[Space] Alpha Centauri example stats

[Agemegos]

A multiple system in GURPS Handbook of Planets

I looked up Alpha Centauri in the Internet Stellar Database and fed the system age, masses, orbital separations, and eccentricities of the components into my GURPS Space 4th edition star system generator.

The spectral classes and luminosities of the stars came out slightly wrong. This is partly because of the approximations used in GURPS Space's spectral class and luminosity model, partly because of uncertainties in astronomical measurements, and partly because the ISDB reports visual magnitudes whereas GURPS Space uses (or ought to use) bolometric magnitudes (which include IR and UV). I didn't worry about the discrepancy in the luminosities, but I manually reduced the mass of component A from 1.1 to 1.09, the mass of component B from 0.85 to 0.84, to get better agreement with the spectral classes.

continued in the next post owing to post length limits