[Mkguild] Proposed redesign of the Mages' Guild Tower

[Ian Jones]

I think that the design is not more efficient than a regular tower, but if done right it could be far cooler. A question you have to consider is whether Kyia's variable geometry affects the tower or not. If it does, then this whole argument is moot. Only if it doesn't do we have to wonder whether the tower will make your legs hurt as you go through it. But putting in portals like you're describing just sounds tacky to me. If you're going to do portals, put them in the center of the room and have one for each floor. You can step off each floor into them, as well.

Personally, I think the tower's layout would be the best aesthetics-wise and efficiency-wise if it was done as a huge Mobius figure. You would get all the benefits of walking up stairs and be able to use twice as much floor space! Of course, the non-mages' guild residents would have to go, because using both sides of the stairs would require that you use the floors in between as well. You could just add more floors, but then the efficiency goes back down again. Gravity would be re-oriented to whatever direction the nearest floor is, you could have bridges across the middle, and besides, how cool would it be to look up and find yourself in one of M. C. Escher's constructs?!


>>> Skylos 08/19/10 5:08 PM >>>
Based on what you have said here I can confirm that I understand what you are saying and the layout you are speaking of, but you aren't actually answering the question I am asking.

The question is *is that a pragmatic layout*. when every 360 degrees is another 200 feet of walking, five floors is 1000 feet of straight-line movement and delay. You have to walk all the way around the floor to get to the next floor.

But you can solve that problem easily enough. Imagine as you come to the 'join point' on the third floor you see two portals and a passthrough. They don't look remarkable - just like an arch sequence over the passageway - but through the right side you see the fourth floor, the center is a continuation of the third perfectly normal, and the left is the second floor corridor.

______ ______ ______
/ \ / \ / \
| 2 | | 3 | | 4 | 
| | | | | | 
| | | | | | 
| | | | | | 
|______| |______| |______| 


If you needed to go from the first floor to the fifth you'd go through portal-to-second, loop 180 degrees across the hallway and come out 2 arch labeled above. another 180 degrees and through arch labeled 4, another 180 across the hallway through the arch and you're on the fifth floor. you can then immediately tight 180 back through the center portal to get to your destination. 

Faster than stairs, uses your portals, kind of cool, is bidirectional without having to run 200 feet between utilizations. Might get dizzy running around in circles though. Right?

Skylos



On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 2:58 PM, Ian Jones <Ian.Jones at valpo.edu> wrote:

On Wednesday - August 18, 2010 at 4:26 PM, Skylos <skylos at gmail.com> wrote:
>Based on what I'm reading, it sounds like its a mobius hallway - if you run in a clockwise direction, you won't be running uphill, >you won't run downhill, but your ears will pop and you will find yourself entering the entrance hall from the other side.


Not true. If the hallway was a Mobius construct, you would walk to the attic on the top side of the stairway or ramp or whatever you use to get from one floor to another, and back down to the entrance hallway on the underside. Of course, you wouldn't notice the flip, and everything would be oriented away from what you think of as floor anyway.

The tower sounds like a dimensional circle, where either the top of the tower is a portal down to the basement or the whole thing is cuved about in a circle so that the top and bottom are connected while the tower itself remains geometrically straight. It's like the space around the tower is curved, but the tower itself isn't - from the point of view of the people walking through it.

Or the tower is a series of circles laid over one another through fancy dimensional manipulation. In that case, it'd just be like a regular circle, only you'd have to go around 720, 1080, 1440, etc. degrees of rotation before you got back to the beginning. Each 360 degree interval be a different floor, and would have its own customizable space (rooms and stuff). Each 360 degree would also be in its own little dimension, and they would be layered over each other with transitions between them where you would normally run out of circle.

If I have confused you, send me an email and I'll try and explain things. I can't promise any clarifying results; it's had to explain things like this without pictures.

Ian
 

_______________________________________________
MKGuild mailing list
MKGuild at lists.integral.org
http://lists.integral.org/listinfo/mkguild






-- 
"If only I could get rid of hunger by rubbing my belly" - Diogenes 


!DSPAM:4c6da405321348154786014!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.integral.org/archives/mkguild/attachments/20100819/9a32df01/attachment-0001.html>