Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett
Spoiler warning: [COLOR="Navy"]if you are going to play in my campaign Red-Blooded Earth-Men,
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On the other hand, I think my players will strain to believe in a Mars that is not colder than Earth: perhaps the icecaps are small because there is little water? Also, I wonder whether it would reassure them to acknowledge the fact that Mars really has enormous differences of relief, and the tallest mountains (Olympus Mons and the Tharsis volcanoes) in the solar system.
What geographical Easter eggs might add an air of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing tale? Should the oceans be saturated with salt, and sterile like the Dead Sea? The vast plains of Mars were once ocean floors, I suppose. There ought to be enormous deposits of halite. What else should have precipitated out as the oceans shrank away?
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The thing about habitability that occurs to me is internal heat and an active planetary core. This is something that the real Mars does not have and it is a significant problem.
If the ground temperature is constantly at least a little above freezing except at the poles then all your water does not get locked up as permafrost. An active core will also keep water that seeps into the rocks from going nowhere but down. When temp and pressure hit steam levels it will come back up.
The Ancient machinery (or perhasp the not quite so Ancient machinery) might also tap this for geothernmal power and then deposit the water in the canals.
An active core also probably means a significant magnetic field. A thing we know now that Mars lacks but would ahve been expected as "normal" in 1917. This will help with radiation shielding that a thin atmsophrre might otherwise be deficient in.
Hopefully these are a few things that might help bolster modern SOD without clashing with period astronomy.