This Orb

In Process

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Tue, 11 May 2010 21:51:00 +0000

Here's a simple update. I'm in the process of completing the next step: elevation. In the process i've learned some new things, which i'll post about once i'm sure i'm done learning them, and once i've completed this step.

Here's what the elevation looks like at the moment. Notice some parts are much more refined than others. Click on the image for a rather large version.

Basic Geography

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 03:07:00 +0000

Finally, time for some more original content as well as nice pictures.

I've finally decided to stop tweaking the coastline can call it done. Click on the pictures to enlarge.

This Orb's coastline. Blue indicated approximate areas of permanent ice

The base texture was created in Photoshop (see below). I wrapped it on a sphere in Google's free simple 3D app SketchUp, though there are a lot of other programs you can use to make your world round. Going from flat to sphere is always tricky conceptually. Using the simplest, most common method (as i've done) you get increasing distortion toward the poles. Since my poles are covered in ice, it doesn't matter too much, though i did spend a lot of time tweaking the land near the poles to conceal obvious stretching.

The base texture for This Orb.

I'll save the technical details about how to design your geography for another post. For now I'll give some artistic tips for a believable looking-world. You might have noticed that the continents of a lot of fictional world look rather blocky, once you get past the fringe of indentations on the coastline. Real geography has a less orderly appearance, but there's a rhythm to it too.

Spend some time looking at a globe, observing at the shapes.
When in doubt, try to avoid a continental set up that closely mirrors ours. How many fantasy worlds have a three continents that relate to each other like Europe, Asian and Africa, with some a couple other contents beyond a wide sea. Sometimes there's a good reason for it, but usually it's just lack of imagination.
People tend to think and draw with right angles, but nature doesn't. Try to build your continents from a variety of basic shapes, and make sure things aren't all neatly aligned.
Avoid symmetry. A landmass is generally going to be bigger at one end than the other, and further from it's neighbor at one end than another. Very seldom will anything be nicely centered. Very seldom will any landmass be of about the same size or shape as another.
Notice that there's a lot of variety in how smooth or convoluted the coastline is. You have really complicated areas like the Mediterranean or Indonesia, and simpler areas like the Atlantic coast of Africa and South America. Unless you have both these extremes to some degree your map will seem contrived, and be visually less interesting.
Similarly, the number and size of the indentations and protrusions in the coastline varies greatly. If the jags in your coastline are roughly the same, it will look mechanical.
Islands tend to come in chains, and sometimes are the continuation of mountain ranges that wandered off the edge of the coastline.

A bad example. These coasts equally convoluted everywhere, which besides looking fake is hard on the eyes.

Finally some ideas about arranging your clusters of continents. There's nothing particular about Earth's setup of continents that needs to be duplicated. Mix and match as you like.

Pangea: All continents are connected together.
Chain: All of the continents are linked together in a series that encompasses much, or even all of the world.
Several Clusters: Instead of two clusters of continents (Americas and Eurasia/Africa), there are several.
Island Continents: No continent connects to another.
Deleted Climate: There is no land near the equator, or none in the temperate zone, or none near the poles.
Disconnected Oceans: Land goes all the way around the world, so you have two or more oceans that don't connect. Ocean life might be distinct in each.
Reversed World: Most of the world is land, with oceans as the exception. Note this would realistically have a very big effect on climate.

Moon(s)

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:04:00 +0000

What better way to signify that a someone is not on earth than to have them look up and see a different moon, or even more than one?

There are a couple ways the moon(s) will effect you planet besides making the night sky prettier.

1) A moon's gravity tugs at your planet and is the main cause of tides. Additional moons would make the tides more complicated since sometimes the moons would work against each other, and sometimes they would add their power together. The strength of the tide is also strongly varies by the shape of your oceans. Generally bigger bodies of water have bigger tides, since there is more room to slosh around, which is why tides are negligable in lakes. The way that the ocean floor and coastline funnel the water also has a big effect on the strength of the tide.

The Celestial Architect Spreadsheet will calculate the magnitude of your planet’s tide, taking into account one moon at a time. You'll still have to figure out how the tide varies from place to place by yourself. I guess i’m a land-lubber since i’ve resolved to mostly ignore the tidal question by designing a moon that causes far more modest tides than Earth has.

2) Stone is more resistant to tugging than water, but it is not immune. If the moon is close and massive enough it will significantly flex your planet’s crust. In other words shift your continental plates more and thus cause more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. I don’t have any formulas for this. It is an open question weather our Moon is massive enough to provide a significant earthquake effect. If your Moon has a tidal magnitude many times greater, you may want to consider writing in frequent earthquakes into the world.

3) A moon can’t be too close. A moon that passes Roche’s Limit will tend to be ripped apart by the difference between the gravity on it’s near and far sides.

4) A moon also can’t orbit too far from it’s planet otherwise it will get snagged by your star and wander away from the planet.

You can use the "Size & Moon" page of the Celestial Architect Spreadsheet to calculate all these things for you.

For more information, including the formulas see the excellent section on Moons from Creating an Earthlike Planet.

Aside from the decision to have less tides, i’m going to put off designing the moons for Orb. Though i’m really impressed by the appearance of Io, (at the top of this post) and will try to include one of these pizza moons, if i can make it work. I'm not sure at the moment what conditions are required to keep a small moon volcanically active.

So what range of Gravity is Habitable for Humans?

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:00:00 +0000

Low gravity (relative to earth) seems to give people no problems once they get used to it. We've had people in weightless environments for months. However the human body can easily adapt to those conditions, and gets rid of what it perceives as excess muscle, bone mass, and fluid volume. Which is fine, unless the person wishes to return to a higher gravity world-- like Earth. Astronauts use rigorous exercise programs to stay in shape enough to return to Earth, though the longer they stay in space at zero G, the longer it takes to return to full health on Earth.

Of course, any planet that retains and atmosphere will have much more gravity than is experienced in a space station or shuttle. The difficulty of adjustment would naturally decrease as the differences in gravity decrease. You might only feel jet-lagged for a while moving between a 0.9G planet and Earth.

Unfortunately we don't know as much about how the human body could adapt to higher gravity environments--the nearest is Jupiter, and even if we could get there, surviving the pressure is far beyond our current tech. But we can get some idea observing the reactions of people in centrifuges and fighter jets. At the equivalent of 9 Gs well-trained pilots black out in seconds. It's exhausting just sitting for an hour at 3 Gs. It's been estimated that people could get along at up to 2 Gs (if with a reduced life-span due to the strain on the heart). But beyond 1.25 to 1.5 Gs normal activity would feel burdensome. Short, lean but muscular people with strong heats would tend to cope best. See Habitable Planets for Man, a free PDF.

Of course, if your inhabitants aren't human, you don't need to worry, though many of the issues with high gravity would apply to any humanoid, if not quite to the same degree. A human-tall biped would need an absurdly large and powerful heart to pump blood up to his brain in a 9G world. And tripping would be life-threatening.

How Heavy & how Big?

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:34:00 +0000

The next step is to figure out the size of your planet, and the strength of its gravity. This information is derived from your planet's mass, radius & density. With only 2 of these variables you can figure out gravity, and anything else relating to your planet's size. Given the same mass, the denser a planet is, the higher the gravity. Jupiter with over 300 times the mass of earth has a gravity of less than 3 times that of earth's (on the theoretical, unobserved surface of Jupiter) because it is very diffuse, made out of gas rather than iron and stone.

Mass can be pretty much whatever you want, within certain bounds. Dole estimates (see Habitable Planets for Man, free PDF.) that a planet needs at least 0.4 Earth Masses to retain a human-breathable atmosphere. Depending on who you ask, 5, 10, or even 14 earth masses is the upper limit for a terrestrial planet. Beyond that it will retain so much atmosphere that it crosses over into gas giant territory.

Radius can also be whatever you want, as long it doesn't force the other variables into something silly. Just be aware that radius has a strong effect on the surface area of your planet. If you double the radius, the surface area increases four times.

Density is a little trickier. But here are the basics. Density is primarily determined by what a planet (or moon) is made out of. Gas, such as helium and hydrogen, tends to be least dense and then in increasing density are ice (water), rock, and iron. These are the main ingredients of the known planets. It is easy to find the densities for these materials at normal, surface of the earth conditions. But as the mass of a planet increases, so does the pressure inside, and thus the density of various materials.

None of the of the world-building sites i've seen provide much guidance for the layman on what densities are reasonable. However i did find a recent scholarly article, Planetary Radii across Five Orders of Magnitude in Mass and Stellar Insolation, which while the calculations are over my head, i can use this handy chart. Color and grey added to enhance clarity.

Mass (in M⊕) vs. radius (in km and R⊕) for planets composed for ice, rock, and iron. The topmost thick black curve is for pure “warm” water ice. (See text.) The middle thick curve is for pure rock (Mg2 SiO4). The bottommost thick curve is for pure iron (Fe). The three black thin curves between pure ice and pure rock, are from top to bottom, 75% ice/25% rock, 50/50, and 25/75... The gray dotted lines between rock and pure warm ice are the same pure ice and ice/rock curves, but for zero-temperature ice. The three black thin curves between pure rock and iron, are from top to bottom, 75% rock/25% iron, 50/50, and 25/75... At the upper left we show the horizontal extent of mass error bars, for any given mass, from 10 to 200%.

I should mention that for human habitability you probably want at least some iron in your planet. Earth's metal inner core is thought to produce our magnetic field, which besides making compasses useful, wards off harmful cosmic radiation.

Also, rotating planets are never exactly round. The speed of rotation tends to create a bulge at the equator. This is not really noticeable in earth-like speeds of rotation, but if you want to play around with a planet that has increasingly strong gravity toward the poles, spin your planet really fast, like Hal Clement's classic, Mesklin.

So, whether you are prepared to pick some numbers out of the air, or want to more carefully calculate your planet's composition and density here's what you do:

A: Use the "Size & Moon" page of the Celestial Architect Spreadsheet

B: If you don't like spreadsheets, go to this Planet Designer website, enter mass & density and have the resulting diameter, surface area, and so forth calculated for you.

C: Read about the formulas here and do the math for yourself. It also provides formulas to calculate the difference between polar and equatorial gravity, if you care, though generally the differences will be negligible.

Freebie: The colors of Gas Giants

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:25:00 +0000

Of the lifeless planets, gas giants, or jovians are the most beautiful. So i've wondered --the extrasolar giants we've been discovering but haven't yet got a good look at-- do they look like the our tan and striped jovians, or are they different?

Apparently they've been able to infer some things about how they appear. See this Extrasolar Visions page. Scroll down to "Color, Albedo, and Temperature".

I may have to swap out the first planet in this Orb's solar system for a Jovian. I think it would be a Class II, white water-cloud jovian.

At closest it would be ~0.2 AU away, as compared to Jupiter's closest 5.2 AU, so at closest to Orb it would appear to have about half the diameter that the Sun does from Earth— assuming it is as big as Jupiter. That would be quite a cool sight.

a water cloud jovian from Extrasolar Visions, apparently with a life-bearing moon.

Celestial Architect Spreadsheet

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:51:00 +0000

To simplify the effort for myself, & for others who may be interested i've created a spreadsheet for moderate control without much effort.

Download Celestial Architect Spreadsheet 1.1 below:

for Open Office
Microsoft Office Excel 95

EDIT: Updated to 1.1. Renamed the Spreadsheet and added another page dealing with the moon.

Using The Sheet

The "Sheet" is a spreadsheet-- a file you can open with Microsoft Office, or free alternatives such as OpenOffice or it's Mac port, NeoOffice. All you need to do is enter numbers in the yellow boxes, & all the other figures will be instantly recalculated.

Your Sun

Now, as i've mentioned before, the most important variable is the mass of your sun, from which all it's other stats can be pretty accurately derived. The sheet assumes that your star is a main sequence star, like 90% of the universe. If you want to try a dwarf or giant star, you are on your own, but it shouldn't be too hard to plug in those numbers if you are familiar with spreadsheets. I think all you would have to do is change the way luminosity is calculated to something appropriate to your new star type.

Some things about stars to be aware of:

A smaller star puts out a lot less heat & light than you might expect, & the opposite is true of larger stars.
Smaller stars have habitable zones which are closer to the star, so the planet's year is shorter. Again the opposite is true of larger stars.
As a star's size increases, so does the depth of the habitable zone, so with a bigger star you have more room to adjust your orbital position (& thus length of the year) or maybe fit in multiple habitable planets.

Habitable Zone

The Habitable Zone (also known as Goldilocks Zones) is the area in space where a planet that could supports "life as we know it" might be. It doesn't mean that a suitable planet will be there, or that life will exist, just that both are theoretically possible in the zone. As might be expected not everyone agrees exactly how big the habitable zone is. I've chosen a newer, more conservative estimate from this PDF by Tom E. Morris, which has great in-depth explanations.

If you are clever you may be able to think of an unusual circumstance that allows your planet to be habitable outside of the normal zone.

The Habitable Zone from Wikimedia Commons.

Length of Days & Years

The length of your planet's year is set by the mass of it's sun, & the distance of it's orbit. However the length of it's day can be pretty much whatever you want.

You might even want to tidally lock your planet to it's primary (as the Moon is to Earth), so that one side is eternally day, & the other night. Tidally locked planets are generally thought to be incompatible with "life as we know it", but a lot may depend on the specifics of the planet. At the very least the weather will be freakishly weird. Any planets in the habitable zone of an M-class star are believed to likely be tidally locked. Note "M-class" doesn't really mean "earthlike" as it did in StarTrek. M-class are generally red dwarf stars.

To really complicate the calender you can make your planet into a moon of a larger planet such as a gas giant. Or you could put multiple stars in your solar system. If so, good luck, that's more math than i want to deal with.

Heat & Light

Temperature is one of the variables that, in my opinion science fiction doesn't use to it's full potential very often. There are plenty of "desert planets" & "ice planets", but they are blandly monotone, & realistically uninhabitable. With just the right temperature you could instead have a hot planet where only the polar regions are cool enough for human life, with an deadly equatorial belt where water boils away. Or a cold planet where a narrow equatorial band is the only place where the ice ever melts, with massive ice caps dominating the planet.

Albedo is the measure of how white or reflective your planet is overall. Any radiation reflected away isn't going to warm your planet. You can find out more about the albedo of various materials here.

The "Greenhouse Effect" mentioned isn't about climate change apocalypses. It's more basic than that. A greenhouse traps some of the energy that would normally be reflected back to the sky. Our atmosphere does the same thing, which keeps the planet from getting too cold. It's the strength of the greenhouse effect that is critical, which (among other factors) makes Venus a deadly inferno.

Be aware that this is not the final word on your planet's temperature. There are lots of other factors like axial tilt, land/sea arraignment & coverage, & mountain placement which will effect what the temperature is at a particular time & place. We'll get to that later.

Finally i should thank "Geoff" for his page Creating an Earthlike Planet. Even though the equations are found elsewhere, i didn't understand many of them until i read his explanation.

Instructions for second page to be added...

This Orb's Solar System.

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:24:00 +0000

Well, i had decided that i wanted this Orb to be less hospitable than earth. The simplest way to do that was to make it hotter or colder. I decided to go with colder, since i could then mostly ignore those tricky parts of the texture map where it wraps around the pole and gets extremely distorted.

A yellow sun seemed somehow passé, so i tried some smaller stars on my Sun & Planet Creator Sheet. It quickly became clear that this Orb's year was going to be significantly shorter. I didn't want to bother with reckoning a year that was some weird fraction of an earth year, so i pushed the numbers around till this Orb's year was just over half an Earth year.

a screenshot of this Orb's system from StarGen with appropriate alterations.

I was kinda hoping that a class K orange sun would tend to work with differently colored photosynthesis, but as best i can understand from NASA Predicts Non-Green Plants on Other Planets, the optimal color of plant life is pretty much the same. Leaves designed for a class K sun might look a little bluer than ours normally do. But Earth-life photosynthesis should work fine with the light-- which is something i wanted anyway.

At first i had a lot of trouble figuring our how hot my planet would roughly be. I hadn't found the formula now in the Celestial Architect. I learned that only slight variations in insolation produced (from a human inhabitant's perspective) wildly different temperatures. Notice below that while This Orb gets 98.9% of the solar energy that Earth does, it's on average 12º F colder. Human comfort is a tiny little bit of the extremely cold and hot temperatures the universe can provide.

There's a feed-back loop that you may or may not want to take into account. Adding snow and ice tends to increase the albedo, which tends to reflect away more heat, which lowers the temperature and produces more snow and ice. Fortunately the real world is more complicated than that. We've had ice ages in the past and they have gone away, which wouldn't happen if climate were a simple as the math in my spreadsheet.

Approximating this Orb's albedo was a big pain. Land ice/snow has a higher albedo than sea ice. And i really couldn't find any good numbers for how much of the earth is covered with either or both. There seem to be a lot of conflicting and vaguely defined answers on the 'net, but no specific ones. In the end i made an educated guess and had to revise it down to keep the whole planet from freezing over.

So i ended up with this:

Sun "Ember"
Class K0 (orange)
Mass .78 of Sol

Orb
Average distance from Ember .651 AU
Rotation 28.73 Earth hours (28 hours ,43 min, 48 sec)
Orbital Period 194.843 Earth days (.525 earth years)
Orbital Period 159.824 Orb days
~ 1/6th of a day short of 160 days, so every 6 Orb Years they have an un-leap year with only 159 days
Year is generally divided into 8 months of 20 days.

Average Insolation 0.989
Albedo: 0.335
Greenhouse Effect 0.13

Approximate winter ice/snow coverage 45%
Approximate summer ice/snow coverage 35%
Average ice coverage 40%

Average temperature -12º F relative to Earth

These numbers are, i admit, not very exciting in themselves. But they lay the foundation for what is to come.

I'm not very interested in the rest of the planets in the system at this point. I ran a bunch of StarGen simulations to find a solar system that looked interesting. I chose this one, since it had a good variety of planets and didn't seem too much like a copy off our solar system. Ignore the 2nd planet out. That's roughly where Orb goes. I'll ignore the last 3 rockballs, demoting them from full planetary status like poor Pluto. Then this Orb's system has a tidier number of planets, seven.

Elusive Accuracy

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:48:00 +0000

Please note, that not all the sources i'll link to precisely agree.

Sometimes the calculations are only rough approximations of complex systems.
Sometimes scientists are making their best guesses, but aren't all making the same guess.
Sometimes it may be out of date information.
Sometimes i won't know which of the above is the case.

I'd like to know about any out-of-date info i've included, but i expect to find sources that don't exactly agree.

While i do strive for accuracy and understanding, it's also important not to get carried away with details that aren't important for one's purpose.

How to get Started

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:34:00 +0000

If you are interested in a normal fantasy world, you may not find anything useful in this post. By "normal fantasy world," i mean one where the temperature, length of the year & the day are about the same as on Earth. Often fantasy worlds have archaic or unique cosmologies, so that the nature of the sun, stars, moon, etc. are quite different from our own. Somehow these cosmological differences seldom change the *effect* of the sun on the fictional world, but i suppose if you are re-writing the laws of physics, you can get any result you want. I often find these fictional cosmologies quite interesting, but i won't digress further into these infinite possibilities.

Since i'm building a realistic sci-fi planet, & not assuming the sun & other features are just like earth’s, i need to find a good place to start. A lot of the factors interrelated. The only truly independent factor is the sun. It will greatly effect your planet, but is not effected by it.

There’s a huge variety in the size of stars. For “normal”, main sequence stars, the larger & brighter stars are bluer, while the smaller, dimmer stars tend to red. Wikipedia has a good overview of the star types.

Main sequence stars. From Wikimedia.

Stars are often found together, orbiting their common center of mass. “Binary”, or multiple stars & other exotic locations can be used for plausible sci-fi. Niven even wrote about an inhabited ring of air orbiting a neutron star. But putting a habitable planet in one of these exotic settings require math beyond my power. I leave them others’ imaginations. This blog will focus on relatively earth-like worlds around a single main sequence star, which still leaves a huge number of variations.

But before you just pick your favorite color for a star, realize that the size & therefore color & brightness of a star is strongly connected to things like weather liquid water can exist, the temperature & length of the year. So how do you begin?

I offer three starting points:

The Easy, Automatic Starting Point

There are websites that can quickly create random, but reasonably realistic solar systems. If you don't like the results you can press a button & get a new solar system in a few seconds. Even if you want to be more hands on, you might find it useful to start with one of these generators & then tweak or redo the planet(s) by hand which you have a special interest in.

I recommend StarGen, which has a pretty easy to use interface, & allows you to specifically search for systems with habitable worlds, & gives you quite a bit of info on the planets. It also makes some sophisticated calculations about temperature & atmosphere, & will tell you when planet should be tidally locked.

a StarGen screenshot

There's also the un-concisely named, An Applet for Synthesizing Solar Systems, a simpler, more straight-forward option, with less control & feedback.

There are additional solar system generators that run on Windows computers, for free and otherwise. I haven't used them, since i use a Mac, so won't say anything about them. I'll generally be sticking with free stuff, since i'm a cheapskate, though there are some apparently nice programs you could buy if you wanted to.

The Math-Lover’s, Do-It-Yourself Starting Point

You can find all the formulas you need at websites like Geoff's Creating an Earthlike Planet (with more explanations) or The World Builder's Cookbook (with more equations). You may find that you need to keep going back & changing variables to get rid of unexpected ramifications. If that's true please see this post, where i provide the Celestial Architect spreadsheet that will do a lot of the calculations for you. A spreadsheet is idea for slightly tweaking the variables to try to get the result you want.

The Way of Moderate Control & Effort

This one requires it own post. The Celestial Architect will be my first chunk of usefully original content...

Life, but Not as We Know it

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:00:00 +0000

When i mention "life", or more specifically "earth-like life", i will generally mean the same thing: carbon-based life-forms. It’s something built from organic chemicals using mostly carbon, hydrogen,oxygen, & nitrogen, and requires access liquid water. In other words: “life as we know it”.

While i don't deny that other biochemistries might exist— things that breath chlorine, ammonia, or even something that no one has thought of— i will mostly ignore these possibilities.

Firstly, because i’m not a chemist and can’t evaluate how plausible different proposed biochemistries are.
I believe it’s all just a slightly educated guess. Scientists know a lot about earth life, but not what makes something alive—certainly not to the degree needed to know what other forms life could or couldn't take.
Finally, it would simply be too complicated to take into account all theoretically plausible types of life, and all the different types of planets they could live on.

digital sketch of a random gas-giant dwelling alien

Feel free to devise life based on any biochemistry you want, just realize that any statements about life and habitability in this blog won’t apply to "life not as we know it".

My Objectives for this Orb

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:38:00 +0000

For this project i will often follow the process & accept the outcome, weather expected or unexpected, but sometimes i'll fudge a little to get the results i want. Since much of the process of even the most rigorous world-building is outrageous simplification, & bold guesstimation, there is a lot of wiggle room. No doubt other world builders will choose to be loose where i will be strict, & consider factors that i don't understand or don't care about. Though i am interested to hear about any mistakes i might make— especially before a lot of additional work is based on them.

This Orb is an out-of-the way planet in a sci-fi setting where some form(s) of FTL are possible. Several waves of sapient explorers, refugees, conquers, & colonists have settled there.

The following are my objectives for this Orb.

While humans can live on it unaided, it is not as hospitable as Earth.
This Orb is not conducive to global communication and rule.

The oceans are completely separated by land, so it's impossible to sail round this Orb.
Mountains, rivers, currents & coast make it generally less convenient to cross a continent.

There is one location that is geographically destined to be the crossroads of the whole planet.
Some factors prevent the inhabitants from rebuilding a spacefaring civilization.

I'd recommend that aspiring world-builders jot down the traits that they want their new planet to have. This will make it easier to navigate through the myriad possibilities in the following steps.

Hello World(s)

noreply@blogger.com (j. w. bjerk) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:59:00 +0000

I've always been fascinated by maps, globes & planets. As a child, i drew maps of all kinds. Wanting to make better maps, i became curious about the "why"s behind real geography. Gradually, i accumulated little bits of information from books & inferred patterns by looking at maps. But i wasn't satisfied with what i understood.

A year or so ago, i searched the web for world-building, & though i had to dig, i found nearly all the answers i was looking for, including a step-by-step process for approximating climate. Using a more rigorous process, i designed a planet up from the orbital mechanics, until i got stalled in the middle of "climate". My understanding had increased through following the process, & so i was no longer happy with how i started out.

So now i'm starting over. Via this blog, interested world-builders can watch the process unfold, or even better discover this after i've made a lot of progress. I've found some good examples of constructed worlds, but not much that really shows the process of building that world. I don't know how many people will be interested, but this blog is something that i would have loved to find.

I'll be linking to the best sources i've found, showing how i apply that information, & giving some ideas of my own. I'll be trying to bring some of the technical information down to an easier-to-understand form.

Once i clear up the introductory matters, & finish tweaking the appearance & settings, we'll start with orbital mechanics.

an old version of this Orb taken with Celestia