'Beach' World

[madd0ct0r]

Not certain if this should be here or sci-fi.

In a little bit of world building I'm doing, I'm aiming for the dominant theme of a world to be 'beach;.

So, small-ish world with lots of water.
Geologically dead?
Large Moon(s), in non-circular orbit to give irregular monster tides.


Sand constantly moving from wind, currents and tides.
Usual sequence for a given area is
1) a large shallow sea
2) accreating coastline, dune system forms
3) behind dunes, large, flat frequently flooded area
4) either storm/tide breaks dune system, and returns area to sea.

Mangroves common in current of former river deltas.

Large and active bio-sphere, based mostly around crabs and amphibians. (both taking all niche's up to mega-pod and whale)

What happens at the poles? How hot does it have to be at the equator? what have I forgotten?

[CaptainChewbacca]

Multiple large, eccentric moons are going to give you a lot of crust flexing and lead to geologic instability. The key to 'ocean world' isn't less geologic activity, its MORE. If you have a world that is a lot of mountain fissures and volcanoes, and then you have massive undersea eruptions displacing water (as happened in our own past) then you get sudden, big sea level rises. The mountain ranges break up your ocean currents, and get the water all nice and mixed in protected, shallow seas.

Your beaches will be black sand, but that can be scenic.

This turns your mountain ranges into archepelagos, and your high plateaus into the sort of flat areas you wanted. Just make sure the temperature is warm and avoid polar continents. I'd also give it a negligible axial tilt to avoid severe seasons.

[Jawawithagun]

Wouldn't you in a pure ocean world with no mountains also get a continuous equatorial storm? With nothing to break up the winds it can just build up and up.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Wouldn't you in a pure ocean world with no mountains also get a continuous equatorial storm? With nothing to break up the winds it can just build up and up.

IIRC you could, what the simulations show as possibly happening is a storm like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, a huge persistent storm. But since the OP said they only want the "dominant theme" to be beach, just toss in something like a big mountain range or two sticking out of the ocean to break up the weather patterns and leave the rest of the landmasses flattish.

[madd0ct0r]

well, I was expecting huge storms, indeed without them the landscape would stablise all too quickly.
I thought persistent required a pure liquid world, which isn't what I wanted anyway.

If i follow captain chewbacca's advise, then I get a lot of volcanic activity, a lot of earthquakes and the constant shifting of sand flats, dunes and sea that I was aiming for.

Basically, I wanted a world unsuitable for much else, but with huge amphibians (though most of the species will be adapted to live 90% dry or 90-100% wet)

[Terralthra]

A crust made mostly of mafic compounds would be ideal. Fault activity low, but with various hot-spot style shield volcanoes. This will make for lots of Hawaii-esque islands with constant low-level vulcanism, but not much in the way of large continents, which tend to require upthrust and felsic crust. Large eccentric moons are out, as CaptainChewbacca notes.

Negating the equatorial perma-storm can be done by making all the oceans fairly shallow. Hurricanes form over a large area of deep water with warm surface temperatures (leading to/and) humid air. While land breaks them up, even a decent reef or shoal can dissipate a lot of the storm.

[Marko Dash]

so you want the world to be unsuitable for large scale colonization but to be a desirable vacation location?

[Xenophobe3691]

Where would I be able to find out more about this hypothetical ocean world and its continuous, never ending story...I mean storm?

[madd0ct0r]

here: http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=148919

I'm leaning towards the Kitchen sink approach.

Ekaptios has a large and eccentirc moon, therefore a flexing crust and lots of geology.

It also has lots of storms, although nothing like the red spot.

[Rossum]

Is this planet natural or artificially made?

Maybe it could have origionally been like a desert world (close to the sun and its atmosphere burned off or something) then somebody placed a huge solar collector between it and the sun which absorbs a significant fraction of the light hitting it. The planet cooled down enough to support liquid water, and then they dumped a lot of ice asteroids on top of it.

However, the planets geography was such that creating an ocean resulted in lots and lots of smaller islands instead of big contenenats. It might have roughtly the same landmass as Earth (or even more) but its all broken up into lots of smaller isalnds. The sand could be the result of erosion due to sandstorms before they created the ocean.

As for wind-storms... You could either have a large number of tall mountains showing up on the new islands (like there were lots of mountains before the ocean flooded the planet which could break up storms if there are enough of them around) or the people who terraformed it have weather control mechanisms to stop storms before they happen.

Like the huge solar collector they put between the planet and the sun is made up of millions of smaller panels that can be adjusted. If a big storm starts forming then the solar array shuts off all the light beaming down to the area around where the winds are coming from. No light hading to the area means no energy being added to the system which means no hot air movement which means wind doesn't form and the storm fizzles out.

As for the planets infrastructure: With a giant solar collector it could broadcast the gathered energy to the planet below to power whatever machines they need. So the planet would basically be a huge resort thing without any big ugly power plants... except maybe wind/solar power or microwave collectors to gather the energy broadcast down to the surface. Unfortunatly, most of the planets habitability relies on the aformentioned solar collector and if it malfuntions (lets too much light through or lets too little light in) then the planet overheats or freezes or gets all sorts of weather problems.

[madd0ct0r]

it's almost certainly been terraformed, but this is 40K, so it was done millenia ago in the Dark Age of Technology.

I quite like the solar collector thing but it's a little too obvious. Perhaps there existed one once, and with it's destruction in Humanity's fall Beachworld became the unstable thing it is now?