Types of System Bodies and purpose?

[Mor (OP)]

According to the Galactic map system overview, those are the System Bodies found within star systems:

• Terrestrial Planets
• Terrestrial Moons
• Superjovians
• Gas Giant
• Planetoids
• Small Moons
• Asteroids

Which in game terms probably means:

• Terrestrial Planets = every celestial body that falls withing our species environmental tolerance. 
• Terrestrial Moons same as the above, only orbiting anything other than a star. 
• Gas Giant - No colonies, possible source of fuel?
• Superjovians- Big Gas Giant.   
• Planetoids - non Terrestrial Planets, but can be mined (limited colony)
• Small Moons -same as the above only obitting anything othet than a stat
• Asteroids - same as the above only found in asteroid belts, can be mined (limited colony)

However, in the system info listing there is no mention of Planetoids, instead we have Dwarf Planets, chunks, Comets and possibly other things that I have yet to encounter. 
 
Can anyone please expand\correct my limited perception of what we might encounter out here and how it effects gameplay. 

[MarcAFK]

I can't fully explain every body type, but I'll give a brief explanation of what the limiting factors are to how you'll actually use the bodies.
Firstly gas giants and superjovians can't be colonised, however they are locations you can send fleets to and fuel harvesters sent to gas giants with sorium will refill their fuel tanks.
Terrestrial planets and moons are the best places for colonisation, sometimes they'll have great mineral availability and a good environment, rarely they'll have a suitable atmosphere for life.
Most other bodies, ie dwarf planets, minor moons, chunks, asteroids, comets and even smaller terrestrials are colonizable, but if their gravity is too low they're only inhabitable with expensive underground infrastructure.
Mineral availability is generally increased by planet diameter,  large terrestrials having the best chance of being excellent, sometimes having gigantic reserves of all minerals, albeit most being of low accessibility. Also comets usually have a bonus compared to asteroids and are great for mining.

[Rich.h]

Bear in mind also the term terrestrial is very loose in Aurora. While we here live on a terrestrial planet, the game also classes places such as Europa as a terrestrial moon, even if you were to melt the ice so it was one giant ocean. Terrestrial simply means that providing there is not a massive amount of gravity difference from the body to your species levels, then it can be colonised with the required amount of infrastructure. But for RP purposes you may decide not to do so, or limit what you put there and so on. The only real way to get some kind of insight into what type of ball a body actually is, is to delve into the statistics of the F9 window, there you find all sorts of info like basic composition (your gas giants, chunks, etc), surface temperatures, gravity and so on.

[Mor (OP)]

1.   If I understand correctly, system bodies are tagged terrestrial only if they are within our species gravity tolerance.   Which isn't to suggest that they are habitable, only that they can be made so through terraforming (gravity being the only thing that we can't change).   While their current suitability is reflected by the tag color.   Correct?

2.   Is planet diameter the only parameter effecting mineral availability? e.  g.   Does Gas giants should be though after due to higher availability\accessibility of sorium than average, or they just lack everything else.   Same for comets, any reason why we should bother with them instead of mining asteroids or anything else?

3.   Does LP, inter-system jump points, are only created around Superjovians?

4.   Chunks?!

5.   I seen mention of Black Holes, does anyone have a system map with one of those?

[Erik L]

1 - It seems that all planets that are not gas giants, asteroids, chunks, or dwarfs are Terrestrial. The suitability is reflected in the colonization cost (and color for a quick classification).

2 - Gas giants have only sorium. AFAIK availability is random, with larger planets having higher concentrations. That being said, a world classed as a Home World has more minerals in volume and availability. Along with having all of them.

3 - Yes.

4 - It seems to be anything under a diameter of 2000km, but there are some exceptions. Ceres is labelled a dwarf and is 984 diameter. Rhea is ~1500 and is a chunk.

5 - Since most play with Real Stars, no black holes.

[MarcAFK]

I've analized the planets pretty well while making my image pack. Terrestrial appears to be any body over about 3000 km diameter that isn't a gas giant.
Chunk is any moon that's not large enough to be terrestrial.
Dwarf planets are a little more confusing, I've seen asteroids bigger than dwarf planets, but on average dwarf planets are around 1000 km. I assume they could be anywhere under the 3000 km terrestrial limit. For comparison the moon is just over 3000 km and just at the limit of .1 g.
It appears asteroids are generated after the other planets and therefore can be of varying size.
Comets are basically asteroids with very irregular orbits, sometimes of billions of years per orbit.
Asteroids seem to have higher mineral availability than moons of the same size, but comets definitely have a much higher chance if being mineral rich. Virtually every comet I've surveyed has something. In my old game only 1 out of 24 comets had nothing.

Back to your questions, inhabitability has nothing to do with terrestrial suitability.
You'll find many terrestrials with too high gravity. But if they have a good atmosphere an NPR could spawn there who finds it ideal, or you could use SM mode and play with high gravity humans or whatever.
Legrange point JPs are indeed created as a result of superjovians.
Black hole systems are empty as I recall, they'll have jump points, and ships will lose speed, 1000 km/s per level of black hole I believe.

[Mor (OP)]

So it can be simplified into:

• * Large bodies - Gas Giants and Super-jovians - uninhabitable. 
• * Medium bodies - Terrestrial planets/moons.  Best prospects for colonies.
• * Small bodies - plantoids(small planets), chunks(small moons), asteroid (found in asteroid belts) and Comets (irregular orbits) - The later are best prospects for minerals deposits.

As for terrestrial suitability, is there some kind of formula for this other than following the universal color code i. e.  red is bad.

[MarcAFK]

The colour code will show suitability for your player race, it's affected by temperature, oxygen content, presence of toxic gasses etc.
If the wiki is still up the terraforming page will give specifics.

    ) If the atmosphere is not breathable, the colony cost is 2.0.
    ) If there are toxic gases in the atmosphere then the colony cost will be 2.0 for some gases and 3.0 for others.
    ) If the pressure is too high, the colony cost will be equal to the Atmospheric Pressure divided by the species maximum pressure with a minimum of 2.ie
    ) If the oxygen percentage is above 30%, the colony cost will be 2.0
    ) The colony cost for a temperature outside the range is Temperature Difference / Temperature Deviation. So if the deviation was 22 and the temperature was 48 degrees below the minimum, the colony cost would be 48/22 = 2.18

The bottom line refers to temperature difference between the planet's temperature and the species lowest ideal temperature (subtract it's allowed deviation from it's actual ideal temperature)/ the species allowed temperature deviation. So for normal humans the ideal temperature is 14 degrees and Max deviation of 24. Minimum ideal temperature therefore is -10
I believe mars has a default temperature of about -48 degrees, that's a 38 degree difference divided by 24. Colony cost should be 1.58 But is at 2.00 because of the atmosphere being unbreathable. I just checked this by adding .1 atm oxygen, .1 atm greenhouse gas and .1378 antigreenhouse gas, the atmosphere becomes breathable but is still -48 degrees. Colony cost is 1.5833

[Prince of Space]

5 - Since most play with Real Stars, no black holes.

Didn't Steve turn black holes back on for Real Stars in 6.40?

[Erik L]

Didn't Steve turn black holes back on for Real Stars in 6.40?

Not sure. Last real game I played was 6.0 or so.

[Prince of Space]

It's in the release notes, but I haven't played enough lately to run into one myself.

[boggo2300]

Didn't Steve turn black holes back on for Real Stars in 6.40?

I don't see how that would make any difference in Real Stars,  where is there a black hole that you could encounter?

[Black]

I discovered Black Hole in my last Known Star Game (6.40) and it was actually connected to one of the Sol Jump Points.

[Rich.h]

I can confirm that 6.43 did have black holes for real star games. I came across two in two separate games, haven't played enough of 7.0 yet to find any but I would imagine they are still there. The previous version ones I found though were very rare things.

[Mor (OP)]

So after reading the above and that terraforming page. I believe that:

Planets and Moons that are within acceptable gravity range tagged as Terrestrial, or Dawf planets and Chunks otherwise. Which makes sense since Terrestrial generally means suitable for humanoid life. And according to the terraforming page, planets can only suppot population if they meet the gravity criterion (which inturn linked to the body size) ***

The planet suitability is influenced by several environmental factors, generally summarized by colony cost. The Terrestrial tag color reflects where the planet on the colony cost range from 0-blue ideal to 25-black barren and dead.



***From the terraforming page:

In addition to the individual species tolerances, the requirements for an ideal habitable world are no dangerous gases such as Chlorine or Hydrogen Sulphide and a maximum oxygen percentage of 30%. A planet that doesn't meet the gravity criterion is uninhabitable and there is nothing you can do about that. Falling outside one or more of the other criteria means the planet will have a colony cost above zero.

So the original breakdown was:

Gas-Giants: Not colonize-able
Terrestrial: Colonize-able and habitable
Everything else: Colonize-able but not habitable.

The only thing that has changed since that tutorial was written, is that since v6.something we can build underground infrastructure making previously unhabitable bodies (colony cost N/A) habitable by throwing at it a lot of resources.