The base temperature of Luna is significantly lower (-98C) than that of Earth (-4.8C), or even that of Mars (-48C). I noticed this at the beginning of this game (since I'm terraforming Luna) and it's bugging been bugging me ever since.
The problem is that I remember calculating (back in college thermodynamics class) the expected temperature of a black-body, perfectly thermally conductive sphere that's sitting at the radius of the Earth's orbit away from the Sun. The really cool part is that this calculation gives you roughly 300 degrees K (i.e. room temperature) without tweaking anything - it's just based on the Earth sucking up all the solar energy hitting the disk it occludes, and radiating it back out over its entire surface at a rate proportional to the fourth power of the temperature.
The part that's been bugging me is that the same calculation should hold true for the Moon as holds true for the Earth - they're both roughly the same distance from the Sun, and they're both spheres. The big difference is that the Moon doesn't have any big heat sinks (read oceans) on its surface, and so will undergo bigger temperature fluctuations. Still, the "average" temperature of the moon should be roughly 25C (the same as the Earth), not -100C. This says to me that there's something seriously broken with the temperature model in Aurora.
I did some googling around for "average lunar temperature" and found the following link:
http://www.lunarpedia.org/index.php?tit ... emperature which gives a pretty good analysis of all this. I also found a link to a paper claiming to measure the average Lunar temperature at the equator and getting 220C (but this is probably the surface temperature which undergoes wild fluctuations).
Oh, yeah, and Luna also claims to have a "10% Ice Sheet" Hydrosphere, the same as for Mars. I think this might be a bit over-optimistic
BTW, this also seems to indicate (to me at least) that maybe greenhouse are of more use in giving thermal "inertia" to a planet - preventing wild day/night temperature swings due to the night side radiating away all its heat overnight.
John
PS - If anyone other than Steve wants to respond to this, you should probably take it to another thread and reference the post (you can get the reference by searching for something like Lunar_Temperature in posts from me) so as not to clutter up the Bugs thread with a long discussion. I almost put this in a thread in mechanics, but at the end of the day I think that it's a bug that worlds at the same distance from the Sun don't have the same base temperature.
