Sol System in Starfire

[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...

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...  

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

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

Michael

Interesting article.  Thanks for the link.

[procyon]

I really doubt that a tidelocked planet would have a small habitable zone that we would consider tolerable.  It would be easier to just pick the hot or cold side and go with that.  If you shoot for the area that has warming from the 'heated' side but isn't in the 'cold' area, it would not be a friendly enviroment.  Would the temp be survivable, yes.  Would the conditions.  Not a chance.  Especially if we are talking about the planets with an atmosphere to conduct the temperature - which most of the articles I have read are talking about.  If it had water in the atmosphere, it would be a death trap.
   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.

[crucis]

procyon, actually, the more recent articles I've read on the topic of tidelocked worlds of Red Dwarfs being potentially habitable have seemed to lean towards believing that it's entirely possible that they'd be habitable.  

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.

[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.

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..

[crucis]

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.

[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.  Somerimes you just have to chalk it up to "Its just a game".

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.

[crucis]

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.

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.  

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...

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

[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.

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.

[crucis]

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.

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.

[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.

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.

[crucis]

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.

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...

[Tregonsee]

Re: Kuiper Belt colonies-

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...