Thanks for helping me out here, Azélor! I really appreciate it.
Regarding the exoplanet YBP 1194b, you are right - it can't be a gas giant, can it? It's probably a huge ball of molten rock and metal. For my novel's purposes, it's a weekly astronomical event that serves a few purposes. One is making a week seven days - on a world with no moon but a ring, the equinoxes and solstices are the great, visible indicators of the year's passage, and noticing that the sun dims twelve times between each one makes it easy to split a quarter-year into three four-week months - even without a lunar cycle to back it up.The other reason is religious - to give the people something omnious in the sky, to associate with darkness , cold and evil. With six gods to name the other days of the week, the last one is reserved as Shadowday (or Shadday, as time passes and words get cut down). Since all the other planets of the system are brazenly made up - including Theia, of course - I'll happily hand-wave the details of its size, speed and distance to make it able to play its roles.
What I said about a few billion years and tectonic activity was simply a comment on how the Worldbuilder program doesn't move tectonic plates around in several cycles. On Earth, mountain ranges have risen up and been eroded down several times, our rocks churned and mixed across deep time. My Theia heigh map doesn't have that luxury, due to the limitations of the software - but I still imagine it to be just a little younger than the Earth, and to have gone through pretty similar tectonic processes. The star YBP 1194 is thought to be .5 billion years younger than the Sun, but as wikipedia says, the error bar is high due to the distance, and could be off by as much as 1.6 billion years. I will definitely give Gplates a look! I bet that could texture up my continental plateaus nicely.
As an interesting side-note, as I re-read the YBP 1194 article now, I noticed that the star is placed in a cluster, with over 500 other stars within a distance of 10 lightyears. We only have 17 stars that close, and about 134 stars within 20 lightyears. I had figured that the Ring would blot out most stars, but with 500 of them really close, they ought to be bright enough to actually give Theia a pretty spectacular night sky - especially at midnight, when the worldshadow obfuscates a large part of the Ring.
Thank you so much for the modified currrent map! You are completely right, of course - the water would be a lot colder. Working with the ice sheet layer turned off made me a bit blind to its effects.I will use it to re-create my temperature maps, and also try to find a way to make the temperature bands of the permanently ice-covered regions to shift (my Select/Color Range process made it hard to modify the hard line between blue/white and red/yellow heat map gradients from Worldbuilder).
I will also re-make the pressure maps - and as a result, the precipitation maps as well. Guesswork will still have to be made - but with your invaluable input, Azélor, the guesswork will be a lot more educated this second time around.
-Niels
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