> How high is the skydome over Genertela? How high is it altogether?
If you sit at the top of the Ziggurat of Raibanth, the furthest things you can see on the ground are around 25 miles away. The Sky Dome is of course, as a Yelmic thingy, a perfect hemisphere, and thus *logically* is as far away from you vertically as the furthest things the Emperor can see horizontally at his enthronement. Ergo, the Sky Dome is exactly 25 miles high.
Mount Top-of-the-World is the tallest mountain in Glorantha, reaching up into the Middle Air. It is ten kilometers tall, and is said to have another mountain made of ice atop its summit, which reaches half-way to the sky. Let us assume this "other mountain" is equal in size to Top-of-the-World. 20 km is 12.5 miles, which is "half way to the Sky". Ergo, the Sky Dome is exactly 25 miles high.
=46rom the tipmost top of Top-of-the-World, you can leap over to the Red Moon. The Red Moon embodies balance, and is currently in possession of the Middle Air (i.e. the thing between the Earth and the Sky). If the Red Moon is on a level with the tippytop of Top-of-the-World, it floats majestically 12.5 miles up, and this is the middlemost point of the Middle Air... well, ergo, the Sky Dome is exactly 25 miles high.
So much for impeccable logic, because the Sky Dome is a perfect hemisphere that covers the whole of Glorantha (including the Outer World), and Glorantha is more than 50 miles across (last time I looked).
The *real* answer is that the height of the Sky Dome is a God Plane thing. It depends who you are, and why you need to know. For my own, mortal purposes, I say it's "25 miles high" and that's all I need to know. Everything else fits into my worldview, which it is of course impossible to disprove. Because the Sky Dome is over where *I* stand: it's not an abstract thingummy, it's a part of *MY* perception of the world. So: do I think the moon and stars are close, or far away? It depends who I am, what I think of them, where I believe them to be. My interaction with celestial thingies is always held on my terms, and anyone else's needn't trouble me.
> Assuming it isn't RW lunar orbital distances, is there any reason
> why a navigator couldnt use triangulation to find his position?
Yes. It'd be dull.
> I realize I'm missing something, but I don't see it.
I think what you're missing is that the Sky Dome looks like the sky (blue by day, black by night), and spins around and around and around, and nights are of different lengths at different times of the year, and the only truly "fixed spots" (the Sky Vagina, the Dwarf Sputnik) are dim and hard to see, and maybe even *they* move, and sometimes the sky is overcast and you can't see it to work out where you are, and besides you'd need a good map to make it worthwhile using trig for positioning (and there aren't many of those around)...
I'm sure Malkioni (triangle-fetishists) would love to malarkey around with trig functions for navigational purposes. But if it worked, it'd make the world more boring. Ergo, logically, it doesn't work, because the world isn't that boring. QED.
::::
Nick
::::
Powered by hypermail