Interesting worldbuilding articles

[Malenfant]

I chanced upon a couple of articles that could be useful for realistic worldbuilding... the author is a professor in astronomy so he knows what he's talking about

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Atmospheric effects on planetary surface temperatures

The retention/loss of planetary atmospheres

 

[mike wightman]

Very good, thanks Malenfant

 

[Psion]

Thanks much.

I found the linked discussion of Titan interesting. It suggests to realistically portray atmospheres of objects in the outer system, there might be a "zone" where an atmophere is possible for an icy body.

Question: how far out from a gas giant is a moon normally tide locked?

 

[Malenfant]

If you've followed what I've been saying about worldbuilding here and on JTAS, you'll notice that I already try to account for most of the things he mentions there (especially in the second link). I'll have to check my numbers when I get home though, I might be using a different value for the atmospheric retention timescales.

Speaking of which, I notice that the World Tamers Handbook (currently available free at DTRPG) has tables that (a) link free oxygen in the atmosphere to hydrographics and (b) show the minimum molecular weights retained by different worlds... and size 1 and most size 2 worlds should always have no atmosphere according to that (which is what I've been saying for a while)! I suspect those might be taken from the 2300AD worldgen system...

 

[Psion]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
Speaking of which, I notice that the World Tamers Handbook (currently available free at DTRPG) has tables that (a) link free oxygen in the atmosphere to hydrographics and (b) show the minimum molecular weights retained by different worlds... and size 1 and most size 2 worlds should always have no atmosphere according to that (which is what I've been saying for a while)! I suspect those might be taken from the 2300AD worldgen system...

I downloaded that but didn't look at that, but I did remember they had that in 2300. I thought TNE used canonical data. Or did they take the fact the rebellion and virus screwed everything up to redo the data?

 

[Flynn]

Unfortunately, there are those of us whose firewalls do not allow us to take advantage of those free downloads, because we cannot activate our DRE managers. *sigh*

Enjoy,
Flynn

 

[Malenfant]

I dunno... the WTH just adds some extra bits to what is IIRC a fairly normal world generation sequence in TNE (I think the TNE version adds a density table too though).

 

[Psion]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
Speaking of which, I notice that the World Tamers Handbook (currently available free at DTRPG) has tables that (a) link free oxygen in the atmosphere to hydrographics and (b) show the minimum molecular weights retained by different worlds... and size 1 and most size 2 worlds should always have no atmosphere according to that (which is what I've been saying for a while)! I suspect those might be taken from the 2300AD worldgen system...

I noticed that GT:FI does B in a somewhat abstract fashion (by dividing plante categories into masses and zones and using that to define world types.)