I'm guessing the strange place in question was Orion's Arm, everything there is written from a fictional POV 10,000 years in the future, but its sort of an open-license universe for very hard sci-fi. I don't contribute there much, setting is too transhuman for my tastes, but its a dumping ground for almost every real or not-too-fringy science idea for sci-fi purposes.



It would depend on what you mean by 'closer to the light source'. The poles are colder on Earth because the area near the equator is roughly perpendicular to the sun. You take a piece of paper and hold it flat toward a light and it gets maximum light per area, as you begin to tilt this decreases and edge-on it's nil. Do this with a basketball and because your eye is not linear in it's sensitivity you won't really notice that the area halfway up tilted at a 45° is getting less light than at the 'equator' but you might be able to see, especially outside where there's no reflected light, that the top 'pole' is much dimmer. This is the principle effect I'm referring to.

However you have to take it a little further when your 'sun' is some artificial thing orbiting the planet. For a star it is so far away the light may as well be parallel, not so here. If I'm holding a sheet of paper perpendicular to the light from a distant source it is uniformly lit, or mostly so, because the top and bottom of the paper or only a little further away from the light then the center. As I bring it nearer this ceases to be the case. Hold a normal sheet of paper far from a light bulb and it gets almost the same amount of light everywhere, but hold it right next to the bulb and the center is clearly brighter than the edges. For a world the size and mass of Earth, not rotating, a 24 hour day would be produced by placing it 26,000 miles from the center of Earth. The equator is then at 22,000 miles from the sun and the poles 26,000 and change from the hypotenuse. Specifically geosynch is 26,200 from the center of earth and the earth 3960 miles in radius so the pole (P) would be 3960²+26,200² = P² or P= 26,500 and the equator at 22,240 miles. That's actually a pretty big deal because it means for every 1000 watts of light falling on a spot near the equator a perpendicular spot at the pole, roughly 20% further from the light source, would be getting less light by the square of that distance, about 700 watts. That's before you even factor in the decreased light from curvature that we already have from our own sun. I would not be surprised if such a world had large ice caps a smaller habitable ring around the middle.

A problem here is that typically when I think about non-rotating worlds getting their light from an artificial satellite I assume it's because the world is bigger than could be conveniently rotated in a day. You build a shell world around a gas giant or brown dwarf and you begin to have to worry about centrifugal forces not just ripping the shell to pieces but making the apparent gravity at the equator lower than at the poles, make it wide enough and you either make your world egg-shaped so the equator is physically closer to the center or you might be have low gravity at the equator. I remember working out one super-planet built as a shell this way that had equatorial deserts with moon-like gravity and airships, probably over-looked something important but it was in the safe handwave area for amusing contemplation, it also had several thousands times the land area of earth which I always find appealing made up worlds.

As to the difference between air over water versus air over land, I'm afraid my knowledge on that is pretty slim, I don't know if land radiates heat out faster or slower than sea, or if the effect would be significant enough to dominate weather effects.




No prob, screwing around with artificial or alien world concepts is probably my biggest hobby and time burner.