How would a Flat World work, visually?

[dema]

Disc World

Yep, I have one too. It was a work in progress years ago. Maybe 4e will get me interested again. I have the edges of the oceans falling off of the EDGE, causing a misty place between planes of gravity (spell jammer concept) and there are ship made to crash through to the other side of the gravity plane by going to the out skirts of the EDGE, flipping, twisting and getting back to the upside of the otherside. Never got a chance to work it all out though. Distance is limited by the godly created landscape and fog war type deal. It's fantasy for crying out loud.

 

[Tetsubo]

Think of the scale of a ringworld... the radius would be so great that to all intents and purposes it would be perfectly "flat" at any place you decided to plonk yourself.

But wouldn't you have the Great Arch over your head?

 

[Dlsharrock]

But wouldn't you have the Great Arch over your head?

On a truly gargantuan world where the curvature was so subtle as to be effectively flat, I think you'd have a narrow band overhead, narrowing ever further toward the apex. It would probably look more like a gap between two hemispheres of sky than some spectacular upside down world hanging above. Distance would be similar to that between the Earth and Moon, so you'd see vague shades of detail but for the most part it would look like a a very thin band widening as it dropped to either horizon. The spectacular stuff would happen where the band widened and you could really make out details of distant cities and countryside, or bird's eye perspectives of cloudscapes and weather. Personally I think the thickening of atmosphere caused by line of sight would cause a sort of hazy smog between the rising curve and the horizon so the arch would seem to hang in the sky rather than merge with the ground. To the immediate observer the world would seem to be flat, but that reckoning doesn't make it a flat world. An observer standing on the surface of a large enough globe (like, um, Earth I guess) could be forgiven for thinking his world was flat. In fact if you look at history...