Tau_Cetacean
two discoveries this week:
interactive Star Wars galactic map:
http://www.swgalaxymap.com/
(admire this as a GM, and a survivor of ArcMap from grad school... while I'm not fully on-board with some of the Expanded Universe, and Disney just Deep-Sixed it... and I do sort of miss the mid-1990s when you had West End Games saying "there are thousands of sectors, we won't tell you about all of them, go make your own"... after the expanded universe had it's say, it seems there are merely dozens of sectors... it is undeniably cool to have this and wookipedia at your fingertips if you are doing a bounce-around-the-galaxy style campaign)
freeware 3D galactic atlas of a galaxy not so long ago, and not so far away:
http://www.thinkastronomy.com/M13/index.html
(I was struggling to program an excel spreadsheet that would convert Right Ascension and Declination of stars/nebulae/clusters/whatever and put it into galactic coordinates and then into X,Y,Z... but this puppy has already done that for you... still playing with it, but definitely seeing its potential for my main campaign: a hard sci-fi setting using real galactic geography)
Comments
- Kallak
I used his process to create a node map for my Sci-Fi setting, seen here: https://outremer.obsidianportal.com/maps/49601
The short version is that it uses data from the real world HabCat database (which compiles actual stellar data such as coordinates for stars most likely to host habitable planets - e.g. suitable for terraforming or assisted habitation). Then I personally filtered down to only those stars with recognizable names (i.e. Delta Pavonis, Beta Hydro, Iota Pegasi, etc...) and exclude those that only had catalogue designations. From there, you can generate real-world distances, and process those into either jump routes or travel times (depending on how you want interstellar travel to work in your setting). Finally, I used mind-mapping software to convert those real world distances and jump routes into a usable 2.5d node map (because accurate 3d interstellar maps look terrible and confusing), and then dressed it all up with some pretty graphics.
The end result, I feel, was a great balance between accurate data/numbers, and aesthetics.
His description of the process is here: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/starmaps/2.5dmaps.php
And some discussion and examples of other maps using real-world data here: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacemaps.php
EDIT: At one point I had a larger map with dozens of systems (still derived from the real-world HabCat dataset) and had run it through a similar process to determine capitals/major/minor based on "colonization date" (derived from distance from Sol and an arbitrary mission launch timeline) and distances to connecting systems to simulate trade routes and I think metallicity and luminosity to determine industrial and agricultural output, but I think I've lost that somewhere along the line. It was a masterpiece... * sniff * * sob *
right now I'm mostly focused on near-future history and in-solar-system stuff (esp. with "The Expanse" putting me in the mood to work on the asteroid belt), but eventually want to scope it out to interstellar (no FTL/hyperspace/wormholes) and tap into my former life as a planetary geologist to do realistic exoplanets...
http://www.starwars.com/games-apps/star-wars-crawl-creator
"Donjon website Science Fiction":http://donjon.bin.sh/scifi/swsg/
They are among us!
XCom: Defiance - Campaign of the Month November 2016
whoever coded it slapped on randomized star type as well, which I would just ignore all together because it pays no attention to basic details like how white dwarfs are too cold to warm up a planet to where liquid water is possible, A-type stars don't last long enough to develop habitable planets, M-type stars have habitable zones too close to the star and stellar flares would strip the atmosphere away over geologic time, plus wild climate swings due to starspots, etc.
it also has habitable gas giant moons, which, granted, is established in the movies with Yavin-4, and if you count the prequels and the trips with a submarine through Naboo's core you can just kiss all of planetary geophysics goodbye.. but... realistically, a moon of a gas giant would have formed with the gas giant beyond the "snow line" (e.g. incorporating about equal parts ice and rock) and migrated inwards with the gas giant... end result, if the gas giant moves into the habitable zone... ice crust and upper mantle melts... you get a moon with a) 100% ocean cover, b) ocean is >100km deep, c) sea floor is exotic high pressure form of ice, d) natural atmosphere would be oxygen, water vapor and some hydrogen that is being lost to space...
you could explain Yavin-4 as a rocky planet that got captured by a inward migrating gas giant, but that would be a rarer scenario... most large moons of habzone gas giants would be the melted ice ball scenario
Link "here":http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0150.html
~Mae
CotM Selection Committee
http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/94.html
~Mae
CotM Selection Committee
According to the KISS study, the cost for a future mission to identify and return a 500 ton asteroid to low earth orbit is ~$2.6 billion USD, ignoring the costs to develop the infrastructure necessary to process the materials in the asteroid ("Asteroid usage", 2012). However, Planetary Resources estimates that a single 30 meter long platinum-rich asteroid could contain $25 to $50 billion USD worth of platinum at today's prices (Klotz, 2012). Clearly, once the proper infrastructure is in place, there is potential for significant profit. Currently, research into the feasibility of human and robotic missions to asteroids is being conducted by both governmental organizations (JAXA, NASA) and private companies (Planetary Resources).
http://www.space.com/15405-asteroid-mining-feasibility-study.html
http://www.space.com/15395-asteroid-mining-planetary-resources.html
Mining off the sea floor is believed to be $1-$2 billion.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a11842/why-deep-sea-rare-earth-metals-will-stay-right-where-they-are-for-now/
MIT timeline for ocean and asteriod mining
http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/oceans.html
http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/asteroids.html
They are among us!
XCom: Defiance - Campaign of the Month November 2016
that's the rub... all our mining techniques are based on mining terrestrial rocks which have had ores formed by processes usually related to liquid water (flowing through the ground and hydrothermal fluids, dissolving, transporting and depositing various ions) in specific plate tectonic settings... a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid simply isn't going to have the same convenient distribution of ions
"a single 30 meter long platinum-rich asteroid could contain $25 to $50 billion USD worth of platinum at today’s prices"
*at today's prices*, based on today's supply and today's demand, you haul an iron-nickel asteroid with some amount of platinum in it into low earth orbit and the price for iron, nickel and platinum is going to crash, even before you figure out how to cost-effectively melt, separate and segregate the platinum and nickel from the iron, in airless microgravity
by the logic of the asteroid mining hype, a similar volume of soil on the Earth's surface today is worth $1.7 quadrillion:
http://ronaldbrak.blogspot.com/2006/02/great-asteroid-mining-con.html
And the waste product from the process can easily be recycled into Soylent Green, so it's ecologically sound!
...eh, what's that? I meant to say "us" pesky humans, not "them"... I'm certainly not a colony of space arachnids piloting a human skin suit, why would you even think that?!
Sluuurrrp
- skitter skitter -
Has anybody developed a working model of their fantasy game's solar system? Added additional planets, named the moon(s), etc.? I'd be curious to know how you went about it, and what tied it into your world, as it's something I have been trying to establish in my own setting for some time.
~Mae
CotM Selection Committee
I started with the idea that medieval cosmology was literally true: the Earth (or the Earth-like main world in my setting) is at the center of the universe, which is only one star system
the moon is in the closest orbit, other planets beyond that, then the sun, then the other planets, then a giant crystalline sphere to which the stars are attached
I take the medieval notion that the equator is impassably hot to be true (e.g. the land is scorching hot, the seas are boiling), but can be circumvented by caravan routes that cut through the underdark
I take the medieval notion that outer space is made of "aether" and say that ethereal plane exists in between the planets in my setting (and can be traversed... you just had to have the right magic, be able to handle an ethereal plane encounter table and deal with the distances involved)
the inward-facing side of the crystalline sphere is the functional equivalent of the astral plane
the "stars" are giant glowing half-domes on the astral plane (which is otherwise a vast featureless crystalline plain, shrouded in mist)
haven't quite decided if the outer planes are inside the domes, in a TARDIS-like "bigger on the inside" scenario, or if they are just portals to the outer planes (which I suppose makes more sense for a multi-verse where my outer planes are shared by other universes)
beyond the crystalline sphere is THE VOID... basically, insert Lovecraftian horror-type stuff here
the planets I named using online elvish dictionaries, since I take the elves to be the biggest astrologers / astronomers in my campaign and their naming system would dominate, just as we now use Roman names for the planets and Arabic names for the brightest stars... the climates / geographies of the different worlds I inferred from their position in the solar system: if the main world has Earth-like conditions at the center of the universe, because it is at a uniform distance from the sun... than the planets in between the main world and the sun will be warmer... when the sun is closer to them... and colder... when the sun is farther away
and then we get to the really messed up part of my universe, which is that I've tried to keep continuity with every D&D game I've ever run, since middle school... and well... being a novice DM in middle school and having a very weird friend in middle school... I once had a rampaging evil overlord (ret-con: he was an avatar of The Void), and dropped hints that he could be destroyed by the heat of the sun, and here's this magical artifact that controls the cosmos (ret-con: the Orb of Creation or the Astrorb, or I need to come up with a better name), and instead of bringing down a small chunk of the sun like I'd hinted, he brought down the entire sun on the planet (ret-con: any mortal who touches the Orb of Creation is overwhelmed by the immensity of the cosmos and has a Wisdom drain down to 1)
this is the cataclysm known as Sunfall (which, yes, needs a better name)
mitigating factors:
1) the sun isn't as big as the earth (e.g. going off the sizes that medieval cosmology thought)
2) as it came down to the earth, it lost some of its heat/mass
3) the moon, or rather, the old moon, was in the way and took most of the blow
4) ret-con: this was all prophesied, and certain powerful people had taken to building a Arkopolis at the bottom of the sea, with the great library, the great zoo, etc. to repopulate the planet after it was cleansed of the Avatar of the Void
5) after the firestorm scorched the continents and boiled the seas, etc., divine intervention (using the recovered orb) created a new sun
6) after a secondary cataclysm known as Moonfall (asteroid impact, basically, from a chunk of the old moon, except that the rock is magical equivalent of radioactive waste and has a lycanthropic radiation type effect... basically this is my in-game excuse for using all of these nifty "how can we design a radioactive waste depository so that dumb humans from tens or hundreds of thousands of years from now understand that it's dangerous / do not touch and not just laugh it off and raid it, like we ignored the curse warnings and looted the tombs of Pharaohs" type papers in one of my dungeon designs), another artifact was created, which now resides at the core of the new moon (which it created by pulling in all of the chunks of the old moon)
I've vague idea that pre-catacylsm there was this magic-heavy interplanetary civilization who built gates (borrowing liberally from Stargate SG-1 here), but since the cataclysm, the Earth-like planet at the center of my universe has been cut off from it, all of the Earth-side gates have been destroyed, etc.
something to keep in my back pocket if my next campaign ever gets high powered enough that they've exhausted all the possibilities one world can offer
http://www.eldacur.com/~brons/NerdCorner/StarGen/StarGen.html
Now I can't speak to its accuracy directly, but the author seems to have spent a fair amount of time and attention to detail in creating the algorithms that power it. One nice feature is that you can enter the stellar characteristics and it will use that in the generation of the system - useful if you are wanting to generate a plausible system for real stars.
That's largely how I use it - to fill in systems with the illusion of detail (that I don't have to generate myself).
until we got more data
(and even then - part of what's going on now is an observation bias - the fact epistellar Jovians exist at all was a huge curveball, but they are also easier to detect than any other kind of planet... so the degree to which solar system-like solar systems are "weird" is sometimes exaggerated... and unfortunately Kepler's gryoscopes crapped out right when it was on the cusp of detecting Earth-sized planets in Earth-like orbits around Sun-like stars... so we're probably a few decades still from really answering the question)
GURPS Space (2nd Edition) did a decent job of encapsulating 1980s-style understanding of planetary system generation, and there are some good coded up versions of that I've seen online... GURPS Space (4th Edition) tackles epistellar Jovians, but I haven't seen it coded up anywhere online... and there are still some things I'd quibble with about how they do things... and a big missing factor - relating stellar metallicity with properties of the planetary system
"NASA’s Kepler Marks 1,000th Exoplanet Discovery, Uncovers More Small Worlds in Habitable Zones":http://www.astrobio.net/topic/deep-space/new-planets/nasas-kepler-marks-1000th-exoplanet-discovery-uncovers-more-small-worlds-in-habitable-zones/
http://exoplanet.eu/ is a good resource for all of the known exo-solar systems to date... there was another one that had illustrations (both showing the orbits and relative sizes of the exoplanets compared to Jupiter), but damned if I can find it now
just as an fyi - some new details from the Spitzer space telescope on the exoplanet 55 Cancri-e in the 55 Cancri system (aka Janssen in the Copernicus system, because the IAU has finally gotten around to assigning formal names to some exoplanets and exoplanet host stars)
8 times the mass of Earth, and almost twice the radius, 18 hour long day/year (tidally locked)
and here's the new data: the temperature: 1,100°C (2,000°F) - ON THE NIGHT SIDE - on the day side 2,400° C (4,400°F), e.g. molten lava
http://www.nbos.com/products/astrosynthesis