08-24-2019, 12:56 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Mar 2013
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[Space] Worlds Types And The Species That Live On Them
OK, in my last thread I talked about tentative plans I have to run a game on a Starfire scenario, specifically one based upon the fall of an evil empire due to civil war, the setting is the (power) vacuum that follows, where no governments reach is greater then the planet it's based on and there's no international/interplanetary community.
As a part of this I wiped up a table for Space world types and sizes based upon the one used in Starfire to better visualize them and figure out what sort of species could/would live on them without it being a hostile environment and it's actually rather interesting: 1. There's no Hadean world type for Tiny or Large worlds for some reason. 2. There's no Rock world type for Standard or Large worlds for some reason. 3. The Chthonian world type is an anomaly as Standard and Large, by definition, have strong enough gravity to maintain an atmosphere despite factors like solar wind, yet these worlds lack atmosphere's because of the action of solar wind. 4. The switch to Ice type worlds occurs earlier for Standard and Large Worlds then it does for Small and Tiny ones, it's rather weird. Now I'm only concerned with worlds that humanity could invade as it's rather hard to enslave the people of a world if you can't send in the stormtroopers, and it's also rather hard to have the PC's have interactions with races that live in such environments. For each type of life Homochirality will apply, and gravity factors for Water-Based life, as high-grav worlds are not nice places to live, so the simple parts is: Water based life [4 Species] for Garden Worlds (Standard and Large) Methane based life (Anaerobic) [4 Species] for Ocean Worlds (Standard and Large) Sulfur based life [2 Species] for Sulfur Worlds Ammonia based life [2 Species] for Ammonia Worlds But that's the simple stuff. A species that evolves on on a Chthonian world is presumably Silicon/Liquid Rock Life and it could live on worlds similarly close to a star, like say Mercury. But could such a race live on the Moon or Mars without life support gear, and if not what type(s) can? Any help is appreciated. Final Note: The questions this raises highlighted a problem, if only a small one, with how worlds are classified in Space, the classifications are not very helpful in telling you what type of life might live on a world, nor does it touch on the issue of if these other types of life exist how might they change their world, like how the presence of life on Earth changed it from an Ocean World to a Garden one. |
08-24-2019, 06:42 AM | #2 | |||
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: [Space]Worlds Types And The Species That Live On Them
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
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08-24-2019, 07:52 AM | #3 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: [Space]Worlds Types And The Species That Live On Them
One thing to remember is that Space is ancient when it comes to the field of exoplanet studies. After all, you cannot use it to create Mega-Earths (such as Kepler-145b) or the extremely tight systems that orbit stars (such as the HD 40307 system, with its first five planets orbiting within 0.25 AU of its star). Of course, our technology is still new, we have only confirmed 3,000 or so exoplanets, so we might just be only able to find the weird systems for the most part right now (unless it was perfectly oriented with our system to allow for transit detection, we still could not detect our solar system).
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08-24-2019, 07:54 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: [Space]Worlds Types And The Species That Live On Them
As an added note, the difference between Tiny (Ice) and Hadean is the reason for the lack of atmosphere. In the former case, it is because of lack of gravity. In the latter case, it is because of lack of warmth.
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08-24-2019, 11:51 PM | #5 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: [Space] Worlds Types And The Species That Live On Them
Note that Garden Worlds only exist when they have life that injects oxygen into the atmosphere, since an oxygen atmosphere without plants to replenish the oxygen would quickly (in geological terms) lose the oxygen.
With that in mind, I find it somewhat peculiar that life that isn't water-based is assumed to exist in naturally-occuring atmospheres, as opposed to ones that would be unstable but for the presence of life that releases a highly reactive gas into the atmosphere. That has may or may not be oxygen; but frankly, there probably should be something like that, in order to fuel the alien biochemistry: something akin to plants, which take solar energy and use it to release the working gas into the atmosphere; and something like animals, which can operate on a high-energy basis because of the presence of a gas that's too reactive to be there naturally. Last edited by dataweaver; 08-26-2019 at 10:48 AM. |
08-25-2019, 07:54 AM | #6 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: [Space] Worlds Types And The Species That Live On Them
Garden worlds require photosynthetic life and the presence of large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere provides enough energy for multicellular life to evolve in the oceans and then spread to the land. Strangely enough, plants do need oxygen, just that plants produce net oxygen through photosynthesis, so you need microorganisms to have produced massive amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere before plants can evolve.
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08-26-2019, 02:41 AM | #7 | |||||
Join Date: Mar 2013
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Re: [Space] Worlds Types And The Species That Live On Them
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08-26-2019, 07:34 AM | #8 | ||
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: [Space] Worlds Types And The Species That Live On Them
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Yeah, there are large differences between a rock with a frozen covering of ice and an ice planet with a "mantle" of liquid water many kilometers under an icy core. I'm just not sure that it matters most of the time. You have a smoothering atmosphere and a surface with features of ice. If you want your system to distinguish (and I think you are going to have to expand the system anyways) you can certainly flag frozen rock planets as such. Quote:
Page 140 of space has a table about which worlds can support which bases of life. Its designed to have you generate the aliens first and then the world they come from, but it can be inverted give each type of life you want a chance of having "THEIR" version of a garden world.
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
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08-26-2019, 11:27 AM | #10 |
☣
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: [Space] Worlds Types And The Species That Live On Them
Oxygen does have an advantage in being by far the most abundant oxidizing element.
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