What would it be like to be on a Culture Orbital?

[cntrational]

Wikipedia link if you're not familiar with the concept.

To be specific, I'm not asking about how life would be like in the Culture, but what would physically happen to be on an Orbital. What would the weather be like? How would the sky look like, in day, twilight, and night? How would things behave with its use of centrifugal rather than mass-based gravity? What if you went up to the air-enclosing walls? How would you get around, given the huge amounts of area that an Orbital has? How would passing objects like meteors behave?

[Terralthra]

Have you read the novels?

[Elheru Aran]

Play Halo a few times and you'll get the general idea. That's basically what an Orbital is, Bungie has acknowledged that the Culture novels were a direct influence on their story.

[Terralthra]

Well, Halo's ringworld structures are tiny compared to Orbitals. Orbitals are ~3 million km in diameter, where Halo rings are 16,000 km in diameter.

[Ahriman238]

The answer to the first, second, fourth and last questions are "what/however the governing Mind wants." There's clearly enough atmosphere for weather, and on a clear day you can probably see much an arc in the sky. If you climbed a thousand miles up the air retaining wall, you'd eventually run out of air, but probably not before you got sick of climbing.

I'm less sure about the gravity question, so I'll leave that to people much better at it than I.

As for transport, well the Culture has transporters but frowns on using them casually or excessively. I believe they have high speed monorails, flight-suits and a dizzying array of personal craft.

Meteors would strangely behave exactly like objects being blown up or deflected from a path going anywhere near the orbital, because Culture Mind. Planets get hit with stuff, Culture habitats, not so much.

[cntrational]

Have you read the novels?

Some of them.

The answer to the first, second, fourth and last questions are "what/however the governing Mind wants." There's clearly enough atmosphere for weather, and on a clear day you can probably see much an arc in the sky. If you climbed a thousand miles up the air retaining wall, you'd eventually run out of air, but probably not before you got sick of climbing.

I'm less sure about the gravity question, so I'll leave that to people much better at it than I.

As for transport, well the Culture has transporters but frowns on using them casually or excessively. I believe they have high speed monorails, flight-suits and a dizzying array of personal craft.

Meteors would strangely behave exactly like objects being blown up or deflected from a path going anywhere near the orbital, because Culture Mind. Planets get hit with stuff, Culture habitats, not so much.

Well, yes, but I was more interested in what would happen "normally", without a conscious attempt to make it otherwise. For example, Earth's climate is based on interactions across the the entire planet, but an Orbital is just a tiny strip, so the weather would obviously be different.

[Vendetta]

Weather can be artificially controlled, and most orbitals probably do so. (Though some would likely relish the idea of leaving it up to atmospheric chance, Orbitals tend to attract people of like mind. Chiark in TPoG is a centre of gamesmanship, whereas Masaq in LTW is geared towards, essentially, extreme sports).

Some might even be sufficiently sparsely populated that individuals could request their own weather from Hub. (Orbitals aren't the population centres of the culture, they're relatively sparsely populated compared to the GSVs which are the true "cities", and Gurgeh, for instance, lives in the middle of nowhere even for an orbital.)

I'm not sure that anyone knows what the qualia of rotational gravity are to describe whether it would "feel" different from the ordinary kind, but an Orbital is probably big enough that coriolis effect would be negligible due to the slowness of rotation.

Transport on an Orbital is myriad, they have high speed transit lines through the plate substructure, but people also have personal flyers, shuttles, boats, and any number of other ways of getting around.

Incoming objects like meteors can be destroyed, diverted, or in extreme cases the orbital can just move out of the way (though again Masaq prides itself on not doing any of those things, because that's what they're like).