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 Post subject: Horizons
PostPosted: August 12th, 2016, 12:28 pm 
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Thought this would be a fun one to work on:

Wikipedia informs me that on a level plain, a 5 foot 7 inch person (neighborhood of 1.75 meters) sees the horizon 3 miles away.
But what if you're on my Underland and the "earth" on which you stand has only half the radius, or less, than the "Earth?" A smaller ball should mean a farther horizon, methinks, but I'm not sure.

EDIT:
Believe it or not, some people on the internet already did this.
These articles will be of use to you if you want to plan how far away objects are to your characters' vision, or if you have planets with smaller or larger radii.
The effect of different radii
Table of distances for earth-sized planets

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 Post subject: Re: Horizons
PostPosted: August 12th, 2016, 1:15 pm 
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Interesting!

I was wondering just yesterday about the converse: what if you're in a world that, like Narnia, is a plane rather than a sphere?

The point of a palpably different horizon also comes up in Niven's Ringworld and at least the first sequel (I haven't read any further than that ...); the Ringworld is so large that it includes life-size replicas of every inhabited planet of "Known Space," but instead of curving down as on a sphere, the horizon curves up.

And there's also a less-well-known science fiction novel I've read (which I hesitate somewhat to recommend due to "language" and "content" issues, but here's a link to it on Goodreads) in which the main "other world" is significantly larger than Earth, but what really messes with the character's "horizon sense" is that it's a binary planet, with a "moon" that covers (if I remember correctly) up to about a quarter of the sky.

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 Post subject: Re: Horizons
PostPosted: August 12th, 2016, 9:45 pm 
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Slight tangent: The best visual example I've ever seen of a ringworld horizon is, of course, in the Halo series. See here:
http://i.imgur.com/pDLPvFj.jpg

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 Post subject: Re: Horizons
PostPosted: August 12th, 2016, 11:15 pm 
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Jakorosin Darksbane wrote:
Slight tangent: The best visual example I've ever seen of a ringworld horizon is, of course, in the Halo series. See here:
http://i.imgur.com/pDLPvFj.jpg

To me, that looks like a normal horizon with the ringworld arch added to the background, not a horizon that slopes up instead of down ...

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Originally inspired to write by reading C.S. Lewis, but can be as perfectionist as Tolkien or as obscure as Charles Williams.

Author of A Year in Verse, a self-published collection of poetry: available in paperback and on Kindle; a second collection forthcoming in 2022 or 2023, God willing (betas wanted!).

Creator of the Shine Cycle, an expansive fantasy planned series, spanning over two centuries of an imagined world's history, several universes (including various alternate histories and our own future), and the stories of dozens of characters (many from our world).

Developer of Strategic Primer, a strategy/simulation game played by email; currently in a redesign phase after the ending of "the current campaign" in 2022.

Read my blog!


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