Creating flying cities
Writing about suspended cities within a planet's atmosphere! The story itself focuses on the air forces that fight for each of the hundreds of floating city states living in the sky, but that's here nor there. I would prefer the suspended land masses to be naturally occurring (predating technology).
I've come up with some options for how it would work, but I could use some help with looking in depth at each possible explanation for how the cities fly.
Asteroid Lodestones - this is my favorite theory, as it has naturally occurring floating-land that has been around for millennia in this world. The theory is that over time, space rock crashes into a planet as it does with any planet. But these asteroids are naturally magnetized to be repulsed from the planet's surface. Therefore, the asteroids enter the atmosphere and get hung in the sky before impacting. Or after impacting. Either way, this allows for floating land without technological help.
Magically powerful atmosphere - Piggybacking off theory number one, if the asteroids weren't NATURALLY magnetized to repel from the planet's surface, could the space rock by magnetized as it passed through a planet's atmosphere? Could, theoretically, the magnetic waves be that powerful in the upper layers of an atmosphere? And could something be magnetized in such a violent, intense way?
Electromagnetism (maglev) - I have a rough understanding of this. Electric currents are needed to produce a magnetic charge, which keeps things afloat? Do the rocks themselves have to carry the current? If not, is there a separate magnet which has to conduct electricity, such as a tower or surface-based giant magnet? Similar to theory two, could an asteroid by electromagnetically charged when entering an atmosphere?
If you guys could give me feedback on these, any tweaks to these theories, and any other ideas about floating land masses I would be very grateful!
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/128257. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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My first bit of advice would be to drop the idea of magnets or anything magnetic as being the mechanism. To have it occur "naturally" would involve too many contortions of planetary mechanics and using maglev would be impractical as well - the inverse square law would mean that having an altitude of more than a few centimetres would require so much energy as to be ludicrous.
What I propose instead would be to have the lower regions of the atmosphere be a "soup" of very dense gases and your cities based on asteroids made up of a materiel that is less dense that, as a result floats on the denser atmospheric layers beneath.
This way you could still have:
- naturally occurring landmasses that "fly"
- a planetary surface beneath (you'd need a pretty pressure-resistant craft to reach it mind you - but not much beyond a submarine)
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