From: Colin Watson (watson@computing-science.aberdeen.ac.uk)
Date: Mon 29 Nov 1993 - 18:18:39 EET
>Last spring, Paul Reilly mooted that the decadent mercantile Carmanian
>nobility of the West Reaches had developed insurance as an outgrowth of
>gambling
Sounds cool.
>From memory, freight by sea
>was quite astoundingly cheap in the ancient Mediterranean
Good, that's what I guessed. (The only thing against this is the relative increase in risk from Gloranthan aquatic encounters which might bump up the cost slightly.;-)
>If some ship-owner is charging too much for cargo, buy your own ship.
I did. It's definitely sound advice if you can afford it (especially if you
can get insurance:).
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(About bending light rays to simulate a horizon)
>Simple: if you have a flat earth, but light bends upwards, you get exactly
>the same horizon effect as in the real world.
Hmm. To get the same effect as the real-world horizon (which, for the sake of argument, we'll say has straight rays and a spherical surface) I feel the path of Gloranthan light rays would have to follow a *Tangential* function which tends to vertical as the distance between the observer & the target approaches 1/4 earth circumference (hence you could never see further than 1/4 earth circumference in any direction no matter how high you went; and any arbitrarily large flat plane would appear from high altitude like a sphere of fixed diameter; ie. like the earth from space). [I think...]
If, on the other hand, the path of the rays was parabolic (which seems more natural to me; didn't one of the grey sages compare the path of light to the path of a arrow? ie. a parabola) then there would be some distortion at high altitude. From the ground you probably wouldn't notice much difference, but the higher you went the further you would see, and the range of vision would increase *exponentially* without limit (unlike on earth, where the range of vision eventually reaches a limit). Looking down on Glorantha from a great height would be something like looking at your reflection in a spoon: ie. strangely distorted at the edges. However, if the area of Glorantha is much less than the surface area of earth then you might not notice this peculiarity much (especially since you'd hit the sky if you went too high). But I can't help thinking that the appearance of tall objects (Wintertop, the block etc) would be distorted also; wouldn't they appear as though the summit bent away from the observer on the ground?
Of course, perhaps denizens of Glorantha would be used to such strange perspectives and would consider this "normal".
[Writing a ray-tracing program to incorporate the functions above is left as an exercise for the reader. I'd be interested to see the results.:-) ]
___
CW.
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