Be Excellent To Each Other

In November 1993 it was.



Malc

Cripes, Malc was online a whole 18 months before me!

[shakes fist in a South Westerly direction]

Complicated... There's no substance that could cope with the gravitational and rotational stresses involved at the size of a planet - that's why they end up ellipsoid.

If it could exist, the gravity would be significantly stronger in the middle of a face compared to at a vertex.

MR WHY AM I ANSWERING MATHS QUESTIONS ON A FRIDAY NIGHT FACE

Well, I would have been online before that, I think it would have been the first week of October (as that's when I started Uni). I had (briefly) used bulletin boards before hand (although I wasn't allowed a modem at home so could only do that a friends house)

I remember I spent a good part of my time browsing aminet for demos and utils and stuff, putting them on 720 disks, and then copying them off pc(0) (or whatever they were called when you installed the utility to so the amiga could read pc dos based disks) and onto my 20mb hd (which I think I had partitioned into 3 chunks: Games, Utils, Workbench)

Hard to think that that was almost 15 years ago...

Malc

Oh yeah, I'm aware that odd shape planets get "eroded" down to spheres over time.

Are you sure about that? Imagine if your standing on the vertice, you have all of that mass "below you" pulling you essentially in one direction. Wheras at the center of the face, I know you'll be significantly closer to the center (can all of the mass be considered a point mass at the center in this example?), but some of that mass is off in front of you, and behind you, and to the left of you, and behind you! I guess you're right actually,

Imagine a journey starting at the center of a face and heading to a vertice. It would be like climbing up a slope as the gravity would be pulling you to the center of the face. And if you had a ball, and let it go near one of the vertices it would roll straight towards the center.

Now imagine you are not near one of the vertices, but you are near an edge, could you jump from one face to another over the edge? As your trajectory takes you over the edge, you're first going to be attracted to the face you are on, then you will have a moment where the forces balance out, followed by being attracted to the face where you are going to land.

If you were to try and build on one of the faces, the floors would have to be "sloped" for gravity to feel "normal" The further away from the center of a face you got, the more they would have to be sloped. If you got too close to an endge, you would have a problem where the top of the building was being pulled towards one face, and the bottom of the building pulled towards another. Ah, no you wouldn't as if you were to build a straight tower block, the top is going to be further away from the face than the bottom, so you would have to change the steepness of the slope as you built. Buildings would have to be curved for gravity to appear "normal". There would be some very interesting looking cities on this cube planet.

Because of every thing wanting to get to the center of the faces, what you would find is that any water that was there would flow towards them, so in essence you would have one giant ocean, with 8 corner islands continents sticking out.

If the land followed the general principles of most planets, then there would be islands caused by mountains. Mountains would be significantly harder to climb from one direction compared to the other unless they ended up curved as well, which they probably would. For a square world, I think it would probably end up quite curvey.

Malc

Gaaaah! I typed out a long reply and my computer crashed MR PISSED OFF FACE...

I might try again later...

If it were a pefect cube, imagine what would happen if you added an ocean. The water would gather in the middle of each face and would probably grow in the middle, so if you looked at it from space, you might have what looks like a sphere jutting up through your cube world. From the POV of someone near a vertex, looking 'down' toward the ocean it would look like a huge bubble of water sat on the plains.