10-14-2019, 06:59 PM
Location
The section of this nation that is located in the IDU basically occupies a peninsula extending southwards from the South Continent’s southern coast. It is not this nation’s main territory, which centres in the area that the name would presumably lead you to expect on a more RL-like version of Earth instead: This is just an outlying territory, called ‘Diamant', which the nation’s people reached using their advanced spacecraft.
(The nation’s player and people say that they travelled across the stars, to a different solar system, and that — although they agree with me about wildlife from Earth ending up here — the physical similarities between this planet and Earth [and between their solar systems, too] are just a happy coincidence: I think, however, that their vessels’ ‘interstellar’ drive must actually have turned out to be an ‘inter-dimensional’ one that moved them between two alternative versions of the same solar system instead. We’ll probably have to agree to disagree about this…)
The 'Basic Presumptions & Overview’ from which I am currently working place this nation approximately from 6[sup]o[/sup]S to 9[sup]o[/sup]S, with a maximum width of approximately 2 degrees of longitude: This would give it a N-S distance of around 210 standard miles, and a maximum E-W distance of around 150 standard miles, unless a “Tardis Effect” applies and it’s actually bigger on the inside than on the outside.
From what I remember of the region’s old topographical map, and as agreed by this nation’s player, there is a line of mountains running roughly N-S through the peninsula. I see that OOC the CTEd nation which formerly occupied these lands (although IC memories have presumably been retconned to say that it, like so many other CTEd nations, never existed at all…) apparently had one of its main cities on the eastern coast: This version of the peninsula is being retconned, however, to have all of its best “habitable” areas in the west instead. This change seems advisable due to the change in latitude involved now that we’ve expanded the map’s presumed scale, and I’m calling it a side-effect of whatever cosmic incident caused the latter retconned alteration in the structure of Reality… Making this change means that the “habitable” areas now all in the west are shielded from some of the equatorial rains and heat — and from hurricanes — by those mountains. The western side has a ‘dry season’ & ‘wet season’, but due to the different pattern of lands & seas these are be less extreme than those in RL experienced by [e.g.] India (i.e. the ‘Monsoons’).
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Basic Ecotypes
The nation’s natural habitats are basically arranged in a series of strips, running approximately north-south parallel to each other and mostly widest (where the nation as a whole is) in the north. Between the opens seas in the west and the open (and stormier) seas in the east, these, are:
Coral reefs
Coastal waters, sheltered to some extent by the reefs, and some enclosed as lagoons; some of these areas include ‘seagrass meadows’.
Shoreline: mostly consists of sandy beaches, although near the peninsula’s southern tip a branch of the mountains reaches the shore and provides both cliff-backed coves and offshore islets where (with reasonably safety from land-based predators) sea-lions emerge from the water to breed or just to rest.
Coastal plain: This is mostly covered by forests that are ‘tropical evergreen’ but are not actually ‘rainforest’.
Inland plains: There is a fairly gentle & long slope from the coast up to the actual foothills of the mountainous spine. Tropical evergreen forests extend inland along the river valleys, but further from the waters (inland and/or uphill) they shade through ‘tropical seasonal forest’ (including ‘thorn forest’) and scrub into wooded savannah, and then into open grassland. Some areas have sandy soils, low in both nutrients and moisture, within which those transitions in vegetation occur over shorter distances.
There is a significant area of marshland where two of the main rivers that join these plains meet, inland from the coastal forests, which usually undergoes flooding during the ‘west season’ to become a wider swamp. This area is generally considered to mark a “boundary” between the northern and central sections of those plains.
For approximately the southern one-third of the peninsula’s length, the seasonal forests & scrub inland from the coast merge almost directly with those of the mountain’s foothills, with little or no wooded savannah — let alone open grassland — in between.
Foothills: The last of the rain brought by winds from the east flows down from the mountains “behind” these, allowing the river valleys and the hills’ lower slopes to bear more wooded savannah, scrub, or even woodland, than generally exists along the stretches of the same rivers that flow through the open plains below. (Some areas may be suitable for growing Coffee.)
Mountain slopes (western side): These become steeper after the foothills, but still typically less so than on the eastern side. Scrub exist near the base but becomes patchier with height, leading into a predominantly grassy cover that includes quite sizeable stretches of relatively level ‘meadows’ in places. There are patches of scrub and even small trees in hollows where water can temporarily collect, but then there are also expanses of bare or almost-bare rock where the surface is so close to vertical that plants — and soil itself — cannot sit there easily.
Mountain summits: The almost-continuous cover of vegetation that exists lower down is replaced by scattered clumps, as one gets close to the snow-line (on any mountains high enough to have one…), and the seed-bearing plants largely give way to more primitive types.
Mountain slopes (eastern side): With much more water & a bit more warmth available, there is only a relatively thin belt of meadow before the ‘scrub belt’ starts. Bamboo, and “giant” forms of both heather and stinging nettles, are common members of the latter level’s plant communities. Below this is a belt of ‘’cloud forest’, where lower temperatures at higher altitudes cause humid air rising from below to release much of its moisture, resulting in extensive fogs and a considerable reduction in the direct sunlight received by plants: This is thickest in the ‘saddles’ between peaks, or other hollows, where that moisture is likeliest to be deposited, and may be “broken” by areas of direct connection between the two adjacent belts in between those. Ferns and mosses fare relatively well alongside the seed-bearing plants in these damp — but not too sunny — conditions. Below this, again, is a belt of ‘tropical montane rainforest’, largely containing species of trees that are better adapted to steeper slopes & thinner soils than are those of the lowlands.
Coastal plain: This is basically covered by ‘tropical lowland rainforest’. Its relative narrowness, combined with the way in which it slopes towards the sea, means that it has numerous small rivers but these don’t manage to combine into just a few large ones as would happen in larger & flatter expanses of this habitat (such as the RL basins of the Amazon or the Congo…): These conditions also mean that there are no large expanses of ‘flooded forest’ or swamps such as would also occur in larger & flatter rainforests. However, there is an intermittent line of lakes & swampy areas running parallel to — and only a few miles inland from — the middle half of the coastline [more-or-less], because a seam of relatively soft rock reaches the surface here and has been eroded more deeply than the harder rocks to either side. To the south of this, much of the area between the mountains and the shore is occupied by a ‘karst’ landscape of heavily-eroded limestone with some quite spectacular landscape features (including at least one major set of caves, containing an underground river).
Shore: Much of the eastern coast is formed by cliffs, although fairly low ones, where relatively soft rocks have been eroded away leaving more resistant strata along the modern shore. Some of these have ‘wave-cut platforms’ at their bases. There are some lower areas, where certain rivers meet the sea and at this coast’s northern end where the main rock-types are different, and these have mangrove swamps present. Coral is relatively scarce here, compared to the more sheltered western side, but some smallish outcrops do occur particularly offshore from the karst region.
Coastal waters, less sheltered (and narrower) than those on the western side, shading quite quickly back into open seas.
The section of this nation that is located in the IDU basically occupies a peninsula extending southwards from the South Continent’s southern coast. It is not this nation’s main territory, which centres in the area that the name would presumably lead you to expect on a more RL-like version of Earth instead: This is just an outlying territory, called ‘Diamant', which the nation’s people reached using their advanced spacecraft.
(The nation’s player and people say that they travelled across the stars, to a different solar system, and that — although they agree with me about wildlife from Earth ending up here — the physical similarities between this planet and Earth [and between their solar systems, too] are just a happy coincidence: I think, however, that their vessels’ ‘interstellar’ drive must actually have turned out to be an ‘inter-dimensional’ one that moved them between two alternative versions of the same solar system instead. We’ll probably have to agree to disagree about this…)
The 'Basic Presumptions & Overview’ from which I am currently working place this nation approximately from 6[sup]o[/sup]S to 9[sup]o[/sup]S, with a maximum width of approximately 2 degrees of longitude: This would give it a N-S distance of around 210 standard miles, and a maximum E-W distance of around 150 standard miles, unless a “Tardis Effect” applies and it’s actually bigger on the inside than on the outside.
From what I remember of the region’s old topographical map, and as agreed by this nation’s player, there is a line of mountains running roughly N-S through the peninsula. I see that OOC the CTEd nation which formerly occupied these lands (although IC memories have presumably been retconned to say that it, like so many other CTEd nations, never existed at all…) apparently had one of its main cities on the eastern coast: This version of the peninsula is being retconned, however, to have all of its best “habitable” areas in the west instead. This change seems advisable due to the change in latitude involved now that we’ve expanded the map’s presumed scale, and I’m calling it a side-effect of whatever cosmic incident caused the latter retconned alteration in the structure of Reality… Making this change means that the “habitable” areas now all in the west are shielded from some of the equatorial rains and heat — and from hurricanes — by those mountains. The western side has a ‘dry season’ & ‘wet season’, but due to the different pattern of lands & seas these are be less extreme than those in RL experienced by [e.g.] India (i.e. the ‘Monsoons’).
________________________________________________________________
Basic Ecotypes
The nation’s natural habitats are basically arranged in a series of strips, running approximately north-south parallel to each other and mostly widest (where the nation as a whole is) in the north. Between the opens seas in the west and the open (and stormier) seas in the east, these, are:
Coral reefs
Coastal waters, sheltered to some extent by the reefs, and some enclosed as lagoons; some of these areas include ‘seagrass meadows’.
Shoreline: mostly consists of sandy beaches, although near the peninsula’s southern tip a branch of the mountains reaches the shore and provides both cliff-backed coves and offshore islets where (with reasonably safety from land-based predators) sea-lions emerge from the water to breed or just to rest.
Coastal plain: This is mostly covered by forests that are ‘tropical evergreen’ but are not actually ‘rainforest’.
Inland plains: There is a fairly gentle & long slope from the coast up to the actual foothills of the mountainous spine. Tropical evergreen forests extend inland along the river valleys, but further from the waters (inland and/or uphill) they shade through ‘tropical seasonal forest’ (including ‘thorn forest’) and scrub into wooded savannah, and then into open grassland. Some areas have sandy soils, low in both nutrients and moisture, within which those transitions in vegetation occur over shorter distances.
There is a significant area of marshland where two of the main rivers that join these plains meet, inland from the coastal forests, which usually undergoes flooding during the ‘west season’ to become a wider swamp. This area is generally considered to mark a “boundary” between the northern and central sections of those plains.
For approximately the southern one-third of the peninsula’s length, the seasonal forests & scrub inland from the coast merge almost directly with those of the mountain’s foothills, with little or no wooded savannah — let alone open grassland — in between.
Foothills: The last of the rain brought by winds from the east flows down from the mountains “behind” these, allowing the river valleys and the hills’ lower slopes to bear more wooded savannah, scrub, or even woodland, than generally exists along the stretches of the same rivers that flow through the open plains below. (Some areas may be suitable for growing Coffee.)
Mountain slopes (western side): These become steeper after the foothills, but still typically less so than on the eastern side. Scrub exist near the base but becomes patchier with height, leading into a predominantly grassy cover that includes quite sizeable stretches of relatively level ‘meadows’ in places. There are patches of scrub and even small trees in hollows where water can temporarily collect, but then there are also expanses of bare or almost-bare rock where the surface is so close to vertical that plants — and soil itself — cannot sit there easily.
Mountain summits: The almost-continuous cover of vegetation that exists lower down is replaced by scattered clumps, as one gets close to the snow-line (on any mountains high enough to have one…), and the seed-bearing plants largely give way to more primitive types.
Mountain slopes (eastern side): With much more water & a bit more warmth available, there is only a relatively thin belt of meadow before the ‘scrub belt’ starts. Bamboo, and “giant” forms of both heather and stinging nettles, are common members of the latter level’s plant communities. Below this is a belt of ‘’cloud forest’, where lower temperatures at higher altitudes cause humid air rising from below to release much of its moisture, resulting in extensive fogs and a considerable reduction in the direct sunlight received by plants: This is thickest in the ‘saddles’ between peaks, or other hollows, where that moisture is likeliest to be deposited, and may be “broken” by areas of direct connection between the two adjacent belts in between those. Ferns and mosses fare relatively well alongside the seed-bearing plants in these damp — but not too sunny — conditions. Below this, again, is a belt of ‘tropical montane rainforest’, largely containing species of trees that are better adapted to steeper slopes & thinner soils than are those of the lowlands.
Coastal plain: This is basically covered by ‘tropical lowland rainforest’. Its relative narrowness, combined with the way in which it slopes towards the sea, means that it has numerous small rivers but these don’t manage to combine into just a few large ones as would happen in larger & flatter expanses of this habitat (such as the RL basins of the Amazon or the Congo…): These conditions also mean that there are no large expanses of ‘flooded forest’ or swamps such as would also occur in larger & flatter rainforests. However, there is an intermittent line of lakes & swampy areas running parallel to — and only a few miles inland from — the middle half of the coastline [more-or-less], because a seam of relatively soft rock reaches the surface here and has been eroded more deeply than the harder rocks to either side. To the south of this, much of the area between the mountains and the shore is occupied by a ‘karst’ landscape of heavily-eroded limestone with some quite spectacular landscape features (including at least one major set of caves, containing an underground river).
Shore: Much of the eastern coast is formed by cliffs, although fairly low ones, where relatively soft rocks have been eroded away leaving more resistant strata along the modern shore. Some of these have ‘wave-cut platforms’ at their bases. There are some lower areas, where certain rivers meet the sea and at this coast’s northern end where the main rock-types are different, and these have mangrove swamps present. Coral is relatively scarce here, compared to the more sheltered western side, but some smallish outcrops do occur particularly offshore from the karst region.
Coastal waters, less sheltered (and narrower) than those on the western side, shading quite quickly back into open seas.