Expanding Atmosphere Types

[dmm]

Fyron said:Sadly, there is no moddable formula for conditions.

Wow, really? Not to be disrespectful to Aaron (who has made some great games that have given me kilo-hours of pleasure), but that's pretty lame. I was hoping to make a pseudo-realistic mod where the "outer" planets were numerous but cruddy, airless, and tiny. Then I could have a non-threatening race that ekes out a living on the fringes of everyone else's systems. (Maybe crystalline?)

I like your compromise idea for locating binaries. I would go one further, and put them way out at the corners.

[Fyron]

dmm said:
I like your compromise idea for locating binaries. I would go one further, and put them way out at the corners.

If I did that, planets and such would have to be located between the stars. I'd rather keep them outside the whole sphere occupied by the stars.

[dmm]

Fyron said:
If I did that, planets and such would have to be located between the stars. I'd rather keep them outside the whole sphere occupied by the stars.

Yes, exactly. In a binary system with two main sequence stars, the stars are quite far apart and the planets are bound to one star or the other. The "twin" star might be so far away that inhabitants of one planet might not even know about it. Some astronomers think the Sun has a partner.

Of course, the system I'm describing can't be done with SEIV/V as currently coded. And anyway, such planetary systems are effectively not binary or trinary anyway. So, what I'm really saying is that binary or trinary systems in SE should always be shown as red giant / white dwarf pairs or trios. If you're aiming for semi-realism, that is.

[Fyron]

I'm not seeing anything that requires a binary pair to be in the red giant + white dwarf phase, only that it can happen.

"As a main sequence star increases in size during its evolution, it may at some point exceed its Roche lobe, meaning that some of its matter ventures into a region where the gravitational pull of its companion star is larger than its own."

Is it possible to mod facilities so that they only work on certain planet types or in certain atmospheres or only under certain conditions?

Not to my knowledge.

[Leternel]

Is it possible to mod facilities so that they only work on certain planet types or in certain atmospheres or only under certain conditions?

Maybe will you be able to scale productions (or any...) with conditions, and with domed status, but I'm not sure.

[dmm]

Check out the references of that Wiki article, esp. 38, 39, and 43.

There are 2 cases: Planets orbit one star of the pair (S type) or orbit the center of mass of both stars (P type).

S type: If the stars are closer than about 7 AU, then planetary formation is severely compromised. Note that most binaries have separations similar to the distance from the Sun to Neptune (~30 AU).

P type: (This is the type currently depicted in SE.) For this type, you need stars closer than about 0.2 AU or so, plus the eccentricity of their mutual orbits has to be close to zero. Otherwise, again, planetary formation is severely compromised. But at this distance, they are close enough to steal matter from each other as they form. So one companion almost always ends up significantly more massive than the other, and you wind up with a red giant / white dwarf combo. I admit, though, that I don't know how long this would take. It might take a long time. So I take back my original criticism. It's not (obviously) silly to have several main sequence stars in a close binary or trinary.

There's another important point. Although 0.2 AU sounds small, the Sun's diameter is only a bit less than 0.01 AU. I was rather shocked at that info. It turns out that SEIV depicts star+planet systems more accurately than SEV, in which the stars are shown WAY too big. Perhaps a "realism mod" for SEV should greatly reduce the sizes of main sequence stars. (Of course the planets are ridiculously large, but that's just a graphical depiction. Regardless of the planet size, it only takes up one hex.) Alternatively, the star size shown could be taken to be the diameter inside of which ships burn to a crisp. So the star isn't actually that large, but the non-navigable region is. Unfortunately, this is always the same distance regardless of the empire's tech level. A better way would be to make the star much smaller but surround it with rings of damaging storms that diminish in intensity as you get further from the star. Then high tech ships could take short cuts and use hiding places unavailable to low tech ships.

[Phoenix-D]

The stars are only too large if you have a fixed scale in mind for the hexes. Though I agree the current size would be best left to very large stars.

[JAFisher44]

I think that in SEV both stars and planets are inflated in size for "graphical depiction"

If you suppose that the entire system map encompasses say orbit of Pluto, that means that the system map is about 50 AU from center to edge. This gives you a rough distance of about 4 AU per hex. At .01 AU a star would be 1/400th of a hex across. Even if you reduce the map to 1 AU per hex a star will still only be 1/100 of a hex across. Either way, it will be as small as the stars in the background if you want to display it realistically.