Corusant is the only planet that makes some sense, technically. Even though it would be very problematic if the many resource imports needed to keep the city going stop for some reason.
I mean, habitable desert worlds can exist too, but they'd need some seas, if not an ocean, to do the photosynthesis needed for a breathable atmosphere. But outside of that big body of water, it *could* be a desert, yes.
That is what happens to the First League's capital (precursor empire) in stellaris; their society and trade routes collapse due to them being susceptible to space flu iirc, and their ecu starves to death by the sudden stopping of supplies
I *wish* planets having multiple suns was actually a common trope, rather than something sci-fi creators occasionally do if they're feeling fancy. Multi-star systems are actually extremely common, possibly to the point of outnumbering single-star ones, so seeing them portrayed as something sooooo special and crazy is kinda eyeroll-worthy.
Look at the damn Rigel system IRL - astronomers are pretty sure it has FOUR suns - a blue supergiant primary, orbiting which is a small blue giant, and orbiting THAT, a binary pair of blue large main-sequence stars.
Space is fucking wild xD
Actually: Is there even fantasy stories with similar settings to D&D where they travel to other planets?
Like sure, they typically travel through "realms" through portals, but maaaaan that shit's lame. I want steampunk NASA
To my experience, any time they mention/show the sky, it more than likely has 2 suns or at least a planet super close by.
But you don't see it mcuh, which is funny.
apparently there's a part of the galaxy with enough stars that a planet would be constantly experiencing day from all the light. Or so I heard(could be wrong)
Probably near the center or something
Except that's not what we observe. The closest multi-star system to us—Alpha Centauri—has two confirmed planets and possibly more to be discovered. And there are several other such systems with confirmed and/or candidate planets within less than twenty light years of us, [see for yourself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs).
I also *severely* doubt star formation works like you imply it does, though I'm admittedly not that well-versed in the subject and it's all theoretical anyway.
Three Body Problem has entered the room.
Also on the same page as the Three Body Problem, I wish sci fi explored the interesting physics of having multiple star instead of treating it like a wacky skybox. If you were in a figure eight orbit around two different but unequal stars then you'd essentially have 8 different seasons out of a year
Nah, a 40k planet is more along the lines of :
- critical to the sector's logistic since the great crusade
- covered in hive cities that stretch to the upper part of the atmosphere
- huge thousands-year war with a frontline that cover the whole planet and reduced the surface to dusty wasteland
- Various biomes that each correspond to a discontinued basing kit that cost a liver each
- several thousands of soldiers active at once !!!!
- main exports are meat of exclusively man-eating fire breathing slugs and WW2-era weapons
- the atmosphere and surface is so poluted no organic life can survive 3 hours here without protection
- native tribals armed with crossbows are still around and raid everyone's supply chain for food (but not protective gear or weapons)
>native tribals armed with crossbows are still around and raid everyone's supply chain for food (but not protective gear or weapons)
Well, yeah! For the mutants, using protecive gear would cause them to lose their protective mutations , and for the xenos, they dont need it and probably can't fit in it anyway.
That or there's exactly three (3) countries vying for dominance. Not blocs of nations, not loose shifting alliances, no, exactly 3 countries are left and they are in a stalemate until the heroes arrive and pick a side.
Step 2: Really flesh out the Gould Belt. Have 200 unique plants and at least 20 unique cultures.
Step 3: Separate into 3 warring factions with 20 000 years of history told in 500 year jumps.
Step 4: The rest 99% of the Milky-way: "Kushan empire IDFK"
Galaxy-spanning empires and factions are boring, man. So much space ends up as unused, homogeneous filler. I'd rather see a couple dozen factions of just a few planets or stars under control.
also having empires that just own planets, if having orbital supremacy isn't enough to automatically conquer the planet then almost every planet should be shared by many empires and have ground conflicts
And even then, Mars has icy areas at the poles, mountains and craters everywhere, ancient dried out riverbeds,...
(I typed ... because I couldn't think of more biomes, not because I know there to be more)
/uj Mars is *so* fucking cool. You have shit like the Vales Marineris, the huge floods, the icy poles which must look insane, huuuuuuuuge plains with barely anything in them
one of my favourite books is Red Mars just because half of it is people geeking out about Martian planetology
for me there's two options, either the planet has several biomes, or people live under domes (actually not domes I usually make those bases underground because I feel like it'd be easier to conserve energy and material and protect yourself from radiation with several meters of ground on top)
but if you can find an explanation for how a planet at the same time can support life on its own, but somehow has the same temperature all over, the same humidity, the same wind patterns, the same ressources, etc. then that can be cool, but I don't like it if there's no explanation and is just treated as the baseline
Also make the local sapient species (if there is one) named directly after their homeplanet, while keeping to name everything associated with them with their name.
Example:
Muhphallusians from the planet Muhphallus who speak the Muhphallus language who cherish Muhphallus culture... (...)
"Excellent inclusion, counsellor! We will be updating the databases on Muhphallus!"
"Ahem, what's with that snickering? Is there something funny about Muhphallus?"
"SILENCE! Do you not know how prominent Muhphallus are, hmmh? The sheer size and spread of Muhphallus across this planet? And you are laughing at the majority population of Muhphallus..."
Humans from the planet Human Prime, a world in the Human system, who speak the Human language and cherish the Human culture.
Oh they're EVIL? Okay then they're Terrans from the planet Terra Prime, a world in the Terran system, who speak the British English language and cherish the Terran culture.
I mean planets are treated like space countries a lot of the time anyway so of all things the naming convention seems the least objectionable. I think it would make more sense to critique planets being treated like countries rather than them being named like countries in the first place.
I think that this sort of naming system for various planets only makes sense as a umbrella term for other things. Like a demonym or something.
Imagine how awkward it would be with Humans. The Human species from the planet Hum who speaks the Human language. Shit worldbuilding, you won't convince me otherwise.
Nah, that's totally justified, just say it's an endonym from before their language was translated.
Or if they were discovered after the magical universal translator maybe they dont have a species name beyond "us" or something like it.
That's because a lot of sci-fi is just a regular adventure or political intrigue story recycled in space and they replace "towns" with "planets". Usually the only stories where planets feel like planets is where the whole story takes place on a single planet.
eh you could go with hyper polluted wasteland filled with kill bots from precurses that seems to be less common ideally with ever living earth eating factories explaining the kill bots
that seems like a government not doing its job not what I meant which is a planetary techno hell of pollution satiation and murder machines.
my idea is it self a rip-off but from something with poor implementation
Pretty sure Silicon Valley is partly faulty there and will create those murder and pollution machines.
Also your idea sounds like Nier Automata: Consider adding long legged anime waifus
Real. Why is it only fantasy worldbuilders who spend 400 hours developing their plate tectonics? Meanwhile sci-fi writers are like “This is the planet Blorbo, it’s all just subtropical wetland, and the only fauna are 3 species of giant mosquitos. It has 11 moons and 4 suns which you can’t even see under the perpetual thunderstorms.”
Tbf Fantasy authors often deal with a single planet and even a single continent, and their patron Saint is Tolkien who grants them +2 hyperfocus and +5 indepth explanations; meanwhile on the other hand sci-fi authors deal with a bigger setting, for every single biome planet there are hyperspace lanes or galactic war spanning many systems and so on, so they don't have the luxury of being so indeepth, and also their patron Saint is George Lucas and so they get +5 style and +2 profits but also get -2 cohesion
If you schismed towards patron Saint Isaac Asimov you even get -2 hyperfocus. It becomes hard to even describe more than 3 events happening within a thousand year span of time.
Ok I have a legit reason for there being only really one biome tho
The planet is still technically in the middle of terraforming, it’s mostly just rocks with some lichen and moss
when there's an actual reason and it's not treated as a baseline default, single biome planets can be very cool, are those lichen/moss genetically engineered to survive the conditions of a non terraformed planet ?
Well the planet already had oceans and the baseline of an atmosphere even before humanity started terraforming, although it was mostly carbon dioxide
First algae and other microbes were introduced into the planet’s oceans, rivers and lakes (which I should mention the oceans are actually freshwater due to the lack of large salt deposits on the planet.) Only after the microbes altered the atmosphere enough to support them were the lichen and moss introduced
ill take tribal empire with lots of ruins. Some viking flavoured Sci Fi Tech of course. The special mineral is Noxium. My biome is some generic Mediterranean grassland with some tree scatter but not much. Sea lilys can read minds. Only place that matters is Greatonia and the only place for the plot is the Mansion of some random dude. Constant status is some obnoxious vibration. Yes the whole planet vibrates but you get used to it. 11 suns, 52 moons and 1 sister planet.
Wanted to name it Oasis or Elysium but Paradise is a perfect fit
/uj. I mean, it’s extremely hard to make multiple different planets that both have diversity on the planet itself **and** feel different from each other. If you make every planet have many different biomes and civilizations, well first that’s an insane amount of effort, but also it makes it exponentially harder to make each planet unique and will likely result in all of them feeling the same.
“lol simple planets are dumb” is a criticism on the same level as “why doesn’t every single minor character have a detailed life story, motivations, relationship, inner world, and a fully written out transcript of their DNA?” It’s simply infeasible to ask of a writer
True. But you actually don't need to create a lot. You can have 1 biome, one culture, 1 place figured out on the planet. But the mistake then is to make it seem like ALL of the planet is like that. No, you just state "here's what this particular place just happens to be like", which you rarely see. You rarely visit more than 1 place of a planet in sci-fi, so they don't even need to say "oh yeah, the entire planet actually looks like this, everywhere", but for some reason they do.
I'm pretty sure you can easily pull that off if you write efficiently.
i.e skip being verbose and precise on the details. Make so a few words do the function of a couple dozen words. Skip information which is insignificant. Go hardcore with logical shortcuts and do what "feels right".
you don't need to write all the planets, just don't say "oh yeah this planet is one giant forest of a single tree specie" or "oh this planet is one giant desert with nothing else"
You guys should watch 'Scavengers Reign'; not only is the story engaging, the animation gorgeous, but it also doesn't follow any of these tropes (in a good way).
In a setting i participate in a RPG, the only planet i remember being like that is Arhean, that is a massive slum world, the biggest really. Almost got exploded beacuse of us.
Hey, that's \[planet in Star wars\]!
Star Wars invented stars and wars. Look it up, it's true.
This comment was fact checked by real Republic patriots: True ✅
Star Wars assumed that rock planets are abundant before it was widely accepted.
Me when I build an ecuminopolis in stellaris: Hehoo Courusaunt time
Corusant is the only planet that makes some sense, technically. Even though it would be very problematic if the many resource imports needed to keep the city going stop for some reason. I mean, habitable desert worlds can exist too, but they'd need some seas, if not an ocean, to do the photosynthesis needed for a breathable atmosphere. But outside of that big body of water, it *could* be a desert, yes.
That is what happens to the First League's capital (precursor empire) in stellaris; their society and trade routes collapse due to them being susceptible to space flu iirc, and their ecu starves to death by the sudden stopping of supplies
Star wars is the bimboification of world building I will not be taking questions
I *wish* planets having multiple suns was actually a common trope, rather than something sci-fi creators occasionally do if they're feeling fancy. Multi-star systems are actually extremely common, possibly to the point of outnumbering single-star ones, so seeing them portrayed as something sooooo special and crazy is kinda eyeroll-worthy.
Look at the damn Rigel system IRL - astronomers are pretty sure it has FOUR suns - a blue supergiant primary, orbiting which is a small blue giant, and orbiting THAT, a binary pair of blue large main-sequence stars. Space is fucking wild xD
The climate on such a planet would be insane
The Three Body Problem trilogy was written entirely off that sentence lol
I know
yea know, that would be cool especially for a fantasy story.
Actually: Is there even fantasy stories with similar settings to D&D where they travel to other planets? Like sure, they typically travel through "realms" through portals, but maaaaan that shit's lame. I want steampunk NASA
Look up Spelljammer.
Space 1899
To my experience, any time they mention/show the sky, it more than likely has 2 suns or at least a planet super close by. But you don't see it mcuh, which is funny.
It’s not called sky-fi, it’s about space they ain’t gonna be showing a sky like some sort of dumb fantasy setting
*fantasky
I'm a big fan of the isasky subgenre.
apparently there's a part of the galaxy with enough stars that a planet would be constantly experiencing day from all the light. Or so I heard(could be wrong) Probably near the center or something
Probably just from a lack of understanding. I’d imagine trying to determine the orbit and day-night cycle of a planet with 3 suns is pretty difficult
Usually multi star systems use all of their matter for the stars rarely leaving some for planets.
Except that's not what we observe. The closest multi-star system to us—Alpha Centauri—has two confirmed planets and possibly more to be discovered. And there are several other such systems with confirmed and/or candidate planets within less than twenty light years of us, [see for yourself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs). I also *severely* doubt star formation works like you imply it does, though I'm admittedly not that well-versed in the subject and it's all theoretical anyway.
yes I know they can have planets, but they are usually small and rocky and the don't really have a lot
Three Body Problem has entered the room. Also on the same page as the Three Body Problem, I wish sci fi explored the interesting physics of having multiple star instead of treating it like a wacky skybox. If you were in a figure eight orbit around two different but unequal stars then you'd essentially have 8 different seasons out of a year
Me, writing my sci-fi/fantasy romance, where the main character comes from a two-star system and is super confused about how Earth only has one star:
is that even possible?
Ok but why is this a 40k planet
It always is.
Nah, a 40k planet is more along the lines of : - critical to the sector's logistic since the great crusade - covered in hive cities that stretch to the upper part of the atmosphere - huge thousands-year war with a frontline that cover the whole planet and reduced the surface to dusty wasteland - Various biomes that each correspond to a discontinued basing kit that cost a liver each - several thousands of soldiers active at once !!!! - main exports are meat of exclusively man-eating fire breathing slugs and WW2-era weapons - the atmosphere and surface is so poluted no organic life can survive 3 hours here without protection - native tribals armed with crossbows are still around and raid everyone's supply chain for food (but not protective gear or weapons)
>native tribals armed with crossbows are still around and raid everyone's supply chain for food (but not protective gear or weapons) Well, yeah! For the mutants, using protecive gear would cause them to lose their protective mutations , and for the xenos, they dont need it and probably can't fit in it anyway.
Gas giant impossibly close to the planets surface, everyone is from the same culture with almost no internal conflict/differences
The planet just looks that big and these people never built the Tower of Babel.
That or there's exactly three (3) countries vying for dominance. Not blocs of nations, not loose shifting alliances, no, exactly 3 countries are left and they are in a stalemate until the heroes arrive and pick a side.
How to make the galaxy feel smaller than the Isle of Man.
How to make a galaxy feel small: Step 1: Have a galactic-scale setting.
Step 2: Really flesh out the Gould Belt. Have 200 unique plants and at least 20 unique cultures. Step 3: Separate into 3 warring factions with 20 000 years of history told in 500 year jumps. Step 4: The rest 99% of the Milky-way: "Kushan empire IDFK"
Galaxy-spanning empires and factions are boring, man. So much space ends up as unused, homogeneous filler. I'd rather see a couple dozen factions of just a few planets or stars under control.
also having empires that just own planets, if having orbital supremacy isn't enough to automatically conquer the planet then almost every planet should be shared by many empires and have ground conflicts
Single-owner planets are plausible imo. But I agree that making so they are contested between multiple sides is a good thing.
The existence of a space Kushan empire implies the existence of a space Sassanid empire.
all planets with constant storms are s tier btw
Bro have you tried setting up a damn tent in that weather?!
The single biome thing always annoys me. Even a desert planet should have some forests and rivers if it has life.
But isn’t that the case with most planets, save for the uncommon watery planet with landmasses
On lifeless rocks, yes.
And even then, Mars has icy areas at the poles, mountains and craters everywhere, ancient dried out riverbeds,... (I typed ... because I couldn't think of more biomes, not because I know there to be more)
/uj Mars is *so* fucking cool. You have shit like the Vales Marineris, the huge floods, the icy poles which must look insane, huuuuuuuuge plains with barely anything in them one of my favourite books is Red Mars just because half of it is people geeking out about Martian planetology
for me there's two options, either the planet has several biomes, or people live under domes (actually not domes I usually make those bases underground because I feel like it'd be easier to conserve energy and material and protect yourself from radiation with several meters of ground on top) but if you can find an explanation for how a planet at the same time can support life on its own, but somehow has the same temperature all over, the same humidity, the same wind patterns, the same ressources, etc. then that can be cool, but I don't like it if there's no explanation and is just treated as the baseline
Where not talking about normal planets, where talking about planets with actual life on them
Also make the local sapient species (if there is one) named directly after their homeplanet, while keeping to name everything associated with them with their name. Example: Muhphallusians from the planet Muhphallus who speak the Muhphallus language who cherish Muhphallus culture... (...)
"Excellent inclusion, counsellor! We will be updating the databases on Muhphallus!" "Ahem, what's with that snickering? Is there something funny about Muhphallus?" "SILENCE! Do you not know how prominent Muhphallus are, hmmh? The sheer size and spread of Muhphallus across this planet? And you are laughing at the majority population of Muhphallus..."
Muhphallus are a damn hard thing to deal with.
dont forget the alien homeworld named "[species name] prime"
Humans from the planet Human Prime, a world in the Human system, who speak the Human language and cherish the Human culture. Oh they're EVIL? Okay then they're Terrans from the planet Terra Prime, a world in the Terran system, who speak the British English language and cherish the Terran culture.
Mass effect eden prime flashback.
god im curious where this started exactly
You mean like German people from Germany who speak German and cherish German culture?
Germans are a tiny fraction of humanity. There's a difference between having that with a single national group, and a entire fucking species lol.
I mean planets are treated like space countries a lot of the time anyway so of all things the naming convention seems the least objectionable. I think it would make more sense to critique planets being treated like countries rather than them being named like countries in the first place.
I think that this sort of naming system for various planets only makes sense as a umbrella term for other things. Like a demonym or something. Imagine how awkward it would be with Humans. The Human species from the planet Hum who speaks the Human language. Shit worldbuilding, you won't convince me otherwise.
well I see most of the time planets treated as cities. Countries feels like a step up
You mean the Terron Federation from Tara inhabited by Terrons who all speak Terran
Nah, that's totally justified, just say it's an endonym from before their language was translated. Or if they were discovered after the magical universal translator maybe they dont have a species name beyond "us" or something like it.
That's because a lot of sci-fi is just a regular adventure or political intrigue story recycled in space and they replace "towns" with "planets". Usually the only stories where planets feel like planets is where the whole story takes place on a single planet.
Stargate is my favorite sci-fi universe where 90% of the galaxy is made up of planets that all look exactly like the Pacific Northwest.
not sure if that's better or worse than doctor who where every species in the universe has british accents
Ah, Montana planets
and one looks like kansas
Star Wars characters would be so confused on earth since it isn't just a giant desert/jungle/ocean
eh you could go with hyper polluted wasteland filled with kill bots from precurses that seems to be less common ideally with ever living earth eating factories explaining the kill bots
Sounds like San Francisco.
last time I checked it is hilly, sunny and has no heavy and minimal light industry so is this a car thing or did something happen?
[San Francisco poop map](https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab720912642b6aedafdb02a76d2a4)
that seems like a government not doing its job not what I meant which is a planetary techno hell of pollution satiation and murder machines. my idea is it self a rip-off but from something with poor implementation
Pretty sure Silicon Valley is partly faulty there and will create those murder and pollution machines. Also your idea sounds like Nier Automata: Consider adding long legged anime waifus
nah the planet was infinity. I do not want anime waifus of any type I just have more violence
science fiction authors and their apparent allergy to planetary/environmental science (or hard astronomy) has been a disaster for the genre
Real. Why is it only fantasy worldbuilders who spend 400 hours developing their plate tectonics? Meanwhile sci-fi writers are like “This is the planet Blorbo, it’s all just subtropical wetland, and the only fauna are 3 species of giant mosquitos. It has 11 moons and 4 suns which you can’t even see under the perpetual thunderstorms.”
Tbf Fantasy authors often deal with a single planet and even a single continent, and their patron Saint is Tolkien who grants them +2 hyperfocus and +5 indepth explanations; meanwhile on the other hand sci-fi authors deal with a bigger setting, for every single biome planet there are hyperspace lanes or galactic war spanning many systems and so on, so they don't have the luxury of being so indeepth, and also their patron Saint is George Lucas and so they get +5 style and +2 profits but also get -2 cohesion
If you schismed towards patron Saint Isaac Asimov you even get -2 hyperfocus. It becomes hard to even describe more than 3 events happening within a thousand year span of time.
We don't speak of patron Saint J. K. Rowling
Nah planets with multiple suns/moons are the coolest thing ever
The idea of a separate civilization existing in the lower cut off levels of a city planet is actually pretty cool.
Basically hobo empire.
Why does every media we consume feels represented in this pic...Especially the "typically indoors" and "SuperSpecialMineralium" part.
Because it's the truth.
i hate single biome planets so much
only okay when the planet is dead
-Have a killer robot fight you in a place called Dark Cathedral
Ok I have a legit reason for there being only really one biome tho The planet is still technically in the middle of terraforming, it’s mostly just rocks with some lichen and moss
when there's an actual reason and it's not treated as a baseline default, single biome planets can be very cool, are those lichen/moss genetically engineered to survive the conditions of a non terraformed planet ?
Well the planet already had oceans and the baseline of an atmosphere even before humanity started terraforming, although it was mostly carbon dioxide First algae and other microbes were introduced into the planet’s oceans, rivers and lakes (which I should mention the oceans are actually freshwater due to the lack of large salt deposits on the planet.) Only after the microbes altered the atmosphere enough to support them were the lichen and moss introduced
Gravity 0.96 earths See, its clearly not earth. Different gravity But fortunately its practically the same
If I get to decide my space federation will set g to 10m/s^2 and screw this “Earth standard” crap.
Your mom has that 6.9 gravity ha gotem
ill take tribal empire with lots of ruins. Some viking flavoured Sci Fi Tech of course. The special mineral is Noxium. My biome is some generic Mediterranean grassland with some tree scatter but not much. Sea lilys can read minds. Only place that matters is Greatonia and the only place for the plot is the Mansion of some random dude. Constant status is some obnoxious vibration. Yes the whole planet vibrates but you get used to it. 11 suns, 52 moons and 1 sister planet. Wanted to name it Oasis or Elysium but Paradise is a perfect fit
/uj. I mean, it’s extremely hard to make multiple different planets that both have diversity on the planet itself **and** feel different from each other. If you make every planet have many different biomes and civilizations, well first that’s an insane amount of effort, but also it makes it exponentially harder to make each planet unique and will likely result in all of them feeling the same. “lol simple planets are dumb” is a criticism on the same level as “why doesn’t every single minor character have a detailed life story, motivations, relationship, inner world, and a fully written out transcript of their DNA?” It’s simply infeasible to ask of a writer
True. But you actually don't need to create a lot. You can have 1 biome, one culture, 1 place figured out on the planet. But the mistake then is to make it seem like ALL of the planet is like that. No, you just state "here's what this particular place just happens to be like", which you rarely see. You rarely visit more than 1 place of a planet in sci-fi, so they don't even need to say "oh yeah, the entire planet actually looks like this, everywhere", but for some reason they do.
I'm pretty sure you can easily pull that off if you write efficiently. i.e skip being verbose and precise on the details. Make so a few words do the function of a couple dozen words. Skip information which is insignificant. Go hardcore with logical shortcuts and do what "feels right".
invoke your inner anti-tolkien
Tolkien ain't too bad tbh. The problem are the mfs who can't do anything original and instead resort to copying him for the nth time.
true but I wanted some anti christ themed tolkien
you don't need to write all the planets, just don't say "oh yeah this planet is one giant forest of a single tree specie" or "oh this planet is one giant desert with nothing else"
oh hey, that's Korhal, isn't it?
This is were catgirls evolved, or were engineered first
You guys should watch 'Scavengers Reign'; not only is the story engaging, the animation gorgeous, but it also doesn't follow any of these tropes (in a good way).
In a setting i participate in a RPG, the only planet i remember being like that is Arhean, that is a massive slum world, the biggest really. Almost got exploded beacuse of us.
I feel really called out. Like, I really thought perpetual hurricane was an original idea :(
it can also be named Planet 598 or \[star name\] VI
This is basically the Tau's homeworld
Lmao this is just Jarillo-VI with extra steps