Campaign Setting: Sky Pirates

[Rebar]

Just my 2c, but i

 

I'm familiar enough with physics to understand there is no gravity within a hollow sphere. Gods or very highly advanced beings built this place and populated it with samples from other worlds.

Away from each island, there is about 0.1 G pulling outwards towards the crystal sphere. On islands and a ship with its keel under power, gravity is about 1 G. If a ship gets too close above an island, it will start falling, so it is safest to approach from the sides.
 

Just my 2c but it sounds like you've proposed a fantastical new setting, where really interesting things could happen, but are now rolling all the interesting things back to mundanity. Gravity is everywhere, always points on one direction, islands are fixed, sun is always overhead, etc. Especially if you have to resort to HABs (highly advanced beings) to fine-tune it to operate like on Earth (1G on islands, but floating when "at sea")

 

What's the point in making fantastical flying ships with gravitic drives navigating floating islands if it all ends up being only an aesthetic difference from Earth-bound pirate genre? Why not propose the fantastical world, set its parameters, and then let the physics fall where it may?

 

A bit of a presumptuous critique on my part, granted ...

[Steve]

Eh, it's a fair comment, I guess. I'll try and tackle it.

 

The gravity thing is just my mental way of keeping "clutter" out of the skyways. At 0.1 G, things will fall very slowly towards the outer regions so it's not quite as desperate a situation if someone falls overboard. However, there could be weird eddy regions or "Sargassos" where gravity drops to nil. Things would tend to accumulate there, like old ships and some form of airweed, like seaweed.

 

In order to have seasons, I need some way to explain it to myself, or I can't communicate it to players, so islands slowly drift in towards the sun and out, causing seasons.

 

With the setup I've come up with so far, its like a vast inverted sea world on the inside of a sphere, one that allows the ships to rise and sink in level as well as propelling themselves horizontally.

 

Could I have ships coming at each other from different orientations, like one upside down to the other? Sure. I'd just prefer to keep things more like ocean navies than space navies, only these sailing ships can come up underneath or from overhead to each other, adding a bit of submarine ability to an Age of Sail type setting.

[The Monster]

Wild (and probably stupid) thought: rather than having gravity pull toward the sphere, why not invert it - so that some kind of 'solar wind' type pressure pushes everything out? Functionally, the result might be similar...

 

It might explain why the islands haven't all 'fallen' to the sphere; larger masses are pushed slower. There may be some way to push back on a large scale - a public works project on the order of building a big hydroelectric dam, but doable when and if necessary by a stable government. Larger land masses, remain closer to the sun, thus large tracts of trackless, windswept deserts. Places with the right resources and dedication can adjust their 'solar radius' every few generations, staying within a good range for crops and comfort. And larger islands are harder to move than smaller ones, and move more slowly with the wind.

The islands could be spinning to provide a day/night cycle - and could even adjust it.

 

People who 'fall off' islands and ships will indeed fall out, away from the sun, at an accelerating rate; there's a fairly short window in which it's possible to catch them, so it's very similar to someone falling overboard on an Earth sailing ship.

 

Sailing the skies is a mix of riding the solar wind with sails and employing thrusters (as per Treasure Planet).

[Steve]

Those are interesting ideas. If I went with a solar wind idea instead of very low G once off a ship or an island, I'm not sure how a region of breathable air would exist at the layers the islands float in. It seems like that would blow away first.

 

I'm still thinking over notions. Since it would essentially be a form of Dyson Sphere, the amount of land mass available for such floating islands could contain an entire galaxy's worth of races.