Announcement & Information

Here Be Dragons: Book 1 Of The Emergence Series — www.royalroad.com · All chapters

Announcement & Information

Hello everyone!

After almost a year of writing and editing, the rewrite is finally complete!

For any newcomers, this story takes place in a universe where humans evolved upon an ocean world.
These humans were landlocked upon their native continent, but eventually made their way to the second industrial revolution before discovering other landmasses across the world.
Book 1 covers the journey of the first successful expedition to these foreign lands, which are inhabited by many strange and alien creatures.

This chapter contains maps and some preliminary information about this world, but the actual story starts with the next chapter.

For returning readers, I ended up making quite a few changes, as well as completely rewriting the first 120k words or so (with some significant changes to the rest). I could post an exhaustive list of changes at the end of this volume, if that's something that people would like to see.

As per popular request, the original draft version of the story is preserved as a separate volume. These chapters will also be prefaced with [OLD] in their title.

This story of mine was inspired by works like The Martian and Project Hail Mary (By Andy Weir), and the Temeraire series (By Naomi Novik).

VikasRao on Deviantart has also been a great help in providing and inspiring ideas for this story, and their work on speculatively biology (featuring realistic dragons) is insanely detailed.

I wrote this story for several reasons, but mostly in an attempt to cover a more interesting and sensible first contact scenario. I also wanted to create a "magical" world without magic – reality can be stranger and far more interesting than fiction, after all.

And finally, special thanks to my beta readers for their help and feedback!

Reference information

Maps:

Earth:

	Alt-Earth (In Real Units)	Earth
Mass	4.7725×10^24 kg	5.97×10^24 kg
Radius	6371 km	6371 km
Gravity	7.85 m/s^2 (80% Earth gravity)	9.81 m/s^2
Day	24 hours	24 hours
Year	420.1 days	365.24 days
Magnetic field	15,000 - 55,000 nT (Slightly weaker than Earth's due to more iron and less nickel within its core)	25,000 - 65,000 nT
Distance from sun	1.1 AU (163.480 million km) Perihelion: 161,807,881 km Aphelion: 167,307,471 km	1 AU (148.93 million km) Perihelion: 147,098,074 Aphelion: 152,097,701
Average Intensity of Energy received from Sun	1124 W/m^2	1360 W/m^2
Atmospheric Pressure	1.5 atm, 152.0 kPa	1 atm, 101.3 kPa
Atmospheric Composition	79.63% Nitrogen 18.31% Oxygen 2.045% Argon 0.015% CO2, H2, & trace gasses	78.08% Nitrogen 20.95% Oxygen 0.93% Argon 0.04% CO2 & trace gases
Average Temperature	16.1°C	13.9°C

Moon:

	Alt-Moon	Real Moon
Mass	1.62% of IRL Earth or 9.79689745 × 10²² kilograms	1.2% of Earth or 7.34767309 × 10²² kilograms
Diameter	3,814 km	3,474.8 km
Orbital Period	35 days, 1.3 hours	27 days
Average Orbital Distance	422,100 km	384,400 km

Scientific Units:

	Alt-Earth	Real Units
Measurement of Length	Same as Real Unit, as it was initially based on 1/10,000 of the distance from equator to north pole. Redefined using a physical bar of metal. Plans to be defined as 1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum are in progress.	Distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second
Measurement of Mass	1 liter (dm^3) of water at max density, higher atmospheric pressure means 1 alt-kg is greater than 1 kg, but by an insignificant amount. NOTE: Mass =/= weight Since gravity is 80% earth gravity, 100 kg on a scale will show 80 kg. 100 kg is still 100 kg on this planet, it just weighs less.	Defined in terms of planck constant
Measurement of Time	1 second = 1/36288000 of a year Minutes and hours are the same, for a total of 420 days in a year (exact value: 420.1 days)	Time it takes for caesium 133 atom, to vibrate 9,192,631,770 times
Measurement of Temperature	Like the metric system, this world uses the freezing point of water as 0° while the boiling point is 100°. However, the thicker atmosphere causes the boiling point of water to be a little higher, meaning their 100° is actually our 111.91°C. The freezing point of water is not significantly affected by the difference in atmospheric pressure.	Melting Point of water @1 atm = 0°C Boiling Point of water @1 atm = 100°C (Currently defined by Kelvin, which is defined by the Boltzmann constant)