Sol System in Starfire

[crucis]

Reducing the return on investment for colonization of Ice worlds and even gas giants would be a good idea.  

On the topic of gas giants its fairly clear from observations of some stars that what makes up a gas giant needs some updating from 3rdR.

I'm not sure what you mean by this sentence.  Are you referring to Hot Jupiters   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Jupiter, i.e. Type G planets existing in what Starfire would call a star's rocky zone?  I'm aware of Hot Jupiters, though haven't fully decided on whether or how to use them.  

And/or are your referring to "Eccentric Jupiters"?    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentric_Jupiter   EJ's are Type G planets having very eccentric orbits, and supposedly exist in 7% of all known systems with planetary systems, which makes them more common than Hot Jupiters.  However, EJ's are a very problematical type of planet to deal with in Starfire because of their eccentric orbits.  Starfire assumes circular orbits.  Highly eccentric orbits would be amazingly difficult to represent in Starfire, if one was using orbital movement.  Also, an EJ's eccentric orbit would disrupt other planetary orbits, which would require calculating the inner and outermost distances of the orbit, so that the other planetary orbits could be wiped out.  All in all, EJ's are just a pain in the butt that I intend to ignore for the sake of sanity.

Back to HJ's...  If they exist in fewer than 7% of known systems, then they're not terribly common.  That's not really a big deal.  The problem for me is that putting an HJ in the rocky zone ought to cause rather more orbital disruption than a Type G out in the Gas zone, since orbits in the rocky zone are rather closer together due to the nature of the Titius-Bode relationship that Starfire uses to produce orbits.  This isn't as difficult a problem as the orbits of EJ's, but it might require wiping out something like 1 orbit sunward and 1 orbit outward.

A number of examples of so called 'Super Jovians'  some in fairly proximity to the star have been noted along with things like Brown Dwarfs in larger numbers as we get better at detecting them orbiting larger stars.  Brown Dwarfs along with Red Dwarfs should be fairly common in space.

There are quite a few little details in these two sentences...

Super-Jovians are basically defined as gas giants possessing a mass greater than Jupiter.  Not sure that that fact by itself is particularly interesting, unless we were to start paying attention to different masses for Type G planets for some reason.  There's really not much point to saying that a Type G is Mass 1, 2, or 3, unless there's a particular reason... such as higher mass G's being able to hold more moons than lower mass G's.  As for Gas Giants being fairly close to their stars, i.e. Hot Jupiters, I've covered that above...  

Brown Dwarfs are sort of a mid point between being a very massive gas giant and a very low mass star, that don't really have enough mass to sustain nuclear fusion.  As a type of planet, I'm not sure how different they'd really be from a Type G gas giant, other than to call them a Mass 3 or 4 gas giant.  Could a BD have a biosphere?  Perhaps, we'd be starting to talk about distances measured in tactical hexes rather than LM's.  Ultra does happen to have an oddity that represents this situation.  But all in all, this is a bit too complex for a standard sysgen process.


As for the commonality of Red Dwarfs (and Brown Dwarfs), this is actually a different sort of question.  In real life, yes, Red Dwarfs supposed represent nearly 80% of all stars.  However, an underlying assumption of 2e/3e Starfire was that WP's were more likely to be attracted to higher mass stars than lower mass stars, hence the distribution on the star type table.  And frankly, I don't think that the use of this assumption violates reality, simply because it is making an assumption about the nature of WP formation that known reality cannot speak to.  It doesn't say that there are fewer Red Dwarfs than there should be.  It says that WP's are more likely to make connections to stars in proportions that do not match the same proportions that describe the numbers of each spectral class.

However, if I were to change the existing star type table's distribution to the real life distribution, it would almost certainly cause a drop in habitable planets of about 50% or more... thus causing an increase in exploration luck.  This is a very touchy subject.  Some people might love this, but many others might hate it.  Those for whom realism is important would probably enjoy such an adjustment.  Solo players might not mind it, since they don't have to worry that much about exploration luck issues.  More competitive players might not like it so much though.  But then again, more competitive players can already get grumpy when random system generation expresses its randomness is less than favorable ways (i.e. they don't get enough T/ST planets), so an adjustment that would cause a drop in T/ST's by 50% or more would probably not be met with much happiness from them.


As for Brown Dwarfs as "stars" in their own right, well, they seem rather useless, and would really, really complicate system generation.  It'd be tricky enough if they were acting as simply large Type G planets.  But as system primaries?  You'd end up having to do the sysgen process in tac hexes, not LM's.  And I'm not at all sure that we could make any assumptions about planetary formation zones, etc.  Frankly, BD's as system primaries seem like a headache I'd rather avoid.




BTW, note that just because I may come off in this post as sounding a bit negative about these ideas, don't think that I'm actually entirely negative.  I've actually put a fair amount of time and effort reading up on a lot of this stuff over the past year or so, and am open to considering such ideas as long as they can be done in a fairly simple, easy to use manner, and have some value.  For example, it's been my intention to include Red and Blue Supergiants as a system anomaly... that is, properly sized supergiants... that have stellar radii that could be measured in system hexes.  (IIRC, the largest known star has a stellar radius that equates to about 6 system hexes.)    And since WP's are attracted to higher mass stars, supergiants, though very rare, would almost certainly have considerable numbers of WP's.

Well, that's enough for now...

[drakar]

Personally I think that the Super Giant idea sounds very interesting, especially should the warp points be attracted to a much closer orbit of the star. (Especially where one could see tractors and pressor beams becoming more of a weapon of moving your opponent it to the star and not just one to force your opponent to not be able to disengage   )

[crucis]

Personally I think that the Super Giant idea sounds very interesting, especially should the warp points be attracted to a much closer orbit of the star. (Especially where one could see tractors and pressor beams becoming more of a weapon of moving your opponent it to the star and not just one to force your opponent to not be able to disengage   )

You also have to consider that super and hypergiants have immense coronas.  All stars have a corona that's equal to its radius... including super and hypergiants.  Thus, if a supergiant had a stellar radius of 4 system hexes, its corona will be another 4 system hexes.  If you are fighting near the edge of SG or HG's corona, a ship won't be automatically destroyed by the corona, but you do NOT want to be diving into it for any length of time.  So, yes, you could indeed use tractor or pressor beams to nasty effect near a star's corona, though you couldn't push the tractored ship particularly deep into the corona as you'd be limited by the range of the T or Pb... unless you were willing to dive into the corona yourself.

OTOH, as you imply, the corona will be sort of a "wall" that will affect ship movements.  And with SG and HG coronas, on the tactical scale, it'll appear to be a roughly flat "wall".  So, you could most definitely corner a fleeing enemy up against a corona, particularly a SH or HG corona, as on the tactical scale, there's no getting around those corona.  Heck, even on the system scale, it could be hard to get around a SG/HG corona, if you have a couple of forces to use to block a fleeing enemy from trying to go around.

[drakar]

The largest bit i can see about this type of system is the ability to slow a swarm and allow one to chose a more favorable position to fight it as most swarm are usually composed of smaller ships that move quickly and dive for your warp points in mass this corona forces them to move a more prolonged route that may just lead to a counter to the pesky things by forcing a battle near the corona where their smaller ships will surely suffer against larger ships that may be able to use the safety of this corona to prevent flanking movements from their nasty swarm enemies.

[procyon]

The issue with the very large gas giants we can now detect is that they are HUGE, and (with the exception of one that I am aware of) orbit at ridiclously fast rates.  Any small rocky planets in those systems would be thrown completely out of the main star's orbit much like Jupiter (and the migration of Neptune and Uranus) cleared the larger part of the smaller bodies from Sol system and threw them out into the Kuiper belt. It would simply be the equivalent to a close binary (main star-brown dwarf) with no planets.  Not much of an issue for the game.

As for the absolute abundance of rocks you could park on in Sol, we have no reason to beleive that other star systems would have less.  Particularly the ones with longer main sequence lives/less violent 'ignitions' (ie red dwarfs).  They likely have bunches of rocks around them also, but those stars by nature are not conducive to letting us get a look at their companions (yet).  I'm with crucis on the fact that if you want to be able to play the game with a pencil, you can't track a couple hundred bodies per system.  You'd have to carry binders for your first couple months surveying.  Let alone a campaign hundreds of turns long (which will turn into a couple binders on its own).

I do quite a bit of detailed coverage of the Sol system for my Nemesis Campaign, but that is for one simple reason.  They weren't going anywhere in a hurry.  The best way to keep it interesting, (and teach the kids a bit) was to include a lot of the bodies no one bothers with (ala hiding behind some of the smaller moons of Jupiter during the battles there).  If I have a four page layout of the bodies in Sol, but it wasn't getting any bigger, then that is workable.  The players also needed somewhere to settle if they weren't going off to other systems.  But four or so pages for every system would collapse under its own weight.

I personnally like the colonizing inner bodies and ignoring the rest (other than as terrain) solution if you are bouncing around the cosmos.  The hurdles of inhabitting all the little rocks of a system would be terribly hard.  All but the largest asteroids have rather eccentric rotations over the three axis and would make any sort of sustained ability to interact with it (just landing on the dumb things) difficult, and most likely have rather variable compostion which would make just being on one hazardous (although not quite so bad as the movie Armaggedon would have it).  Most of the outer moons would be so inhospitable as to make the asteroids look like vacation resorts with the big planets radiation belts, tidal effects on their moons, etc.  
Nope, Luna is a garden spot compared to those areas, nice and close to boot, and 50 years after we've been able to park there, we still haven't come up with a good reason to stay on it.  If humanity isn't interested in colonizing that body now - as overcrowded as we are getting, I doubt it will get better if we can just keep bouncing from system to system occasionally finding much easier places to stay.  If we couldn't find anything, then maybe.  But that is unlikely in Starfire.

But those are just my thoughts.  To each their own.  If you want that sort of detail, just put it in.  If you enjoy it, it won't be work.  And if it doesn't work, just learn from it and start over.  One of my best instructors told me that there was something to learn in everything, even if it was only that there was nothing there to learn.

[crucis]

The issue with the very large gas giants we can now detect is that they are HUGE, and (with the exception of one that I am aware of) orbit at ridiclously fast rates.  Any small rocky planets in those systems would be thrown completely out of the main star's orbit much like Jupiter (and the migration of Neptune and Uranus) cleared the larger part of the smaller bodies from Sol system and threw them out into the Kuiper belt. It would simply be the equivalent to a close binary (main star-brown dwarf) with no planets.  Not much of an issue for the game.

As for the absolute abundance of rocks you could park on in Sol, we have no reason to beleive that other star systems would have less.  Particularly the ones with longer main sequence lives/less violent 'ignitions' (ie red dwarfs).  They likely have bunches of rocks around them also, but those stars by nature are not conducive to letting us get a look at their companions (yet).  I'm with crucis on the fact that if you want to be able to play the game with a pencil, you can't track a couple hundred bodies per system.  You'd have to carry binders for your first couple months surveying.  Let alone a campaign hundreds of turns long (which will turn into a couple binders on its own).

I do quite a bit of detailed coverage of the Sol system for my Nemesis Campaign, but that is for one simple reason.  They weren't going anywhere in a hurry.  The best way to keep it interesting, (and teach the kids a bit) was to include a lot of the bodies no one bothers with (ala hiding behind some of the smaller moons of Jupiter during the battles there).  If I have a four page layout of the bodies in Sol, but it wasn't getting any bigger, then that is workable.  The players also needed somewhere to settle if they weren't going off to other systems.  But four or so pages for every system would collapse under its own weight.

I personnally like the colonizing inner bodies and ignoring the rest (other than as terrain) solution if you are bouncing around the cosmos.  The hurdles of inhabitting all the little rocks of a system would be terribly hard.  All but the largest asteroids have rather eccentric rotations over the three axis and would make any sort of sustained ability to interact with it (just landing on the dumb things) difficult, and most likely have rather variable compostion which would make just being on one hazardous (although not quite so bad as the movie Armaggedon would have it).  Most of the outer moons would be so inhospitable as to make the asteroids look like vacation resorts with the big planets radiation belts, tidal effects on their moons, etc.  

Nope, Luna is a garden spot compared to those areas, nice and close to boot, and 50 years after we've been able to park there, we still haven't come up with a good reason to stay on it.  If humanity isn't interested in colonizing that body now - as overcrowded as we are getting, I doubt it will get better if we can just keep bouncing from system to system occasionally finding much easier places to stay.  If we couldn't find anything, then maybe.  But that is unlikely in Starfire.

But those are just my thoughts.  To each their own.  If you want that sort of detail, just put it in.  If you enjoy it, it won't be work.  And if it doesn't work, just learn from it and start over.  One of my best instructors told me that there was something to learn in everything, even if it was only that there was nothing there to learn.

First of all ... Miketr, I'm sorry if I've hijacked your thread.  I'm just happy to be able to discuss these issues with people outside of my own little group, that I'm thrilled to get some feedback from other sources...


Procyon, I've been refining my "rocky zone colonization concentration" concept over the past day or so...  Rather than completely ban it or prevent those gas/ice zone moons from having income (which was my first inclination), I've been looking at SM#2 for some inspiration.  In SM#2, there were separate environment and mineral wealth modifiers.  And the result was that "extreme" environment populations tended to "take it in the shorts" pretty hard.  And I'm starting to think that the best way to promote rocky zone colonization over gas and ice zone colonization is to start forcing those gas and ice zone populations to start taking in the economic shorts again...

Furthermore, someone else's comments got me to thinking about an additional vector in this regard... and that is, slightly changing the way that mineral wealth is looked at.  What I'm looking at is making mineral wealth get progressively better as you get closer to the system primary.  That is, rocky zone mineral values would be better on average than gas zone mineral values, which would in turn be better than ice zone mineral values.  This sort of tracks with reality, since denser metal ores have a tendency to be attracted to forming in planets closer to the star.  It also helps to promote rocky zone colonization since those worlds would be on average a bit wealthier in their mineral wealth.

When all's said and done, the ROI's for ice zone moons may end up looking pretty nasty, and gas zone moon ROI's not much better, while rocky zone Type B's may look half decent.

[procyon]

Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of SM#2 (I have always liked to be able to pick up a book and read it), and will have to take it on faith for this.  With poor returns on the outer planets, I do see little reason for colonizing them.  Especially if the inner zone is more likely to be a 'richer' find.   But it all begs the idea of why bother with the outer parts of the system at all.

On the subject of colonizing the outer bodies, I will concede that it would be easier to include a rule that I can choose not to use, than to omit it and irritate those folks who would like the option.  My Nemesis game is pretty much based around those outer bodies and the rules concerning them, so I don't have much room to squawk.

As for mineral values, if its playable, its fine with me.  Most of our guesses about what we will find in other systems are just that, guesses.  As will what we find valuable at a given time.  Folks long ago weren't too impressed with petroleum, hated finding aluminum because it was so hard to refine, and had lots of taboos about other chemical we just can't do without now.  The current problems with the games economics are more of an issue to me than the values tagged to the planets.

As for planetary formation zones, my players hate me because they never know what they will find -  'cause I tend to change it .  The discovery of gas giants orbitting in Mercury type orbits kind of frees up any sort of mischief for the SM for planetary formation zones (I suppose you can argue that some of them are actually rocks of Jupiter size and greater mass, its possible.  Gives new meaning to a mass 3 rocky planet ! )  The fact those big pups are in retrograde orbits about 25% of the time has kind of messed up several notions of planetary formation in general.

I just like the game, and running it for my group.  Give me a good framework, and I can write a good story.
That is all I ask.  The rest is just details.
But the devil is in those details. :oops:

[miketr (OP)]

I got what I was looking for out of the thread I have no objection to the thread moving about.

I am not so sure on the idea of ROI being tied to distance to the star.  Once you are no longer talking about living on the planets certain things become no longer assumed.  Water (also the H2 and O if its broken down) and Organics.  Metals are nice but people in space need Water, Oxygen, Hydrogen, etc and those "dirty snowballs" out passed the liquid water zone of the star could be very handy.  Its really a question of what do you want to mine?

In a response to Crucis up thread I am talking about the really large planets that 20 to 50 times the size of Jupiter.  What some people call brown dwarfs.  Those would be real handy at wrecking anything near them in the star system.

Michael

[crucis]

I got what I was looking for out of the thread I have no objection to the thread moving about.

I am not so sure on the idea of ROI being tied to distance to the star.  

Well, this really is already the case in both SM#2 and 4e/5e.  My thinking is more of a case of returning to a more SM#2 level of "aggressiveness", I might say, to dis-incentivize gas and ice zone colonization.  In 4e/5e, SDS made adjustments to the desolate and extreme ROI's in ways to promote not only in-system colonization of them, but to promote some degree of out-system colonization of them, as a way of promoting an overall strategy of exploration over the stay-at-home strategy. In this case, I like the reason, but not the method.  

I want to promote rocky zone colonization and dis-incentivize gas and ice zone colonization, as a part of my general D/E book keeping simplification concept.  Of course, if gas and ice zone colonization remains profitable, even at reduced levels, that may not exactly do much to cause people to not want to colonize those rocks, though making Rocky zone non-habs more profitable than gas and ice zone non-habs should tend to cause them to focus their colonization efforts in the rocky zone for at first.  Another thing that I'm thinking about is perhaps allowing all moons orbiting each planet to be pool into a little pool for that planet (but not combined with the planet's economy, if there is one).  This would reduce the numbers of economic records for moons somewhat.  Also, it would simplify the question of where your populations are.  That is, if one uses a desolate moon pool for an entire star system (or even a binary), without relatively complex placement SOP orders, you have no idea where those populations are.  But if one pools only those moons orbiting each each planet, you have more records (though less than you'd have for each individual moon), but you have less of a problem with knowing where your people are.  Also, it tends to make the question relative to sensor bases less difficult, since on the system level, it may not matter too much which moon around Neptune you have an Outpost on, as long as there is one on one of its moons, when it comes to system level detection ranges, since all of those moons would be in the same system hex (orbiting Neptune).

Once you are no longer talking about living on the planets certain things become no longer assumed.  Water (also the H2 and O if its broken down) and Organics.  Metals are nice but people in space need Water, Oxygen, Hydrogen, etc and those "dirty snowballs" out passed the liquid water zone of the star could be very handy.  Its really a question of what do you want to mine?

The definite presumption of non-habitable colonization is that they are mining facilities.  I agree that it's a question of what you want to mine.  I've tended to think that the important things to be mined for strategic purposes are the metal ores.  Mining of things like water, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. seem more like local concerns necessary to keep the local population viable in increasingly more difficult environments (but that may be my misperception).

In a response to Crucis up thread I am talking about the really large planets that 20 to 50 times the size of Jupiter.  What some people call brown dwarfs.  Those would be real handy at wrecking anything near them in the star system.

Eek!  20-50 times the size of Jupiter?  I thought that I read somewhere that there was a theoretical upper limit of size relative to Jupiter of around something like 17 times J. (I'm just taking a wild stab at that number, as it's been a long while since I read the article.).  Also, IIRC, the gist of the article seemed to be that as after some point, increasing the mass above Jupiter would tend to produce diminishing returns relative to actual size, as gravity would tend to cause increased degrees of density, etc.

Regardless, thanks for reminding me about "wrecking anything nearby" in the star system thing.  That's certainly an ... interesting thing about brown dwarfs, to be sure.  And speaking of "wrecking anything near them"... should this be an increased chance to simply destroy the next orbit sunward?  Or/and perhaps it should completely eliminate the next orbit sunward and outward, on the presumption that the Brown Dwarf sucked in all that matter in its creation?  

I will admit that I do worry that this could make the sysgen process a bit more complex.  OTOH, I don't know how many people really do sysgen manually, when there are sysgen utility programs available to download, or often people (such as myself) write their own.

[crucis]

Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of SM#2 (I have always liked to be able to pick up a book and read it), and will have to take it on faith for this.  With poor returns on the outer planets, I do see little reason for colonizing them.  Especially if the inner zone is more likely to be a 'richer' find.   But it all begs the idea of why bother with the outer parts of the system at all.

On the subject of colonizing the outer bodies, I will concede that it would be easier to include a rule that I can choose not to use, than to omit it and irritate those folks who would like the option.

That's pretty much the key point of my thinking at the moment, procyon. If I remove outer system colonization, some people would say why can't I colonize there...  OTOH, if I allow colonization of those outer system moons, but just make them rather less profitable, then they can't complain that they can't colonize them.

As for planetary formation zones, my players hate me because they never know what they will find -  'cause I tend to change it .  

I'd think that that was pretty cool.  Part of the fun of strategic starfire is the exploration... finding new and interesting star systems.  It'd be pretty boring if every star system just came from a set of something like only 5 templates.

The discovery of gas giants orbitting in Mercury type orbits kind of frees up any sort of mischief for the SM for planetary formation zones (I suppose you can argue that some of them are actually rocks of Jupiter size and greater mass, its possible.  Gives new meaning to a mass 3 rocky planet ! )  The fact those big pups are in retrograde orbits about 25% of the time has kind of messed up several notions of planetary formation in general.

Oh, yeah.... finding a Hot Jupiter must be ... interesting!!!

[miketr (OP)]

Super Jovian vs. Brown Dwarf?  

As you pointed out Crucis above a certain mass number, 10 or 13 Jupiter masses things this big don't get much bigger in terms of their volume.  Lack of hydrogen or helium fusion causes gravity to compact them down.  The volume numbers are governed by things like electron degeneracy pressure and coulomb pressure; with math I wouldn't even claim to have any idea how they work.  The issue for formation of planets and orbits in a system with one of these things isn't the volume of space they sweep but their mass and resulting gravity foot print.    

Some big gas balls are going to have larger volumes because they are very hot physically; odds are because they are close to the star they orbit and get lots of heat from the star and this causes the gas balls volume to increase.

We don't know how common objects under 80 Jupiter's are because they are just so hard to find.  Considering how common red dwarfs are in our area I tend to think that these large sub-stellar objects are fairly common.

Michael

[crucis]

miketr, speaking of Red Dwarf stars and gas giants, check out this link:  http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/2006/1213.html

The linked article talks about how it appears that gas giants are less likely around Red Dwarf stars, though the data is still rather limited and statistically inconclusive.

Such a concept would have significant effects on planetary formation around Red and Red Dwarf stars in Starfire (Red and Red Dwarf stars in Starfire compromise what are called "Red Dwarfs" in real life).  The practical effects that I'd foresee is that you might see Type B (O2) planets or much smaller, Neptune sized gas giants in those star types' gas zones.  Heck, it might also affect the formation of ice giants as well, resulting in either smaller Ice Giants (though there's probably a practical min size for the smallest gas or ice giants, that I've read to be around about 13 earth masses) or Type F planets.


I might look into seeing how this could be accomplished, as it could make Red and Red Dwarf stars a bit different than the larger, hotter star types.

[mavikfelna]

Just a quick throw in, using planetary moon pools and making book keeping easier.

The pools would be good, but why not just have them add to the planet population total. It would just make it much easier. For non-colonizable planets, just pool the moons.

Also, for H, F, and B planets, asteroids and moons, I'd just set the mineral value for all bodies of those types. Probably something close to H = .8, B = .95, and F=.5. Adjust downward to makes the ones you want less inviting/less valuable.

--Mav

[crucis]

Just a quick throw in, using planetary moon pools and making book keeping easier.

The pools would be good, but why not just have them add to the planet population total. It would just make it much easier. For non-colonizable planets, just pool the moons.

Also, for H, F, and B planets, asteroids and moons, I'd just set the mineral value for all bodies of those types. Probably something close to H = .8, B = .95, and F=.5. Adjust downward to makes the ones you want less inviting/less valuable.

--Mav

I'm not really interested in adding them to planetary populations, particularly when the moon and planets are of differing environment types.  However, I am considering pooling all moons around the same planet.  There are certain advantages... One is that for the purposes of knowing where your population is, there are fewer issues.  There are really only up to 5 moons to choose from (sometimes less).  Also, militarily, for listening post OP's, it doesn't matter all that much which moon orbiting Neptune has that 1 PU, as long as one of those moons as the OP and its innate sensors, since all of Neptune's moons are in the same system hex.

As for mineral values, I actually have been thinking about something along those lines.  For one thing, when you start pooling anything, you really do need to do something "different".  Oh, I suppose, in a 2 moon "pool" you could just average the 2 moons' mineral values.  But for simplicity's sake, it's easier to have common values... particularly for moons.

As for the actual values, I've been actually leaning towards something that has sort of a more real life feel to it, wherein bodies closer to stars are more likely to have better mineral values than those further away because more massive metals have a tendency to be drawn in closer to stars than lighter gases and "ices".  This is a reason why planetary densities have a tendency to get increasingly more dense as you look at planets that are closer and closer to their stars.  Now, as for how this would end up manifesting itself is undecided, but I was about to look at the idea you suggest, i.e. assigning mineral values by planetary type.  My general thought is to leave T/ST's to use a range of mineral values.

[miketr (OP)]

miketr, speaking of Red Dwarf stars and gas giants, check out this link:  http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/2006/1213.html

The linked article talks about how it appears that gas giants are less likely around Red Dwarf stars, though the data is still rather limited and statistically inconclusive.

Such a concept would have significant effects on planetary formation around Red and Red Dwarf stars in Starfire (Red and Red Dwarf stars in Starfire compromise what are called "Red Dwarfs" in real life).  The practical effects that I'd foresee is that you might see Type B (O2) planets or much smaller, Neptune sized gas giants in those star types' gas zones.  Heck, it might also affect the formation of ice giants as well, resulting in either smaller Ice Giants (though there's probably a practical min size for the smallest gas or ice giants, that I've read to be around about 13 earth masses) or Type F planets.


I might look into seeing how this could be accomplished, as it could make Red and Red Dwarf stars a bit different than the larger, hotter star types.

The article is interesting on the Red Dwarfs but as they point out the sample size makes it hard to draw conclusions.  If smaller stars are much less likely to have worlds of any size then the become much less valuable than they already are and they are fairly worthless as is.  

One thought is if you have Gas Giants inside of the liquid water zone of these smaller stars then perhaps one of the moons of the gas giant might have a hospital environment.  I know at least one star, I think a Red Dwarf, has a Jovian planet in such a position.  

On the subject of size for gas worlds minimum size you might want to read this article  its pure theory but makes for interesting reading.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/new ... anets.html

Michael