even that technologically advanced, or perhaps salvaged from an ancient otherwise forgotten invention). So I decided on a large flat coastal region, sand an wet, going on for many many miles. It’s subjected to near constant coastal-winds and is otherwise not very fertile, but its nomads need a quick way of traversing the expanse – so they use these machines. I imagine a solitary itinerant travelling on such a thing, personalized by his years of scavenging, all his belongings and piles of scrap carried on its back. Ah bliss! 

The Difference Engine 

Most of you are probably familiar with this. In a nutshell Charles Babbage’s difference engine was a prototype analogue computing machine that was never completed, devised between 1823 – 1842, when funding was cut by the british government, Babbage worked slowly (or was a perfectionist…). Had the engine been completed and built upon, the world today would be a very different place indeed. 

I’ve been meaning to add such a thing to my world for some time; perhaps as something the half-dozen largest cities would have as a means of computing knowledge and maintaining contact with one-another. But a video I saw the other day gave me another idea: 

I love Adam Savage: he’s somewhat of an idol, alongside characters like Stan Winston, Nikola Tesla, H.P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert. E. Howard. Anyway… that video and the comparison of old storage sizes and new storage sizes got me thinking… How about a city-sized computer made up of millions of vacuum tubes and a legion of workers to maintain it, constantly replacing burnt bits in an endless cycle. Of course such a machine is unfeasible in the real world, though fits in with the cyclopean sense of wonder I want my world to have and the nature of human life – toiling like ants as part of a greater hole, their individual actions insignificant, though when taken together, creating a whole so much greater than the sum of its parts. 

I envisage a city in the cold north (the climate helping cool the monolithic thing) served by millions of tech slaves overseen by demiurne overlords whose objectives are undisclosed (what the hell is the empire, analogous to the roman empire in Victorian England, doing with a terabyte of computing power?)…

So I think the world is taking place. Another piece of the puzzle fits in place.

the Legacy of Worlds-gone-by

What follows is an excerpt of what I've been working on (worldbuilding-wise), regarding the development of the 'contemporary' nations of Elyden. In a nutshell, the world is now populated by the descendants of the handful of survivors of the end of the previous age, who weren't forced to discover things for themselves as the original mortal races had...

the Legacy of Worlds-gone-by

Being a world of many pasts, the development of Elyden’s present Age had as its advantage various factors, not least of which were the ruins and remnants of past cultures. There was no slow rate of progress as one invention slowly appeared and became popularised, paving the way for other discoveries based upon its virtues. The survivors of the Fourth Age and its cataclysmic war found a world tarnished, filled with the ruins of their forebears, littered by the detritus of both war and peace.

We can never know what it is like for developing peoples and cultures to develop at a natural rate. Such a thing can only have happened once – following the creation of the Two-and-twenty mortal seeds and their eventual birth following the actions of the Demiurges – and even then, their actions were guided by the Demiurges. We of the Fifth-Age have inherited an old, used world. Many skills and technologies were either remembered by the descendants of the Fourth-Age or re-discovered through their exploration of the dead empire’s remnants.

Many advancements that took the first mortals centuries to develop; like husbandry, agriculture, organised trade and metalworking, amongst many others, were skills carried-forth from the old age. Tools lay rotten, disused, their forms echoing their one-time purpose. Skills were recovered far quicker than they originally took to develop, leading to an unnatural cultural development, where small groups of people – familial tribes or the retinues and followers of rogue leaders – advanced at a rapid rate. Within centuries, if not decades, of their re-emergence following the Fading of the Fourth-Age, these disparate group were wielding iron or bronze weapons of their own design (subject, of course, to the availability of resources and the logistics involved in their manufacture), erecting monuments and structures of a sophistication rivalling that of their forebears, and waging war with their neighbours over resources – raw materials and, as history tells us, slaves.

Dubbed the Renaissance of Rediscovery, this rapidity of advancement has, as records show, led to an aggressiveness that seems difficult to understand at face value. Unfortunately, there are little to no records of similar events having taken place in previous ages with which we can compare this phenomenon, but we can find theories.

Small groups of emergent mortals can be imagined to be a world onto themselves. They are isolated and restricted by the advancements and skills that their best members possess. Historically, all groups were on a relatively equal-footing, with most discoveries and inventions following a vague timeline. For instance, in the postulated first age of mortal live, the production of steel could not exist without a reliable history of extracting and smelting iron, itself a practice that favours agricultural communities with the resources to set up quarries and mines to excavate the raw materials, which would have required the development of husbandry techniques and the domestication of grasses and livestock.

The groups of people emerging from the Fading of the Fourth-Age had little of those constraints. The remnants of past cultures were all around re-emerging groups – disused mills, tools, quarries, raw materials, art, culture, coinage, and so on.

The mortals of the Fifth-Age are largely (though not exclusively) plunderers, building on the ruins of their forebears, having earnt little of their technologies and culture through toil, instead borrowing it from dead nations. As a result of this, things like currencies became prevalent quickly, using the treasures and coins of past empires for trading. Groups lucky enough may have found access to untapped natural resources – coal mines and iron-fields lying disused, awaiting extraction from the surface; overgrown fields, already sown with domesticated crops, and so-on. This led to a rapid growth in some areas, particularly in temperate and dry climates, such as mid-to northern latitude Llachatul and Meniscus, as well as southern Sammaea (though the latter two, being distant lands, have not been as thoroughly explored as Llachatul and the Inner Sea), with groups expanding rapidly thanks to the boons they found. Cultures developed quickly, inheriting the artistic traits of the ruins they raided, developing their languages around the written records they found.

So were the nations of Elyden’s Fifth-Age born; in the wreckage of those who fell before them.

Sweet Norfolk

I love Norfolk. My mum is from there and her family lives there. I myself am Maltese. to those of you who don;t know, Malta is this tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Mediterranean. To be blunt its been raped by most old world cultures imaginable, from Carthaginians, Phoenicians,  Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Italians, French, and English, leaving us with a long history, from some of the eldest standing monuments (dated to around 5,000 BC to a couple of remarkable sieges - one in 1565 and another, more famous one, known as the 2nd world war - leading to our independence as one of the smallest nations in the world in 1964, with a population of about 450,000.

I hate Malta! Its filthy, populated by what I consider to be ignorant Mediterranean people, obsessed with religion and politics and football: three things i care very little about. It's loud, extroverted and is horribly humid (making summers unbearably hot and winters horribly cold, despite our latitude). Despite what tourists insist in, i find locals very brash, uncourth and far from friendly. I Often feel an outside in my own country, possibly something to do with my dual nationality (English mother, Maltese father) and what I consider a close affinity with English culture.

Having said that I do respect its history and what it's (my) people have lived through. Picked on by ottoman pirates for centuries, housing the Knights Hospitalier for 268 years, withstanding some pretty intense sieges and sticking it to der fuhrer in WWII, Malta has had its fair share of ups and downs...

So Going north to England for my holidays is always a strange experience. i feel nothing but warmth for the English people, their self-deprecating humour (something Maltese people are not entirely aware of), their sarcasm. I also get a very 'old world' feel whenever I'm in the U.K. - i imagine this is due to the fact it's a relatively old country with established laws and mores, unlike Malta, which has only been self-governing for 40-50 years, and, in many ways, is still finding its feet. I love its buildings, its weather, and the determination of its people and its pubs! its many faults notwithstanding (its faltering debt-based economy springs to mind...) I love the place.

What does this have to do with worldbuilding? Nothing! It's my sister;s birthday in a few weeks and i decided to make a map of Norfolk for her:

It's in an old 18th century style, with distressed old paper and uses old-school naming conventions. I'm quite happy with it and will probably start working on a Maltese one soon - for all its (perceived) faults, Malta, being the Centre of the Med, has a rich cartographical history i can steal from.

Also, I might be working on my first map commission soon - an ancient Egypt map, something I've always been interested in. maybe a career in cartography beckons! My Elyden Atlas/encyclopaedia seems that much more plausable now :)


On the worldbuilding front, I'm slowly working on ideas for coins - done in PS as small relief pictures, depicting the various coins of different regions, base don time and reign. i have a few ideas for coins, many of them already use din my fiction, others little more than new ideas I'm still working on. My favorites are the coins that are minted with dents and perforations dividing them in quarters, which can be snapped and broken into smaller deniminations. i'm not sure how plausable the economies of such coins are, though i like the idea.

the flooding of almagest

a challenge entry over at cartographersguild.com, with a submerged theme. Voting's underway now, so any of you that can vote: http://www.cartographersguild.com/current-mapping-challenge/22491-%2A%2A%2A-february-2013-challenge-voting-submerged-%2A%2A%2A.html#post209341

:D

the City-Kingdoms of the Haréshk

So, I finally finished the Haréshki map, after some setbacks (both real-life and within photoshop - damn i hate saving after making an unnoticed mistake that cant be edited...).

The Haréshk is a dichotomous place, its idyllic terrain and beautiful hills and grasslands forming a stark contrast to the politicking of its regions and their rulers; kings and queens and their countless lords and advisors. The place is somewhat antiquated, still holding onto traditions that the world's major powers (amongst them the two Korachani empires and the Secular Parthian Republic chief amongst them) consider to be antiquated, such as knightly traditions and a feudal state. The region is renowned for its myriad flags and heraldic devices and the angelic and draconic motifs (both attributed to its religion) that fill its art and culture.