[crossfire] weather, lattitude, town location, and the world

[Lalo Martins]

Now that some people seem to be working on salvaging the weather system...

I remember one thing that was somewhat polemic about it, was the choice
of two *corners* of the map for the poles (nw and se IIRC), rather than
the north and south as would seem more reasonable.

This does incidentally work remarkably well for Wolfsburg, which ends up
a hot, but miserably rainy town - as would be expected of a pirate port.
 Scorn is also suitably temperate, and the "mushroom peninsula" is
tropical enough for its swamp.  However, it can be argued that
Brest/Britany is warmer than it should.  And I haven't yet seen
mikeusa's new region.

Another problem of this approach is that it assumes we're looking at the
complete planet; however, some devs have expressed the view that this is
but one continent.  The plaque in Lone Town's "dragon" entrance claims
Pupland is an island (which actually kind of shocked me, I always
thought it was the name of the nation, but I digress).  And the Empire
supposedly originated from another continent, with which we lost contact
eventually for unknown reasons.

So before the weather system is made usable, it would IMHO be a good
idea to make a decision about where "our" continent is located on the
planet.  Given the distribution of cities, I would expect it to be in
the southern hemisphere; although this would kind of spoil it for the
"mushroom peninsula", it makes sense for all towns.

Of use here could be Brendan's recent mathematical unit rationalization:
- 1 outdoor square = 1 chain
- the continent is approximately 1500 chains from N to S and from W to
E; about 18 miles, or 30 km.
- Earth (for comparison) is about 992716 chains from N to S (12409
miles, 19970 km), and 1992112 chains around the equator (24901 miles,
40075 km).
- So if Bigworld is more or less the same size as Earth (and Brendan is
correct), then this continent occupies about 0.075% of the W-E
circumference, and about 0.15% of the distance between poles.
- For another comparison, the Hawaiian island of O'ahu (where Honolulu
is located) is about 2500 chains W-E (32 miles, 51km) and 3280 chains
(41 miles, 66km).  Since it's not as neatly square-ish as "our"
continent, we can say they have roughly the same area.

Hmm.  Maybe "bigworld" is not big at all :-P Brendan's calculations
still make sense to me generally, except that now I'm thinking about
one-chain-wide mountains and finding them a bit silly.  But that can
pass, since those are relatively rare.

On the other hand, fantasy worlds don't *have* to be the same size as
Earth.  (They don't even have to be the same shape... a disc, with the
"pole" at the center, or a ring, or even the "normal" shape but with us
in the inside rather than outside, are all heard of; and many fantasy
worlds are simply flat - some discoid, some rectangular.  So there.  But
we'd better stick with almost-spherical, if for no other reason, because
changing the shape would probably require rethinking part of the weather
code.  On the other hand, a rectangular flat world avoids problems of
projection, in case we end up mapping the whole surface.)

For consistency reasons (since we don't have contact with other
continents, and what with dragons and magic, I believe we have more than
enough "technology" to do that), I can see two possibilities:

1 - the world is *much* smaller than Earth - the maps we have (in
/world) cover from 10% to half its area.  People don't go to the "old
continent" because they don't want to (maybe they're afraid of the "old
empire", or maybe the "old empire" indeed has powerful defenses, or
maybe it was overtaken by monsters.)

2 - the world is mostly water-covered; there may be other inhabited
continents out there, but the chance of a traveller actually finding it
is so small, that nobody bothers to try.  Nobody knows exactly where the
"old empire" is supposed to be; if anyone ever found it, they didn't
come back.  The world could still be somewhat smaller than Earth, just
to give us enough weather variation in our continent; if we make the
world 1% the dimensions of Earth, then our continent would be
proportionally about the size of Australia.  (I'd make it slightly
bigger than that; what about 15000 chains from pole to pole - so our
continent is a neat exact 10% - and 32000 around the equator?)

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
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