General Water World Weather

[atpollard]

Again, this depends on how you think of a city. Is it relatively horizontal, like a small town? Failures can be isolated.

Are we talking about New York City, where it'd be massively vertical as well? If the latter, what happens when the lifters in an upper-level module fail and it crashes through a few other modules on the way down?

Personally, as a Land Planner, I would design a million person city as 2000 x 500 person (2000 dT) modules all permanently interconnected so that if a module fails the 4,000,000 dT combined structure only has 3,998,000 dTons of lift and will begin to fall at 1/2000 G (0.005 m/s2). If it normally floats at an altitude of 1 km, that leaves about 10 minutes to effect repairs or hit the water at 3 m/s velocity (the equivalent to a 0.45 meter fall at 1 G). So the city only needs to be strong enough to survive a 0.5 meter fall (people will already survive a 0.5 meter fall).


Your analysis is correct for building gossamer structures that are not self supporting without Grav tech (like free floating floors with no support structures) … but I am not proposing that.

 

[kilemall]

For failure, wings if the atmosphere is thick enough to support it. Modular only.

The modular version isn’t so crazy if you reassess cities as voluntary collectives and you can and do readily connect up for the season, tax purposes, cultural events, etc. Very different urban governance model if entire neighborhoods can move away.

Another safety mechanism, standardized power coupling so even if the local module power fails/runs out of fuel it can ‘buy’ from the current interconnect until it can be repaired/refueled.

 

[gchuck]

Roll 2d6
1.) Clear sky
2.) Overcast
3.) Cloudy
4.) Light Rain
5.) Heavy Rain
6.) Major Storm

This is what I'm using for the Scouts base;
Throw 2d6 for Daily Weather
2: Thunderstorm with torrential rain (Winds 1-4: 5-20kph gusts 5-6:20- 40kph gusts)
3: Windy and/or light rain
4: Mild Storm and/or moderate rain
5: Clear
6: Partly Cloudy or Overcast
7: Clear
8: Clear and breezy
9: Partly cloudy and breezy
10: Severe or Heavy Storm (Winds 1-4: 5-20kph gusts 5-6: 20-40kph gusts)
11: Partly Cloudy or Overcast
12: Partly Cloudy

I'm thinking this may suffice for the WA world that's in the works. Just crank up the wind speed a bit.

 

[Enoki]

Having weather like that would make colonizing such a world very sketchy. That's a lot to overcome right away. It's almost a "DUNE" like scenario in terms of environmental hostility. There better be something really worthwhile there to justify all the trouble.

Submersibles can certainly work (depending on what resource is being extracted). However, similarly, you could probably just do as well with a reinforced space ship that can either weather the events via straight buoyancy, or "simply" lift up and off out of trouble to a new, calmer area, or park in orbit for the storm to pass. In the end, having no actual, permanent surface installation.

I one case where I had a low pop water world, it was a turbulent one with massive waves. The "starport" (a D) was located with the only settlement inside the cone of a now extinct volcanic vent of very hard granitic material that could withstand the pounding of the seas. That put it above sea level and for the population (hundreds to possibly a thousand + at most) it allowed an existence on an otherwise inhospitable planet.

Of course, given the low law level, it was also largely a dangerous den of thieves and outlaws... Think bar fights and other Traveller-esqe behavior.

 

[Krikkitone]

One other thing is a Water World could have slightly less than 5% land… For Earth that’s about the size of North America. Even 1% Land is still 1/2 of the US or Canada or China.

That’s plenty to potentially break up waves (especially if there also vast shallow regions..ie continents that are mostly flooded)

So you could get away with regular sized (maybe double Earth usual) waves…if you want…Or
You could have the humongous…everyone lives in orbit or on the surface (under the water)..waves with mega storms.

Underwater cities are TL A so quite doable. And Spaceships built to handle high pressure (not just low pressure) seems reasonable.

 

[Enoki]

Would a world covered by mostly something like a bayou or deep swamp count as a water world? Rather than vast oceans the planet is say mostly under 10 meters deep in water but entirely, or nearly so, covered that way.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Would a world covered by mostly something like a bayou or deep swamp count as a water world? Rather than vast oceans the planet is say mostly under 10 meters deep in water but entirely, or nearly so, covered that way.

It's theoretically possible for that to happen ... but in order for that to be true, the "smoothness" of the solid surface would have to be almost impossible.

First of all, any form of active plate tectonics would result in mountain upthrust of the crust (somewhere), defeating the purpose of what you're trying to achieve with this postulate. Likewise, we have examples of "solid lid" crust formations (Venus, Luna, Mars) where there are no active plate tectonics and even those world surfaces do not achieve the degree of "smoothness of surface" that you're aiming for here.

So by NATURAL means, there really isn't a path to make a "perfectly smooth" crust on a world large enough to retain a "shallow" ocean over the entire surface such that it can qualify as a (swamp) water world.

ARTIFICIALLY ENGINEERED to "level the mountains and fill in the valleys" of the surface crust in order to remove any irregularities in elevation COULD yield the result that you're looking for ... but such a world would need to be "geologically DEAD" in order for the surface modifications to persist over extended times (on geologic scales). Note that this would mean that there is no recycling of materials between the outer crust and the mantle (because, no plate tectonics) which likewise means No Volcanism (pretty much by definition, for a perfectly "smooth" world with uniform shallow sea/swamp everywhere). As far as we know (@TL=7-8), a lack of plate tectonics recycling materials between the lithosphere and mantle means that EVERY biological process on the surface turns into a "runaway" type situation, because there are no counterbalances to anything that biochemistry is producing ... since there are no "sinks" taking byproducts (excess carbon, etc.) out of the surface chemistry mix. Likewise, there are no "inputs" from subsurface sources of energy and chemistry going on (see: geologically DEAD) so there are no locations that are resource/energy "rich" enough for life to gain a foothold based on planetary energy sources, rather than stellar radiation energy sources.

In other words, the amount of WORLD ENGINEERING required for such an outcome to be possible are both excessive AND inherently unstable once life (of any variety) gets introduced into the picture.



If you increase the average depth of the world ocean to be more than 10+ meters, things start getting more practical (and therefore, possible) again. But an excessively shallow (10 meters or less EVERYWHERE) ocean world type setup is ... exceptionally unlikely ... to occur naturally. There are just "too many coincidences" needed in order to make it happen.



However, if you modify your assumptions ... slightly ... it would be possible for a world tidally locked to the star (one side always day/one side always night) to have a shallow water "ocean" on the day side and a glacial ice "candy shell" covering on the night side. Basically more of an "eyeball world" type of situation. This is one of the proposals for what a world, with water, would probably look like (if it existed) in the TRAPPIST-1 star system. The ocean almost certainly wouldn't be 10 meters or less deep, but you get the idea.

 

[Enoki]

It's theoretically possible for that to happen ... but in order for that to be true, the "smoothness" of the solid surface would have to be almost impossible.

First of all, any form of active plate tectonics would result in mountain upthrust of the crust (somewhere), defeating the purpose of what you're trying to achieve with this postulate. Likewise, we have examples of "solid lid" crust formations (Venus, Luna, Mars) where there are no active plate tectonics and even those world surfaces do not achieve the degree of "smoothness of surface" that you're aiming for here.

So by NATURAL means, there really isn't a path to make a "perfectly smooth" crust on a world large enough to retain a "shallow" ocean over the entire surface such that it can qualify as a (swamp) water world.

ARTIFICIALLY ENGINEERED to "level the mountains and fill in the valleys" of the surface crust in order to remove any irregularities in elevation COULD yield the result that you're looking for ... but such a world would need to be "geologically DEAD" in order for the surface modifications to persist over extended times (on geologic scales). Note that this would mean that there is no recycling of materials between the outer crust and the mantle (because, no plate tectonics) which likewise means No Volcanism (pretty much by definition, for a perfectly "smooth" world with uniform shallow sea/swamp everywhere). As far as we know (@TL=7-8), a lack of plate tectonics recycling materials between the lithosphere and mantle means that EVERY biological process on the surface turns into a "runaway" type situation, because there are no counterbalances to anything that biochemistry is producing ... since there are no "sinks" taking byproducts (excess carbon, etc.) out of the surface chemistry mix. Likewise, there are no "inputs" from subsurface sources of energy and chemistry going on (see: geologically DEAD) so there are no locations that are resource/energy "rich" enough for life to gain a foothold based on planetary energy sources, rather than stellar radiation energy sources.

In other words, the amount of WORLD ENGINEERING required for such an outcome to be possible are both excessive AND inherently unstable once life (of any variety) gets introduced into the picture.



If you increase the average depth of the world ocean to be more than 10+ meters, things start getting more practical (and therefore, possible) again. But an excessively shallow (10 meters or less EVERYWHERE) ocean world type setup is ... exceptionally unlikely ... to occur naturally. There are just "too many coincidences" needed in order to make it happen.



However, if you modify your assumptions ... slightly ... it would be possible for a world tidally locked to the star (one side always day/one side always night) to have a shallow water "ocean" on the day side and a glacial ice "candy shell" covering on the night side. Basically more of an "eyeball world" type of situation. This is one of the proposals for what a world, with water, would probably look like (if it existed) in the TRAPPIST-1 star system. The ocean almost certainly wouldn't be 10 meters or less deep, but you get the idea.

The water depth itself could vary from what I suggested some. The idea is that it's all sufficiently shallow sea that you can have swamp / bayou-like terrain. That is some sort trees and plant life that turn much of the world's surface into a vast rain forest / swamp. With shallow water of that sort, life would teem on the planet.

One way that could be attained is the world once had deeper oceans that have partially boiled / evaporated off over time by say the planet having a weak (or no) magnetic field. That would allow solar wind to strip the atmosphere which then gets replaced by evaporating water that might even breakdown in to oxygen and various hydrocarbons as it does so. At the same time, the oceans wear the surface down over time into a fairly flat set of terrain. The lack of a magnetic field would likely mean little tectonic and volcanic activity too.

This would result in a world that's dying but that death would take millennia to occur. In the interim, you have a swamp-like planet teeming with things that want to eat you and, say, a bug / insect population that is absolutely horrific in scale.