(C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Khemehekis »

elemtilas wrote: 12 May 2020 03:48 Fluorescent hot pink post-algae-quasi-worm species that live on a moon under a bright uv star living symbiotically with black plants. Their broad leaves look like tar paper joints during the day, but at night, they unroll and do their photosynthetic thing from underneath by the light emitted by the quasi-worms.
Ooh, what a lovely idea! And it opens up a whole can of (quasi-)worms . . . er, questions. Like, how did algae evolve into such a helminthoid animal? And will diurnal herbivores eat the plants' leaves if they're all rolled up? Or is the rolling-up a defense mechanism to save the plants from defoliation by slash-and-burn herbivorous animals? Will eating the plants when they're rolled up like tar paper joints get the herbivores high?
Khemehekis wrote: 12 May 2020 00:05An intentional naming, or a curious coincidence?
It's the latter. I came up with the planet name when I was 15, and had never heard of Harvey Keitel.
Ha! Course I had Gen. Wilhelm Keitel in mind!
I had to look him up. What a terrible man. [:(]
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by LinguoFranco »

I've been reading about coreless planets, and I'm wondering if it is possible they could contain a strong magnetosphere?

By coreless, I mean a world that has no metallic core or magma, and is entirely rocky mantle.

Is there a way I can get around having a core in order to have a magnetosphere?

The idea for my world is about a society with no metal, and I thought "Hey, what about an entire planet without metal?"
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Pabappa »

There's metal in our bodies .... calcium, iron, etc .... though if youre willing to radically rework the evolution of life, you could perhaps have us getting our body's firm parts from something like chitin, which is non-metallic, or silica, which is what plants' thorns often come from.
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by qwed117 »

LinguoFranco wrote: 17 May 2020 02:33 I've been reading about coreless planets, and I'm wondering if it is possible they could contain a strong magnetosphere?

By coreless, I mean a world that has no metallic core or magma, and is entirely rocky mantle.

Is there a way I can get around having a core in order to have a magnetosphere?

The idea for my world is about a society with no metal, and I thought "Hey, what about an entire planet without metal?"
Not a coreless planet, but a planet with no metals could. It could use a core of just hydrogen to create a magnetosphere, but otherwise the core of the planet must be metal to develop one
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by LinguoFranco »

qwed117 wrote: 17 May 2020 05:27
LinguoFranco wrote: 17 May 2020 02:33 I've been reading about coreless planets, and I'm wondering if it is possible they could contain a strong magnetosphere?

By coreless, I mean a world that has no metallic core or magma, and is entirely rocky mantle.

Is there a way I can get around having a core in order to have a magnetosphere?

The idea for my world is about a society with no metal, and I thought "Hey, what about an entire planet without metal?"
Not a coreless planet, but a planet with no metals could. It could use a core of just hydrogen to create a magnetosphere, but otherwise the core of the planet must be metal to develop one
Could a planet with a hydrogen core still be earth like in that it could support carbon based life, have continents and oceans, etc?

How would humans fare?
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

"Could" is a difficult word.

We should reiterate that anything could happen in a fantasy world. It could literally be made out of cheese if you wanted it to be. Naturalism is not the only route here.

However, if you do want to be naturalistic, then you have some pretty massive problems here.


A planet with no core

The core is what creates the magnetosphere. No core, no magnetosphere. Also, no plate tectonics, which probably means no carbon cycle, so probably no breathable atmosphere and little climate stability.

A planet with no metals

People are made out of metals. If you have no metals, you have to complete throw out earth biology and start from scratch. [the obvious one is calcium for bones, but small quantities of iron, magnesium, selenium and so forth are essential for cellular processes.

A gas core

What happens if your world has gas at the centre? Well, we need to distinguish two very different scenarios: hollow earth; and gas planet.


---------------

A hollow earth

In this scenario, the mantle is made of rock, but the core is made out of gas. What happens? Well, it could get quite complicated.

The first thing to say is that it's almost certainly impossible. You know what happens when you have a lot of rock sitting on top of gas? It falls down. The entire weight of the mantle would be pushing down on its inner surface, and nothing but hot air would be holding it up. No vault could be perfect enough to not allow some of the rock to fall - and then ALL of the rock would fall.

Now, it could theoretically be possible. If you make the gas hot enough and dense enough, the pressure of the gas attempting to escape could equal the weight of the rock pushing down on it. It's hard to imagine this working in practice, though - surely, even if it were globally true, there would be small areas where it wasn't true and grains of rock would fall. As rocks fell, the gas would expand into the gaps, and eventually it would find a way to burst out and the planet would explode. After all, our hot liquid rock in our planet periodically bursts out the top - but fortunately, liquid is a lot less explody than a pressurised gas!

The real physical killer, though, is how such a situation would arise. It's one thing if a god sets it up like that (they could make the inner surface of the mantle out of solid, impervious unobtainium, for a start). But in nature, you could never all all the rock converging simultaneously to trap exactly the right amount of gas in the middle - instead, like grains in a sieve, the rock would inevitably fall to the bottom while the gas floated to the top.

One fun thing about a hollow earth, though: inside the mantle, there is effectively no gravity!

Oh, and about hydrogen forming a magnetosphere: yes, if it's metallic hydrogen. Specifically, it needs to be liquid metallic hydrogen. Metallic hydrogen only exists at insane pressures (it's debated whether we've ever managed to produce any). Even the pressure at the centre of our Earth is not great enough to produce metallic hydrogen!

-------------------

A gas planet

It is conceivable that life could exist in a gas planet. There can be a band in which liquid water is possible, and conceivably at reasonable temperatures and pressures - such a band does exist on Venus, for instance, which isn't a gas planet but does have a big atmosphere. So far as I'm aware such bands don't exist on our gas giants - high enough up to have normal pressure, and you're very, very cold; warm the place up and you get crushed. But it should theoretically be possible, I'd have thought?

Obviously, though, you wouldn't have any earthlike life. Clearly you couldn't have continents and oceans - as you can observe, rocks are heavier than air, so they would fall down (once you reached air that was dense and hot enough for continents to float on... well, then you'll have some survivability problems!).
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by jimydog000 »

So when I filled the star motif of this flag after using the pen tool it looked like this:

Image

It's pretty good, but I'm thinking I could also make the octogon into a circle or fill in the white spaces.
What do you think of it?
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by WeepingElf »

It's best the way it is. Neither circlifying the octagon nor filling the little white spaces would improve it, I think.
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by jimydog000 »

WeepingElf wrote: 18 Jun 2020 13:50 It's best the way it is. Neither circlifying the octagon nor filling the little white spaces would improve it, I think.
lol, your avatar.

If anyone is irked. I won't spam the threads with this sort of thing, maybe find a discord server.
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by elemtilas »

jimydog000 wrote: 18 Jun 2020 14:55 If anyone is irked. I won't spam the threads with this sort of thing, maybe find a discord server.
Not at all. This is precisely the kind of thing this thread, and indeed this forum, is for!

In fact, rather than the chat we engage in on the discord, it would actually be nice to see longer, ooey-gooey loret-porridgey posts detailing the meaning, history, and culture behind this flag!
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by WeepingElf »

jimydog000 wrote: 18 Jun 2020 14:55
WeepingElf wrote: 18 Jun 2020 13:50 It's best the way it is. Neither circlifying the octagon nor filling the little white spaces would improve it, I think.
lol, your avatar.
My avatar was not the reason to make this suggestion. I do think your flag looks more interesting than mine the way it is.
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Dormouse559 »

jimydog000 wrote: 18 Jun 2020 14:55If anyone is irked. I won't spam the threads with this sort of thing, maybe find a discord server.
As elemtilas said, this subforum is an appropriate place to talk about your flag. If you want to go further than just "quick questions", I'd suggest the Symbols of Concultures thread, where there is plenty of flag discussion. You can also make a thread specifically for your conculture.
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by jimydog000 »

Dormouse559 wrote: 18 Jun 2020 19:04 If you want to go further than just "quick questions", I'd suggest the Symbols of Concultures thread, where there is plenty of flag discussion. You can also make a thread specifically for your conculture.
Cheers doormouse.
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Greetings and farewells

Post by eldin raigmore »

In the Inca empire the traditional default greeting was:
“Do not steal, do not lie, do not waste time”.

—————

In the USA the new traditional farewell is rapidly becoming:
“Stay safe and healthy, wash your hands, wear your mask.”.

Edit: Oops! I forgot to phrase it in the form of a question!
....
Has anyone else also noticed this?
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by brblues »

I would like to make my first foray into althist, and I'm particularly interested in more modern times from say the 19th century onward. As my conlanging preferences, however, are very strongly towards the a priori end of the spectrum, I have been wondering how I could best throw an a priori conlang into an althist that diverges quite late. I'd also mostly like to play around with central Europe and German-speaking countries (Prussia, a possible differently-formed German nation-state and an alternative Austria-Hungary).

So I thought that I'd ideally place an a priori isolate somewhere in Europe, but it would be quite difficult to justify that the existence of that nation/people has for some reason not resulted in too large deviations from actual history, but only the ones I like aesthetically :D Especially given that I feel like any language, even if its an isolate, right in the middle of Europe would have way too many outside influences (working both ways).

My other idea was to put an island that does not actually exist in our world into my althist, possibly somewhere in the Atlantic between Europe and America (cf. the phantom island Antillia from Iberian legends, or possibly also a Pacific island. Now I would, however, want that island to be neither too small (so I would be limited in what I can place there) nor big enough to actually change the alt-earth's climate and ocean currents etc. such that I would need to think something up there.

Does anybody have any suggestions or input about this? Am I generally aiming for something completely impossible, overlooking some obvious issues, or possibly even overthinking things?
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Pabappa »

brblues wrote: 22 Aug 2020 19:32
Does anybody have any suggestions or input about this? Am I generally aiming for something completely impossible, overlooking some obvious issues, or possibly even overthinking things?
well some ideas:

1) Put them in "Eastern Europe", the more buried the better. Russia in particular is like a whole other continent full of republics like Udmurtia and Kalmykia with their own languages and cultures, yet with no geopolitical influence in the world outside Russia.

2) Iceland. It's an island, like you said, and it's at least within reason that history could play out in much the same way as in our timeline if Iceland had been settled by a group culturally similar to Scandinavians but linguistically isolated. Perhaps they could be descended from the pre-Sámi hunter-gatherer substrate group .... their discovering Iceland before the Germanic tribes would be quite a stroke of luck, but not impossible. Only a few words are known from this substrate, so the project would be effectively a priori.

Alternatively, a tribe of Native Americans could have done the same thing from the opposite direction ... Im not sure if you can hunt seals, etc off the coast of Iceland but perhaps a change in diet would help them. There are at least some extinct Native American tribes whose linguistic affinity is unknown, so this could be a true a priori project. You could also still have Germanic tribes settle Iceland later on, either making the island bilingual, or having the first settlers be strong enough to resist the elsewhere victorious Vikings.

3) Another idea is to simply make this group very small. There are only 250000 Aromanians in the world, and I would say their effect on history is very minimal, such that they could be replaced with another group of similar size and the world would still be the same. There exist smaller tribes still, especially in mountainous areas, and they can be ranked on a scale from groups like the Aromanians with hundreds of thousands, to groups like the Vepsians with a few thousand, to groups like the Ubykh which are extinct as a distinct culture and only show up in ancestry charts.
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Creyeditor »

brblues wrote: 22 Aug 2020 19:32 I would like to make my first foray into althist, and I'm particularly interested in more modern times from say the 19th century onward. As my conlanging preferences, however, are very strongly towards the a priori end of the spectrum, I have been wondering how I could best throw an a priori conlang into an althist that diverges quite late. I'd also mostly like to play around with central Europe and German-speaking countries (Prussia, a possible differently-formed German nation-state and an alternative Austria-Hungary).

So I thought that I'd ideally place an a priori isolate somewhere in Europe, but it would be quite difficult to justify that the existence of that nation/people has for some reason not resulted in too large deviations from actual history, but only the ones I like aesthetically :D Especially given that I feel like any language, even if its an isolate, right in the middle of Europe would have way too many outside influences (working both ways).

My other idea was to put an island that does not actually exist in our world into my althist, possibly somewhere in the Atlantic between Europe and America (cf. the phantom island Antillia from Iberian legends, or possibly also a Pacific island. Now I would, however, want that island to be neither too small (so I would be limited in what I can place there) nor big enough to actually change the alt-earth's climate and ocean currents etc. such that I would need to think something up there.

Does anybody have any suggestions or input about this? Am I generally aiming for something completely impossible, overlooking some obvious issues, or possibly even overthinking things?
The Glottolog has language families called Unattested, Bookkeeping and Unclassifiable. Some of these are mentioned in some literature but there is no description. Maybe you find some language that you could do a priori? Assuming that they existed in our timeline but where not documented before going extinct.
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by elemtilas »

brblues wrote: 22 Aug 2020 19:32 I would like to make my first foray into althist, and I'm particularly interested in more modern times from say the 19th century onward. As my conlanging preferences, however, are very strongly towards the a priori end of the spectrum, I have been wondering how I could best throw an a priori conlang into an althist that diverges quite late. I'd also mostly like to play around with central Europe and German-speaking countries (Prussia, a possible differently-formed German nation-state and an alternative Austria-Hungary).
You could put it in Ill Bethisad.
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Has anyone ever heard or read of supermajorities of:
Four sevenths?
Or five eighths?
Or five sevenths?
Or four fifths?

.....

IRL most votes can be carried by a simple majority; anything more than half.
And nearly any measure can be adopted if the vote is unanimous.

If a supermajority is required, but unanimity is not required, usually a two-thirds majority is necessary and sufficient.

If a two-thirds majority is not enough but unanimity is not required, usually a three-fourths majority is necessary and sufficient.
If a two-thirds majority is not required but a simple majority is not enough, usually a three-fifths majority is needed and enough.

A 4/7 majority is more than half but less than 3/5. Has there been an example of such a required supermajority?
A 5/8 majority is more than 3/5 but less than 2/3. Has anyone ever heard of that being required and enough?
A 5/7 majority is more than 2/3 but less than 3/4. Has anyone heard or read of any body requiring such a supermajority for some actions?
A 4/5 majority is more than 3/4 but less than unanimous. How about that — which bodies where and when have required certain measures to be approved by at least 4/5 of its voters?

....

Thanks!
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Re: (C&C) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

... do you mean "do any national legislatures require supermajoritarian votes of such magnitude for certain purposes?"


Because if you don't mean national legislatures, but any voting anywhere, then yes, of course these things have existed. There have been probably millions of voting bodies over the years, they've probably done almost everything.

[and 'supermajority', incidentally, is not something limited to voting!]

Converting into percentages, you're asking about 57.14%, 71.43%, 62.5%, and 80%.

We can probably rule out the first two automatically, because they're silly numbers, as you know.

80% is conceivable, but probably unlikely. Most requisite supermajorities are 55%, 60%, 65%, or 66.666%. Occasionally 75% is found for constitutional amendments or the like. I suspect that if you're going to require more than 75% support for something, you'll probably just demand unanimity (or 95%). Although 80% is possible.

62.5% is unlikely because it's a moderately silly number. However, it is in the usual supermajority range, and isn't THAT silly, so I wouldn't be shocked.

In fact, looking it up (there's this thing called Google, it's wonderful), some people think that the Treaty of Nice required 62.5%. However, everyone else believes it required 62%. That said, given the practicalities, these thresholds were effectively identical for all practical purposes (it wasn't possible to get 62% without also getting 62.5%).

--------

Needless to say, if you want overly-complicated weird supermajorities, you need to look at the EU.

So, looking it up on Wikipedia:

- under Rome, the supermajority was 70.588% (or 12 seventeenths);
- under the '73 accession treaty, it became 70.690% (or 41 fifty-eighths)
- under the '79 accession treaty it became 71.429% (or 45 sixty-thirds)
- under the '85 accession treaty it became 71.053% (or 54 seventy-sixths)
- under the '95 accession treaty it became 71.264% (or 62 eighty-sevenths)
- under Nice, there came to be three different supermajorities required: 62% of the population, 74% of voting weights, and 66.67% of member states (if the proposal was not put forward by the commission; Commission proposals only requires a plain majority of states, but the other two supermajorities still applies)
- during the Nice discussions, supermajorities of either 73.4% or 74.78% were announced instead of the 74% figure, but ultimately 74% was gone with in the final treaty
- under Lisbon, it now requires 55% of states and 65% of the population; HOWEVER, the states requirement raises to, of course, 72% if the proposal does not come from the commission

The Poles instead suggested a quota of one half of the sum of one and of the division of the root of the sum of member state populations by the sum of the root of those populations... I think? The proposal has not (yet) been adopted.
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