An unusual planetary system
This is a setiup I've been playing with for the Swarm shared universe.
In that universe humans were contacted by a confederation of aliens (who are scared silly of us) because There's an even *more* scary species moving down the galactic arm.
The Sa'arm are some sort of hive-mind, and nobody has been able to communicate with them. They discover a suitable planet ("Earthlike") land, and start harvesting all the resources in sight. This includes the inhabitants, if any.
They dig in *literally) and start producing more Sa'arm, and more ships. Eventually they've used up all the resources they can get at and abandon the planet. the ships they've produced go hunting more worlds to exploit.
The aliens (and humans) are often ignored, until they get in the way, or encounter a food harvesting party. If they attack, they get swarmed and killed.
Being pacifists, the member races of the Confederacy get slaughtered. so they contact us. We weren't their first choice, but that species suicided upon contact because they were *extremely* xenophobic.
Contact with us has a lot of problems. But a deal of sort is worked out. We get access to some technology, and ion return we go fight the Sa'arm (and try to build defenses on Earth).
Anyway, the Confederacy names systems for the jmajor inhabited planet by adding the suffix "-at" to the name of the world. So we live in the Earthat system. this is important...
So there are ships surveying space to look for planets we might colonize, planets the Sa'arm have colonized, and anything else that may be useful. The prelim stuff is done by ships popping out of hyperspace every so often and taking scan of the surrounding sky. These get combined to make 3D maps and decide which stars bear a closer look.
Discovery of the system
Copernicus had popped out of hyper in deep space to perform yet another set of observations of distant stars.
"Start standard scans as soon as the sensors are properly deployed" the ensign on duty told the ship's AI. Then he went back to reading a mystery novel.
An hour or so later, the AI interrupted him, "Ensign, as discoverer, you have the privilege of naming the habitable planet we are near."
For a second the Ensign stared. The ship was in deep space!
"Habitable planet? Nearby? Where is it?" the last was all run together because he was flustered.
"You wish to name the planet Whereisit?" asked the AI. "That would make the system Whereisitat. Please confirm."
He started to correct the AI. Then stopped and thought for a minute. With a huge grin he said "Log that as a tentative name. I'll hold on confirming until I see the data on the planet and system."
He stared at the display in surprise as the data started scrolling across the displays.
Whereisitat system
Primary: Ember
class L9 brown dwarf
mass: 80 jupiters
Planets:
Whereisit
roughly Earth size & mass.
year length: 59 hours (.2 AU orbit)
day length: tide-locked
land masses are more evenly distributed than on earth.
Whereisit has six "poles". North & south at the normal locations. a hot pole in the middle of Dayside and a cold pole in the middle of Nightside. They threw in an east and west pole for good measure, they are where the equator hits the terminator (boundary between Dayside and Nightside).
Hot & cold poles are mostly water with scattered islands.
Local life forms are a few insectoids on land with primitive land plants. Water based life is more complex, but scattered. (Basically equivalent to the middle to late Devonian period on Earth). So land animals are insects, arthropods (spiders & scorpions) and myriapods (centipedes and millipedes). There may be lungfish in some places near water. sea level is a lot more complex.
Local plants use a photosynthetic compound that works with the red light available from Ember. So they absorb red light strongly. This means they tend to be blue to violet colored by artificial light, and more or less black by local sunlight.
Ground cover ranges from algal and bacterial mats (think a coating of slimy stuff up to a CM thick) through primitive non-vascular plants (no more than a few inches tall without much of a root system) to horsetails and ferns, with the occasional fungus. some of the fungi on earth at the time were up to 20 feet (6 meters) tall!
Primitive trees may be starting in places.
2 more rocky planets.(Whatsit & Thingamabob)
Whatsit .35 AU
Thingamabob .5 AU
(above stuff is "official". Below stuff is tentative or references)
Because Whereisit is tide-locked, if you are on the equator at the prime meridian, the sun is directly overhead. Always.
Ember's magenta.. It's also *huge*. Covers almost 10 degrees. Our sun covers a bit over *half* a degree.
To get a feel for it, hold a CD at arms length. Whereisit's sun will be bigger. But a 45 record will be bigger than the star. ("Actual" sizes are for a meter away. CD is 12 cm, 45 is 18, the star covers 16 cm)
You can look directly at it without discomfort. But your face will feel the heat the same as a sunny day on earth (only about 1% of the star's output is visible light).
Light intensity at the hot pole is about like 10-15 miuntes before sunset on Earth.
It's a class L brown dwarf. Brightest and most massive brown dwarf class.
It's a bit smaller than Jupiter, but a *lot* heavier.
The local day is infinite length (tide-locked, remember?). The local year is around two-and-a-half days. Nobody really cares about the exact length as it doesn't really affect anything. Only of interest to navigators.
There are a couple of other planets. Smaller and farther out. They have some significant tidal effects, part of the reason Whereisit still has active plate tectonics.
They may have also helped with the development and evolution of local life by causing the planet to spiral in closer at a rate approximating the rate at which the star cools.
The atmosphere is thick enough that global circulation exists and evens out the temperature some. So dayside and nightside temps aren't horribly different.
Nobody wants to live at the Hot Pole or Cold Pole, but they aren't major extremes. (say, bad summer & bad winter levels?)
Whereisit has six poles:
North/south
hot/cold
east/west
Weather is mostly high level winds radiating out from the hot pole to the cold pole with lower level winds returning. Being tide-locked, there isn't enough coriolis force to cause the sideways deflections of flow that lead to cyclones and the like.
This means precipitation is at lower levels, with it getting scarcer the closer you get to the hot pole at the center of dayside. Rivers and other bodies of water moderate this.
Wondering if the might be a (very salty) sea at the center of dayside to moderate the climate? Also wondering if there might be a glacier at the cold pole with flowing ice helping transport water back to dayside?
Local vegetation looks black in local sunlight. Under artificial light it's shades of blue and indigo. It absorbs red light strongly along with some yellow (the yellow isn't involved in phoptosynthesis but that's just the spectral response of the pigment)
A bit of local color
They'd been working outside for a while and the magenta light from Ember was starting to get to Chrissy. She turned to one of the other concubines who'd been on the colony longer.
"How long is it until sundown. Seems like the sun has hardly moved."
"About three thousand miles," was the reply.
"What?" Chrissy was very confused.
"Whereisit is tide locked to Ember. So the sun never moves in the sky. You want sundown? The nearest part of the terminator is about three thousand miles away." She pointed. "I think it's that way."
This entry was originally posted at https://kengr.dreamwidth.org/1106181.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
In that universe humans were contacted by a confederation of aliens (who are scared silly of us) because There's an even *more* scary species moving down the galactic arm.
The Sa'arm are some sort of hive-mind, and nobody has been able to communicate with them. They discover a suitable planet ("Earthlike") land, and start harvesting all the resources in sight. This includes the inhabitants, if any.
They dig in *literally) and start producing more Sa'arm, and more ships. Eventually they've used up all the resources they can get at and abandon the planet. the ships they've produced go hunting more worlds to exploit.
The aliens (and humans) are often ignored, until they get in the way, or encounter a food harvesting party. If they attack, they get swarmed and killed.
Being pacifists, the member races of the Confederacy get slaughtered. so they contact us. We weren't their first choice, but that species suicided upon contact because they were *extremely* xenophobic.
Contact with us has a lot of problems. But a deal of sort is worked out. We get access to some technology, and ion return we go fight the Sa'arm (and try to build defenses on Earth).
Anyway, the Confederacy names systems for the jmajor inhabited planet by adding the suffix "-at" to the name of the world. So we live in the Earthat system. this is important...
So there are ships surveying space to look for planets we might colonize, planets the Sa'arm have colonized, and anything else that may be useful. The prelim stuff is done by ships popping out of hyperspace every so often and taking scan of the surrounding sky. These get combined to make 3D maps and decide which stars bear a closer look.
Discovery of the system
Copernicus had popped out of hyper in deep space to perform yet another set of observations of distant stars.
"Start standard scans as soon as the sensors are properly deployed" the ensign on duty told the ship's AI. Then he went back to reading a mystery novel.
An hour or so later, the AI interrupted him, "Ensign, as discoverer, you have the privilege of naming the habitable planet we are near."
For a second the Ensign stared. The ship was in deep space!
"Habitable planet? Nearby? Where is it?" the last was all run together because he was flustered.
"You wish to name the planet Whereisit?" asked the AI. "That would make the system Whereisitat. Please confirm."
He started to correct the AI. Then stopped and thought for a minute. With a huge grin he said "Log that as a tentative name. I'll hold on confirming until I see the data on the planet and system."
He stared at the display in surprise as the data started scrolling across the displays.
Whereisitat system
Primary: Ember
class L9 brown dwarf
mass: 80 jupiters
Planets:
Whereisit
roughly Earth size & mass.
year length: 59 hours (.2 AU orbit)
day length: tide-locked
land masses are more evenly distributed than on earth.
Whereisit has six "poles". North & south at the normal locations. a hot pole in the middle of Dayside and a cold pole in the middle of Nightside. They threw in an east and west pole for good measure, they are where the equator hits the terminator (boundary between Dayside and Nightside).
Hot & cold poles are mostly water with scattered islands.
Local life forms are a few insectoids on land with primitive land plants. Water based life is more complex, but scattered. (Basically equivalent to the middle to late Devonian period on Earth). So land animals are insects, arthropods (spiders & scorpions) and myriapods (centipedes and millipedes). There may be lungfish in some places near water. sea level is a lot more complex.
Local plants use a photosynthetic compound that works with the red light available from Ember. So they absorb red light strongly. This means they tend to be blue to violet colored by artificial light, and more or less black by local sunlight.
Ground cover ranges from algal and bacterial mats (think a coating of slimy stuff up to a CM thick) through primitive non-vascular plants (no more than a few inches tall without much of a root system) to horsetails and ferns, with the occasional fungus. some of the fungi on earth at the time were up to 20 feet (6 meters) tall!
Primitive trees may be starting in places.
2 more rocky planets.(Whatsit & Thingamabob)
Whatsit .35 AU
Thingamabob .5 AU
(above stuff is "official". Below stuff is tentative or references)
Because Whereisit is tide-locked, if you are on the equator at the prime meridian, the sun is directly overhead. Always.
Ember's magenta.. It's also *huge*. Covers almost 10 degrees. Our sun covers a bit over *half* a degree.
To get a feel for it, hold a CD at arms length. Whereisit's sun will be bigger. But a 45 record will be bigger than the star. ("Actual" sizes are for a meter away. CD is 12 cm, 45 is 18, the star covers 16 cm)
You can look directly at it without discomfort. But your face will feel the heat the same as a sunny day on earth (only about 1% of the star's output is visible light).
Light intensity at the hot pole is about like 10-15 miuntes before sunset on Earth.
It's a class L brown dwarf. Brightest and most massive brown dwarf class.
It's a bit smaller than Jupiter, but a *lot* heavier.
The local day is infinite length (tide-locked, remember?). The local year is around two-and-a-half days. Nobody really cares about the exact length as it doesn't really affect anything. Only of interest to navigators.
There are a couple of other planets. Smaller and farther out. They have some significant tidal effects, part of the reason Whereisit still has active plate tectonics.
They may have also helped with the development and evolution of local life by causing the planet to spiral in closer at a rate approximating the rate at which the star cools.
The atmosphere is thick enough that global circulation exists and evens out the temperature some. So dayside and nightside temps aren't horribly different.
Nobody wants to live at the Hot Pole or Cold Pole, but they aren't major extremes. (say, bad summer & bad winter levels?)
Whereisit has six poles:
North/south
hot/cold
east/west
Weather is mostly high level winds radiating out from the hot pole to the cold pole with lower level winds returning. Being tide-locked, there isn't enough coriolis force to cause the sideways deflections of flow that lead to cyclones and the like.
This means precipitation is at lower levels, with it getting scarcer the closer you get to the hot pole at the center of dayside. Rivers and other bodies of water moderate this.
Wondering if the might be a (very salty) sea at the center of dayside to moderate the climate? Also wondering if there might be a glacier at the cold pole with flowing ice helping transport water back to dayside?
Local vegetation looks black in local sunlight. Under artificial light it's shades of blue and indigo. It absorbs red light strongly along with some yellow (the yellow isn't involved in phoptosynthesis but that's just the spectral response of the pigment)
A bit of local color
They'd been working outside for a while and the magenta light from Ember was starting to get to Chrissy. She turned to one of the other concubines who'd been on the colony longer.
"How long is it until sundown. Seems like the sun has hardly moved."
"About three thousand miles," was the reply.
"What?" Chrissy was very confused.
"Whereisit is tide locked to Ember. So the sun never moves in the sky. You want sundown? The nearest part of the terminator is about three thousand miles away." She pointed. "I think it's that way."
This entry was originally posted at https://kengr.dreamwidth.org/1106181.html. Please comment there using OpenID.