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Originally Posted by David Johnston2
I've never had the impression in 4th edition that people who live on tide locked planets are living in the twilight zone anyway.
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Have you calculated the Habitability scores and Dayside temperatures of a lot of randomly-generated tide-locked worlds? I've had quite a lot of them drop out of my generator, and I don't like the look of them. The ones with high Habitability scores have uninhabitably hot day sides.
The thing that brought this issue to the forefront of my mind just now is trying to generate a society (and adventure) for Gliese 370 II "Persatuan", the highest-Habitability tide-locked world in Central Sector of my randomly-generated universe. It has an average temperature of 27 C, and a calculated dayside temperature of 67 C.
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More like in the northern and southern latitudes where things are cooler than they are at the east pole anyway.
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I don't understand this. What do you mean by "East Pole"? The subsolar point? The intersection of equator and terminator east of the subsolar point?
What is it in
Space that makes you think that latitude makes a significant difference? Did I miss something big, or are you bringing in more recent discoveries from other sources?
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Which overlooks the biggest issue impacting habitability there of course, the periodic blasts of radiation from the sun.
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Yes, those x-ray flares and solar ion storms are nasty. The stripping of atmosphere by the intense solar wind is bad, too. Then there is the prolonged intense heating of the inner system as the star develops along the Hayashi track. Given those three challenges, the fact that the sunlight is rich in IR and poor in photosynthetically active radiation (meaning slow photosynthesis and delayed development from "Ocean" type to "Garden" type) is almost trivial by comparison.
There is still a lot to find out about the planets of M and late K -type dwarf stars — twenty years ago it was still not clear that they were common at all! — but I'm not really holding my breath on the discovery of planets habitable by humans in the system of anything cooler than about K5.