The Moon and the Lizard.

Tonto Silerheels wrote:runsforcelery wrote:

Yes, tides exist on Howell Bay.

So, much like the Earth, Safehold has an unusually large moon. Did that occur naturally? Or was it towed into place by the terraforming crew?

~Tonto

In fact, Safehold's moon is somewhat larger than Luna, both absolutely and in proportion to the planet's mass, and it's albedo is considerably brighter. And, no, it wasn't towed into place (that would be considerably beyond the capabilities of the Federation's tech), but its presence was a factor in selecting Safehold for colonization in the first place. As for story implications, aside from the tides which have already been discussed here, the fact that it's possible to carry out large scale military maneuvers by moonlight without low-light equipment or spotlights may --- may, I say --- play a role in some future novel about Safehold.

Who knows?

runsforcelery wrote:

Tonto Silerheels wrote:runsforcelery wrote:

Yes, tides exist on Howell Bay.

So, much like the Earth, Safehold has an unusually large moon. Did that occur naturally? Or was it towed into place by the terraforming crew?

~Tonto

In fact, Safehold's moon is somewhat larger than Luna, both absolutely and in proportion to the planet's mass, and it's albedo is considerably brighter. And, no, it wasn't towed into place (that would be considerably beyond the capabilities of the Federation's tech), but its presence was a factor in selecting Safehold for colonization in the first place. As for story implications, aside from the tides which have already been discussed here, the fact that it's possible to carry out large scale military maneuvers by moonlight without low-light equipment or spotlights may --- may, I say --- play a role in some future novel about Safehold.

Who knows?

Moonlight on snow maybe?

Keep in mind that while tides are related to the mass of the moon, the distance is a major factor.

While gravity follow an inverse square of the distance rule, tides follow an inverse cube of the distance rule.

=2014/10/15=

I didn't know about the "cube law".

Thanks for making my day by teaching me something new !!

R
.

BarryKirk wrote:Keep in mind that while tides are related to the mass of the moon, the distance is a major factor.

While gravity follow an inverse square of the distance rule, tides follow an inverse cube of the distance rule.

Just for the sake of completeness (okay, and for the sake of nerdiness ), I'll also note that the tidal force is also directly related to the radius of the body experiencing tides. That is, if you double the radius of the planet, you double the tidal effect on the planet. And it is completely independent of the gravity of the planet--it is only dependent on the gravity of the body causing the tide. [edit]Well, not quite true. The acceleration caused by the tide is independent of the gravity of the planet. The average height of the tide is dependent in a complicated way on how big a percentage that is of the planet's own gravity.

(Hey, I gotta do something when someone beats me to a planetary science answer! )

Hello all! Have been following the forum for years now and have finally gotten around to creating an account.

This may have been covered numerous times so if someone can point me in the direction of the post regarding it, it'd be much appreciated.. Has there been any speculation of a lunar base? IIRC, Merlin has never scanned anything farther the OBS.

ChaChaCharms wrote:Hello all! Have been following the forum for years now and have finally gotten around to creating an account.

This may have been covered numerous times so if someone can point me in the direction of the post regarding it, it'd be much appreciated.. Has there been any speculation of a lunar base? IIRC, Merlin has never scanned anything farther the OBS.

Welcome! I'm not familiar with any such speculation, but I would be surprised if it didn't exist. From what I can tell the amount of speculation here is equaled only by RFC's willingness to help fuel such speculation with his detailed and informative posts. I would guess that Merlin was limited in his scans to the OBS because the OBS itself prevented him from going any further. Certainly he could do long range visual scanning of the Lunar surface (or at least the part visible to Safehold), but he couldn't get anything past the OBS to get close to the moon.

As an aside, does the Safehold moon have a name? We use the word "lunar" derived from the Latin "Luna". Did the Archangels use the name Luna as well?

It was named Langhorne (mentioned in the first parts of OAR).

Nick wrote:

Welcome! I'm not familiar with any such speculation, but I would be surprised if it didn't exist. From what I can tell the amount of speculation here is equaled only by RFC's willingness to help fuel such speculation with his detailed and informative posts. I would guess that Merlin was limited in his scans to the OBS because the OBS itself prevented him from going any further. Certainly he could do long range visual scanning of the Lunar surface (or at least the part visible to Safehold), but he couldn't get anything past the OBS to get close to the moon.

As an aside, does the Safehold moon have a name? We use the word "lunar" derived from the Latin "Luna". Did the Archangels use the name Luna as well?

Follow up.

While Safehold's Moon was named after Langhorne, it's possible that Safeholdians first called it "Langhorne's Moon" to differ between talking about the Archangel Langhorne and the object in the sky named after him.

Over time, they may have just referred to it as "The Moon".

For that matter, while Safehold's Sun was named after Admiral Kau-zhi, I believe that Safeholdians just call it "The Sun".

Of course, this may be just an artifact of the "translator" (David Weber) changing "Kau-zhi" and "Langhorne" to "Sun" and "Moon" respectively.

DrakBibliophile wrote:It was named Langhorne (mentioned in the first parts of OAR).

Nick wrote:

Welcome! I'm not familiar with any such speculation, but I would be surprised if it didn't exist. From what I can tell the amount of speculation here is equaled only by RFC's willingness to help fuel such speculation with his detailed and informative posts. I would guess that Merlin was limited in his scans to the OBS because the OBS itself prevented him from going any further. Certainly he could do long range visual scanning of the Lunar surface (or at least the part visible to Safehold), but he couldn't get anything past the OBS to get close to the moon.

As an aside, does the Safehold moon have a name? We use the word "lunar" derived from the Latin "Luna". Did the Archangels use the name Luna as well?

Hi Nick,

The SNARC's could check out the moon without the OBS destroying them, because the Rakurai only destroyed the 2 SNARC's that approached it, and the Rakurai don't cover all of Safehold's sky, just a small part of the orbit in fact.

When this occurs to Nahrmahn or Nimue will be interesting to see.

A possible lunar base wouldn't violate the mission requirement to hide, since any Gbaba recon of the system would check the possible inhabited planets and discover humanity anyway.

If the Hamilcar was destroyed, this may be where the archangels are 'resting'.

Whether the Rakurai are also protecting the resting place is another interesting question.

L

Nick wrote:

ChaChaCharms wrote:Hello all! Have been following the forum for years now and have finally gotten around to creating an account.

This may have been covered numerous times so if someone can point me in the direction of the post regarding it, it'd be much appreciated.. Has there been any speculation of a lunar base? IIRC, Merlin has never scanned anything farther the OBS.

Welcome! I'm not familiar with any such speculation, but I would be surprised if it didn't exist. From what I can tell the amount of speculation here is equaled only by RFC's willingness to help fuel such speculation with his detailed and informative posts. I would guess that Merlin was limited in his scans to the OBS because the OBS itself prevented him from going any further. Certainly he could do long range visual scanning of the Lunar surface (or at least the part visible to Safehold), but he couldn't get anything past the OBS to get close to the moon.

As an aside, does the Safehold moon have a name? We use the word "lunar" derived from the Latin "Luna". Did the Archangels use the name Luna as well?