fusor said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
Nothing to do with Travellor? Isn't Traveller about space, How could doing a post about the Solar System have nothing to do about space?. if I posted all the charts in one post, it would make a very long post, rather than posting it in bite sized pieces, I have to turn all these pictures into jpgs on the internet so I can post them here, And I don't have all the fancy tools you have for making blogs, or Solar System simulators that you talk about, I don't have a lot of money for buying these tools, I'd be lucky to get the 2nd edition Mongoose Traveller core rulebook, and I'm a bit leery of buying stuff on the internet as it might expose my credit card numbers to hackers and so forth. I use paint, it comes with windows, and nothing fancy. I don't like downloading stuff unnecessarily, and if I posted something here, it would be jpgs, not a solar system simulator, I'm not a program developer, maybe you are, but I'm not, I don't have a workstation at home, just a lap top. No one is forcing you to look at these and read every post, unless it is your job to do so, is it? Because you seem to think you are speaking for everyone here, did someone elect you to represent the entire forum?
Again, you're not listening. Focus!
Blogs are
free. You don't need "expensive tools" for them. Go to https://wordpress.com/ and start one. The free option they have would work fine for you.
The Solar system simulators that are out there are
free. They require a bit of effort to learn, but I'm sure you'll manage - google for the ones I mentioned (Celestia, Space Engine, Orbiter).
Some graphics programs are
free. GIMP is a good one that does a lot of things that photoshop does. https://www.gimp.org/
So "I don't have any money" is no excuse. And you wouldn't be "downloading stuff unnecessarily" because these
would be necessary. Yes, you'd need to learn how to use them but apparently you have lots of time on your hands and it'll only benefit you in the long run.
And yes, it's nothing to do with Traveller. Traveller is more than just "about space", it has specific assumptions and settings which you're ignoring completely. Lord of the Rings is "about fantasy" but that doesn't mean you can throw Game of Thrones or a bog-standard D&D campaign in there.
So far I've just posted a Generic Solar System, the Terra System exists in the Solomani Rim setting, so these charts could be used in that, the only difference is I used miles instead of kilometers, but miles lines up more nicely with the standard sizes of Traveller planets, and they are measured in thousands of miles and its easy to do the conversion. I use 100 pixels per square. And for your information D&D is not a specific setting, one could indeed play Lord of the Rings using Dungeons & Dragons, you basically have to use different rules for magic, but that's about it. D&D covers many different Worlds. Traveller originally was a generic setting, so I'm just tweaking the rules to match the setting I have in mind here.
The Solar System is a very big place, the way it is used in the standard Traveller setting makes it seem small. My idea is to make Gerard O'Neill's book,
The High Frontier into an RPG setting using as many standard Traveller rules as possible, and throwing out the ones that don't fit, such Jump Drives or reactionless engines. One thing O'Neill complained about was "planetary chauvinism" and the standard Traveller setting has a lot of that. Traveller assumes that most people will live on planets of moons, and that space is just used as a medium of travel to get from one world to the next. Well if I throw out that assumption, it turns out that an FTL drive is not needed after all, people can live in artificial colonies in space, and there is plenty of room for them in our own Solar System. One doesn't need a way to get around the light barrier if one is not looking for natural planets to live on, so the challenge then becomes, how do you turn an O'Neill Space setting into an interesting RPG setting. Anyway my intent is to draw a map, the only things that move around much are in the inner solar system, over 90 days, theouter planets barely move at all, so for planning purposes I am putting things on these charts, since I already did so many of them, and I am basically taking a snapshot of the Solar System, and lying out the colonies. We can talk about them along the way. Yes, I am doing things by hand, and with Paint, it is easy enough to line up concentric circles, I lay them out and then adjusted them so that each one is centered on the smaller one, with practice I have gotten good at this, I have learned the ins and outs of Microsoft paint. Laying out a square grid was easy enough, life you said, I did a lot of copying. I use paint as a "chalk board" to express my ideas visually. To post my ideas, I go to Deviantart to put them in a form I can post visually here, I am more that 50% complete with my charting, so if you don't mind, I'll just complete what I am doing here, and then I'll learn about the other stuff. We can do plenty of talking along the way. I am at the chalk board stage in planning this setting.
I have thought about terraforming the planets, but after some discussion here, I've decided that would just bring I back to "Planetary Chauvanism" so I am leaving the planets unterraformed, people still live on them. Venus is the Hellhole it has always been, but people to live in lighter-than-air habitats in its upper atmosphere. Venus has almost the right gravity that humans need to stay healthy, breathable air is less dense and lighter that Venus' carbon-dioxide atmosphere, and the upper atmosphere at an altitude of 35 miles. One can do a "Cloud City" in the atmosphere's of the gas giants, but there are two problems with that, one is the atmosphere at the 1- bar level is too cold in all of the gas giants, and if you go to a deep enough level where it isn't too cold, you end up having to breath exotic mixtures of gases to avoid nitrogen narcosis, and the other gases, such as helium are only good up to around 10 bar, and then you start suffering from the effects of narcosis with hat gas as well. One could of course live in a submarine environment and hold out the pressure with a rigid container, but that would limit your habitat to small sizes, otherwise the vessel would implode, but even if it doesn't implode against all that outside pressure, hydrogen gas has a tendency to lead through solid walls because molecules of it are so small. A depressurized vessel would have to deal with a hydrogen build up within an atmosphere containing oxygen so humans can breath. If the hydrogen concentration gets high enough an there is a spark, you get an explosion. All of the gas giant's atmospheres are flammable in the presence of oxygen, so Venus is perhaps the friendliest extraterrestrial environment that humans can live in so long as they stay in its upper atmosphere, and there is plenty of solar energy here as well.
The most populated part of the Solar System is the inner Solar System, this is because Earth is located here, and the other parts of it are closest to Earth, in the Outer Solar System, it is easiest to live in an O'Neill colony in a vaccum, one can set up large mirrors in space to concentrate sunlight as needed, and in a weightless environment, then mirrors can be thin and light weight, in other words they don't need to hold themselves up under gravity in a planetary environment, and in a weightless environment, you can always have a standard 1 Earth gravity, by rotating the vessel at a certain rate. (You don't need switch on/switch off artificial gravity that is featured in many standard Traveller spaceships and space stations.) I don't have time to learn new RPG systems, so I am just adapting the Traveller rules that are relevant. I like the simplicity of 1 through 6-G standard accelerations. the rocket systems I have outlined are superior to anything we have today. In Oribital for instance, there are separate spaceships for getting off of a planet and the ones that go from one part of the Solar System to another, stay in space and do not land, I decided to eliminate that part, and just have oneset of spaceships that do both, without having to resort to shuttles to orbit. I'm assuming high thrust fusion rockets, and yes I know some "Poindexter" is going to say there are some problems with a fusion rocket operating in an atmosphere, and there will be problems dumping all that heat, but I'll just assume that future technology has found a solution for that and handwave it away. We don't have to solve tomorrows problems with today's technology after all, so I'll assume tomorrows scientists and engineers are cleverer than we are today, and I don't have to design a technology system that will work today to play this game in this setting.
Since I have already posted it on Deviantart, here is Jupiter on the same scale Chart H as the other planets I have done do far:
Jupiter, as you can see, fills most of the chart at this scale, so there is room for only 2 orbits, one just above the cloud tops and one 5000 miles further up. The low orbit is probably the most suitable for humans. If you orbit just above Jupiter's atmosphere, traces of that atmosphere sweep space of most of that hostile lethal radiation that exists higher up in Jupiter's magnetic field. People will tend to avoid living on Io and Europa, maybe within it, under the crust, but not on the surface of those worlds. Ganymede and Callisto are more suitable planetary colonization targets. An O'Neill with a thick enough hull can block out most of the radiation coming from Jupiter's Van Allen belts, but these are large vessels, sometimes it becomes necessary to do work on the outside of the hull. Robots can be used, but the radiation will eventually fry their circuits. but you could place an O'Neill just above the atmosphere, high enough to stay in orbit with some orbital boosts from time to time, but not so high as to expose the colony to the high levels of charged particles that accumulate in Jupiter's magnetosphere. Why would anyone want to live here? That is good question. There is helium-3 to be found in Jupiter's atmosphere, the Moon is another source, but Jupiter has a lot more of it, the easiest source to get at is the planet Uranus of course, since that is the smallest gas giant in the Solar System, which has the least gravity to overcome to bring it out.
You could of course use it as a generic Large Gas Giant for your standard Traveller campaign as well, just change the scale to 8000 km per square if you like using the metric system, and that will be close enough.
