Geological help needed for world design for a novel

[avatarxprime]

Close, Venus' circumference is 23,627 miles. Did you get a value for it's radius and convert or did you take a percentage of Earth's?

[Ariphaos]

Junghalii
No, the world is all variable apart from the fact I need large land masses, a few inland seas, and it needs to be hotter n drier than Earth. Size is irrelevant, and gravity I want to be about Earth normal, give or take a very little as I don't want to have to change the end of the 8th novel, which has the last couple of chapters set on that world. Luckily they are in powered armor mostly for it...

My Valtegans cannot operate easily in the cold without heated suits - they start getting sleepy and heading toward hibernating. The damp wouldn't suit them much either, but then they would avoid that area, and my Sholans CAN use it. Being felinoid, they'd do great there with the trees.

I just accepted what the program suggested, which was 50,000 mile circumference. So I am open to all and any suggestions to make this work.
Oh, and I'm a not a guy, just so you know. And if you want to know the series, it is here. http://www.sff.net/people/Lisanne

CaptainChewbacca - thanks on the Cloud Forest link.

I am really enjoying all the info this is generating from you all, gives me much food for thought. I really appreciate it.

Nice to meet you.

While the makeup of the planet itself isn't important, it can be suggestive as to the resources of the rest of the Solar System, so shrinking it to 20,000 miles in circumference and giving it a gravity slightly higher than Earth's might indicate that. If it scales well, looking at your map:

http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y186/K ... drical.jpg

A hot world is, by nature, going to have a lot of rainfall. Water will probably carry quire a ways, but it looks like you have two immense bands of mountainous ranges there - they are largely going to get snow-covered, and to the appropriate side (Depending on direction of rotation) you are going to have rain shadow deserts. They would resemble the Gobi or similar regions.

You will actually probably have quite a few of smaller ones, though thoroughly crisscrossed by rivers from melt.

[Junghalli]

Close, Venus' circumference is 23,627 miles. Did you get a value for it's radius and convert or did you take a percentage of Earth's?

Converted the radius into miles from kilometers and then used the diameter to figure out the circumference. I think I might have done some rounding in the process too. Not a big surprise I wasn't exactly right.

A hot world is, by nature, going to have a lot of rainfall. Water will probably carry quire a ways, but it looks like you have two immense bands of mountainous ranges there - they are largely going to get snow-covered, and to the appropriate side (Depending on direction of rotation) you are going to have rain shadow deserts. They would resemble the Gobi or similar regions.

You will actually probably have quite a few of smaller ones, though thoroughly crisscrossed by rivers from melt.

Plus the planet is supposed to have broader continents and smaller oceans than Earth. That will naturally create a more arid climate, as rain has a harder time penetrating to the center of bigger landmasses. The rain shadows will enhance the effect, of course.

If you want a lot of general aridity, another possibility is to have most of the land be at high elevation. Just look at Africa on Earth, which is rather dry in part because much of it is quite a ways above sea level. This would work well for a water-poor world, as on a water-poor world the oceans might not completely fill up their basins. The sides of the continental plateaus (the continental slopes) are relatively steep*, so the result would be that the continents would be mostly high plateaus well above sea level.

*Steep compared to the typical rate at which the land goes up on the continental shelves anyway. If you were actually standing on one the slope would probably be noticeable but gentle.

[Kitts]

At this stage, generating another world is easy.
So if I start from scratch, and have an axial tilt and rotation the same as Earth, circumference of 24,000 miles (rounding up for ease), what would I want the highest mountains to be and the lowest depth?
The only other parameters I can set are % land and % sea, and the World Seed Generator which randomly generates whole numerals up to + or - 9 places. I can keep reusing the seed I had for this world, which gives roughly the same placing of water to land. I cannot see any observable correlation to the vast range of numbers and me tweaking them because I tweak, it changes totally.

What I need is a high snowy mountain range, going to gentler slopes, curving round a sea some 60-80 miles from the lower slopes, on the equator, and short of lowering and raising sea levels, I cannot tweak that in this program. That's why I played at raising and lowering land and sea to get the sea to extend closer to the mountains.

So if you can make me some suggestions as to the main parameters, I can do it and Post Links here.

[Beowulf]

Note that just because a world has low surface gravity doesn't mean that it's got a low escape velocity. A large radius low-g world will have a higher escape velocity than a low radius low-g world. Obviously you can't go to far in either direction of radius. At one end you have a literally solid iron ball, and on the other you have a world made of aerogel.

[Ariphaos]

At this stage, generating another world is easy.
So if I start from scratch, and have an axial tilt and rotation the same as Earth, circumference of 24,000 miles (rounding up for ease), what would I want the highest mountains to be and the lowest depth?
The only other parameters I can set are % land and % sea, and the World Seed Generator which randomly generates whole numerals up to + or - 9 places. I can keep reusing the seed I had for this world, which gives roughly the same placing of water to land. I cannot see any observable correlation to the vast range of numbers and me tweaking them because I tweak, it changes totally.

What I need is a high snowy mountain range, going to gentler slopes, curving round a sea some 60-80 miles from the lower slopes, on the equator, and short of lowering and raising sea levels, I cannot tweak that in this program. That's why I played at raising and lowering land and sea to get the sea to extend closer to the mountains.

So if you can make me some suggestions as to the main parameters, I can do it and Post Links here.

High ~40k to a low of -20k feet should be fine, assuming a smaller amount of sea (40-50%?). A semi-problem you have is that without making the entire planet a desert, a hotter planet with any significant source of water is going to have massive rainforest areas, simply because the water cycle is getting turbocharged. On Earth, it's a few days.

If you want the region to be dry, you will want it to be in a rainshadow, possibly with the mountains in between two bodies of water. The region on the other side will be intensely humid.

I typically use fractal maps to build out a more realistic world using PSP or photoshop, though eventually I'll finish a geological sphere simulation >_>

[Junghalli]

A semi-problem you have is that without making the entire planet a desert, a hotter planet with any significant source of water is going to have massive rainforest areas, simply because the water cycle is getting turbocharged.

You could have a world where the sea level is several kilometers below the level of the continental shelves. The only wet regions will be a little margin at the exposed continental slope; pretty much everything else will be high, dry plateaus.

[Kitts]

I am remapping the world to put in the meteorite bombardments suggested by CaptainChewbacca. I am also trying another one where I haven't tweaked up the base line land or water, and the slope on the mountains backing where the town will be are not so steep.

Please excuse the delay, but it does take hours to do this.

[Kitts]

OK finished remapping it.
CaptainChewbacca - I tried adding craters to the original map but couldn't do it as for some reason they all gathered at the 2 poles in a mess of trenches and scars that looked dreadful.

Here is a new world. Circumference is 24,000, and mountain heights go from 37000 high to -2000 low in the ocean.
The % orf ocean I couldn't really reduce much more or else there would be virtualy none.
New maps named M'zull2 then climate, altitude or temperature are below.

http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y186/K ... titude.jpg
http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y186/K ... limate.jpg
http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y186/K ... rature.jpg

I'd really appreciate you looking thses over for me. I have added by hand some meteor craters but most seem to be on the other side of the planet.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Looks good, just toss in a few more craters and you're in business. I especially like the massive northern high-altitude glaciers. Looks imposing.

[Kitts]

Thank you kindly.

[Kitts]

Dang, can't find an Edit button.

Meant to ask, will I still need the same climate changes as on the first planet with the 50K circumference, or are the mapping climates OK?
Also is it still going to be metal light? I can make it not as rich as Earth yet still have mines and some metal and munitions plants so my Heroes can blow them up. I do intend to have them mining asteroids and moons too as was suggested.

Thanks again.

[CaptainChewbacca]

You can just SAY it doesn't have as much metals, its fine.

[Edi]

Dang, can't find an Edit button.

Most of the fiction forums have the edit button disabled because they are debate forums and we used to have a problem with trolls who would post crap, have it ripped to shreds and then going back and editing their posts. So the edit button is only available to mods on many subforums.

You do have a time window of a few minutes to edit your posts right after posting them in order to fix typos and bbcode formatting mistakes.

Those are some kick-ass graphics of the world, by the way. Very, very good-looking.

[Kitts]

Thanks, both for the explanation and the compliment.

The program is Fractal Terrains Pro and is at http://www.profantasy.com/products/ft.asp It can be edited and exported to their main program, Campaign Cartographer, and then further edited to make not only Overland maps, but a city, a building, and rooms within it. For the latter ones, city and buildings/rooms, you need the addons for Cities and Dungeons.
It even has a space ship and sector space mapping add on called Cosmographer that I own too.
It ia all Drg & Drop symbols you add to a map. So engine parts, and furniture, trees and moutains, and deck plating, you choose from the may the program provides and just Drag n Drop where you want them. You can change their oorientation and size. You can even design your own Symbols as they are called. I have designed Traveller command consols and even entered competitions to design symbols.

http://www.profantasy.com/products/cos.asp
For sample maps see http://www.profantasy.com/evidence/gallery.asp

There is a free download of a Viewer to open maps in, and a demo of the basic Overland Mapping program you can download too.
Here is a ship I designed for the last book, one from the planet I am designing now. The beauty is the closer in you go to your plan, the greater the detail is, you can see down to the books in a bookcase with no loss of detail as you can see from the 2nd image. This is because it is a CAD program at base.
I really cannot praise the program enough, it has made my job so much easier than pen and paer would have. And it is not expensive. The basic program, British made by a really nice small firm with great tech support and a mailing list for help from Users, costs only $45 or 30 UK pounds. Each add on is about $40 or 28 UK pounds. I mean, where can you get another product like this for that price? And no, lol, I don't have shares in the company.

Here is my ship.
http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y186/K ... lship1.jpg - the ship deck plan
http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y186/K ... etail2.jpg - cabin details

Thank you so much all for your help. It has been really appreciated. I like to keep my science as accurate as I can. Those of you who write will find me in your writing forum now too.

[Kitts]

Forgot to add, the ship was designed using a mix of Marc Millar Traveller rules and the GURPS Traveller Modular rules. I did the math, and it will fly according to them. All is accounted for, engines, fuel, life support etc..
I've had to design ships all through my series since my Editor told me for book 2 that the huge starship the Khalossa was too like the Enterprise and I needed to decide its real purpose, then go and design it. So I did. At several kilometers long, only very very small areas ever got mapped, obviously!

[Ariphaos]

I converted a UNIX based fractal mapper to windows-compilable C about a few decades ago - it used the greatcircle shift method. I'm always a cheapskate in those regards - if it's not free, adapt something that is and do the rest myself : )

I picked out Blender to do my ship design in Solar Storms, but haven't really gotten around to it >_>. Ultimately for me it comes down to finding excuses to crew a ship with flesh and blood bodies instead of braincases or AIs.

[Kitts]

People are cheaper to reproduce?

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

People are cheaper to reproduce? :P

At a certain point along the science fiction 'hardness' scale, people stop being useful aboard starships and start being deadweight. After all, to haul around a person, you're going to need to haul the mass of the person, plus the mass of volatiles needed to keep that person alive and reasonably comfortable, plus the extra hull material required to construct a person's living space. All to haul around 80 kilograms of surplus organic material (their body) plus the 1.5 kilograms of organic material you actually care about (their brain.) Doing that is very, very expensive. Hence the in-milieu desire to reduce the crew to so-called braincases.

If one was really cheap, they'll be looking at the 1.5 kilogram human brain as deadweight too, aching to be digitized into something more compact, or replaced with something slightly better designed than the end-product of a system whose overreaching goal was "live long enough to have sex."

In a situation like that, putting people aboard a spaceship is something that only happens due to author fiat.

[Kitts]

Well, logically I cannot argue with that, but it is all dependant on how, and if, AIs develop to the point of the equivalent of human thought and extrapolation, and are dependable.

I remember an old but lovely SF short about 2 planets at war with each other, using automated war ships etc to pound each other. The story is about a scientist coming into a meeting with the President and telling him he had an answe to the expense of the war.
It was all based on the fact that he could use a writing impliment on a piece of paper to calculate anything, no need for special programs or components, just the human brain. "We can send people into the war instead of machines because they are cheaper than the technology we are using! It will give us the edge over the enemy."

KISS - that old addage about keeping things simple is a good one. I think there will always be a need for the human element in everything.

[Kitts]

Had to look for these articles. First is a Daily Mail one re "The MK5 anti-aircraft system, with two huge 35mm cannons, is essentially a vast robotic weapon, controlled by a computer."

It gooes on - A few minutes before nine in the morning, and the young soldiers have no idea of the horror that is about to strike them. They are taking part in a massive military training exercise, involving 5,000 troops, and are about to showcase the latest in robotic weapons technology.
But while it's one thing when your laptop freezes up, it's quite another when it is controlling an auto-loading magazine containing 500 high-explosive rounds.
As the display begins, the South African troops sense quickly that something is terribly wrong. The system appears to jam - but what happens next is truly chilling.
'There was nowhere to hide,' one witness stated in a report. 'The rogue gun began firing wildly, spraying high explosive shells at a rate of 550 a minute, swinging around through 360 degrees like a high-pressure hose.'
One young female officer rushes forward to try to shut down the robotic gun - but it is too late.
'She couldn't, because the computer gremlin had taken over,' the witness later said.
The rounds from the automated gun rip into her and she collapses to the ground. By the time the robot has emptied its magazine, nine soldiers lie dead (including the woman officer).
Another 14 are seriously injured. The report will later blame the bloodbath on a 'software glitch'.
It sounds like a blood-spattered scene from the new blockbuster Terminator Salvation, in which a military computer takes over the world using an army of robot soldiers."
Not fiction http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... ns-us.html

And a more scientific write up of this kind of machine, minus mention of the above blood bath.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technol ... tml?page=1

I can see a Skynet situation happening for real, you know. Which is why I believe there must always be human intervention, and a way to pull out the plug from the power supply!

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Well, logically I cannot argue with that, but it is all dependant on how, and if, AIs develop to the point of the equivalent of human thought and extrapolation, and are dependable.

There are people here who can speak credibly to that, but, from what I recall, the ability to produce an AI capable of improving itself beyond what humans are capable of is not that far off.

KISS - that old addage about keeping things simple is a good one. I think there will always be a need for the human element in everything.

KISS, for a given definition of "simple." There may also be considerable variability in the definition of "human," as advances in genetic engineering, cybernetics, and computing may allow us to vastly expand what it is to be human.

Had to look for these articles. First is a Daily Mail one re "The MK5 anti-aircraft system, with two huge 35mm cannons, is essentially a vast robotic weapon, controlled by a computer."

To pick nits: The incident in question was started by a mechanical jam, followed by an accidental discharge of another shell, which lead to a chain reaction of shells going off inside the magazines, which happened to be completely full at the time. The South Africans blamed the problem on a mechanical flaw. The Daily Mail's (which seems to have a reputation for being a bit of a rag) representation of the story is flawed, as the anti-aircraft gun in question is not robotic, it's merely an automatic gun fired by remote human control. The story is also nearly two years old.

[Kitts]

The article I reproduced was only a couple of days old in the Mail. Thanks for pointing out the device in the article had a human operator, which tends to back up my opinion that the human element is still considered vital. I do hope it remains so when weapons, at least, are concerned.

However note these paragraphs from your Link - it was also computerized to the point it nneeded an on the spot person, not a remote one, to stop it.

"The unknown officer tried to shut the gun down but she couldn't because the computer gremlin had taken over. Her fate was unknown at the time of going to press."

"It appears as though the gun, which is computerised, jammed before there was some sort of explosion and then it opened fire uncontrollably, killing and injuring the soldiers."

As for the Mail "having the reputation of being a rag.." the Forces boarding school I taught at in Englnd had every newspaper delivered. The Mail was consistently less biased than any of the others and more readable than papers like the Times. It also does good work by campaigning for the little person. I like it.

You say:
"There may also be considerable variability in the definition of "human," as advances in genetic engineering, cybernetics, and computing may allow us to vastly expand what it is to be human."

Or maybe not to expand it. We have difficulty deciding what intelligent is with regards to the other creatures we share this planet with as it is. I don't see either genetics or cybernetics, if it can develop, (the Bionic Man, given even organ transplant rejection, has to be considered far fetched right now) affecting a person's humanity, but it will make them be considered enhanced and unnatural in the way we mostly despise those who have had excessive cosmetic surgery, to name the most common current personal enhancemt available today.

Anyway, what the future holds is pure speculation on anyone's part, and one opinion is as valid as the next. Be that as it may, you are entitled to your opinions. I don't need to share them, though.

[Ariphaos]

People are cheaper to reproduce?

No. I use psychics, avatars, and 'vessels'.

Psychics - or by whatever name you call them (in Solar Storms they vary - Striatvari, Prometheans, Angels...) - need to be in their own idealized form in order to best access their powers. It can help if solipsism syndrome is an actual persistent issue for them - in order to be most effective, their effectiveness must be compromised and the easiest way to do so is to surround them with the relics and artistry of home - including people.

Avatars - taking a more science fiction outlook, I am of the impression that, unless we do really find something 'magical' like the above, we will instead create our own worlds and avatars of ourselves within them. No FTL? No problem, make our own in our own little Universe. We have an entire cluster of galaxies and a trillion years to play even at STL speeds.

'Vessels' work with both of the above concepts for braincases interacting with the real world. 'Surrogate' is an example of this in a way, but not necessarily remotely controlled and of course, a lot more secure.

If one was really cheap, they'll be looking at the 1.5 kilogram human brain as deadweight too, aching to be digitized into something more compact, or replaced with something slightly better designed than the end-product of a system whose overreaching goal was "live long enough to have sex."

Not sure I'd replace it entirely. The general mechanism, however superficially wasteful, is extraordinarily efficient. It's 25 watts, for crying out loud.

In a situation like that, putting people aboard a spaceship is something that only happens due to author fiat.

Well, full flesh and blood bodies, anyway.

Well, logically I cannot argue with that, but it is all dependant on how, and if, AIs develop to the point of the equivalent of human thought and extrapolation, and are dependable.

Who says we would limit ourselves to AIs in such a scenario?

Humans are pretty good are resource management and situational analysis when properly trained. We have another ~25-30 years before AIs truly reach the human level, and another ~15-20 years before they would be commonplace. A lot of knowledge about genetics, gene therapy, algaculture and its resulting support structures, and so on are going to occur in the next forty to fifty years.

One of the subthemes of Solar Storms is that 'humanity' eventually no longer refers to that most ancient race - some awarenesses from which shall exist through the beginning of a new Time, but rather the moral code that it imprinted on its children.

And students.