Guys the river and dam make 0 sense

[yurls]

Water should be perfectly level and static inside the Stranger
Water would only "move" if the Stranger started rotating faster, but it doesn't.
Conclussion: river and dam are impossible.

Also the dam empties at a far less rate than the flow of the rest of the river.

I had to have a big suspension of disbelief on this one

[KaitoKid]

Sorry to hear it, hope you can enjoy this otherwise 100% realistic game.

[darkscaryforest]

The sun completing the tail end of its life cycle in 22 minutes doesn't bother you more? Are you a civil engineer by chance?

[lieutenantkirtar]

Maybe the space owls that made an entire artificial biome inside of an interstellar spacecraft figured out how to make the water flow in one direction instead of sitting and stagnating.

[Mr. Nobody]

The water is perfectly level and static. It's just an optical illusion that the dam is at a higher elevation.

[luvbentley]

Tbh my impression has always been that the water is mechanically engineered in some way to flow for electricity purposes, although I guess it might not be and it's just an oversight.

[Furrfire]

This sounds like it should be an episode of "Vsause" or "because science".

[ZeroGravitas]

Yeah, the eternal river bothered me a little... There's clearly turbulent flow, so there must be energy put into moving it. The gates *feeding* the dam make little bubbles, implying they might impel the water. But clearly they don't raise the potential energy as much as the fall on the dam side.

If the ring were side-on to the sun (or another large planetary body), we might discuss gravitational tidal forces. They would at least create a bulge, that would drag water around (in a different way). But then the Stranger itself mysteriously exerts no gravitational pull on your ship. I mean, the mass of water behind the damn, alone, must weigh as much as the Interloper. The instability that would cause in this rotating structure is a real headache to even start thinking about...

But, to be honest, it's kind of a miracle that the devs made the map geometry somehow work for continual *downstream* flow, from the *bottom* of the dam, to the *top*! I mean, that's some M.C. Escher level **** right there in plain Euclidean sight. Impressive!

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by ZeroGravitas:

But, to be honest, it's kind of a miracle that the devs made the map geometry somehow work for continual *downstream* flow, from the *bottom* of the dam, to the *top*! I mean, that's some M.C. Escher level **** right there in plain Euclidean sight. Impressive! :KOh:

Oh no, I already thought it didn't make sense but thinking about that detail makes it even worse! Maybe we're supposed to assume there's secret water vents propelling it so it feels more like home, and they built a dam...so it can break to be cool?

[Paintbrush]

We should demand refunds

[Sammun Mak]

Originally posted by ZeroGravitas:

Yeah, the eternal river bothered me a little... There's clearly turbulent flow, so there must be energy put into moving it. The gates *feeding* the dam make little bubbles, implying they might impel the water. But clearly they don't raise the potential energy as much as the fall on the dam side.

Can you explain this more clearly to me? Is there something impossible if we assume the possibility that they could be adding or taking energy away at any point using whatever other mechanism powers the ship?

[ZeroGravitas]

Originally posted by Sammun Mak:

Can you explain this more clearly to me?

So, I meant that if the water were instead a "superfuild" (a state of matter in which it behaves like a fluid with zero viscosity), then one can have perpetual rotating flow. But once you add turbulence to that, kinetic energy is being converted to heat/sound/etc, reducing the speed. So observing all the splashing of the water, alone, tells us there must be energy input. Quite aside from the impossible topology of the dam's water levels.

Maybe the Stranger has some kind of rotating force field acting on all the water, pushing it around. After all, it will pic you against surfaces it's not even flowing through. Where, in reality, there'd be no flow, so you'd be able to move back. Or the flow would have to be lateral, sliding your off... But, you know, limitations of game design. Heh.

[Comrade Question]

Originally posted by Paintbrush:

We should demand refunds

I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a magic river or something? Boy, I really hope someone got fired for that blunder.

[Jabrwock]

Originally posted by ZeroGravitas:

Yeah, the eternal river bothered me a little... There's clearly turbulent flow, so there must be energy put into moving it. The gates *feeding* the dam make little bubbles, implying they might impel the water. But clearly they don't raise the potential energy as much as the fall on the dam side.

True, but for this universe it does at least make an effort to make the flowing water system in a ring world work. We're talking a place where something the size of Phobos has a breathable atmosphere, and tree people can create interstellar cloaked ships. I think bending the capability of some impellers doesn't stretch the imagination that much further.

They have light powered crystal impeller rafts... I think they can make the gates impel the water more than you think.

[Sykes]

Fluid dynamics are ruining my immersion in this time travel game! >:[

[BestJamie]

from what I can see, the river ISNT flowing, so much as the river bed is moving underneath it. The Stranger rotates in the opposite direction to the flow of the river, and since the water in the river has mass, it resists the motion of the stranger, making the water appear to have force acting on it relative to the "stationary" point of view of the stranger. The majority of this "force" is outward from the point of rotation, and is why the water isnt just floating around in space, and seems to fall "down", away from the centre of the stranger, however, a small portion of the resistance would appear to be a force pushing the water counter to the rotation of the stranger from the perspective of the stranger.

Fun fact this same small portion of force would also make it so that on a perfectly level ring world you would always feel like it was sloping downwards in the opposite direction to the rotation of the ring. The feel of this downward slope could be dealt with by making the ring world a spiral rather than a perfect circle, where going in one direction relative to the spin of the ring brings you closer to the centre of the ring, and going the other direction brings you further away. As you cant just have the surface slope towards the centre of the ring infinitely but still connect at the end you will need to eventually do all of the "downhillness" at once either resulting in a sheer cliff which connects one of the most inwards parts of the ring to one of the most outwards parts of the ring, or several cliffs, or a really steep hill or several downwards hills, or even some sort of combination of hills and cliffs. You can experience this on the stranger, because as you travel along the river, even though the river feels flat from a local perspective, you do come closer to the the centre of the ring, which is how you get from the bottom of the dam to the top while never going uphill. (The secret is that you were going uphill the entire time it just felt level from a local perspective)

As for why the owlks would decide to build the dam? My guess was so they could have a river without leaving half the ring (the half further away from the centre of the ring) underwater or having the entire ring feel like it was constantly on a slope. Without the dam, the entire lowlands region is flooded and becomes unusable, which they wouldnt want, and if they raised the buildings and land there so that it wasnt underwater then youre right back at the problem of that section of the ring feeling like its on a slope, which they probably also wouldnt want cause their homeworld seems pretty flat.