Talk:Jinx (Known Space)

I removed the following:
 * The early colonists had a strong tendency towards swearing, but this seems to have diminished by Beowulf Shaeffer's time.

...because the ref in question only shows one individual, Mayor Herkimer, swearing, and may not be true of all Jinxian colonists. Noclevername 17:46, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Er, I don't think it would work like this, but can't find any references
For some reason I'm interested in whether this would be realistic. My intuition is that it would not, that the atmosphere would have to be in "hydrostatic equilibrium" just like the surface material. Perhaps the atmosphere would be different heights at different latitudes rather than different surface pressures. Foogus (talk) 20:56, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Vacuum at the ends of Jinx is due to orbital evolution
Not quite, Niven explained this in at least one of this novels. When Jinx formed it was at an orbital radius such that its orbital period around the gas giant was longer than the rotational pediod (day) of the giant. This causes the spin of the gas giant to transfer angular momentum to Jinx which then slowly moves to a larger and larger orbit. This exact process is occurring right now to Earth's moon so it does work. Mars is an interesting case where one moon (Phobos) is in a spin in orbit because its period is less than the Mars day and the other (Deimos) is in a spin out. Phobos will eventually get so close to Mars as to be torn apart. But in the Jinx case, Niven was saying that the crust of Jinx was strong enough that it retained the prolate shape even as the larger orbit reduced the tides but the atmosphere being free to move settled to the equatorial band. The real question is, would rock be strong enough to do that. Jinx's core is very poor in radioactive elements (as noted in the article), otherwise there's be enough heat production to power plate tectonics and thus a thin crust. If Jinx had a thin Earth like crust the planet would settle back to conform to the new geoid (ie the atmosphere and crust would follow the same shape). This is a pretty good discussion of this in a fan blog The Origin of Jinx —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.241.37.140 (talk) 20:22, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

No it's not
Jinx is supposedly larger than Earth. Even solid iron could not maintain that kind of disequilibrium. Foogus (talk) 11:20, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Meridian?
Is there not a mistake running through this article? I think that "meridian" should be "equator" throughout; but I haven't read the source material in sufficient detail to be sure. Please consider this! Thomas Goodey

Bandersnatchi
From Juggler of Worlds"

" Sigmund knew all about Bandersnatchi. The white, slug-like Jinxian creatures were the ultimate big game, bigger than brontosauruses. The Bandersnatchi were also intelligent, and hunting licenses were their main source of hard currency. The covenants that governed the safari trade restricted hunters' weapons to those that gave the prey a fair chance.

Roughly 40 percent of hunters didn't make it back."

According to this it is not one human per one Banderstach as stated in the article, but 2 humans who die for 3 Bandersnatch, i.e. it is not a fair fight. RiceMilk (talk) 18:39, 17 June 2013 (UTC)