Gibson: A Colony World

[bartmoss]

Hi. It's been a while.

I just started creating a new world map. The first one in, well, forever.

This is a map for a worldbuilding project I call "Gibson City". Essentially, it's a colony settled by humans via FTL slow boat - that is, FTL is "slow", meaning it still took centuries to reach the destination. The world is just a little bit smaller than Earth, and a lot warmer. Water covers 85% of its surface.

I'm using an RPG "icosahedron" projection because it's by far the easiest to work with (IMO). Right now the map aims to be practical first and foremost - I can do beautiful later. First though I need to nail down the geography so I can work on the other aspects of the planet.

WIP is pretty basic. I decided I wanted one large continent, two small continents, and a smattering of islands. I worked out that, very roughly, 1 pixel = 9.6km and placed boxes on the maps that very, VERY roughly correspond to the intended land area of my continents. I'm then eye-balling bringing them into more naturalistic shapes while maintaining the correct area.

yfKNczy.jpg

Not much to see yet but I figured it is an essential step.

[bartmoss]

WIP #2: Finally landmasses I am reasonably happy with. Blotted in some rough mountains and some very rough tectonic planets. The central mountain range in the big continent will be the highest on the planet. The "Eastern" ocean has a divergent plate boundary.

gibson-v1-wip2.jpg

WIP#3: Equally rough ocean currents

gibson-v1-wip3.jpg

Just going off this, I'm thinking the southern half of the large continent will be rather arid, with some wetter areas in the central area of the east coast. The northern half will probably fairly wet.

In general, there will be very severe storms on this planet, what with the huge ocean on the "Eastern" hemisphere.