As this is my first post let me start by saying hi to everyone here. I have been following as a reader this forum for quite some time and I find it really interesting, a really good place where people can discuss in a civil manner upon the true shape of Earth.
I would like to discuss about some (possible) implications of General Relativity (GR) in the FET.
According to the FAQ gravitation in the FET is due to the constant acceleration of the Earth and the equivalence principle in GR. This means that the geometry of the space in which Earth is is not Euclidean (even if it is still flat in the sense that the curvature is zero), in particular this means that light should bend downwards. This is not a noticeable effect, but this also means that we won't really see Earth as flat even if we are standing on an high enough tower. Maybe we could see something like a curved horizon if the Earth is large enough... (but this effect could not be confused with the curvature in RET: this one should be even much less noticeable).
So what I am saying is that Earth is not flat at least according to the intuitive idea of flatness even in FETs.
My proposal is then to give up some of the "flatness" of the Earth in FETs in order to be able to fix some difficulties in the theory. One for all the shape of the land masses. It's against the experience of most people that Australia has a size comparable with the size of Asia like here:
and this is just an example: it seems to be really difficult to make an accurate (on both the "hemispheres"!) map in the FET framework.
If Earth is flat then probably it's sitting upon a really massive object (a think layer of rocks or something more exotic) than according to GR this masses are bending the structure of spacetime actually changing the underlying geometry, changing the relative distance of places and so on. This could also explain ship sinking and other RE-like optical phenomena in terms of gravitational effects on the light.
Here there are many possibilities... one that I am thinking on is the RFET the "Round Flat Earth Theory" or NCFET "No Conspiracy Flat Earth Theory", it is a FET theory in which the true shape of Earth is a *flat* sheet like this:
orbiting around an hypermassive object (a black hole?) leading to massive gravitational optic effects and distance distortions. Up to the point that people flying at really high altitudes (even up to the moon?) could be lead to think that Earth is a ball, so that no conspiracy is required for the Theory... (Conspiracy being perhaps the most difficult thing to believe for me in any FET).
Edges in the Earth map could be connected thanks to the multi-link topology of spacetime.
I still have to figure out many things in this RFET, but I do really think that it is possible to mathematically construct a FET model + spacetime curvature explaining any of the "RE" effects...