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UPP Sizes compared to Sol system objects

M

MikeinBallard

SOC-9
I've seen several graphic representations of exo-planet size vs. Earth size on the net lately, and I've been noodling around with Travellermap.com. I've wondered what sizes correspond with objects in our solar system, and I created Special Supplement 1105-002-SC003-SR1827, "UPP Code Size Comparison to Terra System Bodies". It's a .pdf that shows planet sizes 1 - 10, and select objects from our home system. I used Torben Mogensen's "Planet" to create the vegetation, desert, bump, and specular textures, and did some creative erasing and grain merging in the Gimp to get some good maps. Celestia was used to render them. I screen shot, cropped and assembled them in LibreOffice Draw. Here's a sample shot from Celestia of my interpretation of the Solomani capital, Home.

I believe I shared this out correctly, let me know if you can't reach it.
 
Nice.

I love the way the Size 4 World has red plant life. Which makes a certain sense from what I recall. No matter if accurate or not is a cool touch. Now is it possible to gen one up with all the Sizes shown?

Thanks again, this is pretty and neat.
 
I'm glad everyone liked it! Thanks! @Magnus: Do you mean a larger planet with anthocyanic (red pigmented) plants? That would actually be kind of neat to do the full-meal deal with red foliage, deserts and icecaps.
 
Uh, no, but cool.

MikeinBallard said:
I'm glad everyone liked it! Thanks! @Magnus: Do you mean a larger planet with anthocyanic (red pigmented) plants? That would actually be kind of neat to do the full-meal deal with red foliage, deserts and icecaps.
Click to expand...
I was referring to the Size 4 World on the current .pdf. It looks red, which I took to be anthocyanic. Maybe it is just a lot of rusted iron crust, in which case I see a mining colony there someday. :)

As to the other larger worlds I meant Sizes B-F (though T5 has some other Big Worlds above F, but they tend to be Ice, Storm or Rad Worlds).

Now, going back to your idea of doing up a anthocyanic world would be cool, we know green is not the only color of life and being a science fiction RPG it would be neat to see some not Earth worlds.

Does that clear things up? Sorry for the confusion, I was way tired the last two days, overtime at bill paying job.
 
I think I see my next 3 projects:

  • Sizes A-F with select Kepler exo-planets (super-earths)
  • All homeworlds from Travellermap compared
  • The detailed carotenoidic, xanthophyllic, and anthocyanic world ()orange, yellow, and red vegetation).
 
Wicked cool.

MikeinBallard said:
I think I see my next 3 projects:

  • Sizes A-F with select Kepler exo-planets (super-earths)
  • All homeworlds from Travellermap compared
  • The detailed carotenoidic, xanthophyllic, and anthocyanic world ()orange, yellow, and red vegetation).
Click to expand...
Can't wait to see them. Okay, I can wait, but hope to see them soon.
 
MikeinBallard said:
  • The detailed carotenoidic, xanthophyllic, and anthocyanic world (orange, yellow, and red vegetation).
Click to expand...

BTW, an article in Scientific American several years ago also suggested that a world orbiting a red star might have black vegetation in order to absorb as many wavelengths of light as possible (since M-type stars have a significant portion of their spectrum in the infra-red).
 
Regina and Assiniboia. This is about 2 hours of noodling with the regular and desert textures, monkeying with the sea color, and reusing a terraformed Venus cloud cover map. And then monkeying with Celestia to get a plausible (-ish) ssc file put together for both with mostly correct orbital periods and distances.

I will just stick with the planets of interest in the future. :CoW: I might just put all of them in orbit around a gas giant for the photo session needed for the chart. Regina was just an exercise to see if I could put something together that worked.
 
whulorigan said:
BTW, an article in Scientific American several years ago also suggested that a world orbiting a red star might have black vegetation ...
Click to expand...

Black - to us. Our vision centers more or less on our sun's peak frequency. Perhaps to a species with vision centered on the peak frequency of a red star, his/her/its plants would look green and ours would look yellow.
 
Gee, thanks.

Carlobrand said:
Black - to us. Our vision centers more or less on our sun's peak frequency. Perhaps to a species with vision centered on the peak frequency of a red star, his/her/its plants would look green and ours would look yellow.
Click to expand...
Like my life isn't complicated enough, now I have to think about how color shifts make things look to non-humans. Dangnabbit! Still, good to know, thanks for the info, got any links to share on that one, or just have a good head for those kind of details?
 
Last edited:
Carlobrand said:
Black - to us. Our vision centers more or less on our sun's peak frequency. Perhaps to a species with vision centered on the peak frequency of a red star, his/her/its plants would look green and ours would look yellow.
Click to expand...

Good point. Although in your example above I think our plants would look either purple or black to him/her/it.
 
MikeinBallard said:
monkeying with the sea color
Click to expand...

What color values do you use?

I find that RGB values of like 0/30/60, 0/20/50 or 10/10/50 produce convincing results in Bryce. It depends on the atmosphere settings. Strangely, changing the properties of the atmosphere layers have the greatest impact on of the ocean's color.

I used photos from various satellites, Apollo missions, and the Messenger probe for a baseline. An eyedropper sample of the darker ocean blues from Apollo 11 photos shows a typical RGB value of 10/10/50.
 
I'm using an older version of "planet.exe", with the following options:

Code: 
set seed=.20130610768546452199
set width=8192
set height=4096
set name=Regina
@echo,
@echo Generate planet map, bump map, and specular map
@echo,
@echo seed value = %seed%
@echo image will be %width% x %height%
@echo,
@echo This may take some time based on the width and height specified
@echo,
@echo Generating planet map ...
@echo,
Planet.exe -pq -c -a -s %seed% -m 1 -M mycolors.rgb -w %width% -h %height% -o planet_%name%_%seed:~1,10%.bmp
@echo,
@echo Generating specular map ...
@echo,
Planet.exe -pq -c -a -s %seed% -m 1 -M mycolorsspec.rgb -w %width% -h %height% -o planet__%name%_specular_%seed:~1,10%.bmp
@echo,
@echo Generating bump map ...
@echo,
Planet.exe -pq -c -a -s %seed% -m 1 -M mycolorsbump.rgb -w %width% -h %height% -o planet__%name%_bump_%seed:~1,10%.bmp
@echo,
@echo Generating desert map ...
@echo,
Planet.exe -pq -c -a -s %seed% -m 1 -M mydesertcolors.rgb -w %width% -h %height% -o planet__%name%_desert_%seed:~1,10%.bmp
@echo,
@echo Generating Outlines and grids map ...
@echo,
Planet.exe -pq -c -a -s %seed% -m 1 -g 30 -G 30 -M Outline.rgb -E -w %width% -h %height% -o planet__%name%_grid_%seed:~1,10%.bmp
@echo,
@echo Generating Litoral map ...
@echo,
Planet.exe -pq -c -a -s %seed% -m 1 -M White.rgb -E -w 2048 -h 1024 -o planet__%name%_litoral_%seed:~1,10%.bmp
@echo Completed.
@echo,
@pause

The color file mycolors.rgb is defined as:

27 46 76
48 78 128
30 60 56
70 94 75
94 117 100
228 228 228
255 255 255

The first two lines are the deeper and the shallower ocean colors. Planet will blend those colors depending on how the seed value dictates. Once I run my full set to obtain the green, desert, bump, and specular maps, I pull the green and desert in to adjust them. I create separate layers for the oceans and the processed land areas. In the depictions of Regina I've seen, the sea is more cyan that blue, so I manually adjusted the sea to that color.

The specular map is easy to get (water reflects, land doesn't, snow does a bit more), the bump map colors are kind of a hack that works, but I have to manually edit the poles, as the pack ice looks like it's 20 miles high if I don't.
 
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