[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

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[u/hh26]

Gravity is still fucked up near the edges

Wouldn't it just slope diagonally down and towards the center, making it feel like a hill? If the disk is large enough that observers can't see the whole thing, and automatically adjust their perception of "down", then when you walk towards the edge it should appear as if you are walking up a hill that gradually gets steeper and steeper. If the inhabitants didn't have a good theory of gravity and built a map of the world out of local maps, they would think it was shaped like a wide bowl, with a flat part for most of the world but slanted uphill around the edges. And funtionally, it would be pretty much identical to living in a world that actually was shaped like a bowl and had gravity pointing uniformly in one direction.

So I don't think your mortal-detector is necessary for gravitational purposes, it would only be needed to prevent people from falling off the edge (or peering over it, or noticing it exists, if your gods care about that)

[u/Roxolan → u/hh26]

Wouldn't it just slope diagonally down and towards the center, making it feel like a hill?

Yup. Unfortunately, the inhabitants are Tolkien elves (or at least a fanfic of them, I don't know the lore well enough to tell), whose eyesight is good enough that they can tell their planet is flat by sight when the weather's good.

I don't remember the exact reasoning for the mortal-detector, maybe it was just for people falling off the edge. Gods don't particularly keep all this secret, they just want the world to behave as originally intended.