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Original question on worldbuilding.stackexchange by PyRulez
This is a test drive of the alien-geometry. I hope it will be a fun tag.
Okay, for the purposes of this question, the world is flat (like, you still have plants and hills and stuff, just no long term curvature.) We donât care how far it goes, or why it like that.
So we have a world much like ours. We have sunlight during the day and moonlight at night. Plants and animals and such. The only difference is if you move 5 feet to East or West, you end up in the same place.
To visualize this, every object is visually repeated infinitely to the East and West every 5 feet. Of course, these are all the same object (they wonât diverge or anything). You only viewing it from different angles. You can imagine sort of that the entire world is like a cylinder with a circumference of 5 feet (except that it isnât curved and the ground is still really deep.)
If we want to be precise, an infinity by infinity by 5 feet space, and topologically glue the two faces of this space together.
I hope to ask a lot of questions about this world, but to start off, letâs look at combat.
How will combat be different? Both 1 on 1, and smallish battles (not thinking about big battles or wars yet.)
Its similar to fighting in a 5ft wide corridor of infinite length.
A defensive fighter would want to face opponent on a north south axis along the corridor. A large shield or two men standing abreast you block the entire world from getting past. Two attackers could charge forward with spears knowing their foes could never side step around them.
In a skirmish the vast majority of troops would be archers lobbing attacks over the handful of melee troops
It would seem that only a few dozen troops could participate in a war. The narrow confines also remove the traditional attackers advantage of choosing the site of battle, you donât need to defend a whole castle only 5ft of wall. Defense becomes much more effective.
1 on 1, you are in a world of complexity. Martial artists have an infinite edge over non-martial artists as they can appear to kick on the right side and hit the opponent on the left! Also there are very high chances a short range projectile weapon (like a slingshot) would be used by every combatant. The most shocking battles would ensue when the opponents face each other in east-west direction. Now you they not only have to defend themselves from the front, but the back too, as both parties can strike behind their backs and it will hit the opponent in their backs.
Generally in this world weapons like the Meteor Hammer and the Rope Dart would have far higher effectiveness against fixed-shape weapons like the sword, spear, mace etc. Battles where two masters fight, one with a fix-shape weapon (sword) and the other with a rope-dart would be immensely complex, both to write and to comprehend.
In battles involving projectiles, every trooper would be trained rigorously about how to hit the opponent on both sides while standing right in front of him at much distance.
Detailed analysis of weapons and combat tactics depends on what level of technology the residents of this universe have, as compared to ours.
Would a being evolved in such a space really even perceive the duplicate images, or would their wetware evolve to eliminate the cognitive overload of the redundancy? Perhaps they would only perceive a single instance of each object, albeit viewed simultaneously from many angles. Perhaps their perceptions would convert the flat space around them into a perceived cylinder, to give them awareness of the wraparound effects?
Original question on worldbuilding.stackexchange by PyRulez
Following the same geometry as this question, how would architecture be different? To review, when go east or west 5 feet, you end up back where you started.
Is there a way to make structures feel roomier, despite the fact the wrap around thing (say, by connecting rooms in a certain way).
How would this affect structural integrity? How would the building be built different to deal with and/or take advantage of this.
How would you attach structures to themselves (âwrapped aroundâ)?
Anything else of note?
A nice way to think about this type of thing is to imagine a bunch of âĂâĂ5 ft blocks stacked next to each other, with the same stuff in each block. So if you were in one block, looking into another, you would see another copy of yourself and the room you are in, and another one beyond that, and so on, repeating infinitely. In math, this is called a covering space. I will refer to the strange space you describe as cylindrical space.
Something interesting about this space is that it is not simply connected. Imagine you had a string in normal space. You could tie the ends together, and then do whatever you wanted with it. You could wad it up and put it in your pocket, for instance. But in this space, you could tie one end of your string in one of the blocks to the other end in the next block, and you would suddenly have an infinite strand which you could not wad up without breaking! Moving down from the covering space to cylindrical space, it would look like a an infinitely long piece of string. This is a really weird concept which is not true in normal space.
Disadvantages
Everything, obviously, would have to fit in this very narrow space. There is really no way around this. Every room only has two walls (unless you want it to be even narrower), so all the electricity and plumbing has to run to these two walls, or through the floor. Also, all things we normally put on walls, like TVs, paintings, mirrors, etc,... would have to go on these two very narrow walls. An architect would have to take advantage of vertical space to make lots of rooms. Beds would have to lie in the infinite direction because nobody taller than 5 ft could lie down in the 5 ft direction. Nevertheless, skinny houses and buildings are possible. Something like this narrow house might be what you get.
Advantages
Itâs not all bad. Even though the room is narrow, you donât have to worry about everybody seeing the TV; there are a whole array of TVs, one in each copy of the universe all stacked next to each other. Since you only need two walls, the building will be stronger. Also, you donât need so many mirrors in the bathroom because it is really easy to see the back of your head. There would be more advantages, I think if the universe were a little wider. Say, 30
ft. Then you could take advantage of the cylindrical properties to have hallways that wrap around. Then, instead of two rooms being at opposite ends of the hall 30 ft apart, the furthest apart they can be is 15 ft. The same advantage applies to lots of application where minimizing distance is an issue.
Some things could seem infinite, like beds or bathtubs five feet wide. That would be pretty cool.
All in all, this would be a pretty weird place to live.
Youâd only need one side wall to support your structure. It would be pressed on from both east and west and therefore resist from both east and west. Of course, with a front and back wall, you could forego the side wall entirely.
Your world would have to build up and down a lot, but youâd still be constrained by gravity. Iâm not sure how gravity would be affected, but it would change the density of stars and planets.
Iâd imagine youâd have a lot of hobbit-type holes. People would live underground (or at least under roofs) and pathways would be built on top of them. You could build above the pathways, but since buildings are heavy and people are not it would make more sense to put the lightweight things on top.
If you came to a bridge thatâs out, thereâd be no way to bypass it. But because water canât travel sideways particularly, there probably wouldnât be many wide chasms to begin with.
The world would have a lot less water, or thereâd be no dry land. On the other hand, if thereâs less gravity (not sure thatâs true), the mountains would be much taller, so you could have really deep lakes and oceans and still have dry land.
Weather patterns would change dramatically. There would be no way for pressure to move sideways, so tall buildings might be out of the question, although thereâs still some limited room to build pipes between floors to allow air pressure to flow north to south.
Sideways momentum would be weird. If you came across other planetary systems, youâd have to add a sideways vector. I donât know that itâs terribly complex, but it would be different since you canât orbit along that axis, just move.