Recent content by Dan D

Mine arrived today.

I like this book a lot--that said, I have to be straight with you, most of the first half of this book, that deals with physical characteristics, is formulae. You can certainly skip (most of) the ones that go into more detail than you want, but the main content of the book is those formulae that...

Oh I see. I thought the first statement of the formula was for planets and the second statement of the formula was for moons. And I didn't see units in the first statement so I figured Primary Mass was in solar masses, Distance was in AU and Period was in years.

Can someone check my math in re: tidal heating effects? I've got a size 5 planet with 0.17 Earth masses, orbiting a pair of stars having a combined 0.869 Solar masses at a distance of 0.691 AU with an orbital period of 0.616 years and an eccentricity of 0.47. If I plug these values into the...

In the results column of the surface feature distribution table on the bottom of page 100, if a result says "x% of surface coverage is in major bodies," does that mean x% of the total surface of the planet, or x% of the proportion of the planet's surface that's covered in "bodies" (of land or...

Question: by definition, about 80% of a belt's population orbits within its main span, but if you use the significant body orbit # generation procedure on page 74: then only about 2/3 of the significant bodies will have orbit #s that fall within the main span. Is there a physical reason for...

The example of system baseline number determination on p. 45 says, "For the Zed system, with 17 worlds, the DMs are -2 for the companion and -2 for the secondary stars." The DM table on the same page doesn't include any DMs for secondary stars, only for the primary and total world number. The...