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Old 12-15-2013, 10:38 AM   #1
acrosome
 
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Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: The Land of Enchantment
Default [Space] Terraformed Venus as a setting

I've mentioned elsewhere that I want to set an ultra-low-fantasy (no magic) campaign on a terraformed Venus, a few millennia after some sort of cataclysm. Venus works far better than Mars for keeping the backstory a secret from the players- the gravity is close enough to Earth's that the difference can be safely disregarded, it's closer to the same size, and not every scifi fanboy in existence would instantly recognize a map of the planet as they would for Mars, etc.

But the problems are manifold.

First, to get this out of the way, yes I have to hand-wave an awful lot of the terraforming, though having TL12 planetary engineers for playthings helps a lot. That's not what I'm going to get into here. A lot of the terraforming stuff I found online are certainly interesting, but don't work for my purposes. I need something that is stable on its own.

So I'm trying to make decisions about some very basic stuff, and I'd appreciate your thoughts.

First, Venus's year is 224.7 [24-hour] days. That's workable, but if I wanted to is there a larger orbit to which I could move Venus safely- i.e. without doing horrible things to the Earth? How far out could I move it without adversely impacting Earth's orbit, and how long would the year be? Could I move it into Earth's L4 or L5? I found a lot of stuff online about Lagrangian planets but everything seems to assume that one is much larger than the other, which would not be the case here, so I have no idea what the repercussions would be. Would both planets orbit their respective Lagrange points, like Trojan asteroids? None of the other Langrangian points work- L3 was very tempting, but it is unstable on the order of 150 years. Or am I missing something elementary?

A world without a moon would actually make for a pretty interesting setting, but it has problems- no tides, impact upon some forms of wildlife, etc. Plus, everyone likes moons and adding a moon to Venus would, again, help disguise the planet's identity from the scifi fanboys. So I'm thinking about finding an appropriately-sized body (or two) in the solar system and moving it to be Venus's new moon. Anyone have good ideas for candidates? I'd want it big enough to cause appreciable tides, though they needn't be quite as large as Earth's. I just need enough to flush out the estuaries and keep the mangroves alive. What other effects would this have? The rest of the planet would tide as well, obviously, so- might it restart vulcanism? Like moons, everyone likes volcanoes...

Venus's current solar day is 116.75 [24-hour Earth] days long. Unworkable. I found various terraformation schemes online that could explain spinning it up as fast as a 14-day solar day. That actually intrigued me- having the "fortnight" as the basic timekeeping unit- but I've decided that it probably causes a lot of problems, and would likely raise the suspicions of scifi-fanboy players. Having the sun rise in the West is odd enough to keep things interesting for my purposes. Also, I have no idea how many Hadley cells a 14-day rotation would cause, whereas I'm pretty confident that I'd get Earth-like cells at a similar rotation. No one is quit sure what Venus's interior is like beyond that it's pretty clear that it doesn't have plate tectonics, so spinning up might plausibly lead to mantle cells and a magnetic field- another bonus.

(I'm going to fix that axial tilt, too. A world without seasons strikes me as bland.)

Input?

Last edited by acrosome; 12-15-2013 at 10:58 AM.
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