Worldgate Mechanics (and other things...

Worldgate Mechanics, Part One.

The Basics; Where Gates Appear, and what they look like.


Okay. Here's what me and Mutt have worked out about the mechanics of the worldgates and a bit about other assorted stuff. If Anke or anyone wants to read our emails so as to tell me what I've left out, I'm happy to forward those to you.


Okay. Basically, Gates appear in locations on worlds depending on a variety of factors (read: I have no clue yet) that combine to create areas of low enough resistance that gates can open there. Other areas will exist where gates don't open but could, and areas where gates could open if more power was put into the process; these will matter only late in the game when mages start to work out the mechanics. When gates appear, they are centred on a single point. This point may move or not move when a gate closes are re-opens, but if it is a moving gate, it'll stay within a general area, the size of which is related somewhat to the size of the gate itself. Gates can appear on solid ground or at sea, but always touching the surface.. no entirely aerial gates, that is. Probably. Gates linking areas of different air pressure can form, and gates from dry land to sea also.

Gates are paired generally speaking with a single gate on another world, although a few anomalies to this will turn up eventually.


The size of the gate is a circle/sphere around the point at the centre at which the gate nominally appears. A gate only appears visibly when viewed from certain angles, and can appear larger or smaller from different angles. These different angles of view are separate portals through the gate, and each one is matched with a identical portal on the paired gate. The matching portal on the paired gate is not necessarily at the same angle to the other entrances as it is on the first gate, though.

I made a pair of graphics to help explain this, showing a matched pair of gates.

The red dot at the centre is the technical location for the gate. The black line is the diameter of the gate, IE, that largest possible size of a.. let's call them a doorway in the gate. The little colored lines outside the circle are the vectors or directions you need to approach/face the gate from in order to see a particular doorway in the gate, and the direction you'll be facing when you exit having entered the matching doorway in the other gate. The matching colored lines inside the circle, stretching across the centre in different widths, are the actual doorways.


First gate

Second gate

Disregard the fact that all vectors of entrance/exit are in the same 180degree arc on each gate, that's just caused by the program I made it with.

Essentially, the size and number of doorways in each gate matches, but the directions one has to approach the gate from to get to each doorway can be and are wildly differing.

Worldgate Mechanics, Part Two.

How it works; The way gates take you from Here to There.


Okay then. First up, I forgot a major point that should have been in the first post, that is, what does the gate look like when you're in a position to see it?

Basically, gates are holes in the fabric of stuff. So they're mind-twistingly weird. And your mind tricks itself into seeing a great empty hole in the world (with spiraling twisting bits of horrible pink and gold that aren't actually pink and gold because your mind is inventing them to stop from going insane, to keep Mutt and anyone who is writing a description in-story happy), with nothing on the other side (the main point being that you can't see your destination on the other side)

Oh, and as for the size of that spherical boundary I mentioned in the previous post, the limit on how big a doorway can possibly be in that gate... We're thinking average door sized to mile-diameter sized, on pretty much an average bell curve, maybe skewed a bit to the lower end.

Alright. How the gates work. When you enter the gate, you enter fully into a colorless, essentially input-less buffer zone inside the gate, formed by a quirk of the mechanics made neccessary because under the way these gates work, it is impossible for anything to be partly in one world and partly in another. No matter how big an object is, it spends exactly the same amout of time in the buffer, that is, a very short time. I've been calling it a half-step for the sake of giving it a measurement not measured in actual time.

When entering or exiting a doorway, to observers it appears that a object/person/whatever is entering or exiting entirely at it's own speed, but to anything sentient that is/is part of that object, entering feels like the doorway envelops you as soon as you touch it, you take a half-step through nothing, and then it pops you out. This means it wouldn't mess up orders of march and whatnot, because to everyone except whatever happens to be entering or exiting at a certain point, the time it takes for anything else to enter or exit is exactly what it should be.

So if you're a man walking behind a cart; to the cart it feels like it enters instantly, spends half a step inside, and exits instantly. To you it appears to be slowly entering in front of you, and then after your own instant transfer, it has already slowly exited in front of you.

Some gates are very large, and most are large enough that at least two humanoids can go through side by side. This works fine and you leave in the same relative positions you entered in.

Hmm. Projectiles/anything not under it's own power can fly through the gate, along with air and water and whatever. Things without their own power lose a lot of velocity in the pass through the gate, though.

Gates open and close, each pair with their own set period of opening and closing; this isn't nesscarially a simple period, and can go a LONG time without repeating itself, so there are cases where a gate is seemingly set into a set repeating period and then suddenly closes or opens for a long period of time or changes it's period or something else unexpected; this is NOT the gate changing it's period, simply that it hasn't actually started repeating itself yet and there is a change in the times between opening and closing that is part of the period.

When gates open or close, they fade in and out one doorway at a time. Anything that happens to be in the buffer for a doorway that closes when it closes is suspended in stasis in the buffer until that doorway spirals open again.

I would like to add that, while it looks like things enter and exit the gates at their own speed, this is the distortion of space-time, not the perception of entering and exiting instantly.

That is to say, once you come in contact with the gate, you *are* going through, regardless of how big you are and how long it looks like it takes for you to step through. I'm sure most of us have seen Stargate, at least clips of it; These worldgates canNOT be touched and withdrawn from the way stargates can.

This elucidation came to me while thinking about the Engineers, and how the train they're on passes through the gate.

So to give a relevant example, as soon as the nose of the train hits the gate, what actually happens is the entire train pops out of Steamy and into the buffer zone, and after a the 'half-step' of buffer, instantly exists on the other side.

What it looks like is like the train hits the doorway of the gate and continues to move forward at its speed until it disappears entirely into the gate, and on the other side looks like it moves out of the gate.

What it feels like is that it hits the gate, there's the total lack of input for everyone aboard for the same half-step period, regardless of their position on the train, and then it exists on the other side instantaneously, entirely out of the gate. This is likely to be one of the first things that alerts the theorists to the actual behaviour of the gates.

All contiguous objects have this behaviour. The writer's discretion (and previous example once we get that far) for what counts as contiguous, but I'd say airships and the like count, trains or wagons count, a line of people holding each others coat-tails probably don't.

If the exiting object had sufficient velocity upon entering the gate to not lose it all in the transfer (which as I mentioned dumps a lot of velocity), then that velocity acts on it starting from a position of entirely exited from the gate, because this is the position it *actually* enters that world in. Thus, the engineers train ends up further from the gate than you might expect if it had passed through an archway or door, because it's velocity acts on it from a position of it's nose starting the train's full length from the gate.

Because it looks, to a theoretical outside observer, like the train's movement starts at the gate doorway and not it's full length away from the doorway, the movement will look slightly and inexplicably wrong, because the distance it moves will not fit with the observed velocity.

Let me know if I've explained this properly. I'm never sure.

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quote:

once you come in contact with the gate, you *are* going through, regardless of how big you are and how long it looks like it takes for you to step through. [...] These worldgates canNOT be touched and withdrawn from the way stargates can

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Agreed, this was exactly what I'd envisaged.

When you say "lack of input for everyone aboard", are they aware of nothingness, or is time suspended for them?

Not sure I can picture what you mean with the exiting train velocity-wise. So it really emerges moving more slowly than expected (velocity bled off by gate), but it appears to emerge through the gate at its old velocity until it reaches the 'fully out' position where it catches up with reality? Wheels spinny in slow motion or something?

This buffer thing's going to be confusing for our pirates, murderers and robbers. Victim's essentially invulnerable until fully out of the gate. Not an easily noticeable difference for a human; very noticeable for a long train, snake, great big eff-off dragon, etc.

I mean full sensory deprivation.. it's a length of time, they perceive it, but there's no input to any senses (including telepathic and any magic sense. full sensory deprivation.)

The train appears to exit from the gate and continue moving until it stops (well, crashes, as you'd expect) because it's wheels aren't on a track anymore. However, it's actual movement when leaving the gate starts from a fully exited position, thus, it will end up further away from the gate than you'd expect it to be having moved at the observed speed.

I'm not sure how the whole 'not actually existing until fully out' thing should be handled in terms of invulnerability or whatever. Suggestions welcome.

Presumably full sensory deprivation includes 'mass' sense and 'life' sense (significant for various of my critters). We'll say so.

And ah, right, without rails - see what you mean.

Invulnerability-wise, I'd say there should be something solid there, otherwise you'd be able to walk through it while it emerged and get splinched.

All senses. yes. basically as far as you can tell, you are a mind hanging in nothingness, for a time which is noticable but not measurable. It'd actually be pretty mindblowing to be perfectly honest and I'm glad I'm not going through one of these gates I have so lovingly crafted to be completely insanealicious.

Seeing as it's really a relativity problem, I'm thinking you can shoot at it/attempt to interact with it as it emerges, but such interactions will not affect it until it is emerged. 'bullets slowing down' MAY be one way to describe this in writing terms, but I really don't like it and hope we work out something better.

Once the character scientists work out what's happening, having someone say 'the bullets slow down when they get near it' to them will probably make them wince in the way relativitists do when you mention 'faster than light'

It'd actually be pretty mindblowing to be perfectly honest and I'm glad I'm not going through one of these gates I have so lovingly crafted to be completely insanealicious.

Can we not do that?
Someone nearly (or actually) losing their mind when crossing through a worldgate sound dramatic and all, but it seems to me like one of those things that get old really, really quickly when you have to write it several times for different people.

Suitov says he doesn't have enough spares.

Heh. I didn't mean like 'i'm going crazy' just 'well shit this is incredibly weird'. Mindblowing in the tradition sense of 'whooaaaaa' not as in 'boom'.

Full sensory deprivation is something that it we can already do with current technology, at least mostly (i actually kinda do want to try a sensory deprivation tank, regardles of what I said above), and I am reliably informed that it does not make you crazy but it IS an incredibly.. different experience. A very short moment of it is not going to drive anyone insane. Except Weft, because he's a brainless goofball anyway, right Weft? :P

Yeah, sens dep tanks are meant to be weird. I'm not rushing to try one, not after seeing that ep of The Simpsons.

Weft is carefully conditioned to withstand sensory deprivation, including touch-starvation (which affects Instarrians very seriously).