 August 25, 2011 - 12:31am | I was watching Firefly and it hit me: how about two or three of these are habitable asteroids? Say there's an asteroid field in the Osak system, right in the habitable zone of the star. Say some of these are of sufficient size to actually have an atmosphere, decent gravity, etc. That could explain four or five habitable worlds in the same G4 star system. My other option is to make the osakar race able to live in a wider range of temperatures, atmospheres and conditions, some of which could be uninhabitable to non-osakar. Long live the Frontier! |
 August 25, 2011 - 4:49am | I think its safe to say that the investment in other worlds involves dome cities and or other sealed environments. Lots of factors impact the retention of atmosphere; in Mar's case the solar wind actually strips atoms of atmosphere and its bigger than asteroids. I doubt that an asteroid would keep an atmosphere with out the application of technology and that technology would have to be of such a high level that it s categorized as weird alien tech. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
August 25, 2011 - 4:51am | A possibility is what we saw in Avatar. Moon orbiting a gas giant that is technically beyond the inhabitable zone. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
August 25, 2011 - 11:53am | I tend to agree with domes/artificial enclosures/habitable moons, but I tend to go with a listed world (especially one with its own moons) is fairly habitable without such. Otherwise, there would likely be more worlds in every system. As to atmospheres and planetary science, Mars is small, but its biggest problem is the lack of magnetic fields, which has allowed the solar wind to strip away its atmo as well as bombard the surface with hard radiation. One the flip side we have Venus, which is almost identical to Earth, yet has a massive atmosphere (about 92 times that of Earth), toxic and extremely hot, and that's with a magnetic field much weaker than Earth's. There's still a lot about planets that we don't understand (the hot jupiters and super-Earths have really made astronomers rethink things); maybe there is a way to have 5 habitable worlds in a singular star system naturally, but for now I, for one, don't want to stretch the boundaries of the believable. :) Long live the Frontier! |
August 25, 2011 - 11:59am | that was the general concensus in the High habitable systems thread. but also wrote a little quirk into the constitution of the Rim that pushes the 3 races to colonize more worlds since that lets them put more delegates on the board of the coalition. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
August 25, 2011 - 5:38pm | I've also toyed with the idea of a double world, where two planets revolve around a shared center of gravity, or barycneter. For a time, Pluto and Charon were thought to be a double planet, but this theory has since been abandonded. This has shown up in fiction, and there are some double asteroids and kuiper belt objects, but no known double planets. Again, food for thought. Long live the Frontier! |
 August 25, 2011 - 6:04pm | Actually technically Pluto and Charon are a double planet (or double dwarf planet) system. The barycenter for the two objects is outside of Pluto in space between the two so they both orbit the common center of gravity. The Earth and Moon are close but the barycenter is still about 1000 km below the earth's surface so we're not considered a double planet system. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
