Strip-mining the Galaxy and random walking an Octasphere!

I’m up late watching tomorrows’ episode of SFIA a little early on nebula. This is strip-mining the galaxy, bringing all the resources of the galaxy home to your galactic capital to build some sort of depot with everything under your watchful eye and iron hand… We can strip-mine stars with star lifting to lift the mass off the surface and carry it off with the nuclear fires of the sat. A planet gets mass shot off from mass drivers and orbital rings, using the remaining mass of the planet as the reaction mass and spinning down its rotation before spinning it up again. Eventually the planet is spinning backwards faster and faster until it literally flies apart! This is fairly easy to do with asteroids, some of which are already spun up by the sun with a process which adds spin over millions of years until things fairly quickly reach escape velocity for a tiny space mountain… Getting the stuff back to Earth or a central depot will probably involve lasers, the galactic interstellar highway network. In coming mass could be decelerated at a nice profit if done correctly and should more or less balance out, but may actually push Sol and the depot out of the galaxy!

Later this evening- I’m out of test strips and it’s too late to go get some… I’ll have to take care of it tomorrow.

I’ve done square to octasphere to death, but I am going to return to it with an implementation of a random walker to build a nice height map. In this case I simply want our random walker to wander around from point to point, not quad to quad; edge points are shared with the appropriate edge to wrap and then warp the square to my octasphere. As I have done this before, I’m not too interested in getting anything fancy done. Fancy comes next, after I get it working and I want to follow my random walker around, in which case I will have the page draw a square grid on the left and a sphere on the right which will rotate as needed to follow my walker around in its travels! 8-P

But wait! There’s more to my madness… I would love^2 to fake some plate tectonics, but more than that, I have this mad idea about assigning my world a certain amount of water and then flood the lower heights, which necessarily involves approximation. I can do the math, but better is the enemy of actually getting some working code. I know I am cutting short and if and when I get something done and have the time and desire I can make something better! For now I will set the random walker wandering while less than some number of grid points are land (or sea, if the walker is leaving wet footprints as opposed to muddy footprints), and pop the walker around at some point to get more than one land mass, possibly...