dryn wrote:kinvoya wrote:You can sail around the world north to south on a sphere, too, right? I never understood this torus thing.
You are right. The difference is that if several people were to start at various points on the earth, then head directly north, they would get closer together.
Another difference is that after a certain point the only direction to go would be south; on cantr, you can start out at any latitude or longitute (if such things exist) and sail due north and you will still be sailing north when you reach your original position (assuming no lands in the way, etc). Also, if two ships sail due north next to each other (again assuming no lands in the way) their paths will never intersect.
A torus is the only way to map this kind of double-wrapping 2-dimensional space onto a 3-dimensional object, but even on a torus there'd be a "northernmost" latitude and a "southernmost", although whether those would be on the "top" and "bottom" of the donut or on the "outside" and "inside" would be a matter of arbitration.
Side note: the cardinal directions as such aren't much use in cantr, completely aside from west-being-up only being possible because cantr is NOT a sphere. A spheroid planet rotates on an axis; north and south are derived as towards the termini of the axis whereas east and west are along the rotation. (this isn't an ACTUAL 'axis' as such, just an imaginary line drawn at the center of rotation) Thus whether north or south is up is a matter of convention; not all Earth cultures have equated north with up. Usually only the Northern-Hemisphere cultures did.
On that note, directions in cantr don't exactly correlate to cardinal directions (towards and away from the axis' termini, to and fro on the rotational side, etc) because cantr doesn't, as far as we know, rotate or indeed have an axis around which it rotates. So "north" and "south" and "east" and "west" in cantr aren't the same thing as on Earth; they're really just different terms for "this way", "the opposite direction", "that way" and "the opposite of that way."
You can return to your starting point, going in any direction, without the "cardinal" direction changing. This is not a problem east-west, as mentioned before, because you can certainly go west forever without ever going east (because "east" and "west" don't have terminal points on a sphere - there is no East Pole or West Pole), but it is a problem going north-south, because as mentioned before, cantr's world has no discernable axes. At no point, traveling north, do you suddenly start going south. (at least not according to cantr's navigational mechanics.)
In conclusion, then, the north-south-east-west paradigm is not geographically useful when dealing with large amounts of cantr's world map.
0, 90, 180, and 270 are more useful directors, if a bit prosaic. I hereby welcome suggestions (in a non-official capacity, of course) for new direction-names for the cardinal (and thus I suppose the ordinal) directions.
