Author Topic: Spreadsheet: Skoormit's Terraforming Planner  (Read 10159 times)

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Offline hostergaard

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Re: Spreadsheet: Skoormit's Terraforming Planner
« Reply #15 on: October 10, 2021, 03:33:58 PM »
I have been mulling over trying to make something like that, or maybe make a utility. Right now I have just been annotating a copy of the sheet with explanations as I starting to understand parts of it.

Edit: I could share my copy of the spreadsheet that I put notes on, and make it open for anyone to work on. As long Skoormit is ok with it and don't complain, its his work so I will respect his wishes on it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QoNy-6DOzdf7XZiN-WHINdmYexru2Kjc8o1EZQlqDD0/edit?usp=sharing

Here it is, its open for anyone edit. So trolls can frakk around, but I guess then I can just roll it back, hopefully this forum is small enough it won't be an issue.

So, right now I am just working on noting everything to get a clear picture of how it works. Next step will be to make it more use friendly and ad something like what Garfunkel suggest (TF work seems to be that, tought its a bit unclear, working to figure out how it works). Feel free to add new sheets and work on a solution, but avoid messing around too much with the sheets Skoormit made so as not accidentally mess it up (not that its forbidden, it should be worked on but be smart about it!), then its better if you make your own copy to mess about whit and if you make something really good then copy it over to the shared sheet. Basically, its open for anyone to optimize and work on, I trust people here have the wisdom and discretion to know what to do and not do.
« Last Edit: October 13, 2021, 10:05:31 AM by hostergaard »
 

Online db48x

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Re: Spreadsheet: Skoormit's Terraforming Planner
« Reply #16 on: August 13, 2022, 08:28:55 AM »
Have you thought much about how to update it for 2.0? I am looking at my (edited) copy and wondering where to begin, and how to measure the difficulty of handling a planet where the hydrosphere freezes for half of the year.
 

Offline skoormit (OP)

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Re: Spreadsheet: Skoormit's Terraforming Planner
« Reply #17 on: August 13, 2022, 09:24:11 AM »
Have you thought much about how to update it for 2.0? I am looking at my (edited) copy and wondering where to begin, and how to measure the difficulty of handling a planet where the hydrosphere freezes for half of the year.

Honestly, I don't plan to ever play with eccentric orbits.

But if I did, let me think, what would I need to do with this.
I guess I'd never really be interested  in the current CC. I just care about the max and min.
Well, unless this planet has a very long orbital period.
In which case I might care a lot about the next, say, ten years. I still need to know what happens in the decades after that, but timing really matters.
However, the timing issue might not matter all that much in practice, because nearly all reasonably terraformable planets have reasonably short orbits (no more than a few years).
The ones that are reasonably terraformable and have very long orbits are probably orbiting an immense star, which is going to make the distances involved so large that I'd probably never consider colonizing it anyway.

So, assume I just ignore timing, because the orbit is far shorter than a typical terraforming timeline.
I would need to duplicate every existing column that refers to surface temperature, and calculate once for max distance and once for min distance.
Actually, might be simpler...I haven't looked at the formula that calculates base temperature from the orbital properties, but orbital distance is surely a factor. Probably an inverse square relationship?
Whatever it is, calculate the base temperature at min distance, and use that plus the eccentricity to infer the temperature at max distance.
Now I just need my "how much do I need to cool the place off" columns to consider the temperature at min distance, and my "how much do I need to heat the place up" columns to consider the temperature at max distance.
In nearly all cases, I'd expect only one set of columns to produce a positive number. Meaning I only need to either heat the place up or cool the place down, and I just need to make sure that I don't do so much of one or the other that I make things worse on the other side of the orbit.

If that's the case, or if both columns show a positive number, then there is no way to get this place to CC 0 permanently.
So, figure out what needs to be done so that the min and max CCs (for temperature) match, and that's my target CC.

In fact, the logic might be simpler overall if you just start from here.
What's the min and max temp CC right now, and how much can I reduce the higher one before the two are equal (or until I've changed the temp as much as it is possible to change it)?
In ideal cases, you can get them both to 0.

I don't even want to think about the hydrosphere issue.
My hunch is that only a vanishingly small number of otherwise desirable targets will be crossing the freezing threshold post-terraforming. Although I'm assuming roughly Human temperature ranges. Certainly one could play a race that likes colder places.
Maybe just figure out, based on orbital properties, how much hydro will freeze per orbit, and add enough extra hydro so that the hydro CC won't exceed the target CC.
« Last Edit: August 13, 2022, 09:30:10 AM by skoormit »
 

Offline skoormit (OP)

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Re: Spreadsheet: Skoormit's Terraforming Planner
« Reply #18 on: August 13, 2022, 10:26:20 AM »
Maybe just figure out, based on orbital properties, how much hydro will freeze per orbit, and add enough extra hydro so that the hydro CC won't exceed the target CC.

Rereading this, I realize that this is a good example of something that is simple to describe in English but difficult to actually calculate.

"How much hydro will freeze per orbit" is just the rate at which hydro freezes out of the atmosphere in Aurora (when the surface is cold enough for water to freeze) times the amount of time the body spends below that temperature during an orbit.

You'll need to find the orbital distance at which the surface temperature equals the freezing point of water, then figure out how much time the orbit spends from that orbital distance to the aphelion. Double that, and that's how much time water spends freezing out of the hydrosphere.

The orbital distance freezing point is easy enough, given that you already have the calculations for surface temp based on everything, including orbital distance.
Just set that equal to zero and solve for the distance term.

The proportion of the orbital duration that the body spends at that distance or greater is a question for calculus.
It's not as simple as the length of the ellipse segment over the circumference of the ellipse, because the orbital speed changes with the orbital distance.
Instead, it's the area of that portion of the ellipse over the area of the entire ellipse.
I'm confident that, around the time I finished calculus in school, I could have solved such a question in less than an hour.
But that was a long time ago, and besides, now we have google.
 

Offline ydirbut

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Re: Spreadsheet: Skoormit's Terraforming Planner
« Reply #19 on: September 10, 2022, 12:08:25 PM »
I just downloaded the spreadsheet, but I think I found a bug in it. One of my planets has a carbon dioxide level of 0.0304, but for some reason the SQL query is returning that as a toxic gas instead of a greenhouse gas.

 

Offline nuclearslurpee

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Re: Spreadsheet: Skoormit's Terraforming Planner
« Reply #20 on: September 10, 2022, 12:28:30 PM »
I just downloaded the spreadsheet, but I think I found a bug in it. One of my planets has a carbon dioxide level of 0.0304, but for some reason the SQL query is returning that as a toxic gas instead of a greenhouse gas.

Not a bug, CO2 above a certain proportion is considered to be a toxic gas in the C# version - this is a change from the old VB6 version.

Greenhouse gas is Aestusium and anti-greenhouse gas is Frigusium, both some TN handwavium substances added in C#.
 

Offline skoormit (OP)

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Re: Spreadsheet: Skoormit's Terraforming Planner
« Reply #21 on: September 11, 2022, 09:15:22 AM »
I just downloaded the spreadsheet, but I think I found a bug in it. One of my planets has a carbon dioxide level of 0.0304, but for some reason the SQL query is returning that as a toxic gas instead of a greenhouse gas.

Not a bug, CO2 above a certain proportion is considered to be a toxic gas in the C# version - this is a change from the old VB6 version.

Greenhouse gas is Aestusium and anti-greenhouse gas is Frigusium, both some TN handwavium substances added in C#.

Note:
All toxic gases have a concentration threshold below which the game does not count them as toxic.
The spreadsheet does not take this threshold into account; any presence of a toxic gas is reported as toxic.
For most toxic gases, the concentration threshold is so low that there is only a trivial difference between removing the gas down to the safe level and just removing all the gas.

CO2 has the highest threshold, at 0.5% of total atmosphere.
In extreme cases you could save a non-trivial amount of terraforming time by leaving the extra 0.5% CO2.
In those cases, you can calculate the CO2 amount that you can safely leave in the atmo (when all tforming is done), and set your Maximum Atm number on the Environment tab to that number when removing CO2. (Although you might need to subtract 0.0001 because of rounding issues.)

Methane and Hydrogen thresholds are 0.05%.
All the other toxic gas thresholds are lower than that.
 

Offline Wizard of War

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Re: Spreadsheet: Skoormit's Terraforming Planner
« Reply #22 on: December 06, 2023, 10:43:55 AM »
I know this topic has been dormant for over a year, but I have been searching everywhere (without success) for exactly this:
Quote from: skoormit
Actually, might be simpler. . . I haven't looked at the formula that calculates base temperature from the orbital properties, but orbital distance is surely a factor.  Probably an inverse square relationship?
Whatever it is, calculate the base temperature at min distance, and use that plus the eccentricity to infer the temperature at max distance.

Using just information from the database, I am lost on how to calculate min and max temperature.
Has anyone stumbled accross the calculations?