Is this an impossible situation? (Long Post)

[Malenfant]

Check this out:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/alien.html

"Blue Moon" has a dense atmosphere N2/O2 with some interesting life...

 

[TheEngineer]

Very interesting topic and many good posts here, folks.
Thanks to initiate than, Ken.

The Blue Moon project is a very good inspriration for world-building. I saw the a related TV-show a couple of months ago and it was really cool. (Well, the CG wasn't always good).

Regarding life on Your world, I would see it everythere. Especially high atmo pressures will lead to higher oxygen concentrations in the sea, high is just good to enhance life support

If the pressure is "just" 5 bar (o.k. 500 kPa), I surely would stress the importance of the water surface for evolved ecologies..

regards,

TE

 

[KenHR]

Yeah, awesome discussion. I'm learning a lot.

I saw the Aurelia/Blue Moon article while searching for inspiration for this world, actually. The television special was very good, and it'd be neat if they did more (a series...planet of the week?!). I especially like the flora, the Pagoda Trees in particular for some reason.

With all the ideas thrown out here, I'm giving Polassar system a more prominent place in my campaign plans, as it'd be a shame for my players not to see it. I have a hook for it, courtesy of random generation: the planet has a really high resource rating (F), high enough to have a dramatic effect on the economy of the entire sector. These resources haven't been exploited (0 export rating). However, the native life has a pretty advanced TL (8, about where we are now), so they probably know about their planet's riches and are working on their own way to extract them. They probably won't take kindly to Federation scientists and commercial interests taking those resources without giving them a cut of the profits. Or maybe some rare compound exists there that is crucial to maintaining the ecosystem. Lots of ways to go with that idea.

I just need to figure out what sorts of resources this planet has...more research.

I'll post up more stuff as it gets written. Hopefully it'll be good enough to stand up to what everyone else on this thread has contributed.

So...Scouts seems to have fallen down with this world design. Are its numbers so far off across the board, or was this just due to the unusual nature of this system? Again, not that I'm concerned with absolute fidelity to science in-game, I just find the whole process of world design fascinating and would like to know more.

 

[Malenfant]

You might want to check out the old Blue Planet RPG (by FFG) if you can get your mitts on it - set entirely on a waterworld (albeit with a standard atmosphere), it's a very gritty frontier setting. However, what makes it shine is the environment - the designers really went to town on making it as realistic as they could. The "Natural Selection" book has TONS of info in it about the biology and biomes of the planet.

One thing that springs to mind with your world is that waterworlds usually have very powerful, persistent storm systems, since there's no land to slow the winds down as they go over the water, or to suck the energy out of hurricanes. In a denser atmosphere, those storms are going to be even more devastating because there's that much more air mass involved - that said, that's also countered by the fact that you need more energy to mobilise all that air. Having a K V primary might also counter the storm generation a bit since those stars are less energetic... but I think you'll still get the megastorms forming occasionally. And when they do, everything had better get the hell out of the way...

That may be one reason why your rock/crystal spires aren't too likely - they'd be demolished by the winds.

Scouts is useful to get a 'first pass' at a system, but its results usually need a lot of refining. If you want more realistic world design then use GT: First In (I've not seen GURPS Space 4e yet).

 

[mike wightman]

I'd recommend GURPS Space 4th edition too, a lot of it has been updated to more modern scientific discoveries, and it's a lot cheaper than trying to find First In.

Plus it includes a very good alien race (similar to Uplift) and culture design system.

 

[KenHR]

I've seen the 1st and 2nd edition Blue Planet books at my FLGS. From what I've read of the setting on RPG.net, it looks really good. The next pocketful of disposable income that comes my way might have to go toward those books...damn, I think FFG had a package deal on these books a couple months back, too.

GURPS Space 4e is fantastic, quite well-written in that it not only provides the necessary info, it talks straight to the reader. The aliens chapter is what inspired me to try this experiment. I think I've actually seen a real copy of First In at another bookstore around here, but I might be wrong. If it's there, it's mine now (unless the store owner really knows what she has on the shelf....).

Looks like I will be using the GURPS books to derive my data from here on out. While I'm sure my players wouldn't notice any inaccuracy, it seems silly to derive and parade all these figures and stats if they're just dead wrong (the MD companion Malenfant cited earlier being an example). Why go through all the work when I can get the same sorts of nonsensical results via handwave?

(edit: durn, no crystal spires. No biggie; giant storms are so much cooler )

 

[Malenfant]

If you're getting Blue Planet, get the 2nd ed books. If you're lucky you might still find the package deal with four of the supplements available somewhere...

 

[kafka47]

Malenfant, whilst the 2nd edition does have goodies, I would still go for the 1st edition and the Blair Reynolds artwork that made them so wonderful to look at. You can always pick up the 2nd edition for the crunchy bits.

BTW, anyone know if Blue Planet has official died or are they a game in search of a publisher (apologies to Pirandello).

 

[Malenfant]

AFAIK it's dead. FFG decided that boardgames and card games were more interesting and let it languish. Getting a straight answer as to its official lack of support was a right pain. I think it's reverted back to the original copyright holders now.

IMO the supplements are much better for 2e than for 1e. Plus most of the info from 1e is in the 2e books anyway.

 

[KenHR]

Wow, I gotta take a look at both of these this weekend.

Still working with all this stuff. Home life has a way of getting busy just when you're starting to have fun.

 

[Plankowner]

There's a book called "Saturn Rukh", I THINK the author was Robert Forward, that gives a description of life in the atmosphere of Saturn. The life was based on Terrestrial Biology (at it's basis). The biosphere was pretty well described with floaters, sharks etc. While this doesn't match your planet exactly, it might give you inspiration since all the life was suspended in the atmosphere. The native intelligence might fit the bill for you alien race if you like. They were very different and had an interesting Male/Female relationship.

 

[princelian]

Note that the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (for which I work) and the programs that came before it (Deep Sea Drilling Project, Ocean Drilling Program) has found life - albeit not life like we think of it here on the surface - at every depth of ocean, sediment, and rock we have drilled.

We drill in water depths from 200 m to 8000 m, with a typical depth of 2000 to 4000 m. We penetrate sediment to depths of 1000 meters below seafloor (mbsf) and then (on hard rock coring expeditions) up to several hundred meters into bedrock. Bedrock penetrations have typically been into oceanic crust, but our most recent expedition off the coast of Costa Rica (X312) penetrated slightly into unaltered peridiotite, which is mantle material.

At every depth, there's life. Bacteria that exist in what we would consider extremely unfavorable conditions. Temperature extremes from over three hundred degrees C (thermal vents) to below freezing. Pressure domains up to hundreds of atmospheres. Lack of light and nutrients.

These creatures have incredibly slow metabolisms - orders of magnitude less reproductive rate than terrigenous bacteria - existing on chemical fluxes from the interstitial water that flows slowly through the sediment and rock. These are iron-reducers, sulfur-reducers, and even-stranger-element-reducers. But they're down there.

And they're such a wide variety of life (which we know little about so far) that I'd believe that life could exist at any sort of nasty conditions.

Higher life is unlikely to form at such temperatures, pressures, and lack of energy flux, but hey, this is science fiction. There's a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where there's a silicon-based nano-life-form colony that begins destroying a colony because the humans were draining the fluid that gave them life....I think they infect Lt. Cmdr. Data in order to communicate after taking over the ship or something.

Anyhow, who knows what lurks under those high-pressure clouds?

 

[Malenfant]

That deep-crust life is interesting, but I was under the impression that it's there only because there's surface life - i.e. that early on, surface life migrated downwards into the crust and evolved its own way. So there's no guarantee that otherwise lifeless worlds would have that kind of life too (unless perhaps the worlds had surface life in the past that died out, like possibly Mars).

 

[KenHR]

I'm working along the lines of stuff found in the deep ocean, actually, along with hunting down illustrations of animals found in the Burgess Shale (lots of tentacle-y things and strange manipulators in weird places). Any sources you recommend for deep-sea life?

Saturn Rukh sounds interesting. I read the wikipedia entry and a couple of reviews after reading your post, Plankowner. Definitely have to hunt it down; durn, and we were used book shopping today (finally got around to picking up Vance's Star King). Thanks for the tip!

I have to admit, the amount of knowledge that has been demonstrated here is intimidating! (But in a good way.)