Educational General Academic Research Unit aka “Edgar” is part of the first production line of non-limited Artificial Intelligence’s. He is currently one of the House Tindal researchers, and is Professor Gage’s second-in-command. Also one of the members of the Crystal One development team.
House Tindal. Physicist, Head of the Crystal One development team and all around curious man. A late term cancer patient, Dr. Gage heads out to Bellisarius Territory to settle his own curiosity about some flaws in the eyewitness reports. He now finds himself spending the last days of his life with his reformed team of Crystal One scientists in an attempt to prevent the literal end of the world.
250 *miles* away?!? To be seen at that kind of distance, you need a cloudless day, a clean atmosphere and a Tower the size of a city reaching miles into the sky. Anything less wouldn’t be so visible and would be hidden by planetary curvature.
I’d be spooked by a mountain-sized piece of ancient, unknown and advanced technology too.
I should have put in 150 miles away, actually…
Back when I was putting the initial stages of this together, I consulted with a couple of scientists on a (now defunct) forum about it and used their calculations as the base for it.
Even at 150 miles’ distance, damn that’s still a pretty mountainous tower. At 15 miles of total interior, it would be a 6,600 floor structure assuming 12′ per floor. And each floor would have a square mile of space. If we kit it out as living space and remove 1/3 of the floors for support (and simplify the Tower to a rectangle), we would have 4400 square miles of interior space, You could house hundreds of millions or even billions depending on the population density you’re building for.
One assumes that the Tower’s solar capacity is used to keep it idling. Sure coating a structure that size in solar panels will generate serious energy in absolute terms, but the square-cube law is going to massively reduce its ratio of energy generated per unit of interior volume compared to smaller human structures.
John, I went back and looked at the Encyclopedia page that Mr. Roden linked to, and did some figuring (after looking up some formulas). The Towers are ten miles high, or 52,800 feet. If you take the square root of 52,800 and multiply it by 1.22, you get the maximum viewing distance in miles; with clear enough air, you could still see the tip of the Tower 180 miles away. The formula is based on a planet the size of the earth and ignores the atmosphere. We can see more than just the tip so it’s closer than 280 miles; I’ll got with what Mr. Roden says, 150 miles.
The Towers are also one mile on a side. The pictures I’ve seen of the Towers do not show any tapering as they rise. The angular width of the Tower at a distance of 150 miles will be arctan(1/150) which is 0.38 degree, a bit less than the size of our moon (which is about half a degree wide). Looks right to me.
I measured the visible height in the comic, and marked off multiples of the width. It came out that we’re seeing about the top four-fifths of the Tower. I’ve got no idea if that’s right for 150 miles away, my trig is too rusty.
250 *miles* away?!? To be seen at that kind of distance, you need a cloudless day, a clean atmosphere and a Tower the size of a city reaching miles into the sky. Anything less wouldn’t be so visible and would be hidden by planetary curvature.
I’d be spooked by a mountain-sized piece of ancient, unknown and advanced technology too.
I should have put in 150 miles away, actually…
Back when I was putting the initial stages of this together, I consulted with a couple of scientists on a (now defunct) forum about it and used their calculations as the base for it.
Or you can read the entry on it at
http://requiem.spiderforest.com/?comic=2004-09-28
Even at 150 miles’ distance, damn that’s still a pretty mountainous tower. At 15 miles of total interior, it would be a 6,600 floor structure assuming 12′ per floor. And each floor would have a square mile of space. If we kit it out as living space and remove 1/3 of the floors for support (and simplify the Tower to a rectangle), we would have 4400 square miles of interior space, You could house hundreds of millions or even billions depending on the population density you’re building for.
One assumes that the Tower’s solar capacity is used to keep it idling. Sure coating a structure that size in solar panels will generate serious energy in absolute terms, but the square-cube law is going to massively reduce its ratio of energy generated per unit of interior volume compared to smaller human structures.
John, I went back and looked at the Encyclopedia page that Mr. Roden linked to, and did some figuring (after looking up some formulas). The Towers are ten miles high, or 52,800 feet. If you take the square root of 52,800 and multiply it by 1.22, you get the maximum viewing distance in miles; with clear enough air, you could still see the tip of the Tower 180 miles away. The formula is based on a planet the size of the earth and ignores the atmosphere. We can see more than just the tip so it’s closer than 280 miles; I’ll got with what Mr. Roden says, 150 miles.
The Towers are also one mile on a side. The pictures I’ve seen of the Towers do not show any tapering as they rise. The angular width of the Tower at a distance of 150 miles will be arctan(1/150) which is 0.38 degree, a bit less than the size of our moon (which is about half a degree wide). Looks right to me.
I measured the visible height in the comic, and marked off multiples of the width. It came out that we’re seeing about the top four-fifths of the Tower. I’ve got no idea if that’s right for 150 miles away, my trig is too rusty.