Khardessa Orbital Lift Station
In needing a break from the Haevenstadt Harbor Project, I decided to spend a bit of time working on another story setting, and though it is geared towards Science Fiction, it is still a town/city, so I figured I would post it here instead of in the Sci-Fi Forum. It's a story I've been working on in bits and pieces for a while now, and one of the problems I had been facing was the actual setting in which most of the scenes take place. I also thought it might be a good situation to experiment with adding in buildings through Terragen since they are likely to be enclosed structures with a grid-work of "tubes" connecting them. There would still be some open area, but it would be used mostly for the development of vegetation and, perhaps, a market place, of sorts, for the "less privledged."
From the onset, I knew that the planet was very Mars-like in many ways as well as being marginally habitable. I knew, as well, that it was part of a relatively small star system. With that in mind, I used EP Eridani as a basic stellar model and extrapolated the following information based on the "known" information as listed in the Internet Stellar Database (ISDB);
Stellar Statistics
Spectral Class : K2V
Stellar Mass : 0.747 Sol
Stellar Radius : 0.915 Sol (635925 Km)
Stellar Luminosity : 0.360 Sol
Abundance of Heavy Elements : 98% (*/- 20%)
Surface Temperature : 4543 Kelvin
Habitable Zone : 0.6 AU
Then I hopped over to WinstarGen (a handy little utility for generating planets around stars that gives more detailed results than AstroSynthesis) and started cycling through planetary systems until I found something marginally useful.
Planetary Statistics
Radius : 4248 Km
Mass : 0.29 Earths
Density : 0.98 Earths
Gravity : 0.65g
Atmospheric Pressure : 0.336 Atm
Albedo : 0.66
Orbital Distance : 94816418 Km
Base Surface Temperature : 263K (-10C / 14F)
Greenhouse Gas Adjustment :
Final Surface Temperature : 275K (2C / 36F)
Local Day : 72 hours
Length of Year : 184 Standard Days (61 local days)
In the two hundred years since it has been colonized, greenhouse gasses have been slowly introduced into the atmosphere, bringing down the overall albedo to its current level as well as thickening the atmosphere to a more tolerable level. It is still somewhat thin, however, and survival without aid is dependent upon keeping physical activity levels to a minimum.
An important note here; The surface temperatures listed are those as measured at the equator. Moving north or south towards the poles results, obviously, in a temperature reduction that can become rather extreme (as low as -142F). As a consequence, most of the surface is covered in ice. Near the equator, however, there is a narrow band of water and some usable land. Were it not for the abundance of medium weight ores, the planet would likely have been ignored for something better around another star. As it is, this "fringe" world is little more than an "out-lying village" in terms of the expansion of humanity.
The colonists have, within the last few decades, started to introduce vegetation as a means of increasing the oxygen content of the atmosphere. It is a long range goal at this point as is maintaining the delicate balance of atmospheric pressure to albedo. Any major shift in one or the other would result in a global ice age that would likely render the planet completely inhospitable.
As of this writing, I've started with a basic landmass located near the equator. It is the site of the Orbital Lift Station (quite similar in theory to a Space Elevator) which is located atop the plateau that can be seen near the middle of the image below. Off to the left, there is another low rise that will likely become the "Flight Control Center" for shipments coming from other locations around the planet's surface, most of which will also "land" on the main plateau. I've a bit of work to do with the "coastal" portions, but given the fact that this landmass covers an area of roughly 16 square kilometers, detailing the coastline is going to be a low priority thing. In this first render, my primary goal has been to get the coloring worked out as far as the land and water surfaces go as well as the atmospheric effects. I've included a bit of the vegetation, but this is mostly to get an idea how it is going to look under a dimmer sun and through an atmosphere that isn't as blue as our own. When time permits, I will pull up a couple more, less intensive renders, to give a better idea of how the "island" looks from different points of view.
Comments? Suggestions?
GW
And now it's off to look at this month's Challenge Entries . . . Wooohoooo!
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Originally Posted by Nytmare
