wbnc said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
wbnc said:
Ye gads....no reason to go near that beast...it ate any planet circling it eons ago. Other than science ships I don't see anyone going into that system.
although depending on the temperature of it's outer layers some daring entrepreneur might be able to skim it for fuel.
One can calculate its habitable zone.
5.6×10^5 L☉ or 560,000 times the luminosity of our Sun, by taking the square root of that number you get the distance of the habitable zone in astronomical units.
A whopping 748.33 AU! That would correspond with standard orbit 13 from the orbital distances table from classic Scout Book 6. In the book, orbit 13 stands at 614.8 AU. The star has a mass of 15 to 35 times that of our Sun. If we go with 15, then we get an orbital period at that distance of 5,285 years, and 218.27 days. This star is fairly young compared to our Sun, even though it is at the end of its life, planets are still forming, out as far as 750 AU in a system that is only millions of years old. This star might have a very extensive planetoid belt with forming planets within it. It probably would be a belter's paradise. If the star goes supernova, the first warming would be a shower of neutrinos before the shock wave reaches the outer layers of this star. A jump drive would probably suffice in getting a starship out of there in the nick of time.
I didn't think about that..I assumed as it expanded it had engulfed, or incinerated it's system. A thick cloud of proto planets, and rocks would be a big draw to prospectors, and mining companies. A rich enough strike would be a reason to deal with the potential for stellar instability, or detonation.
now that would be an interesting setting for a short scenario, and maybe a longer one with long term issues to be dealt with
Well it has 15 to 35 times the mass of our Sun in material, the protoplanetary nebula that created it might also have have 15 to 35 time more mass to make planets out of, and there is another thing to consider as well. Remember how I said a planet orbiting within the habitable zone of this star would take over 5000 years to complete an orbit? That means things orbiting at this distance, (750 AU) are hardly moving at all, as far as we humans are concerned these objects might as well have fixed positions, you could do a map of the system or part of the system, allocate 1 AU per hex, and do a hex map, like this one:
Allocate 1 Astronomical Unit (the average distance between the Earth and the Sun) per hex instead of one parsec. Roll a d6 and every time you roll a 5 or a 6, or if you roll 2d6 and get an 8+ then you place a world in that hex, otherwise the hex is empty. Now unlike the usual subsector maps, each hex only contains a world and its moons, the worlds don't move much in their orbits during a human life time, within a single decade they stay in the hex they are mapped in, these planets move so slow that a map of the system shows the approximate location of each planet in each hex. Worlds have moons, so replace the gas giant symbol with a cresent moon symbol to indicate the presence of moon(s), starport is indicated in the usual spot. Remember that his hex map is 8 hexes wide and 10 hexes tall, and the habitable zone of this star is wider than that. the habitable zone for this star probably extends from 712.5 AU to 1125 AU from this star, that means it is 413 hexes wide from the end closest to the star to the end that is furthest out, that is about 40 subsectors wide if you use the long end to measure distances, There could potentially be thousands of planets here, maybe mostly asteroids, but remember stars of this mass last only a short time, planets haven't had enough time to consolidate all of this interplanetary debris. On the down side, if we use the 100 diameter rule for making a Jump, then the Jump limit around this star would be 2000 AU from the star's center, a starship would have to accelerate across 1000 AU of space before it got far enough away from this star to make a Jump, this has other implications as well. An Astronomical Unit is 500 light seconds across, it takes 500 seconds for light from the Sun to reach Earth, now to travel 1000 times that distance it would take 500,000 seconds, to put it in more familiar units that is 5.787 days, almost as much time as a starship spends in jump space! A starship within this sphere cannot make a jump or send out any sort of communication until it reaches 2000 AU from this star, the light itself would take 5.77 days to travel this distance as would radio, lasers, or meson communicators, Jump drives do not function within this sphere, that is if you use the 100 diameter rule. If you take the cube root of the star's mass in Earth masses you get a small distance in Earth diameters, depending on how generous your GM is, there is a big difference between the two however!
The Sun has 330,000 times the Earth's mass since VY Canis Majoris is 15 to 35 times the Sun's mass, it is 4,950,000 to 11,550,000 times the mass of Earth, taking the cube root of the larger number to be safe we get 226.04 times 100 Earth diameters and Earth diameter is 12,800 km so 100 times that amount is 1,280,000 km multiply this by 226.04 and we get 289,336,994 km which equals 1.93 AU, a big difference between that and 2000 AU don't you agree? If you were going to use VY Canis Majoris in your campaign which value would you use? If you think the Jump Limit is mass related instead of size related, you would go with 1.93 AU, which is inside the star itself, not that your starship could go inside this star without being destroyed, generally its a good idea to make a jump outside the photosphere of a star, not inside of it. Of course 750 AU where the habitable zone is, is way outside this limit, so you just have to worry about going outside the Jump Limit or each planet, it probably makes more sense to do this from a gaming perspective, than to use the 2000 AU limit which is based on the star's size. What do you think?
There is an added danger towards using the mass limit rule however. If you jump into this star system and rely on the mass based jump limit, you could emerge from you Jump well inside this star, and that would destroy your starship! You might want to jump towards individual planets of this system instead of the star itself, or you could try to calculate a Jump that leaves your starship about 1000 AU from the star's center, that is probably an easier thing to do.
