So...I have a planet with 8 moons, and I used Astrosynthesis on my buddies laptop (haven't bought it yet) to place those moons and see how an orbit plan would look...and I'm having a hard time figuring out whether or not I'd have any orbital collisions...
Its a pretty amazing program...I almost have to learn astrophysics to fill it all out, but so far its pretty nifty...
Anyone know if there's an easier way to see if there's any collisions in my moon orbits...its a very confusing view looping around the system diagram window trying to see if the lines ever cross close enough to cause a collision.
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This site has the most amazing tangents....
Probably being a bit pedantic here, but the moons will have gravitational fields of their own, and if two moons get too close, they will disrupt each others orbits. So it's not just collisions you have to watch out for - but near-enough-for-gravity-to-wreak-havok as well
Norm
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Not to mention your planet is closer to the size of Mars than to Earth so gravity is already going to be weak so hopefully those are some small moons. Consider the other planets in our solar system that have more than two moons and how massive they are to be able to keep all those moving. Considering also that your world has some sizable oceans those tides are going to be pretty crazy unless somehow the moons sort of balance them all out.
My Finished Maps
Works in Progress(or abandoned tests)
My Tutorials:
Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP
How to create ISO Mountains in GIMP/PS using the Smudge tool
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Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
I find this interesting - but then again I am rather sad
I am currently doing some research on plantetary positions when disasters strike our planet, and although far from conclusive, it seems that for example when the Boxing Day Tsunami struck a few year back, the planets were in specific positions. Similar story over a lot of the major earthquakes over the last 50 years.
The source of this research is an Australian farmer who was looking for a correlation between dry weather and sunspots. There is a link, but he also discovered that the planetary alignments seem to play a large part in this too.
I can go deeper if you'd like, though some of it is very dry and could hardly be described as light reading (two puns for the price of one there - )
The skeptic in me wants to say "the planets are always in a particular configuration when something happens; it's only when you can predict something based on the configuration of planets that you'll have something there". Of course, this skeptic has been known to watch things like pro wrestling and the Jerry Springer show so be sure to take any such opinions with a grain of salt. Or a ton of salt.
My stepdad used to gauge the stock market by running historical star charts and comparing them to stock market highs and lows, and then looking for similar star and planet configurations and buying and selling based on that.
So...I'm depressed now by all this gravity talk...As a DM...what would you do...
Fake it with a good write up and talk of the power and wisdom of the gods to maintain such a delicate balance of moons around a planet?
Or change the 8 moons to something else like other planets in the system and maybe give my smallish planet two tiny moons?
Basically, the 8 moons represent the 8 core deities of the world...and two of them are the mother and father figure of the world...so thats how the cosmology and pantheon WERE supposed to line up.