World Map for my Campaign - WIP

[Karro]

I'm not sure what the exact effect of this would be, but stormy weather, like hurricanes, are typically a part of the way the earth regulates temperatures and distributes heat built up in the tropical zones northward and southward into cooler climes.

So... if only the southern region continues to get more sunlight and the northern less, for one, you'd have less seasonality (only summer in the south, only winter in the north). Then, I'd think there's be no set "storm" season, but that massive storms would be a constant threat throughout the year. But I'm just conjecturing here...

[su_liam]

I can think of two things(outside of magic, not part of my skill set).

The first one is tidal locking, One side of the planet permanently faces the sun, the other side is in perpetual darkness. You won't have days or nights, though. Also you won't really have a north and south pole, but sort of east and west poles.

The second possibility is a combination of extreme axial tilt and high eccentricity. I find this one interesting.

During northern hemisphere(NH) winter, the planet is at perihelion. This "winter" is a period of darkness and heat with, probably, extreme humidity from all of the evaporating southern seas. The southern hemisphere(SH), at this time(summer is a mild word), could be quite hellish: perpetual sun blazing down upon parched sand, salt, and the evanescing remnants of seas and lakes.

During NH summer, the planet is at aphelion. Penguin-time! Sun perpetually wheeling along the horizon of a cold frozen world. The SH would be about the same, only colder and dark. Not pleasant.

This assumes a semimajor axis centered fairly well on the optimal habitable zone. Move the planet in a bit and the NH winter would be even hotter, while NH summer might make a good growing season. Move it out a bit, and the SH might have a good growing season during perihelion, while the NH is basically unfit for anything but mammoth-hunting barbarians named Conan or Lothar.

[philipstephen]

I like your second idea Su Liam. the parched south and ice locked north with storms all around is exactly what i would like.

What I see is not perpetual day and night either. The planet still rotates. So days would be longer in the south and shorter in the north - with the poles in almost continual darkness or light.

I will try to draw a picture of what i imagine this looking like...

...okay, that picture will not win any awards, but i hope it makes the idea clear that there is still rotation and tilt, but that the degree of the tilt does not alter in relation to its position to the sun... keeping a roughly constant season on each hemisphere...

i imagine this would be rough on crops and do something strange to weather.

i will read more of people's ideas and suggestions now to see if i missed anything.

[philipstephen]

Okay... the colours are all wrong and the land masses need some more work and the mountains and valleys are bound to move and blend a bit more...

but for some reason i am generally happy with the shape of this one...

i am very likely to cut and paste portions of the last map into it and do some of my painterly style as well to blend it a bit...

phil

[philipstephen]

This version has better mountains... but crazy mountains that need some taming...

i am likely still going to get rid of some islands and tighten up the coast lines a bit...

and then? tame those mountains... build some roads... yahdee yahdee yahdah...

[su_liam]

Your shorelines look terribly fractal. I don't mean that in the Musgrave or Perlin sense so much as the Mandelbrot or Julia Set sense.

EDIT: I am lovin' hard on the water texture!

[su_liam]

Your orbital diagram is a little off. The axis should point in the same direction throughout the year.

The axis does rotate a little over very long periods(for Earth I think about 26,000 years). This is called precession. I don't have the formula handy, but off the top of my head, I'd say a precession period approximating the length of a planet's year would be a fairly unphysical phenomenon, at least for habitable planets.

I've made a crappy reworking of your chart to show how the axis of the planet should look as the planet revolves about it's primary.

My writing was unclear. What I meant to say was that the planet has seasons in the same sense as the Earth, but because the axis is at a much larger angle to the equator the seasons are more extreme so that the pole is pointed almost directly away from the sun in winter and almost directly toward the sun in summer.

Another, separate influence is that the planet moves much closer to the sun at one point in its orbit and much further away at the opposite point in its orbit. Because of this the entire planet is considerably warmer at perihelion(the close point), and considerably colder at aphelion(the far point). I had a math teacher who pronounced these as pair-uh-heel-ee-uhn and uh-feel-ee-uhn, but I think the correct pronunciation for the latter is ap-heel-ee-uhn. Anyway.

I'm assuming that perihelion is occurring at the same time as the north pole points away from the sun, because of that the north pole will point away from the sun at aphelion. As you can probably see from the lame chart I made, the northern summer will be warmer because of this eccentricity and the southern winter will be colder. Another effect is that the northern winter will be very short and the southern winter will be very long.

The northern hemisphere will have a long summer varying from quite warm to very cool or cold, this should result in a very long growing season. For earthly plants, this could result in several seasons of growth with plants from very different climates thriving in the same location at different times throughout the year. In the south, the winter may be long enough to create an ice cap which could even be large enough to survive the very hot, but very short summer. How large would a glacier have to be to survive, say, two weeks of constant daylight at 110ºF? Hey Redrobes, you wanna try modelling this?

I've made a terrible chart all my own to try to demonstrate my idea.

Whether you use my idea or not, this is a really fun gedanken experiment that I might try myself.

[philipstephen]

Thanks for all the info Su Liam...

I wonder how I could remedy that Fractal critique you had?

It is better to have smooth coastlines and not jagged? Or it is just my style of jagged seems fractal and repetitious?

phil

[philipstephen]

And in regards to my tilt and rotation question... i do like your model, but it does not fit what i had imagined...

what i see is like this... when a spinning top is nearing its last legs it sometimes traces a circular-ish path before toppling...

as it does so, the point of the top angles inward towards the centre of the circle and the stem points outward, away from the circle.

If the point were the south pole and the stem were the north pole, that is how i imagine my world spinning... perhaps even with a destabilized orbit...

my world is a world that is winding down... maybe with less than a 100 years left before collapse...

Phil

[su_liam]

@Orbit: Pretty cool idea for a fantasy world. Probably even good for something like a Star Wars kind of setting. For any harder kind of science fictional setting I'd avoid it. The top is different because of the friction at the "south pole" and because it has a gravitational force operating on it from "north" to "south." For an object orbiting in vacuum, it seems aphysical. Don't take my word on this, but you may be able to work something similar out by having an unlikely extreme concentration of mass to the south pole. For a world with magic, though, just say it was the result of the Godwars or something...

This is clearly just a recommendation, you're the creator here, I'm just the kibbitzer.

@Jagged coastlines: This is a harder one. I'd say, probably start with a blobby mass. Peninsulas and inlets greater than about a quarter or more like a tenth of the "diameter" of the blob should be infrequent or even unique. An inflorescence up to a third of the blob size could be added as a unique, Europe-like structure. In general a peninsula greater than ten times as long as its smallest width should be pretty unusual, and generally only present at fairly small scales. This was the first thing I thought of.

The second thing I came up with after a great deal of thought(yeah, you could smell the wood burning, I'd probably get more done if I didn't think so much about other people's maps). What makes Musgrave's Multifractals work? Inhomogeneity. Your coastlines are fairly uniformly jagged. What I think might help is to vary that more. Some coastlines should be somewhat jagged with small bays and inlets, other patches should be seriously jagged with fjords, rias, frequent tidal lagoons(tectonically inactive -old- regions), and still others should be very straight, with only very gentle curvatures and the occasional small river delta and perhaps small inlets following faults(active -young- coastlines).

I expect the kind of fractal shape you have, self-similar to very small scales might apply better to high mountain areas.

This is even more just a recommendation. I've spent a long time trying to tame noise into good looking terrain with very limited success. So, hey...


Anyway, it is a good looking map, and your climate idea is interesting. That's why I'm offering so much "constructive" criticism. That and it's a personality defect...