Quote:
Originally Posted by ErinRigh
Sure are wrong there. Ya know that metal thing they keep showing at the beginning of Game of Thrones? It's an Astrolab that hangs in the great library, they have focused on it in episode. I think that it is reasonable to say, It's axial tilt is likely variable (ie it wobbles) and that the "current" scholars in Westeros have no idea how it works, but to say that it can't be understood humans is a bit reaching IMO.
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If the planet has axial tilt that the people understood enough to have astrolabes then that means they could measure the solar year, the tilt is measured against the plane of the elliptic after all. But there can't be a conventional plane of the elliptic because that would mean a stable solar year and stable seasonal lengths.
The only way the Known World works, beyond a handwave of "its just magic," is if the Known World's orbit is far more complicated than can be easily described. Perhaps it is actually co-orbiting two Jovian class giants which are themselves tidally locked together so that the Known World spins in some wild and extraordinarily complicated dance between the 2 planets as they spin around the parent star. This could result in long periods where the world was closer into the Goldilocks zone, summer, and farther out in the Goldilocks Zone, winter, or even periods where it was mostly occluded by one or the other Jovian resulting not in so much an eclipse but in long periods in the planets penumbra. I'm sure if you give the fellows at JPL a little while they could come up with a model of such a planetary system that might actually be stable. I'm just not sure how human life could survive on such a place.