Cone-sunned Earths.

The sun is cone shaped, thus triangular as seen from earth, pointing right or left as it rises from the horizon. This kind of sun can emit radiations high in the Spectrum of Existences (the heshot spectrum), and nearly all of the peculiarities of the Earths that orbit them are directly or indirectly connected to these radiations.

All the water that would be on the surface of the earth is suspended in a liquid water canopy several hundred meters deep (on average, it fluctuates greatly). This canopy is on average a height of 72 km, but it is much lower than this at the poles, and nearly twice as high at the equator than at the poles, because it is spinning at the same speed and axis as the earth. The canopy is not as deep as it would be, because around half of it is forced to fill the atmosphere below the canopy by the heshot radiations. It does not fill the atmosphere as vapor, but is in a different form, which is invisible. Plants transform it into water again from the air, and animals get their water from plants. If water evaporates below the canopy it is forced back up into the canopy, and from there forced into the lower atmosphere again, maintaining equilibrium. Advanced civilizations invent water collectors, which appear roughly similar to solar collectors. Water never forms clouds (except in scientific experiments where it is shielded from the heshot radiations).

The light from the sun is many times more intense than sunlight on round-sunned Earths, like Lewis's Silver Sea, or the flash from an atomic explosion. People who are not used to the light cannot escape it, by closing their eyes, or by going indoors, or even underground. The shadows are more like changes in the light than a lessening of the light. The heat is no more than on round-sunned Earths, rather, it is cooler on average. It is not hotter nearer the equator, nor colder nearer the poles.

The mountains are around six times higher, and not very much wider. Hills, however, are the same as on round-sunned Earths.

There are great deserts (dry, but not hot), and great tracts of land so densely grown with plants that they are uninhabitable. Men live between these regions. There are also vast regions of desert or forest that are nearly always in an earthquake. Different kinds of plants grow there, designed to float in the liquefied earth.

When the canopy is broken, when an opening is made in it, such as when a meteor passes through it, the light passing through the gap makes a flash mark on the ground, which can appear very strange, and its effects are different depending on where it falls.

There are great plains of a kind of fern, lettuce like plants, and dense, giant, Venus flytrap like plants. The insects are far more numerous, and more varied, and more often large. They are far more prominent than the mammals, or reptiles. Birds are also more common, but no more varied.

Many strange technologies are developed in this sort of Earth. There are also strange diseases, and strange atmospheric events.

I have other threads here:
http://www.holyworlds.org/scifi/posting.php?mode=post&f=66&sid=80d2bd41c19ec88c08e972cdb048dbb2

And here:
http://www.holyworlds.org/fantasy/posting.php?mode=post&f=108

There it is, I hope this explains some things about thorn-sunned Earths, and the vastness of their transformation. There are threads about the thorn-sunned Earths in these places, try to imagine the contrast between them and the cone-sunned Earths:
http://www.holyworlds.org/fantasy/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=5493
http://www.holyworlds.org/scifi/posting.php?mode=post&f=17

The highlands of thorn-sunned Earths rose in the change, so they do not exist in cone-sunned Earths.

Please critique! What are your favorite ideas? Do you have any ideas for further development? Did anything confuse you? Do you have any questions?

Wow! A stunningly gorgeous departure from intuitive physics! Very interesting stuff.

Sure, I'll briefly go over the things that stood out to me. [Edit: Which turns out to be pretty much everything. And it turned out to be not so brief...]

1. I was gonna ask what the sun is and how on earth (or how in space) it can retain a conical shape, but maybe I'll find that out in other threads, so I'll not concern myself for now

2.What suspends the canopy and prevents it from falling?

3.Slightly confusing way of putting it, but I think I know what you mean. "Vapor" is a rather...cloudy term, if you'll pardon the pun. Water vapor (in the scientific sense) is always invisible. What we see in mist/steam/clouds is tiny, suspended droplets of liquid water that have condensed out of the vapor...but these condensed droplets are often also referred to as vapor, themselves. Do you mean to say that water fills the atmosphere as a gaseous vapor (invisible) but never condenses into visible droplets on its own? That would seem to square with the bits below...

4.This is a very interesting hydrosphere plan! It seems clear that there is some relationship between heshot radiation and water's ability to condense.

5.I like this a lot; you seem to have thought out some implications for a radiation that penetrates matter without losing intensity, though it changes in quality. This heshot radiation is neat stuff! What kinds are there, and what interactions do they have, with water and everything else? Would love to see this system fleshed out in a consistent way (I imagine that would be something of a challenge!).

6.Hmmm...how do you get the climate variation? You've actually eliminated the two biggest contributors to climate variation, namely difference in temperature and availability of water. Is it about nutrients in the soil/ground? Is there something hostile (chemically or otherwise) that prevents growth in the deserts?

7.That's awesomely crazy. Crazy tectonics, to say the least! But liquefied earth? What is it, sand ground to dust so fine that it flows like a viscous liquid? If so, there might be weird implications for the atmosphere and canopy [edit: although it seems you have radiation keeping dust out of the sky in thorn-sunned earths, so maybe not]. But putting plants in it is just ingenious. Easiest pollination ever, no flowers necessary, constant churn of nutrients...it might be interesting to think about how they'd compete for surface area? But then, with the crazy earth-penetrating heshot radiation, do they even need to be on the surface? Can plants photosynthesize underground? Can heshot radiation pass through one plant and still be used by another?

8.You seem to have a larger proportion on flying creatures...can they fly up and drink directly from the water canopy? If so, that might explain a prevalence relative to land-bound creatures, which seem dependant on eating plants to get their water. Btw, does anything live in the canopy itself?


I read a little about the thorn-sunned earths, but I couldn't view the scifi forum stuff. I should get an account there...anyway, really neat-looking stuff. Whew.

Thank you Cephron!

I like your questions very much.

Only slightly confusing? That is an improvement. My main problem is the confusion I generate when I try to describe what comes into my mind. What comes into my mouth is so inferior to what comes into my mind.

Actually any vapor below the canopy is forced up into it. No condensation takes place except in laboratories. The water that is forced out of the canopy into the air below is not in a vapor, though it is invisible. It is in a form not known to us, and only plants in those planets have the processes for transforming it back into its known form. I need to make a name for the other form. All I can think of calling it for now is heshot transformed water.

There is, but it is only that water vapor is forced into the canopy rather than being allowed to condense. Bodies of water can be gathered from plants, but are lost as they evaporate unless their evaporation is contained, so that the vapor cannot reach the canopy.

There is only a certain kind of radiation on cone-sunned Earths, and it has very many different effects. There is not only heshot radiations though, but heshot shapes: new shapes; new numbers, new substances and new physical laws, and for now I am only describing the effect of a certain kind of heshot radiations on non-heshot things.

This is one of the most interesting things, something I have developed mostly after I read your question. I already knew that something resembling electricity, going from the ground into the air, was a significant part of the weather. Recently it occurred to me that the deserts were probably of electric origin. Then I realized the process. The weather on those planets is very haunting, very... disturbing.

Sounds, possibly with heshot parts, and not many of them within the range of human hearing, run through the earth, possibly originating from what ever causes the earthquake grounds, converge in certain places, breaking something you could call a "concentration barrier," and generating "electric" fires. There would have been no deserts in the original planets, as you would expect.

These fires would be smokeless, of course, because of the "aerosol suppression." They form very little tongues, most of the time none at all, the fire would be spherical, covering things like a coating of ice or dew. When the desert is burned out, there rise from the ground great arcs of "electricity" in rows, or single arcs like solar flares. These "electric eruptions" would be the weather, or storms, of the deserts, other than dust storms. Often the arcs would have faint concentric arcs within and without the main arc, like a multiplied rainbow. Sometimes the rows of arcs would branch along "sound fault lines." There would also be arcs that form in the air and constrict down into the ground. Sometimes there would be a short dense row of static, incomplete arcs, which would look like tufts of lightening quivering in the air. There would be other phenomena like ghost lights, ball lightening, lights like fire flies.

In a few words, the deserts are eldritch places to be.

Here is a link about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_liquefaction

It can certainly pass through one plant and be used by another, I mention that in one of the other threads. I actually did not think of plants underground (though I might have in time, I have developed other underground plants). It is a good point, caves in gas-sunned Earths are dark, and do not have green plants, but in cone-sunned Earths they would be in perpetual "night light." I believe that something would be very different about underground plants and plants in the lower layers of forest.

I had not thought of that, and it makes perfect sense. Thank you for your observativeness!

Of course there would be sea life in the canopy itself, necessarily of a different kind because of the strange situation, but I had not given it enough thought. Amita4ever thought of the idea of bio-luminescent algae. It may be that the sky is clouded by the life in the canopy (which would be very indistinct in the high atmosphere) rather than by clouds of water.

But there is the problem of anything that is not water staying in the canopy. Anything light or buoyant enough not to fall (whatever suspends the water would not suspend fish) would float on the lower surface of the canopy. Though they would be able to use the currents the same way they would use prevailing winds, and perhaps feed on algae very near the lower surface, I do not know what else could be done.

Yes I do though! If the creature had enough water in its makeup the weight of the rest of the creature would not be able to draw the water it was attached to out of the canopy. In fact if you drove a tank truck to the top of a mountain (which would be impossible because they are too high and steep) the entire truck would rise into the air like a balloon, gathering speed, eventually crashing into the canopy and the broken wreckage would rain out of the upper atmosphere like meteorites.


I just posted the development from the other threads in the thread on the Fantasy forum, but you still need to get an account on the Sci-fi side! From the posts you have posted here I can tell that your good thinking is needed there.


Here is development I have posted in the other threads (at least one of your other questions is answered here):



Whew indeed. The reply was even less brief. It was fun though. It even raised sweat at one point.

Nice, Tsahraf! Your answers are very enlightening and paint a more complete picture of what kinds of processes are going on in this world.

I'm not sure how this part works, though. The article you linked says pretty explicitly that this only happens when the ground is completely saturated in liquid water, which (as I understand it) doesn't stick around very long on the surface of a cone-sunned earth. Wouldn't the liquid water evaporate into it's heshot-transformed state before enough accumulates to allow soil to liquify?

That's very cool! That implies that any object that contains a significant quantity of liquid water (like a human body, for example) has a balance point at some height in the atmosphere where the upwards pull on the water cancels out the downwards pull of gravity, meaning it could just float there--in theory. In practice, though, it would be like balancing on a knife edge--a slight drift in either direction would eventually send the object tumbling up or down. If one wanted to maintain position, they would need to be able to push air up or down (like, with helicopter fans or something). If they wanted to change altitude and maintain stability, they would have to dump ballast--rocks/sand, if they were moving down; water, if they were moving up. Of course, the rocks would fall down, and the water would fall up. Just imagine the airships you could have!! The pro is that they can be as big as you want them--just add more water! The con is that they constantly have to maintain their altitude to prevent from falling one way or the other, unlike balloon-based airships.

Actually, that would make the moon completely invisible. When we see the moon, we're seeing light that has reflected off of it; light that passes through it would never reach our eyes. But of course, that's talking about ordinary light. Heshot light--who knows?

This actually implies that, in order to see anything (by sunlight) other than the sun, heshot light has to either sometimes be reflected, or emit a sort of "secondary light" when it changes form by passing through something...do you see what I mean? Like, if I'm looking at a tree and I see a tree, that means light is coming from its surface (either reflected or emitted) and entering my eye and stopping in my retina. So if sunlight is only heshot light, and heshot light just passes through the tree without stopping, it never enters my eye and I never see the tree. So unless you restructure how sight works, something has to come from the tree when the heshot light hits it...am I making any sense to you? I don't know if I've misunderstood something about your system.

Edit: Hey!
There might be another good effect of going with the "secondary light" paradigm. So, whenever heshot light passes through something, it changes form, right? How about, whenever this happens (or maybe just depending on what kind of change), it also releases a photon of "secondary light", which could be either ordinary light or something that behaves like ordinary light in the important ways. This would solve two problems--first, it solves the problem I described above. Secondly, the heshot light would continue to release "secondary light" as it moves throught the planet body, from one material into another...causing a buildup of energy inside the planet which could give rise to all the crazy electric and tectonic effects you described in your original post. The regions of low electric activity vs. high electric activity could be explained by convection currents in the planet's molten core, just like tectonics on earth.

Thank you Cephron! I am glad you are still interested in this, and helping me work it out and clarify everything.

Good point. Though the ground would certainly be of a different sort in those regions. I wonder what it would be like.

You must remember liquid water is very expensive. It would probably be cheaper for them to use more boring technology to fly. The strange technologies I have thought of work by using the heshot radiations directly.

Sorry, I should have described that more. The light passes through, and reflects off of all sides of the moon, so no matter which side faces earth that side would be completely illuminated. That is the way it works for everything else also.

Here is a picture: on the left is what happens else where, on the right is what happens on cone-sunned Earths:



I will start with describing one weapon that is developed in such Earths, since there are so many and they are all so hard to describe.

The Shield weapon:

This can take the form of a flat, full body shield, or a shallow concave circle like a satellite dish. They can be metallic gold or clay textured middle gray. They are pointed at the victim and a beam of light, visible or invisible, strikes the victim (if it is aimed correctly), and the effects are strange: stiffening clothes, rapid emaciation, whitening and hardening of the skin, loss of sight to a white brilliance, or a light that is neither white or black (with the invisible rays), loss of hearing, a sensation of extreme temperature that is neither heat or cold (or, either extreme heat or extreme cold would equally describe the sensation), and a feeling of uncontrolled terror.

Please critique! Ask questions! What was your favorite part? Did anything confuse you?

There are other weapons to come.

And you can still talk about the other things I have mentioned in this thread, especially if something does not seem right.

And thank Cephron, a lot of the development was because of his thoughts and questions about different things.

Perhaps you could consider the viscous dust idea? I think it might work, specifically because of how dry the air is.

Well, I've had an idea which could help here by making water cheaply available. But the great thing about this idea is that you could decide whether it's plausible or not pretty much on a whim. So if you like the water-airship idea, and the cost of water is the problem, this could be a solution. But if the water-airship idea is a problem, and the cost of water is your solution, then just wave this idea away as impossible.

Here's how to mass-produce water cheaply on a cone-sunned earth:

The part that makes it totally up to you is the 72-kilometer cable. Could there possibly exist a cable that could bear 72 kilometers of its own weight, plus containers of water? Yes--then this idea would work. No--then it wouldn't. If you decide it's possible, it would probably make sense to build these on high mountains, as close to the water layer as possible.

Ok! The picture was very helpful. But I'm still just a little confused, so I'll ask for clarification. Suppose a single photon of light hits the surface of the moon. If it was normal light, it would either be absorbed (turning into heat), or reflected in some direction. But it's not normal light--it's heshot light. So what does it do? Does it:

(a) keep going forward, but also spawn a photon of normal light and send it off in the direction it would have reflected?
(b) copy itself, so that now one heshot photon is reflected and the (identical) other keeps going straight?
(c) have a 50/50 chance (or some other ratio) of being reflected or going straight, but never does both?
(d) "Photons?" What are you babbling about??

If none of these make any difference to you, I would recommend option (a) as the closest to what you seem to want. Option (b) could lead to weird chain reactions where huge amounts of heshot light could get produced in exponentially growing quantities (which would generally leads to explosions, since you mentioned heshot light can generate heat). Option (c) actually conserves energy, which is a nice property, but it also means that the back of the moon would be dimmer than the sunlit side (still shining, but more dimly. How much more dimly could be controlled by playing around with a few parameters). As for option (d)....well, it's your world, and maybe my familiarworld paradigms for describing light don't apply to heshot light. Up to you, good sir! If you're interested in more detail on any of these options, ask away.

(This post has been sitting here for a long time, I think I ran into a problem, but now I do not remember what it was... )

The ground would form very strange patterns from being shaken so often, but I really have no clear idea of what that would be like.

I like the diagram, but I agree that a 72km cable would break under its own weight. Even airplanes, helicopters, and balloons have difficulty flying in that region of the atmosphere I believe. It is practically in space. However, with the cost of setting it up aside, and the need for a rope of adamant, it would work.

I looked up the human body and found that 65% of the bodies mass is water, but 98.73% of its molecules is water. Since the lifting force acts more on bodies of water than on separate molecules I have come to two conclusions, first, the human body would not be able to remain in the water canopy without falling (the tanks would, however), and second, I need to go drink some water.