Navigating Capricorn

Imagine you’re a resident of Capricorn, living in Ossi sector like Pod and his friends in Between Two Worlds. How do you know where you are? How do you navigate?

You might be thinking: hang on, this book is set in the far future on a massive generation ship full of technology beyond our comprehension. Everyone on board will have some gizmo, probably some AI, that’ll know where they are and can answer all their questions.

That’s not what life is like for the residents of Capricorn. They live a rural, agrarian, low-tech life. An AI is watching and is in charge, but it’s not literally everywhere. Within buildings, mobile balls hover around; outside, where people gather and on most major paths, static balls keep watch from tall poles. Nobody carries an AI gizmo.

Which means that people might still need to figure out where they are. They’ll always need a way to give directions for navigation.

In a couple of recent posts I’ve mentioned the Capricorn Basic terms narv, sove, spinward and spoutward. These are equivalent to the compass points north, south, west and east, though on the wheel there’s no magnetic field to orient you.

On Capricorn, each sector is 80 km by 10 km: a long, narrow strip. Narv and sove refer to the shorter side, and spinward and spoutward the longer side, which curves up and around and back.

Spinward refers to the direction in which the wheel spins; spoutward is the opposite direction. If you’re standing on the tread — the inside surface of the wheel, the “ground” — the only way to infer the spin direction is from the movement of the stars beyond the wheel. If you’re facing spinward, stars appear to move down. If they appear to move up, then you’re facing spoutward.

The wheel completes a full spin in about thirty seconds: you’ll have no trouble figuring out which way the stars are moving, assuming you’re outside.

Knowing which way is spinward tells you narv and sove: if you’re facing spinward, narv is to your right and sove is to your left. You can also tell from the stars. Facing narv, the stars spin anticlockwise; facing sove, the stars spin clockwise.

There’s no need for a compass on Capricorn.

That gives me an excuse to post this video again:

With spinward identified, you can locate your position within the sector pretty easily.

The wheel has spokes — ladders in Capricorn Basic — ending in walls, which mark each end of a sector. Capricorn has ten sectors, so each sector extends along an arc a tenth of the circumference. The curve up both spinward and spoutward is real and obvious, and you’ll be able to see both walls almost all of the time. You can make a good guess how far you are between the walls from their relative sizes and angles.

It’s trickier to figure out your position narv/sove. There’s a gentle curve up from the central axis to the rims at the far narv/sove edges, but that curve is disguised by local geography, lumps and bumps, and possibly nearby buildings. The rims themselves are pretty tall: if you can see both sets, you can make a decent guess of your position. If you’re close to a wall you can use that to help, as each ladder leg is a known distance from the axis.

And your sector? As Pod says, “You probly know which sector you in, else you got a fat problem you ent gonna solve by looking.”

As a resident of Capricorn you’ve spent your life with the stars and the wheel in view whenever you’ve stepped outside, and this navigation by-eye will be second nature to you. The relentless spin of the stars is background noise – not the disorientating, nauseating nightmare it would be for us.

I think this incongruity between the high-tech and low-tech, the weird-normality of it all, is what I love most about the setting of Between Two Worlds. After book two of the Pod of Capricorn series, I might return to this place to tell more stories here. What would you most like to know? Leave a comment!