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Freecloud: By the Numbers - Orbital Mechanics, Coastline Stats...

The coastline would be a mere matter of choosing your measurement accuracy. If it's sheer rock faces diving into the sea, you can have sharp curvature and decide that a mile of coast is five hundred miles long up close - Norway, say, is like that in places. If it's sandy beaches, then a mile is a mile, unless you measure by the pebbles in which case it might just as well be five hundred lightyears. But the fjord model is clearly what Chabon is going for here, and should work just fine for any arbitrary length of coastline.

(Yeah, that particular choice of words is intriguing. In fifteen years, really interesting things could have happened with and to the Federation, including a drawdown or two... Not the subject matter of PIC S1 yet.)

Timo Saloniemi
 
If the binary is widely spaced enough, planets can orbit one star. Better questions might be why are there class M planets around an A0V star, and how do the colonists deal with the variations in luminosity?
 
Given the overall economics in play with the conception of Freecloud as a neo-Libertarian near-Utopia, I imagine drawdown in "Federation drawdown" is used in the economic sense. The year 2385 is incredibly important to Picard, as it is the year of the Martian attack and the nixing of plans to evacuate Romulus. Apparently, if I'm reading the document correct, the Federation also abandoned autonomous authority over the Thread and Freecloud gained it's de jure independence, or at least more de facto independence than it had before.

Freecloud also seems to be a settled world in an uninhabited system, so terraforming or even simply habitat-buildings seems likely. It could be deadly to exist outside of conurbations and cohabs in the semi-arid portions of the planet because of radiation. It could also be, due entirely to its location in the Iconia sector, that Alpha Doradus IV was an ancient terraformed colony abandoned by an ancient disappeared empire for unknown reasons, and just settled by these Freecs when they were racing away from the growing Federation. I like to imagine that the galaxy is littered with these experimental terraformed places, and squatter's rights are fairly common when other folks move in.
 
Given four billion years of humanoid meddling, every star probably has at least one terraformed planet; on some, the terraforming might still endure, while others might have gone fallow. Ceti Alpha VI with its supposed lifelessness but breathable atmosphere would be an example of the latter, unless the free oxygen has some non-biologial explanation. Ceti Alpha V of course would now be another, with the mechanism not left unclear...

Some such planets might have been optimized for relatively brief exploitation, so the nature of their mother stars might not really matter. For others, the stars themselves might have been manipulated, and their current status might be transient - although of course Alpha Doradus and all other UFP stars of note would be so close to Earth that our current lightspeed-observation knowledge of their nature would be relevant for the Trek eras, too.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Drawdown as "a reduction in military presence" could mean the Synth attack on the fleetyards, or as "decline in investment" with the threatened secession of 14 UFP worlds? I don't love either interpretation, because I don't fully subscribe to "Starfleet in the 24th century is military" or "The Federation of the 24th century uses money internally". But as Jake Sisko once said about '"selling" his first story', "It's just a figure of speech".
 
Mike McDevitt said:
Drawdown as "a reduction in military presence" could mean the Synth attack on the fleetyards, or as "decline in investment" with the threatened secession of 14 UFP worlds? I don't love either interpretation, because I don't fully subscribe to "Starfleet in the 24th century is military" or "The Federation of the 24th century uses money internally". But as Jake Sisko once said about '"selling" his first story', "It's just a figure of speech".
Click to expand...

Even if we fully accept Picard and Jake's mantra that there is no money and people just enrich themselves culturally or whatever (and the Feds provide everything everyone needs and then some), economics still need to exist, externally, in the form of interstellar trade with their neighbors.
 
Or internally, with just the consumer market eliminated, either because it's peanuts, or because it's too unstable and people should never be given control of their money. Machines could still buy starships and pergium from each other; the gal who invents the topaline-free air filter just gets her usual free food, accommodation and holodeck time, plus quite a bit of fame.

Yet Freecloud would appear to be about the consumer market specifically. Ex-dictators might be trying to buy new armies the non-monetary way, but when it comes to buying secure retirement, it's a consumer thing first and foremost. OTOH, Freecs might compete for the honor of cleaning the manifolds of the Sirena for non-wealth-related reasons, too, if they buy into this UFP way of doing things.

Timo Saloniemi
 
When I read drawdown, I thought it referred to the presence of the Federation on the Romulan Neutral Zone. With the Romulan Star Empire destroyed, the purpose of the RNZ lost its meaning, so the Federation could reallocate their resources elsewhere. It is interesting, when looking at the starchart from "Maps and Legends", to note that the Romulan Free State has expanded into what was Federation space.
 
DEWLine said:
2) Could you get a continental coastline of 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometres) for a single continent? Assuming the planet hosting that continent is about Venus-sized?
Click to expand...
Depends on how you measure it.

The Coastline Paradox say that the length of a coastline theoretically is infinite, or undefinable, because the closer you get the more detail you find, like zooming in on a fractal

The CIA World Factbook gives the coastlines of the world as 356,000 km, but the World Resources Institute once gave it as 1.63 million km. It sounds like Chabon cribbed this latter figure.
 
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