The stars at night look big and bright

[marvo]

Celestia shows the Deneb would have a magnitude the same as the sun at a distance of about 500 AU.

Just for the grin value I ran Heaven and Earth on the OTU Deneb system. I thought I would get something totally outrageous, but in fact it did not turn out so bad. Here's what I got:

System Name: Deneb

PBG: 610

PRIMARY SYSTEM A2 Ia

7 Deneb I Theta G410200-B
moon - 6 Deneb I Theta Ay YS00000-0
11 Deneb I Mu G50066B-C Mn Co Re Nv
12 Deneb I Nu B537ADD-C Hi In
13 Deneb I Xi H64066C-C Mn Co Nv
moon - 12 Deneb I Xi Ay Y300000-0
14 Deneb I Omicron X000000-0

As you can see, this puts the main planet out in orbit 12. Not having my book infront of me I am not sure how far out that is. From the system diagram it looks about 200 AU, which is probably still way to close. H&E puts the mean surface temperature of the planet as 28.021 degrees C. A bit warm, but really nice compared to the weird temperatures H&E usually defines as 'habitable'.

 

[Malenfant]

Problem with Deneb is that it's (a) far too massive to have planets, (b) far too young to have planets, and (c) far too hot and energetic to have planets - so much so that it probably wouldn't even have asteroid belts or Oort clouds since its solar wind would have blasted any planet-forming material away.

Basically, supergiants won't have planets directly in orbit around them, and even if they're captured they'll be uninhabitable.

 

[trader jim]

Geeeezzzz....you guys take all the fun out of the Rifts concept....Now I cant use my new "Deep Rift Highliners"...all 10 of them !!!!!!

 

[marvo]

Originally posted by trader jim:
Geeeezzzz....you guys take all the fun out of the Rifts concept....Now I cant use my new "Deep Rift Highliners"...all 10 of them !!!!!!

That's always been my personal gripe with Traveller's definition as 'hard' science fiction. Just how 'hard' do you make it? It's nice to discuss all the science, but when it comes down to actual gaming, I give a certain leeway towards playability over science fact.

 

[Malenfant]

I'd really like to know how getting the astronomical facts right has any effect on the game's playability...

 

[marvo]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
I'd really like to know how getting the astronomical facts right has any effect on the game's playability...

Point taken and with prior planning your right. In this case I was thinking in terms of positioning of planets etc. I assume that a ships navigation system holds all of the UWP data for several sectors and the players all have access to this information. For this I use all the OTU data available on the web or in print. (The whole OTU fit's on my laptop, so this sounds reasonable to me.) As we know, this contains a lot of systems that do not make sense in astronomical terms. For systems that I know the PC's are going to interact with I prescreen them beforehand and make changes. But if someone questions something I am not prepared for I prefer to go with the OTU data and explain it however I can, rather that slowing things down to redefine the system.

I have been following your excellent reworking of the system generation tables on another thread. This really works well so I hope this can be incorporated into T5. But, this leaves the question of what to do with the old OTU data. Is someone going to rework it all?

 

[Malenfant]

To be honest, if it was going to be incorporated into anything I'd rather it was incorporated into the current OTU than a vaporware T5 that is probably not going to happen.

I'd like to see all the UWP data for the 3I regenerated somehow using my tables - I'm sure Flynn could just set his programmed conversion of it loose on all the sectors. We'd have to keep certain systems as they are (the ones explicitly mentioned in printed canon, plus any real ones like Antares), but it's certainly possible that we could regenerate the rest. Even if that's not "official", at least that means a much more realistic universe is there for anyone who wants it.

But even in practise, just about the only difference it makes in gameplay terms is for things like figuring out where the 100D distance from a given star is - all those habitable worlds that were previously orbiting red giants but are now orbiting main sequence stars are suddenly going to find that it doesn't take forever to reach the 100D limit anymore

 

[marvo]

What do we do about Deneb? It's the sector capital so we cannot ignore it. We have to leave it as a type 'A' star, but we also know that in practice it cannot have any planets.

I was thinking of giving it a distant companion and locating the habitable planet there. Also have to assume that it has a very long period of rotation and is currently eclipsed by Deneb from Earth.

Any suggestions?

 

[Malenfant]

There's a bit of info on Deneb here.

There's no *known* companion to Deneb, but a far M5-M9 V companion might well do the trick - I don't think we'd be able to detect that directly from Earth and the gravitational wobble would be very slight since we're considering a 0.1-0.2 solar mass star in a several thousand year long orbit orbiting a 25 mass star that's several thousand lightyears away.

EDIT: As an aside, do we know that the sector capital is actually located around Deneb? Or could Deneb just have an uninhabited asteroid belt around it and the sector capital is around another star (this doesn't stop the sector being named after it, of course)? Though it's a moot point since Deneb isn't even in Charted Space.