Post by: miketr on April 25, 2010, 09:55:38 PM
Post by: crucis on April 25, 2010, 10:03:52 PM
Here's a version of it using the currently envisioned planetary codes for Cosmic.
Type H = Hot (i.e. Mercury-like)
Type B = Barren
Type F = Frozen
An 'm' prefix indictates a moon. And an 'a' prefix indicates an asteroid belt.
Code: [Select]
Primary Star Type: Yellow --> Sol
3 LM -- H (mass 1) --> Mercury
6 LM -- V (mass 2) --> Venus
8 LM -- T (mass 2) --> Earth
mB --> Luna
13 LM -- B (mass 1) --> Mars
23 LM -- aB --> Asteroid Belt
43 LM -- G --> Jupiter
mB --> Io
mB --> Europa
mB --> Ganymede
mB --> Callisto
79 LM -- G --> Saturn
mB --> Tethys
mB --> Dione
mB --> Rhea
mB --> Titan
mB --> Iapetus
160 LM -- I --> Uranus
mF --> Ariel
mF --> Umbriel
mF --> Titania
mF --> Oberon
250 LM -- I --> Neptune
mF --> Triton
Post by: drakar on April 25, 2010, 10:05:55 PM
Post by: miketr on April 26, 2010, 12:42:18 AM
Crucis thanks!
I am debating doing a new campaign with Sol as the start. The players will control different Earth Governments, like many of the Aurora stories. So I am looking for something to use for that idea.
Post by: miketr on April 26, 2010, 08:28:30 AM
Under the current rules Mars, Luna, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Iapetus, Rhea, Dione and Tethys are all treated as O2 bodies despite a massive spread in size, gravity and atmosphere. Also the asteroid belt by base rules is assumed by its distance to have about 115 asteroid colonies, note that Ceres is 32% of the mass found in the Asteroid Belt and far larger than any other asteroid.
Looking at things in detail just reinforces my sense that low mass O2 worlds like Mars should be treated different than the moons of Gas Giants. A world like Mars because of its higher gravity and better surface temperature is going to be a far more favorable target for colonization. If anything I think a strong case could be made that a high tech civilization would find Mars a better environment to colonize than a Heavy Gravity World.
Name Surface Area
Earth 510,072,000 km²
Luna 37,930,000 km²
Mars 144,798,500 km²
Asteroid Belt (200 Asteroids with a diameter larger than 100km)
Ceres 2,845,795 km²
Pallas 929,239 km²
Vesta 878,701 km²
Hygiea 583,290 km²
Interamnia, 704 333,707 km²
Europa, 52 284,487 km²
Davida, 511 262,256 km²
Cybele, 65 234,021 km²
Eunomia, 15 225,527 km²
Juno 209,011 km²
Jupiter
Ganymede 87,000,000 km²
Callisto 73,000,000 km²
Io 41,910,000 km²
Europa 30,900,000 km²
Saturn
Titan 83,000,000 km²
Rhea 7,337,000 km²
Iapetus 6,700,000 km²
Dione 3,952,896 km²
Tethys 3,568,158 km²
Enceladus 797,610 km²
Mimas 490,000 km²
Uranus
Titania 7,820,000 km²
Oberon 7,285,000 km²
Umbriel 4,296,000 km²
Ariel 4,211,300 km²
Miranda 700,000 km²
Neptune
Triton 23,018,000 km²
Post by: miketr on April 26, 2010, 10:34:16 AM
Michael
Code: [Select]
Sol System
3 LM -- O1 (mass 1) --> Mercury
6 LM -- V (mass 2) --> Venus
8 LM -- T (mass 2) --> Earth (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Luna (Size cap 100 PU) (MW = Rich)
13 LM -- O2 (mass 1) --> Mars (Size cap 250 PU)(MW = Rich)(Environment 0.8)
23 LM --> Asteroid Belt
O2 --> Ceres (Size cap 32 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Pallas (Size cap 20 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Vesta (Size cap 20 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Hygiea (Size cap 18 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Interamnia 704 (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Europa 52 (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Davida 511 (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Cybele 65 (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Eunomia 15 (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Juno (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
One Hundred and five other Asteroid Colony sites (Max Size Cap of 16 PU and MW = Rich)
Note: Ceres can be colonized by two players, each with a cap of 16 PU.
43 LM -- G --> Jupiter
O2 --> Io (Size cap 50 PU) (MW = Rich)
O2 --> Europa (Size cap 50 PU) (MW = Rich)
O2 --> Ganymede (Size cap 50 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Callisto (Size cap 50 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
79 LM -- G --> Saturn
O2 --> Tethys (Size cap 50 PU) (MW = Normal)
O2 --> Dione (Size cap 50 PU) (MW = Normal)
O2 --> Rhea (Size cap 50 PU) (MW = Normal)
O2 --> Titan (Size cap 50 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
O2 --> Iapetus (Size cap 50 PU) (MW = Normal)
O2 --> Enceladus (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Rich)
O2 --> Mimas (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Normal)
160 LM -- I --> Uranus
O1 --> Ariel (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Rich)
O1 --> Uriel (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Rich)
O1 --> Titania (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Rich)
O1 --> Oberon (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Rich)
O1 --> Miranda (Size cap 8 PU) (MW = Normal)
250 LM -- I --> Neptune
O1 --> Triton (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Very Rich)
350 KM --> Kuiper Belt
KC --> Eris (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Very Rich) (Environment 0.5)
KC --> Haumea (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Very Rich) (Environment 0.5)
KC --> Makemake (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Very Rich) (Environment 0.5)
KC --> Orcus (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Rich) (Environment 0.5)
KC --> Pluto (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Very Rich) (Environment 0.5)
KC --> Charon (Size cap 8 PU) (MW = Rich) (Environment 0.5)
KC --> Quaoar (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Rich) (Environment 0.5)
KC --> Sedna (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Rich) (Environment 0.5)
KC --> "Snow White" 2007 OR10 (Size cap 16 PU) (MW = Rich) (Environment 0.5)
Sixty other Kuiper Colonies are possible (Size cape of 8 PU) (MW = Rich) (Environment 0.5)
Note: Kuiper Colony (KC) costs $80 per PTU to ship and place, Requires 80 H, 10 Q and has a pure emplacement
cost of $40. Kupier Belts can normally hold a number of Kupier colonies equal to LM / 5. Kupier Colonies
always have a mineral wealth of Rich. Kupier Colonies have a environmental value of 50%. A Kuiper or
Outer Bodies Survey requires 50 Survey Points to complete.
Post by: crucis on April 26, 2010, 11:18:19 AM
Quote from: "miketr"
Some notes on the make up of Sol
Under the current rules Mars, Luna, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Iapetus, Rhea, Dione and Tethys are all treated as O2 bodies despite a massive spread in size, gravity and atmosphere. Also the asteroid belt by base rules is assumed by its distance to have about 115 asteroid colonies, note that Ceres is 32% of the mass found in the Asteroid Belt and far larger than any other asteroid.
Looking at things in detail just reinforces my sense that low mass O2 worlds like Mars should be treated different than the moons of Gas Giants. A world like Mars because of its higher gravity and better surface temperature is going to be a far more favorable target for colonization. If anything I think a strong case could be made that a high tech civilization would find Mars a better environment to colonize than a Heavy Gravity World.
Michael, there's only so much detail that a p&p game can sustain... at least in its official rules.
Yes, Mars, Luna, Io, etc. are all treated as O2 (which is Type B for Barren in Cosmic) bodies, though I would point out that Mars is a planet, albeit a small one, while the rest are moons.
For Cosmic, my definition of what qualifies as a "moon" is any satellite having a radius of 500 KM or greater. And anything below that gets ignored. Note that surface area increases in relation to the square of the radius, so there's a considerable difference in surface area between the smallest (500 km radius) moon and the largest, Ganymede. Still, for the sake of simplicity, they are currently considered the same... I'm a little wary of adding another step into the sysgen process to start creating moon sizes, even though a few of the largest moons are actually larger than Mercury... which should arguably allow them to have larger pop capacities.
As for the asteroid belt and Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, etc., I actually have suggested that AB's be handled differently. Instead of 2 or 5 OP's per sH, roll 1d10 per AB, with the result being the number of "planetoids", like Ceres, Pallas, etc. And it is only on those limited number of bodies that you could colonize. Those planetoids would be of the type that is proper for their location. That is, Sol's AB would be Type aB, as it is in the Rocky Zone (though just barely). But an AB in the Ice Zone would be coded aF. Those planetoids would be only be able to support an Outpost, since even the largest planetoid is smaller than the smallest (by Cosmic's definition) moon. (Note that there are two upsides to this planetoid concept. 1. There are many fewer populations to track. 2. You know exactly where each of those 1-10 planetoids are for defensive purposes.)
As for Mars vs gas zone moons, it is worth pointing out that currently, Mars can support a larger Settlement level population, while those moons can only support Colony level populations. I think that that's a significant enough population difference. Having said that, if Rocky Zone Type B planets and Moons were to remain as Type B and mB (for Barren), what would you code (and term) Gas zone moons? (Note that I use the prefix 'm' for all moons, hence the code mB for Barren moons.)
However, there is one point that you've missed here, and that's that it's not really a Mass 1 Mars-like planet that you should be pointing to for improved habitability, but the larger Mass 2 and 3 Type O2's ... and particularly those that are relatively close to the outer border of the liquid water zone. There is arguably a substantial difference.
First of all, M2/3 O2's would have gravities much more similar to T/ST planets. M2/3 O2's would quite possibly have retained their magnetospheres, which would protect their atmospheres from being stripped away from solar winds and help protect them from radiation. Their atmospheres would probably be reasonably dense ... denser than Mars' rather thin atmosphere which has been largely stripped away due to a lack of a magnetosphere. Oh, it's likely that these atmosphere would still not be breathable to T/ST races, as there wouldn't be any plant life to produce and sustain higher levels of oxygen.
Also, IF those M2/3 O2's are relatively close to the outer edge of the liquid water zone, the planetary temperatures may be fairly tolerable ... oh, not in a let's go out and bask in the sunshine sort of way, but maybe tolerable in a throw your breathing mask on and a winter coat, and you might be able to walk out on the surface without wearing a full blown spacesuit. (Just speculation, mind you...)
Also consider that there may be a region of "tolerability" just sunward of the LWZ, where it might be a little too warm to sustain liquid water in the open or produce life, but have an overall "environment" that was at least tolerable for colonists.
Obviously, such a type of world would be vastly different from Venus. Venus starts by being a little too close to the sun to even be in this region of tolerability, but it also has the problem of having no magnetosphere, which has allowed the solar winds to strip off the lighter gases from its atmosphere, leaving only the heavier ones ... such as CO2, which has resulted in its immensely dense (something like 100 times that of Earth) and deadly atmosphere.
It's been theorized that Venus may have had a magnetosphere at some point. But at some point in its distant past, Venus was struck not once but twice by large objects that mostly stopped its rotation ... its "day" is about 240 earth days ... and thus caused its magnetosphere to disappear. Thus, it's possible that perhaps Venus' deadly environment is due to extremely bad luck as much as its location. This isn't to say that if it did rotate more normally and retained an atmosphere that it would be habitable. But if it did rotate normally, have a magsphere, and retain an atmosphere, it might at least be something like a very warm desolate world, or at worst, just a large Type H Mercury-like world.
I've actually been considering adding a new planetary type for Cosmic ... Type M for Marginal. A "Marginal" planet would be a Mass 2 or 3 planet that existed just outside of the LWZ, either sunward or outward of the LWZ. (I actually have a version of the planetary formation zone table that includes these "warm" and "cool" zones where Marginal planets could exist.) Thus, Type M's could be just a little too warm or a little too cool to be truly habitable T/ST worlds. But they would be very tolerable worlds and would be more hospitable to colonization to the traditional Type B (aka O2) planets and moons, and would support up to a Small population, though they would fall into the "non-habitable" category, since they cannot produce life. (And since it's my intention that "non-habitable" worlds cannot grow to simplify bookkeeping, populations on Type M's would also not grow except thru colonization.)
Crucis
Post by: drakar on April 26, 2010, 11:22:09 AM
Post by: crucis on April 26, 2010, 11:58:49 AM
Post by: miketr on April 26, 2010, 01:19:30 PM
Without getting drawn into a big debate on why Venus and Mars are the way they are I do find the comments on the magnetic fields for the two worlds interesting. The problem with talking about that is we are not sure exactly why Earth has a Magnetic field. Some believe that its because of the Moon and its tidal effects on the earth. A large body like the money might have prevented Venus from being tide locked to the sun. We could go on an on.
I agree that system generation needs to be kept simple. Your comment on the larger grave worlds that fail to make T/ST is an interesting one. My issue with that is that I feel that we gravity control it would be simpler to overcome the negative effects of low gravity physiology than that of high gravity. My assumption is that with Starfire type tech artificial gravity generation would be possible. So on lower gravity worlds where housing was setup artificial gravity could be created. You could do the same for higher gravity worlds but the difference is what happens when people leave the controlled gravity environment of the cities / settlements? From what I have read prolonged high gravity is far more dangerous and debilitating than low gravity is.
The point on limiting bodies to a diameter of 500 kilometers or larger is an interesting one. I suspect that people want more room to expand. How about that for each asteroid belt you roll the d10 for the number of planetoids in the size class able to support 16 PU settlement. Plus a pack of 4 PU habitats scattered throughout the belt on bodies larger than a diameter of 100 kilometers? That would get you Five Times the Light Minute Distance from the Primary little bodies for rocks. So for Sol it would be Ceres, Vesta and Pallas able to have 16 PU populations and 115 more 4 PU populations for a total population of 508 PU in main asteroid belt; 25,400,000 people.
What about the Kuiper bodies? Some of them are very large and in terms of surface temp no worse off than moons of the Ice worlds.
As to generating size of moons, I agree that going wild with lots of tables could and would be counter productive. I was looking for more of a spread in size between Luna, Mars, Ceres and Europa which are all treated right now as the same thing.
Draken
It depends on where the cut off size is for populations the Trajon rocks and ice balls past the main belt are fairly numerous but not very large over all. Only a few are larger than 200km in diameter.
Post by: crucis on April 26, 2010, 02:15:45 PM
Quote from: "miketr"
Crucis:
Without getting drawn into a big debate on why Venus and Mars are the way they are I do find the comments on the magnetic fields for the two worlds interesting. The problem with talking about that is we are not sure exactly why Earth has a Magnetic field. Some believe that its because of the Moon and its tidal effects on the earth. A large body like the money might have prevented Venus from being tide locked to the sun. We could go on an on.
Yes, I agree that it's possible that the Moon may be a factor in the presence of Earth's strong magsphere. Of course, if we were to accept that as a requirement, then all T/ST's without moons would have to be downgraded to something like Marginal worlds or Type B (O2) worlds.
Also, Venus isn't totally tidelocked to the sun ... yet, though it's certainly on its way to being so...
Anyways, the presence of magsphere seems very critical for a planet to a) retain anything close to a breathable, non-super-dense atmosphere, and b) to provide protection against various forms of radiation from space that could be harmful to life.
Quote
I agree that system generation needs to be kept simple. Your comment on the larger grav worlds that fail to make T/ST is an interesting one. My issue with that is that I feel that we gravity control it would be simpler to overcome the negative effects of low gravity physiology than that of high gravity. My assumption is that with Starfire type tech artificial gravity generation would be possible. So on lower gravity worlds where housing was setup artificial gravity could be created. You could do the same for higher gravity worlds but the difference is what happens when people leave the controlled gravity environment of the cities / settlements? From what I have read prolonged high gravity is far more dangerous and debilitating than low gravity is.
That may be true (the comments about high grav, etc.). The problem it creates though is then you start having to pay attention to mass 2 vs mass 3 Type B planets, with Mass 3 B's being less hospitable to Mass 2 races ... not terribly unlike dealing with habitables. But if it's easier to deal with lower gravity than higher gravity, don't you then create a situation where M2 races would see M3 B's as less than hospitable (maybe downgrading from Desolate to Extreme?) but M3 races would not have the parallel penalty for seeing Mass 2 B's as less hospitable. There are balance issues here that cannot be ignored. It would also be rather ... strange ... if M3 races saw M2-B's in the same way that M2 races saw M3-B's, because then how do you explain it if M2 and M3 races were to see M1-B's in the same way? It creates a rather strange conundrum. It seems easier to me to assume that if some sort of artificial gravity tech does exist and is used to make non-habitable populations more hospitable, then it's better if it works equally well in either direction so that there are no balance issues.
Quote
The point on limiting bodies to a diameter of 500 kilometers or larger is an interesting one. I suspect that people want more room to expand. How about that for each asteroid belt you roll the d10 for the number of planetoids in the size class able to support 16 PU settlement. Plus a pack of 4 PU habitats scattered throughout the belt on bodies larger than a diameter of 100 kilometers? That would get you Five Times the Light Minute Distance from the Primary little bodies for rocks. So for Sol it would be Ceres, Vesta and Pallas able to have 16 PU populations and 115 more 4 PU populations for a total population of 508 PU in main asteroid belt; 25,400,000 people.
115 more little populations? YUCK! The idea is to reduce the number of economic records, not increase them. And of course, players want room to expand. If you told them they could colonize the surface of the sun, some would do it. At some point, you have draw lines in the sand. And the idea of tracking dozens of tiny little individual populations repulses me. Frankly, I think that there are far too many people being allowed to colonize asteroid belts as it is. Asteroid belts are just giant strip mines to me, not places to dump tens of millions of colonists.
Also, there's the logical problem that says if you can start dumping colonists on those tiny little rocks in the asteroid belts (other than the significant planetoids), why can't you do the same thing with moons with radius' smaller than 500 km? If that were the case, then Jupiter might have upwards of 50 or more little moons. At some point, lines have to be drawn for the sake of game simplicity, bookkeeping simplicity, and outright sanity.
(I'm sure that some could say, why not treat all those small moons like a pool? Sure, you could do that... but then you also end up with the arguments about where do all those mini-OP's exist when some enemy enters the system? And does each of those mini-OP's have to be conquered separately? And is each of them a potential source of interrogation into to any conqueror? Frankly, this is all too much of a pain. )
Quote
What about the Kuiper bodies? Some of them are very large and in terms of surface temp no worse off than moons of the Ice worlds.
I fully intend to just ignore them as being worthless slushballs that are far too cold and distant from their star to be productive or profitable places to dump down mining outposts.
Quote
As to generating size of moons, I agree that going wild with lots of tables could and would be counter productive. I was looking for more of a spread in size between Luna, Mars, Ceres and Europa which are all treated right now as the same thing.
Frankly, I believe that they're all treated the same because to do otherwise would require an additional level of detail that would have a ripple effect on some other rules (such as population limits) and increases in complexity. However, it would be possible to basically have to different general sizes of moons (not counting twin planets). Size 1 could represent most of the 500+ km moons in our solar system. And Size 2 moons could be those very few moons, such as Ganymede, that are approaching the same size as smaller Mass 1 planets.
However, doing this creates the aforementioned problem in the population limit tables. Right now, for Desolate and Extreme populations, the distinction is simple ... planets vs. moons. But if this additional layer of size is added, you then have to consider having 3 size categories... Small Moons, Large Moons and Small (Mass 1) planets, and Large (Mass 2/3) planets.
I have considered doing something like this, but haven't really felt the pressing need to do so. A few players such as yourself have expressed a desire for additional detail in this regard, but I haven't seen any huge outcry for it. Still, I don't completely dismiss doing something along these lines.
Post by: miketr on April 26, 2010, 02:54:28 PM
Quote from: "crucis"
QuoteWhat about the Kuiper bodies? Some of them are very large and in terms of surface temp no worse off than moons of the Ice worlds.
I fully intend to just ignore them as being worthless slushballs that are far too cold and distant from their star to be productive or profitable places to dump down mining outposts.
As to temp they are no colder than many of the Ice worlds Moons; after all 60 Kelvin vs. 40 Kelvin isn't much of a difference.
Keep in mind that the hydrogen, ice-water and hydrocarbons such as methane much in abundance on those rocks would be very valuable for a space faring society. A number of the inner moons such as Titan, Callisto and Ganymede are in a large part made up mostly of frozen water.
As you said you do need to draw a line.
As to tracking all the little bodies in the asteroid field recall my solution in many games is not to allow anything other than Terran worlds to be colonized.
Michael
Post by: crucis on April 26, 2010, 03:14:54 PM
Quote from: "miketr"
Quote from: "crucis"QuoteWhat about the Kuiper bodies? Some of them are very large and in terms of surface temp no worse off than moons of the Ice worlds.
I fully intend to just ignore them as being worthless slushballs that are far too cold and distant from their star to be productive or profitable places to dump down mining outposts.
As to temp they are no colder than many of the Ice worlds Moons; after all 60 Kelvin vs. 40 Kelvin isn't much of a difference.
Keep in mind that the hydrogen, ice-water and hydrocarbons such as methane much in abundance on those rocks would be very valuable for a space faring society. A number of the inner moons such as Titan, Callisto and Ganymede are in a large part made up mostly of frozen water.
As you said you do need to draw a line.
As to tracking all the little bodies in the asteroid field recall my solution in many games is not to allow anything other than Terran worlds to be colonized. :wink:
Frankly, I happen to like the "concentration" method of minimizing non-habitable colonization ... that is, trying to make rocky zone colonization far more profitable than non-rocky zone colonization. What I'm been thinking about in the past couple days is taking a step back to how SM#2 dealt with environmental modifiers as opposed to how Ultra handled them. In Ultra, it appears that an intentional decision was made to make the ROI's for desolates and particularly extremes better compared to IU ROI's to further promote Desolate and particularly Extreme colonization, even at distances greater than 0 StMP. The thought popped into my head ... "why?" Why not just look at it in reverse... make Desolate and Extreme colonization ... particularly Gas and Ice zone colonization rather less profitable, even in-system, than IU's ...to promote rocky zone colonization over gas and ice zone colonization. Such a decision wouldn't prevent gas and ice zone colonization ... just make it far less desirable for economic reasons. You still might put those little "listening post" OP's in the far reaches of a star system, but in far more limited numbers and with far smaller populations.
Of course, if promotion of rocky zone colonization is the goal, then it would become important to have the mineral content values for planetary types actually IN the Rocky Zone produce higher returns than those in the gas and ice zones.
Post by: crucis on April 26, 2010, 03:28:21 PM
Quote from: "miketr"
As to temp they are no colder than many of the Ice worlds Moons; after all 60 Kelvin vs. 40 Kelvin isn't much of a difference.
Michael, actually, I'd thought about this general question a few months back, when someone wondered about why the Moon and Gas Giant moons were of the same type, but gas giant moons and Ice giant moons were not of the same time, given all of the relative temperature disparities. After all, the temperatures of some gas giant moons are closer to the temps of Ice Giant moons than those of the Moon. Sort of makes one wonder why rocky zone Type mB (O2) moons should be treated 100% the same as gas zone Type mB (O2) moons, doesn't it? Maybe gas giant zone O2 moons need to have a different type than rocky zone O2 moons, so that they can be valued differently. (Rolls eyes at self for thinking about more reasons to create additional complexity...
)
Post by: miketr on April 26, 2010, 04:42:43 PM
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. 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 starts. Brown Dwarfs along with Red Dwarfs should be fairly common in space.
Michael
Post by: crucis on April 26, 2010, 06:46:12 PM
Quote from: "miketr"
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.
Quote
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...
Post by: drakar on April 26, 2010, 08:58:32 PM
)
Post by: crucis on April 26, 2010, 09:20:06 PM
Quote from: "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
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.
Post by: drakar on April 26, 2010, 09:37:36 PM
Post by: procyon on April 27, 2010, 01:27:00 AM
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.
Post by: crucis on April 27, 2010, 02:57:25 AM
Quote from: "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.
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.
Post by: procyon on April 27, 2010, 04:02:47 AM
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:
Post by: miketr on April 27, 2010, 09:13:15 AM
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
Post by: crucis on April 27, 2010, 10:11:24 AM
Quote from: "miketr"
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).
Quote
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).
Quote
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.
Post by: crucis on April 27, 2010, 10:39:10 AM
Quote from: "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.
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.
Quote
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.
Quote
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!!!
Post by: miketr on April 27, 2010, 01:26:30 PM
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
Post by: crucis on April 27, 2010, 01:56:43 PM
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.
Post by: mavikfelna on April 27, 2010, 08:25:08 PM
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
Post by: crucis on April 27, 2010, 09:18:48 PM
Quote from: "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
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.
Post by: miketr on April 28, 2010, 07:46:53 AM
Quote from: "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.
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 (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/earthsized_planets.html)
Michael
Post by: crucis on April 28, 2010, 11:36:20 AM
Quote from: "miketr"
Quote from: "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.
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.
I'm not sure that I'd go that far. Not having large gas giants isn't exactly going to kill the value of a such a star system. It might have smaller GG's or even type B planets in their place. And a Type B (O2) planet has the population capacity of about 3 Type mB (O2) moons that could be around a GG (and that doesn't count any potential moons around the Type B planet itself).
Also, the current belief about Type T/ST planets and Red Dwarfs is that being tidelocked to the star is no longer the kiss of death to habitability it was once believed to be. I've read a number of credible sources that speculate that tidelocked planets could still be habitable, though they probably wouldn't be a pleasant as Earth, for example, due to generally somewhat harsher conditions.
On a semi related side note, the probability of mutually tidelocked moons used in prior editions of Starfire is, to put it mildly, BS. I did an analysis of moon sizes in our solar system and plugged them into the tidelocking formulas, and discovered that moons that I consider to be a "moon" for starfire purposes (i.e. having a radius of 500 km or greater) would, on average, mutually tidelock with their planet in 50% of the time in the first orbit (i.e. 1-5 tac hexes). (What this analysis entailed was taking the 15 moons in our solar system that would meet the 500+ radius standard, and I determined how many would MTL at 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 tac hexes. 100% MTL'd at 1 tH, while about 33% MTL'd at 5 tH, IIRC. The weighted average came out to roughly 50%, give or take a handful of percentage points.)
Another related point here is that ALL 15 of those moons were tidelocked to their planets. ALL of them. Thus, all Starfire moons are tidelocked to their planets. The real question is whether the planets are tidelocked to their moons (which I call "Mutual Tidelocking" or MTL). And that number is roughly 50%... for Rocky Zone planets.
OTOH, I can hardly speak to the likelihood that a moon would be a "twin planet" or not... something you reference below...
Quote
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.
I suppose that it's possible, but this is the sort of thing that would probably be highly rare. Just having a GG in the rocky zone would be a rarity ... having a GG in the LWZ would be even more rare ... then having that GG in the LWZ also happen to have T/ST sized large moon would be yet another rarity. Just as a swag, if one assumes that there's only a 5% chance of a GG in the rocky zone, and that there's a 33% chance that a GG in the Rocky Zone would fall into the LWZ, and that there was a 1% chance of having a "large moon" that was T/ST sized ... that comes out to 1.65 such systems per 10,000 star systems generated using these probabilities. To be frank, this is one reason that I'm a bit wary of creating such possibilities... because I'd be having spend time and effort to write up rules to cover some amazingly rare situations, and I question whether it's really worth it. As it was, I always tended to question the logic of including the requirement that T/ST's absolutely needed to be mutually tidelocked to a moon to remain a T/ST in Red Dwarf systems because the probability of that was so low ... about a 0.56% chance that any Red Dwarf star would have a T/ST with this requirement... or about 1 in 200 RD's might have a T/ST.... and that's pretty high compared to 1.65 in 10,000. So anyways, I'm just a bit wary of spending time and effort on extremely rare corner cases...
Quote
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 (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/earthsized_planets.html)
Michael
Interesting article. Thanks for the link.
Post by: procyon on April 30, 2010, 01:11:36 AM
The stresses on the crust of the planet from the conduction of the thermal energy would make for a rather dynamic surface. Think of the tower of pisa on steroids. That might be manageable, but add an atmosphere and it gets worse. Much worse. Watch the news and see how any area of high and low pressure meeting is a storm. We have that problem on our planet and generate some healthy storms with a difference in temps of only a few degrees between air masses. As that energy transfers from high to low it generates a LOT of kinetic energy that we see as wind. Now try that with air masses differing in temp by a couple hundred degrees. Yikes.
If water was present it gets real bad. Without going into the math, water has a high specific heat, and a real high energy of evaporation/condensation, plus a healthy amount for freezing. What that means is that water takes 1 calorie to heat from one degree to the next, but you have to add 80 extra to get 0 degree ice to go to 0 degree water, and several hundred to get it to go from 100 degree water to 100 degree steam. It gives up that energy when it condenses (which is why your soda gets warm fast if you leave it out to 'sweat'). Now if you park in the zone where the water vapor in the air is condesing out, and then forming snow, well it wouldn't be pretty. It would only take a little water vapor, given the extremes of temperature, to create a constant hurricane/maelstrom around the entire band of the planet most folks would think was the 'right' temp. It would probably be easier to live on Venus.
Nope. Just pick the warm or cold side. Forget the 'habitable zone'. It isn't.
Post by: crucis on April 30, 2010, 09:53:03 PM
It's actually an important issue for me in Cosmic, as adding these worlds as habitables represents a fairly significant increase in the number of potential habitable worlds in the overall mix. Note that I'm not actually saying that I'm for or against adding them... just that it's an issue. But having said that, I'm not terribly fond of including them in the old form, where the odds of them existing were ridiculously low (about 1 in 200 Red Dwarfs would have a Type T/ST due to possessing a properly MTL'd moon). I could (and have considered) "skirting" the issue by making these planets into Type M "Marginal" planets.
I've been investigating including Spectral Class "A" stars in the Star Type table. Oh, in a sense, they're sort of there already under the umbrella of the misnamed "Blue Giant" type (which includes O, B, A, and F0-F4 types ... in ISF, but only O and B in Ultra ... which is a considerable source of contention for me). What I'm considering doing is simply replacing the so-called Blue Giant type with the "Blue Star" type which would be comprised only of class A and F0-F4 stars. I don't intend on moving the F0-F4 stars into the White type because those sub-types, like all of the class A, do not have the stellar life spans to produce truly habitable planets according to my calculations and investigations. However, they can possess planets and perhaps could support planets of the Type M "Marginal" planetary type that I'm considering.
As for the Class O and B stars, I intend to ignore them for 2 reasons ... 1) they are very, very uncommon, and 2) were a Class O or B star to be in a binary or trinary system with a star that "could" have T/ST planets, it would seem to make the entire system unable to support any habitable planet (if any planets at all) due to the very short life spans of the O/B stars.
Post by: procyon on May 04, 2010, 06:04:36 AM
Of course if you do away with nebula, that would solve the issue.
As to why you would find mostly only AB and gas giants, which will likely contradict what you would read in most public forum services as they would start with rocky particle formation follwed by planet, then gas giant, I will explain to some degree. (And hopefully not anger any of my former colleagues.)
That theory has admitted problems with explaining why the rocky clumps gather up at all, and is totally lost on how a gas giant can accrete so rapidly with the stellar medium so rapidly disipating as the star begins its fusion cycle. The latest conjecture that I am aware of that addresses this has gas giant formation occurring primarily in concert with the main star, much as binary stars form from the same cloud each gathering material as they rotate around a common center of gravity. The gas giants are the losers of the race as they were unable to gain sufficient mass to begin sustained fusion prior to the primary. In binary stars both manage to maintain sufficient material (or aquire enough driven off by their partner) to achieve steady fusion. Gas giants accumulate most of the rocky material secondary to the initial formation. As for the formation of planets from the stellar dust, accumulation works up to about 1cm, then the current theory of why rocks would stick to rocks just doesn't work. This is primarily due to the fact that it employs great physics, poor chemistry. Most of the formation would once again occur in locations of low stellar energy, and it has everything to do with ices. Take two pieces of ice, even at room temp, and put them together. They will eventually stick together and form a single mass even as they melt. This also occurs below the freezing point of a material per sublimation. The particles will exchange energy states and reform together.
Shortly after the start of sustained fusion by the primary and or secondary, the majority of the nebula material will be driven off or accreted. The particles with low angular acceleration are accreted, those with high will be accelerated out of the system. This would occur over a span of a thousand or so years, but would still leave a small span of time to find a star with a 'nebula' around it. But planets in a terrestrial sense would be rare, and gas giants would likely occupy their orbits prior to migration out farther (ala Neptune and Uranus) as they accrete mass and increase in angular acceleration in respect to the primary. If there were terrestrial planets they would likely be Venusian in environment due to the high heat they would be generating at this stage due to the presumed rapid accretion that would occur once they began to approach the 500 to 1000km range in this setting.
As for habitable tidelock, the atmosphere is likely much more dynamic than the models I have seen, and the only survivable zones (valleys/canyons) they posit, would be rapidly reformed due to the action of water on the landscape in such variable thermal gradients. Your valley you settle in might be survivable now, but in a year it won't be there. Think mud slide but worse..
Post by: crucis on May 04, 2010, 10:36:38 AM
Quote from: "procyon"
A thought on sysgen in the upcoming Cosmic. My oldest (drakar) has talked about some of the topics discussed on the SDS site. Unfortunately I am still unable to regularly (ever?) get to that site. Most of the idea sounds good, if possibly based on rather streched physics. Some of it may be lost in secondhand telling. But it sounds as if you plan on trying to fit formation of planets/moon/etc on current formation theory (ala nebula formation/accretion disk). The 4e and 5e include nebula as possible environments for a star to be found in, but if these are kept the most likely finds would be gas giants, AB's (probably all ice) and stars. This would tend to be due to the systems formation age in respect to finding it, as any system with large amounts of free gas in system is likely very young in stellar age.
Of course if you do away with nebula, that would solve the issue.
(snip other interesting stuff)
It's unfortunate that you're unable to get to the SDS board. I don't know what drakar's telling you, but I wouldn't assume that any of the sysgen related threads in the Ultra forum represent the direction that sysgen will take for Cosmic. Those sysgen ideas aren't even standard for Ultra. They represent a more complex optional model that Cralis has developed.
As for Cosmic, the sysgen process will tend to follow the existing ISF model, though with a couple of aspects from Ultra, and some original tweaks here and there (such as changing the aforementioned misnamed "Blue Giants" to "Blue Stars", which would have planets, just not any habitables, and the Type M "Marginal" planet.)
I'm not averse to realism or more variety, I just like finding ways to do it simply. I don't like adding "realism" for the sake of making things more complex. Increasing variety will make things a little more complex, but again, I try to do it in the simplest ways possible to minimize the pain.
I'm wary of adding nebulae into Cosmic. They're definitely not a part of ISF or the Canon History. OTOH, at least some nebulas would make some sense, but they're just too common in Ultra for my taste. I'm also even more wary of combining of planets and nebulae. The magnetosphere sizes in Ultra are just plain silly, because they're ridiculously large. IIRC, Earth's magsphere should only be something like 1 tac hex in size. SDS made the magspheres ridiculously large for game play reasons that I just can't accept. It may be the biggest reason why I don't like planets in nebulae... if you don't want to use realistically sized magspheres for game play reasons, then don't include planets in nebulae in the first place.
I'm less bothered by nebulae without planets. The overall situation is much simpler. No planets requiring type changes, no magsphere issues, etc. Starless systems and non-planet-bearing stars are better places for nebulae for Starfire's purposes. Of course, some people seem to think that star systems without any planets are "useless". And in one sense, that's true. But that's also the way things are. Every place you visit isn't be a place that you can exploit. Sometimes places are relatively useless.
One gripe that I've had with 4e was the change it made in the assumptions about WP formation, i.e. how WP's became more common in starless regions, and least common for stars with planets, and ignored any of the old mass based WP die roll modifiers. I'm of the opinion that this created a contradiction in the sysgen rules that is not addressed. This contradiction is that the Star Type tables which have star types (White, Yellow, etc.) exist in percentages that are not in sync with what they are in real life. In ISF, this is assumed to exist because those are the relative percentages of star types caused by how often WP's connect to each of those star types... with an further underlying assumption that stellar mass increases the likelihood of attracting WP's (though in a relatively simplistic way). However, in 4e, with the assumption of WP's being attracted to greater stellar masses, the underlying assumption for the Star Type table are completely thrown out the window... and that table should be using the actual real life percentages (though this would reduce the # of T/ST planets by a bit more than half).
I will be returning to the old assumption that stellar mass attracts WP's... I currently intend to include super and hypergiants (though very rare) which would be great attractors of WP's. Super and hypergiants are almost certain to be WP nexuses, due to their great mass. (And they'll also have realistic stellar sizes, as well.) Starless regions will return to being places where you don't find many WP's... no mass = few WP's.
Post by: procyon on May 08, 2010, 01:27:24 AM
As for nebula with no planets and no stars, I like it. Realsitically that would be the most common way to find that situation. I do like nebula, as drakar is a huge beam weapon fan, and nebula reducing sensor ranges and disabling shields in Ultra has made him happy and given him places he can fight the 'missile queen' on his terms.
And as for useless, no. Not profitable, but far from useless. If you ask the middle boy and my wife about a starless nebula named Besheez in the Empires Campaign, they will have many, many stories to tell about this strategically placed nebula and the battles that occured within it. For those who read drakar's fiction, his old admiral Jack Ryan made his name in that nebula at the only battle the players actually named, calling it the Battle of Frozen Tears. Alas, I didn't keep detailed turn notes back then, so that bit of fiction is lost to all those who weren't there
.As for the BIG stars, I like them. Great terrain and opportunities. We use the rule that when your shields are gone, the ship is destroyed by the star - period. Makes dragging other ships with tractors into the corona a useful tactic. Changes the dynamics of the battles around the star. Might not make everybody happy, but we like it.
As for WP's and placement, it is a little contrived no matter how you go. With no real definition of how the WP operate/form/etc, you could kind of do whatever you want. For us the WP's are handled differently (warning - another house rule coming up).
I declared that WP's are actually the 'mini' singularities causing the loop in space time field. Like folding a piece of paper over with the tunnel allowing the distant points to touch. This means that our WP's orbit the star if there is one (not fixed as in current rules), and can be found in wierd places. And why black hole systems swallow all the ships. On the little singularities the ships ride the edge of the fold but can climb out just like they leave a planet's gravity well. The big gravity well of a stellar mass black hole will trap the ship. The warp jump twig just allows you to ride the fold from farther out on the curve (not very realistic, but game-able). It also explains why they can show up in the middle of nowhere, just a random small singularity ejected from some other system or just drifting by itself. In that they were formed in the first few moments of the cosmos, there won't be anymore as there is no natural (that I know of) way to create a low mass black hole without the conditions that would have existed in the early universe. It also explains in our game why you do gravitational surveys. You are trying to locate the small mass of the mini black hole and its effect on other objects in the system or the ships sensors. The harder to locate WP's just have progressively smaller mass in our 5e game, making them harder to find and requiring more precise and thorough readings.
You can't have WP's and any other item in the same spot - other than a drive field ship (although I allow warp jump to get a CP drive through in our game). The mini WP explains why you can't have all those mines/IDEW's/AP's in the hex with the WP also - that rule is necessary, but seemed arbitrary in the original rules. The WP's orbital movement makes those minefields a little trickier also. They have to assign minelayers to the WP to tend and move the mines or the WP will move away from them/swallow them up eventually.
This also helps explain why stellar mass attracts the dumb things in the first place. They won't be blown away by initial 'ignition' from the star, and the bigger the gravity well of the star, the more likely they are to be pulled into orbit.
You just have to assume they are a whole lot more common than we think they are (maybe that is where the 'dark matter' that accounts for 90% of our universe's mass is at, a bunch of WP's).
You also have to make sure if it is the same distance from a star as a planet, that it is in opposition or a lagrange point, although I have put some in orbit around planets (our original Empires game had one in a distant orbit of Neptune). But I choose WP number and placement before we ever start in the pregen systems, so I don't have to worry about random rolls.
This is just how we do it, and it works for us.
Post by: crucis on May 08, 2010, 12:24:48 PM
Quote from: "procyon"
Drakar tells me quite a bit, bit it isn't always in the most organized fashion. I guess that beggars can't be choosers. As for adding complexity, I'm definitely against any more than necessary. Realism without complexity is do-able in areas. Sometimes you just have to chalk it up to "Its just a game".
Yes, I know... A problem that always exists is that people have different suspension of disbelief tolerances... For example, in sysgen, some people can look at the star types, and just shrug and say "whatever", while more astro-geeky types won't be able to stomach certain things.
Quote
As for nebula with no planets and no stars, I like it. Realistically that would be the most common way to find that situation. I do like nebula, as drakar is a huge beam weapon fan, and nebula reducing sensor ranges and disabling shields in Ultra has made him happy and given him places he can fight the 'missile queen' on his terms.
And as for useless, no. Not profitable, but far from useless. If you ask the middle boy and my wife about a starless nebula named Besheez in the Empires Campaign, they will have many, many stories to tell about this strategically placed nebula and the battles that occurred within it. For those who read drakar's fiction, his old admiral Jack Ryan made his name in that nebula at the only battle the players actually named, calling it the Battle of Frozen Tears. Alas, I didn't keep detailed turn notes back then, so that bit of fiction is lost to all those who weren't there
I don't mind generally empty nebulas. (Actually, from what I've read, it's actually relatively common for white dwarfs to be associated with nebulae, since they expel a massive amount of matter in the course of becoming a WD in the first place.) As for "useless", I meant that many people tended to see planetless star systems as generally "useless" in an economic manner. No planets or moons to colonize. For that matter, no planets or moons on which you could place little outposts for their innate sensor capability. In this way, a planetless star system is little different than a starless region. However, I do understand your point that a nebula system can be tactically and strategically useful for military reasons.
Quote
As for the BIG stars, I like them. Great terrain and opportunities. We use the rule that when your shields are gone, the ship is destroyed by the star - period. Makes dragging other ships with tractors into the corona a useful tactic. Changes the dynamics of the battles around the star. Might not make everybody happy, but we like it.
That's pretty nasty... (i.e. lose your shields, lose your ship). And yes, it would certainly change the dynamics of battles around a star...
Quote
As for WP's and placement, it is a little contrived no matter how you go. With no real definition of how the WP operate/form/etc, you could kind of do whatever you want. For us the WP's are handled differently (warning - another house rule coming up).
I declared that WP's are actually the 'mini' singularities causing the loop in space time field. Like folding a piece of paper over with the tunnel allowing the distant points to touch. This means that our WP's orbit the star if there is one (not fixed as in current rules), and can be found in wierd places. And why black hole systems swallow all the ships. On the little singularities the ships ride the edge of the fold but can climb out just like they leave a planet's gravity well. The big gravity well of a stellar mass black hole will trap the ship. The warp jump twig just allows you to ride the fold from farther out on the curve (not very realistic, but game-able). It also explains why they can show up in the middle of nowhere, just a random small singularity ejected from some other system or just drifting by itself. In that they were formed in the first few moments of the cosmos, there won't be anymore as there is no natural (that I know of) way to create a low mass black hole without the conditions that would have existed in the early universe. It also explains in our game why you do gravitational surveys. You are trying to locate the small mass of the mini black hole and its effect on other objects in the system or the ships sensors. The harder to locate WP's just have progressively smaller mass in our 5e game, making them harder to find and requiring more precise and thorough readings.
You can't have WP's and any other item in the same spot - other than a drive field ship (although I allow warp jump to get a CP drive through in our game). The mini WP explains why you can't have all those mines/IDEW's/AP's in the hex with the WP also - that rule is necessary, but seemed arbitrary in the original rules. The WP's orbital movement makes those minefields a little trickier also. They have to assign minelayers to the WP to tend and move the mines or the WP will move away from them/swallow them up eventually.
This also helps explain why stellar mass attracts the dumb things in the first place. They won't be blown away by initial 'ignition' from the star, and the bigger the gravity well of the star, the more likely they are to be pulled into orbit.
You just have to assume they are a whole lot more common than we think they are (maybe that is where the 'dark matter' that accounts for 90% of our universe's mass is at, a bunch of WP's).
You also have to make sure if it is the same distance from a star as a planet, that it is in opposition or a lagrange point, although I have put some in orbit around planets (our original Empires game had one in a distant orbit of Neptune). But I choose WP number and placement before we ever start in the pregen systems, so I don't have to worry about random rolls.
This is just how we do it, and it works for us.
Well, I do use the old assumption from 3e and before that WP's are gravitic phemonema that are attracted to larger masses. The result of this is that Starless regions have many fewer WP's... and Super and Hyper Giants would have many more. I'm really not so sure about the great gap between those two extremes though... While Red Dwarf stars are very low in mass, your average Yellow star is almost as low in mass, relatively speaking, compared to a Super/HyperGiant as the RD would be to the Yellow star. Also, the combined mass of 2 (or 3) planet bearing stars really isn't anything more than a minor blip compared to the extremely high mass of Giant stars. The only reason that one could use for binaries or trinaries attracting more stars would be that there was some sort of unexplained effect caused by multiple stars in close proximity that caused them to attract more stars, beyond the simple addition of their masses. (Personally, I've ignored the entire binary system die roll mod for determining # of WP's...)
Procyon, it would seem to me that if WP's were mini-singularities having mass, that they'd be rather easier to detect than currently envisioned... but that may just be a supposition on my part.
Speaking of WP's... an idea that I've been working on is a type of semi-closed "Shadowed" WP that would fall between the traditional 2e/3e closed WP and open WP's. This semi-closed WP would really be an "unformed" WP at the "closed" end, which is why it cannot be detected ... until someone first transits it. Once transited, the WP becomes detectable and can be found thru surveying. Of course, this means that if you suspect that someone has entered your rear areas thru such a WP, you'd have to re-survey a system(s) to find it. Theoretically, if you were seriously paranoid, you could constantly resurvey your empire, but this would really be a waste of time. You'd only really need to resurvey when you had a reason to suspect that an enemy had found such a WP into your space (such as by noticing an unknown ship in a system where it shouldn't exist). Of course, the WP might be an actual closed WP, in which case, you still wouldn't find it. But if it's one of these "shadowed" WP's, you would be able to find it.
Anyways, it's just an idea that I'm toying with...
Crucis
Post by: procyon on May 11, 2010, 12:21:57 AM
As for detecting mini singularities, finding something that would absorb anything you sent out to detect it (radio waves, light, etc), would likely have an event horizon measured in inches, and with the mass of a large asteroid in a system likely filled with objects of the same mass all moving on rather random orbits...
With only a small gravitational effect on surrounding bodies, and nothing else to detect it by (ok, there might be 'Hawking radiation' but Stephen isn't sharing on what he thinks that would be or what we would be looking for), it would be the needle in a haystack problem. It would be like trying to detect Phobos by its effect on Mars orbit. You'd have to take a close look at Mars to even notice the perturbations caused by it, after you ruled out the effect of every other fair sized body in a system. And a little black dot a few inches in size drifting across the face of Mars would be awfully hard to see.
Shadowed WP's? Humm...
Sounds ok. Not sure how I would explain them in my little cosmos.
For me closed WP's were the white holes of the univese. The other (type) end of a worm hole where the hawking radiation would most likely be found, but lacking a singularity. No singularity, nothing to find unless you were right there to see someone come out.
For shadowed I'm probably going to have to drag out some string theory, quant. flux psuedo science to come up with something the wife and kids would buy. But in the end if it makes for a fun game, and they can exploit it, they will like it.
Post by: crucis on May 11, 2010, 12:46:28 AM
Quote from: "procyon"
Oops, a white dwarf would have a thin nebula for a while after the nova. How long it would stay within 1StMP is debateable, but if the nova was anything more than a few thousand years earlier, the area around the white dwarf should be realatively clear. You could encounter it if you moved out far enough, but that just sounds way to complicated to me. Nebula around white dwarves, sounds ok.
I think that nebulae around WD's sound interesting... For one thing, if I make it so that WD's only exist in single star systems, they'd tend to make for rather boring systems on their own, but linking them to nebulae would add some spice to them. As for the type of nebula, IIRC, they're called "planetary nebulas"... I doubt that a PN qualifies as a "dark nebula", but it might qualify as a reflection or emission nebula. Any thoughts on that?
As for how long it would remain around the WD, yes that is debateable... which might be a good reason to include an XX% chance for the nebula to exist, rather than say that it always exists around the WD.
Quote
Shadowed WP's? Humm...
Sounds ok. Not sure how I would explain them in my little cosmos.
For me closed WP's were the white holes of the univese. The other (type) end of a worm hole where the hawking radiation would most likely be found, but lacking a singularity. No singularity, nothing to find unless you were right there to see someone come out.
For shadowed I'm probably going to have to drag out some string theory, quant. flux psuedo science to come up with something the wife and kids would buy. But in the end if it makes for a fun game, and they can exploit it, they will like it.
First of all, think in more 3e terms for these Cosmic WP's. Currently, I see 3 basic types of WP's in 3e. The rules say that there are two basic types, Open and Closed, but functionally, there are three basic types ... WP Types 1-6 being Open and discoverable with just the "rough" survey, WP Types 7-11 (?), technically called "Open", but I think of them as "concealed" or "hidden" because you can only find them with the second "detailed" survey, and WP Types 12-15 being the Closed WP's.
As for "shadowed", it's just a word for the moment. The key point is that the "shadowed" end is an effectively unformed WP, or at least not fully formed, that can never be detected until after it is first used. This maintains the same functionality as closed WP's for a sysgen as you go process. As for the word "shadowed", I'd like to use WP visibility words that have different first letters so that any sysgen outputs can refer to their WP visibilities wiht that single letter, 'O' = Open, 'H' = Hidden, 'C' = Closed, etc. This 'S' for "Shadowed" works out well in this regard.
Anyways, it's just an idea for the moment.
Post by: procyon on May 11, 2010, 02:03:11 AM
And xx% chance sounds good to me. Like it all so far.
As for the 3e WP classes, it proved a little to complicated for my kids (and wife for that part). They didn't care about the number, just where it was and what it took to find it. They seldom built ships large enough to worry about 3e limits on movement through the WP so we just ignored that. We just reduced it to Open 1 for the type 1-6, Open for the rest of the open, and closed for anything else. It was less for them to keep track of, and really the where it was and how they found it was all they needed to play for the younger kids. They just told me they were surveying the system and that was it. The 4e/5e system with survey pts worked just about the same as what we used for the kids. The black hole expanation just made it sound cool (and gave me another chance to teach them something without them realizing it. If I sat them down to try and explain space-time field folds and temporal distortion/event horizon, well, you can guess what would have happened to the 10yr old with the PS2 only feet away).
If you like the 3e system, go for it. It is easy to simplify for the littler players. And the olders ones are probably to the point they would have some fun with the detail. Maybe.
My only question is how you would determine if a system held a S WP. Would it be an initial gen item, an addition from a second system that rolled a link to an already surveyed system, or an SM tool (I know that I would definitely use it for the latter)? Not that it matters much. Just curious.
Post by: crucis on May 11, 2010, 10:54:29 AM
Quote from: "procyon"
I'm fairly sure planetary nebula would be an emission type due to the ionized state of the gas. If it wasn't it would be news to me.
And xx% chance sounds good to me. Like it all so far.
Re: planetary nebulae as emission nebula: yeah, that's what I thought as well. As for the "xx%" chance, I was leaning towards a 10 or 20% chance, since it could be done on a nice little d10 die roll.
Quote
My only question is how you would determine if a system held a S WP. Would it be an initial gen item, an addition from a second system that rolled a link to an already surveyed system, or an SM tool (I know that I would definitely use it for the latter)? Not that it matters much. Just curious.
Shadowed WPs would function like closed WP's in that you wouldn't include them in the star system in a sysgen as you go process. As an "unformed" WP, the "shadowed" WP wouldn't exist until someone actually transited it. In fact, it might even be best if once transited, the shadowed WP changed its type to another type so that it wasn't recognized as a "shadowed WP" (in which case, perhaps the initial name should really be just "unformed WP"). The point of doing this would be so that if you entered a star system that was new to you, but not new to someone else, and the "shadowed" WP had already been transited and formed, it wouldn't be recognizable AS what it was. It would only appear like some other WP type, and no one would be the wiser as it were.
Still, it's just an idea at this point, and might get dumped...
Post by: Tregonsee on September 17, 2010, 02:54:50 PM
If I read this right, the nations of the Earth have discovered warp points. If so, kuiper belt colonies would probably be abandoned and moved to greener pastures...