Talk: Shellworld

Dimensions

I'm somewhat confused.  Things the book says about dimensions:

• Core:
  • "solid metallic core fourteen hundred kilometres in diameter." [1400 km ⌀]
  • "The Core’s only fourteen hundred klicks in diameter" [1400 km ⌀]
• Level numbers:
  • "Arithmetic Shellworlds invariably held fifteen interior surfaces" [+ the exterior Surface?]
  • "Sursamen Levels: Inhabitants" lists exterior surface as level 0, and core as "level" 16
    • But level 16 would be inside the solid core, so not really a level?
    • And level 0 is the exterior surface, open to space, so it doesn't have a ceiling and its atmosphere doesn't count towards diameter?
• Total:
  • "and were forty-five thousand kilometres in external diameter." [45,000 km ⌀]
• Level height:
  • "In an Arithmetic Shellworld, the levels were regularly spaced at fourteen-hundred-kilometre intervals." [1400 km]
  • "halfway down the first section of the Tower, seven hundred kilometres from the Surface." [700 km]
  • "We’re fourteen hundred kilometres above the Deldeyn province" [1400 km]
  • "ambient-drop ... through nearly a thousand klicks of near-vacuum" [1000 km]
  • "and then hit the atmosphere" [which therefore must be 400 km high]
    • roughly similar to Earth's atmosphere, though they have lower gravity
  • “above a dark shaft fourteen hundred kilometres deep” [1400 km of floor height?]
• Open tower:
  • "It is the end of a Tower which leads all the way down to the Machine Core"
  • “you are looking across twenty-one thousand kilometres of vacuum to the lair of the Xinthian itself” [21,000 km]

So if core has a radius of 700 km, then each level is 1400 km, and there are 15 of these levels and then the surface, the total diameter would be (700+(1400*15))*2 = 43400.  So does this neglect the floor thickness?  If there are 15 floors between levels (including the exterior Surface) then these would be (45000-43400)/15 = 106.667 km thick.  Maybe he included a floor around the solid core also?  Then it works out to exactly 100 km floor thickness, but that's an additional thickness around the core, which seems odd.  I couldn't find a mention of the floor thickness. 

So the open tower would extend from the exterior surface to the surface of the machine core (which then had a door into it that had to be blasted open?)  So that would cross 14 levels, so 21000/14 = 1500 km per level, which would imply 100 km for each floor thickness?  So 14*1400 + 14*100 = 21000  Including exterior surface thickness but excluding machine core ceiling thickness.  That seems to make sense? Omegatron (talk) 00:31, September 10, 2020 (UTC)

Tower spacing

• "No more than six out of a million Towers on any Shellworld"
• "a concentric succession of spherical shells, supported by over a million massive, gently tapering towers"
• "A million Towers held the world up."
• In the Machine Core: "There’s no Towers."

This sounds like 1 million towers for the entire world, not per level.  And 14 levels not including Machine Core.  So 1e6 / 14  = 71428 per level, which looks something like this:

If the Sarl 8th Level is about 12,205 km radius (not sure about this, see above), then the surface area of their level is 1.48e9 km², or about 20,700 km² per tower.  If the towers are in a square/diamond pattern on a small scale, as in the image, then they are roughly 150 km apart.

"must have flown over six hundred thousand strides – six hundred kilometres. They had passed twelve Towers to their right, and flown left by one tower every five."

600 km / 12 = 50 km apart.  Hmm.... Omegatron (talk) 04:57, September 10, 2020 (UTC)